folio : Barry McKinnon (1944-2023)
I’ve been thinking about Barry so much, and I just don’t know where to begin. I guess to begin would be to admit he’s gone, and I’m still trying not to do that.
Barry spurred me on because I could feel him over there, across the city, obsessing about poetry. His work and his thoughts, when he’d share them, if we met over beers or after a reading, made me ask myself if I could do more, if I was writing all I could write, and that was so valuable to me.
Once, my sweetheart and I were at his place on Gorse and he showed us the chapbook and broadside treasure troves that were his filing cabinets. We went home with our arms spilling over, poems trailing behind us. That was sometime around 2008 or 9. Recently, our daughter came home from university with rows of black text tattooed on the insides of her arms, just south of her elbow crease. They were from a broadside of Barry’s we’d framed. It had lived on so many walls of our home. The others made their way into my husband’s classroom. This one made it onto the body of a young person who comes from the pulp mill town Barry’s poems observed so carefully, and they’ll travel with her, part of her sideways inheritance from him, and part of his testament to northern living - the resilience required to survive here and build art despite and because of its strange beauty and difficulty.
Barry’s work always struck me as a quiet, personal conversation I was privy to, which is a rich and unsettling, delicious feeling for a reader. It didn’t call me so much to respond, but more that it invited me to write alongside. I love that his work seems to stem from curiosity - it questions and argues and prods and worries. That’s always appealed to me more than work that supposes it has the answer. Barry might come to an answer, but he does so without fanfare, with humility, sometimes with a confession just this side of devastating, certainly raw, certainly human. Living in Prince George has been, for me, twenty years of invitation from Barry to come say my piece, to put it next to his, to be a voice in the north, and that wasn’t nothing when I was a new mum in my twenties, new in town, shit-scared I wouldn’t be able to be the writer I wanted to be. Barry said, why not? His work said it. He said it in person. With a shrug. A squint. He’d push his glasses up the bridge of his nose, and if you were sitting next to him, he’d give you a nudge with his elbow. Barry made me feel like he was glad I was here, doing my thing, whatever it was. And that made me do it. And it made me glad and proud to be doing it alongside him, from across the city. He made me welcome.
When I was 28, Barry told me about a series of poems he and rob mclennan were writing, and other poets too, or maybe rob told me: the Sex at… series. Sex at 31, Sex at 38. I, of course wondered which women were writing, and without invitation, wrote my own and inadvertently laid down a section of foundation for my personal poetics - look at it straight, write it down, whether it’s bloody or milky or sexy or all of the above, and do it with or without invitation. Barry loved that I’d joined in. I was buoyed, and my poetics were bolstered by his refusal to cede all the space to southerners or easterners - he would keep writing, and so would I.
I ran into Barry only once after the pandemic, and he looked so happy, which was unusual but kind of delightful. He was having coffee with another writer. Of course he was! He said he was living part time somewhere else. It suited him, clearly. He looked so good. I miss him here in PG, but I run into the memory of him here quite often - certain buildings, some bars and coffee shops, definitely at the college, definitely if I catch a glimpse of John Harris trekking through the city - I see what he built here even if it’s invisible to some eyes because I have his words in my head, and his words drew a particular lasting map of this city. For me, and for most other Prince George writers, we’re building our own maps alongside his, and it’s pretty great. It’s less lonely for sure, and it’s a strong foundation for us to build on. I’m grateful for it.
Gillian Wigmore lives on Lheidli T’enneh territory in Prince George, BC. The author of three books of poems and three books of fiction, most recently Night Watch, published by Invisible Press, she is a winner of the ReLit Prize, and a runner up for the Danuta Gleed Award, the B.C. Book Prize for Poetry, and the George Ryga Award for Social Awareness in Literature. She works in health communications.
