I was very fortunate to be the Canadian Writer-in-Residence with the Calgary Distinguished Writers’ Program from fall 2022 to spring 2023. It’s important for me to say that Jori Celona was awarded this residency in the first place, and had to turn the opportunity down for an important personal reason. I was honoured to be called in to fill the role in Celona’s stead and hope you’ll familiarize yourself with their work in lieu of their residency term. When I got the unexpected call from then-Program Coordinator Alex Handley inviting me to step in, it had been a difficult season. I had moved to Calgary from Vancouver in summer 2020, wanting to be driving distance to my family in Saskatoon while flights were stopped. By summer 2022, we were entering the I’ve-lost-count-now wave. There was so much to love about Mohkinstis: I had a satisfying day job, plus an editorial position with New Forum magazine—a revival of a historic local feminist publication produced by an excellent collective at the literary artist-run centre Loft 112. I was rapidly making up for ten years of sunshine deficiency on the (otherwise truly beloved) west coast. The drive to Banff or Kananaskis was shorter than my commute to work had been some years in Vancouver. My apartment was beautiful and affordable; I could walk along the Elbow River to the grocery store and a delicious French bakery and see the mountains. I lived at the edge of a nature preserve where I regularly saw bobcats, coyote, deer, hawks, and more rabbits than I could count. I was also extremely isolated, missed my friends, and was disturbed by a large, weekly anti-vaccine demonstration in a few of my regular neighbourhoods. Meanwhile, my family in Saskatoon was starting to hug each other again, without me. And, well—I had been rejected for the CDWP residency for the third time, having started applying before I ever lived in Calgary. Now my window for eligibility was rapidly closing, and with Calgary not panning out the way I had hoped, I knew it was time for me to leave and move home to Saskatoon. The week I booked the truck, Alex called to offer me the position.
I panicked on the phone. Of course I was interested. “Interested”
was an understatement. But I also couldn’t stay in Calgary. I couldn’t keep
going days without speaking to another human unless I weighed the risks and ran
errands. And I had already given up my apartment! While I panicked, the
compassionate, quick-thinking, and creative Alex talked me through a totally
cogent plan. I’d pursue a hybrid residency and offer a majority of programs
online—a wise decision regardless of my location, and one that may well have
come to pass even if I stayed in the city, due to continually frightening and
surging COVID numbers. I’d arrange to visit Mohkinstis a few times during the
year for week-long visits that would coincide with important in-person events,
yet to be revealed. It made perfect sense, and rather
than create limitations, this flexibility opened up exciting possibilities all
throughout my term, especially the ability to connect with under-served writers
who are particularly at risk due to the ongoing pandemic. I remain extremely
grateful to Alex and committee members Dr. Clem Martini, Dr. Bertrand
Bickersteth, Vivian Hansen, Rosemary Griebel, Serena Bhandar, and Dr. Joshua
Whitehead for trusting me with a hybrid model and so much experimental
programming. Outgoing WiR Teresa Wong, offered me so much valuable insight based on her own term,
and left me a beautiful, hand-drawn comic full of wisdom on my brand-new desk
in my office. (Teresa has a new graphic memoir out now that you should most definitely order; I’ve seen excerpts
and like all her work, it’s profoundly moving.)
I had planned to go back to Saskatoon and recuperate and eat ice cream in my pajamas, etc. Not anymore! I had to get it together and talk to the paper and the radio and write a novel for the first time—the crux of my application to the residency, along with a robust, queer-centered proposal for community engagement, which is perhaps the hallmark of the residency. Its reputation as the highest-paid residency in Canada comes with a 50/50 split of writing time and free, public programming including free manuscript consultations. My schedule for consults was fully booked by January 2023; we maintained a waitlist until the very end of my term in June. Clients ranged from brand-new, brilliant emerging writers to very experienced mid-careerists with impressive publishing records. A number of folks have since reported back with positive news since then, following some of our revisions—book deals, grad school acceptances, first-time journal publications—which is very moving. (If you’re reading this—like I said in our consults—keep me posted on your good news!) Offering a majority of online consultations (and events) made it possible to reach rural writers, disabled, immunocompromised, and generally COVID-cautious writers, as well as a remarkable number of writers from Vancouver, Ontario, and the Maritimes who were able to book consultations if spots were available, after prioritizing writers located in Mohkinstis and on Treaty Seven territory or within Métis Region Three.
I
think an undersung highlight of this residency is the amount of committee and
administrative support the authors receive. I’m used to doing just about
everything by myself, with a bestie, or a very small team. The gift of funded
autonomy over my time and programming, with a built-in support network of about
ten professionals is extremely rare. The committee and staff team were on deck
for talking me through everything from wondering why writing a novel feels so much more vulnerable to me than
poetry, to helping iron out bureaucratic wrinkles to create a BIPOC-specific
virtual space. I want to specifically call attention to the time and energy
Alex put into pre-screening the manuscript consultation documents I received
from clients. I was fully prepared for a broad range of powerful content, but
having never worked with this volume of consultations before, I was perhaps
unprepared for the scale. Alex’s consistent work to flag consultations that
included topics like explicit violence and self-harm was deeply appreciated and
helped me show up more fully for our clients. For our in-person events, Alex
arranged live captioning, CART services, scent reduction, and accommodated my fearful insistence on COVID protocols wherever
possible, even as the university lifted restrictions. I remarked multiple times
to Alex during my term that I am amazed she
had not yet been headhunted by a publishing house due to her exemplary work
with this program. Any author would benefit from her profound attention, and
any publishing house would benefit from her comprehensive range of skills. I
remain awed about what she was able to make possible for me, let alone during a
three-day workweek while also completing her studies. I know she’s off making
waves in her new chapter! We’re lucky that celebrated Calgary poet and writer
Amy LeBlanc is now steering the program for outgoing and outstanding writer
Francine Cunningham and incoming, incomparable Danny Ramadan. I would also be totally remiss without mentioning Nikki
Reimer, an award-winning poet who also happens to be a professional on the Arts
Communications & Marketing team at the university. Due to the themes of my
writing, I’ve been known to find media interviews inducing of a cold sweat at
best and nauseating at worst, and I had a marathon week lined up to announce my
residency in mid-October. Nikki provided me with invaluable mentorship during
those early days as I navigated a wide variety of media requests and developed
some new coping skills for promotion.
The residency’s platform put me in front of new audiences and helped me partner with some top-notch prairie organizations to reach writers on and off-campus: the Writers’ Guild of Alberta, the Saskatchewan Writers’ Guild, the Alexandra Writers’ Centre (thanks to Precious de Leon), and the Taylor Family Digital Library (with thanks to librarian Christena McKillop). One of my favourite parts of the residency was a collaborative workshop series I developed with Skipping Stone, a nonprofit that connects trans and gender diverse youth, adults, and families to comprehensive and low-barrier support across Alberta. I worked specifically with the fantastic Haley Wray, coordinator of Skipping Stone’s peer mentorship program, to develop and facilitate writing workshops for youth accessing services both in-person and online. While homophobia and trans-antagonism are heartbreaking realities across the country right now, I found that aspect of the climate in Alberta especially painful—the same as I do here in Saskatchewan—and this was a small way to combat some of my own perceived hopelessness. While we unfortunately weren’t able to collaborate on an event together during my term, I also met twice with Cal Gibbens, organizer of local queer & trans mutual aid collective Pansy Club. Pansy Club runs an extremely broad range of capacity-building programs for Calgary’s queer community, from dance parties to low-cost resource sharing events and a burgeoning open mic night. I so wished I had been able to take an even more active part in Calgary’s queer community when I lived in the city; I could not have imagined that the residency would give me such a meaningful second chance.
The most starry-eyed, humbling moment of my term was the chance to meet Jamaica Kincaid (!!!!), who was the Distinguished Visiting Writer-in-Residence that year through a stroke of extreme luck I still can’t quite believe. Having a front-row seat at her event in conversation with Suzette Mayr was a real once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. The Calgary Women’s Literary Club generously hosted me for a beautiful reading and discussion at the Memorial Park library. (Of course, we all love the gorgeous downtown branch in Calgary, but Memorial is really my favourite location. It was walking distance from my old apartment, frequently had ducks wandering onto the lawn from the riverbank, and is just across the street from beloved bookstore Shelf Life. Plus, the park was the site of Calgary’s first-ever public protest for gay rights, if I recall my queer history walking tour with Kevin Allen correctly in addition to fondly). I was also invited to participate in wonderful local reading series Flywheel and Single Onion. Through an exchange with the University of Alberta thanks to Thomas Wharton, I was able to meet and read with their tremendous Writer-in-Residence, Bänoo Zann, and make an online visit to Marilyn Dumont’s poetry class. Back in Calgary, I was very graciously invited to speak to a number of classes, including Dr. Rebecca Geleyn’s first-year creative writing students, whose contagious energy was incredibly reviving when I started to flag and wonder why I ever pitched writing a novel in the first place. I was also honoured to virtual visit a few classrooms, including Dr. Annette Tim’s Holocaust Studies students, who brought an undivided level of care, attention, and understanding to Moldovan Hotel that continues to make me emotional just thinking about it. And I was able to take some risks and offer some experimental workshops: how about a dress rehearsal for writers who are anxious about public readings? How about some “parallel time,” where we write together online in silence and prioritize people who benefit from body doubling and/or voice-off spaces? The residency gave me the freedom to explore interventions beyond traditional formats, as well as turn some of my skillshare articles I had completed as the Open Book Writer-in-Residence in April 2021 into interactive workshops.
Oh, also—somewhere in the midst of all this, while moving and packing and week-long stays in hotels and very long cab rides and unpacking, I completed a draft of a novel. There was significant hand-wringing, a whole lot of related Duolingo practice, and major-league brushing up on my Yiddish folktales. You can read an excerpt of this work-in-progress in issue #81 of filling station thanks to Omar Ramadan and editors. Big thanks as well to the crowd at Hello/Goodbye 2022 for helping me take it for a test drive. I was also solicited for a pair of new poems from Riddle Fence, which you can find in their upcoming fall 2024 issue, and for this essay in periodicities—thank you rob!
I’m so grateful to the CDWP for providing me with a second chance at an improved relationship with Calgary. It would have been so painful to leave another city on an emotionally difficult note, similarly to my departure from Vancouver early on in the pandemic. The residency gave me a safer, more hopeful, and deeply literary way to connect with so much of what I’d missed out on while living on the territory in person, and resolved so many of my wishes and anxieties left unresolved from when I moved in the first place. Just this past weekend I was co-facilitating the Writers’ Guild of Alberta retreat outside of Caroline, thinking about what a different visit it would have been if not for the residency—perhaps with some dread and regret along for the ride—if indeed the visit would have happened at all! Organizers I met during the residency (thank you Ashley White and Ashley Mann!) hosted a beautiful weekend for us in the woods. I saw a fox for the first time, and my first shooting star in a long while, which I get to tuck neatly in beside my neighbourhood bobcat memories. I’m hopeful that I can keep nurturing the literary and creative connections we built across the prairies during my term, and I’m so glad I was really able to be in two places at once.
Leah Horlick is the author of three collections of poetry: Riot Lung, For Your Own Good, and Moldovan Hotel. She is a past winner of Arc's Poem of the Year and the Dayne Ogilvie Prize (Canada's only award for emerging LGBTQ2S+ writers. Her second book was named a Stonewall Honor Title by the American Library Association. She was the 2022-23 Canadian Writer-in-Residence with the Calgary Distinguished Writers’ Program. Originally from Saskatoon on Treaty Six territory and the homelands of the Métis, Leah is happy to have moved back home after many years away in Vancouver and Calgary.