Chris Johnson : “I’m so fuckin self conscious I doubt the motives for shitting”: on being a writer-in-residence at the Al & Eurithe Purdy A-frame in late Fall 2025

 

 

 

 

 

I watched a National Film Board documentary about P.K. Page’s life and literary career while I was the writer-in-residence at the Al & Eurithe Purdy A-frame. I was watching it for research. In the documentary Page talks to the interviewer about getting her poems accepted by the influential Chicago-based magazine, Poetry. She says that she’d wanted poems in that magazine for years, but once it happened it didn’t seem like a big thing. In the documentary Page then references Groucho Marx, mixing up the phrase somewhat, saying, “Why should I join an exclusive club that lets in people like me?” There was the 1954 Governor General’s Literary Award winner, for everyone to stream for free on the NFB website, laughing at herself, self-deprecating and undermining the selectness of her achievement.

My time at the A-frame can be pretty accurately summed up by that scene in that documentary. There I was, by some measures a “successful writer” who was sitting in the cottage of a Canadian literary icon by the means of a prestigious residency program, selected by a jury of my peers for this honour, and I was still grappling with self-doubt. It’s a funny thing to also view the figures of CanLit’s past, like Page, as humans and not just the geniuses behind their best literary compositions. It’s a little odd, even, to view them as capable of feeling like imposters or frauds or hacks. (Aside: on the topic of poets being self conscious, while I was at the residency I read a bunch of Al’s correspondences published in Yours, Al: The Collected Letters of Al Purdy and my favourite line was from one of Al’s letters to the American poet Charles Bukowski, in a moment when Al was, I guess, getting a bit too emotional or sentimental for his liking and needed to alleviate the seriousness of his tone by saying: “Anyway, talking about feeling as above, bothers me. I’m so fuckin self conscious I doubt the motives for shitting.”) There is a little yellow Moleskine journal in the A-frame where each writer-in-residence can put down a few sentences or paragraphs about their time in the space. That document also clarified for me that everyone who had been in Purdy’s cottage hadn’t just been creating non-stop, penning perfect poem after perfect poem. It did take me getting there to realize that this kind of output wasn’t expected of me over my 4-week residency. When I was first informed that my application to the residency was accepted I was overjoyed, then came the anxiety mixed with excitement, and once I’d arrived I felt simultaneously like I belonged and never should have stepped foot in there. I felt like I shouldn’t’ve joined the club that would have someone like me.

Going back to the beginning, let me review how I got the A-frame residency. As I mentioned, there was an application process. Like most writing residencies, the application consists of a professional curriculum vitae, a plan for the residency (i.e. a project that will be worked on and/or completed at the residency), a writing sample, and an optional letter of reference. The Al & Eurithe Purdy A-frame residency is somewhat unique because the application also includes a “community-based project” that the writer-in-residence will complete during their stay in Prince Edward County, where Al & Eurithe’s A-frame is located. Suggested community projects are writing workshops or public readings; the first writer-in-residence at the A-frame, Katherine Leyton, filmed various strangers around the County reading a poem by Al Purdy for her community-project. This was the source of my initial spat of self-doubt. What could I, a 30-something Ottawa-based writer without a full-length collection and a smattering of poems in nationally-distributed literary magazines, offer to a community around 200 kilometers away from where some writers actually know my name and (perhaps, hopefully) care about what I’m doing? I pitched printing linocut poster poems or broadsides as my project. I’m no artist, but the assessors of my application probably didn’t know that. And I thought it would be unique. If you can’t be ambitious when writing an application for a grant or to a writing residency, when can you? In October 2024 I sent in my application package, six printed copies mailed to BC and an email I finally hit “send” on at 11am on a Friday.

I missed the phone call from Jean Baird, board member of the A-frame Association, when she was trying to notify me that I’d be selected as a writer-in-residence at the Al & Eurithe Purdy A-frame. I was in the shower. What are the chances that she would call during the five minutes I was washing! She sent me an email asking for a good time to connect after I didn’t pick up, which I saw while toweling off, and I called her right back. I might have even still been wearing a towel. The phone call was brief, I think, although it sent me soaring. Whatever was said doesn’t really matter—perhaps some generous comments on my application from Jean, definitely multiple utterances of thanks from me—though I’m sure Jean could hear my grin on the other side of the phone. It was January 2025 and, not that Jean could possible know this, it was just 12 days before my 35^th birthday. I would be notified later that I would be the last writer-in-residence for 2025, living in the A-frame for four weeks from mid-October to mid-November. At the beginning of the year, the residency couldn’t come soon enough, although I knew there were still obstacles to navigate.

Here’s what the A-frame writer-in-residence is offered: a stipend of $750 per week, a temporary library card for the library at Queen’s University in Kingston, and the entirety of Al and Eurithe’s A-frame cottage for four weeks. (I believe some residencies were longer in the past, and even in 2025 there is a Steven Heighton Fellowship that includes a six-week residency.) Here’s what the writer-in-residence is still expected to do after being offered a residency: submit a grant proposal to the Canada Council for the Arts (CCA) for matched funding for the residency and travel expenses. Writing a grant application is and isn’t an onerous task. It’s not much more work than the residency application, but cultural funding agencies require a budget detailing what every penny of funding will be spent on. Everyone I talked to, including the folks at the A-frame Association, insisted that I should ask for the full amount possible from the CCA. Everyone I talked to assured me that, even if I didn’t receive what I’d asked for, the CCA would offer the travel funding for the residency, considering this was an exclusive opportunity offered through a juried application process. Most of my time working on that grant application I spent finetuning my budget, concerned that this would be the thing that would make or break my application, but I’ll likely never know if that was the deciding factor.

Of course I wasn’t offered anything by the CCA. Nada. Zilch. “It did not score highly enough compared to others” is the extent of the explanation in the results email. I would learn this result of my grant application just about a month before I was to head to the A-frame. When I first opened the email with the results of my application, I thought for a moment, “This is another jury of my peers telling me that I don’t actually deserve this residency, that my writing isn’t worthy of even a miniscule investment of a couple thousand dollars to help make this opportunity possible.”  With only the $3000 stipend from the A-frame Association and an expectation to take the 4-week residency off from my various jobs, I had to pivot last minute to ensure that I didn’t have to pay out of pocket for a month-long car rental, and that I wouldn’t have to resort to subsiding on white rice at the A-frame. Luckily, my parents have two cars and the ability to spare one for four weeks. That did mean, however, that the first day of my residency was going to consist of approximately 8 hours of travel: getting my uncle to drive me from Ottawa to Barrie, getting my parents’ car there, then driving from Barrie to Ameliasburgh. When I first stepped into that cottage at around 8PM on a rainy Sunday in October, I knew the whole ordeal was worth it.

The space that Al Purdy lived and worked in for almost 50 years, where he wrote the Governor General's Award-winning The Cariboo Horses and many other books, where numerous other CanLit icons visited and drank and wrote and laughed—it’s a magical space. I wrote a poem that first night that I got there—three poems, actually, although there at least two of them will remain pages in a notebook and nothing more—and I set a goal for myself to write at least one poem every day during my residency. I set a number of goals or rules for myself: reading for at least one hour every morning, exercising at least once a day, baking something once a week. I didn’t achieve that last goal, and the only thing I “baked” myself was pancakes for breakfast. The rules were essentially effective, though, and paired with the newness of the cottage and the break from my usual day-to-day responsibilities (apart from cooking and doing dishes) I found myself quite productive, especially in those first few days. It was a novelty to wake up and have nothing to do except read and write and think about poetry. Nevertheless, after the first week I began to question my work, both the new poems I was writing at the A-frame and more generally. I reached out to my group chat to kvetch about not feeling successful. The first week at the A-frame was novel but it eventually sunk in that bar was set incredibly high, that people who had written and created art in this space were successful and talented and the same expectation would be held up against my work now. I started to question the intentions behind my writing, whether they were justifiable or if they even existed at all. I was reminded by my lovely and patient friends that the only person who is setting the bar for myself is myself. The morning after I sought reassurances from my group chat I wrote a sort of Ars Poetica that was really a series of questions to myself and no one in particular, a two-page anxiety-induced rant about how I feared that my poetry didn’t matter, and an uncertain guide to how I could make my poetry somewhat matter to a certain audience or even a wider audience, if I could pull it off.

It’s still too soon after leaving the A-frame to know if my newfound purpose is actually leading to any sort of meaningful change in my writing. It’s too soon to know if any of the writing I did at the A-frame is any good. (I haven’t really looked at any of it since I left.) I am certain, though, that I’ll never not feel self conscious in the literary world, like I’m taking up space that would be better filled by someone else. But, like P.K. Page and Al Purdy and a million other writers seem to always be advocating this, the goal is to stick to it and to keep working on the craft and to fake confidence if necessary. Nobody wants to read a self conscious poet, but goddammit that’s what they’re gonna get if they ever pick up my book.

 

 

 

 

Chris Johnson (he/him) was born in Scarborough, Ontario, and currently lives on unceded, unsurrendered territory of the Anishinaabe Algonquin Nation (Ottawa). He is the managing editor for Arc Poetry Magazine and editorial assistant at Nightwood Editions. In Fall 2025, Chris was a writer-in-residence at the Al & Eurithe Purdy A-frame. His latest chapbook is 320 lines of poetry (counting blank lines) (Anstruther Press, 2023).

Chris Johnson : KINAUVUNGA?, by Aedan Corey and Hold Steady My Vision, by Emily Laurent Henderson

KINAUVUNGA?, Aedan Corey
Publication Studio Guelph, 2024 

Hold Steady My Vision, Emily Laurent Henderson
Publication Studio Guelph, 2024

 

 

 

Although they’ve been around since 2009, the Publication Studio network might be flying under the radar even for the most attentive small press aficionados in Canada. Publication Studio isn’t a traditional publisher by any means, but instead a network of artists and creatives who are interested in publishing original books on-demand, creating something unique and individual for each author. Originally starting in Portland, Oregon, there are now eleven Publication Studio partner locations including three in Canada: in Vancouver, Edmonton, and Guelph. The studio location in Guelph (stylized as PS Guelph) was initiated in 2013 by a charitable foundation for the arts, Musagetes, which has a mission of promoting the arts as a means for social transformation. This foundation’s mission has informed all of the releases by PS Guelph. One of Musagetes’ programs is Indigenous Otherwise, curated by Elwood Jimmy and primarily engaging Indigenous artists whose practices are mindful of the Earth and all living species that inhabit our planet. The support of this program aided in PS Guelph’s publication of Taqralik Partridge’s debut book of poetry in 2020, and Partridge returned to the studio to curate and edit two new poetry collections for PS Guelph in 2024. Aedan Corey’s KINAUVUNGA? and Emily Laurent Henderson’s Hold Steady My Vision are compelling contributions of Inuit and Inuk voices to the world’s Indigenous literature, as well as beautiful book objects from PS Guelph.

The good things about Aedan Corey’s and Emily Laurent Henderson’s books from PS Guelph are multiple, and many of those good things can be applied to the books as art objects. Both books are almost pocket size, slightly smaller than the standard 5.5” by 8” dimensions of many poetry books. Corey’s cover is a full-colour version of an illustration that is also included inside their book, and Henderson’s cover is purple cardstock with a stamped illustration and text of the book’s title. The back covers aren’t adorned with any blurbs or barcodes, just the embossed logo for PS Guelph. These details contribute to an aesthetic enjoyment of these books before a reader will even engage with the writers’ poems, which are just as expertly typeset as the books are made. It’s always a pleasure when a publisher understands that putting care into a book’s design can elevate a reading experience, not distracting from but contributing to the enjoyment of engaging with the text.

It might be contradictory to qualify the reading of poems (or any writing) on difficult subjects as enjoyable, but engaging with art about hard truths can help soften the impact. Aedan Corey’s rewarding poetry is straightforwardly lyrical, brief and effective, exploring topics of family, identity, and grief. The title of the collection, KINAUVUNGA?, translates to “Who am I?” as per a glossary at the back of the book. Despite the title’s question about identity, Corey’s poems don’t seem uncertain, but rather mournful of the culture that the author has lost in the colonization of Turtle Island, as demonstrated in “throat singing” when the poet-speaker laments the loss of the their people’s songs: “Now my throat is raw / at the thought / and the world is quiet / without our words.” This collection laments many of the ways that the colonial project has utterly failed Indigenous communities, including the rural and urban Indigenous populations facing homelessness, a lack of clean drinking water, unfair treatment by the judicial system, and various other hardships. The longest poem in the collection is “atausiq,” which appears in the middle of the collection. It is effective in presenting a sampling of the collection, including a repeated refrain of italicized words that translates to “one / two / three / four / five.” The counting in this poem is echoed in the speaker’s exhaustion by keeping count of their siblings, cousins, and friends that they’ve lost to suicide. These messages stick with the reader, even though there are moments of levity in the book. At the end, it is inevitable that Corey’s goal is to build community in their poetry.

Community in Emily Laurent Henderson’s Hold Steady My Vision appears as roots and woven threads. This Kalaaleq (Greenlandic Inuk) and Settler writer’s debut poetry collection is also similar to KINAUVUNGA? thematically in its exploration of grief, love, and identity. The image of a thread plays double duty as it can fray to represent the poet-speaker’s lost connection to the land of their cultural roots: “Have you ever heard the fraying of the word home,” opens the poem “Belonging and unbelonging” near the beginning of the collection, where maps are first mentioned in connection to an ambiguous and omnipresent feeling of displacement. The poem ends by naming this complex feeling of disconnection for the poet: “for home is a fraught migration / and I am already there.” Moments of certainty are almost immediately cut off and questioned, as with the appearance of a missing mapbook in a later poem: “There is no mapbook / for the chapstick and the way you will search / and heal” (“In absence of a rite of passage, I spend my 20s in the city”). The mention of an endless search for chapstick provides an example of Henderson’s humour in the collection, and the small details that personalize and make these intimate poems relatable. With all of the poems titles appearing after the poems, there is new context or a different reading one can bring to the poem after discovering the title below the poem’s last line. Perhaps this too is meant to contribute to the book’s beautifully crafted sense of place and displacement.

For the amount that these poets’ small and intimate lyrics communicate anger and grief and love and longing, the poems easily leave an open-hearted reader full and comforted. Corey and Henderson’s collections are filled with a variety of emotions, tough subjects and difficult truths, but the poems are also accessible and welcoming. These are both poets exploring their Indigenous identities and the way their existence is political in 2024. The Indigenous Voices Awards’s 10th anniversary will have just passed by the time this review is posted, and KINAUVUNGA? is a finalist selected by the esteemed jury in the “Published Poetry” category. This review is being written before the awards are announced, so the outcome is to be determined. It would be beautiful, however, for this landmark year of the IVAs to also be one in which they recognize the talent of a singular poet like Aedan Corey. Regardless, I hope that the recognition of even being shortlisted means PS Guelph gets a little more attention. After the strength of Aedan Corey’s KINAUVUNGA? and Emily Laurent Henderson’s Hold Steady My Vision it will be interesting to see what books PS Guelph puts out next.

 

 

 

Chris Johnson (he/him) currently lives on unceded, unsurrendered territory of the Anishinaabe Algonquin Nation. His latest chapbook is 320 lines of poetry (counting blank lines) (Anstruther Press, 2023).

photo credit: Curtis Perry

 

Chris Johnson : some sentences about some of the raccoon poems

 

 

 

“The writer must speak (somehow and always) to the contemporary moment.”
      —    Geoffrey Nilson, “The Poetic Body in Architectural Space”

 

 

April is National Poetry Month. A Wikipedia list tells me it’s also Arab American Heritage Month, Jazz Appreciation Month, National Pet Month (in the UK), and Sexual Assault Awareness Month, among others. In Canada, specifically, April has lots of National Days and Observances, including World Autism Awareness Day, Tartan Day, Vimy Ridge Day, World Book and Copyright Day, Holocaust Memorial Day, and Journey to Freedom Day, which I had never heard of until doing this little bit of research for a preambulatory paragraph to a write-up on a chapbook that has little-to-nothing to do with any of these special days. Well, in 2019, a fledgling friendship with another poet, Ashley Hynd, lead to ranting about how distracted we both were and how we hadn’t been able to write as much as we would like. So, logically, during April we both agreed to write a poem every day and pop them into a shared Google Drive folder to hold each other accountable. To up the risk (and reward, potentially) my partner in this month-long project proposed that for every day that we missed writing a poem we’d owe the other person two poems—and this was on top of the poem we had to write for the next day. We forced each other to write poetry—lots of poetry—in April 2019. Turns out the accountability of this grueling practice was more helpful than harmful, and we have kept it up in 2020, 2021 and 2022. It has become our own little month-long observance. Turns out that when you engage with poetry every day for a month, your writing actually benefits from that sustained engagement. (Who knew?)

That first year of attempting to write a poem every day, I composed multiple poems in which raccoons made appearances. This didn’t come out of nowhere. As a child, my favourite stuffed animal was a raccoon I named Ricky. Perhaps because of the stuffed animal, my favourite song by The Beatles was “Rocky Raccoon.” Growing up in Toronto—the traditional territory of many nations including the Mississaugas of the Credit, the Anishnabeg, the Chippewa, the Haudenosaunee and the Wendat peoples—also meant growing up amongst a large and ridiculously behaved urban population of raccoons, getting into the trash or getting struck and killed by drivers of motor vehicles on highways. Fast-forward a few years, the virality of Toronto’s and Ottawa’s raccoons in the news brought about a new admiration of the procyonid’s antics. Raccoons were and are always just around, and I decided it was time that they were around in more of my poetry.

To be honest, the raccoon poems were a joke. I was trying to find connections to other works that mentioned raccoons, but largely I thought the poems were just amusing. At an event near the end of 2019 that rob mclennan was hosting at his favourite hole, The Carleton Tavern, I debuted a bunch of raccoon poems. The positive response I received in front of a small audience in that beautifully crappy bar motivated me to keep working on the poems, and at the end of 2020 I received a small grant from the City of Ottawa for this project. Fast-forward to the end of August 2022 when rob emailed me with the subject line “hey old man,” as many of his emails are headed, and ended with an off-the-cuff question: “oh, and are we ever doing a second chapbook?” (My first above/ground chapbook, Gravenhurst, was published in 2019.) It’s a privilege to have someone in your local poetry community who makes a point of asking you about your writing, and even more of a privilege when that person is willing to print your work, staple it together, and mail it to hundreds (thousands?) of readers around the world.

some of the raccoon poems is many things beyond a chapbook of poems that feature appearances by raccoons. These poems live in the intersection of nature poetry, confessional poetry, and political/social commentary. Many poems take inspiration from other poets and artists in content, form, or style. Of course Ashley Hynd’s poetry makes an appearance, as does some of my favourite writers from Ottawa’s poetry community. A Bill Callahan song slips in, and so does a poem I discovered through The New Yorker Poetry Podcast. Oh, and the title rips off an Artie Gold collection: some of the cat poems (CrossCountry Press, 1978). Beyond poetic influences, this chapbook is also a snapshot of who I am at this moment, communicated though lines and references that are a sum total of my experiences. That’s how I speak to the contemporary moment in my writing: naming who I am reading and talking to, who I am collaborating with, listening to, learning from, growing with. We’re all a part of a community with shared resources and holidays and communal spaces, and we’re building up that community when we acknowledge the people or places that brought us to where we are. We’re past the age of the lone genius. Let’s start mythmaking a world of collaboration, reconciliation, and respect.

 

 

P.S. It seems only fitting to add an end note here thanking Manahil Bandukwala and nina jane drystek for help editing this essay/note/preface/thing.

 

 

 

 

Chris Johnson (he/they) is a settler poet from Scarborough currently living on unceded Algonquin Anishinabe territory. He is the Managing Editor for Arc Poetry Magazine, a board member at the Ottawa Arts Council, and a member of the creative collective VII.

Author photo credit: Nicolai Gregory