Jessica Hiemstra
[photo credit: Cory Lavender] is an award-winning artist, writer, and designer.
Her writing has appeared in chapbooks, essay collections, journals, and in
three full-length poetry collections that she also illustrated: The Holy
Nothing, Self Portrait without a Bicycle, and Apologetic for Joy.
In 2018, Hiemstra won Toronto’s My Entertainment World’s Outstanding Set and
Costume Design award for her work on Shannon Bramer’s The Hungriest Woman in
the World. In 2021, she received second place in Brush and Lyre’s Palette
Poetry prize for her multimedia entry, “Cormorant”, an animation of cormorants
in flight over Lake Ontario/ Niigaani-gichigami. Some of these drawings appear
in Blood Root.
Jessica Hiemstra reads in Ottawa on Tuesday, March 25 as part of VERSeFest 2025.
Amanda Earl:
Can you talk about your dedication “for roadkill” and how it relates to the
book, which is full of animals, their behaviours and mistreatment by humans.
Jessica Hiemstra: I remember driving over a garter snake on
my bike as a child, gutted that I could kill something by not noticing it. As
an adult, to my shame, I drove over new frogs, spring peepers, on my way to get
a bottle of wine. I noticed the frogs, hundreds of bright bellies in my
headlights, and continued. I was able to kill all those frogs without stopping.
I did it on the way to the store, and again on the way back. My desire for a
glass of wine eclipsed my humanity.
What are we
willing to sacrifice for desire? What words can we invent to say or not say who
or what someone or something is? The fact that this concept, the word roadkill,
exists at all, is an indictment. It extends beyond frogs, to all living beings.
It’s central to capitalism, colonialism, my own personal cultural history.
AE: You mention
in the acknowledgements that the drawings in the book are stills from your animations (cormorants,
herons, cliff swallows). I don’t know if
you see any ekphrastic role at all to the poetry. Ekphrastic poetry is
typically a response to art, but these poems do feel like they are in
conversation with the art. The inclusion
of artwork here is powerful and acts as a way to condense emotion.
JH: I’m glad to
hear that you find the inclusion of the artwork powerful. I feel very lucky to
be able to both draw and write – it means that what I do is more dialogue than
ekphrasis. I made the drawings for the animations and wrote the poems over many
years alongside one another. I like that
with a drawing you see the “end” first but with a poem you take in the parts, one
line at a time; the whole is what you’re left with when you’re done
reading. The acts of drawing and writing poems feel similar to me - like two
ways of touching the same thing, almost like two senses, so I like that they
can dialogue in the book, almost like translations of one another.
AE: You say on
your site that you think of your drawings as poems and that your drawings are
as close to your heart as you can get? In the book you write, “my drawings are
hymns/for slow ghosts of turtles” (15). I adore this. It really resonates for
me. What you’ve done here is connect art
and poetry, but also the human body with nature. It makes protecting the
environment such a visceral and essential thing. How do you feel your art and
text are connected in Blood Root? What is their relationship? Echo?
Repeat? Juxtaposition? Other?
JH: I’m glad this
resonates, Amanda. Drawing lets me look deeply at what I’m drawing – whether
that’s a plant, or something inside me I need to get out and put on paper. It
slows me down, makes me attentive to details. The physicality of drawing is
something I like, too – pencil in hand,
hand on paper. I touch the paper, but
also follow the lines of what I’m looking at with my pencil/pen – a kind
of touching without touching. The paper makes a sound under my hand, under my
drawing tool. In this way, drawing’s not only deep looking, but a kind of listening.
There’s also something special about the
way drawing is finding language without words – this affords me a precision in
the expression of a feeling, or an observation, without containing or naming
it. This really appeals to me. I like how much room this gives another person
when they’re looking at it, and also how much room it gives me, as the one
making it. Drawing has this magical aspect to it – it’s like I’m the only one
who speaks this language, like I’ve invented it to say something, yet you can
understand it, without speaking it.
Drawing gives room to mourn the dead in new
ways, too. For example, while I have reverence for all creatures, knowing
housecats kill 100 million birds every year, in the place we call Canada, is
sobering. I felt nervous about naming this in the book – so many people love
the cats they live with. And the cats are here. I feel like the drawings
in the book allow us to see cats, herons, songbirds, with tenderness and care.
When I speak of cats, and we have the echo of the drawing of a bird in a cat’s
mouth, I think we become tender, too. The cat, the songbird, are in front of
us. Layered with the disappearing turtle on the highway, slipped in between
poems.
AE: What struck
me so much about this book was the way in which you will not let beauty be
idealized, it comes from what is real and what is part of life: “something
perfect and white/spills from a gull’s anus” (24). You don’t just juxtapose
beauty and idealism with unvarnished truth, which is sometimes ugly and causes pain,
you make them inseparable: “a swan appears/in the moment of painful light”
(27). “Mom’s ex-husband George brings me papaya/its pink flesh smells like
vomit//I don’t like papaya/the seeds look like rabbit shit” (60).
Can you talk about how you see beauty
portrayed here and what its role may be for you?
JH: One question that
has a hold on me is: how can I see who or what’s in front of me with as much
dimension as possible? I want to be able to welcome who or what I’m looking at
in their/its wholeness. If I see in fullness,
then I feel like I honour what I’m looking at. Of course, I can only go so far
– we can’t see within anyone – but the effort to see any other beings as best
we can is rich witnessing, and I find it transformative. Another question for
me is how can I observe without judgment? I feel like something special happens
when I don’t leave things out -like a perfect white arc of shit, or the sweet
and vomit-like smell of papaya. It’s a kind of censorship to remove death,
remorse, vomit, pain, from life. I don’t want to be part of that.
AE: In the
opening poem you write “I’ve taken my father apart/to understand myself” (9). I
related to this, being a child of an apologist for colonialism and a bigot and
having to learn to reprogram myself.
You address the shame of your heritage and
its connection to colonialism, racism, white supremacy and violence. and
connect it to your own feelings of failure as a white person: “I failed Breonna
Taylor/because I am a coward” (15). “my notebook’s a grave/I’m glad it’s
rotting (56).
This book has a sense of urgency, like it
was something you had to get out, but at the same time to write about such
complicated feelings of shame can be difficult. How did you come to terms with
it as something you needed to write about and when did you decide it was time
to share it? Do you have any advice to fellow writers dealing with complex
issues, especially on race and heritage?
JH: I’m
interested in habits of thinking that don’t dissect. In adulthood, in an effort
to understand myself, I tried to dissect both my father and God, inseparable in
my imagination. It took me a long time
to find the line you refer to: “I’ve taken my father apart/to understand
myself”. It holds a lot for me – first and foremost the violence of dissevering
another person to understand who I am (a rather colonial thing to do).
As a child, I believed in the Christian
god, and learned that I was responsible for saving the people I met from “eternal
damnation”. I learned this while I was busy learning about hibiscus flowers,
the moon, and monkeys. I was full of fear and wonder, and also the weight of
responsibility that I needed to save people by making them believe what I did.
The havoc this kind of thinking has caused is not something I need to explain
here (!?).
Looking closely and taking apart aren’t the
same – so I asked myself how I could look at my upbringing with curiosity,
love, and anguish, at the same time (like looking at that gull in the sky, the
papaya). I like what happens when clarity
comes from adding – for me this means telling my truth about how I felt about
things in my childhood, how I feel about the historical (and current) violence
of Dutch people and their ancestors (my ancestors), how I feel about being a
settler, growing up a missionary, how much I love the forest, how much I love
other people, how much I miss praying, how I mourn for cracked turtles on the
highway, how I’ve grown, am growing. We are, I think, ecosystems within
ecosystems. What happens when we don’t leave out anything?
The first draft was written with urgency,
and I’m glad you can still feel it. I think I began writing this book around
2018. It took time to feel like I had a draft worthy of a reader, and worth
sending out. Goose Lane rejected it the first time I submitted it, and I was
grateful to spend another two years digging deeper, going further. I wanted to
make a book that was healing – not just for me, but for other people. I didn’t
want this book to be published if it didn’t work. I was very close to putting
it in a drawer.
It would have ended up in a drawer if
I hadn’t got help along the way – my friend (poet and playwright) Shannon Bramer,
read an early draft and told me the book felt like a whirlpool. She reminded me
to stay gentle. I thought a lot about how to make a book in which the reader could
surface.
Working with Sadiqa de Meijer as editor was
also transformational. Without Sadiqa’s insights and encouragement, I don’t
think this book would have found a shape that honours the people inside it –
from Anton de Kom to Breonna Taylor to Billy Gauthier to my grandfathers, both
ministers. My Opa and Grandaddy were people who spent their lives riddling how
to be kind, how to help others, how to honour their Creator. I had to remember
that I could respect and disagree with my ancestors at the same time – in fact,
I could show them respect by growing. Sadiqa also encouraged me to speak of my
life with the same candour I speak of the seagull. Not to hide what I felt
shame about, but to name it plainly.
I hesitate to offer advice. I’d offer this
to other white writers who want to speak with and about their ancestors: do
your best to listen humbly – to hear your own shame, to feel your own love, to listen
to the people you wish aren’t hurting and hadn’t been hurt by your kin or by
you, and listen to your kin. Along with that I’d offer a caution that you can
speak for yourself but not for others – not the people you’ve hurt, nor those
your grandparents hurt. I don’t even think you can speak for your grandparents.
I think it’s possible to honour other people and your ancestors through
listening. I feel we can change the future by witnessing the past and present. I’d
say, if you can, tell your truth and go all the way; it will be healing for you
and, quite possibly, for others.
AE: Religion and
the concept of holiness are weaved throughout the book, but the holiness comes
from nature while Christianity is critiqued. I love all the contrasts
throughout book: “when letting go’s too hard/we find ways to preserve the dead”
(33). They show the complexities of life, of your life. “Badala’s where I
learned to walk/but my feet don’t belong” (53). “I want to put flowers on
graves/of people my ancestors brutalized” (32).
Can writing and sharing this book act in
any way as atonement for you? What does atonement look like?
JH: My childhood ecosystem was full of hymns –
trees clapping their hands at the arrival of God, hymns about butterflies and
lilies of the field. Those hymns were full of wonder for the world I loved. I
learned a lot about love and kindness from Christianity, but the dogma was a
dress that never fit. The Christian god, to me, feels like an abusive parent.
The effects of dogma are horrifying, but I’m glad I can still find the wonder I
felt singing hymns as a child when I walk in the forest.
I grew up in two villages. The first was Badela,
in the West African country called Sierra Leone, which means “lion mountain” in Portuguese,
a name written on a map by Pedro de Sintra in 1492. Sierra Leone’s colonial
history includes one of the busiest ports during the trans-Atlantic Slave
trade, and waves of white people arriving over centuries to mine and
proselytize – from de Beers, the diamond company who arrived in Sierra Leone by
way of South Africa, to NGOs of every flavour. Badela spans the Seli River
(also called the Rokel), where I spent my early years playing in puddles,
eating roasted groundnuts, and running
around with other kids.
We were there because my family was missionaries for the Christian Reformed
Church. Badela feels like home, despite all the reasons it isn’t.
When I was
five we moved to Bobcaygeon, Ontario. The forest had remnants of shepherd’s
stone fences and stumps from old trees. Chiminis Island (also called Big Boyd
by settlers) in Bobcaygeon, has been a meeting and harvesting place for First
Nations people for thousands of years. It’s a place of significant cultural
value to the Curved Lake First Nation. We lived in the forest not far from the village; my parents built
a cabin there and I grew up with garter snakes, black bears, wolves, coyotes
and a shaggy crew of
domesticated animals. I spent summers swimming in the creek, catching frogs and
riding my bike as fast as I could up and down
the dirt road that lead home. I was (and am) a child of the woods; a skier,
a hiker. I know who I am in the woods and that forest
is home to me, despite
all the reasons it isn’t. It’s
the holiest place I know.
I’ve sat and sat with this question about
atonement. Is atonement possible? Should you put flowers on the grave of
someone you’ve brutalized? Is that a further act of violence? Should you be
there at all? I hope that anytime I see and love a stranger – across any
distance and across time – I’m part of healing. This means imagining another
girl in the forest in Bobcaygeon, 1000 years ago, coming across bloodroot in
the forest I grew up in and being struck with wonder like I was. This means
staying up at night sick thinking about Breonna Taylor’s sister’s grief. This
means imagining a small boy in a coconut tree in Indonesia murdered by Dutch
soldiers. I hope compassion, attentiveness, and respect are transformative –
and can lead to action. I won’t ever drive over frogs again to get wine. And I’ve
begun to overcome my discomfort in crowds to go to large gatherings, to
protests. And I am learning a history of the Dutch that includes war crimes and
brutal atrocities – facts the Dutch have, for a long time, tried to downplay.
AE: Throughout
the book, there is much space given to the failure of language. When I tell
people I write poetry, they often say, “you must be good at language.” I tell
them I am not at all good at language, which is why I have to work things out
through poetry. How do you write about language’s failure but still use
language to try to articulate? What do you think language fails to do for you
and why?
JH: I feel
similarly, Amanda. Finding words is so hard. I feel like I mostly fail. But
when we can name something, it’s astonishing, isn’t it? Language usually fails
for me because of its linearity. Drawing feels easier for me because the
linearity happens in process but you don’t have to read it word by word – line
by line by line I can make a cat with a bird in her mouth appear. That said, a
compelling thing about language is the way we can meet each other in it. Its
imprecision (I don’t think there are two people who see the same thing when I
say “father”) is also what’s dazzling about it. When language doesn’t fail it
soars and connects us. The way poetry can do this surprises, and delights, me.
AE: Blood Root
contains three long poems with nested visual art. I’m always interested in
fellow long poem writers. Is this a departure for you, something that was
specifically suited to the book’s content?
JH: The book
feels like frames in an animation. And it feels like drawing. It was a departure
but it feels like a form I’ve been reaching for since I first tried to write poems.
I like that in this form there are layers, echoes, referential circles (like a
whirlpool on its side?). As soon as I realized the book could have this
movement in it, I was relieved.
AE: I love the
space given before the two couplets on page 81, which is nestled between your
art. I’d like to have heard the discussion with the editor and designer about
this choice and the choice to include the artwork, how to ensure its
intricacies could be properly rendered in book form. You also have several
pages in the final poem that include the word “stain” in a lighter font at the
bottom of the page (86-94). Did you have a specific vision or opinion on the
design of this book? Can you talk about working with Sadiqa de Meijer?
JH: What a nice
cascade of questions, Amanda. That couplet is all that’s left of 16 pages of
couplets (speaking of stains!). In a draft that hung on for a long time there
were 16 poems that were blessings for the reader. When we neared the end of the
editorial process, Sadiqa asked what would happen if those pages were whittled
down to just two lines – two lines that say “come out come through / this
moment’s a door”. It’s as if language
itself becomes a door on the page. Being a visual artist, I loved placing that
couplet on the page as one would a smudge. And, when you look at the drawings
its nested between, you see that a cliff swallow we haven’t seen yet pops out
of a nest. This feels like poetry, too. What’s on the other side of shame,
wonder, reckoning? I like sitting there, quietly, for a moment, holding that.
I’m grateful Goose Lane was open to including
so much artwork. Julie Scriver’s thoughtful
design helps the drawings converse with the poems. I’m glad Goose Lane was open
to sequences of drawings, too – I feel this helps the reader see the drawings
the way they read the poems, rather than as illustrations.
When I had the though that the word “stain”
could appear as a stain, in lighter text Julie did it. Julie was creative and
open to those kinds of suggestions from me – her touch on the book is elegant
and light.
Goose offers poets the opportunity to
suggest someone they’d like to work with as an editor and I requested Sadiqa. I
hoped to work with her for several reasons – first and foremost that I love and
admire her work. I aspire to write like her. She also grew up in Holland, speaks
Dutch, and is a person of colour. We had important overlaps, and differences. I
knew she would challenge me. I knew that if I worked with Sadiqa I would have
to push myself and push my writing; I would have to grow. Sadiqa as an editor
was sharp, kind, generous and critical. She recently wrote this, on Bluesky: “Jessica
Hiemstra’s Bloodroot is out in the world. A fierce and gorgeous book. As editor
I admired how Jessica could take a breath and bravely answer to what a poem was
asking for, even when that also meant a revision of the self. The result is so
breathtaking – I hope it finds all the readers.” I make art as an act of
generosity, and also to grow. Without Sadiqa, I would not have gone far enough
in revision of the self.
AE: On your site,
there is a fascinating section called “Happenings” with details
of your animations, exhibitions, and readings. You also work with others to
help them to make art by offering workshops. You’ve done so many beautiful,
whimsical, community-engaging things. I’m in awe. Do you see Blood Root
as having any follow on related projects, more art and animations or
exhibitions, for example? Or does it have a finality for you now that it is
published and you are having a chance to read it to an audience?
JH: I’m glad you
enjoyed that part of my website! I love what art can be and do in and for
community. I paint murals and do workshops and like what can happen with collaboration.
Blood Root is part of a larger project – and I think it’s the groundwork I needed to do to start
learning more about my ancestors, and also to clear the air to work on a longer
animation in which I respond with pencils, ink, using stills of myself, to how
I feel about the stuff on the pages of the book. I have something to make that
has no words, apart from a title (!).
AE: How does the
audience react to the book? It’s so raw and visceral and relatable in many
ways. I can imagine people coming up to want to talk about their own feelings
about their heritage and the guilt that they might be experiencing.
JH: You’re one of
its first readers. And I feel so grateful for the depth of your reading and the
depth of these questions. I hope other readers find something they are looking
for in it, too.
Blood Root
is a work that is staying with me both for its art and the vividness and
emotion of the poetry. It’s an important book, Jessica. Thank you for writing
it and sharing it with the world.
JH: Being read
with such care is a gift. I thank you, Amanda.
Amanda Earl
(she/her) is a writer, editor, mentor, reviewer, publisher, living on the
unceded territory of the Algonquin Anishinaabeg Peoples. Hire her as an editor
or literary event organizer. Her latest book is Beast Body Epic, a
collection of near-death long poems. More info: AmandaEarl.com.
Linktr.ee/AmandaEarl
