Living as Though the World Were One Long Summer

I aspire to read and to write as much as I can. If I’m lucky, I’ll get to do so in front of a window out of which I can see trees ache and bloom all summer.

In the background of my Zoom frame, there is a shelf unit on which I have stacked more books than I probably should have. People make comments about how hazardous it appears. When someone did so the first time, I laughed because they ruptured a fantasy of ecological harmony I had fooled myself into thinking I had brought about. They saw disorder where I saw order; they saw a future mess where I saw a past and future archive of my writerly longings (the protagonist of Valeria Luiselli’s Lost Children Archive: “I don’t keep a journal. My journals are the things I underline in books”). Around and on my desk, there are towers of books stacked precariously but not randomly. Each has stirred in me a sense of connection to the human effort of art-making, and if not a connection to the human effort of art-making then at least to the belief that my solitude isn’t mine alone to bear. My kingdom of solitude is fragile and permeable, but it expands nonetheless.

Last year I tweeted: “weaponizing my BA in Comparative Literature by buying more books than I could ever hope to read.” It’s true. I don’t have enough life ahead of me to get through the whole of the library I’ve already pieced together in my late twenties. There’s a sadness in this, and for me it’s bound up in the sadness of the knowledge that Indigenous peoples in Canada live shorter lives than “other Canadians,” sometimes fifteen years less. I don’t know how to mourn the loss of those years before I’ve lost them. Writing seems like one way to do so. Being among books is a way my grief is held.

I wrote my first book, This Wound is a World, in many different places: an apartment in Edmonton during my undergrad, a bookshop café on high street in Oxford, at my mother’s kitchen table in northern Alberta. Where I wrote it mattered less than why I wrote it. I wrote it in a state of desperation; I was trying to bring myself into being via the construction of lyric poems. The lyric “I” is inextricable from the act of self-making. To evoke the lyric “I” is to say I have survived or I am trying to survive. It wasn’t writing alone that saved me, but also the work of close reading and analysis that my academic training made available to me. Across disparate spaces and their histories, I carried books with me as though they were talismans, little artifacts from the future.

I live now in Vancouver, British Columbia, on the unceded and ancestral lands of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh. The fact of the land’s uncededness matters to my writing practice. I want to write books that don’t presume the country is an anthropological given, which is to say books that insist on Indigenous peoples’ futurity and indomitability. My apartment is located on an expanse of land that didn’t exist until the arrival of settlers (who transformed the environment to their whims). One day, it’ll be underwater again.

Books are so solid and insistent, but somehow they put me in mind of my impermanence. They surround me and, because of this, have become a form for my living. When I’m at my desk, I feel the presence of a literary history, of which I am apart and can subvert in my own modest ways. I feel fortunate to forge a life and a living through literature. Even if I were to tidy up the space, to clear off my desk, to relieve the shelf of some weight, the area would return to its state of controlled disarray. I have no aspirations to fix it or to change as a person. I aspire to read and to write as much as I can. If I’m lucky, as I am right now, I’ll get to do so in front of a window out of which I can see trees ache and bloom all summer. Really, I want to live as though the world were one long summer of aching and blooming.