“Writing for Building” a project by Joanne Bristol at M:ST Festival, 2018
Just as Emma-Kate says “dad,” a huge chunk of snow breaks across the right half of my skull. Those Calgary BEWARE OF FALLING SNOW AND ICE signs are no joke but offer no help. We chortle and are still excitedly slicing into each other’s words when we enter CommunityWise Resource Centre. The threshold to the room is a soft membrane and on the other side live the quiet focused feelings of a library without a librarian. It’s clear to me that I have entered the work. There are two tables, chairs, papers and writing utensils, and the things that live in the space, it’s not too precious. There is a microphone in a stand at one end, empty and blinking. Joanne sees us and greets. She’s wearing a t-shirt printed with the same text as on the signs around. It says:
WRITING FOR BUILDING
write and share a text addressed to the building
your text could be a political manifesto, or a love letter, or a useful question, or...
your text could be read aloud, or placed within the building, or...
I like it. Especially the “, or...”s.
I sit down to write. People are softly focused but sometimes someone is loud and that is okay also. It is not facist feeling. Joanne encourages us to be wherever we’d like in the space. I feel sky and scuttle onto an arm chair away from the other bodies. Someone starts reading into the microphone. It’s beautiful. Each person who reads, writes in their own way. Some instead/also fold up their papers and tuck them away into the building which Joanne has described as “quite porous” and with many places to leave a letter to it. And I begin to hear intimate letters to the building. I learn about its holding of feminist organizations, how it was a landing spot for “mail order brides” so that they didn’t land directly into their new husband’s home (I feel weird about the term “mail order brides” so decide to listen more closely and see what I can learn). The building was apparently somewhat-squatted by NGOs and now those same orgs have the space.
I start writing my letter
:
It would be, I think, rude to address you without first attending to you over time and with heart. So instead, This Building, as a visitor (which you are too to these lands), I’ll tell you of the place I know best. I’ll read to you my love letter to another building, hoping that offering some of me to you is more generous:
My ribs are the building that stays, but they learned that from you.
In them, nested and fluttering, are too many bedrooms and roommates to count. Learning the word DECAPITATION with a soft butch on a water bed at 3; learning about okra in south-west Florida at 12, during the Bush-Gore election when another butch—harder this time—taught me that I couldn’t believe in reincarnation and go to church. (I hate okra.); seeking the quietest kid in the school yard to befriend has turned into seeking the grumpiest art lady writer with glasses to date but it’s the same thing. Still there. We change but not much.
My ribs learned about holding play: create it, world it, sparkling light through glass. These white bones learned your way of holding grief, her face blue and ear lobes swollen from pooled liquids.
You taught my ribs secreting (as in to produce and discharge a liquid) which is spelled the same as secreting (as in the verb of “to keep a secret”) and, not caring, my rib buildings take them as one act.
And though I still wake up in a different place each week, I know the thatch of my iraqi-thick hair that I tied to the branch out back, that I embed with czech magic passed on through the women in my family, that the tree imbibed and grew over, ties me to you.
So that once Grandma—my godsend—dies and I am left alone, I will be rooted through and into the grounds where you stood, blue and warm. __
Photo’s source: https://www.mountainstandardtime.org/project/writing-for-building
More about the event: https://www.mountainstandardtime.org/project/writing-for-building
More about CommunityWise Resource Centre: http://communitywise.net/