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Letters capture rare moments of illumination or intense feeling, acting as guides to the ideas and emotions many of us shy away from expressing.

Connections

JEH: Your friends say you have great ears? How could anyone resist? Sent on 4/18/2013

JB: Well no one has nibbled on them recently. That’s one hell of a list of books and films. So when is the next time you might head to California? Sent on 4/19/2013

JEH: I was just looking up PH on a map, as I hadn’t a clue where that was. But obviously — obviously — it is the location of your ears, so I don’t quite know why I was wondering. I couldn’t geo-locate my way out of a paper bag, but I have been known to hop planes, particularly to take in art, and as it happens, “Girl With a Pearl Earring” is in San Francisco’s de Young Museum right now until June 2, the first time in N. America. I have a yen, though recognize it lands me still somewhat north of your auditory canals or the nibbly bits below them.

I enjoyed your profile. In particular, the things you most value, like thinking (clearly) and engagement with the world and good friends.

When is the next time you might be headed north? (Do your ears even travel?)

I have a cat, and I myself am somewhat taller than the cat, although still short. Tell me about your spawn. Mine are mid-30s and lovely, lovely, lovely. Sent on 4/20/2013

Jane Eaton Hamilton and Julia Balén OKCupid Messages Spring, 2013 age 59 (Hamilton)

From Where the Nights Are Twice As Long: Love Letters of Canadian Poets. Available now wherever fine books are sold (add to Goodreads).

Above: Julia Balén and Jane Eaton Hamilton

Jane Eaton Hamilton, born in 1954 in Hamilton, Ontario, is a poet, fiction writer, and visual artist. She has won or been a finalist for dozens of awards and has won the CBC Literary Award twice. Her work has been short-listed for the Journey Prize, the Pat Lowther Memorial Award, the Ferro-Grumley Award, and the Ethel Wilson Prize, among others. Hamilton’s books of poetry include Body Rain (1992) and Steam-Cleaning Love

Julia Balén is a feminist scholar and a professor of English. She earned a PhD at the University of Arizona and directed the undergraduate and graduate women’s studies programs at the same institution. She has published widely in the area of sexuality and social justice.

Where do we go from here? I can only say how I feel. I can’t second guess what you want. I feel…I want to go out with you: I want to be with you. Like a moth to a flame. I know it could be painful…that we might last two nights or two months…nothing matters.

Myna Wallin to Richard ——— November 26, 1988 age 28

From Where the Nights Are Twice As Long: Love Letters of Canadian Poets. Available now wherever fine books are sold (add to Goodreads).

Above: A photograph taken of Myna Wallin in 1988, shortly before the letter was written.

Myna Wallin is a poet, prose writer, editor, and radio host. She is the author of Confessions of a Reluctant Cougar and A Thousand Profane Pieces. Wallin has published widely in magazines and literary journals including Existere, CV2, Descant, Rampike, Matrix, and many others.

Come live with me, I’d like to share this watch that doesn’t tick, this TV set that takes the sickness of the world and wraps it in sex and show, this chimney growing taller with each blast of heat.

Barry Dempster, 2007 age 55 "Come Live with Me"

From Where the Nights Are Twice As Long: Love Letters of Canadian Poets

The love letter is not dead, just different, a new book proves.

I watch my plane ascend towards the jagged moon suspended in its rectangular frame; west by mere degrees, the smouldering Everglades reminding me of a card, a relic signed and seared with phrases from a permanent island of temporary refuge. . .

Judith Fitzgerald, 1991 age 39 "Harmony of Moonlight"

From Where the Nights Are Twice As Long: Love Letters of Canadian Poets

Judith Fitzgerald, poet, musician, and journalist was born in 1952 in Toronto. She studied at York University and the University of Toronto. She is the author of over twenty books of poetry, including the four-volume Adagios Quartet (2003, 2004, 2006, 2007) and 26 Ways out of this World (1999). She has also published several books of prose – two on Sarah McLachlan and one on Marshall McLuhan – and has edited several volumes. Fitzgerald’s book Rapturous Chronicles was nominated for the Governor General’s Award. Her other awards include the 2003 Poetry Fellow of the Chalmers Arts Foundation. “Harmony of Moonlight” originally appeared in Rapturous Chronicles (Mercury Press, 1991).

A flourishing epiphany inscribed on a page from the book of my heart.

Judith Fitzgerald, "Harmony of Moonlight"

From Where the Nights Are Twice As Long: Love Letters of Canadian Poets

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C. Isa Lausas and Tyson John Atkings Across Saskatoon, Saskatchewan January 23-27, 2014 ages 23 and 24

From Where the Nights Are Twice As Long: Love Letters of Canadian Poets. Coming February 3 from Goose Lane Editions (add to Goodreads).

Tyson John Atkings is a visual artist and poet. He was born in Nipawin, Saskatchewan, in 1989. He received a BFA in painting from the University of Saskatchewan. His paintings have been exhibited across Canada. Atkings’s instant-messaging correspondence reproduced here first appeared in the chapbook Exi[s]t/I (JackPine Press, 2014), a collaboration with C. Isa Lausas. Follow Tyson on Tumblr.

C. Isa Lausas was born in Tornio, Finland, in 1990. She moved to France at the age of thirteen. A visual artist and writer, Isa graduated from the École nationale de beaux-arts de Marseille in 2012. She is currently a student in the MFA in writing at the University of Saskatchewan. Her visual art has shown internationally, and she has published several collections of poetry, including On That Border (2012). Her chapbook Exi[s]t/I, a collaboration with T. J. Atkings, was published by Saskatoon’s Jack Pine Press (2014). Follow Isa on Tumblr

#love letter #text message #text me please #text me back

Finding Amelia

I love writing love letters—the pace of writing, the physicality of the paper, the distance my words have to travel, and after the mailbox has clanged shut, knowing that somewhere, sometime, someone will recognize their name on an envelope, and maybe even recognize my handwriting. I love that letters involve the tearing open of an envelope, the unfolding of paper, that perfect, physical gift.

I live with the person I love, so I often see him read the letters I write for him, which is wonderful in its own way, but there’s something about sending love off into the world without any chance of witnessing the response that fascinates me. It’s why in my Love Lettering Project, where I ask people to write love letters to their communities and leave them for strangers to find, I ask for the letters to be anonymous, then hidden, and happened upon by strangers.

And since 2001, I’ve been writing letters to Amelia Earhart in part because I can’t see her open them. All I have is her imagined response.

I fell in love with her in that strange vacuum between Christmas and New Years. I found her, wearing a thick leather coat, goggles perched on her forehead, in the sale bin at a bookstore. It was a biography, something I rarely read, and I quickly realized how little I knew about her, other than the fact of her disappearance, and that she was a pioneering female pilot.

I was astounded by how poorly this biography was written, but there was something about the re-imagined conversations child-Amelia had with her sister, that were written in dialogue form, that made me take on my own imaginings, extrapolating fiction from fact. I wrote to her until the New Year, and then got busy with a million other things.

I didn’t think about her for years until I was in Seville, alone. It was the first time I had ever travelled solo and I found myself missing her the way I missed friends I’d lost touch with. I felt a strange guilt about not thinking about her for the last few years, so I started writing to her, about the bridge called Isabel I found one afternoon, and about the oranges I bought from a man with a moustache who recognized me standing at the bus stop one day.

But after I returned home, I only thought about her when a friend sent me emails with updates on her disappearance—a robot cruising the bottom of the Pacific, speculation on a scrap of metal that might have been a piece of her plane. And I wrote to her again, missing her, and then would forget about her until my inbox was filled with another fragment, her freckle cream jar.

Last summer, I decided to visit Newfoundland and see the places she flew from for her trans-Atlantic flights—Trepassey, Harbour Grace. I stood on the beach where she was grounded for weeks, the fog thick and impermeable, and I walked the perimeter of the airstrip she took off from solo. Since that trip, I miss her less lately because I write to her often.

These days I am terrified someone will find her—there’s yet another search coming up this summer—because then, who would I write to to tell about the gold Eiffel tower stuck in a neighbour’s garden, that I took the dead roses out of the garden in the house I just bought, or about the snow that didn’t arrive on Christmas?

Lindsay Zier-Vogel studied at the University of Toronto and the School of Toronto Dance Theatre. A book binder and founder of Puddle Press, Zier-Vogel’s writing has been widely published in numerous places, such as Taddle Creek, Descant, Grain, and filling station. She also founded the Love Lettering Project, a community-based arts project that has sent love letters to strangers since 2004. She is at work on a novel. Follow Lindsay on Twitter @lindsayzv.

Read Lindsay Zier-Vogel’s love letters to Amelia Earhart in Where the Nights Are Twice As Long: Love Letters of Canadian Poets. Available from Goose Lane Editions wherever fine books are sold (add to Goodreads).

#love letters

Sixth Letter in Autumn

Since you left I have remembered the minutiae of your face and hands, lifted debris from every pore as a smith would dints from a silver cup. You are constantly reborn.

John Barton, 1982 age 25

Photo by Pasquale Verdicchio

From Where the Nights Are Twice As Long: Love Letters of Canadian Poets. Available from Goose Lane Editions wherever fine books are sold (add to Goodreads).

John Barton was born in Edmonton in 1957. He attended the University of Alberta, the University of Victoria, and Columbia University. He is the author of eight books of poetry and the recipient of numerous literary awards, including the CBC Literary Award. Barton also co-edited Seminal: The Anthology of Canada’s Gay-Male Poets (2007). He was the long-time editor of Arc Poetry Magazine and is currently editor of The Malahat Review. “Sixth Letter in Autumn” was originally published as the seventh section of “Six Letters in Autumn and One Unwritten” in Notes Toward a Family Tree (Quarry, 1993). Follow John on Twitter @WildePoet.

#poetry #poet #john barton

Love is another language, a continent of its own.

One can’t help but feel wretched and romantic about Paris. It’s a place of grotesque beauty, a city of extremes, thin light, and unhinged indulgence. From the moment I stepped off the plane at Charles de Gaulle, I learned: lust is dirty, complicated. Love is another language, a continent of its own.

Turns out, Paris was nothing like Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s film The Fabulous Destiny of Amelie Poulain. There were no dancing wine glasses on a checkered tablecloth, no cats leaning in to listen to children’s stories, or globetrotting garden gnomes. Instead, a taxi driver who propositioned me for a threesome, and when I declined, tried to feel me up, and a merry-go-round of men who whistled, hollered, and chased me around street corners, begging for a kiss.

Yet, with pen to paper, I felt unabashedly romantic, dismissing the strangers with hard-ons. Perhaps I had vertigo from antique carousel rides, or was blinded by the shimmer of the Eiffel Tower, likely a bit tipsy on cheap French wine, caught in daydreams of Anais Nin and Henry Miller’s passionate affairs. I was filled with longing.

Years later, with these lovelorn letters now published in Where The Nights Are Twice As Long, I am a moth still drawn to the illuminated city. These letters capture a different side of my Parisian memories. It’s not all trigger warnings, and brazen men. Within these love letters lays a personal journey of wild abandon. It was my first solo trip abroad, a period of time when I unearthed my inner romantic, and felt unbearably alive.

Of all my Paris days, it was that afternoon in Montparnasse, where I wandered through the shops, and discovered pristine Claire Fontaine paper and envelopes at a stationary store. I came across a closet-sized wine boutique, and bought a small bottle of champagne the shopkeeper wrapped in tissue paper, inquiring if it was a gift, or an offering for a picnic. I didn’t answer him, and asked him to keep wrapping, the elegance so foreign.

I slung the tissue-laced bottle under my arm, and made my way on foot to Cimetière du Montparnasse, where it took nearly an hour to find feminist writer and intellectual Simone de Beauvoir’s plot. I didn’t know until I found her named etched in stone, buried next to French philosopher and writer John-Paul Sartre, they were life-long lovers.

At the foot of their grave, bones now separated by concrete, spirits somewhere intertwined, their ideas remain. I popped the bottle of champagne, and raised a toast in Beauvoir’s honour. I gave a wink to Sartre.

As the bubbly took hold, I paused a moment to meditate on the significance of their literatures and philosophies in the world, and to my own puny brain, and made a pact with myself.

Quietly, I whispered a promise I still keep to this day: Lead with your heart. Learn to let go. Love is the only revolution.

Shannon Webb-Campbell, poet, fiction writer, and arts journalist, grew up outside Toronto and now lives in Halifax.Her first collection of poetry, Still No Word, is forthcoming from Breakwater Books in 2015. Follow Shannon on Twitter and Instagram.

Read Shannon Webb-Campbell’s love letters in Where the Nights Are Twice As Long: Love Letters of Canadian Poets. Available from Goose Lane Editions wherever fine books are sold (add to Goodreads).

#love letters #paris #amelie poulain #france #travel

#love #love letters #kissing #jack garton #jennifer hammer

Under the covers of Where the Nights are Twice as Long: Love Letters of Canadian Poets

Interviewing writers Michael Blouin and Elizabeth Rainer from on relationships, process and how much fiction is involved in fiction. By Elizabeth Friend

Did this particular work exist before Where the Nights Are Twice as Long came together, or was it written for the collection?

Michael: This is a part of a book length project titled Let/Lie that took place over the course of a couple of years actually.

Elizabeth: An earlier excerpt of which was published as a chapbook by Above/Ground Press and was shortlisted for the bpNichol Award. It was written mostly by email.

The style of the work takes the form of the two of you writing back and forth to one another. Was that your actual process?

Elizabeth: Pretty much, yeah.

Michael: We actually wrote “live” once or twice, in the same room at the same time, but for the most part it was emailed back and forth with many miles in between. And sometimes days in between.

Elizabeth: Simmer time.

How much revision and editing was involved in reaching the finished work versus how much of it came organically from writing back and forth to one another?

Michael: The finished manuscript from which these pieces come is a little more complex than that. For example the first word of each piece is the same as the last word of the previous one, things like that, some of that would have come in the first draft though.

Elizabeth: Most of it I think.

Michael: Most of it yeah, you think so? I guess so. And some things more complex than that. Other things that are found in the finished, complete work.

Have the two of you created anything together besides your work in this collection and the Let/Lie project that it came from? How did your working relationship come to be?

Elizabeth: Really the world has to get on this, there’s a second manuscript that Michael has written which I have done the illustrations for. Hopefully to be published soon right?

Michael: We met in a bar.

Elizabeth: We did not meet in a bar.

Michael: She was drunk.

Elizabeth: You used the word organic. That’s the way I would describe it. It worked right away. He said something in an email and I answered it back with a phrase and we were off.

In terms of working on a project and finding that you’re missing a certain skill, perspective or just a certain something in the mix , fill in the blank for each other. If I needed __________, I’d go to Mike. If I needed ___________, I’d go to Elizabeth.

Elizabeth: Lyricism, I’m pretty direct in a lot of what I do. In life and in art. Sometimes too direct that’s what they say.

Michael: If I needed a kick in the ass I’d go to Elizabeth, still do.

Elizabeth: And I’d supply it. Because I am direct.

Michael: She is.

On writing about love, do either of you find that it can be something tricky to write truthfully? Believably? In this respect is it easier to write about a romantic relationship that’s healthy and happy, or one that exhibits more conflict like the relationship you illustrated in Where the Nights Are Twice as Long?

Michael: It’s very hard for me to think which moments in my life have been more important – the ones I’ve been close to death or things being so bad that I desired death or the times when I was so filled with love for another person that it was physically painful to me.

Elizabeth: Paloma Faith has a song called “Only Love Can Hurt Like This”. It’s a simple line but it I think it is very true. There is no pain like love.

Michael: I’ve written about both ends of the spectrum. I don’t think we had much choice about which aspect we covered.

Elizabeth: He doesn’t think we had much choice.

There’s a long tradition of love poetry obviously, how do you see this work fitting within that line?

Michael: Well it is love poetry, but it’s not. I mean I might describe it as “I love you but you’re really pissing me off” poetry.

Elizabeth: “I love you but I really wish I didn’t” poetry.

What would each of you say the split is between how much you draw on imagination versus personal experience when you’re writing poetry or fiction? 50/50? 90/10?

Elizabeth: For me it’s 100% but I’m not saying which.

Michael: And I’m the other. No, I wouldn’t be able to put it to a percentage but I would say that what I write, let’s say it’s a scene in a bar… I’m not in that bar, but I am in the washroom maybe, or outside in a car. I’m not very far away.

Elizabeth: That sounds like 90/10.

Michael: Sometimes the car’s pretty far down the street.

Do you find that working with each other diminishes any mental blocks or lulls in inspiration in your writing that you may have had if you had been working alone?

Michael: I’m very competitive so yes. If there’s a piece that Elizabeth wrote and it’s waiting for a response it’s not just that I have to get it done, it’s that it has to be better.

Elizabeth: And is it?

Michael: Not always.

Elizabeth: This is very different for me from my painting which is always done in isolation it seems. I like doing things on my own well enough but sometimes it’s just better doing it with someone else.

What can be the most challenging part of working on a collaboration like this?

Michael: I had to give up drinking during it so that was a challenge.

Elizabeth: I’d say working with a partner who had given up drinking was challenging.You got cranky.

Michael: I’d actually say that going back to working with just myself was the most challenging.

Elizabeth: That’s very sweet.

If you each had to pick one line from your section of Where the Nights Are Twice as Long to blow up and frame on your wall, what would it be?

Michael: “there’ll be no heroes this time”

Elizabeth: “I believe in nothing that I can ever hold onto” or maybe “you’re all gravy and no meat”. Yes, that one.

To hear more from Michael and Elizabeth, get under the cover of Where the Nights Are Twice as Long, David Eso and Jeanette Lynes’ collection of letters and poems from more than 120 Canadian writers. In addition to Michael Blouin and Elizabeth Rainer, other notable names in this can’t-miss collection include Pauline Johnson, Malcolm Lowry, Louis Riel, Alden Nowlan, Anne Szumigalski, Leonard Cohen, Di Brandt, and many others.

The collection is coming this February, and is available for purchase on Amazon.

#cry #teaching #emotions #robert service #constance maclean

#love #love letters #jack garton #jennifer hammer

"He became distant and we passed through the gates that lock us out, lock us in, lock us everywhere away. I got in my car and thought of you doing three years chained in the hole having bean cake slapped on your face three times a day, breakfast, lunch and dinner, and I thought that’s the saddest thing I know."

Susan Musgrave to Stephen Reid mid-1980s age 35

From Where the Nights Are Twice As Long: Love Letters of Canadian Poets. Coming February 3 from Goose Lane Editions (add to Goodreads).

Susan Musgrave, poet, novelist, and author of non-fiction and writing for children, was born in Santa Cruz, California, in 1951. Musgrave teaches in the University of British Columbia’s MFA program. She is the author of many books of poetry, including the Governor General’s Award-nominated, A Man to Marry, A Man to Bury (1979). Her book of fiction The Charcoal Burners (1980) was also nominated for a Governor General’s Award. Musgrave has edited half a dozen books and written song lyrics. Her non-fiction book You’re in Canada Now...Motherfucker: A Memoir of Sorts appeared in 2005. She lives in Sidney and Haida Gwaii. Follow Musgrave on Twitter @Musgravian.

Stephen Reid was born in Massey, Ontario in 1950. Reid’s first novel, Jack Rabbit Parole, was published in 1986. He taught writing between 1987 and 1999, when he was again incarcerated until 2008. Reid’s second book, A Crowbar in the Buddhist Garden: Writing from Prison, received the 2013 Victoria Book Award.

#love #love letters #susan musgrave #stephen reid

You try getting any sympathy when you tell your best friends how much the self-avowed sadist broke your heart, how much pain she put you through.

Ivan E. Coyote to ——— Prince George, British Columbia August 11, 2004 age 35

From Where the Nights Are Twice As Long: Love Letters of Canadian Poets. Coming February 3 from Goose Lane Editions (add to Goodreads).

Ivan E. Coyote grew up in Whitehorse, Yukon. The author of eight books of short stories and one novel, Ivan is also a performer with three CDs and four short films. Coyote, the author of the bestselling book Boys Like Her, has received many writing awards, including the ReLit Award for Bow Grip. Coyote’s books have been short-listed for the Ferro Grumley Award and the Danuta Gleed Award. Coyote has taught writing and mentored writers at Capilano University and Carleton University and has been writer-in-residence at the University of Winnipeg and the University of Western Ontario. Follow Coyote on Twitter @ivancoyote.

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