Photo by TJ Bonnick.

By Michaela Ritchie

On April 30, 2024, Calgary Arts Development announced that Shone Thistle would become Calgary’s seventh Poet Laureate, stepping into the office from 2024-2026. An avid reader and supporter of our magazine over the years, FreeFall Magazine is thrilled to welcome Shone into this position, and we’re looking forward to seeing what they accomplish in this role, which was previous held by such Calgary artists as Wakefield Brewster, Sheri-D Wilson, and FreeFall’s Editor in Chief, Micheline Maylor.

Shone Thistle is an author, poet and multidisciplinary mixed-media artist. Their work spans radio to jazz ensemble, festival to conference keynote, inner city cabaret to gallery by the sea. In the sport of Slam poetry, they’ve received perfect scores at the world-famous Nuyorican Poets Café.

Shone’s writing can be found in several anthologies, including Mic Check: An Anthology of Canadian Spoken Word Poetry, and YYC POP: Poetic Portraits of the People. Their 2024 projects include both a children’s book about a childhood trip to Carmanah Valley, and a book of poetry about time spent with their deaf dog titled Conversations with Henry.

In addition to serving as Calgary’s latest Poet Laureate — the first genderfluid artist to occupy the role — they are also the Executive Director of Calgary Queer Arts Society, where they find purpose in empowering Queer creativity, joy and community. Over the course of their career, Shone has created measurable impact in service of violence prevention, poverty reduction and equity. They played an integral role in the creation of Calgary’s first permanent Pride and Trans crosswalks, as well as mobilized sector wide leaders in the establishment of Canada’s strongest municipal bylaw against conversion therapy.

But at FreeFall, we know the best way to get acquainted with an artist isn’t to read about their accolades, but experience their creativity, which is why we’ve asked Shone to share a selection of their recent works with us.

The following poems were created in tandem with the mixed media works that accompany them; it is in the process of art-making that Shone writes much of their work. Crafted from drywall compound, plaster, acrylics, latex paint, and metallic inks, the art, and their poetic counterparts, exemplifies a dedication to the Earth, and the shared energy of all living things, that is present throughout Shone’s portfolio.

Fold into me

push the sheets with your feet
so we can feel the summer breeze
awkward and entangled
as familiar as unknown

as estranged as we’ve
allowed ourselves to become
surrender to the memory
fold into me

____________

Shone Thistle
Fold into me (2024)
Mixed media on canvas
18” Framed

Ripples

stardust emulates conscious connection
as if we have a choice.
merging and converging,
together tethered through time.

will you be this familiar
when next we collide?
or so very foreign
we call this love at first sight?

____________

Shone Thistle
Ripples (2023)
Mixed media on canvas
26” Framed

Flow

when surface water paddled churns
dive deep to quiet waters
relax your gaze
reorient yourself

find silt stone sky shimmer
the current is calling
and despite this setback
you still know how to swim

____________

Shone Thistle
Flow (No. 2) 2023
Mixed media on canvas and pine
24” Framed

To learn more about Shone Thistle, and keep an eye on their upcoming appearances in Calgary and beyond, visit their website or follow them on Instagram.

The post Welcome Shone Thistle, Calgary’s 7th Poet Laureate appeared first on FreeFall Magazine.

The post The Missing Vision in the Visionary: An Essay on Paul Vermeersch’s “Shared Universe: New and Selected Poems 1995 – 2020” appeared first on FreeFall Magazine.

How often do I visit this place? The memories that drift in
and out are not my own and they constantly drag me back to this
town. I remember going to school. I remember going to the church
across the street from that school. I don’t remember riding my bike
from the settlement to my grandmother’s house. I don’t remember
spending the evening playing cards with her. I don’t remember
waking up to begin the day-long trip it would take to get back home.
My Dad told me about blood memory. The memories of ancestors
or close relatives that flow through NDNs to deliver us messages or
remind us of our traditions. The unfamiliar memories that visit me
are my Dad’s.

He tells me to go back home. The persistence of these
memories is a sign that it’s time to revisit. Maybe I’ve spent too
much time in the city and it’s creating a disconnect from my people,
he says, but I need to be here. Being here gives me opportunities
that I don’t have in High Prairie, but he’s right, I’m giving up a
lot to be here. I don’t have access to family or tradition and the
old ways serve no purpose here. What use is it to speak a language
that no one understands? What use is it to tell stories no one cares
for? Part of me is dying for the sake of assimilation, but I survive.
Since I last spoke to my Dad, the blood memories have been more
persistent, more vivid, and always there, in High Prairie, the draw
becomes stronger. I can no longer ignore it and I decide to leave.

The next day, I spend the afternoon at the Cozy Corner with
a pint. I’ve never been to this pub before, but always wondered
what it was like as a child. Walking by, seeing the neon sign, encased
in a rouge housing, I would imagine what it looked like. The main
room had red carpet with walls draped in maroon cloth creased like
accordion bellows. There are circular tables small enough for two
people, draped in the same maroon that hung on the walls. Each
table had its own circular shroud behind it to offer some privacy
from the other patrons. Cigarette smoke permanently hung in the
air which softened the lighting and created orange halos around the
bulbs hanging above each table. The only detail I got correct was
the cigarette smoke.

The walls and floors are painted in a matte black that looks
sticky to the touch. Plastic furniture is strewn about the room with
no particular seating arrangement in mind. In addition to the smell
of cigarette smoke, the smell of mildew and old piss also hangs in
the air. My disappointment in the Cozy Corner assures me that
there is no reason to return.

I leave the pub and make my way to the car. As I sit in the
driver seat gripping the steering wheel, I contemplate the rest of
my visit here. An unfamiliar place like the Cozy Corner was a bad
start, but I’d like to keep visiting old haunts and go from there. My
childhood home is the next place I visit. High Prairie is small, and it
only takes a few minutes to get to the house. I like longer drives. It’s
a time for contemplation and to listen to songs that somehow never
overstay their welcome. A small break from the real world. I drive
slowly.

A playground where I spent most of my adolescence comes
into view. The large poplar trees are still there with their snowy
seeds strewn about the ground. At one point, this place was open
with sky always visible from the patchy grass below. The small
buildings peppering the town were the only objects on the horizon.
Now, a firehall and an arena box the place in. The trees, now stifled,
compensate by rising above the new structures which in turn, blocks
the sunlight that was previously plentiful.

My small detour wraps me around a small church that has
no obvious changes to the exterior, but now hosts a small sandwich
board advertising a real estate listing. A place of worship now being
sold for the land it inhabits. A small part of me wants to take it
back. A small victory for NDNs, I think. If it’s still here, I’ll consider
it.

I decide to park outside the church. Walking would lengthen
my trip before my confrontation with the old house. I also want
to look like a passerby upon my arrival. Enough time has passed
that I would be considered a stranger in these parts. It also doesn’t
help to be an NDN casually wandering through a largely white
neighborhood.

Strolling along the opposite side of the street, I look at the
surroundings trying to observe any changes from my last visit. Most
of the houses remained the same as I remember, variations of 70s
style bungalows or ranch houses with the same brown, green, and
orange tones reminiscent of the time. The trees that line both sides
of the street remain the same too, forming a large shady archway,
shielding residents from the outside world.

While the street and surroundings remain the same from my
memory, my house has gone through several changes. The familiar
two-tone white and gray paint scheme has now transformed into a
dull shade of blue that envelops the entire house. The trim around
the windows and the eavestroughs are now painted black. A modern
look that looks out of place in this environment. The old gravel
driveway is now paved with black asphalt. No doubt to match the
trim of the house. It’s odd to see a renovation in a neighborhood
that’s barely changed.

There’s an entryway into the alley right beside the house. I
make my way around to the back. They built a fence. A fence my
dad always intended to build. It’s eight feet high with slats arranged
vertically; A privacy fence, meant to keep people in and “other”
people out.

I continue my walk down the alley. I find a bike leaning
against one of the neighbour’s fences. An old red and black singlespeed
with “Vagabond” written on the frame. No handbrake to
speak of. It’s one of those coaster systems that require you to pedal
backwards to stop. No obvious owner. Either abandoned or left here
carelessly. I have one of my dad’s memories of riding his bike and
want to recreate that moment. I borrow the bike.

I start heading east of town, passing the playground from
earlier and two public schools. I pass by the only grocery store in
town. It looks the same as I remember it, but with a different name.
It’s a place worth visiting for the sake of nostalgia and a chance to
buy smokes. It still has the strange pebble patterned vanilla linoleum
in it. I used to think they were tiny marshmallows stuffed together
between two thin sheets of plastic. The registers are also wrapped in
that same linoleum. The turn tables being used in place of modern
conveyor belts also have that same wrapping, except with brown
rubber trim that protects the edge of the turntable from rubbing
the walls of its housing. I ask for a pack of cigarettes which is pulled
from a cabinet behind the register covered in the same linoleum.

I leave the grocery store and continue east towards the edge
of town. An old farm comes into view. There’s a barn that sits on
a tilt, unsure of whether it should fall or not. It looks like it needs
to rest. An old grain silo lays flat on the ground next to it. The silo
made its choice.

The barn looks over at the silo in mourning.

The same style of bungalow found in my old neighborhood
sits on the other side of the property. I remember the boy that
lived there. He died in a snowmobile accident when I was in the
sixth grade. His father attempted to jump over a snowbank without
realizing his son was sitting underneath. The anguish his father felt
after his wife left drove him to sell the property. From the looks of it,
no one ever bothered to make an offer.

As I pass by the farm, I feel a pull directing me further east
down the road. Every attempt to stop is ignored and I feel my body
continuing forward. I want a chance to consider where I’m being
led, but my legs continue pedalling forward despite my attempts to
resist. I finally stop at an old car lying in the ditch beside me. The
vehicle is overgrown with the native plant life that was there
for years before the car called this place home. The car’s windows
are empty voids with only the rubber lining that once kept the
glass secured in its frame. There are tiny specks of glass within that
rubber lining. Inside the cab, the only thing left behind are the metal
frames that would have held the fabric and foam creating the seats.
The car appears to have been burned, but there are traces of the
original colour speckled throughout. At one point, it could have
been seafoam green, but the lightness of the colour is deceiving. Fire
transformed this car, and all evidence of its original form is lost.

With the bike left on the road, I approach the car and
attempt to pry open the driver’s side door. Years of rust causes the
handle to fall off at the first attempt. I brace my foot against the
back panel next to the door and place my hands on the frame of
the window to pull it open. The door finally gives, and rust can be
heard rattling down to the ground below. I stare at the inside for a
while when the pull comes back and forces me to sit in the metal
frame of the seat. My hands place themselves on the bare metal of
the steering wheel. I look out where the windshield used to be and
see how the car got here.

§

I work at the mill in town. I haven’t been working here long,
but I’m a fast learner and quickly move up the ladder. I started on
the table saw, then moved to the plywood press, and now foreman.
It’s not hard work, but it is unfulfilling, unchallenging. I don’t know
what else I would be doing. Staying at this mill, in this town, is
becoming normal. It scares me.

I like to watch the rest of the employees go about their days
during my lunch break. I watch another foreman moving along
the catwalk and he stops at a section that hangs above the plywood
press. He looks intoxicated, but that’s common around here. A lot of
guys drink during lunch. This section of the catwalk is a good place
to end a break because it’s also close to the burn pile. Have a smoke
after lunch, inside away from the cold, and throw the cigarette butt
into the pile afterward.

The man threw the remains of his cigarette into the pile. He
lingered staring into the flames fuelled by sawdust and scrap lumber.
One of the millwrights yells toward the foreman from below. The
noise of the machinery and other workers is overwhelming. I can’t
hear what he’s saying. The foreman looks below into the press
and spits on it. The millwright from below continues to yell. The
foreman inches closer to the burn pile and begins to push himself
up onto the railing. Many others join the millwright. The cacophony
of voices goes unheard. The foreman stands on the railing, looks at
his co-workers one last time, and jumps.

The next day, I pack my car with the few things I own.
Clothes, comics, a guitar, and an old quilt my mother made. There’s
a small city with more work, better work, two hours away from
town. There’s also a college there that offers programs outside of
trades. I’ve done this kind of work for so long and now I have the
motivation for a change.

I drive east out of town. My head starts hurting. Headaches
are normal for me, so I think nothing of it. Pop a couple Ibuprofen
and keep driving. The pain gets worse. A throbbing pain that starts
from the top of my head and feels like it’s moving around the crown
of my skull. I pull over. I’m disoriented from the pain, and I pull
too far from the road which leaves me in a ditch. I turn the car off
and try to catch my breath. The pain doesn’t stop. Lurched over
the steering wheel, I begin dry heaving. I open the door and lean
over to vomit. I’m trying to brace myself against the door while also
trying to hold my head up. I slip and fall out of the door headfirst.
My body hangs out of the cab while I struggle to push myself back
up. I keep slipping and finally give up. I just lay here and wait. I feel
myself being pulled from my body. Like someone is here pulling me
slowly away, and the further I am away from my body, the better I
start to feel.

I remove my hands from the steering wheel and try to rub
the rust from it on my jeans. I sat so long in the metal frame of
the seat that my clothes are stuck on the hooks meant to hold the
missing cushion. I finally get loose and leave the car. I pick up the
single-speed and begin my journey back to town to return the bike
and collect my car.

The post Blood Memory appeared first on FreeFall Magazine.

At its heart the Bear
Clan protects us,
Puskamoose declares.
our peoples need
aggression, that modern
Canada makes us smile
at being inappropriate.

Drops deck screws,
clearance twine, two
packs of Thrills
atop counter, bears,
cousins to spirits
Creator lets loose
to haunt our north.

He says he’s seen them,
waking up in the static
of his TV when Global
goes off air for night,
bothered by post anthem
white noise, he knows
they’ve come in season

In keeping with ancient
teachings, town Cree
like him don’t follow.
First saw them after
a Scott Tournament
of Hearts replay. Heard
hunger in their stirrings.

The post Eddie Puskamoose Showers History at the Main Street appeared first on FreeFall Magazine.

by Anna Yin

When I received the book cover and the page proofs of Mirrors and Windows from Guernica Editions, I was overjoyed. I was no stranger to this joy, for I had previously published five poetry collections; yet this time was different. It was like a long laborious childbirth, finally, safely, delivered. Holding 280 pages of the contributions of the 59 poets whose texts were included—as well as the two-way translations (English to Chinese; Chinese to English) in a beautiful and sophisticated mirror-layout, I reflected on many detours that I had taken on the winding journey of this translation project.

Robert Frost once remarked, “Poetry is what gets lost in translation.” Then why did I spend years translating poems and make the great effort to publish them into book form?  I saw it and continue to see it as necessary. I believe it to be what I might call “a loyal love,” not just a consumption of time and labor, but a journey of collaboration of words mapping, discoursing, exploring, and restoring. Translation needs the courage of “To Be or Not to Be,” the interrogation of “Other” and “I,” the isolation and unity of reflections and explorations. It involves culture, history, and politics to bridge the messages for allowing deeper mutual understanding, communication, and more…I wanted desperately to be a part of this exchange.

Yet without any precise GPS for navigation, one can easily get caught up in detours and get lost on this poetry translating odyssey. Looking back, I recognize detours were necessary. I turned to Every Step Was into a New World, and there I found Al. Moritz’s intuition and philosophy; and when I followed A.E. Stallings’ Mistake, I understood even mistakes were an opportunity to grow and to learn; in Dana Gioia’s Thanks for Remembering Us, I smiled at his amusing love episode triggered by an unsuspected error. In The Flaw by Molly Peacock, I witnessed: “a hand saying through the flaw, / I’m alive, discovered by your eye.” Yet, Peacock’s Why I am Not Buddhist puzzled me for days. Next, I ran into chaotic torments in Allan Briestmaster’s “Ask dying fish what difference: fire and mud …” and in Lan Lan’s “But already too late – / Around the world the tall pillars /Are collapsing…”  My translation pilgrimage entailed traversing various labyrinths among historical courses and cultural examinations. I could get lost but still, I had to keep going.

I remember Moritz’s semi-autobiographical Poetry: “though as it assures you it abashes you / with crushing beauty…” and I translated it in 2013, but found several mistranslations later, after our email exchanges. Then with an online Poetry in Translation discussion, we traced the unconscious side to Dante’s journey through the deepest of dark forests. All those collaborations helped me to rework my translations.  When I flew to Italy in 2019, I found myself waiting in a long queue in front of St. Peter’s Basilica and I was reminded of Richard Greene’s “I was thinking of Michel-/angelo almost daily – Pietà / as essence of the only art I seek…” I instantly reviewed my translation; at Pompeii, I heard Ronna Bloom’s “Salve, Salve, Salve…” echoing beyond the ruins; I regret I missed Tombeau de Keats and only could imagine George Elliott Clarke’s “Language fabricates intimates..” and picture the ghost of Keats inking letters that bloomed in the vast Roma field.

It takes years to get there—to get to the heart (and the head) of a poem! When at last I thought I had fully understood their poems and felt confident in my translations, I heard Gioia’s Do not Expect: “And only briefly then / you touch, you see, you press against/the surface of impenetrable things.”  So, what do I know? How confident am I?  What has still been lost, after many revisions and discussions with these poets and their thoughts re-thinking— seeing windows open and close as if by themselves and then open again—mirrors reflect, obscure, and spring to life again? Where can I detour? Where can we detour?

I found C.D. Wright’s poems were the most difficult to translate. Upon completing the book, I was still perplexed. I tried to learn “the art of losing,” although I believe I stumbled upon the clue to her Only the Crossing Counts: “Frankly my dear, Frankly my dear, Frankly”; I made my final translation. Unfortunately, when she was still alive, I had not confirmed this with her. Now I leave it as it is, I believe that the final choice is truly her call, her autobiographical voice.

Tantalized by Peacock’s Peach, I had the good fortune to discuss it with her in detail. I also had the joy and nerve to invite other Chinese translators to translate the same poem and shared an online hot debate to exchange different translation values, interpretations, and even mistranslations. The reward I received from these collaborative processes was that I grew in confidence to translate and transform the poem in a Chinese romantic way, “a red tinge, with a hinge,” to a renewed world.

While translating the renowned late Chinese modern poet Luo Fu’s poems into English, I constantly thought of “The personal is political” in a larger sense. I was stunned by his arresting images and symbols. His grief of “the clock, / is constantly / killing itself…” reminded me of inevitable tragedies in history and inspired me to write The Great Cold and other poems. For his poem “讀詩十二法” (Twelve Ways of Reading Poetry), I made extended image enhancements and applied such techniques as pen poetry, make poetry, shape poetry, engrave poetry, compose poetry…with compatible imagery in twelve varied ways, so the poem never repeated his expression “寫詩” (write poetry) in my translation. I hope this is my special effort to pay my great homage to him and respect for his work and render the complex layers of humanity and cultural background implied by his poem. Additionally, I used Traditional Chinese instead of Simplified Chinese for his original to reflect its multifaceted cultural and political meanings. Luo Fu greatly advanced beyond several generations of Chinese poets; even with his shortest poems, we can perceive his grim humor, sharp insight and linguistic play all informed by modern Chinese culture, politics, and philosophy.

Scientifically, any image we see in a mirror is the image in the past. Translation seems the same: No matter how long poets want to claim that Poetry is timeless, we read poems with the language and the cultural context related to special moments or historical periods. Thus, translating a poem is to “Make it New” and “Make it Known” in another language. It is such a thought-provoking and word-collaborative process that it demands “a love so dark / you have to long to pierce it repeatedly” (Moritz). Like the “Eros, / raddled asteroid, lumpish and erratic, / on a loopy path” in Advice to the Lovelorn by Alice Major, I have struggled to find directions, but I truly believe that for a peach, even in its mirror-image, the translator should let readers taste the juice of it.  Clarke claims: “the struggle for Beauty is never ‘history’”. I believe translators should, like the poet, strive to recreate its beauty.

I hope with Mirrors and Windows I have fulfilled the role as both a poet and a translator. Yet I have deliberately left a few “flaws” or unsolved “slipups”, Yes. That was and remains my plan. I hope readers will pause, detour, and uncover them, then they begin to debate: “Am I alive or lost in translation?”

Anna Yin was Mississauga’s Inaugural Poet Laureate (2015-2017) and has authored five collections of poetry and one collection of translations: Mirrors and Windows (Guernica Editions) in 2021. Anna won the 2005 Ted Plantos Memorial Award, two MARTYs, two scholarships from USA and three grants from Ontario Arts Council etc. Her poems/translations have appeared at Queen’s Quarterly, ARC Poetry, New York Times, China Daily, CBC Radio, Literary Review of Canada etc. She has designed and hosted various Poetry Alive workshops with multimedia since 2011 and they have been well received in classes in person and online. Find her online at annapoetry.com

The post On Poetry Translation: Where Can We Detour? appeared first on FreeFall Magazine.

The post Frogs Fell from the Sky: Fiction in Poetry appeared first on FreeFall Magazine.

I made it through delivering my mother’s eulogy, and as I scanned the church filled with the last of my great aunties and uncleswho’d driven down to Calgary from Olds, I saw the Elliott tartan of my mother’s mother’s clan. Then the hired piper played “Amazing Grace.” I could no longer restrain myself. Ten years earlier we’d lost my great uncle John Elliott, our patriarch and our piper. Hearing the skirl of the pipes never failed to take me back to him pacing the yard of the Upper Saskatchewan Ranger Station on Alberta’s Kootenay Plains, under the watchful binoculars of Roly the fire lookout man on Mount Cline, and to the bafflement of the sled dogs in their pens and the pack horses in the pasture.

After my mother’s funeral that Saturday in late spring of 2001, we retreated to my brother’s place. The phone rang and my sister-in-law said, “it’s for you, from Rocky Mountain House.” An unmistakable voice came on the line, somewhat frail—a scrappy London accent even after 60 years in Canada—John’s widow and hard-working partner at the ranger station on Kootenay Plains, my Auntie Kathy.

“So, do you ever think of your days on the Upper Saskatchewan?” she asked. The name was our shorthand for the ranger station, Kootenay Plains, and the entire North Saskatchewan watershed. It had been 30 years since we spoke, but I could hear in her voice the deep longing and the need. “Oh, Auntie Kathy. Not a day goes by.” Choked, I took a deep breath. “Not a day goes by. In fact, I’ve finished a book about it. I’ll come see you before I go back east.” And thus began my many returns to Rocky Mountain House and the memories of the sacred places and people of my youth: John and Kathleen Elliott, the Wesley band of the Stoney-Nakoda people, and especially, Silas Abraham. But I knew the station that once flourished was now covered by the waters of the man-made lake named for Silas. A lake Silas opposed and that flooded much of the valley where he once lived and hunted.

My connection to my Uncle John was profound. I lost my hearing after pneumonia in infancy and John his in WWII after a German bomb blasted him from his barracks shortly after his arrival in England. John wore large hearing aids, as did I, and had told my grandmother, “they’re not doing anything for him in school. Send him up to Kathy and me.” It was true, at nine, I floundered. Although I was already bookish, I got into fights and trouble at school and was caught shoplifting, setting fires, andmore.

After the Stampede that summer in 1961, I took the Greyhound north to Red Deer and west through all the little towns to Rocky Mountain House. Kathy and John met me, him in his ranger’s uniform, and we squeezed into the green forestry truck’s cab. Clearwater Car Four was its radio sign. A stick shift and massive Motorola two-way radio dominated the transmission hump as John geared the truck out of Rocky. For a nine year-old boy this was pure adventure. We passed the Alberta Forest Service compound with its helicopter pad. Highway 11 west to Nordegg turned from pavement to wide gravel at Ram River crossing, and as we passed the fenced-off ghost town of Nordegg, I was excited. We dodged construction equipment and soon the boulders that bounced in the wheel wells hushed as the road narrowed again to a dirt track tucked into the rugged front ranges of the eastern slopes of the Canadian Rockies. Everything smelled fresh here: the perfume of pines and the musk of river mud. Massive shards of limestone and shale from the ancient seabeds shouldered the sky around us. Scree bracketed the flatirons on the slopes beside us. A wide valley gouged out by advancing ancient glaciers opened up before us, home to the Upper Saskatchewan headwaters. The Bighorn reserve of the Wesley band of the Stoney- Nakoda spread out beside the river below us.

Boreal forest enveloped us now. Standing water and muskeg was everywhere. Small islands floated pockets of scrub bush, I’d later learn from John, that were dotted with Labrador tea, wooly willow, and mountain mare’s tail. White spruce with ghostly water marks calibrated the river’s summer descent. An active beaver dam rose in a distant backwater. John geared down to ford a small creek and powered up again, swerving to dodge a logging truck from the Edwards Lumber company heading to the sawmill in Rocky. As we slowed near an empty campsite, a black bear snouted an upturned garbage can. John snapped on the Motorola’s mike and warned the Nordegg rangers of its presence. We are in the bear’s house now; mind your manners, John’s tone told me.

Finally, as we thumped over the wooden planks of the black iron bridge at Cline River crossing, we came onto the dusty prairie of Abraham Flats which John said he named after Silas Abraham’s old camp there. Nearby, was the ranger station’s small grassy airstrip with a bright Shell Oil windsock drooping from a striped pole. Mule deer grazed on the edges of the runway, seemingly oblivious to us, but scattered as we got close. This is where Kootenay Plains began then, before the Bighorn Dam went in, stretching from the Cline River up to Whirlpool Point.

John Elliott named Two O’Clock Creek, too. So I know where I am, he quipped. Over the summer, as we patrolled in his truck, he pointed out his handiwork: the fire road gates, the campground at Two O’clock Creek where the David Thompson Cavalcade was held, the stopover cabin at Thompson’s Creek near Saskatchewan Crossing where the Clearwater forest district ended and Banff National Park began. Beyond that was the Columbia Icefields and the Howse Pass where the Kutenai (or Ktunaxa), for whom the Kootenay Plains is named, came over the Rockies to hunt the buffalo.

I saw the springs and creeks that flowed from a distant glacier’s crowfoot. I rode a helicopter for the first time up to the Cline fire lookout where John had cleared the mountain top with a chainsaw while Kathy watched the trees topple through her binoculars from the station below. John showed me how to distinguish between fir and spruce by rolling their needles between my fingers: Fir, with its square needles, rolled; spruce did not.

The Upper Saskatchewan Ranger Station was a sizable compound with a modest ranger’s house, a large storage garage forfirefighting equipment and tools, a bunk house, generator shed, radio shack, weather station, and a greenhouse and barn in a nearby pasture. Out back were the dog pens and beside the house a large vegetable garden. In front, flower beds spelled out AFS—Alberta Forest Service. A flag on top of a varnished pole claimed the territory right beside Abraham’s camp and declared who was in charge in the wild backcountry now. This place would be my home for two summers; summers that changed me and formed the backbone of a lifetime of creative work. John taught me what he learned from the forestry school at Hinton and from another less formal school, out on Kootenay Plains and the trails, from the elders, especially Silas Abraham, noted guide and hunter.

The Kootenay Plains was a sacred place, John said, as it had been for indigenous people for more than 5000 years, not long after the last Ice Age and the retreat of the massive glaciers that created the valley. Explorer David Thompson passed through in 1807 as he made his first attempt to reach the Columbia over the Rockies via the Howse Pass. Thompson recorded in his journals seeing buffalo among the deer, elk, bear, mountain goats, and Bighorn sheep. According to historian John Laurie, the buffalo herds likely disappeared from Kootenay Plains by 1869. The Stoney- Nakoda (or îyârhe Nakodabi, the Rocky Mountain Sioux) still talk of one herd in the Siffleur wilderness area as late as the 1920s. Those summers I saw everything, except the buffalo, that Thompson noted, including a wolf pack, moose, and traces of cougars.

If John was the stern-faced ranger and peace officer in charge of Alberta Forest Service’s Upper Saskatchewan district, Kathy was the station’s tough heart. As John’s unpaid and unacknowledged assistant, she managed the radio, weather station, sled dogs, and nearly everything else. Even after a life of helping John fight fires and poachers in the bush, Kathy was no cowgirl, and didn’t even learn to drive until after John’s death at 81. In London, she had been a secretary at a law firm where they wore gloves and hats and smoked at their desks. She survived the Blitz by taking shelter in the “tube” or subway tunnels under the city, as bombs rumbled and rockets screamed above. When she met John she was living with her mum above a cake shop in London, but she fell in love, and, like many war-brides, she left the comforts of the city to come west to be with her Canadian husband. When Kathy arrived in Longview, Alberta in 1946 to join John after the war, he was not in town. He had come in for supplies two days earlier and left again for the Highwood Ranger station. Hitching a ride on a log truck, she made it to the station only to find John and his horses gone. There was also no bread to eat. She’d never baked a loaf in her life, but she walked 14 miles round trip to a surveyor’s camp and returned with the cook’s recipe, which she never forgot. She baked beautiful bread, John always said.

When I visited Kathy in Rocky after my mother’s funeral, she told me how the young women there didn’t believe her stories of life in the bush before cellphones, SUVs, and paved roads. At the Upper Saskatchewan, the nearest ranger station was in Nordegg, and in order to call Rocky for firefighting backup or a helicopter from forestry headquarters or the Mounties, Nordegg would have to relay messages, since the radio range was 80 kilometers at best. The Upper Saskatchewan was remote and often the only traffic for days was a logging truck. In winter, the road out was usually impassable beyond Windy Point where the snow plowing stopped. There were no power or phone lines in the bush, and four wheel drives were notorious for breakdowns. Few owned them. Kathy shook her head, “when I tell them how we lived, they don’t believe me.”

The Upper Saskatchewan Ranger Station was in a new forest service district created in the late 1950s, with the station located at the confluence of the Cline and North Saskatchewan Rivers, and a fire lookout erected directly across the North Saskatchewan on Mount Cline. It was needed because the parched grass rooted in glacial flour, or silt, saw little snow in winter creating an extreme fire hazard in summer. Wild animals had been drawn to the area for over-wintering for thousands of years, which attracted hunters and, unfortunately, poachers too. When John first came to the Upper Saskatchewan, he said forestry wanted the Stoney people and their horses off the Plains and back on the reserve. John’s presence created tension because he was the face of government pushing the Stoney people out. And there was talk the ranger carried only one gun on his horse. John had to be careful in the early years, with the nearest help hours away.

Each morning that first summer, I shadowed Kathy on her rounds. After tending to breakfast we checked on the dogs and, sometimes, aided in the birth of their puppies, then to the woodpile where she split wood with a lumberman’s double-bitted axe and loaded a contractor’s wheelbarrow. She was slight, standing around five feet, but her thin arms were lean and muscular; Kathy may have never considered herself a cowgirl, but she was as tough as any I knew. Some afternoons, she would put up a proper English tea for her and John, but she’d also adapted to this new land. One day while John was weeding the garden, hidden behind a row of beans, a black bear sow and her cub climbed the rail fence, after the ripening raspberries. I was shelling peas for dinner when she grabbed the .303 from the ranger’s office and shucked a cartridge into the chamber. Outside she screamed at John who was as oblivious to the bear as the bear was to him. He was deaf after all. Luckily, Kathy’s scream warned off the sow and her cubs. For a moment, John looked uncertain who the gun was for.

When I spoke to Kathy after my mother’s funeral, I had already begun to think my novel was not finished, yet. In the Bear’s House started out as a poem, “Two O’clock Creek,” about the mystery of rivers and the magic of water appearing anywhere and on time. To research the novel, I made many trips up to Kootenay Plains through Banff on up to the Icefields’ Highway, but never through Rocky. I lived in the east and had lost touch with John and Kathy, so I relied heavily on John’s own memoir for inspiration—a gift he’d given me years before at a family reunion. The stories of men in the backcountry abound. But Kathy’d been as much a part of my young life as John. Maybe more. And without her voice, at least in spirit, I knew my book would be incomplete. Backcountry women’s stories like hers need to be heard. She understood that too and she told me everything she could. And I remembered so much too, including the ranger station’s radio call sign: “X78278,” I repeated it to her like my old phone number. Kathy beamed.

Kathy warned me much had changed in 40 years. I left Rocky after our first visit and took the now-paved Highway 11—DavidThompson route—past Nordegg. Nordegg had been a ghost town with a padlocked gate for years after the coal mine closed in the 1950s, but it was open again. As I passed over the Bighorn River, I saw the turnoff sign for the Bighorn (or Kiska Waptan) Reserve. The highway followed the curves of Lake Abraham for miles and an RV camp and motel clustered around its far end where the Cline River emptied into it. I sped all the way through, without stopping, to the clutch of Banff park’s warden’s cabins, at what we used to call Saskatchewan Crossing, where Highway 11 meets Highway 93, the Icefields’ Highway. Across the North Saskatchewan River was the new Crossing resort, where George Brewster built his bungalow camp in 1948.

Forty years and nearly a lifetime of changes. Lake Abraham was long and high up the valley sides. I thought of John, after hearing old Silas Abraham’s recollections, searching out and fencing in, and thus honouring the graves of the Stoney dead; at first, so they would not be disturbed, but later this allowed the graves to be reinterred on higher ground in anticipation of the lake and the new highway.

The Kootenay Plains changed John in a way no other place did. He had experience in the southern Alberta backcountry as ranger in the Crowsnest Pass where he’d taken a vicious beating by poachers; incredibly, one was a ranger himself. Afterwards, John applied for a handgun permit and seldom went out on patrol without a revolver and a rifle. When I was there, he rarely travelled without them, especially when alone on horse patrol. But the Upper Saskatchewan was more than just a job to him, it was home. John encouraged the return of the Sun Dance. Later, an aging Silas asked John to bring him stone from Whirlpool Point, a sacred place where the Stoney-Nakoda got their pipe stone. The pipe Silas made was a tribute to their friendship and remains in our family. John prized it and kept it in his sideboard, with his war-time mementoes, wrapped in a special cloth. Silas Abraham died at the age of ninety, the year after my first summer there, but his presence remains everywhere on the Plains, at the Bighorn, and in the cutting marks on the pipe. It has been smoked only once. “Helluva a draw,” John’d tell anyone who asked. But that wasn’t the only reason he never smoked it again. Like the Kootenay Plains from which it came, the pipe was sacred. As was his friendship with Silas. He never shared the pipe with anyone else after Silas died.

Kootenay Plains changed me too, from a troubled young boy. If I could not hear, I could better observe and listen; John and Kathy taught me that. Words are small, actions are bigger. John erected fences around Stoney graves on the Plains to protect them. He hadn’t much use for religion, but respected Silas’. Silas and John had started out at odds when he first arrived in the district, but they shared a religion of the backcountry and its creatures. Both men were hunters and lived for the outdoors. John as an eight-year old boy was a gilly or helper in Scotland for his father, a gamekeeper of a large estate—as an aside, whose story’s strikingly similar to Oliver Mellors’ in D.H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover. The ranger station living room was festooned with the skins of bear, cougar, lynx, and wolverine and the requisite deer and elk heads and antlers. For a poor boy from Scotland, and Kathy a middle class city girl, this was their wilderness Eden. Hummingbirds flitted in the lupine and lilies; swallows and mountain jays raided the berry bushes in the lush garden outside.

John spoke often of Silas Abraham as a legendary guide and elder—whatever happened between them when they first met was never spoken of around me. Over the two summers I was there, we’d visit the Bighorn reserve, sometimes with a small load of fresh garden produce. It was on one of John’s trips I met Silas. By then he was stooped and frail, but still formidable and yet gentle to a young boy. I knew I was in the presence of a great man, half-brother of the legendary Walking Buffalo (also known as Tatânga Mânî or George McLean), founder of the Banff Indian Days, and a renowned speaker who travelled the world as a peacemaker. The Stoney-Nakoda people included me in everything: games, dances, and conversation. I was not treated differently, although I felt different then. No one seemed to notice my thick glasses with the big hearing aids attached to their temples and the plastic tubes in my ears or asked about my “accent,” my speech impediment. I was welcomed into the chicken dances at the Cavalcade and played with the Stoney-Nakoda children at the Bighorn.

I took many trips back to Kootenay Plains during the years I wrote In the Bear’s House, and during each trip I was given signs; maybe they were messages from John, or the land itself, or perhaps even Silas, but I brushed them off then. After my mother’s death, and my first visit with Kathy, I was troubled and sad. I returned to the Plains later that summer, this time with Pam Knott from Banff who can climb a mountain in flip flops. She is Métis and conversant with the backcountry and its signs.

The fall before I reconnected with my auntie Kathy, I was visiting Pam in Banff, when a significant sign presented itself, in this case literally. A mutual friend, poet Charles Noble, showed up at my rented cabin early one morning. He had been knocking on the window and door, but without hearing aids, I was hard to rouse. Charles stood outside with a fellow holding a grey weather-beaten board. Banff photographer and painter Alex Emon had returned from exploring Kootenay Plains two years prior, and later heard me read “Two O’clock Creek” on CBC’s Daybreak Alberta. Charles told him I was in town and Alex had a present for me: I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. “2 O’clock Creek,” the original sign. Incredulous, I quizzed Alex on where he found it.

“Not the right place,” I muttered, still in shock. But it had the nail holes I mention in my poem and when I turned it over, there was sap from the spruce tree. “It can’t be,” I said. Local author, Bob Clarke, who had been listening from the next cabin, stepped in.

“Oh no, it’s the right sign alright. I was a catskinner on that road. We moved the creek to take the David Thompson highway through. That sign probably got left behind.” The glacial silt and dryness of the Plains had preserved it remarkably well and it now hangs above my desk as I write this.

During my first visit with Kathy, I asked about the sign. She not only confirmed it was the original, but revealed a family secret. “You must not tell anyone. We buried John at Two O’clock Creek,” and she told me where.

It was the spot Pam and I were looking for as we hiked down Two O’Clock Creek across the Plains to where it meets the North Saskatchewan. Across from us was a mountain the Stoney-Nakoda call the Sleeping Chief. We met a young First Nations man walking up from the river. He was searching for sweetgrass for his ceremony at the sweatlodge, he said. Thomas, we learned, was from Edmonton and preparing for a Sun Dance later in the summer. Pam sprinted back up to her car, fetched a braid of sweetgrass she kept for emergencies, and gave it to him. Thomas then led us to a nearby camp. I was self-conscious, and a little embarrassed, in my grieving. And I was the only non-aboriginal. But on Kootenay Plains I’d always felt welcome.

An older man, an elder, offered us cups of coffee and invited us to join in the circle of lawn chairs. Beside him boulders and firewood waited by a fire pit to heat the sweatlodge. Half a dozen young men, some Mohawk from outside Montreal and others Cree from up north, introduced themselves. Behind them, I recognized the saplings lashed together. The frames of a sweatlodge. They’d been there at Abraham Flats near the ranger station, but I had no idea what they were that long ago day. Without John or Kathy’s permission, I’d snuck under the barbed wire fence surrounding the bent willow frames and a mysterious abandoned cabin, with an overturned wash basin and a rusty cast iron frying pan lying in the tall grass like the camp had been abandoned quickly. I wondered if that cabin had belonged to Silas Abraham and was ordered fenced in by forestry; why John had named the area where it stood Abraham Flats. And if John was the ranger who shot their horses. Or was it someone else? I remembered a horse hide drying on the fence beside the barn. Kootenay Plains has many secrets.

In front of the young men, I thought I’d masked my emotions, but the elder was prescient, “in times of great sorrow, we return to the places of our youth.” Pam looked at me and laughed with her eyes. She didn’t have to say it. Yet another sign. The elder invited us to join in the sweatlodge. I had a plane to catch back to Toronto, I said lamely. In truth, I was afraid of what I’d find. It was too soon. But I thought of Silas Abraham, a man I’d met only once. I remembered his grey braids, and him sitting on a cot in a back country cook tent next to where the Stoney were cutting poles for Alberta Government Telephones. It was a meeting that changed my life. Silas too, like this man in front of me, was an elder. A spirit guide. Finding John’s grave could wait.

I’d been shocked at first when Kathy told me that law and order John was buried here, but I was beginning to understand. And I had indeed returned to the sacred places of my youth. And to the sacred people, Silas, John, and Kathy too, who taught me much. My elders John and Silas, once at odds, worked together to honour the ancestors. John was deaf, but insisted he be heard, because above all the deaf wish to be heard. As did Silas. But to be heard, we first must listen. I think that was what Silas and Kathy taught John and thus me. The lesson of the
friendship pipe.

Kathy also taught me to be tender as a gift to yourself. I was already too tough for my age, but as I helped her deliver litters of puppies those summers, I listened to Kathy coo endearments to the mothers as they whelped. I learned despite what little I had, of hearing or sight or anything else, I could still make a good life just as John and Kathy made their Eden in the glacial silt. When John had the ranger station’s soil tested, he heard from the Edmonton lab—there were zero nutrients.That didn’t stop John and Kathy. They gathered buffalo bones and asked everyone in Rocky for their old leather shoes to compost. They made their own soil. In the back country, you either make it or you make do. Silas enjoyed the turnips from the garden John took him, he said. Turnips from buffalo bones and old shoes.

When I returned to fifth grade in Calgary that fall, I spoke less and listened more. Lipreading was fine but eyes and actions said more. And I learned a fierce courage from my auntie and uncle. I made sure now I was heard. Kathy taught me that sometimes a whisper, a coo, or a laugh, was almost always more powerful than a shout or a fist. But sometimes, not.

Knowing these two men, one of them only in spirit, and Kathy, has made all the difference between the further trouble I was clearly heading for, or a life of substance. Since then, I’ve been blessed with challenge and creation, but most of all love. Kathy’s love for John was both ferocious and tender. She’d once raged, “you’re a hard, hard man, John Elliott.” And as a woman without her own children, she loved me. She phoned after my mother’s funeral and offered no condolences; I still had her, after all. She wanted to know if I remembered. Kootenay Plains haunted my dreams for years until I wrote a book with these lines: “… and all the years since I learned how rivers are made/ this is the place I come to in my dreams,/ between the highest point of land and the sky/ so I can drink from the clouds.”

After we left the sweat lodge, I was pensive. Pam pulled back onto the highway towards Banff, after we’d paused at Whirlpool Pointwhere John got the sacred grey stone for Silas’ pipe, and a thousand year old wind-shaped limber pine, a giant bonsai, stands at the peak. We were nearing the park boundary and stopped one more time for a quick hike past John’s old cabin at Thompson Creek, now a caretaker’s summer home at the campground. We got up to a grove of pencil-thin aspens and Pam pointed out how they were beribboned with tobacco—offerings to the ancestors. A sacred grove. A sign. “Is this new?” I asked. Pam shook her head and turned back towards the car. I didn’t remember it. Maybe I just didn’t see it.

The sun dropped low over the ridge. It would be dark when we got back to Banff. Just before the park boundary, Pam braked. A young black bear rose from the river and sprinted across the highway. His coat glistened with water droplets and he shook it off as he ran. Here the river runs fast, cold as ice and jade-green with glacial silt, coursing down to Edmonton and on to Hudson Bay. “It’s an omen,” Pam laughed. “It’s weird. This happens every time you come here.” It had been a day of signs and now this. The bear.

We were in the bear’s house now with Silas and John, and Kathy too. My Auntie Kathy died in 2010, the year after In the Bear’s House was published. Suffering from dementia and in a care home, she was not able to read her story, but it got told.

As a young prairie boy, I loved the magic of a high mountain montane teeming with wildlife and history, and a creek that appeared
at two o’clock as the sun warmed a distant glacier’s crowfoot. How the creek slept at night, after sundown, its water frozen at high altitudes. The Upper Saskatchewan ranger station, that boreal valley, the old road, and the Cline Bridge, on the last curve home. All are gone now, deep under the lake. But if you look carefully, you can find the concrete abutments of the Cline Bridge below the David Thompson resort. And across Lake Abraham, the Cline fire lookout still watches over the Plains.

Kootenay Plains is where I come to in my dreams. Someday I will return to the sweat lodge, and to the sacred places of my youth to drink from the clouds.

Calgary born and raised, Bruce Hunter has authored six books, including
In the Bear’s House, 2009 winner of the Canadian Rockies Prize at the Banff Mountain Film and Book Festival. In 2017, he was the Calgary Public Library’s 30th Anniversary Author in Residence. In 2019, the third edition of his 1996 collection of gothic Calgary stories. Country Music Country, was “rebooted” with an introduction by Calgary literary historian Shaun Hunter. His poem mentioned here “Two Clock Creek” will be included in Sweet Water – Poems for the Watershed, due in spring 2020.

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-Thomas King Massey lecture The Truth About Stories: “You’ll never                                                                                        believe what happened” is always a great way to start.

For the purpose of this essay, the artist Rae Spoon will be referenced in the gender neutral pronoun: they/them. I recognize the grammatical problems this may pose to some readers but until the language evolves, the gender binary of “he” and “she” and the gender neutral “they” will continue to be a necessary grammatical issue for readers, writers, presenters, performers, and anyone whose identify does not fit in either singular binary pronoun.

Stories are a funny thing. When they happen, they feel unique: like no one else could ever fully understand the experience that created that story. When written down, fiction or non-fiction, they are very much the story-tellers – until suddenly they are not. No matter how hard we try to hold onto our stories, to control the metaphorical revelations or the key elements as they pertain to our experience, as soon as we let them out into the world, as soon as we let others take part in our experience, all bets are off. What was once personal is now public and what was once in an intimate relationship with the teller may now have a relationship with someone else.

Rae Spoon is one of my favourite singer-songwriters which also makes them one of my favourite storytellers. Rae’s album, My Prairie Home, is a personal collection of stories about growing up in Alberta while navigating a number of unique circumstances both personal and familial. Amongst the collection is one story that I felt particularly drawn into a relationship with. The song “I can’t tear it from me” is a personal story of which I have no life experience to parallel, yet I can’t help the visceral reaction I have when I hear it. It stops me in my tracks every time.  It’s about their grandmother. And though the story is short as told in the song, it continues in my mind long after the song ends. I see Rae’s grandmother watching this teenager on the verge of implosion and I see her remember them as a baby. I picture a fat cooing baby that grows into a curious little toddler. Their Grandmother probably remembers pink dresses for Sunday school and bell bottom pants for hanging upside down on the monkey bars. Rae is the same age as me so I imagine them in my old clothes doing things I would have done (I guess that means Rae wore pink dresses to hang upside down on the monkey bars too, then). Rae and I grew up in the same Calgary. In fact, geographically, we went to high school only five minutes away from each other. But we also grew up in very different Calgary’s. Rae’s story reminds me just how different. When I hear it I find myself sitting with their Grandma, watching her gangly teenaged grandchild trying to make sense of who they are. This child, unsure of what it means to feel safe, struggling for acceptance that goes far beyond trying to make your parents accept the blue dye in your hair, fighting with peers over the right to be in a relationship, and I realize I never had to ask those questions in my Calgary.

September 2014, the Epcor Centre’s Art!Flicks showed a screening of the documentary, My Prairie Home of which the album is the soundtrack to.  It was part of Alberta Culture Days and what better film to feature than a homemade documentary about a homemade musician with a homemade soundtrack. Rae comes back and shares with us the Calgary they knew. It seems obvious to say that we can’t run away from the stories that make us who we are. We can try, but at some point we have to stop, turn around, and see them for what they were. That is where stories as raw and honest as Rae’s come from. Each song on the album is paired with or highlights a story in the documentary. “I can’t tear it from me” accompanies a much longer telling of the circumstances which caused Rae to move in with their grandmother and Uncle. The two took Rae in just before things got to the point of no return in Rae’s parent’s home. Not every kid like Rae has a grandmother like that, which only makes this story even harder to hear. Not everyone has someone to “pull them from the wreckage” (“I can’t tear it from me”) and even those that do often don’t get pulled until things have happened that can’t be taken back.

When I heard the story being told in the documentary, I instantly felt ownership of it. I felt like they were telling a story only I shared with them before that moment. All of the feelings I get when I listen to the song were instantly present in that small little theatre. Now when I hear the song, a new narrative runs through my mind. It’s similar to the old one but this new story includes Rae watching Wheel of Fortune with her uncle and grandma. It’s a little less sad, in fact it even has some comic relief, but it isn’t any less a reminder that my Calgary and Rae’s Calgary were very different. And maybe that’s why I developed such a strong relationship with that story. Not because I could relate to it but because I couldn’t. My grandmother taught me to sing “you are my sunshine” Rae’s taught them “to be strong and to sing [their] way through things. Without her [they] would have never learned to love” (“I can’t tear it from me”).

No, we didn’t live in the same Calgary, but that doesn’t stop Rae’s stories from permeating into my Calgary so that I can connect with someone I might not have otherwise thought about. That I definitely didn’t think about when I was in High School. I want to hug Rae’s grandmother. I want to shake every grandparent who has a gay or transgender grandchild in a home that is less than supportive and say, “your only job is to love them. Love them beyond reason. Love them beyond expectation. Just love them.” Because that’s the other thing stories do. They reveal connections. They take what you think and ask you to think again. As Thomas Kings says, “the truth about stories is that that’s all we are” (The Truth About Stories).  And if that’s true, that stories are all we are, then we have great power within ourselves. We can choose what stories to tell, what stories to re-tell, and what stories are given power in our social consciousness. We can shape our Calgary simply with our stories.

The post The Thing about Stories Is… appeared first on FreeFall Magazine.

Leonard Cohen’s writing career spanned over sixty-five years and throughout this time, he made a profound impression on the tradition of Canadian folk music. Among his greatest contributions, is the practice of using religious texts as the metrical and conceptual basis for his music. Infusing ancient stories with his own reflections and vernacular, Cohen asserts the presence of the secular hymn in modern music. While many of his songs invoke biblical stories, none are more widely listened to than his magnum opus, “Hallelujah.” Maclean’s Magazine called it “the closest thing that pop music has to a sacred text” (Johnson). Like the Bible, which can be found in nearly every hotel and motel across the country, “Hallelujah’s” presence is nearly as sweeping. Sung in churches to remind parishioners of the cautionary tales of David’s adultery, or Samson’s foolishness; slurred and crooned in dimly lit karaoke bars; played faintly in the background of a teledrama; Cohen’s masterpiece is omnipresent in Canadian culture, although it does not always assert the same significance. A song about religion and love, “Hallelujah” is also an ode to the act of writing itself. Leonard Cohen worked on this song for many years and allegedly wrote eighty verses—some which have been read, most of which were discarded. Analysis of the seven recorded verses reveals as much about Cohen as it does his manner of faith. “Hallelujah’s” seemingly tireless composition contextualizes his belaboured form of worship and exemplifies the essential role of devotion in writing practices. 

Leonard Cohen began his writing career at McGill in 1951. Initially enrolled in General Arts, he studied broadly and lightly, when he did at all (Simmons 33). During his period at McGill, he met writers who would come to be mentors to him; chief among them, were poets Louis Dudek and Irving Layton (Simmons 41). While Dudek inducted the young poet into the Montreal poetry scene, it was Layton who would come to be most influential upon the young writer’s form. Biographer Tim Footman notes, “One element that Layton encouraged from the beginning was the need to focus on his Jewish heritage” (22). Cohen’s fascination with the Bible began in his earliest years as a writer, and of course continued throughout the bulk of his career. What Cohen and Layton shared was an interest in Jewish scripture, if not for its theological merits, for its rhythm and poetic meter (Footman 22). Beyond religion, they both shared reputations as womanizers. In their poetry, each of them wrote candidly on sex, to ill and positive reception. Regarding his first collection of poems, Let Us Compare Mythologies, Allan Donaldson of the Fiddlehead disparaged his “overuse of images of sex and violence” (Simmons 53). Alongside what some critics might deem salacious, were rich reflections upon religion and love. It is at this reverent crossroad, where Cohen would find his voice. These early embraced themes blend nearly indiscernibly in “Hallelujah.”

One of the most common mythologies surrounding “Hallelujah” is that Cohen originally wrote eighty verses over the course of many years (Cheal). Laborious as it may seem, this claim aligns with what is known of Cohen’s writing practice. Singer Kathryn Williams said that his songs are “massively laboured over to not sound laboured” (Footman 9).  In an interview with Sylvie Simmons, Cohen claimed that he and had written “Treaty” over the course of over 15 years and modified “Born in Chains” for nearly 25 years before its release (513). The precision in Cohen’s lyrics was not god-given, but instead the result of time and considered effort. He would not release a song or poem until it felt resolved, and what would finish as one song, might have been the product of tens of verses and years of reflection. As a lyricist, Cohen is often compared to Bob Dylan. Both were ethnically Jewish, wrote within the same period, lived at the famed Chelsea Hotel in New York City, and made folk music. Despite their frequent comparison, their writing practices couldn’t be more different. In a 1991 interview, Cohen shared an exchange he had with Dylan a few years prior. He said, “I helped out at a Dylan concert in Paris, afterward we went out to get a coffee together. He mentioned one of my songs that he played on stage, ‘Hallelujah.’ He asked me, ‘How long did it take you to write it?’ ‘Oh, I don’t know. Two years maybe, at least.’ Then I mentioned one of the songs from Slow Train Coming, ‘I and I’. He answered, ‘15 minutes.’” Years later, Cohen would admit that he had been dishonest with Dylan and that the song had in fact taken him much longer. In one interview Cohen said, “I wrote Hallelujah over the space of at least four years. I wrote many many verses. I don’t know if it was eighty, maybe more or a little less” (Light 3). When the song was first recorded in 1984, Cohen cut down the alleged eighty verses to four. The song begins:

Now I’ve heard there was a secret chord
That David played and it pleased the Lord
But you don’t really care for music, do ya?
It goes like this, the fourth, the fifth
The Minor fall, the major lift
The baffled king composing hallelujah
(“Hallelujah,” Various Positions)

In this verse, Cohen introduces the three main themes in his song: religion, love, and writing. He begins with his central character, the biblical musician and poet, David. In the book of Salomon, David would play music to ease the king’s mind: “Whenever the spirit from God came on Saul, David would take up his lyre and play. Then relief would come to Saul; he would feel better, and the evil spirit would leave him” (1 Samuel 16:23). In Cohen’s allusion to this chapter, he presents his personal use of music in worship, as a celebration of volition. Directly following the initial couplet, he hesitates before an audience. The second person, “ya,” might be interpreted as an ambivalent lover or listener. In either case, his pursuit of this secret chord is one verified only by his communion with God, and not through accolades.  In the bible there is no such reference to a secret chord, this is an invention of Cohen’s. By adding this detail, there is an elusive quality to the song which David played, which Cohen replicates in the fourth and fifth lines. Rather than a “chord,” it is a chord progression. He describes this movement from the fourth to the fifth chord and the shift from a minor to a major key, reflexively, in the fourth and fifth lines. “The baffled king composing,” is not only David but Leonard Cohen too. This metaphor continues into the second stanza, which shifts from the first person to a second person perspective, and from the biblical David to Samuel. The second stanza reads:

Your faith was strong, but you needed proof
You saw her bathing on the roof
Her beauty in the moonlight overthrew ya
She tied you to a kitchen chair
She broke your throne and she cut your hair
And from your lips she drew the hallelujah
(“Hallelujah,” Various Positions)

The first three lines speak directly to King David who watched a young woman, Bathsheba, as she bathed on a roof below his palace in Jerusalem. Although she was married to Uriah, David invited her to his palace and slept with her. This allusion to infidelity mirrors what biographers frequently note in Cohen’s personal life (Simmons 86). The intimation that Cohen saw himself in biblical poets is clarified in the latter three lines through the story of Samson and Delilah. To the dismay of his family, Samson falls in love with a Philistine woman. Though he initially guards the secret to his power from her, she coerces him into revealing it, declaring they cannot love each other without total honesty (“Judges 16”). These final lines complicate Cohen as a romantic figure. These biblical women are presented as the source of the hero’s downfall while they are portrayed as objects of prayer. It is this muddled, objectifying worship of women-as-muses that makes Cohen such a polarizing writer for feminist critics. The third verse continues by questioning a prescriptive faith, echoing the secret chord alluded to in verse one:

You say I took the name in vain
I don’t even know the name
But if I did, well really, what’s it to ya?
There’s a blaze of light in every word
It doesn’t matter which you heard
The holy, or the broken hallelujah
(“Hallelujah,” Various Positions)

Cohen asks if the holy name is hallowed if not uttered in prayer. He argues that praise of any kind is righteous. Salman Rushdie once wrote of this verse, “only Leonard Cohen could get away with rhyming ‘what’s it to ya’ with ‘hallelujah’” (Light 25). This near rhyme inscribes the most prominent theme in this stanza: the irrevocably personal nature of prayer. Cohen uses “ya,” a vernacular word which signifies both you and yes to tease out the affirmative nature of prayer, and the need for an object of prayer— holy, or not. With the word “hallelujah,” he performs a similar function, albeit in a different register. “Hallelujah” is composed of the root word “hallelu” meaning to praise, and “yaw,” an abbreviated form of the name of God. By rhyming these two words—“ya” and “hallelujah”— Cohen argues that every word of prayer contains within it a holy sentiment, even if the words themselves are brusque. His mutable reading of prayer continues into the final stanza:

I did my best, it wasn’t much
I couldn’t feel, so I tried to touch
I’ve told the truth, I didn’t come to fool ya
And even though it all went wrong
I’ll stand before the lord of song
With nothing on my tongue but hallelujah
(“Hallelujah,” Various Positions)

The first two lines reveal Cohen’s attempts to reclaim emotional acuity through his music. Despite his best efforts, “it all went wrong,” and his music falls on deaf ears. The thematic refrain of “Hallelujah” culminates in this stanza, with Cohen’s realization that it is the utterance of prayer, and the volition, which is holy. This semantic crescendo is best summarized in his final line. While he sings “tongue,” the lyrics are often mistranscribed as “lips.” The difference is significant when one considers Cohen’s bilingual heritage. In French, there is one word shared for “language” and “tongue”: langue. This shared word draws together their mutual reliance; language’s indebtedness to articulation and articulation’s presupposition of language. However much the writer may edit and try to produce something great, meaning can be misconstrued and tainted. Therefore, it is not in the subject’s ears which Cohen’s prayer becomes holy, but upon the page, upon his tongue. It seems that like writing, prayer is a lonely practice. When one considers the numerous renditions of Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah,” and its many thematic through-lines, the song can hardly be read as singular.

Hallelujah was originally recorded for the album Various Positions in 1984 with producer John Lissauer. Nearly thirty years later, Lissauer has fond memories of his time in the studio with Leonard. He recalls Leonard’s decisiveness: “there was no ‘Should we do this verse?’—I don’t think there was even a question of the order of the verses” (Light 17). Evidently, Cohen had made up his mind as to how the song would be recorded before he arrived in the studio. Lissauer reflects that “it almost recorded itself” (Light 17), but the ease of its recording was not mirrored in its distribution. After its recording, “[Various Positions] went to Walter Yetnikoff, who was president of CBS Records, and he said, ‘What is this? This isn’t pop music. We’re not releasing it. This is a disaster” (Light 31). In the heart of the 80s pop music boom, the market for depressive singer-songwriters was small. Yetnikoff might be attributed with the record’s slow reception, but he wouldn’t halt the process entirely. Instead of being printed in America, Various Positions was initially released overseas. Despite its stalled success, the album was picked up by PVC Records later that year, and it finally reached an American audience. Among the listeners was John Cale of the Velvet Underground. Cale was among the first artists to cover “Hallelujah.” He recalls, “After I saw him perform at the Beacon I asked if I could have the lyrics to ‘Hallelujah’. When I got home one night there were fax rolls everywhere because Leonard insisted on supplying all 15 verses” (Cale). Although far less than the rumored eighty, Cohen had given Cale more verses than were currently recorded. When Cale recorded his version for the album Fragments of a Rainy Season(1992), he added three verses which hadn’t been recorded yet. In addition to the new lyrics, “Hallelujah” received the benefit of a stripped-down production, with only piano and vocals. Two years later, using the same lyrics as Cale, Jeff Buckley performed and released his own rendition of “Hallelujah” to be released on his sole studio album, Grace. The vastly superior vocal range of Buckley married with the sparse production found on Cale’s version earned the song far more fame than Cohen had initially received for it. Buckley interpreted the song so beautifully that many forget that he didn’t write it himself. 

Following the Jeff Buckley and John Cale covers, Hallelujah gained a new identity. In the version which Cohen releases in 1994, a recording from Austin City Limits in 1988, not only has the organ been exchanged for a guitar, but the lyrics have changed entirely. What was once a song rich in Biblical and musical references, is nearly entirely skewed in the direction of romantic love; no David, no Samson, just Leonard. Cohen writes on the song’s transformation: “[The original ‘Hallelujah’] had references to the Bible in it, although these references became more and more remote as the song went from the beginning to the end. Finally, I understood that it was not necessary to refer to the Bible anymore. And I rewrote this song; this is the ‘secular Hallelujah’” (Light 18):

Baby, I’ve been here before
I know this room, I walked this floor
I used to live alone before I knew ya
And I’ve seen your flag on the marble arch
But listen love, love is not some kind of victory march
No, it’s a cold and a very broken hallelujah
(“Hallelujah,” Cohen Live)

In the first two lines, Cohen entertains a feeling of recollection—perhaps looking back on what would now be a storied career not only as a writer, but as a musician too. In this verse, Cohen seems to respond to the themes he presented in the studio version just six years ago. In Various Positions, there was an optimism towards the nature of prayer; that regardless of the sign, it is volition that matters. Instead, he asserts in the new lyrics that love is not something that should be celebrated as a battle won or a great work of craftsmanship, but instead to be declared cold and broken. This stanza’s final line reflects “the holy or the broken Hallelujah,” heard on Various Positions. Notably, the holy is removed in favour of the cold. Referring to temperature rather than the ethereal, he evokes the bodily sensorium which the song continues upon in verse two:

There was a time you let me know
What’s really going on below
But now you never show it to me, do ya?
But I remember when I moved in you
And the holy dove, she was moving too
And every single breath we drew was hallelujah
(“Hallelujah,” Cohen Live)

In the song’s many verses, this is the most explicitly sexual. The first two lines not only carry sexual connotations but perhaps also refer to the song’s history; that there are numerous, less superficial ways to read the song as a text. Like a clothed body, its subtleties are hidden. In the final three lines, some of the religious motifs which Cohen teased out in his first version are revealed, but only through the act of sex. The consummation of holy love carries into the third verse:

Maybe there’s a god above
As for me, all I ever seem to learn from love
Is how to shoot at someone who outdrew ya
But its not a complaint that you hear tonight
It’s not the laughter of someone who claims to have seen the light
No, it’s a cold and a very lonely hallelujah
(“Hallelujah,” Cohen Live)

Rhyming “god above” and “love,” Cohen creates a harmony between the two. He begins by introducing God as a shaky object of meditation but answers his religious doubts by describing love. He doesn’t answer his own question, he points to their relationship instead. With this, he avoids any strict definition of God or religion and instead merely gestures. He continues to question even his own opinions in lines four and five. The verse concludes by playing upon the association of hallelujah, yet again. Rather than “cold and broken,” this hallelujah is “cold and lonely”; as if after the break, the prayer is alone. This again might refer to the act of songwriting. In Cohen’s live performances of “Hallelujah,” the musical break occurs just between the third and fourth verses, after the line “it’s a cold and a very broken ‘Hallelujah’” (Live In London; Songs From The Road; Live In Dublin). In nearly every one of Cohen’s performances, he finishes with the final stanza from Various Position, but in its new context, it rings differently. When he sings “I couldn’t feel, so I tried to touch,” the emphasis upon “touch” shifts from its emotional connotations to more sexual ones coherent with the song’s secular meaning. 

Over the years, Cohen would all but abandon the original lyrics to his song, and during live performances, opt for a mix between versions, though sometimes playing all seven verses together. Given the popularity of the many renditions which followed his own, this performance is likely a response to other artists’ interpretations of his work. The song’s success is indebted to them. In 2006, R&B singer Alexandra Burke won The X Factor singing “Hallelujah.” That year, her recording of the song had sold over one million copies, becoming the top-selling song in the UK that year (Light 162). Merely by association, Jeff Buckley’s version shot up to number two and Leonard Cohen’s breached the top forty (Footman 206). Cohen saw his sales increase precipitously again after the release of the film Watchmen (2009) which used his song in its soundtrack (Light 176). Cohen recalls reading a review of the movie, where one writer called for “a moratorium on ‘Hallelujah’” (Light 175). Despite its wide use in film and television, Cohen’s renditions were often overlooked in favour of the Buckley and Cale versions. While both artists enjoy a vocal range superior to Cohens, the reason may not be purely musical. Where Cohen’s original studio version on Various Positions features dominant religious themes—attended by organ and gospel singers—later renditions such as the recording by Jeff Buckley are less overtly religious. He maintains some of Cohen’s references, but they appear alongside the romantic verses too, as a hybrid. When Cohen decided “it was no longer necessary to refer to the bible anymore” and rewrote the song (Light 18), he opened it up to a myriad of interpretations. The themes of love and craftsmanship which appeared alongside religion were granted more space and emphasis, and the song grew. Carrying the central hymn through its chorus, the song’s verses became more and more impressionable through their interpretations. The song accrued meaning, as a meme, throughout its various renditions, and in its progression fulfilled Cohen’s belaboured desire for a song which is both holy and broken.  

Donald Shipton is a Calgary born writer currently completing his English degree at the University of Calgary.

Works Cited
Cale, John. “How Was He for You?” The Observer (1901- 2003), 2001, p. 137.
Cohen, Leonard. “Hallelujah.” Various Positions, Columbia Records, 1984. Spotify.
“Hallelujah.” Cohen Live, Sony Records, 1994. Spotify.
“Hallelujah.” Live In London, Sony Records, 2009. Spotify.
“Hallelujah – Live April 17, 2009; Coachella Music Festival, Indio, California.” Songs From The Road, Sony Records, 2010. Spotify.
“Hallelujah – Live in Dublin.’ Live In Dublin, Sony Records, 2014. Spotify.
Cheal, David. “It Was Originally 80 Verses Long – and 19 Other Facts about Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah.” The Telegraph, Telegraph Media Group, 11 Nov. 2016.
Footman, Tim. Leonard Cohen : Hallelujah : A New Biography. Chrome Dreams, 2009.
Johnson, Brian D. “What’s with That Song ‘Hallelujah’? Leonard Cohen’s Masterpiece Has Become the Closest Thing Pop Music Has to a Sacred Text”. Maclean’s, vol. 122, no. 1, 2009, p. 68.
“Judges 16.” Judges 16 (New International Version), Bible Gateway.
Light, Alan. The Holy or the Broken : Leonard Cohen, Jeff Buckley, and the Unlikely Ascent of “Hallelujah”. Atria Books, 2012.
“1 Samuel 16 :23” 1 Samuel 16:23 (New International Version), Bible Gateway.
Simmons, Sylvie. I’m Your Man : the Life of Leonard Cohen. Ecco Press, 2012.

The post “The Baffled King, Composing”: Writerly Worship and Mimesis in Leonard Cohen’s Secular Hymn “Hallelujah” appeared first on FreeFall Magazine.

What I learned about performing from Ivan Coyote:

Ryan and I attended the Wordfest Workshop: “Writing for Performance with Ivan Coyote” back in October 2014. Ivan is one of Ryan’s favourite performing artists, so as soon as we realized that Thomas King and Ivan Coyote would be in Banff Friday night and Saturday afternoon respectively, there was no discussion as to what we would be doing that weekend.

Full disclosure: I’m a social klutz. The thought of speaking in front of a crowd doesn’t actually scare me like it once did, but I bumble like I’m twelve years old none-the-less. I remember being terrified when I had to participate in a mock parliamentary debate in high school. I nailed my argument in a way no one else had but I shook the whole time. It’s frustrating to be so confident and still trip over my own tongue, or worse, to have my systematic mind start circling mid-sentence (think of standing in a circle of people at a party, arguing with yourself under your breath, when mid-argument you get very very loud). Being painfully aware of all this I thought “writing for performing” is just what I need. I envy those who get up and share their work, but, “ack,” no way am I doing THAT!

Ivan was fantastic – confident and honest. Ivan had tips I never would have thought of and yet they were practical and simple. The kinds of things I can’t believe I didn’t think of. This is what I learned from Ivan Coyote (this is not an exhausted list of everything Ivan taught that day. Ivan worked hard at this workshop and I feel it would be unfair, without permission, to share it all for free. Most of what’s written here are my thoughts that came out of Ivan’s lessons):

1. The stage is an exchange – powerful and vulnerable at the same time:

 What’s that old saying? You get back what you put in.
 

2. Why do you remember the performances you remember:

Energy is probably one of the number one aspects that creates a memorable performance for me, that and audience engagement. Not stand-up comic style engagement, but the subtle body movement a dancer directs towards the crowd. Most observers have no conscious idea it just happened and yet they are pulled into the performance just that little bit deeper. Great burlesque, Rufus Wainwright’s cover of “Chelsea Hotel,” or Ivan Coyote’s story telling voice do this.
 

3. Always remember the tech’s name:

Did I not say there was some simply practical advice coming? As the daughter of a floor layer, I know to appreciate the work of the person behind the scenes (or under your feet), and still this was probably the best advice I got that day.
 

4. Get to your performance early – fires that need to be extinguished won’t happen in 5 minutes. But with time, everything is fixable:

I have this weird, deep, psychological pull to never get too ahead of any task. I am the worst procrastinator. I know how bad leaving things to the last minute can be for the stress level of anyone and everyone and I do it all the time.
 

5. Before a performance, take some time for yourself:

Don’t be that tornado that whirls in the door straight from work, downing a fruit smoothie, heart racing, and mind pounding because you are sure you’ve forgotten something in your other bag…oh no, you wanted to wear the red shoes and they’re in the car three blocks away.
 

6. Eat two or three hours before your performance:

Nothing’s worse than debating what excuse will allow you an extra five minutes in the bathroom without suspicion. I can’t think of anything that creates indigestions faster than nerves and a full belly.
 

7. Drink water all day:

You know that person who’s talking to you at work and all you can hear is the saliva in his mouth. The slapping, clicking, thick, slick sound? Don’t be “that guy.”
 

8. Be kind to the staff. Be the example you want others to be:

P.S. that sound guy from earlier, he’s your co-worker not your subordinate.

9. Prepare less time then asked. You’ll always go over your prepared time:

And if you’re as nervous as me, prepare half the time.

10. Read the other readers, what did they do? Be ready to possibly change your idea:

Ivan spoke of a time they were part of a line of performers and realized the mood of what they had prepared was drastically different than the atmosphere the crowd was absorbed in, so they changed the performance to fit the mood of the show.

11. Know and respect your equipment:

Need to loosen or tighten a boom stand? Righty tighty, lefty loosey. Even the technical stuff is simple if you just get there early enough to be relaxed to think about it for a second.

12. Make performance copies that are easy for you to read without flipping pages all the time. A music stand is a great set up:

Going back to that be early and respectful of the staff. It’s very easy to get a music stand if people have the time to get one for you. Rushing in last minute and demanding a music stand because no way are you using that podium, may get you the crappiest music stand in the building. You’ll know there were better ones available when you hear the staff snickering every time the stand slides down on you causing you to stop, pull it back up, and righty tighty it into place.

Now I just need a workshop titled “print off your stories, put a stamp on an envelope, and mail out your work so you can be invited to make a public appearance in which you can use all you learned from Ivan Coyote.”  But kidding aside, Ivan’s workshop was more impactful than I expected it to be. Ivan made what is simple, simple. And as cliché as it may sound, it emphasized the fact that the people I admire performing are artists like me. They also get nervous but they don’t let it stop them from sharing their art with others.

Born and raised in Calgary, Crystal has been writing for over fifteen years. She studied creative writing in both fiction and poetry at Mount Royal University. She writes out of her childhood home where a postcard view of downtown and the Rocky Mountains often distracts her. Other welcomed distractions in her life are her daughter’s ever evolving views on humanity, listening to her talented partner Ryan read drafts of his own work, and wine. Crystal is most inspired in her own writing when exploring the Rocky Mountains or the banks of the Bow River.

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