Category: Creative Writing

Shortlist

This summer, I submitted a poem to the Poetry in Motion program. Ten poems are selected and put on Metro Transit buses for a full year.

The WFNS website describes this year’s theme : The 2023 submission theme, “joy,” was open to broad interpretation—including happiness, delight, glee, festivity, or ecstasy; the objects, causes, or sources of joy; the joystick, the joyride, the killjoy, schadenfreude, or other complications of joy; and other meanings, qualities, and impacts of joy.

Today I received an email from one of the judges. He told that my poem had not been selected, but I was on their shortlist ! I have never entered a writing contest before, so this was a bit of a shock. I jumped up and down in the living room with my slippers on! I am thrilled to be shortlisted. (If I ever actually win a contest, I’ll probably do cartwheels on my lawn…which might be difficult with just one working arm 😉 .

Here is the poem.

Night Joy

Bright celestial blanket

A quilt

Mammoth

Wrapped around the world

Eternally

The firebugs morse code

to those in the sky.

Her

Born in Montreal and raised in Cape Breton, Cindy grew up by the sea. She spent her childhood jumping from rock to rock along the rugged beach with her black lab and her friends, binoculars in hand on the family-owned whale watching boat, and reading lots and lots of books. The Bobbsey Twins, Nancy Drew, Trixie Belden, Anne of Green Gables, Littlest House on the Prairie, Pippi Longstocking and anything by Madeleine L’Engle.

She moved around a bit and had many different occupations. Tour guide on the whale watching boat, T-shirt seller in Banff, bookstore clerk in Yellowknife, tree-planter in BC, oyster picker on Denman Island, English teacher in South Korea.

For most of her adult life, she had to carry identification, to prove her name really was Cindy Crawford. As a result, she published three children’s books under the name CJ Crawford. Luckily for her, she got married in 2020. Bah-bye supermodel moniker!

On November 1,2021, she had a stroke. Before 11am, she could walk and talk. After 11am, she could not. The ICU doctor told her family she might never go home. Two weeks later, she walked out of the hospital. Her speech and arm are still in recovery. She went back to work almost a year later. They would not adjust her duties to accommodate her speech issues, so after seven months she found herself, disconsolately, back on disability.

She has been writing ever since.

Come From Away

I am a come from away. 

I was born in Montreal at St Mary’s Hospital. Dr. Quinn told my father that I was a perky pipsqueak. Perhaps I was too little and lively to be raised in the big city. At 4 months old, I moved to Cape Breton. As the result of my parent’s decision, I was able to spend my childhood roaming the fields with my dog, playing games in my neighbours’ yards and roaming the seashore with my friends.

My father had ties to Cape Breton. His mother, Lucy à William, à John, à Eli, à Basile, à P’tit Basile Chiasson, was born and raised in St Joseph du Moine. She married Lloyd Crawford and raised her children in Moncton, N.B. My father loved to visit his grandparents in Lemoine.

My parents moved from New Brunswick to Quebec in 1965 as they were crying for teachers and paying them very well. Five years later, the October Crisis forced them to re-evaluate. The FLQ (Front de libération du Québec) kidnapped James Cross, a British diplomat and the provincial Labour Minister Pierre Laporte. They killed Laporte. The War Measures Act was imposed. We had an English name.

My father was a school principal and my mother had a good job; they were well established. Nevertheless, in October 1971, they loaded three kids and a dog into their vehicle and drove to Grand-Etang, Cape Breton. No house, no jobs…they were starting from scratch.

Back then, my father’s teaching certificate was no good in Nova Scotia. He got a job selling insurance, door to door. He hitchhiked to Truro during the summer months to take teaching courses. Eventually, he got a job teaching in Inverness, and then at NDA school in Cheticamp, closer to home.

In the summers, my father ran a whale-watching business, the first one in Nova Scotia. He got a lot of flack from the local fishermen for the way he awkwardly docked his boat the first few times, and for telling tourists those ”poissons bleus” were whales. Over time, people realized they were pilot whales, and now whale-watching tours operate in many ports.

He talked to countless visitors over the years, and most times he would say, ”I chose to live here.”

When I was 18, I left Cape Breton. I went to university. I lived in a multitude of places: Banff, Yellowknife, the Gulf Islands, Halifax, South Korea, Ottawa, Quebec.

In 2011, I moved back to Cape Breton. I chose to live here.

I came from away for good.  

Published in The Inverness Oran, May17,2023