Today I will have the pleasure of spending an hour or two interviewing Maleea Acker, geographer, poet, and brilliant all-around writer and gardener, about grief and writing. It’s for my Creative Nonfiction class, because we’re using Maleea’s work as inspiration for a second assignment, a well-researched lyric essay.
We came up with the topic of grief and writing a couple of weeks ago, when I was navigating a month at my college when we lost several treasured colleagues in a short, shocking period of time. We miss them terribly.
Grief always takes me back to the garden.
My mother, who died 22 years ago in early February, was a gardener. She spent long winters in Quebec and Ottawa longing for spring and looking at seed catalogues. There would be elaborate drawings of her plans, refreshed each year, as she added more beds of perennials and annuals, more vegetables and bushes of berries.
We have, a couple of generations back, a failed family history of farming that ended with the Prairie Dust Bowl years: my grandparents, all four of them, were swept from tiny Alberta towns to Edmonton, while one or two siblings remained at home, trying to eke out a living on land that had once provided for a family of twelve.
But my mother didn’t want help in her garden, except for weeding assistance. And since I didn’t know the difference between a dandelion and a budding dahlia (and with three younger siblings, as well as my mother’s multiple jobs as music teacher and organist, she didn’t have time to teach me), I wasn’t much use.
I came to gardening later, when I moved in with my soon-to-be husband on the first floor of a ramshackle row house off College Street, in Toronto. Both of our next-door neighbours were Portuguese Canadians with extensive back and front yard gardens. One elderly man spent the hours between six and ten each day tinkering with his contraption of metal pipes, strapped together and rising twelve feet up, to coax his runner beans. In my youthful snobbishness, I thought it was unsightly: not the kind of thing you put in the front yard, where the neighbours have to see it.
But I was wrong, because he was using his tiny, deeply valued plot of land to grow food.
Years later, in Victoria, I met Maleea Acker, some time after I had read (and then re-read) Gardens Aflame, her wonderful, inspiring book about Garry Oak meadows. This is an ecosystem that is relatively rare and distinctive to the South Coast of B.C., as well as some areas of Washington state.
A Garry Oak is what Alice Munro describes in her story “Differently” as the gnarled and spiky trees you would find in a fairy-tale. They don’t provide a lot of shade; they also don’t require much water, so they endure both Victoria’s rainy winters and arid summers with equanimity.
Maleea gardens in her front yard, not always with the city’s approbation. She is a fervent advocate for Garry Oak Meadow conservation and cultivation.
The thousands of years of Indigenous cultivation of Garry Oak meadows is a crucial part of local history. Camas bulbs were highly prized and traded; they were a food source and a kind of currency.
My home is in a lightly shaded Garry Oak Meadow. It won’t be mine for much longer, because it doesn’t work very well with my evolving disability needs. (I wince, writing that, because some part of me feels like my limitations when it comes to stairs, and heat, and exertion, could really just be overcome with a bit more effort: and that, too, is my mother’s influence: she worked through several critical chronic illnesses that depleted her, and she died at 55).
Talking to Maleea about grief and writing and Garry Oaks will be a balm in a difficult week.
So for my students and for my other readers, a challenge, of a very gentle kind:
- Can you locate a space next week that feeds your soul (and perhaps your writing), and then just spend some time there being, and not doing?
- Can you let yourself rest, even if you don’t feel like you’ve earned it yet, or have too much to do? Can you treat rest, even if only for a short time, as respite and radical self-care?
- And then can you re-commit to being in the world in a way that feels a bit more supported and spacious, so that your writing can breathe with more ease?
Sending best wishes to all for rest and respite in the midst of this grief.
The Landscape of Canadian Women's Crime Fiction 