Māma: the Chinese character for mother.
Māo: the Chinese character for cat.
Mèimei: the Chinese character for younger sister.
Mén: the Chinese character for door.
Moccasin Box: Tekahionwake was Johnson’s Mohawk name. Stories about Captain Vancouver being greeted by Skwxwú7mesh people and about felling trees for canoes are from Conversations with Khahtsahlano, ed. Major Matthews, Vancouver’s first archivist. Annie Foster’s Mohawk Princess tells the history of the Tekahionwake machine gun.
Pictograms for Daphne Marlatt: the greyed-out character is Chinese for poetry. The others are root characters from L. Wieger, Chinese Characters: Their Origin, Etymology, History, Classification and Signification.
The Real Fictional House of His Imagined Film Director: a taropatch is a type of ukulele with six or eight strings in four courses. Margerie Bonner described the one played by her husband as “a long-range uke with more strings and frets” (Perle Epstein, “Swinging the Maelstrom,” Canadian Literature). Italicized material comes from published material by Malcolm Lowry and unpublished writings by Margerie Bonner Lowry. Unpublished writings by Margerie Lowry printed here by permission of SSL/Sterling Lord Literistic, Inc. Copyright by Margerie Bonner Lowry.
Acknowledgements
Enormous thanks to Marion Farrant for her help in the final shaping of this book; her thoughtful suggestions were invaluable. Everyone at Talonbooks has been great to work with; many thanks to Kevin, Vicki, Greg, Ann-Marie, Les, Chloë, and Spencer. I want to also thank Daphne Marlatt and Rachel Blau DuPlessis for their feedback and editorial suggestions on an early version of “Moccasin Box.” And thanks too to Colin Browne for his feedback on “The Real Fictional House of His Imagined Film Director.”
I am very grateful too for the support I received from literary magazines who published earlier versions of pieces in this book, especially Canada & Beyond for publishing “Manifesto” (titled here “If I noiselessly”); Capilano University Editions for publishing “Silence” in One More Once: for Pierre Coupey’s 70th; Dusie for publishing “Cloth Music”; Eleven Eleven for publishing “One cannot”; Endless Buffet Press for publishing “Waiters” in the Banff Writers’ Studio 2011 anthology; Event magazine for publishing “How to Write”; filling Station for publishing “I and Christine” (titled here “If I, No Reply, Write of Christine Stewart,”); Golden Handcuffs Review for publishing “Mén,” “Bàba,” “Māma,” “Mèimei,” “Māo,” “Pictograms for Daphne Marlatt,” and [forthcoming 2015] “Moccasin Box”; Prism International for publishing “If I, Bartleby,” “A Natural History of the Throught,” “Out of the dark,” and “How to converse”; and The Capilano Review for publishing “Bù” and “Hăi.”
The photographs in “Moccasin Box” were sourced online and are in the public domain.
I would also like to thank UBC Rare Books and Special Collections and especially Ken Hildebrand for his invaluable help in researching the Lowry Archive.
Endless thanks to Peter, always my first and most loving reader.
About the Author
MEREDITH QUARTERMAIN is known across Canada for her depictions of places and their historical hauntings. Vancouver Walking (2005) won the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize; Nightmarker (2008) was a finalist for the City of Vancouver Book Award; and Recipes from the Red Planet (2010), her book of flash fiction, was a finalist for the Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize. In Rupert’s Land (2013) her first novel, a town girl helps a residential-school runaway in Alberta in the 1930s.
Quartermain was the 2012 writer-in-residence at the Vancouver Public Library, where she led workshops on songwriting and writing about neighbourhoods, and enjoyed consulting with many other writers from throughout the Lower Mainland. She now continues these activities as poetry mentor in the Writer’s Studio Program at Simon Fraser University.
Quartermain has taught English at the University of British Columbia and Capilano College and has led workshops at the Naropa University Summer Writing Program, the Kootenay School of Writing, and the Toronto New School of Writing. In 2002, she and her husband, Peter Quartermain, founded Nomados Literary Publishers, through which they’ve published more than forty books of poetry, fiction, memoir, and drama.