i start by painting my nails,
because if the polish is wet, then, for fear of messing it up, i'll stay at my
computer and write. it's nice to worry about sullying my nails, rather than
about screwing up an as-yet-unwritten poem or tarot log or something. i don't
have any other tricks. finally, the executive dysfunction that tormented me for
the middle part of the 2010s has vanished, along with any seasonal affective
disorder, in southern taiwan's tropical climate.
pete and heather are the only people
i know here, where the cost of living is low but the quality thereof is high. i
learned that they were moving here too when i backed out of a literary
collective. i told the group chat that i wouldn't be around for in-person
readings because i was leaving to work in taiwan, and pete revealed that he and
heather would be doing the same thing. they're in taipei, though, and we
haven't been able to figure out the timing for the high speed train that gets
you from one end of the island to the other. i don't think that this failure is
some big revelation as to why any of our post-in/words collectives haven't
panned out. it's that moving to taiwan is expensive, and teaching schedules and
lifestyles don't encourage early morning starts to the weekend.
craig offered to send my teaching
cohort photos of me flailing passionately on the ground at karaoke, as proof
that i'm a cool person. i'm not great at making friends or forging connections.
i told him that i guess i'm fundamentally awkward and unlikable. i don't get
invited out to the same things as everyone, perhaps because i don't have one of
those ubiquitous scooters for day trips to little ryukyu. someone else said
that i'm too introverted and aloof.
i think that it is hard not to be
conspicuously uninvolved from the canadian small press scene when you aren't
living in canada. canlit seemed too nationalistic and stifling a label even
before the concordia bullshit broke. i wasn't as interested in midcentury
canadian writing, or even in material chapbook production, as my in/words
peers, so it was hard for me to feel like a good fit at home, too. i say 'home'
like that's a real signifier for a twentysomething english lit graduate: in
2017, i visited ten cities and lived in three. i didn't do much writing in
halifax because i was learning how to become a teacher, but i did a lot of
writing (and a number of CBT worksheets) on the train ride back home, and then
on the way to vancouver.
it makes sense, then, that most of
my recent publications have been online. i was a regular contributor at word
and colour (before the editorial shift) and at the salvage (before i moved).
right now, i'm combing twitter for submission calls and trying not to feel bad
about breaking my weeklong snapstreak with jesslyn. she told me that poetry was
never really her big thing, but that she had a blast at show and tell's
keyboards! show. i wonder if i'd lose my shit at being asked to compose a poem
on the spot using a typewriter--i'm wed to my backspace function, but who's
talking about marriage?--or fall into a familiar routine of trying to be as shocking
and obtuse as possible in front of my friends.
i'm put off by a few online
publication pieces because they try too hard to be alt lit, like that scene
wasn't concordia before concordia. playing with memes and trying to generate
some ultrahip poesis hasn't really been my deal, and i'm a little embarrassed
that i once won a prize for precisely this sort of thing. despite craig's
assertion, i'm not a cool person. literary cred doesn't come easy if you're too
jaded and distant. a lot of my writing happens on the weekend in the
evening--in ontario's early morning, like everyone else--when i haven't spent
the day teaching or subbing or hustling somehow.
they tell you not to teach to the
test, and i imagine that you shouldn't write to the publication, but that's
what i'm doing now. i'm trying to get some stuff in for the hart house review's
upcoming call, because it seems like that's what youngish canadian poets should
be doing (and because their issues are delightfully, decidedly not a sea of
whiteness). angelhouse wants many more submissions by women and nonbinary or
genderqueer writers for an issue that interrogates what poetry is (i.e., not
just free verse by tenured academics).
lately, i've been playing a lot of
pokemon showdown online with jayce, who lives in scotland. one battle of ours
devolved into a pair of literal fluffy fairies fighting each other with psychic
powers and poison. this seems like the sort of material in which a press
championing queirdos (queer-weirdos; there’s no comfortable way to make this
portmanteau work) and esotericism would rejoice. or is it a stupid idea that
screams weirdness for weirdness' apolitical sake? i will ask my friends,
because writing, despite my remoteness, has, at the end of the day, been about
friendship for me.
Jenna Jarvis was born in Ottawa and
lives in Kaohsiung. Her writing has appeared in Word and Colour, The Salvage,
Sea Foam, and other digital and print
publications. Her poem "syndical not synecdochal" secured an
honourable mention for the Puritan's 2014 Thomas Morton Prize, and she was the winner of the 2012 John Newlove Poetry Award, as well as Carleton University's 2011 George Johnston Poetry Award . Her third chapbook,
year of pulses, is forthcoming from
above/ground press.
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