It’s a great day to be a grizzly bear in British Columbia: BC’s government has banned all grizzly hunting in the province (though First Nations can still rightly hunt them for food, social or ceremonial purposes, or for treaty rights). Here’s some coverage from CTV News. Having spent several days up close and personal with wild grizzlies at BC’s Khutzeymateen Grizzly Bear Sanctuary this summer while doing research for this collaborative Smithsonian photo essay (and staying aboard Ocean Light II), I thought I’d post a few quick pics in celebration. But for professional photos from conservation photographer Neil Ever Osborne, plus grizzly facts and bear-viewing stories, please give the photo essay a read.
There are bears, bears everywhere in BC’s Khutzeymateen Grizzly Bear Sanctuary. Here’s one munching on protein-rich sedge.
Wading in an all-you-can-eat salad bar of sedge.
Grizzlies have been wiped out in many parts of the world, and they’re currently listed as threatened in some part of BC. The 50 or so who live in the Khutzeymateen have been lucky; thanks to a dedicated team of conservationists and tour guides, they’ve been protected since 1994. As of today, the rest of BC’s grizzlies are now protected, too.
A vigilant sow and her cubs forage for food by the shore. (Photo by Doug Gorney.)
I commend Premier Horgan, the NDP, and BC’s Green Party for coming to this decision and leaving our grizzlies in peace.
A subadult grizzly bear catches a brief snooze on a moss-covered rock. (Photo by Doug Gorney.)
As a parting shot, here’s the view flying into the Khutzeymateen by float plane (you can also sail in). When you’re protecting grizzlies, you’re helping to support a healthy ecosystem like this one. That’s BC forest at its finest: wild, pristine, and primeval. May it remain so for generations of grizzly bears to come.
Soaring into the Khutzeymateen Grizzly Sanctuary by float plane.
There’s nothing quite like the feel of a fat package in your mailbox—especially when it contains contributor copies of Grain Magazine. I’m thrilled to announce that my essay “Brahman is the Charioteer” is in the Spring 2017 issue of this eclectic Canadian literary journal.
Grain Magazine, Spring 2017. Cover art by Winnie Truong.
Editor Adam Pottle has dubbed this issue “Relativity of Zen,” and it features writers and artists exploring, in Pottle’s words, “many different approaches to achieving Zen.”
His editor’s note begins:
Finding peace has become a vital endeavour. Not just between nations and people, but in the small morsels within our daily routines, those in-between moments where we transition from one activity to another: when we take the bus home, or after we put the kids to bed, or when we’re doing the dishes after a big dinner. It seems that peace within our own lives is difficult to find and almost impossible to sustain, so to hope for a better future appears fantastical.
This Zen-themed issue feels like the perfect home for my essay, which is about my late mother’s love of Sanskrit and our complex relationship with spirituality—and each other. The essay contains chapter segments of a book-length memoir I’m working on; it’s a coming-of-age story about a girl with cystic fibrosis struggling to live up to the utopian ideals of her spiritual community in Iowa, and the mother who brought her to live there.
More on that later. For now, I hope you’ll head to your nearest bookstore and get Grained!
My Northern Ontario birthplace was formed 1,849 billion years ago when a 10-kilometre-wide meteorite—actually, now they’re saying it was a comet—travelling at 8 times the speed of sound crashed to the earth. The massive impact formed what is now known as the Sudbury Basin, the earth’s second-largest crater at 62 km long and 30 km wide.
That sucker punch from outer space filled the earth’s sunken face with molten rock containing nickel, copper, platinum, palladium, gold, and other metals. It took centuries for the pulverized rock to cool, and until the late 1800s for settlers in the Sudbury Basin to figure out they were sitting on, literally, a gold mine.
Sudbury, home of the mighty Big Nickel.
By the time I was born in 1974, the city’s mines—Inco and Falconbridge—were two of the world’s leading producers of nickel. I grew up playing under giant plumes of sulphurous smoke belched by Inco’s massive smokestack at the refinery. My friends and I scrambled over the lunar landscape of rocks turned black by the copper smelting process. Some nights, Mom would drive my sister and me to see the slag being dumped by the mines. We’d sip milkshakes and watch the hot, lava-like substance spill down the side of a hill, mesmerized by its beauty.
That’s right. I said beauty.
For that’s what Sudbury was to us, then: the magical, pockmarked backdrop upon which our imaginations could roam freely. With a little creativity, rocky outcrops became British boarding schools. Grassy backyards became stages for elaborate dance recitals. Graveyards became sites of espionage and intrigue as my sister and I hid behind tombstones, pretending our pointed fingers were guns.
OK, we were strange children.
But as Ray Bradbury puts it, “Trains and boxcars and the smell of coal and fire are not ugly to children. Ugliness is a concept that we happen on later and become self-conscious about.” (That’s from the introduction to Dandelion Wine).
Indeed, I did grow self-conscious about Sudbury in my teens, especially after I moved away. “I’m from Sudbury,” I’d say apologetically to other Canadians, who’d laugh and say, “Ah, yes, the armpit of Ontario” (it turns out other cities like Hamilton share this dubious moniker as well). But now, after a visit back home this summer, I realize Sudbury is actually the heart of Ontario. For me, anyway.
The city’s greening efforts—they’re now growing trees in the mines!—have, over the decades, transformed Sudbury into quite a leafy, picturesque city in many places. Art is springing up all over town, too, thanks to Up Here, an emerging art and music festival. There are hundreds of freshwater lakes scattered throughout the area. And, of course, Sudbury is home to friends and family members—including my father, my wonderful step-family, and my indefatigable grandmother, still going strong at 100.
Mural in downtown Sudbury by artist Danielle Daniel.
However, the giant smokestack, now owned by a Brazilian company called Vale, still remains. The weather-beaten roads are potholed and plastered together with asphalt and tar. There are defunct breweries, shambling shacks, and, yes, graffiti-covered boxcars. At its core, Sudbury remains Sudbury—a hardscrabble frontier town built in a crater that was created when the cosmos decided to give the earth a walloping clout on the chin. Sudbury is gritty, tough, and has gold at its core—both the chemical element and the people. And that’s a beautiful thing.
As a child, my imagination sprouted in the somewhat barren Sudbury of the 1970s and ’80s—just like the seedlings that now grow in Vale’s greenhouse, 4,800 feet below the earth. It has taken me several decades to really start mining my creativity and publishing essays and poems, but if I keep going, perhaps I’ll hit gold one day.
Or perhaps not. But if my hometown has taught me anything, it’s the power of perseverance. In any case, I’m enjoying digging deep into my past and present for material. Sometimes, I stumble over subject matter that, at first glance, seems quite bleak—chronic illness, death, mortality, and madness, for starters. Fortunately, Sudbury has trained my eye to see the beauty shimmering beneath the soot.
Who wants to spend their days sitting at a desk, poking around such bleak emotional terrain, you might well ask?
I do. The landscape is incredible.
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As spring turns into summer, I find myself Googling writing residencies. There’s really nothing like spending a few weeks—or more, if you’re lucky—writing and talking shop with fellow writers, artists, musicians, and filmmakers.
Last October, I was fortunate enough to participate in the debut Memoir Residency at The Banff Centre, nestled in Alberta’s Rockies. For two weeks, I had the privilege of studying memoir under Karen (Kaz) Connelly, Alison Pick, and Alexandra Fuller—three exceptional Canadian authors who are as warm and encouraging as they are accomplished. The program was directed by the exceptional Devyani Saltzman.
I learned a great deal from my peers, as well, as we discussed our projects and hiked among the hills. The scenery was spectacular, and so well suited for a writing residency. After hours squinting into a computer screen, I’d emerge into the sunlight and find myself awestruck by the mountains; it was just what I needed after all that intense focus.
My memoir-in-progress, if you’re wondering, is about growing up in Fairfield, Iowa, the nexus of the Transcendental Meditation movement. Like many of my former Maharishi School of the Age of Enlightenment alums, I’ve found myself reflecting upon those unorthodox high school years spent studying Sanskrit alongside Shakespeare while I lived in Utopia Park—the town’s trailer park for meditators.
In recent months, however, my writing—and the book—seems to be shifting in focus as I grapple with cystic fibrosis, a genetic lung disease. During a weekend trip to Galiano Island, in the Southern Gulf Islands here in Canada, I wrote an essay about my illness and what larger lessons it may have to teach me. That essay, “Wild, Salty Body of Water,” will be published in The Rumpus in the next few months.
Meanwhile, I continue to research residencies! I’d like to go somewhere new. My friends at The Luminous Writer are working hard to arrange an autumn workshop in Ireland, near Dublin, so if that comes together, I’d really love to attend. I’m also tempted to return to The Banff Centre sometime. If you’re a writer, a musician, artist, or performing arts professional, I encourage you to look into their programs. I did, and it was life changing.
