by Emily Deming
Last Sunday, In the two original rooms of Mallard Cottage’s heritage structure, warmed by a large double-sided brick hearth, Andreae Callanan and Megan Coles read new fiction and poetry over plates passing and glasses clinking. The acoustics were not perfect, but the response from patrons was good. And that was not a given. When booking a St. Paddy’s Day brunch not everyone thinks, “I hope that just before the dessert course a stranger stands up in her red minnie mouse heels, taps on a stemmed half-pint of Blanche de Chambly and announces a poetry reading.”
But these were the right artists for the first ever reading organized through Mallard’s Writer-in-Residence Program: Callanan’s poems of grandmothers coming together to solve the world of ills through new production means for mustard pickles; Coles’ roiling, funny, touching and oddly appropriate profanity-laced short fiction. The audience was not self selected for the material. There were babies and retirees, dates and family reunions, art critics and anaesthesiologists. A restaurant manager from another popular spot was part of the first seating; on his way out, he told one of Mallard’s owners, “I don’t usually like art … but I enjoyed that.”
[Above: Deming, Callanan, Coles. Below left: Session musicians Duane Andrews and Darren "Boobie" Brown. Below right: Callanan and Coles. All photographs courtesy of Ken Holden Photography]
While that makes me want to grab the whole world by the collar and say, “oh no! You’ve been mislead about art! It is exactly what you like,” it also proved I may not have to say a word. Not with people with Callanan and Coles sharing their words so broadly and so openly. The readings were not disruptive, they were additive. And the audience was engaged and relaxed. A few people came in from elsewhere in the restaurant to stand in the doorways and listen for a while, before heading back to the uninterrupted live music and buffet out in the main room.
Readings are not just for writers. Fiction goes with everything. Poetry is incorporable. Art is not easy; but it turns out it is not hard to swallow.
Excerpt from Megan Coles’
“This Berry Bucket is just a Butter Tub”
We take the ferry to Bell Island.
You insist. Against my better judgment, I concede. The heat wave and my hangover make me malleable to your will on a Sunday afternoon. And you promised Soft Serve, maybe whales, so there was relenting. A disagreement unfolds in the car almost immediately and we curse at each other without cursing. Slut whips out like a birthday party whistle and I careen around to see if it has penetrated the front seat-back seat divide of adult delusion. The boy’s eyes are ready for me. Their size acknowledge I’ve said a bad word and I start babbling about fantasy milkshakes awaiting us on the other side of this strip of ocean. A weak cover up. A lame bribe. You should never promise children things that may not exist, I think, and my guilt demands I return to my sofa. Turn around now, logic says.
This is a doomed day at the seaside.
Besides, I would rather spend the time in my sweaty panties watching Footloose on Netflix. Or Ghostbusters. Nature documentaries, maybe. A lot of cooking shows. Every TED Talk ever made about sex and love, vulnerability, how to cope. Wisdom on a loop in an attempt to soak up some better strategy then driving toward a smaller island than the island we’re currently on. Why be after another tiny island? It’s preposterous. What’s to see? Nothing more than an evolutionary accident of ancient shifting tectonic plates. Metamorphic rock, a bit of grass, some berries perhaps. Not even berries. We’re in between berry seasons. The bakeapples have gone sharp, the raspberries are weeks off, there’s barely a hint of a blueberry. Lord fuck.
Regardless though, you’ve containers in the back seat. Just in case we strike them, you say. Dismissing botanical science, the lunar cycle, growth seasons and climate change with your desire to go berry picking. As if that’s the answer to all of life’s problems. A few berries crammed into a plastic margarine tub. Why do you still eat margarine? I have told you a million billion trillion times how bad that shit is for you. Buy real butter dummy! You are going to die of a heart attack before you’re fifty. Yes. Yes. You do look like you’ve gained a few pounds. You look like someone who spreads whipped, dyed, vegetable oil on your toast. And no. You do not look Eversweet! Jesus. And I think, you’re a fool. Truly deluded. You know nothing. Why are we even friends?
Can a man and a woman even be friends? I scan my mind for examples of permanence but they all end in a wedding dress. I vow aloud to never be friends with her. You can’t make me. And it’s the first brutal incision of the day. I have punctured you with this declaration. I can see the tiny hole squirting despair into the car and I decide to fill the cab with it. I will tailor you into one of your girlfriend’s trashy belly-tops, you will be a blood red mesh sleeveless number alerting others from streets away, like some visual siren, that you doubt your self-worth.
So I continue my slaughter. I will never go to your frigging barbeques. I will never attend a frigging baby shower. I will never frigging call her on the frigging phone. I won’t even answer if she calls me. Texts, maybe. Maybe I’d return her frigging text. But I will not frigging like her. And I will not pretend to frigging approve of your ludicrous relationship. You are not frigging Romeo and she is not frigging Juliet. I say frigging a lot for the boy but you know my vocabulary doesn’t allow for subtly. And you leak with the knowledge of what I mean to say. You can hear the plethora of fucks piling in the back of my throat. A cacophony of vulgarity directed at you. You know me so well. We’ve been friends for fifteen years. So far, anyway.
[Megan Coles is a graduate of Memorial University, the National Theatre School of Canada and is currently enrolled in the UBC MFA Opt-Res program. She is Co-founder and Artistic Director of Poverty Cove Theatre Company. Megan is presently working on her debut novel (House of Anansi 2017) and The Driftwood Trilogy of plays. Megan's first fiction collection, Eating Habits of the Chronically Lonesome (Killick), won the BMO Winterset Award, the ReLit Award and the Margaret & John Savage First Book Award and earned her the one time Writers Trust 5x5 prize. Originally from Savage Cove on the Great Northern Peninsula, Megan now resides in St. John's where she also the Artist-In-Residence at the Arts and Culture Centre and Executive Director of Riddle Fence A Journal of Arts & Culture.]
Revival
By Andreae Callanan
The national canning company said
there would be no more mustard pickles
for our Sunday lunches of cabbagey
boiled comfort after mass,
no pickles to grace our salt meat hash,
no pickles for our baked ham dinners
nor for our cold ham sandwiches
on warm white bread. None
for the pan-fried fishcakes, dense
with salt cod, confettied with onion
and flecked with summer savoury.
No thick jar-bottom pickle sauce
for spooning into the potato salad,
a secret ingredient brightening
the dish's pallor to near-neon yellow
on charity turkey tea paper plates
at the Lions' Club or the parish hall,
And so the grandmothers stepped in,
opened their pantries, brought jars
from basement shelves, ducked crawlspace
clearance to emerge with half-pints, pints,
standard and wide-mouth jars gleaming
gold (and near as dear). They arranged
their wares on church-sale tables and raised
enough money to fund a mission to India.
The missionaries returned with suitcases
of turmeric, fat, damp rhizomes folded into
souvenir t-shirts and silently smuggled.
The turmeric was planted in new-built
community glasshouses, flourished
among the cucumbers and red peppers.
Gardeners tended their vegetable plots
with wartime vigour. Around the bay
the old-timers hauled the twisting
silver bodies of caplin by bucket loads
to nourish the stony soil, brought pans
of clean ocean to dry in the sun, raking
the water away until there was only
salt. In town, construction of hotels
was halted, the land dedicated to lush,
waving mustard fields and the cultivation
of sugar beets. Children spent their
summers plucking pale-green caterpillars
from cauliflowers' pale-green ribs,
wrapping the leaves tight to shade
the white heads of curd within. Neglected
crab apples were newly prized, as urban
foragers discovered the ancient secrets
of making vinegar from windfall. Each
small shop developed a signature slant,
each community a variation, an accent.
In the provincial archives, two pieces
of paper are on prominent display: one,
a brittle, spill-stained list of ingredients
taken down in a slanting, last-century
hand, and the other a facsimile of an official
letter to the national canning company,
telling them they can shag right off.
[Andreae Callanan is a poet and essayist from St. John's. Her poetry was shortlisted for the Fresh Fish Award in 2009, and she has received multiple other awards, including McGill University's Lionel Shapiro Award for Creative Writing and Arts NL's Lawrence Jackson Writers' Award. She has created original work for interdisciplinary performances and installations, and has had several poems translated into French and Catalan. She is currently pursuing a masters degree in English at Memorial University.]
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