A Woman Clothed in Words (17 page)

A stone may be a pebble, a rock. A stone may be a huge boulder. A stone may be the size of a human heart. The stone that has been given to me in place of my heart. The rock of memory. The wound that experience has inflicted on me when someone took a knife and cut out my heart and placed a stone in my breast and made a botch of sewing me up. The stitches were sewn higgledy-piggledy, why bother being neat about it.

And if I were the only one with such a wound, such a burden then things would not be too bad, but there are hundreds, thousands, probably millions of us. Women who cannot forget.

Carrying children, carrying water, carrying burdens almost too great to bear. Carrying stones.

Acknowledgements

This book was a long spell in the making, and my first thanks must go to Nik
Burton, the managing editor of Coteau Books, who never lost sight of it or faith in it. He and Geoff Ursell made excellent editorial suggestions.

Andris Taskans, the executor of Anne Szumigalski's estate, gave good advice at key moments, encouragement at others, and seldom chided me about the length of time I was taking. My gratitude to him, as well as to Kate Bitney and Frances Bitney, for the intelligent support of the Szumigalski family.

Deep thanks to Bob Haverluck, who kindly gave his permission to reprint Prairie Mass, of which he was the co-author and prime mover. He also provided copies of the text, informed me about its performances and explained to me the origin of heartberries.

My questions about particular issues in the manuscript were answered by Tom Bentley, Don Kerr and Pat Dewar. The poem “Kahan” owes its existence to Ben Kahan and its rediscovery to Isa Milman; my thanks to them both. Kitty Lewis was generous with her usual practical wisdom.

I received invaluable help from the staff who work at the University of Manitoba's Archives, McGill University's Division of Rare Books and Special Collections, the University of Regina's Archives and Special Collections, and the Reference Department of the Pointe Claire Public Library.

My wife, Ann Beer, understood the value of all this unpaid work. Even during the years when it ate up half my office and the months when it ate up half my time, she had the grace not to complain. I'm truly grateful.

Biographical Note

Anne Szumigalski
was born in 1922 in London, England, and grew up in a Hampshire village. Her
family was large, close and eccentric. A precocious lover of poetry, she began to write at a very early age.

She joined the British Red Cross upon the outbreak of war, and worked with Belgian refugees in England before serving in Europe as a medical auxiliary, interpreter and welfare officer as the Second World War came to an end. She married a Polish exile, Jan Szumigalski, and spent four years with him in rural Wales. In 1951 they immigrated to Canada, where they raised two daughters and two sons. The family lived in the Big Muddy region of southern Saskatchewan, then moved to Saskatoon in 1956. The city would be Anne Szumigalski's home for the rest of her life.

Her first book,
Woman Reading in Bath,
was published by Doubleday in New York in 1974. Thereafter she remained loyal to prairie publishers. She was nominated three times for the Governor-General's Award, winning for
Voice
(1995). Her many other honours included the Saskatchewan Arts Board Lifetime Award for Excellence, life memberships in actra and the League of Canadian Poets, two Writers' Choice Awards and a Saskatchewan Order of Merit. Special issues of
Prairie Fire
and
Arc
paid tribute to her work. She published fifteen books of writing before her death in 1999, and others have appeared since.

The depth and breadth of her involvement in the Saskatchewan literary community are hard to overestimate. Anne was a founding member of the Saskatchewan Writers Guild, a founding editor of
Grain,
and the first writer-in-residence at the Saskatoon Public Library. She taught for many years at the Saskatchewan Summer School of the Arts, and served as an informal mentor to countless young and aspiring writers. Apart from her collaborations with other writers, she enjoyed working with dancers, musicians, actors, visual artists, translators and filmmakers. Each year her name continues to be recalled by an Anne Szumigalski Memorial Scholarship, an Anne Szumigalski Editor's Prize and an Anne Szumigalski Memorial Lecture.

Bibliographical Note

The following
details are only as complete as the editor has succeeded in making them: Anne Szumigalski did not keep the most meticulous records of publication, especially for her early work. It is conceivable that a few of the poems in this book, apart from those mentioned below, were published in journals many years ago.

“Three Facets of the Poet's Dilemma”:
Delta
16 (Nov. 1961).

“Magdalena,” “Danuta”:
Delta
15 (Aug. 1961).

“Astarte's Weaning”:
Delta
17 (Jan. 1962).

“Climacteric”:
Canadian Forum
(Jan. 1962).

“Designing”:
Canadian Forum
(Sept. 1961).

“Biographics I”:
Alphabet
14 (Dec. 1967). In an undated typescript, the poem is entitled “Chapter One.” There are small differences between the two versions, and it is unclear to me which came first.

“Lovers and Choosers”: As far as I know, this poem is previously unpublished. But a note among Anne Szumigalski's papers in the Archives and Special Collections, University of Regina, shows that an early version of
Woman Reading in Bath
(her first collection, published in 1974) had the title
Lovers and Choosers.

“Beginnings”:
Salt
12 (1974-5).
Salt
was the mouthpiece of the Moose Jaw Movement. The editor, Robert Currie, introduced this essay and a few of Anne's poems by recalling an occasion on which “Anne Szumigalski had just finished giving a poetry reading when a sweet little lady came up to her and patted her on the arm. 'My dear,' she said, ‘I was once Saskatchewan's most beloved poet, and I never
once
mentioned sex.’”

“Kahan”: written for Ben Kahan, one of the last Jews in the little Saskatchewan town of Lipton, and mailed to him in 1975 after Anne had visited the Lipton Hebrew Cemetery. Mr. Kahan proudly kept the poem even after he moved to Nanaimo, where he showed it to the poet and artist Isa Milman in 2006. She kindly made a copy for me.

“Poetry Workshops – Some Practical Advice”:
Athanor,
spring-summer 1981.
Athanor
was the magazine of the Concordia University Students' Association.

Prairie Mass:
Bob Haverluck is a United Church minister as well as an artist and writer. This work was first performed at Westminster Church, Shoal Lake, Manitoba, a small town where he was serving as pastor, on October 30th, 1983. Shortened productions took place in the 1990s at Oxford United Church and St. Andrew's College, both in Winnipeg. Typescripts of the different versions are held in the Anne Szumigalski Collection, Special Collections, University of Saskatchewan.

Bob wrote to me that after the St. Andrew's performance, “Anne whispered, ‘You could almost have me believing in God again.’ It was an incredible high for all of us. Fact was, the Anglican Prayer Book and the King James version of the Bible were deeply and craftily ensconced in Anne's bones, in spite of herself. She certainly found companions there in the questioning and contentious prophets, poets and writers of the wisdom books like Job and Ecclesiastes.” Bob Haverluck and Anne Szumigalski later began to collaborate on a separate performance text based on
Job.
Unfortunately the work did not advance far enough to be published here.

Litany of the Bagladies:
First performed in Saskatoon in November 1983, and restaged there and in Toronto in June 1984. The idea for the piece came from Pat Dewar, who also choreographed it and performed in it. Other performers were Sandra Ledingham, Jill Steacey and Anne Szumigalski herself (“Baggy Badlady”). Excerpts appeared in
Women in Politics
(Saskatoon: A.K.A. Gallery, 1984) and
Prairie Fire
18:1 (1997).

“Poetics of Tension and Encounter”: Published in
Trace: Prairie Writers on Writing
(ed. Birk Sproxton, Turnstone, 1986). Two fragments of this essay were reprinted in Anne's book
The Word, The Voice, The Text
(1991). The poem “Our Sullen Art” had first appeared in her collection
Doctrine of Signatures;
“The Question” had first appeared in
Instar.

“The Story of the Heartberry”: Commissioned by Bob Haverluck, and performed by Anne at the Rainbow Stage, Kildonan Park, Winnipeg, as part of the Winnipeg International Children's Festival. The piece is based on a traditional Iroquois story that Bob Haverluck heard from Stan McKay (a Cree teacher and minister who would become the first Aboriginal moderator of the United Church of Canada). It was retold during the last performance of
Prairie Mass
given while Anne was alive.

“The Child as Mother to the Woman”:
Grain
15:4 (1987). The essay was accompanied by a poem in Anne's handwriting, “Silent Is the Cuckoo,” written in 1934 when she was twelve years old. I have not republished the poem here for a couple of reasons: first, because this book contains no other of her extraordinary juvenilia; and second, because the essay discusses not the verses she wrote down in her later childhood but the ones she recited in “a field of words” before she knew how to read and write.

“Untitled essay on language”: Found several times on Anne's diskettes, with no indication as to whether it was ever published. It may have been a draft essay for use in her quasi-memoir
The Word, The Voice, The Text
(1990). She apparently intended to preface it with a long quote from Rudyard Kipling's
Just So Stories,
and she wrote: “needs a title.”

“The Thin Pale Man”:
Prairie Fire
13:1 (1992). Written for an issue that paid homage to the Manitoba writer Patrick Friesen. The capitalized words and phrases to the right of the main text are titles of Friesen's books.

A State of Grace:
A brief excerpt from this unfinished novel appeared in
Voice,
the 1995 collection for which Anne Szumigalski won the Governor-General's Award for poetry. The excerpt, entitled “Brythyll,” comprised the first seven paragraphs. Anne was unsure what to call the novel (or novella); the only two possibilities that have survived are
A State of Grace and O Greenest Bough
(alluding to a poem by the medieval mystic Hildegard of Bingen). While not thrilled by either title, I decided against imposing a new one of my own.

As published here, the piece is about 10,100 words long. On Anne's diskettes and printouts, it continues for three more short sections, amounting to roughly 800 words. These last sections are tentatively written and, instead of arriving at a conclusion, they merely peter out. I have preferred to end the piece at what seems to me a good moment. The Szumigalski papers at the University of Regina contain the full text.

“Untitled statement for
Grain”
:
Grain
26:3 (1998). These paragraphs appeared in print a few months before her death, as an introduction to seven of her latest poems.

“Golden Rat”: On a diskette, this piece is entitled “Golden Rat and Deer Woman.” There being no trace of a deer woman in the text as it now exists, I have adjusted the title accordingly.

“Another Conversation”: In her final years Anne wrote many pieces for two voices, often titling or subtitling them “A Conversation.” Six were published in the books
Fear of Knives
(2000) and
When Earth Leaps Up
(2006).
Three Women at the End
of the World
is for the most part an example of the form, and Anne may have intended “Another Conversation” (which is previously unpublished) to become a scene in that play.

“Untitled” (“red with the acid...”): These lines appeared on one of Anne's diskettes, the file being named “Bits and Bobs.” Perhaps she never wanted these lines to stay together. Perhaps they were nothing more than jottings or promptings. I hope her spirit will forgive me and her readers will applaud me for publishing them here.