Friday night, I got to meet David Hilliard who was in town for an event Wayde’s group organized with Meegan Maultsaid for the Vancouver East Cultural Centre. So inspiring. Last night, he joked that everybody was an activist these days; but we weren’t activists, he said (speaking of the Black Panther Party), we were organizers. He was talking about how change can begin with involvement at the local level, through civic politics. And one of the most inspiring things for me was that his politics was lived and that was apparent in his language. It wasn’t a theory that arches over. You could hear that he was used to speaking to people from many different communities and with many different histories and experiences. His language was nuanced, and his presence was, when he spoke to you, such that the world felt different. Listening to his practical knowledge of how to direct change was both ordinary and a revelation — ordinary, in that it was almost unbelievable that you hadn’t before seen how the world is changeable and how committed people can affect, at the local level and meaningfully, issues like poverty and access to education and criminalization.

I’ve just been replaying an interview I did with Betsy Warland in January about writing spaces and the materials of writing (going to start transcribing it next week). She’s just finished a collection of essays on the subject, and one of the ways in which she formulates her writing space is as a heightening of the ordinary; every day language and objects, she points out, are the materials of writing. So, in her space, she arranges her materials with deliberation and consistency in order to evoke and sustain whatever writing project she’s working on at a given time. It’s as if the threshold to her study door is one that abandons the happenstance. I’m excited by her collection. There are so many books out there about writing, but this one is a different and more interesting approach altogether. Anyway, it’s the first in a series of such interviews on writers and their spaces I’m doing for Matrix. Next up, writers who write in public spaces (like the local coffee shop or the VPL); and after that, an interview with a writer whose orientation to text is through sound and echo.

I’m just putting in the last edits on the new novel, Delible (uh, again), which I’ve been working on forever, or so it seems (of course, abandoning a few 200 page drafts and beginning from scratch is an integral part of the process, which is why it takes me so long). The thinking began in April of 1999, when I was handed a missing poster. Throwing it out wasn’t an option, because the girl hadn’t been found. Putting it away amounted to throwing it out. So, I ended up putting up the poster over my desk, and when I moved to Vancouver, the poster moved with me. Every day, I sat down to write, and it was below the poster, seeing the girl’s unknowing smile. That picture haunted the edges of my thinking. It shaped the direction my writing took.

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