Author Note: Kristen Unrau

As part of our Author Notes series, Kristen Unrau talks about the blurring of fact and fiction in her poem “Love Letters to Joan of Arc,” which appeared in The Ex-Puritan Issue 44, Winter 2019.

Some of this poem is real. Some of it is not. In rereading it I have found it increasingly difficult to tell one from the other. My aunt does have a china cabinet, and there is a ceramic angel inside. Its wings are cracked and hot-glued back on. One of my cousins broke it. The hayloft is real, though there’s no hay in it now because the farm doesn’t have livestock anymore. As a child that hayloft was one of my favourite places. It still is, I suppose. Reality is slightly altered up there. It feels like time moves slower, and it’s dark and cobwebby. There’s something oddly liberating about hiding somewhere dark and cobwebby when you’re thirteen and brimming with angst. The small town is real, too. It seems that no matter what city I move to, that small town retains its hold on my writing. As a teenager I remember hearing someone talking about some son or nephew who had recently moved back into town. It’s funny how everyone who leaves ends up coming back here, he had said. I won’t, I had thought to myself. The church group is real, and the blockbuster was actually an independently owned rental place, but it was real in essence. It’s not there anymore, of course. I think it’s an activewear store now. When I was in middle school a bunch of us would go to the church group on Friday nights, and a bunch of us would ditch and head down to the movie store instead. Someone knew the cashier, who was indeed paid under the counter. Afterwards we’d walk around town in the dark. We never went far, never did anything wild, but it was the one thing I did as a young teenager that my parents didn’t know about. At thirteen it was exhilarating. And Joan. In grade four, I’d been told to write a speech on someone I admired for a school project. I wrote on Joan of Arc. After speaking with other girls who grew up in Christian households, it seems commonplace for us to go through a phase of idolizing Joan of Arc. Then we get older and turn to atheism, nihilism, and agnosticism, in that order. We say that we will remember our high school French, and then we don’t. But in this poem, Joan is the amalgamation of every girl I’ve ever looked at and thought, damn. I’m not sure if I want to be her or if I want to know her. Girls that wear black lipstick are just phenomenal. I can’t even wear a clear gloss without feeling like everyone is staring. As I reread this poem, names spring to mind of the girls who make up Joan, but I won’t go into them here. I wish that this poem had a single thread of meaning, but truth be told there isn’t one. This poem was a personal exorcism, in a sense. Religion, youth, girls, small towns you never quite leave. They all found their place in here. 

Kristen Unrau is an undergrad at the University of British Columbia. She is taking a double major in English Literature with Honours and Creative Writing with a focus on fiction and poetry. She has published one poem, “A Sincere Apology to the Galaxy” in the collection Waking Dawn. She lives in Vancouver, BC.