Author Note: Renée Jackson-Harper

Renée Jackson-Harper is the author of the poem “Re: Council” which appeared in The Puritan Issue 38, Summer 2017. In this author note, she writes about the process that went into writing the poem.

Moving used to be a compulsion. A break up, dissatisfaction with a job, unease with a roommate, or a sharp change in the weather might lead to me packing milk crates with my tatty paperbacks, throwing my threadbare clothes into my army rucksacks (I have two), rolling up my thin mattress, and shoving all of this into my old station wagon, ready for the next town, the next shit job.Escape was my animating principle, my modus operandi. It felt better to go, on Greyhound buses or in a car packed to the gills than to stay. In my car, punk rock cranked, gas station coffee in the cup holder, the world was right and I had a place in it. But in stasis, planted in a region, I felt nothing but apprehension, waiting for the next calamity to strike. I owed place nothing, nor did it owe me.It’s only after years of doing work in the fields of CanLit and Western Mythography, as an academic and part-time poet, that I’ve come to realize how rooted in the colonial epistemologies of mastery my pathological transiency was. I could reinvent myself endlessly on new terrain, taking what I needed and discarding what I didn’t. I never stopped long enough to consider on whose territory I was stopping, nor what responsibilities I owed to that place. I didn't seek out community and, in turn, was not protected by community.Now I live and work on the unceded territories of the Sinixt, Syilx, Ktunaxa, and Secwepemc peoples in the West Kootenay Region of British Columbia. I’m a settler, uneasy in my settlement. But I’m working to stay put (even on days when the voice in my heart howls at me to go) and I’m working to be a part of a community, with all the joys, vexations, and discomfort that staying entails. I owe a place and its people.And while I still speed down highways drinking shitty coffee and listening to the punk rock of my wayward youth, the roads don’t take me far from home. Home is here. And here is where I’m slowly, apprehensively, awkwardly, and sometimes poorly, sending out nervous tendrils, seeking to establish roots in soil I have no right to claim.

Renée Jackson-Harper is a PhD candidate in Canadian literature at York University and a faculty member in the English and creative writing departments at Selkirk College. Her creative work has been published in Prism International, RoomWTF MagazineThe Trinity Review, and aired on CBC Radio’s “A Verse to Summer.” She has been long listed for the 2015 CBC Poetry Prize, shortlisted for the 2016Prism InternationalPoetry Contest, and long listed for the Prism International Pacific Spirit Poetry Prize.

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