I've been meaning to ask you (interviews)

I think I’ll even be haunted after death.

I've been meaning to ask Jessica Joy Hiemstra

Jun 20, 2025

What is your first memory of existing?

I’ve sat sat sat with these questions, Kathryn. I’m stumbling over “existing”. The gift of it. How many people right now aren’t safe, as they are, where they are. I regularly exchange messages with a family in Gaza, a child named Meera, a young artist who I connected with after this most recent slaughter in Gaza began. I check to see when their account was last active. Right now, I’m holding my phone: “Walid Family – Active 45 minutes ago”. So I know: they were alive 45 minutes ago. They still exist. I say “hug Meera for me” and “if you have lost hope, I will hold it for you”. I think about Meera’s mother, remembering her daughter’s birth, and my heart cracks.

One of my earliest memories is the birth of my brother – my older sister and I were on the other side of the village we lived in, Badela. Someone came to tell us he was born and we ran across the village to meet him. My bare feet pounding the ground. Our neighbours clapping and singing my name as I ran past them – it was like running through a gauntlet of joy.

What is the best or worst dream you ever had?

I was up to my chest in a bayou. Reeds. Muck. There was a crocodile easing towards me. Someone in the distance was wearing a blue baseball cap. They were in the reeds too. I shouted to them – “help me”. They turned to me – “you must kill your own crocodile”, they said. The crocodile put their jaw around my belly. Teeth sank into my doughy bare stomach. I put my hands on either side of the crocodile’s jaw. With great effort I pried the crocodile’s mouth open, lifted the beast, and forced the lower jaw right through the upper jaw. I felt pretty magnificent when I woke up.

Do you have a preferred emotion to experience? What is it and why? Or is there an emotion that you detest having and why?

I prefer listening, long slow thoughts. I’m wild and gentle and make my own kind of loving noise in my art, but how can I be that person in our world, right now? There is work to do, and it feels like it’s loud work. Is cowardice an emotion? I hate it when I’m afraid to speak up. I want to have the courage to make noise. Or at least go to noisy places and stand up for who and what I care about.

Can you recount a time (that you're willing to share) when you were embarrassed?

I’m still ashamed I haven’t gone to a single Black Lives Matter protest. I think that’s how my last book began. I needed to understand why I was afraid to be somewhere, in the choir of angry, justice-seeking, outraged and loving people.

What do you cherish most about this world?

Reading. The flight of a pileated woodpecker. Owl duets. My tired underpants on the clothesline. The moment in spring when the forest floor goes paper white and trout lilies lift the leaves. James Baldwin. Dirt. The passion of teenagers. Tanya Tagaq’s sense of humour. Old Son House recordings. Trying to wrap my mind around the size of the cosmos and failing. YouTube clips of Carl Sagan imploring government. Ghost hunters. Thich Nhat Hanh. Beavers. Anohni. That glass is made of sand. Garlic sizzling in butter. The print of an owl wing in snow. Cross country skiing. The way stones hold time and heat. My nieces and nephew. Audre Lorde. Orcas playing with their food. Pianos. Drums. That human beings can make a musical instrument out of just about anything. Meera’s voice on my phone saying thank you.

What would you like to change about this world?

I’d like the 94 Calls to Action from the Truth and Reconciliation Commission prioritized and completed.

Do you believe in ghosts? Why or why not?

I’ve spent my life so far haunted – ghosts of extinct frogs. My ancestors. Other people’s ancestors. I think I’ll even be haunted after death. Hopefully not by an angry crocodile.

If you could send your love to anyone, who would it be and why?

Meera Walid. I wish my love could protect her. But it’s not enough.

Jessica Joy Hiemstra is a visual artist, writer, and designer. Her writing has appeared in chapbooks, essay collections, journals, and in four full-length poetry collections that she also made art for. Her most recent collection, Blood Root (Icehouse, 2025), has sequences of stills from her animations of animals. In 2018, she won Toronto’s My Entertainment World’s Outstanding Set and Costume Design award for her work on Shannon Bramer’s The Hungriest Woman in the World. In 2021, she received second place in Brush and Lyre’s Palette Poetry prize for her multimedia entry, “Cormorant”, an animation of cormorants in flight over Lake Ontario/ Niigaani-gichigami. Some of these drawings appear in Blood Root. Jessica lives in Gunning Cove, Kespukwik, Mi’kma’ki.

Excerpt from Blood Root by Jessica Joy Hiemstra. Published with permission of Goose Lane Press.

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published

Blood Root
by Jessica Hiemstra
Goose Lane, icehouse poetry, 2025

Buy Blood Root

Publisher’s Description

Reflecting on a dual upbringing in two villages, Bobcaygeon (Canada/Turtle Island) and Badela (Sierra Leone), Jessica Hiemstra’s new collection of poems delves into her relationship with home. In Blood Root, she interrogates questions of legacy, land, belonging, and the breathtaking intimacy of death. One moment tender, the next moment dark, hard, and raw, Blood Root blends diary entries, drawings, and lyricism to hold up a polished mirror to colonialism and its echoing impact. Considering beauty and horror in equal reverence “so I’m not human once removed,” Hiemstra cuts through pretence, bearing witness to humans as they confront and connect to one another and the larger world.

From Sadiqa de Meijer on Bluesky:

Jessica Hiemstra's Blood Root is out in the world. A fierce and gorgeous book. As editor I admired how Jessica could take a breath and bravely answer to what a poem was asking for, even when that also meant a revision of the self. The result is breathtaking - I hope it finds all the readers.
The book's atmospheric and poetic illustrations, on the cover and throughout - breathers, landing places, transitions, transformations between text sections - are Jessica's own.

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