Jennifer Bowering Delisle | Issue 32
Mom has decided to remount a play she wrote for the Fringe a few years ago, as a fundraiser for multiple system atrophy, or MSA, the rare degenerative disease that is slowly killing her.
Excerpt from Micrographia
The Dance
When I was very young, I told my mother I wanted to be the next Shakespeare. I don’t think I knew that he was a poet. I don’t think I even knew his stories were plays. But I loved when she read to me at bedtime from Charles and Mary Lamb’s Tales from Shakespeare. I had heard phrases like “the greatest writer to have ever lived” and it seemed a worthwhile ambition.
I don’t recall the feeling now, only the conversation. Did I want fame? I don’t think so. I wanted to make art as compelling as those stories of murderous kings and doomed lovers. I think I wanted greatness, but a greatness formed out of beauty and connection. A love for my words big enough to endure 400 years.
“Well, maybe not Shakespeare…” she said.
I didn’t understand yet anything of historical context, let alone of the man or the work itself. I didn’t know my goal was ludicrous, even obnoxious. What I heard, in her response, was my limitations. It was the beginning of the rite of passage from a child’s arrogance to an artist’s self-doubt.
*
Mom has decided to remount a play she wrote for the Fringe a few years ago, as a fundraiser for multiple system atrophy, or MSA, the rare degenerative disease that is slowly killing her. She busies herself finding a director and a venue and overseeing the casting. It is something to occupy her time and her mind, but it is also a final project, a kind of opus.
The play, Wind in Her Sails, tells the story of Mom’s grandmother, Jean, who at the age of 16 saved the lives of those onboard a ship that wrecked in a storm off the coast of Newfoundland. I told the same story in my own first book, a family memoir about to be published.
Mom and I portray the event in different ways. In her play, Jean takes the wheel when the captain is knocked out, steering the ship to safety, heedless of the warning that “the wheel be a challenge even fer a strong man, miss.” Her play is about the strength—both physical and mental—of young outport women, despite the misogyny of their time. It is a drama in every sense of the word, full of peril and inspiration.
In my non-fiction version, I gather the fragments that live in old newspapers and oral histories, including Jean’s own poem about the experience. The stories don’t add up. The one from an archive that claims Jean took the wheel, the most exciting and dramatic version of the tale, can’t be true. Jean’s own poem says the wheel was smashed when the mast fell. My book is about the errors in the record, how we can’t ever know the real story.
My mother’s is a story about triumph, while mine is a story about inadequacy.
*
In grade four, my teacher invited a few of us in my class to write books to be included in the school library. I had already been writing stories and poems on my own, but this—this would get a laminated cover and pocket for a real borrowing card. It would be read by someone besides my teacher or my mom. I could see it all before me—book deals, bestseller lists, film adaptations. My career as a writer had finally begun.
I began the project with vigour and earnest. I wanted my story to be serious and important, to both move and inspire. I invented a girl, Danielle, the same age as me, whose mother had died and whose father was an alcoholic. Danielle was an earnest, capable girl, trying to take care of her family, like the girls in the books I read. She cooked, she cleaned. She made her father a birthday cake, and knowing vaguely that sometimes cakes were made with rum, I had him raging when he learned his daughter’s cake did not contain any booze.
My mother found my half-finished manuscript. After school she sat me down for a talk.
“There’s an expression,” she said gently. “Write what you know.”
My face burned. There was something in this conversation that evoked shame, but I didn’t fully understand why.
At first, I thought she was worried that people reading it would think it was a cry for help—that my own father was the abusive alcoholic on the page. I know now there was no danger of that. It could have been a much-needed lesson on my own privilege, appropriation of voice, and staying in my lane. But my mother meant it as a lesson on craft. Emotion is not inherent in plot—it has to come from a deeper place.
I ended up writing something about ghosts.
But I drew from my own life, creating grandparent characters very similar to my own, a detail about a little brother getting stuck in his own shirt, which had happened to mine the week before. I didn’t learn the lesson quite right—or maybe I learned it too well—starting to blur the lines between life and writing in a way that would sometimes paralyze me. Did I know this story enough? Who was I to tell it? And if I did feel the emotion deeply enough, could I still write it?
*
I first came to Jean’s story because she was a poet. I saw in her ballad’s existence a kind of writerly lineage. “It’s in the blood,” people say when a child exhibits a proclivity for the art or science of their parent. As if that means they have come by their talent more authentically, as if that means their work has more legitimacy.
Yet I know of no other poems or stories, and she never shared the ballad she wrote about the shipwreck, keeping it hidden until her death.
*
Mom sends me a new monologue she has written; she’s thinking of having an actor perform it before the play. “When you have time” is the email subject line. It’s called “The Dance.”
My husband and I love to dance, she writes. Of course, we don’t know what we’re doing. I didn’t say we dance well…just that we love to dance.
She writes about abandoning the ballroom classes for their own version of the steps. She writes about her own parents celebrating their 60th anniversary, the night before my wedding—how they danced in her kitchen, how in the middle of the night her mother, in the fog of Alzheimer’s, tried to walk out the front door. And she writes about her MSA.
On a recent cruise, I told my husband that I would love to give dancing a go again.
“I would never do anything that would make us look foolish,” he said.
So we practised a bit in our state room, because now I use a walker…There we were…Me holding on for dear life to the man I married while he maneuvered me around, until I got dizzy and collapsed on the bed. We never made it onto the dance floor, that night or any other night.
“Is the monologue good enough?” she asks. “To be mounted with Wind in Her Sails?”
I understand her question. It’s the same one that I would ask. But it’s the wrong question, too.
In these last months of your life, Mom, what else do you need to say?
No, forget the timeline, it’s irrelevant.
In this one life, what stories do you need heard? What do you want to make?
*
Jean wrote her poem about a single public event. But as I wrote about her, I became less interested in her heroism, real or imagined, and more interested in her life. How she worked, how she loved. Farmed, hooked mats, cooked fish. Lost infants to disease, lost a son in war, lost her mind in age. Kept secrets. Died. What was “in the blood” were her stories; it felt like they were also my stories. I wanted to map her life like a genome. Maybe “write what you know” should be “write what you want to know.”
The story I want to tell now is not romanticized by corset or sail, by historical and geographical distance. It is a story that is still unfolding.
I send Mom an essay I have written about her illness, called “Micrographia.” I am proud of the craft of it, relieved by the work of it. But is it good enough—to honour what she is going through, to remember? What words could ever be adequate?
*
A boy in my class took my ghost story out of the library.
“It was good,” he said. “I liked the part where the kid gets stuck in his shirt. That was funny.”
It was good.
*
The same evening Mom emails back. Her email is short but brimming with positive adjectives. “Deep respect and sincere pride in you,” she writes. And with that she seems to be gifting me—not the story, which is her life—but this tiny piece of it. She likes it. And maybe this is good enough.
*
“The Dance” ends with my mother dancing with my son.
He pushes my walker…trying to drive it. Sometimes I get behind the wheel and he chases me around the kitchen island.
What dance moves can we do together from my wheelchair?
He doesn’t care or even know if he is being judged.
Whirling past like a hurricane. Always smiling.
I can never fully know what my mother is going through. But our stories dance with each other, close, twirling, stepping on the other’s toes.
We make art imperfectly, incompletely, as a way of being in the world, hoping that it will be good enough to outlive us. Hoping that it will be good enough to help us share our truth with those who come after us.
Maybe the doubt is what keeps that truth close.
Maybe “write what you know” should be “write what you want to keep.”
© 2023 "The Dance" by Jennifer Bowering Delisle was first published in Micrographia (Gordon Hill Press, 2023).
Jennifer Bowering Delisle is the author of three books of lyric nonfiction and poetry: Micrographia (2023), Deriving (2021), and The Bosun Chair (2017). Her fourth book, Stock, is forthcoming with Coach House Press in 2025. She is on the board of NeWest Press. She lives in Edmonton on Treaty 6 territory.
Micrographia by Jennifer Bowering Delisle Gordon Hill Press, 2023
As Jennifer Bowering Delisle was on her path through infertility towards motherhood, she was simultaneously losing her own mother to a rare degenerative neurological disease and an approaching medically-assisted death. The lyric essays in Micrographia explore how losses can collide and reverberate both within our own lives and in our relationships with the rest of the world. How much do we share of our stories, and how much do we understand of what others are experiencing? Ultimately, this is a book about connection; “micrographia” is both the term for the diminished handwriting caused by neurological disease, and the narrative fragments offered here.
"Write what you want to keep,” says Jennifer Bowering Delisle. In these brilliant lyric essays about becoming a mother after infertility and miscarriage, and losing a mother to a cruel degenerative disease, she preserves for us the feeling of “both wishing and losing”—sweet and tart as a summer’s worth of raspberries, powerful enough to linger like heat on stone. – Susan Olding, author of Big Reader: Essays
"Micrographia is an extraordinary collection of sharply-crafted lyric essays. Jennifer Bowering Delisle exhibits a poet’s ear for resonance while skillfully weaving a structure that allows the cumulative power of small, carefully witnessed moments to billow into a powerful and moving story. Delisle writes by letting the smallest of details say what only they can say, but without shying away from the biggest of questions: "In this one life, what stories do you need heard? What do you want to make?" I couldn’t help but feel that Delisle writes with an ear tuned toward her readers’ own unimaginable losses. This is not a book only about her own grief, but a smart and capacious exploration of the vulnerabilities implicit in being alive—in bodies, in families, with losses we bear across generations. The care, both ethical and aesthetic, taken in crafting these essays is palpable in these pages. Micrographia delivers what it promises: a whole story about what it means to be human inscribed in the shell of a walnut. Reading Micrographia, I was reminded what the best writing—by which I mean not simply the most skillful but also the most ontologically curious and emotionally generous writing—can do." – Lisa Martin, author of Believing is not the same as Being Saved
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