When I was 27 I got fired from my job as a night time office cleaner after being caught using the photocopy machine at 2 am to make the zine (Barscheit)
Essay | Lisa Robertson | Issue 20
An Education
When I was 27 I got fired from my job as a night time office cleaner after being caught using the photocopy machine at 2 am to make the zine (Barscheit) I used to put out with friends before we published anywhere else or even considered that possible. I love trash publishing.
After I was fired I had to go on welfare to pay my rent. So I was freed up a bit from being a cleaning lady, and took a bus with my friend from Vancouver to Red Deer Alberta for a summer class on alternative publishing with bpNichol and Fred Wah.
The social worker whose caseload I was a part of knew this and was in agreement with my fantasy of poetry. He had been a close friend of the poet Pat Lowther, who was murdered by her jealous husband. He told me to take all the time I needed
& I did need time because I was having a breakdown after a drunk boyfriend strangled me & left me for dead. I recall thinking this is it, I'm dead, as his thumbs pressed down on my trachea. After that I quit school as he was in all my classes. So I don't have a BA
but I started taking night classes at the Kootenay School of Writing. My first was a week long workshop with Lyn Hejinian. Her book My Life had become a guidebook on how to break open narrative to encompass the disjunction that was my main experience of being.
Something about having survived made me fearless. I stopped writing slender verses about subtle perceptions and started writing clunky sentences that excitingly took me nowhere. And I doubled down on my reading of feminist theory.
When I was 30 my first chapbook of these odd sentences, The Apothecary, was published by Tsunami Editions, a Vancouver small press run by Lary Timewell, who had been putting out first chapbooks for the young poets who hung out at the KSW. Later Tsunami published our first books.
By the time my first book XEclogue was published in 1994, Tsunami Editions was run by Mike Barnholden who told me recently that the books were paid for by an insurance claim his wife Nancy Newman received after a car accident. At that point Toronto presses wouldn't touch our work.
After I quit my BA I took my student loan & made a down payment on a tiny bookshop where I was volunteering. It was run by one of my English professors as a hobby — he wanted to reduplicate Charles Olson's library. I guess you cd say it was a concept shop. I ran it for 6 yrs
keeping the shop open by freelancing as an art writer and using these fees to pay publishers. It was an amazing shop — small press poetry, theory, philosophy, some choice rare editions. I closed it when I received my first Canada Council grant in 1995.
I wanted to use the grant to write a book, so I sold off my stock, paid off as many bills as possible, and moved out to the country near Mission. I wrote Debbie: An Epic, and went deeper into my art writing. I had a column for a Toronto art quarterly, & wrote on architecture.
I've continued freelance since then, with occasional residencies at universities. I never got a permanent job because I have no degrees. I no longer try for one, preferring to muddle on and focus on writing books for as long as I can do it. I'm 61.
I'm working class, feminist, and an unwise planner. I've worked since I was 13 years old, when I began house cleaning. My single mother, a nurse, raised 4 us. This has been an economic history of how writing has gotten written beginning in the 1980s and continuing until now.
It's a story situated in a strong moment in Canadian political history. I have benefitted from universal healthcare, social support, open access to birth control and abortion, low tuition fees @ a public university, student bursaries, & since I was 34, Canada Council arts grants.
It's also a story about passionate feminist networks of support. In my writing life, my oldest friends, Christine Stewart, Catriona Strang & Kathy Slade first showed me my work was worthy of attention. Lyn Hejinain, Rae Armantrout, Andrea Brady have helped me. Alana Wilcox
my editor and publisher at Coach House since 2006, is behind each book. Sina Queyras in Montreal became an ideal reader of my work. I collaborate w young people who keep me solid — Sabrina Soyer, Claire Finch, Avra Spector. In short my writing life has been made by people I love.
Somehow I didn't yet name the poet, translator, deep thinker of feminist being ErÃn Moure who has been the kind of friend who becomes infrastructural since we met in 1994.
Since I will never bother to write a memoir, having so many other wilder plans up my sleeve, this morning between loads of wash and making fig compote I suddenly decided to tweet what I might call my Sentimental Education.
Originally published on September 17, 2022 on Twitter.
Lisa Robertson is now 61 and lives in France.
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