Vol. 5, No. 6 (Fall 2023)
Clare Goulet has published creative nonfiction, poetry, and reviews as well as essays on metaphor and polyphony. Adjunct prof and writing centre coordinator at Mount St. Vincent University, she co-edited with Mark Dickinson Lyric Ecology on the work of Jan Zwicky. Her book, Graphis scripta: writing lichen, will be published by Gaspereau Press in spring 2024.
1.
1975. Late summer in the woods behind the backyard, lost, first freedom, almost five, lying across a warm rough slab of granite, heat soaking into my belly where the cotton t-shirt has pushed up, scratched by brown prickly things—rock tripe, though I didn’t know the name, genus Umbilicaria—the world something sensuous, even reading which came too early, my head already filled with poems. The sun is hot. I mumble made-up lines, sleepy, peeling brittle bits to see the thick white cord connecting each to its substrate, holding rock, lichen, child in place. It will be forty years before these come together and I feel this whole again. Continue reading “Already Whole: rethinking your so-called ‘parts’”
