an excerpt from "The 100 Mile Diet: Teaching Creative Writing in Northern BC"

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Of course, a poetic 100 mile diet would be absurd, like a badly planned economic protectionist policy. While local pride is something necessary for creative survival in Prince George, the “local” is also a troubled insignia to wear. Henri Lefebve in The Production of Space remarks “the net result is that a particular ‘theoretical practice’ produces a mental space which is apparently, but only apparently, extra-ideological” (6). The apprehension of the space (“Prince George”) is not a given but a delicate creative interplay between the physical, mental, and social constructions that occupy it (both Lefebve and Guattari in Chaosmosis refer to this three-part harmony).

Exercise #22

Compose a poetic portrait of Prince George in a three part series with the parts titled “psyche” “socius” & “ecos” in any order.

But, besides complex, this network or circuitry of place is one that is striated with power traces. Dainotto argues that place, like the local, has a politicized epistemology that is “possible only from the place of [Walter] Benjamin’s ‘victor’—and as an occultation, precisely, of the barbaric history that has led to the victory” (12).  So you have, on the one hand, a claim to the local that is the stamp of the settler, one embedded with colonial, sexual, and other dominant ideologies (very much like a dominant national discourse) and, on the other hand, a self-created exile or displacement as a form of analysis of the very ground one stands on. How is the illusion of nationalism any less oppressive than the illusion of regionalism or the reification of the local? How does any articulation of a regional identity not homogenize with the same brutality as any other identity trap?  My class is still wondering.

Wrapped up in the problem of a usable sense of place (read: marketable) is a similar epistemological sink-hole but this time instead of privileging the ‘local’ it is privileging ‘local ecology’ especially as it appears in “nature writing.” Ecology then becomes the new unquestioned ground zero (‘extra-ideological’) even though it is coded with just as much history and oppression. Western codes (symbols, narratives, forms, motifs, stereotypes, positions, etc) that mediate and construct the land, share the structures and dynamics of the oppressive ideologies of Western colonialism and patriarchy. A concerted resistance to these oppressions would share some of the strategies incorporated by feminist and counter-colonial discourse and art.

 Exercise #31

As per our discussion of Laurie Ricou’s work, write a detailed study of a local plant that included an element of language/naming, historical, and sociological study.

I have been working through a writing project that encounters a pastoral gem of a plant called Devil’s Club. This is the common name and then there’s the Latin name stemming from the all-pervasive Linneaus naming system: ‘Oplopanax horridus’. The ‘horridus’ is just perfect: horrible, of course, but also descriptive of the rough and sharp qualities of the plant. ‘Oplopanax’ is more complicated, consisting of ‘oplo-‘ meaning ‘armour’ and ‘panax’ meaning ‘heal-all’, related to ‘panacea’ (from the Greek goddess Panacea). So, we have a well-guarded, powerful healing plant. One more layer of colonial naming has come recently, as American companies have misleadingly marketed the plant as “Alaskan ginseng.”

But before these names was the Dakelh name for the plant: Hoolhghulh. I studied two years to learn how to pronounce the name correctly.

Ideally, in the creative writing classroom, the semiotics of ecology and the elusiveness of the object of study becomes the poem. Ostranenie in backyards.