Wildfire Winter Salon Co-op

Last winter I began a literary discussion group I called Bits of Books on Friday. I'd pretty much stopped writing and I'd dropped out of my wonderful book group for a variety of reasons. I soon found myself a bit bereft and most especially missed talking about books with thoughtful friends. Because I needed something close to home and my friend Sarah Beck had decided to open her shop Wildfire Pottery and Used Books on Friday afternoons, I asked if I could use her cozy upstairs for meetings and she agreed. During the week I'd gather short readings or a group of poems by different writers, usually centred around a theme -- fathers, humour, food (a very successful meeting) -- and I'd copy and send out the readings in an email. At the beginning of each meeting we'd read the pieces aloud, a part of the meetings I came to thoroughly enjoy, then we'd talk. And talk and talk and talk. It was grand!

This year I'm back to work on my novel and don't have the time to gather readings every week so decided to see if the old group would share the work with me. And so the Wildfire Winter Salon Co-op was born. This is the Wiki definition of a salon:

A salon is a gathering of people under the roof of an inspiring host, held partly to amuse one another and partly to refine taste and increase their knowledge of the participants through conversation. These gatherings often consciously followed Horace's definition of the aims of poetry, "either to please or to educate" ("aut delectare aut prodesse est"). Salons, commonly associated with French literary and philosophical movements of the 17th and 18th centuries, were carried on until quite recently, in urban settings, among like-minded people.

We met for the first time last week to discuss poems by William Stafford, whose deceptively accessible and beautiful poems are some of my favourites. (I'll reproduce some of the poems for you below.) I particularly like how he writes about the natural world.

This week Marion Thompson is going to be our "inspired host" and she's leading a session on shyness, taking a reading from Giller Award winner Elizabeth Hay's wonderful novel, Late Nights On Air.

Here are two Stafford poems about coyotes, with apologies to anyone who knows the poems and knows the format of the second one, Coyotes, and knows that the footstep section is formatted to look like a coyote track. I offer them because after the tragic death of a young woman who was attacked by coyotes in Cape Breton Highlands National Park, there was and continues to be much talk and too many meetings about coyotes, and a great deal of fear has been generated about them. These poems place coyotes in their world, and in ours.

Outside

The least little sound sets the coyotes walking,
walking the edge of our comfortable earth.
We look inward, but all of them
are looking toward us as they walk the earth.
We need to let animals loose in our houses,
the wolf to escape with a pan in his teeth,
and streams of animals toward the horizon
racing with something silent in each mouth.
For all we have taken into our keeping
and polished with our hands belongs to a truth
greater than ours, in the animal´s keeping.
Coyotes are circling around our truth.

Coyote

My left hind-
foot
steps
in the track of my right
fore-
foot
and my hind-right
foot
steps
in the track of my
fore-left
foot
and so on, for miles-
Me paying no attention, while
my nose rides along, letting
the full report, the
whole blast of the countryside
come along toward me
on rollers of scent, and-
I come home with a chicken or
a rabbit and sit up
singing all night with my friends.
It's baroque, my life, and
I tell it on the mountain.
I wouldn't trade it for yours.

William Stafford