DETAILS
Inquiries
By Michelle Porter
62 pages
$19.95
Breakwater Books
Book launch event at 2 p.m. on Sunday, Aug. 25 at Audreys Bookstore, 10702 Jasper Ave. in Edmonton. Porter will be reading with Loic Mulatris.
This book was virtually meant to be. As a young girl growing up in a household that moved around often and periodically in St. Albert, Michelle Porter always knew one thing to be true.
“As a child and teenager, I always intended to grow up to be a poet,” she said. “To become a poet at 43 with my first book of poetry – I suppose I was one before – but to have my first book published, all that is really, really lovely. It's kind of grounding, I take myself far more seriously.”
Indeed, a published poet she has now become with Inquiries, a book whose subject matter is the author’s life itself. Now based in St. John’s, N.L., the Red River Métis woman offers up the atmospheric marrow of her youth in this series of more than 60 poems. She sets the stage for the reader to borrow her own nostalgia for her mother’s kitchen while we ride along on the swells of infuriation at the unfair struggles of poverty and more that beset the whole family.
Porter has proven herself to be a deft writer, especially a writer of personal history. She’s a self-made literary giant in the making who proved her dedication with degrees in journalism, folklore and geography, and toiled with words through creative nonfiction, being a reporter and editor to boot. Her work has received notice with literary journals, newspapers, and magazines all across the country, and awards have already followed her home too.
It would seem that she has much to say and there is nothing that can stop her from saying it, even if she knows it’s going to make some in the audience shed a tear, feel their hearts break ever so slightly for knowing her pain.
“I like writing in ways that evoke as much as or even more than tell. I like to bring people into the feeling,” she continued.
“I'm a person who’s all feelings for good or for ill. When I write, it’s as much to tell the things that you can say, that are easily said, or as much as to evoke or to bring in the things that aren't said. And I really wanted to write about the places because I moved around so much. I experienced geography that way. I have a PhD in geography – imaginative geography,” she laughed.
“I moved around so much today that when I experience my memories, they’re flashes of places, little flashes of emotions and colour and senses. I experience them in a sensory way disconnected from a lot of things. It was just a constant moving on and leaving the old things behind going to the new but the memories just build up. They become these little disconnected yet oddly connected fragments. So in a sense, I was writing it as I feel it more than I know many of the places."
She's looking forward to visiting St. Albert during this trip as she lived here more than anywhere else, she said. The pages of Inquiries then are infused with this city as seen through Porter's eyes, and felt through her life. This book is a breath of fresh, warm baked bread air.
