Deanne Achong and Lois Klassen were hosted as artists-in-residence at the McLoughlin Gardens cottage for a wonderful week at the beginning of October (September 29 to October 6). The week involved luxurious cabin time filled with long-gazing at the north Salish Sea, long-wandering on fern-lined forest trails and empty dirt roads, folding accordion pages and covers of Mama D’Lo and Missy G Under the Sea, making kindling, hauling wood, making fires, reading, making food, taking out and burying compost, playing Hanafuda Flower Cards and scrabble, photographing RML3 books, reading, long-talking, thinking, and reading.
The McLoughlin Gardens cabin has an enticing collection of books, including a library of inscribed publications by former writers-in-residence in the master bedroom. Since Lois and Deanne were reflecting in that week on their project’s distribution, they decided to add to that bookshelf the six publications making up RML3: Undercurrents and Folds, along with a few others from the larger Reading the Migration Library project:
- Ac·cu·mu·la·tions, Clare Yow (2024)
- Didactics to Postpone the End of the World, Sarah Shamash (2024)
- Directions to BUSH Gallery, Tania Willard and Leah Decter (2024)
- Mama D’Lo and Missy G Under the Sea, Deanne Achong (2024)
- Hanafuda 花札 (Flower Cards), Candie Tanaka (2024)
- x: the meeting place makes the spine, Leah Decter and Peter Morin (2024)
In addition, Feeding the Migration (Painted Lady) (2021) by Lori Weidenhammer who was in residence at McLoughlin Gardens in 2023, was moved from the living room bookshelf to join the other RML books in the bedroom. And, three poetry chapbooks making up Ghanaian Writing on Migration and Diaspora (2021) were added for future poets in residence who will love finding these words about distant migrations and nearly failed migrations:
- On Loss: Two Poems from Ghana, A.B. Godfreed (Epifania Amoo-Adare) & SAAN (Sally Afia Antwi Nuamah)
- We Are Moulting Birds, Gabriel Awuah Mainoo
- Walking on Water, Jay Kophy
Those ten small-scale artists’ publications from the RML project were left in exchange for the comfort the other books offered, during Deanne’s and Lois’s gentle week in the woods. The book-grazing was good.
Found in Air-proof Green by Maleea Acker (2013), the poem “The Inheritors” covers a lot of ground while recounting family migrations. It includes these lines that speak so clearly as belonging to Reading the Migration Library,
… But who does
Not know the pleasure
Of arriving in a new city, the language
unknown and every corner exchange,
every call tossed down from a tenement
so secret and glory filled…
And “Among Forests and Fields” in Acker’s 2009 volume, The Reflecting Pool, reflected the week at McLoughlin Gardens,
I look and look to the page, then turn, see
myself reflected in the window of the studio.Dusk and the dark firs waving at me.
Night and the dark firs waving at me.All kinds of pictures and poems on the walls.
Nest of necessity, curling around the room.To search and search for this beauty,
then discover the girl alone. O firs, O black night.the tug of the wire attached to the skull,
it hauls light up ever higher, emanatesheat from its core; firs, black night and
reflecting pool of window, forgive me.
Thank you, McLoughlin Gardens Society, for a week of reflective and restful dark nights, and for the many hours of creative work in front of windows, and the sea.
