Cover artwork by Ale Silva
Summary
We’ve got something a little different for you: something a little less in the sciences, and a little more in the humanities — in the realm of language and human experience.
Today, through a series of conversations, we’re exploring the notion of what it means to have a relationship to land, to be or not be of a place (in other words, to belong or not) and how the intrinsic tensions in all that may be metabolized through the practice of art, and more importantly, that of life.
Ongoing support for this podcast comes from listeners just like you. To keep this show going, join our community at patreon.com/futureecologies
Our supporters get access to early episode releases, a community discord server, discounted merch, and exclusive bonus content.
Show Notes and Credits
Our co-producer and interlocutor for this episode is Darby Minott Bradford: poet, editor, translator, and the author of Bottom Rail on Top.
Our guests are author Jordan Abel (Nishga, Empty Spaces), multi-disciplinary artist S F Ho (Green Lines), and poet Cecily Nicholson (Wayside Sang, Harrowings)
Music by Thumbug
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Future Ecologies is recorded and produced on the unceded, shared, and asserted territories of the WSÁNEĆ, Penelakut, Hwlitsum, and Lelum Sar Augh Ta Naogh, and other Hul'qumi'num speaking peoples, otherwise known as Galiano Island, British columbia, as well as the unceded, shared, and asserted territories of the Musqueam (xwməθkwəy̓əm) Squamish (Skwxwú7mesh), and Tsleil-Waututh (Səl̓ílwətaʔ/Selilwitulh) Nations - otherwise known as Vancouver, British Columbia.
Transcription
FE6.6 - Landings [MASTER 2025-09-20]
Tue, Sep 23, 2025 8:21AM • 59:56
SUMMARY KEYWORDS
belonging, land, nature poetry, black experience, greeting custom, hiking, settler colonialism, diaspora, reparative practices, food security, incarceration, cultural identity, ecological relationships, language, community.
SPEAKERS
SF Ho, Adam Huggins, Darby Bradford, Mendel Skulski, Speaker 2, Jordan Abel, Cecily Nicholson, Introduction Voiceover
Introduction Voiceover 00:02
You are listening to Season Six of Future Ecologies.
Mendel Skulski 00:11
Hey, I'm Mendel
Adam Huggins 00:12
And I'm Adam
Mendel Skulski 00:14
And today we've got something a little different for you. Something a little less in the sciences and a little more in the humanities, in the realm of language and human experience. Through a series of conversations, we're exploring the notion of what it means to have a relationship to land — to be or not be of a place. In other words, to belong or not, and how the intrinsic tensions in all of that may be metabolized through the practice of art and more importantly, that of life. Our co producer and interlocutor for this episode is Darby Minott Bradford, poet, editor, translator, and most recently, the author of Bottom Rail on Top
Darby Bradford 01:10
— which is sort of a funny book. Bottom Rail on Top kind of started as me attempting to come up with a nature poetry or a pastoral poetry or a land-based poetry that made sense to me as a black person, essentially. To come up with a kind of black poetics, of those kinds of entanglements that accounts for essentially how my body got here, and the things that I see when I when I look at land on this continent. So you know, certain big ideas around slavery and subjection, and also this big artifact of all that that I carry with me, which is the English language, right? This, this big thing that I'm intimate with in a major way, that also carries this big, big clue as to what exactly has happened to people like me, right? And then, of course, I started trying to do that, trying to write this new, kind of, for me, or for people like me, nature poetry — which is kind of a big, clunky, weird project in the first place. And very quickly, I kind of started writing about this relationship between the past and the present, between all these different things that connect across that expanse, but also that, I think, create this big experiential gap.
Darby Bradford 02:30
It's kind of curious that you start in this place of trying to write a kind of like black embodied poetry about land, and you end up in this space of writing about a kind of modern conception of blackness and its relationship to the historical record and the things that have happened to people like me, you know, on the land. The curiosity of that, the loadedness of that, the sometimes it's a little bit more complicatedness of that.
Darby Bradford 02:57
When we started talking, I think that the first thing I brought up to you was this, this anecdote that I think is is pretty relatable, but I think probably especially relatable to anybody who's ever been out hiking and isn't just a cis het white guy or cis het white guy passing right, which is this whole quandary, and I think funny set of litmus tests involved in the greeting custom. The whole like, like, hi, hello, when you pass people when you're out hiking in the middle of nowhere. These places where often the people saying hi, hello to each other, people that if they crossed you on the street, they would never say hello to you. In some cases, particularly maybe like, if you know, if you're looking like this, or if you're a little, you know, a little fruity looking. I'm a little bit of both. I'm a little brown, I'm a little fruity looking. These are not people that always want to say hi to me, but some of them feel bound to it by the greeting custom, and so they do. There's the people that don't want to say hi to you, but they know they should, so they do. There's the ones that you say hi to really cheerily, but kind of aggressively, because they clearly don't want to say hi to you. You know, it becomes this whole funny, mangled social thing. And that was kind of the story I brought to you, because I think, in a funny way, you're just out there trying to get some exercise and try to get some fresh air, but become so loaded, so quick, if you let it, or if you're, if you're taking some of those things in there with you, which clearly some people aren't. Some people are just out for their morning, like trail run or whatever, and they're never thinking about it, right? Which feels strange to me. Obviously, it feels, it feels quite strange to me.
Adam Huggins 04:36
Can I ask a couple of questions about it? About like the reading custom that you mentioned here. I spend a lot of time hiking. It is funny and weird out there. You know, you meet, like, generally, a certain set of person, right, wearing a certain set of things, especially if you're out far enough away from an urban area. I don't know. My experience of those places is that, yeah, people can be really friendly. Maybe there is some obligation to greet each other sometimes, I think fairly frequently, like people are also just like they went that far out because they really didn't want to be around other people. They wanted to have the illusion that they were kind of alone out there in the wilderness, and having this experience connecting directly to nature and all of the other people on the trail out there are sort of like trying to do the same thing, and so I guess there's a kinship in that. But at the same time, they are sort of impediments to that experience, because they are really giving the lie to it. Like, the lie to the idea that we are all sort of like out there independently connecting with nature in this kind of like wilderness way that isn't, in some ways, highly facilitated by our existing social system. So anyway, I just wanted to bring that in that I think there's kind of an interesting, I don't know, corollary to that greeting custom that is like a begrudging aspect to it, depending on where you're at.
Darby Bradford 05:57
Yeah, I definitely think that fits into this kind of rambly way I had of describing it, which is, there are the people that are just annoyed to see you, and that might have to do with me, but it might not have to do with me at all. Might just have to do with me just being another human right. And they were, they were trying hard not to be involved with that for a moment, which I think everyone can relate to at least a little bit, right? It's an interesting one. I think inevitably, for me, as someone who probably has hiked a fair bit less, I can't help but think about these spaces that are not quite as remote, where, you know, there are people that are clearly not hikers at all, right? They were like, let's go do the walk. This, like, once a year, like, let's go out with the family and do this thing that by the end of it, we've kind of all regret, right? We've had to stop and, you know, like, massage the feet because we don't have the right footwear. And, you know like, in a funny way, if I look back at my whole life, that's more what I'm used to with, with these kinds of spaces.
Adam Huggins 06:59
It's like a holiday you go out on the Easter walk or something like that.
Darby Bradford 07:02
Yeah, yeah, exactly, exactly. But in these mixed spaces, I think people involve themselves more in the like, one or two people say hello to them, and they're like, Oh, we say hello out here. And they're either annoyed by that, or they kind of get invested in the idea of like, oh, yeah, that's right. Out here, we're all we're all in it together. Except, are we? I guess is part of the question. But I just find it interesting. I don't necessarily have a final argument, yeah, I just find it interesting that we all agree to do this thing
Adam Huggins 07:32
That is interesting. So, I mean, I have a similar experience, just in the sense that, like, you know, when I'm in a city or when I'm in an area with lots of people, like we're walking around on the street, we're not that likely to say hi to each other, regardless of what we look like and like, not necessarily think anything about it. And maybe if I'm feeling in a good mood, I'll like, smile, yeah, but, but I'm not gonna say hi. And then, you know, if I go out on the trail or something like that, yeah, we're like, passing each other one by one, going like, different directions or something like that, or there's you feel like some obligation to acknowledge the presence of the other person, even if it's just to say on your left absolutely as you're passing, or to just, like, give a nod, or something like that. Like, I have that same experience, but I don't ascribe to it any sort of greater valence of race or ethnicity or of history to it. And so I'm just curious about, like, how you how you experience that a little bit differently.
Darby Bradford 08:24
I think I just don't belong out there. I mean, I think even in these little communities around Montreal that I'm talking about, you know that you can tell who's the local and who's not, and mostly they don't look like me. I mean, that's all I mean, really, it's nothing more complicated than that. I may be marked in a way that it'd be hard to fake it well enough that I might look like I'm one of the locals, you know. And I say this is now like a, you know, sort of habitual hiker, you know, I got decent gear. I don't look out of place out there, per se. But for me, for me, right? It becomes this elevated, kind of, like settler space. What Mendel and I had been trying to, like, tap into, and I was saying I kind of just don't understand, which is this thing that I see in a lot of Canadian poetry, and certainly when I'm, you know, assessing a pile of poetry applications for Canada Council or some other arts body, which is people that are just like, Isn't nature great? And the relationship to nature is one that's presumed, that it's taken for granted, that that's that's an easy one.
Adam Huggins 09:33
It's unproblematic. I'm connecting directly with nature without any intervening layers of social significance.
Darby Bradford 09:39
Exactly. It's not, yeah, it's not mediated. It's on any of that. And then the flip side, or the other half of that, you know, it's this ultimate settler project is, I think, that stewardship aspect, that this is something we kept this way. Aren't we responsible? Aren't we playing by the right rules? Aren't we not so bad, you know, aren't we great?
Adam Huggins 09:59
Mm. Hmm, like a pride in having set aside these lands and kept them for, you know, this purpose, and also an ethic of leave no trace. We all expect that of each other. We expect these kinds of behaviors. And the Leave No Trace aspect, it's not just don't litter. It's also like, well, we're probably not harvesting anything here. We're probably not leaving the kinds of signs of our presence that indigenous people leaving, doing all sorts of things in these landscapes.
Darby Bradford 10:23
And not to mention that sometimes the whole way the place is planted is a trace, right? But like, really the initial feeling of it, it's not like I'm out there doing a Black Studies project, taking notes as I go. Really the initial impulse of this whole funny thing about the greeting custom. It's just being out there, being brown and being a little fruity, and people being like, oh shit, I gotta say hi to this person. You know, you can kind of see it on their face, and it connects to also this, this broader thing that I've discussed with so many artists of colors and queer artists too, to a degree, but I think particularly artists of color, which is this whole thing of like, I don't even know if I want to go out to all these middle of nowhere residencies, because then, you know, usually there's a town attached, and usually people treat you funny at the town. You know that there is a perimeter that becomes increasingly complicated. I spoke with some people that I think have some things to say about that.
Mendel Skulski 11:22
So, Darby is going to bring us into conversation with three artists, but don't worry if you're not already familiar with their work. First up we have Jordan Abel, author of Nishga, a work of memoir and Empty Spaces, a work of fiction.
Darby Bradford 11:43
Jordan encountered and engaged this problem of return that I think a lot of particularly urban indigenous folks face with disenfranchisement and feeling in some ways cut off from a culture in a land that they'd like to find their way back to.
Jordan Abel 12:01
You know, there are certain goals that were kind of impossible from the outset. Reconnecting with all of my family, that's a hard thing to do. That's a lifelong practice. You know, like learning my language, that's also a hard thing to do. That's a lifelong practice. Trying to return to Niska territory, even that was really difficult, and I can't exist there all of the time. I have other places, other geographical spaces, I have to exist in most of the time. And so, like the project then became, how do I write about this experience? How do I, you know, write about this lack? And Empty Spaces became a really cathartic way of writing back to lands, writing about these spaces that I couldn't exist in.
Mendel Skulski 12:47
Jordan's latest book, Empty Spaces is itself a countertext to James Fenimore Cooper's 1826 historical romance novel, The Last of the Mohicans — a book which famously solidified stereotypes of a native presence in North America that was equal parts savage, noble, and imminently vanishing. To create Empty Spaces. Jordan took all of the passages from The Last of the Mohicans, which described quote, unquote, empty spaces, and then proceeded to permutate and remix them
Darby Bradford 13:25
To kind of rebuild this, not just natural space, but a natural space that ultimately becomes its own character, becomes something very different than just, quote, unquote, an empty space. And in the process, maybe re imagine for Jordan's own self, right? Nisga'a land and Nisga'a relationship to land.
Jordan Abel 13:46
I want to imagine Empty Spaces as a work of imagining, a work of fiction, a work of metaphor and also a work of allegory. It's, you know, a book that, on one level, is rooted in this conceptual unraveling of James Fenimore Cooper's The Last of the Mohicans, and then, on another, more metaphorical level, is a book that's about my own personal dispossession from traditional Nisga'a territory, and having no choice but to imagine that territory through fiction and through imagination. And so my writing in Empty Spaces is about that on an allegorical level. I guess it was really an exercise in trying to decenter human perspectives, and that was one of the ways I imagined that that might be possible to you know, treat the city you know in the same way that you would treat the woods you know or the mountains you know, and to have them enter into these sentences in the same way that didn't draw any more or less attention, but was very equitable, I guess, about how things exist in relation to the land.
Mendel Skulski 15:05
Sometimes there are bodies that lose themselves in the town. Sometimes there is white lightning in the sky, a mile in the air above us. Sometimes there is the taste of copper in the air. Sometimes the clouds spill out across the sky. Sometimes the bodies are no great distance. Sometimes the waters rise. Sometimes the elevation plunges. Beyond the forest, there are cliffs and rivers and chasms and low bushes and the scent of roses. Beyond the forest, there are islands surrounded by other islands. Beyond the forest, there are headlands dotted with countless islands. When the light reappears in the morning, there are pink and orange clouds in the sky just above the town.
Darby Bradford 16:00
There's a tradition that is deeply ingrained in a kind of Eurocentrism or settler colonial mindset, that we matter, that people matter, that our perspective is what describes the world and makes it make sense, and pretty much all literature is organized around that perspective. So I think Jordan is talking about resisting some of the things that we're all not just taught at a direct level, but that we're wooed by and persuaded by in reading literature on our way to being writers in the first place. Right where none of us are going to give up on the human perspective anytime soon, but Jordan gave himself the project for a minute. So for Jordan to enter that mindset, and I mean, in a strange way, I think, to conceptually retool this language about empty spaces, kind of having to retool the way perspective works in terms of, like measurements and things like that. You know, the dimensions that humans abide by and used to measure their own lives cease to be the appropriate measuring stick.
Jordan Abel 17:06
Yeah, I found it incredibly difficult to enter into that mindset. You know, because all of my training in writing is rooted in human perception. You know, it's all about how I think through and how I exist in the world, even the language that we have access to is perhaps necessarily rooted in human perception as well. So I found it very difficult to create that space where the kind of collective land body perspective could exist and where it wasn't tethered to human ways of thinking and knowing. And yet that inevitably happened. You know, there's a lot of measurements in the book, you know, for example, like there's miles and there's distances, other things as well, you know, that are like very human. Some of those things are inadequate.
Darby Bradford 18:07
Jordan's attachment to not leaning into an image that coheres, to letting the one thing, kind of like slick into the next, I think, was really excellent. Sometimes to make things too coherent, ends up feeling kind of editorialized. And to let the mess be a bit more of a mess, it ends up feeling pretty for lack of a better term... natural.
Jordan Abel 18:32
You know, one of the things that I think about this work so often is that often on a just like a single sentence will be coherent image, kind of like a time and a place, you know, there's something that exists there, and then it's followed up by something that sidesteps that a bit. So there's this like, kind of accumulation of impossibility that happens that I find to be really compelling, just like adding these 1000s of images together, and, you know, seeing how they all don't exactly fit together, but they all exist in the same space. And that aspect I find very interesting.
Jordan Abel 19:12
When I talk about Empty Spaces, I almost always have to talk about Nishga too, because I think they share the same research questions. The research questions being, what does it mean to be dispossessed from traditional territory? What does it mean to be an urban indigenous person? What does it mean to be displaced from indigenous language, indigenous knowledge, indigenous culture and tradition. And you know, for me, all these things are Nisga'a,
Darby Bradford 19:48
These questions are eventually, maybe for putting down, but they'll never be for fully moving on from and I can really relate to that. I mean, I think, you know, with Bottom Rail on Top, as much as anything else, I was trying to just describe this inevitable curiosity of what I felt like was the coexistence of emotional and real connection between, say, someone like me, you know, a black person living here in the present, and this history that I'm both physically and, I think, culturally connected to of enslavement and resistance and the Civil War, all while knowing that there are these huge experiential gaps between where I am now and where those people were then, and that there are things about my life now that look a lot more like the enslavers life than they do like enslavement, even as there are artifacts of a particular kind of subjection that continue to tension the way, say, my life interacts with society or with the government or with structural issues, let's say. And the best I could do was kind of just be like, hey, there's these two things. Let me count the ways. There's nothing to do about it. You almost have to come back around and be like, Oh, in case you were wondering, there's nothing... I don't know what to do about it.
Adam Huggins 21:08
You know, we arrive there with some frequency on this show too, just talking about complex issues in ecology and human nature, right? Where we just we have to put these things up together. We don't necessarily always have a resolution. Human histories on these landscapes are really complex and layered, and all of our relationships to these over time are unique, yeah, and not, not necessarily commensurate with one another. And by trying to have a particular historical narrative, a story a particular relationship, inscribed on a landscape, inscribed on a given history, is a form of violence, right? It's a form of flattening of all of these different things that should otherwise kind of just be held up and not necessarily need to be made to coalesce.
Darby Bradford 21:56
Yeah, I think that this idea around flatness really relates to this other concept that I think is essentially a different way of saying that, that Jordan has written about at length around Nisga'a culture and indigenous identity in general, which is authenticity.
Jordan Abel 22:13
Authenticity is such a rabbit hole
Darby Bradford 22:16
There's this idea, a flattening one, I think, of an authentic experience of land from a particular cultural standpoint or racial standpoint even, that Jordan is alluding to, either in his work or in his experience, which is largely people saying like, you don't know anything about this culture. You don't know anything about this land. I feel like this anecdote from Nishga is rather useful. It features a moment when he describes himself being at some gathering, and an indigenous man comes up to him and asks him where he's from. And he says, Oh, I'm Nishga. And the man says, You're not Nisga'a, because Nisga'a people say Nisga'a, they don't say Nishga. And it becomes this to me, very recognizable and very familiar moment of a kind of intra communal ascribing, of judging of who's the real thing and who's not the real thing, right? There's some resemblances, if not, you know, I don't want to overstretch those between indigenous communities and black communities in North America, but where people instantiate a particular idea of what a real black person is, or who's black enough.
Jordan Abel 23:30
It's an impossible question to answer, because there's no arbiter that says like this, one experience is Nisga'a and this other is not. Authenticity is a framework that can be problematic.
Darby Bradford 23:46
Inevitably, I think you become your own arbiter. You ask yourself, if you've overstepped, you ask yourself why you're so focused on this. You ask yourself where you're really going with this, which, again, is maybe just as much as anything else about making sure you're on the right track to figure out how to be okay in the world.
Mendel Skulski 24:09
Trying to be okay in the world is not limited to art practice, but it is also a concern of our next guest, SF Ho.
SF Ho 24:20
My name is SF Ho I'm a writer, an artist and occasional like cultural facilitator, organizer type person living on the unceded territories of the Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil Waututh for the past 13 years, I think, specifically, largely in East Vancouver. My practice is hard to describe.
Darby Bradford 24:48
To give some examples, rather than a description, SF's work includes performance, perfumes, installations, community gatherings, visiting elders, textiles and more recently, text.
SF Ho 25:02
The work that I'm doing right now is strongly based around language and trying to find within language a connection to ecological relationships in the non human world, how it's latent within that. You know, Chinese language comes from pictures. To look at the word Day you actually see the sun in it, or the images inherent in Chinese words for No. So like the etymology for sun setting into a bush, or a tree not yet grown, or a calyx. If you look at different Chinese words for No, that's what the picture part of that character is with the meaning of it being No.
Darby Bradford 25:44
SF, in a strange way, is really involved with their own version of that arbiter related question, deeply connected to the idea of not belonging.
SF Ho 25:55
I was kidding around with some younger artists the other day about, like, a lot of the bad art that I've made in the past, in avoidance of being like a diasporic person, but not wanting to talk about that directly. One thing I was doing for a while was trying to learn every other language that I could like, the process of like awkwardly and badly learning other languages, but never the language. And I'm still complicated about it. I'm still like, why do I need to lean into like this culture so much? But I'm doing it. It is significant for me to continue to try and find ways of being in the world that are more holistic, that lean in on relationships more than individuation. It's something that I've known in a way longer than I've known what art is.
Mendel Skulski 26:53
Upon returning to Hong Kong after 15 years, the following text was written. The distance between one's experience and the experience of another. The distance between experience and its representation, specifically through language. The distance between a historical event and the historical statement through which this event is interpreted. The distance between the memory of a friend and their tangible presence. The distance between a song's point of transmission and point of reception. The distance between the territory occupied at present and a territory of belonging.
Darby Bradford 27:34
SF brings something that connects with the weirdo in me that isn't terribly concerned about the belonging aspect is more concerned about something that maybe stands in its place
SF Ho 27:45
to talk about, quote, unquote, my own context. It's not just like, I can just go back to this context and be like, Oh, this was nice. This is great. I'm just gonna be Chinese, and that'll fix everything. I'm just gonna do Chinese things and eat Chinese food, and take on, like, a kind of identity or a nationalism, and that will fix the problem, because, like, that's better than settler colonialism, because there's so many aspects of the culture that I'm coming from that is far more complicated than that. So like to return to that and to try and find some ways of being in the world that feel better than like the context of settler colonialism and that violence, it requires a recuperation, more than just like a simple adaptation of what's there. You have to kind of dig in the same way that one has to dig here to, like, try and figure out how to be in a not fucked up way.
Mendel Skulski 28:49
Our conversation with SF Ho continues right after this.
Mendel Skulski 29:10
And we're back with Darby Bradford in dialog with three artists about, in the words of SF HO, how to be — in a not fucked up way.
Darby Bradford 29:23
Again, all these people are trying to figure out how to be. They're not trying to figure out who they are. And there's a key difference there, I think. I think that's something that is really inspiring about the way SF talks about this, is that the main concern is the life practice in their relationships, not just in the work, right? That the art is secondary, and the art honestly comes after the first impulse of, how should a person be and being skeptical about this and that, that that impulse comes before the impulse to put that in the art or to use the art to do that work.
SF Ho 29:57
It's that tension between not wanting to be just the artist that represents where you come from, and the tension of wanting to avoid representation entirely, not to be just the sum of what came before you, and also to not have those precious things about you consumed by this cultural world that we inhabit. Like to keep some of that to yourself.
Darby Bradford 30:27
Now we're getting into the problems of persona and performativity, and, you know, doing these things for a living. SF taps into, I think, this very elder millennial artists of color problem, which is largely that for a long time, these things of being the artist that talks about, or that seems to be talking about, that could be lumped in with nothing else than just talking about where they come from, felt like a trap. And not only did it feel like a trap, but we were told by other people that it was a trap, that it wasn't anything anyone was interested in really, if we wanted to be doing something that was actually serious, and we've had to kind of have this evolving, complicated relationship to trusting our gut on that and coming back around to it.
SF Ho 31:16
It's been long enough to notice cycles. There's like a seasonality or cyclicalness to how everything works, including what you return to in your practice, right? And then you start to know that that's kind of the things you can't turn away from, and are able to maybe articulate better the second time around or the fifth time around. I've tried to run from it for so long. I remember saying to my friend Robin, like, oh, Chinese medicine is such a big part of who I am. And my grandfather did it. It's like part of my family thing. I would never put it in my art. And now, like, you know, I've had to reckon with that. There's ideas that you return to, and you can't get away from. You know,
Darby Bradford 32:04
Somewhere with each of these speakers, there's something of what is before me just won't work for me and trying to go for something else.
SF Ho 32:12
I feel like I'm always failing at my work, but I feel like there's a lot of creative people who fail because they're trying to, like, speak to something really big, and I'm still too baby to like, be able to entirely point at that big thing in the way that is a service to that. But I feel closer than I have before.
Darby Bradford 32:34
I feel like this connects to the idea of the genitive, of the answering versus the answer. Genitive refers to, like a verb tense... now I'm getting a little too nerdy for my own good. The verb tense for like, you know, a verb that ends in ING, right? As in the describes an act that is happening in a continuous way, as opposed to one that is accomplished, accomplishing versus accomplished. Accomplishing doesn't really end, and that's kind of the point.
SF Ho 33:06
I don't ever expect to feel like I belong anywhere. I've just never felt that way, I think because of my positionality of just being a little different, and you could name it under all different kinds of umbrellas of that, to the point where I'm almost an oppositional person. It might just be something in me. I don't mind that at this point. I feel like that's like a good position to be in. It's a position that I embrace.
Darby Bradford 33:40
SF is, on the one hand, building on the work that came before them in a literal sense, right, in terms of ancestry. And then also, I think, part of a kind of research question community, all kind of trying to figure out some of the same questions, questions around relating to a place, relating to history, relating to a distance that is now kind of part of this diasporic experience.
SF Ho 34:05
One thing that I've always felt is this plurality of voices within me. As I'm working, I feel myself like resting upon that as I move, sometimes, all these texts, vernaculars and voices that I've been sitting with for a long time. I've always tried to bring those forward in these really awkward ways, but to be able to just vocalize them, to use my body as a form of publication, to vocalize that within the world.
Darby Bradford 34:41
I think SF, in that regard, is really invested in how it takes things outside of the fiction of the individual.
SF Ho 34:50
I've been working on trying to talk about my relationship to plants for a long time. Um, I couldn't, I couldn't find the form. And I feel like it makes a lot of sense to place myself within that. Like to be active within that, but as a vessel, and not necessarily as an individuated creator. There's one thing to just sit back and be like, Wow, nature is beautiful. Let's just look at it. And there's another to be like, Okay, what am I doing here?
SF Ho 35:24
With time, you understand what needs to be done, not for yourself, but what would serve a moment. And I think that comes for me from listening to plants being in my garden, going out to nature, listening to host nations, listening to stories of seniors in my community and in my family, and taking in all the stuff that is important to me, and then making some decisions. The starting point of it is to like, recognize the land and all the land holds as much as you can. To care for it and to also take responsibility for, like, the settler colonialism, the violence that's happened on that land that's wrapped up with like, a kind of relationality, a kind of listening. Once I started on that process, I began to look at how what there was within the context that I'm coming from that could also speak to that the cultural context of being in diaspora, and the history and the lens that I carry, the complications... of being a settler. Of coming from a different place, of not really knowing where that is, but needing to speak to the land from, where I was coming from,
Darby Bradford 36:49
I feel like what they say connects with what Jordan was saying about maybe being open about rupture, and about that kind of diasporic rupture being an authentic cultural experience in and of itself, and not merely be a space to be kind of exited, right? You're not, you're not trying to get closer to authenticity. That space of the diasporic context itself is also a rich one, and is a real one more importantly, I think, not just one to be left behind.
Speaker 2 37:22
The way that I'm seeing it is that there's no way to extract yourself from the world within this way of being in the world, there's no like rational stepping back so that you just have this object of the mind in front of you. You know what you're always going to get back to is like some sort of observation or relation to your connectedness to the world outside of you.
Mendel Skulski 37:55
And finally, we have Cecily Nicholson, author of Wayside Sang and Harrowings.
Cecily Nicholson 38:03
So hello. My name is Cecily Nicholson. I am a poet. That is my easiest noun to go to. I work often in a number of communities, but I'm mainly connecting these days with folks who think through food security and recent or current experiences of incarceration. I am a teacher. I teach in poetry and writing at the University of British Columbia on Musqueam land. And yeah, I guess that's probably plenty. Cecily Nicholson.
Darby Bradford 38:33
Cecily grew up in Ontario. Grew up on a farm, essentially.
Cecily Nicholson 38:37
Southwestern Ontario was a really important place of migration. Migration is not the right word in the context of the Underground Railroad and an early place of settlement for black people doing labor on the land. And I didn't grow up knowing anything about that. I grew up within 50 miles of this place known as Chatham. Knew nothing about that. History was never addressed or talked about in any context of education, which is shameful, and I imagine the degree to which it's talked about now is still minimal or insufficient. So growing up on a farm, you know, I struggled with that tension of, what does it mean to be black on a farm, because I grew up, first of all, with it constantly being reinforced that it was a weird thing that I was a black person on a farm, and that the very nature of being black was inherently an urban thing. And then you can't possibly be black enough if you come from a context outside of a city, for starters, and that to be, you know, farming, in so many ways, was was a derisive like, it was something that was like, there was just not a quality to it in any of the environments I was in for the first 20 years of my life that reaffirmed that as a positive thing. So I internalized a lot of that, and I also grew up with a lot of you know, hard work, labor, trauma, violence, from a number of different perspectives. So I conflated a lot of that experience.
Darby Bradford 40:02
I was introduced to Cecily's work through Wayside Sang. I remember being taken immediately with how her poetry was a bit abstract. Again, to return to this idea of coherence versus incoherence, and what actually feels interesting and alive to me in poetry just was tapped into some opacities that I thought were really interesting and that there was just something for me to learn there, I guess. And it's funny, because the first time I read that book, it felt like it was a book about — and clearly, just a little bit of like research would have, would have kept me from from realizing this — but it felt like it was a book about like, pedaling your bike along the highway. It turns out it was a book about driving
Mendel Skulski 40:51
Flowers bloom. Who loves a bloom? Delible. Meadow reminds me of a puzzle, captivated us hours over days. Wildflowers like Blue Ridge Mountains, hard to piece back together. Caught a slip at the gas station, a new ride in a new direction. The language. In memories of winding Carolinas, far gone. Bits, rags, frag, embittered. Bloom was an orange glow of city light pollution, against the sky cast cosmic pulses. You remember the first time you saw this.
Cecily Nicholson 41:29
One of the things that I was trying to get out from under in this book was the ways in which the roadway, the car, the fossil fuel industries, amounted to a kind of freedom for me, particularly as a child, and had everything to do with fleeing the rural the small town, fleeing difficult or violent situations. My capacity to drive or to be a passenger in a safe way has always been a skill that I deeply value. So trying to extract that from the very nature of extraction, I guess, and the completely unsustainable mode of transportation that we're embedded in and energy consumption that we're embedded in. So that was the tension I was exploring so obviously unresolved, but trying to bring to light, I guess.
Darby Bradford 42:12
There was an element of locomotion and an element of always being in relation with and an attunement in her voice to always kind of shouting out those relations, to always being present for those relations first.
Cecily Nicholson 42:28
So I was really deeply engaged in history, and a big history, like the idea of the automotive industry, roadways, the very construction of them, you know, their embeddedness and the formation of the nation state, the advance of settler colonialism and the entrenchment of all sorts of elements of class and mobility. But concurrent to that, all of the other industries, which is where this book spread out into So, the hospitality industry, entertainment industry, various kinds of migration for labor. And then somehow in that finding a thread that was personal, or it was connected to this idea of African ancestry as it related to my personal experience.
Darby Bradford 43:10
In Wayside Sang, I feel like Cecily taps into this idea of cars and freedom, which is an idea that I think she has a very personal relationship to, but also is a very, you know, big North American certainly idea, right, that the open highway is freedom, and a car is an enclosure that can get you quite a ways, and can get you away from some stuff, and can keep you, at least in some ways, safe while you make the journey. That's the fantasy, but also that's the use case. It sounds so silly to describe a car in such an academic way, but I do think that that's real, and I do think that it represents that for a lot of people, it taps into this problem of when something adds self determination to your life, but you know that it's also destructive to something else.
Cecily Nicholson 44:02
I think the challenge of that approach for those of us who think and work this way, you know, because we're moving between scales, indeed, I think in political and economic scales quite readily. I'm trained that way, trained to think about culture. I'm unlearning. And trying to think through these multiple scales while doing something relevant and specific, is the tension. And then, yeah, resolving black presence on land. I mean, this is, this is a question we can, we can unfurl this in the next little stretch, but it's, it's in so many ways, irresolvable with the goals of of an anti colonial or decolonial stance in so many ways, because we are embedded in the machinery and in the violence and in the labor and we have since we've been brought here as bodies and people centuries ago, maybe irresolvable, as you know, I don't want to counter the revolution, but it's, it's a deep, long, hard struggle to extract oneself.
Darby Bradford 45:02
Belonging, certainly, but safety also maybe... they're kind of defined and tensioned by the possibility of the opposite, that belonging is only belonging if there's such a thing as not belonging.
Cecily Nicholson 45:17
What does it mean to be safe on land if you don't own it is a tension that you chronically live with in the city as a renter. So there's just this tension around, when will we ever be in place? You know, when will we ever settle and belong and settle, not in the violent sense, but settle in a peaceful sense? Like, do we ever get to do that? And I love there's this great line of Audre Lorde's. This may be a paraphrase, but it's wherever the bird with no feet flew, she found trees with no limbs. And I feel like that's a very apt commentary in my life. Like I've never had the means to actually perch anywhere in when it makes sense. And that's not just about land. It's also about black, diasporic experience, as you know, my truncated and sort of severed, complicated relationship to that given my family history. So there's almost always a place of belonging. It's just it somehow exists in the poem. It exists in my imaginary it exists in community. I have deep and full welcomes in so many places and so many ways, and that involves a range of indigenous people, places, lands, nations. So I don't, you know, I don't want to construct a deeply alienated existence or anything, but I think that the idea of of ever fully entering into the bloom of colonial presence. Personally, I don't think that's going to happen, but it is a funny thing, isn't it? Like just giving over to what that means in terms of the idea of security, safety and being of a place
Darby Bradford 46:57
I don't think it is about being safe. You know, there's feeling safe, which I think is what most people are chasing when they're buying a place. And a writer that Cecily and I are both, I think, on some level or another, influenced by Fred Moten, will go way out of his way to say, you know, property is a fantasy of safety. It just happens to be one that has some pretty convincing tools in terms of trying to prove its realness. On the other hand, feeling safe, belonging. They sound like some pretty wishy washy things in the sense that they're they're quite affective, right? They don't feel very stable, or it feels like a lot of work has to go into making them stable, making an environment, a space, land, a community, act in such a way that they feel static and continuous. And I guess either way. You know, even in under better circumstances or healthier circumstances than that, a lot of collective work goes into it, I think, which is why maybe for some people, whether it's me or SF, it's easier to depart and to find something else, which maybe sometimes is just finding a different way to think about it. I don't know that we're coming up on something that different from belonging, but it's just like, where do I stand as a point of contact in this field of points of contact?
Cecily Nicholson 48:27
So as a poet, you know, I'm an observer and I'm a participant in my communities, and I don't shy away or turn away from whatever level of calamity that I'm witnessing, whether it's in a present moment. We're situated right now as we're recording this, my proximity to the Downtown Eastside community or neighborhood where I worked for 20 years.
Darby Bradford 48:48
I think something important to understand about Cecily's work is this idea of what she calls reparative practices, which relates to this idea of repair and reparation. To put it a lot more simply, how to be okay in a way that maybe makes the world a little bit more okay, in a way that makes other people, other living beings, the environment around you, also safer, also more okay, also well.
Mendel Skulski 49:17
It's a bit better than leave no trace.
Darby Bradford 49:20
Yeah, it's much better than leave no trace. Leave No Trace is part of the problem. It's about making the trail a little bit better for everybody else. She gets into this in some detail in her collection of poetry, Harrowings.
Cecily Nicholson 49:34
That work very much comes out of literally, you know, physically, being in this place and in between on my breaks, writing these scribbled notes to myself and to a book, I guess, as it turns out. And trying to process multiple levels of trauma, you know, at a collective or community level, and also personally,
Darby Bradford 49:55
She really connects into this reparative praxis, particularly in this place called Emma's Acres.
Cecily Nicholson 50:02
So I've been volunteering with Emma's Acres now for just over three years. Coming up on my fourth year, this organization, or the farm space, or green space, has been in existence for just under a decade. I introduce in Harrowings a section of the book called Clamor with this description.
Cecily Nicholson 50:19
Engaging in restorative justice, holding a free, aspiring organic and no till green space, Emma's Acres provides food for families of incarcerated people and low income families living in the food insecure city of Mission, in an area currently known as the Fraser Valley in the Pacific Northwest. So these last few years, volunteering with this farm, led by people who are formerly incarcerated, I've engaged in correspondence, sometimes poetic, with community inside.
Cecily Nicholson 50:46
It is intended to be a respite of people on day passes, people who recently released from prison, families who have moved to the area to support people who are in prison. Low income families in the area come to this place for good food, but also to put time in on land, so to be outside, to do something that feels constructive, and honestly, just at times, feels so beautiful to choose to be in that mode. So not to romanticize my volunteer efforts, as you know, being entrenched in necessary labor, but reminding myself of that labor and the people that do this every day, all over the place that we depend upon in a dissociative way for food. And during this pandemic, many of the people that would come to the farmers laborers were not allowed to leave the prison. So the experience of lockdown, which was not a metaphor was very much a 23 out of 24 hours of the day experience for many people who are incarcerated, regardless of their sentencing, regardless of their status within the prison, and the rights that they were to be afforded they were denied. So the farm was this place of communication, advocacy. Meanwhile, mainly, we were just outside or in the greenhouse doing farm labor. And so I set out just to have that experience, because it was a necessity. But while engaged in all of that work, literally, my hands in the soil, I started to remember things differently from how I grew up. Started to connect, to reconnect, I think, to some of the somatic memories of it, and to great joy, actually, and I have always known this, and this is the nature of trauma. And when you survive things, or you are in a survival mode, so much of your memory that you pull through and carry with you is of the harder times, is of the harrowing moments. Something about writing this book and this experience at Emma's Acres helped me reconnect to so many of the things that were beautiful about that upbringing that I had really I just never had given time for.
Darby Bradford 52:50
I can relate to that I didn't expect I'd make it back here, or I didn't expect I'd make it here in the first place. You know, in the same way that when I started out with this idea of a black nature poetry, right? It's a very bookish idea. It's a little inside baseball. And I remember early on getting interested in in bird nomenclature, right? Getting interested in all these different ways that language interacts with nature in this kind of like Western traditional frame of nature and writing. And I mean, getting interested in in bird words, gets you interested in birds, it just does. Birds are cool. There's nothing I could do about that. I didn't plan for that one, but birds are cool. Even the crappy city birds that I have, some people will say they're crappy. I don't think they're crappy. I like my little sparrows and my little cardinals, which are there more and more every year now, because of climate change, essentially, you know. The weird grackles being creepy. You see them where you shouldn't see them, but they're there, you know. Anyhow, you start noticing things around you. You start noticing, oh, this bird is that bird, and oh, that bird is doing that thing. And sooner or later, you're just looking at things out in the world finding their own little way. Begrudgingly for me is maybe too big of a word, but it happened despite myself, and I think, in her own very different way, Cecily makes it to Emma's Acres and everything that that's brought for her in a way that she knew there was good to be done there. But maybe the sweetness of being on the land is a gift that wasn't necessarily what she expected. And for Cecily, I think one instance of that kind of surprise is this story about hot peppers.
Cecily Nicholson 54:38
So at the time, Zach, who was a lead farm hand, I guess would be the frame, which always seems like old fashioned terms. But Zach had been experimenting with a range of peppers, and it was fascinating, because I didn't grow up with that range of peppers. Grew up some really boring like green peppers. I think diversity of any crop is always like a revelation to me. Given our monocrop culture and what we've kind of been grown to accustomed to seeing at the grocery store and purchasing and so on. So I was just mesmerized.
Cecily Nicholson 55:08
And then I was mesmerized by all of the peppers had a story. They had names that were they were wild, like, some of them were like, like, Sugar Rush Peach, or, like, Buena Mulata, like as a name of a pepper, mm. And California Reaper, of course, and so on. So there is a poem and a moment in the book, in Harrowings, that details those names. But the Fish Pepper in particular becomes a little story because the history of that plant comes from the African continent. Came with people. People brought seeds. How did people bring seeds? I don't know. They brought seeds. They made their way through the Caribbean. They made their way through the southern states to suddenly, somehow, you know, centuries later, to find them in a green like, I don't want to cry, but like to find it in a greenhouse that I happen to be volunteering at is this, like, you know, muddled but stalwart, representative black community and connecting to this. And, yeah, it was just beautiful, beautiful at the level of horticulture, beautiful at the level of just care. And, like, you know, people raising things beautiful esthetically, like, they're very beautiful to look at.
Darby Bradford 56:22
The flip side to this is we can't talk about how nice these things are if we talk about the other stuff, the bad stuff. And I don't know how to appreciate the good part without the other part. You know, part of what I so love about my neighborhood is we're right on the river, which is kind of unusual in Montreal, most, most of the shore is often cut off by industry, storage, loading docks, like all kinds of stuff like that, like a lot of cities. And there's this little strip in Verdun that isn't where you can go right down to the water. And a very manmade trail has been put in there over time are just dug out over time, and you can find the concrete of where the old docks used to be mixed in there and and it's all very craggly, but kind of nice to walk. And it exists very much in this space where you can hear the cranes in the background and the cars a little bit in the distance, and you can see the like affordable housing complex, and it in a very different way than those kinds of reassembled landscapes I was talking about with hiking just outside the city. These are very honest landscapes in a funny way, very settled and very mangled. But all of it is out there, right the grackle going between the like, roots of the trees along the shore are there, but so is like the rebar popping out next to it, and that they've just decided to leave alone because it's holding up a tree. And they're like, this is too much to work with. Let's just hope no one hurts themselves. And that honesty, I find such a relief, and I find that I can just enjoy it down there, and even enjoy saying hi to people, oddly enough, in a way that I can't in other places, because it feels so devoid of fantasy. And maybe that's just the urban person in me, I don't know, like maybe, maybe this would be, like, jarring and nowhere near as comfortable for someone who's used to, you know, hiking out in the middle of nowhere, but having it all hanging loose, I think, really helps appreciate the good side.
Cecily Nicholson 58:34
It's fun to look at flowers and the birds and all of that. And as we've discussed, this is actually a privilege that we're realizing we need to connect to. But it's also just like that's by no means all of it, and if we focus just on these beautiful things, like, what are we really saying?
Mendel Skulski 58:54
In this episode, you heard Jordan Abel, SF Ho and Cecily Nicholson.
Adam Huggins 59:00
You can find links to each of their work in the show notes. Our co producer for this episode was Darby Bradford, author of Bottom Rail on Top and other works of poetry. And if you see him out on the trail, don't be shy, say hi.
Mendel Skulski 59:16
Future Ecologies is independent and listener supported. Help us make the show at patreon.com/futureecologies, or leave us a rating and a review wherever you listen.
Mendel Skulski 59:31
'til next time. Thanks for listening.