A local author is celebrating the release of their second book of poetry which is taking readers on a trip into the past in order to challenge the heteronormative stories history accepts as the default.
Joelle Barron is a poet from Fort Frances, and released their second book of poetry, Excerpts from a Burned Letter, last month. A collection of poems centred around historical figures, Barron noted the book takes a look at individuals that history assumes were heterosexual, and challenges the often baseless notion.
“It’s like a revisionist history,” Barron explained.
“It’s based on the idea that a lot of the time, when historians are looking back at history, they will say that somebody who seemed like they were super queer definitely wasn’t. Just the fact that people obviously did conceive of queerness and transness differently than we do now, but the idea of, if you can’t know for sure, historians lean towards ‘no.’ So I was like, ‘what if I lean towards ‘yes’ instead?”
Barron noted that they aren’t always comfortable at writing from the perspective of another person, and so in crafting the poems that make up the new collection, they instead decided to superimpose their own personal experiences over that of particular figures from history in order to inform the conversation between these historical figures. Barron stressed, however, that the book is not a memoir, but rather “what if” scenarios that star these potentially queer figures.
Barron noted the process of choosing different historical figures or moments in time to craft a poem around was not necessarily deliberate, instead finding inspiration through their own reading or other research. By way of example, one poem centres around Francis Hodgson Burnett, the British playwright and author of the classic novel The Secret Garden. Barron said they began thinking about the book, and Hodgson Burnett, after they re-read the book to their daughter and picked up on queer undertones to the novel. After that, it was a matter of research into Hodgson Burnett’s life, and upon discovering some other speculation about queer undertones in both the novel and Hodgson Burnett’s life, decided to go ahead with a new poem.
“I’ve found that oftentimes, if I’m reading something and it isn’t necessarily about queerness at all, like something just niggles in my brain and I’m like, ‘this seems kind of gay,’” Barron said.
“And if I go and look, I find lots of people think it seems kind of gay, so that was kind of it [for inspiration for the poems], just stuff I had already known about and stuff I would randomly come across.”
Barron said only a small number of the poems making up the new book were previously published in journals or other outside publications, with about “95 percent” of the poems being expressly written for the new book.
It takes plenty of time and effort to write a book of poetry, and according to Barron, it can take just as long to get it published. While they are not publishing for the first time, Barron said they decided to seek out a new publisher following the release of their first collection of poetry, 2018’s Ritual Lights, as the publisher for that volume was located in the east of the country, and Barron said most of their poetry community in based in the British Columbia area, where they attended the University of British Columbia and received their Masters of Creative Writing.
“[My first publisher] was great and wonderful and it’s not anything against them, I was just interested in finding a publisher in Ontario or in British Columbia, because that’s where my poetry community is,” Barron said.
“Basically, when you write the book, you send it out to publishers and just wait a really, really, really long time. It was well over a year of waiting. So then my publisher Nightwood had expressed interest, and it took a little bit longer because they were doing a staff turnover thing in the midst of it all, but yeah, they wanted to publish it, so we signed a contract.”
While Barron noted they don’t set out to write about identity all the time, it’s the topic they keep coming back to time and again. They noted they had received feedback from strangers and random people who told them how important the book was to them, which Barron chalks up to the lack of light that is still shone upon marginalized communities such as the LGBTQ+, and as they felt the subject matter that eventually came to make up Excerpts from a Burned Letter was important, it was just something they had to write about.
“As I’m writing from a marginalized identity, I know it’s going to be important and I’m going to reach people that way, even if it’s hardly any people,” Barron said.
“That part of it is the part I value the most.”
Excerpts from a Burned Letter is available for purchase now direct from the publisher Nightwood Editions, as well as other major retailers. Barron also noted that Betty’s in Fort Frances would be receiving copies in the near future, though they had not yet heard when copies would arrive in store. Additionally, Barron, themself an employee of the Fort Frances Public Library Technology Centre, noted that borrowing the book from the library is another way to help them and other Canadian writers, due to the Public Lending Rights Program, which sees Canadian authors receive payment for each time one of their books is checked out within the library system.
