Every year poet Rob Taylor talks to several BC poets in celebration of National Poetry Month. The following interview is the first of an annual eight-part series.
Sockeye
People are fishing today
the Nlaka′pamux
dipping their nets into strong water
hanging deep red flesh
to dry in the wind
almost like
life goes on
my neighbour brought me a salmon
heavy gift
almost like she had always been next door
almost like her house
didn’t burn
I washed the dishes
sat down outside
watched a dry leaf shake
in the wind
almost like
I was ok
Reprinted with permission from Burning Sage (Caitlin Press, 2023)
Rob Taylor: Burning Sage is your debut poetry collection, written about the 2021 Lytton fire which destroyed your café, most of your neighbours’ houses, and almost your own. To say the least, it’s not your typical debut. Could you talk about the way this book came into being?
Meghan Fandrich: When the fire destroyed our little village, it wasn’t just the buildings that were gone. It was my community, the place of my childhood memories and my daughter’s, and the future I was building for us there. It was everything that was normal in my life, everything I trusted would always be there. Past, present, future. All gone.
About a year later, summer meant another fire was burning homes and farms near Lytton. Support and stability, and even a precarious “new normal,” were still impossible. I was living in fear and trauma and knew I had to focus on something, a distraction, so that I could be a present parent—a present person—again. I decided I would do an art project for a friend (a love), the “you” of the poems: I would write out some memories and musings from my life, things we hadn’t talked about yet, little pieces that make up who I am. I decided to start with a memory from the fire.
Up until that point, I think, I had just been focused on survival, on single-parenting, on adjusting to life in an isolated burned-out place that kept getting hit with natural disasters, even after the first fire. I hadn’t stopped to think about it; I probably couldn’t have. I couldn’t have acknowledged the depth of the experience when I was in the worst of it.
So I sat down at the typewriter on the living room floor, and memories came pouring out. They weren’t the memories I expected, but instead subconscious memories, scenes and feelings that I had never put words to before, even in thought. When I took the page out of the typewriter and read the words, I started crying—for almost the first time since the fire.
Past, present, future. All gone.
Was poetry something you’d written a lot before? Did it feel natural to find yourself processing your trauma in this way?
I was surprised that the words emerged as poetry. I’m not a poet. I’d never written poems (other than the rhyming poems of Grade 6, of course). For the past decade, I hadn’t written at all, not even in my journal; I had only recently begun to journal again when I met the friend, the love, six months after the fire. There was no reason that the memories would come out as poetry. But they did.
And then, maybe an even bigger surprise: I felt the intense need to share what I wrote. I’ve never shared my writing before, and with that first poem, “Entrails”—and all that followed—there was the absolute need to share.
Instead of working on the art project for that friend, I kept writing. Each time a little memory of the last year would surface, I would write it out. And cry it out. I started writing poems as events happened, too, letting the emotions out immediately instead of suppressing them. The stack of pages beside the typewriter kept growing.
In one of the first poems in Burning Sage you write, of watching the fire burn, “we stood together / in silence // and then looked away.” So much of the book takes place in the personal and collective aftermath of the fire, showing what happened after the rest of the country “looked away.” You’ve spoken about how writing these poems was a way for you to be a more “present person.” How did poetry help you not “look away”?
For me, looking away was never an option. The fire was just a moment, and yes, in that moment we had the eyes of the world on us; but when the world looked away, we were still here, and the trauma was just beginning. We had to keep going. We had to keep living, even though everything had changed. And because the world looked away—because we existed as just that one moment in the eyes of others—we became invisible.
Trauma is isolating, even collective trauma. We all experienced that with the collective trauma of Covid, right? How we were all “in it together,” but each of us felt so alone. And it was the same with the fire. As we kept going, as we started to realize that there would be no immediate rebuilding, no quick return to normal, no “better than ever,” as the reality of the situation set in, we were each alone. Alone and invisible.
When I started writing the poems, and more importantly, when I started sharing them, I suddenly saw my own experience reflected in others’ faces. When the poems said, “This is how I feel,” I saw the readers nod in recognition. With tears in their eyes, they saw me. They gave me the gift of their emotions in response to mine, and I started to become visible.
There was no reason that the memories would come out as poetry. But they did.
Two sources of invisibility in this book, which draw your anger, are the news media (“aggressive / bloodthirsty / cameras rolling”) and the government crews which cordoned off and leveled the town (“Keep your windows up, / they say… don’t look at us while we stand / and laugh”). Did writing Burning Sage give you a chance to speak back to these groups on your own terms? What do you hope they might take away with them if they read your book?
The poems emerged, one by one, as fragments of that first year. I didn’t write them with any intention; I just had the need to get each of those memories out of me, out of my body, out of my subconscious. But when I read through the stack of poems, I saw that thread of anger and was able to acknowledge how harmful both entities—media and government—have been throughout this experience.
Since the fire, I’ve tried to speak with the media when possible, to advocate for my community and our ongoing struggle. Almost invariably, the reporter would bring the interview back to the moment of the fire, the moment of running from the flames. Reopen the wound and run that footage on the six o’ clock news. And it would feel like I only existed as that sensational moment of June 30, and now, after, I didn’t matter. I was invisible. The reporter would move on to the next story, and I would be left, shattered, to cope with my reopened trauma.
Overall, I wish the media would consider the harm they can cause. But some are doing it right: I’m grateful for journalist Francesca Fionda and the Climate Disaster Project, who are making a difference in how survivors’ stories are shared.
And government… I don’t even know where to begin. Every level of government has failed us: municipal, provincial, and federal. And more than that, their complacency has augmented the trauma we have experienced. I don’t mean that in an abstract, emotional way, although there is that too. They have also failed to meet our basic needs, the minimum necessary for survival.
For example, between a six-month Do Not Consume Order and a three-month Boil Alert, the homes left in the Village of Lytton and Lytton First Nation’s IR17 had potable water for three out of the twelve months in that first year. It meant that in deep trauma, in an isolated burned-up town, we had to find drinkable water to keep our children alive.
A year after the fire, I attended an unmet needs committee meeting with other Lyttonites, various NGOs, and the Village of Lytton’s recovery team. We stressed that drinking water was still a primary unmet need. I remember very clearly that the recovery manager at the time, who worked for Lytton from the comfort of his home in the Okanagan, leaned back in his chair and said, “Look, you’ll get water when you get water.”
That’s awful. And a window into a dynamic most of us in BC have yet to experience. In focusing on the aftermath of the fire, you offer readers a glimpse into the long-haul effects of forest fire destruction.
In 2023 we suffered the worst fire season in BC history, and that record’s likely to be broken again soon. What do you wish you’d known in advance about the long road to recovery? What would you like to tell those who experienced losses in 2023, or those who might in the future?
I don’t know if there’s anything I wished I would have known. Would it have helped with any of the trauma if I knew in advance that recovery—of the village, of ourselves—would take years? Would it have helped if I had known that the slow-moving and impersonal systems of government are incapable of adapting to pressing needs? Would it have helped to know that only time would get us through the worst of it, and not everyone would survive that journey? I don’t know. I think I would choose naïveté and have those truths unfold one at a time, as they have for me.
I do have a wish, though. I wish that my little book might help other survivors of climate disasters to feel that they’re not invisible, even after the media moves on. The book shares my very personal experience, but through sharing, through others bringing their own emotions to it or recognizing their own experience in it—their experience of loss and grief of any kind—it becomes universal, and the experience becomes shared experience. Does that make sense?
Yes, very much so. The path to the universal must run through the particular. I think a great number of people will see their lives reflected in your book, even if they’ve never experienced a major fire.
On this theme, despite Burning Sage‘s dramatic subject matter, relationships—some tender and loving, others strained—sit at the emotional heart of the book. This feels in keeping with the true nature of grief: all loss is personal loss. Could you talk about your decision to widen the scope of the book to include your personal relationships, such as the “friend (love)” you mentioned earlier? Was it a decision at all, or was this the only way you could think of approaching the subject matter?
I think if I had decided, “I’m going to write a book about the fire,” the result would have been very different: less personal, less intimate. But the poems simply emerged as I processed individual memories, and the personal relationships were an inextricable part of those memories.
One choice I did consciously make was to include the “breakup poems” in the book. I was already writing the book when the relationship ended, and those poems were written in all the pain and agony of that loss; as such, they feel more vulnerable than any of the other poems. But I had to include them, because the breakup, too, was part of the healing. I cried because my heart was broken, and then I couldn’t stop crying—weeks of crying on the living room floor. I couldn’t understand it, the extent of the grief, until a friend pointed out that I was finally crying out the fire and the impossible life after, and all of the struggles from before the fire too. Finally, finally, crying them out.
For me, more than anything, Burning Sage is a love story. I wrote it for and about one person; it’s about the way that one person saw past the moment of the fire, and saw me for who I am. And, feeling seen, I could see myself—no longer invisible—and the network of love and support and community that is all around me. What I mean is that love showed me that I was never, ever invisible.
In “Fabric” you write about knitting something inspired by smoke: “dropped stitches / disrupted fabric / intentional deconstruction / damage.” This made me think of your poems which, in their raggedness and repetitions, convey panic, fear and breathlessness (as in “At Siska,” where “I am not ok” is repeated five times). Could you talk about the style you adopted in writing these poems? What are their dropped stitches and disruptions?
I wish I had a good answer for you—I wish that any of it had been intentional. I didn’t consciously adopt any style; I just wrote the poems as they emerged. But maybe I can explain it a little.
After the first poem or two poured out, and I felt how cleansing it was to finally put those memories on paper, I wanted to keep writing. I would step into my memory just enough to see the flash of an image or the hint of a feeling, and that would be enough. Bare feet on hot asphalt. My daughter Helen covering my eyes. The numbness of the first visit to the ruins of my café. A fireball. A moment of intimacy. In a way, I would hold an emotion-memory in my mind, something that needed to come out, and I would start typing. And often the buried feelings surprised me as they emerged.
Each poem, then, is an emotional snapshot of that particular moment in my experience and in my memory. Does that make sense? So when “At Siska” repeats the hum of “I am not ok,” it’s because at that time—in the first hours and days after the fire—I didn’t know anything except that I wasn’t ok. Or when the nice tidy love-lines of “Highway 12” explode into messy fragmented lines at the reappearance of trauma, it’s because I was ripped out of quiet peace when we turned a corner in the road. It wasn’t intentional, and maybe it all surprised me.
Throughout the whole experience of life after the fire, there was never a smooth, unblemished fabric, except maybe in the briefest moments of love. But no, not even then. I would be ok for a minute, an hour, and then another stitch would come unravelled: at the memory of a mushroom cloud, or the smell of smoke, or the sight of an empty fridge with the closest grocery store now an hour away.
During and after the writing process, I spent countless hours editing the poems. At first they were all on the typewriter, and each set of revisions meant I would retype the whole stack of poems, weighing the changes, reading them aloud, adjusting spacing by a fraction of an inch or travelling a long path of synonyms to find the right word. That’s when I started to notice themes that run through the book, and to find meaning behind so many of the unintentional decisions. And editing, too, more than writing, gave me control over those memories. I could distill them down, refine them, make them beautiful, and they would no longer have control over me.
For me, more than anything, Burning Sage is a love story.
You mentioned visiting the ruins of your café there. While your house survived, you lost your business, Klowa Art Café, to the fire. Are you planning to rebuild?
Klowa was a really special place, but I can’t rebuild. I had insurance that was enough to rebuild at the time of the fire; with the bureaucratic delays and narratives of toxicity and supply chain shortages and many other circumstances, though, the quotes a year later were coming in at more than double my policy limit. In other words, I would have had to find an additional $350,000 or more just to rebuild the little building that I had. Impossible.
My only other option was to hire a lawyer to negotiate a settlement with the insurance company for the subjective “actual cash value” of the building, which was substantially lower than my insurance policy limit and, in the end, was just enough to pay the lawyer and clear the two mortgages that I’d still been paying on that burned-up property. The claim was finally settled in September 2023, two years and three months after the fire, and I own an empty piece of land where Klowa once stood.
I’m so sorry. While you can’t rebuild Klowa, do you see writing Burning Sage as a small way of rebuilding what was lost?
I was going to say no, that it hasn’t been a part of rebuilding what I lost, that it honours the memory but what’s gone is gone… but maybe I’m wrong.
A little while ago, I was telling a dear friend—someone who lost her home to the fire—that a surprising part of sharing my experience with the world has been how people then share theirs with me: their story, their grief, their emotion. It’s as if through honesty and vulnerability and a raw form of beauty, the book makes them feel safe to be vulnerable, to be themselves. And she answered, “But Meghan, don’t you know that Klowa was that for us, too?”
Meghan Fandrich lives with her young daughter on the edge of Lytton, BC, the village that was destroyed by wildfire in 2021. She spent her childhood and much of her adult life there, in Nlaka’pamux Territory, where two rivers meet and sagebrush-covered hills reach up into mountains. For almost a decade, she ran Klowa Art Café, a beloved and vibrant part of the community; Klowa was lost to the flames. Burning Sage is Meghan’s debut poetry collection.
Rob Taylor’s fifth poetry collection Weather will be published by Gaspereau Press in Spring 2024. He lives with his family in Port Moody, BC. You can read more of his interviews on his website.