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Academic Writing

Simon Fraser University

Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences

In-Depth Definitions

English 341: The Long 1930's

Prof. Mary Ann Gilles

Class

Class is a concept which refers to the categorization of people within a society by dividing them according to socio-economic status and culture. The wealthy, the middle class and the working classes rarely mix not only due to discrepancies in relative wealth but also because the adaptive manners and internalized values intrinsic to each tend to contradict those of the others. Orwell refers to this in The Road to Wigan Pier, when he is explaining why it is nearly impossible to get exploited employees from the middle and working classes to join together to fight for their rights. He says (as a middle-class person), "Economically I am in the same boat with the miner…But culturally I am different from them. Lay emphasis on that and you may arm me against them." (Orwell 213) He decides that trying to break class distinctions is far too difficult a project for the short term. These ingrained behaviours, manners and values run too deep. Instead, he argues for the de-emphasizing of such distinctions in the interest of putting together a socialist party large enough to make considerable change. He says, "I am implying that different classes must be persuaded to act together without, for the moment, being asked to drop their class differences." (Orwell 211)

Works cited:

Orwell, George. The Road to Wigan Pier. London, Penguin Books, 1987.

Documentary

Documentary is a factual genre often accompanied by a serious tone. We are meant to think of it as true, perhaps bringing hidden things to light. ("Documentary Film") In Orwell's The Road to Wigan Pier, his prose marches forth unrelenting and unadorned. His descriptions lack the glowing adjectives and long-winded sensory experiences of those in Holtby's South Riding. He does not mince words when he states, "Here am I, sitting writing in front of my coal fire. It is April but I still need a fire." (Orwell 29) Compare this to Holtby's description of a season in South Riding:

"Mothers with laden paper carriers and aching varicose veins pushed

prams back to hot crowded lodgings; elderly gentlemen in nautical blue jackets

leaned on iron railings and turned telescopes…upon the charms of Kingsport

nymphs emerging from their final bathe. The tide was coming in, a lid of opaque

grey glass sliding quietly over littered shingle." (Holtby 52)

His economy of words pulls back all else to reveal their intent - to observe the fact of the absolute necessity of coal in that society, and to educate us by encouraging us to ruminate on the implications of this given the treatment of miners and their working-class counterparts.

Works Cited:

Holtby, Winifred. South Riding. London, Virago Press, 2010.

Orwell, George. The Road to Wigan Pier. London, Penguin Books, 1987.

"Documentary Film." Definition. Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Documentary film - WikipediaLinks to an external site. Accessed Feb 1, 2023.

Social Realism

The genre of social realism depicts the true conditions of the lives of people, often lower class, who are struggling with unjust burdens placed on them by society. Social realism is a means of protesting these conditions by those who lead the charge for change, namely, people who identify politically as left-wing. Winifred Holtby uses this genre in her text, South Riding. In the case of the disabled yet mentally astute widow Miss Roper, "She was indeed deplorably deformed…Her hands were so cruelly distorted by lumps and swellings that they were more like monstrous fungi than human members." (Holtby 295-6) The woman was asked all kinds of personal questions by the council to determine whether she should receive some support rather than be sent to an "institution." (Holtby 297) This scene brings to light the invasive process that even badly disabled individuals had to go through to obtain social assistance.

Works Cited:

Holtby, Winifred. South Riding. London, Virago Press, 2010.

English Essays

English 413: Literature and Environments

Prof. Margaret Linley

Lost Lagoon as Radical Resistance to Colonial Dispossession of Land

Poet Pauline Johnson was the child of a Canadian Mohawk father and an English-American mother. She was widely influential as a writer and poet at the turn of the 20th century, known for her romantic style and advocacy in “Indian” poetry, as well as presenting humans in harmony with nature. (Dickson 3-5) In an initial reading of The Lost Lagoon, Johnson represents the sorrows felt at the loss of intimacy with nature in the form of an elegy. Scholars have enunciated the significance of this. Professor Steve Dickson’s theoretical situation of this poem focuses on its importance from an eco-critical standpoint. Citing Timothy Morton, he emphasizes the eco-elegaic nature of the poem, (Dickinson 1) and the oft-overlooked emphasis on the “interconnectedness” (Dickinson 1) of all the natural elements in her poems. I propose a further niched, activist angle to the dominant interpretations of this poem as an elegy for nature alone. The human element is an inalienable component to its interpretation. Read politically, this is a poem of radical resistance to colonization which contradicts dominant colonial ideologies of the time and subverts assertions used to dispossess Aboriginal people of the land. It mourns the process of displacement while at the same time criticizing it.

Colonizers used several strategies to dispossess Aboriginal dwellers from the land they wanted: evoking temporality, legalizing strict categorization of race which dictated land use, and separating the elements of the ecosystem and humans from the ecosystem. The colonial ideology at the time included the assumption that humans were separate from and above nature and intended to dominate it, regardless of ecological consequences.

The fact that the poem, The Lost Lagoon, and the critical reading: Imperial Legacies, (Post) Colonial Identities: Law, Space and Making of Stanley Park, 1859-2001, are written about the same geographical location feed into a discussion of a case study that is both broadly applicable and locally specific. It is paradigmatic of Johnson in particular, to be non-specific when representing people, especially Aboriginals. There were several reasons for this, some better than others. If the speaker is undefined, it could be anyone: native, white, or mixed-race, as Johnson was. This encourages the suspension of assumptions to do with race and sex, fostering empathy with the speaker, helping the audience to receive the poem on a deeper level, bypassing cultural biases. (Thommasen) This element in her work has not gone unnoticed, as scholarly criticism of her work often focuses on “the way in which her poetry and short stories textually play out her different cultural influences by blending together distinct aesthetics and traditions.” (Dickinson 3)

Such blending is a key feature of this poem. In The Lost Lagoon, and The Song My Paddle Sings. Johnson subverts assertions of colonial role allocation according to category by deliberately obscuring the race of her speaker. (Thommasen discussion post) In The Lost Lagoon, the only clues the reader has to their identity are that they like nature, have a companion in stanza one, referred to by the phrase, “we two;” (Johnson) that they “hear the call of the singing firs” (Johnson) in stanzas two and three, and they have a canoe which they paddle around the lagoon. The one-ness of their surroundings and the mutability of time also speak of Aboriginal narration more broadly. But no tribe is identified. Some of these are first nations images, but it could be a mixed-race person, a man or a woman. Blurring categories between peoples and groups was problematic for colonial authorities, (Mawani 121) as it would have rendered their laws less capable of dispossessing all of the Aboriginals from the land. (Mawani 121) Rigid categories were necessary to limit those with ‘legitimate’ claims to land rights. “If mixed race peoples were defined as 'Indians', authorities feared that they could…gain access to…land, hunting and fishing rights.” (Mawani 121) Specifically, The Brockton Point residents were concerning to authorities. There were a number of mixed-race families that had lived there for several generations by the turn of the century. (Mawani) “The fluidity as opposed to fixity of their racial identities…raised anxieties for colonial administrators.” (Mawani 121)

Similarly, Johnson contradicts the settler mindset of the separateness of the individual elements of the lagoon by blurring the distinctions between them. She does this to emphasize the interconnectedness of the elements of nature. The “gulls,” the “firs,” the “moon,” and “you,” (Stanza 2, lines 3-5) would have all been characters with individual spirits and voices in Coast Salish spirituality. Yet the individuals are gone together because the ecosystem needs all of its elements to function optimally and to support healthy biodiversity. () This is symbolic of First Nations culture as a whole in the process of erasure by forces beyond individual, and even corporate Aboriginal control.

In addition, Johnson was known for presenting humans in harmony with nature as opposed to colonial male writers of the time who showed humans dominating it. (Dickson 3-5) Dickson points out that “The Lost Lagoon necessarily brings together the general themes of nature and landscape[:] the solo female canoeist, intimacy, sensuality, love, and mourning over loss that extend through Johnson’s earlier poetry into a single poem that emphasizes the interconnectedness and intimacy between human beings.” (Dickson 1) In The Lost Lagoon, she naturalizes the harmony of humans and nature. For example, the speaker describes the land as pristine and dispossessed of the mysterious “you.” They say, “Gone are the depths of blue…and the old canoe, the singing firs, and the dusk, and you.” (Johnson Stanza 2, lines 2-4) “Gone,” (Johnson Stanza 2, ln 2,5) superficially refers to the loss of the water during low tide. However, other things are gone too, including the moon, the firs, and you. Therefore, this probably represents something beyond just the disappearing lagoon. It could be a lover, as others have suggested, or a plural ‘you,’ referring to Aboriginal peoples to which she has blood ties. Or it could be a personal friend who was evicted from their home on Brockton Point.

Finally, Johnson evokes the mutability and temporality of the lagoon to illustrate the current tenuous nature of Aboriginals’ intimacy with the land and their dispossession from it. In the 1st stanza she uses the words, “dreaming,” “dusk,” “away,” “drift,” “twilight,” (Johnson ln 1-4) which speak of temporal states of flux. In the second stanza, she evokes temporality with the phrases: “Beneath the drift/ Beneath the drowse.” (Johnson ln 3-4) The speaker and friend, ‘we two,’ (Johnson ln 2) are subject to a colonial force greater than themselves that is causing the changes. The moon is “golden,” (Johnson Stanza 1, ln 5) as it is in transition from day to night. That is the only time the moon seems golden. It could refer to relationships that were sweet, and now are gone. In contrast, colonial authorities evoked temporality to force Aboriginal (First Nations and Mixed-Race) people to be labelled as illegal squatters. “Ideas of illegality were also articulated through discussions about the temporality of the resident's homes…and contrasted…with the rooted-ness, civility and permanency embodied by European colonisers.” (Mawani 120)

Works Cited:

Bollwitt, Rebecca. The History of Lost Lagoon. Miss 604: since 2004. 28 Jan 2016. The History of Lost Lagoon » Vancouver Blog Miss604

Dickinson, Steve. "To Hear the Call of the Singing Firs: (Re)Reading E. Pauline Johnson’s Lost Lagoon as Eco-

Elegy." Making 19th Century Literary Environments, English 435. (Spring 2017) View of To “Hear the Call of

the Singing Firs”: (Re)Reading E. Pauline Johnson’s “Lost Lagoon” as Eco-Elegy | ENG 435: Making

Nineteenth-Century Literary Environments (sfu.ca) Accessed July 31, 2023.

Johnson, Pauline Emily. "The Lost Lagoon." Poetry Nook: Poems for every occasion. Poem: The Lost Lagoon by

Emily Pauline Johnson (poetrynook.com) Accessed 31 July 2023.

Mawani, Renisa. "Imperial Legacies, Post-Colonial Identities: Law, Space, and Making of Stanley Park, 1859-

2001." Law, Text, Culture. 7 (98) 2003. Hein Online. Downloaded 23 Oct 2021.

"'Life in the Bush' as Cure for Personal and Societal Ills," Excerpt

"In Land as Pedagogy, Leanne Simpson presents Nishnaabeg education as self-directed, other supported, and non-performative. This fits the description of a society ‘in control of itself and aware of itself;’ the ideal that western societies should aim for, according to Horkheimer and Adorno. (James 2) If the title of the book, Noopiming, were taken literally, it could function as not only an ironic statement, but also an answer. Being in the bush is Simpson’s idea of a cure, for not only the personal malaise Moodie presents in terms of her depression, negative attitude, vastly disproportionate fear of top predators, and prejudice against indigenous lifeways, but also for the ills of settler colonialism. These include gaslighting of immigrants about pioneer living conditions in Canada, and wealth discrepancies and constant striving for position in the colonies and in Britain.

While there are many things going on in the book, Noopiming meditates on the idea that living in the bush is a way of educating and healing people and communities through revitalizing their relationship to the land and its elements. If we read Susannah Moodie’s chapter of Roughing it in the Bush through the lens of ‘living and learning in the bush the indigenous way’ as cure, we find evidence that it works to clear up her settler malaise, as well as the societal malaise she presents in Canadian settler colonialism. Interestingly, this model also works as a better path to Horkheimer and Adorno’s society ‘aware of itself and in control of itself,’ than the capitalism model. It allows for a ground-up approach which results in non-toxic, non-performative education and work, and a sustainable society in terms of the individual, the society and the planet."

Works Cited

James, David. “Self-mastery and universal history: Horkheimer and Adorno on the conditions of a society 'in control of itself'.” Philosophy and Social Criticism. Sage, 2016, Warwick Research Archive

Portal. http://wrap.warwick.ac.uk/83538.

Malm, Andreas and Hornburg, Alf. “The geology of mankind? A critique of the Anthropocene narrative.” The

Anthropocene Review: Perspectives and Controversies. 1(1) 62-69. Sage, 2014, anr.sagepub.com. DOI:

10.1177/2053019613516291.

Maracle, Lee. “Goodbye Snauq.” First Wives Club: Coast Salish Style. Theytus Books,1950, Penticton.

Moodie, Susannah. “Chapter Fifteen: The Wilderness, and Our Indian Friends”. Roughing it in the Bush or Life in

Canada. 1852. Unattributed article excerpt. Downloaded from course materials. 08 August 2023.

Simpson, Leanne Betsamosake. Chapter 9: “Land As Pedagogy.” As We Have Always Done: Indigenous Freedom

Through Radical Resistance. Project Muse, University of Minnesota Press, 2017, muse.jhu.edu/book/55843.

Simpson, Leanne Betsamosake. Noopiming: The Cure for White Ladies. House of Anansi. 2020. Traditional Lands

of Many Nations, Treaty lands of the Mississaugas.

Creative Writing

Short Stories & Excerpts

Requiem

Isobel sat up in bed, breathless. Her night shirt and pillow were damp. Blue moonlight spilled through the open window onto her bed, casting strange shapes on the wall.

The soapy moon rose high above the treeline, white-faced against the navy night. The shape engraved on its face was that of a wolf posed in a perpetual howl. Isobel got up and peeled off the wet shirt. She found a tank top and an old sweatshirt in one of the drawers and put them on.

Outside it was dark but not too cold. She could feel the grain of the wooden boards beneath her bare feet as she walked across the porch. Isobel's arms alighted on the top rung of the porch railing; she cocked her head to the side, staring out into the yard.

The nearly rectangular plot of grass was edged on three sides by the forest that ran uninterrupted for thousands of hectares. In the yard's centre stood a crumbling cement fountain. A glassy layer of rainwater had collected above the murky, stagnant water below.

The fountain drew her to itself. It was unassuming, made of soft grey concrete, pitted by the rain, mute and reflective. The first time she'd stared into it, she had seen something moving, coming up from far below. Right now, all was still. Caressed by night breezes, her forearms grew pimply. Translucent waves rippled out as she trailed a fingertip through the water.

Then she heard it – a shriek ending in a squawk-like hiss. She cocked her head and waited: it was coming from the forest, on the side of the house that was nearest the road. The Woman had set the boundaries out clearly: she was not allowed beyond the edges of the lawn. Isobel's face felt the cold prick of the first raindrops as she stepped onto the grass. She shrugged off a shiver of guilt as she moved to from the grass and into the trees, following the strange, forlorn cries.

The greatness of the woods swallowed her as she stepped beneath the arc of branches and onto the trail. It was dark under the canopy. But as her eyes adjusted, the analogous grey became punctuated by silver highlights.

There it was again – like an owl screech, resounding off the tree trunks. Isobel hurried toward it, then corrected herself. She moved through the brush, receding into herself, trying to be as quiet and "animal" as possible, all the while feeling bluntly awkward. The little twigs that littered the ground snapped beneath her feet as if to thwart her.

Every time she thought she'd found it: in a grotto of ferns; under the upturned roots of a tree; beneath a thick huckleberry bush growing out of a rotting stump; the noise would move, leading her further into the forest. She had noticed the ground start climbing.

Isobel halted only when a stream too wide to leap across transected her path. She rested one foot on a log, catching her breath. The mists curled down from the mountainside here, like a tablecloth, unfurling over an outcropping of bare rock overlooking the stream.

Looking within and immediate, she must have blinked or turned away, but then looked back. Standing on the table, proud and muscular-chested, was a cougar. Kohl-lined eyes wild and intense, it stared out at the world. Isobel blinked, scarcely believing, and saw it regard her. Then with a flick of the tail, it leaped away into the mist.

After that there were no more cries. Isobel headed back in the direction of the house, damp and exhausted.

She woke up in her bed, to the sound of The Woman yelling, loudly. Apparently she'd slept through three snooze cycles of the alarm clock and most of the tirade as well. The tears that hadn't oozed out in days were not so easily held back. Not until after The Woman stalked out of the room did she sit up and push back the covers. It was time to go to school.

In the daylight, the raw sienna of her skin showed up warm against the stark white sheets. Isobel rubbed her arms, feeling cold. The sweatshirt was still damp but there was nothing else so she layered it over the hand-me-down t-shirt and jeans.

Walking out to the bus, the morning air felt cold. Dark and solid, the mountains rose like monoliths from the ground, towering thousands of feet high. Hearty clouds capped the sky, sealing her in.

Isobel slumped onto the couch afterschool and turned on the T.V. The Woman would be at work until five. She watched for a while and then went into the kitchen.

There was a note on the fridge:

"There's goat casserole if you want it."

She did. Waiting by the microwave for the food to heat, her legs were restless and cramping, muscles both sore and underused. The Woman's cat made some figure 8's through her legs, and she petted it, soft grey fur reverberating beneath her hand.

When Isobel was finished eating she scraped her plate into the garbage and closed the lid. Then she retreated to her room. The cat wanted to follow but she shut it out, ignoring the plaintive mews interspersed with flurries of indignant scratching on the door. It would give up eventually.

The endomorphic shadows on the wall caught her eye, deepening in the growing dusk. Long-fingered shapes played on a pallid wall. She saw her father's silhouette: long hair, broad shoulders and pot belly, and thought about the alcohol. The shadows lengthened and the dark intensified as she lay staring at them. The bed was an oblong expanse of sheet and blanket, and the hallway was the tireless road of an endless journey. She lay there, sober, thinking, weeping, dead-panning, then going through the cycle again. Her life was laid out before her, not like a slideshow or a vision but a spreadsheet, full of boxes containing different aspects of who, what, where and when. She mused over them until boredom had dried all the tears.

She did not know when sleep took over or even remember closing her eyes. The next thing she knew, the alarm was squawking. She slapped it off, only to be roused by The Woman coming in the door.

"Isobel, you have to get up. It's time to get ready for school," she said, then clacked down the hall on her shiny black boots. School was the only thing they really cared about, she thought, as The Woman walked away.

It had been three days since the accident, and since they had taken her into custody; three days since they had placed her with The Woman, in this unfamiliar house with it's strange smells.

They said they would look for her aunt, a much-older sister on her mother's side.

Isobel fidgeted with the buttons on her shirt, fingers trembling. She'd always been told that her mother had been aboriginal, from one of the tribes of the Coast Salish First Nations. She believed it, looking at her own black-brown hair and copper-coloured skin. Her father was white though, having contributed the freckles and green eyes that she saw in the mirror.

It was instant, they told her, that he had felt no pain as he left this world. And that was when it all went numb.

* * *

She was wakened after midnight, by Moon. Finally full, face washed and brilliant, it showed through an opening in the clouds. Isobel opened the window as she caught her breath and let the cool air wash over her febrile skin. Alarmingly close, a voice like a slide-pipe rose and fell: the call of a wolf. It was answered by two or three others far in the distance.

Isobel put on some jeans, socks, shoes and a hoodie before opening the sliding door and slipping out. The wind threw a sprinkle of rain in her face; she squinted and blew outa puff of air. The surface of the water in the fountain was rippling in the breeze.

Isobel touched it lightly with a finger. Instantly she felt the change, the magic in the water tingling under the skin. Her finger turned to lead, the heaviness of it tempting her to submerge her whole hand.

Would the metal make her invincible? She yielded to the force, each part becoming heavier as it was submerged. The water wanted her; and she wanted it, wanted the sea change. She let it pull her in up to the shoulder, whole arm turning dark and heavy. Then the rest of her body was sucked into the vortex.

It was dark. Isobel opened her eyes. She was standing in an upside-down world that mirrored her own. Gravity was the opposite here, so she stood without floating, anchored to the ground.

The landscape looked the same: there was the house with its porch and rust-coloured railing, and the forest and the mist streaming off the mountain. But the edges of things were rippled and blurred, as if underwater, and everything was tainted with shades of blue.

The pine trail through the trees was soggy. Ten feet onto it she saw something: a pellet like an owl's, made up entirely of grass, fur and bones. There were paw prints in the mud. Crouching to measure them, she found that they were long as her hands were wide, and taller than that. A new howl sang through the icy air, flaying her to the bone. Shivering, she wondered at the control and precision of its voice.

A new sound was coming from the direction of the house; the dum-doom, dum-doom, dum-doom of a rawhide drum. She recognized the sound of it instinctively, as if recalling a dream or pre-natal memory.

Isobel paused, then turned toward it, re-tracing her steps. The beating grew louder until she could not escape it: it reverberated through her whole being, pulsing in her veins, pushing out everything else. It was the loudest as she approached the fountain and looked into its face. Resting on top of the water was the reflection of the moon, and the face of the moon was a drum. The drum blurred, as if submerging deeper. When it came back into focus it was marked with the cougar totem, outlined in black, decorated in red and blue.

Isobel swallowed the moon, with its drum and cougar, and a face appeared in the water. It was a friendly face: a woman. She recognized something of the curve of its features, something about the nose and cheeks. This woman had black hair streaked with grey. The skin by her eyes crinkled as her mouth broke into a grin.

"Isobel," she said, "Welcome home."

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