Shy

by Naomi K. Lewis

  During the break, I approached Marilyn Dumont. She was deep in discussion with Aruna, their voices animated and their expressions warm. As I quietly waited a few steps away for an appropriate moment to interrupt, the familiar anxiety brewed inside me. Moments earlier, I had been comfortable talking to her in front of the entire class; now I was terrified of asking her to sign my copy of her book. I almost backed away several times. I should have realized it didn’t matter whether I had anything clever to say.

  She asked my name, then inscribed the book, her pen moving over the title page, filling more space than I’d ever expected. I waited until I was out of sight before opening the cover. This is what she wrote: “It is a great loss to the world that we didn’t know what our own voice sounded like until age thirty.”

  I stood outside the building where we held our class, a cold fall wind slapping my face as I read the inscription several times. A wad of grief stopped my throat. I understood she was right. And I was not alone amongst the unseen and unheard. I’d never been.

  Contributors

  RONA ALTROWS has won the W.O. Mitchell Book Prize and the Brenda Strathern Prize for her fiction. She is the author of two collections of short stories, A Run On Hose and Key In Lock. Her stories and personal essays have been published widely in literary magazines. She also writes articles on the art and craft of writing and works as a freelance book editor. She has served as Writer-in-Residence for the Calgary Public Library and the Alexandra Writers’ Centre Society.

  DEBBIE BATEMAN belongs to the secret cult of writers who wake in the small hours and write before the demands of the day can take away their creative energy. It started when her children were young and 4:00 A.M. was the only time she could be certain of privacy. Her sons are men now, but the habit has remained. She recently finished her first novel and is now working on a collection of linked short stories. She supports her creative work by editing and writing learning materials for educational institutions, emergency services organizations, and the oil industry.

  WADE BELL is the author of Tracie’s Revenge (2012), No Place Fit for a Child (2009), A Destroyer of Compasses (2003), all published by Guernica Editions, and The North Saskatchewan River Book, stories set in Edmonton and Jasper, published by Coach House Press. From Edmonton, he has lived in Ottawa, Barcelona and Vulpellach, Spain, and Calgary.

  ALEX BOYD is a Toronto poet. His books are Making Bones Walk (2007) and The Least Important Man (2012).

  JANIS BUTLER HOLM lives in Athens, Ohio, where she has served as Associate Editor for Wide Angle, the film journal. Her essays, stories, poems, and performance pieces have appeared in small-press, national, and international magazines. Her plays have been produced in the US, Canada, and England.

  BRIAN CAMPBELL’s most recent collection is Passenger Flight (Signature Editions, 2009). His work has appeared in numerous reviews, including CV2, Prairie Fire, The New Quarterly, and The Saranac Review. In 2006 he was shortlisted for the CBC Literary Award for Poetry; in 2011, he received a Canada Council grant toward the completion of his third collection. Campbell lives in Montreal. It particularly pleases him that “Women Friends,” which he previously had been too shy to submit, has finally found a suitable print-home more than a quarter century after it was written.

  WEYMAN CHAN, a finalist for the 2008 Governor General’s Award for his second book of poetry, Noise from the Laundry, divides his time between writing, family, electron micrographs, and non-sequitur fluxes in spacetime, brought on by insomnia….Catfish. His latest book, Chinese Blue, is an auto-replicated biography that unsuccessfully exceeds the impersonal.

  LORNA CROZIER’s books have won the Governor General’s, the Canadian Authors Association, and two Pat Lowther Awards. A member of the Royal Society of Canada and a Distinguished Professor at the University of Victoria, she has published fifteen poetry collections, the most recent The Blue Hour of the Day: Selected Poems and Small Mechanics. She has received three honourary doctorates for her contribution to Canadian literature, and in 2011 became an Officer of the Order of Canada. She has read her work around the world. A memoir, Small Beneath the Sky, was published by Greystone Books in 2009. Concurrently, a Spanish translation of her poems, La Perspectiva del Gato, was published by Trilce Ediciones in Mexico City. Her newest book, The Book of Marvels: A Compendium of Everyday Things, was one of the Globe and Mail’s top 100 books of 2012.

  MIKE DUGGAN is a poet of Anglo-Irish descent. Married to a drama teacher, he is proud father of triplets—twin girls and a boy—the amazing result of IVF. He works as manager of an electrical wholesale outlet and recently completed a degree in English with the Open University. His poems have appeared in The Rialto, Poetry & Audience, and Magma, and he is working toward his first collection.

  BEN GELINAS is a writer and editor currently based in Edmonton. He worked for a handful of years as a crime reporter for the Edmonton Journal, while also dabbling in arts writing. He left newspapers in 2011 for work as a story and dialogue editor at Edmonton-based video-game company BioWare.

  ELIZABETH GREENE has published two collections of poetry, The Iron Shoes (Hidden Brook, 2007) and Moving (Inanna, 2010). A third collection, Understories, is due out from Inanna in 2014. One of her poems was a finalist for the Descant/Winston Collins Prize in 2012. She has edited/co-edited five books, including We Who Can Fly: Poems, Essays and Memories in Honour of Adele Wiseman (Cormorant, 1997), which won the Betty and Morris Aaron Award for Best Scholarship on a Canadian Subject. She taught English at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario, for many years. She lives in Kingston with her son and three cats.

  VIVIAN HANSEN is a Calgary poet and activist. She has run poetry workshops for The John Howard Society and Inn from the Cold literacy initiatives, and for youth at risk. She has published the chapbooks Never Call It Bird: The Melodies of AIDS and Angel Alley: Jack the Ripper’s Victims. Her poetry collection Leylines of My Flesh (Touchwood, 2002) explores the experiences of Danish immigrants. Hansen holds an MFA in creative writing from the University of British Columbia. She was the 2012 Writer-in-Residence for the Danish Canadian National Museum in Dickson, Alberta, and her book A Bitter Mood of Clouds is forthcoming from Frontenac House.

  ELIZABETH HAYNES’s writing has appeared in magazines including Alberta Views, Room, The Capilano Review, The Malahat Review, and Prism as well as anthologies, most recently Walk Myself Home: An anthology to end violence against women (Caitlin Press, 2010). She’s won the Western Magazine Award for fiction, the American Heart Association Award for fiction, and the Jon Whyte essay competition, twice. Her short fiction collection, Speak Mandarin Not Dialect (Thistledown Press) was a finalist for the Alberta Book Awards. Haynes is a Speech-Language Pathologist at the Institute for Stuttering Treatment and Research (an institute of the University of Alberta).

  STEVEN HEIGHTON’s most recent books are Workbook (memos and dispatches on writing), Patient Frame (a poetry collection), and Every Lost Country (a novel). His 2005 novel, Afterlands, appeared in six countries; was a New York Times Book Review editors’ choice; and was a best-of-year choice in ten publications in Canada, the US, and the UK. Heighton’s poems and stories have appeared in many publications—including London Review of Books, Poetry, Tin House, TLR, The Walrus, and Best English Stories—and have received four gold National Magazine Awards. He has also been nominated for the Governor General’s Award and Britain’s W.H. Smith Award.

  JENNIFER HOULE’s work has appeared in numerous publications including The Antigonish Review, The Fiddlehead, Arc, Room, Prairie Fire, CV2, and Dandelion. She was the recipient of the Writers’ Federation of New Brunswick’s 2011 Alfred G. Bailey Poetry Prize. She lives in Fredericton, New Brunswick.

  I.B. (BUNNY) ISKOV is the founder of The Ontario Poetry Society. Her work has been published in several literary journals and anthologies. She has published two full poetry collections and many chapbooks. Her newest collection is In a Wintered Nest, published by Serengeti Press in the fall of 2013.

  EVE
S. KRAKOW is a writer, journalist, and translator. Her stories and essays have appeared in lichen literary journal, Smithsonian Magazine, Cahoots, Quebec Heritage News, and Writings (Volume Two), an anthology by the Montreal branch of the Canadian Authors Association. She lives in Montreal, Quebec, with her husband and two children.

  SHAWNA LEMAY is a writer, blogger, editor, Getty Images artist, and library assistant. She is the creator and editor of the website Canadian Poetries. She resides in Edmonton with her partner, Robert Lemay, a visual artist, and their daughter, Chloe.

  NAOMI K. LEWIS grew up in Ottawa and lives in Calgary. Her novel Cricket in a Fist was published in 2008, and she co-wrote Spencer Beach’s bestselling 2010 memoir, In Case of Fire. Lewis was the 2011 Writer-in-Residence at the Calgary Public Library. Her 2012 story collection, I Know Who You Remind Me Of, won Enfield & Wizenty’s Colophon Prize and was shortlisted for the Alberta Readers’ Choice Award and the Georges Bugnet Award for Fiction.

  SHIRLEY LIMBERT lived and wrote in Prince Edward Island. She told tales since she was quite small, and at fourteen wrote for Tiny Tots, a national children’s magazine in England. In May 2001 she achieved a lifelong ambition and published a book of poems, Lilacs Year to Year. A book of creative non-fiction, Seachange Cottage, came out in April 2005. Her third book, Melanie: A Love Story, Limbert’s first lesbian novel, was published in February 2007. Her poems, articles, and award-winning short stories have appeared in publications including Our Lives, By Word of Mouth, Kaleidoscope, Island Moments, Tide Lines, and A Time of Trial: Beyond the Terror of 9/11. Shirley Limbert died peacefully at home on June 10, 2013.

  CAROL L. MACKAY is an introvert living on Vancouver Island. Her poems have been heard on CBC Radio and have recently appeared in The Fiddlehead, Prairie Journal, and Existere. Her introvert tendencies can keep her from actively participating in readings, but she does, on occasion, suck it up and present her work in public. Her closest friends don’t believe she is shy.

  MICHELINE MAYLOR’s latest book, Whirr and Click, is available through Frontenac House. She teaches creative writing at Mount Royal University and edits FreeFall Magazine in Calgary. She thanks all the authors at Wordfest for inspiring her shyness poem.

  DON MCKAY has written many books of poetry, including Paradoxides (2012), and several volumes of essays addressing wilderness poetics, including The Shell of the Tortoise (2011). He has received a number of awards, including the Governor General’s Award, twice, and the Griffin Poetry Prize. He lives in St. John’s, Newfoundland. “Sometimes a Voice (1)” appears in Another Gravity (2000).

  STUART IAN MCKAY is a member of the Writers’ Guild of Alberta and the League of Canadian Poets. He is a two-time winner of CBC’s Alberta Anthology. Stele of Several Ladies: a long poem, his first book, was published in 2005. He lives in Calgary. “a more blissful orbit” is from a manuscript in progress and was set to music by resident musicians at the Banff Centre for the Arts in February 2010. McKay’s newest book of poetry is a cognate of prayer (2013).

  BRUCE MEYER is professor of English at Georgian College and the inaugural poet laureate for the City of Barrie. He is author or editor of thirty-four books of poetry, fiction, non-fiction, pedagogy, literary journalism, and emblemata. His most recent books are Mesopotamia, Dog Days, Alphabet Table, Alphabestiary (with H. Masud Taj), The White Collar Book (with Carolyn Meyer), and A Book of Bread.

  JEFF MILLER is the author of the short-story collection Ghost Pine: All Stories True (Invisible Publishing, 2010). He lives in Montreal and spends his summers in Jeddore, Nova Scotia.

  DHANA MUSIL is a 2011 graduate of The Writer’s Studio at Simon Fraser University. Her creative non-fiction has won several awards and has been published in various newspapers and publications. She is currently working on her memoir, which chronicles the decade she spent living and loving in the underworld of Japan. Dhana lives in Vancouver with her partner, two daughters, and two cats.

  LORI D. ROADHOUSE is a Calgary writer, poet, and aphorist. She founded the Hilltop Writers critiquing group, and co-created the 2003 Writing Toward the Light Poetry Contest/Concert. She is a member of the Writers’ Guild of Alberta and the Alexandra Writers’ Centre Society. Roadhouse is a board member of the Single Onion Poetry Society. From 2008 to 2010, she was co-artistic director, performer, and MC of Lotus Land at South Country Fair. She was the 2009 poet-in-residence for Radiant Lights E-Magazine. She is a featured reader at poetry and spoken word events, and has been published in many magazines, newsletters, websites, radio programs, CDS, and anthologies.

  KERRY RYAN lives and writes in Winnipeg. Her first full-length collection of poetry, The Sleeping Life, was published by The Muses’ Company in 2008 and shortlisted for the Aqua Books Lansdowne Prize for Poetry. Her second book, Vs., a collection of poems about boxing, was published by Anvil Press in 2010 and was a finalist for the Acorn-Plantos Award for People’s Poetry.

  SYDNEY SHARPE is an award-winning, bestselling author of such books as The Gilded Ghetto: Women and Political Power in Canada; Storming Babylon: Preston Manning and the Rise of the Reform Party (with Don Braid), and Staying in the Game: The Remarkable Story of Doc Seaman. Her most recent book is Seeking the Summit: Sam Switzer’s Story of Building and Giving. Educated at Calgary’s Bowness High School, the University of Alberta, and McGill University, Sharpe was a tenured professor of anthropology and left academia to become a writer. She has been a senior columnist for the Calgary Herald, Calgary Bureau Chief for the Financial Post, and a press gallery member in Ottawa. Also, she’s shy.

  NATALIE SIMPSON’s first book, accrete or crumble, was published by LINEbooks in 2006. Her poetry has also appeared in the anthologies Shift & Switch (Mercury) and Post-Prairie (Talonbooks). She is a former managing editor of filling Station magazine and intermittently publishes limited-edition chapbooks through her press, edits all over. She practises law in Calgary.

  SYLVIA STOPFORTH is a university archivist and reference librarian whose fiction has appeared in Room and TNQ; she has also published work-related articles and book reviews, and serves as volunteer editor of a column in BC History: The Journal of the British Columbia Historical Federation. She lives with her husband in White Rock, BC.

  DAVID VAN BUREN grew up in Westchester County, New York. He graduated from SUNY at Oneonta, with a BS in English. Since the mid-1970s, he’s worked as an editor and writer for various companies in both New York and Dublin—where he moved in 1991, and currently lives with his wife and five children. Writing credits include poems published in various journals, a weekly column (“An American In Dublin”) for the Irish Voice Newspaper (NYC), and a children’s picture book, I Love You as Big as the World, published in 2008 by Little Tiger Press (London) and Good Books (USA).

  ARITHA VAN HERK is the author of five novels: Judith, The Tent Peg, No Fixed Address, Places Far From Ellesmere (a geografictione), and Restlessness. Her critical work is collected in A Frozen Tongue and In Visible Ink; she has published hundreds of articles, reviews, and essays. Mavericks: An Incorrigible History of Alberta won the Grant MacEwan Author’s Award for Alberta Writing. That book frames the Alberta history exhibition at the Glenbow Museum and Archives; Audacious and Adamant: The Story of Maverick Alberta, accompanies it. Van Herk’s words accompany George Webber’s photographs in In This Place: Calgary 2004–2011 and Prairie Gothic.

  RUSSELL WANGERSKY is a writer, editor, and columnist from St. John’s, Newfoundland and Labrador. His books include the firefighting memoir Burning Down the House: Fighting Fires and Losing Myself (2008), the novel The Glass Harmonica (2010), and the short-story collections The Hour of Bad Decisions (2006), and Whirl Away (2012), which was shortlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize.

  CASSY WELBURN is a poet and storyteller who has had her work published in FreeFall Magazine, The Antigonish Review, and a variety of anthologies, as well as broadcast on CBC radio. She enjoys sharing her work at storycafés and festivals around Canada.

  MADELAINE WONG is a former schoolteacher who
now dedicates her time to writing and caring for her family. She has been published in the Copperfield Review, Dark Gothic Resurrected, and Toska Magazine and won FreeFall Magazine’s chapbook contest in 2010. She self-published her mother’s biography, Cradling the Past: A Biography of Margaret Shaw. When she was a shy teenager, Wong’s imagination was fired by the adventure, violence, and magic of Roman and Greek mythology, and the ancient myths continue to influence her writing.

  ELAINE WOO facilitates writing classes for Megaphone Magazine’s Community Program. She is membership coordinator for CWILA (Canadian Women in the Literary Arts). She recently published in Arc, poetrypacific.blogspot.com, Ricepaper, V6A, Earthwalk, and The Enpipe Line, and was shortlisted for the 2012 City of Vancouver Book Award. Her art-song collaboration, “Night-time Symphony,” with composer Daniel Marshall earned a festival prize from the Boston Metro Opera in early 2013.

  ELIZABETH ZOTOVA Only child, Siberian-born introvert. Domestically inclined. Likes Scrabble, wine, fruit trees, and spoiling her parrots with reckless abandon.

  Permissions

  Alex Boyd’s “The Culture of Shyness” was previously published in The Least Important Man (Biblioasis, 2012). Reprinted by permission of the publisher.

  Janis Butler Holm’s “Are You an Introvert? Take This Simple Quiz” was previously published in Sketch (No. 1, 2009).

  Weyman Chan’s “that animal” and “to the red-haired girl on eighth” were previously published in Chinese Blue (Talonbooks, 2012). Reprinted by permission of the publisher.

  Lorna Crozier’s “Watching My Lover” was previously published in The Blue Hour of the Day (McClelland & Stewart, 2007). Reprinted by permission of the publisher.