writing fragments

“I will make tiny things today.” – that’s the message on a sticker I got in a Hello Writer package from Firefly Creative Writing about 18 months ago. I love that sticker (and its partner, “one clover, and a bee” from Emily Dickinson’s “To make a prairie”) and for a long time I didn’t want to stick it on anything at all because I didn’t want it to wear out. But finally, I decided I would be more likely to lose it if I didn’t stick it somewhere, so both ‘tiny things’ and ‘clover and bee’ are now on my computer lid, so I can see them and savour them every single day.

*sticker from Firefly Creative Writing’s Hello Writer program (sadly ended)*

Tiny things are my jam. Small stories. Fragments. Bits and pieces. Hints. Shadows. Archival dust.

I love speculating in the spaces between archival materials, at the points where story threads unravel. I love small and seemingly unimportant details. The backdrop of an old photo. The marginalia. The bit of ribbon. The wax seal still affixed to a letter, 250 years after it was put there. A splash of bright colour.

I love fragments. And I write fragments.

*wax seal on a letter sent to Samuel Auguste Tissot, an eighteenth-century celebrity doctor based in Lausanne, Switzerland.* *The Bibliothèque cantonale et universitaire de Lausanne* *is home to some 1300 letters written to Tissot during the second half of the eighteenth century.*

If I had to come up with a definition, I’d say that a fragment writer is someone who can see seemingly random or disparate things and bring them together into a new whole. The whole looks cohesive and complete, but is internally fractured, and the individual pieces don’t make sense without each other.

Writing fragments is an act of mending.

Fragments can be creative interventions. Provocations left in curious or unexpected places. Like affirmation quilts draped over railings or hanging in the woods . Or tiny cross stitch provocations attached to light poles. Or little hints of poetry graffiti. Or a friend’s guerrilla art practice. Or the trail of paper hearts I once blue-tacked from the front door of our residence hall to a friend’s door for her birthday and the way those hearts found their way all over the residence until we could find them in every single room, and on the weirdest things like the fire alarm in a practice room, or the pew of the disused chapel, or the door to the toilets at the end of the hall, or….

Fragments are an act of gathering.

*a gathering of sea urchin shells, somewhere near Heart’s Delight, Newfoundland and Labrador, 2017.*

Fragments are tactile. They are about texture and touch. They are also intense: they are a burst of colour. The tiny fairy painted onto a garden stone. The dahlia in full bloom. The small “Abortion is health care” poster stuck into a window.

Fragments are all the tiny grains of sand, each individual and beautiful if you look at them closely, but only ever understood in their multitudes.

The way the sun hits the Japanese maple at 3 pm in November. A trombonist playing “Misty” from a condo window at the waterfront in July. A snatch of misremembered (or misheard) conversation. A torn off shopping list. The moth hole near the bottom of a favourite skirt.

A snapshot. Or 100.

But fragments aren’t just about what’s inside the frame. They’re as much about what ‘s not visible. What happened after the misremembered conversation? Or when the sun went down on the Japanese maple? Or after the trombonist finished practicing jazz standards? What’s on the other missing half of the shopping list?

*Sandy beach, Point au Gaul, Newfoundland and Labrador, 2021.*

Fragments are about silences.

Fragments are about what happens behind, beyond, next to. They are about space, and how it can be filled, or left open. They are about Katie Gliddon, writing her suffragette diary in the margins of a book of Shelley’s poetry. They are Natalie Harkin’s Archival-Poetics, where poetry and archival materials and weaving mingle and resist to create an anti-colonial archive.

Fragments are about conversations that can only happen in the juxtaposition of silence and story. About the space that comes after the period.

Fragments are layers and frayed edges.

Fragments are the middle.
Always unfinished.
Never begun.

In my creative work, fragments are:

my love for any and all things archival (including oceans);

my quilting and stitching practice (and my need to keep on playing and experimenting with new things);
my passion for found poetry and playing with words and rhythm and sound;
my interest in micro essays (I co-authored a whole book of them….);
my neighbourhood walks, taking photos of the small things;
my penchant for asking questions and more questions and more questions (and following rabbit holes and more rabbit holes);
my love for bright markers and journals with pops of colour and words that stand out;
and…

Where do fragments appear in your life?

a quilt as deep as time

proactive