Featuring Caroline Topperman, Carolyne Van Der Meer, Karen Green, and Rajinderpal S. Pal
Caroline Topperman, author of Your Roots Cast a Shadow (Health Communications Inc, December 2024)
Sometime in 2011, I got the bright idea to leave Vancouver. It was a great city, but after living there for thirteen years, I had lost my connection with myself. I needed to live in a city that fed my soul. So, after claiming our Polish citizenships — a process that took roughly a year and a half — my husband and I made the big leap. We sold almost everything we owned and landed in Poland on the cusp of a major election that would change the course of the country for the next few years.
Unbeknownst to me when I first arrived in Warsaw, my flat was on the same street as the building where my parents were married. In fact, my paternal grandparents were also married there, on the corner of Smolna and Nowy Świat. My new home was around the corner from where my family once lived on Kopernika Street. It seemed as if every time I turned a corner, there was a memory, a piece of my family’s story, waiting to be discovered. Since my maternal family was evicted from the country in 1968 and my paternal family had disowned my father my parents did not speak a lot about their lives in Poland. So, many of the connections were up to me to make. Warsaw has an impressive stadium in the city center; it stands on the grounds of the arena my grandfather helped build for the Fifth World Festival of Youth and Students in 1955.
When my father arrived for a visit, he pointed out the Academy of Fine Arts where my mother studied interior design. It holds a prominent spot on the street I took to get to my ballet classes. I discovered that both my grandfathers had worked on the first metro system. My paternal grandfather had protested its build because it was designed for the ground depth of Moscow and did not take the Vistula River into account. These stories only continued to grow as we traveled north to Sopot on the Baltic, where my father lived immediately following the war, and south to the Tatry Mountain Range, where my mother’s family frequently hiked.
Tripping over the cobblestones that my parents and grandparents once walked, I learned their histories from a new perspective, and it became apparent that their voices needed to be heard even though they were no longer there to speak. I knew I could tell their story and my own. Even though I was in my family’s country decades after they had left, I was able to find parallels that helped me reconnect to my long-lost roots. Because of this, I was also able to connect with my peers, and that is when I realized that it is our stories that connect us. Having a deep understanding of our cultural backgrounds helps to develop a strong sense of self and the ability to understand someone else’s story and its impact on their worldview. I firmly believe that this shared awareness is the path to mutual cultural understanding.
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Born in Sweden and raised in Canada, in 2013 Caroline Topperman returned to her ancestral roots in Poland to live, and to explore her love of traveling and experiencing different cultures. From sampling authentic Neapolitan Pizzas in Naples, to photographing a piano, frozen in a river in Užupis, an independent artist’s republic in Lithuania, to pitching Poutine as a great comfort food to a local French baker in Poland. She speaks fluent English, Polish, and French. Caroline holds a BFA in screenwriting from York University (Toronto). Her book credits include Tell Me What You See: visual writing prompts for the wandering writer (One Idea Press) and a complementary guide to her blog, FitWise: straight talk about being fit & healthy. Caroline has written a column for Huffington Post Canada and was the Beauty Editor for British MODE.
Carolyne Van Der Meer, author of All This As I Stand By (Ekstasis Editions, 2024)
Why did I write this book? The short answer is that I had more to say. But it’s also more complicated than that—and was illuminated during a reading event in Toronto in mid-October. During a panel discussion, fellow poet Concetta Principe commented on the fact that in All This As I Stand By, there is not just poetry but fiction, that there is a kind of storytelling one would find in a novel or short story rather than a poem. I loved her observation because in fact, she’s right. When I set out to write this collection, I was wrestling with the concept of “I” and how, so often, readers of poetry expect the speaker in a poem, the “I,” to be the poet. I began to wonder if it was possible to write poetry outside of any assumptions about who the speaker might be. I especially wanted to experiment with writing “other people’s stories” and whether I could achieve the same power with these stories as with my own more personal stories.
In an Arvon House masterclass that I took this past summer, British poet Caroline Bird said something that resonated: “I am not the ‘I.’ The ‘I’ is the net I pull myself in with. That net helps you figure out which part of you it is.”
In other words, to tell someone’s story, some of “us” goes into it. The way we relate to our subject—the “I”—helps us to make that speaker’s voice and journey more authentic. And ultimately, we, as poets, channel the story so that readers can relate, can locate themselves within the story, can feel, can identify.
All This As I Stand By tells my stories but it also tells the stories of many others: Marie Antoinette, Brigid Boland, the Brontë Sisters, Robert Merriam, Mildred Dresselhaus, Gothel (the witch in Rapunzel), John Keats, the more universal characters of Lily, Lucinda and Mabel—and even the Irish racehorse, Shergar. But it also tells the story of those who read the poems—through how they react and relate.
Writing this book taught me that the power of storytelling isn’t necessarily achieved through the poet filling the role of speaker, of being the “I.” The power of storytelling is in translating the authenticity of the lived experience. That, for me, is the poet’s job.
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Carolyne Van Der Meer is a Montreal journalist, public relations professional and university lecturer. Her articles, essays, short stories and poems have been published internationally in journals and anthologies. Her four previously published books are: Motherlode: A Mosaic of Dutch Wartime Experience (2014); Journeywoman (2017); Heart of Goodness: The Life of Marguerite Bourgeoys in 30 Poems | Du cœur à l’âme : La vie de Marguerite Bourgeoys en 30 poèmes (2020), and Sensorial (2022).
Karen Green, author of Yellow Birds (Re:Books Publishing, July 2024)
It’s so rare that we get a chance to revisit an experience from our past and consider it with the context, analysis and understanding that time can award. That’s what was foremost in my mind when I began drafting Yellow Birds, a coming-of-age novel featuring a group of young music fans who follow a legendary band from town to town. While not biographical, Yellow Birds is based on a lot of my early experiences as a Deadhead, following the Grateful Dead across North America, and the cast of colourful characters I met along the way.
Music is such an important part of who I am, so integrating it into the plot of a novel felt so comfortable and natural. I wanted that visceral, endorphin-releasing feeling that live music can offer to come through; that power and hold that music can have over us to be almost like another character. I also worked as a writer for a record company for more than 10 years and love to write songs, so getting to create a whole play list was indulgent and a lot of fun.
To be honest, I was surprised that nobody had written a book like this already. Retro music acts are having a moment in the cultural zeitgeist, with teens wearing the t-shirts of band they’ll probably never see play, and GenX is ready for a moment of nostalgia as we grapple with middle age. Yellow Birds features an aspect of counter-culture that is so ready-made for storytelling that I was constantly looking over my proverbial shoulder, wondering every Tuesday if I would see a similar novel in the new releases. I mean – road trips, rock and roll, and seriously interesting, interconnected relationships – the world-building alone was so much fun to reimagine.
I hope though, that Yellow Birds resonates with readers because more than anything else, it’s about building a community and finding your place within it. Writing Yellow Birds took me back to a time and a place that I loved so much and gave me a chance to pull back the curtain on a part of society that not many people got to experience. And it gave me a chance to revisit that life from the purview of time passed, with its gifts and consequences fully realized. To quote a Grateful Dead song, what a long, strange trip it’s been.
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KAREN GREEN is a successfully published writer who has had her poetry, essays, and fiction featured in Room Magazine, Chicken Soup for the Soul, The Globe and Mail, and more. She has also contributed to Juno-winning and platinum-selling albums during her tenure as a senior copywriter. She is the author of two young reader books (Fisher Price).
Rajinderpal S. Pal, author of However Far Away (House of Anansi Press, August 2024)
For a story that took nineteen years from initial concept to publication, the answer to the question why I wrote this book? has been through as many iterations as the manuscript that eventually became However Far Away. Time and distance act as both filters and kaleidoscopes. Intention changes with age and circumstance.
In the mid-2000’s, most of the diaspora literature I was reading was either set in the country of origin or focused on the struggle to adjust to a new life in a new country. There were exceptions of course. In the work of Hanif Kureishi, the reader never doubts the Englishness of his protagonists. When the character of Devinder Gill first manifested himself, I knew very clearly that though he was of Punjabi-Sikh origin, he would strongly identify as Canadian—in his taste in music, his dress, and his interests. I wanted Devinder’s main struggle, his difficulty in navigating between duty to family and duty to self, to be self-imposed and universally understood. In fact, I wanted all the main characters to be true-to-life, not heroes or villains, neither all-good nor all-bad—normal people in ordinary entanglements. I wanted them to feel a deep connection with the landscape and terrain of Vancouver, to be rooted there no matter their heritage or personal history. I convinced myself that the lead protagonists must be positioned in the here and now to give the story a sense of immediacy. All three protagonists in However Far Away are haunted by their pasts but there is no magic realism, no ghosts or spectres, to distract them from the real world.
I was sensitive to how I portrayed the complexity of Punjabi-Sikh culture, to move beyond the food, the clothes, the music and dancing—although those are also featured. I hoped to show the reverence I feel for the cultural values of loyalty, compassion for others, service, and honour. Building the story around a family wedding seemed to be the best way to do that.
However Far Away is my debut novel and having it out in the world feels like a shedding, a coiled rope I had to caste off before I could move forward with other creative projects.
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RAJINDERPAL S. PAL is a critically acclaimed writer and stage performer. He is the author of two collections of award-winning poetry, pappaji wrote poetry in a language i cannot read and pulse. Born in India and raised in Great Britain, Pal has lived in many cities across North America and now resides in Toronto. However Far Away is his first novel.
