There used to be a hospital called Grace here in Vancouver, in which I was lucky enough to be born. My parents, with others equally idealistic, moved to Hornby Island then, and built a home in a place where I could run wild. Both worked with their hands, my father as a boat builder and my mother as a doctor. When their relationship ended, I moved in with my mother and visited my father, following her as she moved to Vancouver with my stepfather. I lived on a street called Princess, in Chinatown, and thought I had arrived. And then we left, to Anacortes, Washington. My Anacortes grew me, town of churches and horses and fishermen, town of lost girls.
When I got thoroughly lost, we moved to Seattle and I finally got a chance to sink my teeth into books, to find the friends I still count as my dearest. Canadian? American? I cast my vote when I went to Montreal to study. Brick oven bagels and blood-dripping lambs. A new language. Winter for half the year and a summer that blazed and sweated. A woman I loved who spoke three languages and wore a fine gold chain around her throat. A mountain that was really a hill with an angel on it. Beautiful women and wise professors and all those nights of slick confusion as I found my way and got lost again. Washed up in Japan, adrift, I submitted to Judo, to being alone with no company but my dog, to being an adult, learned to love persimmons, jellyfish, bewilderment. Coming home to the woman in Montreal and learning to live in her language, make a home with her. The world cracked open: a son, slim volume of poems. Back to Vancouver with my lover, our child. A garden, a daughter, another collection of poetry. No, we’re not married, and yes, she is the love of my life, and I know I’ve been lucky. A second baby son now, hauled around laughing by the older two, the dog sleeping out her twilight years on the front porch, and another manuscript about to be born.
LIFE II
Born in Vancouver, Canada, Rachel Rose holds dual U.S. and Canadian citizenship. She grew up on Hornby Island, in Vancouver’s Chinatown on Princess Street, in Anacortes, WA, and Seattle, and has also lived in Montreal and Maebashi, Japan. Her work has appeared in various journals in both countries, including The Malahat Review, Verse, Arc, Black Warrior Review, Poetry and The Best American Poetry. Her first book, Giving My Body to Science, (McGill/Queen’s University Press) was a finalist for The Gerald Lampert Award, The Pat Lowther Award, and the Grand Prix du Livre de Montreal, and won the Quebec Writers’ Federation A.M. Klein Award. Her second book, Notes on Arrival and Departure, was published by McClelland & Stewart in 2005. She holds a BA in English from McGill University and a MFA in Creative Writing from the University of British Columbia. Two essays appeared in anthologies about mothering in 2008, in Between Interruptions: 30 Women Tell the Truth About Motherhood, and in Double Lives. Other work has been anthologized in Uncharted Lines: Poems from the Journal of the American Medical Association, White Ink: Poems on Mothers and Motherhood, In Fine Form: The Canadian Book of Form Poetry, Rocksalt, Open Wide a Wilderness, and Letters to the World. Rachel is the poetry and lyric prose mentor at Simon Fraser University’s The Writers Studio.