Kara-Lee MacDonald had something inside her she just had to get out.
The buildup of words was a mental pressure that started as a child. It started as experiences and impressions, reactions and suppressions. She struggled to process life and she had more to struggle with than most. Thankfully, the English language is huge and elastic, and her need to purge the mind was just as powerful as her addiction to purging her body.
Eating Matters is her debut book of poetry and it is a synonym for her years struggling with bulimia.
Once she put the words on public paper, she then had to struggle with the reactions of her loved ones. She even included some lines of poetry about her father's despair over her eating disorder, asking her where he went wrong that she should be vomiting up her food as a matter of almost daily course, affecting her health and signaling some kind of disruption in her state of mind, or state of life.
"It is devastating to look at your dad when he's feeling that way, even if you're giving him every assurance that it wasn't his fault, he didn't do anything wrong," MacDonald said.
But something caused the bulimia and that is inside this crucible of words. The reference is tiny but lurches from the page.
It gives no specifics, and neither does MacDonald in analysis, but it involves a child and trauma and the food associated with it. Food, even now, is a mental trigger that discharges food from her mouth, and along with it the nutrition and the sustenance it provides.
"My mom was a cook," is MacDonald's added irony. "We were always talking about food. It was such a big thing in our house. It was always presented as this big, healthy, enjoyable, family-building thing. She was also hit with this worry that she was part of the problem, but no, not at all."
Anyone who has ever suffered through bulimia will recognize a lot of hallmarks of the disorder. She set it up that way - to entertain the reader, stimulate the poetic heart, but also document the anatomy of compulsion to force-vomit almost everything you ate.
"At first - for the first year maybe - you think you're in control. You control when you're doing it and what the conditions are at the time, and you think that's being in control. You're convince of it. But when I was spending upwards of $100 a day on food I wasn't keeping down, wasn't keeping in my body, it adds up and it gets out of hand. But you see the money before you see anything in the mirror that tells you something is wrong. You notice the time, too. I was spending six or seven hours a day on the whole process of binging and purging."
What hurt the most, before she turned to the pen as a healing agent, was having to disclose her problem. "Keeping it hidden is part of the process. Of course more people know than you can imagine when you're in the middle of it, but it is a mission in your life and you think that the mission can't be completed if it isn't hidden. Even now, talking about it helps. This conversation right now, yes, it is triggering me a little, but it is also helping. I find that the days I talk most about it are days I think less about binging and purging."
It was her dentist that first confronted her about it. You can't hide bulimia for long from the dentist. The upheaval of stomach acid starts to burn the throat, mouth, tongue and teeth in ways dental professionals recognize.
The written word also confronted her.
She was a heavy reader as a child and young adult. She took a particular liking to poetry, especially Canadian poetry. She was inspired to the core by that style of expression. She gradually started to supplement her obsessions with food intake with a focus on words and what they could do on a page.
She didn't take creative writing as a course in her grade schooling, but she dove into UNBC courses and attained a masters degree of English. She read and read, and she wrote and wrote. She sought out expert advice. A large chunk of Eating Matters was written in the home of iconic Canadian poet Barry McKinnon. She was helped in the editing process by northern B.C. lit-luminaries like Rob Budde and Greg Lainsbury. She earned the outspoken peer respect of poets like Cecily Nicholson, Nikki Reimer and Elizabeth Bachinsky.
Bachinsky, herself a Prince George contribution to the Canadian poetry landscape, said Eating Matters is "a stylish collection of secrets that's incredibly smart and brave, visceral and terrifying, and I couldn't be more grateful. She's put the unspeakable into words and, in doing so, has drawn upon a reservoir of power that's as vast as hunger itself. I can't recommend it enough."
Although MacDonald is new on the Can-lit landscape, Bachinsky's reaction is representative of the broader reception. MacDonald is getting calls for book signing events and guest speaking opportunities. It seems eating matters to a lot of people, and so does poetry, because it's the medium that most articulates the human condition. It most wrings sopping wet consciousness out of the mind's clothing after dives into the deepest trenches of the human ocean.
"I could have had conversations with my bulimia," MacDonald said.
"It was a person to me. My relationship with it was as much as a friend or family member. I made it into something I could hold in my hand and throw it hard into the trash so it shatters. That was a significant moment in my bulimia career."
Her shattered unwanted relationship still tries to call her over to that trash can to feel guilty and maybe get picked up again. It drunk-dials her. It shows up unannounced.
"It's still an ongoing process," she said.
But so, too is writing. Words are now her passion and her pass-time. Staying busy keeps her mind off the binge and the purge.
She is working on new material and she is one of the co-founders (with Budde and George Harris) of new arts and culture magazine Thimbleberry. Something as simple as a regular job has helped by forcing her to keep a schedule that requires early rising, which requires early bedtime, and her urges for purges are sharpest late at night.
She was working in the adult literacy field in Fort St. John, in association with Northern Lights College and the city's literacy society. She was recently offered a similar position by the Prince George Native Friendship Centre. Her new office is across the street from where she will be reading.
Eating Matters gets its Prince George launch on Wednesday at Art Space at 7 p.m. along with some talented friends who will share the evening with readings of some of their own work. Admission is free, so money can instead be spent on books. And food. Because eating matters.
