Letter from the Editor-in-Chief: The Freedom Not to Think

by Gillian Smith-Clark, ​for The 44 North, Editor-in-Chief

"Spring Greening Along The River" by Pat Katz

As I ran alongside the riverbank on a clear, crisp fall afternoon in my new city, following a dirt path through a canopy of trees just beginning to turn colour, I should have felt relaxed. Instead, the moment when I normally let go, letting the music from my headphones seep into my consciousness and my mind drift and clear, didn’t come.

My thoughts were jumbled and scattered—moving between the beauty of my surroundings, whether I was alone on the trail, the warmth of the sun, and: How safe is it to run alone here?

That particular section of the trail was a paradox. Covered in foliage and sheltered from view of the nearby road, what made it so lovely was also what made it potentially dangerous. An acquaintance had recently reminded me of a murder that occurred decades ago, somewhere along this riverbank. How safe is it now? Should I have an alarm or pepper spray? Should I not be wearing a ponytail, because someone could jump out of the bushes and grab it? How long would it take for someone to get to me if I were attacked and screamed?

Am I overreacting, overthinking? Maybe.

Images of the men in my life, past and present, filled my head. Some were rolling their eyes. I wanted to let my mind drift. I wanted to turn up the volume on my music and daydream, but I couldn’t.

The memory of Alyssa Lokits surfaces—a horrific story that happened on a trail not unlike this one. With a shiver, I wonder how far I am from the paved trail and more people.

What lingered after that run was not whether I was overthinking the situation, but the fact that the calculations had to happen at all. Alongside that was another uncomfortable realization: How many years of my life have contained a similar mental calculus—the times when I got it right, and the moments when I realized I’d made a costly error.

Some of us move through the world carrying questions daily that others rarely have to ask; still others inherit forms of watchfulness so embedded in our psyches that we barely notice the effort they require.

That idea—of attention, and of who is required to pay it—runs quietly through many of the pieces in this issue. What do we learn to notice? What are we afforded the freedom not to think about? And once something enters our awareness, what responsibility follows?

"The Meewasin Trail" by Pat Katz

“Braiding a Ladder” is a pivotal piece, bringing together three different but equally powerful perspectives on modern-day misogyny. At its heart is a question about what happens when the burden of noticing misogyny is disproportionately carried by the people most likely to experience its consequences. Women are often asked to remain alert to risk, to recognize warning signs, to modify our behaviour, to protect ourselves, to explain what happened afterward. But what changes when the work of paying attention is more widely shared? When men look more closely at the language, assumptions, jokes, behaviours and systems around them, and begin to ask what responsibility follows from what they see?

The same movement from attention to awareness to responsibility appears elsewhere in this issue, although in very different forms.

Our Artist Spotlight takes an unexpected turn this issue, placing Earth itself at the centre. In “Earth is the Artist,” memory, land, family history, displacement, grief and environmental harm become tangled together. The piece asks us to look differently at something we so often relegate to the background: The ground beneath us. What changes when the Earth is not scenery, property, or resource, but witness and maker; something that carries memory, bears wounds, and responds to what we ask it to absorb?

Wardah Malik’s essay on tradwife and girlboss culture turns that same act of attention inward. Her question—are our desires truly our own?—is deceptively simple. The lifestyles we imagine we’ve freely chosen do not emerge in a vacuum; they’re shaped by economics, gender expectations, cultural narratives, algorithms, and the particular forms of security or escape available to us at a given moment. What feels entirely personal may also carry the fingerprints of forces we have stopped noticing.

Elsewhere in the issue, attention becomes an act of care. “The Wake of the Nepal Flash Floods: Keeping Each Other Alive” looks at what remains when catastrophe strips away the illusion of self-sufficiency. Our conversation with Rohit Doel asks us to distinguish between grief, loneliness, and isolation within disabled friendships rather than flattening different experiences into one. And Fernn Eastman’s “From Feeding Tube to Paramedic: Your Body Is Not Your Enemy” turns toward the intimate work of learning to inhabit the body differently.

These pieces are not making the same argument, nor are the experiences they explore equivalent. But together, they ask us to look beneath the surface of what’s immediately visible—at the assumptions, histories, systems, desires, memories, and burdens that sit just underneath ordinary life. 

At its core, this is an issue about freedom and what that means: The freedom not to think, the cost of constant attention, and the responsibility that begins when we finally notice.

Thank you, as always, for reading.

Warmly,

Gillian Smith-Clark

Editor-in-Chief, The 44 North Media

Writers Room | The Wake of the Nepal Flash Floods: Keeping Each Other Alive

by Mikaela Brewer ​for The 44 North, Senior Editor

Artwork by Logan Brewer

Please note: this short story discusses cancer, climate catastrophe, mass death, and sexual assault. It may activate folks with similar lived experiences, beyond what feels safe to spend time with. Please engage with this story how/whenever it feels safe for you.

"Where did all the horses go? In Tamang mouth, ghost, and blossom come from the same root. In Tamang Tongue—there is no way to say this / in English."

—Samyak Shertok, “Mother Tongue: A Haunting”

***

Not many can say they’ve survived three flash floods, let alone in the same day. 

At 8:37 a.m. local time, as my mother slept just minutes away from her alarm, she drowned in the Gorkha district of Nepal, along the Nepal-Tibet border. As ice and rock collapsed from a glacier high in the Himalayas, water surged downstream via the Lhende Khola, Bhotekoshi, and Trishuli rivers, sweeping her home away with chunks of bridge, building, and road. Here in Canada, around 6:30 p.m. local time, a second flash flood rushed, unwanted, between my legs, in a dark supply closet at the end of my residency shift in the pediatric ward. The third poured as blood, minutes later, from a mouth a few floors down where my best friend was dying from cancer. 

That amount of water pressure should have powdered my bones. 

I limped out of the closet into the washroom across the hall, fell to the floor in the stall, and wept so there would be room for oxygen in my body. I must have fallen asleep because when I opened my eyes, my friend was sitting across from me, bare ass on the floor under her hospital gown, wiping crystallized tears off my face with her thin thumbs. The ceiling fan swished the stale air; the sound of waves coming again and again. My mouth tasted like salt.

“I’m going to bloody kill him,” Gelly said, her Irish accent thicker, it seemed, to compensate for her body’s withering. 

“I can’t take any more death today, Gelly.” Dr. Williams, the lead physician on the floor, had been making comments to me for months. This time, after the news broke from Nepal, he told me he wanted to comfort me—that he wanted to make me feel better. Still in shock, I vaguely remember giving in to him touching me. Soon, his want took over, and he was too strong to stop. I hadn’t told Gelly this yet. 

“I know, love, I’m sorry.” She paused and, maintaining a serious face, said, “We should’ve shaved my hair tomorrow instead.”

I couldn’t help but smile, yet it felt wrong. And I still didn’t know what to do—I was waiting for more news, more information. My mother was dead. My childhood home was erased.

“How did you get up here?” Gelly snuck out often to see me, as long as she was physically able. More and more often, she wasn’t.

Gelly looked at me long and hard. “I told the receptionist the truth.”

I nodded, but didn’t say much in reply. The homesickness washed nausea over me, and I quickly spun around to throw up in the toilet. I could feel Gelly’s hands on my back as a brace. When I’d finished, she said: “Well, maybe you have room for my plan now?” 

“Your plan?” 

“Aye, my plan. I made a new friend downstairs. She’s a cook.”

I looked at my watch: 2:13 a.m. “Gelly, I need to go home and sleep.”

“No, no, no. Well, yes. But not quite yet. Right now, you need yam curry.”

“Yam curry? How do you figure on making yam curry?”

Gelly pulled me to my feet, tidied my thick black hair, took my hand, and led me down the hall. The hospital lights were still on, but many were sporadically dimmed. It was an eerie place to be on a quiet night, especially after such a violent day. Everything was still functioning, but not quite fully, as if run by ghosts. It seemed there was less colour in the already drab labyrinth of hallways, diluting and draining away like my tethers to Nepal. The burn of disinfectant from whoever had mopped the floors made my eyes water as we rounded the corner to the staff kitchen.

A nurse, maybe a few years older than me with long black braids and warm brown skin, stood with her back to us. She was organizing ingredients on the table with a tender touch: Purple yam, ginger and garlic paste, asafoetida, ground turmeric, salt, cumin, and coriander, Kashmiri chilli powder, chopped tomatoes, bhat, Greek yogurt, Tama Ko Achar, and Hariyo Khursani Ko Achar. How she found these ingredients, I had no idea, let alone how she snuck them into the hospital. There was a Nepalese grocer in the city, but I’d always figured I was the only one in the building who knew where it was.

The woman turned around and smiled kindly, just enough to see her dimples propping up a spray of freckles.

“Seti, this is Niimi, my nurse downstairs.”

Niimi placed her hands on her hips. “Seti, would you help me?”

Exhausted, delirious, and still gripping Gelly’s hand, I nodded. Gelly let go, stepping shakily off to the side to sit in one of the kitchen’s chairs. I made eye contact, aware of her exertion, but she nodded toward the table and smiled. She was so thin that her entire face wrinkled, though she was only 23. It was her wisdom, laughter, and kindness made visible; I wanted to believe. 

I walked slowly toward the table, guided by my hands as if they were a puppet’s. I started peeling the yams, cut them into one-inch chunks, and covered them with water to preserve the colour and texture. I heated the oil, slowly folding in the ginger and garlic pastes until they softened. Into the pan I dusted the turmeric, yam, and salt until shimmering golden brown. My fingers slid in the chilli powder, cumin, and ground coriander to cook for a few minutes, then the tomatoes to cook for a few more under the lid. As I removed it and sprinkled in the fresh coriander, I became aware of my mouth. It watered not only because I was hungry, but because I’d been speaking of my mother the whole time. 

Gelly and Niimi had been asking me questions about Nepal—about my parents, about their horses, and about my mom’s recipes and flower garden. How she loved the chef Santosh Shah, but thought he didn’t quite make yam curry right. Niimi handed me ingredients as Gelly asked their names and origins in Tamang. I scooped the steaming curry onto 3 paper plates, complete with bhat, Tama Ko Achar, Hariyo Khursani Ko Achar, and Greek yogurt.

When I finally sat down, deeply sore in body, mind, and spirit, I looked into Gelly and Niimi’s faces. Gelly was dying far from a home scarred with war and oft-forgotten colonial violence. Niimi’s tribe’s lands were being sold for military and economic development. We had known such loss, and yet, we each remembered something that very early morning: Curiosity about life in the face of death; offering an able body as Earth, the largest we know, cries for help; and making from ancestral memories while devastation and violation threaten to unmake them. My hands had become my mother’s in this small kitchen across the world.

There’s a poem I adore from Nepalese poet Samyak Shertok, called “Mother Tongue: A Haunting.” One line has settled uncomfortably in my heart for a long time: “If to speak one’s mother tongue is to keep one’s mother alive, / I kill my mother daily.” Earlier in the poem, he also writes: “In Tamang mouth, ghost, and blossom come from the same root.”

There is formal support, I know, for sexual violence, grief, and palliative care. The way Gelly and Niimi are looking at me now, eating our makeshift yam curry, I know I won’t have to find or approach help alone.

I can’t speak Tamang fluently, but the best nourishment that evening was the grief and love cooked into the meal—ingredients as containers. Right now is all we have sometimes. Right now, maybe, is all we need to keep each other, and by extension my family, alive in the way we know how.

Resources:

• Red Cross

• Tear Fund

• Canada Helps

Artist Spotlight: Earth is the Artist

by Mikaela Brewer for The 44 North, Senior Editor

Neist Point Lighthouse on the Isle of Skye, Scotland.

In Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, there’s a twenty-page chapter where the characters disappear from the stage. Time passes in the 1920s, and we witness their summer home on the Isle of Skye, Scotland, begin its return to the Earth.

That same decade, outside the world of novels but a sure-footed setting for one, a small red brick house was built up the hill from Kempenfelt Bay. A century later, it will be forked from the ground—expropriated for a freeway expansion in a small town.

At the marina in Barrie, Ontario, I rest my elbows on a rock large enough to reach my chest. I look up the hill, now Bayfield Street (Hwy 26); I can see the chimney of that red brick house—my great-grandmother’s, now my grandmother’s.

Before I climb to it, likely for the last time, my eyes glaze over with memory film: The gardens of rhubarb, baby spinach, blackberries, mint, chokecherries, strawberries, and milkweed; the blue rope swing; the heartier, yellow rope swing as my limbs lengthened in youth; the tarp sheds with bicycles of every size; going to school smelling of roasts, homemade fries, and soaking sauce pans when we stayed over on weeknights; my grandpa’s floor-to-ceiling toolshop, converted from an electrician’s testing room; my grandma’s dress design studio, like an autumn forest made of fabric and buttons, where my 8th grade graduation dress was sewn by hand.

In Underland: A Deep Time Journey, Robert Macfarlane writes: “Into the underland we have long placed that which we fear and wish to lose, and that which we love and wish to save.”

From Underland by Robert Macfarlane

His words linger: I recall the caves, tunnels, underground rivers, and mycelial-root networks he writes of over 500 pages of travel in the “underland.” Unlike the home ashore the Isle of Skye, my grandma’s house will be torn from the ground with tongs designed to shred and destroy. No one, even outside of our family, will inherit it. The parts that came from the Earth—which are many, given when it was built—will not return home. And I realize, quite suddenly as I’m writing this in my notebook at the marina, that I can’t be the artist this time. Maybe there are moments in our lives where no human can be…  

It’s another who makes us again and again. We seem to remain one of their favourite things to sculpt and paint. They know, though, to flinch from us; monarch butterflies, crows, and red foxes dip back into the woods at the sound of our footfall. They lick their wounds and stitch them with moss, lichen, limestone, and mushrooms. They conceal what’s been taken and gouged from them with water and goldenrod. But they aren’t graceful in their grief or rage—as much as we expect them to be. 

I wonder now: Do humans create environmental disasters, or are they in fact the Earth creating—trying to forge art from ever-violent wounds? As we’re responsible for those wounds, our dis-ease with their art—that erupts, explodes, crashes, or drowns—is inevitable.

My family were Scottish settlers on Anishinaabeg land, first among the Ojibwe on Manitoulin Island. What’s happening now to my family’s home has repeated over, and over, and over again—across the Americas, the Congo, Sudan, Palestine, Iran, Lebanon, and beyond. It’s still happening, and no, white families aren’t safe—no matter their ‘allegiances.’ 

The Grove Neighbourhood, Barrie, 1875

When we ravage a body with the claws of an empire, how can we be surprised that its art is revolutionary, radical, abolitionist? An earthquake, a tsunami, a hurricane blooming inside the rawest flesh. 

Like those of us fighting to live in hope’s lane rather than despair’s, Earth processes the only way they know how: Art. And wounds, we know, will wound—especially the most vulnerable.

How can we not spotlight them as the artist—as only defined by the attempts on their life? 

I trust them, wholeheartedly, to hold and remember the memories I can’t—in their soil alongside the Anishinaabeg peoples’. I trust them with “that which [I] love and wish to save.” Even paved over, I must believe something remains intact. 

And when Earth crafts their art in quakes and floods, the shape of rhubarb gardens and children’s bicycles, to the beat of a rope swing well-broken in, will we see it for what it is? Earth as the only artist to follow into the fray, because if they’re an artist, then so are we.