Writers Room | On the Wildfires: Of Course She Ran Back

by Mikaela Brewer ​for The 44 North, Senior Editor

Via CTV News

after Natalie Diaz’s “Of Course She Looked Back”

In a small middle school classroom in Red Lake, Ontario, Rilla Fable was called upon to answer a question in English class. 

Cocking his head to the side, so that his ear became a funnel for her voice, Mr. Wilcox nodded as Rilla spoke. But it was clear he hadn’t heard her, for he paraphrased his own question following a kind smile. 

Rilla wasn’t one for speaking, really, at all. But Jack, who sat behind her and had turned thirteen first, said that she better be careful: Her vocal cords would surely dry out if she didn’t use them enough, catching fire like sticks rubbed together when she ever did need to speak. 

Despite what everyone else thought, her inner world wasn’t, likewise, silent. It was anything but. 

Rilla glanced out the window. The smoke was so dense that the teachers’ parking lot was no longer visible. She closed her eyes for a moment and listened: The brush fires couldn’t be seen. Nor could the snapping and cracking be heard. 

***

Rilla’s N95 mask strings were too tight, folding her ears down as she walked home from school. Her dad’s cycling sunglasses, with wraparound wind protection, didn’t block the ash from slipping behind her contact lenses. The fires weren’t far now, and the sky was thick with an orange haze that bled the sun’s light. Surely, the evacuation order would come soon. 

Rilla stopped, knelt, and thumbed a brown-singed red lily growing from the boulevard. She looked across the dry grass as she stood; the wildlife was scorched along the sidewalks. Summer gardens had scattered into crumbs across front yards. Tree leaves had withered to lace. Rilla swept a finger along her bare forearm: No sweat. The air itself seemed dead, parched in the 35-degree heat.

Taking a shortcut through a paved ravine without sidewalks, Rilla had to avoid the bluffs this time—closed to the public to delay the fire spreading. There wasn’t much foot or car traffic here, given the steep, uneven asphalt, but there was usually a wide river bisecting the road, continuing beneath it. Rilla could always hear it rushing a few hundred metres away, comforted: It always seemed to know which direction to run. But there was no sound, now. For weeks it had been nothing but a small stream, hardly even a ‘burn’ as Rilla’s Scottish grandfather would’ve called it. But nestled among it were the friendly faces she’d hoped to see—the real reason she took this shortcut.

Rilla stopped on the metal-plated bridge overlooking the river, smiling as she watched pots being filled in the stream, soon to soak and soften dried ramen noodles. The coloured tents looked like a carnival, and perhaps that wasn’t an entirely dismissive observation. Each person she’d met in the encampment had a skill to offer the group: Cooking, sewing, medicine, geography, and knowledge of safe injection sites. The difference was, no one lined up to see the brilliance they had to offer the world. Locals seemed to see them as glitches in their life: Stains, filth, and impurity. They didn’t see Tomah’s large brown hands whittling wooden brushes and spoons from fallen trees, or Mag’s knowledge of nettle, witch hazel, and willow bark, or the fact that she could make absorbent diapers. There was Jern’s dexterity with a knife and needle, crafting bandages and clothes from scraps. Arnold seemed to have a complete territorial map of the area in his head, all the way to Thunder Bay. And then there was fourteen-year-old Fariq, who made Rilla blush, and tracked the moon while he carried buckets of toothpaste water to be discarded away from the stream. Just now, he looked up from mending a shoe with thread and needle alongside Jern. His serious, dark brows unfurrowed as he smiled and nodded. Rilla nodded back, lifting her elbows from the bridge that overlooked the encampment to wave. Would they ever be seen past houselessness, or struggling with heroin, psychosis, schizophrenia, HIV, and more that Rilla hadn’t yet seen the impact of? She admired their togetherness and their skills, but quickly caught herself: They were worthy of care, belonging, food, shelter, and dignity—unconditionally.

Fariq waved to her, but it seemed sad, as if ‘goodbye’ in code. She had to go home, now. The sky was reddening. 

***

No one was home, which wasn’t unusual. As Rilla sat at the island on a bar stool, shelling pistachios, the kitchen saturated with orange light streaming in the windows. But Rilla stood to close the curtains as she did every evening: With her eyes closed, clearing shell residue from her teeth with her tongue. She didn’t want to see the sign across the street, today or any day, but just as she thought of it, the curtain clips clattered over the tension rod, and an alarming sound reverberated through the small townhouse. The evacuation order.

Rilla clamped her eyes shut and accidentally swallowed a sharp bit of shell. Her phone continued to siren, and the curtain clips seemed to reverberate their clanging in her teeth. She opened her eyes, just a crack, no wider than what was left of the burn in the ravine, and her gaze fell on the sign. One of those black and white, “Safer Ontario” signs filled with straight-faced, armed police officers in flapjackets. As the screen changed every day, it read abbreviated versions of, “Protecting Ontario neighbourhoods: Ontario is working to protect our neighbourhoods by tackling auto theft, clearing encampments, shutting down drug injection sites near schools and daycares, building more jails and strengthening the bail system, so criminals stay behind bars.”

Rilla winced, shook her head until dizziness blurred the image, and turned away.

“What do you think this means about remaining human, or finding the human spirit, in difficult times?” Mr. Wilcox had asked about Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower. 

“To grieve, prepare, and breathe,” Rilla had replied, recalling the fascinating etymology of that word ‘spirit’: The breath of life, or of God. 

There was only fire to breathe, now. Breathing would be hard—speech even harder. But Rilla’s voice had never been loud, and maybe it wasn’t a speaking voice she needed, but a quiet, generative one to disrupt the silence she longed for. One that says: Witness.

In the distance, flames cast ghostly shadows on the underbelly of the clouds. They flickered through the curtains like the sun through closed eyelids. 

What if they didn’t receive the evacuation order? Rilla wracked her brain for a memory of anyone in the encampment with a phone. 

Her rage churned from grief in her stomach, like cheese from milk. She knew her dads would be texting her that they were coming, driving towards the meeting spot they’d chosen that morning: Under the sign. It stood on two thick concrete poles above the seesaw, a sentinel on two immovable legs. 

Parallel burns streamed down Rilla’s face as she grabbed her evacuation-ready bag and walked outside, grateful, now, for the tightness of the mask.

Do they have masks?

Out the front door, Rilla could see the flames licking the treetops in the hills. Fire isn’t survivable. Rilla knew that much. It can’t be breathed, digested, or burned inside the body. But she was sure that’s what her grief felt like. Only when she was safe would she cough up the ash of all that had burned behind her. 

The anticipatory grief, it seemed, wouldn’t burn into anything but a stream in a ravine. Rilla scanned the county road her house sat on. Across the street, to the left, was the playground and the sign. To the right was the lip of the ravine. Rilla closed her eyes so tight, they squeezed out ash and salt. Hardening is human, whether into the charred bone of death, or alive into the salty-sting of regret.

Of course, when Rilla opened her eyes, she ran back.

---

Resources:

• Wildfire Map Spotlight: Northwestern Ontario wildfires, Canada | IQAir USA

• How to prevent forest fires | ontario.ca

• Smoke Forecast - FireSmoke.ca

• First Nations Wildfire Updates and Support - Chiefs of Ontario 

Poet’s Corner: “Ordinary Sugar” by Amanda Gunn

by Mikaela Brewer ​for The 44 North, Senior Editor

Amanda Gunn, “Ordinary Sugar” from Things I Didn’t Do with This Body. Copyright © 2023 by Amanda Gunn.

Artwork by Logan Brewer

Note: This poem is not in the public domain! Please use the link above to read it. 

My first encounter with Amanda Gunn’s “Ordinary Sugar” was through Poetry Unbound with Pádraig Ó’Tuama, not long after I read his bread recipe-poem and reflections on soup. Poems and recipes are kindred spirits, both in form and function. And, as Anthony Bourdain writes in Medium Raw: A Bloody Valentine to the World of Food and the People Who Cook, “the ability to feed yourself and a few others with proficiency” is a vital, fundamental skill. Perhaps the same is true of poetry: We’re not all poets, but everyone can ask how they’re nourishing others with words, or learning how to absorb them for the soul. As Ó’Tuama writes:

“[R]ecipes are an old form of poetry, and I think a recipe and a poem each have a measure at the heart of them—a measure about pain, a measure about love, a measure about pleasure, or about survival. They’re giving a certain form of instruction that can turn you either towards the deliciousness of food or the deliciousness of language, that can help you look at your own life and feel like you’re finding something from it in the engagement with the writing.”

Gunn’s “Ordinary Sugar,” like opening an heirloom cookbook, unfolds the complexities of the generational relationship between poem and recipe. Recipes as poems—and vice versa—are a form of ancestral archiving and memory, amplified here in the rhyme of the second stanza: keep, knees, pristine, sweet, green, pleasurably, plenty. These words summarize the ‘story’ Gunn is sharing with us; rhyme aids memory for prayer, song, patience, attention, and presence.

Remembering is also an honouring of people and their circumstances, especially through a recipe and how it’s engaged with or followed: Making sweet potato pie from russets, the gleaming glass eye, pregnant wordlessness, and fast spinning through the kitchen. There isn’t a distinct narrative arc in the poem, per se, true to the patchwork our memories often are, but Gunn includes clear, specific, detailed snapshots—not temporally bound—and brings them alongside her present-day voice’s reflections, inviting us into Grandma Mattie’s life experience and ensuing motivations. Then, the poem tethers this archiving to a bearing of witness through time—how Gunn paid attention as a child and how she’s paying attention now, through inheritance. The stanzas move from Aunts Mary & Earline → Amanda → Grandma Mattie → Amanda → Amanda’s mother → Amanda. Generational influence is layered, akin to those graham cracker cakes, yellow cakes, and the recipe book they’re making was kept safe in.

In this vein, Gunn shows not only the desire her family had to soothe what might have been a difficult life, but a witnessing of why: Hunger, poverty, starvation, and the threat of scarcity are present because they’re remembered in the body, and therefore inherited as well: “Too, the ruthless / manic canning, putting by, / putting by, against memories / too near starvation—the / machine in her belly built / to last.”

Like the inheritance of poverty or scarcity—and the accompanying shame, fear, and silence—some things aren’t documented in a recipe book. Ways of survival and being are altogether missing from our present day-to-day lives: The economic intelligence and commitment to caring for a summer garden—weeding, tilling, watering, and feeding with eggshells and coffee grounds—and harvesting it before the first frost to have enough food for winter. But we all come from oral cultures, and Gunn’s poem seems to say: Don’t forget to witness and remember what wasn’t written down—it’s as much a part of the recipe (of survival) as the ordinary sugar made extraordinarily by love.

And ultimately, though an accessible free-verse poem in five stanzas, “Ordinary Sugar,” is in fact the recipe that includes as much as Gunn can gather. Through the language of food and cooking, it alchemizes its reader and speaker: What’s inherited takes a new shape when digested, then gifted, like the bread and jam in the final stanza. As Ó’Tuama says: “[A] recipe is an opportunity in writing to give some tools for survival as well as maybe a couple of quantities.” When we follow a recipe, it’s not only those fed who survive. The person who crafted it lives on, too.

Dinner Isn’t Debt: What paying the bill reveals about romance, power, and control (Part 1)

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

Artwork by Logan Brewer

The Cheque, please..."This is a story about romance. But it is also a story about power."

I’ve felt it before—that subtle tightening in my body when the bill arrives. A kind gesture should feel warm and generous, but sometimes it leaves lingering doubts: What does this cost me?

I’ve always bristled at the word beholden: Obliged, indebted, bound by someone else’s favour. Raised to value independence, I learned to resist becoming indebted to others. Yet I also absorbed the unspoken social rules around me: The expectations about who pays, who owes, and what it all means.

Nowhere does that tension surface more than at the dinner table.

So when an old, gendered trope resurfaced recently as a social media trend—the idea that if a man is serious, generous, masculine, or worth your time, he should always pay on a first date—I found it unsettling. Not because there is anything wrong with generosity. There isn’t. But because the question of who pays for dinner is rarely just about the money.

It’s about expectations, performance, and what we’ve been taught romance should look like—and what we fear if we don’t play along.

The trend took me back, reluctantly, through time to countless restaurant tables and the small, loaded pause that comes when the bill arrives. As a university student, that moment often brought a knot in my stomach and a quiet flicker of anxiety about the balance of my bank account. Whether on a date or simply out with friends, I quickly learned that “splitting the bill 50/50” could mean paying for someone else’s steak when I had ordered soup.

I also remember the enticing pull of letting someone else pick up the tab when my bank account was low, then wondering whether accepting would leave me feeling subtly indebted. Would I seem cheap if I insisted on paying my share? Ungrateful if I hesitated? Difficult? Rude? A “radical feminist”? Or, worse, would accepting the meal create some unspoken expectation I had not agreed to?

This is a story about romance. But it is also a story about power.

When the bill arrives, it often brings with it a surprisingly loaded question: Who pays? Sometimes the terms have been negotiated ahead of time. Often they have not. Sometimes the server places the bill in front of one person, usually the man at the table if the date is heterosexual, and the old script quietly reasserts itself.

On the surface, this looks like a transactional question about money. But underneath it are layers of manners, class, gender, dating etiquette, sexuality, income, pride, fear, and control. Buying dinner and “picking up the cheque” plays into what many of us have been taught to believe romance should look like, and what it can cost us to accept that script without questioning it.

Over time, the hidden cost of letting someone else pay can feel like compounding interest on a credit card we never really wanted in the first place.

This norm didn’t emerge in a vacuum. As historian Moira Weigel explains in Labour of Love, the shift from 19th-century “calling” (a man visiting a woman at home) to “dating” (couples going out in public) moved courtship into spaces where men were treated as hosts—and thus expected to pay. The expectation took root in a world where men held most of the money, mobility, and social power. 

That history matters because the expectation that men should pay was never simply about kindness. It developed in a world where men generally had more money, more mobility, more public freedom, and more social power. By the mid-20th century, the expectation was firmly entrenched, reflecting rigid gender roles: Men as breadwinners and women as dependents. What gets remembered nostalgically as “chivalry” was also part of a broader structure of inequality.

Literature has long understood the darker side of this dynamic. If history explains the origin of this norm, literature exposes its dangers.

In Boris Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago, Victor Komarovsky offers a chilling portrait of exploitation disguised as romance. Wealthy, polished, and connected, he grooms and manipulates the young Lara, taking her to expensive restaurants and presenting his attention as protection. His fine clothes, grand gestures, and apparent generosity are not evidence of love. They are tools of control.

His gifts are not acts of love; they are investments in her compliance.

Of course, not every polished and wealthy person is a Komarovsky. Most people who offer to pay for dinner are not predators in disguise. But every society has its modern equivalents: People who understand the performance of generosity but not the ethics of it. The lesson is not that we should treat every kind gesture with suspicion. It is that a flawless performance of romance does not tell us what someone will do when the script stops serving them.

Still, there is an unmistakable appeal to traditional dating rules. Clear rules can feel emotionally safe, and human connection thrives on safety. Dating is exhausting. Dating is expensive. Letting someone else pay can feel simple, flattering, and reassuring.

It can also feel fair. In a culture where women are still often underpaid, undervalued, and expected to invest significant time, money, and effort before they even arrive—clothing, grooming, transportation, emotional labour, safety planning—the idea that a man should pay can feel less like entitlement and more like acknowledgment.

And sometimes, paying is simply kind.

A person can pay because they invited someone out. Because they chose the restaurant. Because they can afford it. Because they want to offer something generous without expecting anything in return. There is nothing inherently wrong with treating someone to dinner. It can be a beautiful and thoughtful gesture.

The problem begins when a gesture hardens into a rule: When “I’d love to pay” becomes “men should always pay,” when generosity sours into performance, and romance turns transactional. When the person who pays, consciously or not, begins to feel that they have purchased more than a meal.

A meal should never come with an unspoken price tag. 

Dinner is not debt.

There is another illusion hidden inside the nice dinner too: The illusion of safety. A person who chooses a good restaurant, dresses well, orders confidently, treats the server politely, pays the bill, and tips generously can appear stable, respectful, and trustworthy. Sometimes they are. But presentation is not character. The ability to perform respectability is not the same as being respectable.

Jane Austen built an entire novel around this problem in Pride and Prejudice. Wickham is charming; Darcy is difficult. Wickham performs goodness; Darcy eventually proves his character. The first impression is not the truth, and appearances are not reality.

As Austen puts it, “One has got all the goodness, and the other all the appearance of it.” That distinction—between performance and character—is worth remembering when we romanticize grand gestures.

That is the distinction worth paying attention to. In the context of who pays for dinner, the issue is not simply whether someone pays. It is what that payment does.

Does it create warmth, or pressure? Does it make the other person feel cared for, or managed? Does it leave them feeling free, or subtly indebted?

This is why the old fantasy of being “swept off your feet” also deserves closer scrutiny. In its sweetest, most whimsical form, it simply means surprise, delight, or being deeply moved. But cultural scripts matter. When we romanticize relentless pursuit, grand gestures, and persistence after hesitation or rejection, we risk teaching people to mistake pressure for passion.

Love that refuses to respect hesitation is not romance: It is a red flag.

A healthier version of romance does not require anyone to be overwhelmed, persuaded, purchased, or won. Romance does not have to mean being swept off your feet. Sometimes it means being met on solid ground.

Romance should not require one person to perform power while the other receives it. It should not require a man to prove his worth through dominance, spending, pursuit, or control. It should not require anyone to prove their desirability by being chosen, treated, or won. And it should not require anyone, regardless of gender, sexuality, or relationship structure, to perform a role that does not fit them.

These norms do not only affect men and women in traditional heterosexual relationships. The idea that one person should always pay—whether because of gender, income, masculinity, femininity, status, or some other expectation—creates a cultural script that can make anyone feel like they are failing if they do not conform. Queer couples, non-binary people, and people in non-traditional relationships can all feel the pressure to perform roles they did not choose.

When we internalize these scripts too deeply, we lose the chance to define romance on our own terms.

None of this means every first date must involve a perfectly calculated split; there are many fair ways to handle a bill. The person who invites can pay. Two people can split it. They can take turns. They can choose something inexpensive, like coffee, ice cream, or a walk, especially for a first meeting. One person can offer, and the other can accept, as long as both understand that a gift is not a contract.

The healthiest approach may not be a single rule, but a shared ethic: No one should feel bought, tested, trapped, or owed.

That ethic matters, because so much dating and relationship advice teaches people to perform roles instead of asking better questions. Is he masculine enough to pay? Is she feminine enough to accept? Did he invest enough? Did she show enough gratitude? These questions reduce people to parts in a very old play.

Better questions might be: Do I feel comfortable? Do I feel respected? Can I say what I want? Can they hear “no”? Does this person’s generosity make me feel freer, or smaller?

Who pays the bill at the end of dinner will never answer all those questions. But sometimes, the way someone handles it tells us more than we expect.

So perhaps the best rule is this: Pay attention not only to who reaches for the bill, but to what happens next.

Many years later, I am no longer that student pinching pennies and silently calculating what I can afford to pay, literally or metaphorically. Now, when I have the opportunity to take someone to dinner and pay for the meal, I try to do it with the quiet understanding that the best kind of generosity does not leave the other person feeling small.

I remember what it was like to be on the other side of that equation: The way a free meal could feel like a gift or a trap, depending on the context. I also understand now that sometimes letting someone pay for dinner, and allowing them to care for me, can be a gift of another kind.

True generosity is not only about what you give. It is about how you allow the other person to receive it: Without strings, without debt, without the unspoken weight of obligation.

And romance, in my opinion, should never begin with debt. Love, in all its forms, should never require anyone to give up even a whisper of their integrity.

So who should pay on a first date? Be prepared to pay for your own meal. Not because generosity is suspect, but because freedom—from obligation, from silent contracts, from the weight of expectations—is priceless.