Washita (5 page)

AFTERWORD

I've been a right-handed, one-finger typist for the fifty-five years of my writing life, many short stories, three failed novels, a memoir, a completed novel, and many books of poetry. It was after the novel,
Red Dog, Red Dog
, was published that I began the second of what I imagined would be a trilogy. One hundred and seventy pages into that next novel my right shoulder froze and I was unable to lift my arm to type. After several crippled weeks I tried to work on a poem. Unable to use my right arm, hand, and forefinger, I used my left, but discovered that the right side of my brain did not know where the lettered keys were. The process of typing became excruciatingly slow, each key having to be searched for visually before I could type a letter and then finish a word. A word such as
The
came very slowly, a
T
and an
h
and then an
e
… the word,
The
, safely there and then the relief of the space bar. In the time it took to accomplish the typing that simple article I had discarded numerous adjectives and numberless nouns, my mind reeling at the possibilities language offered in the time between letters. The majority of the poems in this collection are the result of that discovery. The process of writing each poem was exquisite, each letter, each word, and each line meditations rare and beautiful. My imagination became an eddy in a meadow creek, a thin trout in turning water. Each letter was a dry fir needle circling above slow brown fins.

In this late time of my life I am in debt to many people. You know who you are. My gratitude to you all. You have blessed my life with your presence. I name here only my companion, Lorna Crozier, wife, lover, and friend. She is my one, my private beauty.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Patrick Lane, considered by most writers and critics to be one of Canada's finest poets, was born in 1939 in Nelson, BC. He grew up in the Kootenay and Okanagan regions of the BC Interior, primarily in Vernon. He came to Vancouver and co-founded a small press, Very Stone House, with bill bissett and Seymour Mayne. He then drifted extensively throughout North and South America. He has worked at a variety of jobs from labourer to industrial accountant, but much of his life has been spent as a poet, having produced twenty-four books of poetry to date. He is also the father of five children and grandfather of eleven. He is an Officer of The Order of Canada and has won nearly every literary prize in Canada, from the Governor General's Award to the Canadian Authors Association Award to the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize. His poetry and fiction have been widely anthologized and have been translated into many languages. Lane now makes his home in Victoria, BC, with his companion, the poet Lorna Crozier.