Canadian Mennonite
Volume 6, number 12
June 17, 2002

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Abbotsford, B.C. - The grade five students at North Poplar Fine Arts School here had mixed reactions when their teacher announced that Barbara Nickel was going to lead them in a poetry workshop. Several squealed with delight, others rolled their eyes. As they entered the room, Nickel recognized one of the students and welcomed her by name, the girl blushing and twirling with delight.

The workshop included reading and writing, learning new words like "onomatopoeia," and a chance to jump rope to creative rhymes. The boys even warmed to the topic when they realized they could write poems about skateboarding.

Teaching is just one of many things Nickel is doing since returning to B.C. from Newfoundland where she and her husband Bevan Voth lived for two years while Voth did a residency in rural medicine. Greendale, where they live now, is the most recent stop on a journey that has taken Nickel from the prairies to both coasts and points in between. It's no surprise that "moving" and "home" are recurring themes in her writing.

Nickel is currently working on a collection of poetry that is based on the 1912 home in which she grew up in Rosthern Saskatchewan. Central to the poems is a crown of sonnets-seven sonnets in which the last line of one poem is the first line of the next. Emerging themes include the definition of home, moving homes, and permanence and impermanence.

"The circular poem, the crown, brings to mind cycles and generations, what changes and what stays the same," she explains. She is animated as she talks about her craft. Her hands move in the air or make rings on the table between us. When her parents moved out of that home "it was huge" for her and these sonnets are "a bit of a requiem, an elegy."

When asked where home is for her, she smiles.

"Ideally, I want to live in a small town where I can walk to the corner store, where I know my neighbours and kids play street hockey," she says. "But I'm learning that you carry your home with you, that's why I could write prairie poems when I was in Newfoundland." She refers to her book of children's poetry From the Grain Elevator written during her time in St. John's.

But Nickel doesn't only write poetry. "The project I'm working on now is a novel for children. I have an adult novel that's been on the backburner for 10 years, but it's just not its time yet. I am working on a children's picture book."

She and Voth are expecting their first child in July and Nickel is looking forward to seeing how their child will feed her writing life.

"I'm looking forward to more time," she laughs, knowing how naïve that must sound. She hopes that her experiences with motherhood will give her more material to draw from "because I write what I know-family, life, love." And faith.

"I'm always in a process of searching for a place where my writing and faith come together," she says. "Writing a poem is like a journey. You begin by trying to enter it, knocking on the door. Then you find an entry and there is cause for celebration. Then I'm in and that is often fraught with difficulty-not getting it, fear of rejection."

She is quiet before saying softly: "Then moments happen when you find the right word and it feels like a gift from God and it's not about me at all but something much larger.... It's grace, I guess."

Nickel, who has a master of fine arts degree in creative writing from the University of British Columbia, has received national recognition for her work. "The Rosary Sonatas" won The Malahat Review Long Poem Prize in 1995. Her 1997 poetry collection, The Gladys Elegies, won the Pat Lowther Memorial Award. A novel for young adults, The Secret Wish of Nanerl Mozart, was a finalist for three awards. Schumanbrahmsschuman was selected as a "Pick of the Fringe" at the 1998 Vancouver Fringe Festival and received honourable mention in a national playwriting competition.

Nickel's work has also been published in a number of anthologies and journals, including Breathing Fire: Canada's New Poets and an upcoming anthology of Mennonite writing called A Cappella: Mennonite Voices in Poetry scheduled to appear in 2003 (University of Iowa Press). Nickel will be participating in "Mennonite/s Writing: An International Conference" to be held in October at Goshen College.

-Angelika Dawson

The True Meaning of Being a Man

I am peeling an onion for the borscht
It is firm as a bulging bicep
I split the grainy, weather-beaten outer skin
It peels off cleanly, unequivocally
Inside: the absolute onion, colour of old ivory
smooth and sure as a man's career
Curious, I make another incision -
another layer bares itself, whiter, more vulnerable
than the last. I cut again, and again
two more shells open, delicate and lopsided
as a lover's balls
The odour of this flesh, pungent as acid
incisive as a prophet's warning
stings my nostrils
brings tears to my eyes
I become obsessed, attacking
carving my relentless way
through flesh and bone and brain
with the razor-edged calculus of a knife
each layer paler, more translucent
more precious and righteous than the last
Ruthlessly I chop them up
cast them into boiling broth
Finally, eyes gleaming
drenched in manful sweat
I have it: the tiniest of pearls
unmitigated onion, essence of cognizance
gallstone of intellect
Religiously, I lower the triumphant blade
My hands are trembling

"Aren't you putting a lot of onions in the borscht?"
my wife asks.

David Waltner-Toews
(From The Earth is One Body, Turnstone Press, 1979)

Transforming Conflict in Your Church, edited by Marlin E. Thomas, is a workbook for assessing and dealing with congregational conflicts. The manual includes exercises, tools, resources and Bible studies on various aspects of conflict. The authors are Marlin Thomas, president of Resources for Resolving Conflict in Lancaster, Pennsylvania; Larry Dunn of the Center for Peacemaking and Conflict at Fresno Pacific University; Duane Ruth-Heffelbower, conflict management prof at Fresno Pacific; and Alice M. Price, mediator and trainer from Colorado. The 64-page book is published by Herald Press.