My first book, The Small Words in My Body , is one history (there are others) of how I negotiated my flight from home, and from Canada; it is also the start of a long account detailing the costs incurred, the gifts received and lost, through departure. It can be perilous to speak of poetry as autobiography, but that first book is very autobiographical in ways both obvious and deceptive. Every poem in the collection was written before I was twenty, and much of the first half of the book was written when I was fifteen, sixteen, and seventeen. I wrote then, as I write now, to understand the world I live in. If we are fortunate, that world grows, both widening and deepening as we ourselves mature .

I knew I was a writer from the time I was very young, and though I became quite disciplined in my teens, I did not yet “know” how to write: I was writing, sometimes feverishly, sometimes coldly, in a tone that was not my own daily voice, but one used to protect myself. That is one of the redeeming features of a writer’s life. We can be tougher, and perhaps wiser, on the page than we are during our days, thereby saving, if not ourselves, at least our dignity. For me, writing was also connected to power and delight, a sense of self and beyond-self. It was like that when I was ten years old and it is like that today. To name life is to belong to it, even if one feels locked away from it, cut off . . . That I had a gift for writing was an act of grace. Knowing this, I took it very seriously.

Passionately believing in the power of words to set things right, I was nevertheless suspicious of everyday, “realistic” speech, particularly the dialect I was learning in school, with its dull and stultifying obligations. One of my early poems reveal that growing suspicion, and the terrible frustration I experienced as a student. Though I had several extraordinary teachers whom I continue to think of with gratitude, I had some real duds, too. The principal at the high school I attended in Calgary was a frightening man; after his first speech to the brand-new students in the school, I went to the library and looked up the word fascist in an etymological dictionary. At fifteen, I knew enough to take the edge off wanting to be a writer by saying journalist, but even on hearing that proposed profession, my guidance counsellor suggested I take a short-hand course: then I could always fall back on secretarial work.

Yes, organized education was like having bricks laid in my cranium. In my first book, there’s a poem called Languages I Have Failed To Learn written after a series of incidents in my Grade 10 biology course. When I refused to dissect small mammals, out of a sense of repulsion and violation--I was a rather small mammal myself—my teacher called me an anti-intellectual in front of the rest of the class.

When you refused to cut
  into the white belly of a mouse
    the small scientist with small eyes asked,
    Do you have a crippled tongue?

Your brain could not breathe.
It ran backwards, it tripped,
  its wrinkles unwound, it rolled away
    like a ball of yarn.
You could not understand the little man
  or the bags and bags of wet mice.
You couldn’t say a word.
What a foolish girl.
When sheeps’ eyes came to class
  like some foreign delicacy,
  you cut your finger with a scalpel
  and were excused.

Being called an anti-intellectual was a definitive moment for me; a fissure opened between myself and world as it was constructed. Because I had been raised to believe in a fundamentalist religion, some sort of split had come years before, but now I understood it in a fully conscious, perhaps adult way. And this time, I chose it. I remember thinking, “Fine. Because I refuse to take part in your desecration, I am an anti-intellectual. I am a writer and an anti-intellectual, which is absurd.”

My father was a big-game hunter. Though my brothers and sisters and I could understand the apparent necessities of hunting—we ate the deer he killed—we each developed intense empathy for animals. I grew up loving and taking care of small creatures: ants, frogs, tiger salamanders, mice, lizards, rabbits. I knew what I knew, and at school and everywhere else, I could not be argued, scolded, or shamed out of my convictions. The small lives were valuable even if they could not speak our language. By extension, the small words, too, were valuable, even if we could not understand them.

There began, I think, a conscious fascination with other modes of knowing, which served as doors out of what I already knew about the world. Knowledge is a door that opens and closes; it is only a passageway, even when we first conceive of it as an escape. Like knowledge, writing (and reading) is both a path in and a path out, letting us move beyond our accustomed borders but also bringing us back, close to home, to the source. Because the great work of poetry is to close distance, to lay bare the unity of disparate things, people, and places, it can transport us to a different realm and bring us to the source simultaneously. I suspect the work of poetry is like the very small child’s first experiences in language: given to us by others, these strange sounds come out of our bodies and correspond--mysteriously, arbitrarily, magically--to the surrounding world, even to the world we have not seen.

Though the first poetry I read was in English—the Bible is also a collection of extraordinary poems--reading it was like entering a new language. When I started to live abroad, the surprise and delight of learning other languages echoed the experience of coming to poetry as a child. Quite naturally, I got hooked. Learning a new language is a rebirth, not only of the stumbling speaker but of the whole universe: every single object and idea is born anew. Like a baby, the impulse in this new world is to to put everything into your mouth, experiencing it through the skin. As I grew into adulthood, living first in Thailand, then in Spain, and France, and Greece, then again in Southeast Asia, the languages I learned, imperfectly but nevertheless, provided a physical way of understanding the countries and the people among whom I lived.

Ironically, it is hard to describe how immersion in another language provides such deep entrance into a new culture. Though the foreigner remains foreign always, unable to claim ownership to the mythical key that opens another country, sometimes the other country possesses the mythical key that opens the foreigner. Immersion in the language of the place makes this weird and fascinating opening more likely. When one begins to speak and dream in another language, one begins to think about the world, and one’s life, in new ways. Different languages are laced, imbued, with diverse approaches to being human . . .

It is not so surprising for a Canadian, born in a country built of so many different nations and voices, to choose to enter other landscapes and languages, to become a foreigner by choice. It is impossible to separate the history of my era—this post-industrial, migrant-filled, technologically-charged time--from that of my turbulent, difficult family. Though my initial departure was a well-timed escape, it has always been important for me to be going towards as well: education and experience in the world, wisdom in more than one dialect, spirit in more than one religion, a generous portion of laughter in all of it.

Very early in my work, I named my family as “the other,” and did not want to be like them, or to become them. Then I spent the next fifteen years searching out the other, giving myself passionately to other countries and other languages. I am the other now; and I am, at long last, part of my own family again. As an evolving anti-nation like Canada suggests most ably, the other is ourselves.

More and more people in the world no longer live in the countries where they were born. Any Canadian city—increasingly, any city on the planet--is a loud proclamation about how strangers make homes and build lives out of the materials and the landscape at hand. It is possible for people to maintain connections to their countries of origin while becoming neighbours with others very unlike (and very like) themselves.

Writing this, I falter, pausing, casting about for words. I am aware both of the over-simplifications and of the real pain involved in this “one world as home” stance, particularly for those people who are forced to leave their countries because of violent political and economic upheaval. In Canada, racism and discrimination are much more prevalent than some people think--particularly those who are unlikely to suffer it--and race-related violence continually haunts our past and violates our present.

Though living elsewhere is more common now than it has ever been before, living far from home is still not easy. Departures involve choices that are understood only later to be immense sacrifices, despite all the apparent gains, and to make a home in one place precludes having the same kind of home in another. In Greek, as in English and French and Spanish, we talk about setting down roots. When you buy a house in Greece, people say, Kalo riziko: good roots, meaning, may you grow strong roots here, a family of your own.

To be split, as I feel split, between cultures, languages, countries, loyalties, is to nurse a curious, long-term fracture. It does not leave you, cannot, because it has become you. All of us are fragmented in more or less perceptible ways; many people have more than one language, one home, one allegiance, one truth. As confusing as this fragmentation and multiplicity can be, they also offer us a new way to understand our world and to approach the work of being engaged human beings. Though the poet healed herself by discovering a home in Greece, the disorder of love was not so neatly unravelled. By its very nature, it never will be. Slowly, wherever I live, I am learning to find a peace within the complexity of what I am, what I was, what I will become.