Ellie Sawatzky
Alt text: Ellie Sawatzky is posing outside on a patio with wooden frames. She is wearing a brown tank top. Behind her is a sunny backdrop with flowers and tall trees.
Biography
Ellie Sawatzky (@elliesawatzky) grew up in the territory of the Anishinaabe Nation in Treaty #3 (Kenora, Ontario). She holds an MFA from the UBC Creative Writing program. A past winner of CV2’s Foster Poetry Prize, runner up for the Thomas Morton Memorial Prize, and a finalist for the 2019 Bronwen Wallace Award, her poetry has appeared, or is forthcoming, in magazines and journals such as The Walrus, Canadian Literature, Prairie Fire, Grain, and The Fiddlehead. She is the author of None of This Belongs to Me (2021), her debut poetry collection, and currently lives on the unceded and ancestral lands of the Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh (Vancouver) where she writes and teaches poetry.
Poetics Statement
“Poetry is a space that grants a lot of permission. In poetry, weirdness, playfulness, anger, pain, fear, grief, joy, and celebration can all come together in one place, and be okay—more than okay, they belong. Poetry embraces ambiguity, allows for contradictory truths, a certain fluidity of being. Loneliness is good and bad. The child is mine and not mine. In this space, hard truths feel softer.
My first book, None of This Belongs to Me, dwelled in the ecosystems of my millennial coming of age—my rural Ontario girlhood, Mennonite heritage, relationships with my parents, upbringing into the Information Age, the decade I spent working as a nanny in Vancouver, friendship, first heartbreak, the tender beginnings of self love.
In current works, I am engaging with chronic pain and mental health in a time of unprecedented social disunion and planetary upheaval. I am also delving deeper into my Mennonite matrilineage. I am not a practicing Mennonite, but I am fascinated by the ways in which this specific cultural/religious history impacts my contemporary womanhood—for example, through my work as a caregiver, through my anger and innate sense of justice, the physical symptoms of inherited pain.
Through poetry, I believe I can use pain and anger as productive, redemptive forces. I can write critically from a place of love, soften into tough but necessary conversations, and I can work to create an aura of inclusivity, granting space, as the universe does, to migraines and orgasms alike, to contradictory truths and multiple versions of the same story.”
Sample of Poet's Work
OVERNIGHTS AT THE HOSPITAL
I have slept in the snow.
In a greenhouse. On other people’s
couches. In a hammock.
I’ve slept in the seats of cars, trucks, buses,
on the Trans-Canada highway, on goat paths,
gravel roads. In a safari van, in
a sleeping bag on the floor of a lemonade stand,
in the staff room at the Safeway. In
a tent. A few times in a taxi. On boats, trains, an airplane over the
North Atlantic, the Sahara. During Cyrano de Bergerac
in a Paris theatre. During
sex. I’ve slept
under the table at a wedding, in the dirt
at the Winnipeg Folk Festival, in libraries, in shitty motels. Once,
in a lighthouse, a few times in a castle.
On a bench. In a church.
I’ve slept through storms, loud music, sirens, through
meteor showers, blood moons. I’ve slept
through nightmares, forgotten
by morning.
I’ve slept in the sun. In
a bathtub. On someone’s
balcony, overlooking the lake.
In an orchard, a screen porch, an army barracks, and once
on a fold-out bed in a trailer, a spotted horse
in the yard outside, and buttercup dust on
my knees. Not
in the chair beside my father’s bed.
This is what it is to be awake.
CRYSTALS
B clicks fistfuls of amethysts. B is six. Earlier this week,
in an Agassiz campground, she held a tiny
abandoned rabbit. Watership Down,
but with ravers,
fire driving out the wildlife for the new wild life, EDM
and bike lights, B’s mother gripping
capsules stuffed
with crystals
in her fist. I tell my mother I never want kids. My mother teaches
motherhood in Ontario woods, leads La Leche League,
squirrels worn-out clothes
for quilts to send
overseas. My blood is hot, monthly, laced with misanthropy.
These years as B’s nanny, her nature scraping
against my nurture.
Her mother
couldn’t breastfeed, couldn’t risk trickling helixes of infected
T cells, says she sometimes senses this
distance. What bits of
my mother
insist in me? To what do I affix our distance? The burr thicket of it,
sticky. The body’s crystal arithmetic. B gives me
an amethyst, tells me how
the rabbit’s heart
beat beneath her fingertips.
THE FALLING MAN
Mary Oliver tonight I find myself
in another strange corner
of the Internet
where the man is still falling
seventeen years later
and in January
Outside my window
the prairie sun flushes drunk
and stumbles home shivering past
the airport
Curiosity keeps me clicking
keeps me noticing
the smoke reflected
in the glass
the way the man hovers in time
like a still of an osprey
wings tucked in
like maybe moments later
he flicked up out of some silver lake triumphant
with a fish
You died today Mary Oliver
while I was at the bank
I was angry
I’m often getting angry about money
When something happens
it’s the feeling before
the feeling that snags
Dark now
but I don’t close the curtains
Snow rosy under streetlight
This is a photograph of a man dying
the pull quote reads
A photograph of every witness
to this instant
strobing with life
It has nothing to do with you Mary Oliver
except proximity within me
the imaginer
except maybe some
kind of flight
