Beautiful Books: Poetry and Paper Quilling in Tea Gerbeza’s How I Bend Into More

Tea Gerbeza on How to Make a Paper Spine

As I pull the woven white strip off my red fine quilling comb, my tension is off and the middle of the shape pulls itself away from the others, unravelling. Thankfully, I didn’t glue the end yet so I can take it off the comb and reweave, heal the core of the shape meant to finish a vertebra I’m creating. As I write this, I’m taking a break from making a spine necklace as part of a preorder giveaway for my debut book, How I Bend Into More. To make this spine resemble my curved one, I rely on simile: the small curve I’m able to achieve in the eight paper vertebrae is like the spine inside of me. I need the wearer to imagine the spine as full when they wear the necklace.

The eight individual paper vertebra shapes are composed of five long woven marquise shapes curved like a “C,” then edged with a strip into one full half-moon shape; this is the base of the vertebra. The small bones that stick out of each vertebra are two long teardrop shapes with their ends curved in—again a small c— and their tails overlapped to hug the base of the moon. When all eight are stacked and glued together, they become a paper spine.

How I Bend Into More is a book that hinges on shape. While writing it, I thought deeply about bends, coils, crevices, and curvatures, since scoliosis is commonly understood through letter shapes—“s” or “c” curves. I have an “s” curve (two curves in the spine, one in the thoracic segment, and one in the lumbar). For me, an “s” shape also holds two “c” shapes, which is a common linguistical theme throughout the long poem. Shapes upon shapes upon shapes spool something.

Even the lyrical “I” is a shape of the body. While writing How I Bend Into More, I imagined the “I” as one of the titanium rods fusing my spine, bracing the curve from caving in to give room for my lungs to breathe, my heart to beat. The “I” is marked—“I/I/I/I/I/I/I/I/I(” (42)—suggesting that there might be harm done to the “I,” but ending with an open parenthesis, the I is ongoing. The “I” reshapes itself within its multitudes. In connecting letters to the body, the long poem’s form suggests that each line, letter, and punctuation, represents the body, so how do paper quilled shapes fit into all of this?

It wasn’t until my MFA mentor Jennifer Still encouraged me to experiment with using my paper quilling alongside my verse that I found it to be essential. I would turn to paper quilling when I was a stuck on a poem and needed to turn them over in my head. As my hands spooled the shapes, the lines worked themselves out. During one of our meetings, I showed Jennifer an accidental poem that came from playing with strips from cut-up drafts of the long poem. I had woven the strips on my metal quilling comb and took off the long marquise shapes and put a few of them together where words were visible. When Jennifer saw the shapes up close, she gasped and told me that these pieces were a spine-poem in the making. Hearing this broke my brain into star points. Of course paper quilling is the poetry that was missing. After that, I created more with my tools and strips. I cut up subsequent drafts of my book to twirl into shapes and create images, and through this crafting I envisioned myself recreating my body—how the paper bent naturally toward light. The paper was never without curve, just as I am never without curve. Quilling gave me another layer of power, of voice.

In an earlier draft of How I Bend Into More I had written,

Again, the body’s “s” shape appeared, but this time I had unearthed possibilities to give voice to S: s-scroll and c-scroll shapes. What was my hinged silence? I broke open this question by building the paper spine on page 111 of my book with s-scrolls and c-scrolls. Its coils and spirals were exactly what the drafts of the long poem were enacting, working toward. The essence of the poem calls the paper to life: a spinal self-portrait. The scanner gave the paper spine an additional layer as I imagined it to be my x-ray machine. These images were created with all the lights turned off. I worked on the glass platen without being able to see what I was doing until the image arrived on my computer screen. My only intention for the scanographs (scanner photographs) was to have a depth to them that gave the subjects on the glass platen a medical feel, but also within this medicalization, there was a poem, a new being, emerging from the depths. And through this emergence came resistance. The rest was up to my body’s intentions, to the paper. By having this control over the “medical machine,” I was able to reclaim myself. It was important for the book to become a new body, and I tried to manifest that through the visual poetry, the verse, and the structure of the book. All the winding and curving to me was the essence of paper—it curls, loops, bends so easily into shapes, but it’s also resistant and uncontrollable, too.

Coiled spirals, serpentine scrolls, woven shapes as intricate as leaf stems—these are the quilled shapes that represent my body. A spiral allows light in at certain angles, is dizzying in others, is endless. I imagined myself as a coil and my poem as words on strips of paper swirled inside themselves. Coils unravel. The visual poetry of my book is wrapped up in the shape of itself, this metaphor arising from its physicality. In creation, I followed the natural arches of the paper, only manipulating it when I needed to, but a need to manipulate was rare. Usually, the paper did what it wanted when glued. The line “Bone does what it wants” is a persistent echo throughout How I Bend Into More. This echo captures the multitudes of how my poetry and visual art intersect. An essential part of the process of creating paper-quilled jewelry is to coat the pieces in a sealant so that the paper becomes sturdier, more resistant to UV rays and daily rambunctiousness, so it can remain alive for a long time. The sealant I use sinks into the paper rather than simply drying a layer on top, making the paper hardier and more resilient. While I coat the spinal necklace I’m finishing, I notice how the teardrop shape’s inner coils expand as they dry. They are no longer tight spirals; they are now more pronounced, more spatial. I attach the finished vertebral column on a chain and fasten it to my neck. In the mirror, “the threaded vertebra bob…the paper ossifies” (45). Bone does what it wants.

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Tea Gerbeza is a neuroqueer disabled writer and multimedia artist. She has an MFA in Writing from the University of Saskatchewan and an MA in English & Creative Writing from the University of Regina. She is the winner of the Ex-Puritan’s 2022 Austin Clarke Prize in Literary Excellence for poetry, and has published widely in magazines including ARC magazine, Action Spectacle, The Poetry Foundation, Wordgathering, and Contemporary Verse 2, among others. Tea resides in oskana kâ-asastêki in Treaty 4 territory (Regina, SK) with her spouse, three dogs, and cat. How I Bend Into More is her first book. She hopes you spiral art from its pages.

Photo of Tea credit Ali Lauren.