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Where in Canada: Sourcebooks for Our Drawings
Danny Jacobs takes us through a singular and idiosyncratic portrait of New Brunswick through the commercial sprawl of contemporary Atlantic Canada. In this excerpt from Sourcebooks for Our Drawings (Gordon Hill Press) we get a closer look at the realities of the village fires of Petitcodiac mixed with elements of prose, and speculations of generational arson.
Tinderbox: Dispatches from the Village of Fire
Burned to the ground
means nothing’s left
but the need to say it
— Lia Purpura, “History”
My conjectured arsonist hurries through prewar penumbral streets, joyous, while oil lamps pulse like backaches through waved glass. He scouts unlocked barns and warehouses, carriage houses, shut up structures glutted with hay and raw timber, backing businesses on Kay and Main. My conjectured arsonist has an eye for aridity and wither, for bad ventilation and opportune vectors, can knock a wall’s shake and feel how fast the wood might succumb, dance with oxygen, go up up, transmogrify. Chemistry through instinct. He looks at the stars: so many cinders. He licks a finger, tests the wind.*We tally fires at the Legion, the County Fair exhibit hall, the public library’s Heritage Week Community Social; we surmise, ballpark years. Hazy and half-crocked timelines.“Oh, she’s burned, what? Five times.”“Five? More, sure.”“Those two in the aughts, wha?”We say “Yep” on a quick intake of breath, what counts for casual affirmation in the Maritimes. The local histories, pages held fast by the plastic tube of comb binding, constitute the not-quite-official record of spotty citation and anecdote. Arthritic fingers scan the lines. We slide from photos from pH-neutral folders. We pour coffee from the Tim Horton’s Take-12. But no one knows how many times Petitcodiac has burned.“Now see that, there. That was my grandfather’s store. She burnt.”You see the photos and assume it all burned. A denuded record in black and white, pen and ink. Fire the default for the no-longer-standing, even if there’s no longer anyone to say for sure. We nod: She burnt.Everyone in the village is a few degrees from conflagration. They had a long-lost relative who saw their business turn to foundation hole and charred girder. They can recite the second-hand accounts, the generalities. They sure as shit remember when Stedman’s went in ’93. In Village of Fire (1997), authors Robert and Mary Hibbert bold all instances of the word fire, including adjectival variants like fiery. It’s a stylistic choice that lends the book an insistent, obsessive edge. Your inner voice shouts fire! as you scan paragraphs—a mantra, an earworm, a warning. Even if looking for something else, fire foists itself upon you. Turn to chapter 12— “Fire, War and Fire” –and the fires ladder from the page, zigzagging down paragraphs, screaming from burning streets.* * *
Danny Jacobs’ poems, reviews, and essays have been published in a variety of journals across Canada, including The Malahat Review, The Fiddlehead, Grain, The Walrus, Maisonneuve, PRISM International, Hazlitt, and Hamilton Arts & Letters, among others. Danny won PRISM International’s 2015 Creative Nonfiction Contest and The Malahat Review’s 2016 P. K. Page Founders’ Award. His first book, Songs That Remind Us of Factories (Nightwood, 2013), was shortlisted for the 2014 Acorn-Plantos Award for People’s Poetry.His poetry chapbook, Loid, came out with Frog Hollow Press in 2016. His latest work, A Field Guide to Northeastern Bonfires, is a hybrid lyrical essay/prose poem sequence published in 2018 with Frog Hollow’s NB Chapbook Series. Danny holds a BA in English (Hons.) from Saint Mary’s University, an MA in Creative Writing from UNB, and an MLIS from Dalhousie.He lives with his wife and daughter in Riverview, NB, and works as the librarian in the village of Petitcodiac.