Writer's Notes

First.

I don’t want to erase you, Anne, wouldn’t dream of withholding your final “E” You really are ahead by a century & I always cry at the exact same places always. & you were right he wasn’t talking to you he was talking to God. Being wicked was the easiest thing ever in that system. I think of you when I eat carrots when the apple blossoms bloom when a wallop of purple brooch hits sunlight. I think of you when I coil a shawl around my shoulders. I think of you when I remember my art teacher, so like Miss Stacy. I think of you when there’s someone I’ll never forgive. You taught me how to step through portals, what it’s like to be a gull. Don’t wish you erased, ever. But they’ll erase you, they’ll find a way; someone terribly clever will come along and remap your world, which heaven knows was flawed, rife with prejudice, parochial, colonial. A world where children were trafficked, commodified as labour. Even the pastoral beauty of your island they’ll contrive to ruin. They will cancel you, but I’ll never forget you, never not love you. I leave here shards of that love. 

Second.

Erasure poetry, as the name suggests, removes words from a text and what remains generates a new text. Erasure poetry is a way to engage with an earlier text and create a new one from it with, often, the objective of critiquing the original text. There’s value in these projects. The erasure performed here is its own project of orphaning, a form of homage, a foregrounding of Montgomery’s unique phrasing, lyrical turns. It’s painful to erase what you love. I have changed upper case to lower case and vice versa, in some of the above. Let the critiques happen in the white spaces around words; cleave to the shards. Words orphaned with love.

Bio: Jeanette Lynes’s fourth novel, The Paper Birds, about women codebreakers in World War Two, is forthcoming from HarperCollins in summer, 2025. Her personal essay collection, Apron Apocalypse: Lyric Essays will be published by Thistledown Press in 2026. University of Regina Press will publish her volume on research and creative writing in 2027. Jeanette is also the author of seven books of poetry. She directs the M.F.A. in Writing at the University of Saskatchewan.

Banner Image: Pink Erasers Abstract. Photo taken by Michael Hamments. Unsplash.com.