Magpie Ulysses : part one

Writer, Rabble Rouser, fancy talker; Magpie Ulysses began performing at the age of 17 to save her life. She has performed across North America and is a veteran of the national poetry slam community in Canada where she was a member of two national champion Vancouver poetry slam teams. She was named a Poet of Honour at the Canadian festival Of Spoken Word in the Fall of 2012.

A bit of a witch, a nature freak and an activist at heart, Magpie is known for her visceral, often surrealist writings that extend from the everyday human experience into the depths of natural and inanimate worlds. Magpie has spent much of the past decade heavily involved in the arts while living in and around rural BC and Southern Ontario. Having spent the past few years raising a new human and past many years caring for her grandmother through Alzheimer’s disease, she has become increasingly interested in questions surrounding genetic memory, place, body, grief, aging and how we choose to tell our own stories. She currently lives on the west coast of Canada on the traditional lands of the Snuneymuxw.

What are you working on?

Creating in this pandemic time has been very difficult for me. I have been homeschooling a neurodivergent child and caregiving for my grandmother while my husband finished a professional degree in our basement in a city we didn’t want to be in. It’s hard to have a thought of one’s own in conditions like that. I grew a lot of food and saved a lot of seeds and focused on reigning in my power and energy for the future.

I have been working on a large project about caregiving for my grandmother who lives with Alzheimer’s disease. It has been years of research around memory, genetic memory, her own family history, settler histories, how I interact with the past, how we tell our own stories and understanding the kinetics of homesickness. Hours upon hours of sitting with things my grandma said or did. I have 100 pages of poems I don’t know what to do with now. And then I sat down the other day and just started writing poems with an outpouring of deep grief. The opioid crisis, the last ancient forests being cut down on the west coast in BC, my grandma’s house, endangered species, lost healing herbs, my childhood, my housing instability, other people’s lost children, free things that are no longer free, our inability to connect in meaningful ways, our obsession with categorizing humanity, it’s all in there. Sometimes you have to go back to where you began to be able to continue.