Christine Fellows’ latest work evolved from album to multimedia art project

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This article was published 23/09/2014 (4408 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Canada’s North, in all of its resplendent beauty and biting harshness, makes for a rich muse. Just ask Christine Fellows. She mined both a full-length album and an entire book of poems from the complex and multi-faceted landscape that exists in our figurative backyard.

Burning Daylight, the local singer-songwriter’s sixth studio album and first collection of poetry — released today via ARP Books — explores themes of isolation, family, frailty and dislocation through a feminist lens. The northern landscape serves not as a mere backdrop, but rather as another of Fellows’ beautifully realized characters.

The project is a multimedia feast for the senses. Fellows’ poems are evocative and altering, a reminder of what can be achieved with plain language; in her hands, an ice cream pail full of rotting fish heads sounds romantic.

Illustrated by densely layered collages by visual artist Alicia Smith and rendered in cool mint greens and fiery sunset oranges and pinks, the book is both literary work and objet d’art.

The accompanying album, meanwhile, is an affecting collection of sparse piano and vocal tunes — or “minimalist Klondike show tunes,” as Fellows calls them.

The project has been a slow burn. The record came first, when Fellows was travelling around the Yukon as Dawson City Music Festival’s songwriter-in-residence in 2011 and was recorded, paradoxically, during a full-on heat wave in July 2012 in Toronto. The poems and collages came in October 2013, when Fellows and Smith took a trip to Igloolik, Nunavut, as part of a National Film Board film crew.

A year later, over wine at a Winnipeg restaurant, Fellows is marvelling over the completed project, but specifically how Smith’s collages captured the sentiment of it.

“She’s a visual genius. I’ve always wanted to do something with her. She has a really specific eye. She has an architecture background. She’s really visually and conceptually thoughtful. I always say I’m not a visual person, but I realize I am — but I can’t do that,” Fellows says, pointing to the page. “I can’t make it happen in a visual way. I can do it through language, but I so appreciate having that to respond to.”

Fellows has long been an avid interdisciplinary collaborator. Her last album, 2011’s Femmes de Chez Nous, evolved out of Reliquary/Reliquaire, a multimedia piece mounted by a collective of artists including Fellows, visual artist Shary Boyle (one of Fellows’ longtime collaborators), filmmaker Caelum Vatnsdal, cellists Leanne Zacharias and Alex McMaster (who are also on the new album) and vocalist Lise Brémault at Le Musée de Saint-Boniface Museum in 2009.

Burning Light was initially conceived as a musical-theatre piece, but after it was workshopped, it wasn’t the right time, or necessarily the right medium. Still, it was a worthwhile process.

“In a weird way, it lead me to writing poetry I think,” Fellows says. “It’s that thing where you’re putting your same self and same ideas on a different form and looking at it from a different perspective.”

It was actually her husband, Weakerthans frontman John K. Samson, who suggested it might make a book of poetry. Though she was always a voracious reader of poetry, Fellows had never written it before; she’d began out of necessity during another residency at the University of British Columbia’s creative writing faculty, during which she was living at a hotel and couldn’t make a racket in such close quarters.

Fellows says, contrary to popular position, writing poetry is not like writing lyrics at all.

“I’d always get punchy when people would say ‘lyrics are poetry,’ but no, they’re not,” she says with a laugh. “Lyrics live in the air. They’re not meant to be read on the page. I’ve always rebelled against the idea of publishing lyrics. I consider them a reference. They’re flat on the page. Poetry leaps off the page. There’s a visual element to it. We can’t do that with lyrics. You can do that with songs, I think, and musical composition, but not with lyrics.”

While the poems in Burning Daylight are informed by an isolated, polar north — “a clash of time and culture” — the songs on the album are about a different kind of north. Written during her time in the Yukon, the record is informed by The Call of the Wild author Jack London’s Gold Rush-inspired short stories — in particular, the harrowing To Build a Fire, which is, as Fellows calls it, “a bedtime story about freezing to death.” Her songs are responses to his stories.

“I picked (London) because I had a bit of knee-jerk feminist reaction to his writing — it’s so ridiculous and over the top — but he’s a brilliant writer and storyteller, and he lived through that. He got the crazy scurvy and his teeth fell out and he didn’t make any money. Instead, he became a successful writer,” she says.

Fellows says Canadians owe it to themselves to visit the North at least once in their lives. It’s an experience that leaves one changed.

“It should be part of our culture to have that exchange,” she says. “People from the North come to the south a lot, but it’s usually in times of peril, or they’re needing to do business. It’s not because of a natural curiosity. They need us — and we need them.

“There’s something about being in a place that’s so Canadian, yet so foreign at the same time. It’s a real trip in many senses.”

Fellows launches Burning Daylight at McNally Robinson on Wednesday at 7 p.m.

jen.zoratti@freepress.mb.ca