Norma Rosier is a weaver, sewer, knitter, and spinner. Originally from Yorkshire, England, Norma became interested in spinning and weaving after seeing a spinning demonstration in Yorkshire and becoming curious about the creative process. “You can’t be around weavers a lot before you get sucked in,” she says. Norma joined a guild in Bradford, the centre of the British woollen industry, and learned how to weave.

In 1982, Norma took a rug weaving course in Wales; this made her decide she wanted to be a rug weaver. After meeting her husband, who was a woodworker, she asked him if he could build her a loom. He obliged. “He made me a wonderful loom,” says Norma. She then became a full-time weaver.

Norma wanted to make a living out of rug weaving, but everyone told her that the rugs were too nice to put on the floor, so selling them was difficult. So Norma thought, “Why not hang them?” She began tapestry making.

Norma and her husband decided to come to Canada after living in the Hebrides. “We were very keen on finding somewhere where I would meet other fibre artists. It was very important to come to an area like this where we had the guild.”

Norma says that she tends to stick to landscape and seascape designs both because she likes them, and also because it is easier to create horizontal patterns on the loom rather than vertical, which would result in much harsher lines. She has played with geometric patterns in the past but now focuses on landscape imagery. Norma says that she developed her style from photos she took in the Hebridean landscape. Her style was initially inspired from an early issue of the magazine Handwoven, which featured an article on a tapestry made for the Swedish Houses of Parliament, which comprised three panels stitched together. This is essentially the style that Norma does now, although not to the same scale. Instead of stitching the panels together, she prefers to keep a few inches of space between each panel, so your eyes fill in the negative space.

Creating tapestries can take a long time. For Norma, working a few hours each day, tapestries can take up to two to three months from start to finish. Each thread has six strands that – together – create a specific colour. Norma describes the threading process as something similar to that of a painter mixing paint.

Although Norma has taught classes in the past, her favourite thing to do is create. From a young age, she had the urge to create and has always found joy in making things. She reminds herself that with all the skills she has acquired, she truly enjoys what she does. She says that this is what keeps her going.

A member of the Kingston Handloom Weavers and Spinners guild (KHWS), Norma teaches beginner-level tapestry weaving workshops held at the guild’s studio space at the Tett Centre for Creativity and Learning.

She really enjoys teaching tapestry and rug weaving workshops, specifically at the beginner level. “It’s satisfying to take someone who has never done weaving before and getting them to the point where they can take it and run with it,” she says.

After taking a workshop with KHWS member Bridget Lewis on creative dyeing, Norma found it incredible to see how she could create her own colours. She has now been dyeing wool for knitting and fibre for spinning. She also has an at-home dye station (involving a microwave and her upstairs bathroom). Norma can now create any particular colour she wants.

 

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Photo cutline: Two of Norma’s tapestries on display at the Tett Centre. The blue scenic tapestry utilizes wool from a mill in Scotland where Norma lived before coming to Kingston. Norma’s advice for those wanting to start weaving or any related craft is to get involved with fellow crafting groups, “because the people who get involved are the ones that stay,” adding that “until you become a part of a community, it can feel a bit isolating.” She has formed friendships and learned a lot from others at the guild.

An interview with Kingston poet Sarah Yi-Mei Tsiang

Sarah Yi-Mei Tsiang doesn’t see herself as the kind of writer who needs to write, who must write each day. Instead, she comes to the blank page when she can find the time, usually driven and panicked by a deadline with her local writing group, to sort through what’s on her mind, what she has “complicated feelings” about.

Most days, these feelings circle around her three children, their continual and ever-evolving needs and desires, and the shape of their family life together, nestled in a cozy, book-filled home in Kingston’s Inner Harbour neighbourhood.

“Parenting is all-consuming and is always just right there. I am usually trying to figure out what the need is at a particular moment and why I can’t meet this need,” says Tsiang, an award-winning poet, editor, teacher, and children’s/young adult author. “I’m always evaluating where my kids are at and what I need to be doing to help them and push them in the right direction.

“My husband has also joked that I’m dead inside, that I have no connection to my feelings. And so I think writing poems helps me to untangle what’s going on inside.”

Tsiang released her third book of poetry, Grappling Hook (Palimpsest Press), earlier this year, and will head to Kingston WritersFest this week to join a panel of poets dissecting the “intimate and messy realities of motherhood, femininity, desire, and identity.” She will also host another event, exploring the writing life with renowned local writer Helen Humphreys.

In Grappling Hook, Tsiang delicately examines both the small details and the vast questions that arise amidst the sweep of daily life. She roots the reader, and then swiftly leads them to expansion and contemplation, as in the poem “Globe,” which begins with her son waking from a bad dream, soon crawling into her bed:

“What infinites. What magnitudes / are the reach of your questions / between our interlaced hands. / Read the equator of our lifelines, the latitudes / of fingers accustomed to the triangle, longitudes / of our limited reach.”

Tsiang easily manoeuvres from the personal to the universal, connecting to larger truths through her own openness and vulnerability. She doesn’t hesitate to examine complex societal questions, patriarchy and the #MeToo movement for example, or struggles and shifts happening within her own neighbourhood and community. Place – her home in Kingston – infuses itself naturally into her work, and is also a central focus of certain poems, such as “Kingston Pen” and “The Cataraqui Street Verses” in her debut collection, Sweet Devilry (Oolichan Books).

“A large part of what I write about is place, and I don’t think you can write without place. You can’t separate it from what’s happening,” says Tsiang, who grew up in Peterborough and has now lived in the same Kingston house for 16 years.

 

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She and her husband initially thought it would be a starter home and they would move on. But they quickly became rooted, finding close connections with neighbours, and for Sarah, within the writing community. “We are now embedded like ticks,” she jokes. “Even when we were both working out of the city in Toronto, we didn’t want to leave. I often say now that I want to die in this house and haunt it.”

A large part of the pull to Kingston is Tsiang’s involvement in The Villanelles, a group of local poets she founded in her early days in the city (by putting up posters inviting local writers to join). Dubbed the “Kingston poetry pack,” the group has evolved over the years and now includes Nancy Jo Cullen, Sadiqa de Meijer, Ashley-Elizabeth Best, Susan Olding, Y.S. Lee, Kirsteen MacLeod, and Tsiang. They meet each week (online since the pandemic began) and workshop each other’s writing – providing a supportive and encouraging environment, and the weekly deadline Tsiang loves and needs.

Tsiang also credits the City of Kingston’s child-care subsidy for helping her build time early in her career to write, and she feels deeply connected to the arts community through Kingston WritersFest, which has supported all of her books and often gave her that boost of professionalism she needed at critical moments, of feeling valued as a writer.

 

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“As poets, we’re all in the trenches together. We know we will never be well-known, so when people come up to you at WritersFest and tell you how much they enjoyed your book, it’s an amazing feeling. The festival makes me feel connected in a way I don’t while writing.”

A rare outgoing poet, Tsiang is a natural networker, it seems, and she extends her extensive knowledge of the craft of writing to her teaching (she has taught at Sheridan College, UBC, and Queen’s) and to her work as an editor (of other books and at Arc Poetry magazine) and creative director of Poetry in Voice, a non-profit organization that promotes poetry and brings poets to Canadian classrooms.

“It is an exciting organization to be a part of – to see poets in classrooms, and kids learning about poetry. Every single child is converted,” Tsiang says. “And Kingston has so many poets – we should all be in the schools sharing our stories and our knowledge.”

 

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See Sarah Yi-Mei Tsiang at Kingston WritersFest on September 29 – Dogs and the Writing Life, and on September 30 – Mother Tongue: Identities in Verse. Follow Tsiang on Instagram, where she posts 10-minute poems along with artwork by Natasha and Victoria Tsiang.

“How people connect”

When Iain Reid moved back to Kingston several years after his stint here as a Queen’s student, he initially planned on just staying for the summer. His debut memoir, One Bird’s Choice: A Year in the Life of an Over-educated, Underemployed Twentysomething Who Moves Back Home, had just come out, and he was working on a second about road-tripping with his grandmother. He figured Kingston would be a good place to lay low and get some work done. Over a decade later, he’s still here.

“I just liked it so much,” says Reid. “I felt like I was productive here. There are lots of places to walk, it’s quiet, it just kind of fits what I like to do. I started to feel like I was seeing the city in a totally different way than I did as a student.”

Reid is also a big fan of the Kingston WritersFest. At the 2022 event, he joined KWF director Aara MacAuley on stage for a conversation about his new novel, We Spread. This is far from Reid’s first experience with the festival – he was there as a spectator in 2009, a year before One Bird’s Choice was published, then returned the next year as one of the featured authors. He remembers being impressed by the festival both as an attendee and as a speaker.

“It’s such a well-run festival; it’s always been that way,” says Reid. “It’s always been very well organized. I’m always so impressed by the number of volunteers, too, because festivals like this can’t operate without lots of volunteers. And, of course, not without lots of people who are interested in coming and getting tickets and being part of the discussion.”

Though Reid began his writing career with back-to-back memoirs, these days he’s better known as the author of three genre-bending novels. He finds fiction more challenging to write than non-fiction – “because anything’s possible” – but ultimately more interesting and rewarding. The result is a blend of literature, horror, and science fiction, all detailed in Reid’s signature spare prose. And while Reid’s books might be hard to categorize, it feels safe to say that few writers know how to deliver the same creeping sense of domestic unease.

We Spread delivers the same uncanniness as Reid’s previous novels, I’m Thinking of Ending Things and Foe, but that’s where the similarities end. It follows the story of Pennie, an elderly woman who’s being moved to a long-term care facility after an accident, which she’s told is only one in a series of “incidents.” She’s also told that her partner, who died years ago, set this move up with her consent – except that she knows nothing about this. Things only get weirder from there.

 

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While We Spread includes elements of suspense and science fiction, the original idea for the story is very much grounded in the real world: Reid’s experience of his grandmother living with dementia in a care facility. Though dementia isn’t explicitly mentioned in the novel, and Reid says it wasn’t the main thing he was focused on while writing it, he can’t help thinking about what it means to live through what he calls “extreme old age.”

“I think a lot of times, there’s this idea that you can’t really talk to people with severe dementia and really interact with them,” says Reid. “And yet, why is the onus on them to try and understand our world, instead of trying to connect with them or understand them in a new way? So, I think I was really interested in all those things, how people connect and that you can still make connections at each stage of your life. When you reach your 90s…that’s a place in time or an age that we should – I think – value a lot more than we do. It seems to me that we just kind of diminish it or are scared of it.”

 

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If Reid had to pick a theme that connects his three novels – which, plot-wise, are entirely dissimilar – he thinks it would be relationships. So, in a way, it makes sense that this book is indirectly about his grandmother, with whom Reid had a close relationship (she’s the same grandmother that he went on the road trip with in his second memoir). He thinks about her often, and the type of wisdom he received from her right up until the end.

“The fact that there’s a finite amount of time that we get, that’s really the thing that creates meaning more than anything,” says Reid. “So instead of being frightened of it, it seems like that’s a stage to embrace, as ‘I’m lucky to be here,’ even with the certain issues that may arise. I think my grandma embraced it in that way. So, it kind of reshaped how I thought about old age in my own life and think about if I ever get to be that old that I want to embrace it in that same way.”

We Spread by Iain Reid is now available at Novel Idea in downtown Kingston and at Bookland in the west end.

Meet Bethany Garner, fibre artist

A unique sector of Kingston’s artistic community is the world of textile art. This artistic niche includes anything from fibre art to weaving and spinning.

Discover work from Kingston’s established fibre artist Bethany Garner and her advice to young artists. Bethany has been creating art for much of her life and continues to find inspiration wherever she is. She enjoys sharing her craft with others by teaching workshops and taking on students.

Bethany Garner: Fibre Artist

Bethany Garner is a local fibre artist in Kingston. She has a long history of both creating and teaching art in the Kingston area and beyond. Bethany has traveled across Canada, the US, and the UK sharing her knowledge and her passion for art.

Bethany has graduate education in textile design, typography, cartography, and photography. She has been an instructor at the St. Lawrence College Textile and Arts Program for 22 years and has been the owner and director of the FIBREWORKS Kingston Weekend Workshops Program since 2015. While she currently lives just outside of Kingston, Bethany is originally from Michigan. She was first introduced to crafting by her grandmothers who were skilled sewers.

Bethany describes her artistic style to be contemporary and fine art-focused. She utilizes abstract design, colour, contrast, and relationship value to create unique pieces with original dyed and painted fabrics. She describes her pieces to be simple enough to entice someone to get close to it, and exciting enough to consider collecting. Her style was not always contemporary, and she has changed her approach over the years discovering new ways to create. Bethany is always keen on challenging herself and creating new pieces and often learns new things during the design process. Although she enjoys creating, her first priority is education and sharing with her students.

Bethany enjoys hiking and being outdoors. Much of her inspiration stems from nature and is reflected in her artwork. Whether it be woodlands, lakes, rivers, or wetlands, Bethany finds both comfort and inspiration in the natural world.

The camp she just wrapped up had 26 women from all over Ontario and from Quebec. For a week they worked on several different projects using techniques like flat dying, monoprinting, and rust dying. Everything starts as white cloth which is then dyed to create colourful patterns and designs. Bethany also teaches these techniques at workshops at the Tett Centre.

Bethany uses a variety of innovative techniques and is always exploring new ways of doing things. She often suggests moving away from patterns and instructions and embracing the experimental process. One method that is particularly intriguing is ice dying or snow dying. After the material is wrapped up and placed in a colander, snow is placed on top, and dye on top of the snow. While the snow melts, the dye creates a pattern on the material.

Bethany says that the Tett Centre for Creativity and Learning, where she has been for many years now, is a warm and welcoming environment with a great support system. The Kingston community is full of support networks and resources that continues to grow. Her advice to young artists is to develop their own vision of the world they live in. “Find things that excite you, calm you, and explore how colour can affect your mood to create,” she says.

Bethany also participates in quilt restoration and conservation. For over 30 years she has provided quilt documentation, conservation, and educational services for the Arts and Quilt Guilds, groups, private individuals, private and corporate collectors, and museums as the Director of the Eastern Ontario Quilt Documentation Project.

Bethany is part of Kingston’s Tett Centre as a Creativity Studio Artist resident. To find out more about Bethany’s list of workshops visit her website for details on classes and dates. She is also a local authorized dealer for Ashford Wheels and Looms.

Bethany has a series of collections and exhibitions both within and outside of Canada. Some of her permanent collections include the National Quilt Museum in Paducah, Kentucky and the International Quilt Study Center at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Her Canadian exhibitions include Connections Fibre Artists Exhibitions, Wellington County Museum, Kitchener City Hall, and THREADWORKS.

Stop by Bethany’s studio space at the Tett Centre and get inspired by this local fibre artist or visit her blog for current workshops.