Until I bought the bookcase I’d packed and unpacked, sold, given away, purchased, received, and misplaced hundreds of books (where is my Collected Poems of Thomas Hardy ???). I’d dragged basic texts in a suitcase across the Atlantic several times and used digital copies whenever I could. But as a visual writer and artist, for me books are aesthetic things that ‘home’ me, as well as intellectual or inspirational objects. And when I look at the spines of beautiful books I focus more easily on the task at hand. I like the feel of a book in hand, and I love how they look on this little bookcase that folds ups so nicely when needed. In the photograph below (from 2019), you can see what I was researching/working on at the time: The Métis and the Medicine Line , a Riel bio, some French grammars for the opera (written in five languages); Edna O’Brien for stylistic prose purposes; Diego Rivera’s murals in Detroit for visual and intellectual companionship; The Chicago Manual of Style which is all business and weird pleasure (I was editing a project for MIT);
a few Golden-Age detective collections to lure me into the fantasy that I might have leisure time; a biography of Marie Colvin, the war correspondent I was to meet in 2012 had she not been murdered by the Assad regime; drafts of the opera; some poetry, and my taxes. If I took a photo of the bookshelf today, you’d see some new books; the little bookshelf, so aesthetically pleasing and filled with ghosts of books past, continues to give visual insight into what’s in my brain these days. Besides the core texts I mentioned, I currently have the following in the bookcase: Indigenous People in the Canadian Military ; The Tivium (a primer on logic and argument); Maria Campbell’s Halfbreed (new edition); a graphic novel bio of Josephine Baker; collections of essays; Ford Madox Ford’s collected letters; The Collected Writings of Louis Riel (to cross- reference as Riel aficionados are particularly careful about details and I need to be armed and ready); Lincoln’s bio; Alice Oswald’s Memorial , and much more. Gone, however, are early draft manuscripts of the opera. However, sadly, tax receipts and their paperwork remain. c
Dr. Suzanne M Steele is an author, an editor (with a specialty in Indigenous style), a scholar and a visual artist. Currently she is engaged in a major Indigenous language project and advises on protocol. She is a frequent speaker on the subject of art, language and reconciliation.
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