I met Barry McKinnon at a Gwillim Lake Writing Retreat near Tumbler Ridge in 2008. This is north of Prince George, maybe six hours west of Edmonton deep in the mountains. I worked in forestry at the time like many others in the area, and saw the poster in town in Dawson Creek for the retreat, and I recognized the name McKinnon. It was like cold beer in the middle of a desert, and felt just as unlikely, did this artistic retreat with someone I’d read while living in Ottawa, so far away from the Western haunt. That was before I discovered the farmer artist scene around Rolla and learned of the many writers pocked around the immense place of North.

“In Gwillim we trust,” Barry signed his collected works, The Centre, for me.

I must have taken a Greyhound down to Gwillim because I didn’t have a vehicle then. Either that or I got a drive with a co-worker heading that way. Memory is “silt-like” in poet Ken Belford’s words. Eventually memory is completely eroded. “All that remains is the name,” wrote Barry. Ken and Barry were friends then. But it seemed that politics wedged between them, a decade before such wedges became ubiquitous.

Events and people, after memory bottoms out, become notes in registries, maybe names on maps. I think that’s what Barry meant. Eventually it’s just our name floating on the surface of the pond, scrawled in undulating pollen. But like Belford implies, the silt-like nature of memory means that it can be “stirred”, awoken. Sharing memories of people as they depart—maybe this is an essential stirring.

McKinnon was in the anthologies, and was published at that time by above/ground press, so I knew the name and knew this obscure writing retreat was a must attend. So I got there, somehow. It was idyllic. Cabins, woodstoves, local rural writers giving workshops to the small but keen attendees. I could sense Barry was a role model. I use the term, I don’t know why. He was sharp-witted and had sartorial panache. I might use the term “class act” to describe him. Despite being situated way up there, far from “the centre” of the cities, a spatial concept he explored at length. He’d been nominated for a GG prize, and been close with Robert Creeley, he supported writers by inviting them to the New Caledonia campus (the last I saw him host was African-American experimental poet C.S. Giscombe who had a hereditary tie to the area). Later, 16 years later, I meet Cascadian poet and editor Paul Nelson who recounts his own travels to the pulp town for poetry purposes (a town as serious about poesie as it is about pine and cedar).

I remember, after a reading in PG, Barry was holding the floor with his vibrant, tightly wound presence as we lingered and he remarked “The poet and the scientist have a very similar undertaking if you think about it.” At the moment I couldn’t fully agree—it was a lateral leap I’d need to consider, turns out for years, before I could see what he meant: both that poet and the scientist rigorously investigate phenomena. And in his poems you can see the scrutiny of the line, the word, the moment of expression rendered pure, non- placebo. An empirical approach to creativity. At least in this context. In this moment I try to express. As we stood there, post-reading, as we, sill, linger.

He was a no-bullshit guy. He had a fire burning in him hot. He also had a stove. A wood stove in his well-kept home. The trees on his street were tall and lovely. It was one of the nicest streets in PG, not like a rich street, but just a nice street with older houses and mature trees, across the river from the pulp mill and within walking distance of Prince George’s gritty downtown core. “We’re pretty sure it takes 10 years off our lives,” he laughed about the proximity to the smokestacks. He said the grit was grist for the art. I remember the air in his living room, it was a moist day but his woodstove on the south wall radiated an even heat. And I remember the air was perfect—just a nice warm glow off the stove. It felt incredibly comfortable in that living room. He’d shown me some of the work he did with his Gorse micro press, collaborations with jw curry, for one. And something by bp Nichol. He’d published. Something racy.

Every death hurts. Our lives are seen in relief, the aquifers of feeling and the particular shade of our personal histories merging with a certain slice of time. I’m glad to have known Barry, and experienced the northern BC writing scene. It felt like a centre of its own. I want to keep stirring the sediments, remembering the names. There was friction there. Nobody got away from the streaked avenues without some grease on the knee. There are debates never quite resolved, ruptures frozen in their hemorrhage. But I feel that meeting others who know him, the elixir to be born again fresh, uncontaminated, old debates laughed off. Poems, at last reread.