Micrographia

By Jennifer Bowering Delisle

As Jennifer Bowering Delisle was on her path through infertility towards motherhood, she was simultaneously losing her own mother to a rare degenerative neurological disease and an approaching medically-assisted death. The lyric essays in Micrographia explore how losses can collide and reverberate both within our own lives and in our relationships with the rest of the world. How much do we share of our stories, and how much do we understand of what others are experiencing? Ultimately, this is a book about connection; “micrographia” is both the term for the diminished handwriting caused by neurological disease, and the narrative fragments offered here.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Gordon Hill Press
• Release date: Sep 1, 2023
• ISBN: 9781774220962

Jennifer Bowering Delisle

Jennifer Bowering Delisle is the author of a poetry collection, Deriving (2021) and a lyric family memoir, The Bosun Chair (2017). She has a PhD in English and frequently teaches creative writing classes and workshops. She is also a board member of NeWest Press. She lives in Edmonton/Amiskwaciwâskahikan/Treaty 6 where she is an instructional designer and a mother of two. Find her online @JenBDelisle and www.jenniferdelisle.ca.

Book preview

I. Gater

Spectre

That first month, we went to Wreck Beach. Wreck had the best waves, the illusion of open sea, and I was trying to find comfort in the certainty of tides. Everywhere were bodies asking to be looked at. Hipsters with tattoos where pubes were waxed away, old men with bellies brown as nests sheltering bald pink penises. Everywhere bodies who were born. Everywhere the potential to procreate. I was trying to find comfort in the commonplace of life.

I don’t know if the fear triggered that first month of trying was because I had expected to be pregnant, or all along expected I might never be. I watched the waves, inched back as the tide came in. Beneath my towel alone a thousand billion grains of sand. My disappointment was unreasonable, my anxiety irrational. We had only just begun. Next month we would try again.

*

Mary Tudor tried to produce an heir. This is what the books say: Mary I, Bastard Queen, had to pass papist England to a Catholic son, to keep the realm from the hands of heretics. She was expected to do so, and she herself expected to do so. Such royals are not permitted love, or loss.

In September of 1554, both Mary and England thought that she was pregnant. The nursery was readied, she said she felt the baby move. Letters announcing the birth were prewritten with fil, which could easily be changed to fille if it were a girl. In April, false rumours of a son spread across Europe. But by summer there was no child, her belly receded, and no one in court was allowed to speak of