About Carla Barkman
I'm a physician, writer, and aspiring visual artist from Regina, Saskatchewan, close to the center of Canada (horizontally speaking), which I acknowledge - though this is only a token and I hope/want/try to do more - is in fact unceded Treaty 4 territory, the traditional lands of the Cree, Saulteaux, Dakota, Lakota, and Nakoda peoples, and the homeland of the Métis Nation . I grew up on the prairies, graduated from the University of Saskatchewan with a B.Sc. (Medicine) and M.D. in 1999 , and completed a family medicine residency at the University of Manitoba in 2002. I joined a medical practice in Atikokan, Ontario, where my more experienced colleagues taught me how to be a doctor for real. After interludes in northern Saskatchewan and Nunavut, I have settled in Regina with my two children and far too many cats*. I have written poetry earnestly since meeting Erin E. MacDonald in grade 9, but narrative medicine workshops at Columbia University and the University of Toronto ten years ago inspired a more mindful integration of medical and creative work. In 2021, I finished a B.A. (English) at the University of Regina and am currently enrolled as a Visual Arts major, learning to draw and paint at long last. I have published poems in various literary journals and anthologies; I was particularly blown away when my poem “Last evening I stumbled” placed second for Vallum Magazine’s poetry award and my flash fiction story, “Four Children,” won the Saskatchewan Writers Guild's inaugural Guild Prize. I practice family and addictions medicine in Regina, teach medical students and residents, sing in The Regina Philharmonic Chorus, and am deep into a memoir about trying, but failing, to walk the 800 kilometre Camino de Santiago in Spain.
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About The Poetic Object
I often fantasize about buying an old building in a small town and populating it with my pets, a piano, beautifully illustrated hardcover books, jewelry, carvings, figurines; on the walls, framed paintings and postcards and poems transcribed by hand, calligraphy on the fattest most milky white paper imaginable, or picture-poems, collages. My days will be spent scouring the lands - by which I mean Saskatchewan’s auction houses and garage sales - or poised above notebook or easel in an alcove off the great room that is my shop, gathering and creating these physical THINGS, these poetic objects, which I will curate and adjust until my home-shop-world is aesthetically just-so, cats roaming and dozing on Turkish rugs, a yellowed copy of Schubert’s Album for the Young on the piano ledge, tea cups and saucers on a tray. People will wander through and admire the OBJECTS, occasionally purchasing a trinket or a rare old book, and I will earn far less money than I must to pay the mortgage and keep the roof from leaking but somehow I will manage to eat and sleep, if not to travel or drive a car. The town will be small, and I will walk to post office and grocery store, choir practice, public library. I will know my neighbours. We will help each other out in a pinch.
I don’t expect ever to inhabit this life, and so I am compiling objects that manifest as poetic in a blog… The planet is overpopulated with THINGS; I do own paper and pens and pencils and paint and plan to employ them, along with scraps of this and that pulled from here and there (ideally nothing that has not been owned and used before so as not to contribute to the cycle of overproduction and overconsumption that will almost certainly be our destruction), to assemble pictures that express something of what it is to be me, this human, here and now… but outside of that, I aim to simplify, overcome, transcend my desire for - well, everything. Nothing is perfect, nothing that is near-perfect remains so, all will pass away. And yet, for the moment, I must collect and share.