A Guelph poet is taking readers on an emotional journey through the seasons of the Medicine Wheel with the release of her new book, Homecoming.
Melinda Burns has been writing for decades, featured in literary publications like The Grain and The New Quarterly, and winning awards for her short stories and essays.
After doing a reading as part of the Wellington Writers’ Festival a few years ago, a woman asked Burns if she could purchase her book, but she didn’t have one.
“So it got me thinking, maybe I should put some of my most recent poems together in a little chapbook, and then I would have one the next time somebody asks me that question,” she said.
The daughter of a Mohawk mother and English father, Burns is a status member of Lower Mohawk First Nation; the poems explore her journey to reclaim and celebrate her heritage.
“My mother didn’t actually go to residential school as a resident, but likely went as a day student” at the former Mohawk Institute in Brantford.
“She was taught to essentially be ashamed of her heritage,” she said. “That was the mission of the residential schools, was to kill the Indian child, so she did not pass on anything about our culture to me.”
Told to hide her heritage, it wasn’t until she became an adult that she started getting in touch with its “richness, and in particular, the Medicine Wheel.”
The Medicine Wheel is a symbol in native spirituality, she said, having to do with fullness and balance.
“It’s essentially a way to look at our lives in a way that is circular rather than linear,” she said. “It has to do with the different seasons of life. You can have beginnings any time in your life.”
It’s also how she organized the poems in the collection.
“When I thought about arranging the poems according to the Medicine Wheel, it just became much richer. Because it wasn’t just adolescence, middle age, old age; it was all the beginnings we have, all the kinds of joy and innocence and places of loss.”
The poems in Homecoming were written over decades and primarily follow four strands braided together: her relationship with her mother, which has a lot to do with her heritage; marriage and divorce, motherhood and raising a daughter, and moving into the place of the elder, as well as taking care of her parents in old age.
Though the concepts are personal, they’re also universal, she said – as is the title, Homecoming.
“The journey is about coming home to yourself and becoming more of who you meant to be; the directions of the Medicine Wheel can help you with that, if you’re willing to embrace them,” she said.
Though Burns writes in other mediums as well, poetry has always felt like the most natural form of expression.
“(As a child), I would write poems in my head on my way to my piano lesson,” she said. “I had this very formidable older piano teacher, and she would sit down at the typewriter and type it for me before we went into our lesson.
“I just like the way it can capture a moment, but that moment can open into something more universal, or something larger,” she said.
The book, published by Bookland Press, is available now in most bookstores.
Burns is celebrating its release with a launch party this Saturday at Red Brick, where she spends much of her time writing.
“I’ve come to Red Brick every Friday morning for over a decade to write,” she said. “I’ve probably written some of these poems here.”
It kicks off at 7 p.m. and will feature poetry readings from Burns and local authors Michael Kleiza and Greta DeLonghi, as well as live music by local folk collaboration Lettercraft.