Here’s the story of how I met Marty Gervais. I was twelve years old and receiving my first ever writing award for poetry. I had submitted a poem entitled ‘Spring’ to the Windsor Star newspaper annual student poetry contest – and I’d won! I was thrilled and terrified to go to the award event, and I cannot remember where exactly it was, only that it was darkly lit and very hot. My family and I had stopped to eat at Burger King before the event. This too was a special as dining out was a treat too! And so, there I was all dressed up and excitedly nerve-racked, and Marty was introduced or maybe he was the emcee, but he was there. I remember his glasses and his beard and his tallish, thin frame. He was totally intriguing to me and I knew he was someone to know and have in my writing life. I introduced myself but was too nervous to remember anything he said the second as he said it…as happens when you’re a child and you meet an intriguing grown-up. I hoped he would remember me…an aspiring young poet. I went home and promptly vomited all over, experiencing a terrible bout of food poisoning from the burger I’d eaten! Good grief!
It wasn’t until years later that I met Marty again. It was on the University of Windsor campus, and he was hosting a Brown Bag Writers Salon series over the lunch hour. I was studying Communication Studies and taking Creative Writing classes in the English department as my electives (because I was too scared to just take Creative Writing!) so I was on the peripheries of being an English major but still feeling like it was okay to attend this salon. Marty was talking about identity and how the ability to identify oneself as a writer was an important step in a writer’s life. He suggested we own our passion for writing and state it clearly. Out loud. And mean it. Well! Didn’t he just light my writing identity fire! As soon as the salon was over, I marched to his office, banged on the door and before he was even able to open it fully I declared: I AM A WRITER!
I vividly remember how it felt to declare this sentence to him. It truly was the start of my self-identification out loud as a writer. And the fire that he sparked continues to burn bravely deep in the marrow of my being.
Marty’s office door is always open. Marty’s email is always available. His cellphone number too, if you ask for it. But the best part of Marty that is readily available and shared with a smile (sometimes it’s mischievous, sometimes it’s Cheshire, sometimes it’s compassionate…) is his storytelling gift. And it is a gift.
Marty can tell stories like nobody’s business. And he can do this because he’s made it his passion to make everybody’s business his business. Since he was a young child growing up in Northern Ontario, he’s been paying attention to the world around him with an insatiable thirst to know it. He became a newspaperman in his late teens with a mixture of right-time, right-place luck and brazen moxie. By the time he was in his mid-twenties, he was employed, in love, and starting Black Moss Press out of an attic apartment in Toronto. Black Moss Press, a book publishing company specializing in poetry and children’s books, would grow to publish the best writers in Canada for the next 45 years (and counting).
Because he was entrenched in the Canadian poetry movement since the late 60s and beyond, Marty has shared ink and paper with the best poets our country has read and continues to read. His keen sense of what makes a great poem extended into his publishing company. For decades, he has been able to recognize a superb line or a thought-provoking stanza. Through his mentoring and his writing salons, and the literally thousands of classes and/or workshops he has led or been a part of, Marty can pick a poet out of a crowd like a magnet a needle in a haystack. Community is as important to him as ink is to his pen, and he continues to cultivate students and citizens in challenging and entertaining ways that cause positive change, that birth new writers, and that prove that there is a needed and delicate and hopeful place in our communities for poetry and literary arts.
He has been labeled an historian, a journalist, a poet, a writer, a teacher, a photographer (for his photography is poetry all its own) – and all of these labels are correct, but what they all have in common is a storytelling foundation that is unbreakable and completely inspiring.
Recognizing a powerhouse on the Canadian literary scene like Marty Gervais is a must. To this day, he cultivates people on the cusp of breaking out into the world as writers. People who are, on the inside poets and writers and photographers – essentially storytellers like himself – who, once under the mentorship and guidance of Marty, will identify themselves as the creative souls they are – but on the outside as well.
To list Marty’s published books or to quote one of his poems…well, we can easily do this on the internet with the gentle tap-tapping of fingers to keys, but what I think needs to be recognized is something that we maybe can’t see or read upon first look at lists and labels.
I want to write about what it feels like to know and share writing space with Marty. Those butterflies I felt in the deep recesses of my belly that night I met him over twenty-five years ago – that was the writer in me beginning to sense itself. When I was in my twenties and I declared my identity as a writer to him after one of his writing salons – that was the writer in me bursting out. And now, as someone who has been published by Marty, worked at Black Moss Press with Marty, traveled near and far with Marty, I can tell you that I’ve heard stories that he shares with an open heart and a belly laugh, and I’ve heard stories only his memoir will reveal. The best part of knowing Marty is seeing and hearing the world through his eyes and ears, through his poems and photos – the best parts of Marty are his stories.
It’s an honour to call Marty my friend – in words and in stories and in life.
Marty Gervais is the Poet Laureate of Windsor, ON. Visit Black Moss Press.
Vanessa Shields is a writer, poet, mother, wife…lover of great books and chocolate, living and working in Windsor, ON. For everything Vanessa Shields, please visit www.vanessashields.com.