Black Cake, Turtle Soup with Gloria Blizzard

Gloria Blizzard is an award-winning writer and poet, and a Black Canadian woman of multiple heritages. She holds an MFA from the University of King’s College. Her work explores spaces where music, dance, spirit, and culture collide. Her work has won the Malahat Review Creative Nonfiction Prize and has been nominated for the Pushcart prize. Her essays, reviews, and poems have been published by the CBC, The Globe and Mail, The Humber Review, Wasafiri International Contemporary Writing, and World Literature Today. Her first book of essays, called Black Cake, Turtle Soup, and Other Dilemmas, was released by Dundurn Press in 2024. Gloria lives in Toronto, and she dances daily.

Instagram @gloriawrites

Bluesky ‪@gloriablizzard.bsky.social

Website: www.gloriablizzard.com

Links to buy: https://linktr.ee/blackcaketurtlesoup

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Transcript

(0:14 - 1:30)
Welcome to All Right in Sin City, a podcast about writers and writing in the Windsor, Detroit region. Your podcasters today are Irene Moore Davis, author, educator, and local historian, Kim Conklin, Windsor-based writer and filmmaker, and me, Sarah Jarvis, former bookseller, publishing rep, and literary festival chair. Our guest today is Gloria Blizzard, an award-winning writer and poet and a Black Canadian woman of multiple heritages. 

She holds an MFA from the University of King's College. Her work explores spaces where music, dance, spirit, and culture collide. Her work has won the Malahat Review Creative Nonfiction Prize and has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize. 

Her essays, reviews, and poems have been published by the CBC, the Globe and Mail, the Humber Review, Wassaferi International Contemporary Writing, and World Literature Today. Gloria's first book of essays, called Black Cake, Turtle Soup, and Other Dilemmas, was released by Dundurn Press. Gloria lives in Toronto and she dances daily.

(1:30 - 6:01)
Welcome, Gloria Blizzard. Hello, thank you. I'm delighted to be here. 

Thanks for inviting me. So I'm starting with a trick question. Do you remember when or how you first fell in love with writing? Well, I do recall, I have a feeling that writing was kind of bequeathed to me. 

I grew up surrounded by books and music. And I remember after going through multiple careers, sitting in an English class, a compulsory English class that I was doing while I was studying fashion design, one of my many careers. And the teacher was wandering around looking at all the students writing and she walked past me and she goes, you're a writer. 

I think it was just because how engaged I was with the assignment and how I'd gone into myself and I really was delighted in being seen in that way, being seen in that light. And I embraced it, embraced it. You've lived in Canada, in Trinidad, and back in Canada again. 

You've also lived in many different residences as a child and as an adult, and you've traveled all over. What impact have these geographic shifts and shifts in perspective had on your writing over time? I would say that they've informed me in many ways. They've informed me because they also produced, they produce challenges. 

They produce what I call stuck points. And a lot of my writing is exploring those stuck points. For example, the move from Trinidad to Goose Bay, Labrador was something that sat with me for many, many, many years. 

I was ungrounded by that shift in geography and shift in culture and everything. That was something that ungrounded me for many years. And in the process of writing, I was able to explore that and to look at that and to look at the intersections of many things that came together in that voyage and in all the voyages that happened beyond that point. 

Because at each of those intersections, whether it's country or genre of art or culture, there's some wisdom. That's kind of what I discovered. And my writing is a way to explore all those intersections. 

How does your writing routine differ when you're working on nonfiction versus poetry? That's a really good question. Let's see. I don't think it differs, actually, because they are different expressions. 

They're different voices. There's a different compulsion. And when poetry is kind of hovering within me and ready to come forth, it's just finding a bit of time to kind of explore it. 

And the same thing with nonfiction, if there's a stuck point or something that I'm exploring and needs to come forth, it needs to be unraveled or investigated, it's just finding a bit of time. And when I was finishing up my book, I was up at like 5.30 every morning, working on it until 6.37 and then going off to my job. So that was a period of like very intense focus. 

And at other times, it was really important to just get on with life, deal with the challenges of life and not having enough time to write and finding little pockets of time throughout. And that could have been sitting on a bus, it could have been, you know, waiting for a cab or, you know, sitting in a restaurant or whatever. So these little pockets of time that I had to take advantage of, because it wasn't really stretches of time available to me. 

I think a lot of writers go through that. Yeah, that's a common complaint among the writing community. Yeah. 

So music is also a huge part of your life, as mentioned in your bio, and you dance daily. What impact has music and dancing on your writing, whether in terms of content or style or fluidity? Yeah, it impacts both. Content, because I have written about music a lot. 

I started out writing, you know, essays or interviews on profiles on various musicians and artists, dancers and writers and so on. And the content and my life as a musician was very much a part of what I write about as well. So content is very much in there.

(6:02 - 8:13)
And then in terms of style, music is so, so, so important. I hear things with a cadence. I hear them with, they move like music. 

And the space between words or sounds is just as important as the sounds themselves, like the rest between a note, right? And stylistically, the year of jazz, I wrote with the kind of the format of a jazz standard. So it influences style as well in a very concrete way that was very deliberate approach. I'm going to make it look like this is an AB section and, you know, and a chorus and it goes back to the head. 

And so it influences in so many ways. Yeah. So Black Cake, Turtle Soup and Other Dilemmas is this fantastic collection of essays on music, memory and motion. 

And you're emphasizing a lot of family history, personal history, food traditions. And through this collection, you really explore the art of belonging. I'm wondering what inspired this project for you initially and did anything surprise you about the way that it evolved or came together in the end versus how you envisioned it in the beginning? Well, I didn't envision, I didn't envision an ending. 

I envisioned each essay separately. Each one was something that I wanted to explore. And I did an MFA because I knew that I wouldn't necessarily finish a large project like that without mentors and colleagues and assignments and requirements to get things done. 

So and deadlines. So it was within that context that I kind of had the opportunity to explore each of these areas and bring together a lot of them are braided tails, i.e. there's like historical line through it. There's a personal line through it. 

There's an artistic line through it, like a genre of art. And there's weaving back and forth in time. So I also considered a kind of travel writing.

(8:13 - 12:27)
And the essay format allowed me to work in that way. I love the image of braided tails. That's very cool. 

Yeah, that's a visual way to look at the structure. I like that. You do write essays, but they are also all flavored with poetry. 

Sometimes it feels like a light dusting of poetry. And sometimes it feels like poetry has really been rolled into the dough. Can you talk a little bit about that style and how your poetic practice has influenced your nonfiction? I'm so glad you noticed. 

That is that is lovely. Yes. Poetry is infused in my voice. 

And often the most poetic way of expressing something, it just comes naturally. It wasn't like I'm trying to infuse poetry into that. It's just deeply woven into how I express myself. 

And I'm really delighted that you noticed that, that it's a poetic work. The title of the book, Black Cake, Turtle Soup and Other Dilemmas, hints at the complexity of some of the content. I mean, it may seem like a simple essay in the beginning about black cake, for example, but it's also about women's labor, gender roles, the costs and the burdens that individuals and families bear to participate in traditions, family expectations and the weight of them, and how we do or don't choose to comply. 

All of that stuff comes out of just the opening essay. And it goes on from there. You're navigating pretty broad topics. 

And many of the narratives begin with your own life, your own story. When did you start writing this book? And how long was the process from its beginnings to publication? Okay, let's see. 2017. 

I wrote an essay for the CBC, and it was on harmonizing identities through music. And that was like the the seminal work that allowed me to understand that I could weave these complexities into this form. And it was the great form for me to express myself. 

But I didn't really start to work on the collection until I started my master's degree, and that would have been 2019. And this kind of process allowed me to look at them deeply, one at a time, look at each section one at a time. And Black Cake Buddhism was like a seminal essay in that it allowed me to look at the historical context of something that is so ordinary in the Caribbean household, the cake, its historical origins, the fact that nothing in the cake is indigenous to the islands. 

Therefore, where did it come from? And therefore, why are we here? Why are there Black people on this island, you know, and then you're kind of just it just goes down this route, you're digging into the Atlantic slave trade, you're digging into Europe, you're digging into why are these mixed race people here? Why are we here? And then you're also like the indigenous people of the islands, where are they? And there are some, I mean, they're in our family. However, like you, you can't look at something that simple without seeing the whole of the history and the complexity of it, and the trauma of it, and how it impacts families and just the whole thing. So and then then I realized, okay, I can do that in many other spheres, right? I looked at, you know, a meal that our neighbors had given us, turtle soup. 

Or I looked at the university where I was doing my master's and that in itself was a very traumatic experience doing matriculation and going, I don't know if I belong here. And why is that? Why are the walls speaking to me? It feels like there's something that this land needs to say to me and that is indigenous people like and who else who built this structure? You know, whose hands built this? Was it enslaved people? I don't know. Let's find out.

(12:27 - 13:53)
So it was always a process of inquiry, curiosity and inquiry. And that kind of led the way for the entire, the entire book. The topic of belonging is also central to this collection. 

And I have a couple of quotes here that to illustrate that point. For example, you write about not being quite Trini enough in Trinidad, in Trinidad with your Canadian accent, and sliding halfway back into your Canadian accent when you return to Canada. And then you also write, I hated leaving my family being on the island to once again become foreign. 

I learned to live in a generalized non-belonging, a kind of imagined invisibility. It took me decades to land. So how is this search for belonging affected your work as a writer overall? Has this ability to operate from different vantage points and hold multiple identities offered any benefits to you as a writer? Makes me weepy when you read that passage. 

Leaving my familiar to once again become foreign. The interesting thing, I've had many people say that they understood the book from that quest for belonging, people from multiple heritages and places in the world. And many, many women from all cultures have really related to that quest for finding oneself and belonging.

(13:54 - 16:05)
What I do believe is that the intersections and the crossroads are very important places. And my experience of not belonging has provided these intersectional spaces where I can see many, many things simultaneously. I don't remember who used the term second sight with the idea of understanding the majority culture, because you have to, but also seeing something else simultaneously. 

And I think people like myself who've been required to move and exist in multiple heritages and cultures have like multiple sites at the same time. Like I'm talking to you, but I'm hearing many other things, echoes of many other things as well. And so that's definitely influenced my writing. 

That's why the essays are like this, because I don't know any other way of, I can't not see. This essay collection is also very deeply personal. And in it, you're inviting the reader along on your personal journeys, geographic and otherwise. 

You're sharing your various vantage points and places and spaces with them. How have the people who know you and who in some cases are part of this collection reacted to seeing themselves represented in this book? Good question. I've had that at live readings as well. 

I heard someone say to me, what did your father think about this? What did your mother think? And my dad was aware before he died that I was writing this and I'd read snippets. I would interview them constantly, constantly over and over and over again over the years. And since then I've read bits to my mom and she would go, it's exactly like that. 

It's exact. That's exactly what happened. So that was, you know, it was good to have her kind of blessing almost. 

And the book is dedicated to her. And in terms of other people, I mean, I have a dance teacher who I talk about. I have people like that know who they are. 

And nobody's maligned, really. It's all like, you know, it's my story, my discovery. And they are welcome into my world for a short bit.

(16:05 - 17:31)
After they've put the book down and had some moments to reflect on it, what do you hope most that readers will take away from it? I think one of my major themes is that there's a lot of wisdom at the crossroads. There's a lot of wisdom at the intersections. And the other thing that I hope people take, and I've had a lot of responses that indicate to me that this is what's happening. 

The most personal things that I reveal have universal resonance. For example, I talk about my mother making a meal for five people out of a can of tuna, like cutting it. And a Lebanese Canadian woman said to me, my mother did the same thing. 

It wasn't a can of tuna. But it's like those tiny little personal things people can really relate to in their own lives. And my trainer, who's a Filipino Muay Thai practitioner, said, I really relate to the essay Hummingbird, because it talks about how important rest is, and how, you know, we drive ourselves, and that we need to actually respect that.

(17:31 - 17:43)
And also, a lot of Black people have let me know, like, it's so great to see we are more than one thing. We are multitudes. Like, this is just my little world.

(17:43 - 18:29)
And there are many, many, many ways for us to exist. Wonderful. Are you working on any new material currently? I am. 

I'm kind of dabbling. No, dabbling is not the right word. I have a poetry project that's kind of waiting for me. 

And I have a work of fiction that is also waiting for me. I've just been through a year of events and traveling and talking about my book, which has been great. And I'm doing a little bit of a pause and just allowing these things to percolate. 

We'll see what happens next. I'm not sure. Well, good that you have some things calling to you.

(18:29 - 18:57)
Yeah, yes. Would you like to read something from your book for our listeners? Sure, I will read a short excerpt from my essay. It's called Water. 

One day, without notice to myself or lessons of any kind, suddenly I could swim. I was seven. It was as if a memory of some internal amniotic instructions had arisen within me.

(18:58 - 19:32)
That day, I went to a party in the hills at the house of a very rich person, or rather the party of a child whose parents had a grand Trinidad mountainside home. I remember that among the clatter and the laughter and the splashing around of the other girls, I calmly entered the slight chill of blue chlorinated water, floated and then paddled, head held high above the surface. I was fully at ease with myself, immersed and comfortable, pleased and smiling.

(19:33 - 20:37)
Within a year or so after my parents provided formal swimming lessons, I had joined a competitive swim team, swam my first mile and saved my baby brother from drowning. This might be a story of grace. It might be a story of saving others and being saved over and over again by a shadow, an essence, a person, a scenario. 

It might be a story of the power of water. It might be a story of how water holds intertwined cross-continental memories, or how it activates a dormant seed of emotion. Or it might just be a story of amniotic instructions in an oft-repeated first breath. 

Life, it seems, is a sequence of near drownings, rising to the surface and falling again. The book is Black Cake, Turtle Soup and Other Dilemmas, available from Dundurn Press. We've been talking to Gloria Blizzard.

(20:37 - 20:42)
Thank you so much for joining us, Gloria. Thank you for having me. What a delight.

(20:44 - 21:01)
Thanks for joining us. Look for more episodes of All Right! in Sin City wherever you listen to podcasts, or check out our website, allrightinsincity.com. For information and announcements of new podcasts, sign up to our email list or follow us on Facebook and Twitter.