J.L. Fizzell

My name is Jess and I publish poetry as J.L. Fizzell – a pen name I picked out when I was nine or so to honour female writers like L.M. Montgomery during eras where women were barred or discouraged from writing or forced to conceal their gender by using their initials. My poetry is inspired by the natural wonders of Northern Ontario and the art of living. I pull lessons and reminders from my time engaging with and reflecting in (or about when I can’t find my way to the forest) nature and what I’ve come to call “The North”.

I started writing poetry when I was in grade 6. My favourite teacher of all time, Mr. Norman Johns, asked us to write a poem as an assignment. He had a way of making you believe that you could do anything and always inspired me with every lesson he taught. I was a bit of an odd ball kid at the time. My mom was an immigrant which came with a slew of challenges, my parents had recently undergone a kidney transplant where my mom donated her kidney to my dad, I had just switched from French to English school and my grandmother was undergoing treatment for cancer but things weren’t progressing very well. I felt like an old soul compared to my friends, and often misunderstood a lot of “Canadian” norms or ways of doing things. Things felt pretty heavy for an eleven year old and so when I got the poetry assignment I decided to write about my favourite place – which is what I happened to call the poem. I ended up winning an award from the Northeast Council of English teachers that year for the best poem on the theme of the environment and it was the first poem I ever had published.

It goes like this.

My Favourite Place

There is a place I love to go
Where birds sing and flowers grow
Where sparkling streams go flowing by
Where majestic pines touch the sky

The gentle wind whispers in my ear
It gives me hope and calms my fear
The sweet aroma of a summer’s day
Makes my heart run and play

The forest animals sleep under the stars
Away from the noise of trucks and cars
The wise old owl watches at night and
Goes to bed at dawn’s early light

It wasn’t the last poem I would write but it’s the first one that I remember writing and one I can still recite off by heart. Poetry would become my way of making sense of or coping with the world. It was an abstract way of thinking where I could say everything I needed to without really saying anything at all. I think it’s funny now that I never saw this coming – becoming an author and a poet whose main inspiration was and is the natural world. A girl who wanted so badly to live anywhere but Northern Ontario just to become a champion of why this place is so special in her adult years. Nature has helped me make sense of myself and this life over the years. It taught me to live slowly, intentionally and live with wonder for what’s before me. Eventually it would remind me to embrace my younger self and stay true to her spirit.

Growing up, I was blessed enough to have nature trails that I could explore that started about a minute walk from where I lived. They happened to connect with the school I attended and went on for miles with all sorts of offshoot paths. There I could climb rocky hills, follow creeks, watch the birds, pick berries and pretend that my world was alright. I had a wild imagination and a love for stories. I had recently fallen in love with Narnia and it wasn’t hard to imagine that Northern Ontario nature was a lot like the stepping into that world. It wasn’t just the nature trails either. I spent a lot of time outdoors with my family engaging in the best of what Northern Ontario has to offer – hunting in the fall, snowmobiling, tobogganing and ice fishing in winter, camping, berry picking, fishing, swimming in lakes and hiking in the warmer months. I’ve seen more moose, bears and foxes than I can count and have been luckier still to have seen many a wolf, lynx, and eagle. I’ve had mink try to steal my catch, come face to face with the Sandhill Cranes and watched beavers make their dams.

Life in Northern Ontario can be challenging. I grew up in Timmins – home of the 9 month winter with temperatures plummeting to as low as -45C. Life was hard in many ways, but I credit a good part of my resilience to the time that I spent in nature. It has a way of teaching you to weather things while simultaneously teaching you how to still see the beauty through the storm or stay excited about what’s over that next hill. I had no idea at the time, but this would be the foundation of how I found my way to becoming a poet and a published author. Like Mr. Johns, nature had also been a teacher who would inspire me with every lesson. During my mid twenties I hit a period that was especially hard and I turned to nature as a way to escape the hard parts of life and just exist peacefully. I spent a great deal of time reflecting during those times, and many of those reflections quickly turned into poems. Within a few short months I had enough poems to publish my first book. I hadn’t really thought much of it, until my now husband, encouraged me more times than I can count to throw my work out into the world. In the same year I would go on to publish two more books that chronicled my healing journey via my time in nature or simply enjoying my own company. That year I attended my two events as a guest author, and was invited to several school classes to speak about (or teach) on the subject of poetry. Before my final presentation that year the teacher who had asked me to attend, asked if I could slip something in that would hopefully inspire her grade 10 students to consider all the ways in which Northern Ontario had lots of great things to offer. It challenged me to challenge my own thoughts and perspectives and pull from my professional (ie. day job) background in mental health and strength based approaches. How could anyone ever love anything if all they saw the worst? It was an easy trap to fall into up North when winter is relentless, and kids don’t always have the resources to get out of the city by themselves.

I walked away from that experience with a better understanding of what I could aim to do with my books. What started out as a way to let people know that they aren’t alone in their pain turned into a way to inspire people to look at nature and find ways to grow into their best selves. With that my fourth book came into shape – an ode to Northern Ontario and our endless journey into undoing our generational curses, making sense of our experiences and always walking away with some sort of lesson learned. From there I would go onto doing workshops using poetry as a creative means of coping, and do my first performance alongside my husband called Northern Soul: Exploring our Wild Ways. We combined poems I wrote inspired by nature with original music on guitar my husband composed for each poem, alongside photography of Northern Ontario nature from photographers across the province showcasing the beauty of this place we call home. I also used it as a means to display the nature photography of the late John Cernigoy as a testament that you never know what you’ll do in your lifetime to inspire people. He was an avid nature lover and an immigrant from Slovenia who shared my passion for nature and capturing it’s essence. The hardcopies of his photos where also displayed by category in one of his old carrying cases for attendees to take home with them. For the entirety of that performance I wanted people to challenge their ideas of home, the things we can learn from the land, and to hopefully fall in love with (or deeper in love with) Northern Ontario. I really just wanted to champion this corner of the world and help foster the kind of love it needs to thrive and be loved for what it is and not constantly compared to what it is not. Fun fact: my husband and I used our honeymoon to explore and camp in Northern Ontario (we chose Thunder Bay and Manitoulin Island) and many of the pieces from that performance were written/composed during that time.

I wasn’t always the greatest fan of Northern Ontario growing up – at least not the cities. The heart and soul of this place for me has and always been the wilder parts of it. I’ve come around in my adulthood and appreciate life in the North in all its ways, but nature has and always will be the biggest reason that my heart calls this place home. I’ve been to a handful of countries and explored a fair bit of the provinces but there is something about this neck of the woods that feels like the last frontier – not in the Star Trek way but more like Frontier Canada. We don’t have what our Southern Ontario counterpart has for entertainment, opportunities or community resources, but we also don’t have the busyness, crowded places and congestion either. We live a little slower and we make the best of what we have. We’re often criticized for being behind the times, but to contrast that it also means we’re not as concerned with keeping up the Jones. People here feel a little more down to earth – somehow a mix of forgotten times blended with the present. What we do have comes from people who are passionately trying to provide for their communities and grow what we do have. It might not be a lot but it also makes you appreciate what you do have. We have cities but they still feel like small towns for the most part and I’ve come to really appreciate the slowness of life up here and the work it takes to keep building ourselves into something great. I know that when I talk about Frontier, it is a far cry from what early settlers weathered as far as survival. Still, to me “The North” embodies the spirit of resilience, community and hope. It’s about using what limited resources we have to make things better and never giving up.

In my teens and early adulthood I fell deeper in love with exploring. Any side road that called my name was ventured down, I spent many a night under the stars watching meteor shower and looking for constellations with friends, traveling to every community in North Ontario I could, and always finding my way to the first no matter which city in “the North” I was currently calling home for post secondary. I found a lot of hidden gems scattered throughout Northern Ontario and it sparked something in my soul. Sure it usually took a while to get where we were going, but half the thrill was always seeing where the roads would take me and for how long or how far they would take me from home. I’ve found abandoned mine sites and forts, jaw dropping scenery and all manner of folk who celebrated the land with the food they served of the things they made. The soul of Northern Ontario became more and more apparent to me as the years passed. It was a story unfolding before me and the key to finding it was to always keep looking for the beauty and the lessons in every moment. It’s a passion I still haven’t let go off, and I’m always amazed that no matter where I go, I’m always discovering something new. At the same time, I always end up feeling connected my own story and the story of how we all came to be.

Nature is our backyard, and when I get discouraged about the state of affairs in our communities (endlessly rising costs, increasing crime rates, waitlist for services and rising homelessness) I turn to the forest. Something about being en plein air helps me step outside of myself and see the big picture. I can’t be part of the solution if I’m only here to help myself and fix my own problems. None of us can. It can be hard not to feel overwhelmed by it all – life throws a lot at us these days. Still, I remember that feeling of awe and wonder that fills me every time I look up at the stars or the sense of excitement that comes from seeing what’s down an old grown in trail. I marvel at how the trees adapt to chase the sunlight and sunflowers not only bloom bright but clean the soil in which they grow. I think about how salmon always find their way home, about how they sacrifice for their young or how the bear isn’t picky and the moose can be both awkward and simultaneously graceful. I think about the history this land has seen and all that it has weathered. I think about how rivers carve the land, and begin to move more gently as they age. I think about the fact that we can walk on water in the winter and find a meal in the forest. I feel connected to the past, the present, the future. I take all of that and I turn it into poetry because everything is a poem if you can just find the beauty or the lesson in it.

Northern Ontario is nature lovers paradise but it isn’t for the faint of heart. You need the soul of an adventurer to thrive here, and you need to put the work in. You can’t just pay for an entrance ticket to the magic here, you need to dig for it, wander the roads, let the stars tell you their stories and then try and make sense of it all. Read the books that tell the history, or better yet let someone tell you their stories, let the land tell you its stories and let yourself be weaved into the tale. I once wrote a poem that said “The North has made a warrior, the blood in my veins cannot be tamed” and that sentiment still remains true. I chose to embrace my wild, and within it I’ve discovered the best parts of my humanity. Should you ever find your way here, then I’d encourage you to do the same. Find the roads that don’t have names and explore them, sit in the middle of a lake or jump into it, climb a mountain, sleep under the stars, make friends with the wild, learn its secrets – I promise you that you won’t come back the same person.