The main narrative thrust of Yellow Barks Spider (Radiant Press, 2024), the debut coming-of-age novella by Saskatchewan-born trans-woman, filmmaker, sound artist and writer Harman Burns, is a rural boy’s journey toward transitioning to a woman. But to describe the experience of reading it in terms of coining a genre, I’d have to call it a Prairie Gothic Phantasia.
The opening definition in Encyclopedia.com states: ‘The Greek word phantasia is usually translated "imagination." However, in Greek thought the word always retains a connection with the verb phainomai, "I appear." It can be used to refer both to the psychological capacity to receive, interpret, and even produce appearances and to those appearances themselves.’
The protagonist is known simply as “kid” who is raised by “mom”, “stepdad”, “grandma” and “grandpa.” Other characters are equally nameless, such as kid’s friend, “neighbour.” Later on, when kid strikes out on his own, he moves in with “roommate.” The lack of proper names suggests an anonymity prevalent in kid’s surroundings that mostly take a backseat to his inner world. The turbulence of that inner world is made manifest by Burns in a number of textual styles. Foremost, is a stream-of-consciousness prose-poetry that eschews upper-case letters (although kid becomes Kid later on, perhaps alluding to his adult self). Descriptions often tend toward the violent, where “a pile of boards” are “brutalized by nails” or when kid kicks at a dandelion it becomes “white fireworks exploding its brains a thousand directions.”
Although he is warned not to go into a certain shed, kid does and this serves almost as an origin story for him where he encounters the cowspider.
“the spider was startled and in a shot it was crawling up the stick towards kid’s frozen hand. something inside him told kid he couldn’t let go. something said, be still.”
But when fear gets the best of him, his imagination takes over.
“first it would numb him with venom, try to calm him. convince him to relax.
then it would strip him, it would peel him apart and expose him, pinned open with no escape except into the mind, the trapdoor in the basement, through the attic crawlspace into the treehouse, the secret passageway drops down into the hideout in the earth, through the narrowing tunnel, squeezing smaller and smaller shedding years of skin, climbing fleshless and wet with exposed nerves, baby teeth dropping out, small and pink as candies, and
through the tunnel comes the spider.”
Later in its definition, Encyclopedia.com continues: ‘Aristotle gives phantasia a specific place in his psychology, between perception and thought. In De anima 3.3 he offers an account of phantasia that includes mental images, dreams, and hallucinations. For Aristotle phantasia is based on sense-perception and plays a crucial role in animal movement and desire…’
And farther along: ‘In Hellenistic philosophy the term phantasia is most commonly used to refer not to the capacity to receive or interpret appearances but to those appearances themselves. Both the Epicureans and the Stoics use the word to refer to the impressions we receive through our senses.’
Burns achieves this effect by shifting from prose-poetry to a kind of concrete poetry. The use of negative space or the running-together of words gives the reader a visceral entryway into the changes that kid undergoes seemingly at a molecular level.
(((hairless body wet with piss)))
(((sweat saliva crying)))
(((guts boiling over)))
(((vomit escaping the)))
((((spidersareinsidespidersareinsidespidersareinsidespiders))))
((((spidersareinsidespidersareinsidespidersareinsidespiders))))
((((spidersareinsidespidersareinsidespidersareinsidespiders))))
((((spidersareinsidespidersareinsidespidersareinsidespiders))))
Yellow Barks Spider by Harman Burns (Radiant Press, 2024)
Kid’s experiences away from home include sharing roommate’s bed on his first night in the apartment (never to be repeated and after which their relationship alters), working a dead-end job in a restaurant kitchen, and falling prey to substance abuse. In epic form, Kid returns as her female self, back home to the shed where it all began.
“Not even the quietest parts of her, the ones that moved only in the membranes of sleep, could breach the silence that enclosed her now. It showed itself like a magic trick, like a hall of mirrors, repeating forever in some distant haze. There in the black, in the absence, a hole that swallows and swallows. That won’t be drowned, that won’t be shut.
Nothing that has ever happened to you, nothing that you have done, will ever go away.
It lives here. It all lives here.”
Anyone who has read Yellow Barks Spider knows the excerpts I have provided merely scratch the surface of what Harmon Burns achieves, torturing and twisting language to forge a lightning-flash of immediacy and, along the way, alchemizing mundane, everyday experience into a ritualistic cleansing. Anyone who has not read it yet, will, I hope, be enticed to take a literary leap of faith and open themselves to an experience they won’t soon forget.
Harman Burns.
About Harman Burns:
Harman Burns is a Saskatchewan-born trans woman, filmmaker, sound artist and writer. Her practice is informed by folklore, nature, the occult and bodily transfiguration. Her writing has been published in Untethered Magazine and Metatron Press, and was shortlisted for The Malahat Review’s Far Horizons Award for Short Fiction. Burns currently resides on the unceded ancestral territories of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh peoples (Vancouver).
Steven Mayoff.
About Steven Mayoff:
Steven Mayoff (he/him) was born and raised in Montreal. His fiction and poetry have appeared in literary journals across Canada, the U.S. and abroad. He is the author of the story collection Fatted Calf Blues, winner of the 2010 PEI Book Award for Fiction; the novel Our Lady of Steerage; and two books of poetry Leonard’s Flat and Swinging Between Water and Stone. His acclaimed novel, The Island Gospel According to Samson Grief, was released by Radiant Press in 2023. Steven lives in Foxley River, PEI.