Ciara Renaud
Introduction by Heather Sellers
Ciara Renaud is attracted to spare lines, lists, overhead bits of conversations, and simple, searing images from daily life. She is gifted collagist. Her pieces bristle with juxtaposition. Often, her work is strikingly humorous, though here, in these pieces, there is an emphasis on the strangeness of grief—the loss of a beloved grandparent, the end of childhood. Always, I appreciate Renaud’s dedication to precision, simplicity, concision, and clarity. In placing high value on close observation and the weirdness of the human experience, she often reminds me of Lee Upton and Dorianne Laux.
At Kemptville Union Cemetery
- “Do you want to help?” my mother asks me. I step forward and hold the other side of the
green velvet bag holding the box with my grandfather’s ashes, and we lower it into the
ground together. - I scoop a handful of dirt out of the pile and toss it into the hole, on top of the green velvet
bag. - The priest is reading a passage from John. Someone on my left hands me a travel pack of
tissues. I whisper thank you as I accept them. - The two men in black suits from the funeral home stand side by side wearing sunglasses,
hands clasped in front of them. - “It’s a nice, orderly line, thank you.”
“It’s all the teachers.” - “We’ve only been to Tim Hortons once.”
“What?” - As I walk back to the car, a little boy in a blue hoodie walks out of the shed with a shovel.
Winter
Monopoly set on the kitchen table overlooking
The barren snowy backyard with
The empty stone birdfeeders, bowls turned
On their sides, resting
Against the gray pedestals.
Watching
The squirrels and rabbits running
In between the skinny fir trees whose
Green leaves feel like plastic
Like the trees in my Lego set.
I shuffle through the snow
On my knees, in a snowsuit,
My legs digging tunnels
Carving roads
Falling back to make
A snow angel, long blond hair
In white powder,
A colorless sky, flakes
On the knit pom-pom of
My cap.
Ciara Renaud is a new Canadian-American writer who is primarily focused on micro memoir, and she most often works in the spaces where nonfiction and poetry intersect.
Heather Sellers is the author of Field Notes from the Flood Zone (BOA Editions) and You Don’t Look Like Anyone I Know, a memoir about her experience as a person with face blindness. Her most recent book is How to Make Poems: Form and Technique. She directs the creative writing program at the University of South Florida.
Thank you for reading Volume 3, Number 2
