Erin (E)

I am a Montreal-based feminist writer/creator interested in collaboration, performance, experimentation, hybridity, digital storytelling, and creativity as a space for connection, community and social change. I value art that offers opportunities for healing, accountability, and transformation. I value tenderness, innovation, imagination and care and I believe revolution(s) are both needed and possible. 

I love poetry for its resistance of linearity, its visceral embodied quality, its sense of play with language as a texture or material, and the seemingly endless possibilities with form. I am drawn to poetry’s fluidity-one which I feel resists pitfalls of rigid certainty and harm in oversimplification. I think poetry lives in the world of complexity and nuance and I have a lot to continue to learn from the overlapping portals left in its wake.

I am most at home when building and writing from a character and was inspired by Katie’s practice, trust and vulnerability to share in a more personal capacity through this project. I have been learning so much from my friend, kin and collaborator and am genuinely proud of the intentional and sensitive process and work that we have built together. I also feel honoured to have experienced the collaboration of the 9 interdisciplinary artists we had the joy of working with on this project.

I have been buoyed by this work and process and my hope is that sharing How Does This Work? might cast a line of connection and resonance- a sonar echo amidst loneliness and disconnection. A possible rippling out in the dark waters ( tunnels) of this global crisis.

If you want to learn more about me and other projects I am working on you can visit my website at crowlake.space I also have an Instagram poetry account -@crowlake. 

I have been held by Tiotià:ke, also known as Montreal, during this time and many of the poems are rooted in this city. It feels important to mention that this land is located on the unceded Indigenous land of the lands of the Kanien’kehá:ka (Mohawk) nation of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy that have existed as a meeting place for many First Nations people. 

Erin Lindsay designed the website for How Does This Work?