The idea of 'home' means something different to everyone 鈥� and its definition is often rife with contradictions.
For Nelson-based author, artist, and professor of Literature and Creative Writing at Selkirk College Ren茅e Harper PhD, home is a place where people can acknowledge the complicated contradictions of the land they love while being able to find joy in where they are.
"I looked at what it means to call the Okanagan home," said Harper in an interview with Black Press Media about the recent publication of her book of poetry Boundary Territory.
Contradictions, like loving the wilderness of Okanagan 鈥� where Harper spent her formative years 鈥� while holding the knowledge that her favourite trees, book stores and lakes are located on unceded Indigenous land, are woven throughout the book of poetry.
Harper first started writing poems about her life as a youth in B.C.'s Interior and how her experiences intertwine with the Okanagan's history of settler colonialism while defending her PhD thesis in Canadian literature.
"I just started writing poems off to the side," said Harper.
It was in the margins of dissertation drafts and on scrap paper that Harper began to untangle the deeply personal but also cultural, ecological and historical question 'what is home?'
The collection of poems offers a dual perspective, the vantage point of Harper voyaging around the Okanagan as a transient teenager, and that of an adult in academia examining landscape with a deeper understanding of colonial settler and Indigenous history, culture, and the environment.
In the modern world, seemingly innocuous actions like heating a house emits damaging pollution into the environment, causing harm to the places people call home. Harper points out that environmental degradation is a contradictory act to do to something you love.
"Our lives are rife with contractions," said Harper. "While acknowledging these things, it is important to find family, joy and home."
"I hope people will think about where it is they call home and how they interact with it," she added.
. Most book stores will also be able to order the book in if requested.
