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Born Out of This follows Christine Lowther's journey from the unutterable loss of her mother to the discovery of her own poetic voice through deep reflection and her intimate connection to the coastal rainforest. Lowther looks back on her mother's poetry and activism. She recalls the day the police arrested her father, and the indifferent beauty surrounding that life-changing moment.
Tumbling through the years that follow, Lowther searches for her own identity--foster homes, punk rock concerts, activism and wanderings in Europe fill her hours but leave her searching. Ultimately she is drawn back to the forests and coast of her home.
With remarkable poetic vision, Lowther weaves her words and her mother's poetry into the landscape, until language and land are inseparable. She describes the waning days of spawning salmon: "barely submerged, the dark grey still-living move slowly among the dead, except for sudden splashes, bursts of energy, pinnacles of desperation." Nothing is simple in this dense, temperate jungle, and even this routine tragedy renews: "This landscape of gore nourishes and fertilizes the trees and berry bushes."
With over twenty years of poetic devotion to Clayoquot Sound, Christine Lowther entrances readers through the stunning vividness of her writing, profound reflections on our place in the natural world and its ultimate indifference to us: "We ... humans stand between forest and ocean like acupuncture needles, feeling the world pulsing with its endless cycles." Steeped in the immense beauty of the coastal rainforest, this indifference is strangely reassuring.
Christine Lowther resides in ƛaʔuukwiiʔatḥ (Tla-o-qui-aht) territory on the west coast. She is the editor of Worth More Standing: Poets and Activists Pay Homage to Trees and its youth companion volume. Author of three poetry collections, in 2014 she was presented with the inaugural Rainy Coast Award for Significant Accomplishment. Christine’s memoir, Born Out of This, was shortlisted for the 2015 Roderick Haig-Brown Regional Prize. In 2016 Christine won first place in the creative non-fiction category of the Federation of British Columbia Writers Literary Writes contest. She served as Tofino’s Poet Laureate from 2020 to 2022.
"In Born Out of This Christine Lowther partners spirit of place with an exploration of self in a sensitive and celebratory dance of natural beauty and human creativity."
–Candace Fertile, Room
“Born Out of This is a memoir of savageries and beauties written in a style that is reverent but never precious. Lowther is at home in the natural world — this landscape of disorder — in a way few people are. She lives and writes from the margins with the eye of a naturalist … Through it all, her mother’s spirit is her guide.”
–Eve Joseph, author of In the Slender Margin
“Unlike other contributions to the genre … Lowther embraces the fluidity between urban and wilder places in a way that is wholly her own, and she includes meditations on urban wildlife and calls for the ‘mingling’ of writers across the coast’s social landscape. Daring to crisscross activist stereotypes and literary genres, Lowther’s passion lives up to her title."
—BC Studies