Every Day We Disappear
By Angela Long
Radiant Press
200 pages
$22.00
In the sixth of the 66 essays in this book, written when she was 33 years old, Angela Long begins by giving us a long list of all the men that she’s had relationships with, and then moves on to tell us of the many, many jobs that she has had: gardener, hotel receptionist, maid, waitress, pottery teacher, cook, piano teacher, busboy, olive picker, hostel manager. She doesn’t mention the job that most of this section of the book deals with, searching for caves in parts of British Columbia. She was used to the forest because she had spent five years planting trees in areas like this.
She also didn’t list English teacher among those occupations, but the third essay in Part 1 of the book is about teaching English in Guatemala.
This is also the section of the book where she reconnects with the mother who had given her up for adoption and whose wanderlust it seems she has inherited, along with her eyes.
So, Part 2 of this collection takes place all over India, where she falls in love with an aspiring monk, is hugged by a saint, witnesses the lives of people who live in poverty, and learns to sit still and listen. This is the largest section of the book and takes her to many places in the country before, in the last essay, she moves on to Korea.
Later, on Haida Gwaii, in a cabin called The Spare Girl, she writes that she found herself: “I tried to do what I’d learned in India—breathe. Inhale-one, exhale-two. I tried to listen to the natural soundscape of my mind.”
She was enchanted by Haida Gwaii and stayed there months longer than she originally intended to. “The first time I travelled this road, one of those ‘this is it’ feelings had welled up inside me … That feeling had kept me here months longer than I had intended to stay. On a second visit, only an offer to live in Italy had pulled me away.”
But eventually that wanderlust, which seems to characterize so much of her life, pulled her away again. In the last section of the book, she packs her Corolla with all her possessions and heads off down the road for another adventure. Eventually, after several attempts to apply, she ends up here in Dawson City, for a two-month stay at the Berton House Writers’ Retreat. In-between, she has spent time living in Spain and on Vancouver Island.
Angela Long is a freelance journalist and multi-genre writer. Her work has appeared in numerous publications over the last 25 years, including The Globe and Mail, Utne Reader, and Poetry Ireland Review.
She has travelled widely—collecting stories, working and volunteering—from the Indian Himalayas to the rainforests of Central America, to the farmers’ fields of Basque Country. In 2018, she drove across Canada visiting rural media outlets for an upcoming book about the power of local news, for which she once visited Dawson and interviewed this writer about the Klondike Sun.
She has written about living off-grid (after her own three-year experience on Haida Gwaii), about Indigenous water issues, and astrophysics. She has profiled famous artists, volunteer doctors, and war correspondents. Her work has been anthologized, and she’s the author of two books, Observations from Off the Grid (poetry–2010) and Every Day We Disappear (essays–2018).
While she calls Toronto home, recently she has resided in British Columbia and spent part of last year as writer-in-residence at Berton House in Dawson City. Who knows where her travels will take her next; but while here, she mused of returning to Galicia, Spain, where she had lived for several years, writing and caring for a growing number of abandoned cats.
