I’VE BEEN A CLOSET POET FOR DECADES.
Writing poetry feels to me like a dangerous, delicious pleasure, an indulgent but necessary form of creative expression, a dirty little secret, and one I would’ve happily kept to myself, were it not for the big cardboard box sitting under my desk, haunting me. That box contains the only evidence of the thirty years my aunt spent living in a notorious residential hospital.
In the 1960s Canadian writer, journalist and broadcaster, Pierre Berton, opened a national conversation about the mistreatment of disabled adults through his exposure of an institution known as, The Asylum for Idiots, (later, Huronia “home” for the developmentally delayed.) Despite Berton’s CBC documentary coverage, Huronia and its “overflow” sister institutions, Cedar Springs near Blenheim, and the Oxford Regional Centre (ORC)…