About Carla Barkman
I'm a physician, writer, and aspiring visual artist from Regina, Saskatchewan (unceded Treaty 4 territory). I graduated from the University of Saskatchewan with a B.Sc. and M.D. in 1999 and completed family medicine residency at the University of Manitoba in 2002. I've practiced medicine in northwestern Ontario, northern Saskatchewan, Nunavut, and from time to time in Regina, where I live with my two children and far too many cats*. My love of poetry began when I met Erin E. MacDonald in grade 9 and she read Tennyson to me in the school library... finally in 2021 I finished a B.A. (English) at the University of Regina, and because I'm happiest in a classroom, ideally learning rather than teaching, I'm now enrolled in a Visual Arts degree program. My poems have appeared in literary journals and a couple of anthologies (see Publications page if you care to check these out); I was particularly blown away when “Last evening I stumbled” placed second for Vallum Magazine’s poetry award and my flash fiction story “Four Children” won the Saskatchewan Writers Guild's inaugural Guild Prize. I practice and promote the discipline of Narrative Medicine as developed by Rita Charon and colleagues at Columbia University, aiming to center the patient's story and the clinician's empathetic response, guided by techniques of literary analysis and personal reflection.
*3
About The Poetic Object
I often fantasize about buying an old building in a small town and populating it with my pets, a piano, beautifully illustrated hardcover books, jewelry, carvings, figurines; on the walls, framed paintings and postcards and poems transcribed by hand, calligraphy on the fattest most milky white paper imaginable, or picture-poems, collages. My days will be spent scouring the lands or poised above notebook or easel in an alcove off the great room that is my shop, gathering and creating these physical things, these POETIC OBJECTS, which I will curate and adjust until my home-shop-world is aesthetically just-so, cats roaming and dozing on floral carpets, a yellowed copy of Schubert’s Album for the Young on the piano bench, tea cups and saucers on a tray. People will wander through and admire the OBJECTS, occasionally purchasing a trinket or a rare old book, and I will earn far less money than I must to pay the mortgage and keep the roof from leaking but somehow I will manage to eat and sleep, if not to travel or drive a car. The town will be small, and I will walk to post office and grocery store, choir practice, public library. I will know my neighbours.
I don’t expect ever to inhabit this life. And yet I struggle to stop collecting objects that manifest as poetic, gathering all to myself, a waste... so here, I wish to share.