ST. JOHN'S, N.L. — After recently completing her first novel, “Quiet Time,” Katherine Alexandra Harvey found herself surrounded by hundreds of sheets of paper, scattered across her room, marked with corrections.
“I was printing off the novel over and over and over again, making notes, and I was thinking, what a waste of paper (even though) it’s completely necessary,” Harvey said. “When I was a kid, my mother had made paper, so I … gave her a call.”
When Harvey was a child in Cupids, her mother, Janet Power, would often be sitting at her pottery wheel in the room just off the kitchen, in the back of their saltbox-style home. As the wheel spun, her hands molded and formed the clay and she let her mind wander.
“I was experimenting with clay, making clay (and) simultaneously I was reading about the Sumerians, the Egyptians,” Power said. “(I was) beginning to understand how people started to leave oral traditions to have their things written down.”
It was the evolution of communication that was on her mind, she said. And never one to let an idea lie dormant, she started foraging for anything she could, from birch bark to old jeans, to boil and break down the fibres to make her own paper.
And her kids would often join in the process.
So, when her daughter called to ask about the process, it had more meaning than a simple memory for Power, who currently lives above the Arctic Circle in Cambridge Bay, Nunavut.
“In many ways, I didn’t really realize what it meant to them. And so, I was delighted when Kate called up and said, how did we do that again?” she said. “We never realize what we’ve done and what’s going to interest our children as they discover themselves in what you’ve brought to them.”
The paper Harvey is making, and the art project it has become, is beautiful and her own, Power says.
“She’s really stepping into something, I tell ya,” Power said.
The paper is made from hundreds of pages of her unpublished manuscript, combined with leaves, flowers and berries she foraged from areas of significance for Harvey. To break down the fibres, water is needed, so she began taking it from the ocean and a stream in Middle Cove, where her grandfather grew up.
“It was very much a process, too, in a time when everyone is so isolated, of going back to your roots,” she said. “I had this urge when quarantine started to use my hands.”
Harvey bakes and cooks as well, but the convenience of a modern appliance like an electric mixer didn’t feel right.
“It was very strange,” she said. “I wanted to use my hands (to) knead the bread. I started making things I’d never made, like I tried to woodwork. It was ridiculous (and) I kind of ran with it. It was about doing these rituals that women have done for so long and taking back the idea of femininity.”
Once the paper was dry, Harvey finished it by stamping it with lines of her writing. And while she didn’t initially plan on selling it, people were interested in buying it.
It’s called “The Rewrite Project,” and each piece is one of a kind and sells for $45.
So far, she’s sold pieces to people in Spain, Nunavut, the United States and Newfoundland and Labrador.
Harvey is already looking forward to her next paper project, which will be called “A Fragmentary Poem.” Each piece will include a line from an original poem inspired by the “Weighing of the Heart” ritual from the “Book of the Dead,” a collection of Egyptian spells.
She loves the idea of words and lines from her poems being split up and sent around the world, connecting people unknown to each other in the process.