Relative to Wind: On Sailing, Craft, and Community, Phoebe Wang. Assembly Press, 2024.
Relative to Wind is framed around Phoebe Wang’s sailing journey. Amidst exciting descriptions of races and the technical language of sailboats, Wang finds community, observes Toronto’s histories, finds common ground with her writing practice, and considers her presence as an Asian-Canadian woman in historically white male spaces. As a reader of Wang’s poetry since 2018, it was captivating to read about her craft and overall sensibility in approaching the world through another lens.
In the first essay, “Boat Words,” Wang describes sailing as a type of language. She dives right into sailing terminology at the get-go, immersing her reader in the world of sailing before saying, “Reading isn’t how I, or how most sailors, learn phrases like ‘ready to come about’ or ‘raise the main.’ We learn them when the skipper gives a brusque direction that sends us scrambling for the right line, only to have an experienced, empathetic crew member point it out” (3). She gestures towards a more intuitive sense of learning, one that lets you feel your way through the world. For writers, whose practice revolves around knowing what words and phrases mean, Wang’s gesture is a permission to learn.
An openness to learning lies at the core of Relative to Wind. Wang shares anecdotes of relinquishing her own sense of control to allow others in to help her. Although the book is structured with individual essays, each piece moves seamlessly into the next. In the titular essay, “Relative to Wind,” Wang writes: “The points of sail are more than a metaphor — they are a way of seeing, of being, that continues to guide me and my imagination” (45). Wang is not going out of her way to write sailing as a metaphor — the metaphors are already present.
“Time Elapsed, Corrected Time” is situated within the 2020 state of emergency and closures of everything. Once Wang could race again, “It made the rest of the week, with its devastating news and the world in suspension, more bearable” (160). Wang does not pivot towards talking about the metaphor this moment has for writing craft. Instead, the act of sailing is a solace, a way to cope. The limitations of writing and art are left unsaid but are still present. Wang inspires me to ask, what do we need beyond writing and intellectualizing to make our lives worthwhile?
When Wang writes about community, she does so with a full awareness of the many meanings of community. There are, of course, questions like “When do we become a crew?” (20) and reflections like “Belonging is more than membership” (101), which can be applied to the writing community as well. But throughout the essays, there is an observation and reflection on the history of sailing clubs and wharfs in Toronto’s history, and the essay “Buried Timber” focuses entirely on Toronto’s harbourfront and how it has changed over a century.
The story of people of colour in institutions like sailing clubs is nuanced. “When I visit a yacht club, the thought at the back of my mind is how they are spaces that have historically excluded people like my family” (101), writes Wang in one essay. In another, she describes how belonging to a club with a Japanese-Canadian commodore “made [her] realize sailors could look like [her]” (10). There are sailors in clubs who disrupt the image of whiteness, but Wang is still aware of the “sport with a brutal and bloody history” (8), and continuously sits within the tension of this history and a “desire [for] at least one recreation that is a literal and metaphorical escape” (8).
This is a book that has many audiences, but one of those audiences is the poets and writers whose non-writing lives feel alien within the writing spaces. There’s a constant tension between lives, as Wang describes missing book events, TIFF screenings, dates, and festivals for sailing, and on the other side of it, missing things at the sailing club like trivia, dance parties, and awards banquets. When Wang writes, “You tried not to let sailing take over your identity . . . After all, you’re proud of your skills” (256), I feel a resonance with my own martial arts hobbies, where I spend most of my non-working weekly time, more so than I do on my writing. Identities, especially those imposed on women of colour, are difficult to manoeuvre. In all spaces in Canada, writing, sailing, or otherwise, there is an awareness of ‘“otherness,” but within that is belonging, however fraught that belonging may be.
Wang not only grapples with her position as a woman of colour within the sailing world, but also reflects on it in one of the last essays in the collection, “In Pursuit.” Here, Wang also acknowledges her own frustrations with gender inequality in sailing, as well as her own lack of awareness of initiatives taken to address the gender gaps within sailing by other sailors. “There are many essays and memoirs written by Asian-Canadian women on topics such as race, family, food, culture, and education,” writes Wang in the same essay. She goes on to say how “the women of colour I do know in the sailing community haven’t shared or written their stories, at least not yet . . . Perhaps I am writing this book to find them” (195-196).
Relative to Wind might, at the outset, be about sailing, but it absolutely meets the invitation or call that Wang puts out. The affirmation that parts of our lives, especially ones where we have pride in our learning, do not have to be siloed away from the “serious craft” of writing. The call for those of us who do sports, whether sailing or otherwise, to take comfort in putting our experiences to page and knowing there is a desire for those stories.
I went into Relative to Wind knowing little about sailing. I emerge from the book knowing a little bit more than I did, but a lot more about an openness and verve with which to approach life.
— Manahil Bandukwala is the author of Heliotropia (Brick Books, 2024) and MONUMENT (Brick Books, 2022).
