Author of Garden Inventories: Reflections on Land, Place and Belonging, 2024 Sarton Winner in Nonfiction
After winning the Sarton Award for nonfiction for Garden Inventories, Mariam Pirbhai wondered what May Sarton, for whom the honor is named, would have thought about her book, particularly since similar musings are everywhere in Sarton’s Journal of a Solitude. “I’m especially humbled by an award in nonfiction that honours a writer who was not only prolific in this genre, but who was also passionate about gardening,” says Mariam, the daughter of Pakistani immigrants to Canada.
“Another aspect of the award that is especially significant,” Mariam adds “is that it comes from a collective of women writers and readers outside Canada. The award tells me that the book has resonated with readers across North America and hopefully beyond. In the final telling, all books should be borderless.” Mariam also says she always looks to grow and learn from her readers. “So, extending one’s readership across borders, especially at a time of such deep division, gives me hope. And, of course, the joy and conviction to write some more.”
Pirbhai is a professor of English literature at Wilfrid Laurier University in Waterloo, Ontario, where her family arrived in the late 1980s. “Ours was an atypical circuitous journey from Karachi, Pakistan, where I was born, to England, the United Arab Emirates, the Philippines, and finally to Canada. Whatever the complicated catalysts for each of these migrations,” she adds, “I am grateful for the outcome: to never take home or belonging for granted, a theme that invariably finds its way into my writing.
“For me, to find joy and wonder in the everyday has always been a prime mover. I get on best with people who are as enamoured as I am by a monarch butterfly landing on a milkweed flower. And I say this with an awareness of the privilege that comes with living in an exceptionally privileged part of the world. Perhaps this is part of the credo, too… Be aware of your privilege in whatever capacity it has come to you, or in whatever way you have earned it, and use it with care.”
The author explains that in writing Garden Inventories, she wanted to consider how nature, the natural landscape, and in particular the act of making a garden can inform one’s sense of place and belonging. But the book, she says, is also about “How the land and landscape have been shaped—some would say radically transformed—by colonization and European settlement.”
Mariam’s previous books include two academic texts and two works of fiction. Her creative writing career came about in her forties, when she gave herself permission to write creatively in the throes of an academic career. Her first collection of short stories, Outside People and Other Stories, was published in 2017 by Inanna Publications, Canada’s oldest feminist indie press. And in 2022, her first novel, Isolated Incident, was published. The short story collection, Mariam notes, considers an eclectic group of émigrés who are a kind of invisible minority. Both Outside People and Isolated Incident won IPPY gold medals for Multicultural Fiction.
Since writing Garden Inventories, Mariam says, she has known she wants to write more about gardens and, more broadly, in the area of nature writing. “One of my current works-in-progress is another gardening memoir but written from the perspective of someone with a few more years of gardening experience. Another project in gestation is a food memoir.” These projects, Mariam adds, give her pleasure, and she’s not thinking about details, deadlines, or publishers right now. “The path to publication and everything that follows is all very hard work, so if my heart’s not completely in it, well, what’s the point? I want to write with conviction and with joy.”
“To anyone who has a story inside them, I’d say that you are the gold dust in your writer’s toolbox. Sprinkle yourself generously in everything you have to say. I don’t mean you should just write autobiographically, of course. I just mean that we each have a filter, a way of seeing the world that is uniquely ours. All the other stuff can be learned.”
