Young Missy gets mistaken for Bigfoot Junior and cries because the photo of her didn’t include her Jimmy Choo Ivory Satin Flower Bag or her Petal Double Earrings
I’ve gotta say, despite everything, this job is pretty interesting. I haven’t had it for long. I received this text out of the blue saying get an outdoor table at the Starbucks on Westlake and 7th at 13:17 on October 23. Since that was tomorrow, and I didn’t have much else to do, and I like the money they pay, I thought I’d go. See what was up. The clients I get are unusually really interesting. I mean the last one was a puffer fish. My bosses are called the SadCats. Don’t know anything about them, except they seem pretty interested in a wide variety of things.
Didn’t occur to me my new client would be an Australopithecine in a vintage Dior little black dress carrying a Jimmy Choo bag and wearing earrings. Somehow, Young Missy (that’s her name) knew who I was because she came right up to me and sat down quite gracefully, her long arms placed delicately over her lap, her handbag in the little triangle her arms made over her dress. I must have looked amazed, because she preened a little and said It’s a wonderful dress, isn’t it! I nodded quite vigorously, saying just what I was thinking. I realized I must be staring, so I blurted, what are you doing here?
She explained, crying a little when she handed me the newspaper with the blurry photo of her on the front page with the headline PROOF THAT BIGFOOT HAS A CHILD.
OMG! Anyway, that was my first YM task. I have to tell you now that this assignment is over—I fucking love this job!
Process Statement by the poet herself:
“I am an anthropologist. I express my love of that through poetry. I write about dead people, mythological people. I write about made up folks, and very, very occasionally about real people. When I do that, I very carefully hide their identities because the living can be litigious. The dead, not so much.
I create under a variety of names. Think of Pessoa’s heteronyms. My main ones are Carol Shillibeer, Pearl Button, Ars Cogitanda, Ira Mundi, and A. Non. It should be no surprise that I have a number of poetic voices. If you go to my website on the page “poetry,” you’ll see a list of books that I have self-published, or have been published by others. On another page you’ll see images that I have created—photographs, doodles, watercolour, ink, acrylics, digital, or a combination. OnYouTube, you’ll see a more recent mode of self expression (and fun), videos on things poetry.
The only things I really study these days are the craft of poetry and archaic human migration patterns. The rest is just for fun.
Like most writers, I started writing when I was very young. Then I got a bucketful of hormones, wandered around various countries, got married a couple of times, had children, raised them on my own, moved onto the Reservation, took various degrees at university, got jobs doing a whole range of things from cleaning dorm rooms (I mean, yuck!) and teaching as an adjunct at various universities and colleges.
I started the retirement process and moved to the West Coast (Canada). I applied for a grant, won it, and went on another road trip to do research about cultural patterns related to the Native American game that I know as stickgame. You might not know what this is, but believe me when I tell you it is big in the western part of North America. It’s a gambling game in Indian Country called handgame, or stickgame. I went to stickgame gatherings—listened to the songs, the drums—the noise of it was fabulous. Month after month. So great. Then I came back and wrote.
What’s curious is that stickgame didn’t show up much in the resulting two manuscripts. What did show up were prose poems (that’s what I call them) that spoke to various people from my past, including Ella Cara Deloria, a Dakota anthropologist who I really admire. I wrote about five women who represent my ‘belonging’: Ella Cara Deloria, Iphigena, Antigone, Feiga, and Egeria. I kept going, and ended up with a second volume, but this time the main characters were Badger and Coyote, trickster figures that are very big in my life, and have been so since I was a child.
I also started painting with watercolour and ink. I made a few pieces that hit big. I suppose it was all the water-gazing, travel on ferries, time spent with big trees, the sound of warblers and gulls, the movement of giant rivers as they came crashing down into the sea. I applied for, and won a 3-year residency in a live-work studio for a watercolour called “the storm before the poem comes.”
During that residency, Covid hit. I have to tell you, Covid was wonderful to me. I quit everything except poetry and painting. It was stellar. The residency was extended for a 4th year. It was awesome. Then some money fell out of the sky and I was able to move from the west coast of Canada (which is deeply beautiful, but horribly expensive), to the east coast of Cape Breton (still Canada), and deeply beautiful, but nowhere near as expensive.
I live in a tiny house in the middle of a meadow in a semi-rural area. I still receive the blessings associated with municipal services, including internet, water, sewage services, electricity, etc., but I also genuflect (as much as my knees will allow) on a daily basis with my neighbours, the crows, foxes, bluejays, rats, deer, mice, feral cats, gulls, eagles, hawks, chickadees, etc. Really a great compromise between urban and rural life.
It is here that the Ovid stories clamoured for attention. I’d finished both the story of the five women (Calamitous House of Kindness) and the trickster stories (Dear John) and was reading The Metamorphoses, so, of course, Ovid wanted out. Out of my head and onto paper. Along with many of his crew—Scylla, Charbidis, Glaucus, Demeter, Polyxena, Rhea, etc. They all have sequences in development. And of course, Young Missy (not Ovid, YM is an australopithecine. Long story.).
Things may change, but for now, I write, laugh at and with Ovid, am a little scared of Polyxena, am really super mad at Zeus, and hope Young Missy will revisit soon.
Oh and I won the Alfred G Bailey Prize (poetry) in 2025 for another manuscript (not about Ovid) called language be like.That one is about language and communication in the human species. It’s not particularly funny, but it does have a good voice. It comes out of my anthropological self. And another one about my long-dead mother called into the wilds of the first born and unwanted. That one is from my whiney-assed and asshole self.
In between bouts of writing, I teach poetry, mostly through Poets & Writers Groups. And I submit my various manuscripts.
It’s a good life.”
video series/playlist Poetry 101 Elements of Craft
video series/playlist Auntie Dodo Reads
video series/playlist Carol Reads Her Own Work
video series/playlist poetry videos by friends
Editorial note: For 3 other poems by Carol check out our March 2026 issue! The poet about this piece: this poem opens the Young Missy series. A suite of 10 prose poems that describe the relationship between 2 women, one human and the other australopithecine. Since the australopithecine species is extinct, and has been for over 2.5 million years, the story is necessarily speculative. Young MIssy and Ovid share this same speculative world.