Montreal writer Joshua Levy reflects on the late poet Steven Heighton: 'More than merely a mentor to me'
'Despite Steven Heighton's many talents, it is his friendship that I will miss the most'
Steven Heighton was a Canadian novelist, short story writer and poet from Kingston, Ont. His books included the Governor General's Literary Award-winning poetry collection The Waking Comes Late, the novel The Nightingale Won't Let You Sleep and the memoir Reaching Mithymna, which was a finalist for the 2020 Hilary Weston Writers' Trust Prize for Nonfiction.
Heighton died from cancer at the age of 60 in April 2022.
Joshua Levy is a writer of creative nonfiction, fiction and poetry. He was the 2018 CBC/Quebec Writers' Federation writer-in-residence, made the 2017 CBC Nonfiction Prize longlist for My Brother's Engagement and was a reader for the 2021 CBC Nonfiction Prize. His first book of poetry, The Loudest Thing, was published in 2019.
Most importantly, Levy considered Heighton a friend.
Born Aug. 14, 1961, Heighton would have been 61 in 2022. Eariler this year, Levy shared his thoughts on the acclaimed Canadian poet.
My first glimpse of Steven Heighton was in a sun-soaked solarium on the upper floor of an aging Tbilisi, Georgia mansion.
Dressed in dark jeans and a navy-blue Hawaiian shirt, with slightly curled lips and a poofy black hairdo that pooled in rakish sideburns along his ears, Steve (as I would later call him) reminded me of an Elvis impersonator, albeit a really cool one. As I, and a handful of other aspiring writers, claimed our seats around a table on a sweaty summer's day in 2019, he picked up a piece of chalk and leaned it against his mouth like a cigarette.
Then he slowly and deliberately scratched a few words on the chalkboard.
"What makes this sentence tick?" he asked, his voice deep and brooding as softly rolling thunder.
Silence. We were already in over our heads.
"This sentence," he said at last, "is no different than a delicately constructed pocket watch. Or a bomb."
There was an audible gasp from the woman sitting beside me. I realized I was in the presence of a master wordsmith.
There was an audible gasp from the woman sitting beside me. I realized I was in the presence of a master wordsmith.
And yet, despite Steven Heighton's many talents, it is his friendship that I will miss the most. He was what, in Yiddish, we call a mensch: a person of profound integrity and honour (I can't help but pause here to reminisce about how he loved learning new words. I think he believed that each one held a secret).
A few months into the pandemic, I emailed Steve to coax him into participating in a Zoom reading. "I guess I should get used to this new virtual world," he wrote.
Our emails to each other soon grew longer and more frequent. Steve sought my feedback on a crop of songs he was constructing for his metamorphosis into a troubadour and offered to blurb my first book, introduced me to his agent, and then … I got cancer.
This is the part of the story where Steve became more than merely a mentor to me: he was a confidant in those dark days and shared stories of his own (many) brushes with death. Luckily, my health improved, and the content of our correspondence turned to more hopeful topics such as his blossoming singing career and news that I was going to be a father.
And yet, despite Steven Heighton's many talents, it is his friendship that I will miss the most.
Last December, Steve enthused about a gig he had just played in British Columbia with Ginger, his partner. "Ginger was the wind in the sail of my song tonight," he wrote, sounding drunk on love and on life.
In January, he wrote that he was having trouble sleeping, and in February reported that he was shedding pounds with alarming ease. I begged him to keep prodding his doctors to investigate further. Steve promised he would stay on them, and then sent me a second email, a few hours later, asking if my wife was getting enough Vitamin D.
"It's good for pregnant women," he wrote.
"Doctors don't tell you these things."
That was the kind of man he was.
Part of me keeps expecting to find a new email from him in my inbox — exquisitely written, of course. Philosophical, tender, and littered with shrewd observations about what it's like on the other side.
