Meghan Fandrich is the poet behind Songs from the Lytton Fire, Andrew Staniland’s powerful choral setting drawn from her collection Burning Sage: Poems from the Lytton Fire. A survivor of the 2021 Lytton wildfire, Meghan writes from lived experience of loss, displacement, and the long work of rebuilding. In advance of If the Earth Could Sing, we asked her about urgency, witness, and what it means to find breath again after fire. Experience the world premiere March 28 & 29 at If the Earth Could Sing. Click here to buy tickets.
Q1: “4:54 p.m.” accomplishes so much in such a short time, and we can feel the urgency as we read it. When you look back at this poem now, what feels most important about the way it moves through that moment, and what do you most hope listeners carry with them as it’s sung?
“This poem was really difficult to write—it’s about running from the flames, the moment when everything irrevocably changed. The moments I describe in “4:54 p.m.” still reappear in my nightmares. I hope listeners can feel the intensity, but also the humanity of it: the familiar sidewalk under your feet, the things you grab in the moment of flight (a basket of laundry, your kid’s favourite stuffies, the wide-eyed cat), and what you see in the rearview mirror as you drive away.”
Q2: In both “4:54 p.m.” and“Fire at night,” the voice is stark and observational, almost documentary. When you were writing from this experience, how did you distill something so traumatic into language with such clarity?
“I wrote my book Burning Sage: Poems from the Lytton Fire just over a year after the fire, and for poems like these two, it was the first time I had put words to the memories I’d been holding in my body all that time. To write them, to get them out of my body, I had to step back into that moment. I think the clarity, the almost dissociative distance, comes from the shock I was experiencing. Running from the flames of a raging wildfire, or watching your hometown and the forests around it burn, is so far beyond emotion that all one can do is witness.”
Q3: Andrew’s set ends with “Now (An Epilogue),” which shifts away from the fire itself toward breath, connection, and trusting oneself. In your view, what does that poem insist on, and what do you hope audiences feel or understand when it arrives at the end of the piece?
“While the life-changing fire was the hardest thing I’ve ever endured, I can still find gratitude. Trauma carves you open and hollows you out, and I’m grateful that I have been able to fill that hollow with the joy of small moments, connection, and a rebuilt sense of self. I no longer take the little things for granted, because they might all be gone tomorrow. “Now” insists that strength can be found within—that I can trust myself again, and that we all can.”