Relative to Wind: On Sailing, Craft, and Community

A lingering, long-haul collection of writing about sailing for readers of Julietta Singh and Kyo Maclear.

Humans have sailed for centuries, but as poet Phoebe Wang discovers, when you step on a boat for the first time, the learning curve is steep. Relative to Wind documents Wang’s decade-long journey of learning to sail, becoming an avid racer and volunteer race organizer, and interrogating what it means to be a relative newcomer to an old tradition.

Wang delivers thoughtful renderings of her experiences--from colonial echoes in sailing language to a beautiful look at what it means like to work alongside prickly crewmates in tempestuous conditions, to battling the desire to quit or gender equity in the sporting world.

Following the motif of a race course and structured as a kind of manual to help readers apply sailing lessons and techniques to their relationships, to their craft, their careers, to community and to place, these essays recognize the parallels between sailing and a creative life, and between sailing and a sense of belonging and relationship with the land, inspiring both sailors and would-be sailors to embrace restoration and wonder.

Phoebe Wang is a first-generation Chinese-Canadian currently based in Toronto, Canada. She is the author of the poetry collections Admission Requirements (McClelland and Stewart, 2017), shortlisted for the Gerald Lambert Memorial Award, the Pat Lowther Memorial Award, and nominated for the Trillium Book Award, and Waking Occupations (McClelland and Stewart 2022). Her fiction and nonfiction have appeared in The Globe & Mail, The New Quarterly, Brick and The Unpublished City, shortlisted for a Toronto Book Award, and she co-edited The Unpublished City: Volume II, The Lived City. She is currently on the editorial board with Brick Books. She has been a mentor with Diaspora Dialogues and is an adjunct professor and mentor in the University of Toronto Creative Writing MA program. Wang lives and sails in Toronto, Ontario.