LEGS L’EGGS LEGS: Jennifer Still in Conversation with Christine Fellows and Chantel Mierau

What is the membrane between elegy and leggings? A poem and a body? Nude nylons and a tiny plastic egg?

It all started in 2020 when Christine Fellows invited me to join a workout group of artists that was just getting started here in Winnipeg, an in-person class led by Athletic Therapist Robyn Edge called Spaghetti & Meatballz. After a 10-minute warm-up, my legs were noodles. What was I standing on? There was a blank space under me.

A few weeks later I was on a solo retreat at our family cabin near the Winnipeg River where my mom, Joan, was born. It had been five years since her death, and I was just beginning to press into myself for some words that might hold—and release—my loss.

Every morning I faced the jumpsquat. 3 sets of 20. A jumpsquat for every year of my mom’s life. This single move, jumping and pushing away from the ground, allowed me to see myself lifting. And landing. I caught some traction in this newfound space. I wrote a poem.

We don’t know what we’re making until we make it. When I shared my poem with Christine Fellows and Chantel Mierau, two brilliant artists I was over the moon to collaborate with, the page dissolved and burst open all at once. Chantel arrived with a costume she had made years before that just happened to be waiting for a home: a fantastically long pair of leggings. Christine baked cakes, and we took them to all my mom’s homes: a pool cake for her birthplace, a running track cake for her community, a flower cake from our city yards, a hospital bed cake with number candles to mark the address of her childhood home. The cakes became the places and everything else, stuffed into nylons–sink plungers, sponges, swim goggles, sewing patterns, easter eggs, pool noodles, pond water, delphiniums, even cake!—became legs.

legs premiered in 2023 at the Zebra Poetry Film Festival in Berlin, Germany, receiving the Ritter Sport Film Award. The film and sculptural exhibition, legs, was exhibited at Gallery 1C03 in Winnipeg, MB, November 22, 2023–February 16, 2024.

The following is an in-person conversation between Christine Fellows (sound design, music, stopmotion animation), Chantel Mierau (costumes, videography, video editing), and myself, Jennifer Still (narrator/poet), on our collaborative process. This conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Christine Fellows (CF): Nylons stuffed with different things is a recurring image in the film. So, where did the idea of stuffing nylons with things come from? I don’t even remember that being a discussion.

Jennifer Still (JS): You and I were on a walk, talking about turning the poem into a video, and you said we should just stuff things into nylons. When we stepped over a broken curb, you said, “we could put that in there.”

CF: And that was the thing that summoned Chantel into the project.

Chantel Mierau (CM): Really? “I’ve been called… Somebody’s doing work about the body…”

JS: Nylons turned out to be the best thing. We kept asking, “What can these hold?”

CF: Where did cake come from? Why did cake go in the nylons?

JS: It’s the first line we edited out of the voiceover: “Barbie doll cake toppers on a domed icing skirt / eventually one will have to cut into / and discover / she doesn’t have legs / L’eggs.”

This was the hardest edit for me. It felt like a big moment when I was writing it, that she was only a half figure. Floating on icing.

CM: But the cake stayed in.

JS: The cake stayed in! And that was brilliant. The cake became the legs.

CF: It’s my favourite part about making things: you can have all this information and then just start removing, removing, removing, and it’s still all there. Because you go one thread too far or one pair of nylons too far and then…

JS: …it all comes undone. It became exciting to take lines out because then the question became, “What are we letting in?”

CF: I recently re-read the original chapbook version of the poem,¹ and it’s almost unrecognizable in some ways, but it’s all still there in the video. I see where we took things out and represented them in a visual way or in a conceptual way.

CM: Because we had steeped ourselves in the poem, we were all anchored in that text in everything we did.

JS: It was easier to trust the removals the further we got from the page. As we recorded my voice, the page was gone, and there was more space.

CF: Do you feel you got to a point where you could do that version, the one that’s in the film, from memory?

JS: I think I could. I think I’d have to be moving, though. Imagine if you had to sing without moving. One of my favourite shots that actually didn’t make it into the video is a shot of our blue nylon feet as we sing. You can actually see us singing from our toes!

How does movement figure into your practice, Chantel?

CM: Maybe it’s more like doodling. It’s the hands that move. The way I think is to diagram. When I talk through an idea, I use my hands.

JS: When you were installing the long navy legs in the gallery, I was fascinated by how you listened with your hands, tussling the fabric to see where things naturally fell.

CM: This talk of movement is a good segue to talk about jumpsquats. You both were exercising when I signed on to the project. You invited me to join Spaghetti & Meatballz. I thought, “I could never do that.”

JS: To exercise is to admit your vulnerability… Every class, I find weak spots.

CF: When you started writing this, Jenn, you had just joined Spaghetti & Meatballz, and you were finding your legs.

JS: It’s true. It was so painful. Eventually it got to the point where I had something I wanted to protect. I felt my growth; I felt my strength. I was on a writing retreat at my cabin, and I would wake up in the morning and do my jumpsquats, and I started to write about the action itself. And then the jumpsquat was all a metaphor: if I can catch myself when I’m at my lowest, I’m my own back-up.

It was freeing and exciting to feel this strength in myself, and in concert with this physical strength I felt a freedom in my voice. I felt that I was stretching out into the poem and that I could say anything and jump around and leap around in fragments. The material was all about my mom and me and the body, and so it felt so wound and braided in itself—the lines were muscular, like tendons or something, so everything was holding onto each other. The jumpsquats and the writing were very together.

CF: And by yourself…

JS: Completely by myself for five days. At the beach. Swimming was a big part of it. Water was a big part of it. And it was also just listening to the present moment of my body. The jumping thump-thump-thump of my heart.

CF: Chantel, have you got to that point with Meatballz yet, where you like it?

CM: It’s not a consistent feeling, but I feel way differently about it. I don’t feel like it’s something that’s not accessible to me anymore. It always bothers me when people say, “I’m not creative,” or “I can’t draw.” Those are just skills. They’re not character traits. I had to realize this with the body too. These are just skills, and you can work at them and you can grow them.

CF: You know when you’re at the beginning of a project and it just seems so overwhelming, and you think, “I don’t have the skills,” and then you realize, “Of course I do”? It’s accumulation. It’s not just fully formed. Well, you don’t remember where some things came from—they just were always there. Like, now when I picture you, I picture you in that striped two-piece bathing suit Chantel made for you.

JS: It is the only bathing suit in the world.

CM: I still haven’t made you the altered top that I promised you. It didn’t quite fit you well. The bottoms fit but not the top.

CF: And that’s a line from the poem! How does it go?

JS: “i cut the top off my jumper and tailor the bottom half / everything is about fitting the bottom half / top is easy top is lessthan / bottom is morethan / bottom is full-figured.”

CF: It is funny. It feels like everything is in this poem. Everything.

CM: When you were talking about the fragments, Jenn, it made me think about the wholeness. The wholeness is still there through all these little fragments and snippets: the wholeness of who your mom was to you, or what the body means to you, or what legs do for you and where they take you, because the poem goes through many phases of life. It goes through several generations. All these fragments add up to something.

JS: It’s really hard to hold it all at once. I’ve had people tell me they couldn’t stop crying after watching legs. I’m struck by this sorrow, because there’s so much joy in the film.

CF: When we were editing, my own personal barometer for what to keep was if it made me cry. It wasn’t always crying because it was devastating; it was more like recognition.

CM: Have people asked you if we storyboarded? I was thinking, “What story? It’s not a story, it’s a poem!” We didn’t do it that way.

CF: All the interesting footage was the things that happened between and around the shoot, not the actual thing we were trying to shoot! So, that’s a lesson. The thing that’s engaging about the process is discovering it. If I knew what was already there, why would I bother doing it?

JS: Especially with a poem or a song which can be more circular. Meaning is webbed and spiralled in so many ways.

CM: There were lots of moments where we were looking at something, and someone would quote a line from the poem and we would all go “oh,” and then we would latch onto that. But it didn’t happen in order. We just gathered materials that referenced the poem somehow, and we put it all in a big pot and just started pulling out the noodles.

CF: The pool noodles! The poem was a storyboard I guess. Even the absent lines were a part of the storyboard.

JS: Chantel, what gave you the idea for the legs to be so long?

CM: I had made some big, long legs before and tried to make a video about it and didn’t really know where it was going, and it didn’t ever get finished.

CF: You were doing research for this; you just didn’t know it!

CM: I brought those legs to show you two at the very start of the project and we all just laughed and laughed. So, I was like, “Just make long legs,” to exaggerate that part of the body. It’s kind of like when you have a part of the body that is sore or bothering you, that it just feels so big in your mind. It takes up so much brain space. It does feel like they loom large.

CF: They are the shadow. Those legs are like the long shadows in fall. Crazy long, like “I am superhuman.”

JS: Christine, when you wrote the music, “Honeycomb Bell Chorale for Three Voices,” it was such a delightful surprise. We all met on my porch, and you played it for us and gave us our “ahhhhhhs” to sing. “AH AH AH AH AH….” is the lyric you wrote right on the music. I think of “AH” as a word, a gasp, a poem! Our harmonizing together is such a buoyant and grounding presence in the film. How did the music come to you?

CF: You had sent me a recording of the wind you heard while visiting your mother-in-law in the hospital. When she heard it, she thought it was voices, singing. She was in the hospital thinking, “those are voices outside,” and it was just the wind going through a metal stop sign.

JS: She told me it was a choir. And I believed her.

CF: Of course, whenever you get some sort of sound information, whatever it is, for me that’s the signpost. It’s like, “What if we put cake in the nylons?” Something that draws you in. Then you just keep putting more cake in the nylons.

[Laughs all around]

JS: To think that wind sound was such a huge part of your musical composition, and the way the wind played with the long legs was such a huge part of our visual composition….

CF: And it was all kind of accidental! We were just like, “This is beautiful. I could watch this for four hours, those legs, the shadow.” Did you know they connected that way, the legs and song, with the wind?

JS: Not until now.

CF: Yeah, the wind.

CM: Legs and wind.

CF: Why were the numbers 7-6-0 so important to you?

JS: It’s a signpost. It indicates a physical place: the address of my mom’s childhood home. It represents the idea that she’s home even at a very hard moment, when she goes to the hospital for a scan and the room number is 760. She is the one who makes this connection. It is her enlightenment, her joy, her discovery, standing there in these blue voluminous hospital pants, pointing up at the number.

And actually, I didn’t get it.

CF: Your mind was elsewhere.

JS: Yeah, I was like, “I’ll remember where you went.”

CF: And then when did it hit you?

JS: I was writing it down, I was journaling the whole time, and then it struck me that as she goes through she is pointing up, and in a heavy whisper she is saying “my home.”

CF: She actually did this? [pointing up]

JS: Yeah. I’m pretty certain.

So, I think I was letting that kind of mystical element in, allowing for meaning.

CF: The idea that you can feel at home at a moment in your life that is the least comfortable and most terrifying…

JS: Yeah, in a place that’s kicking you out. It is the most common question I get: “What is 7-6-0?” But I kind of like that it’s a puzzle. The answer is there.

We often miss those connections to our life stories because so much is happening, but in acute moments—like when everything is resting on a scan—we see the connections all around us. Our story is being revealed to us.

CF: If Joan were to watch it, she would see it right away.

CM: Of course.

JS: Remember how we were trying to find a pool, and then the pool was empty? And it turned out to be the biggest gift, learning how to swim in an empty pool?

CF: And yet so terrifying and disgusting.

CM: So much work cleaning out the pool.

CF: At 900 degrees.

CM: And all the bugs.

CF: I kind of think that was part of the film, even though it’s not in the film, the whole experience of showing up there and going “Okay, how do we work with this?”

JS: We didn’t realize then that our behind-the-scenes process was the poem.

CM: We were just getting warmed up!

CF: That was early days of understanding…

CM: …what we were doing…

CF: …and how we were doing it.

JS: In every editing session there was some surprise where we all went “wow” together.

CF: Remember, there were times when Chantel wasn’t available and you and I, Jenn, would try to do something and we couldn’t do it? And as soon as you came in, Chantel, it would work. All three of us needed to be there.

CM: And especially in the editing. We needed to have three sets of eyes, and somebody saying, “Okay, that’s not there yet,” and one person identifies the problem and another has the solution.

JS: It was like a joined brain. The logic of us three.

CF: My favourite collaborations are something that has a source. Having a really excellent source, an anchor, gives you all this freedom. Because we could have made so many different films. The poem always felt new to me and felt like it was always speaking to one or the other of us. It was always telling us something… never like we had specific roles, but telling us, “This feels right. Keep doing this.”

CM: When I was feeling I had run out of ideas, Jenn would email, and I would say, “Let’s get this and this and this,” and then we had momentum again.

CF: Yes, momentum is key. Especially a project of this length, like over a couple of years.

JS: All of our locations were in a home. All the video editing and stop-motion creation and the audio editing and vocal track happened in your home, Christine. That was where the poem first lifted into the air. And the dining room of my home where we filled the stockings with cake, and my mom’s childhood home in Pine Falls where we swam, and of course 760, the home inside all the homes.

CF: Being able to be in a home setting, especially for a poem like this, just sets the tone. And the last location is Joan’s final home.

CM: When we started talking about the exhibit, we thought, “maybe some homey seating. It should feel homey.”

CF: The gallery space needed to be home. Ah!

CM: That’s why there had to be chair cushions.

JS: With neon pink ruffles. And a writing desk with legs in my mom’s rollerskates.

Christine Fellows finds music in sounds we tend to take for granted: the voices of the people we love, the sounds of the spaces we move through as part of our daily lives. She is a songwriter and performer, whose practice includes poetry, spoken word, paper collage, stop-motion video, sound design, and composition. Over two decades, she has released eight solo albums and toured internationally, from the Canadian Arctic to Southern Australia. For her latest solo album, Stuff We All Get (2022), she created 13 songs alongside 13 stop-motion videos.

Chantel Mierau is an artist working in video and performance. Her work examines the everyday, frequently focusing on the body and clothing. By strategically using repetition to either lull and comfort, or to build tension and suspense, Mierau reckons with the comfort and discomfort of living in a body. Since graduating from the University of Manitoba with a Bachelor of Fine Arts in 2011, she has exhibited locally and nationally. Her recent work 3 Chores was exhibited in Winnipeg at Platform Centre for Photographic and Digital Art in 2019 and was featured in BlackFlash Magazine in 2020.

Jennifer Still composes poems with physicality. She is the author of several handmade chapbooks and three poetry books, Comma (Book*hug), Girlwood (Brick Books) and Saltations (Thistledown). legs is a limited-edition chapbook with Baseline Press (2022) and winner of the 2021 Malahat Review Long Poem Prize. In 2020 she collaborated with Christine Fellows on I Write with Fossils, a video-poem exploration, and the live-action sewing video Close Call with Chantel Mierau. legs: a collaborative exhibition, made its Canadian premiere in fall 2023 at Gallery 1C03, University of Winnipeg.

1. legs is a long poem by Jennifer Still, published as a limited-edition chapbook in November 2022 by Baseline Press. An earlier version won the 2021 Malahat Review Long Poem Prize and appeared in The Malahat Review #215.