The Courier dives into the existential with our guide, writer and professor Dr. Actis
Mia Lancaster (she/her) // Letters Editor
Andy Poystila (he/him) // Art Director
What Are We In?
As Andrea Actis understands it, “We’re in something beautiful that is also so needlessly overfull with suffering, something that warrants both our reverence and our disgust. We’re in something that has every possible vibration in it.” She goes on to articulate it as, “every horror and every tenderness unfurling simultaneously. It’s a bottomless and cyclical aesthetic mystery, basically, and we could be taking such good care of each other in here.”
Born in Toronto to a Hungarian mom and Italian dad, Actis came to Vancouver when she was 14 years old, “two days after seeing Titanic in the theatre.” The writer, editor, professor and deathworker has been immersed in investigating the strange and existential for quite some time, both academically, creatively and prarprofessionally. As a cherished professor of Capilano University’s English department since 2017, Actis has encouraged the next generation of writers, poets and critics to consider the fantastic, mysterious and often painful phenomena of existence. Recently, she has been invited to help revive and co-teach the courses PSYC 341 (Psychology of Religion and Spirituality) and PSYC 343 (Psychology of Anomalous Experiences), which have been lying dormant since Psychology professor Dr. Leonard George—who designed and taught the courses for several years—retired in 2018. With collaborator and partner Trevor Shikaze, she runs a research entity and small press, literally called What Are We In? (WAWI). She adds, “How Do We Fix It? is probably the more important question, really.”
20 years ago, Actis was at work on her undergraduate honors thesis, examining the Existentialist philosopher Simone de Beauvoir. Drawn to the Beauvoirian theory of ‘ethical ambiguity,’ she mentions an impactful quote from the 1947 book The Ethics of Ambiguity:
“The notion of ambiguity must not be confused with that of absurdity. To declare that existence is absurd is to deny that it can ever be given a meaning; to say that it is ambiguous is to assert that its meaning is never fixed, that it must be constantly won.”
Actis explains that this line of thought became a personal means to cope with the most alienating parts of secular postmodernism. “This distinction between absurdity and ambiguity was a lifesaver for me at the time, giving me a way to swim towards meaning,” she says, “towards something like purpose or truth, without needing to latch on to any of the maniacal counterfeits of these things that white heteropatriarchal modernity had handed down to us.” Actis adds that Audre Lorde and Gloria Anzaldúa would have played a large role in informing her early development in academia, had these great writers been assigned and acknowledged in her undergraduate ‘Great Texts in the Humanities’ course back in the day. She wishes, “I hope they are now.”
In her writing Actis has developed a distinct style, often drawing meaning from the aleatory and spectral, like her “father’s ghost,” dreams and otherworldly phenomena. However, it may come as a surprise to her students and readers that she actively avoided this collaboration in her early years as a writer, first looking to a larger social picture, using writing to more explicitly reflect political-economic contexts and languages before diving into the personal, internal or mysterious. In 2021, Actis published her first book, Grey All Over, which stemmed from her connection with her father, his passing, and what was left behind. “I’ve become less apologetic about seeing the personal and political as also spiritual,” she says, explaining the shift in her focus in writing after publishing Grey All Over. “To me it feels necessary to any anticolonial stance or project to not be dismissive of the kinds of experiences and epistemologies that most populations in the world take seriously and make room for.”
Figuring out how to hold on to these pulling, glowing experiences and ephemera became a practice of its own: an intuitive kind of noticing, as she calls it. This noticing is also something she brings to the classroom, and encourages in her students. As a professor in the twenty-first century, Actis has observed the consequences of engineered distraction through media and technology operating in the attention economy, coupled with the rise of surveillance capitalism, and essentially the thievery of one’s invaluable time, which the internet and rapid technological advancement has brought about. She says we are currently suffering from a crisis of attention. “The way information now moves works exactly against the conditions that human writing needs: unmediated and patient encounter with a thing for long enough that it starts to transform you, not just traumatize and numb and enrage you.” She continues, “a lot of what I try to do in the classroom is just protect those conditions, make space for not-knowing and not-being (ideally, without overfetishizing not-knowing and not-being). Existence precedes essence, as the Existentialists loved to say.” Thus, part of this protection is the reminder that we still have the option to access slowness, when we need it; to witness, notice and respond meaningfully. Sharpening one’s ability to be present and reflect by slowing down not only helps us to register, record and transform what is happening externally, around the world and our community, but also, internally. Actis offers, “if you don’t tamper too much with the evidence of your life, the evidence tells its own story, making it easier to recognize and own up to yourself. Then, maybe, if you need to, you can change.”
Along with writing, teaching and noticing, Actis has recently been developing as a deathworker. During a leave from her PhD program at Brown over a decade ago, the idea of creating a memorial planning business began to take shape. Her vision was “to help people create memorial events that were honest and idiosyncratic, that honoured the totality of the person who’d died rather than flattening everything into whatever a given funeral home had in its catalogue and was going to charge you thousands of dollars for.” Moreover, she already had experience; she had previously organized two big, very personal, memorial events: one for her father and one for her grandmother. While contemplating the memorial planning service, Actis spent her time volunteering at a hospice, in addition to editing The Capilano Review. “I just really wanted to be spending as much time as possible in the deathspace, where for whatever reason I felt more comfortable and useful than anywhere else.” She shares, “I didn’t end up quitting grad school or continuing with the memorial business, but the impulse never left me.”
Since then, Actis has cultivated her deathcare practice through Douglas College’s End-of-Life Doula program and become certified as a deathcare guide through The Centre for Sacred Deathcare. Her approach is steeped in compassion and creativity and is very much informed by her initial vision of the memorial planning service she once conceptualized. She sees herself in the role of a deathcare guide as “companioning others through both the material and the more-than-material dimensions of the deathspace with a special attention to its aesthetics–in the richest and deepest sense of that word.” With her clients, she works thoughtfully with this question in mind: “How can we make this as beautiful and bearable as possible while never denying the obliterating realities and frequent injustices of loss?” This work spans many aspects of grief and loss, from helping people revisit a death that feels difficult to know how to memorialize, to supporting those facing serious diagnosis or preparing for an anticipated loss. It can also include creating legacy projects or rituals, as well as making space “for validating and exploring the kinds of non-ordinary or mystical experiences that are frequently reported in scenarios of death and grieving.” On the subject of such phenomena, Actis says, “I believe in believing people’s experiences and testimony, fundamentally, and luckily for me as an artist I don’t need to have an investment in sorting out and defending what is or isn’t literally true or provable on this front.”
So, before this existence comes to a close, in one sense, we revisit the question, “How Do We Fix It?” In this specific moment where the image is losing its ability to be used as proof, right-wing conservatism is seeing a resurgence, a clanker can become a digital domme daddy during our loneliness epidemic and human rights are being violated on an extreme scale, Andrea Actis voices this plea: “we are going to need some really good imagination to counteract all the really bad imagination being baked into our present and emerging technologies, which are inextricable from our present and emerging politics. I struggle most days with a feeling that it’s too late, that whatever we do in the spirit of better storytelling will amount to no more than harm reduction.” But she insists on “keeping a candle lit however we can.”
To keep up with Andrea Actis’ writing and other work, visit her website andreaactis.com or say hi on campus!