I hardly recognize professor and writer Priscila Uppal when we meet for a run just a few days before she jetted to London to compete in her very own endurance performance event: Pumping out two poems a day covering Olympic & Paralympic action.
Dr. Up, as her writing pals call her for her PhD in poetry and upbeat personality, jogs into Toronto’s Winston Churchill Park looking like a rock star on her way to yoga. Her long hair is died Canadian-flag red and she wears hot pink sports shades with a funky running skort over tan running legs that are nearly as long as her list of accomplishments — two novels, 9 books of poetry, 5 anthologies, her first play being workshopped, professor of English and Humanities, all by the age of 38.
That Priscila looks smashingly glamorous in running gear shouldn’t surprise me. This is a woman, after all, who has been wearing capes, grand operatic hats and hair plumage to grungy Toronto literary events since long before we got fascinated with Kate Middleton’s fascinators. And she is just as likely to arrive at a friend’s book launch with a massive bouquet of flowers for the writer — big-hearted generosity is yet another way Priscila brings drama to an occasion.
Creating her position as Olympic poet in residence to the Canadian Athletes Now Fund (CAN Fund is a charity that raises money for elite athletes) is yet another luminous act of munificence. She invented the role for Canada’s Winter Games in Vancouver and is reprising it for London. Not only is she elegizing athletic achievement and drawing vastly greater sporting audiences to the near empty stadium of Canadian poetry, she donates all royalties of her cross-pollinating efforts to CanFund. Her collection about Canada’s winter Olympics, Winter Sports: Poems, and her London poems are available on that site — and nothing has made me laugh harder that her rhapsodizing about the sex life of snowboarders and curlers getting their rocks off.
To do all this good work, she pays her own way to the Games as well as purchasing her own tickets to events. When I suggest she might merit just a little support from the Olympics – as in a media pass for gadsakes – she brushes it off. “Swimmers train their whole life for the Olympics and they get only one ticket to their event – so they have to choose which parent to give it to. It’s tough.” Plus, she says, covering the Games from the vantage point of fans in the stands and also the streets gives her a more intimate perspective.
As we float along a trail that winds through one of Toronto’s western ravines, Priscila proves she has plenty of running heart too. The former high-school athlete (basketball, track, volleyball) drifted away from sports during her PhD, but she has been putting in 5 miles a day pretty much since taking up running in 2009. During that time, she’s dropped her 5k time from 27 minutes to 23. And though she trains for 5k and 10k races, last spring she entered the Niagara Falls Women’s half marathon on a last-minute whim. Without training for that distance, she finished in 1:47.26.1, just a minute off the persona best I set during a year I ran two marathons. Then again, her running coach and partner is former Pan-American champion race walker Ann Peel.
The more I hang out with Priscila the more I wonder if there’s anything this woman cannot do?
Actually, there is one thing she can’t do and that is call herself an athlete. “I have too much respect for what they do,” she says. “It’s like someone who writes in their spare time or dabbles in their journal calling themselves a writer.”
So let me paraphrase — Priscila reconnected with her sporty past when she became a professor and faced the horror of lecturing to 200 undergrads. She figured a way to get over her fear was to do something that terrified her even more, so she took up 3-metre and platform diving. Pretty gutsy considering she’s afraid of heights.
As we jog along in this brutally humid Toronto summer morning (making Priscila answer questions on the run is a great way to slow her down, um, so I can keep up), she tells me that she became a bit of an athletic flanneur, after she realized that diving had something to teach her about poetry. (See my story on Priscila in the Globe and Mail)
She took fencing lessons (which made her think of the strategies of essay writing), then figure skating (similar to drama) and has since fallen in love with running, “definitely an endurance sport like novel writing,” she laughs.
I think Priscila’s onto something. I took up training for a marathon, I thought, for perhaps the most bizarre of reasons – I wanted to write a novel and figured the marathon had something to teach me about long-distance writing. You don’t just wake up and run a marathon just as a completed novel doesn’t suddenly land on your lap. Both require careful planning, training, patience and confidence building as it takes months and even years of training/writing to get to the finish line of both.
But I also admit to Priscila that, as she did with diving, I also tackled the marathon because I was afraid of it. I hoped the fear of all those training miles would distract me from my greater fear of writing fiction. And it mostly did, perhaps because 90-kilometre running weeks keep me too exhausted for anxiety.
Since realizing the link between sports and creativity for herself, Priscila has organized conferences on sports and creativity and edited anthologies of sports stories. And she also tells her creative writing students at York University that being fit will help them become better writers.
That topic burns away a few kilometres of trail as she tells me how she works out solutions to writing problems during her runs. “I’ve now learned that my brain will solve things for me when I’m running. I get ideas all the time. During the first few kilometres, I frequently work out what I’m angry about, what’s frustrating me. I think very actively about that for the first 20 minutes, and then I go into a meditative state and solutions start to come up. Now I will start a run by actively thinking about what I need to find solutions to. And, of course, it calms the nerves.”
The Olympian poet has even put running to use solving her transit problems – a non driver, she now frequently gets in her five miles a day by running from her St. Clair-area home to downtown literary events, plays, meetings and even the opera. “People have learned that if they invite me to a party, I’ll likely be changing in their bathroom.” Luckily she has one awesome partner in Chris Doda, also a poet, who frequently takes the transit and packs along the capes and operatic hats for the wonder poet to change into.
But to gauge exactly how competitive Canada’s Olympic poet is, I ask if she ever tries to beat Chris as he takes the subway or streetcar to meet her? Priscila’s laugh comes out in a high-pitched gush. “Yes! And I usually win.”
Then Dr. Up, ever modest about her own sporty abilities, points out that this is grid-locked Toronto after all.
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