Hello Friends. I’m Shelley Leedahl, a multi-genre writer in lovely Ladysmith on Vancouver Island, and this is Season 3 of my literary podcast, Something Like Love. I’ve always loved to explore, so I’m feeling the pain during these restrictive, pandemic times and thus have decided to dedicate Season 3 to travel and exploration through poetry, fiction, and essays. 

You’re warmly invited to join me each week on international adventures from my past, and I’ll share some Canadian locales too. I also promote other writer’s work and – because I just can’t help myself – I add a dash of music to the mix, too    

No passports required, no quarantine necessary.  Let’s … just … do … this. 

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Sometimes you write something and it sits in your drawer for years. Decades. That’s been the case for the six postcard stories I'm sharing in my podcast, Something Like Love, today. Each brief story is set in Mérida, on Mexico’s Yucatán Peninsula. 

I was in this colonial city working with nine other Canadians and ten Mexicans – equal parts writers and photographers – for a month-long exchange in 2002. A year later the Mexican artists came Canada way … we spent six weeks together on our individual projects - and collaborations - at the Banff Centre. 

I hold these two experiences close to my heart, not only for the art that was made through them, but also because of the enduring connections they spawned. Lifetime friendships. 

Mérida's known for its rich Mayan history and culture. We arrived just after Hurricane Isidore had devastated the area; the graceful city I'd toured many times online was not the city I arrived in, yet as I piled into a taxi with a few other Canadians, I had the distinct sense that for for the first time in my thirty-nine years, I was home. I got a visceral sense of the city’s passionate heartbeat: people danced in the streets. Hell, I danced in the streets. 

I was struck by the city’s unique, S-shaped benches, called confidentes, silla tu y yo, or de los enamorados – for those in love. These binary benches are connected by their handles on opposite sides, so when you sit down you're facing the other person.

A legend exists about a father whose daughter was being courted by a young man in the village. As a condition of their courthship, the jealous father asked the couple to venture only as far as the park benches. They accepted, but the father then realized that the traditional park bench gave them plenty of opportunity to be physically close, so he decided to crate the silla tu y yo, which allowed them to speak each other and look into each other’s eyes while maintaining a discrete distance. 

I was amazed at how openly passionate couples - of all ages - were on these confidentes and on regular park benches throughout the city. Hugging, kissing, stroking … well, you get the picture. As a rule, you don’t see this in Canada.

I teamed up with renowned Mexican photographer Gerardo Montiel Klint for a project. Gerardo photographed six of these amorous couples, and I learned first names and occupations. From this, I constructed a fictional story for each of them. All these years later, I'm finally sharing those very short stories and the people that inspired them. 

In this week's episode I'm delighted to also include a Mérida poem by my dear friend and fellow Canada-Mexico participant, Victoria's Maleea Acker. Maleea's poem, "Calles de Mérida a las Tres de la Mañana," is from her remarkable book The Reflecting Pool, published by Pedlar Press. Maleea has a new poetry collection forthcoming in 2022, and I very much look forward to reading it.   

I normally create all the music for my podcast, but this week I used salsa from creative commons … the song is "Montuno: Evening Mood "by Dee Yan-Key from Tribe of Noise . Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike: http://creativecommons.