Jay Ruzesky Ing to Get Clean in Vancouver’S Thunder River by Tony Cosier (Thistledown $18.95) Downtown Eastside

PHOTO

ROBSON

PETER

Reprinted thirteen times, Anne Cameron’s Daughters of Copper Woman is one of the bestselling books of fiction published from and about British Columbia.

WINNER ANNEANNE CAMERONCAMERON Since 1995, BC BookWorld and the Vancouver Public Library have proudly sponsored the Woodcock Award and the Writers Walk at 350 West Georgia Street in Vancouver.

16TH ANNUAL GEORGE WOODCOCK LIFETIME ACHIEVEMENT AWARD FOR AN OUTSTANDING LITERARY CAREER IN BRITISH COLUMBIA

ANNE CAMERON BIBLIOGRAPHY: Novels & Short Stories: Dahlia Cassidy (2004) • Family Resemblances (2003) • Hardscratch Row (2002) • Sarah's Children (2001) • Those Lancasters (2000) • Aftermath (1999) • Selkie (1996) • The Whole Dam Family (1995) • Deeyay and Betty (1994) • Wedding Cakes, Rats and Rodeo Queens (1994) • A Whole Brass Band (1992) • Kick the Can (1991) • Escape to Beulah (1990) • Bright's Crossing (1990) • South of an Unnamed Creek (1989) • Women, Kids & Huckleberry Wine (1989) • Tales of the Cairds (1989) • Stubby Amberchuk & The Holy Grail (1987) • Child of Her People (1987) • Dzelarhons: Mythology of the Northwest Coast (1986) • The Journey (1982) • Daughters of Copper Woman (1981) • Dreamspeaker (1979). Poetry: • The Annie Poems (1987) • Earth Witch (1983) Children's Books: T'aal: The One Who Takes Bad Children (1998) • The Gumboot Geese (1992) • Raven Goes Berrypicking (1991) • Raven & Snipe (1991) • Spider Woman (1988) • Lazy Boy (1988) • Orca's Song (1987) • Raven Returns the Water (1987) • How the Loon Lost her Voice (1985) • How Raven Freed the Moon (1985) Vancouver Public Library reading Thursday, July 29th. Call 604-736-4011 for info.

FOR MORE INFO SEE WWW. ABCBOOKWORLD. COM

2 BC BOOKWORLD SUMMER 2010 people A hunk, a hunk, of burning love: DOUG, EZRA, Electrifying Vegas headliner Morris Bates returned to The Cave nightclub in Vancouver to DAGWOOD & trade kisses for scarves in 1978

MARSHALL neck in shit’ and Phyllis and Pascal came out of the bar and found me and Marshall McLuhan, took me to their home.” what were ya doin’? It sounds like a tale from Charles Dick- n Extraordinary Canadians: ens. Bates began touring Marshall McLuhan (Viking Western Canada with his $26),novelist-turned-psychopa- own Injun Joe’s Medicine I Show. Though he never lis- thologist Douglas Coupland gives us two great thinkers at tened much to Elvis until once—a father-son act of Cana- 1968, Bates first changed dian minding-bending—with his his act to Canada’s Tribute To Elvis, then changed it original appreciation of Canada’s to A World Tribute to Elvis. most enigmatic intellectual, The kid from Williams Marshall McLuhan, citing Lake eventually graduated McLuhan’s autistic leanings as a to The Cave nightclub in possible source for his creativity. Vancouver where he made Coupland, author of Generation $10,000 in three nights. X: Tales for an Accelerated Cul- Bates never knew his ture, also traces the evolution of father until his mid-forties, after Bates McLuhan’s growth as a “cantanker- struck it big as one of Las Vegas’ most ous conservative,” including his durable attractions. Having played conversion to Catholicism, his in- everywhere from the Mad Trapper’s debtedness to University of Toronto Lounge in Inuvik, to a South African academic Harold Innis, his dis- stage with Otis Redding, to an ap- like for the Biblical scholar pearance on the Merv Griffin Show, Northrop Frye and his TO VEGAS Bates ultimately felt his white Elvis jump- fascinations with Ezra Pound and suit was turning into a straitjacket. Dagwood Bumstead cartoons. Once an electrifying performer who FROM HORSEFLY, BC rubbed shoulders with the stars, Bates Still best-known for “the medium is the message,” McLuhan is given now works as a counsellor in Vancou- his due as an artist, rather than as Discovered in a Williams Lake baby carriage, ver’s Downtown Eastside and conducts a philosopher or futurist. In doing Morris Bates went on to become one of the Reality Check for Indigenous People pro- so, Coupland speculates that future world’s highest-paid Elvis impersonators. grams to help First Nations kids stay off biographers might examine brain drugs and alcohol. 978-1-894997-15-7 chemistry as much as environment T’S HARD ENOUGH FOR A BASS and history. player from a bar band in Back in the early 1960s, Vancouver or Calgary to end McLuhan also predicted that that up as a highly-paid head- visual, individualistic print culture liner in Las Vegas for fifteen would be replaced by what he years, but Morris Bates called “electronic interdependence,” did it from Williams Lake’s creating a new “global village” char- Sugar Cane Indian Reservation after he acterized by a collective identity with hadI lived with his foster parents Pas- a tribal base. Jeez, the guy even cal and Phyllis Bates in a rustic predicted the Internet. 9780670069224 cabin near Horsefly Lake. Elvis lookalike Morris Bates, easily one of the world’s foremost Elvis impersonators, tells it like it was in Morris as Elvis: Take A Chance on Life (Fox / Quarry $34.95), an amply illustrated memoir, co-written with Jim Brown. Bates’ mother Lillian, a Shuswap, was impregnated in 1949 by a handsome Haida while she was employed at the fish cannery in Port Edward. “During the Williams Lake Stampede in the summer In the ghetto: of 1950,” Bates says, “my mom went Morris Bates (left) now down to the Ranch Hotel and left me In a famous scene in Annie Hall, works as a First Nations outside in my baby carriage. Woody Allen consults Marshall counsellor in Vancouver’s McLuhan about his theories. “She went into the bar and left me Downtown Eastside. there. Many hours later I was ‘up to my

SUMMER Publication Mail Agreement #40010086 Contributors: Elizabeth Godley, Grant Shilling, Mark Forsythe, For this issue, Return undeliverable Canadian addresses to: BC BookWorld, Joan Givner, Louise Donnelly, Sheila Munro, Cherie Thiessen, we gratefully acknowledge the 2010 3516 W. 13th Ave., Vancouver, BC V6R 2S3 Hannah Main-van der Kamp, John Moore, Shane McCune, Joseph Farris. Writing not otherwise credited is by staff. unobtrusive assistance of BC Issue, Produced with the sponsorship of Pacific BookWorld News Web consultant: Sharon Jackson Canada Council, a continuous Society. Publications Mail Registration No. 7800. Photographers: Barry Peterson, Laura Sawchuk. BOOKWORLD partner since 1988. Vol. 24, No. 2 BC BookWorld ISSN: 1701-5405 Proofreaders: Wendy Atkinson, Betty Twigg. Design: Get-to-the-Point Graphics. Deliveries: Ken Reid Advertising & editorial: BC BookWorld, 3516 W. 13th Ave., Publisher/ Writer: Alan Twigg Vancouver, B.C., V6R 2S3. Tel/Fax: 604-736-4011 All BC BookWorld reviews are posted online at In-Kind Supporters: Editor/Production: David Lester Email: [email protected]. Annual subscription: $25 www.abcbookworld.com Simon Fraser University Library; Vancouver Public Library.

3 BC BOOKWORLD SUMMER 2010 people Mack the life MARK ZUEHLKE ver since chiefs Baptiste Ritchie and Sam Mitchell of the Mount Currie and Fountain reserves recommended Charlie Mack as the best source of Lil’wat GOES DUTCH Estories in 1969, ethnographers Randy Bouchard and Dorothy Kennedy began visiting his Birkenhead River cabin in the Pemberton Valley. The more Mack shared his world view and moral code as a master storyteller, with animated renditions in both Lil’wat and English, the more a friendship between the trio became crucial for recording Mack’s continuity with a mythological past. Two decades after his death, the team of Bouchard and Kennedy have compiled a tribute to Mack’s essential role in B.C. ethnogra- phy with The Lil’Wat World of Charlie Mack (Talonbooks $24.95), ensuring his rightful place in B.C. literature. Mack was born in 1899 and died in 1990. His stories were first recorded, translated and published in Lillooet Stories (BC Archives, 1977). 978-0-88922-640-1

Duncan Regehr ZORROASTER-ISMS AVING PLAYED ZORRO IN A LONG- Mark Zuehlke: Pierre Berton running HBO TV series and without the bow-tie Hportrayed Pat Garrett alongside Val Kilmer in Billy the Kid, ever mind Sidney Duncan Regehr has learned a thing Crosby’s overtime or two about not flubbing his lines. Di- goal. The greatest rector Peter Jackson wanted him to N play Aragorn in Lord of the Rings but the Charlie Mack (left) with Canadian victory was the lib- role went to . Randy Bouchard (centre) eration of Holland. Viggo Mortensen and Baptiste Ritchie, 1974 Having attended Oak Bay High The Olympics cost only School, Duncan Regehr has now re- four billion dollars; the settled at Shawnigan Lake and pub- Dutch liberation cost the lished his first collection of poetry, oincidental with the release of lives of 1,482 Canadians and Scarecrow: Poems and Drawings Wild at Heart: The Films of resulted in 6,298 casualties. (Ekstasis $24.95), in which he “explores Nettie Wild (Anvil $18), the Pa- The Dutch remain grateful. the metaphor of line—the line of verse, Ccific Cinémathèque launched a career retrospective of the director with the In On To Victory (D&M the line of the pencil, the lay lines of the same title in January. The mini-festival fea- $37.95), the eighth and fi- land of the scarecrow’s domain—in an tured four Nettie Wild documentary fea- artistic vision that is both penetrating and tures: A Rustling of Leaves: Inside the nal volume of his Canadian Philippine Revolution (1988), Blockade (1993), Battle Series for World War prophetic.” A Place Called Chiapas (1998), and FIX: The Regehr is a Royal Canadian Artist, Story of an Addicted City (2002), as well as II, Mark Zuehlke recalls a recipient of the American Vision Award Wild’s most recent film, the medium-length Canada’s fiercely-fought and documentary Bevel Up (2007). of Distinction in the Arts, and holds a Both FIX and A Place Called Chiapas won bittersweet military triumph. Doctorate of Fine Arts, honoris causa Genies for Best Canadian Feature Documen- It’s his 23rd book. from the University of Victoria. His paint- tary and all of her films have been widely distributed in cinemas across North America. In an era when “creative ings are found in collections and galler- The Vancouver Film Critics Circle recently non-fiction” is de rigueur, ies worldwide. But never mind all that… announced that Wild is the winner of this Zuehlke is a popular histo- He has appeared in several Star Trek year’s Achievement Award for Contribution to the British Columbia Film Industry. rian who deserves more credit episodes and portrayed Errol Flynn NETTIE The book features an essay by Mark for his slogging in the in the biopic My Wicked Wicked Ways. Harris and an interview with Wild by Claudia trenches of old-fashioned re- 978-1-897430-58-3 WORTH Medina. 978-1-897535-03-5 search. 978-1-55365-430-8

From W.A.C. to Wick

When Howard McDiarmid arrived on the tarmac of tiny Tofino airport in 1955 to become the lone physician for the Long Beach area, he intended to stay six months. Instead he served as the local MLA from 1966 to 1972. It was his one-on-one meeting with Premier W.A.C. Bennett in 1969 that persuaded Bennett to give the green light to McDiarmid’s park preservation idea that led to the creation of Pacific Rim National Park in 1971. “Many people have attempted to give various individuals, in particular Ken Kiernan and Jean Chrétien, credit for creation of the park, and rightly so,” he writes in Pacific Rim Park (Wickaninnish Inn $18.95, plus postage), “but the es- tablishment of Pacific Rim National Park required the expendi- ture of large amounts of provincial money to acquire private properties....W.A.C. deserves huge credit for this. “I believe to this day that if I had not represented a Social Credit constituency, the outcome would have been very different.” McDiarmid shifted his practice to Victoria, and later California, but maintained a residence in Tofino. He later opened the new Wickaninnish Inn on Chesterman Beach in 1996 with his son, Shell Beach, from Charles, having acquired legal control of that Pacific Rim Park name twenty years earlier. 978-0-9813204-0-3 (Wickaninnish Inn $18.95)

4 BC BOOKWORLD SUMMER 2010 foreword by robert f. kennedy, jr.

“A wondrous book, an exquisite meditation, beautifully conceived and eloquently written.” wade davis

a wilderness almanac chasing clayoquot

david pitt-brooke IN THE FABLED EAST CHASING CLAYOQUOT A Novel David Pitt-Brooke Adam Lewis Schroeder ISBN 978-1-55365-523-7 ISBN 978-1-55365-464-3 $19.95 paper GREYSTONE BOOKS $29.95 cloth DOUGLAS & MCINTYRE

“I will recommend this book to patients, colleagues, and friends.” dr. andrew weil “In the Fabled East blends compelling DODGING realism with a naturalistic approach to myth THE TOXIC and magic realism ... Schroeder creates a BULLET novel that, while rich in echoes of works HOW TO PROTECT YOURSELF FROM EVERYDAY like Heart of Darkness and Lost Horizon, ENVIRONMENTAL HEALTH HAZARDS DAVID R. BOYD is breathtakingly original and shockingly Foreword by david suzuki powerful . . .” —   DODGING THE TOXIC BULLET David R. Boyd ISBN 978-1-55365-454-4 $21.95 paper EASTERN JUNGLES GREYSTONE BOOKS AND

Maggie de Vries ENGLISH GARDENS FraserIllustrated by Renné Benoit Beara cub’s life JOURNEYS INTO MYTH AND MEMORY

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A GUIDEBOOK TO CONTEMPORARY ARCHITECTURE IN the way of a VANCOUVER

THE WAY OF A GARDENER A Life’s Journey a life’s journey Des Kennedy CHRIS MACDONALD ISBN 978-1-55365-417-9 A GUIDEBOOK TO CON- TEMPORARY ARCHITECTURE $22.95 paper IN VANCOUVER GREYSTONE BOOKS Chris MacDonald et al. ISBN 978-1-55365-445-2 “Th is engrossing memoir charts beloved $24.95 paper DOUGLAS & MCINTYRE garden writer Kennedy’s strict Irish- Catholic childhood in Britain to a countriﬁ ed adult existence in Gulf Islands, BC... Kennedy broaches topics like Aboriginal des kennedy rights and the devilish obscenity of a billy goat at stud.” —  

THE TOTEM POLE Aaron Glass & Aldona Jonaitis ISBN 978-1-55365-421-6 www.douglas-mcintyre.com www.greystonebooks.com $60.00 cloth DOUGLAS & MCINTYRE

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5 BC BOOKWORLD SUMMER 2010 6 BC BOOKWORLD SUMMER 2010 bc book prizes PHOTO

BRADLEY

SHARON PHOTO

TWIGG Thumbs up: Andrew Scott upon hearing he has just won the Haig-Brown Prize

Wilson Fiction Prize winner Cathleen With PHOTO

shows her appreciation to BRADLEY gala organizer

Bryan Pike. SHARON Lorna Crozier: Evans Non-Fiction winner

Here’s what they said from the podium at the 26th annual B.C. Book Prizes gala. THE MAGNIFICENT SEVEN HE MOST MOVING SPEECH WAS made by Dean Griffiths Taccepting the Harris Prize for an illustrated children’s book. He re- AT GOVERNMENT HOUSE called coming to terms with the physical abnormalities of his much-loved Four winning titles were published in B.C.; three from Ontario newborn daughter, having just illus- to a man who had his ear rubbed off by ing B.C. publishers as cultural he- trated the winning book about a char- the highway pavement during a motor- roes, citing Rolf Maurer of acter dealing with negative responses to cycle accident. New Star Books in particular. a newly-adopted sister deemed ugly by Dorothy Livesay Prize winner Fred Host Shelagh Rogers school-mates. Wah praised B.C.’s teachers as the opened the evening by recalling her Andrew Scott took home the “word warriors” on the front lines of lit- first literary interview for an Ontario Haig-Brown Prize for his massive re- erature. radio station. She was asked to talk search project about 5,000 coastal Hubert Evans Non-Fiction Prize win- to someone named Timothy places. “The whole process was like deal- ner Lorna Crozier praised and Findley who had won a Gover- ing with one of those giant runaway thanked her publisher Rob Sand- nor General’s Award. During their

snowballs you often find in comic strips,” PHOTO ers, as did Brian Brett. From Berlin, Fred Wah, Livesay Poetry winner & Brian on-air conversation she was sur- he said. “The damn thing keeps getting Brett, Duthie Booksellers’ Choice winner

Stan Persky sent a message prais- TWIGG prised to learn he was a novelist. She larger and larger, and it’s all you can do had presumed Findley must have just to keep out in front of it. At least, won some sort of military citation. that’s how I felt. But the staff at Har- Accepting the Lieutenant Governor’s bour were undaunted. You would think And the winners are... Award on behalf of Stan Persky, who they put together an encyclopedia every Emceed by Shelagh Rogers, and CHRISTIE HARRIS ILLUSTRATED could not attend, Terry Glavin week.” hosted by The Honourable Lieutenant CHILDREN’S LITERATURE PRIZE closed the evening by noting it was the The punchiest political statement came Governor Steven L. Point at (Supported by Kate Walker & Co.) first time in the award’s seven-year his- from triple nominee Brian Brett, Government House in Victoria, the BC Book Maggie Can’t Wait by Frieda Wishinsky; illustrated by Prizes gala produced the following winners: Dean Griffiths (Fitzhenry & Whiteside) tory that it went to a “mainlander.” Six winner of the Duthie Booksellers’ Choice previous recipients have all lived on Van- Award, in response to recent cutbacks in BILL DUTHIE BOOKSELLERS’ RODERICK HAIG-BROWN couver Island or one of the Gulf Islands. B.C. arts support. Brett recalled that dur- CHOICE AWARD REGIONAL PRIZE ing World War II, when money was (Supported by the Duthie family & independent B.C. bookstores) Encyclopedia of Raincoast Place Names: A Complete Reference to Coastal British Columbia scarce for the war effort, a cabinet mem- Trauma Farm: A Rebel History of Rural Life by Brian Brett (Greystone Books) by Andrew Scott (Harbour Publishing) ber suggested to Winston Church- ill that government funding for the arts SHEILA A. EGOFF HUBERT EVANS NON- should be decreased, whereupon Winnie CHILDREN’S FICTION PRIZE (Supported by Abebooks) replied, “Then what are we fighting for?” LITERATURE PRIZE (Supported by the BC Library Association) Small Beneath the Sky: A Prairie Memoir The most amusing remarks came The Gryphon Project by Lorna Crozier (Greystone Books) from BCTF president Irene by Carrie Mac Lanzinger, a math teacher who pre- (Penguin Group Canada) DOROTHY LIVESAY POETRY PRIZE PHOTO

sented the Livesay Prize. She joked that ETHEL WILSON (Supported by the BC Teachers’ Federation) she was responsible for making many stu- FICTION PRIZE is a door by Fred Wah (Talonbooks) BRADLEY dents turn towards the arts. (Supported by Friesens & Webcom) Having Faith in the Polar Girls’ LIEUTENANT GOVERNOR’S AWARD PHOTO

Carrie Mac, a paramedic by

CARRIE MAC: SHARON Prison by Cathleen With FOR LITERARY EXCELLENCE trade, told the audience her Egoff Prize- Egoff Prize winner Recipient: Stan Persky Livesay Poetry Prize nominees (Penguin Group Canada) TWIGG winning novel was inspired by tending Larissa Lai and Gillian Jerome

7 BC BOOKWORLD SUMMER 2010 8 BC BOOKWORLD SUMMER 2010 featureview FICTION

Walt Whitman’s Secret by are no less influenced and George Fetherling (Random House $34) changed by the process. The complicated biographer/ sub- alt Whitman, often con- ject relationship is often filial, sidered the greatest obsessive, erotically tinged, and WAmerican poet of the marked by strange affinities. nineteenth century, had many The fictional weaving together secrets in his life & of Traubel’s autobiography and In his novel Walt Whitman’s Whitman’s biography is a deft Secret, George Fetherling cov- & way of probing the political, tem- ers not only the life of “the good WALTWalt Whitman’s secret is not his homosexualityABE in a new peramental, and educational gray poet” but also the affinities between the two men. conspiracy against Abraham Lin- fictional take on the poet by the prolific George Fetherling. It also illustrates the changes coln, the president’s assassina- wrought upon the personal life tion at Ford’s Theatre, and the nadian slant and emphasizes tion to good purpose in his own Although a biography is, by of Traubel and, by implication, flight and death of the assassin, Whitman’s connection to biography of George Wood- definition, one life seen through of any biographer. John Wilkes Booth. Canada. This, in spite of the fact cock). the lens of another, it is by no Thus, although Traubel’s It is at the intersection of that Whitman had “a two-sided After acknowledging several means a one-way transaction. If idiom belongs to an earlier era, these story lines that the secret relationship with Canada.” He secondary sources he has used, the biographers’ experiences and gives the novel a more lei- of the book’s title is uncovered. revered the majesty of the geo- Fetherling expresses regret subjectively modify the lives they surely pace than current read- But I won’t divulge it here. graphical Canada and its native that, because his book deploys record, their own lives ers are conditioned to Along the way, population, but re- the “liberties, conjectures, trans- expect, its appeal is Fetherling skillfully mained convinced it positions and imaginative un- fairly wide-rang- introduces was not a democracy truths” of fiction, “it will be of ing. It includes Whitman’s relation- like the United States. no interest or use whatever to ship with the semilit- And he had a deep Whitman scholars.” This oddly continued on next page erate railroad worker, dislike for Queen Vic- negative verdict is quite un- Pete Doyle; the fe- toria and her minis- founded. male paramours he ters. The relationship between bi- hinted at, and the ex- JOAN GIVNER Flora Denison or- ographer and subject is of per- istence of some chil- ganized a retreat ennial interest. It has been dren born out of wedlock. (The dedicated to Whitman’s ideals endlessly explored by psycho- latter turned out to be as illu- at Bon Echo, a provincial park analysts, scholars, and by the bi- sionary as the fake butterfly near Kaladar. After his death, ographers themselves. Nor has poised on Whitman’s finger in she constructed there a memo- the topic been exhausted, in the famous “butterfly” photo- rial to him that exists to this day. spite of being trivialized in nu- graph). Nor was she the only Canadian merous works of fiction. It is to All these provide tantalizing in Whitman’s inner circle (he this exploratory tradition that Walt Whitman’s red herrings before Fetherling preferred the colloquial term Fetherling’s novel belongs and portrait from Leaves makes the final shocking revela- “gang”). The poet was briefly a it is far from trivial, in spite of of Grass, published tion. The conclusion he con- patient of Dr. William Osler, on the murder-mystery component. in 1855. trives to the mystery component one of the doctor’s visits from of his novel will be deeply satis- Montreal to Philadelphia. For a fying to readers addicted to much longer time he was at- page-turning thrillers. tended by Richard Maurice Lytton Strachey, the eminent Bucke, a psychiatrist and super- Victorian biographer, famously intendent of the provincial “in- said, “each person carries his sane asylum” in London. It is to secret within him, and the biog- Bucke that Traubel turns rapher is the one who has the in the novel for an gift of discerning what it is.” understanding of Accordingly, Fetherling frames Whitman’s ho- his narrative by making it a first mosexuality person account by Horace or, in the Traubel, who in real life was parlance Whitman’s spiritual son and the of the day, author of a nine-volume account “uranianism.” (published between 1905 and Fetherling 1996) of Whitman’s last years. In appends to the novel, it is he who solves the the end of the mystery that Whitman carries text, some com- within him. ments on his tech- Traubel, the son of a Ger- nique, describing his man-born, secular Jewish immi- book as “the reverse of grant, was a self-educated a non-fiction novel, in that printer and journalist. He was it is fiction that exploits the the poet’s constant companion same conventions of non-fic- at the end of his life, tirelessly tion.” Yet, this complex novel recording his sayings, and col- deserves more than a few ex- lecting documentation and planatory words banished to the memorabilia for use in his book. acknowledgment section. One Fetherling recreates Traubel’s convention of non-fiction he life and meshes it with that of might well have exploited is the the poet as Traubel struggles to preface, in which biographers understand Whitman and to traditionally situate their work in understand the nature of his the context of others on the own involvement. “The point I same subject, and set out the am trying to make,” Traubel theoretical underpinnings. says, “in my rushed and yet long- (Fetherling used this conven- winded way is that I don’t know why exactly I am writing all this. As you see, I have many imper- fections as an author.” Just as Samuel Johnson The person Traubel addresses so directly is the To- had his Boswell, the life of ronto-based feminist, socialist, and Whitman devotee, Flora Walt Whitman was slavishly MacDonald Denison, whom he recorded by Horace Traubel. calls his “lady of the jury.” By using this manner of address, Fetherling gives the novel a Ca-

9 BC BOOKWORLD SUMMER 2010 reviews

continued from previous page students of Walt Whitman, of Ca- nadian literature, and students of biography. Who killed LINCOLN? Fetherling acknowledges key sources that include With Paul Serup Charles Chiniquy Walt Whitman in Camden by revives the conspiracy theory of . Horace Traubel, published in nine volumes between 1905 and Who Killed Abraham Lincoln? by Paul Serup In his non-fiction investigation of Chiniquy’s (Salmova Press / Sandhill Distributing $29.95) 1996; Walt Whitman, A Gay Life claims about Lincoln’s assassination, incorporating by Gary Schmidgall and Walt information gleaned from court records, newspa- Whitman: The Song of Himself by aul Serup’s Who Killed Abraham Lincoln? per clippings, interviews and cemetery records, Jerome Loving (1999). is a 400-page non-fiction study that gathers Serup notes that the man who headed the official PHOTO evidence to support the claims of a investigation of the mur- 978-0-679-31223-9 P disaffected Catholic priest, Charles der of President Lin- SAWCHUK Joan Givner writes regularly on bi- Chiniquy, that Abe Lincoln was the vic- coln, and who also tim of a Catholic plot. effectively ran the LAURA ographies and autobiographies. She George Fetherling lives in Mill Bay. Chiniquy first became world famous United States gov- in the mid-1800s for persuading a re- ernment immedi- ported 200,000 people in his native ately after the GEORGE FETHERLING BIBLIOGRAPHY Quebec to stop drinking. “In 1851, he assassination, was invited to establish a French-Cana- Secretary of Walt Whitman's Secret The File on Arthur Moss (2010), novel (1994; 2005) dian Catholic colony on the unsettled War Edwin The Sylvia Hotel Poems Selected Poems (1994), poetry prairie south of Chicago,” writes Stanton, also (2010), poetry Year of the Horse: A Journey Serup. “Five years later, he made the believed Lin- River of Gold (2008) Through Russia and China (1991) Jericho (2005) The Dreams of Ancient Peoples acquaintance of Abraham Lincoln, coln was killed George Fetherling & his Work (1991) who defended him in two high profile by Catholics. (2005), edited by Linda Rogers The Broadview Book of Canadian 978-0-9811685-0-0 Singer, An Elegy (2004) Anecdotes (1990), editor court actions. One Russia, Two Chinas (2004) Rites of Alienation (Quarry, 1989) “In 1858, Chiniquy left the religion of Three Pagodas Pass (2002) The Gold Crusades: A Social his childhood and became a Protestant, fol- The Vintage Book of Canadian History of the Gold Rushes, Memoirs (2001), editor 1849-1929 (1988; 1997) lowed by more than a thousand of his coun- The Book of Assassins The Crowded Darkness (1988) trymen. His fame increased worldwide as he Abraham Lincoln (2001; 2005) Documents in Canadian Film spent the rest of his life speaking and writing Madagascar: Poems & (1988), editor (1809–1865) Translations (2000), poetry Documents in Canadian Art extensively against the Church of Rome and try- Travels By Night (2000) (1987), editor ing to win his former co-religionists to simple Jive Talk (2000), edited by Joe Blades. Moving Towards the Vertical Running Away to Sea (1998) Horizon (1986) faith in Christ.” The Gentle Anarchist: The Blue Notebook: Reports on First published in 1885, Chiniquy’s autobiogra- A Life of George Woodcock Canadian Culture (1985) phy Fifty Years in the Church of Rome went through (1998; 2005) Variorum: New Poems and Old Way Down Deep in the 1965-1985 (1985), poetry some 70 editions prior to Chiniquy’s death Belly of the Beast (1996) A George Woodcock Reader (1980), fourteen years after its appearance. The The Other China (1995) editor news of his death appeared on the The Rise of the Canadian Gold Diggers of 1929 (1979, 2004) Newspaper (1995) The Five Lives of Ben Hecht (1977) front page of the New York Times as well as in other U.S. newspapers.

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10 BC BOOKWORLD SUMMER 2010 11 BC BOOKWORLD SUMMER 2010 Extraordinary visions from Ekstasis Editions…

EKSTASIS EDITIONS WWW.EKSTASISEDITIONS.COM

Scarecrow India, India Muscle Memory The Jagged Years DUNCAN REGEHR YOLANDE VILLEMAIRE LINDA ROGERS of Ruthie J.

ISBN ---- TRANSLATED ISBN ---- RUTH SIMKIN Poetry & Art  pages BY LEONARD SUGDEN Poetry  Pages ISBN ---- . ISBN ---- . Memoir  Pages Fiction  pages . .

The Watchmans Eyes & Ears on What It Means Three Blocks West Dance Boundary Bay to Be Human of Wonderland MIKE DOYLE DAVID WATMOUGH D.C. REID HEATHER SUSAN HALEY ISBN ---- ISBN ---- ISBN ---- Poetry  pages Poetry  pages Poetry  pages ISBN ---- . . . Poetry  pages .

S PLIT Poems and life Winnipeg from Woman Walking Selected Poems STEPHEN BETT with angels the Fringes ELIZABETH RHETT ISBN ---- GUNDULA MOGERMAN WALTER HILDEBRANDT WOODS Poetry  pages ISBN ---- PHOTOGRAPHS . Poetry & Art  pages BY RON A. DREWNIAK ISBN ---- Poetry  pages . ISBN ---- . Poetry  Pages . Misshapenness The Catch Club The Language Triptych J.J. STEINFELD JOHN O. THOMPSON of Water MANOLIS ISBN ---- ISBN ---- GENINE HANNS ISBN ---- Poetry  pages Poetry  Pages ISBN ---- Poetry  pages . . Poetry  pages . .

EKSTASIS EDITIONS BOX 8474, MAIN POSTAL OUTLET VICTORIA, B.C. V8W 3S1

Strange Bedfellows The Invention The Private Lives of Words of theWorld ½ Howard Richler Richler’s wit and erudition make his fifth book on language a Jack Hodgins must-have for all those intrigued by the the English language’s reputation for “sleeping around.” 978-1-55380-100-9 6 x 9 160 pp $19.95 Skin Like Mine ½ Garry Gottfriedson A native poet like no other, Gottfriedson reveals what it feels like to live First Nations in the changing landscape of band politics and environmental degradation. 978-1-553380-101-6 6 x 9 100 pp $15.95 Follow the Elephant ½ Beryl Young In this young adult novel, a boy accompanies his grandmother to India and establishes a mysterious relationship with the elephant god, Ganesh, teaching him how to cope with his father’s A new edition of the novel that defined recent death. British Columbia. “In the beginning” a giant bull 978-1-55380-098-9 5-1/4 x 7-5/8 248 pp $10.95 begets a sky god who brings an entire Irish village to Canada. In the end, the whole of Survivor’s Leave Vancouver Island and perhaps the entire country ½ Robert Sutherland attend a rural wedding whose extravagance This young adult novel features two Canadian sailors whose ship propels everyday life into the extraordinary epic is torpedoed at sea during WWII and whose shore leave takes them world of modern myth. to a country house where they uncover a dangerous Nazi plot. 978-1-55380-097-2 5-1/4 x 7-5/8 176 pp $10.95 978-1-55380-099-6 6 x 9 356 pp $18.95

Available from your favourite bookstore or order from LitDistCo Ronsdale Press Visit our website at www.ronsdalepress.com

12 BC BOOKWORLD SUMMER 2010 reviews FICTION INFIDEL, SHORT LIST HERETIC, Man Corn Murders by Lou Allin (Gale $25.95)

AUTHOR A departure from her Belle Palmer detective series, Lou The Collected Short Stories of Ernest Allin’s Man Corn Murders is set Hekkanen: Naturalistic, Modern Gothic, in southeastern Utah where re- Surreal & Postmodern by Ernest Hekkanen (New Orphic $28 each) porter Terry Hart and her Aunt Judith get sidetracked as they UARANTEED TO BE THE MOST try to follow an historic Mormon Gimpressive, least-talked- road through the canyons— about fiction accomplishment of only to find the mummified 2010, the 880 pages and 73 sto- body of a missing student who ries of Volume One and Volume was helping to uncover an ancient Puebloan village. Two of The Collected Short Sto- 978-1-59414-750-0 ries of Ernest Hekkanen: Natu- Crisp by R.W. Gray ralistic, Modern Gothic, Surreal (NeWest $17.95) & Postmodern represent an astonishing range and depth over A grieving widow pursues a forty years of highly original sto- priest, an unhappy wife whittles rytelling. her husband to bits, and a nos- None talgic man has a one-night of the sto- stand with a whale trainer in ries in the Crisp, a first collection of stories by R.W. Gray, raised on the twin com- northwest coast of B.C. He re- pilations ceived a PhD in Poetry and Psy- escaped choanalysis in 2003 from the Uni- editing, versity of Alberta. Two of his nov- PHOTO and a few els have been serialized in Xtra HAY were ex- West magazine and he teaches Ernest Hekkanen tensively film at the University of New 978-1-897126-59-2 re-worked. KATHLEEN Brunswick.

After 41 books, he has writ- Linda Rogers and her cousin Joanna Trollope Death as a Last Resort by Gwendolyn ten, “My history as a writer has Southin (Touchwood $12.95) been that of believing in myself and my work, in the face of near In Death as a Last Resort, the fourth anonymity—which, rather early installment of Gwendolyn Southin’s private investigator series featuring de- in my career, after my first few tective Margaret Spencer, the mature books were published, became IT’S ALL RELATIVE heroine and her cohort Nat Southby my modus operandi. Indeed, “My cousin from Canada is a bigger Trollope than I am,”— Joanna Trollope stumble upon a frozen body on a skiing working in solitude and ano- date in 1961, leading to criminal paths nymity became a kind of disci- in the Lower Mainland and Sunshine The Third Day Book by Linda Rogers novelist meant Rogers’ family United Empire Loyalists. “My pline for me. For a long time, it (Cormorant $20) was more closely related to eldest son is Sasha Trollope- Coast. 978-1-926741-02-4 was my belief that a writer should Anthony Trollope than her side Wilgress Rogers,” she says. “He The Penalty Killing by Michael McKinley write as though he didn’t desire (M&S $29.99) HE RESEMBLANCE BE- of the family. will never forgive me.” to be read, for, in the end, when tween Linda Rogers With equal wit, Rogers has In Rogers’ sequel to The Em- our solar system performs its fi- Having written four books on hockey, and Joanna Trollope is remarked, “Joanna and I could press Letters (2007), her tragedy- has added the first nal feat of collapsing, all the T Michael McKinley not uncanny. The two novelists be sisters, but she is definitely prone lead character in The volume in a projected murder mystery words in all the books on the are cousins, both related to the the pretty one. She is tall and Third Day Book is married and series, The Penalty Killing, featuring face of the earth won’t be words Victorian novelist Anthony elegantly slender, whereas I.... raising a deaf daughter in Vic- former hockey great Martin Carter enough to animate the human Trollope (1815-1882). um, love to cook.” toria. When Precious discovers whose career has been cut short by a tongue.” “My cousin from Canada is a Rogers’ ancestors emigrated she is again pregnant, bitter- head injury. He now works in public re- Bill Gaston has dubbed bigger Trollope than I am,” said when Anthony Trollope’s sweet memories of her time in lations for the fictional New York St. Patricks. A female love interest turns into Hekkanen as Canadian litera- Joanna Trollope when she met mother, Frances Trollope, also a Hong Kong with her Chinese ture’s “most resolute maverick.” a would-be blackmailer who has re- Linda Rogers at an awards cer- novelist, traveled to America and father and stepmother begin to corded a near-fatal hockey brawl on Possibly Hekkanen would agree. emony at Canada House in Lon- wrote her travel books. These stir, reminding her of the fragil- Meanwhile this iconoclast will videotape, only to be found dead a don. The bestselling English relatives came to Canada as ity of the present. 9781897151396 few days later with Carter’s DNA on her just have to do his life over again body and in her apartment. Only he has before tastemakers in eastern seen the video before it goes missing. Canada care to recognize his He flees to Vancouver where he tries to output. CLOCK FULL OF IDEAS exonerate himself. 978-0-7710-5582-9 978-1-894842-17-4; 978-1-894842-18-1 The Wolsenburg Clock by Jay Ruzesky ing to get clean in Vancouver’s Thunder River by Tony Cosier (Thistledown $18.95) Downtown Eastside. Her first (Margaret Woods Books $14.95) TO BE HORATIO novel, Having Faith in the Polar has revisited his boyhood AY RUZESKY’S FIRST NOVEL, THE Girls’ Prison, has won the Ethel Tony Cosier Helsingor: The True Story of Hamlet and fascination with the parallel ancestries Horatio by Kevin Roberts (Pilot Hill $20) JWolsenburg Clock is an ambi- Wilson Fiction Prize. It depicts tious work that explores the of European settlers and First Nations fifteen-year-old Christa, in Cana- families for a trans-generational novel, LSO FAR FROM THE MAINSTREAM, private lives of individuals over da’s far north, as she copes with Thunder River, set in a fictional town Kevin Roberts’ Helsingor: A the centuries who have built and sexual abuse, drunkenness and called Thunder River but shaped by B.C. The True Story of Hamlet and refurbished variations of a re- failed motherhood. 978-0-670-06845-6 history. Horatio is a limited-edition novel markable, 625-year-old astro- Four linked novellas carry the reader that focuses on the buffoon-like nomical clock that also charts from the gold rush era, through the Great character of Horatio, a would- celestial motions. The clock is TREE REBELS War, through War World II, on past the be actor, and his friendship with still operating in the Austrian year 2000, starting with a pioneer ex- We Will All Be Trees by Josh Massey the Shakespearean tragic hero city of Wolsenburg, near Italy. (Conundrum $15) plorer who describes a Shuswap named Hamlet that arises from their The narrator is the 20th cen- Smoke descending upon a survey crew “like the coming of an ancient god” in raucous student days in tury custodian of the clock that AVING PLANTED TREES IN FOUR Jay Ruzesky the 1880s. Wittenburg. was first built by Wildrik Kiening provinces, Josh Massey of H Cosier’s fictional Nikaoman culture Roberts offers a tragic-comic for a cathedral in Wolsenburg, Smithers has written a lively and is modeled on the aboriginal people of exploration of the court in- at the cusp of the 14th century. TEEN CLASH authentic novel about an amus- the B.C. interior watershed. trigues at Elsinor, leading to the “Perhaps,” the narrator ing cast of suitably unconven- In the second story, a young Having Faith in the Polar Girls’ Prison by tional, wise-cracking tree- death of the Prince of Denmark. writes, “what humans need Cathleen With (Penguin $32) Nikaoan named Matthew struggles with Helsingor is the original name more than anything is not planters who ultimately rebel for his identity in the early 20th century. In of the castle, north of Copenha- atomic clocks that help us keep S A CREATIVE WRITING GRADU- the sake of their sanity and dig- the third, a pacifist fights his own war at gen, where Hamlet resided and more and more precise track of A ate from UBC, Cathleen nity, in We Will All Be Trees. It home in the mid-20th century. from where Horatio tells the tale time, but less complicated lives With related the harrowing ex- is a fine fictional counterpart to Descendants of those characters of how the upstart Fortinbras so the measurements would periences of runaways and ad- Helene Cyr’s Handmade Forests: emerge for a contemporary, fourth- generation conclusion. eventually usurped power from again matter less.” dicts in Skids (Arsenal Pulp), The Treeplanter’s Experience (New 978-0-9812315-0-1 Hamlet. 1-896687-97-01 978-1-897235-62-1 drawn from her experiences try- Society 1998). 978-1-894994-41-5

13 BC BOOKWORLD SUMMER 2010 reviews FICTION

Sinclair Ross (left) spurned his literary career; Jack Hodgins (pictured here at mid-career, 1998) has moved to a third publishing house for his 14th title, a novel about a dedicated English teacher. PETERSON - ENRIGHT

BLAISE

AHEARNE

PETERSON

BARRY SUZANNE

BY BY

PHOTO PHOTO

ROSS

HODGINS

JACK SINCLAIR

“Collecting Stamps Would Have Been the ferry dock who simply shoves More Fun” by Jordan Stouck & David him aside. Stouck (U. of Alberta Press $34.95) Alex must do something be-

The Master of Happy Endings by Jack THE TEMPTRESS OF fore his idle solitude drives him Hodgins (Thomas Allen $32.95) further into paranoia, but what? In the past, he has been a HE EPOCH OF MOST WRITERS hugely successful teacher, and is about the same as for so he longs to teach again. He TNHL hockey players—or decides to place an ad in the less. Few literary careers, or even newspaper offering his services their spates of notoriety, last for as a tutor who wants to live with more than two decades. CREATIVITY a family, NHL hockey players often Can a man’s love of literature replace the love of his life? Eventually, after receiving a retire gimped-up but at least number of bizarre replies, Alex they have money in the bank. Or can a man’s love of literature ruin his life? does find a student, but instead Writers, on the other hand, in- of tutoring the seventeen-year- variably get shunted aside by old boy in his home on Vancou- changing manners, changing received B.C.’s highest literary four) or McClelland & Stewart 6-foot-8, he is “a Norwegian gi- ver Island, he winds up personnel in publishing houses, honour at the time, the Eaton’s (books five through thirteen). ant of a man,” who swims naked accompanying him to Holly- and generally don’t have much Book Award. And--no surprise--it’s about an in the freezing ocean every wood, where his pupil has a mi- to show for it. Influenced by the ‘magic re- ex-teacher dealing with the dis- day. nor part in a television series. Even worse, writers can get alism’ of Gabriel Garcia comforts of being put out to pas- The voice of his late wife now In the supercharged LA at- gimped-up psychologically Marquez’s One Hundred Years of ture before he feels ready to be inhabits his imagination while mosphere, Alex finds himself in when they realize there’s a fresh Solitude and other Latin Ameri- sidelined. ✫ Alex, feeling stranded, plays his danger of being sidelined again, crop of brash, photogenic can authors, Hodgins’ audacious cello mournfully to an assem- trying to impart a love of Shake- young-‘uns,’ with far less talent, first novel, The Inven- The Master of the bled throng of stumps on the speare to an inexperienced ac- who are the latest flavours of the tion of the World, re- title is Alex Thorsdal, beach. tor who is struggling just to learn week. A trailblazing novel from ceived the Gibson’s a widower living on a The island harkens back to his lines. But then the misguided twenty years ago counts for First Novel Award. small island off the the animated mindscape of Spit adventure takes a different diddly-squat. With three chil- B.C. coast, in the cabin Delaney’s Island or Joseph Bourne. turn, and becomes a kind of ret- That’s why the title of a new dren, Hodgins con- that he and his wife It is filled with wild, eccentric rospective on Alex’s life. book based on the correspond- tinued teaching high retired to. characters like Gwendolyn Alex learns the true fate of his ence of one of Canada’s most school until 1979 Alex’s wife called Something, the mother of six father (a Hollywood stuntman) venerable writers, Sinclair Ross, when The Resurrection SHEILA MUNRO him ‘The Master of daughters, each with a different and he encounters a beautiful who wrote a ‘classic’ called As of Joseph Bourne, his Happy Endings,’ sar- father, who are named after bo- Irish actress, Oonagh Farrell— For Me And My House, is entitled third book, won the nation’s top castically, because of his opti- tanical plants (one is Hooker’s who he was once in love with. Collecting Stamps Would Have Been fiction prize, the Governor Gen- mism about what could be Willow). And there’s an old Hodgins’ fiction isn’t every- More Fun. It’s a line from one of eral’s Award. Hodgins had the accomplished in the classroom abandoned commune in the one’s cup of tea. There’s never Ross’ letters in which he de- bit between his teeth, and he through sharing a love of litera- rainforest, and rumours of shad- anything ribald, or risqué. scribes his lifetime of struggling was set to have one of the most ture. It’s that optimism that owy drug dealings. There's more of Stuart McLean for recognition, ultimately dying successful fiction careers of any- is at the heart of Hodgins’ At 77, Alex knows he’s old, than Marquez in these pages. in relative obscurity in Vancou- one born in British Columbia. work. but not that old. He is definitely Connections between charac- ver, plagued by Parkinson’s. Ten books have followed, Thorsdal is one of those typi- not ready to be a “senior senior,” ters don’t feel emotional. But, in Ross’ letters are edited by nearly all fiction, except for one cal, mythic West Coast charac- someone consigned to the irrel- his seventies, he’s got 14 books Jordan Stouck and David Stouck children’s book and a writing ters that Hodgins is fond of evance that others might wish and counting. He’s not quite up (who has written biographies of guide, A Passion for Narrative, inventing. He is not just tall; at for him—like the young man on to Gordie Howe, but he’s get- Sinclair Ross and Ethel Wilson). that arose from his experiences ting there. They reveal the extent to which as an extremely popular instruc- Remarks made by Jack Hodgins He’s clearly not contemplat- Sinclair Ross, a closeted homo- tor at UVic’s creative writing pro- upon receiving the George Woodcock (formerly ing collecting any stamps in the sexual, was acerbically alienated gram. Hodgins won an Ethel Terasen) Lifetime Achievement Award in 2006: near future. from the CanLit world, essen- Wilson fiction prize for his novel Jack Hodgins has developed tially angry, despite his affilia- Broken Ground, but his sales have “Nothing I’d read at school or home told me that writing about BC was a his own style, his one lens, with tions with the likes of Earle never been stellar. reasonable prospect. I’d heard that there was a juvenile magistrate and mythic elements, and he has Birney, Margaret Laurence and It hasn’t helped that fisherman in Campbell River [Roderick Haig-Brown] who wrote books, made an enormous contribu- Margaret Atwood. And he was a Hodgins’ long-time editor and tion to B.C. fiction in the proc- and I even saw one of them once – a paperback titled Timber with a half- guy who wrote a classic, a book publisher, Douglas Gibson, has ess. As a trailblazer, he’s in the that has been required reading left McClelland & Stewart, once naked woman on the cover. My parents had brought it into the house but realm of Bertrand Sinclair, his on high school reading lists for Canada’s foremost publishing I was never able to find it after that first glance, though I turned the place Nanaimo-born contemporary more than two decades, dating imprint. upside down looking for it. If they had hidden it somewhere, I thought, this Anne Cameron, or playwright back to the 1940s. Now Hodgins, after a six-year ✫ was probably because it was, like Peyton Place, not fit for young minds. George Ryga. hiatus, is making a comeback of To me, the curious thing was – the miraculous thing of it was that, whatever He has dared to be original. Jack Hodgins, by compari- sorts. His fourteenth book and Collecting stamps 978-0-88864-521-0; was on the cover, it had been written by someone who lived on the same son, is a huge success story. He twelfth work of fiction, The Mas- Happy Endings 978-0-88762-523-7 / $32.95 burst onto the scene in 1976 with ter of Happy Endings, is his first piece of the world as I did! And it had been published -- just like the “real’ a collection of comical short sto- title not published by either writers from other countries, the writers we learned about in school.” Sheila Munro conducts writing work- ries, Spit Delaney’s Island, which Macmillan (books one through shops & writes from Powell River.

14 BC BOOKWORLD SUMMER 2010 Canada’s Truly Independent Publisher

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Grass Widow Observations poetry by From Off Apryl Leaf the Grid poetry by paperback Angela Long 9 x 6 in 109 pages ISBN: paperback 978-1-926763-04-0 9 x 6 in 136 pages $17.00 ISBN: 978-1-926763-02-6 $18.95

Vespers Within These poetry by Bonds Manolis anovel by paintings by Loreena M. Lee Ken Kirkby paperback paperback 9 x 6 in 169 pages 9 x 6 in 138 pages ISBN: ISBN: 978-1-926763-01-9 978-1-926763-03-3 $20.00 $28.00

Libros Libertad Publishing Ltd • [email protected] • www.libroslibertad.ca PO Box 45089 • 12851 16th Ave • Surrey, BC • V4A 9L1 • Canada

15 BC BOOKWORLD SUMMER 2010 16 BC BOOKWORLD SUMMER 2010 reviews FICTION LIVINGSTONLIVINGSTON,, WEWE PRESUMEPRESUME IfIf everever therethere waswas anan anthologyanthology ofof storiesstories inin whichwhich authorsauthors weren’tweren’t identified,identified, fansfans ofof BillieBillie LivingstonLivingston couldcould easilyeasily spotspot herher contribution.contribution. PHOTO BC BOOKWORLD STAFF PICK BATTISTONI

PETER

Greedy Little Eyes by Billie Livingston Money who is welcomed into Chocolate Truffle?” she repeat- Giving away the ending to broken watches she brings him (Random House $22) the household by grossly negli- edly asks. At night she has a se- one Livingston story out of ten is as an excuse to see him. She gent parents. ries of “egg” dreams about enough. Suffice to say there is a doesn’t learn his name. She ark, as an adjective, is Money is always loud, always conceiving a child. bizarrely romantic union belongs for him to touch her, to overused to describe drunk, carousing with her father, Fern knows she is losing her tween Fern and Flash, but not mend her, to make her tick. Dliterature, so let’s just making lewd flirtations with her grip. Life is passing her by, and before the desperado Martin She drives to the zoo east of say Billie Livingston’s ten stories mother, while stalking the nar- it’s humiliating to boot. Flash is “slapped across her Vancouver, off Highway One, in Greedy Little Eyes are the op- rator’s sister, Beth, who is six years While handing out samples, windshield like a scrap of paper.” where she watches a young posite of upbeat and she has de- older. Beth goes berserk when Fern is forced to talk with a Like a bride and groom, Fern mother ignore her own child in vised a style of her own. she catches Money trying to de- long-unseen high school ac- and Flash will get their fifteen favour of reaching her hand to- Invariably incorporating file her innocent sister; Money quaintance with a baby in a seconds of fame on the six wards a young orangutan. This sexuality and alienation, her sto- pins Beth to the bathroom floor stroller. Fern lies and says she is o’clock news. Earlier, there is a woman ignores the DO NOT ries often appear realistic until when she retaliates, proving his going to have a baby. She didn’t passage from which the title of TOUCH sign and holds the they veer towards harrowing in- invincible manhood, his power to plan this lie. this story and the collection has orangutan’s fingers in a reverie ventions—vividly wild yet clev- ruin. been derived: reminiscent of God touching erly constructed, confident and The two sisters success- “The problem with Adam on the roof of the Sistine riveting. fully lure the loutish sexual As a storyteller, voyeurs is they think it’s all Chapel. In the longest story, ‘Candy predator, at night, to a river Billie Livingston rides about them and their greedy If life consists of a series of From a Stranger’s Mouth,’ the where they stand, scantily little eyes. They never stop to moments, as Borges has written reader feels like a slightly clad, siren-like, for a “party,” the Tilt-a-Wheel, gets lost think about the exhibition- in a poem, well, this strangely changed person by the final sen- until the narrator asks Money in the Tunnel of Love ist. Ask any old exhibitionist blissful union between a human tence, but it’s hard to describe for a piggy-back. While Beth you like, and they’ll tell you: female and an orangutan child exactly how or why this is so, only pushes her tongue into Mon- and she rides the gigantic exhibitionism is by the ex- through the metal mesh of the that one sees the world differ- ey’s mouth, the piggy-backed roller-coaster. hibitor for the exhibitor.” zoo cage in Aldergrove definitely ently; askew. narrator feels the metal in Try substituting the word counts as a moment. Possibly the creation of these her skimpy dress. Never a dull moment. exhibitionist with writer. “The woman looks back into stories has some therapeutic ef- “I pushed myself higher ✫ the monkey’s eyes [orangutans fect on their maker—in the on his hips, pulled the blade Fern becomes fascinated The story “Do Not Touch” is are not monkeys], tears sliding same way that Kafka had to write from its slot in the handle, and with a performance artist less outlandish, but perhaps toward her jaw, and starts to sing, The Trial or Van Gogh had to did what my dad took pains not named Martin Flash who has more satisfying as a construct. A her voice cracking, Lullaby and paint, whether they sold their to do every morning—dragged gained widespread media expo- relatively ordinary girl who works good night… ” work or not—but that is second- the edge hard into his throat.” sure for announcing, one week in a CD music store is flattered As the human seeker of ary to their value as art and en- As the girls float the carcass in advance, that he plans to drive to be bedded, and invited to live physical contact ignores the irate tertainment. down the river, Livingston’s fi- a steamroller over a rat squished with, a brainy arts critic for Cana- zoo attendant, the orangutan, in You wouldn’t find nal sentence is impeccable: between two art canvases. da’s largest newspaper. “I should return, straining his hand to her Livingston’s stories in The New “I held his hand, Beth asked Predictably, there is an hys- have known something was face, instinctively reaches and Yorker. They are too ‘edgy’ to win me if I was cold, if I’d like her to terical outcry of public protest wrong when Thomas sucked touches her jaw, as though she mainstream literary prizes. They wash my hair when we got from rat saviours, schoolchildren back the better part of a twenty- is beautiful. can be grim. No, they are grim. home, and he let us lead him and Life Is All Right [LIAR] led sixer of Glenlivet before he Okay, two endings. But they are also painfully downriver as if we were taking by a sanctimonious spokesper- could kiss me the first time.” Life is a carnival. Some like poignant and often, under- him to safety.” son who also likes to expose abor- Soon feeling sexually re- the genteel merry-go-round or neath it all, rather funny... in a ✫ tionists and murderers. jected by the impotent Thomas, the bumper cars; as a storyteller dark (oops) sort of way. The title story “Greedy Little Fern is enamoured of the who is addicted to internet porn Livingston rides the Tilt-a- ✫ Eyes” is about a young woman provocateur. She drives to the and chat rooms, the narrator Wheel, gets lost in the Tunnel In a story called ‘Did You named Fern who hands out free planned rat execution for art’s becomes infatuated with a of Love and she rides the gigan- Grow Up with Money?’, a pubes- samples in department stores sake where hordes of protesters neighbourhood “watchmaker” tic roller-coaster. cent girl describes a thoroughly and supermarkets. “Would you want to tear Martin Flash to [jeweller?] when she sees the Never a dull moment. disreputable character named like to try a Lindt Swiss Milk pieces. way he delicately handles the 978-0-679-31324-3

17 BC BOOKWORLD SUMMER 2010 WINNER OF THE ETHEL reviews WILSON FICTION PRIZE

“[Cathleen] With offers a fully realized and authentic narrator beset with tremendous personal and cultural obstacles. Trista’s deftly portrayed sense of delusion, despair and hope is ultimately both moving and unsettling.” —National Post

“THE EMOTIONAL FORCE OF THIS NOVEL IS UNDENIABLE.” —Quill & Quire

cathleenwith.com

AVAILABLE IN FINE BOOKSTORES EVERYWHERE Norma Macmillan: the voice of Casper the Friendy Ghost FANCIFUL ROOTS

The Maquinna Line: A Family Saga by Norma Macmillan (Touchwood $19.95) he main characters of deceased author Norma Macmillan’s The Maquinna Line: A Family Saga Tare Caucasians in Victoria. Former Georgia Straight editor Charles dramatic Huldowget: A Story of the North Pa- Campbell of The Tyee website has done a cific Coast (Toronto: J.M. Dent & Sons, fine job editing and updating Macmillan’s 1926) and A.M. Stephen’s The Kingdom of previously unpublished manuscript for the Sun (Dent, 1927)—an historical ro- contemporary tastes, but The Maquinna mance about a gentleman adventurer Line falls short of its goal to emulate Aus- named Richard Anson who sailed aboard tralia’s The Thorn Birds, America’s Roots or Sir Francis Drake’s Golden Hind, only to be Britain’s The Forsyte Saga. cast away amongst the Haida—to Hubert Although two unplanned, out-of-wed- Evans’ landmark realism in The Mist on the lock pregnancies to First Nations women River (Copp Clark, 1954) and Anne provide grounds for a title and connect the Cameron’s astonishing but controversial story to Chief Maquinna-—the honorific ti- Daughters of Copper Woman (Press Gang, tle for the leader of the Mowachaht 1981). (Moachat in the novel) sub-nation of the In 1971, professional forester Ian Nuu-Chah-Nulth Tribal Council— Mahood of Nanoose Bay self-published an Macmillan’s representation of First Nations historical novel about the life and times culture is minimal. of a Nootka/Nuu-chah-nulth chief The plot culminates with an unex- Maquinna, The Land of Maquinna, along pected sexual encounter—followed by a with a photographic study of Nootka sudden and fatal car crash—to link the Sound. blood of a family that is proudly related to Mahood’s effort was admirable for its Winston Churchill to the blood of the time, but since 1971 a great deal more in- Maquinna line. formation about the Mowachaht heredi- The author’s life is arguably more fas- tary chiefs name Maquinna has been made cinating than her characters. Born in 1921, widely available. Scholars and Mowachaht, Macmillan was a Vancouver playwright who for instance, generally concur there were moved to Toronto with her actor-husband two Maquinnas during the early period of Thor Arngrim in the mid-1950s. She be- contact in the late 1700s and early 1800s. came the voice of Casper the Friendly Ghost Earlier, newpaperman B.A. McKelvie in 1963, and moved to Hollywood in 1965 had published Maquinna the Magnificent where she started her only novel and ap- (Montreal: Southam Company, Vancouver peared in several movies. Daily Province, 1946), She returned to Van- an attempt to craft a couver in 1993 and was popular biography later honoured with a of the Mowachaht star on Vancouver’s chief loosely based Starwalk. Norma on historical ac- Macmillan died in 2001. counts and impres- ✫ sions left by the first The literary process of European visitors to integrating First Nations Friendly Cove in characters and culture Nootka Sound. into West Coast fiction has George H. Southwell’s 1946 painting of There’s gotta be a a long history from B.A. Maquinna meeting Captain Cook, from movie in this some- (Bruce) McKelvie’s melo- Maquinna The Magnificent where. 978-1-926741-03-1

18 BC BOOKWORLD SUMMER 2010 FICTION

Sweetness from Ashes by Marlyn Horsdal WRITER’S BLOCK & (Brindle & Glass $19.95)

HARSH REVIEWS ARLYN HORSDAL IS AN EDITOR AND Curtains for Roy by Aaron Bushkowsky Mex-publisher who operated (Cormorant $21) Horsdal & Schubart Publishing from Salt Spring Island and later N AARON BUSHKOWSKY’S CURTAINS Victoria, with her husband I for Roy, Alex is a playwright Michael Schubart, from 1984 to suffering from writer’s block and 2002. Born in Ottawa and edu- harsh reviews. His best friend, Aaron Bushkowsky cated at the London School of Roy, is a theatre director with Economics, she taught in Ghana lung cancer and six months left as a CUSO volunteer and later to live. In pursuit of fresh air and created a non-profit society to great wine, they go on a road trip provide scholarships for girls at St. to the Okanagan Valley where Louis Secondary School in Roy rediscovers his passion for Kumasi, Ghana. Her first novel, theatre. But when he decides to Sweetness from Ashes, describes stage a production of A Midsum- how the reunion of three siblings, mer Night’s Dream at a winery, dis- honouring the wish of a deceased aster ensues: the woman cast in Marlyn Horsdal relative to return ashes to a fam- the lead is the winery owner’s wife ily farm in Ontario, leads Jenny, a and has no talent; wildfires en- book editor, to unravel family se- croach upon the surrounding for- crets and discover hitherto un- est; and Roy slips closer to death, known connections to West one cigarette at a time. Curtains Africa. 978-1-897142-45-5 for Roy is billed as an hilarious Deloume Road by Matthew Hooton and poignant peek into the (Knopf $29.95) world of theatre, where the greatest drama is offstage and the best ATTHEW HOOTON OF VICTORIA completed an MA in crea- performances take place behind Matthew Hooton M the curtain. 9781897151747 tive writing at Bath Spa Univer- sity, where he wrote Deloume Road set The Mercedes Variation by Chris Banner (Diamond River $19.95) in a small Vancouver Island town in the early 1990s. The suicide of pioneer HRIS BANNER’S NOVEL THE MERCEDES Gerard Deloume one century earlier is the CVariation concerns a romance be- catalyst for a series of violent and tragic tween two ‘back-to-the-landers,’ also events that includes a Ukrainian butcher known as beansprouters by the locals, who yearns for his absent wife and small named Paul and Mercedes, during the pe- son, a widowed Korean girl who fears for riod of the so-called sixties when young the life of the baby she is carrying, and a people formed agricultural communes, Native artist whose pilot son has crashed rejecting consumerism in favour of ideal- in the wilderness. 978-0-307-39813-0 istic flower-power. The Promise of Rain by Donna Milner Paul is infatuated with his rural neigh- (McArthur $24.95) bour who “stepped from her truck scrubbed, fresh and vibrant. Her eyes sent S A FOLLOW-UP TO AFTER RIVER, PUBLISHED IN sparks as she smiled. She’d twined a chain A twelve countries, Donna Milner’s sec- of daisies through her ebony black hair and ond novel The Promise of Rain is about a her nipples played hide and seek behind motherless daughter dealing with the af- the delicate lace of her blouse. The wind ter-effects of her father being captured wrapped her skirt around her more tightly as a prisoner-of-war in Hong Kong. “By the than a mummy. She had open leather san- time I was six years old,” writes the narra- dals on her feet. She looked like a virgin tor Ethie, “I knew my father was not like gypsy. I was dazzled.” 978-0-9811376-1-2 other fathers.” 978-1-55278-840-0

The Find by Kathy Page (McArthur & Co $24.95)

n Kathy Page’s seventh novel, and the Ifirst to be set in Canada, The Find, paleontologist Anna Silowski makes an extraordinary discovery in a remote part of British Columbia, but at the same time, the tensions below the surface of her successful career are exposed. She finds herself unexpectedly dependent on a high school drop-out, Scott Macleod, as she re- cruits him to help on the excavation of ‘the find’ and the project teeters on the edge of disaster. “Her life would have been a lot simpler if she had not liked men, if she The Wickininnish Inn proudly presents…. had been a nun, or gay. Or both.” The Find was partially inspired by the beautiful skel- % eton of an elasmosaur that hangs from the ceiling of the Courtenay & District Mu- seum. In 2002, her novel The Story of My A Country Doctor’s Role in Preserving Long Beach Face was longlisted for the Orange Prize. and Establishing the new Wickininnish Inn She lives on Salt Spring Island. 978-1-55278-837-0 12 3 4 5 4 Sub Rosa by Amber Dawn (Arsenal $22.95) Pacific Rim Park tells the uplifting story of how Howard McDiamid arrived MBER DAWN’S FIRST NOVEL SUB ROSA FEA- on the west coast of Vancouver Island in 1955 as the new doctor for A tures a teenage runaway heroine Tofino, Ucluelet and the surrounding area, served as MLA for Alberni named Little whose descent into the sex from 1966 to 1972, and became a key orchestrator for the trade is both surreal and chilling. Dawn, a creation of Pacific Rim National Park along with Jean Chrétien performance artist, has one of the more and W.A.C. Bennett. Along the way, he and his son, Charles, established the new, world-class Wickaninnish Inn in 1996. unusual curriculum vitae among UBC creative writing grads. Her ‘docu-porn’ S film Girl on Girl has been screened in eight countries; she has thrice toured with the !" ##$!% &! Sex Workers’ Art Show in the U.S. and she ' !() (*+!!#-+.#/ #/).(!(/.+* !0(!* was voted Xtra! West’s Hero of the Year in Amber Dawn 2008. 978-1-55152-361-3

19 BC BOOKWORLD SUMMER 2010 reviews FICTION CSIS-STYLE THRILLER

Machiavelli’s Desert by Lawrence Uhlin (Libros Libertad $22.95) CHERCHEZ LA FOUNTAIN ANADIAN PRIME MINISTER NICHOLAS A delicious mystery finds a plot in French Indochina. By Cherie Thiessen CPlato has a few problems. Canada has been found guilty of crimes against In the Fabled East by Adam Lewis Schroeder (Douglas & McIntyre $29.95) in the novel, but he does make a brief appearance soon after humanity. The body of a Canadian Na- Lazarie’s arrival in Saigon. Prior to joining his new battalion, Cap- tional Research Council scientist has DAM LEWIS SCHROEDER SAYS HE NEVER PLANNED TO WRITE THREE tain Tremier asks Pierre Lazarie’s new employer, the Immigra- been found float- books about Southeast Asia. Set in bombed-out Singapore tion Department of the Colony of Cochin-China, for assistance in ing in the Ottawa and contemporary Thailand, Schroeder’s first novel Em- finding his mother. River. A suicide A press of Asia (2006) evolved from his curiosity about his grandfa- The captain pulls out an old photo of her. One look, and bomber has killed ther’s generation and World War II. “I first travelled to Southeast Lazarie is in love. He will find her. hundreds of peo- Asia with my wife in 1996-97,” he says, “and a visit to Changi Jail It matters not that Adélie would be 56, if alive—which is highly ple in a Las Vegas in Singapore inspired me to do the work that became Empress of doubtful, given that she suffered from advanced stages of tuber- nightclub. And Asia.” culosis. In Heart of Darkness style, the reluctant LeDallie and the there’s a CANDU With stories set in wartime Bali, 19th-century Singapore and excited Lazarie begin their trek down the Mekong and beyond, Lawrence Uhlin reactor that is go- an opium den in Thailand, his first fiction collection Kingdom of into the remote jungles of Laos. ing to meltdown Monkeys (2001) featured a reworking of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Within a tiger’s leap of their goal, misfortune bares its teeth, and destroy life on the tiny Pacific is- Darkness. Kurtz is found alive and well, and the decaying set of and LeDallie can no longer continue. Lazarie is forced to re- land country of Arnivan. That’s just Apocalypse Now is a shrine for a Brando cult among the locals. treat, and his dream of finding the woman in search of the mythi- some of the CSIS-related intrigue that Returning to Thailand in 2001, Schroeder became intrigued cal Fountain of Eternal Youth must be reluctantly abandoned. befuddle the characters of Lawrence with Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos—the countries comprising Back in Saigon he will become more and more like the old col- Uhlin’s political thriller Machiavelli’s the former French Indochina. “They loomed as this delicious league he’s replaced, as he loses his idealism and youth. Desert. It’s a gripping tale in which mystery,” he says, “but a mystery without a story.” It’s 1954. And we’ve begun to figure out where this is all go- Uhlin takes time to quote Mordecai After collecting more material in Laos and Vietnam in Au- ing. The French Indochina War is limping to its bloody conclu- Richler: “...truth is Canada is a cloud- gust of 2007, Schroeder has embraced and embroidered a mys- sion. France has surrendered at Dien Bien Phu and Captain cuckoo-land, an insufferably rich coun- tery involving a Fountain of Eternal Youth in the forests of Laos, Tremier is in retreat with his ragtag handful of soldiers, try governed by idiots, its self-made giving rise to In the Fabled East. bushwhacking through the jungle toward Laos. problems offering comic relief to the ✫ Eventually, they wind up in the village of the Sadat, modeled ills of the real world.” Ouch. The glo- As a story, the search for eternal life and Shangri La is a bit after an actual Khamu village, Mak Tong. More cannot be re- bal plot resembles an Ian Slater disas- hackneyed, but Schroeder’s dexterity, using multiple narrators, vealed. With Schroeder, the plot can take surprising turns, and ter novel, hopscotching hither and turns the tale into a risky literary enterprise well worth the jour- revealing it would simply not do. yon—to Washington, D.C., Houston, ney. With this young writer, in addition to characters you want to Grand Cayman Islands, the British Vir- We first travel with Pierre Lazarie, a romantic-minded hang out with (or eavesdrop on), you’ll get an engrossing, fre- gin Islands and... Kamloops—and that’s Sorbonne graduate who, upon receiving his Baccalaureate in quently surprising plot to keep you second-guessing. You’ll also a good thing. Canada’s sovereignty is Oriental Studies, sails to Saigon to take up a clerical position as a get a new appreciation for how good the English language really put to the test while Uhlin cleverly in- bureaucrat. He is schooled by Henri LeDallie, an acerbic, cynical is in the hands of a literary acrobat. tegrates advances in nanotechnology senior bureaucrat. Perhaps most importantly, you’ll get so immersed in the world and chemistry (derived from the dis- Adélie, a hauntingly beautiful Parisienne, begins to tell her he creates that it might take some time to emerge from it. covery of buckminsterfull-erene in story much earlier, in 1886, having endured deaths, sudden penury A member of the UBC creative writing ratpack, Adam Lewis 1985). A sophisticated and ambitious and early widowhood. By 1909, beset by tuberculosis, she leaves Schroeder is setting his sights closer to home with a murder mys- debut. 978-1-926763-01-9 her nine-year-old son and her mother-in-law to search for a heal- tery, to be set in 1958, in Penticton, where he now lives. ing fountain in ‘the fabled east,’ apparently never to return. 978-1-55365-464-3 ALSO RECEIVED A third narrator is Captain Emmanuel (Manu) Tremier, Adélie’s son, in his 30s. He does not take centre stage until late Cherie Thiessen reviews fiction from Pender Island. The Damascus Letter by Daniel Dick (Black Diamond $14.99) 0986495905

Faded Love by Robert N. Friedland (Libros Libertad $22.95) 978-1-926673-00-2

The Love Market by Carol Mason (McArthur & Co $24.95) 978-1-55278-845-5

Living in the Shadow of Fisher Peak by Keith G. Powell (Wild Horse Creek $21.95) 0981214614

A Brewski for the Old Man by Phyllis Smallman (McArthur & Co. $24.95) 978-1-55278-836-3

Darwin’s Bastards: Astounding Tales From Tomorrow (D&M $21.95), stories edited by Zsuzsi Gartner, 978-1-55365-492-6

No Tame Cat: Fur trade daughter, her Cape Horn captain, and the Chilean courtesan by Robert Harvey (Ptarmigan $24.95) 978-0-919537-80-4

The Doctrine of Affections by Paul Headrick (Freehand Books $23.95) 978-1-55111-978-6

Dahanu Road by Anosh Irani (Doubleday $29.95) 978-0-385-66699-2

Pulse by Lydia Kwa (Key Porter $21) 978-1-55470-259-6

The Darkening Archipelago by Stephen Legault (NeWest $19.95) 978-1-897126-63-8

The Waterbird by Robert Strandquist (Anvil $18) 9781897535073

The Nights Also by Anna Swanson (Tightrope $14.95) 9781926639130.

Never Going Back by Antonia Banyard (Thistledown Press $16.95) 978-1-897235-69-0

“The captain pulls out an old photo of her. One look, and Lazarie is in love. PHOTO

The Devil You Know by Jenn Farrell (Anvil $18) He will find her.” CLARKES is a series of stories about sex, love, work, birth, Adam Lewis and of course, death. 9781897535066 Schroeder LINCOLN

20 BC BOOKWORLD SUMMER 2010 a forum for & about writers # 39 LOOKOUTLOOKOUT 3516 W. 13th Ave., Vancouver, BC V6R 2S3 • [email protected]

Painted in 1949, The Forest, The Ocean by George Fertig, depicts the beach near Portrait of a Young Artist in the West End Lumberman's Arch in Stanley Park.

MONA FERTIG, who co-managed The Literary Storefront in Vancouver from 1978 to 1982, has always been distressed by the unfairness of the visual arts with the youthful optimism of a man BY MONA FERTIG world. Growing up in Vancouver, she watched how her father, , George Fertig experiencing the end of the war, an art- a gifted and dedicated oil painter, never got his due. How did URING THE 1930S AND 1940S, THE Jack Shadbolt ist on the verge of becoming him- get so many one-man shows at the Vancou- Vancouver Art Gallery held self. ver Art Gallery? popular juried quarterly and Every Sunday for many years, dedi- D To retrieve and bolster the reputations of annual exhibitions, which any artist could cated artists, as well as novice painters, enter. Its policies supported the plethora significant B.C. artists whose names and works have been unjustly overlooked, Fertig would pack up their sturdy easels, brushes, of local artists (600 in 1949) in ways that paints and canvas and trudge off to were considered naive and unprogressive has undertaken a bold publishing series within her Mother Tongue Publishing imprint Stanley Park to paint and show their work. in the 1950s, but in retrospect seem nos- I remember seeing them there on week- talgically and indiscriminately supportive from Salt Spring Island. Hers is a Quixotic and expensive mission that has won her more ends when I was a young girl. Marlene of Vancouver artists. admiration than she has ever gained as a Flater told me that’s where she first saw From the soon-to-be-famous to the poet for her own books. George Fertig’s art in the early 1950s: now-forgotten, artists often had their first After the first two well-received books in George Fertig, circa 1949-50 “His paintings just blew me away! I’d exposure there. My father, George the series about sculptor David Marshall, painter Frank Molnar, sculp- dabbled a bit, and when I got home, I Fertig, participated in as many exhibitor and printmaker Jack Hardman and painter LeRoy Jensen, she has tried to duplicate your dad’s image, tions as he could. turned her hand to writing and publishing an illustrated volume at the heart of which had a moon in it, on a small six- Born in Alberta in 1915, George Fertig the matter, The Life and Art of George Fertig (Mother Tongue $36.95). Her inch oil painting so I could remember was a member of the infamous Trail Mine appreciative study looks at her father as a painter, a Jungian, a socialist, a what I saw. Years later, when I was work- Mill Union in the ’30s and travelled to symbolist and a perpetual outsider. ing at the Vancouver Sun, I invited about Mexico in the ’40s. Carl G. Jung and In this excerpt, Mona Fertig describes life among artists in post-war Van- four or five of the ladies over to my place Morris Graves were important influences. couver, when her parents met at the Ferguson Point Tea Room, and when in Kitsilano on York Street… He moved to Vancouver in 1941. local artists such as George Fertig were redolent with hope. “Your mother was one of the women ✍ who came over; she lived close by. When In 1948, my mother, Evelyn Luxa, born in She recalled wheeling a trolley around to customers she saw the Fertig imitation, she pointed to it and Winnipeg, Manitoba, moved to Vancouver. with tea, milk, buns and scones in a copper-covered exclaimed, ‘What’s that?’ So I told her the story, and She was a gorgeous, dark-haired, olive-skinned basket. Evelyn worked there for a short while. The a few days later she invited me over to meet your dad, woman with an easy laugh, and her talent for having back of the tea house had a studio space where the and he showed me his paintings.” fun provided quite a contrast to George’s seriousness. artists and students gathered. In 1949, George moved to 1137 Beach Avenue. When she arrived in Vancouver, she lived downtown Fred Amess, director of the VSA, and other He was again listed as an artist in the B.C. Directory. at 997 Dunsmuir at the YWCA and worked as a re- artists, including George, hung their work on the Evelyn was listed at 161 Nelson Street, a 23-minute ceptionist while taking night classes at the Vancouver walls, and jewelry and pottery was offered for sale. walk away. School of Art. Evelyn also read tea leaves and cards at Joy called George a “beautiful I’m not sure when my Dad and Mom the Y to earn extra money. painter” who always wore corduroy. began going out together. At first, she was My parents first met at a tea house, a former am- George was often at the tea only one of several girlfriends. She told me munition bunker at Ferguson Point in Stanley Park. house gallery whenever he and that she would often bring him cheese During the war, the building had been used as an John Ahrens [of Ahren’s sandwiches because he was so poor. army base, and the whole shore was armed. The Parks Books], came in from salvaging logs George would recite poetry to her, and Board was anxious to get rid of the ammunition bun- around Third Beach, with John’s they would often walk the West End ker after the war, so they rented it out to Jack boat. Unemployed after the war, beaches, sit on a log and watch the sun- Southworth, from the Vancouver School of Art, they sold the logs to salvage compa- set. They were married in 1953. and his girlfriend. The couple opened a summer tea nies. ✍ house in June of 1947 and lived in the apartment In the late summer of 1948, George Fertig died in 1983. His paint- above. Their close friends included artist Joy George showed Third Beach, listed ings were rarely exhibited but many are Zemel Long and photographer Jack Long. for $50, in the Stanley Park in Pic- held in private collections. The tea house was a “swank restaurant,” remem- tures exhibition at the Vancouver A George Fertig Retrospective runs bers Jennifer Hobbs, who graduated from the Art Gallery. He completed English George Fertig & Evelyn Luxa, from June 1 to July 11 at the Burnaby Art Vancouver, circa 1949 VSA that year, hoping to become an interior designer. Bay in 1949. The painting is filled Gallery. 978-1-896949-06-2

21 BOOKWORLD • LOOKOUT • SUMMER • 2010 AArr tt THE WATER’S

EDGECarol Evans lightens up the “haunting loveliness” of quiet, wild shorelines.

“MOST OF US HAVE A FAVOURITE PLACE ON Born in Vancouver, Carol Evans produces sophisticated and uplifting watercolours of the the ocean’s edge,” says Carol Evans, coast, often visiting out-of-the-way locations by small boat, kayak or sailboat. Although her im- “some beautiful refuge that we return to ages are realistic, they border on magic realism due to her particular skill in terms of depicting again and again.” Her haven is Mudge water that is dappled or shining with light. “Oh, the water,” writes Salt Spring Islander Island, between Gabriola Island and Van- Arthur Black. “Ye, Gods, can the woman capture water. The glint and the couver Island, accessible glare of it; the lambent reflec- tions and refractions of its flick- only by boat. ering depths and shallows. Her In her collection of shimmer- brushes dance across the canvas, ing paintings, The Shores We trailing water’s near-inexhaust- Call Home (Harbour $18.95), ible palette of colours, from Evans fondly recalls enchanting flinty, unforgiving obsidian all of those living things around you. You spend Shaman’s Rock (above); Peace in Fury Cove (below); Oystercatcher at Cactus Island (left) and often harrowing trips she through blues and browns and “I also have favourites that are places we love: “I think our shores are such made across the heavy current of ochres to the softest, yielding your entire day amongst those sounds, then set Bella Coola Net Loft, Refuge Cove, and Taking the a source of solace and joy False Narrows to reach Mudge, greens.” up camp and sleep with them still all around Dog to Shore. Also, the painting called Mending and uplift to all of us who rowing in an aluminum skiff, When once asked by you.” Nets with Grandma, depicting a quiet, ordinary live along them. And I think before she established her studio Robert H. Jones in 1998 She and her husband Bryn King switched day in a First Nations fishing community. we sometimes take them for on Salt Spring. as to how she chooses her sub- to sailing in 2000, usually taking off in June for “I think the human animal is really invigor- granted, me included. So I “I had to leave Mudge Is- jects, Evans said, “A very great most of the summer. “We still poke about on the ated by being out in that fresh air. When you’re wanted to paint them in their best light almost to hold land,” she says. “Life flows on Carol Evans per cent is the light, the way it shoreline,” she says, “but it’s in the pudgy, inflat- inside working—no breeze, no sound, no little and there’s no stopping in the plays. Another is clear water— able dingy, not the sleek, graceful kayaks.” birds—it’s okay, you get work done and them up and say, ‘Aren’t they beautiful? Aren’t we lucky?’” current. But for years after my departure, I had I don’t know why I love painting it so much, but “I think our shores are such a source of solace you’re comfortable, but it’s not the same.” — CAROL EVANS a recurring dream of pulling a rowboat down to I am so attracted to it. I guess because it’s got the and joy and uplift to all of us who live along them. 978-1-55017-465-6 the water, rowing across to Mudge and going first surface, the depth, the bottom, and what reflects And I think we sometimes take them for granted, thing to see the neighbours. In the dream they off the surface. It’s just got so many levels to it. me included. So I wanted to paint them in their welcomed me warmly and said the cabin was “I find mist beautiful, too, so even when it’s best light almost to hold them up and say, ‘Aren’t available and I could move back. dull and grey, if there is some interesting mist they beautiful? Aren’t we lucky?’ I want to share “I discovered that when the soul is longing, it moving around it really inspires me. Why? It’s the appreciation of this land and where we live talks in the language of dreams. That’s how I probably related to some old, deep-seated rea- because I think if we care about it, we’ll look af- learned my body could live wherever it liked, but son, but I don’t try to analyze it. I can paint, but ter it.” in my heart, that island and those people were I’m not too good at analyzing. I don’t even think Evans’ book is organized with southern coastal ‘home.’” about that, I just do it and it comes, like right paintings at the outset, leading further and fur- Carol Evans’ reverence for the Gulf Islands now! I never have to wait for the muse, it’s always ther northward to Haida Gwaii, so it mirrors a and Haida Gwaii shines in more than 80 water- with me.” journey. colours in her third book. Since 1981, she has Evans was a fair weather canoeist who became “It is really hard to pick a favourite,” she says, held fifteen one-woman exhibitions, building a an avid kayaker. “When we were in our kayaks I “but one that jumps to my mind is Passage to the solid career from art that people actually like, and could feel almost like a little sea animal myself. Sea. It is a very wild, untouched beach and the buy, beyond the effete urbanism of so-called It’s a totally different feeling out there—the painting comes pretty close to what the place re- modern art. breeze, the water rippling against the hull, and ally looks like. It feels to me like being right there.

22 BC BOOKWORLD • LOOKOUT • SUMMER • 2010 23 BC BOOKWORLD • LOOKOUT • SUMMER • 2010 24 BC BOOKWORLD SUMMER 2010 reviews TEEN NOVELS

ROXY’S GREEK FICTION SHORTLIST TRAGEDY OBSESSION Roxy by PJ Reece (Tradewind $12.95) A young girl and Barbara Ann Scott “the Gretzky of 1948” ELL-TRAVELLED CINEMA- tographer PJ Reece Chasing A Star by Norma Charles (not P.J. Reece) of (Ronsdale Press $10.95) W Chilliwack has set his realistic novel for mature teens, Roxy, in T’S LATE AUGUST, 1951, AND FOR Greece. It’s about a secretly 12-year-old Sophie LeGrange pregnant teenager who visits the Ilife is the movie Annie Get deathbed of a grandfather she’s Your Gun, pink and blue auto- never met and uncovers family graph books—may your life always Polly Horvath: character secrets and complications— building into the 90s be as rosy as this page—a new while she falls in love with hand- school, bossy, wimpled teacher- Northward to the Moon by Polly Horvath some Georgio. “...every kiss and (Groundwood $ $14.95) nuns, gym bloomers, ginger ale, touch arose from nowhere. Eve- Rocket Richard, roller skates, rything was unfolding perfectly Polly Horvath of Metchosin began Brylcreem jingles, Star Girl com- for us shipwrecked lovers, two to write stories at age eight. “I began ics, and her large comfortable accidental secret keepers float- wanting to do nine books about a char- working-class family. ing away in each other’s arms.” acter, from childhood to 90s,” Horvath Eclipsing all this, though, is Barbara Ann Scott Roxy’s grandmother had once told a reviewer. “The voice that Sophie’s obsession with figure died in childbirth when she was came to me was that of a 91-year-old lady looking back on her life, and I’m skating sensation Sophie’s aunt and well as an appendix of career the same age. Roxy is sophisti- intrigued by the idea of taking some- Barbara Ann Scott. Scott’s enigmatic highlights. cated fiction, equally suitable for In Chasing A Star, skating partner, the Norma Charles grew up in one through a life.” My One Hundred adults. 978-1-896580-01-2 Adventures (Groundwood, 2008) and Norma Charles recalls dashing Ricardo French-speaking Maillardville, her twelfth title, Northward to the Moon the equally passionate Montaine? And that attended school in New West- concern the same family of characters, national fervor for motorcycle gang? minster, skated at Queen’s Park so more volumes in the series are an- Canada’s first—and Sophie’s sure they’re Arena and got to see Scott in the ticipated. Horvath is a rare three-time only—gold medal Ol- coercing Joseph to famous Hollywood Ice Review. recipient of a B.C. Book Prize, as well as ympic winner in wom- LOUISE DONNELLY join them and, much, This is the third young adult numerous other awards. 9780888999993 en’s figure skating. much worse, mount- novel in Norma Charles’ Sophie Swim the Fly by Don Calame Known as “Canada’s Sweetheart” ing a heinous plan to kidnap series of adventures. 978-1-55380-077-4 (Candlewick $19) from her professional days tour- Canada’s Sweetheart. ing with the Hollywood Ice Re- Chasing A Star features pho- Louise Donnelly is a writer and Given that fifteen-year-old Matt Gratton and his two best friends, Coop and view, the “Gretzky of 1948,” tographs contributed by Scott as part-time library worker in Vernon. PJ Reece Sean, have never had the nerve to go Barbara Ann Scott, was inducted on a date, their summertime quest to into Canada’s Olympic Hall of see “a real-live naked girl” for the first Fame and received the Order time seems doomed to failure in Don of Canada. Calame’s debut young adult novel, More thrilling to young Swim the Fly. Meanwhile Matt struggles Sophie, though, is her much- to impress the beautiful swim team star coveted Reliable Toy Company of the Lower Barbara Ann Scott doll that her Rockville Razor- stylish, sophisticated aunts have backs, Kelly West, by trying to brought from Montreal. Sophie excel at the 100- is in heaven when she learns the yard butterfly Hollywood Ice Review is coming (hence the title). to town and Barbara Ann Scott Their swim club will be performing right in her hasn’t won the hometown of New Westminster! Don Calame annual swim But Maman says tickets are meet in thirty-four CABINCABIN FEVERFEVER years—but hope, hormones and raun- much too expensive, especially after the costs to send Sophie to After the Fire by Becky Citra (Orca $9.95) chy teenage dialogue spring eternal in an all-girls academy. Maman this amusing first novel inspired by an incident when Calame was a member worries the local high school is n After the Fire by Becky Citra, Melissa’s mother is changing her of a teenage swim team. “Yes, I have ways. No more guys. No more drinking. She’s getting back on her feet too rough. The neighbourhood the collection of green fifth-place rib- isn’t what it used to be. A mo- and, to save money, she, Melissa and little brother Cody are spending bons to prove it,” he writes. “I tucked torcycle gang has even moved in. the summer in some old cabin. “Just think,” says her mother, “Pretty the story away and promptly forgot Still, Sophie soon we’ll be swimming in a real lake…” about it until my wife gently nudged is very deter- IBut Melissa knows by now that nothing her mother plans ever turns out. me—thirty-six times—to expand it into a mined to at Despite the outhouse, the mosquitoes and the lack of running water, liv- book.” 978-0-7636-4157-3 least get an ing at the cabin’s not bad. For one thing, Melissa gets her own room. Her The Sky Tree by P.K. Page autograph. charismatic mother charms the locals and, surprisingly, puts the run on two (Oolichan $19.95) Badger- beer-toting guys looking for a little fun. was increasingly drawn to Melissa takes her fair share of responsibility for Cody, watching him in the P.K. Page ing her older writing for young readers in her old age. mornings while her mother struggles with a correspondence course, deter- brother While pondering the source of the term Norma Charles Joseph into mined to get her grade twelve. Melissa is still haunted by the trailer blue-blood, she was inspired to write a taking her on fire two years earlier that they, and her mother’s no-good boyfriend, conventional fairy tale in which a prince his new motorbike to the arena had so narrowly escaped. One afternoon, on a paddle out to a little must prove himself worthy of the hand where he plays hockey, Sophie island, Melissa meets a mysterious pale-faced girl with long blond of a princess, The Sky Tree. has high hopes of spotting her hair. Alice is different. She’s writing a fantasy novel about changelings The Sky Tree takes the form of a con- heroine at early morning prac- and evil fairies. She talks endlessly about a popcorn-throwing, tree- nected trilogy of fables. In the land- tice when the ice is still the pris- house building older brother and a cupcake-baking mother who’s locked kingdom of Ure, three compet- ing young men set off to complete the tine and perfectly smooth in publishing. Alice calls Melissa her best friend. Yet there’s the in- king’s challenge: bring him back a flask tense, almost clinical, interest in Melissa’s scarred right hand, the surface Scott requires for her of sea water. The eventual winner, daredevil leaps. unnecessary and obvious lies, the sudden rages, the blood pact she Galaad, who truly loves the princess, Sophie finds a silver bracelet insists on. “Do you come in peace or war?” Alice had once asked. falls under the spell of a wizard and for- with the initials BAS. One of her As Melissa slowly learns the truth about Alice, her idyllic family gets his quest until he takes the wizard’s aunts, who went to school with and her dangerous fantasy world, she has to ask herself the same goats to an Eastern Sea where the goats Barbara Ann Scott, agrees to in- question. are transformed back into young men tervene and suddenly Sophie is Becky Citra is a retired elementary school teacher who grew up and women. meeting her idol. Maman is be- with the Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew. She gardens, skis and writes at Ultimately, King Galaad and his ing recruited to play the organ her Bridge Lake, B.C. ranch where she has also written her Max and queen ascend to heaven, leaving their son Treece to rule Ure. Illustrated by Kristi for the Review. Even Joseph is Ellie historical series and a Greek myth-based time travel series, Bridgeman, it’s a happy ending at the The Enchanted Theatre, featuring the talking cat Aristotle. touted as a possible fill-in for one Becky Citra and cover end of a long writing career. 978-1-55469-246-0 of the male skaters. art of After the Fire 978-088982-258-0 But what’s going on between

25 BC BOOKWORLD SUMMER 2010 Read the winners of the 26th annual BC Book Prizes

ETHEL WILSON FICTION PRIZE HUBERT EVANS NON-FICTION PRIZE CHRISTIE HARRIS ILLUSTRATED SHEILA A. EGOFF Supported by Friesens and Webcom Supported by AbeBooks CHILDREN’S LITERATURE PRIZE CHILDREN’S LITERATURE PRIZE Supported by Kate Walker and Company Supported by the BC Library Association Cathleen With Lorna Crozier Frieda Wishinsky Carrie Mac Having Faith in the Small Beneath the Sky: Polar Girls’ Prison A Prairie Memoir and Dean Grifﬁths The Gryphon Project (Penguin Group Canada) (Greystone Books) Maggie Can’t Wait (Penguin Group Canada) (Fitzhenry & Whiteside)

DOROTHY LIVESAY RODERICK HAIG-BROWN BILL DUTHIE STAN PERSKY POETRY PRIZE REGIONAL PRIZE BOOKSELLERS’ CHOICE AWARD Supported by the BC Teachers’ Federation Supported by Yosef Wosk Supported by the Duthie family, independent bookstores recipient of the 2010 and Transcontinental Printing and the Western Book Reps Association LIEUTENANT GOVERNOR’S AWARD FOR LITERARY EXCELLENCE Fred Wah Andrew Scott Brian Brett and Greystone Books is a door Established in 2003 by the Honourable Iona Encyclopedia of Raincoast Place Trauma Farm: Campagnolo to recognize British Columbia (Talonbooks) writers who have contributed to the development Names: A Complete Reference A Rebel History of Rural Life of literary excellence in the Province. to Coastal British Columbia (Harbour Publishing)

See ﬁnalist books, tour photos, contest details and more at www.bcbookprizes.ca

Winner of the 2009-10 Donner Prize Award Pathbreaking new books from UBC Press The Politics of Linkage Power, Interdependence, and Ideas in Canada-US Relations On the Art of Being Canadian Art in Turmoil The Chinese Cultural Revolution, 1966-76 Brian Bow Sherrill Grace Richard King, ed. A decoding of the rhetoric The Politics of Linkage A beautifully illustrated of China’s turbulent decade, cuts through the rhetoric exploration of what the arts a time of both brutal that clouds debates about and artists can tell us about iconoclasm and radical Canada’s “special” relation- being Canadian and being experimentation in the arts, ship with the United States. ourselves. that offers new insights into Among the many fresh and March 2010, 224 pages works that have transcended 978-0-7748-1579-6 PB $32.95 welcome aspects of the book their times. is the focus on leadership July 2010, 318 pages and norms, and diplomatic 978-0-7748-1543-7 PB $32.95 tone, as key variables in our bilateral relations. Bow does an excellent job of Spirits of Our Whaling Ancestors Doing Business in a New Climate Revitalizing Makah and Nuu-chah-nulth A Guide to Measuring, Reducing and Offsetting challenging the big domain that the traditional concepts Traditions Greenhouse Gas Emissions of structure, power, and interdependence have claimed for themselves in explaining Canada-US relations. He Charlotte Coté, Foreword by Micah McCarty Paul Lingl, Deborah Carlson, and does so sensibly, carefully fitting normative ideas without the David Suzuki Foundation throwing out the big political, economic, and military A member of the Nuu-chah- From the David Suzuki dimensions of the relationship. nulth First Nation, Charlotte Foundation with input from business leaders around the – Alexander Moens, author of The Foreign Policy of Coté iffers a valuable perspective on the issues world, this highly readable George W. Bush: Values, Strategy, Loyalty surrounding indigenous business guide to greenhouse July 2010, 232 pages whaling, past and present. gas management is packed 978-0-7748-1696-0 PB $32.95 August 2010, 328 pages with strategies and tips for 22 illustrations, 3 maps business strategy and rapid 978-0-295990-46-0 PB $24.95 implementation.

PUBLISHED OUTSIDE OF CANADA BY THE UNIVERSITY January 2010, 96 pages OF WASHINGTON PRESS. 978-1-8440-7908-7 PB $29.95

Canadian rights only. EARTHSCAN / DISTRIBUTED IN CANADA BY UBC PRESS

Available from fine bookstores near you! or order online @ www.ubcpress.ca

26 BC BOOKWORLD SUMMER 2010 indies

Berlin, 1945

ever mind the ing for his mother and his admiration for female contact typographical lends a necessary poign- Nand spelling er- ancy—we are on his side, we rors. Or the poor repro- accept him as an individual duction quality of the b&w storyteller beyond his platform as a victim of war. Every time photos. One of the most he recounts an episode about riveting memoirs you’re the dawning of sexual rela- ever not going to come tions, it serves as a beautifully rendered oasis within the nar- across is Klaus G.M. rative; a jarring reprieve, a Sturze’s From War to detour towards health. Peace: Memoirs of an Im- Evidently intense cruelty migrant (Penticton: Self- and privation can magnify beauty and joy. Similarly, the published), an account of strength of the author’s affec- surviving as a boy in tion for Canada as a haven in post-war Germany. which he has thrived is likely derived from the depth of his Jerzy Kosinski’s fic- bitter resentment of Nazi Ger- tionalized A Painted Bird and many and Soviet-occupied “boy soldier” Ishmael Germany. Beah’s A Long Way Home There is an inelegant quickly come to mind, but afterword that any commer- both were skillfully embel- cial publishing house would lished and/or edited, whereas likely expunge or sanitize. Sturze’s simply written account Under the word Epilog [in- of his post-World War II pri- stead of Epilogue], we learn: vations is impossible to distrust. “Looking back today, I Sturze’s relative lack of so- think the Nuernberg [Nurem- phistication as a writer only berg] trial missed its mark. The serves to enhance the believ- maniacal and unconscionable ability of his naïve perspective leadership of the Nazi govern- as an innocent—so it reads like ment should not have been a novel. hung, even though they de- “I will never forget the served it. The death penalty night in January 1945,” he be- was way too good for them. It gins. “I wasn’t yet ten years old. was all over within a second. It was dark and bitter cold. We BURIED “There was no suffering. were standing on the platform The terror and the slaughter, for passenger trains in Breslau, Germany. caused by them, to humans of all Mother, her sister Lotte, whom we [had] nation[s] involved, was horrendous. I been visiting, and I. Mother had sud- think they should have been sentenced denly decided we would go back to to life in prison at hard labor and re- Schmuerckert, where we lived, a small ceived every Sunday five lashes with the town in Poland. A two-hour ride away. whip, until they died in prison. All of We found sheer pandemonium at the the inner government were guilty, be- train station.” cause they all saw the slaughter and no Sturze’s mother is a resourceful one was willing to put an end to it.” woman who befriends many “uncles” to There are thousands of heartfelt and make it through the war. She miracu- necessary first-person testimonies by lously gets the family to the Polish town Jews and others who suffered under the only to learn the dreaded Russians are Nazis, and who lost their loved ones to rapidly advancing. Either the Poles will The author of From War to Peace is no Tolstoy atrocities and other police state machi- kill them, or the Russian soldiers will rape LIT nations; Sturze’s perspective as an inno- his mother, so they join a phalanx of —but he’s genuine and German cent German child is alarming in its own starving Germans, in horse-drawn carts, way. Here is the collateral damage of desperately trying to reach Berlin in the “She never wanted me. She had told In the mid-1950s, newly married, despotism and racism. From an histori- snows of January. me this often enough, but she was not Sturze hopes to immigrate to Canada cal perspective, this is second class hor- So begins a seamless nightmare— willing to give me up either. It was too with his new wife and daughter. Es- ror, but not for the individuals who completely fascinating when safely much of an advantage to have a little kid tranged from his mother, he meets her absorbed it. viewed through the rear view mirror of around in times like this. I was to learn in a café and asks for a loan. She replies, The perpetrators of evil didn’t suffer; time. It is dedicated to all children sur- later on in life, as I had grown up, she “Do you think I’m stupid? I’ll never see the child in Klaus Sturze did. He is an- viving a war. Details have been burned had dumped me on my father when I my money again. No way. You got a good gry about it, and haunted by that injus- into Sturze’s mind. “The horror and the was six weeks old and made off with an- looking wife. She can go and make some tice. From War to Peace is the mirror tragedies of the war were with us every other man. My father managed some- pussy money.” Appalled, Klaus calls her image of a real life, an act of truthful- day and still is hounding me fifty years how to get my mother to live with him the dirtiest human he has ever come ness, so unfettered by pretension that it later,” he writes. again when I was three years old.” across. It was the last time he ever spoke is artful. It was self-published in 2007. Initially we assume the mother is sav- Evil begets evil. His mother has re- to her. “Even her cries for me on her There is no distributor, no professional ing her child with heroic ingenuity. That peatedly used him to gain money and deathbed could not move me to see her. representation. In March of 2010, there is his perspective. She repeatedly outwits sympathy from her many lovers (includ- I had no feelings for her. She didn’t exist was only one copy for sale on the and overwhelms figures of authority, ing SS officers during the war). When for me.” internet, from a store in Cranbrook. The using either sex or anger, or both. But he reaches his teens and earns money as Conversely, Sturze’s simple descrip- author lives in Penticton. There was no the truth is uglier. From War to Peace is an apprentice in a hotel, his mother steals tions of his sexual awakenings as a boy listing on AbeBooks.com. You can al- doubling alluring as we grasp the narra- money from him. With half the city in and teenager are touchingly candid, sen- most not buy it. And you can’t invent it. tor’s emerging understanding of his ruins, at age fifteen, Sturze asserts his in- sitive and deeply appreciative of women. It exists beneath the rubble of com- manipulative mother. dependence, escaping from her tyranny. This strange friction between his loath- merce and creative writing. 978-0-9732575-4-0

27 BC BOOKWORLD SUMMER 2010 reviews NON-FICTION

Writing British Columbia History, 1784- 1958 by Chad Reimer (UBC Press $29.95) W.K. Lamb is arguably the greatest and most under-celebrated figure of British ndependent scholar Chad Columbia’s literary history. Watercolour Reimer of Chilliwack had a portrait by Brenda Guiled. Isplendid idea. Somebody should write a book about the evolution of writing history in British Columbia. Not pictographs, not oral stories. Just the Anglophilic tomes. This would easily allow us to see how social prejudices are re- flected, from one decade to the next, and how history itself changes with demographics and economies. You start with a sprinkling of explorers with their journals, perhaps a few pithy quotes from letters. Reimer chooses to open the preface in his Writing British Columbia History, 1784-1958, with a quote from Rupert Brooke in 1914, “It is an empty land.” Captain Bodega y Quadra had a better line, in the late 1700s: “I sailed on, taking fresh trouble for granted.” Basically, when Europeans arrived here, they didn’t know where the heck they were. Next you add the blinkered views of early settlers and liter- ate transients. Everyone’s voice has an English or Scottish ac- cent. The likes of William Hazlitt produced British Columbia and 40), University Librarian of the Vancouver Island (1858) and a civil University of British Columbia engineer named Duncan (1940-48), Dominion Archivist MacDonald published the 524- of Canada (1948-68) and Na- page British Columbia and Vancou- tional Librarian of Canada ver’s Island (1863) in which he (1953-67). He held ten honor- described the inhospitable wil- ANGLO-SIZE IT! ary doctorates, received the derness as “England’s Siberia.” Tyrrell Medal from the Royal So- Why histories are made to be broken in England’s Siberia. ciety of Canada and was an Of- ficer of the Order of Canada. who set the bar, who understood bia from the Earliest Times to the rate nation rather than a British Margaret Ormsby was born in that this land at the western Present (1914), co-written with adjunct by contributing Sir James Quesnel in 1909 and grew up edge of European exploration Judge Howay, who wrote the Douglas and British Columbia on a Coldstream fruit ranch, was quite simply special and wor- second volume. It replaced (1930). later writing a local history of thy of serious scholarship from Bancroft’s work as the standard This sets the stage for W.K. Coldstream. Hers was one of the the get-go. history for the next four dec- Lamb and Margaret Ormsby, first graduate degrees con- Newly arrived Alexander ades. both of whom were interviewed ferred by the new UBC history Begg received $1,100 from the Judge Howay’s work hailed by Sage in 1992. This pair rep- department when she received B.C. Legislature to produce his the capitalists as builders and he resent the climax of Reimer’s her M.A. in 1931. History of British Columbia with eulogized coal baron Robert concise overview, culminating in As a female academic, John Kerr and Oliver Cogswell. Dunsmuir as a “pioneer of pio- Ormsby’s safe but respectable Ormsby received her PhD from ✫ Bryn Mawr College in 1937, but “British Columbia’s first resi- no positions were available in dent historians,” writes Reimer, Canada. She taught at a private “also wished to correct the em- San Francisco high school until Hubert Howe Bancroft, 1852 barrassing anomaly of having an she could join McMaster Univer- American outsider provide the sity in 1940. She overcame de- Finally, along comes the fan- first and only provincial history.” partmental discrimination tastical San Francisco publisher- In 1893, R.E. Gosnell was ap- against female scholars at both turned-historian Hubert Howe pointed the first permanent li- McMaster and UBC, where she Bancroft who visits Victoria with brarian of the B.C. Provincial began to teach in 1943. his wife, for research purposes, Library and head of the prov- R.E. Gosnell Frederic Howay Margaret Ormsby She finally attained the sta- in 1878, and later produces his ince’s new archives when it was tus of full professor in 1955. She remarkable 792-page History of opened as an independent body neers.” As Reimer makes clear, centennial celebration volume, became acting head in 1963, British Columbia. in 1908. Gosnell collaborated “The historical literature of Ed- British Columbia: A History then chaired the department The intrepid Bancroft’s ef- with E.O.S. Scholefield for their wardian British Columbia repre- (1958). for ten years until her retire- forts to record the early history two-volume Sixty Years of Progress: sented a heyday of imperial W.K. Lamb is arguably the ment in 1974. Long active in the of the entire western part of A History of British Columbia sentiment and capitalist faith.” greatest and most under-cel- Okanagan Historical Society, she North America are little-known (1913), a work which Gosnell Not exactly unexpected in a ebrated figure of British Colum- died in her Coldstream home today, but he was a cultural gi- later dismissed as “that hunk of place named by Queen Victoria bia’s literary history. on November 2, 1996 at age 87. ant, along with two homegrown cow dung.” after a fur-trading district. Lamb attended UBC, the ✫ historical heroes, Judge Frederic Following a centenary cel- Howay acknowledged the Sorbonne and the University of Reimer limits his study to the Howay and W.K. Lamb. [see ebration of Simon Fraser’s voy- importance of First Nations in London where he earned a old guard. Fair enough. It’s a first www.abcbookworld.com for de- age down the river that was his British Columbia: The Making PhD in 1933. He succeeded step to towards recognizing and tails on Bancroft, Howay, Lamb] named for him by David of a Province (1928). John Riddington as understanding the key works of And no less remarkable was Thompson, E. O. S. Scholefield Walter Noble Sage, the second of UBC’s those who have tried to help us the French-born Oblate mission- had initiated copying programs who eventually head- chief librarians prior better understand ourselves. ary Father Adrien Morice who for materials about B.C. that ed the UBC history to becoming Domin- The likes of Martin Robin, ministered to the Carrier peo- were housed in Hudson’s Bay department, was ion Archivist and the George Woodcock, Jean Bar- ple around Fort St. James from Company records in London among the first to rec- first national librarian man, Harold Griffin, George 1885 to 1903, producing his and the Bancroft archives in ognize “the overhang of Canada. Bowering and Daniel Francis (as highly original (and counter-Ed- California. of colonialism” and to W.K. Lamb was the editor of the Encyclopedia of B.C.) wardian) History of the Northern Five years prior to his death, argue that historians Provincial Archivist have since eclipsed Ormsby, Interior of British Columbia (1904). Scholefield published the two- were slowly recogniz- and Librarian of Brit- Lamb, Howay, as new histories But it was Hubert Bancroft volume, 727-page British Colum- ing Canada as a sepa- Chad Reimer ish Columbia (1934- arise. 978-0-7748-1645-8

28 BC BOOKWORLD SUMMER 2010 “I enjoyed this book a lot. It brings us to the present day, with an excellent account of the growth of trade, on the extension of the Port’s authority south of the 49th parallel, on the Alaskan cruise business and on the recent introduction of alarmingly large vessels capable of bringing 6,000 automobiles into the port on one ship.” – CHUCK DAVIS

Second edition, revised and updated

• Winner of the 2006 BC Book Waterfront: The Illustrated Maritime Prizes Booksellers’ Choice Award History of Greater Vancouver in honour of Bill Duthie James P. Delgado • Co-Winner of the 2006 Paperback, $24.95 City of Vancouver Book Award 978-0-9809304-3-6

Stanton Atkins & Dosil Publishers other sa&d books For more information visit our website A Road for Canada: The A Flag for Canada www.s-a-d-publishers.ca Illustrated Story of the Rick Archbold Trans-Canada Highway Paperback, $24.95 Available in bookstores across Canada. Daniel Francis 978-0-9732346-9-5 Distributed by: Paperback, $24.95 Hardback, $44.95 Sandhill Book Marketing Ltd. 978-0-9809304-0-5 978-0-9732346-8-8

29 BC BOOKWORLD SUMMER 2010 From the publisher of 2000 Days in China After Her Brain Broke BY JOHN HEMMINGSEN by Susan Inman Bridgeross Communications John Hemmingsen chronicles his adventures in China as a a metallurgical Steve Pitt’s engineer, adapting to new customs and helping to "These true life tales range establish a business in from the gently picaresque to the wildly funny Leacock redux.” Taiyuan, Shanxi Province, - William Deverell, from 1998 to 2009. While deeply appreciative ISBN 9780981003771 of Chinese history, Hemmingsen frankly And two new describes “the massive crime novels from problems that continue to plague China in that B.C. Native David Laing Dawson country's incredible race to a permanent status as a Distributed dominant industrial power.” by For more information, visit Ingram www.2000daysinchina.com “A little Seinfeld, a little Elmore Leonard” “Fiction as close to reality as it gets” ISBN 9780981008719 ISBN 9780981003757 ! "###$% &!# "$"' www.bridgeross.com [email protected] (")$"' $"

30 BC BOOKWORLD SUMMER 2010 reviews NON-FICTION THE SECOND GROWTH OF FIRST NATIONS ART Paying homage to the past is important, but so is paying the rent.

Challenging Traditions: Contemporary ish Columbia Provincial Museum First Nations Art of the Northwest Coast by Ian M. Thom (Douglas & McIntyre $60) in Victoria, the curators sought out younger artists who were hat constitutes con- producing new work and com- temporary First Na- missioned pieces from them. Wtions art? Should the Other factors contributing to contemporary First Nations art- what Thom sees as an enormous ist adhere to the past as closely growth in production and inter- as possible? Or should est in First Nations art he or she challenge over the last forty years tradition, adapt to it or were the increasing Enjoy Coast Salish Territory: Available from www.sonnyassu.com even deny it? use of the screen For Challenging Tra- print and the devel- ✫ doing such work because “it’s with Japanese manga (a form of ditions, Ian M. Thom, opment of market- Sonny Assu is a graduate of not right, it’s not traditional.” It graphic novel). Like many of the senior curator at the ing. the Emily Carr University of Art is that creative tension that artists represented, Yahgulanaas Vancouver Art Gallery, Traditional ap- and Design who combines as- makes Assu’s work (to this did not at first see himself as an has selected and inter- GRANT SHILLING prentice and ment- pects of popular culture with viewer) interesting. artist although he did always viewed 40 artists oring programs also First Nation design elements. As One of Assu’s more stellar draw. Initially Yahgulanaas’ pri- “working within or referencing played a part in the resurgence, Thom notes, Assu’s work was not works uses the trademark font, mary focus was on the social and traditional First Nation aesthet- as did the Emily Carr University universally encouraged within swoosh and iconic red colour of political struggles of the Haida ics.” Therefore some experi- of Art and Design and the Freda the First Nations community. a Coke ad, subverting the ‘En- people and on environmental mental artists of First Nations Diesing School of Northwest One of his uncles for example, joy Coca Cola’ message to read issues. ancestry, such as Brian Jungen Coast Art in Terrace. told him that he should stop ‘Enjoy Coast Salish Territory.’ Yahgulanaas’ first comic book (he of the Nike shoe masks and “I think that it is important was about tanker shipments of the whale-made-of-lawn-chairs) that there are artists out there oil and gas along the B.C. coast. are excluded. Thom describes that do the traditional stuff,” In 2001, his first widely pub- the highly successful Jungen as Assu told Thom, “because it is lished book was A Tale of Two “more influenced by conceptual important for the culture to re- Shamans, the beginning of what and environmental concerns claim itself, but I am all about he has called the “Haida than by languages of his ances- pushing the bounds of the cul- manga.” It was Yahgulanaas’ try.” ture.” Japanese students who com- Fair enough, but when we ✫ pared his work to manga and begin to go down this road it For Beau Dick, an initiate of assured him that it was a respect- becomes a slippery slope to the Hamat’sa society of the able art form in their homeland. question whether it is necessary ‘Namgis people, identity as an ✫ at all to group artists by their aboriginal is integral to who he Concise, yet broad in scope, ancestry. That is where some his- is. Dick is keenly aware of the Challenging Traditions: Contempo- torical perspective becomes use- push and pull of reclaiming and rary First Nations Art of the North- ful. redefining—aesthetic versus west Coast offers an important From the years 1882-1951 functional, and art versus introduction to aboriginal artists aboriginal cultural practices— ritual—that many contemporary attempting to push the bounda- such as the potlatch—were First Nations artists face. ries, to tell new stories in a vari- criminalized. “As a young child I saw two ety of mediums and styles, It was not until 1958, in an worlds colliding ,” Dick says, “As responding to radical changes in exhibition to mark the cente- I grew older I wanted to be in a the world while respecting and nary of the province of B.C., that traditional world, and I look balancing the old and the new. First Nations art and objects around and I see my people suf- Thom’s language to describe were exhibited with artworks fering because they are putting the works is blessedly free of art made by European immigrants. all of their energy into useless speak, and it’s inclusive and as It was not until the following things in our modern culture, plainspoken as most of his sub- year that aboriginal people were whether it is TV or playing jects. He has done a commend- granted the right to vote feder- bingo.” able job of representing their ally (they were granted the right ✫ stories. 978-1-55365-414-8 to vote provincially in 1947). Michael Nicholl Yahgulanaas In 1971, when The Legacy “Portrait of a Residential School Child” by Lawrence Paul creates a revolutionary mix of Grant Shilling reviews exhibition opened at the Brit- Yuxweluptun, from Challenging Traditions (D&M) Haida imagery and storytelling from Cumberland

31 BC BOOKWORLD SUMMER 2010 New from the Royal BC Museum

Images from the Likeness House

Dan Savard

$39.95

In this insightful book, Dan Savard Savard shares his passion for explores the relationship between historical photographs as he shows First Peoples in BC, Alaska and the value in each, how or why the Washington and the early photographer produced it, or its photographers who captured their importance to researchers today. likenesses on glass plates or nitrate This book is a visual statement film. about perception (and mispercep- Images from the Likeness House tion), cultural change and survival. features more than 250 photographs It’s also a collection of vivid and produced from 1850 to the 1920s. striking images that show the All are faithfully reproduced, as they artistry of early photographers. have survived, without digital enhancements or retouching. ISBN 978-0-7726-6150-0

For more information about Distributed by Heritage Group. Royal BC Museum books, go to www.hgdistribution.com www.royalbcmuseum.bc.ca and click on Publications. YOKA’s Summer Literary pick is: Stephen Miller’s The Last Train to Kazan (Penguin Books $24) 987-0-14305585-3

32 BC BOOKWORLD SUMMER 2010 reviewsPOETRY ANVIL

Garry Gottfriedson is typing beyond PRESS stereotyping: “I write inside of eyes that new titles never close.” Kaspoit! | Dennis E. Bolen “Kaspoit! is either a sublime literary work of near genius or is one of the most wretched wallows in the dark mire of the soul ever published. … Reader beware, Kaspoit! is not for the easily upset, but, if you can handle it, you’ll soon realize you’re reading a work of stark brilliance. … the conspiracy it posits is startling compared to the vague news coverage that the infamous pig farm case received.” ISBN 978-1-897535-05-9 — Les Wiseman, Victoria Times Colonist $20 | 258 pps. | available now A Room in The City | Gabor Gasztonyi A Room in the City represents Gasztonyi’s PIERCING LAMENTS ﬁve-year project of photographing the resi- dents of Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside hotels. They are represented in private moments, with respect and dignity. Gasztonyi’s style continues in the great tradition of Josef Koudelka, the photogra- WITHOUT SELF-PITY pher of the Roma. Foreword by Gabor ISBN 978-1-897535-28-8 Don’t expect a lot of hey–ya, hey–ya Maté. $40 | 144 pps. | June from rancher poet Garry Gottfriedson. The Devil You Know | Jenn Farrell Skin Like Mine by Garry Gottfriedson Occasionally a little too abstract These stories deal with sex, love, work, birth, and (Ronsdale $15.95) (beauty, nature, loss, tears, fulfillment), death—what else, but life’s defining moments? Gottfriedson’s inspired rawness is lived Farrell gets to the ticking core of her characters ROM PLATO TO EAST HASTINGS, FROM fear, lived grief and lived exaltation. He Picasso and Puerto Vallarta to The doesn’t draw back from harsh history, and pulls the reader along every step of the way. F Old Ones, Garry Gottfriedson and weather, indigenous language loss and the Jenn Farrell’s smart, observant stories about desire his work resist stereotyping, “bones born in cultural confusion of the urbanized rez and escape take us to the places we’re all afraid to the city (Kamloops)/ moved to the reservation kids. admit we’ve been. Read The Devil You Know to write and ride… targeting mouthy politi- Gottfriedson’s honesty is engaging, “so with greed and a hot, pleasurable hint of guilt. cians/ tipping over tequila and/crying over here I am/ searching/ for recovery tools and —Sally Cooper, author of Love Object ghosts.” the right prayer/ worthy/ of shaking the bro- ISBN 978-1-897535-06-6 and Tell Everything A rancher poet from the Secwepemc ken sky into repair.” $18 | 128 pps. | June (Shuswap) First Nation, this is a poet who “I was born a nightmare/ in this drunken cannot be pinned down. Readers will find universe,” so begins an opening poem The Skeleton Dance | no idealized “Indian” in this book though about the mutilation of land and culture, Philip Quinn there is respect for the grand- which ends, “I seek the refuge of my Musician turned ad copywriter Robert mothers, the geographical loca- own kind/ sealed among the drunk- Walker drifts into a hallucinogenic, violent world tion, the dancing and chant ards.” of drugs, pornography, and murder. His oldest and what is left of the old na- He rages but does not rant. and closest friend, the successful criminal tive culture. He calls himself a There is self-knowledge but not bushman: “sacred in a drunken self-pity. The strongest section is lawyer Klin Abrams, greases his descent by be- universe/ where the drum is still ‘Scalps and Derma.’ Here the la- traying him to the Diamondbacks, a motorcycle heard/ like a contemporary Koyoto ments are piercing. Where griev- gang trying to control the Toronto drug trade. MAIN-VAN story/ played out on the tv screen” HANNAH DER KAMP ing is great, laments must be long “The terrain of The Skeleton Dance is His raw words include scath- and deep. Yet, no matter how cut- marked by violation and futility, which Quinn ing criticism of the violence and self-pity ting, they are spoken with dignity and do renders with finesse …” – Quill & Quire ISBN 978-1-897535-04-2 in tribal culture: “this is the result of some- not resort to sarcasm. Well, occasionally they $18 | 168 pps. | Avail. thing gone stupid/ we are stupid… afraid to do as in ‘One Tribe Canada’ where he live/ afraid to die/ afraid of ourselves.” He pokes fun at “Indians” adorned in button Wombat | Rod Filbrandt doesn’t hold back when he takes aim at blankets capped with war bonnets who politics, both that of colonial history, bu- build sweat lodges in suburbia. Down those rain-slick, neon-lighted reaucrats and the Department of Indian Anger is most articulate when it is in- streets Chandler sent Philip Marlowe; Affairs and Northern Development. terspersed with tenderness. These poems meanwhile, a few blocks over, several In ‘Political Dysfunction,’ he takes on describe a wide emotional arc. The rage decades later, Vancouver’s Rod Filbrandt the politics of the rez, where “internal pet- is acute and the tenderness surprising. He sent his own knight errant and holy tiness is the norm.” is capable of writing about mystery as in Don’t expect a lot of hey–ya hey–ya. In ‘Night Dancers,’ a lovely, short piece about fool—a man in a porkpie hat, a a piece about Mary Magdalene, God cries the Northern Lights. sportshirt, and pants that can only be blood. In a Crow poem, the cawing red Without undermining the strong described as trousers. A man known by tongue is searching for road kill. words, Gottfriedson leaves the reader with a single name only: Wombat. Accessible plain talk, not literary po- a sense of his equanimity. On the Silent ISBN 978-1-897535-06-6 —John Armstrong (AKA “Buck Cherry”) etry, with terrific speech rhythms, these Night streets, “peace overrides misunderstand- $18 | 168 pps. | May From the Introduction poems are most effective when they are ing at this moment of heartfelt song.” about concrete experience. Skin Like Mine is an eye opener. Read- Contemporary CanLit with a The writing about horses is exquisitely ers who drive the rendered though not sentimental. A se- highway east of Kamloops will never drive Distinctly Urban Twist ries about Horsechild evokes his love for through that rolling Shuswap landscape horses, knowledge of them, their com- with the same eyes again. 978-155380-101-6 anvilpress.com panionship. His language about his horses is like the language one uses for grand- Hannah Main-Van Der Kamp writes children. from Victoria.

33 BC BOOKWORLD SUMMER 2010 reviews POETRY

Vancouver Co-op Radio. “After RUN ON we had stopped the tape re- COLD SLEEP corder and smoked some of the Cold Sleep Permanent Afternoon by Let Beauty Be: A Season in the Highlands, Ray Hsu (Nightwood $17.95) Guatemala by Kit Pepper best homegrown buds I’d ever (Leaf Press $17.95) had, the interview took a de- Ray Hsu arrived in Vancouver in 2008 cided turn for the better and we to teach as a Postdoctoral Teaching RITTEN IN THE FORM OF A JOUR- talked about underground com- Fellow in the creative writing program Wnal covering 31 days, Kit ics, poetry magazines, his favour- at UBC. His poetry collection, Anthropy, Pepper’s Let Beauty Be: A Season ite music and musicians, Bob won the 2005 League of Canadian in the Highlands, Guatemala re- Dylan’s lyrics, pornography, the Poets’ Gerald Lampert Award for best calls Ronald Wright’s aphorism, Evergreen Review, poet D.A. Levy first book and was a finalist for the Trillium Book Award for Poetry. Hsu’s second “Beauty cloaks Guatemala the and the FBI.” off beat features the collection is Cold Sleep Permanent way music hides screams.” As a transcript of Wright’s 45-minute Afternoon. 978-0-88971-244-7 jogger who was working for a talk with Ginsberg, as well as a clinic in the highlands, Pepper CD version. 978-1-933606-19-4 gathers her impressions of roost- ers, death squads, evangelicals, LONDON CALLING poverty, markets, political cor- ruption and the sufferings of The Geography of Arrival Mayan women along with per- by George Sipos (Gaspereau, $25.95) sonal insights into her own char- OR MORE THAN 25 YEARS, BU- acter. “Awake and for some Kit Pepper and Ruby holding new-born Yoli in Guatemala Fdapest-born George Sipos reason reviewing my life. Look- was the leading bookseller in ing for passion, moments where Prince George where he oper- the only air wanted was air that GINSBERG ated Mosquito Books while Leanne Boschman was shared. At 5 a.m., decide teaching at the local college. He I’ve not been guided by that kind ON CORTES left the book trade in 2005 to of passion. Simple as that.” PRECIPITATIONS off beat edited by Hillel Wright become manager of the Prince Anyone who has visited Gua- (Printed Matter Press) Precipitous Signs: A Rain Journal by George Symphony. That year he Leanne Boschman (Leaf Press $16.95) temala will recognize the poign- released his first book of poetry, ancy of that country’s mild- N 1985, AT THE INVITATION OF Anything But The Moon (Goose What is appropriate dress for a Prince PHOTO mannered peasants who have IRex Weyler, Allen Ginsberg Lane Editions), nominated for Rupert poetess? One made of kelp, of been slaughtered and tortured accepted an invitation to lead a the Dorothy Livesay Prize. He course. Leanne Boschman is wear- WRIGHT for decades. She takes her final poetry and meditation retreat at later became executive director ing one in her author photograph for run. “Finally, this day, I count the Hollyhock Farm on Cortes Is- Precipitous Signs: A Rain Journal, a HILLEL of ArtSpring, a performing arts skilled and humorous book sodden with greetings: thirty-six in one hour. land for a handful of participants Allen Ginsberg at Hollyhock centre on Salt Spring Island, and As if the air itself speaks. Boys that included Trevor Carolan, coastal downpour. Especially worth- released his second collection, while are the poem/stories taken from on bicycles, girls with buckets of who recorded his memories and been reprinted in the collection The Glassblowers (Goose Lane newspaper accounts of Rupert in the corn, babies on their backs, men impressions of accompanying entitled off beat, edited by Hillel $17.95), now followed by The Ge- twenties; the whores, the school and their livestock or machetes, his mentor to Cortes Island in Wright, who recorded an inter- ography of Arrival, a memoir of marms, bachelors and colonial big- women with chickens in baskets Giving Up Poetry: With Allen view with Ginsberg at Hollyhock growing up in London, Ontario. wigs. Through it all, the scent of damp- on their heads. They all greet Ginsberg at Hollyhock (Banff Cen- on May 5, 1985, using a portable, Geography 9781554470808; ness. 978-0-9788379-9-0 me.” 978-1-926655-03-1 tre Press, 2001). An excerpt has reel-to-reel tape recorder from Glassblowers 978-0-86492-540-4;

34 BC BOOKWORLD SUMMER 2010 Reading Service for Writers If you are a new writer, or a writer with a troublesome manuscript, EVENT’s Reading Service for Writers may be just what you need. photo by Anne Grant Visit http://event.douglas.bc.ca for more information

FLIGHT OF THE Li Tat, DRAGONFLY an indentured labourer, leaves his home in China´s A moving novel Guandong of a people who Province helped build for Gum Sahn, a country Gold Mountain — that did not the New World. want them.

Available at Danial Neil borealispress.com/ Four-time flightofthedragonfly winner of the Surrey International and through Writers’ Conference your bookstore: Poetry Award ISBN 9780888873781

Book Ends by Naomi Beth Wakan

I did muse that had I started reading these 1001 novels by the time I was, say, seven years old... I would have read them all by now and would therefore be able to die in peace. But what kind of life would have been devoted entirely to reading 1001 novels? No husbands, no ! divorces, no mortgage – why it !" would have been a wretched existence. New from Poplar Press # # # A division of Wolsak and Wynn Publishers www.wolsakandwynn.ca

35 BC BOOKWORLD SUMMER 2010 Back in print, the classic about the Chilcotin War High Slack Waddington’s Gold Road and the Bute Inlet Massacre of 1865 by Judith Williams

Find it here: People’s Co-op Bookstore • Open Book, Williams Lake • Caryall Books, Quesnel • Royal BC Museum Shop, Victoria • The Gallery, Port McNeill • BC Ferries • Save-On-Foods • Amazon.com

www.NewStarBooks.com

NOTICE: You are in Pirate Territory! Islands of Resistance Pirate Radio in Canada

Andrea Langlois, Ron Sakolsky & Marian van der Zon, eds.

Find it here: People’s Co-op Bookstore • Pulpfiction Books Spartacus Books • UVic Bookstore • UBC Bookstore Galiano Island Books • Abraxas Books, Denman Island Laughing Oyster, Courtenay • Wild Heather, Ucluelet Bookland, Vernon & Kamloops • Save-On-Foods Amazon.com

www.NewStarBooks.com

A great companion to the work of the Griffin Prize-winning poet Robin Blaser Stan Persky & Brian Fawcett

Find it here: People’s Co-op Bookstore Pulpﬁ ction Books Galiano Island Books UVic Bookstore UBC Bookstore Amazon.com

www.NewStarBooks.com

Now entering North Delta This is a moving story about tolerance, Off the Highway Growing Up In North Delta compassion and the TRANSMONTANUS 18 power of family ties. by Mette Bach Ellen’s Book Find it here: People’s Co-op Bookstore • Pulpﬁ ction Books • Black Bond Books • BC Ferries • of Life UBC Bookstore • Save-On-Foods • Chapters | Indigo | Indigo.ca • Amazon.com ($17.95 Groundwood) ISBN: 978-0-88899-853-8 A young adult novel. www.NewStarBooks.com

36 BC BOOKWORLD SUMMER 2010 WHO’SWHO BRITISHCOLUMBIA

is for Assu is for Dawson is for Forsberg is for Harrison

Great-grandson of Chief Billy Assu, Re-released by David Laing To escape the party life of Watson Lake, Tor Keith Harrison’s 1990 diary-style Frank Assu of Comox has self-pub- Dawson, the novel Essondale Forsberg, at age twenty-three, went novel Eyemouth recalls a maritime disaster lished a collection of essays about the We (Bridgeross $19.95) is set in the historic south to even tinier Iskut where she learned, that killed his great-grandfather who lived Wai Kai people of Cape Mudge, Lekwiltok Essondale “mental institution” in over several years, to hunt, trap, skin beaver, in Eyemouth, Scotland. Nineteen years Anthology (First Choice Books $20). Born Coquitlam wherein protagonist Dr. Robert field dress moose, make bannock and bea- later Harrison was invited to Eyemouth as in 1973, he is a Snow discovers murder and sexual abuse ver stew, build a log cabin, evade grizzlies— a featured speaker for member of the are rife. Concurrently Gina Mc- and live with herself. Now back living at the town’s literary We Wai Kai Murchy-Barber has published Free as Watson Lake, she recalls her love affair with festival. His new, First Nation on a Bird (Dundurn $12.99) a remarkable the bush in North of Iskut: Grizzlies, non-fiction Quadra Island young adult novel about a young woman Bannock and Adventure (Caitlin $24.95), work is an un- and a member of with Down syndrome who is marooned a solo female wilderness memoir in the spirit derstated love the Laichwiltach in the prison-like Woodlands, opened in of Gilean Douglas. 978-1894759-42-7 story, The Mis- Tribe which is a 1878 as the Provincial Lunatic Asylum. sionary, The Vio- sub-tribe of the Essondale 978-0-9810037-4-0; Free as a Bird 978-1-55488-447-6 linist and the Aunt Kwakwaka’wakw Whose Head Was Tribes. Frank Assu is for Gutstein Squeezed (Oolichan 978-1-926747-729 $18.95), braiding is for Eckhoff While teaching in the fields more family of journalism, documentary history, travel One of the most research and policy at SFU, writing and is for Bradley puzzling and origi- Donald Gutstein cultural an- nal books of any researched the role of thropology. Alan Bradley burst into prominence year, kevin think tanks and the me- 978-088982-265-8 last year with The Sweetness at the Bottom mcpherson dia in disseminating continued on of the Pie, a young adult mystery that in- eckhoff’s right-wing propaganda. next page troduced his youthful and precocious sleuth SeanRhapsodomancy This work led him to Flavia de Luce, who lives in an ancient fam- Aiken(Coach House publish Not A Con- ily house somewhere in England in the $16.95) is illustra- spiracy Theory: How 1950s. In his follow-up, The Weed That tivehangs writing and Business Propaganda Keith kevin mcpherson eckhoff PHOTO Strings the Hangman’s Bag (Doubleday out:symbology in- Hijacks Democracy Harrison $29.95), Flavia investigates the sudden spired by, and representative of, Sir Isaac (Key Porter $22.95). It has

an apple a day, PETERSON death—mid-performance—of a master Pitman’s invention of shorthand in 1837 a national and international fo- - puppeteer named Rupert Porson who ar- anda the job forty-character per phonetic alphabet cus, but there is a strong B.C. ENRIGHT rives in the hamlet of Bishop’s Lacey in a calledweek. Unifon that was invented by John component in which he traces 978-0-385-66584-1 broken-down van. BLAISE

Malone in the 1950s. These two pho- the origins of the Fraser Insti- & netic systems provide the images, along with tute and its role in the historic drawings, that almost incomprehensively 1983 “tough guy” election and PETERSON is for Cunningham “tease out a relationship between voice and budget. Gutstein is co-director of words and visual poetry.” 978-1-55245-231-8 NewsWatch Canada. 9781554701919 BARRY

Full-scale opera was first performed in Vic- toria in 1877 and Vancouver in 1891. Joan Sutherland made her North American operatic debut in Vancouver in 1958. Rosemary Cunningham’s Bravo! The History of Opera in British Columbia (Harbour $39.95) is the first- ever history of its kind, including more than 100 photos. Born in New Westminster in 1928, Cunningham is a long-time fan of Pacific Opera Victoria and the Vancouver Opera. She includes an appendix for all Vancouver productions from 1960 to the present; and all Victoria productions from 1980 to the present. 978-1-55017-486-1 PHOTO

GLASS

BARRY is for Forsberg Placido Domingo as Cavaradossi and Nancy Tatum as Tosca were the ill- Burkha of the North: Tor Forsberg fated lovers in Vancouver Opera’s production of Tosca in 1968.

37 BC BOOKWORLD SUMMER 2010 SCRATCH BY CHARLOTTE CORBEIL-COLEMAN WHO’SWHOBRITISHCOLUMBIA DRESS

RED

THE

YEE IN

DAVID

BY LADY “Yee’s imagination knows no “…marks the mainstage splash of boundaries…” a gifted and courageous writer.” —NOW Magazine, Toronto —EYE Weekly, Toronto

WWW.PLAYWRIGHTSCANADA.COM PLAYWRIGHTS CANADA PRESS

Susan Inman has taught drama and English at Windermere Secondary School in Vancouver for 20 years.

is for Inman is for Mandel

After Susan Inman’s youngest daugh- Born in Comox in 1979, and raised on ter developed a catastrophic schizoaffective Denman Island, Emily St. John disorder in 2000, she has written and spo- Mandel attended The School of Toronto ken extensively about issues related to seri- Dance Theatre and lived briefly in Mon- ous mental illnesses. Her memoir as a treal before relocating to New York where devoted and desperate mother, After Her she now lives in Brooklyn. Brain Broke: Helping My Daughter Re- Mandel’s first novel, Last Night in Mon- cover Sanity (Bridgeross $19.95) has an in- treal, was a finalist for ForeWord Magazine’s troduction by Sen. Michael Kirby, 2009 Book of the Year. Her second novel, chair of the Mental Health Commission The Singer’s Gun (Unbridled / McArthur of Canada. 978-0-9810037-8-8 $28.95) tells a tale of international crime, false identities, and the limits of family ties. It was #1 on the Indie Next List for May Shane Koyczan 2010. is for Joseph Mandel will be at the Denman Island Writers Festival, July 17-18, and at Galiano Having been nominated for the Dorothy Island Books on July 25. 978-1-936071-64-7 Livesay Prize for her first poetry collection about grief and death, The Startled Heart (Oolichan, 2004), Eve Joseph has evoked and examined the process of reach- is for Nickerson ing epiphanies with The Secret Signature of Things (Brick $19). In a long poem Founding member of the performance called ‘Tracking’ she struggles with the ques- group Haiku Night in Canada, humourist tion of how to remember missing aborigi- Billeh Nickerson has recorded his ex- nal women on the west coast. 978-1-894078-81-8 periences as an employee under the golden arches for McPoems (Arsenal $15.95). It’s an amusing collection of recollections and O confessions of the (literal) counter culture is for Knighton of the nineties, battling the mundanity of a McJob at McDonalds. 978-1-55152-265-4 Love is blind anyway… so it’s no surprise that Ryan Knighton has followed his memoir of learning to cope with the onset of blindness at age eighteen, Cockeyed, with ! " a similarly candid memoir of what it’s like being a father during the first year of his # child’s life, C’mon Papa: Dispatches from !P a Dad in the Dark (Knopf $29.95). 978-0-307-39669-3 N

is for Lundy ! "#$%& At age 60, in the aftermath of the deaths of " '()$'*+ ",- three close friends, former Northern +./",' "%& '()')*++,+0&1 Irelander turned Salt Spring Islander Derek Lundy rode his rusty Kawasaki LRR 650 motorcycle the length of the U.S.-Mexico border, as well as the length of the U.S.-Canada border, to write Bor- derlands (Knopf $32), an often- Find more than humourous memoir that explores American 9,438 B.C. authors society, and its obsession with security. ABC “Borderlands anywhere,” he writes, “are of- BOOKWORLD ten like a third country, distinct in many www.abcbookworld.com ways from the two countries the border Billeh Nickerson: You deserve a defines.” 978-0-307-39862-8 poem today

38 BC BOOKWORLD SUMMER 2010 $29.95) to assess how Cana- dian and global institutions is for Olafson deploy various notions of race. This collection of essays is for Araxi Drawn from a series deploys “an anti-colonial James Walt’s Araxi: Seasonal Reci- of chapbooks of writ- feminist lens.” 978-1-897071-59-5 pes (D&M $45) contains recipes from the ing from his period of Whistler restaurant that celebrity chef residency on Saturna Gordon Ramsay has touted as one Island, Richard of Canada’s best. Nominated for a James Olafson’s poetry is for UBC Beard Foundation Award in the Cooking collection Island in from a Professional Point of View category, the Light (Ekstasis Richard Olafson it previously won the Gourmand World $19.95) celebrates Cookbook Award in the Best Chef Book coastal nature. While reviving his Ekstasis John in Canada category, as well as the Cordon publishing imprint and continuing to pro- Sutton d’Or Gold Ribbon International Cook- duce a book review periodical with Lutz book Award in the Illustrated Cookbook Trevor Carolan, Olafson also found category. time to jointly launch his own Walt spent four years at Sooke Harbour book in May with fellow poets “Poor little Hilderl House before joining Araxi in 1998. He Ilya Tourtidis, Manolis and was a delightful child, John Sutton Lutz’s sweet, bright, charming. lives in Pemberton. 978-1-55365-367-7 Eduardo Pinto. 978-1-897430-02-6 examination of the collision One day as she was between indigenous and walking home with her non-indigenous cultures of mother, a Nazi tank British Columbia, Makúk: is for Yandle is for Phillips deliberately drove onto A New History of Aborigi- the sidewalk and killed nal-White Relations (UBC Hilderl. I don’t know To mark the centenary of Malcolm Born in 1959, Kamloops-raised Wendy Press $85), has won the how her mother Lowry’s birth, one of the world’s pre-emi- Phillips of Richmond has been a jour- Harold Adams Innis Prize survived. nent Lowry scholars, Sherrill Grace, nalist, bookbinder, English teacher and high for the best English-language We all thought she has gathered her work on Canada’s most school teacher-librarian. With degrees in book in the social sciences would go crazy.” famous alcoholic for Strange Comfort: Es- English, education, journalism and chil- published in Canada in says on the Work of Malcolm Lowry dren’s literature, she has lived in Ottawa, 2009, having previously re- — from Letter from the Lost: (Talonbooks $19.95) and dedicated her Lesotho, South Africa and Australia. Her A Memoir of Discovery ceived the Canadian Histori- collection to the pioneering and somewhat first poetry collection, Fishtailing (Coteau by Helen Waldstein Wilkes cal Association’s 2009 Clio saintly UBC librarian Anne Yandle $14.95) follows the struggle of four teen- Prize for B.C. 9780774811392 (1930-2006), one of the people most re- agers with violence and bullying. affordable housing. Rotberg describes a sponsible for making UBC Special Collec- 978-1-55050-411-8 Vancouver that is shallow, narcissistic and tions into a treasure trove of archives for more obsessed with appearances to the out- is for Violini Lowry research and scholarship. It includes side world than with solving the problems a new essay on Lowry’s legacy for the is for Quitting of its most vulnerable citizens. 978-0973406511 twenty-first century, as well as a new essay For eighteen years Juanita Rose on Debussy in Lowry’s masterpiece, Under Violini ran murder mystery events in Van- the Volcano. 978-0-88922-618-0 Having sworn off the couver, leading her to produce a potpourri booze at age twenty, is for Scobie of histories, mysterious and unexplained Susan Juby re- events, in Almanac of the Infamous, The calls her turbulent The Measure of Paris (University of Al- Incredible and The Ignored (Red Wheel is for Zwicky years as a teenage alco- berta Press $29.95) by Stephen $19.95). This self-illustrated reference work holic in Nice Recov- covers Peking Man to UFOs. 978-1-57863-447-7 Scobie is a series of studies of Paris as Philosophy is the catalyst for Jan ery (Penguin $20), an presented through the eyes and works of Zwicky in Plato as Artist (Gaspereau often funny memoir Susan Juby mostly Canadian writers including John $25.95), her study of Plato’s dialogue about extremely dis- Glassco, Mavis Gallant and with Meno concerned with the nature of mal times. Belting out ZZ Top numbers, Lola Lemire. 978-0-88864-533-3 is for Wilkes human excellence. Set during the decline she discovers the cure for shyness comes in of the Athenian empire, in a society ob- a bottle, and she proceeds to float away and Retired, with a PhD in French literature, sessed with fame rather than morality, down. She wanted to call this cautionary Helen Waldstein Wilkes of Van- Meno’s questions are both urgent and con- tale Drinky Pants: A Quitters Tale, “but was is for Thobani couver, born in 1936, examines her Jew- temporary. Zwicky reveals how Plato’s fo- talked out of it by more sensible people.” ish/Czechoslovakian background in Letter cus on character, emotion, and 978-0670069170 Former president of the National Action from the Lost: A Memoir of Discovery psychological plot is Committee on the Status of Women, (Athabasca U.P. $24.95). Much of this so- central to the work’s Sunera phisticated and well-illustrated material is philosophical mis- is for Rotberg Thobani of UBC derived from letters—received by her par- sion, and she suggests has followed her Ex- ents in Canada from family members in a mystical dimension alted Subjects: Studies Europe from 1939 to 1948—that Wilkes to Plato’s thinking Exploring Vancouverism by Howard in the Making of Race rescued from an Eaton’s Christmas box af- that connects Rotberg (Canadian Values Press $25) and Nation in Canada ter her father died in 1959. As Nazis closed mathematics in on war-torn Czechoslovakia, her father doesCover not paintart for a pretty picture of Vancou- (UTP) by co-editing and morality. ver, but strikes at the heart of many of this The States of Race had managed to escape from Prague with Awfully Devoted Women Sunera Thobani Jan Zwicky 9781554470754 city’s major problems including a lack of (Between the Lines his young family in 1939. 978-1-897425-53-4

39 BC BOOKWORLD SUMMER 2010 letters Imagine there’s no BookWorld I cannot imagine my life without B.C. BookWorld. In the BCBW spring issue, I really enjoyed the “life and times” article about Cherie Smith and November House publishing; also the profile of playwright Joan MacLeod. As always, I found several books for immediate purchase that I would not likely see reviewed so well (or at all) anywhere else: Gumption and Grit (for a friend); Shin-Chi’s Canoe (for my classroom reading); and Counting on Hope (for my Grade 7 novel study group). I have two older editions on my desk right now, just so I can re-read the beautiful tributes to Alice Munro, P.K. Page and others. I also have a list of authors and titles from the last two issues that I ILLUSTRATION will take to my favourite independent bookstore, Volume One in Duncan, to FARRIS look for books for friends and relatives. I have three other bits I have clipped on JOSEPH local history writers for my Dad. blood-poisoning caused by a mosquito- ✍ meaning to send you my support ever There are always several remarkable bite. She also says that he “never arrived Greetings from the five volunteers of since I heard about the bizarre with- photos of authors and characters I might at any battlefront or saw the horror the New Denver Reading Centre. We’ve drawal of public funding. never see elsewhere; and the political there.” In fact, he served gallantly in long appreciated receiving B.C. Laurie Ricou views gleaned from BCBW articles and battle with the Royal Naval Division in- BookWorld. As you might know, grants Vancouver reviews provide enough fodder to keep fantry, which suffered heavy casualties to Reading Centres were totally cut. We, ✍ anyone’s social consciousness primed. during the siege of Antwerp, Belgium, too, are getting good responses from the I’ve decided to become a supporter/ Thank you for making the connections in October, 1914. This combat experi- public. We still have devoted readers subscriber. Let’s keep B.C. BookWorld between book and reader that are essen- ence inspired him to write another mag- and folks who know the value of the alive and thriving through these bleak tial to the culture, history, and future of nificent poem. Centre in their village. Enclosed is some and backward times in public funding B.C. Brooke’s grave lies on the Greek is- support for your worthy paper. for all the arts. All I can say is the literary world of land of Skyros, where he died on April Agnes Mary Cherry Davies British Columbia IS B.C. BookWorld. It 20, 1915, while en route to fight at New Denver Vancouver is indispensable. Gallipoli. ✍ ✍ Susan Yates Sidney Allinson A ride on BC Ferries would Both my wife, Dolores Gabriola Victoria be so boring without B.C. Reimer, and I are really horrified BookWorld. Please keep pressing! to hear about the cuts to the arts Rupert, Love letters Marlene Angelopoulos in B.C. B.C. BookWorld is a we hardly knew ya Crescent Beach one-of-a-kind publication which I LOVE B.C. BookWorld. The for- ✍ Allan Safarik has reached an outstanding sta- It was a pleasure to see BC BookWorld mat is exciting—the way you do the A I would just like to tell you I tus regarding its relationship with make further mention of the famous to Z of books, authors. I LOVE it so think this government is making a big mis- writing, publishing and the reader. No English poet, Rupert Brooke. Winona much! Your publication brings joy. It’s take cutting funding to BC BookWorld. I publication in Canada has come close Baker’s letter refers to Brooke having our publication. Thank you, zillion-fold. have been enjoying this publication for to achieving this kind of cultural impact. “died suddenly of some mysterious dis- Nefertitit Morrison years. It is the most valuable tool in sup- Allan Safarik ease.” His death was simply the result of Nanaimo port of Canadian authors. Dundurn, SK. ✍ Frank Barazzuol ✍ Letters or emails contact: Mega million thanks for this public North Vancouver You guys really deserve a gold medal! BC BookWorld, 3516 W. 13th Ave., labour of love. You will be remembered ✍ Thanks for your marvellous publications Vancouver, BC V6R 2S3 in my will. You do a great job of being both in- all these years. email: [email protected] Letters may be edited for clarity & length. Hilda Dahl clusive and committed to British Colum- Gordon Barnes Victoria bia’s lives in words. Thank you. I’ve been Salt Spring

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