CON TROVERSY

LOOKOUT #18 • a forum for writers 3516 W. 13th Ave., Vancouver, BC V6R 2S3 LOOKOUTLOOKOUTLOOKOUT s Richard Heinberg recounts in Power A Down: Options and Actions for a Post- Petroleum is Carbon World (New Society $22.95), America was the world’s foremost oil producer during the period when mankind evolved from ox carts to jet planes. For much of that century, USSR production of oil ranked second. $ According to Heinberg, oil discovery in America peaked in the 1930s; its oil pro- water. You notice now that the raft is surrounded by many sound-looking canoes, each duction peaked around 1970; but by then America hadP established its linksO with the carrying aWER family of indigenous fishers. Men on the raft are systematically forcing peo- Middle East for oil imports. Soviet oil production peaked in 1987. During the Eight- ple out of the canoes and onto the raft at gunpoint, and shooting holes in the bottoms ies, the CIA fomented proxy wars in Soviet territories (i.e. Osama bin Laden in Af- of the canoes. This is clearly insane behaviour: the canoes are the only possible sources ghanistan) and Saudi Arabia was persuaded to flood the world oil market with cheap of escape or rescue if the raft goes down, and taking more people on board the already oil. The Soviet Union crumbled. overcrowded raft is gradually bringing its deck even with the water line. You reckon The lone superpower left standing was determined to keep it that way. “If, instead that there must now be four hundred souls aboard. At this rate, the raft is sure to of having the world’s second-largest oil reserves, Iraq were the world’s foremost ex- capsize in a matter of seconds. porter of, say, kumquats,” says Heinberg, “would America be spending tens of billions A few seconds elapse. You can see and feel water lapping at your shoes, but amaz- of dollars to ‘liberate’ its citizens?” ingly enough the raft itself is still afloat, and nearly everyone is still busy As has been outlined in The New Yorker, Heinberg believes eating, drinking or gambling (indeed, the activity around the neoconservatives in the White House, such as Paul casino has heated up considerably). You hear someone in Wolfowitz, are implementing the Machiavellian doc- the distance shouting about how the raft is about to sink. trines espoused by the University of Chicago political sci- You rush in the direction of the voice only to see its entist Leo Strauss. He believes these are dangerous source being tossed unceremoniously overboard. people ‘by any historical measure’, especially when You decide to keep quiet, but think silently to your- aligned with the Christian fundamentalism of self, “jeez, this thing can’t last more than another Pat Robertson. The Democrats wouldn’t couple of minutes! What the hell should I do?” be much better. And Michael Moore isn’t You notice a group of a dozen or so peo- even telling you the full story.” ple working to patch and reinforce one cor- In The Party’s Over, Heinberg resisted mak- ner of the raft. This, at least, is constructive ing public allegations about American govern- behaviour, so you join in. But it’s not long mental complicity in the 9/11 attacks, but before you realize that the only materials Richard having read sources such as David Ray Heinberg available to do the patching with are ones Griffin’s The New Pearl Harbour, he’s now cannibalized from elsewhere on the raft. unapologetically forthright. “I find the con- Even though the people you’re working with clusion inescapable,” he says. “Persons within clearly have the best of intentions and are the U.S. government had clear foreknowledge making some noticeable improvements to the of the attacks, and efforts to prevent those at- few square feet on which they’ve worked, there tacks were systematically thwarted on orders from is simply no way they can render the entire ves- higher levels.” sel “sustainable,” given its size, the amount of time But Heinberg’s latest book is not all gloom ‘n’ doom required, and the limited availability of basic materi- ‘n’ paranoia. Instead he allocates the second half of Power als. You think to yourself that there must be some bet- Down to discussing energy and food strategies for self-limi- ter solution, but can’t quite focus on one. tation, cooperation and the sharing of resources. As you stand there fretting, a couple of minutes pass. You Along the way he includes the following mini-essay. realize that every one of your predictions about the fate of the raft ✍ has been disconfirmed. You feel useless and silly. You are about to make the only rational deductions—that there must be some mystical power keeping the raft THIS IS HOW I FEEL SOMETIMES by Richard Heinberg afloat, and that you might as well make the most of the situation and have some barbe- Imagine yourself in the following circumstances: You have just awakened from sleep cue—when a thought comes to you: The “sustainability” crowd has the right idea… to find yourself on a tarpaper raft floating away from the shore. With you on the raft except that, as they rebuild their corner of the raft, they should make it easily detach- are a couple of hundred people, most of whom seem completely oblivious to their able, so that when the boat as a whole sinks they can simply disengage from it and situation. They are drinking beer, barbecuing ribs, fishing or sleeping. You look at the paddle toward shore. But then, what about the hundreds of people who won’t be able rickety vessel and say to yourself, “My God, this thing is going to sink at any second!” to fit onto this smaller, reconditioned raftlet? Michael Smith of Miraculously, seconds go by and it is still afloat. You look around to see who’s in You notice now that there is a group of rafters yesteryeargrappling with takes the soldiers a who’ve charge. The only people you can find who appear to have any authority are some been shooting holes in canoes. Maybe, if some ofbreak the canoes from and too their much indigenous pompous-looking characters operating a gambling casino in the middle of the raft. In occupants survive, then the scope of the impendingscience. tragedy can be reduced. But direct back of them stand heavily armed soldiers. You point out that the raft appears danger- confrontation with the soldiers appears to be a dangerous business, since many of the ous. They inform you that it is the safest and most wonderful vessel ever constructed, protesters are being shot or thrown into the water. and that if you persist in suggesting otherwise the guards will exercise their brand of You continue working with the sustainability group, since they seem to have the persuasion on you. You back away, smiling, and move to the edge of the raft. At this best understanding of the problem and the best chances of survival. At the same time, point, you’re convinced (and even comment to a stranger next to you) that, with those your sympathies are with the protesters and the fisher families. You hope and pray that idiots at the helm, the raft can’t last more than another minute or so. this is all some nightmare from which you will soon awaken, or that there is some means of escape—for everyone—that you haven’t seen yet. A minute goes by and still the damn thing IS afloat. You turn your gaze out to the 0-86571-510

21 BOOKWORLD • LOOKOUT • WINTER • 2004 PUBLISHING

Karl Zeigler and David Robinson (Talonbooks)

David Hancock Ed Varney Cherie Smith (Hancock House) (Intermedia) (November House)

William McConnell (Klanak) PHOTO

1974-2004 TWIGG Pulp Press founder Steve Osborne, current ABPBC executive director Margaret Reynolds, first ABPBC director Sally Mennell, Tourism Vancouver’s Rick Antonson (ex-publisher) and D&M publisher Scott McIntyre were part of the 30th anniversary celebrations for B.C. publishing. Howard White (Harbour) drawn by TURNING 30: Kerry Waghorn. THE BOOKIES WHO THRIVE

Ron Smith (Oolichan) Garnett Basque (Stagecoach) Greg Young-Ing Ron Hatch (Ronsdale) Michael Burch (Whitecap) Gordon Soules (Soules Dist.) AGAINST THE ODDS

COLLECTIVELY, YOU’RE PART OF A SUCCESS STORY. According to federal surveys, B.C. has the highest book reading rate per capita in Canada. Recent encyclopedias of heavily populated states such as New Jersey and North Carolina sold ten times less than the Encyclo- pedia of British Columbia. Our premier recently stated he wants British Columbia to Art Downs (Heritage) Art Downs (Heritage) Julian Ross (Bluefield) Michelle Benjamin (Polestar) Peter Milroy (UBC) Rolf Maurer (New Star) be the most literate place in North American by 2010. But we’ve already got that gold medal. At the core of B.C. literacy is a small com- munity of publishers who have always

Charlie Morris (Sono Nis), at right received far less funding than their co- horts in Ontario and Quebec. And at the cen- tre of that industry is a vital organization called the Association of Book Publishers of B.C. Margaret Horsdal (H&S, Touchwood) Roger Touchie (Heritage) Della McCreary (Press Gang) Brian Kaufman (Anvil) Nancy Wise(Sandhill) Michael Carroll (Beach Holme) bill bissett (blueointment)) Jim Douglas (pictured on cover) of J.J. Douglas Ltd. spearheaded the crea- tion of the organization 30 years after a conference organized by UBC librarian Basil Stuart-Stubbs. Today the ABPBC represents ap- proximately 30 fulltime publishers, the newest being Anita Large (pic-

Chris Plant (New Society) Brian Lam (Arsenal Pulp) tured on cover), director of Native- owned Theytus Books in Penticton. Only a few of the pioneers (such as Art Downs, Gray Campbell, William

Bob Tyrrell (Orca) Dick Morriss (Sono Nis) McConnell, plus printers Howard Mitchell, Charlie Morriss and Dick Morriss) have died. It’s still a young industry in a very young place. B.C.’s trade publishers celebrated 30 years of en- Diana Douglas Mark Stanton (Raincoast) Ralph Milton (Oolichan) (Self- durance and innovation in September at a Stanley Park Counsel) gathering organized by ABCBC executive director Margaret Reynolds and BC BookWorld. We’re not a trade publication, but once every few decades it Richard Olafson feels right to give the publishers their due. Allan MacDougall (Ekstasis) (Raincoast) For more information about the Association of Book drawn by Roy Petersen Emi Morita and Publishers of British Columbia, you can visit Gray Campbell www.books.bc.ca. Diane Morriss (Sono Nis)

22 BOOKWORLD • LOOKOUT • WINTER • 2004 23 BOOKWORLD • LOOKOUT • WINTER • 2004 MARITIME

Legless mariner Tristan Jones aboard Pants on fire his dinghy ‘Little Leg End’ off Phuket, ccording to a new biography, Welsh Thailand, circa 1993. sailor Tristan Jones was the greatest A Arctic Alaska, made river expeditions with nautical storyteller of the 20th century but Bangladeshi naturalists in search of the Royal nearly everything he did was based on a lie. Bengal tiger and paddled wilderness rivers in northern Canada for the Discovery Channel. “He was a nobody until age 40,” says Anthony Dalton, au- Dalton is a Fellow of the Royal Geographi- thor of Wayward Sailor: In Search of the Real Tristan Jones cal Society and a Fellow of the Explorers (McGraw-Hill $21.94). “He essentially invented Tristan Jones, then Club. He is now writing a novel about a man- he grew into the shell he created for himself.” eating Bengal tiger that is inspired by his Dalton spent three years tracing how Jones chronically lied about frightening encounter with one—in the mid- his background and used false passports while describing his imagi- dle of a river. nary ordeals in the Royal Navy, South America and the Arctic. None- Wayward Sailor has been released in trade theless Dalton admires the man whose maritime accomplishments paperback and Dalton has co-authored The eventually caught up with his reputation, as he lost both his legs in Best of Nautical Quarterly, Vol 1, The Lure the process. of Sail (H.B. Fenn $65) with Reese A boating fanatic, Dalton lives in Tsawwassen where he keeps a Palley. 33' sloop and a self-built 21' Polynesian outrigger canoe. If you can Dalton and Bernice Lever recently believe his resume—he has led a CBC-TV documentary expedition co-chaired the national convention of the 85- to the salt mines of Taoudenit in northern Mali, conducted a near- year-old Canadian Authors Association. fatal solo voyage by small boat around the west and north coasts of Wayward 0-07-144028-3; Best of 0-7603-1820-4

ONE DEGREE OF SEPARATION FROM STEINBECK

orn in 1897, Ed Ricketts of California made three ex- Bcursions to British Columbia in 1932, 1945 and 1946 to collect marine specimens as a mostly self-taught ecologist and biologist. With a small laboratory in New Monterey, California, Ricketts was close friends with the philosopher Joseph Campbell and the novelist John Steinbeck. Campbell accompanied Ricketts on his first trip to the Queen Charlotte Islands in 1932; Steinbeck modeled several charac- ters in his fiction on Ricketts, including ‘Doc’ in the 1945 novel Cannery Row. Ricketts died when he was hit by a train near Cannery Row in May of 1948. At the time he and Steinbeck had been planning a trip to British Columbia to satisfy Rickett’s Sam McKinney intention to write a book about B.C. coastal marine life to be called The Outer Shores. Rickett’s first book, co-written with Jack Calvin, was about Pacific invertebrates and called Be- tween Pacific Tides (1939). It was followed by Sea of Cortez: A Leisurely Journal of Travel and Research (1941), co-written with Captain of an invisible crew Steinbeck. At age 32, Ucluelet-raised journalist in 1932. “In 1933,” McKinney says, “he developed Eric Enno Tamm t age 70, fortified by his pipe and the has published the first biography of Ed Ricketts called Beyond a very small, five-horsepower engine, believing that the Outer Shores (Raincoast $36.95). The son and grandson occasional glass of rum, Sam in oil-poor Japan, a drop of fuel was equal to a drop of commercial fishermen of Estonian descent, Tamm had started of blood.” investigating Ricketts’ life as a result of his research into his McKinney has emulated the McKinney is also grateful to Greek scientist A own hometown. Archimedes for the principle of leverage, Swiss voyages of Captain George Vancouver’s He published an article physicist Daniel Bernoulli for his law of phys- Eric about Ricketts in the Georgia charting expeditions of 1792-1794, sailing and ics that explains the dynamics of sailing, and the Enno Tamm Straight in 1999, and continued French chef Nicolas Appert who invented motoring his 25-foot sailboat Kea between his research into Ricketts’ life the canning process in the early 19th century. “My while he spent several years liv- Puget Sound and the Queen Charlotte Islands. canned dinners did become monotonous, but re- ing in Sweden. Whereas the re- membering the food choices of Vancouver’s men— McKinney isn’t the first person to follow the paths lationship between Ricketts salt pork and beef—made them more palatable.” of West Coast explorers to write a book—it’s been and Steinbeck was well-known, Along the way Sam McKinney experimented done by Robin Fisher, Gary Geddes, Rose- Beyond the Outer Shores pro- with the anti-scurvy recipe that was given to bota- mary Neering, Barry Lopez and Wylie vides fresh insights into the nist Archibald Menzies (an adversary of Blanchet, among others—but he’s the first to give friendship between Ricketts George Vancouver) by Sir Joseph Banks. “I credit to an invisible crew. and Campbell based on Tamm’s wanted to see what spruce beer tasted like,” “Germany’s Rudolph Diesel invented the die- interviews with Ricketts’ son McKinney writes. “I boiled some spruce needles sel engine and to him I am indebted,” he writes in and daughter, and his girlfriend in water, added brown sugar, and came up with Sailing with Vancouver: A Modern Sea Dog, Antique in the 1940s, . something that tasted like sweet turpentine.” Toni Jackson Charts and a Voyage Through Time (Touchwood Tamm’s history of the McKinney based his research on W. Kaye $17.95). Fascinated by the pneumatic tinder igniter friendship and rivalries between Lamb’s classic George Vancouver: A Voyage of Dis- that resembled a simple bicycle pump, Rudolph Die- Steinbeck, Campbell and Ricketts contains a section outlining covery to the North Pacific. Maps were provided by sel dedicated his life and fortune to incorporating the the three-month voyage made by Campbell and Ricketts around Portland designer Les Hopkins. McKinney is a principle of his ‘Black Mistress’ into an efficient power the Queen Charlotte Islands in 1932 in the Grampus, a small former research associate at the Vancouver Maritime engine. cruising vessel. At the time Campbell was escaping the wrath Museum and a builder of small boats. Sailing with Similarly, McKinney notes his ten-horsepower of Steinbeck for cultivating an affair with Steinbeck’s wife, Carol. Vancouver is his fourth title, following his biography Yanmar engine was developed by the Japanese indus- Tamm works for Ecotrust Canada. 1-55192-733-0 of Captain Bligh, who sailed alongside Vancouver trialist Magokicki Yamaoka, who saw his first to Nootka Sound under Captain Cook. diesel engine at an industrial fair in Leipzig, Germany, 1-894898-12-5

5 BOOKWORLD WINTER 1-5 2004 MARITIMEMARITIME

James Delgado near the mouth of the Columbia River where he almost drowned in 1987.

SOME PHOTO

LENIUK

PEOPLE DARRYL

ames Delgado, director of the Vancouver WILL GO TO ANY Delgado has examined the hulk of the British four-masted barque Peter Iredale, wrecked in 1906—and shown above. Maritime Museum, has toured the wreck of the ✍ Titanic two miles beneath the surface of the DEPTHS After viewing the remains of the Isabella, James Delgado re- JAtlantic. He has seen Pearl Harbour from the sand up and surfaced to the dive boat, pulled off his mask, spat out his regu- lator, without first removing his weight belt. Reaching down to he has dived to investigate an American Civil War pull off his fins, he fumbled and fell backwards off the ladder, plummeting back to the Isabella. submarine—in Panama. TO GET “With the desperate strength people sometimes find in these situations, I push off the bottom with my legs and kick for the Co-host of The Sea Hunters, a television show syndicated in surface, my lungs burning,” he writes, reverting to TV-speak. With more than 170 countries, Delgado has also examined a Dutch outstretched hands, Delgado was able to claw and scratch his way th HIGH cargo ship sunk carrying 18 century art belonging to along the fibreglass hull of the dive boat, but the weight of his Catherine the Great and found vestiges of the Kublai tank and belt dragged him back downwards again to the bottom. Khan’s lost treasure fleet off the coast of Japan. “My mouth opens convulsively, and I take a breath of cold A veritable Neil Armstrong of the ocean floor, Delgado water and gag. I’m going to die, I realize, and I’m really angry.” has even explored the waterfilled remains of the Third Reich’s His dive training finally saved him. He tugged the clasp of his underground munitions factory in the Harz Mountains of Ger- weight belt and it fell free. “Then I reach up to my buoyancy many where Buchenwald prisoners lived, drilled and blasted rock compensator and pull the lanyard that activates a co2 cartridge. in twelve-hour shifts. I start to float off the river bed and remember not to hold my But his most harrowing underwater experience, breath or I’ll burst my lungs as I rocket to the surface.” Pulled described in Adventures of a Sea Hunter (D&M JAMES DELGADO into a Zodiac, Delgado coughed up muddy water and eventu- $35), occurred closest to home, in 1987, while in- ally quipped, “Well, did I die like his men?” vestigating the hulk of the Hudson’s Bay Company For more on James Delgado and his 28 supply ship Isabella, a relic discovered near the mouth of the books, visit www.abcbookworld.com Columbia River more 150 years after it sank. In the same area, underwater detective 1-55365-071-9

For information on all INDEX to Advertisers BC authors visit: www.abcbookworld.com Alcuin Society...10 Joan Givner...39 Raincoast Books...3 Produced with the sponsorship of Pacific BookWorld News Anvil Press...20 Granville Island Publishing...42 Ronsdale Press...41 Society. Publications Mail Registration No. 7800. Arsenal Pulp Press...18 Harbour Publishing...44 Salal Press...39 BC BC BookWorld ISSN: 1701-5405 Banyen Books...36 Heritage House...11 Sandhill Distribution...28 BOOKWORLD Writing not otherwise credited is by staff. Bolen Books...30 Hignell Printing...42 Save-On/Overwaitea...40 Contributors: Mark Forsythe, Joan Givner, Louise Donnelly, Carla Lucchetta, Candace Walker, Hannah Main-van der Kamp Booming Ground...31 Houghton Boston...42 Self-Counsel Press...28 Proofreaders: Wendy Atkinson, Betty Twigg. Book Surge...42 Kids Can Press...7 SFU Writing & Publishing...32 Deliveries: Ken Reid. Design: Get-to-the-Point Graphics Book Warehouse...35 World of Work...36 Sidney Booktown...36 Winter Issue Vol. 18, No. 4 Advertising & editorial: BC BookWorld, Caitlin Press...26 Literary Press Group...33, 35 3516 W. 13th Ave., Vancouver, B.C., V6R 2S3 Signature Publishing...36 Publication Agreement 400-100-86 Crown Publications...30 McClelland & Stewart...2, 18, 30, 31 Sono Nis Press...12 Website: www.bcbookworld.com David Ellis...36 Michael’s Books...37 TalonBooks...24 Publisher/ Writer: Alan Twigg Davus Publishing...40 New Society Publishers...9 Teacher-Librarians...36 Tel/Fax: 604-736-4011; email: available on request . Douglas & McIntyre...43 New Star Books...32 Editor/Production: David Lester Annual subscription: $12.84 Transcontinental Printing...42 Douglas College/EVENT...36 Northstone Books...30 UBC Press...27 Marketing Manager: Jeremy Twigg We acknowledge the Ekstasis Editions...14 Oolichan Books...20 VanCity...4 assistance of Canada Fernwood Books...39 Orca Books...14 Vancouver Desktop...39 Council and the Province of British Columbia, Friesens Printers...42 Penguin Books...6 Vancouver International Writers through the Ministry Gaspereau Press...33 People’s Co-op Books...36 & Readers Festival...15 Publication Mail Agreement #40010086 of Community, George Ryga Award...16 Purpora Books...36 Yoka’s Coffee...35 Return undeliverable Canadian addresses to: Aboriginal, Ghost Writer Services...39 Printorium...42 and Women’s XYZ Publishing...35 BC BookWorld, 3516 W. 13th Ave., Vancouver, BC V6R 2S3 Services

6 BOOKWORLD WINTER 1-5 2004 NATURE For deer life True or False? You’re more likely to be struck by lightning than get rabies from a bat. True. Three blood-sucking species of bats are found only in tropical rainforests and they rarely prey on humans. True or False? Dragonflies fly at a maximum speed of 20 miles an hour. False. Some dragonflies can fly 40 mph, as well as upwards, sideways and backwards.

s well as 44 “ecologically sound” projects for feeding and housing

the likes of bumblebees, butterflies and even bats, Catherine J. A Johnson and her editor Susan McDiarmid have included lots of natural history tidbits in Welcoming Wildlife to the Garden (Hartley & Marks $29.95).

Deer are the bane of it ferments too quickly rural gardeners. If you By Candace Walker and can cause a fungal don’t deter them with a infection in humming- barking dog, a scarecrow or an electric birds’ tongues. fence, you can plant fragrant herbs such And, oh yeah, hummers don’t mi- as catmint, catnip, chives, garlic, onion, grate on the backs of geese. Skunks, rac- lavender, sage, spearmint, thyme, pars- coons, squirrels, coyotes, neighbourhood ley and rosemary. Deer also dislike cats and the ‘friendly Buddleia (butterfly bush), boxwood, pigeon’ aren’t always holly, pine, spruce, hawthorn, euca- welcome visitors, but lyptus, jasmine, lilac and vinca vine. there are ways to control, co- But those are diversionary tac- exist or capture unwanted tics, not solutions. “Keep in guests. mind, that if deer are hungry You can even learn to wel- enough they will eat almost any come lizards, bees, toads and plant,” says Johnson, “and their snakes. In the world of na- tastes vary from place to place.” ture, it’s not who you Translation. Unless you wanna know, but what you know. use a shotgun… ✍ ✍ Catherine Johnson Hummingbirds, the lives on a ten-acre farm in most popular garden Hummingbird Pender Harbour. She’s guests, feed from many of part of the Stickleback Re- the same flowers that attract covery Program on Texada butterflies. There are more than 300 spe- Island and she was recently involved in cies of hummers, they must feed every West Nile Virus research. 10 to 15 minutes and they do not attack With an extensive section on build- humans—ever. ing nest boxes for birds, Welcoming Wild- If you want to become part of the life includes hundreds of photos and Trochilidaie food chain with a backyard illustrations by Edward R. Turner. feeder, the proper proportions for sugar 0-88179-201-2 to water are 1:4. Make sure your feeder Candace Walker is a freelance writer has a red lure. Don’t use honey because in Prince George

A black-tailed deer chows down on backyard birdseed.

7 BOOKWORLD WINTER 1-5 2004 PROFILE THE MAN FROM SHEEP CREEK “The myth is that I’m some sort of barbarian,” says Patrick Lane. “I hate that myth.”

atrick Lane was born in the mountain town of Sheep Creek, three years. He almost died after being bitten by a poisonous centipede. It was near Nelson, on March 26, 1939. He grew up in the Okanagan, one more close call, having survived sev- TRAILER PARK primarily in Vernon, where he couldn’t escape from the futility of eral severe car crashes. In 1972 Lane was awarded the York hisP surroundings. His father, an ex-miner, had moved to the dry Interior University Poetry Award for his book TRIBULATIONS he death of Patrick Lane’s revered because he was suffering from silicosis. Mountain Oysters. Since then he was won some of the major poetry prizes in Canada Tolder brother Dick (aka Red), also a “My brother Johnny got married in and Seymour Mayne, Lane began including the Governor General’s Award gifted poet, is a fundamental part of June because he got his girlfriend preg- one of the first literary publishing houses in 1979, the Canadian Authors Associa- Lane’s life story. He vividly describes nant,” he told The Globe & Mail in 2000, in counter-cultural Kitsilano called Very tion Award for Poetry in 1988 and the kicking his brother out of his trailer park “My brother Dick got married in Sep- Stone House Press. Dorothy Livesay Prize. home, at his wife’s urging, when they tember because he got his girlfriend In 1968, Lane was jarred once more ✍ were unhappily hitched in Merritt. pregnant. And I got married in Febru- by the random murder of “Back in the late 1950s and early 1960s while I struggled with ary because I got my girlfriend preg- his father by a customer who my early poems, I lived in a nant.” had a grudge against the Old demons & flowery prose trailer park in Merritt, a Lane left school to work as a labourer, earth moving equipment Regret, guilt, violence, shotgun weddings. Thievery, carnivals, wretched, dusty mill town in fruit picker and truck driver, later be- company for which his fa- drunkenness, deaths. Former substance abuser Patrick southern British Columbia. coming a first-aid man because it paid ther was an employee. Lane has never lacked for content. He has resurrected some “My two children were three an additional l5 cents per hour. In a com- In 1969 Lane moved to of his ghosts in a new poetry collection called Go Leaving years and one year old and my pany town of Avola, with 150 people, Trumansburg, New York to Strange (Harbour $16.95) in which an addict strives to keep young wife tried and failed daily he sometimes dealt with grisly injuries. work on the New American ahead of death in “Smack” and a man kills his six-year-old child to be happy in the miserable Having been a regular at Rivard’s pool and Canadian Poetry peri- in “Weeds”. But the future is far from bleak for the man from trailer the bank owned. I left hall in Vernon, he dreamed of making odical. Very Stone Press be- Sheep Creek. Lane’s There is a Season: A Memoir in a Gar- that flaking aluminum prison his living as a pool player until his teacher came Very Stone Press in den (M&S $34.95) is an uplifting non-fiction work by a man who each morning for a job in the said he could never make it because he Transit for ten years. kicked alcoholism in 1999 by taking refuge in his garden, observ- sawmill, the only life I knew wore glasses. Lane decided to try writing Down and out in To- then, though I laboured late ing his pond and flowers. Season 0-7710-4633-2; Strange 1-55017-328-6 instead. He mailed three poems to Ca- ronto, Lane sold his literary into the night on writing my nadian Forum and they were all ac- papers to McMaster Uni- poems. I think it was poetry cepted. When other poems sent to versity for $3,000 in 1971 and took off, Having survived broken marriages that saved me from killing myself or PRISM at UBC were rejected, Earle wandering through South America for and addiction to alcohol, Lane has pro- killing others. There were times when I Birney nonetheless sent him an en- duced more than 20 books of poetry, sucked the steel barrel of my Lee- couraging letter of praise. plus some fiction, and now lives in Vic- Enfield rifle or, worse, aimed it at a Lane came to Vancouver toria with fellow poet Lorna Crozier, passing pickup truck. What saved my after the death of his also on the staff of the Writing Depart- wife I do not know. brother Dick (Red) ment at University of Victoria. The “In December 1964, there was a Lane, also a poet, in couple met at a writers’ workshop phone call late at night from my sister, 1964, due to a cer- in Saskatchewan in 1976. Linda, telling me Dick was dead. I borrowed my boss’s car and drove ebral haemorrhage. Fellow poet Susan crazily over the winding mountain roads After three chil- Musgrave organized a to Vernon, where my birth family dren, he and his 55th birthday celebration huddled, waiting for his ashes to be wife divorced and for him in 1994, gath- shipped up from Vancouver. she married a rich ering 54 poets for a “In four more years I would be gone, man. Lane was commemorative vol- my wife remarried and my children lost astonished to ume called Because You to me. After my divorce I lived in a fury. I hear the poetry Love Being a Stranger. ranged from woman to girl, friend to of Al Purdy, Since then Lane, the stranger, bar to barrio, city to village, all a mentor-to- hell-raiser, has appar- designed with one end in mind, to kill be, who later ently become more of a myself or at least kill whatever it was drank with teacher and a rumina- that daily ate me alive. I made women him at the tive soul, writing evoca- fall in love with me and then discarded Cecil Hotel in tive descriptions of them like chaff. Guilt, fear, self-pity, self- Vancouver, wildlife of the flora variety. loathing, self-destruction, all and none and his course “Guilt,” he writes, of them. I remember little of those was set. With inThere Is a Season, “is the years. Much of it is blacked out by bill bissett emotion that wastes a life.” depression, alcohol, and drugs. I remember waking up in a car wreck in a snowbound field south of Prince George Patrick Lane: not guilty and wondering why I was still alive. I pried the barbed wire off the door and walked away in search of a bar.” PHOTO

HILL

KATE Selected bibliography: Letters From the Savage Mind (Very Stone House) 1966 • Calgary City Jail. Poster Poem 6 (Very Stone House) 1969 • Separations. Trumansburg (New Books) 1969 • Mountain Oysters (Very Stone House) 1971 • The Sun has Begun to Eat the Mountain (Ingluvin Publications) 1972 • Passing into Storm (Traumerei Communications) 1973 • Beware the Months of Fire (Anansi) 1974 • Unborn Things: South American Poems (Harbour) 1975 • Albino Pheasants (Harbour) 1977 • Poems, New & Selected (Oxford UP) 1978—winner of the Governor-General’s Award • The Measure (Black Moss) 1980 • Woman in the Dust (Mosaic) 1983 • A Linen Crow, a Caftan Magpie (Thistledown Press) 1984 • For Riel in that Gawdam Prison (Blackfish Press) 1985 • Selected Poems (Oxford UP) 1987—winner of Canadian Authors Association Award • Milford and Me (Coteau Books) 1989—poems for children • Winter (Coteau Books) 1990 • Mortal Remains (Exile Editions) 1991 • How Do You Spell Beautiful? and Other Stories (Fifth House) 1992 • Too Spare, Too Fierce (Harbour) 1995 • The Bare Plum of Winter Rain (Harbour) 2000 • There Is a Season: A Memoir in a Garden (M&S) 2004 • Go Leaving Strange, Poems (Harbour) 2004

10 BOOKWORLD WINTER 1-5 2004 TOURISM BEFOREBEFORE WEWE WENTWENT irst you must catch your American before you “Between 1920 and 1970,” Dawson writes, “tourism was effectively incorporated into North America’s growing culture can sell him anything.... We cannot play golf and SUPER-SUPER- of consumption.” The state has now supplanted private in- drink afternoon tea and expect these people dustry as the prime marketing force.There are now programs F to ensure taxi drivers aren’t scruffy and our license plates are to send us their money by registered mail.” NATURAL mini billboards proclaiming ‘Beautiful British Columbia.’ —B.C. PREMIER SIMON FRASER TOLMIE IN 1930 NATURAL Although he has permitted himself a few humorous asides, Dawson stops short of speculating how we might best collec- Apparently Gordon Campbell agrees. Our bid to hold tively tart ourselves up for 2010. Selling British Columbia is the 2010 Winter Olympics was spearheaded by the premier’s In the ’60s, strictly about the past, so our notion as to how we can identify dynamic real estate developer friend Jack Poole and, like Highways ourselves as a distinctive culture—beyond scenery, the Em- Expo 86, its legitimacy will proceed in tandem with the lure of Minister Phil press Hotel, whales and totem poles—remains as fuzzy as ever. economic growth and investment. Gaglardi said In the next five years, all loyal British Columbians will be the initials called upon to their economic duty and help market our neck B.C. stood for of the woods to the “Boom rest of the planet. Country.” Hence the timing of Michael Dawson’s Selling British Co- lumbia: Tourism and Consumer Cul- ture 1890-1970 (UBC Press $85) Dawson showcases publicity materials and collects some of seems ideal. the terms that have been used to help attract visitors to the Statistics and Pacific Northwest. These include: graphs are provided, The Land of Simon Fraser including one show- Land of Pleasure Cruises ing how visitors in automobiles from the U.S. increased from Canada’s Colour-Camera Country 270,000 in 1926 to more than three million in 1971. Nega- Evergreen Playground tive aspects of tourism are rarely considered. Dawson’s study The Land Where The Apples Grow strictly concerns the agendae of tourism marketers. Selling Brit- The World’s Greatest Out Of Doors ish Columbia culminates with ‘Operation Daffodil’, a quasi- The Vacation Land That Has Everything militaristic invasion of Alberta by Chamber of Commerce types, The Switzerland of America enticing Albertans to the balmy coast with daffodils. 0-7748-1054-8

11 BOOKWORLD WINTER 1-5 2004 FICTIONBC ✍ people to have published a the gallery.” Famous Italian authors plot SHORT STORIES A humour-tinged amateur book while living in 100 Mile to win a Lifetime Achivevement Award. sociologist, Chris Gudg- House, where the collection of Fantasy and reality are comfortable bed- eon is the co-owner of Some- 12 ‘edgy’ stories was launched fellows throughout. 1-894842-05-7 thing Fishy Salmon Gifts in at the Chris Harris Gallery. ✍ PHOTO “Everyone you know is going Victoria and the biographer of Monte works at Stanford Orthotics, Tales of Munrovia to die,” he writes in ‘Like I

two Canadian icons beyond GILMORE restoring people’s balance. But his own Alice Munro’s collection Runa- Care’, “Everyone you’ve ever the mainstream, folksinger life is more than a little unstable. He’s way (M&S $34.99) has eight stories that DAVID loved, ever been friends with, Stan Rogers and poet Milton Chris Gudgeon fallen in love with Donna Rossini—or reflect her dual hometowns of Comox, ever met, ever walked by on Acorn. His first collection of rather, with a mold of her feet. “I raised B.C. and Clinton, Ontario, but, as a the street. They’re all going to eleven stories, Greetings from the foot to my lips, and kissed, one after Quill & Quire reviewer put it, “The die. Get used to it.” 1-894345-74-6 the Vodka Sea (Goose Lane $19.95), is the other, all of her toes… I heard—so many layers and richness of observation mainly about people grappling with sex ✍ help me—the youthful sound of her in Munro’s writing make it impossible to and each other, a follow-up to a non-fic- After teaching creative writing at the laugh.” Monte’s foot fetish turns into an say that the book or even a single story is tion title The Naked Truth: The Untold University of Alberta since 1990, unlikely correspondence in Balance, the about one thing or another.” Three Story of Sex in Canada (Arsenal Pulp, Kristjana Gunnars has moved to opening story of Jack Hodgins’ 13th linked tales follow Juliet, a young teacher 2003). These stories include a chess-play- the Sunshine Coast and used her new title Damage Done by the Storm (M&S who visits her fisherman lover’s home the ing doctor who loses his wife to a psy- surroundings as the locale for her col- $32.99). 0-7710-4152-7 day after his wife’s funeral. In the chologist and an adulterer who lection Any Day But This (Red Deer ✍ title story, Munro keeps us considers seducing a mid- $29.95), in which one woman realizes guessing as to how a white Co-founder and co-editor of The dle-aged woman he finds she belongs to a class she secretly despises. goat’s disappearances Claremont Review, Bill Stenson of repulsive. 0-86492-383-X Gunnars’ recent collection of essays on relate to a couple’s Victoria has already published 15 of the ✍ writing is Stranger at the Door. 0-88995-311-2 unraveling relation- ✍ 18 stories in his first collection, Trans- ship. The final story The title story for lating Women (Thistledown $18.95). covers almost a life- James With wry shades of Franz Kafka and “Not every man would find Muriel a real time in 65 pages. Marshall‘s collec- an opening quote from Thomas Mann— looker,” he writes in his title story. “That’s Munro’s work con- tion Let’s Not Let A “Quiet! We want to look into a soul.”— where the power of translation comes in. tinues to be unparal- Little Thing Like some of the stories in Ernest Muriel’s not the kind of woman you ap- leled and retains the The End Of The Hekkanen’s 34 th title Melancholy proach aesthetically straight on. It’s the distinction accorded World Come Between and Mystery of a Street (New Orphic way she flips her hair, the turn of her her by the New York Times, Us (Thistledown $18.94) $23) unfold in Italy, Switzerland, Finland cheek, the pause she’s perfected before “the only living writer in the was picked by the Malahat and Afghanistan; others are set in his important sentences.” 1-894345-77-0 English language to Review as its top hometown of Nelson. A Finn travelling have made a ma- story for 2004. through Afghanistan on a bicycle finds PREVIOUSLY NOTED 2004 FICTION jor career out of Marshall also himself in a folktale. A cynic attends a COLLECTIONS BY B.C. AUTHORS: short fiction has the distinc- student art show. “On the night in ques- Ernest Hekkanen, Alice Munro The Big Dave and Little Wife Convention (New Orphic) alone.” tion of being tion,” says the narrator, “I donned my I George Bowering, Standing on Richards (Viking) 0-7710-6506-X one of the few Hate Art T-shirt and headed downhill to

12 BOOKWORLD WINTER 1-5 2004 FICTIONBC she clung to the hope that she’d just been ✍ PREVIOUSLY NOTED 2004 NOVELS fishing in the wrong bay and if she A Tofino coroner has his NOVELS BY B.C. AUTHORS: moved around often enough, sooner or hands full when a girl known Tom Osborne, Foozlers (Anvil) later, with or without the help of God only as Sparrow is found on a Gerry Williams, The Woman in the Trees (New Star) and the angels, she’d happen upon a man Harold Eustache, Shuswap Journey (Theytus) beach wrapped in barbed wire. , Jericho (Random House) who had more in mind than some fric- George Fetherling Hi, Fidel-ity Sweep Lotus (Dundurn Bill Gaston, Sointula (Raincoast) tion.” As a follow-up to last year’s Family $11.99) is the third Elias Douglas Coupland, Eleanor Rigby (Random House) Hal Sisson’s detective novel You Jack Whyte, Clothar the Frank (Penguin) Resemblances, this satire on relationships McCann mystery set in the Long Should Live So Long (Salal Press Eileen Kernaghan, The Alchemist’s Daughter (Thistledown) is another stirring and funny portrait of Beach community by Vancouver Eileen Kernaghan, Winter on the Plain of Ghosts $10.99) once more features a humorous a female survivor who earns her inde- Islander Mark Zuehlke, (Flying Monkey Press) pair of ‘down-but-never-out superannu- Federico Morales, The Sun Never Sets (Freedrow) pendence in a small town on Vancouver who doubles as a World War II ated sleuths’ in a free-spirited romp that George Szanto, The Underside of Stones (XYZ) Island. 1-55017-344-8 historian. 1-55002-532-5 George Szanto, Second Sight (XYZ) doubles as a socio-political protest. ✍ Terence Young, After Goodlake’s, (Raincoast) This time Sissons is responding to Rachel White, Time’s Reach (Oolichan) In Theresa Kishkan’s Robert Strandquist, The Dreamlife of Bridges (Anvil) the devastation and arrogance Joan Givner, Playing Sarah Bernhardt (Dundurn) wrought by the United States in re- A Man in a Distant Field Esi Edugyan, The Life of Samuel Tyne (Knopf) sponse to 9/11. (Dundurn $21.99), the pro- Ian Slater, WW III: Choke Point (Ballantine) Marilyn Bowering, Cat’s Pilgrimage (Harperflamingo) Part of the action occurs in Cuba tagonist Declan O’Malley comes Barbara Hodgson, The Lives of Shadows (Chronicle) where Fidel Castro appears as a char- to the coast of B.C. to escape Des Kennedy, Flame of Separation (Insomniac) memories of his family’s death at Annabel Lyon, The Best Thing For You (M&S) acter who, among other things, ac- Allan McTeer, Red Zone (GreyCore) cuses the American government of the hands of the Black and Tans Susan Juby, Miss Smithers (HarperCollins) having failed to forewarn the Pacific in Ireland. He’s also working on The Redemption of Ann Dupree (Ekstasis) Jim Jack, Justin Fowles (Trafford) fleet in Pearl Harbour, despite ad- a perfect translation of Homer’s Ann Ericksson, Decomposing Maggie (Turnstone) vance knowledge of an imminent Odyssey. Kishkan’s first novel was Lorna Jackson, A Game to Play on the Tracks (Porcupine’s Quill) Margaret Hollingsworth, Be Quiet (Blue Lake) Sisters of Grass. 1-55002-531-7 Japanese attack. Irosh Irani, The Cripple and his Talismans (Raincoast) “Then, knowing that Japan’s sur- ✍ Stephen Guppy, The Fire Chief (Thomas Allen) Anthony Bruce, The Gatekeeper of Lies (Glendambo) render was imminent, they had The third of the Archonate nonetheless dropped atomic bombs series, Matthew Hughes’ on Hiroshima and Nagasaki as the Black Brillion: A Novel of the Archonate release by Warner Aspect in 2001. opening salvo in the Cold War (Tor $33.95) blends science fiction and 0765308-65-7 against the USSR and China.” fantasy and crosses Jack Vance with Carl ✍ Sisson includes a reading list of Jung. A peacekeeper of Old Earth, Baro Lisa Smedman’s historical fan- recommended political titles at the Harkless reluctantly joins forces with the tasy novel The Apparition Trail end of the novel. 1-894012-09-7 stylish swindler Luff Imbry. Their com- (Tesseract $19.95) is set in the Canadian ✍ mon enemy is Horselan Gebbling, a no- west of 1884 and features a Mountie The heroine of Anne Cameron’s torious con-man who may hold the cure named Marmaduke Grayburn who tries Dahlia Cassidy (Harbour Fidal Castro: the earliest photo of him invading for the fatal ailment known as the lassi- to solve a series of paranormal disappear- $24.95) hasn’t been lucky in pick- Cuba in 1956. “Above all, we are fighting for a tude. Hughes’ five previous titles include ances. He serves in an elite and secretive ing the fathers of her kids. “For years democratic Cuba and an end to dictatorship.” Fools Errant, reprinted for mass-market Q division founded by the legendary

13 BOOKWORLD WINTER 1-5 2004 FICTIONBC Sam Steele. One of the founders of Ad- Came (Bookus, unpriced), about a ventures Unlimited magazine, Smedman young girl who grows up in the isolated has designed a number of electronic ad- company town south of Squamish, after Hopeful Hiro-ines ventures and written short fiction for the Depression. 0-9735750-0-X Ravenloft and Dark Sun, and has de- ✍ orn in Chiba-ken, Japan in 1966, Hiromi Goto of Burnaby immigrated at signed gaming products for Star Wars, Douglas Isaac of the Fraser Val- age three. She lived on the West Coast for eight years; then moved to Nanton, Indiana Jones, Cyberpunk, Immortal, ley describes his fictional work Past, BAlberta where her father realized his ambition to operate a mushroom farm. Shatterzone, Millennium’s End, and Present: Tense... (BuschekBooks $15) as Growing up she was influenced by the stories of Japan and Japanese culture told to her Deadlands. 1-894063-22-8 by both her grandmother and father. ✍ a 91-page satirical, ironical, sometimes tragic, epic narrative, long poem. “In it After attending University of Calgary, she wrote A Chorus of Mushrooms (NeWest Bill Gallaher’s third historical a dis-spirited, contemporary urban man Press, 1994), a novel about three women in the same family in Nanton. The grand- novel of the Cariboo gold rush, Deadly is snatched by the spirit of his dead, Rus- mother came to Canada at age 54 having survived a loveless marriage and the firebombing Innocent (Touchwood $18.95) tells of sian Mennonite grandfather from a sen- of Japan during World War II. Her daughter rejects traditional Japanese the misfortunes of brothers William, Gil- ior level meeting in an ad agency where culture in order to integrate in a new society, changing her name to bert and Thomas who followed the trail he works, transformed into a medieval Kay. She marries a Japanese Canadian mushroom grower and of the Overlanders in 1862 with Father flying gargoyle and whisked back they have a daughter who forges her own identity between the Lacombe. Once the brothers reach the to the beginning of Mennonite two older female forces. The novel received the Commonwealth Rockies, their dreams go awry. Gallaher (Anabaptist) history, the Reforma- Writers Prize for best First Book (Canada-Caribbean) and the Canada-Japan Book Award. is a musician in Victoria. 1-894898-11-7 tion, Munster, 1534. From there ✍ the two return in time, stopping as Her follow-up adult novel The Kappa Child refers to a creature in Japanese folk tales called the kappa, with a frog’s From the mean streets of Toronto to observers, sometimes participants, body, a turtle’s shell and a bowl-shaped head that holds Vancouver’s nightclub scene, Shane at other significant moments in his- water. The novel mixes science fiction, fantasy and Japa- Kennedy’s first full-length novel tory. Munster, Danzig, the trek to nese mythology. The title story of Goto’s new collection of Highbinders (Wordshack Publishing Chortitza, Epp’s mad quest for the stories Hopeful Monsters (Arsenal $19.95) is derived from a $19.95)is a Canadian spy tale about Seth Messiah (1889), the emigration to paper by Wendy Pearson called “Sex/uality and the Her- Delaney’s plot to gain control of his fa- Canada—none are spared the author’s maphrodite in Science Fiction, or, The Revenge of ther’s munitions company Highbinders sharp-edged quill.” 1-894543-19-X Herculine Barbin.” The collection in general is Industrial Ltd. Kennedy lives in Port ✍ concerned with transformation, adap- Moody and has worked for his father’s Greg Bauder’s first novel The tation and gender blending. The Alberta-based publishing company, Lone Temptress Ariel (Publish America, hopeful monsters, accord- Pine. 1-4184-5327-7 unpriced) is an unlikely love story ✍ ing to press material, about the sensitive Don and “are women who will Having grown up in Britannia dur- the streetwise Ariel, two Hiromi Goto: not be tethered by fa- ing the 1940s and written a history of schizophrenics who meet concerned with milial duty or the that former mining community on the in a psychiatric boarding transformation, ghosts of the past.” 1-4137-3296-8 adaptation and Sea to Sky Highway, former newspaper house. 1-55152-157-1 gender blending reporter Florida Town has written an historical novel, Before the Road —by Jeremy Twigg

14 BOOKWORLD WINTER 1-5 2004 FINANCES GRAY PRIDE en years ago, Baby Boomers were raising children and Tpaying off their mortgages. Now they’re managing their parents’ finances and worrying more about retirement.

Sylvia Lim’s come to live off. Unlike down-to-earth guide By Jeremy Twigg a paycheque—which is Finances After 55 (Self steady—your invest- Counsel $14.95) is designed to offer ments can generate income one year, but practical tips for the newly gray as they they may not generate income the next. jog and sail and jazzercize their way to- “You have to watch your investments wards old age. at all times. You have to do your home- “People today are definitely better- work. You have to be committed to educated about retirement,” Lim says. spending time with your portfolio, or “Many people don’t feel they have a gov- committed to finding people to help ernment safety net—whether that per- you. You shouldn’t count on your pen- ception is real or not—so they do more sion to cover all your retirement ex- for themselves. RRSPs have become so penses.” popular that it’s almost unheard of for Not all adjustments during retirement people not to have long-term savings of will be monetary. some kind.” “You have to be mentally prepared,” Some of Lim’s clients are so she says. “Have you heard of well-prepared for retirement people who die because that they make the mistake of “We’re they’re forced into retire- not living for today, of unduly ment? It’s because they have hoarding their resources. They definitely absolutely no idea what won’t even take themselves out they’re going to do with to see a movie. Those super- better-off themselves. savers can take some comfort “It’s important to have a in knowing seniors in Canada than in the circle of friends and social are comparatively in good States.” activities beyond those that shape. surround you at work. You’re “We’re definitely better-off not going to work nine-to- than in the States,” says Lim, a financial five, Monday to Friday. So are you go- planner “because we have better social ing to be hanging around the house every programs here. For instance, 30% of the day, driving your wife crazy?” population in the States has no health The good news is most people are bet- care insurance. One aspect of retirement ter at playing the retirement game than that Canadians don’t have to worry about they used to be. Often retirees take up is health insurance and prescription part-time work they like and experience drugs. Our system looks after us. That’s personal growth in retirement. Fewer and what we pay taxes for.” fewer people avoid making a will. So it’s not all gloom ‘n’ doom. With One option is to move to a different the combined political clout of the Baby area of the province in order to main- Boomers, it’s likely our nursing homes will tain your standard of living on a reduced be well-stocked with Jimi Hendrix CDs income. Yippee, Quesnel here we come. for a few more decades to come. Or, at Meanwhile there are lots of government least, that’s the word from our current agencies such as the Canadian Associa- Prime Minister. Whether or not all tion of Retired Persons (CARP) provincial premiers can resist that provide seniors’ discounts, two-tiered health care sys- two-for-one coupons and tems is another matter alto- travel discounts. gether. Finances After 55 serves “Retirement requires as a beginner driver’s a new mindset,” Lim manual for the road to re- says. “You need to ac- tirement. Proceed with tively manage your caution, but don’t forget investments, in or- to have some fun en der to generate in- route. 1-55180582-0

Sylvia Lim: “It’s important to have a circle of friends and social activities beyond those that surround you at work.” PHOTO

TWIGG

JEREMY

15 BOOKWORLD WINTER 1-5 2004 ENVIRONMENT

“Aquaculture Feeds Families” —BC Salmon Farmers’ Association campaign FARMED & DANGEROUS “Wild Salmon Don’t Do Drugs” —Georgia Strait Alliance bumper sticker Farmed salmon production has exceeded the world’s wild catch since 1997. B.C. consumers may be forgiven for being precious few showed up. One fisherman Many fear that expansion coming near years, DFO and DOE have failed to pro- confused about whether to let a farmed Atlantic searching for the fish called it a “watery Prince Rupert will mean more escapes tect the water quality when it would con- salmon land on their plate. There’s a blistering wasteland.” of Atlantics, imported stock that could flict with the needs of the provincial war of words out there. The stakes are immeas- It wasn’t long before fishermen and muscle in on the habitat of wild stocks. government or industry.” This 32-year urably high. local whale researcher Alexandra One critic considers these Canadian fish DFO veteran sees the department in a A coalition of environmentalists, commer- Morton were connecting missing salmon “smart bombs” carrying potentially lethal conflict of interest: tasked with protect- cial fishermen and native groups argue the very with fish farms in the area. Morton be- biological payloads upon the wild stocks. ing wild salmon while it’s simultaneously future of wild salmon stocks, the marine envi- ronment and possibly human health are at risk. gan testing smolts entering salt water near Fish farmers are quick to respond that mandated to encourage development of “Exaggerated and misleading,” says the the farms, and reported finding them pathogens found in farmed Atlantics are aquaculture. salmon farming industry, assuring us fish farm- covered with sea lice (9,145 sea lice on actually indigenous to wild stocks. ing is environmentally sound, takes pressure off 872 pink salmon smolts). Don’t blame the farmed fish. Don Staniford, a director of the fishing wild stocks and is key to revitalizing “I noticed bleeding at their eyeballs Ever since B.C.’s first fish farm was Salmon Farm Protest Group in Scotland, coastal communities like Port Hardy and and bleeding at the base of the fins, established by forestry giant Crown pens a chilling chapter called Silent Campbell River. which are classic symptoms of fish dis- Zellerback at Ocean Falls, the fortunes Spring of the Sea to describe a “chemical Stephen Hume, Alexandra ease. I was horrified to see these baby fish of salmon farming have been rising and Morton, Betty C. Keller, Rosella arms race” within the industry due to being ravaged by these parasites,” falling. Sunshine Coast contributors antibiotics, artificial colourings, M. Leslie, Otto Langer and Don Morton writes. Betty Keller and Rosetta Leslie provide Staniford offere a critical evaluation of fish antiparasitics and antifoulants. Some of The fish were being eaten alive. De- a chronology of the ups and downs in farming in A Stain Upon The Sea (Harbour these substances have polluted the ocean $26.95), reviewed here by Mark Forsythe. partment of Fisheries and Oceans (DFO) their essay called Sea-Silver. and can be lethal to other species like questioned her science, but the Pacific By 1989 the silver rush was well shrimp, lobster and mussels. ritish Columbia is the now In Scotland an artificial pink dye used underway, with 185 small salmon farms to alter the colour of salmon flesh for the world’s fourth largest marketing purposes was linked to reti- nal damage in humans. Dichlorvis, used producer of farm salmon. B previously in the U.K. and B.C., has Having generated 1,800 direct jobs, been linked to testicular cancer. Invermectin, an in-feed treatment for sea and another 2,000 indirect jobs in lice, can produce severe side effects. small coastal communities, fish That did not stop Canadians from giving thousands of farmed salmon a mas- farming is regarded by some sive drug overdose. In 2000 as many as

PHOTO 10,000 farmed salmon were killed at a people as an economic saviour. farm in the Broughton Archipelago. A MORTON Salmon farming has become the prov- new treatment being used in trials is a ince’s biggest agricultural exporter (about Simoom Sound, 2003 new product called Slice. The catchy sales

15% of total agricultural production) ALEXANDRA slogan is Slice Kills Lice but critics fear it returning more than $600 million to the Fisheries Resource Conservation Coun- in B.C., operated by more than 100 might harm or kill other marine life. economy each year. cil, an independent watchdog chaired by companies. By 1993, “as a result of Staniford argues, all too often, risk as- In 2002 the province lifted a mora- former federal fisheries minister John storms, disease, algal blooms and rock- sessments are done after chemicals have torium on expansion. The industry— Fraser, backed her up. Industry was bottom salmon prices, those numbers been approved, and when a “risk assess- outlawed in Alaska—is now poised to ordered to fallow 11 of the 27 farms that had shrunk to 80 farms operated by 17 ment is finally published years later (af- take its open-net cage pens to the North fall to create a migration window to make companies, but they had become large ter the targets’ resistance to the chemical Coast of B.C. A billion dollars of new smolts less vulnerable to sea lice. This par- farms and international companies.” To- has made its use redundant anyway), a economic activity is predicted over the tial fallowing seemed to have an effect, day mostly those farms are far bigger and new chemical takes its place.” next ten years. as significantly fewer fish were infected more automated. A Stain Upon The Sea (Harbour that year. However, DFO scientists A Stain Upon the Sea effec- Whale researcher Alexandra Morton, $26.95) arrives just in time re-ignite de- assert there is still no study that tively marshals arguments the woman who’s come to symbolize the bate for the upcoming spring election. shows a cause-and-effect relation- against fish farming on various fight against salmon farming, closes the This collection of essays, written by ship between sea lice on wild and fronts. We hear the voices of book. When she first saw a net pen be- six critics, is a harpoon launched at the farmed fish. sports fishermen worried about ing towed into the Broughton Archi- industry and government regulators. Hume’s journey continues to the future of wild salmon stocks pelago, Morton thought salmon farming As conservationist Terry Glavin western Ireland with its longer his- and a $1.5 billion dollar tourist might be a good thing for the area, but points out in the introduction, tory of fish farming. He meets fishing industry. she soon “lost trust in the system.” The aquaculture has been with us for thou- fisheries biologists who con- Commercial fishermen are government permitted farms to be lo- sands of years, from oyster breeding to sider the sea lice infestation MARK spitting mad after seeing wild cated in what local fishermen considered clam gardens. So what’s really new? of our pinks a replay of what FORSYTHE salmon runs go extinct (some to be sensitive ‘red zones’, important to “Salmon are carnivores.” he writes. “For happened to juvenile sea trout (with simi- fish farmers argue these commercial fish- wild stocks. Atlantic smolts infected with the first time in history we’re raising car- lar life cycles) in their waters. One com- ermen over-fished these very stocks), furunculosis were allowed to stay in the nivores for food. So it is an experiment, ments, “We’ve lost a wild sea trout angling catches reduced and salmon prices hit water at one farm, possibly posing a one might say. And by so intensively in- fishery that was worth millions of rock bottom. threat to wild stocks. terfering in the process of natural selec- pounds. Fisheries here that used to be Former DFO biologist and now Di- “I felt it (DFO) was working to hide tion, by subjecting salmon to such phenomenal are now derelict.” rector of Marine Conservation for the the truth,” she says. From her eye-wit- elaborate methods of artificial selection, Irish scientists are now pushing for a David Suzuki Foundation, Otto Langer ness perspective, Morton chronicles es- by genetic tinkering and by long term ban on fish farms where migrating smolts skewers the DFO bureaucracy for not liv- caped Atlantics, disease outbreaks on selective breeding, we are creating a could come into contact with farmed fish. ing up to its job of protecting wild salmon farms and the sea lice infestation which wholly new species.” The manager of a 250-year-old fishing stocks and habitat. He traces this to reor- she believes brought on the crash of the lodge, forced to cater to cyclists and hik- ganization at DFO back in 1971, “when Broughton pink—confirming most of We are also tinkering with a symbol ers, says, “We’re witnessing the death of pollution staff were taken from DFO and the suspicions that many British unlike any other. To many, wild salmon the fishery.” moved to the new Department of the En- Columbians have about a high powered is the soul of British Columbia. Journal- According to Hume, fish farming is a vironment (DOE). This meant that peo- industry having its way in public waters. ist and columnist Stephen Hume has ex- divisive issue among British Columbia’s ple responsible for fish habitat protection A Stain Upon the Sea is pretty much amined the “collision between the First Nations. The Kitasoo at Klemtu, for were no longer responsible for the qual- a one-sided argument. Next year, artificial and the natural” in his piece example, are looking to the industry as a ity of the water that the fish lived in.” Raincoast Books will release a book on about a trip to the Broughton Archi- way to cut devastating unemployment Langer suggests cuts to staff and in- fish farming by Peter Robson. pelago where one of the biggest recorded rates of 85%. But other First Nations are dustry self-policing haven’t helped either. 1-55017-317-0 collapses of pink salmon occurred, in vowing to fight expansion in their terri- “Sadly, the environmental enforcement Mark Forsythe teaches writing for 2002. Almost four million pinks were ex- tory. record goes up and down like the tide in media at BCIT and hosts BC Almanac pected to return to six local rivers, but Alaskans are also sounding the alarm. Prince Rupert. For most of the past 30 on CBC Radio.

18 BOOKWORLD WINTER 1-5 2004 MARITIME Swiss family Blanchet More than 13 printings later, a mother’s sailing memoir remains a coastal classic.

ossibly the most enduring polite to them—you get absolutely no- where.” of Pacific Northwest After World War II, Blanchet sold sailing books is The Curve Caprice for $700 to the owner of a Vic- P toria boatyard. It went up in flames dur- of Time (Whitecap $18.95) by M. ing repairs and never sailed again. Capi Blanchet continued live at Wylie ‘Capi’ Blanchet. Curteis Point after her children grew up, Published in 1961 when its author resisting her doctor’s advice to move. To was 70 years old, this unlikely bestseller combat her emphysema and the damp recalls the author’s 15 summers with her climate, she reportedly sat with her head five home-schooled children aboard a inside her oil stove for 20 minutes each 25' cedar launch, Caprice. day. The family’s June-to-October adven- The Curve of Time began as a series of tures are condensed into a series of articles for Blackwoods Magazine in Lon- sketches as if they constitute one voyage don, England, before it became a book when her youngest child was three. in 1961. Its unusual title was derived Born in 1891 in Lachine, Quebec, Capi Blanchet (far right) with her children Francis, Peter, Betty, David and Joan. from The Fourth Dimension by Blanchet was a tomboy who upset her Maurice Maeterlinck, who tutor by carrying mice in her pockets. long-vacant cottage designed by Samuel of Caprice) was hard-pressed to make viewed time as a curve. At its height, one Her High Anglican father was often Maclure at Curteis Point, near Sidney. ends meet. Each year she rented her can simultaneously view the past, present mysteriously absent on world travels, dis- A year later they bought the one-year- home and set off in Caprice with her chil- and future. appearing for a year at a time. old Caprice for $600. Its gas engine had dren for five months of exploration. On September 30, 1961, Capi As Muriel Liffiton she competed for to be overhauled because the boat had The family investigated Indian settle- Blanchet was found dead at her type- academic honours with her two sisters sank during the winter. With constant ments, canneries, marine stores, floating writer, having suffered a heart attack at until, at age 18, she married Geoffrey tinkering, the engine would remain in logging camps and traced the voyages of age 70. Blanchet from Ottawa. Theirs was use for 20 years until 1942. Captain George Vancouver, keep- Blanchet’s neighbour and friend not a marriage made in heaven. One more child was born, then trag- ing a copy of his diary aboard. Gray Campbell of Sidney released Whereas her banker-husband was edy struck. Geoffrey Blanchet died, or Blanchet rejected conventional no- the first Canadian edition of The Curve emotional, she could be intensely prag- else he disappeared, in 1927. After he tions of fashion for women and wasn’t of Time in 1968. It sold for $1.95. matic. After he fell ill in his early 40s and embarked on Caprice and stopped at afraid to get her hands dirty. “Engines [Edith Iglauer Daly has writ- retired, the couple drove west with four nearby Knapp Island, he was never seen were invented and reared by men,” she ten about Blanchet in Raincoast Chroni- children in a Willys-Knight touring car. again. The boat was found, but not his once wrote. cles; Rosemary Neering has Upon reaching Vancouver Island in body. “They are used to being sworn at, and provided a profile in Wild West Women.] 1922, they serendipitously discovered a The indomitable ‘Capi’ (i.e. captain just take advantage of you; if you are 1552853519

5 BOOKWORLD WINTER 6-10 2004 NORTHWORDS GETTING NOWHERENESS A small book about a big place, Un- LANTERN LIT marked: Landscapes Along Highway 16 Five Gitxsan stories from the campfire to the classroom (NeWest Press $15.95) by Sarah de Leeuw reflects on lives in Tlell, Port nthropologists and others them and believed them and ap- Clements, Kitwanga, Rosswood, Fraser Lake plied them to my life, I knew I was a have brought many First and places that many people have never heard A story teller. I am a story teller, I come from storytellers and I want it said of. De Leeuw’s poetic essays capture stories Nations’ myths and legends to of me, ‘she told a good story.’” from up country print, but increasingly traditional 0-9684043-6-7 communities dotted along grand river storytellers such as M. Jane Hearing Suskwa voices valleys, below Smith, a teacher at John Field In 1974, 19-year-old Jean towering mountains Christian moved to a Elementary in Hazelton, are and across a backcountry cabin in the isolated Suskwa Valley in northern B.C. She turbulent sea— writing the stories themselves. spent 15 years there, raising three various places de Sarah de Leeuw Smith says she still hears her grand- daughters with her partner. Leeuw has called mother’s voice in the stories she To stave off a fear of being left home. “No one believes the tales I have to tell,” learned during childhood summers in alone in the wilderness, Christian she writes, “the tales of balancing rocks and a fish camp on the Skeena River— deepened her meditation practice whales spitting on highways, of road fissures hundreds of stories that became her M. Jane Smith: and was awakened “to a greater so deep that a constant stream of cement constant companions. “When the lan- “I used to have place within.” cannot fill them, tiny tern was turned off,” a scientific She began channeling voices, a mind.” earthquakes always re- By Heather Ramsay she says, “my grand- process she came to call The Guid- opening the pavement. mother would start ance. The guides offered wisdom to help her, and others she knew, through difficult times. Drink from the water near this fracture and your telling a story and sometimes you would fall asleep but you al- ways knew that story would come around again.” When Christian moved to Smithers, she began teaching medi- blood will be charged like a magnet; you will During the day her grandmother would share the antics of tation courses and offering counseling sessions. Her self-pub- always return, a compass needle veering the raven trickster or the Naxnok bird. When Smith’s uncles and lished Cycles of Wisdom: Teachings for an Awakening toward the magnetic north.” De Leeuw has grandfather came back in the evening, she would be the one Humanity (self-published $35) is gleaned from these sessions. worked in a women’s centre and a logging who had to tell the tale. “That is when the confidence was in- Chapters are transcribed answers to questions brought by camp; as a tug boat driver and a journalist. She stilled in me,” she says. attendees. The Guidance is now completing her Ph.D in Cultural Smith hopes the stories she first learned in Sim’algax will reach speaks on death: Geography at Queen’s University in Kingston. a wider audience with the publication of Returning the Feath- “We offer a description of the soul in the phase af- She describes her first book as a collection of ers: Five Gitxsan Stories (Creekstone $13.95), a collection illus- trated by Gitxsan artist Ken Mowatt, an instructor of ter the body has died. ... essays about powerful people whose stories silk-screening and carving at the ’Ksan school in Hazelton. This can be a most playful “are relegated to the land of nowhereness.” Initially Smith felt uncomfortable recording oral histories and wondrous time. This 1-896300-88-X —Heather Ramsay passed on to her by her grandparents, but elders encouraged can also be an agonizing ✍ her, saying the stories need to be preserved and treasured like a time depending on the Bob Burrows began working on the chief’s regalia. The title of her first book, Returning the Feathers, consciousness of the soul and their willingness to West Coast as a minister and captain of a is a reflection of her respect, referring to feathers lost from a chief’s headdress. adapt and move into who United Church mission boat based at Ocean “When you tell a story you credit your sources and the listen- they are.” Falls in 1960. From 1981 to 1984 he was ers realize they are hearing a story that goes all the way into the Cycles (250) 847-1915 Chair of the national United Church Commit- beginning of time.” tee responsible for all mission hospitals across “I used to have a scientific mind,” Smith says, “and thought Heather Ramsay lives in Jean Christian Canada, leading him to produce his history of [the stories] could never have happened . . . but when I took Queen Charlotte City. United Church Mission hospitals, Healing in the Wilderness

(Harbour $26.95). 1-55017-338 ✍ As one of the foremost surveyors of northern B.C., Frank Swannell took many remark- able photos between 1908 and 1914. Now a former Vanderhoof teacher and president of the Nechako Valley Historical Society, Jay Sherwood, has culled the best of Swannell’s portraits and images for Surveying the North (Caitlin Press $29.95). “His photos appear in most books that cover the BC Interior in the early 20th century,” says Sherwood, now a teacher- librarian in Vancouver, “yet he is seldom given more than passing

credit.” 1-894759-05-2

Surveying the North (Caitlin)

8 BOOKWORLD WINTER 6-10 2004 LAW

ON THE WAGON Douglas Hamilton reveals how favouritism and bureaucratic bungling scuttled the prohibition era and put the booze business back where it belongs—as a cash cow for the B.C. government.

Travelling B.C. salesman with booze & rifle, near Kelowna, circa 1920.

esus drank, turned water into wine and promised been banned since 1901, and intro- Five breweries were allowed to form a duced laws, from 1917 and 1919, that cartel called the Amalgamated Brewers his followers they could drink wine in heaven. But radically restricted alcohol consumption. Agency to sell exclusively to the LCB. After the province’s so-called ‘Purity Indians who wanted to drink legally Mothers Against Drunk Drivers have ample J Election’ had included referenda on could do so after 1921 if they rescinded evidence to support their fears that booze is a costly and women’s suffrage and alcohol in 1916, their status Indian designation and be- B.C. officially went dry in 1917, but came Canadian citizens. Between 1857 deadly element of society that requires strict sanctions. wealthy folks could import the stuff or and 1940, fewer than 500 did so. else obtain alcohol legally with a doctor’s Hamilton makes clear Aboriginal peo- Neither a proponent of booze nor a in the name of efficiency rather than prescription. ple metabolize alcohol at the same rate MADD campaigner, Douglas L. morality, tried to encourage the ration- As soon as the war ended, returning as everyone else. Hamilton has written Sobering Di- ing of grog, but eventually eradication soldiers were keen to drown their sorrows “The firewater myth was the construct lemma (Ronsdale $21.95) to evaluate of demon alcohol for Indians was pro- with “God’s tranquillizer.” As well, most of Europeans who needed stereotypes the evolution of liquor control laws in posed from Victoria. immigrants to B.C. were born in Britain based on the ‘unalterable inferiority of In- B.C. Governor James Douglas intro- and they “regarded the anti-liquor fanati- dians’,” he writes. “Such views provided Alcohol was unknown on the coast duced the first legalized prohibition in cism of the Methodists and others with the rationale for confiscation of lands for until Captain Cook’s arrival at British Columbia in 1854—and for the scepticism, even disdain.” settlement, while at the same time elimi- Nootka Sound in 1778. Within 20 years, next 108 years, until 1962, Indians were Quebec was the first Canadian prov- nating the need to look for other causes the maritime fur trade was well lubri- not permitted to purchase liquor in B.C. ince to eliminate prohibition, in 1919, of the social dislocation in the Aboriginal cated by booze, prostitution and wide- ✍ but B.C. was second, in 1921. community.” spread tobacco use. Douglas Hamilton has examined all While prohibition was still in effect After World War II, Native veterans When the Boston arrived in 1803 with manner of alcohol restrictions in British in the United States, rumrunners such who drank overseas found they were still a cargo of 1,260 gallons of rum and Columbia from 1854 onwards in Sober- as Johnny Schnarr made illicit de- forbidden to drink at home. Activists 3,000 guns, its captain didn’t realize the ing Dilemma, augmenting the spade- liveries by boat. “By 1924,” Hamilton pointed out the hypocrisy of Canada extent to which some of the ‘savages’ un- work done by Robert A. writes, “the trade had become highly or- scornfully accusing Nazi Germany of rac- derstood English. He made the fatal mis- Campbell in his two books and ganized, and many of today’s well-known ism while it continued to subjugate its take of insulting Chief Maquinna, Harold Tuttle Allen. families in B.C. and across Canada made Aboriginal people. whereupon the Nuu-chah-nulth slaugh- Binge drinkers from the early gold their fortunes smuggling liquor to the As Jean Barman concludes in tered all but two of the Boston’s crew. That fields of B.C. gave rise to Dashaway United States.” The most notorious of the her introduction, “Sobering Dilemma re- must have been one helluva victory party. Clubs, genteel establishments that pro- smuggling ships was the 245-foot long minds us of the dangers of smugness in Hudson’s Bay Company bean vided libraries and gymnasiums, attract- Malahat, displacing 1,500 tons. It could thinking that we have the answers on be- counters were soon complaining that In- ing the likes of Amor de Cosmos, carry 84,000 cases in her hold with an half of others.” dians were “so much occupied drinking second Premier of B.C. additional 16,000 on deck. Most folks will drink to that. that they don’t take time to either hunt World War I gave rise to prohibition Hamilton reports that liquor lord ✍ or fish.” This led to the first prohibition in Canada. In those days, prohibitionists Henry Reifel made more than of alcohol in B.C.—for one week only portrayed alcohol consumption as un- $100,000 in political contributions to Douglas L. Hamilton has previously in 1825—when nervous fur traders at patriotic. Workers had to be sober to ef- Liberal politicians in B.C. and his em- written about the smallpox epidemic of Fort Simpson “stopt the sale of Liquor as ficiently serve the war effort and ployees regularly made “contributions” 1862, the Pig War, rum-running, Ty- a punishment to the Chiefs who appear drunkards on the front lines couldn’t to liquor store employees, but he was phoon Frieda and the Japanese subma- very much inclined to quarrel when in- shoot straight. nonetheless dissatisfied with his level of rine attack on Estevan Lighthouse. He toxicated.” Despite the opposition of soldiers, influence in the alcohol trade. and his wife live on Lasqueti Island with The ‘Little Emperor’ of the Hudson’s Canadian provinces followed the lead of Attorney-General Alex Manson sheep, cows, chickens and a harpsichord. Bay Company, George Simpson, Prince Edward Island, where liquor had had a solution to the bootlegging mess. 1-55380-016-8

10 BOOKWORLD WINTER 6-10 2004 ACADEMIXBC

CBC radio contributor Will Garrett-Petts, chair of Halkomelem 101 English and Modern Languages at University College of the Cariboo, has edited The Small Cities Book: Halkomelem is one of the 23 languages On the Cultural Future of Small Cities (New Star, $29). that belong to the Salish linguistic family. Wayne Suttles has prepared a grammar He localizes questions of globalization and cultural of the Musqueam dialect of Halkomelen identity at the municipal level by using Kamloops and entitled Musqueam Reference Grammar its environs as a ‘living laboratory.’ 1-55420-009-1 (UBC Press $125), the fullest account of any Salish language. Suttles work on the subject began in the 1950s. There are also chapters on kinship, personal narratives and a history of the work on Halkomelem. Suttles previously edited Coast Salish Essays (Talonbooks). 0774810025 ✍ Including letters and journals from early converts to Christianity among the Tsimshians on B.C.’s north coast, Susan Neylan examines the nature of Tsimshian religious ideas both before and after the arrival of missionaries in The Heavens Are Changing: Nineteenth Century Protes- tant Missions and Tsimshian Christianity (McGill-Queen’s $27.96). She claims, “the concept of ‘sin’ was a revolutionary idea, with no apparent parallels in ‘traditional’ Tsimshian culture.” 0-7735-2573-4 ✍ As a lecturer in the Department of Sociology and the Department of Humani- ties at Kwantlen College, Kamala Elizabeth Nayar has published The Sikh Diaspora in Vancouver: Three Genera- tions Amid Tradition, Modernity and the “Indian” and the Second phering war,” he says, “is the Multiculturalism (UTP $55) which exam- Hyper-Heidegger ines family relations, child-rearing and World War (UBC Press $85). realization that delusion un- religion through more than one hundred Hyper-nihilism. Virtual Capitalism. 0-7748-1094-7 derpins the base compo- interviews. 0-8020-8947-X Digital Sweat Shops. Switching Flesh. ✍ nents of aggression.” ✍ These are some subjects Arthur With a Masters in psychol- 0-9729872-0-7 Now a member of the planning depart- Kroker investigates for his critique of ogy, Bo Filter of Courtenay ✍ ment at Cardiff University in Wales, John “the ethical crisis of contemporary tech- has launched a projected six- Roy Woodbridge is Punter has examined—favourably— nology” in The Will to Technology & volume series that examines ‘the president of Woodbridge & Vancouver’s unique approach to zoning, The Culture of Nihilism: Heidegger, mental illness of war’ with The Bo Filter Associates, an environmental planning and urban design from the early Nietzche & Marx (UTP $24.95). Ac- Cause of Wars & Aggression: consulting firm in Vancou- 1970s to the beginning of the 21st century in cording to UVic’s Kroker, “Martin Book 1 (Global Justice Publish- ver, and he’s the author of The Vancouver Achievement: Urban Heidegger is the theorist par excel- ing $39.95). It’s dedicated to “people The Next World War: Tribes, Cities, Na- Planning and Design (UBC Press $34.95). lence of the digital future.” 0-8020-8573-3 who think that war is incurable.” After tions and Ecological Decline (UTP 0774809728 ✍ ✍ exploring the nature of aggression in his $27.95) in which he calls on the United first three volumes, he plans to explore Nations to convene a World Forum on Carol J. Williams’ study of pioneer Inventing Tom Thomson (McGill- photographers, Framing the West: Race, Queen’s $39.95) by Malcolm the cure of wars and aggression in the Global Provisioning in order to declare Gender and the Photographic Frontier Lowry scholar Sherrill Grace of final three volumes. “The key to deci- ‘war’ on ecological decline. 0-8020-8830-9 in the Pacific Northwest (Oxford University UBC examines the life and work ✍ Press $21.95), has received the Norris and of painter Tom Thomson, While teaching at the De- Carol Hundley Award from the American the iconic figure who died in partment of Germanic and Rus- Historical Association (Pacific-Coast). Algonquin Park due to mysteri- sian Studies at UVic, Serhy Framing the West almost exclusively ous circumstances in 1917. Ykelchyk has published Sta- concerns British Columbia. The photography 0-7735-2752-4 lin’s Empire of Memory: Rus- of Hannah and Richard Maynard is ✍ sian-Ukrainian Relations in the most widely represented. No mention is C. Alan Bradley of Soviet Historical Imagination made of The Magic Box, the study of Kelowna has co-authored Ms. (UTP $50). He examines Rus- Hannah Maynard’s work and life that was Holmes of Baker Street: The sian propaganda and the com- published by in Claire Weissman Wilks plicity of non-Russian 1980. As well, there’s no bibliography to Truth About Sherlock (U. of Al- intellectuals in maintaining the alert the reader to the the photography of berta Press $34.95), with dominance of Russians over C.D. Hoy, early Japanese Canadian William A.S. Sarjeant, to Ukrainians under Stalinism. En- photographers, Daniel Francis’s explore some of the female quali- somewhat similar study ties of Sir Arthur Conan couraged by John-Paul Copying People 1860-1940, Doyle’s legendary detective. Himka at the University of Al- David Mattison’s 0-88864-415-9 berta, Ykelchyk wrote much of Camera Workers, or this book in his parents’ apart- Thomas Allen’s Photogra- ment in Kiev in 2001. It is par- phy of the Indian in War-blings tially based on declassified materials from eight Ukrainian B.C. Studies. As a history professor at 0-19-514652-2 and Russian archives. UVic, R. Scott Shef- 0-8020-8808-2 field has examined how First Nations people were “Forever with the Great discussed in both admin- Russian People”, a 1954 Carol J. poster in Stalin’s Empire istrative and public realms of Memory Williams during World War II in The Red Man’s on the Warpath: The Image of

3 BOOKWORLD WINTER 6-10 2004 KIDLIT

CAMELS,CAMELS,RRRRRaaaaatststststs&& DINOSAURSDINOSAURS amels stink. They frighten mules. They bite, kick, his family in Ladysmith, brings whimsy the world’s 400 dinosaur species, several aplenty to Davies’ exuberantly detailed of which Bill Slavin and spit, and their feet are made for traversing sand, Robertson Rat (Ekstasis / Cherubim Esperanca Melo feature in their il- not rock-strewn roads of the Cariboo Gold Rush. $24.95). His multi-layered, richly pat- lustrations. 1-55337-393-6 C terned illustrations, originally created for ✍ But businessman Frank canyons of the Fraser River a solo show, playfully introduce Imagine being eight years old and dis- Laumeister knew none of to the northern gold fields, Robertson who “dabbles in this and dab- covering six dinosaur footprints that lead this when in 1862 he dreamed Cameron and his father bles in that” as a rat of many talents. to even more startling finds, opening an up the Dromedary Express. find themselves dealing Robertson Rat is a sailor, a poet, a entire new geographic area for dinosaur Convinced camels, with their with camel-sized problems. philosopher. He’s a snappy dresser, a research. legendary toughness and en- Always resourceful, skillful juggler, a collector of Daniel’s Dinosaurs (Maple Tree Press durance, would be ideal for Cameron fashions canvas candlelabras, sumptuous tapestries and $9.95) is the true story of how Daniel transporting supplies to the and rawhide into camel rare ginger jars. He sews, he cooks, he Helm and his friend Mark went tub- gold fields, he and several naïve shoes. He bathes the stinky dances. And he has a message for young ing one summer’s day in 2000 and cohorts imported 21 of the ani- LOUISE creatures in rose water. In readers: Never be afraid to dream. chanced upon—and recognized—six mals. DONNELLY the end, Cameron can’t 1-894800-53-2 shallow hand-span-sized indents in a Laumeister was unaware the two- make the camels adapt as pack animals ✍ large flat rock along a Tumbler Ridge humped camels they received were, in in the Cariboo. “Drumheller dinosaurs rise up tall. creek bed. fact, Bactrians, not the single-humped Kasia Charko, who recently il- Across the Badlands they skeleton- In his first book for children, Dromedaries their venture was named lustrated Julie Lawson’s Arizona crawl.” Charles Helm, a medical doctor, for. The short-legged Bactrian, while Charlie and the Klondike Kid, has used Award-winning Vancouver primary outdoorsman and Daniel’s father, tells slower than an Arabian racing drom- watercolours and coloured pencil to fab- school teacher and children’s poet the story of how the boys’ discovery edary, could travel much longer but that ricate the rough mining camps, the vast Robert Heidbreder takes young brought not only Rich McCrea, one mattered not a whit to the miners who Cariboo landscape and 21 shaggy, toothy, readers on a moonlit romp when dusty of North America’s top dinosaur foot- soon came to despise the foul-smelling, double-humped camels. 1-55143-284-6 dinosaur bones rouse themselves and re- print experts, to the remote and wildly evil-tempered creatures. Laumeister, ✍ assemble to “tango, fandango and break- beautiful northeastern British Columbia forced to cut his losses, simply aban- Born in Manitoba and raised in the dance.” community, but also Philip Currie, doned the camels to fend for themselves Rocky Mountains, first- A storm, say the the Royal Tyrrell Museum’s Curator of in the Cariboo countryside. time author Gillian grownups, hearing Dinosaurs. In Camels Always Do (Orca Davies of Courtenay the thunderous tam- Many more footprints were discov- $19.95), Lynn Manuel recalls this grew up in a house full bourine beat, but ered, including one with a broken toe, unlikely piece of British Columbia his- of unusual pets, from the kids know it’s only as well as BC’s first ever dinosaur skel- tory through the eyes of young, camel- snakes to raccoons, an the dinos drumming eton which, at 93 million years old, is the mad Cameron who has a dream of experience she found and dancing the oldest dinosaur ever found in Western striking it rich with his gold panning fa- useful in creating the Drumheller Dino- Canada. ther and someday crossing the ocean to dapper, urbane and saur Dance (Kids The author’s proceeds from book see real camels. On a trip into town, he’s charismatic character Can $17.95). sales support paleontological projects of astonished to discover camels have come of Robertson Rat. Alberta is home the Tumbler Ridge Museum Founda- Grant Leier, to Drumheller’s to him! tion. 1-897066-07-4 Signing on as packers to take the who lives in a whimsi- Royal Tyrrell Mu- Dromedary Express through the rocky cal garden setting with Gillian Davies & Robertson Rat seum and over 60 of Louise Donnelly writes from Vernon.

6 BOOKWORLD WINTER 6-10 2004 KIDLIT

Picture Books Pony expressed Forewarned not to gulp down her As a young girl in Vancouver, Julie grape soda, Penelope burps down the White first wrote about horses after her house and brings six policemen rushing parents told her she couldn’t keep a pony to the scene of the disaster in Penelope in their back yard. Now she lives on a horse and the Humongous Burp (Lobster farm in Armstrong, raising thoroughbreds Press, $21.95), the first picture book by for racing and jumping. New Westminster-born and In White’s first book, The Ladysmith-raised Sheri Secret Pony (Sono Nis $7.95), Radford who works for Kirsty empties her piggy bank WHERE Vancouver Magazine. to buy Lancelot—a skinny, half- 189422283-0 trained pony—and makes her- ✍ self useful at the pony farm to Jeanne Bushey pay for his board and to earn moved to Iqualuit in 1973, riding lessons. then onto Yellowknife, before Only problem is Kirsty Julie White relocating to the West Coast. doesn’t tell her parents. When a For ages 4-8, her Orphans of riding accident puts Kirsty in the hospi- the Sky (Red Deer Press $19.95) is an tal, she is told Lancelot must go.1-55039-148-8 Arctic story about Sister Lightning and ✍ Brother Thunder. They decide to live Illustrator Cynthia Nugent’s first among the stars after they return to their young adult novel Francesca and the camp and discover their people have left Magic Bike (Raincoast $12.95) is a fan- without them. 0-88995-291-4 ciful story about a ten-year-old ✍ girl who is sent to live with her Marilynn Reynolds bumbling, divorced father Ron of Victoria once lived on Rudderless following the death Griffith Street in the mining of her mother. town of Sudbury, Ontario. It A kindly neighbour sends was 1947, she was seven, and ‘Frankie’ on a quest with a magic her parents were separating. bike and a dog named Dan in Goodbye to Griffith Street order to obtain a family heirloom (Orca $16.95), with winter- that can alter Frankie’s domestic Sheri Radford hued watercolours by Renne circumstances enough to satisfy Benoit, is Reynolds’ chance the concerns of Social Services. 1-55192-561-3 to imagine a better leave-taking than ✍ hers for John, who also lives in a small Nugent has also illustrated singer- white house next to the slag heap, songwriter Norm Hacking’s tango-in- watched over by the mine’s smoking spired When Cats Go Wrong (Raincoast chimneys, the “kindly giants.” $24.95), complete with CD. 1-55192-729-2 John says good-bye to his friends Milo ✍ and the three Beatle Bugs, the protec- tive smokestacks, and his dad. But awak- The Cost of Passage (Herald Press ening to freshly fallen snow the morning $18.29) is an historical novel by he and his mother are to leave, John slips Heather Tekavec of Langley. outside in his winter coat and boots to While struggling to raise enough money say good-bye to Griffith Street. for her family’s safe passage to Canada, Making his way from neighbor to 14-year-old Anna must fight to escape neighbor he leaves each one a present Russian civil strife between the Red Army and a short time later, as the taxi takes (communists), the White Army (czarists) him and his mother away, a pale winter and a ‘Green Army’ led by Nestor sun shines down on a street full of snow Makhno. 0-8361-9237-0 ✍ stars and snow angels. 1-55143-285-4

In Sylvia Olsen’s teen novel, Also Received* White Girl (Sono Nis $9.95), Josie’s Ghost Voyages III by Cora Taylor white skin and good grades are the per- (Coteau Books $ 7.95) 1-55050-305-7 Adventures in the Ice Age by Linda Bailey & fect camouflage until she turns fourteen Bill Slavin (Kids Can Press $14.95) 1-55337-503-3 and her mother meets ‘a real ponytail In- Jeremy and the Enchanted Theatre by Becky dian’ named Martin. Josie finds herself Citra & Jessica Milne (Orca $6.95) 1-55143-322-2 living on an Indian reserve outside town Mormor Moves In by Susin Nielsen-Fernlund & Louise-Andrée Laliberté (Orca $19.95) 1-55143-291-9 with a new stepfather, a new stepbrother, *by BC authors and a new nickname: Blondie. 1-55039-147-X

7 BOOKWORLD WINTER 6-10 2004 MEMOIRS

THE SERAFIN REVIEW: OUT of SORTS

he first chapters of Bruce Serafin’s Colin’s Big Thing Bruce (Ekstasis $21.95) recall his T Serafin assimilation of B.C. culture—rural and edited VR from 1990 urban, raw and sophisticated. to 1997.

He experiences the pulp mill town with its simmer- ing violence, the elite high school in the British Proper- ties, the remote logging camp, the hippie era of Vancouver in the Sixties, and finally the university English class. The young Serafin is creative and talented, and by his 20s he has amassed a rich store of material for the stuff of fiction. With an ear for racy speech and a talent for ren- dering character through dialogue, he seems to be headed towards a career as a man of letters. A conversation with his high school friend Alistair Fraser at the end of the first section predicts his future:

“Bruce,” he said, “Our road is failure.” “Failure. It sounds bad,” I said. “It’ll lead us to grace.” “It’ll lead you to grace.” JOAN “You, too. You too, man.” GIVNER Serafin concludes the exchange by noting, “It didn’t lead me to grace. It led me to the post office.” Serafin becomes a letter sorter by taking a job at the Vancouver post office where he remains for much of his working life. Serafin works on the graveyard shift, which he de-

scribes as a kind of underworld, in which armies of men PHOTO and women toil in dehumanizing and degrading circum- stances. Their efforts preserve a safe and clean world for TWIGG those who produce letters, all the while remaining insulated from “The material in mainstream American comics is so fatuous, so the conditions that make their world safe and clean. Thus the post lacking in any real story, that you have to work hard to keep up office functions as a metaphor for the author’s feelings about his your interest. Most of the independents I know are into storytell- relationship to the literary world. ing—they don’t have the flashy effects. I think that this has a lot to Serafin’s choice of postal work can been viewed as a gesture of do with the influence of punk rock in Vancouver. Its influence has renunciation. What he rejects is a literary “career” characterized by been huge here. With alternative comics, like alternative music, competitiveness and pretentiousness, out of touch with ordinary you have to SAY something. This makes it more relevant to Gen- people, and highly derivative. eration X and younger people. There’s a desire for less ambiguity— A literary journal for which he wrote in high school was marred so many things in modern society disguise their real message. So by a plagiarized story, while his own story, “Sonny’s Blues,” was sto- younger people now, their idea is, ‘If you want to say something, len from James Baldwin. That early sense of the writer’s derivativeness TELL ME, don’t hide it in metaphors or incomprehensible im- is reinforced by his later contacts with writers. agery that I can’t understand.’ I don’t think this means people are Serafin’s admiration for a group of Vancouver poets is soured by ignorant. It’s just that their knowledge is not about Keats.” the exclusiveness of their small circle, and by their slavish imitation One evening, Serafin, unobserved, spots Colin moving alone of ideas and forms imported from elsewhere. His through a crowded street. He seems to per- Spell bound resistance to the literary world is his way of achiev- sonify the zeitgeist of the Vancouver Serafin ing a state of grace. knew as a young man, a “distillate of the fan- Born in the village of Plati in Eventually Serafin finds peace in his work. His tastic city that I see in my dreams, a kind of northern Greece, Ilya depiction of the interaction of the wide range of compound of fog and rain and grey and Tourtidis of Royston lived in eccentric, alienated and heroic characters in the post darker grey clouds.” At the same time Australia for ten years prior to his office is the most compelling part of the book. Serafin is reminded of Alistair Fraser’s pres- arrival in British Columbia in ✍ ence in that fantastic city, walking through 1965. He received an M.A. from the University of Victoria and he Serafin locates one possibility for honest artistic it as “ragged nobleman, with an expression of pitying contempt on his face.” was the co-recipient of the 1993 expression in the production of the alternative comic Gerald Lampert Award for best Gradually during his years at the post of- book—a medium that is minimalist, stripped of first book of poetry for Mad fice, Serafin’s urge to publish reasserts itself. metaphor, and more visual than verbal. Magellan’s Tale (Sono Nis, 1992). His essays and reviews appear in journals and He was alerted to the possibilities of the comic An Associate Fellow of The newspapers, and from 1990 to 1997 he ed- book as art by high school friend Alistair Fraser, a Rational Emotive Therapy photographer, who absorbed people’s stories and its and publishes the Vancouver Review. Fi- Institute of New York, Tourtidis combined the pictures and stories into a comic strip nally he produces this memoir, his first book. has examined the structures that about Mrs. Nemo, a welfare mom with five kids. Its aim is one expressed by Colin Upton who have defined his life for Fraser’s promise as an artist ended when he died at said, “I want to produce a record of the Van- The Spell of Memory (Oolichan the age of 21 in a car driven by a drunken friend. couver I know before it disappears forever.” $17.95), an autobiographical Fraser’s life and work foreshadows that of the Serafin amply fulfils that goal. 1-894800-26-5 exploration of the paradoxical eponymous Colin Upton whom Serafin meets nature of the witness. later in life. Upton articulates his artistic credo in Joan Givner writes from Mill Bay 0-88982-195-X the following words: on Vancouver Island.

9 BOOKWORLD WINTER 6-10 2004 POETRY MUSKOX BURGERS Shifting WITH SNOW “I used to live in the Arctic,” writes Heather Simeney MacLeod, “a the curtains place where my Indian blood found room to live, elliptical it moved within me, solid as snow.” ating back to the Sixties and the TISH A member of the Métis Nation North- movement at UBC fostered by west Territories, MacLeod is a poet and playwright who came to live in the DWarren Tallman, Jamie Reid’s Thompson-Nicola Valley during the earliest work in I. Another. The Space Between writing and publication of The Burden of Snow (Turnstone $15.95), a poetry (Talonbooks $17.95) will collection in which she traces “blood- lines, trap lines and ancestral migrations evoke memories of from Ireland, Scotland and Russia to the heady student poetry British Columbia interior.” MacLeod spent some of her teenage days for some. years in Carcross, “world’s smallest desert, once a glacial lake,” and recalls her var- While his TISH ex- ied past in a prose poem called ‘Ask Me periments may not pass Anything: Yellowknife.’ HANNAH the test of time, Reid’s “I know how to use an ulu; I’ve seen an MAIN-VAN DER KAMP later political writing Inukshuk in the midnight sun on the packs a punch, often a dada-esque one. Who else Jamie Reid: Barrenlands. Ask me anything. I have has written a good long poem on our Premier in Maui? no easy path eaten whitefish, pike and char; I’ve served No topic falls beyond Reid’s scope, be it Milton muskox burgers at the Wildcat Café. I Acorn, an essay on Baseball and Bowering, the IMF worked the dishpit before the dishwasher or Nellie McClung. Spanning more than four went in and wore raingear and rub- decades, Reid’s selected works merge prose, concrete poetry, essays, bissett-imitations, ghazals, ber boots and watched through the travel writing, political observations and homages to peers. flapping of the screen door as Dave As a philosopher, Reid also tries to define, for himself, the depth of poetry “as a means of wind-surfed over Back Bay. I fed approaching the inexpressible, the uncertain and the unresolved. Poetry…begins at the bound- Tracy’s dog, Bug, scraps from plates, ary between the known and the unknown, it is the territory beyond understanding, or at the drank coffee with Baileys through my genesis point of some new order of understanding and therefore at the limits of the speakable.” shift and went back in the middle of This is a writer who cannot be content taking an easy path ever since 1967 when he with- the night, after the bars closed, for drew to the countryside and wrote his first book of poems, The Man Whose Path Was on Fire, wine, beer, a snack. Ask me anything. published by Talonbooks more than 35 years ago. Reid wants poetry to serve his efforts to “shift I swam nude in Long and Great the curtains of language and culture” to open up new emotional and intellectual perspectives. Slave lakes; had picnics in the cem- Mostly he succeeds. “Truth is not the same as beauty,” Reid writes, “and never was.” 0-88922-512-5 etery. Ask me anything. I remember The Rec Hall, the worn path be- tween it and The Range; I remem- VIADUCT Métis poet ber Saturday afternoon jams with Heather Mark Bogan singing Wild Thing Simeney (Wild meat, you make a great treat; MacLeod DEDUCTIONS muskox, I gotta get lots)...” 0-88801-295-0 Poet, turntablist and black historian Wayde Compton has such prodigious talents that it’s impossible to categorize his hip-hop-inspired Performance Bond (Arsenal Pulp $22.95), LIVESAY WINNER complete with a CD of a turntable performance. The Van- Recent Dorothy Livesay Prize winner Philip Kevin Paul is a couver-born author of 49th Parallel Psalm is indefati- First Nations poet from Saanich whose Taking The Names Down gable in his seriousness and zaniness. From The Hill (Nightwood $16.95) refers to wood chopping, A sister has so many beads in her hair she “looks stories of the Old People, deer hunting, vision questing, funerals like an abacus.” God restricts jazz to a bagpipe. and much more. It’s devoid of sentimentality though there’s keen Two winos named Digital and Analogue discuss loss: the threat of a culture’s disappearance and the death of semiotics. Of Sidney Poitier, Compton family members. writes, “You colonized England in reverse, teach- Few readers will know Saanich as intimately as Paul does ing / a classroom full of Cockney racists / how to but to immerse oneself in his artifice-free poems is to breathe speak BBC English.” slower and be in your own natural surroundings differently. With compelling playfulness, Compton paints In “The Gift of the Day,” the praying place is called “the a verbal mural of non-white culture and his per- honest place.” His poems can take you there. sonal history. How many British Columbians The people went into the hills. / They went there together as one know about a Black Moslem temple in False body / knowing who they were / to bring the names home. Creek? Or that Vancouver’s black community Where are the ancestors / we keep calling ourselves? lived mostly in a Strathcona neighbourhood And while the roadways were being imposed, / the crowns were called Hogan’s Alley that was demolished in the cast aside and tangled / and will never be brought home / and Seventies to make way for the Georgia Viaduct? never properly given. “It’s a thin lane / between Hogan’s Alley and self- However, sorrow has had its time. / The mourning must break at hatred. / My ghosthood, / those old standards.” last. I will tell you / what they really left us. / They left us / magic in Performance Bond comes replete with oral histo- everything. 0-88971-182-8 ries, archival photos, prose poems, concrete po- ems, dialogues, conversations, jokes and puns Hannah Main-van der Kamp lives in Victoria and Lund. Wayde Compton: of all kinds. Cumulatively Compton is more more eloquent in eloquent in a few lines than a binder full of ALSO PUBLISHED: a few lines than a RECKLESS WOMEN (Ronsdale $14.95) by Cecelia Frey 1-55380-017-6 Racism Commission Reports. He writes, “and binder full of UNDERWOOD LOG (Oolichan $17.95) by W.H. New 0-88982-193-3 if it was heroic for runaway slaves to seep into Racism WITH EACH BEND IN THE ROAD (The Birches $22.75) by Anne J. Plotnikoff 0-9735586-0-9 Canada, / why is it vilifiable for Chinese migrants Commission (Raincoast $18.95) PHOTO CHANGING ON THE FLY to hide in the belly of a dream now?” Reports. by George Bowering 1-55192-715-2 THE PEARL KING (Brick $16) by Catherine Greenwood 1-894078-38-1 TWIGG 1-55152-164-4 NOWRITE.DOC (Leaf Press, limited edition chapbook) by John Pass

11 BOOKWORLD WINTER 6-10 2004 LETTERS

Handy for haze Drake’s Bay I am a children’s book reviewer with a I am a reader of history, and a lover weekly column in the St. Catharines of pirates and old maps. I am also some- Standard in Ontario. Recently I was in one who has been investigating some of British Columbia and used BC the 17 possible locations for ‘Drake’s Bay’ BookWorld as my guide to purchasing on the Pacific coastline. Arguments books by BC authors. It’s a good thing I about the site go back to the Oregon had BC BookWorld handy as staff at Chap- boundary dispute of 1846. ters and also at independent bookstores In the 1930s American experts au- were a bit hazy on who your authors were thenticated a brass plate found near San (although one helpful sales associate of- Francisco, attributing it directly to fered to “check the list in the back”). Francis Drake’s expedition. The lone dis- Lian Goodall senter was a B.C. surveyor named R.P. Ottawa Bishop who explained how all the explor- [Booksellers can find info on 6,500 BC au- ers ended up bumping into Vancouver thors at www.abcbookworld.com— Ed.] Island. To celebrate 400 years since Drake’s voyage, this brass plate was tested again and proved to be a fake. Doubting Drake Members of the Drake Navigators Guild have long been proponents for Your Lookout article entitled Doubt- Drake’s Bay being located just beyond ing Drake? [BCBW Autumn] presented the Golden Gate Bridge. With the com- Edward Von der Porten’s blustering attack ing of the internet, historian Oliver on Samuel Bawlf’s brilliant but uneven Seeler has laid waste to their arguments The Secret Voyage of Sir Francis Drake. His and as well as Samuel Bawlf’s theory out- statement that “Drake never reached the lined in his recent book The Secret Voy- coast of British Columbia” is only demon- age of Sir Francis Drake. strably true in the sense that no land with I believe the accounts that say Drake that name existed came far enough north that the rigging in 1579. got stiff from the cold. Six of the seven Unmentioned personal accounts state Drake reached by Von der 48 degrees North near the entrance to Porten but the Strait of Juan de Fuca. An atlas quoted from ex- printed in 1646 by Robert Dudley tensively by shows the coast up to Cape Flattery and Bawlf is the testi- his manuscript map shows Drake’s lost mony of Drake’s harbour north of that. Francis Drake young cousin Right or wrong, Sam Bawlf’s book John to the In- attempts to move the argument into quisition on two separate occasions (May Canadian waters. Edward Von der 1584 and June 1587) to the effect that Porten’s letter was designed to prevent “for the whole of April and May until that. The debate continues. the middle of June” the Golden Hinde Ralph Heading “sailed from Guatalco (Mexico) always Boundary Bay on a wind” first “north by northwest” (Tsawwassen) and then “north by northeast” until they sighted “several islands,” then “land in forty-eight degrees, where they remained for a month and a half caulking (their) Hey, look me over vessel” (Bawlf, 205-206). I am writing in response to my sister’s Interestingly enough, the same sort of letter, ‘Helen Smith overlooked’ [BCBW wide tack was taken by Captain Cook Autumn], regarding the review of the bi- some two hundred years later after his ography ‘No ordinary Mike…’ In her trans-Pacific landfall off the coast of Or- review of the egon and preparatory to his landing at book, Joan Nootka Sound on the west coast of Van- Givner did not couver Island, at a time when the British mention Mike’s Admiralty were still looking for the wife (me). This northwest passage somewhere in the vi- seems to have an- cinity of “New Albion” (s.v. “Cook, noyed my sister James,” Encyl. Brit.) Edith. Von der Porten is of course entitled Contrary to to defend his turf, although one may Michael Smith what Edith search in vain a map of the coast of Cali- claims, I was not fornia “near the latitude of 38 degrees” overlooked in the book. The authors Eric for a group of sizeable islands such as that Damer and Caroline Astel cover my years mentioned in the accounts of Drake’s ap- with Michael with honesty and sensitiv- proach to New Albion, an archipelago ity, as they do towards others who in some accounts extending over several touched his life. hundred miles, not unlike that formed In essence, the authors brilliantly un- by the present-day U.S. and Canadian fold the educational and political influ- Gulf Islands and Vancouver Island, near ences which ultimately led to Mike’s whose southern tip was recently un- Nobel Prize. earthed an English sixpence dated 1571 Edith will probably feel differently (Province, 20 Feb., 2004). once she reads the book! Warren Stevenson Helen Smith Vancouver Vancouver

Write to: “Why do Americans pay so little BC BookWorld, 3516 W. 13th Ave., attention to their poets and moralists Vancouver, BC V6R 2S3 email: [email protected] and so much to their millionaires Letters may be edited for clarity & length. and generals?”—LEO TOLSTOY

12 BOOKWORLD WINTER 6-10 2004 OBITS HELEN MEILLEUR First Invaders 1910-2004 The Literary Origins Helen Meilleur died in North Van- of British Columbia couver on August 20 at age 94. She was born at Port Simpson in 1910 and grew Alan Twigg up there on the Tsimshian reserve and British Columbia’s earliest authors on the adjacent Hudson’s Bay Company and explorers prior to 1800 are lands. After careers in teaching and busi- skilfully introduced, for the first ness, and being a wife and mother of five, time collectively, by Alan Twigg. at age 70 she recalled the days of her They include Pérez, Cook, Quadra, childhood for A Pour of Rain (first pub- Malaspina, Moziño, Vancouver, lished in 1980, reissued in 2001) by re- La Pérouse and more than 50 others. searching Hudson’s Bay Company A fascinating account of characters, records. The idea for a book had long been planted in her mind when her fa- events and intrigues, comprising ther, who ran the port’s general store, BC’s earliest literary history. brought home stories about the area’s Over 85 photos and maps. stockade past. A Pour of Rain is both a history of the fort from 1834 and a vivid ISBN 1-55380-018-4 $21.95 memoir of a north coast childhood. Terry Glavin has described it as a classic of coast No Ordinary Mike Sobering Dilemma literature in company with Emily Carr’s Michael Smith, Douglas L. Hamilton Klee Wyck, Hubert Evans’s Mist on the Nobel Laureate Introduction by Jean Barman River, and M. Wylie Blanchet’s The Curve Eric Damer & Caroline Astell This fascinating history of of Time. The extraordinary story of liquor in BC focuses on the —by David Stouck UBC professor Michael Smith period of prohibition from who rose from humble begin- 1917 to 1921. Using formerly nings in Blackpool, England, closed police files, Hamilton YVONNE KLAN traces the scandals, corruption 1930-2004 to become a revolutionary gene researcher, philanthropist and and crime that resulted from Yvonne Mearns Klan died in Octo- Nobel Prize winner. its implementation. Includes ber of 2004, a few months after her first archival photos. and only book was printed, following her ISBN 1-55380-014-1 $24.95 ISBN 1-55380-016-8 $21.95 prolonged battle with cancer. When she was born in a logging camp near Victo- Free Will Reckless Women ria, her Dad cut the umbilical cord while Harold Rhenisch Cecelia Frey her 17-year-old Free Will is a mastery of Reckless women inhabit mother read him melody, imagery, and rhythm the spaces of these poems: instructions from by one of Canada’s most women who dare to travel a St. John Ambu- inventive poets. This is without maps or even lance handbook. Rhenisch the trickster “a single sign,” women An affinity for her at his best. who dare the seduction working class ori- “Obsessive and dark, Free Will of cliff-edge leaps into gins led her to twins Shakespeare with Fellini.” deadly waters.... compile and edit a new survey of – MARILYN BOWERING PHOTO pioneer poets of ISBN 1-55380-013-3 $14.95 ISBN 1-55380-017-6 $14.95

B.C. called The TWIGG Old Red Shirt (New Star, $16). It con- No Time to Mourn Chaos in Halifax tains poems and biographical notes dat- Leon Kahn Cathy Beveridge ing back to James Anderson of One of the few partisan Once again Jolene ventures Barkerville, touted as B.C.’s first pub- fighters to write a memoir of back in time. With her twin lished poet. Klan, of North Vancouver, the Holocaust, Kahn takes us brother Michael she finds was encouraged in the project by her back in time to those terrible herself in the midst of the partner Peter Trower, who contributed years during WW II when, after Halifax explosion of 1917. the introduction to her book. 1-55420-006-7 witnessing the complete When Michael attempts to destruction of his village, he change history, the twins are fled to the Polish forests to led to the brink of destruction. FRED COGSWELL fight the German Wehrmacht A compelling sequel to at every dangerous turn. Shadows of Disaster. 1917-2004 ISBN 1-55380-011-7 $21.95 ISBN 1-55380-019-2 $9.95 The long-serving co-founder of The Fiddlehead literary journal and publisher Gold Rush Orphan Shadows of of Fiddlehead Poetry Books (later Goose Lane Editions), Fred Cogswell, died in Sandy Frances Duncan Disaster New Westminster, B.C. on June 20, 2004 “Sandy Duncan is a crackerjack Cathy Beveridge of a heart aneurysm at age 86. Born on storyteller. Gold Rush Orphan Jolene travels back to the November 8, 1917, in East Centreville, says more about what it was year 1903 and finds herself N.B., he was one of the pioneers of Ca- actually like in those heady times in the coal mining town of nadian literature in Atlantic Canada. He of 1898 than history books ever Frank on the eve of Canada’s wrote more than 30 books of poetry, say. What a great addition this is deadliest rock slide. most recently The Kindness of Stars to Canadian young adult Disguised as a boy, Jolene is (Borealis Press, 2004). Like the poets historical fiction. . . .” challenged to save herself and Pauline Johnson and Al Purdy, and nov- – JANET LUNN her grandfather from peril. elist Sinclair Ross, Cogswell was not a ISBN 1-55380-012-5 $10.95 ISBN 1-55380-002-8 $8.95 British Columbian at heart, but he came west to live with his daughter. “I was for- tunate to have known him,” said SFU Ronsdale Press Special Collections director Eric Available from your favourite bookstore or order from LitDistCo Swanick, who visited Cogswell in May Visit our website at www.ronsdalepress.com of 2004. “He was a prodigious scholar, a great supporter of literature, especially poetry, and a great, gentle man.”

13 BOOKWORLD WINTER 6-10 2004