#67 STRONG WORDS FOR A POLITE NATION $8.00 can $7.00 us DISPLAY UNTIL AUGUST 2014 Million-dollar pro-oil misinformation campaigns Muzzling of scientists, researchers & academics Systematic efforts to silence environmentalists Resist Big BRotheR For more than 40 years A\J has been speaking for the environment. Share in our tradition of publishing leading-edge environmental journalism with a focus on Canadian perspectives & challenges. Get 6 issues of A\J for only $35 and own the satisfaction of knowing that 2+2 will still equal 4 because you’re helping to speak for the earth. Get the facts, witness the folly & be informed in the fight for the planet. suBscRiBe today aNd help Keep speech FRee alternativesjournal.ca/subscribe AJ_Resist_fullpg_SubTerrain_Feb2014.indd 1 14-03-03 12:39 PM CONTENTS Volume 7 IssuE #67 issn: 0840-7533 | since 1988 EDITORIAL | Brian Kaufman RecoNcIliatioN poems 3 deepEr ThaN mErE coincidence POETRY | Jordan Abel COMMENTARY | Peter Babiak 13 plEaSE Check aGainst dElIvEry 4 bIaNCa aNd ThE blaCkbIrdS POETRY | Juliane Okot Bitek FICTION | Robert Nathan 14 a lOvE lETTEr Or considErING reconcilIaTION 10 lOOkS just lIkE ThE SuN in CaNada POETRY | Joanne Arnott NON-FICTION | Stephen Osborne TruTh aNd wreck (ExCErpT) 16 ThE coincidENCE prOblEm 15 POETRY | Daniel Zomparelli POETRY | Beth Goobie to fIll ThE Sky 19 hOpE quest 15 FICTION | Laura Hartenberger 20 thE CaNvaS lush TRIumphANT lITeRARy AwARds compeTITIoN 2013 RuNNeRs-up POEM | April Salzano 25 ThE rOad to coincidENCE rOad FICTION | Adam Elliot Segal 50 rIChard FICTION | Alban Goulden 26 aS If POETRY | Raoul Fernandes 54 SIlENCE SplaShING EvErywhErE (5 pOEmS) FICTION | Jon Paul Fiorentino 30 it SEEmS lIkE SEx IS a wEIrd ThaT uSEd to happEN to mE somETImes Book ReVIews FICTION | Caroline Szpak Report from the Interior by Paul Auster, Needs Improvement by 34 SlEEp ON 57 Jon Paul Fiorentino, The Iraqi Nights by Dunya Mikhail, Cyclists: Photographs by Lincoln Clarkes, Under Budapest by Ailsa Kay, A Recipe for POETRY | Emily Davidson Disaster & Other Unlikely Tales of Love by Eufemia Fantetti, How Poetry 39 pErSImmON Saved My Life: A Hustler’s Memoir by Amber Dawn, The Hypothetical Girl by Elizabeth Cohen, Hollow City: The Second Novel of Miss Peregrine’s Peculiar POETRY | Philip Quinn Children by Ransom Riggs, Black Liquor: Poems by Dennis E. Bolen 40 I rEad ThE NEwS today Oh bOy NON-FICTION | Jim Christy featuRe artisT: 42 ChaNCE JulIe flett FICTION | Gerilee McBride Julie Flett is a Vancouver artist, 46 GENE, GENIE children’s book author, and illustrator. FICTION | Rachel Shabalin 49 SpectaCles The cover image for this issue was inspired by a series of coincidences that I experienced over the past subTeRRAIN is published 3 times a year (Spring, Summer, Fall/Winter) by the month: both my son and a friend sub-TERRAIN Literary Collective Society. All material is copyright of subTerrain, the shared stories with me about the authors, 2014. subscription rates: individuals: Canada/US: One year $18; Two years $32; red flowering currant; I stumbled Elsewhere: One year $24; Two years $38. institutions: One year $24; Two years $38. upon an article about dolphin calls PHOTO: TAylor Ferguson manuscripts & artwork are submitted at the author’s or artist’s own risk and will not be being turned into kaleidoscopic flower patterns using sound wavelets shortly returned or responded to unless accompanied by a self-addressed stamped envelope after having a dream about dolphin ‘petals’ while working on a book about bearing sufficient postage for the submission’s return. Those submitting material from outside Canada must include sufficient International Reply Coupons to cover the mate- dolphins. My sister had also called earlier in the month to tell me about a dream rial’s return. Please allow 4-6 months for a response. Indexed in the Canadian Literary she’d had about our mother; we realized we had both dreamt the same dream. Periodicals Index and the American Humanities Index (AHI). Canadian Publications Mail Products Sales Agreement No. 40065490. Postage paid at MPO, Vancouver, BC. Date of issue: Spring 2014. All correspondence to: subTerrain Magazine, PO Box 3008 Apology: Issue #66 featured an error in Sandra Alland’s story, “Chance”. The line, They pushed Main Post Office, Vancouver, BC V6B 3X5 canada, tel: 604-876-8710 fax: 604-879- their glasses up onto their not-so-pale Canadian nose, and exhaled. was incorrectly published as 2667 email: [email protected]. No e-mail submissions—queries only, please. Printed “…their not-so-pale Canadian noses...” Our apologies to Ms. Alland. A corrected version of and bound in Canada. Sniffing the ether @ www.subterrain.ca her story can be found at our website, subterrain.ca First Books, First Voices They Called Me Number One Secrets and Survival at an Indian Residential School Bev Sellars Xat’sull Chief Bev Sellars spent her childhood in a church-run residential school whose aim it was to “civilize” Native children through Christian teachings, forced separation from family and culture, and strict discipline. In the first full-length memoir to be published out of St. Joseph’s Mission at Williams Lake, BC, Sellars tells of three generations of women who attended the school, interweaving the personal histories of her grandmother and her mother with her own. She tells of hunger, forced labour, and physical beatings, often with a leather strap, and also of the demand for conformity in a culturally alien institution where children were confined and denigrated for failure to be white and Roman Catholic. Winner of the 2014 George Ryga Award for Social Awareness in Literature $19.95 / 256 pp / Non-fiction: Autobiography / 978-0-88922-741-5 The Place of Scraps Jordan Abel “Jordan Abel has moved a poetics of erasure into an inventive and deeply unsettling, stir-it-up interdisciplinary modality.” – Arc Poetry Shortlisted for the 2014 Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize Shortlisted for the 2014 Gerald Lampert Memorial Award $19.95 / 272 pp / Poetry / 978-0-88922-788-0 Talonbooks www.talonbooks.com Follow us on Facebook and Twitter 2 << EDITORIAL >> dEEpEr ThaN mErE COINCIdENCE ometime in March of 2013 I was at the main post offi ce mailing Volume 7 no. 67 several parcels, review copies of books destined for US magazines publishing since 1988 and journals . or maybe it was contributor copies of the maga- publisher/editor-in-chief s zine, fi ve apiece sailing off, at alarming prices, to destinations across Brian Kaufman the country and into the US. I was bantering with the postal clerk, as I editorial collective often do, paying by cheque for services rendered, noting my BC driver’s Peter Babiak, Jenn Farrell, Hilary green, Karen green, license number on the back, lest Canada Post Corp needed to track me Odette Hidalgo, Robert Hughes, down in the event that the cheque bounced, which wouldn’t be a huge Brian Kaufman, Patrick Mackenzie, stretch of the imagination, issuing, as it was, from a small literary maga- Caroline Mcgechaen, Jim Oaten, zine. He took the cheque, inspected it for date, signature, amount and Aimee Ouellette, Paul Pitre, Shazia Hafi z Ramji, Christine Rowlands, then slipped it into the drawer beneath his station. The receipt was zzzzt- Robert Strandquist zzzzt-zzzzt printing out and he soon tore it off and circled the tracking numbers for the various packages that had just been processed. I then book review editor Karen green realized I had forgotten to note the cheque number, which I needed to write on the receipt so that our bookkeeper wouldn’t get on my case advertising Janel Johnson about a receipt without a paper trail. I apologized for not noting the number of the cheque and the clerk obligingly pulled it from the drawer production/layout Derek von Essen and informed me that it was cheque 1996. I thanked him and said, It was a good year. He chuckled and said, Yes, we’ll party like it’s 1996! We publishing assistant both laughed, being about the same age, and realizing (however poi- Natasha Sanders-Kay gnantly) that our heavy partying days were long behind us. We wish! he cover & interior illustrations said and we both laughed again. I thanked him, wished him a good day, Julie Flett and headed off to check our postal box that is located in the main lobby general guidelines just through the doors from the service counter area. I was still smirk- Fiction: max. 3,000 words ing, but wondering, wasn’t the line—we’re gonna party like it’s 1999? But Creative Non-Fiction & Commentary: max. 4,000 words; Poetry: no unsolicited maybe that was his joke? poetry submissions. Photographers and Even in the age of email our post offi ce box is regularly stuffed with illustrators: please send samples, mail—manuscripts, query letters, bills, cheques, subscriptions, review or direct us to your website. copies, and assorted junk mail. And still, after twenty-fi ve years, I feel letters are welcome a sense of excitement when I pull the mail from the box, load it onto We encourage your comments about my arm, and carry it to one of the granite slab sorting counters to sift what you fi nd between our covers. Letters become the property of through and examine the names and addresses on the top left-hand cor- subTerrain magazine and may be ner of the envelopes. One of the most enjoyable aspects of running a edited for brevity and clarity. literary magazine that publishes book reviews is receiving the new re- bookstores & retail outlets leases from our publishing colleagues across the country. subTerrain is available in Canada from And on that particular day in March of last year there was a pack- Magazines Canada 416-504-0274 and in age from Anansi and I tore it open immediately, freed its contents, and the US from International Periodical Distributors (IPD) 1-800-999-1170.