Author Archives: grutter

Authors reanimate Canlit for teachers

Reading Canada: Teaching Canadian Fiction in Secondary Schools

By Wendy Donawa and Leah C. Fowler

Oxford University Press

275 pp. $69.95

Reviewed by Susan Braley.

In Reading Canada: Teaching Canadian Fiction in Secondary Schools, Wendy Donawa and Leah C. Fowler rightfully name teachers as curators of Canada’s narrative culture. Teachers collect, preserve and interpret the literary artifacts of Canada and help students to recognize and understand these national treasures. Legendary books like Margaret Atwood’s Surfacing and W.O. Mitchell’s Who Has Seen the Wind are among these artifacts.

But Donawa and Fowler also name a crisis: innumerable national treasures are missing from the “permanent collection” of contemporary Canadian fiction. Reading Canada, a dynamic guide, re-imagines this collection for Canadian teachers, pre-service teachers, and readers at large.

Reading Canada is spacious and inviting:  in each chapter, key thematic and conceptual principles, such as social realism or visual literacy, come alive in the discussion of new Canadian literature; following the discussion, a pedagogical essay explores how to “call students to responses, reflection and research” using this literature. The case studies at the end of each chapter – for instance,  “What Fear Makes Us Do: Beyond Fear and Bullying” and “Classroom Canada Reads” – are highly engaging.

Fowler and Donawa promote literary-quality, contemporary Canadian fiction for secondary-school students. They point out that teachers, under pressure to manage heterogeneous classes and achieve more standardized outcomes, often choose readings already enshrined in the curriculum. The readings they select are likely to be classics like To Kill a Mocking Bird or Lord of the Flies. Although venerable in their own right, these books do not depict “the sociopolitical, geophysical and imaginative landscape” in which today’s Canadian students live.

To represent this landscape, Donawa and Fowler launch an astonishing exhibition of current Canadian authors, all of them worthy of sharing space with the Atwoods and Mitchells in the existing collection. Many of these books enlarge the definition of “Canadian” and introduce crucial issues like belonging and otherness. For example, Lawrence Hill’s award-winning novel The Book of Negroes offers a powerful story of a black woman, who, after years of enslavement, struggles as a “free” Black Loyalist in Canada. This book and others situate the history and politics of race, too frequently seen as only American concerns, in Canada.

Young adult readers themselves often inhabit complex worlds where they deal with problems like poverty and isolation.  Reading Canada provides a trove of recent Canadian books wherein these readers may find their lives mirrored. Carrie Mac’s The Beckoners depicts the cycle of the abused becoming abusers; Sylvia Olsen’s White Girl follows Josie to a reserve, where she is the only white girl.

Such books also include models for problem-solving; for instance, bi-cultural Ashley in Jamie Bastedo’s On Thin Ice builds strength by connecting with Nanurluk, the Great Spirit Bear of her father’s culture.  Such stories provide students with literary examples of building empathy and hope, “one narrative experience at a time.”

Fowler and Donawa observe that the genre of speculative fiction addresses problem-solving on a large scale, its narratives “challenging the boundaries of the possible.”  The chapter on this genre exemplifies how judiciously Donawa and Fowler contextualize, in every chapter, the newest members of the literary “permanent collection” they envisage. In this case, they outline how myth has nourished speculative fiction, and how hybridity and intertextuality teach students to see the elaborate  “matrices” of thought in literature.

Reading Canada’s expansive matrices give the book energy and dimension: readers can compare new books with books already deemed canonical; contemplate digital forms of learning (for example, creating a book report in the form of a Youtube video); explore the “synchronous space between image and word” in graphic novels; and promote crossover texts and “cross-curricular resonance” in the classroom.

With its deep appreciation of narrative text, Reading Canada transcends the confines of “textbook.” Even so, Donawa and Fowler describe their guide as provisional, a work in progress to be amplified by future teacher-curators in Canada.  Their book offers a vision of the permanent collection, not as unitary and official, but as open-ended and personal, to be shaped and reshaped by the “multiple discourses” and readers of English.

Susan Braley is a Victoria writer and former college professor.

 

 

 

 

Puppet theatre delivers adult message

Ignorance: the evolution of happiness

A play created by the Old Trout Puppet Theatre

Directed by Pete Balkwill, Pityu Kenderes and Judd Palmer

Blue Bridge at the Roxy

 January 7-19

Reviewed by Joy Fisher

Shortly after I took my seat in the third row of the Roxy Theatre, uniformed middle-school students came marching in to fill the rows ahead of me. “Oh-oh,” I thought, “someone didn’t do the homework.”

Sure enough, during the 85 minutes of Ignorance: the evolution of happiness, these children were exposed to explicit sex scenes, death by hanging, murders, and a birth face-on to the audience. Only the fact that the characters were puppets tempered the impact of these scenes. (I surreptitiously tried to scrutinize the students’ faces as they left after the play. They didn’t seem traumatized. I can only surmise they didn’t understand what they were watching.)

Despite the innocent-sounding subtitle, “the evolution of happiness,” Ignorance is a dark tale, filled with the ironic conceit that the harder we pursue happiness, the more miserable we are. Beginning with Adam and Eve in a dark Paleolithic cave, the play moves forward to the modern era where, if anything, the plight of humankind is more wrenching than that of their ancestors.

The narrator, Judd Palmer, tells the audience right up front that the average human being is allotted only about 14 ½ minutes of happiness in his or her entire lifetime, “most of it before the age of 12.”

Eve was the transgressor, of course, but in this play, her fault was to have imagination. Having learned to imagine that the world could be better than it was, she taught humankind dissatisfaction. From then on, no matter how much better our inventive minds made the world, it was never good enough. Over and over again, humans are led astray by yellow happy-face balloons that evade their grasp, get popped, or the cords of which wrap around a pursuer’s throat, strangling him, the agonized spasms of his body quieted only by death.

Nicolas Di Gaetano, Viktor Lukawski and Trevor Leigh, dressed in identical black one-piece tights, each with a hood crowned by a single horn, gave voice (mostly cries of anguish) and movement to the puppets. As is fitting for this existential tale, their own movements were at once graceful and athletic, almost, at times, a ceremonial dance. So adept were they that, although always visible, they sometimes seemed to disappear, transforming the puppets from simple rocks, hanks of hair and arms made of sticks into trembling beings filled with human passion and suffering.

The dramatic effects were enhanced by a somber, almost classical, orchestral score and a rear projector used at times to illuminate a wall of the prehistoric cave, a nod to Plato’s Allegory of the Cave.

The Old Trout Puppet Workshop began in Calgary in 1999. Since then, it’s toured seven productions across Canada, into the United States and as far away as Europe. Ignorance was first developed at a creative residency at the Banff Centre for the Arts in 2011, through a process of “Open Creation,” in which the basic idea of the show was posted on the Internet so that anybody could comment, contribute or criticize.

Ignorance is the first show in the new “Presenter’s Series,” a series of contemporary plays, hosted by Blue Bridge at the Roxy. It’s a powerful and auspicious beginning. If you can get to the Roxy before the play closes on January 19, you’re in for a moving experience.

But leave the kids at home.

Joy Fisher graduated from UVic in 2013 with a BFA in writing. She is a member of the Playwrights Guild of Canada.

 

 

Author sees maps as repositories of history

The Land of Heart’s Delight: Early Maps and Charts of Vancouver Island

By Michael Layland

Touchwood Editions

232 pages,  $39.95

Reviewed by Margaret Thompson

            In this meticulously researched and lavishly illustrated book, Michael Layland traces the development of the accurate, detailed maps of Vancouver Island we take for granted today. His own qualifications as a cartographer and historian, with a special interest in exploration and map-making, ensure that this account will more than satisfy the most exacting academic and scientific scrutiny, but rest assured, that does not mean it would appeal only to scholars. What this book does, in terms that even those with the most limited acquaintance with maps can follow, is to conjure Vancouver Island almost literally out of thin air.

            Near the end of the book, Layland refers to the work of the anthropologist Franz Boas, and shows a long list of traditional Kwakwaka’wakw place names Boas collected which demonstrate the First Nation’s intimate knowledge of the coast where they had lived for centuries. By contrast, the earliest European visitors to the North-West in the sixteenth century were venturing into completely uncharted territory, armed only with rumour and speculation and their own courage. The earliest maps of the region reflect this tenuous grip on reality: fragmentary pieces of unattached coastline, possible straits, rocks and mountains covered with tiny hand-drawn trees, straggling lines that peter out when circumstances forced the explorers to turn back. At the time, those early mariners did not even realize they were travelling beside an island, and thought they were mapping the mainland.

            Readers of this book are in much the same position as the very earliest visitors. The island is hidden at first, but as the author leads us through the centuries, its outline becomes more defined, its intricacies more exactly delineated, its salient features given lasting names, each successive map and chart visibly more accurate and reliable, until the familiar outline emerges. Nor is that the end of the process, for the interior of the island remained an unknown quantity for many years, and the surveyors’ maps of areas of development are just as fascinating as those of the ocean-going explorers.

            What is immediately obvious from the author’s entertaining narrative is how much history, how much human experience, is concentrated in these two-dimensional representations of a three-dimensional world. The maps are the products of a variety of motivations: curiosity, the search for a Pacific entrance to the fabled north-west passage, politics and jockeying for power, diplomatic missions, trade, gold, farming, colonization. The maps also immortalize the people involved in their making, for it was as commonplace for explorers and surveyors to name the straits and bays and islands and hills they discovered after themselves, their colleagues, and their vessels, as it is for a botanist to add his name to a new species. So Layland shows that in the very names familiar to all Island dwellers, and easily located on any modern map—Haro, Juan de Fuca (who was actually Greek), Vancouver, Broughton, Meares, Mayne, Baker, Pandora, Cormorant, Quadra, Gabriola, Pemberton, to name just a few—lies the whole history of European involvement in “the land of heart’s delight” at the edge of the world. 

Margaret Thompson’s new novel, The Cuckoo’s Child, is being published this spring.

Homelessness: It’s Complicated

Home is a Beautiful Word

A play collected and edited by Joel Bernbaum

Directed by Michael Shamata

The Belfry Theatre, Victoria

January 7-19, 2014

Reviewed by Joy Fisher

The complexity of homelessness in Victoria B.C. shines like a multifaceted gemstone catching the sun one facet at a time in the world premiere production of Home is a Beautiful Word now playing at the Belfry Theatre.

Commissioned and directed by the Belfry’s artistic director, Michael Shamata, the play is the product of two years of hard work, most notably by playwright/journalist Joel Bernbaum, who interviewed more than 500 people from all walks of life and perspectives, including many homeless people, and then edited the resulting 3,000 pages of transcript into a two-act play that holds its own as both a work of art and an exploration of a persistent social problem. 

Five actors, two women and three men, give voice to 58 individuals in this production of “verbatim theatre”—where all the lines are taken exactly from the transcripts of the interviews. The actors leaned heavily on their dramatic skills to distinguish one speaker from another, and this effort was augmented by changes in costume, positioning on stage and the timing of entrances and exits. One particularly effective example of stagecraft was the use of a rotating stage to simulate a car tour of the downtown neighbourhood conducted by one interviewee.

In spite of this careful attention to craft, however, it was sometimes difficult for the audience to keep track of changes in speakers, although some stood out more clearly than others.   

The expressed intention of the play is to allow theatregoers to see homelessness from a “new perspective.”  For this reviewer, that new perspective came from an interviewee whose story emerged gradually as the play progressed. This person had opened a beauty school, but unanticipated incursions of street people into his facility eventually ruined his business and he lost his own home after he defaulted on his business loan. He emerged from this experience with his own perspective changed, considering the possibility of a new career in the helping professions. What set him apart from the homeless, he believed, was that he still had his “pride.”

Other vignettes that stood out included a monologue by the mother of a homeless woman who described the anguish she experienced because of her daughter’s precarious situation and another of a homeless woman who felt shamed in her daughter’s eyes when she didn’t have enough money to pay for her groceries and had to leave them at the counter.

The play provides no easy solutions to homelessness, but it offers an opportunity to encounter the problem in all its complicated thorniness.

The theme of “pride” and “shame” emerged more strongly in the “afterplay” discussion, when two people rose to share their experiences of homelessness. The woman complained that the play didn’t depict the “positive” aspects of homelessness. She had been banned from many hostels because of her outspokenness, she said, but had found acceptance among her homeless compatriots. When she voiced criticism of some in the homeless “industry,” a number of audience members, presumably working in that industry, rose en masse and left.

The man, who said he suffered from a brain injury, spoke at length about his personal travails. In both cases, members of the audience grew restless at what they clearly considered disruptive behavior and eventually drove these speakers from the hall.

In the play program, Michael Shamata compliments Joel Bernbaum for his “humanity and generosity.” He “made it possible for everyone to feel safe enough to share their most intimate stories,” Shamata said. The interactions during the afterplay discussion stood out in sharp contrast.

 Joy Fisher graduated from the University of Victoria in 2013 with a BFA in writing; she is a member of the Playwright’s Guild of Canada.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Winning novel’s captures war’s high cost

Lucky: A novel
By Kathryn Para
Published by Mother Tongue Publishing
213 pages, $21.95

Reviewed by Jenny Boychuk

Kathryn Para’s debut novel and winner of The Great BC Novel Contest, Lucky: a novel, explores how we distance ourselves physically and mentally as a way to try to adapt to unthinkable tragedy and suffering.

Anika Lund is a photojournalist working on assignment in the war-torn Middle East when she meets Viva from Syria, a woman in search of her husband’s kidnapper, whom she believes to be in Fallujah, Iraq. Ani’s job is to take photos—of dying children, of broken buildings and dust—that will explain the state of the Middle East to westerners in a way words cannot.

Given the machine gun and the destruction of Murad’s house, Murad, perhaps, is the man she seeks, the one with ties to Zayid’s terrorist franchise that ripples through the Middle East. But on the ground, cradling his head, he looks less like a terrorist than an ordinary man. She takes another photograph of him, and the acid in her stomach lifts, swirls and threatens. Trembling comes next, followed by cold sweat. She lowers the camera and stows it in her bag. Maybe this trip will have been worth the effort. Maybe this time she has taken the photograph that will stop the war.

Ani joins Viva in hopes of finding the photographs that will change everything. Eventually, they are joined by a cocky journalist named Alex, with whom Ani has fallen in love. Together, and well-aware of the dangers that await, they devise an intricate plan to reach their destination. But when Viva’s search for her husband’s kidnapper grows fiercer, something terrible happens in Fallujah.

The novel alternates between the past in the Middle East, and the present in Vancouver, B.C.  Each thread is written in the present tense, which allows the reader to witness the urgency of Ani’s time abroad as she relives it. Para has done something structurally fascinating: like a camera lens, the story fluctuates between zooming the reader uncomfortably far into Ani’s mind post-trauma in Vancouver, and zooming back out to create distance as Ani, Viva and Alex fight for their lives in Fallujah. The pieces of the story that take place in Vancouver are written in first-person point-of-view, from Ani’s perspective, while the parts set in the Middle East are written in a limited third-person point of view, also from Ani’s perspective.

Back in Vancouver, Ani struggles to live with what has happened. Her therapist prescribes a concoction of different anti-depressants and tranquilizers, which Ani mixes with alcohol in an  attempt to escape reality. Then, at a party, Ani’s publisher introduces her to another journalist, Levi, who she thinks might be able to help Ani with her book, to persuade her to open the box of photos she can’t bring herself to look at. Levi is mystified by Ani’s brokenness and, though it isn’t long before the two become locked together physically, she won’t let him into her mind to see what she saw.  By the time a reader reaches the end of the novel, it is not difficult to see why.

Levi finds me later under a tree in the park. I explain that the willow roped me, twisted me around and hog-tied me like a calf, hid me under the dead leaves. My sweet Levi. My swagger man in his tight jeans, my cool-word man with his Mac computer, my investigator man with his laid-back methods. He waits for people to open themselves up. He’s a tricky man.

While the ambitious structure is successful, Ani’s internal first-person voice is much more engaging and interesting. The contrast between voices is obvious but not jarring, and mirrors the premise so well that Para can easily get away with it.

Lucky explores notions of reality and memory and how we skew them in order to try to move forward—or even just exist. The novel succeeds portraying both the deterioration of a civilization and the singular self—and shows how we continue to do the enemy’s work long after we’ve escaped them.

Jenny Boychuk is a BFA graduate about to launch post-grad studies in writing.

Youth fiction worthwhile despite predictability

Three Little Words

By Sarah N. Harvey

Orca Book Publishers

218 pages, $12.95

Reviewed by Marcie Gray

Sarah N. Harvey tries to say a lot in Three little words. Her novel for young adults ranges over the various facets of family life as she tells the story of 16-year-old Sid. He was a toddler when his mother abandoned him and his foster parents took him in, raising him on one of the Northern Gulf Islands. He leads what seems to be a contented life – the only hint that he is unsettled is the comic strip he draws of a boy who is a lonely outcast. Then a friend of his birth mother arrives on the scene, and Sid learns he has a step-brother and a grandmother in Victoria. Sid, pale and wiry and sporting lots of red curls, discovers his brother has curly hair too – but it’s black, along with his skin. From here, Harvey leads us on a journey into what makes a family, as she explores foster families, birth parents, and siblings who are different races.

These are intriguing issues for the intended audience – teenagers who are figuring out their own place in the world. But this kind of audience also demands action right from the start, and Harvey doesn’t deliver. Instead she tries to hook readers by presenting a mystery: an eight-year-old girl arrives at Sid’s house seeking foster care. Her past is unclear, but whatever has happened, she is now afraid of males and speaks only to say please and thank you. Harvey moves from this mystery to a quick but thorough introduction of the main characters, and along the way, even manages to throw in some satirical sexual humour that will appeal to this audience. But it may not be enough to keep them reading past the first couple of chapters.

If these teen readers stick with the story, they’ll be rewarded. Harvey, an author from Victoria, has written nine books for children and young adults, and her prose is polished, her narrative engaging. She introduces more mystery and a manhunt, along with the ever-present question: what does the title of the book mean? What are the three little words? There are lots of chances to guess along the way, and Harvey has fun with the chapter titles, giving each chapter three words, from “Have a Heart” to “Make My Day.”  It’s entertaining just trying to interpret how she names each chapter.

The plot moves smoothly, if a bit predictably. In a young adult novel, the pacing has to stay on track, and on occasion that’s accomplished rather conveniently, when one character or another seems to read Sid’s mind. But these are minor matters. Three little words takes major themes such as family and tolerance and respect, and wraps them in a tasty novel.  I hope teen readers will dig in.

Marcie Gray used to report and produce for CBC Radio. Today she’s writing her own youth fiction.

Rick Estrin and the Nightcats bring the Blues to BC

By Michael Luis

After meeting in 1976 in Berkeley, California, guitarist Charlie Baty and vocalist/harmonica player Rick Estrin formed Little Charlie and the Nightcats. After taking their modern take on Chicago-style blues all over the world for over 30 years, Baty retired in 2008, but Estrin has continued to tour and record with his namesake. The award-winning group is visiting Vancouver’s FanClub on December 8th to play new tunes from their 2013 release “One Wrong Turn,” and to share some favourites from the back catalogue.

Coastal Spectator: Any notable experiences playing in Vancouver in the past?

Rick Estrin: Oh, man. I got lots of memories from playing all over Canada. For Vancouver specifically, we’ve been playing there since the 1980s. We were coming up there regularly in a time when blues had a little resurgence in popularity.

CS: For the past few years you’ve been the bandleader and namesake of the Nightcats. How has this experience compared to years past when it was Little Charlie and the Nightcats?

RE: Part of my job is still the same: writing the songs and fronting the band. But I just have more responsibilities now with taking care of all the parts of it that require feigning adult behavior (laughs). There was somewhat of a learning curve, but I’ve been around it so long. And with Little Charlie, if I ever needed to know anything, he would tell me. I don’t know if I’d call him a control freak, [but] he didn’t really feel comfortable relegating the responsibilities [like] I have.

CS: You guys recently released a record, One Wrong Turn. How did the creative process compare with past releases?

RE: Well, the creative process started the same way. It’s the same thing. I’ll write songs. J., our drummer, he’s always writing songs so that’s not a problem for him. I like to feature him on at least one song. The rest of the process is similar to the way we always did it. I write the song at home on the guitar, and I’m a primitive guitar player so in a way I have a better chance of coming up with something a little different because I don’t know what I’m doing (laughs). So I’ll come up with these things and show them to Kid (guitarist) or show them to the whole band and they would come up with ideas. On this record it seemed that every song they would come up with something that was on the same page— that was what I wanted but even better. They would add things to it that just worked and would make my vision for the song come into focus.

CS: Nice, so it was just naturally organic the way the songs all built up.

RE: Yeah, there was just a synergy in the studio this time. It’s not like I’ve never had that before, but the synergy dial was turned up to 10, man.

CS: You were recently nominated for the B.B. King Entertainer Award at The Blues Awards. Looking at its namesake, B.B. King, he’s still doing it and going strong at his old age, so is that inspiring to see as a fellow blues musician?

RE:(Laughs) Yeah, yeah. The guy that was my role model for that was a guy that actually said he taught B.B. King a lot of stuff on the guitar, Robert Lockwood, Jr. He was even older than B.B. and he was a great guitar player. He was a good friend of mine, and just a role model for me for how to be old. He would show up, and carry in his own amplifier at 90-years-old.

CS: To wrap things up, what keeps you playing the blues after all these years?

RE: It’s my life. It’s all I know. If I didn’t do that, I mean, it’s not like I have hobbies and stuff. That’s my life. I can’t imagine what I’d do without it and it’s been my life for close to 50 years.

CS: Great answer, man. Anything else you’d like to add for your fans in Vancouver or anywhere else who may be reading this?

RE: Anybody who can make the show, anyone within driving range of Vancouver, make it to the show. I guarantee you’ll be happy. I’ll personally give you your money back if you don’t leave there feeling great.

More about Rick Estrin and the Nightcats at www.rickestrin.com.

Michael Luis is a Victoria student, writer, filmmaker, and musician. Check him out at www.michaelacluis.wordpress.com.

Rakoff’s last work darkly funny

Love, Dishonor, Marry, Die, Cherish, Perish
By David Rakoff
Doubleday
113 pp, $32
Reviewed by John Barton

Anyone who follows This American Life or Wiretap will know of David Rakoff, the Canadian-born humourist, who died of cancer in 2012 at 47. Journalist, broadcaster, screenwriter, actor, and artist, he published three books of essays that won two Lambda Literary Awards and a James Thurber Prize for American Humor. Hardbound with a die-cut cover, Love, Dishonor, Marry, Die, Cherish, Perish was published in the summer of 2013, a year after the author’s death. A novel in verse, it is illustrated by Toronto cartoonist Seth; his portraits of Rakoff’s characters sit on the heavy creamy stock disingenuously and resistant to bleed-through.

Rakoff’s narrative strategy is a memorable example of six degrees of separation. The characters—or clusters of characters, all mostly strangers to one another—are scattered in time and place from New York to Chicago, Burbank, and San Francisco, each sometimes making only one star turn or cameo as the twentieth century unfolds from just before the First World World War to the late-century AIDS crisis, before spilling in rhyming couplets into the third millennium. As one storyline is cast off for another, readers may wonder if the spun-out narratives will ever twine into one coherent thread. Hints of how they might are dropped here and there. For example, the first story closes with Margaret, a 13-year-old, Chicago meatpacker escaping an abusive stepfather, being saved from the deathly cold in a westward-hurtling boxcar by a Yiddish-whispering hobo, who holds her inside his coat. In the next story, we learn he is Hiram, the dying father of Clifford, an artistic boy growing up queer in Los Angeles during the 1920s.

Because any real ties between the book’s characters are few, we turn Rakoff’s hundred-and-first page (with only twelve to go) speculating that he may have died before he could shore up his shaky narrative arc. However, he pulls everything together in the last twenty lines. That we close the book appreciating how tenuously his characters are interconnected, even if his characters never do themselves, permits Love, Dishonor, Marry, Die, Cherish, Perish to make an impassioned claim for poignancy.

This novel in verse is no Changing Light at Sandover; nor is it another Autobiography in Red, but it does belong to a tradition of light verse that Americans have excelled at since the Gilded Age (Rakoff became a U.S. citizen in 2003). It’s as entertaining as anything Don Marquis or Dorothy Parker wrote. Anyone familiar with “The Night Before Christmas” should easily recognize the verve of Rakoff’s versifying ambitions.

Though I found his reliance on near-exact rhymes exhausting, his wit amused me throughout. A good example is a passage from the point of view of Sloan, a control-freak realtor who lives an Upper East Side dream that her incontinent mother-in-law renders nightmarish:

The family was blessed and seemed wholly awash
In the kind of good fortune one doesn’t dare dream,
Near-parodically copious, bursting the seams
Of the sky; heaven-sent, like the biblical gift of the manna,
Until her thoughts happened to land upon Hannah.
One Hannah hint seems to be all that it takes
For Sloan’s inner Lexus to slam on the brakes.

I may not own a car, but my solar plexus spasmed with mirth.

Rakoff also succeeds at moving his readers. We last see Clifford, one of his few recurring characters, as he laboriously succumbs to HIV:

What a difference a day makes. Now times that by twenty.
Clifford was hollow, a Horn of Un-Plenty.
Tipping the scales at one-fifteen at most
He was more bone than flesh now, and less man than ghost.
The CMV daily lay waste to his sight
Now, it was all Renoir smearings of light,
I loathe Renoir, Clifford thought, chocolate-box hack.
Chuckling, his hacking cough wrenching his back.

For light verse, this passage is very dark, affirming that such poetry can be serious honestly. A gay man, Rakoff lived in New York through the AIDS crisis and must have witnessed countless friends and acquaintances die. One cannot help imagining their deaths returned to him while writing the very darkest moments of this posthumous book.

I also wonder if the chocolate-box reference is not a wry putdown of Forrest Gump, that loathsomely saccharine movie that for far too long allows its eponymous central character to recount his bathetic life. Despite the light-footedness of this verse, there’s nothing too sweet about Love, Dishonor, Marry, Die, Cherish, Perish. Though their stories are often pathetic, pathos lightens how Rakoff chose to let his characters live out what we see of their lives.

John Barton is the editor of The Malahat Review.

Hearing Voices at The Belfry

By Hanna Leavitt

Earlier this fall, Belfry Theatre patrons may have wondered at the contingent of blind and visually impaired patrons and guide dogs in attendance at a particular performance of Goodnight Desdemona (Good Morning Juliet).   Like the other blind people, I was there to experience the Belfry’s first-ever described theatre-arts event, a service provided by VocalEye Descriptive Arts Society. This Vancouver-based non-profit organization delivers live-audio description services for the blind, the first of its kind in Canada to do so.

I asked my friend Kristi to check out the show with Calvin and me. Calvin’s my guide dog. He’s pretty keen on the theatre, although sometimes he does forget it’s acting. We showed up 45 minutes before the start of the play to register with Larry, the VocalEye representative. We were each issued a single earpiece headphone along with a receiver with its own on/off and volume control. Larry escorted us to our front-row seats where we settled in for the performance.

“Turn on your receiver,” said Kristi, “Someone’s already started describing.” I flipped my receiver on and adjusted the volume. Sure enough, a clear, soft-spoken voice came through my earpiece.

“Good afternoon and welcome to VocalEye’s described performance of Goodnight Desdemona . . . by Ann-Marie MacDonald, directed by Ron Jenkins and produced by the Belfry Theatre. I’m Steph Kirkland, and I’ll be your describer for today. I’m describing from the old follow spot booth behind the balcony, left of centre.”

Kirkland, a 20-year veteran of the Vancouver theatre scene, also reads textbooks for the blind at Vancouver’s Langara College. “When I saw the call for audio theatre describers for blind people, it was a natural fit,” she says.  She has since formed a non-profit society called VocalEye that trains and promotes the services of audio describers to the theatre community. “It’s my goal that this service be sustainable,” says Kirkland. “I would love for it to be available at theatres across Canada.”

Fifteen minutes before curtain, Kirkland provided brief descriptions of the set, characters and costumes via our wireless earphones.

“There are five performers in this production, three women and two men. The main character is Constance Ledbelly, assistant professor at Queen’s University, played by Daniela Vlaskalic. All the other characters are played by the remaining four cast members. The central location is Constance’s office in the basement of Queen’s University. The back wall of her office is completely filled with nine built-in bookcases, each about 3 feet wide and 16 feet tall. The shelves are filled with leather-bound books, their spines embossed with gold and tagged with library labels. Dog-eared sheets of foolscap, a table fan, portable radio, stapler, lamp, clock, mug, and other odds and ends are also crammed in among the books.”

She continued her thorough set description, right down to the blue recycle box alongside Constance’s work space. I now had a picture in my head of the set, the same set that sighted audience members took in with a simple glance.

“I’ll be back in a few minutes when the play starts,” said the voice. The earpiece went silent.

“This should be good,” said Kristi. I agreed. I attend plays from time to time, but it’s frustrating to miss body language and other actions that aren’t always evident from the dialogue alone.

Moments later, the Belfry’s manager took the stage, welcomed everyone and invited us to enjoy the performance.

The voice was back.

“Darkness. Flash of light: Man smothers woman with pillow. Flash of light: Young woman plunges dagger into her belly. Flash of light: Constance Ledbelly in red toque slowly lowers phone receiver to desk – picks up leather manuscript, drops it in recycling bin – plucks white feather from her toque, drops it in.”

Okay, so I knew what the set looked like and what was happening. I wondered about the character of Constance. I didn’t wonder for long though. The voice must have read my mind.

“Constance Ledbelly is in her 30’s, large boned, slim and gangly. Her square face is pale, without makeup, and flanked by two scrawny, brown pigtails. Her large, wire-frame glasses are taped in the middle. She wears a full set of blue-grey long johns under a purple, t-shirt, hand-knit sweater vest, a drab, plaid pleated skirt and knee-high, black rubber gumboots. To top it off, she wears a bright red toque with a big pom-pom on top, a white feather pen tucked in the brim. She writes with this feather pen in green ink.”

Okay, now I had it – the set and the eccentric main character.

All freeze.

“Janitor mops floor, smokes cigarette. One hand on mop. Lets go of mop – the handle stays upright.”

Kristi and I laughed along with the sighted audience members, sharing a comedic moment in real time. What a treat not to have to tap a friend on the shoulder and whisper, “What just happened there? Why is everyone laughing?” I was hooked. The descriptions were concise, informative and blended effortlessly with the action. Kirkland elaborated on the process a theatre describer goes through prior to a performance.

“I typically attain a copy of the script, attend the play at least three times and take notes. Then I spend several hours working on the actual descriptions I’ll use during the play.” Preparing for the play and describing it can take as much as 20 hours per production, according to Kirkland. Her training and skill were evident as she quietly provided just enough detail to inform but not so much that it interrupted the dialogue and action.

VocalEye is committed to offering a comprehensive, theatre-going experience for blind patrons with its three-fold package. Through its Theatre Buddies service, volunteers meet blind patrons at a designated, accessible location. Buddies then guide patrons to the theatre. The audio describer takes over during the performance. But wait, there’s more. After the performance, we were invited to stay for a touch tour.

Kristi, Calvin and I ascended the stairs to the stage along with six other blind patrons. The touch tour was fabulous, adding an entirely new layer of enjoyment to the play. Belfry staff, actors and VocalEye representatives assisted us in our exploration of the set and props. We met the actors. We touched Desdemona’s gown with its elaborately beaded bodice, Romeo’s and Othello’s swords and daggers, the masks worn at the ball and some of the 1,500 hollowed-out books that lined the set’s floor-to-ceiling bookshelves. Touching the costumes and props fleshed out the theatre experience for me, the finishing touch to an enjoyable afternoon. The Belfry contracted with VocalEye to describe one matinee performance per run this season. Will Calvin and I be back for another described show? You bet we will.

Hanna Leavitt is in the second year of her MFA in Writing.

 

 

Collection chronicles difficult lives

Red Girl Rat Boy

By Cynthia Flood

Biblioasis

169 pages, $18.95

Reviewed by Judy LeBlanc

Cynthia Flood, winner of the Journey Prize and the Western Canada Gold Award, amongst others, has published one novel and four collections of short stories. Her latest, “Red Girl Rat Boy” chronicles lives not easily led by those not easy to love; are any of us?  Marcia, in the title story, is sickly obsessive;  Ellen, in “One Two Three One,” rejects her own child.  A host of battle-weary activists spar with one another in “Blue Clouds” and “Dirty Work.” In “Eggs and Bones,” a resentful young mother lies in bed listening to her husband cook breakfast. “ Foods catch, stick on that scaliness, scorch.” Syntax is frequently truncated and I’m disarmed, on edge, as if asked not to get too comfortable.

With the agility of an acrobat, Flood navigates shifts and turns within time, often lifetimes, while employing a free indirect style that catapults the reader from a character’s most immediate experience to retrospective narration and then back again. In “To Be Queen,” the best piece in the collection, Kenny, whose relationship with his lover has just ended, recalls growing up with siblings in a family where a sister died before he was born. With his remaining siblings, in the way that we do, he seeks to piece together the particular grief that shaped him. “Each sibling privately recalls their first sight of Mom crying.”  In a psychic distance that could not be much closer, we are with Kenny in a playful childhood attack from his older sister’s friends; “They’re on me. First I laugh, then there are too many eyes and fingers, open mouths, teeth.” And a few sentences later, with a skillful widening of the aperture; “Thus I learned that if you don’t give a shit, or credibly pretend not to, even in defeat you have power.” At the end of this story, I am left yearning that my own children may never live with the absence of one another. Such is the emotional impact of this raw and honest writing.

Flood’s cast of characters cavort, love, grieve and rebel between the complicated layers of their lives. A montage of ailing elders subvert the meaning of the story’s title, “Care,” in a macabre nursing home setting. Several stories look back to Vancouver in the 70’s and 80’s. “Addresses” is a kaleidoscopic glimpse into the lives of those who rented in the West End at the time. It is, paradoxically, their quirkiness that makes Flood’s characters both recognizable and tender. In “Such Language,” Lauren’s mother, out of love, leaves a foul message on the machine: a wake-up call in code, the only language mother and daughter are capable of speaking.

These stories are told in a voice that navigates like an underground stream through the deepest channels of the psyche. These stories are felt in the marrow.

Judy LeBlanc is a fiction writer from Fanny Bay. She’s one of the founders of the fledgling Fat Oyster Reading Series. http://judyleblanc.com/