Author Archives: gus

Special School of Music Event

UVic 50th Anniversary Event

Faculty Chamber Music Series:
Music For and In the Moment

Saturday, January 12, 8:00 p.m.
Phillip T. Young Recital Hall
(MacLaurin Building, B-Wing)
Tickets: $17.50 & $13.50

Nearly twenty UVic School of Music faculty will converge on the Phillip T. Young Recital Hall stage on Saturday, January 12 for an extraordinary Faculty Chamber Music concert, Music For and In the Moment, to commemorate UVic’s 50th Anniversary.
On the program: music composed by UVic’s renowned faculty composers. Recognized nationally and internationally for their work, John Celona, Dániel Péter Biró, Rudolf Komorous (faculty alumnus), and Christopher Butterfield will present compositions that were either written for the occasion, or dedicated to this celebration.

“UVic has much to celebrate in its support and educational influence in the arts and music,” says Pamela Highbaugh Aloni. “For 50 years the School of Music has contributed significantly to music in Canada and beyond. This is one way to highlight this distinction and share it with our greater university community.” Highbaugh Aloni, resident cellist and member of the Lafayette String Quartet, is
spearheading the event.

The pieces will range from solo performances such as Biró’s Palimpsests, for solo piano and Salvim (Quails), for solo viola, to Celona’s Networks, featuring the majority of the School’s performance faculty. The concert will also feature the world premiere of Christopher Butterfield’s Omar Khayyam in Belfast – Six Postcards for chamber ensemble.

The concert on January 12 starts at 8:00 p.m. in the Phillip T. Young Recital Hall (UVic MacLaurin Building, B-Wing). Tickets are $17.50 & $13.50 and available from the UVic Ticket Centre (250-721-8480 or http://tickets.uvic.ca/) and at the door. Mingle with the faculty performers and composers in a reception following the concert.

P. K. Page lecture by Sandra Djwa January 10th

The Malahat Review presents:

Finding a Map: Writing a Biography of P. K. Page

Thursday, January 10th
7:30 p.m. (doors at 7)
UVic, Social Sciences and Mathematics Building, Room A110
FREE admission

To mark the third anniversary of P. K. Page’s passing, biographer Sandra Djwa will talk about the late and great poet. Organized by The Malahat Review, Djwa’s lecture, “Finding a Map: Writing a Biography of P. K. Page,” is part of the Faculty of Humanities’ Lansdowne Lecture series.

Sandra Djwa, a professor emerita at Simon Fraser University, published Journey with No Maps: A Life of P. K. Page with McGill-Queen’s University Press in October, 2012 to widespread acclaim, including pride of place on the long list for the 2013 Charles Taylor Prize for Literary Non-Fiction.

Elucidating the process of story-making that biography is, Djwa will shed light on the transformative life voyage that took Page from Calgary to Rio de Janeiro and Mexico City, from pen on paper to oil on canvas, and from Alice in Wonderland to Rumi and Sufism.

As part of the evening, Victoria filmmaker Arthur Makosinski will screen a ten-minute preview from his as-yet unfinished documentary, P. K. Page: Looking for Something.

More info on our website <http://www.malahatreview.ca/events/djwa_lansdowne.html>.

 

British Columbia’s Italian Story

Whoever Gives Us Bread:
The Story of Italians in British Columbia
By Lynne Bowen, D and M Publishers
368 pages, $32.95

Reviewed by Jessica Kluthe

Lynne Bowen’s Whoever Gives Us Bread tells us the full story. Through Bowen’s expert, meticulous research and constant resistance to telling us what can be shown through story, we both learn about the rich history and the lasting contributions of Italian immigrants—a story of a province and a story of Italian-Canadians—and we also see it all unfold.

Bowen, who lives on Vancouver Island, details the complex history of what was happening, simultaneously, in 1860 and the hundred years that followed, on either side of the ocean. This structure gives readers a clear impression of the motivations for such mass emigration and why “26 millions Italians emigrated from a land they had no wish to leave.” We encounter both the social and political situation on the Italian peninsula, and that of the booming United States and Canada. Against this historical backdrop, Bowen reveals how separation shaped the story of individual families.

Almost immediately in Bowen’s narrative, we encounter Maria Valle and read the letters she had dictated to her emigrant husband Felice; a friend later found these papers in Felice’s pocket after he dropped dead among his mules. Through careful research and creatively bringing all the pieces together, Bowen has given us stories that would otherwise be lost; thus she makes evident the weight of immigrants’ contributions to the development of British Columbia. Bowen’s dedication to uncovering the facts is unwavering. The ongoing contract with the reader to make clear what has been lost or what we cannot know is clear and is just one of the aspects that demonstrates her expertise as a historian. For instance, in the story of the Valle family, she explains that what’s “missing from official documents is any mention of where Valle is buried,” and that there was not a photo of his son among those papers found in his pocket. Bowen’s clarification of the absent, the lacunae, reveals the tremendous losses—a dark shadow trailing these migrations: A Felice Valle who, after leaving from the Stazione Marittime in Genoa, never again saw his son.

I was invested in this history as someone whose relatives were among those early Italian-Canadian migrant workers, but I finished this book with the certainty that Bowen’s book, which has won the 2012 F.G. Bressai Prize for Creative NonFiction, is an essential read for all Canadians. Whoever Gives Us Bread: The Story of Italians in British Columbia is an important, substantive, chapter of the Canadian story.

Jessica Kluthe’s first book about a Calabrian midwife titled Rosina, The Midwife (Brindle & Glass Publishers) will be available in March. Readers can preorder a signed copy through her website: www.jessicakluthe.com.

Coming-of-age novels differ in structure

The Shore Girl
By Fran Kimmel
NeWest Press, 229 pages, $19.95

Swallow
By Theanna Bischoff
NeWest Pres, 283 pages, $19.95

Reviewed by Joy Fisher

These two Calgary, Alberta, authors have more in common than their place of residence. During this past year, NeWest Press published coming-of-age novels by each of them about girls growing up in distressed circumstances.

While the general theme may be shared, the authors’ approach and the resulting impact of the stories are markedly different, inviting a comparative analysis. The most striking difference is the structure that organizes the two novels.

While Rebee Shore, the protagonist of Fran Kimmel’s first novel, is given a voice in the telling of her story, the majority of the sections are narrated by others who observe Rebee as she struggles through a chaotic childhood guided, as the book jacket, says, “less than capably by her dysfunctional mother.”

Rebee is shown at various stages of her young life through the eyes of her Aunt Vic, her teacher Miss Bel, an older man, Jake, who treats her like a daughter, and Joey, a young man whom Rebee is able to guide through his own stressful adolescence once she has grown into the wisdom of maturity. Like lights on a multifaceted diamond, the various narrators illuminate the many facets of Rebee’s character, which emerges, finally, as rich in understanding and compassion. Rebee is someone who will touch you; she is someone I wish I could know.

The story in Theanna Bischoff’s novel Swallow, by contrast, is narrated entirely by the protagonist, Darcy. What we see is her perspective, organized primarily around flashbacks to her childhood and young adult years as she and her younger sister, Carly, struggle to survive being reared by a mentally unstable mother.

Carly doesn’t make it; the opening line informs the reader she has died, and the remainder of the book gradually reveals the circumstances of her death and the guilt Darcy feels over her sister’s suicide. By the end of the novel, Darcy has become an unwed mother living with her own mother who has recently also attempted suicide for the second or third time. The language in which this ending is written makes it clear that it is supposed to be somehow uplifting. I was not convinced. Far from wanting to know Darcy, I wanted to give her shoulders a shake and tell her to stop wasting my time and to seek professional help.

The Shore Girl builds to a carefully-crafted climax that reveals the secret of Rebee’s birth and her mother’s life-long distress that provides the satisfaction of unravelling a family mystery. Swallow, on the other hand, merely builds, progressively, the lyrics of the childhood song, There was an Old Lady Who Swallowed a Fly, with a few more lines added at the beginning of each major section. I found the story hard to swallow long before the old lady swallowed the horse and died.

Joy Fisher is a fourth-year student in the Department of Writing

 

 

Holiday Greetings from the Coastal Spectator Crew

Here we are: December 19, 2012, and the wind is whipping through the trees outside my office. Some might call this perfect Coastal Spectator weather: lots of atmosphere, grey skies, slanting rain, Douglas fir branchettes whirling through the air, seed cones bouncing on the sidewalks . . .

This is the time of the year, I always think, to sit and reflect, if one can find a moment, and also to count assorted blessings. And here at Coastal Spectator, we have lots to be thankful for: the support of the Faculty of Fine Arts, dedicated contributors of all ages, lots of cultural events and artifacts to talk and think about, and a passel of smart and dedicated contributors, including the three key people who keep the site looking fresh and lively: Candace Fertile, Contributing Editor, who keeps an eye on poetry and reviews; Cliff Haman, Design Consultant, who advises us on the tricky technical stuff, and Matthew (Gus) Gusul, Online Editor, who posts articles at all hours of the day and night. It takes a lot of people to make a cultural magazine hum, and everyone has done her/his part since we began to expand the site six months ago.

Coastal Spectator needs to rest and ruminate a bit, so we are taking a brief break until early January, which is why you may see no new postings for two weeks. But we have lots of new features pending, so keep on checking us out in the New Year.

We are looking forward to continued growth and hoping for more new contributors in 2013. Warmest best wishes to our reviewers, our readers, and all our creators of cultural content. Happy Holidays to all.

— Lynne Van Luven

Uncovering the lively stories of dead British Columbians

Victoria journalist Tom Hawthorn regularly faces an unusual writing challenge: to create a brief profile that not only reports the fact of a deceased person’s life but tells an engaging and memorable story. It is a challenge that many writers could use to hone their skills. Hawthorn’s new book, Deadlines: Obits of Memorable British Columbians (Harbour Publishing, 288 pages, $26.95) tells 50 fascinating stories within the constraints of a newspaper obituary. It’s a lively read. Lorne Daniel asked Tom Hawthorn five questions about his challenges and his craft.

What are your criteria for selecting deceased people to profile for an obituary? How did you decide which profiles to include in Deadlines?

I write obituaries mostly for the Globe and Mail, so the person’s life needs to be of interest to a national audience. I also have to get the editors at the Globe interested in the person. Canada’s a big country, so competition for the obit page is fierce.

Did the person lead an interesting life? Did they have a public persona of note? Were they unique in some way? Does their life tell us something about life as it is lived in British Columbia, or Canada?

From nearly 500 obits written over the past decade, I’ve culled Deadlines to 50. We were looking for a cross section of people from a variety of backgrounds. Otherwise, we could have published a book of 50 hockey obits. Hmmm. Maybe next year.

What are the factors that result in there being relatively few women in Deadlines?

Let’s see, we’ve got an obit of a pioneering aviatrix (Margaret Fane Rutledge), a pioneering doctor (Dr. Josephine Mallek), a pioneering aboriginal leader (Gertrude Guerin), a pioneering rock journalist Jeani Read). I’m seeing a trend. Roles for women were limited until recent years. People who died in the previous decade mostly made their mark in the 1930s, ’40s, ’50s and ’60s, when opportunities for women were restricted. The obit pages of the future will have more women subjects than they’ve had in the past.

In Deadlines, you’ll also read about the Cougar Lady of Sechelt, about Pearl (the Elephant Girl) Edwards, about Norma Macmillan (the voice of Casper the Friendly Ghost), about Leila Vennewitz, a translator of global renown, and about Jean Crowley of Avalon Dairy.

An obituary is a relatively constrained piece of writing in that the writer is expected to cover certain bases. When you are drafting and revising your work, what do you do to keep each article fresh and engaging?

An obit in the Globe does carry a responsibility to touch on the person’s public life. Honours have to be noted. Like any piece of good writing, an obit can be fresh and engaging if a story is told. I seek out anecdotes that capture personality, details that offer insight on the person.

In your Acknowledgements, you quip that “the subjects are in no condition to complain,” but no doubt many other readers scrutinize each obituary quite closely. What is your approach to fact-checking your work — and do you have any tips for other non-fiction writers?

Whenever I write for the Globe, I am all too aware that among the reading audience will be at least one expert in the area about which I am writing. It is a sobering realization.

I am an obsessive researcher. I feel like I can never have enough newspaper clippings, or book citations, or interviews completed. Still, errors do happen and one can only try to be diligent to avoid the most common and to correct mistakes when they are spotted.
I do make that quip, but in doing so I ask readers to inform me of errors. I’m keen to get the story right. Even after it is written and published. Even after the subject is no longer with us.

Tips for non-fiction writers: When in doubt, leave it out. Keep asking questions until you’re sure about the answer. Never guess.

The British Columbians in Deadlines may not have been ordinary or typical citizens but do you see their lives and experiences as saying something about the nature of British Columbia in general? Are certain story lines more pronounced in BC than we would find elsewhere?

British Columbia attracts (and encourages) dreamers and schemers and Utopians, as well as scammers and scoundrels and con artists. It’s at the end of the road, so it is where people go to re-invent themselves. The province is also a place without the chains of church and class and tradition you’d find in more established societies, so it is not surprising that you find so many pioneers and trailblazers here, from Douglas Jung as the first member of Parliament of Chinese-Canadian ancestry to avant-garde theatre provocateur John Juliani. Life is different out here. Describing how so keeps it interesting.

Lorne Daniel’s selected poems, Drawing Back to Take a Running Jump, was published in 2012. He is working on a book of creative non-fiction about Alberta’s fur trade and oil frontiers.

Two Local West Coast Cookbooks

Flavours of the West Coast: A Cookbook from the Celebrated TV Series
By Cedarwood Productions with Steve Walker-Duncan and guests
Touchwood Editions, 168 pages, $29.95

Seasonings: Flavours of the Gulf Islands
By Andrea and David Spalding
Harbour Publishing, 240 pages, $29.95

Reviewed by Candace Fertile

Being able to taste all the food in these two lavishly illustrated books would be quite the treat; reading about the love poured into the dishes, along with the skill of the food producers and chefs, runs a close second. And, given that the food celebrated in these books represents BC at its best, readers have some splendid taste possibilities ahead.

Flavours of the West Coast: A Cookbook from the Celebrated TV Series is the more basic book of the two. Like the TV program from which it hails, the book features the recipes of numerous chefs, along with such simple classics as vinaigrette. The ingredients are generally available, and if something special is called for — Sea Cider Kings & Spies cider in Cider Glazed Free-Range Chicken with Roasted Apples and Lemons — a note explains that a good quality dry cider will do. The recipes are unfussy, and occasionally the chef’s tip will suggest a packaged substitute, anathema to serious cooks, but a valuable aid to those short of time or skill.

From sauces to cocktails, Flavours covers a wide swath of ingestibles, and the most enticing recipes are the homey stick to your ribs and other body parts concoctions, such as Southwestern Meatloaf from Chef John Cantin of John’s Place in Victoria; the unfortunately named but apparently delicious Toad in the Hole; Moroccan Spiced Vegan Rissoles with Rhubarb Gravy; and Whole-Wheat Ricotta Gnocchi with Vodka Sauce. Seafood and fish lovers will salivate over the numerous dishes collected in the chapter “River and Sea,” and serious locavores will head out with rubber gloves to collect nettles for creaming.

The book’s divisions are somewhat arbitrary: Basic Sauces and Dressings, Forest and Field, River and Sea, Farm Fresh, and City Cuisine, but each is illustrated with pictures of the dishes or the environment. More pictures of the food would be great. But as a dip into the world of BC food and how easy it is to make wonderful meals with local fresh ingredients, Flavours does a lovely job.

Because Seasonings: Flavours of the Gulf Islands is written by a husband and wife team, Andrea and David Spalding, who have written numerous books separately and one other together (The Flavours of Victoria), it’s a little more focused in style than Seasonings. It’s also more adventurous and definitely more precise in its ingredients as the Spaldings are showcasing the food producers of the Gulf Islands. Nettles came up in this book as well. Scavenged food has its charms, and I was delighted to learn that Galiano has Nettlefest, a day-long celebration of all things nettle.

Seasonings uses the seasons as its organizing principle, and it divides each season’s recipes into Beginnings, Entrees, Sides, Finishes, and Celebrating. The book is filled with information about food producers, and the authors are keen advocates of small scale farmers and other food producers. Not only does the book offer dozens of delicious recipes, but also it is an exposition on food diversity and individual creativity. Many people are devoted to organic practices, and the Spaldings let us in on their world. Roger Pettit of Galiano grows over 20 varieties of potatoes. His nickname is “The Potato Man.” Juliet Kershaw and Michael Pierce of Saturna have developed an olive consortium. Debbie Lauzon of Salt Spring makes Soya Novu tofu, and now she can do it with soybeans grown on the island. I can hardly wait to try Mushroom, Runner Bean and Spaghetti Squash with Crispy Smoked Tofu. Or maybe I’ll just get my mitts on the tofu and see what I can do with it. The book includes sources for the specialty foodstuffs and suggestions for further reading. I’m already planning Beddis Blue (a Salt Spring Island Cheese Company product) and Fig Tart for next summer when figs ripen on a friend’s tree. And I think I’ll have to test the Salt Spring Chèvre and Cherry Clafouti with Rye Caramel Sauce. And the Caramelized Onion and Zucchini Galette.

Both of these books provided me with tons of fun, information, and inspiration. They do different things well, and they’d be a welcome addition to any BC cook’s bookshelf. The emphasis on making meals with what can be grown nearby is excellent. Both books avoid any hectoring about what people should eat, other than providing strong evidence that healthy, tasty food makes for happy people.

Candace Fertile loves to read about food and also enjoys eating.

Murder-mystery cares about environment

Business As Usual
By Michael Boughn
Published by NeWest Press
354 pages, $22.95

Reviewed by Jenny Aitken

Michael Boughn, who has written plays, books of poetry and a young adult novel grounded in myth has now tried his hand at a new form: the mystery novel. In Business as Usual, Boughn weaves together a multi-faceted plot line that includes illegal toxic waste dumping, amateur detectives, Mafia, murder and a whole lot of intrigue.

Like most mystery novels, the story begins with a crime – a murder to be more precise. But it is not the police or criminal detectives that step forward to save the day; in fact no one seems to care about Bernie Donatello, the truck driver who went missing along the 89 highway in Toronto. No one, that is, except Clare Dumont and her boyfriend David Sanders. After receiving a call from a friend, Clare, a professor of botany, agrees to investigate the sudden plague that has befallen her friend’s grape vines, seemingly overnight. Her boyfriend David, a struggling poet in need of some excitement, begs to go along. Reluctantly Clare agrees, and they set off for Niagara Falls.

When the pair discovers an abandoned trailer, along with evidence of toxic waste having been emptied into the quarry surrounding the vineyard, they are left with more questions than answers. Is someone purposefully using the quarry as a dumping ground for poisonous chemicals? And if so, why leave a licensed trailer as evidence? Clare wants to let the mystery remain just that, but David, hoping to get a publishable story out of the find, coerces her into looking for answers. And so the two set out to discover the truth, jokingly imitating Nick and Nora Charles. Little do they know that it will throw them into the path of the Mafia and a corrupt cabal of government officials.

Boughn’s novel may follow a “business as usual” approach to a mystery, starting with a violent crime and then introducing the unlikely heroes, but despite its occasionally formulaic nature, the vivid descriptions and lively characters more than compensate.
Business as Usual is bolstered by thorough and engaging character descriptions, and the protagonists are endearing and complex. Clare is a levelheaded professor, but also practices martial arts and can deliver a Charlie’s Angel style spin kick. David, on the other hand, is excitable and goofy, more willing to go head to head against a member of the Mafia than to clean his own apartment.

Despite the witty repartee and exaggerated circumstances throughout, Business as Usual still works as a reminder of the danger of treating the environment like your own personal dumping ground. Without being preachy or melodramatic, this novel demonstrates the importance of paying attention to environmental issues, and the dangers of going one on one with the mob (although I suspect most of us probably knew that.)

Jenny Aitken enjoyed this novel after her end-of-semester assignments

Margoshes’ stories capture Jewish New York

A Book of Great Worth
By Dave Margoshes
Published by Coteau Books, 250 pages, $18.95
Reviewed by Isa Milman

Dave Margoshes captivated me from the first page of his book of linked stories. I thought I was reading a memoir of his father and his family life in New York, but it was only after the first two pieces that I realized that it wasn’t really a memoir, but short stories masquerading as memoir. A beautiful hybrid, a labradoodle of a book. Far from confusing me, this boundary blurring increased my pleasure, as Margoshes’s story-telling is a feat of seamless cross-breeding, bringing out the endearing qualities of each genre, while creating something adorable, in the original sense of this word.

I was grateful to be brought back to Jewish New York of the 1920s and ‘30s, the life and times of a Yiddish newspaperman and his newspaper sons, and the cast of characters that made up their world, a world now virtually gone. I saw the sunset of this world as a young woman in the ‘60s, when I tramped the streets of the Lower East Side, frequenting the delis and coffee shops and dives, reading The Forward ever so haltingly in Yiddish while looking for summer temp jobs, but you don’t have to be Jewish to appreciate Jewish New York. Margoshes brings you home to meet his parents, invites you to the local haunts for a drink and a schmooze, rides the subway with you to Harlem, Brooklyn and Coney Island, even takes you up to the Catskills. He delivers a complete experience, including matters of the heart and soul, in a language and style that’s rich in all the important details and note perfect.

I save my pleasure reading for bed, which is a good and not so good thing when a review is called for, because it’s hard to take notes. Every night for a week I’d read a story or two, before turning out the light with a smile on my face. I managed to put a pink sticky note at the beginning of the title story, which is probably my favourite of the collection, but they are all so damn good. Mazal tov, Dave Margoshes, on a book of great accomplishment.

Isa Milman is a poet and visual artist who has called Victoria home for the last sixteen years. Her first two poetry collections have each won the Canadian Jewish Book Award for Poetry. Her new collection, Something Small to Carry Home, was recently released

Author walked the trail, tells the tale

 

Wild
By Cheryl Strayed
Alfred A. Knopf, 311 pages, $29.00

Reviewed by Frances Backhouse

Two years ago, shortly before my fifty-first birthday, I went backpacking alone for the first time. Although the trip was short in both time and distance – three days, 26 kilometres – I felt immensely proud of my accomplishment. After years of backpacking with companions, I had braved the wilderness on my own and carried with me everything I needed to survive. By the time I picked up Cheryl Strayed’s Wild, my blisters and bug bites had long healed and the blackened nail on my left big toe had finally returned to its normal hue, but I felt an instant affinity for this young woman who had dared to embark on her first solo backpacking trip at half my age and with no previous long-distance hiking experience of any kind. After reading her account of her three-month, 1,770-kilometre journey, I am in awe of her fortitude and spunk.

Strayed was 26 when she first heard about the Pacific Coast Trail, a high-elevation wilderness route that follows the western spine of North America from the California-Mexico border to southern British Columbia. Still deeply mourning her mother’s death four years earlier, estranged from her siblings and stepfather, and in the throws of divorcing a man she loved but could no longer live with, she decided a long, solitary walk in the mountains was what she needed to clear her head. She set off carrying a pack that weighed more than half her body weight (she soon nicknamed it Monster) and a compass she didn’t know how to use. Amazingly, despite searing heat in the Mojave Desert, trail-obliterating snow in the Sierra Nevada, ill-fitting boots to which she lost six toenails, exhaustion, loneliness and scary encounters with menacing men, rattlesnakes and a Texas longhorn bull, Strayed kept going, mile after mile, day after day. And like any good pilgrimage, the journey transformed and healed her.

In a lesser writer’s hands, this story might have become mired in pathos or wandered off into tedium. Strayed keeps it on track with her honest self-analysis, wry humour and strong storytelling instincts. With her deceptively simple, conversational prose, she held my full attention through all the highs and lows of her soul-searching, and the endless, gruelling ascents and descents.

Near the end of her epic trek, Strayed writes of how deeply her feet hurt: “Sometimes as I walked, it felt like they were actually broken, like they belonged in casts instead of boots. Like I’d done something profound and irreversible to them by carrying all this weight over so many miles of punishing terrain. This, and yet I was stronger than ever. Even with that tremendous pack of mine, I was capable of hammering out the big miles now, though at the day’s end I was still pretty much shattered.” Her words might not make you want to tackle the Pacific Coast Trail yourself, but they’re bound to inspire. Whether you’re looking for an outdoor adventure story or a rumination on coming to terms with personal adversity, Wild is sure to satisfy.

Frances Backhouse is a Victoria-based author and magazine journalist. Her travel memoir, Hiking With Ghosts, relates her adventures backpacking the 53-kilometre-long Chilkoot Trail.