Category Archives: Interviews in 5 questions

Poet’s new book ruminates upon death

Brentwood Bay writer Eve Joseph’s new book, In the Slender Margin:  The Intimate Strangeness of Death and Dying, is essential reading for everyone.  She recently took the time to talk to Coastal Spectator Editor Lynne Van Luven. Joseph’s first book of poetry, The Startled Heart, was nominated for the Dorothy Livesay poetry prize, as was The Secret Signature of Things.  She is the recipient of the P.K. Page Founders Award for Poetry.  Joseph will launch In the Slender Margin on Wednesday, June 11 at 7 p.m. at Munro’s Books.

Eve, I so admire this profound book of nonfiction, which reads like the exploration of a lifetime. Can you talk about how long ago you started this book “in your mind” and how the compilation of the essays came together for you?

The idea for the book started in the fall of 2005. One year before I left hospice. I was burning out – saturated with images and thoughts about death – and that wasn’t something we talked about in any organized way at hospice. I clearly remember calling one of my colleagues from a phone booth in the Mayfair Mall and saying I could not continue working with the dying if I couldn’t talk about the work. We both agreed this was badly needed and, over the period of a couple of days, we contacted three other friends we worked with and started a group. We decided we would meet once a month, talk about death and drink whiskey. The Women and Whiskey group as we called ourselves. It was from those meetings that the book began to take shape.

I first attempted to write about death in my first book . . .  the poems –  ghazals – really only touched the surface but the associative nature of the form allowed me to use imagery without narrative and that was a breakthrough for me. When it came to this book, I knew I didn’t want to write a traditional narrative; rather, I wanted to build a kind of thematic resonance. One of the most immediate challenges was how to write about death without sentimentality and writing “fragments” as opposed to continuous story helped me do that. It was also really important to me to avoid the kind of false wisdom and new- age language often found in books on death and dying. It helped to have works by Joan Didion and Annie Dillard close by. Didion for her clarity of thought and Dillard for her imagery and the marvelous way she weaves things together.

In The Slender Margin started as an essay that was later published in The Malahat. I returned repeatedly to that essay and “blew it up” from within. I kept going back in and expanding my thinking. The greatest pleasure of writing this book was the opportunity to think on the page and to follow thought as far as I could. Don McKay once said to me my poetry was spare – as if I was a bird hopping from branch to branch. Prose, he said, requires one to be more “doglike.” Nose down, rooting along the ground, getting muddy and lost in the exploration. I’m more dog in this book than bird.

Your brother’s sudden death in 1964, when you were 11 years old,  appears to have been a touchstone-event for your whole life. Does writing a ruminative book like this assuage feelings of loss?

This question is interesting to me as it raises the topic of art versus therapy. In the book I tell a story about a friend of mine who teaches weaving on a reserve in North Vancouver. When she applied for a grant to teach local women, it was suggested she gear her classes for women with alcohol problems. She refused to run the classes as “therapy,” choosing instead to concentrate on creativity and tradition. As it happened, some of the women who came did have problems with alcohol and the course helped to turn their lives around. The intent was not to “heal” people but, interestingly, engaging deeply with the creative act was healing.

I did not set out to assuage an old grief, and I distrust that impulse. When people say “that must have been so healing” I feel grumpy and argumentative as if there is some unspoken belief that writing helps one to “let go” and provides some sort of “closure.” If anything, the opposite was true for me. Rather than letting go, I embraced my brother fully for the first time. I was immersed in thinking about him, in remembering and in learning new things.  In the end, the act of writing and remembering – of giving voice to sorrow – was cathartic. But it was never the purpose of the book.

I find it amazing that you were able to work in palliative care for two decades when so many of us fall apart at the death of a parent or family member. Does glimpsing the Grim Reaper daily harden one’s spirit?

I think it tires one’s spirit more than hardens. There is just so much sadness. As strange as it sounds, on one level it was just a job. It’s what I did to make money and support a family. There was a kind of compartmentalization – I did not feel the immensity of grief that family members felt because I was essentially a stranger to them. It’s completely different to lose someone close, and all my years at hospice don’t soften the grief I feel with personal loss.

To harden one’s spirit implies a shutting down or turning away from something. I don’t think I did this. The problem for me was one of deep weariness. We don’t have an adequate language in the West for problems of the spirit. My mother-in-law, who was Coast Salish, worried that my spirit was walking with the dead, and she encouraged me to pay attention and to practice certain rituals – which I did, but not nearly as often as she would have liked. As much as I appreciated her concern and suggestions, I felt as if I was “borrowing” something that wasn’t mine. If anything, writing has been the thing that has helped me to enter places of darkness and to maintain an open spirit.

In the Slender Margin is laced with wry commentary and humour. Do you think you would have lasted 20 years in your hospice work without a sense of humour?

Humour was an essential part of hospice work. It helped us to laugh at ourselves and at death. It kept us from taking ourselves too seriously and, for many of us, humour made death smaller and less terrifying. Sometimes it allowed us to see beyond illness. One of the stories I tell in the book has to do with a well-respected First Nations man who was dying of leukemia at home and had been in pain all day. When the nurse and counselor arrived from hospice to attend to him, he asked his wife if she had shown them the smokehouse. When she said “no,” he asked her to take them out to see it. Bewildered, she did as he said and showed them the rows of salmon slowly smoking in the shed behind the house. When the three of them returned, he looked over and said to his wife “you didn’t leave them in long enough, they’re still white.” Everyone collapsed laughing and for a moment he was a man with a sense of humour and not a man dying of a catastrophic illness.

People we encountered often called us “angels.” Humour flies in the face of that. It mitigates against the work becoming precious. The saying attributed to Abe Lincoln “I laugh because I must not cry” has a ring of truth to it. We found humour in the absurd and could share things with each other in a way we couldn’t with friends or family. I think it just helped us cope.

I love the ending of your book, when the Egyptian God of Writing, Thoth, tells you “You’re on your own with death.” I’ve always thought that to be the case. Is our final task on this Earth to figure out how to accept that reality, preferably with some modicum of grace?

Yes, it is our final task.  And, I’m not sure it is a task that one can prepare for completely in advance. There will be surprises and unforeseen circumstances and what we may have imagined in advance may or may not be possible. A friend recently asked me if I was less afraid of death having worked with it for years and my answer was mixed. On one hand, I’ve seen so much that I have way more ways to imagine what death could look like – the good and the nasty; on the other hand, at least with expected deaths, I saw that most people met their deaths without the struggle that one might fear or expect. In my experience, I saw that the dying most often enter into a kind of altered state in their last days. Maybe it’s that the body takes over. By the time things are shutting down people are often unconscious and so are spared the “bigger picture” in the way the living are not spared.

Of the few people I saw who fought right to their last breath, family often said that was true to their nature and couldn’t imagine it any other way. You have to remember, though, that I saw people dying in a hospice with excellent supports. The reality of dying in an under-staffed hospital might be quite different.

The analogy of birth makes sense to me. We labour to be born and we labour to die. Childbirth may be painful, but if it were intolerable no mother would have more than one child. The work of labour is so focused that other things disappear – I saw this exact thing with the dying. So, while I have no illusions about how we can die, I also know that most people do it with a modicum of grace.

When I first started working with the dying I didn’t believe in euthanasia. Over the years, I’ve changed my mind about that. I don’t think there’s “one” best way to die. For some people, probably myself included, I think the knowledge that there is a choice about the timing of our deaths could be a very good thing. We don’t have control but we can be active participants in our dying.

Who knows? I may well go out kicking and screaming. I have no wisdom to impart. The things I learned about embracing death and helping others turn toward it may be of absolutely no help to me with my own death.

It’s a funny business this death business. We just don’t know!

Language play enlivens Barton’s Polari

Victoria poet John Barton, perhaps as well known as the editor of The Malahat Review as for his 10 previous books of poetry, has just launched Polari, a new collection with Icehouse Poetry, an imprint of Goose Lane Editions.  Co-editor of Seminal:  The Anthology of Canada’s Gay Male Poets, he has won a number of writing honours, including three Archibald Lampman Awards and a CBC Literary Award.  He teaches poetry workshops across Canada, at such places as The Banff Centre, the Sage Hill Writing Experience and the University of Victoria.  He recently answered Lynne Van Luven’s questions about Polari in an e-mail exchange.

John, I like the title of your new poetry collection, Polari.  Can you tell me a little about when you first learned about the word, derived from the Italian parlare, which you define as a “coded anti-language or idiolect at one time spoken by gay men.”

Polari? I am not sure when I first became aware of the term, exactly. In the last 10 years, maybe longer?  I would hear mention of polari, then forget what it was or how to spell or pronounce it, go searching for it, find it and forget it again, in a long, irritable and irritating cycle, until one day it stuck.

Of course, I am not of the generation who would have used polari terms in order to pass, since the reasons behind needing to “pass” are now nowhere near as relevant as they were sixty years ago (or more precisely thirty years before I came out)—at least not in the part of the world and the stratum of society that is mine. It’s a different matter in Russia or Uganda, for instance—and God knows how one chooses to pass in either. However, I am old enough to remember when the society I belong to was not as open-minded and the urge to speak plainly did truly involve risk—though not risk of imprisonment. I am sure gay men do still talk differently amongst themselves than they would if “non-gay” people were present—and when “non-natives/speakers” are part of the exchange, “experiences” are “translated” for them. Any group is like this.

I realized a few years ago that anyone who might overhear a group of gay men discussing matters solely of their mutual concern might still find the conservation hard to follow. This tendency toward opaqueness—toward this anti-language—is a way of marking and restricting space—and even of policing access of it.  The idea of polari even became a kind of joke to me—”Oh, am I speaking in tongues again—LOL?”

I can’t claim that I was consciously thinking about all these ideas while writing the poems collected into this book, but after writing the title poem it occurred to me that “polari” helped characterize their texture. The surface “beauty” of their language is a protective crust that challenges the reader to take a firm bite—sharpen those intellectual incisors!—by reading carefully (and sympathetically) in order to break through to whatever substance resides within. (Or so I vaingloriously and self-consciously think.)

I also enjoyed the way you played with rhyming language in this collection.  There was a time – not too long ago – when Free Verse Ruled; a poet dared not rhyme words for fear of being thought fusty, but now I see it cropping up in many contemporary books of poetry. Can you talk a bit about this shift?

Observing metrics and rhymes has fallen in and out of fashion since the origins of modernism in the early part of the twentieth century. The current vogue in Canada found its inspiration in the New Formalism movement that began taking hold in the United States in the mid-1980s, with Canadian poets like the late Diana Brebner taking up the influence in her work; I can’t think of anyone who would have tried her hand at such formal concerns in Canada as early as she did—or at least not as well. Today, Matt Rader and Elizabeth Bachinksky, I believe, are among the best practitioners.

For myself, I grew tired of writing in free verse and was looking for a new challenge, which so-called traditional, rhyming forms offered. I had written a little bit of formal verse—the sestina, the sonnet, and the villanelle—when I had been a student over 30 years ago, but had never explored the opportunities to be found in formal writing with any focus until eight years ago.

Writing a formal poem is akin to offering different appetizing tidbits to a fussy eater, having them refused one after the other until said child (or poem) takes a bite and some sustenance—and substance—has been both derived and transferred. It takes patience and inventiveness—much more than I would have ever guessed, especially once one gets beyond thinking that merely observing the rules is enough—the “what a nice plum, what a good boy am I” syndrome. Writing a formal poem is less like filling in the answers to a crossword puzzle than designing a mandala—it’s all about balance and intent. I like how adhering to a strict syllable count and a subtle rhyme scheme forced me to make decisions I might not have had to make had I chosen to write a free-verse poem. I might settle early on for something reasonably satisfying in the latter, whereas to get to something satisfying in the former takes much more tenacity. Writing formal poems expanded my vocabulary, made me more flexible in my expectations, and open to change. Writing in form is like doing aerobics or weight training; writing free verse is like going for a nice walk with great scenery, and if you have a dog, picking up after it.

Writing formal verse has re-enforced my belief, developed while writing free verse, that it doesn’t matter which words you use as long as they work well together.  The challenge ultimately becomes how to write a formal poem that still feels contemporary. For example, I decided not to be a stickler for singsong metrics—ten syllables always, but not necessarily in iambic pentameter. You want the formal attributes to support the poem and not be the end in itself. Also, to match the form to the subject can be crucial; it can make the tension between traditional form and the contemporary subject a subject of inquiry too. However choosing a form arbitrarily, without regard for the subject, and then making it seem like the obvious and only choice is great fun too.

 Some of your titles — I am thinking of “Bombproof Your Horse” or “The Book of Marmalade . . .” — tackle the world with a wry eye that simultaneously notes its violence and its mundanity.  Is that a renewed tension in your work?

The absurdity of these titles—which are titles that have won a Diagram Prize for the oddest book title of the year—automatically draw attention to itself, doesn’t it?  They bring the humour implicit in my work right to the surface. That said, I agree this book is wryer than my previous books. Humour is a defense mechanism we all deploy to sample a smorgasbord of personal and social hurts—a way to make them visible, to decry them if necessary, and if we are lucky, to put them into perspective. Up to a point, self-deprecation is so much attractive than self-aggrandizement. I might not have been able to write many of these poems had humour not empowered me to do so.  In the case of the Diagram Prize poems, they might not have occurred me at all.

 John, you have lived and worked in many regions of Canada – Saskatoon, Fredericton, Calgary, Ottawa – and your family history in this country goes back a long way.  Do you think of certain of your poems as products of geography, or is your relationship to space and place more nuanced than that?

I am not sure what place means to me any more, having moved about so much. It is a pleasant wallpaper against which I live my existence.  Now my response is less one of a tourist, by which I mean I don’t write a poem simply because I have been somewhere (though I have written my share of such poems)—a temporary geographic cure equivalent to grazing at a salad bar. I suppose I see locale as an opportunity to give a particular concern a context. Sometimes, through the concern in question, I become connected to the place where a poem is set. Writing a poem set in a familiar location renews my connection to it. “I am somewhere, therefore I am a particular am”—and am forever. How many tourists taking selfies of themselves with a smart phone can truly say that?

 I’m an old fogey, I fear, but I think our use of language is growing less precise every day.  Is there any one essential piece of advice you like to give the emerging poets you mentor in workshops? 

 No poet can afford to be imprecise, if she or he hopes to be any good. Anyone who aspires to the craft (however fey that may sound), should never allow themselves to think that their readers will get the gist of what is intended—i.e., don’t become too wed to what you’ve put down in your initial draft and think it’s good enough. Instead, revise, have fun, agonize, fall in love with your genius, despair, be surprised, and explore. And most importantly, be your toughest and best reader.

5 Questions with Glenna Garramone of Tower of Song

Victoria musicians Glenna Garramone and Oliver Swain have collaborated to create the Tower of Song project. Tower of Song has just released its debut album In City and Forest, primarily a collection of reimagined Leonard Cohen songs. Garramone, a former University of Victoria writing student, has been a force in the BC music scene for several years, winning the grand prize in the 2010 Artswells Songwriting Contest and performing at venues such as the BC Festival of the Arts and the Victoria Independent Music Awards. She took the time to write thoughtful, insightful answers to reviewer Emmett Robinson Smith’s questions about the Cohen project while on tour with Swain for the album. In City and Forest recreates a selection of Cohen’s works to sound fresh and exciting again, and also includes two originals from Swain and Garramone.

How has Leonard Cohen influenced you as both a lyricist and a musician?

I first listened to Cohen’s music as a child, from the back seat of my parents’ car.  My dad is from Montreal, and both my parents are Cohen fans, so Cohen was often the music of choice on family road trips between our home in Ottawa and visiting extended family in Montreal.  Cohen’s songs have been part of my life for as long as I can remember.  Because of this, I’m sure there are ways in which Cohen’s work influences me subconsciously.

On a more conscious level, the honesty of Cohen’s lyrics continually inspire me to be more honest in my own writing.  Cohen has a way of being serious and insightful, and surprisingly light and and even irreverent at times.

The first time I saw Cohen perform his music live, I was suddenly struck with the realization that he was able to write from such a vast consciousness because he lives his life in such a way that he really exposes his heart to the spectrum of human experience.  I remember hearing an interview where Cohen said something to the effect of (and I paraphrase here) “Poetry isn’t what you set out to create.  It’s a byproduct of a life well lived.”  Seeing Cohen perform his own work inspired me to make changes in my life so that I could risk more, and feel more, so that I could write from a similar expansive place.

In terms of his musicality, some critics contest whether Cohen is actually a “musician” or not.  In my experience of working with Cohen’s songs, the songs are thoughtful, and well composed in terms of the chord progressions, the melodies, and how they interact with the words.  Cohen is not a particularly “showy” musician, but his compositions are durable.  The fact that so many great artists have covered his songs attests to the strength of the work, I think.  Some of Cohen’s songs are simple/straightforward in terms of the chords’ progressions, but there is often an unexpected turn or shift in the development of the song, sometimes even just one chord or one ornament that makes the song more memorable and distinct.  In this way, Cohen has inspired me to be more minimalist as a songwriter, and to allow the simplicity of a few chords to work their magic.

The musical arrangements in many of your covers are quite different from Cohen’s originals. What are you hoping to achieve by this reimagining of Cohen’s music?

When I first started the Tower of Song project, I thought that it was just going to be an evening of some of my favourite west coast artists getting together to bring their own voice to Cohen’s work.  Oliver Swain was the first artist I thought of when I was brainstorming about musicians and songwriters who have a very distinct voice and style. I’m grateful that that first night gave Oliver and [me] the opportunity to reconnect and to sing together because our harmonies became intoxicating for both of us, and that has lead to us forming this duo around the project, arranging, recording, and touring together.

As a performer, I’d participated in a few different tribute nights to various artists, and my favourite part of a tribute is to see how a song can become new again when someone else brings their voice and their interpretation to the work.  Because Cohen’s work is so dense and rich, and because he is one of my favourite songwriters, I wanted to see what would happen when I asked some of my peers to explore his work.  I also found that when I covered Cohen’s work, the songs seemed to have a life of their own.  When I begin learning one of his songs, I learn the song as he wrote it, and then keep playing it over and over and allow it to shape shift into something new.  Essentially I let the song guide me in terms of how to best express it.  Of course I bring my own biases and experience to the interpretation, but I can say that it has been a very organic process.  Some of the songs on “In City and In Forest” I’ve been singing for over 15 years, so they have just evolved with me.  There are a few lines in “Chelsea Hotel #2” where I alter the chord progression and melody, and repeat the lines “I need you…” and that particular melody came to me when I was living in the Arctic and was feeling quite isolated and lonely.  In that way the songs are like companions that have travelled with me, and they change as I change.

Another goal of the project is to keep these songs alive and in the repertoire of modern songwriting.  They’re just too valuable and insightful to stay put.  Since I first started covering Cohen’s songs (about 18 years ago), every once in awhile I would have someone approach me after a performance and say “You know, I have heard that song before, but I’d never really heard it until now.”  I think that for some people in my generation, when they think of Cohen’s music, they associate it with the synth-heavy and very produced studio sound of Cohen’s work from the ’80s and ’90s.  So in some ways, I wanted to present the songs in a different context, so that they could be heard by people who perhaps didn’t resonate with Cohen’s original version, or with Cohen’s voice.  I wanted to honour the song, and Cohen’s original vision, and also to allow the song to be fluid.  That is the nature of songs in the folk tradition.

The Cohen works you selected for the album span a good chunk of his career – 1967 to 2001 — yet you perform them in such a way on the album that they sound cohesive despite the significant time gap. Was this sense of unity and timelessness one of the goals of the project?

We (Oliver and I) definitely put a lot of thought into the songs we chose for the album.  We were also being strategic with the first album, because we had a finite budget (which means finite time in the studio), and so we decided to focus on the foundation of our collaboration, which is our vocal harmonies.  About a year ago I had applied to the Canada Council for the Arts for a grant to make a Tower of Song recording.  At that time the recording we were planning was more of a traditional studio album, with several guest artists and a full band.  But we didn’t get the grant, so we decided to focus on recording the songs where we could carry the majority of the playing and singing between the two of us. We were very fortunate to have the support and financial investment from a fan, and that allowed us to work with Joby Baker and record at Baker Studios.  Joby is extremely talented both as a producer and as a musician (he plays all the drums and percussion on the album), so he is also responsible for the cohesive sound of the album as a whole.

I think that the cohesive sound is also just a reflection of the work that Oliver and I did together to really explore every note and every harmony in the songs, in the two years leading up to the recording of the album.  Sometimes in our rehearsals, we’ll spend over an hour just working on one line, trying to get it just so.  We are both perfectionists when it comes to our music, so when we collaborate we work with the subtleties of harmonizing — blending, breathing together, timing.  This thorough vocal exploration is one of my favourite aspects of the collaboration.  Singing in harmony with people can be a very intimate experience.  I have found that practicing harmony with people cannot just be isolated to “making music” together– you actually find your way to harmony through all the other stuff too– running a business together, touring, dealing with challenges that come up in life.  I think it’s almost impossible to stay rigid when you need to harmonize with another person every night on stage.  It’s a compelling archetype/model of being in the world– I get to maintain my own voice, my own note, my own vibration and perspective, and “the other” gets to maintain their own voice and note and sense of self, and rather than needing one or the other to be “right,” we find that the blend of these two selves is more powerful than the individual.

There are two original songs on the album: Oliver’s “Baby in the Bay” and your “Unicorn.”  Why did you include these two originals in the context of the Cohen-themed album?

The concept for the Tower of Song project came to me through listening to these lines in Cohen’s song (The Tower of Song):

“I said to Hank Williams: How lonely does it get?

Hank Williams hasn’t answered yet.

But I hear him coughing all night long

A hundred floors above me in the tower of song.”

Here Cohen acknowledges his place in the tower of song, and the lineage of inspiration that extends through time.  I resonated with the idea that all artists (in this case, songwriters) are in a dialogue with one another, even if they are not aware of each others’ presence.  When you produce a work of art and put it out into the world, you may feel that you are alone in a room where no one can hear you, but in reality the work is now part of a conversation that is timeless, and there is no way to predict the impact of that work on the world, and the impact on other creators.

I think we all have our own “Tower of Song,” where the creators who have inspired us reside, and we overhear their work as we create our own.  We create [partly] in response to what we overhear through the walls of the Tower.  It is important to me for this project to also hold space for the original work of the artists who are involved.  Both Oliver and I are songwriters and musicians with our own individual projects, so the intention is to also showcase original work by artists who name Cohen as a primary influence in their songwriting.  In terms of selecting these two songs in particular to add to the recording, that decision was informed more by the fact that neither of us had recorded these songs as individuals yet, and that we had created arrangements that featured our vocal harmonies.  It was also on some level an intuitive choice, just going with what seemed to fit with the overall aesthetic of the album.

How did the partnership between you and Oliver form? Will you be collaborating in the future?

I first met Oliver at a jam in a mutual friend’s living room in 2005.  We basically locked eyes and locked voices and then were under a spell of sorts.  Normally at a jam, you sit in a circle and take turns leading songs.  That night Oliver and I kind of hijacked the normal jam circle etiquette, and insisted on playing and singing each others’ songs, while the rest of the musicians had their patience tested, since we didn’t want to stop singing and let other people have their turn.  We continued to collaborate in different capacities — I hired Oliver to play bass on my studio album “Seasky-Starsong” (released in 2008), and a few years later, he invited me to sing harmonies with his band “Big Machine.”  So we collaborate in several different configurations.  The plan is to continue to tour as the Tower of Song duo, and we work with a rotating cast of guest artists as well.  We already have songs selected for the next Tower of Song album!

Find their music here: http://towerofsongmusic.com/home

5 Questions with Aaron Shepard

Aaron Shepard, a graduate of the University of Victoria’s MFA in Creative Writing program, just released his debut novel: When is a Man (Brindle & Glass.) When is a Man wades into the small towns of the British Columbian interior and shines a light on relocation, ghost towns, and rebirth.  Shepard, a writer of award-winning short fiction, grew up in the Shuswap area of B.C. After earning a Recreation, Fish and Wildlife Technology diploma, he built hiking trails and worked for fisheries biologists and silviculture crews around the province. With this much exposure to nature it’s no wonder Shepard decided to explore B.C.’s remote forests in his debut novel.  Recently, Adam Hayman was able to ask Shepard a few questions over e-mail about his novel.

This is your debut novel, and you mentioned that small portions were modified from a short story that you had published in the Malahat Review. How did this novel evolve from that, and what was that process like for you?

Most of the novel’s origins evolved quite separately from that short story, “Valerian Tea,” which takes place in Sweden and also has a protagonist named Paul. When I started writing the novel, I didn’t have a firm grasp on my main character – what kind of person he was or the conflict that was driving him. The mood and tone of “Valerian Tea” seemed to fit with the direction of the novel, so I started taking the story apart and adapting it as part of the novel’s backstory. Through that process, I realized I had a fully developed character in Paul that I could parachute into the novel to give it some emotion and heart. Even though their situations are different, the two versions of Paul share the same soul, the same defeated outlook on life.

Your biography mentions that you are an avid outdoorsman.  This love for the outdoors comes across beautifully in your descriptions. Outside of a personal passion for nature, where did the lengthy descriptions stem from?

“Avid outdoorsman” is probably a little inaccurate after 10 years of city living, unfortunately. My canoeing and tracking skills are pretty rusty. I almost got lost in the woods a couple of weeks ago, and that’s never happened to me before.

The Immitoin Valley, where most of the story takes place, is a composite of different landscapes, rivers and towns that I know well. [I did] some research because I wanted to include elements of reservoirs I’ve never been to, like Kinbasket or Williston, but mostly I was going on memory and experience from years of working and hiking in southern B.C. To write the excavation site in Sweden, I did a lot of internet research on local bogs, birds, grasses, shrubs and so on.

For some reason, it was important to me for the setting to be as realistic and accurate as possible, right down to the moss. I guess it was a way of celebrating the places I’d lived and worked. It sounds really nerdy, but I have a background in forest ecology through a tech diploma program I took in the nineties, so I imagined my setting in terms of biogeoclimatic zones. That way I could invent a place out of thin air – like the old mill site along the river, for example – and know that it fit within the logic of the valley.

Recovery, relocation, and rebirth are some of the themes that course through this novel. Were these themes you wanted to work with beforehand or were they born from the subject matter?

When I started out, I knew I wanted to explore those themes, but didn’t know how they would fit together or what direction they’d go. I had some vague ideas. But the characters and their actions have to feel natural and logical, so ultimately they lead the way and everything else follows. I think a kind of structural tension always exists between the narrative and the underlying ideas – if you tweak something concrete, something abstract is changed as well. Eventually you realize you can only control the concrete stuff. The ideas become slippery and subjective.

One thing I realized early in the writing was how prevalent themes of displacement and rebirth are in Canadian literature. I felt that instead of trying to be coy about themes in my novel and pretend I hadn’t noticed they existed, it was better to hold them up to the light and really examine them. So there’s a bit of a self-referential or “meta“ aspect to my novel, like when Paul wonders why these stories of floods and displacement are constantly recurring and he starts to question the relevancy of his project.

The novel is separated into three sections and in the middle section the form differs slightly: there are no chapter breaks. What was the reasoning behind this?

Instead of having numbered chapters in the second part of the book, I used Paul’s interviews and field notes to create structural breaks. The interviews are a visceral way to mark the time passing, as well as the shifts in Paul’s line of inquiry and his attitude. I also liked the idea of blurring the distinction between Paul’s research and his life – as though he’s turning his ethnographic lens on himself.

As tempted as I am to simply ask you, “When is a man?” I will refrain, and let the readers figure it out. I am curious to know if your understanding of masculinity changed during the writing and/or research of this novel?

In terms of defining masculinity, I was definitely struck by all the untapped possibilities – in both life and literature. When we’re tackling the notion of “manliness” in fiction, it’s usually through the image of the hyper-masculine fighter/drinker/lover or else the “emasculated,” tragi-comic male. Paul’s definitely closer to the latter, but he also sees his recovery from prostate cancer as an opportunity to start on a different path. He goes about it the wrong way, perhaps, but I didn’t want to write a feel-good, politically correct recovery story either. If you become somehow displaced from your body – whether through paralysis, amputation, or impotence – you’re obviously going to go through some dark times.

I read some great articles about how couples dealt with prostate cancer and impotence. From that came the idea that our best relationships transcend the question of gender roles. You do whatever needs to be done for the relationship to survive and flourish, to help love endure.

 

Silent-film romance speaks eloquently

British Columbia writer Margaret Gunning just published her third novel, The Glass Character, with Thistledown Press.  Gunning, a long-time print journalist, columnist and reviewer, as well as a poet, has written two previous novels, Better than Life and Mallory.  She recently took the time to sit down in her office in Coquitlam, B.C., to answer questions  from Lynne Van Luven about The Glass Character.  The novel is a well-paced narrative that melds a young girl’s coming of age story with insights into the ambition and competition that drove the creation of silent films.

Margaret, for some reason the subject of your new novel startled me.  How did a sensible no-nonsense journalist (as I think of you) get so interested in Harold Clayton Lloyd, a 1920s silent screen comedian?

The first thing I ever wrote or published was poetry, so I have never really been all that sensible! But if it hadn’t been for Turner Classic Movies, I don’t think this novel would have happened. Not only do they regularly feature silent movies in their programming, they seem to champion Lloyd above all the others (including Chaplin).  So I first became hooked five or six years ago when I tuned in halfway through The Freshman, during a hilarious dance sequence when Lloyd’s cheap suit falls apart piece-by-piece.  But as a kid, I distinctly remember seeing a full-page black-and-white photo of Harold Lloyd, I think in a coffee table book called The Movies. It was the iconic photo of him dangling from a huge clock, and somehow his name fastened itself to that image.

Can you talk about all the research you did to capture the nuances and action of the Jazz Era in your novel?

I kind of did this backwards! I had already become enchanted with Lloyd, but at that point I was interested in a lot of things and was randomly picking my way through YouTube snippets. Then at some point – I remember the exact instant, when I was sitting in my office chair in a daydream and the idea hit me like a brick – I realized I was going to write about Lloyd. This filled me with woe, because at that point I knew very little about him. I had ordered a superb DVD boxed set called the Harold Lloyd Comedy Collection – take note, it has all his best stuff in it! – but by the time it arrived, I was already writing. So the research ran parallel to the work, and continues today because I am still interested – or should I say, enthralled.

Your narrator Jane is an inspiring character on so many levels.  Do you think “Hollywoodland” would be any different today for an innocent, star-struck teenager?

I think it would be totally different. In the novel, I use the cliché of the girl from a small town getting on the bus, headed for stardom. I figured if it was such a cliché, it must have been true in a lot of cases. Nowadays, a girl could not just walk on a movie set and get a part as an extra. At least, I don’t think so. The devouring machine of these TV talent shows is shark-infested water, as far as I am concerned, and no matter how gifted and determined you are, it’s a lottery with almost everyone going home heartbroken.

As I continued to read your novel, I realized that I had a subliminal memory of seeing the occasional Harold Lloyd movie, but that I was more familiar with Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton.  Do you identify with the ordinary guy/underdog epitomized in Lloyd’s many “Glass Character” roles?

Funny you should say that! Over and over again, when I told people I was writing about Harold Lloyd, I’d get a blank look. Then I’d say:  “You know, the guy dangling off the clock 20 stories up,” and then came the “Ohhh! Yes, I know who you mean.” He’s filed somewhere in the back of people’s minds, but one reason we don’t know him better is that he was overprotective of his movies. He literally locked them in a vault and refused to show them on TV. He seemed to be engineering his own oblivion. As for being the underdog, Lloyd described the Glass Character as “just a regular fellow,” so most of us could identify with him:  an ordinary man in extraordinary circumstances.

I noted that you make no mention of Lloyd’s involvement with the Freemasons at the height of his career.  He reached an exalted level within the Masons, and that association was always part of his life.  Did you skip that fact as just too cultish and unromantic for Jane to absorb, a fact just unhelpful to your fiction?

Oh, there were so many things I could not cover, because Lloyd was the ultimate Renaissance man, an amateur scientist, painter, 3D photographer, show dog breeder, magician, golfer, acoustic innovator, and on and on. Right now, Freemasons are looked upon as targets for all sorts of conspiracy theories, but when my Dad was a Mason in the 1960s, it was just something you did, a dull men’s club. So in many ways it was the most conventional aspect of his life – but perhaps he needed it to remain grounded amongst all the more pedestrian souls.

 

5 Questions with Andrea Raine

Andrea Raine is a local Victoria author and University of Victoria alumna. She has participated in the Glenairley writing retreats led by Canadian writer Patrick Lane in Sooke, B.C. and has been attending the Planet Earth Poetry reading series since 1997. She published her first book of poetry, A Mother’s String, in 2005 through Ekstatis Editions and recently self-published her first novel, Turnstiles, through Inkwater Press. Recently, Nadia Grutter held an email conversation with Raine via email to discuss her writing experience.

1. First off, tell us a little about Turnstiles.

My novel, Turnstiles, is basically about three main characters who are struggling with inner demons, pushing the outside world away and yet, at the same time, wanting desperately to be a part of the bigger picture. They just need to come to terms with a few things first. Their chance (and relatively brief) meetings propel each of them in different directions, where they gain new perspectives on how to move forward. It is an empathetic and honest portrayal of human beings attempting to redefine themselves amidst the clash of idealism and societal expectations. It is a stirring, dramatic depiction of love, loss, impulse, and consequence.

2. Your first published work, A Mother’s String, is poetry. Turnstiles is fiction. Do you prefer writing in one genre over the other? How do they inform each other in the writing process?

I have been writing poetry longer than I’ve been writing novels. My poetic voice definitely influences my prose in how I paint a picture and play with language.

3. From what I understand, Turnstiles is self-published while A Mother’s String is not. How did the publishing processes differ?

A Mother’s String wasn’t necessarily self-published, but it was published through on demand by a small, local publisher Ekstasis Editions. I didn’t pay for the publishing and professional editing services, but I did need to pay for subsequent copies of my book at a discount price. It was entirely up to me to place my poetry book in bookstores on consignment, much like my novel Turnstiles. I published Turnstiles through a publishing package with Inkwater Press that included marketing assistance. So, my two publishing experiences are comparable.

4. Why did you chose to self-publish and would you do it again?

Initially, I tried to publish my novel, Turnstiles, through the traditional route by writing query letters and pitching to literary agencies. I received positive feedback, but there were other obstacles to landing a literary agent, i.e. my book didn’t fit their portfolio. I stumbled across Inkwater Press, an indie publisher, and was impressed with their mandate and services. Inkwater Press was eager to publish my first novel, and they have continued to be extremely helpful in marketing and setting up reading events. I am not opposed to self-publishing again because there is a large degree of freedom and control in the design concept. However, there is a price tag attached to self-publishing and for that reason I am going to first try traditional publishing again for my next book.

5. What advice would you give other authors looking to self-publish?

Self-publishing has its benefits, and is a good way to get your big toe into the book world. Still, authors who are self-publishing need to be savvy when it comes to marketing your book, keeping out-of-pocket costs down, and targeting an audience.

Novelist explores loss and identity

Victoria author Margaret Thompson’s new novel, The Cuckoo’s Child (Brindle and Glass) is a compelling exploration of a character’s loss of both son and brother, as well as her own sense of identity.  Overall, it’s a hopeful narrative about accepting life’s mysteries. Thompson says her initial idea for the novel sprang from a 1980s  news report about a kidnapped boy who had been missing for 12 years but then suddenly turned up at a police station.  She says her first draft “hibernated in a drawer for several years” until she “dusted it off” and did the final editing.  Thompson is the author of an award-winning young adult novel, short stories and two collections of personal essays.  She’s a past president of the Federation of BC Writers.  This month she will be reading April 15 at 7 p.m. as part of Russell Books “At The Mike” Fiction Night .  On May 23, she will give a 4 p.m. reading at Salt Spring Library.  Coastal Spectator Editor Lynne Van Luven and Thompson conducted the following conversation via e-mail just after The Cuckoo’s Child was published.

 It is always interesting to read novels by writers one knows because their invention of characters and creation of narrative are studded by facts and events in the public domain. What tactics do you deploy to balance all three?

Tactics sounds frighteningly intentional! I think the process has something to do with different compartments in the brain contributing to the mix. The characters come from the creative department; they are almost entirely inventions, though Magnus  owes a lot to a head gardener I once knew, and there are a few people who might find something familiar about the three Wimbledon ladies [from whom Livvy Alvarsson rents a room]. I think it’s essential to fabricate the characters because that is the only way to maintain any sort of control over them. Even then, they sometimes get away from you and insist on having their own way. It’s handy, though, to be able to slot them into some kind of framework, and that’s where facts from the information vault come in. The inclusion of fact—things like geography, architecture, the Second World War, the Thatcher era, and the hurricane which flattened 15,000,000 trees in the UK—lends reality, but also imposes limitations that may affect the narrative. The novel’s present, for instance, is the late 1980s; most people at the time had barely heard of computers and certainly didn’t possess their own; there was no Internet, no email, no social networking, so the kind of search Livvy undertakes would of necessity entail a journey and personal effort. The last element to include is memory—untrustworthy by definition, but essential for colour and warmth. I may not remember the exact dates of my visits to the estate I based Hescot Park on, but I can vividly remember every detail of the place and how it made me feel.

The Cuckoo’s Child is a compelling meld of family mystery and searing meditation upon loss. Can you talk about the impetus to combine those themes?

Like most undertakings, things started simply and got more complicated the more I thought about them. I think that long-ago news item about the kidnapped boy had planted the seed of loss, but it took a little jolt in my own life to bring the family mystery idea to the surface. I would have said my family history was boringly transparent until the day shortly after my father died when my mother said, à propos of nothing at all, “Of course, he had another wife before me.” Nothing sinister about that, but it drove home the truism that every family has its secrets! I already knew I wanted to explore loss—how would it be, I wondered, if I took away the family anchorage, too? What effect would that have on the sense of identity?

I notice that, as your novel’s setting ranges from Sechelt to Prince George to London to the English countryside, the narrative action moves naturally through geography once familiar to you. Did you have to revisit these sites or did you write solely from memory?

I had to do a bit of research on places like London and Brighton, but that was just for general topography rather than precise detail, and I wasn’t above taking liberties, either! Most of the details of the various settings came from my own memories.

I don’t want us to give away the novel’s conclusion but I do want to know if you struggled with keeping the ending credible without being sentimental. Can you comment on that?

Fiction rather encourages the inclination to play God, but I am no sentimentalist and I do distrust the pat ending. I wanted an ending that allows Livvy to embrace her future with confidence, but realism ensured that it wouldn’t turn out exactly as she hopes. Life just isn’t like that. So, I deliberately took away as I restored, and left loose ends, some that may turn out well, and others that will never be explained.

I loved Livvy’s dry, sharp comments about teaching that I deduce are drawn from your own experience. I find it interesting that Daniel’s disappearance finds its way into Neil’s art—that is, he is eventually able to externalize his pain at the loss of his son, while Livvy seems to have more difficulty in “dealing” with loss, hence her need to try and “save” Stephen. Can you talk a bit about how that came about in the narration?

Making Livvy a teacher was well nigh irresistible! And the staff meeting scene came from the heart; that Them/Us vibe was so much a flavour of the time during the 80s. As for the art, that arose from a need to turn up the narrative heat a bit. It’s another truism that everyone grieves in his or her own way; it stood to reason that Neil would not react in exactly the same way as Livvy and that his way could be alienating for someone who doesn’t share it. It’s also true that losing a child often puts a huge strain on the parents’ relationship. I didn’t want that rupture—I wasn’t looking to make Livvy a sort of female Job!— but having her run that risk and experience further drift and isolation seemed dramatically feasible. Neil’s art serves another purpose, too. Daniel himself sees it as his father’s way of keeping him alive, which suggests that even though Livvy’s literal attempt to save Stephen fails, there are other ways for her to preserve her brother.

5 Questions with Catherine Bush

“I always wanted to make something with language,” Catherine Bush once commented about her early love for reading and writing.  Bush’s four acclaimed novels include Accusation, Claire’s Head, The Rules of Engagement and Minus Time.  Bush, who has also worked as an arts journalist, has taught creative writing at several universities.  She is the co-ordinator of the Creative Writing MFA at the University of Guelph.  Recently, Lynne Van Luven held an e-mail conversation with Bush about her 2013 novel Accusation, published by Goose Lane.

Catherine, as a former journalist, I love reading novels about the ethical conundrums journalists face, and that subject matter drew me to Accusation.  Can you talk a bit about what event or events sparked the novel?

The novel draws upon some actual incidents from the mid-1990s that touched me. While visiting my sister in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, I and my then-partner spent some time with a children’s circus founded by a Canadian man, whom I interviewed. I wrote about the circus for The Globe and Mail; my partner made a low-budget documentary film. A few years later, some of the teenaged performers fled the circus while on tour in Australia and made an asylum claim, citing the circus director’s sexual and physical abuse of them. I felt caught up in the story, wondering what we had missed. The case became more tangled when another journalist, who happened to be an old friend of my sister, tracked the director down after he’d left the circus and vanished. He denied the allegations and claimed that the teenagers had been coached to say what they’d said in order to make a stronger asylum claim. In the novel I’ve taken events from life and reshaped them, including what the man does once found, which has a harrowing effect on the journalist. My characters are all fictional, however. What interested me was the way others responded to what happened: the assumptions and judgments we all bring to bear when accusations of this extremity are leveled against someone. I wanted to explore the complexities of the case, the difficulties of writing about such a case as a journalist, and the way in which we all judge others and decide whose story to believe.

Your character, the journalist Sara Wheeler, a gets drawn to an exciting story – the hopeful narrative of an Ethiopian children’s circus, Cirkus Mirak – which tells a “good news” story about a part of the world so often the source of sad news.  Do you find yourself frequently reading news about “developing countries” with a sinking feeling?

Stories of calamity tend to attract attention no matter where in the world they occur. Think of weather porn: we are all drawn to natural disasters. Also, acts of sexual predation can and do happen anywhere, across geography, across class, in the houses of affluent North Americans as often as in orphanages in Africa. I feel frustrated when heartening stories from the developing world don’t get told or told as loudly. I was lucky enough to be in Kenya two years after the post-election violence of 2008 and to observe the remarkable artistic response to the violence, the way artists did so much witnessing through writing and film and photographs to make sure that such terrible fracturing and killing along ethnic lines, driven primarily by economic stress, didn’t happen again. Globe and Mail journalist Stephanie Nolen did some amazingly in-depth reportage while posted in Africa, as she did subsequently from India – for instance, her stirring work on the education of dalit girls – and is now doing from Brazil. Philip Gourevitch has done some fantastic long-form journalism on Rwanda for The New Yorker, including a brilliant piece on young Rwandan racing cyclists which was simultaneously an examination of the legacy of the genocide in the generation that had been children at the time. What’s frustrating about much newspaper reporting is how little room it leaves for conveying complexity. This is Sara’s quandary in the novel. One of my aims as a novelist is to convey human experience with some depth and ambiguity.

I have noted that now and then critics claim that Canadian novelists are too dull or too parochial or too-something-not-cutting edge.   I have always felt your novels are critical of the sheltered and insular unexamined lives.   How would you reply to those critiques about Canadian writing?

There’s a strain of domestic, realist fiction that tends not to look beyond the interior life of the self, sexual and social relationships, the world that ends somewhere beyond the street where the characters live. You find it in British and American fiction, too. And yes I find that way of looking at the world limiting. At the same time, I wouldn’t want Alice Munro to do anything other than what she does best. Yet there’s plenty of Canadian fiction that doesn’t fit this description. A large part of the problem is that critics don’t see or don’t know what else is there. They operate according to self-confirming assumptions. If you don’t look for the outward reaching or the beautifully strange, you won’t find it. Among the work of my peers, there’s Michael Helm’s thrillingly smart novel, Cities of Refuge, which is a profound act of sympathetic imagination and links Toronto with the politics of Central America. There’s Martha Baillie’s formally odd and alluring The Incident Report. Madeleine Thien’s Dogs at the Perimeter tackles the legacy of the Cambodian genocide. My novels take in a world that expands beyond the domestic: it’s very important to me to link here, which in my case is usually Toronto, with various states of elsewhere.

In Accusation, Sara begins her story with what we might call good intentions.  But as her research and interviews progress, she begins to learn that the story is deeply complex, more nuanced, than she thinks, and that  Raymond Reneau, the leader of Circus Mirak, may not be purely heroic after all.  Can you comment on the “cautionary” aspect of your narrative, as it applies to writers of all sorts of stories?

The novel opens with Sara’s discovery on-line of the allegations against Raymond Renaud. Because she’s been falsely accused herself in the past of a much smaller crime and she’s spent time in Raymond’s company, she doesn’t want to leap to conclusions about him. She doesn’t want to assume he’s innocent but give him the space in which to be potentially innocent. This is one god intention. She also sets out in pursuit of him, ostensibly so that she can find him and give him a chance to respond to the allegations, another good intention, yet her pursuit brings further complication and harm. Any writing about an accusation risks spreading the allegation further. Yet keeping silent can be a problem. And the voices of those making serious accusations, such as of sexual abuse, must be listened to and taken seriously. While journalism attempts neutrality, fiction doesn’t pretend to it: it enacts our subjective struggle to make sense of the world, a world in which we can’t always find out clearly everything we want yet one in which we still have to act and make choices. We’re always judging others and trying to decide whether or not to believe the stories they tell us. Accusations intensify this condition.

I’m always shocked, even dismayed, when students express a disinterest in anything related to “politics,” if they think the political process is boring.  Do you think this aversion is just a phase the youthful pass through, or is there truly a disconnect between the under-25 demographic and the political process in Canada?

There are some incredibly engaged under-25-year-olds. Witness the Occupy movement. I talk to students who give voice to a great yearning for more meaning. The political process may have failed most of us. One of the problems with democracy is that its attention span exists in election cycles. The life of the planet, for instance, does not exist in election cycles. Our relentless preoccupation with purely human affairs may be the cause of our destruction. I’d like to teach 25-year-olds how to pay attention to the world. To frame the question not as being about politics or being political but about the practice and ethics of attention. How do we pay attention to the world around us? What is the world, your world, here and now? Name its particularities. Think about what gets left out. Every act of attention that focuses on one thing leaves out something else. How can we make those absences felt? In a writing class, with graduate students who similarly resist the political, I use questions like these as our starting point.

 

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.

Frontier still with us, author says

By Liz Snell

Bruce Kirkby looks like a typical surfer dude: tall and tan, with a ready smile and grown-out blond hair. The Kimberley, B.C. writer, explorer, and photographer is certainly familiar with the ocean; he recently paddle- boarded from Vancouver to Victoria over four days, enlisting a high school student to film the trip.

But Kirkby’s adventures stretch far beyond the sea. Speaking at a recent event for Nature Conservancy Canada, he rattled off fantastic tales of his world travels, from hikes in Canada’s far north to traveling the Republic of Georgia by horseback with his wife and young children. Spectacular photographs accompanied his stories. He barely stopped for a breath as he spouted comments and jokes about his adventures in Myanmar: “We ultimately ended up trying to escape from [the military] and getting tossed in the clanger. But that’s a different story.”

Kirkby frequently dropped names, but rarely people’s titles; rather, “vetch,” “locoweed,” “reticulated python,” and “plain-pouched hornbill” freckled his stories as naturally as the rest of us might talk about TV show characters. His language made it clear he feels at ease in nature, though he appeared equally at ease speaking in front of a crowd.

During his stories, he frequently seemed overcome by enthusiasm: “You can hardly believe what you’re seeing.” Describing Burma, he said, “I can’t believe it. It feels like Eden; it’s like the books you read as a child.”

Kirkby communicates a deep passion not just for foreign travels but also for preserving Canada’s natural beauty. He frequently discussed the “archetype of the frontier,” which people first applied to the west coast, then to the far north. “It feels primal and enduring,” he says of the north. People  assume, “There’s always one more valley to go over.” But, Kirby says, “There is no more next valley. The frontier’s given and given and given, and now we’re at the point where we need to protect the frontier.”

In 2011,  Canadian Geographic published Kirkby’s article on the Darkwoods wilderness conservation area in BC’s Selkirk mountains. At 55,000 hectares, Darkwoods is the largest area in Canada ever purchased for conservation, and its caretakers face unique challenges. Kirkby visited Darkwoods 10 times over one year.  He exuberantly described the incredible vastness of the landscape and his encounters with both animals and the humans involved with the property. “I was just beside myself,” he says of swimming with bull trout in Darkwoods.

Kirkby noted his frustration over the politics surrounding conservation, saying that the ‘60s and ‘70s produced a view that “you either cared for the environment or cared for the economy, but not for both.” The two are not mutually exclusive, he said. “I don’t think a love for the environment makes you leftwing or rightwing; it makes you human.”

He encouraged people to develop an appreciation for nature and wilderness in themselves and those around them, as a first step toward conservation. He described the incredible opportunities we have for exploring in Canada, paradoxically stating, “We still have the frontier with us.” (http://www.canadiangeographic.ca/magazine/jf11/conserving_darkwoods.asp)

Liz Snell is the editor of Campus Confidential:  A UVic Modern Love Anthology.