Category Archives: Lorne Daniel

Poet dissects the history of Frog Lake

Massacre Street

By Paul Zits

The University of Alberta Press

107 pages, $ 19.95

Reviewed by Lorne Daniel

Don’t expect a smooth lyrical narrative from Calgary poet Paul Zits’s first book, Massacre Street. The book takes an off-kilter look at the Frog Lake massacre of 1885, an event early in the North-West Rebellion in which a group of Cree men killed government Indian agent Thomas Quinn and shot eight other white settlers dead. Many writers have grappled with the telling of this defining event in Canadian and First Nations’ history, approaching it through poetry, fiction and various forms of non-fiction. Here, Zits pulls apart the pieces of history and patches them together in a jagged collage.

This is the author not as storyteller but as provocateur and questioner. Using archival records and sources like William Bleasdell Cameron’s The War Trial of Big Bear (a key source, as well, for Rudy Wiebe’s novel The Temptations of Big Bear), the poet invites the reader to create new meaning from the juxtaposition of voices and documents. Zits was recognized with a Stephan G. Stephansson Award for Poetry at the 2014 Alberta Literary Awards for his work.

Unlike much contemporary poetry, this is not a personalized, internalized exploration. Zits, the author, is not highly visible in Massacre Street. Certainly, the writer’s hand is evident in the selection and placement of the pieces that form this collage and in the poems that stitch the historic segments together. Consider, he says, the wildly differing worlds of those who participated in the rebellion, the police and informal militia, the court functionaries, the Metis people who remembered some of the events, or oral accounts of them.

Any writer trying to address multiple viewpoints in this clash of cultures must consider and integrate the perspective of “other” cultures – ones he doesn’t belong to. In this case, understanding and representing cultures that thrived on oral storytelling is particularly difficult. It is inevitable that a writer using primarily written archives, as Zits does, will be limited in expressing voices from an oral culture. To address this, Massacre Street pulls Metis and First Nations voices from tapes and transcripts and makes creative use of their different cadence and content to offset the dominant English Canadian voices.

In one section, “The Inadvertent Poetry of Major-General Thomas Bland Strange,” the book pulls phrases from Strange’s 1896 autobiography, Gunner Jingo’s Jubilee, and repurposes them in a newly fractured syntax.

The resulting book is challenging, in all senses of the word. Massacre Street is not an easy read. It forces readers to bridge the gaps and implicitly invites them to dig more deeply into questions of the post-massacre Canadian psyche. As is the way with works of deconstruction, it asks us to start over and reconsider what we thought we understood.

Lorne Daniel is at work on his fifth collection of poetry and a book about Alberta oil country that braids poetry with non-fiction.

Coal-mine disaster dusted off to good effect

The Devil’s Breath

The story of the Hillcrest Mine Disaster of 1914

By Steve Hanon

NeWest Press

327 pages, $24.95

Reviewed by Lorne Daniel

The early years of the 20th century seems distant, faded from today’s viewpoint, almost a full century later. European powers and their “new world” spinoffs still saw western Canada as a sparsely populated hinterland. Tucked into the remote Crowsnest Pass in the south-west corner of the new province of Alberta, however, were a number of coal mines producing the energy that would fuel the first burst of western development.

In June of 1914, the worst mining disaster in Canadian history took the lives of 189 men at Hillcrest Mine in the pass. The story of that disaster has been largely overlooked in our cultural record — and not only because it happened so long ago.

The disaster was covered by western media, but little of the news was picked up in the east. Western coal itself rarely travelled as far east as Manitoba, so the story simply did not reverberate very far afield.

Yet, for a region that had suffered the Frank Slide just 11 years earlier, the Hillcrest explosion was another devastating blow. Filmmaker-author Steve Hanon sifts through conflicting and confusing sources – newspapers, inquiry reports, company reports and memoirs – to patch together a picture of what happened at Hillcrest before, during, and after the explosion and fires.

The Devil’s Breath takes over 100 pages to lead us to the day of the disaster. The context, Hanon says, is everything. He takes readers inside the industrial age thinking of the time, the heated world of coal mining labour struggles, and the work ethic that drove small frontier communities.

The mine exploded between 9:15 and 9:30 am on June 19, 1914, killing many miners instantly. In the book’s most gripping chapter, “Without Air to Breathe,” we follow the frantic escape attempts and rescue efforts that filled the minutes and hours immediately after the explosion. Miners scramble to find escape routes and air to breathe. Rescuers head down shafts, retreat for air and equipment, return at considerable risk and often stumble into caverns filled with the bodies of their friends and co-workers.

What went wrong? Why do Canadians know so little about Hillcrest? The story moves from life and death heroics to the frustrating opacity of our economic, governmental and social systems. One is left believing that there were far too many vested interests in Hillcrest for real accountability to stick. To his credit, Hanon avoids the temptation to pick out a single, arbitrary villain. “The truth likely lay tangled somewhere in the Gordian Knot of human behavior that involved politics, the struggle for control, human failings, fear, shrugged shoulders, equivocation, evasions and fatalism,” he concludes.

The Devil’s Breath is presented in a handsome trade paperback edition with 20 pages of photographs, a useful glossary, an event timeline, a full listing of the disaster’s victims, bibliography and other notes. It is a thorough package.

The effect is more archival than imaginative, which is appropriate. Hanon did not set out to write a new story set in the context of Hillcrest, but to clear away the coal dust and give us a good look at the original story. That he does admirably.

Lorne Daniel lives in Victoria, B.C.. His blog Writing:Place is at http://lornedaniel.ca

Cheryl Strayed finds her way in Wild

Wild: from Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail
by Cheryl Strayed
Knopf, 336 pages, $29

By Lorne Daniel

“The experience of being a writer is a lot like a long walk in the wild,” Cheryl Strayed said early in her keynote address to an audience of 600 at the San Miguel Writers Conference in Mexico on February 13. The Oregon-based writer spoke of parallels between her search for new direction in her life and her literary pursuits.

Strayed’s memoir Wild: from Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail, was an Oprah book club selection, spent weeks on top of the New York Times bestsellers list and is soon to be made into a movie starring Reese Witherspoon.

The book came about only after she hit  “that bottom place in my life.” After her mother died, Strayed lost herself in promiscuous sex and heroin, destroying her marriage. Strayed, who grew up in rural Minnesota, says it was natural to go “looking for home in the wild” on the Pacific Crest Trail.

“I was just flinging myself in the direction of what is good.” In the process, “I got to feel part of the world again,” she says. “On the trail, I experienced all the consequences of my own actions.”

Even so, “experience doesn’t make a book,” she emphasizes. “Consciousness does. I didn’t have a story to tell until I started to write it.” The book was written years after the hike was completed.

“The next journey, after the hike, was becoming a writer,” she says. “I had to really, truly apprentice myself to the masters of the craft. And I did that.” She learned, in part, by “just typing out the work” of writers like Alice Munro, or writing paragraphs that tried to emulate the style of works she admired.

Strayed started writing Wild as an essay “but by page 75 of the draft we had come nowhere close to the [Pacific Crest] trail.” She realized she had to expand it into a book with a broader focus. “Structure is the toughest nut to crack,” she says of decisions about how to build the narrative and integrate events that occurred well before her trail trek.

Working from journals and her memory, Strayed also checked back in with some of the people she had met on the trail to verify her recollections. In many cases, though, Strayed was on her own in both the literal and literary sense.

In her keynote, Strayed read a scene from the book in which she is at the start of the trail but can’t budge, let alone lift and carry, her monstrous backpack. She plays the scene for considerable laughs but acknowledges a writer’s dual purposes of entertainment and engagement. “The deeper meaning of that scene is: how is it that we bear the unbearable?” As a writer, “you start to see yourself in terms of those larger questions.”

“I was wildly ambitious” in pouring herself into the book, Strayed says, but she also “embraced the fact that my book is probably going to fall short” of her literary ambitions. “I had absolutely no idea that one day my cell phone would ring and it would be Oprah Winfrey.” And for writers who might wonder, no, she says, she had no previous network of VIP connections. The book simply found–and continues to find–readers who identify with a lost person searching for her self.

 

Lorne Daniel is a Victoria-based writer of poetry and non-fiction. You can find him at www.lornedaniel.com, on Facebook and Twitter.