Category Archives: Reviewers

Container object for the CS Reviewer categories

Poetry captures nuances of resilience

Steeling Effects

By Jane Byers

Caitlin Press

95 pages, $16.95

Reviewed by Barbara Herringer

From the very first page, Jane Byers plunges readers into her gritty, beautiful first collection of poems as she prises apart her experiences of resilience, of hanging on, of enduring. In short, Steeling Effects reveals the real world: a near-death birth, sexual assault, learning to be an adoptive parent of twins, being a lover, the intricacies of work, and the crucible of one’s geographic location. Her spare language creates a landscape that may be familiar, or at least understood by many of us — the tangled fragility and strength of our humanness.

In a recent interview with Shannon Webb-Campbell (Plenitude, Issue 4) Byers related that “steeling effect” is a phenomena in psychological resilience research suggesting that certain stressors may act as an immunization or enhancement of later functioning in an individual. That definition illuminates the journey of Byers’s life and the territories of resilience and resistance that she uncovers in each of the five sections of the book.

Byers moved to Canada from North England with her family as a young girl, and lives with her wife and two children in Nelson, B.C. Just days after the release of this collection by Caitlin Press, she won the Richard Carver Award at the Kootenay Literary Competition.  She is a three-time winner of the Nelson and District Poetry Competition. Even in her paid work with WorkSafeBC,  and previously in Toronto in corporate health and safety, the reality of resilience is foremost. And it’s shared in a remarkable section of the book.

Byers begins the collection with her near-death birth experience and ends it with the death of a 90-year-old friend. The first section of six poems sets the stage for life-shifting events. I appreciate how she illustrates the shifting moods of resilience in each poem — what keeps her going, what and who sustains her. She is generous in sharing those life-changing incidents that many would keep hidden. In “What Doesn’t Kill You . . .,” she sets the groundwork for the collection:

My first journey alone from uterus to incubator,
an inoculation against despair.

I study resilience.
I search for cracks in structures
returned to their original shape
after assault.

Breakwaters eventually break.

I vow to mimic the tensile strength of a spider web
and the mutability of bacteria
that render them resilient,
not the succor of cement.

I breathe my way back,

empty and fill,

to belief in my pliant self.

I found Byers’ section called “Joy’s Urgent Threshold” especially poignant. These poems move to a new level as she writes the space of parenting 14-month old adopted twins — their lives from birth mother, to foster parents, and finally, to Byers and her partner.

Still, how to explain those essential people disappearing?
What’s left is the efflorescence of tears on your face.
I hold you, you cry some more.
Now you insist, “I cry, I cry,”
as if it is your only birthright.
That lonely sob, a consent to loss.

Throughout the book Byers uses just the right word, line break and space to let us follow her narrative. She is generous to those who people her poems: her grandmother as an audacious young woman; women and men struggling with dangerous work; immigration. And she is generous with herself: how that first conscious breath seems to have set her on a creative path–and opened the door to steeling effects.I’m sure I’m not the only one waiting for Byers’s second collection.

Barbara Herringer is a poet and editor living in Victoria.   

A long time coming, but worth the wait

Fists Upon a Star

By Florence Bean James with Jean Freeman

University of Regina Press

298 pages, $34.98

Reviewed by Joy Fisher

If you like true stories about strong women, you’ll like this book. If you’re interested in live theatre, this book will engage you. If you have a vague notion that it’s important to fight injustice, this book will snap into focus your understanding of the human cost of government tyranny.

If, like me, you have a sparking interest in all three topics, this book will ignite you.

Subtitled “a memoir of love, theatre, and escape from McCarthyism,” Fists Upon a Star tells the story of Florence Bean James and her husband Burton, who founded and ran the Seattle Repertory Playhouse for 23 years, until Washington State’s House Un-American Activities Committee convicted them both of “willful refusal to answer proper and material questions.”

Ruined financially by the legal expenses incurred to fight the charges, they lost the lease on their theatre to the University of Washington. By December 30, 1950, the final curtain had descended on their last production, and, by November 13, 1951, Burton James had, according to his doctor, died “of a broken heart.”

In Seattle, the Jameses had devoted themselves to a “theatre of the people, by the people and for the people.” When Florence migrated to Canada in 1952 after being offered a job with the new Saskatchewan Arts Board by none other than Tommy Douglas, she finally found a “philosophical home.”

Norah McCullough, former executive secretary of the Arts Board, recalled a conversation she had had with then Education Minister Woodrow Lloyd. Concerned the Jameses might have been Communists, Lloyd asked about Recreation for All, the proposal Burton James had made to the State of Washington which had brought him under suspicion. McCullough had a copy and gave it to Lloyd. When he read it, he said: “Well, it sounds like the Saskatchewan Arts Board,” and she replied: “Yes, exactly.”

Already in her 60s when she moved to Canada, Florence James travelled “the length and breadth” of Saskatchewan by train in all kinds of weather conducting acting workshops and directing amateur theatrical productions in hundreds of communities. After her retirement from the Arts Board in 1968, Florence continued to work as a dramaturg with the Globe Theatre, the first professional education theatre company in Saskatchewan. In 1976, she was awarded the Diplome d’honneur by the Canadian Conference of the Arts, presented to a Canadian who has “made a sustained contribution to the cultural life of the country.”

In Canada, Florence James took up the job of finishing the book her husband had started before his untimely death. He had defiantly named it Fists Upon a Star, from a passage in Stephen Vincent Benet’s epic poem, John Brown’s Body, about the radical abolitionist who raided Harper’s Ferry in 1859.

Florence kept the title, wrote and, with author/actor Jean Freeman, rewrote the book and searched in vain for a publisher until her death in 1988 at the age of 95. Fists Upon a Star was finally published in 2013, after Canadian playwright, journalist and social activist Rita Deverell took up the cause and persuaded the Canadian Plains Research Center (now the University of Regina Press) to take a look.

Now we can all take a look. And I hope you will.

Fists Upon a Star includes a preface by Freeman, an annotated introduction by Mary Blackstone, professor emerita of the University of Regina Theatre Department, and an epilogue by Deverell.

It was a 2014 nominee for the Saskatchewan Book Awards in the categories of non-fiction, publishing, and publishing in education.

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

 

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.

 

It strikes where it doth love

Cruel Tears/Lagrimas Crueles

Blue Bridge Theatre at The Roxy

Written by Mercedes Bátiz-Benét, Directed by Brian Richmond

Show held over until May 18, 2014

Photograph by lijc Albanese

Review by Curran Dobbs 

Blue Bridge’s ambitious adaptation of Cruel Tears/Lagrimas Crueles takes the 1975 musical upon which it was based, itself a modernized loose adaptation of Shakespeare’s Othello (think what West Side Story did to Romeo & Juliet) and places it on the Texan/Mexican border. Set in 1975, Juan (played by Indio Saravanja), a native Mexican trucker, falls in love with his boss’s daughter, Kathy (Alexandra Wever). As is natural for Shakespearean tragedies, death ensues, thanks to the manipulations of fellow truck driver Jack (Jacob Richmond), presumably out of bitterness from feeling underappreciated and his jealousy for being passed over for the promotion Juan received in his stead.

The atmosphere of this Tex/Mex musical is set with good use of a smoke machine (consider this a warning to those with respiratory issues) and lighting. The show opens with occasional conflict before developing a much darker tone in the second half. Cruel Tears paints a picture of 1970’s Texas, where overworked and underpaid characters attempt to scrape a living in a society where income and race prey on the minds of lower class blue-collar workers.

There were admittedly parts of the play where the pacing seemed rushed, such as Juan’s descent into jealousy and disillusionment in the second half, or the hastily resolved conflict in the first half between the lovers and Kathy’s disapproving father. This might have been a side effect of developing Othello to the musical medium. Fortunately, it does not detract much from the enjoyment of the play.

The Tejano style music was, for the most part, kept a comfortable low to moderate tempo that was easy to hear and understand. The Spanish lyrics were translated through the use of subtitles displayed on a screen above the stage— owing both to the talent of the performers and the acoustics of the venue. The band took their place on the side of the stage and acted as a modernized Greek chorus, occasionally interacting with the other characters and effectively expositing the relevant plot points to the audience. The music and dialogue made seamless transitions between English and Spanish.

The choreography was smooth, and while the trained dancers (David Ferguson and Jung Ah Chung) did not perform much, when they did, they did so impressively. The dancers also added a tongue in cheek element to the play, doubling as living props for certain objects that required an element of motion (such as truck windshield wipers or a jukebox).

Overall, Cruel Tears is a unique and lively show worth catching while it is still showing.

Curran Dobbs is a local reviewer and comedian.  

 

Deaf memoir speaks passionately

The Deaf House 

By Joanne Weber

Thistledown Press

274 pages; $18.95

Reviewed by Margaret Thompson

There is a prefatory Note to The Deaf House by Joanne Weber that explains the difference between deaf/Deaf and hearing/Hearing as they are used in the narrative. For many readers this may well be their introduction to points of view radically at odds with their perception of profound hearing loss as a disability. That the Note needs to be there at all, on the very first page, is a clue to the frustration and conflict the deaf/Deaf face in their attempts to survive and thrive in the hearing/Hearing world.

Weber relates her own experience to illustrate that struggle. We meet her first as a small child, baffled and disturbed by the sounds in her head. Her hearing parents, especially her mother, throw themselves into the task of acquiring every scrap of knowledge and skill that would help them help her. The result is a child who is amazingly successful at school, despite profound deafness. She loves books, and thanks to her mother’s constant insistence on correction and practice, on learning sign language and lipreading, speaks clearly and grammatically. To all intents and purposes, she functions perfectly, although she guesses much of what is said; she is even paraded as an exemplar of what a profoundly deaf child can achieve.

Weber gives an impassioned account of the inadequacies of this way of life. There is a frantic quality to the events echoed in the tone of her writing. We follow the compulsive student, the affair with a married man, the single mother of two small girls who keeps moving house, the frustrated teacher, torn by the professional requirements that tie her to teaching practices she is convinced are useless. The simmering anger effectively conveys the turmoil of those years, but it is the quieter moments that provide insight for the hearing reader: the younger daughter, weeping, placing her hand on her mother’s throat, for instance, or the image of Weber’s ideal house—open, doorless, so that she can always see people talking.

The tensions inherent in a lifetime of trying to function in a world whose rules are predicated on being able to hear are most clearly exposed in Weber’s accounts of her interactions with her students and the education system. Her attempts to make her students more proactive and independent are frustrated at every turn. The students have cochlear implants and think they need nothing else; they rely too much on interpreters; the interpreters sign sloppily and inaccurately, using a code invented by hearing people rather than American Sign; the students think of themselves as disabled, belonging only to the hearing world rather than to the Deaf community.

Weber uses many fictional devices to convey the chaotic nature of her life. She plays with time, cutting frequently forward and back, to her childhood, to the early days of her relationship with her daughters’ father, often repetitiously, and sometimes, distractingly. She has conversations with herself, and introduces different facets of her own personality in dramatized playlets—Ms. Hearing Weber, for example, Little Red Deaf Coat, Joanne Maybe Hearing, It Depends. Such restlessness “on this weary walk in the desert” needs an antidote, and it does come finally with the appearance of Johanna, who can tolerate compromise and failure, and say, “I must stop looking for ways to escape my Deaf body.” Her voice is the last we hear, calming the turbulence:

“There is no solution, no cure, no rehabilitation, there is my body that just is. Fired into the world, my Deaf body has become the house.”

There is satisfaction for the reader in Weber’s acceptance, but also, perhaps, a sense of an opportunity missed. For those who can hear, deafness is an unfathomable state; how illuminating it would have been to devote more space to a discussion of the role of language, for example, or to explore the choice by the Deaf to not pursue technological or surgical remediation. Dwelling so exclusively on the personal engenders sympathy for an individual, but information and analysis may lead to understanding and action for a community.

Margaret Thompson’s new novel is The Cuckoo’s Child.

Brick Books poetry launch explores underground themes

April 29, 2014

Open Space, 510 Fort St, Victoria, B.C.

Review by Julian Gunn 

There was smoke in the streets of downtown Victoria the night of the Brick Books launch. A derelict garage a few blocks over had caught fire in the afternoon. Poets and their fans drifted towards Open Space through a hazy sunset, carrying in the smell of charred wood on their clothes. It seemed curiously appropriate, since the work we heard that Tuesday night concerned the uneasy meetings of human desires and natural forces.

Sparking off their cross-Canada tour in Victoria, the four poets of Brick Books’ Spring Collection – Victoria’s Arleen Paré and Karen Enns, Whitehorse’s Joanna Lilley, and Jane Munro, formerly of Vancouver Island and now a Vancouver resident – read to a packed house that included a strong showing of Victoria’s poetic community. Brick Books General Manager Kitty Lewis was the enthusiastic host.

“You’ve got your whole spring lineup touring together,” I’d pointed out to Lewis over coffee the day before. “Was that hard to organize?”

She smiled conspiratorially. “No, but we made it work. I told them: you need the nucleus of an audience. So as long as there were two of the four that knew some people in the city, I booked a reading.” Lewis explained that Victoria is the first stop of a tour that culminates in Fredericton, New Brunswick. This is the largest reading tour Brick Books has ever put together. And by Brick Books, in this case I mean Kitty Lewis, since after more than 20 years she still administers the whole show out of her spare bedroom. Founders Don McKay and Stan Dragland provide Brick’s artistic direction. The editors choose and edit manuscripts. The production team ensures that each book is a carefully constructed artifact. Kitty Lewis keeps it all running, and beautiful books of poetry continue to be printed and offered to readers across Canada. Sitting there in the audience, I felt lucky.

Lewis lined up the authors in reverse order of experience. Joanna Lilley began her reading from The Fleece Era by telling the audience that this was a night of firsts for her: her first book, first reading in Victoria, first time touring with the little band of poets. Lilley was born in England but lives in the Yukon. Inspired by the art around us, she spoke about living in the Yukon as a settler, a British immigrant, a vegetarian who ponders the ethics of eating only shipped-in food, and a woman who is childless by choice. Many of her poems traversed the difficult emotional territory of intimate relationships through the twinning of geographical and emotional isolation. She read “Scientist,” about a painful disconnect between partners enacted while skiing: “How is it I’m lost / yet you’re not, although / we’re on the same blank trail.”

Karen Enns began her reading from Ordinary Hours softly, but she built a quiet vocal drama. I noticed an intriguing accumulation of negations and cancellations in the poems she read, a kind of loss by definition. In “Muse,” the titular being “comes with nothing in her hands,” and is both “almost imagined” and “almost real.” Again and again Enns points to things needed, longed for, or disavowed by naming their absence. Enns’ first book, That Other Beauty, draws from her childhood in a southern Ontario Mennonite community, and these memories are also part of the poems she read from Ordinary Hours. In “For F.,” from her moving series “William Street Elegies,” a phrase as simple as “no more / and no less” reverberates with all of the other constraints the poet had precisely delineated.

Arleen Paré’s new collection isn’t in our eager hands yet, but she is a subtly compelling reader with an academic’s attention to detail and an old friend’s quiet humour. Lake of Two Mountains, which Brick calls “a hymn to a beloved lake, a praise poem in forty-five parts, a contemplation of landscape and memory.” “Call and Response,” read meditatively, evoked the dynamic relationships of place: “The Canadian Shield calls to the fault // the fault, tectonic, / replies with the Ottawa River.” Paré’s ecopoetics of the lake include the Oka crisis, the lakeside monastery (now closed), and the child who passionately internalized the place. In “How Own a Lake,” she gently interrogates that joyful claiming, asking whether the child can own “the reservation… completely unknown.”

Drawing together the evening’s underground themes, Jane Munro connected the intimate personal loss of a partner’s dementia to the cultural memory loss that allows environmental ruin. Blue Sonoma is a poet’s witness, by turns sorrowful, wondering, angry: “Don’t tempt me, old man. / Today I have four arms / and weapons in each hand,” she read. These lines come from the particularly fine sequence “Old Man Vacanas,” which arranges stark and humorous images around the centres of love, ecology, and human fate: “Language, travel, art? Props / in a little, local theatre of light.” Yet Munro is also concerned with the irreducibility of things. Her epigraph from the Upanishads reads, in part: “When fullness is taken from fullness, / Fullness still remains.”

After the readings, Victoria writer Sara Cassidy joined the poets for a friendly Q&A. A good interviewer not only brings questions but offers insights, creating a dynamic environment where  new ideas can arise. “Did it feel dangerous to write about caring for someone with dementia?” she asked Munro. “It felt necessary.” Munro answered. “Your book is full of silence,” Cassidy pointed out to Enns, “and also full of blooms.”

Throughout the smoky, slightly off-kilter night, bursts of seagull cries would suddenly punctuate the poems. They seemed to be insisting on speaking alongside the human voices. “This event came about because Karen Enns and Arlene Paré are from Victoria,” Kitty Lewis told me.  “Jane Munro lived in Sooke for years. That all made it possible.” Lewis said that the poets themselves brought the event together, even arranging the excellent refreshments. The audience enjoyed the usual wine and veggies, but also sushi and miniature cupcakes (I had two).

If you missed the reading, don’t despair. You can’t have a cupcake, but you can still hear the poets read on the Brick Books podcast, available through iTunes and YouTube.

Notes

Jane Munro’s collection Blue Sonoma is reviewed here [https://coastalspectator.uvic.ca/?p=3328].

The Publisher

Brick Books:  http://www.brickbooks.ca/

Youtube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/user/brickbooks

The Poets

Joanna Lilley: http://joannalilley.blogspot.ca/

Jane Munro: http://janemunro.com

Arleen Paré: arleenpare.com

Karen Enns: http://www.brickbooks.ca/bookauthors/karen-enns/

The Interviewer

Sara Cassidy: http://www.saracassidywriter.com

 Julian Gunn is a Victoria essayist and poet.  

 

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.

 

Study of unique map illuminates past

 Mr. Selden’s Map of China

By Timothy Brook

House of Anansi Press

211 pages; $29.95

Reviewed by Margaret Thompson

The key word in the subtitle of Timothy Brook’s work of historical detection, Mr Selden’s Map of China, is “decoding.” Even at the most superficial level the map is fascinating; for an expert on the history of China, like the author, it posed many intriguing questions. Bequeathed to the Bodleian library in 1654 by John Selden, an English lawyer and pioneer Oriental scholar, it was largely ignored for three and a half centuries until quite recently, when a curious reader asked to see it, and Brook was called in to inspect the hidden treasure. “The more I examined the map,” he says, “the more it troubled me.”

The map is one of a kind. It was drawn at a time when China had little contact with the world outside its borders, and actively discouraged the export of maps. This practice was maintained well into the twentieth century, as Brook can personally attest. The cartographer is unknown, but the principles by which he worked were original and sophisticated, and seem to reflect acquaintance with European maps of the area. Where most ancient Chinese maps focus on China itself, to the exclusion of surrounding countries and geographical features, and conform to traditional concepts of the country as a square, this map has the giant hole of the South China Sea at its heart, and features the other countries of South East Asia as well as the clusters of tiny islands in the sea. A further mystery is the intricate network of lines crisscrossing the map, as well as the inclusion of a compass and what appears to be a scale of some sort. As a final flourish, the map is full of place names, drawings of trees, mountains and animals, including two butterflies in the Gobi desert.

The expertise Brook uses to decode the map is probably available to very few people. His book, then, must explain a great deal that is not common knowledge in terms that are engaging and accessible. This he achieves. Mr Selden’s Map of China may be a meticulously scholarly argument, but it will also appeal to anybody who enjoys teasing deductions from enigmatic clues, or persuading the long-dead to speak and give up their secrets. In addition, the book contains a wealth of esoteric detail, little informational nuggets at every turn to enlighten and amuse as the reader follows the author along his winding path. Chapter 3, for instance, starts with the King’s Evil, and leads to a breakfast for James II in the Bodleian, a pair of globes, a food fight after the king left, a Jesuit translation of Confuscius, a conversation about the “little blinking fellow”—Michael Shen—his journey from China to Oxford, his translations, his portrait and its iconography, study of Oriental languages, the annotations on the map—and that takes us only halfway through.

This attention to detail, and the step-by-step construction of his thesis, makes Brook’s conclusions about the map, its construction, and its purpose all the more persuasive. He seems to agree with Zhang Huang that the duty of the scholar is “to amass the best knowledge and to make it available to those faced with real-world problems.” No surprise, then, when he concludes that the map reveals that China’s obsession about ownership of the islands off its coast, which is a significant source of tension in the area today, was already a concern in the seventeenth century. Like any good historian, Brook uses the past to illuminate the present.    

Margaret Thompson’s new novel, The Cuckoo’s Child, has just been published by Brindle and Glass.       

 

 

Anthology celebrates queer families

A Family By Any Other Name

Edited by Bruce Gillespie

Touchwood Editions

229 pages, $19.95

Reviewed by Julian Gunn

A Family By Any Other Name, editor Bruce Gillespie’s latest anthology, invites its authors and readers to consider what queer families might look like now. The anthology is, above all, a snapshot of a fascinating moment in queer history – which is to say, just plain history – the incredible transformation of the position of people who identify as queer and our relationships within Canada and the United States.

Shall we refresh our memories? It has been only nine years since the legalization of same-sex marriage in Canada (July 20th, if you want to throw a party). It’s eleven years since Ontario and British Columbia were the first and second provinces to recognize it (June 10th and July 8th, respectively. There’s nothing wrong with having several parties. Or one very long one.) There are still many American states where gay marriage is not legal.

Yet things have changed very quickly. Young people who identify as queer who were children when the laws changed are old enough now to be married themselves, and to have the same expectations as their straight peers about what marriage, fidelity, and family look like. And this is, on the whole, a wonderful thing. I think I’d have to be crazy not to be glad that a generation of people like me won’t be persecuted, isolated, and barred from the public recognition of their relationships.

You should know: this is a good book. The average quality of the essays here is remarkably high. I like to think people who identify as queer take it extra seriously when we set out to tell our stories, but it must also be true that Gillespie is a fine editor who knows how to inspire his contributors. A Family By Any Other Name has a lineage of its own. Gillespie has produced a whole series of anthologies examining the idea of family from all sorts of angles. Full disclosure: I am in one of them. It’s Nobody’s Father: Life Without Kids (2008), co-edited by Lynne Van Luven. A Family By Any Other Name is a substantial addition to the series. It may even be Gillespie’s best.

And yet.

There are some great essays here. Victoria writer Arlene Paré contributes a meditation on the long gestation of her novel and the remaking of her family at the same time, “To Carry My Family in My Imperfect Head.” The well-known trans* author and educator S. Bear Bergman provides an exuberant account of his sprawling chosen family, “Hiddur Mitzvah.” Dale Lee Kwong’s “Created by Choice” describes the merging and multiplication of family through adoption, cultural community, faith, and profound friendship. In “What She Taught Me,” Ellen Russell describes her current partnership as a “blended family” because both partners are widowed: not children but the beloved dead are brought together in this new relationship. I cannot think of a simpler and more profound description of the infinite extension of the bonds of love.

There is also an uncanny similarity among many of these narratives; a similarity that I don’t think would have been present before 2003. Almost all of these stories are primarily about being part of a couple. This couple is usually legally married, and often raising children. If they’re polyamorous, or have unusual rules or configurations in their households, this isn’t usually part of the essay’s focus. A playful exception is “I, Didi,” which describes Dorianne Emmerton’s decision to partner, but not co-parent or cohabitate, with her beloved. Another is Bergman’s essay, describing the shabbos dinners he and his partner host. These dinners are the foundation of an expansive family built on all imaginable configurations of love and commitment: “now we have this kid of our own, a kid whose family tree is practically bent double with relatives of assorted kinds—blood, marriage, wine and glitter.”

Each of the writers in By Any Other Name is funny and thoughtful about  his/her/their own particular struggles, some of which are more likely to be found in queer relationships – the struggle to conceive a child, or the awkward act of donating sperm. It’s just that most of these essays tend to assume the two-person partnership as the family unit. If they extend the discussion further, it’s often to the parents of the spouses. And the chosen family, the queer network of friends and frenemies and supporters and allies? It’s here, but it’s in the background. Several writers make appreciative reference to those communities, but in the end they focus on their spouses and children.

I don’t want any of that delicious talk of spouses and children to stop, but I do want us to remember to spend some time talking about building and celebrating that other love. I think it’s still here, for these writers and for me – it’s just that it was never that easy to describe. We never really had the right language, and now marriage has overshadowed our other loves, at least for the time being. I would have liked, for example, to have seen stories here about the extended communities that came together to face the HIV/AIDS epidemic just a generation ago.

So: the world has changed – right now, in these places, queer lives are better. Being better, they are more ordinary. This is a victory. And yet. I want us to give honour and attention to those who still can’t, or who once couldn’t, or who just won’t, enter into conventional structures of love and connection. I want us to do more than remember. I want us to bring those crazy ideas into the culture at large. I don’t just want queer relationships to be changed by marriage. I want us to change what marriage means. And everything else, too, while we’re at it. As my mom would say: the whole fam damily.

Julian Gunn is a Victoria essayist and poet.  

Belfry nails tri-level family drama

Equivocation: Telling the Truth in Dangerous Times

April 25, 2014

Playwright: Bill Cain, Director: Michael Shamata

Belfry Theatre, Victoria

April 22-May 25: (Belfry), June 11-September 20: (Bard on the Beach)

Reviewed by Joy Fisher

Equivocation is a play about family told on three levels. Politics, says Shagspeare (playwright Bill Cain’s favourite spelling of Shakespeare’s name), is “family writ large.” On this level, the play is about a country divided into the “old religion” (Roman Catholicism) and the new one (the Church of England).

These are dangerous times: it’s 1605, the “Gunpowder Plot” has fizzled, and dissident Roman Catholics, including Father Henry Garnet, are about to be executed. Shagspeare, played by Bob Frazer, has been commissioned to write the official history of the Plot, but he begins to suspect that the government’s version is not true. What to do? He fears he must choose between two equally unpalatable alternatives: “lie or die”.

Shag turns to Father Garnet, who wrote A Treatise of Equivocation, for help in resolving his dilemma. Garnet advises him to look for the “question under the question” in order to avoid both lying and dying. He illustrates with this story:

Suppose you are hiding the king, and his enemies come to the door and ask: “Is the king within?” If you say “no,” you are lying, but if you say “yes,” the king will die. However, if you look for the question under the question, you will discover they are really asking: “Can we come in and kill the king?” To this question, the true and moral answer is “no”.

Cain wrote his play in recognition of the dangers that exist whenever governments lie. The philosophical lesson of Equivocation thus resonates today as much as it did in 1605.

Tobin Stokes’s non-diegetic music powerfully underscored the sense of danger, while the lighting design by Alan Brodie provided an apt visual metaphor for the concept of equivocation: grey fog swirled in a spotlight above stark black and white lighting throughout the show.

I was keen to see how Shag would equivocate his way out of his dilemma. Alas, it was not to be. Somewhere in the middle of Act Two, the commission to write a play about the Gunpowder Plot fizzled like the Plot itself, and so did the plot of the play. On the political level, Equivocation is a play without a climax, and this was disappointing.

The emotional heart of Equivocation is embedded in the second level, which is about the family created in theatre companies. During the period depicted, Shakespeare was a member of The King’s Men, a company in which the actors owned shares that entitled them to participate in decision making. They squabble among themselves, but are held together by their mutual love of theatre, the nature of which they debate at length. Cain, who once ran his own theatre company, writes this story with great affection and high humour.

The third level is about Shagspeare’s relationship with his daughter Judith. The audience is told that both Judith and Shagspeare understand that Shag wishes Judith had died instead of her twin brother, Hamnet. To Judith, stoically played by Rachel Cairns, goes the last line of the play: as she washes Shag’s dead body, she says: “I never knew I had a story until he wrote it.” This line sours the ending because Judith did indeed have a story, but neither Shakespeare nor Bill Cain wrote the truth of it and Judith, who lived it and therefore did know it, was illiterate, and could not.

This co-production runs until September 20, so the actors have plenty of time to perfect their roles. Four of them, Anousha Alamian, Shawn MacDonald, Gerry Mackay, and Anton Lipovetsky have dual roles as both players and characters. They clearly delight in this complexity.

The play runs two hours and 45 minutes with one 15-minute break—inordinately long. It’s nevertheless easy to understand why Michael Shamata, the Belfry’s artistic director, directed it himself. This play may not be perfect, but it’s rich faire, intellectually stimulating and an emotional treat for anyone who loves theatre—two very good reasons to go see it.

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