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BC author captures reality in fiction

People Who Disappear
By Alex Leslie
Freehand Books, 256 pages, $21.95.

Reviewed by Miles Steyn

The title of Vancouver author Alex Leslie’s debut collection of stories, People Who Disappear, sounds like a Dateline: Investigation Marathon. Yes, people do disappear, but don’t expect thrilling, high-stake plots; it’s the everyday, unassuming way of life which causes the Canadian characters who star in this book—some already gone, some living—to change and leave, be it figuratively, literally, mentally, or historically.

Although the plot of some of the stories tends to run away at times, Leslie has an ability to abduct readers with her dark, poetic language, which stands upright, screaming for attention.

Like a camera out of focus, it could take some time to adjust to the metaphors stacked high on each page. Some jar the reader: “The snowy road balanced against the side of a dark mountain, the ultrasound image of a bone inside an arm,” but others strike an image with perfection: “air thrown up by the ocean rushes down the deck and makes my stomach its windsock.” Once you find a rhythm to Leslie’s prose—paying closer attention to the human drama of the stories rather than plot—her tonally and textually rich writing will clasp your attention like a vice grip.

In the opening story, “The Coast Is a Road,” two female lovers—the narrator and a journalist—roam the Pacific coast together, the journalist searching for environmental news stories, the narrator for intimacy. The story zigzags between land and sea, developing the relationship of the characters until a twist in the plot sinks the ferry upon which our two lovers are passengers. It’s hard to miss the connection between this ferry and the BC Ferry, MV Queen of the North, which sank in 2006. In fact, most of the short stories in this collection seem grounded in fact. “People Who are Michael” follows a series of YouTube videos of a small-town Canadian boy who becomes an international recording artist and millionaire before the age of seventeen. Sound familiar? Justin Bieber was evidently the inspiration for the character Michael, who, in an unexpected twist, is kidnapped by a crazed fan. From the colour of his wardrobe, his hairstyle, to the comment his mom makes below a video upload: “Michael before he was famous . . . sorry about the video quality . . .  you can hear his voice pretty great though . . . ” it’s glaringly obvious that this is a carbon copy of Bieber’s life, but with a strong, dark turn.

This collection of a dozen stories features every subject from gay women to the environment, each wrapped in social and political themes such as homophobia, mental illness, or environmental issues, and always backlit by Canadian culture.

People Who Disappear manages to paint portraits of people, not characters; humans who are unified in their flaws, emotions, and desires, all footed in the Western Canadian landscape Alex Leslie so organically depicts. Promising work from a young, talented British Columbia author.

 

Miles Steyn grew up in South Africa and has studied creative writing at UVic and UBC.

Singer’s lyrics aided by English degree

Chris Ho’s new CD, City of Dust, released January 18, 2013 at the Victoria Event Centre, has been keeping Lynne Van Luven happy company for the past couple of weeks. Smitten by the music and lyrics, she keeps changing her mind about her favourite songs. Today, it’s “Ghost Limbs.” Tomorrow, it could be “Story of the Flood,” or “It’s Coming Along.”  Van Luven recently talked to Chris Ho about his work and creative plans. 

Chris, I am one of your newest fans.  Love your lyrics!  I keep trying to figure out your musical influences. I’d call you a bit of a balladeer, but you have a wonderfully energetic sound–which is good, because ballads can get awfully lugubrious and sentimental. Can you explain where you position your own songs in the music spectrum?

Thank you! My top influences include Wilco, Death Cab For Cutie, Stars, and Tegan and Sara. There is somewhat of a genre ambiguity when it comes down to my music. Put simply though, the sort of music I’ve written thus far tends to fall under two somewhat contrasting categories: indie rock and folk. That isn’t to say that they’re always separate from one another, since many songs obviously incorporate both of these traditions simultaneously, but it definitely helps to think of City Of Dust as having two personalities.

The numbers in this new—your first—CD are all appealing, and yet convey their messages in diverse ways. Did you envision an overarching narrative for City of Dust?

After writing the songs, and contemplating which ones I wanted to include on the album, I did end up envisioning an album that was musically eclectic and yet narratively cohesive, which was definitely a bit of a challenge.

Where did you study or are you a totally self-educated musician?

I took guitar lessons for about a year, starting when I was sixteen, at the Douglas Academy of Music in Vancouver, which taught me some basics. But, ultimately, songwriting has always been a process of spontaneity and trial and error. Oddly enough, the English Major I completed last April at the University of Victoria contributed to my growth as a songwriter more than anything else.

 I am impressed by the orchestral sophistication of City of Dust. Can you tell us about the crew that helped you put your CD together?

The co-producer and engineer Sam Weber, along with myself, put our minds together for this, and of course reached out to the local community of musicians in order to add more depth to this album. For example, Taz Eddy (Trumpet), Rob Phillips (Drums), and Alexei Paish (Percussion) were all music students at UVic during the time we were tracking the album. Not to mention, Kiana Brasset (Violin, Backup Vocals), Chelsea-Lyne Heins (Backup Vocals), and Esme John (Bass Guitar) are very much embedded in Victoria’s musical community as well. The hard work of Sam Weber, combined with my artistic vision and a strong support network of musicians, made this album possible.

I know you have a another show coming up in Victoria (Feb. 16th–all ages–at Fairfield United Church with The Archers, doors at 7pm, $10) and recently played in Kelowna, and will keep on with more promotion. Where would you like to be five years from now?

Put simply, I would like to be doing exactly what I’m doing now, except on a larger scale. The singer-songwriter tells the story of [his] journey, and the listener relates it to theirs. Every so often, someone tells me how much they appreciate my music, or how it’s helping them get through something in their life. The more people I can affect this way, the more rewarding and fulfilling that work is for me.

A box of memories reveals a life of curiosity

Sweet Assorted: 121 Takes from a Tin Box
By Jim Christy
Anvil Press, 194 pages, $20

Reviewed by Jennifer Kingsley

Jim Christy has been tossing souvenirs into a cookie tin–Peek, Frean & Co. Limited Sweet Assorted Famous English Biscuit tin, to be precise–for almost forty years. The items are various: receipts, photos, hand-written notes, plastic figurines, sketches, coins and even some human teeth. Christy unpacks the tin and catalogues each item with a photo, a title and a description. Put those elements together, and voilà: Sweet Assorted.

Some descriptions are only a few words long, like the sentence that accompanies a small, yellow-green plastic soldier, “In a hurry to be a hero, or a statistic.” Other entries spin out over a few pages and introduce us to some of the zillions of characters Christy, a former American who’s a BC resident when not traveling, has met in his life of frequent adventure.

I was drawn to this book by its form. I wanted to see what Christy’s accidental cookie-tin curation would produce. He scraps plot development, sustained characters (except himself) and recurring images in favour of, well, a bunch of junk. Some items and descriptions take us on flights of fancy to revisit Oaxaca in 1991, Maple Leaf Gardens in 1971 or New Zealand in 1989. Others lead us down memory lane where we learn about Christy’s tireless travel and boundless curiosity. The premise of the book is like a dare (to mention another cookie company) to find meaning amongst the scraps.

Three-quarters of the way in, Christy asks his readers two questions. The first does a fine job of describing the book; the second points out one of its main issues. “What is this entire book, if not an aside?” he asks, “But, then again, an aside to what?” That was the central challenge of this book for me; I struggled to find a vision that could propel it beyond the sphere of Christy’s personal life. Some of the entries occur as a device to drop names or revisit past achievements. Others are simply descriptions of the photo alongside or of an item with forgotten origin. That being said, perhaps our memories are nothing more than a unique, sweet assorted collection, and maybe it is unfair to ask for anything else.

There was a shine to this eccentric work that I appreciated. Christy is being himself. His tin alternately brings back memories and reveals what he has forgotten. He lays out his successes and his failures and leaves us to form our opinions. I closed the book hoping to meet Jim Christy one day. His curiosity, convictions and thirst for adventure have lasted decades, and they don’t seem to be fading with time. I admire that.

Jennifer Kingsley is a writer and broadcaster based in the small town of Almonte, Ontario.

Gordimer fails to personalize the political

No Time Like the Present
By Nadine Gordimer
Farrar, Straus & Giroux
432 pages, $32

Reviewed by Robert Morris

Nadine Gordimer’s new novel No Time Like the Present will challenge most readers. The gnarled, twisted syntax never relents and often frustrates. No page turns without work; this is not a Dickens or Franzen novel: “Over the seasonal get-together drinks at house or church pool in the Suburb it’s not the comrades’ academic who turns within the holiday mood to interrupt . . .” But Gordimer has her reasons, explaining that “South African English [has] inflections which come from the way the language is used by the Babel of citizens, isiZulu, Setswana, Sepedi, isiXhosa, Afrikaans” as well as Hindi, Greek and Yiddish . Yet the difficult prose and hard work needed to wade through it does not reward the reader. Instead, it just creates a layer of indefatigable resistance to engaging with the plot that follows a married couple, Jabulile Gumede and Steven Reed as they pursue their careers.

The novel begins in post-apartheid South Africa, a time rife with conflict that many authors have exploited for content – for example, J. M. Coetzee in his novel Disgrace, which follows a disgraced university professor as he navigates his newly fallen existence through sexual, political, and racial tension as he moves back and forth across the urban/rural divide. Coetzee’s novel succeeds; Gordimer’s does not. While the same motifs and tensions arise, her novel loses the personal in the political. Characters function as vessels for political ideologies and identities (divorced from a person – as in a gay or black person). For example, Steve, like Coetzee’s character, is a white, a university professor, son of a secular Christian and Jewish mother. His wife, Jabulile, is Zulu, black, a lawyer, and the daughter of a Methodist preacher. Both fought for the Umkhonto, the armed wing of the African National Congress, to end apartheid. They consider themselves comrades in the (communist) Struggle, always capitalized. Gordimer introduces these details as summary rather than as scene; she simply informs the reader in an avalanche of identity data that occurs in the first thirty pages. Worse, the reader, whom Gordimer has already buried, than has to contend with even more identity data as Gordimer introduces peripheral characters: a brother who has reclaimed his Jewish heritage and another who is homosexual; yet, for these two peripheral characters, their Jewishness and homosexuality are what is important, and they offer nothing to the plot. Of course, every character in a novel, and in life, will have politics, ethnicity, identity but in Gordimer’s novel the characters do not feel real, or at best they feel secondary to their skin color, sexuality, religion.

With characters buried beneath language, identity markers and politics, the novel’s interpersonal conflict has no dramatic force and doesn’t propel the plot; instead, conflict between ideologies provides narrative energy, however listless (for it seems unattached to any ‘real’ person). What is personal remains unresolved, with plot lines seemingly abandoned. This causes the novel to read like a political tract: it promulgates rather narrates. And while No Time Like the Present certainly reveals some of the contemporary conflicts of South Africa, it remains blind to the idiosyncratic individuals who actually fight them.

Robert Morris is a Victoria resident and UVic student

Collage artist moves beyond words

Vancouver artist Sarah Gee studied creative writing at the University of Victoria but is now known primarily as a visual artist. Lynne Van Luven talked with Gee recently about her creative process. Gee’s current exhibition of collage works, “Stuck,” is showing at the Slide Room Gallery, Vancouver Island School of Art, 2549 Quadra Street. The show, curated by Tyler Hodgins, runs until Feb. 18, 2013.

Sarah, you strike me as someone whose creative life is always evolving, sometimes between really different forms of expression. Can you talk a bit about your shift from studying writing to becoming a practising visual artist?

For a long time, growing up, I assumed I would be a writer. I came from a highly literate family and I seemed to have the knack for it. I received a degree in Creative Writing and loved that protective, isolated environment, but I never wrote seriously after university. Part of that was due to the immediate pressures of life, which meant a series of low-paying jobs. When I first tried making art, it was more text than image, which betrayed a lack of confidence on my part. But it felt wrong – contrived, somehow, a shortcut, maybe even a falsehood, relying on language when what I wanted was beyond language. Maybe it has something to do with being wary of unequivocal expression, I’m not sure. Now my work is about as mute and ambiguous as it’s possible to be. And I don’t have the knack for visual arts the way I had for writing. It’s really hard, and I fail a lot! But it feels right.

In the publicity for your show at the Deluge Contemporary Gallery in Victoria in the summer of 2012, you were quoted as saying: “I use collaged paper to compose what could be called geometric abstraction, but I sometimes think of it as heretical geometry: formalism combined with the psychedelic.” Could you “unpack” that statement a little bit more and discuss the spatial aspects of your vision as an artist?

If I’m using geometry as a kind of utopian language, that seems heretical to me, in a funny sort of way. I’m more of an idealist rather than biographical or political artist, and I’m hoping for a kind of transcendental experience when you look at my work. Most compositions are made of repeated geometric shapes, and because there is something hypnotic about repetition with slight variation, the image can invoke a sort of theta wave response. That’s where the psychedelia comes in. Psychedelia tries to unlock the mind through intense, vibrating colour and radical, often sexualized imagery. It all looks a little silly today, but I appreciate what they were trying to do, and in my own way I’m attempting the same thing. I don’t know if I unpacked that statement or just crammed a lot more junk into it.

How does the “vocabulary” of art differ from that of creative writing? Or does it?

Creation of all kinds demands the same things from the maker. Be honest and accurate. Avoid cliché by knowing the history of your craft. The only thing that may separate the majority of writing with what goes on in the art world is the act of deliberate provocation. The art world is far more addicted to what I call The Grand Startle than the literary world. Visual artists make work that will most certainly be perceived as ugly, unlikable, or just plain confusing. Yes, there are great experimental writers, from James Joyce to Mark Danielewski, but it’s not part of the larger writing culture. Writers, in my opinion, try to orient you to the world, while visual artists try to disorient you. Through disorientation – shock, bafflement, or in my case, the mysteries of abstraction – hopefully you can come to a new kind of thinking.

With your current show in Victoria, are you marking the end of one period of your work and getting ready to segue into another?

I’m not sure my themes or my methods will change in the near future, but any exhibit is a natural end period – you get to see your work for the first time outside the studio, and it feels elegiac somehow. But when I get a bone I don’t let go. Right now I’m obsessed with these horizontal stacked forms, these “totems,” and I can’t seem to make anything else!

What are you reading right now, and does it somehow inform your art?

Being self-taught, I do a lot of reading about the history of art, and right now I’m reading a coffee table book about, of all things, how big tobacco companies in the 40s and 50s collected amazing contemporary art. It’s filled with drool-inducing photos of industrial spaces crammed with Lichtensteins and Picassos, all with a kind of democratic approach to art that seems not only radical, but sadly obsolete now. But by far the bulk of my reading right now is crime fiction. I’ve come to realize there’s a strong correlation between a mystery novel and my own aims as an artist. Both are concerned with bringing disparate elements into harmony, and both expose secret or hidden aspects of life in an attempt to make sense of it all. I find life mostly bewildering and painful, and the idea of a neat resolution is very alluring.

 

Devious heroine inhabits Tuscan idyll

The Whirling Girl
By Barbara Lambert
Cormorant Books, 395 pages, $22

Reviewed by Vivian Smith

Do you like the board game Clue, in which many suspects are introduced at once and a plateful of red herrings is meant to throw players off the track of whodunit?

Have you been captured by the crafting of Tuscany as an enchanted land of incomparable light, food and ancient villages, as portrayed in pastel movies like Under the Tuscan Sun and books like The Tuscan Year?

Do you enjoy fiction in which a beautiful “Botticelli” heroine from grey, rainy western Washington State (so like Victoria in winter) goes to warm, sunny Italy under mysterious circumstances and the men she encounters are either “alarmingly handsome” or shaggily “leonine” with hints of “petulance” about them?

Would you like the idea of a cream-coloured Mercedes in the rear-view mirror and then later, a turreted castle in which said heroine and the wildly rich owner of said Mercedes (and castle) make love in a great silk bed, because, as we learn early on, such a liaison is foretold?

And do you stand with novels in which every few pages, a series of long questions such as these precedes minuscule plot advancements? Do you appreciate reading some sentences in Italics so you know to pay closer attention?

If you’ve answered yes six times, then this novel will have you as sweetly giddy as if you’d drunk deeply of grappa in a sun-dappled piazza. Me? I felt like a whirling girl myself, at first busily marking plot points and character introductions with yellow sticky-notes so as not to get as lost as one might while hunting through underbrush for Etruscan treasure. That is what protagonist Clare Livingston sets off to do in the olive-groved hills near Cortona. I set down my sticky notes about a quarter of the way in, realizing, through foreshadow as translucent as extra virgin olive oil, that most of it wouldn’t matter in the end anyway.

Clare’s beloved uncle has died, you see, and left her a property in Tuscany, which may – just may – hold ancient artifacts of great worth. He leaves this potential treasure-trove to her “with forgiveness,” which we come to learn has to do with their early relationship as professor/mentor and lonely child. Decades later, Clare’s devotion to her work as a botanical artist, described in rich, meticulous detail for which I was grateful, seems to be the best part of her. Otherwise, I found Clare to be a hard-to-love heroine who determinedly lies to the world about how she researched her own book. She also wreaks vengeance on her ex-husband for his infidelity, after having been the other woman during his own earlier marriage; and she has a role in the ruin of her uncle. And her lover Mr. Mercedes? Gianni, sure enough, is married, too. I did glean one possibly useful insight into the mind of a plagiarist, though, as Clare excuses her huge professional fib as an act of self-indulgence. Never heard that one before.

Clare is, of course, the whirling girl of the title, a woman still spinning inside old lies as she makes up new ones on her Italian adventure, until even she cannot lie any more. The image comes from the kind of Etruscan artifact that her uncle taught her to love: a “dancing woman wearing pointed shoes, whirling, the movement evident in her whipping sleeves, a seven-tiered incense-burner balanced on her head.” I would like to have seen that girl on the cover, rather than a dark painting of a woman at a party, as handsome as the Charles Pachter artwork is.

If, as the book’s front flap suggests, you find in these pages a vivid exploration of what conditions “foster art, or love and the unearthing of civilization’s buried stories,” then you are perhaps a more romantic and forgiving narrative excavator than I.

Vivian Smith is a Victoria-based journalist, writing coach and magazine editor. She is also an occasional sessional instructor in the Department of Writing.

 

 

 

Why I use a Kindle

Rant By Will Johnson

Photo by Darby Jack

My girlfriend bought me a Kindle for my birthday last year.

I was pretty ambivalent about it for the first while, and it sat unused in its box for nearly three weeks before I decided to tinker with it. Like so many other people, I was reluctant to give up the tactile experience of holding a book in my hands. My most cherished novels were dog-eared, maybe water-stained, with notes scribbled in the margins and unrecognizable brown stains in the corners. They were vehicles of instant nostalgia. How could that be replaced by this tiny gray machine?

But after learning how many Hemingway novels I could download for free, my love affair with this gadget began.

The first book I read was The Antagonist by Lynn Coady, and right away I liked the way it updated me on my progress (7% done, 12% done) as I read and the way I could slip it into my coat pocket while rushing out to the bus. By the time I started The Hunger Games trilogy, it had become an irremovable part of my daily life.

Then I discovered the Clippings function, which meant I could highlight choice passages and save them for later. My Clippings file is now a compilation of hundreds of quotes from authors like Christopher Hitchens, David Mitchell and Kurt Vonnegut all thrown together at random.

But perhaps my favorite feature? Every time I reach a word I don’t understand, all I have to do is click over to it and the dictionary will pop up with a definition. This is especially helpful when reading short stories by David Foster Wallace.

My new word for today, learned while lounging in a soapy bath: Contrail.

(If you don’t know already, a contrail is the mist-like vapor that streaks across the sky when planes pass overhead. I never knew what to call those before. Cool, right?)

Then there are the daily deals. At first, I was annoyed by the constant advertising, but for every shitty mystery novel or random shaving gel, there’s a chance to get a classic book for less than three bucks. The other day I downloaded Requiem for a Dream by Hubert Selby Junior for 99 cents!!!! (Sorry, I felt like one exclamation mark wasn’t quite enough there…)

Also, I find I can switch between books with ease. Buying Guns, Germs and Steel by Jared Diamond does not seem as daunting when it’s simply another bullet point in a list of titles. And though reading it sometimes feel likes a scholarly chore, on a Kindle I can dip into it for one grueling chapter, and then switch back to a Tom Clancy thriller to give my brain a rest.

I still read and buy normal books, but I’m finding my patience with them is starting to wear thin. I was working my way through the hefty hardcover of Dear Life by Alice Munro the other day, and I was frustrated that I couldn’t tap my finger on the page to find the definition for “bilious,” “commensurate” or “irascible.” What was I supposed to do? Go find a dictionary? And if I find a beautiful passage that I’d like to remember, which happens every page of two with Alice Munro, do I need to resort to a highlighter? Or maybe I could scribble it down on a notepad?

My Kindle has irrevocably changed the way I interact with literature. It has been a boon to my reading life, has probably saved me hundreds of dollars and it expands my vocabulary every day. Rather than having random piles of unread books lying around my bedroom and stacked on every windowsill, I have this little gray companion that fits comfortably into my bag.

I take it with me everywhere I go.

Will Johnson, a UVIC graduate, is completing his MFA in creative writing at UBC.

Obituaries provide lively reading

Working the Dead Beat: 50 Lives that Changed Canada
By Sandra Martin
House of Anansi Press, 429 pages, $29.95

Reviewed by Joy Fisher

The first thing I noticed about this impressive book was its cover. I can’t remember the last time I saw a hardback embossed in an intricate gold-leaf design. The second thing I noticed was the publisher: House of Anansi Press. This, I thought, promises to be a memorable read.

I wasn’t disappointed.

In Working the Dead Beat, Sandra Martin, the Globe and Mail journalist sometimes referred to as the “Obit Queen of Canada,” resurrects the dead, sets them in the context of their times, and delivers—not eulogies—but, rather, complex and nuanced assessments of their lives and characters, “warts and all,” as she has been known to say.

These short biographies of Canadians who died between 2000 and 2010 demonstrate the art of obituary writing and go beyond it. They are not the published obituaries of the persons who are included, but, rather, expanded portraits based on those “first drafts.” Not all of the original obituaries were written by Martin—though most of them were—but all of the artfully-drawn accounts included in the book are the product of the writing skills she has developed over the past half-century or so she has been observing life in Canada.

The stories are neatly divided into five categories of 10 lives each, many of whom the reader will recognize. “Icons” includes such notables as Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau, writer Jane Jacobs and economist John Kenneth Galbraith. “Builders” encompasses stories of the lives of such notable figures as historian J.M.S. Careless, Celia Franca, the founder of the National Ballet of Canada, and former Supreme Court Judge Bertha Wilson.

Some of the lives memorialized are notable because they are deliciously spicy. Included in the category “Rogues, Rascals, and Romantics,” for instance, are the spy Gordon Lunan, the bank robber Paddy Mitchell and exotic dancer, filmmaker and writer Lindalee Tracey.

Another category, “Private Lives, Public Impact” shines a spotlight on lesser-known Canadians, such as Ralph Lung Kee Lee, a Chinese Head-Tax survivor, who, at age 106, was one of six Chinese men who sat in the visitors’ gallery of the House of Commons as Prime Minister Stephen Harper rose to offer a formal apology on behalf of Canada for its treatment of Chinese men during the early part of the 20th century.

In the final category, Martin writes of 10 people who devoted their lives to “Service.” Found in this chapter are accounts of the lives of, among others, journalist Helen Allen, who helped children find adoptive families, and Ernest Alvia (“Smokey”) Smith, who was, at the time of his death in 2005, the last living winner of the Victoria Cross.

Adding to the value of this well-researched book is Martin’s introduction debunking five myths about the “dead beat;” introductions to each of the five categories that reveal facets of the history of obituary writing itself; and a final concluding chapter that assesses the changes taking place as technology advances.

If you enjoy vividly-drawn, incisive portraits of individuals, you will enjoy this book. If you appreciate social history that speaks to the way Canada has matured as a nation, you will enjoy this book. If you are fascinated by the developments that led to the rise of newspapers in general or of the tradition of obituary writing in particular, you will enjoy this book.

Joy Fisher is a fourth year creative writing student at UVic.

 

Intimate memoir captures 1950s

Pinboy: a memoir
By George Bowering
Published by Cormorant Books, 276 pages, $29.95

Reviewed by Jenny Boychuk

To say George Bowering had fun with this portrayal of his 15-year-old self is an understatement.

What first seems to be a typical coming-of-age story about a boy growing up in B.C.’s rural Okanagan in the fifties soon turns into something much more entertaining, refreshing and unexpected.

Like many his age, young Bowering loves comic books, westerns and baseball. He writes sports journalism for local newspapers and works part-time as a “pinboy” at the local bowling alley. He helps women carry their groceries and takes it upon himself to help those less fortunate. He eats jam sandwiches and Campbell’s vegetable soup for lunch and has supper at 5 p.m. He’s also got some serious testosterone screaming through his body.

But amid these teenage normalities is something both honest and mysterious. Bowering is in love with three different women: his classmate and steady girlfriend named Wendy, a poor girl from across the tracks named Jeanette—and one of his high school teachers, Miss Verge. Bowering takes us through orchards, lakes, fields and an apartment above the local grocery store with these women. He even risks his life for one of them.

Bowering shows the reader these women through the mind of a teenage boy and, regardless of your gender, the female body suddenly begins to feel foreign. One of the great strengths of this memoir is Bowering’s patience in allowing the reader to experience these women for the first time as he did: He enables the reader to question who they are and who they will be, to question their anatomies.

He plays with language as he recalls, for instance, the word hurt: “Funny verb, that, now that I come to remember the first time I heard it. It was from Wendy herself, sometime over the preceding year. I don’t want you to be hurt, she said, I think. And I wondered about that: does it mean hurt feelings? But it sounded more serious than that, more intimate. But then I got to thinking about the word intimate, which always made me think of inside the brassiere.”

Another major strength of this book lies in the authenticity and playfulness of Bowering’s voice. As a reader, I felt as though I was sitting on the front porch in some small town with him. His stories felt intimate and private, although I never questioned that he was happy to tell them. This book felt like one of those wonderful, unexpected conversations that comes from a single question, and maybe you didn’t ask to know about the rest of it, but you leave feeling damn happy he went there.

Though much of the memoir is light-hearted, Bowering doesn’t hesitate to reveal some of the darker secrets of his youth.

“I still believed in God. I did not go over in my mind a list of reasons why that horse died tied up off the path up in the hills. I only figured that something crazed must to have happened. And I did not tell anyone about what I had found. If it had been a human being I would have told people.”

This most human account of a boy coming into adolescence proves to be both hilarious and heartbreaking. For every awkwardly funny and unwanted erection, there is also true yearning for the women around him. It is a privilege to have a glimpse of this part of Bowering’s life, of this boy who spends half of his time living in books and the other half playing detective in the tall grass as he watches a girl walk home from school.

Jenny Boychuk is a recent graduate of UVIC’s Department of Writing. She lives and writes in Victoria.

Confessions in a church of desire

Speaking in Tongues
By Andrew Bovell
Directed by Philip Riccio
January 22 – February 24
The Belfry Theatre

Reviewed by Leah Callen

Meet Pete, Jane, Sonja, and Leon. Pete and Jane are married; Sonja and Leon are married. But Pete wants Sonja, and Jane wants Leon. Thus, two one-night stands overlap in time and space in one hotel room. These characters have a lot in common: lovers, lines, and gestures. Their synchronized dancing suggests that everyone dances the same in the dark. But, the strange unison splits eventually, and each coupling ends on a different note.

Speaking in Tongues felt like a seedy service dedicated to desire in the renovated nave of the Belfry, where characters share unholy confessions. Everyone wants someone, to feel something, to light a burnt-out candle to lust or devotion. Driven by desire, they intersect emotionally like a car crash.

As the play unfolds, the irony is that characters confess their feelings freely to drunken strangers, to a note-taking therapist or a cop. A particularly amusing bar scene brews between Peter and Leon as they unbottle their feelings over beer. But, people struggle to face anything head on with their intimate partners. They speak subtext to their spouses by putting themselves in someone else’s brown brogues using metaphorical monologues. These lengthy scenes tried the congregation’s patience somewhat, but were less disorienting than the echoing hotel scene. Scene transitions were sometimes seamless, but each one spoke such a different language that the play overall lacked coherence.

The adrenaline-charged second act shows Valerie trying desperately to reach her husband on a pay phone in the middle of nowhere before she vanishes. New characters piece together her story. Nick was the last to see her alive, and the last to handle her stiletto. Yanna McIntosh’s deer-in-the-headlights panic as Valerie panting in the darkness made my hair stand on end.

The actors fill the shoes of several characters whose lives spill into each other. Richard Clarkin plays the jilted lover, Neil, with gut-wrenching pathos. Hélène Joy gave me chills as the psychopathic Sarah who eats men alive, rubbing one leg over the other slowly like a predatory cricket. Jonathon Goad seduced us with natural ease as the smooth-talking and smooth-haired cop, Leon.

While these characters worship and excommunicate one another casually, the plot undresses the truth: sex has long-term side effects. Our lives continue to overlap long after we leave the hotel room.

Leah Callen is an aspiring poet-playwright-screenwriter studying at the University of Victoria.