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A Celebration of Myrna Kostash’s Prodigal Daughter: A Journey To Byzantium

Open Space Gallery,
510 Fort Street, Victoria
January 20, 2011
Reviewed by Judy Leblanc

Since I am not usually a follower of non-fiction, I wasn’t sure how I’d respond to an evening with Myrna Kostash at Open Space. The Edmonton author is known for the intellectual rigour she has applied to a body of award-winning non-fiction books, numerous articles, radio documentaries and playscripts. The evening unfolded in the way she describes her book, Prodigal Daughter (published by The University of Alberta Press) as, “part this, part that.” Her readings, interspersed with commentary, swept me along on a journey that was as much intellectual and spiritual as it was personal. I found myself wondering what icons I might pursue were I so inclined.

To write the book, Kostash pursued the legend of a third-century saint named Demetrius. She made two trips through the Balkan countries of the former Byzantium Empire. Her research culminated in Thessalonica, where Demetrius, killed during a period of Christian persecution, was martyred 200 years later.

A hushed audience of just 11 people, the airy gallery and the topic for the evening made for a vaguely hallowed atmosphere. Kostash applied a light touch to what could have been some heavy slogging. The audience laughed when she said that in the seventies she had the  “big fat attitude” that preceded the New Journalism. At one point, she stepped aside from the podium, pointed to the image of Demetrius on the cover of her book, and asked if we knew who it was. Apparently, none of us did.

“Have you heard of Thessalonia?” she asked eagerly, pleased to get some nods.

The ease and accessibility of her verbal delivery was evident in her selected readings. Kostash, the co-founder and past-president of the Creative Nonfiction Collective, has long been a champion of creative non-fiction. She described Prodigal Daughter as “part memoir and part reportage.” The narrative is rife with personal anecdotes. Her attention to detail, common in fiction, drew me into the story. She read from the first page of her book: “I was nine years old, sitting at a worn wooden desk, in a handsome brick school…”  Kostash has thoroughly assimilated her research; that’s a blessing because the book’s bibliography is 15 pages long.

Demetrius employed miracles to defend his beloved Thessalonica from barbarians, essentially the Slavic peoples: Kostash’s people. Kostash, from Edmonton, is of Ukrainian descent. In spite of the Slavs status as barbarians, centuries ago they adopted the Orthodox Church, complete with Demetrius. This curious fact was the impetus for her book. However, the story’s vision shifted into something unexpected.  Kostash reminded us that creative non-fiction often has two levels: “apparent subject,” and the story below, that which is “driving all this.”  She went on to relate a conversation she had with Saskatchewan writer, Trevor Herriot. She had asked him how she might persuade people to care about her book. He challenged her with the question, “Why do you care?”  He suggested that the writing of the book expressed a “yearning for the divine.”

Ever a researcher, Kostash’s recent return to the Greek Orthodox Church of her childhood came from wanting to understand who Saint Demetrius is to people who have faith. She confessed to having some “issues” with the church. Later, an acquaintance of hers told me that Myrna is “shaking things up” in her church. I don’t doubt it and more power to her. Institutions of all kind, not only churches, need thinkers like Kostash in their midst.

Prodigal Daughter, with its esoteric concerns and scholarly background, may not have a large commercial appeal. However, its intelligence and its author’s passion for her subject set this book clearly above the current glut of facile spiritual-journey accounts.

The Sentimentalists

Gasperau Press, 2009, 216 pages hardcover, $27.95 /
Douglas and McIntyre, 2010, 216 pages paperback, $19.95
Reviewed by Arleen Paré

In 2010, Johanna Skidsrud won the Scotia Bank Giller Prize for her novel, The Sentimentalists. This alone guaranteed increased sales for the book, originally published by Gasperau, a small Nova Scotia press, but the resulting controversy about the inability of Gasperau’s small print run to meet post-award book sale demands resulted in greater publicity.   This is Skidsrud’s first novel, again unusual for a Giller Prize winner.   The Sentimentalists is a fine novel; it deserves the attention it received.

The Sentimentalists tells the story of an unnamed female narrator who lives with her alcoholic father, Napoleon Haskell, through the summer he dies of cancer.  During this time, he describes his experiences in the Vietnam War.  The two live with Henry, an old man whose town was flooded by the St. Lawrence Seaway in the 1950s.  Henry’s son, Owen, Napoleon’s war buddy, was killed mysteriously in Vietnam.  The novel, though ostensibly Napoleon’s daughter’s story, told largely from her point of view, focuses primarily on Napoleon.   It begins with Napoleon’s house: “The house my father left behind in Fargo, North Dakota, was never really a house at all.  Always instead, it was the idea of a house.”   As the novel begins, so it proceeds, dealing more with ideas, the hidden and incomplete, more with the invisible than the visible.  The boat her father tries to build never becomes a boat.  Henry’s flooded town was not ever a town.   Her father’s story is pocked with holes.  Owen’s death remains unsolved.

Skidsrud is also a poet.  Her first poetry collection, Late Nights With Wild Cowboys appeared in 2008.   Skidsrud and Gasperau have a Nova Scotia-based history, but now Skidsrud lives in Montreal and The Sentimentalist is published by Vancouver’s Douglas and McIntyre.  Douglas and McIntyre bought publishing rights from Gasperau when the artisan press and printer couldn’t keep pace with post-Giller printing demands.   I have both editions.  They are similar-sized, but the original is slightly thicker, denoting the better quality of paper used.  It’s a handsome book.  The second version, the version most will purchase, is standard:  less subtle, less handsome.   I must be a sentimentalist.  I read the second version, unwilling to blemish the first.

The Sentimentalists might never have been published at all if Gasperau, mainly a poetry press, hadn’t originally given it a contract.  The novel is sufficiently unorthodox that it might not have been accepted by more mainstream publishers.  But its unconventionality and poetic qualities are what make it interesting, prize-winningly so.  As a poet, I appreciate that Skidsrud employs poetic diction and complex syntax, but I think most readers will.  Typical fiction publishers would have considered her long, multi-claused sentences to be excessive, ungrammatical, perhaps, eschewing their rhythmic qualities and philosophical weight.  They might have worried about the novel’s ephemeral narrative, its unlikely plot turns, its phantom-like characters, its shifting points of view, its fictionally unsatisfactory ending.   Traditional fiction-heavy publishers might have balked at the following paragraph:

But as I floated over Henry’s house, and did and did not listen to myself, it occurred to me that the reverse of the thing was also true.  That instead of disappearing – or equally, as we disappeared – we also existed more heavily, in layers.  And that by remaining, as in floodwater, always at the surface of everything, though our points of reference begin to slowly change, it is always so slight a transition, moment to moment, that it is almost always imperceptible.

I savoured every sentence, all six or seven lines of every sentence, in thrall to Skidsrud’s language, her skill to lead the reader through each thoughtful convolution.  The book is beautiful and provocative.  And the mystery remains: how The Sentimentalists slipped through the strict fiction standards to win Canadian fiction’s finest award.

That Gaspereau did not balk highlights the importance of Canada’s small presses.  Some will take literary chances.  Some are loyal to their authors.  But then the almost punitive reversal: when a small press author wins big, a big press must step in, because the small press cannot afford to support the prize.  This dynamic, where risk-taking and discovery on the part of small presses is followed by acquisition and profit by larger presses demonstrates the importance of public support for both large and small Canadian publishers, so that Canadians can go on enjoying such prize-winning novels.

Charm, Beauty and Poise: Timeless Tips for Girls Who Have Let Themselves Go

Performance / Fund Raiser
University of Victoria Student Union – Michelle Pujol Lounge
January 27, 2011
Reviewed by Arleen Paré

Sheila Norgate’s performance of Charm, Beauty and Poise made me laugh out loud.  On a foggy end-of-January night, that’s a good thing.   I’m her perfect audience demographic, an over-fifty feminist.  The rest of the mainly over-fifty feminist audience was laughing too.   Her conservative set-up, deadpan delivery and behind-the-lectern “lecture,” allowed her selected ad material to skewer itself in solid satire.

Norgate, self-described recovering nice-girl, is a successful Gabriola Island visual artist, well-known in Victoria.  Her paintings have sold in art galleries across the continent.  She’s also a performance artist, and has presented Charm, Beauty and Poise in other venues before bringing it to UVic to help student social justice group, Armed with Understanding, to raise money for women’s groups in Victoria and Vancouver.

Norgate calls herself a feminist (NOT, she warns, a post-feminist), and the largely female audience (I counted three men in the room), seemed onside.  The room was packed, which surprised me in an event organized by student volunteers, with promotion primarily through social media, and held in a SUB meeting room at UVic.   Nor is Charm, Beauty and Poise slick.  Norgate deploys no digital technology, no power point, no lighting effects, nor musical background.  This was old-fashioned feminist activism, live-performance satire, a one-woman send-up of patriarchal values.  Some might find it dated, but not this audience.  With Sheila wearing red taffeta, pill-box hat and boa (although her stodgy shoes were all wrong!), the show’s tongue-in-cheek premise is that women these days eschew much-needed beauty help.  In her role as a Miss Manners sort, Norgate provides “corrective” advice, covering a range of beauty remedies, including chin-straps and exercises to reduce cheek fat.  We guffawed, but several younger women in the audience seemed more outraged than amused, and one later wondered why Norgate hadn’t addressed the issue of next steps.   I wondered too at the difficult issues of the “all-whiteness” of the images she used, the lack of biting feminism, and of how feminist and/or lesbian fashionistas might react to the show.

With the use of a slide-projector, Norgate displayed image after womanly image of archival ads.  She paired the images with historical text of pre-feminist beauty etiquette in those not-so-distant times.  While slides bore dates, helping establish context and authenticity, Norgate failed to provide their magazine origins.  As she showed one slide depicting directional arrows on a woman’s body, Norgate read the official formula for the ideal female figure, which, should you need to know, dictates that the width of a woman’s shoulders must be the width of her hips, and her crotch must be half-way between her feet and her head.   A 1961 ad warned that “no face needs sloppy jowls or swinging dewlaps.”

Norgate later explained that she became interested in exposing patriarchal beauty standards after finding an old etiquette book at Toronto’s Hadassah Bazaar in 1994. In 1997, Raincoast published Norgate’s own book, Storm Clouds Over Party Shoes: Etiquette Problems of the Ill Bred Woman, a satirical exposé of former standards.  Norgate’s current aim is to “connect the dots” between early twentieth-century ad material and the current anorexia crisis;

her upcoming book, Dangerous Curves, deals with this issue.  When asked where to buy chin-straps, she answered that she’d seen them for sale in a recent Enroute magazine.  Hmmm – maybe the show isn’t dated after all.

For bookings, contact Norgate by email.  If it’s laughter you need, consider it.