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Book captures history of fabled Tofino

Tofino and Clayoquot Sound: A History

Margaret Horsfield and Ian Kennedy

Harbour Publishing

640 pages;  $36.95

Reviewed by Margaret Thompson

The cover image of this handsome book captures the kind of seascape the names Tofino and Clayoquot Sound immediately evoke: the huge pale sky, a broad stretch of golden sand punctuated by tide pools, waves curling in past offshore islands, a rocky promontory covered in trees, shafts of sunlight lancing through the green and making ghosts of the upper branches. The title, though, tells us that this is not another travelogue designed to celebrate the extraordinary beauty and wildness of the western edge of Vancouver Island; it is a history of a fabled place.

As a history, it has a great deal in common with biography, especially the kind which studies celebrated people who are still living. In just the same way as a biographer explores every detail of the subject’s background, antecedents, formative influences, and life choices in order to explain his or her fame, so Margaret Horsfield and Ian Kennedy have approached this relatively small area of Canadian geography to explain how it has arrived at its present state. As a result, the place becomes a character with a starring role in its ongoing dramatic narrative, far more complex and entertaining than its reputation as a modern tourist mecca would suggest.

The authors begin at the very beginning, with the first volcanic upheavals of 400 million years ago, and the vast collisions of land masses and buckling tectonic plates, the advance and retreat of ice, and the erosion of wind and water that led to the present geography. The detailed description of these giant forces at work emphasizes the grandeur and endurance of the place; the Nuu-chah-nulth peoples who first settled there, drawn by its rich resources, blended harmoniously with their surroundings, if not always with each other, for thousands of years, undisturbed. By contrast, later pioneers had no hereditary feel for the land; they were there to impose their own ways, for their own ends.

Inevitably, biographers will concentrate on the people important to their subjects. No surprise that the early settlers provide the authors with a wonderful cast of supporting characters, whose personalities and actions supply a fund of good stories. There is the missionary who insisted on carrying his pet canary in a cage as he was transported in a canoe; the eccentric Frederick Tibbs and his fondness for dynamite; the former cowboy, Edward Fitzpatrick, who was marooned on a rocky islet and sheltered in the roots of a tree for 19 days; and Bill Spittal and his dog, Joe Beef.

The authors blend these anecdotes seamlessly into a coherent and exhaustive analysis of the forces and events that affected the development of the area. They trace the ebb and flow of enterprises like the sea otter trade, fishing and logging, and the impact of social changes like the missions and residential schools, the building of roads, and the delivery of goods and mail by sea. They describe the change that came to the area with the Second World War, when Tofino suddenly became the first line of defence against a distant enemy across the Pacific, never seeing any action to speak of, but establishing the beginnings of an airport. More modern times have seen just as much change; the hippies of the ’60s and the War in the Woods in the ’80s added their share of strife, at the same time changing the attitude to the environment for ever.

Horsfield and Kennedy acknowledge that there will always be changes and surprises lying ahead, but they stress that the people of the area, after years of division, appear to be relating to each other in new ways. The place survives, ready to adapt to whatever happens next. As the authors conclude, “Here on the west coast, another wave is always about to break.”

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

Genre-bending novel raises questions

Adult Onset

By Ann-Marie MacDonald

Knopff Canada, 

384 pages, $32

 

Reviewed by Julia Leggett

Adult Onset, Ann-Marie MacDonald’s latest book, is genre bending. A sort of fictional autobiography, the novel explores a week in the life of Mary Rose MacKinnon, a part Canadian-part Lebanese, lesbian woman who spent her early years on a military base in Germany and is now a writer with two children living in Toronto with her theatre-director partner.  As shrewd readers will know, Ann-Marie MacDonald was also born in Germany to a Lebanese mother and Canadian father in the military. She is also a lesbian writer with two children who lives in Toronto with her theatre-director partner, Alisa Palmer.

At the start of the novel, Mary Rose receives a positive and loving email from her father about the It Gets Better video, a message of hope and resilience for LGBT youth. Yet years before, when Mary Rose came out to her parents, she was met with their shame, disbelief and vitriol. Through the course of this ordinary week — a week so dense with the minutiae of middle class urban parenthood (Ikea furniture, strollers, yoga mats, toddler tantrums, mild sleep deprivation, non-chemical cleaners, Feminism, Google as a conductor for enlightenment, nannies, organic food, mothering angst and a subplot involving the incompetence of Canada Post) that I often felt smothered — it becomes clear that Mary Rose, despite her efforts to push her feelings aside, is still under the thrall of her complicated childhood. Her father’s email is the tipping point, and the past collides forcefully with the present. Little fault lines appear in her parenting and her relationship, out of which her rage seeps, threatening to poison her carefully constructed world.

All this too has its mirror in MacDonald’s real life. In her 2014 pride speech, MacDonald discussed the lingering effects of her rage over her parents’ initial failure to respect her coming out and how that stifled rage turned towards her partner and — almost  — her children. Curiously, the novel does not tackle the process her parents went through on their journey to acceptance.

I suspect a great deal of fiction is thinly veiled autobiography but Adult Onset deliberately alerts the reader to this fact, creating a curious doubling effect for me. I was jolted from the text. As I read, I was always asking, “Is this part real? Is this part real?” Extracts of Mary Rose’s own YA novel ended each chapter but, at the mid point of the book, tapered off unfinished. The extracts did not deepen the story but simply seemed like another unnecessary nod to the meta nature of this work. Perhaps for MacDonald, the fictionalizing of her life created distance, and enabled her to cleanly excavate meaning. While art often lets us get at the truth in a way that the bone-dry facts do not, and I am sucker for pushing the boundaries of any genre, in this case, as her reader, I did wonder if straight forward memoir might have been a better vessel for this story. And yet, in this slow moving hybrid of fact and fiction, MacDonald can still be droll, moving and astute as she painstakingly peels back the layers to show us what it takes to truly release the past.

Julia Leggett is a Victoria-based writer. Her debut short fiction collection, Gone South and Other Ways to Disappear, is available from Mother Tongue Publishing.

 

Poets offer fresh take on language

Begin with the End in Mind

By Emma Healey

Arbeiter Ring Publishing

57 pages,  $12.95

 

Pluck

By Laisha Rosnau,

Nightwood Editions

91 pages, $18.95

Reviewed by Arleen Paré

I find small books of poetry with bluish covers very pleasing. Both Begin with the End in Mind and Pluck are small books with bluish covers. Begin with the End in Mind is the smaller of the two poetry collections; Pluck is bluer. But given that comparisons are generally considered odious — not that it stops most people from making them – I feel I should stop there. Nevertheless, both collections are pleasing.

The degree of irony and humour in Begin with the End in Mind is particularly engaging. Healey plays with truth, with what is real, and with narrative in a way that establishes poetry’s superiority. She begins her collection with a poem, “Everything is Glass,” that describes her origins. The details — date of birth, place, conditions of delivery – are repeated several times and always changed; on the other hand, the accumulation of detail starts to convince us of veracity. The result is unsettling. She begins with intentional disorientation, dislocates the reader while claiming to locate. Everything, frangible as glass. Later, other poems will address the issue of origins, will unsettle the ground, will involve glass. Her style is edgy, risky, shifting, energetic. Quirky.  Adjectives become nouns; nouns, verbs. Ellipses and elisions proliferate. The more sure, the less likely.

In the book’s eponymous prose poem, “Begin with the End in Mind,” Healey writes, “We start ourselves now, in this moment or tunnel, slow, homebound in darkness, the book says, and rustling. We start something simply by shedding our scarves and thinking the end of things hard as we can.” She is, at the same time as being humorous, serious, philosophical, very Canadian. I recommend this book: it is poetic, stylish and thought-provoking.

PluckPluck is Rosnau’s second poetry collection and her third book. She published both Gateway Girl (poetry) and The Sudden Weight of Snow (a novel) in 2002. Twelve years — and now Pluck. Not surprising; one of the main threads in Pluck is young motherhood, leaving behind one’s own youth, the burden of young children which can hamper a writer’s focus, her production. Another thread is vulnerability, of young women and of living in deep nature and the harm that can come of it, the predators, fear and danger. In “Music Class,” a particularly stunning villanelle (Rosnau uses traditional poetic forms throughout the collection), the narrator describes the ordinary horror of having children who must share the same music class as the children of the man who had sexually assaulted her as a young woman: “Sometimes when we make up a life, / we set aside the part when we were taken to the bush / and pushed down so that we can carry on while / our children go to music class.” That kind of vulnerability. Which seems to lead naturally to the use of traditional form, trying to contain, enclose, encircle, against so much opening, splitting, separation, brokenness. She is trying to mend the harm that has gone before, the harm that threatens in the present. I think she succeeds.

Both collections succeed in conveying particular, nuanced points of view and areas of concern in fresh poetic language and, especially in the case of Begin with the End in Mind, a very engaging, unusual new voice.

Arleen Paré is the 2014 recipient of the Governor General’s Award for Poetry for her recent acclaimed collection, Lake of Two Mountains.

Poets’ letters show work of meticulous editor

We Go Far Back in Time:

The Letters of Earle Birney and Al Purdy, 1947-1987

Edited by Nicholas Bradley

Harbour Publishing

480 pages, $39.95

Reviewed by Candace Fertile

Being able to read the private correspondence of two notable Canadian poets feels a bit like getting away with something, even though Earle Birney and Al Purdy were well aware that eventually their letters would be read by others. At least, they hoped that would happen; both were intent on squeezing as much money as possible out of their writing through publishing and the selling of manuscripts to archives. Purdy, in particular, was conscious of the need to create income as, unlike Birney, he was not a professor.

Purdy starts the exchange when he submits poems to Canadian Poetry Magazine, then edited by Birney. Fourteen years younger than Birney and an autodidact, Purdy initiates a discussion about poetry which quickly develops into friendship and continues for 40 years. The two men don’t always agree or get along, but they had much in common apart from poetry. They admired each other’s poems. They loved to travel. They both loved to drink. They loved women, lots of women, and their testosterone-fueled excesses and sophomoric jokes quickly become tiresome. But they were men of their time, I guess, and probably not much has changed except that university professors are now perhaps a bit more reticent to pounce on their students.

The editor, Nicholas Bradley, who is a professor in the Department of English at UVic (and recently named William Lyon MacKenzie King Junior Visiting Professor of Canadian Studies at Harvard University), has done a monumental job in compiling this book. Perhaps the simplest way to indicate the amount of work he did is to remark on the number of footnotes: 947. And these footnotes are full of helpful, if not essential, information.

Bradley has an immense knowledge of his subjects and a clear understanding of their failures and successes. In his introduction he says, “If We Go Far Back in Time illuminates the poems and serves to sustain interest in them, then the edition will have met its goal.” As Birney and Purdy often commented on each other’s work and included poems in their letters, and I was driven to rummage about in my copies of their work, I think Bradley achieved his goal. Anyone unfamiliar with the poetry is likely to be lost in myriad references.

The meticulously documented letters also reveal the landscape of Canadian writing over four decades: the generally small community of Canadian writers, the utter necessity of the Canada Council, and the problems writers have in trying to make a living (it’s likely much worse now).

But even more than all that, Bradley elevates the role of the scholar. His apparently dogged determination to discover as much as he can about these letters and their writers is a testament to the power of curiosity. Like the best detective, Bradley has tried to lay bare the mysteries while acknowledging that some things may never be completely uncovered. He includes a note on editorial procedures, a timeline of the writers’ lives, a short appendix of undated letters, a short appendix of Purdy’s written comments to others about Birney, a glossary of selected names, a bibliography, an index of titles, and an index of names.

In the age of email, texts, Twitter, Skype, and stuff I have no idea about, such a collection is unlikely to be compiled again. And that is sad.

Reviewer Candace Fertile teaches English at Camosun College.

Novel not quite adult fiction, not quite YA

The First Principles of Dreaming

By Beth Goobie

Second Story Press

265 pages, $19.95

Reviewed by Julia Leggett 

The First Principles of Dreaming is veteran young-adult author Beth Goobie’s first novel length work intended for adults. Goobie delves into unsettling and challenging territory here, just as she does in her work for younger readers. A coming-of-age tale, the novel traces the awakening self-awareness of the aptly named Mary-Eve Hamilton, a teenage girl stifled within a deeply religious and damaged family. As the story progresses, Goobie persuasively lays bare the connection between personal suffering and a proclivity for religious extremism. Mary-Eve’s mother’s grief and madness manifests as Christian visions and glossolalia; her psychological anguish is harnessed to advance the power of the church, while Mary-Eve’s father, a man given to violence, hides his rage behind a pious mask.

When Mary-Eve befriends the worldly Dee, a girl who appears to be everything she’s not, a splitting takes place. Dee nicknames May-Eve Jezebel and initiates her into the world of boys, lipsticks and the backseats of cars. The structure of the novel mirrors this split, switching between first- and third-person narration. This move to third-person narration creates a sense of detachment, as though what happens to the Jezebel part of Mary-Eve is merely observed by her, rather than actually internally experienced. In a sense, the whole novel is a meditation on splitting, on how we disassociate from our pain or attempt to transcend it, and on twinning, that endless quest for our mirror image, for our other half, in a bid to make ourselves whole.

At first, Dee’s friendship seems to offer Mary-Eve a way out, but Dee’s life is not without its own darkness. Both girls have demons to vanquish before they can begin to heal. Goobie creates a nebulous world in which the spiritual, the psychological and the physical spill into each other, where apparitions become corporeal and vice-versa.

The book is an uncanny and surreal read: Goobie adeptly taps into the novelty and intensity of being a teenager where things are sensed and felt, rather than known. However, as a reader, I felt a lack of rootedness. While Dee and Mary-Eve/Jez’s relationship is well-drawn and complex, the relationships between the other characters are less tangible. The lyricism and ethereality of Goobie’s language sometimes borders on vagueness and there is a tendency for plot twists to simply happen, somewhat out of the blue.

The themes of The First Principles of Dreaming are adult in nature and yet both the novel’s scope and voice struck me as being distinctly for a YA audience. We’re always in the midst of the action, with no sense of a world beyond these teenage lives and no authoritative adult narrator to guide us forward. Like Mary-Eve herself, who seems to inhabit several planes of reality at once, The First Principles of Dreaming straddles the realms of adult and YA fiction, being not quite one and not quite the other.

Julia Leggett is a Victoria-based writer. Her debut short fiction collection, Gone South and Other Ways to Disappear, is available from Mother Tongue Publishing.

Memoir born from nature and turbulence

Christine Lowther is the daughter of the noted B.C. poet, Pat Lowther, and is an accomplished poet and essayist in her own right. She has co-edited two books of essays and is the author of three books of poetry. Her most recent book is a collection of her own essays, Born Out of This: A Memoir (Caitlin Press, 2014). Often referred to as a “ lifelong activist,” Lowther has been a resident of Clayoquot Sound since 1992 and this book includes many of her encounters with the natural elements of this still largely unspoiled environment. Recently, she answered Joy Fisher’s questions about her writing and her life.

The title of your book, Born Out of This, is related to a story of paddling in monstrous waves and thus suggests emergence from turbulence. In some of the essays in your book, you refer to the death of your mother at the hands of your father, which suggests that the turbulence you were born out of is not merely that of the ocean. But your final essay concludes with an examination of your obsession with immersing yourself in the ocean. You say: “The water, so cold, changes everything. Day or night, each time I emerge from the ocean, I feel reborn.” What meaning do you wish to convey to your readers by the title of your book?

We needed to come up with a title. This is often the most challenging part of writing a book. Vici Johnstone, my publisher, chose this one, very perceptively. I love the ocean and we were all born from it, and you’re right, there was turbulence. The title is perfect.

The descriptions you include about the behaviour of even the smallest creatures in your environment — for example the pipefish you once watched for a quarter of an hour — suggest an enormous capacity for patient observation. Is this the inborn patience of a poet, or have you had to learn it over time? If you did learn it, how did you train yourself?

I think my need to observe and notice wild things comes from love. Both my parents were nature freaks and when we left the city for Mayne Island I was utterly enchanted. It felt like a different planet. Nothing against the city, which I also loved in my way, especially later on during the punk scene in Vancouver. If anybody trained me, my parents did, for good and ill, and a few good teachers did too. Observation of little things like bugs and birds was also in the pages of books I read as a child. Those books are still with us, but screens are taking over with their games and movies. It feels like I’ve noticed and observed and loved all my life, but I’m honestly not sure, because I have forgotten much of my childhood. I love all the magic that is around us all of the time. In adulthood I fell in love with poetry again and I think reading a lot of it helps in the “training.”

Your essays often recount your encounters with the larger animals who share the relatively intact forest you live in in Clayoquot Sound and it is clear that daily contact with some of them is necessary to your continued sense of peace; but you are also acutely aware of the dangers inherent in sharing space with wild animals such as cougars. Can you elaborate on the tensions inherent in the danger and the balm of living with untamed beings?

My first meeting with a cougar taught me that they are around us whether we know it or not, and this can be very disconcerting. You could almost say we are never alone in the forest. I had a dazzling cougar sighting on May 6, 2014, that didn’t make it into the book. I was on my floathouse deck, depressed because of the manner in which my relationship had ended that morning. I wasn’t sure I’d be able to get any sleep that night. Then I heard a large animal emerge onto the shore rocks from the bush—safely across the water from me. I assumed it was a wolf but amazingly, considering the broad daylight and my presence, it was a cougar. The animal walked along the rocks toward the creek for several moments. After it had returned to the forest, I found myself feeling suddenly light. That night I slept soundly and peacefully.

You write that you began gardening in your mid-twenties, and, now, in Clayoquot Sound, you have a floating greenhouse attached to your float home. What has gardening come to mean to you, both practically and aesthetically, over the years?

I’m obsessive about some things and gardening is one of them. I met a woman on the Walbran Valley logging blockade in ’91. She could identify wild flowers and herbs, and knew how to garden. She was a couple of years younger than me but I saw everything she did as both right and inspirational.

I write poems about gardening and about the flowers that grow around me and the bees I love so much—possibly more poems than I should write about these things, I don’t know. When I try to imagine living with no garden, I feel ill. It just feels right to eat out of the garden. It almost feels like spring wouldn’t happen without gardening. Quite possibly manic. I have learned by experience that if you don’t like gardens and gardening you might not like me much.

In Born Out of This, you write about some of the causes which have engaged your activism, from the peace movement to environmental protection. Can you talk a little about what gave rise to your passionate caring for these causes?

I have to assume my mother is at least partly responsible since she is reported to have read her poems at anti-Vietnam war rallies while I occupied her womb, plus the whole family picketed a development that threatened a pair of old trees when my sister and I were still really young. I discovered Vancouver’s peace marches by myself when I was 14, but these sorts of leanings were clearly in my cells already. I always had a strong sense of justice, as did some of my forbears. Of course, some of it might have been loneliness reaching out, searching for my tribe.

Giller nominated story collection full of surprises

Saltspring author Kathy Page has had a most interesting fall: her latest book of short fiction Paradise and Elsewhere (John Metcalfe Books/Biblioasis,) was nominated for the Giller Prize, and her novel Alphabet, first published in 2004 and shortlisted for a Governor General’s Award in 2005, has been reissued in Canada by Biblioasis Books. Alphabet is a compelling story about freedom and responsibility told through the consciousness of a character named Simon Austen. The busy author, who also teaches creative writing at Vancouver Island University, talked online recently with Lynne Van Luven about how her work and life intersect.

Kathy, I love these new stories of yours in Paradise & Elsewhere because they nicely disconcert the reader. Can you talk a little about how this particular assembly of stories came together: do you think we are indeed living in disconcerting times?

Yes, indeed, though perhaps we always have! It’s true that there’s an element of surprise, of unpredictability, in many of these stories and I’m glad of it, though it was not a deliberate policy, but one of the many common elements which I discovered as I put the book together.

I’d been thinking of a collection of stories, but putting off the task of gathering, arranging and selecting. When I at last got down to it, I realized that the two kinds of writing: the regular realistic, contemporary kind of story, and other stories that have a mythical, magical, uncanny, futuristic or fable-like quality, did not mix particularly well. Belatedly, it dawned on me that I had two collections, not one.

It was exciting to put the two books together at once, and especially so to see the many ways the fabulist stories in Paradise & Elsewhere connected with and amplified each other. For example, there are recurrent motifs and themes: travel, trade, money and sex – what happens when a stranger arrives at the gate, or on the shore. What are we looking for when we make journeys? What kind of relationships do we create? In one story, a group of media people venture out of the city in pursuit of a story – a journey which only one of them will, barely, survive. In others, travelers return home after many years, arrive at a desert oasis, or visit the relics of ancient civilizations. The stories began to talk.

These stories are so well-honed; there is not an image or a word wasted. Do you find yourself writing in a more abbreviated fashion in your short stories than you do in your novels?  (Not that I am saying your novels are verbose!)

Thank you, Lynne. One of the many great things about short stories is that they lend themselves to continuous honing. It’s easy enough to open up the file six months or two or ten years after the story was originally written, read through and make a few changes. But of course another thing about the short story is that it’s often read in a single sitting and absorbed whole, like a poem, and because of that, readers may well be more aware of the detail of the writing. For the same reason, readers are also more aware of form in the short story.

My opinions as to my “favourite” stories in Paradise & Elsewhere tend to shift with each re-reading.  First I thought I liked “G’Ming” the best.  Then I thought it was “Lambing.”  Next week, it may well be “My Fees.”  Was it difficult to decide how to order these stories within the collection, and did you have certain criteria for which one went where in the book?

The ordering of and seams between the parts that make up a book is always very important and how to orchestrate all this is a part of the writing process that I really enjoy. I know you’ve read The Story of My Face – there, I was cutting between the three story lines, regularly, but not in an systematic way. There’s an emotional logic to these decisions that is hard to completely explain. In Paradise & Elsehwere there is a kind of chronology to the stories the book, a movement from the myth-like stories that deal with the origins of particular invented civilizations, like “Of Paradise,” to the speculative fictions which take place in a not-too-distant future, such as “We the Trees,” “Clients,” or “The Ancient Siddanese.” There is a drift forwards in time but I chose to break that “rule” and began the book with “G’Ming,” which is a more contemporary story. The point of view is unusual but the situation is at base one with which many tourists will be familiar; I felt it was gentler, more subtle way into the book, and then I realized that it also sets up many of the themes and motifs that are developed later: the idea of paradise, the way we relate to strangers, the couple, money, trade, et cetera.

 The short stories in this collection have a sort of untethered tone, when it comes to realism. And yet I have always loved the psychological realism of your novels. Are you heading in a different direction as a writer, do you think?

I think I can reassure you there. The stories are set in vivid, real-seeming places: a desert, a story sea shore, a walled garden, a coniferous forest, but you won’t find them on the map, and sometimes what happens may not conform to expectations of reality. But I do think there is a great deal of psychological realism going on. It’s not so much either or, but rather both and more, and I should explain that the stories in Paradise and Elsewhere were written over a long period of time, so this kind of fabulist writing really isn’t a new development for me. It’s putting the stories together and letting them talk to each other that’s new.

Realism is the dominant mode in literary fiction, and it can be a wonderful thing. At the same time, more imaginative approaches do persist and they have always fascinated me. When I sent my two short story collections to Biblioasis, the editor, John Metcalf, was in touch within a week to acquire the realistic collection. I asked about Paradise & Elsewhere, but he hadn’t read it. Three months later, we began editing the other book, The Two of Us and he still had not. When pressed, John admitted that he had a prejudice against non-realistic writing, and said that he tried to discourage his authors from taking that path. Still, I begged, since I already had taken it, would he not take a look? Dreading both the read and the letter he would have to write to me, he agreed to at least run his eyes over the MS.

“Actually,” he told me two days later, “I like them very much. I think we should do them first.”

In the end, the distinction between realistic and imaginative writing, like all distinctions, breaks down. There’s a strong mythical undertow to all my novels, even the grittiest of them, Alphabet, which Biblioasis are reissuing this fall.

When I first interviewed you, shortly after you moved to Salt Spring Island (in 2001), you commented that transplanting a writing career from the United Kingdom to Canada was not an easy thing to do.  Do you now feel properly “re-established,” the way a plant does after a few seasons in a new segment of the garden?

It’s interesting you mention this, given that the arrival of a stranger is one of the themes of the book. I’ve found Canadian writers to be very open and friendly, but even so, moving any kind of life and finding your place is bound to be difficult. I’m beginning to feel more part of things here, and oddly enough this book has a great deal to do with it. Because it includes stories written when I lived in the UK, along with others that originated here, I can feel that I’ve brought at least some of my past into my new life, and integrated the two. The wonderful response to the [collection], and appreciation from Canadian short-fiction writers whom I very much admire, has certainly helped…

Alice sounds a haunting refrain

Alice

Co-created by Robert Wilson, Tom Waits, Kathleen Brennan and Paul Schmidt

Based on Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass 

Directed by Clayton Jevne, Theatre Inconnu

Through Dec. 20

Reviewed by Joy Fisher

Even before the Canadian premiere of Alice at Theatre Inconnu begins, artist Robert Randall’s illustrations of a dissolute man, a bright-eyed girl and a rabbit, projected onto a screen, undulate gently as if deep underwater.

It is an early clue about the psychological depth of this surreal musical exploration of the relationship between a Victorian-era author and the real-life child who was his muse.

In 1856, Charles Dodgson, a mathematician and Anglican deacon, befriended the family of Henry Liddell and became a particular friend of Liddell’s middle daughter, Alice. Dodgson, an amateur photographer, posed Alice in various make-believe postures, including that of a beggar-maid in torn clothing. At one point, Dodgson wrote in his diary: “I wish I could free her of all her clothes.”

In 1863, when Alice was 11 and Dodgson had just completed a draft of what he would later publish as Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland under the pseudonym Lewis Carroll, Mrs. Liddell ended the relationship between her daughter and Dodgson and ordered Alice to destroy his letters. Dodgson continued to write, if not to Alice, than at least about his Alice, and later published Through the Looking Glass.

When Americans Robert Wilson, Tom Waits and Paul Schmidt began to conjure Alice in 1990, they hit on the idea of melding the Alice stories with the real-life relationship between Dodgson and Alice. Wilson, a director known for visual conception, was struck by the image of a photographer with a black cloth over his head. The image also resonated with Schmidt, who wrote the libretto. What must it have been like, he wondered, for a child to be photographed in an era when the process entailed long periods of holding perfectly still, stared at by the camera’s eye? It became his opening scene.

It fell to singer-songwriter Waits to write music and lyrics for the play. In collaboration with his wife, Kathleen Brennan, he created a haunting atmosphere as a counterpoint to the text in which sorrow and reverie, touched by obsession and insanity, rise like a mist around the characters. Theatre Inconnu musical director Donna Williams and the group, The Party on High Street, used an exotic variety of musical instruments, including a horned instrument known as a Stroh violin and the eerie theremin, to achieve an emotionally fragile mood.

Psycho-sexual allusions are never far from the surface. In the Dodgson character’s anguished opening number, “There’s Only Alice,” Graham Roebuck, in the guise of the White Rabbit, sings: “And so a secret kiss brings madness with the bliss.” Alice, played by Melissa Blank, morphs in age, but maintains a strong determination throughout to grow into her own identity. She is not untouched by Dodgson’s obsessive attention, however. In Alice’s last song, as an adult reflecting on her childhood relationship, she signals her continuing attachment when she sings: “You haven’t looked at me that way in years, but I’m still here.”

Hints of pedophilia run through the Alice stories as well. Both acts end with trial scenes in which the Black Queen demands the beheading of, first Alice, then Dodgson, because of inappropriate letters sent and received. This is a crowded tale, populated by seven supporting actors, several of whom play as many as five roles apiece. Imaginative costuming by Shayna Ward, as well as talented acting, effectively disguise this redundancy of roles. Together, the cast and production team bring to life characters from the Alice stories with an edge you’ve never seen in them before.

Despite the condemnation in the scenes derived from the mad worlds created in Lewis Carroll’s Alice stories, this play as a whole is not censorious of pedophilia, but rather treats both characters involved in the relationship with sympathy and respect. In a 1993 BBC documentary, the argument was made that the intent is, rather, to see the relationship as “something complex and moving and beautiful, if troubled.” In Theatre Inconnu’s program, director Clayton Jevne advances his hope that the current production will both entertain and haunt the audience “in a way that reminds us that we are all ‘haunted’ by those who have touched our psyches.”

Jevne’s hope is realized. Alice is a play that risks much and touches deeply.

Joy Fisher is a Victoria playwright and theatre lover.

Tofino artist, writer create fine chapbook

In the fall, a lovely package arrived in the Coastal Spectator mailbox. It was a chapbook, This Dark, haiku by Tofino poet Joanna Streetly, illustrated by Tofino artist Marion Syme. Syme and writer Adrienne Mason are the owners of Postelsia Press, which published This Dark. Mason, who trained as a marine biologist, explains that the Postelsia is the Latin name for the sea palm, a tiny, tenacious seaweed that lives in West Coast habitat. Both Streetly and Mason talked to Lynne Van Luven recently about their creative (ad)ventures.

Adrienne and Joanna, when I hold This Dark, there is no doubt in my mind that this chapbook of illustrated haiku grew directly out of the West Coast environment.  Can you each talk a bit about how you came together in this project?  

Joanna:  Adrienne contacted me one day after I’d put out a haiku about gardening and the rain. It was a rainy April day, and we were all in the thick of the weather change. It was a shared experience, and the poem extended the scope of that shared experience. It linked us to each other and to our environment. A two-point connection became a three-point connection…

I can’t remember the haiku that pushed Adrienne over the edge, but one day she instantly responded to one, saying that the poems just had to be published. Several wine and dinner gatherings later, a first draft was in the makings. In publishing these poems, complete with the gorgeous linocuts, Postelsia Press has helped make them feel tangibly representative of the coast – a hold-in-your-hand collection, but also an expression of collaboration itself.

Adrienne:  I enjoyed reading Jo’s haiku on Twitter – her choice of words always seemed so perfect – and I could tell she was having fun with it… Her daily haiku were a reminder about the importance of daily practice.

Haiku also spoke to the physicality of books that I love. There is something that appeals to me about a small book with some heft that can fit in your hand. And [my partner] Marion and I wanted to design beautiful books, so Jo’s words and our vision of the physical manifestation of the book — small, thick, beautifully illustrated, with a quality wrap cover — came together.

Adrienne, you and artist Marion Syme founded Postelsia in 2009 — hardly a good time to launch a small press. You are an author yourself, published by more established presses such as Greystone and Kids Can Press.  What was your impetus?

I don’t even consider Postelsia a small press, more of a micro press. In some ways it was a backlash to “traditional” publishing. I’ve published over 30 books in that way, and, frankly, I just wanted to do what I wanted to do. More importantly, we have one thing that a lot of publishers don’t have — direct access to a steady stream of visitors from around the world who come to this international destination. We also have two independent bookstores — one in Tofino and one in Ucluelet — as well as two other outlets that sell a nice selection of quality books. We were very clear from the beginning that our marketing and distribution “strategy” (such as it was) would stop where Highway 4 meets the Pacific Rim Highway. I knew how difficult it was to get books into stores outside of the region, because essentially we’re looked at like a self-publisher, so we’ve always been very clear that our market is the Tofino-Ucluelet region.  (Having said all that though, we do have one of our books distributed through Sandhill.)

It is really more a labour of love . . . than anything. Everything gets invested back into the press. I know this business has the smallest of margins, so I went into this with my eyes wide open. I want to produce local books (we use printers in Port Alberni or Victoria), with local writers and artists, on local topics.  You can find the four books we’ve published (and that are still in print) at Postelsia Press.

Joanna, your bio says you “have lived afloat in Clayoquot Sound for over 20 years.” I imagine that somehow the compressed quarters of a boat might have made you a woman of few words when it comes to your writing. Do you think there is any connection between the sparse beauty of haiku and your floating home?

I don’t consider myself a person who is naturally given to sparseness. But my lifestyle has saved me from being a compulsive packrat. I live on a floathouse that I mostly built myself. The interior is 16 feet by 24, with a nice airy loft . . . floathouses have to be able to float. And that means you can’t fill them with possessions, or they’ll list to one side – or even sink… Twice a year as my penance, I reluctantly box and bag the detritus of useless stuff that seems to creep around me like ivy. I sort it into piles – to give away, to sell, to recycle. It’s never enough.

With haiku, the process is similar. I chose to work with the syllables as a way of honing my writing skills. Skilled editing is a challenge and benefit to any writer. And so, for me, haiku became a way to distil essential moments into a single drop of imagery. I always begin with too many syllables, too many words I’m attached to. I always have to sort out my thoughts and choose which ones are worth holding onto. Rarely, a haiku will be born whole, no refining needed. More commonly, I chew them over while I walk through the forest, or they rearrange themselves in my brain as I paddle a kayak.

Artist Marion Syme’s linocuts are a response to Joanna’s haiku, and to her own walks in the forest and along the beaches. Adrienne, you say you had a great launch of the chapbook in August that drew together the Tofino community. I am wondering how you think “community” contributes to artists’ and writers’ process and products.

In Tofino, and in our region in general, “community” is huge. If you are a local writer or artist, you will almost be guaranteed a great launch of your work. The community as a whole is very creative so people understand that when artists put themselves out there – to release their writing, art, theatrical production, music, whatever — it’s part of the “deal” for the rest of us to support them. I know people who will buy every book put out by a local person and purchase new works of art, even though they have no room on their bookshelves or walls…

I think the creative events are also one of the few times in a very busy tourist town where “locals” gather. We did Jo’s launch for This Dark in mid-August, possibly the busiest time of the year in Tofino, but community members filled the venue. It was a little pause in the summer where we could come together, celebrate Joanna and Marion’s creativity, before going back out into the busy world. I am always rejuvenated after these events, and they are wonderful reminders of why Tofino is such a great place to live.

What new books can we expect from Postelsia Press?  

This Dark is our most recent title. Then there is a chapbook, The Golden Fish, which is an original fable by our local (just retired) librarian. And a small anthology (which we envision as one of a series), The Chesterman Beach Anthology — poetry, history, memoir, interviews by locals (some writers, most not) all about Chesterman Beach, our community’s place to celebrate, mourn, exercise, work out our troubles, get married, scatter ashes, learn to ride bikes, party…

Collection maps career of seminal poet

Angular Unconformity: The Collected Works of Don McKay

By Don McKay

Goose Lane Editions

584 pages; $45.00

Reviewed by Cole Mash

The importance of being gifted with the publication of Don McKay’s collected works can be found nested in the title McKay chose for the volume. In the dust jacket, McKay provides us with a definition: “An angular unconformity is a border between two rock sequences, one lying at a distinct angle to the other.” The name is perfect because that is exactly what we have: two Don McKays lying at an angle to each other; one a timestamp of a McKay’s earlier work, and the other the seminal poetry that has made McKay one of Canada’s most celebrated bards.

Raised in Cornwall, Ontario, Don McKay is the author of 12 books of poetry, twice winning the Governor General’s award. He was made a member of the Order of Canada in 2008. McKay is considered a pioneer of Canadian eco-poetry, once describing his own work as “nature poetry in a time of environmental crisis.”  His love of birds and birdwatching is a trademark fulcrum of his poetry.

Angular Unconformity: The Collected Poems 1970-2014 brings together a number of McKay’s books of poetry in their entirety, including, among others, his widely celebrated Birding, or Desire (1983), his Governor General’s Award winning books Night Field (1991) and Another Gravity (2000), as well as some new poems and an insightful afterward by the author.

At the beginning McKay gives us a section called “A Note on the Title” in which he tells us that an angular unconformity has gaps in between the geologic structures; gaps of millions of years. He tells us to “imagine a biography with gaps of decades in it” and that is what we get with this offering: a poetic biography filled with blank space. Some books such as Air Occupies Space (1973) and Lightning Ball Bait (1980) are left out altogether, but in this erasure we get representative relic, a facsimile of an old flight plan.

The volume begins with poems from Long Sault, McKay’s second book of poetry. These poems foreshadow a later eco-centred McKay. “See” starts out by comparing roadways to islands followed by a poem employing the eco-imagery of a river sleeping “behind the dam.” The rest of the poems from Long Sault continue with this eco-imagery, and we even get an early bird sighting with mention of a great blue heron, a bird which McKay would later devote a whole poem to.

Next we have the poems of Lependu. The poems in Lependu centre on historical Ontario and the story of the hanged man (le pendu being French for “the hanged”).  In the poem “When Lependu Loves You”, McKay writes, “Nevertheless//when Dundas Street expects Lependu//to be in the air on Friday night she grins//like an extra long unplayed piano”. In this passage there is an absence of the eco-centrism characteristic of McKay’s work before and after this book. Instead, the poems of Lependu establish a sense of place and country, which McKay also carries forward in his poetry, and drives us onward with the ferocity of language that perpetuates McKay’s work.

Then we arrive at McKay’s seminal book, Birding, or Desire. This book brings together the Canadiana and eco-poetics that McKay cultivates in his first two selected offerings. He does this almost metapoetically in the poem “A Morning Song” in which his copy of “Birds of Canada roosts on the shelf,” a Canadian book on a shelf in a Canadian book to be bought and placed on your shelves. It is here in the book that a thematic and linguistic continuity is found in the wooded space McKay has chosen to inhabit with his words. This harmony is sustained right up to the last poem in the collection, which asserts, “we are here, we love it, we// belong”.

In the beautiful and haunting parable-esque afterword, McKay envisions running into a much younger version of himself. When looking back on his life he tells himself that “half a century, does not pass in vain,” and this book is proof of that; evidence of water collecting in the ground for years–a frost heave crack in the spring pavement.

McKay’s poems are filled with exciting, kinetically charged language in a geography I can inhabit and relate to. The text invites the reader to come and learn about one of our country’s great poets while also sheparding them through the experience; it is a field guide to McKay, and one that would be an asset to the shelf of any lover of Canadian poetry.

Cole Mash is an English and creative writing student at UBC Okanagan. His poetry has been published in The Eunoia Review and The UBC Okanagan Papershell Anthology.