Sharp and quizzical look at human experience

The Pull of the Moon

by Julie Paul

Brindle & Glass, 2014

$19.95; 184 pages

Reviewed by Margaret Thompson

If fiction serves to map what makes us human, the short story may represent those small regions, shown in contrasting colour to demonstrate their position vis à vis the larger country or continent, and magnified to reveal their complexities in more detail. In her second collection of short stories, Julie Paul surveys the minutiae of human relationships with a sharp and quizzical eye.

Her characters are what would be called ordinary people: married couples and single parents, friends and colleagues, family members and complete strangers. We observe them in their separate landscapes, coping with separation and parenting duties, going on holiday, irritated by their neighbours and apartment living, resentful of family demands—all very much the stuff of daily life until we hear the details. Then we see the old secret behind the cottage holiday that has frozen a family in denial and guilt in “The King is Dead,” the psychic distortion caused by the accidental killing of a baby rescued from a car wreck in “Damage,” the grief and loneliness of a brother and sister, “each with a country to themselves,” in “Crossing Over.”

Many of the characters yearn for love and connection, but there is not a single straightforward path for any of them. In “Flip,” the main character seems at first to be a caricature of a librarian: Claudia is timid, socially awkward and has a talent for self-deprecation. She has also had very few sexual experiences apart from an early collision with fellatio and a short-lived relationship with Clark which ended with a text to say he’d gone to Alberta.

Rodger’s courtship transforms Claudia, who “feels like another person has entered her body,” and she finds herself whisked off to Cuba, where she sees, “Women with gigantic cigars in their mouths, looking like they’re enjoying themselves immensely.” This is sex as fun, but Andrew’s experience in “Weeping Camperdown” is alarmingly different. He is a single parent dipping his toe in the dating pool once again. He seems to find a soulmate in Joni. Lying under the Weeping Camperdown in the Ross Bay cemetery is idyllic, but subsequent events quickly bring far more than he bargains for, Joni’s ideas of love being as freakish a mutation as the tree.

Guilt and responsibility for others run like underground rivers in many of the stories. The narrator in “Adios” struggles with her part in Fred Poole’s death, having ignored her neighbour, the victim of a stroke, when she saw him wandering down the street. Even this guilt has its complications, for the Pooles resist medical intervention for religious reasons, and there is a delicious irony in the end to the narrator going to Mrs Poole’s rescue when she has a fall, and becoming “the answer to a prayer.” Angela in “Her Full Name was Beatrice” frets over her role in the tragedy of her friend Erica murdering her child, Beany, tormenting herself with “what ifs,” dreaming of alternative scenarios, addressing herself as “You.”

This is not to say that the tone is unrelievedly serious. There is a delightful sense of humour at work here, and even the most serious stories are leavened by wit, by captivating throwaway lines, by hilarious, incongruous detail. It is a reminder that we are dealing with humans and human behaviour seen up close: funny, sad, inadequate, tragic, venal, conflicted, desperate, sometimes even noble. This particular cartography is often entertaining, frequently disturbing, and always illuminating.

Julie Paul will launch The Pull of the Moon on Sept. 28 at 7.30 p.m. at Munro’s Books in Victoria.

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

Rifflandia: Death Cab for Cutie worth the 17-year wait

Day 3 of Rifflandia 2014,

Royal Athletic Park,

Reviewed by Chris Ho

The hot sun beat down as swarms of  people waited in a massive line that  veered down Cook Street. Luckily, I  wasn’t wearing my banana-suit costume  like the brave men in front of me, but part  of me wished I had. I already felt carefree  energy in the air. Royal Athletic Park was  decked out with two stages, one on either end, and a plethora of vendors and activity tents.

As I walked through the entrance, a giant banner popped out from above: Rifflandia. To my left were black wooden Artlandia panels and a big main stage. To the right, aisles of local vendors led the way to the side stage tent, fast-food trucks, and then, of course, to beer and cider taps.

I was impressed by the musical choices: indie rock, dubstep, Celtic dance-pop, 70s influenced pop-punk and hip-hop. I hadn’t encountered anything like the fiddle-infused dance-pop that is Kytami: the high-energy fiddler hardly missed a beat, even as she danced around, stirring up the crowd, her arms and fingers moving furiously to the notes.

While the main stage sound quality and setup was successful, I had a love-hate relationship with the Rifftop Tent side stage. Everyone appreciated the much-needed shade of the big tent, but unfortunately the sound was muddy trapped under the tent roof. In the end, I put it out of my mind while listening to the Dum Dum Girls.

An all female line-up, the Dum Dum Girls had one guy fill in on lead guitar. He too had awesome long hair and matched the well-coordinated black outfits of the trendy rock trio. The initial impression I had from their video Bedroom Eyes was that they overplayed the gorgeous girls with guitars shtick. But their live performance was more about heartfelt lyrics backed up by Blondie-inspired harmonies and dream-pop guitar licks.

Even though it’s predictable to say so, the highlight of day three was the headlining act, Death Cab For Cutie. As I first discovered at the group’s Pacific Coliseum performance in 2009, there is something special about a band that has played the music it loves for almost two decades. Their on-stage chemistry and energy was infectious. The crowd roared with excitement after the opening song as Ben Gibbard (lead vocals) announced this was their first show in Victoria since the band formed in 1997.

“Wow, they’re old,” I heard a young woman say.

She sounded disappointed. But to me, that was incredibly exciting: the last time Death Cab performed in Victoria, they were just starting out. Seventeen years later they’re back, an international success, still flawlessly performing some of the very first songs they wrote.

After the encore, Ben Gibbard gave a heartfelt thanks to the multi-instrumentalist and co-founder of the band, Chris Walla, who had just played his last show with the band. It was a moment to remember. The drums built up and crashed on the closing note of Marching Bands Of Manhattan and the band put aside their instruments for a group hug. A flurry of camera phones reached up to capture the occasion.

We finally made our way to the exit lights with huge smiles, plastic beer cups crunching underfoot.

Chris Ho is a Victoria musician and writer.

Memoir melds crime with domestic reality

Victoria resident Alicia Priest’s new memoir, A Rock Fell on the Moon: Dad and the Great Yukon Silver Ore Heist (Harbour Publishing, 251 Pages, $32.95) is both exciting and informative. She will be launching the book on Wednesday, Sept. 17 at 7:30 p.m. at the Bard and Banker, 1022 Government Street. Priest recently talked to Lynne Van Luven about the research that went into her move from short-form journalism to the book format.   Most readers will have seen Priest’s frequent byline in publications such as The Globe and Mail, The Georgia Strait and Vancouver Magazine, but she’s risen to the challenge of a book with her usual professionalism.

You have so much experience as a newspaper, radio and magazine reporter — over 25 years — and the gratification that comes with constant publication.  Was it difficult to “settle down” and focus on one topic for a book?  

At first it was, not the topic so much as the organization and stamina. But once I’d completed the first three or four chapters, the book had me by the throat. I was possessed and couldn’t stop writing. The chapters just flowed. But, as always, writing is re-writing. I was grateful for the extended time.

Alicia, I found your memoir really engrossing, and I am glad you were able to tell this family story.  In the process of doing so, how did your emotional connection to or assessment of your father change?

If anything, it confirmed my suspicions that my dad was a deeply troubled man well before the silver heist. He likely was an unhappy boy. What I saw as a child was his affectionate, playful and clever nature, which was part of him too. He suffered as well but the wounds were self-inflicted and made at our expense. I always loved him.

Memoir requires the interplay of both research and memory.  Can you talk a little about how that worked for A Rock Fell on the Moon?

A lot of research went into the book, both delving into historical, forensic and legal archives and research through interviews.  I had more than 900 pages of the official RCMP file to go through, about a third of it redacted. As well, I had more than 300 personal letters to read. And several books and articles. My plan was to do all the research first and then concentrate on weaving my memories in and out with the documented facts. I took creative license in relating certain scenes that I knew about but for which I was not present. For the most part ,that is how the book came together but not completely, do check here and read the whole case. Not surprisingly, there were hiccups, stalls, and last minute discoveries. For instance, well into the writing I learned that the lawyer who represented my father at the 1963 preliminary hearing was living in Vancouver and recollected him and the event clearly. Of course, he had to be interviewed.

I have to confess that as I read your memoir, I found my sympathies shifting between your parents, but in the end, I felt your mother put up with a lot and that your father was one of those dangerous charismatic men whose constitution might not be suited to domesticity.  Is it unduly intrusive to ask how you ended up feeling about the marriage, once you had the book finished?

They never should have married. They were inherently mismatched. But I understand why they did. For my mother, it was a form of rebellion against her Mennonite upbringing and for my father, well, she was a dream come true. And, hell, they were infatuated with each other, which we know is a form of temporary insanity.   My dad put out many red flags  – his brooding, anti-social nature, his antipathy for cities, the fact that not one of his friends or relatives attended their wedding – which my mother ignored. She had a naïve belief that her love would bring out his better qualities and suppress his bad. Many women did during that era. And they did not know each other well – only six months through correspondence and four months in person.

I learned a great deal about Keno Hill, the Yukon Territory and silver mining from your memoir. So few Canadians have the background you have.   Looking back, how do you think your northern childhood shaped you as a person?

My childhood gave me so much: a passion for the natural world, for animals, for reading and writing, for music, for stillness, and the ability to amuse myself without TV, radio or telephone. I was and am never bored.

How to flunk out of gender into something better

Gender Failure

Ivan E. Coyote and Rae Spoon

Arsenal Pulp Press

265 pages, $17.95

Reviewed by Julian Gunn

And what a gorgeous failure it is.

Gender Failure is the new book by performers, authors and musicians Ivan E. Coyote and Rae Spoon. Under its wry title, it succeeds on any terms you care to apply: as a work of art, a collection of autobiographical essays, the record of a stage show, and a gentle but firm declaration that if we do not honour each other’s authentic, struggling, and contradictory relationships to gender, then we fail each other.

Is this a brave book? Sure it is, but I don’t like using that word brave. We mean something good by it, but we also sometimes mean, “Brave, not like me.” We use it to create a little bit of distance between the brave person and our ordinary selves. When people called me “brave” after my own transition, I thought, “That’s not what it felt like at all.” Instead, I want to say that this is a powerfully vulnerable book, and that the more vulnerable the book gets, the more powerful it becomes, because it invites readers to take the same risk.

Fittingly, Gender Failure is a book that can’t be reduced to simple categories. It is based on the collaborators’ live show, and incorporates photos, illustrations, and song lyrics. There are no simple, fixed narratives of gender identity here. There are stories about gender transitions, yes, in the sense of transitions in how each author felt and thought about living gender. Yet Gender Failure is about transition in all kinds of other senses, too. A big part of Rae Spoon’s story is their transition from folk/country to electronic/indie musician, and beyond. Ivan Coyote transitions out of writing a long-term newspaper column. The authors describe physical and social transformations, transformations of wardrobes and pronouns, but ultimately the transition that matters is the one towards self-determination and self-celebration. It’s not a complete journey. How could it be, especially while gendered norms are violently enforced, even in spaces where we expect better? Spoon writes wrenchingly of finding that “the freedom that is part of the rhetoric about indie music . . .  is reserved only for certain people.”

In a section entitled “Do I Still Call Myself a Butch?” Coyote writes, simply: “Yes. Of course I still do.” It’s a reminder that these words—Butch, trans*, Spoon’s playful-yet-serious coining “gender-retired” – are supposed to make space in the world for people to live as their whole selves, not create new ways to exclude and shame each other’s difference. Part of what’s inspiring about this book is the way these two, as collaborators and friends, make loving mirrors of themselves for each other.

Here’s what I hope most of all: that Gender Failure marks the beginning of a new wave of declarations from gender dropouts and gender retirees, gender inventors and gender artists. May we all fail at everything that is wounding and constricting us. May we fail together into something better.

Reviewer’s Note: As good as Gender Failure is, it’s not the same as a live show with Spoon and Coyote. If you get a chance to see one or both of them, go. Meanwhile, clips are available on YouTube.

Julian Gunn is a Victoria poet and essayist.  

Axiatrix can’t escape genre

Blackbirds, 225 pages, $19.95

Blackbirds Two, 226 pages, $19.95

By Garry Ryan

NeWest Press

Reviewed by Judy LeBlanc

Garry Ryan has eight novels to his name, a following for his Detective Lane series, a Lambda award and a great premise in Blackbirds and Blackbirds Two. In these first two of the trilogy he draws attention to women pilots in the Second World War, and unearths little known historical facts such as the eleven black POWs who were tortured and murdered by the SS in Wereth, Belgium.

Sharon Lacey, a young Canadian who goes to England in 1940 to fly for the Air Transport Auxiliary (ATA), is also looking for her estranged father and soon becomes entangled in sordid family dynamics. Much happens to her in the first book, including brawls with Messerschmitts and discovering she has a half brother. Blackbird Two follows her through war, where she evolves into a hard-nosed senior commander with a passion for social justice. Like all fictional war heroes, she kills, suffers moral conflict, and amidst the carnage performs good deeds. Sharon is a woman tucked squarely into the war story canon. The ATA, not typically engaged in combat, served without fighting– a dichotomy that might be explored in a more literary book. However, such story telling would require a nuance that is not demonstrated in these books.

Not hours before reading myself into the cockpit of a spitfire with Sharon, I raced across the Nevada salt flats with a female motorcyclist in Rachel Kushner’s The Flamethrowers. Though both books involve women engaged in high-speed atypical behavior, the irresistible comparison settles more on genre than gender. Ryan’s books are about an aviatrix while Kushner’s is not about a female motorcyclist, though on that bike, you get how “nothing mattered except the milliseconds of life at that speed.” There are no lines so fine in the Blackbird trilogy, and this makes The Flamethrowers a work of literary fiction while the two Blackbirds are fair to middling plot-gobblers.

Graduate school teaches that it matters less what a book is about than how it is written. The formula is simple: there is good writing and bad writing, and plot-driven writing is bad. Furthermore, one should avoid the “expected.” I see little in Blackbirds that is unexpected other than gender and a sprinkling of historical facts.

When I think of the genre wars I want to lie down, and though I’m over MFA school, I grow even more weary when, while happily fantasizing myself into the character of a Second World War pilot, I encounter yet another head of  “slicked back” hair, or I’m meant to feel the character’s “tingling thrill.” This ejects me out of my fictional dream.

And yet, there were brief moments while reading Ryan’s books when I was able to slide into the cockpit of a spitfire face to face with the firmament and nothing stopping me, neither gender nor Nazi plane. Maybe at the end of the genre wars there’s only this, the simple pleasure of an image.

Judy LeBlanc is a writer who lives in Fanny Bay and organizes the Fat Oyster Reading Series.

Simpson’s spirited stories shift perceptions

Islands of Decolonial Love

By Leanne Simpson

ARP, 143 pp., $14.95

Reviewed by Tyler Gabrysh

Leanne Simpson’s latest work, Islands of Decolonial Love, is an impressive collection of short stories. Simpson’s book includes poems and brief vignettes, as well as audio downloads for select stories to round out the reader’s experience.

Simpson’s writing concerns Indigenous Peoples– particularly those of her own Nishnaabeg nation.  Her work conveys heartache, sensitivity, and innocence, sometimes at odds with circumstance, blemished truth, and awkwardness.  Readers are introduced to this collection through the narrator’s unsettling (and implied) account of a relationship incident.

Throughout the book, many words (and chapter titles) replicate the language of the Nishnaabeg with an according translation given at each chapter’s end. While this is admirable, a single index would have been helpful.

“waaseyaaban” opens with the narrator describing the single shower all four family members take as mother “instructed us to wash ourselves and our five pairs of dirty underwear.” Then, “binesiwag” tells of an eight-year-old’s resistance to staying with relatives for the first time. Next, “it takes an ocean not to break” reveals disdain for an ignorant white therapist who uses the word “aboriginal” too frequently.

Simpson jolts us with jarring content, including the following from the narrator’s friend: “lucy says that i made a critical mistake on my first day of therapy. ‘you have to lay all of your indian shit out on the first day, drug abuse, suicide attempts, all the times you got beat up, all of that shit. then you sit back and watch how they react. then you’ll know if they can deal or not.’ ”

As effectively as Simpson jolts us here, she finesses elsewhere. “Caged” concerns a spotted lynx and a male bear, along with  “nozhem,” a female bear spirit. The tone is warm, reaching for compassion. “She told him 10,000 years of everything” is rich in atmosphere as a thirty-something waits at a music gig to interview the lead singer before a timely romantic encounter. “For asinykwe” is tender prose about a woman healer. Although not a central focus, humour pops up now and again, too.

Overall, Simpson provides a host of rarely heard characters and various means of travel and experience. The language is woven with spirit, symbolism and metaphor. Phrases strike a chord and readers are made to re-examine presuppositions they may have held about Indigenous Peoples in Canada.

Tyler Gabrysh (www.tylergabrysh.com) is a writer who lives in Victoria.

Ruzesky treks for beauty, obsession

In Antarctica: An Amundsen Pilgrimage

By Jay Ruzesky

Nightwood Editions

239 pp, $24.95

Reviewed by Bonnie Way

“A map reveals through silence and quiet white space; monsters fill the places that have never been seen. When the earth was a plate there were gorgeous waterfalls at the edges and serpents all around. In the Antarctic, the empty landscape on maps is not snow or lack of geographical character. Those thousands of square kilometers are blank because they have still never been visited.”

In Antarctica: An Amundsen Pilgrimage captures Jay Ruzesky’s fascination with Roald Amundsen, the first man to reach the South Pole on December 14, 1911. In 2011, Ruzesky set out on his own expedition to Antarctica, wanting to see and experience just a bit of what Amundsen had seen and experienced a century earlier.  The story moves between Ruzesky’s contemporary voyage from Vancouver, BC, down through South America to Antarctica and Amundsen’s historic expedition from Christiana (Oslo), Norway, down the globe to the South Pole. Ruzesky brings alive the historical men (and dogs) who made up Amundsen’s expedition and contrasts travel in 1911 with travel in 2011.

Ruzesky can be forgiven for his obsession with Amundsen, who is one of his ancestors. His experience in Antarctica is deeply emotional and his poetic language enlivens the beauty of this far-away place. He says of his trip, “What I am looking for is not icebergs and penguins and humpback whales; I am looking to travel through a myth that is my own, a story of ice that is mine to dream and to know.”

That desire to make the story our own is, I believe, what each of us seeks as we pick up a book. As I read, I found myself comparing this story to that of Ernest Shackleton, another Antarctica explorer whose journey has been told in books and IMAX movies. I also thought of my own trip to Glacier Bay, Alaska, a place of ice and rock and cold and water that only hints at the vast beauty contained in Antarctica.

Ruzesky extols the beauty of Antarctica but also comments on what this hard-to-reach place means to our modern world: “Much in the way Christmas reminds us to want to be our best selves, the Antarctic reminds us to want to change our lives. Here is the world before we messed it up. No cigarette butts on the beaches, no graffiti carved into the glaciers. Pristine is a word I keep hearing.”

In Antarctica is a beautiful melding of the personal and the public, the past and the present, research and emotion. Ruzesky presents the facts of Amundsen’s life and work, yet also captures Amundsen’s dreams and despairs. Just as Amundsen was foiled in his goal of being the first man to reach the North Pole and had to change plans, so Ruzesky also failed follow exactly in Amundsen’s footsteps and reach the Pole. Both men adapted, doing what they were able to do, and creating compelling stories in the process.

Bonnie Way has a BA in English (2006) and a BA in Creative Writing (2014). She blogs as The Koala Bear Writer.

Brick’s GM multi-tasks for poetry

Coastal Spectator contributor Julian Gunn recently sat down over coffee to chat with Kitty Lewis, the general manager of poetry publisher Brick Books. At this year’s League of Canadian Poets gala, Lewis received the League’s Honorary Life Membership Award. She insists that her contribution is to support the artistic vision of Brick founders Don McKay and Stan Dragland. Still, it’s obvious how much the poetry community appreciates that contribution. Gunn’s interview encompassed a discussion of Brick’s current projects, the history of the publisher, and its commitment to Canadian poetry.

Can you tell me a little bit about your history with Brick Books?

The press started 39 years ago, and I’ve been around something like 25. I always forget how long. Don McKay, who’s a poet, and Stan Dragland, who’s a poet, novelist, and essayist, were both teaching at Western University (the University of Western Ontario in those days). They kept coming across students who were writing poetry, and they said, “We should publish some of this.” They started with chapbooks, and then, as people started sending in longer manuscripts, we got into applying for grants for full-length books.

I don’t do the choosing. I don’t do the editing. I don’t do production. I do everything else. I’m the administration. You need someone practical. There are artistic people who are running presses who can do it all. They can write, they can edit, but that’s not one of my talents. What’s great is that I get to run a business but I’m not risking my own money. (She laughs.)

So what’s it like in the Brick Books office? Are there people always coming and going? Interns?

No, no.  It’s in my house. I work strange hours. I tend to stay up really late at night. I maybe start working in the morning at 10 or 11. At 8 o’clock I might watch some TV, and then I might do a couple more hours of work. I go away in the summer. I have a cottage and I just move Brick Books there. As long as I have the Internet, I can run the business.

It never worked out to get an intern. I love to impart what I know, and I’m always happy to meet with people. If anybody writes asking about Brick Books, I will usually meet with them, because they’re interested in publishing. I’ll just sit them down, and we’ll have a chat so I can give them an idea of what it’s all about.

I’ve found through the years that the more you do, the more there is to do. We didn’t have Facebook and Twitter years ago. We didn’t have the Internet.

Speaking of which, Brick Books has a broad-based Internet presence. You seem to have ventured into all available social media. I’m assuming that’s a deliberate strategy?

I started on Facebook because my older son said “Hey! My friends are on here. Lots of people would like to be friends with you.” Then I started looking around, and I saw that other publishers were on the Internet. I just started building that up.

There’s a grant called the OMDC Book Fund – that stands for the Ontario Media Development Corporation. There are grants for film and television and books, all under the same umbrella. In the past, the grant was more for something over and above what you would normally do. In 2008 we had two poets laureate on our list: Agnes Walsh from St John’s, Newfoundland, and Lorri Neilsen Glenn from Halifax. I said, “Are you interested in visiting other poets laureate across the country?” Because you know, I network. I had met these people or at least been in touch with them. So we got the grant, and then the poets said “You don’t suppose we could go up north, do you?” Well, I had no contacts up there, but one of our authors had been to the Whitehorse Poetry Festival (www.whitehorsepoetry.com), so I got that person’s contact and we went north. We went to Edmonton, Yellowknife, Whitehorse – I went with them to those three – then Saskatoon, Toronto, Vancouver and Victoria. So that was the kind of thing we were proposing in those days.

Then the OMDC grant added funding for digital projects. I wanted a project that was going to raise our visibility and discoverability. I knew someone in Toronto who was really good at social media, Julie Wilson. I told her “I’d like to talk to you sometime, but I don’t want to just talk to you and get advice and then buzz off and do it. I want to talk to you, and then I want to hire you.”

We’re a poetry publisher. We’re not looking for fireworks. We’re solid, we believe in what we do, and we believe in quality. I felt that she would understand who we were. And what she came up with is podcasts. We’ve done the whole history of Brick Books. We have books that we published in 1975, and I’ve now got three of the books from Fall 2014 already recorded. We’ve got almost a thousand poems recorded now.

We launched the podcast in Poetry Month one year, then created the YouTube channel. We do about six poems from each book, just to give a taste. On the YouTube channel we put those together and that’s a single podcast. I think the authors really like it. We’re including everybody. We’re not excluding you just because we published you in the 1990s – you’re still part of it.

Of all the things you do to connect readers to the poetry, which do you think are the most effective?

We just keep chugging away. Every year when you’re doing a new grant, you trot out your numbers. So the views on the YouTube channel are increasing, the number of podcast poems is increasing. We have more followers on Twitter. Facebook has become really hard now because they’re only showing 30 per cent of your people. That’s unfortunate, because that was a really good method. We’re still using it.

The Literary Press Group is creating an online bookstore which will be launched in the next few months, so that’s going to be the Canadian place to go. It includes Canadian literary presses – I think there are 35 publishers on board now. We do sell books from our own website, but people are looking for the author, not Brick Books.

I’m constantly networking with reading series . . . Then you have something like Victoria’s Planet Earth Poetry reading series. They do that too, but there are more spaces, so that flexibility is great. Planet Earth is definitely my go-to place.

I know Brick Books is interested in emerging poets as well. Is that a policy?

Don and Stan were teachers, right? If we wanted to publish just established authors, we could, but that’s not where their hearts are. We do seven books a year, so we don’t say “Okay, three need to be first books.” It just happens. We don’t publish a first book just because. We read submissions between the first of January and the end of April every year. We get an average of a hundred submissions, and we have enough money to do seven books. So the manuscript kind of has to sparkle to rise above the others. Those ones will go into the finals. There might be anywhere from eight to 15 that we have to choose those seven out of and that’s hard because there’s not a lot of difference of quality between them. They’ll be strong in different ways. We do about 60 per cent first and second books and then 40 per cent third and up. I’ve been keeping the statistics.

The thing that’s nice about Brick Books is that we only do poetry, so it’s very easy to treat everybody the same way. If you do fiction, you’re probably going to devote a little more time to the fiction because it might make more money and help you afford to do the poetry. We do seven books and everybody gets treated the same way. It suits my temperament, like being inclusive with the podcasts and the ebooks – we just include everybody.

We are trying to run a business and we are trying to be fiscally responsible. But – as Don says – we have the hearts of peasants. We believe in people. We believe in writing. We believe in treating people with respect. Once you’re a Brick author you’re always a Brick author.

(In addition to Lewis’ recent award, on February 23rd Brick Books received the first Publishers’ Award from the Galiano Literary Festival.)

Marjorie Simmins’ coastal life

Former West Coast freelance journalist Marjorie Simmins now lives on the East Coast of Canada, in Halifax, and has become a teacher and writer of memoir. Coastal Spectator Editor Lynne Van Luven recently emailed Simmins some questions about her latest book, Coastal Lives: A Memoir.  The book is now available in bookstores, and to order directly from the publisher: http://www.nimbus.ca/Coastal-Lives-P6828.aspx

Marjorie, this is such a down-to-earth and heart-warming memoir; it talks about mature people living real lives.  Can you talk about the process of creating Coastal Lives?

Sometimes it seems as though we live in a world where the tough realities people live, with great courage and dignity, are not a part of the larger conversation. Mature or otherwise, most of us don’t have Hallmark Card lives. There are hard times and good times – and extraordinary, funny and delightful times, too. I like to think I cover a wide emotional spectrum in the book – with an undercurrent of optimism, because that is who I am. If you show up for your life with verve and energy, sooner or later, good things happen.

The process of creating Coastal Lives was a surprisingly natural one, which came from a lifetime of daily writing. I can actually pinpoint the day I started on the path of becoming a writer. It was — here’s a surprise! — a dark and rainy day in Vancouver. I was around eight years old, and my mother suggested I write a letter to my grandmother, who we called “Minnie.” I was bored and cranky – and not quite willing to give that up. “What do I write about?” I petulantly asked my mother. “Oh,” she mused, looking around the room for inspiration, and, seeing the family cat asleep on a cushion, suggested, “why don’t you write about George? Your grandmother likes cats.” And down went the pen to paper, starting a lifetime of letters between myself and all my family members. I continue to write a letter almost every day of my life.

Part II of the equation is journals. When I was 15, my father bought me my first hard-bound journal, from a lovely arts store on Robson Street. That gift initiated 20 years of journal keeping.

Part III of the equation is my journalism career. By age 30, I had started writing as a freelance journalist. One of the first articles I had published was what I have always called a “personal essay.” I graduated from UBC in 1984, and my first job after that was slinging beer at Jerry’s Cove Pub, on Alma and 4th Avenue. I wasn’t thrilled with the job, but I was doing all right until my manager told me that part of my “side duties” included cleaning the women’s and men’s bathrooms. “Don’t forget to pick out the cigarette butts from the urinals,” she announced brightly, handing me a mop, bucket and rubber gloves. I walked in the men’s bathroom, dressed in a pretty summer dress, my hair pulled up into a jaunty pony tail, looked at the urine-soaked butts in the urinals – and cried my eyes out for half an hour. “Post BA Blues” was published in the then-UBC Alumni Magazine, now called TREK. My career publishing life essays had begun.

As you know, there are 22 previously published essays in Coastal Lives. I use them almost as photographs along the storyline. And so, the writer in the book is a letter writer, a journal writer, a journalist and an essayist. That’s where the voice – voices, really – come from.

The first iteration of the book was in my Master’s thesis, which was a research degree, focusing on memoir studies, from Mount Saint Vincent University, here in Halifax. I called the thesis “Memoir: An Examination of a Renegade Memoir From the Inside Out.” Essentially, I studied memoirs past and present, and then wrote my own, as part of the thesis. The book is substantially different from the thesis, primarily because of the brilliant editor at Pottersfield Press, Julia Swan, who asked for more of the previously published essays to be included, and more detail to the memoir storyline, because she sensed I’d left some large bits out . . . . I hasten to say that I also use humour to describe this process! (I keep waiting for a reviewer to say that he/she laughed when they read some of the essays – they were sold as a humour pieces, first time round, in newspapers!)

Not many Canadians can truly claim “bi-coastal lives.” Is that how you think of yourself now?

Mostly, yes. I know darn well I don’t have the full understanding of the West Coast that I once had – and that distresses me to think about at times. I go to my hometown as a visitor now – and that also distresses me. I couldn’t even afford to live in Vancouver any more – and that distresses me beyond measure . . . When I go to Vancouver, I may well be a visitor, but I am blessed to stay with various great family members on both sides of our families, and in their homes I am welcomed and feted. They ask me, What would you like to eat? And I answer, Salmon, every kind and every meal. They spoil me with this, and with other treats like spot prawns and halibut. (On the East Coast, it’s all about lobster, scallops and haddock.) I also do all sorts of funny rituals that make me feel re-connected to the West Coast world. For example, I can’t get to the banks of the Fraser River fast enough. The Pacific Ocean, too, but it is the Fraser I was raised closest to, and that I love with all my heart. Near the Fraser is Southlands, where I rode for over 20 years. When I go to Vancouver now, I have the huge pleasure of taking my great-niece Leila for pony rides, as I used to take her mother, Jocelyn, my niece. And best of all, this is at the same barn, and with the same barn owner! I am comfortable and happy on both coasts – and grateful for this.

Many of my former journalistic colleagues still seem to have an inborn resistance to the memoir; a few of them, I am certain, even think of it as an inferior form of nonfiction – not as muscular perhaps as first-person reportage that strips out the self. What would you say to such a colleague?

I find this stance — by journalists, academics or even the general reading public — quaint and outdated. I would also suggest people with that view simply haven’t kept up to date with memoir. Some of the finest writers in the world are memoirists – always have been, always will be. Joan Didion, Vladamir Nabokov, Ernest Hemingway, Maya Angelou, George Orwell and Mary Karr. Canadian memoirists are equally dazzling: Farley Mowat, Evelyn Lau, David Adams Richards and Wayson Choy. Other recent and stunning Canadian memoirs include Bog Tender by George Santos, Confessions of a Fairy’s Daughter by Alison Wearing, How Linda Died by Frank Davy, The Danger Tree by David MacFarlane and Notes from the Hyena’s Belly by Nega Mezlekia . . .

Of course there are badly written memoirs. There are badly written novels, and books of poetry and non-fiction . . .  Somehow memoir is held to a higher standard – and so must, on occasion, fall the farthest and most cripplingly . . . There are literary memoirs and trash memoirs. There are beautiful, hybrid memoirs, which include maps, photos, recipes — whatever best illustrates a life. . .  Anyone bored or lofty about memoir needs to go back to the bookstore and look a little longer.

You have a master’s degree in arts research specializing in Memoir Studies and you now teach memoir-writing courses around the Maritimes. Do you find a hunger for telling personal stories among your students?

The hunger is huge. Young, middle-aged and older — the lives people lead are astonishing. I adore learning about other people’s lives, especially when I am taken to worlds I’d never gain access to ordinarily. Fascinating details aside, the job is to craft a story, and the prettiest, most dynamic one you can. I have no problem whatsoever teaching memoirists who simply want a self-published life story to hand down to children or grandchildren. I believe this is laudable. That said, I get as excited as any other writer and teacher when I read a memoir-in-progress that is of high literary quality and may well find a traditional publisher once it’s done. The most uneventful lives can still be led by those who can write like angels. Unfortunately, the opposite is also true. I just do my best to give the people who come to my seminars whatever it is they want and need, to start and finish a memoir — and perhaps, to understand better the scope of their choice regarding content and structure. After that, they’re on their own.

You and author Silver Donald Cameron (whom you call simply Don) now have two dogs.  Muriel Spark once said that owning a cat is conducive to a writer’s concentration. What do canines bring to the writing world, besides the chance to go walkies when your work is not going well?

Don and I walk the dogs every day, whether our work goes well or not. We spend endless hours at our desks – seven days a week, mostly – and the chance to get outside and breathe fresh air and see what the rest of the world is up to, is so necessary to our well-being. Seeing the world through a dog’s eyes is also a revitalizing experience. Let’s get excited about wind! Birds overhead! Sailboats on the North West Arm! A rotten fish on the shore! Eliminating like mad! Other dogs!! Dogs spread happiness and excitement all around them, even on the end of a leash. The pleasure we take in our dogs’ company is immense. For me, the presence of animals in my life — dogs and horses particularly — is non-negotiable: I simply must have them around me to live my best and happiest life.

PGC Issues a Call for Action

By Joy Fisher

The Playwrights Guild of Canada announced a new initiative at its annual general meeting in Montreal recently aimed at redressing the chronic underrepresentation of women in key creative positions in Canadian theatre.

The Equity in Theatre (EIT) initiative will call on the theatre community as a whole to respond to gender inequities in the industry, according to Rebecca Burton, PGC’s Membership and Contracts Manager, who is coordinating the initiative.

“Although approximately 70 per cent of theatre audiences are women, and women make up 50 per cent of PGC’s membership, only 22 per cent of plays produced in Canadian Theatres in 2013/14 were by women playwrights,” Burton said. PGC’s Theatre Production Survey revealed that percentage varied by province, with Manitoba scoring highest at 44 percent and British Columbia dragging the bottom with only 18 percent of produced plays by women.

The percentage of productions by women playwrights reached a record high between 2000 and 2005 when 28 per cent of productions were plays by women according to an Equity Study published in 2006. “The figures demonstrate an actual regression since then,” Burton noted.

A key component of the initiative will be a Symposium to be held in Toronto in April 2015 facilitated by an equity and diversity consultant funded by Canada Council’s Leadership and Change program. Participants will include partners from industry organizations such as Professional Association of Canadian Theatres, Canadian Actors Equity Association, Associated Designers of Canada, and Literary Managers and Dramaturgs of the Americas as well as associations of the underrepresented, such as Cultural Pluralism in the Arts Movement Ontario, the Indigenous Performing Arts Alliance and Artists Driving Holistic Organization Change. The end result will be the development of a first draft of a strategic plan for improved equity in the theatre industry as a whole.

In the year following the Symposium, a series of monthly play reading events will be held across Canada in partnership with Play Development Centres and other organizations. Other events and community actions will also be developed. Women patrons, for example, could exercise their consumer power by demanding more plays by women (reflective of their own reality and age demographics) from the theatres they support.

A research project will seek to identify successes in the industry and to establish best practices. A website will be created as an informational hub to facilitate meet-up groups and provide advice on how to create social actions. It will also house a searchable database of Canadian women artists, including playwrights, to serve as a resource to communities.

The desired outcome is to see representation rates rise to 50 percent, which would not only provide increased opportunities for women but would also produce a more balanced and inclusive vision of Canadian society for audiences to enjoy. “We’ve studied this problem for years,” Burton said. “Now it’s time to act.”

The official public launch of the initiative will be in September 2014.

The link below will take you to the PGC website and Valerie Sing Turner’s lyrical and compelling article Redefining Normal: A Challenge to Canadian Theatres & Artistswhich explores equality and redefining the norm in Canadian theatre. www.playwrightsguild.ca/sites/default/files/FINAL_POV_V.S.TURNER.pdf

Joy Fisher is a UVic writing graduate and a member of the Playwrights Guild of Canada.