Roper’s guitar skills soar on new album

Red Bird 

By Jesse Roper 

$15

Reviewed by Emmett Robinson Smith

Jesse Roper can shred. That much was obvious to me while listening to Red Bird, the Metchosin-raised musician’s new album, which encompasses an array of music styles, from blues-rock to reggae to pop-flavoured tracks, all of which showcase Roper’s impressive guitar skills. Red Bird is Roper’s first official solo venture, after releasing two previous albums with The Roper Show, a band he fronted at festivals across the Island since 2012. Roper has been enjoying solo success. A recent show at Sugar Nightclub in Victoria sold out, and he just returned from gigs in the United States. But while his album’s 12 tracks have conviction, in the end, I felt their lack of originality hurt.

The opening track, which shares the album’s title, is a high-energy blues-rock romper that features Roper’s considerable guitar chops. It’s based off a fast chromatic riff that penetrates the majority of the song as Roper delivers rudimentary lines such as, “Yeah, this is Red Bird a-comin’ / I think I’ve been hit / I’m losin’ all control and I think that this is it.” It sets the tone for the next batch of songs, which follows a similar familiar blues-rock sound.

“The Hurricane’s Eye” is both the album’s lead single and its best song. It’s a mid-tempo barn-burner reminiscent of the White Stripes classic “Catch Hell Blues.” “Hurricane” starts off with melodically plucked guitar, and soon builds into a harmonica-tinged, head-banger riff. Roper’s lyrics lend a hand to this badass groove: “I woke this mornin’ in the hurricane’s eye,” he belts.

Reggae-influenced slow-burner “Quality Time” makes for a refreshing change of pace. But it is a prime example of what ultimately fails Red Bird: the song works, but could have been composed and performed by almost any other musician. There’s nothing to separate this song–with its predictable chord progressions and instrumentation–from the myriad others of this style. Roper performs a tasteful, skillful guitar solo between verses, but it’s not enough to save it from tepidness.

The assorted nature of the album is furthered with the peppy, poppy “Hideaway.” Roper’s Eddie Vedder-esque melody line is complemented by an infectious rhythm-guitar-and-drum pattern. It’s one of the more easy-listening songs on the album. Roper delivers pastoral imagery of watching the sun drifting away. Again, however, comes across as conventional.

The pacing of Red Bird is confounding at times. Given that the first four songs have a blues-rock style, one expects the rest of the album to follow the trend. The reggae influence of “Quality Time” seems random in the context of the album, especially given that “The Hurricane’s Eye,” the following track, returns to the soundscape introduced in the album’s opening songs. “Hideaway” marks the beginning of the final portion of the album, which more or less continues its pop-leaning sound rather than the blues style introduced at the start of the album. Red Bird would benefit from a reorganization of tracks.

Ultimately, however, I thought Red Bird lacked originality and a sense of musical exploration. The album is comfortable in its own safeness, and it’s a shame that Roper’s notable guitar skills aren’t put to more exciting use. Familiarity can be an asset, but Roper’s latest effort does not make a case for it.

Emmett Robinson Smith is a music journalist and classical pianist at UVic.

Human nature laid bare in ambitious production

Lion In The Streets

By Judith Thompson

Directed by Conrad Alexandrowicz

Phoenix Theatre, University of Victoria

February 12-21, 2015

Reviewed by Madeline McParland

Celebrated Canadian playwright Judith Thompson’s Lion In The Streets premiered 25 years ago to immediate acclaim. Set in an ethnic Toronto neighbourhood, the play is a series of interconnected stories that explores the complexities of human nature and exposes indecent behaviors that are often ignored. Director and choreographer Conrad Alexandrowicz has brought his interpretation of Lion In The Streets to life with UVic theatre students, in one of the most ambitious productions I have seen staged at Phoenix Theatre.

Isobel (played by Lindsay Curl) is the play’s central protagonist. The lost Portuguese girl is always present on stage, sometimes as the focus and sometimes as part of the audience, watching the troubled lives of her neighbours unfold. The first half of the play examines class issues and suburban life in Canada. Some intense moments dealt with marital infidelity, but the play also touched on humourous idiosyncrasies of contemporary life, such as Zoë Wessler’s portrayal of a mother, named Laura, who had everyone laughing at her shrill scream of “Bullshit!” when she interrogated a teacher about her child’s sugar intake at daycare. Multiple storylines made the plot difficult to follow at times, but dynamic acting compelled me to stop asking questions. Instead, I was caught in each powerful moment.

At first, I thought it peculiar most actors were present on stage, whether they were involved in the scene or not. They sat upstage and stood from time to time to rearrange chairs to fit the scene. Few props were used beside the chairs; instead the actors relied on intense physicality, acting as props or performing stunts. Actors not starring in the scenes, dressed in black, flitted around the main characters, sometimes to assist in spinning the characters in the air to emulate happiness. Other times, they would act as barriers to signify when a character felt emotionally trapped. Eventually, I decided this was a beautifully intriguing aspect of the play, and I recognized this perhaps as a trait of Alexandrowicz’s, an Associate Prof. at the University of Victoria, who is also artistic director of Vancouver company Wild Excursions Performance.

The humour came to a devastating halt in the second half of the play, when heavy social issues were explored deeply. Starting with Arielle Permack’s impressively strong portrayal of a woman with cerebral palsy, each scene hit harder than the last, dealing with emotionally charged issues such as gender, marital abuse, child abuse and death.

I was unsure how the stories would tie together in the end, yet I came to realize this play was truly about surrendering assumptions about storytelling. As the young girl Isobel watched these individuals’ experiences from beyond, just as the audience did, it became less about the mystery of her presence, and more about the reality of the convoluted, and disturbing, moments life can bring us.

Madeline McParland is a UVic student and freelancer.

Two-4-One film delivers unexpected twists

Film producer, director and media educator Maureen Bradley’s new feature film Two-4-One has its debut, hometown screening on Feb. 14 and 15 at the Victoria Film Festival, and CineCenta on March 25 and 26. This romantic comedy delivers promised laughs along with entertaining, unexpected character and plot twists. Montreal-born Bradley has directed more than 40 short films and videos, four film installations and two web art projects. Her award winning productions have screened at galleries and festivals around the globe, including the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Bradley recently answered Hannalora Leavitt’s questions about her life and work.

Maureen, I thoroughly enjoyed the movie and was delighted by the unexpected narrative twists and my own shuffling of gender assumptions. For instance, as a female viewer, I had to rethink the depth-charge moment when Adam (played by Gavin Crawford of This Hour Has 22 Minutes) slapped the debt collector, another male character, who is shocked when he is slapped, not punched, by another man. There’s also the scene when Adam (a transgendered character who becomes pregnant after a one-night stand) is examined at his ob-gyn’s office. The male presence in that typically feminine space is hilarious and challenging to the viewer.

Thanks for such thought provoking questions, Hanna. I’ve noticed the real comedy comes in putting people in awkward spaces—and what’s more awkward than being in the wrong place for your gender. It’s what many trans and gender non-conforming folks feel on a daily basis but without the humour. Bathrooms are really challenging spaces for trans people. By putting Adam in those uncomfortable situations, I hope all viewers think about how we are positioned every day by our gender presentation. Sometimes it’s easy, often it’s not. While rewriting the script, I tried to think of every possible human interaction Adam could have that foregrounded his gender. I’ve never punched someone and I would have no idea how to! I suspect Melanie (Adam pre-transition) was not a scrappy girl and lacked this experience as well.

As I pondered one major theme—how to become a man—I kept adding opportunities for Adam to learn the ropes of masculinity. When the film opens, he already looks like a man, walks like a man and talks like a man. He’s a stealth trans guy but there are still some experiences left to explore. The first time he hits the punching bag, he does so incorrectly. When he returns to the punching bag later in the narrative, he has actually learned how to throw a punch. I had to rely on a martial arts enthusiast on set to show me the difference since I know nothing about boxing!

The scene with Adam in the stirrups was a hoot to film. It is hilarious to female viewers in particular, but there’s also an intentionally creepy vibe to the scene. Adam leads a very medicalized existence. It’s the doctors and psychiatrists who call the shots in terms of his transition. They hold the power. The doctor really does not need to do this exam. There’s no doubt Adam’s pregnant. But he puts Adam through this humiliation. Female viewers relish seeing a pregnant man, that much I’ve learned from festival screenings so far. However, I was surprised that male viewers could relate to Adam as much as they do. I’m not sure male viewers have the same reaction to stirrups, but every woman I know cringes at the idea of an internal exam. So I threw in the prostate joke to widen the audience. Off the top of the scene the doc says, “Well, I guess I don’t have to tell you to cough.”

Can you talk about the origins of and your decision to go with a transgendered romantic lead? What, if any, barriers or surprises did you encounter in terms of your own creative practice, assumptions and expectations because of this decision?

When I first read about the famous pregnant man, Thomas Beattie, I knew it was only a matter of time before Hollywood made a film on the topic. But his story is the stuff of tabloids and reality TV. It’s not a movie. I read about a trans man accidently getting pregnant in exactly this way—sharing sex toys during a home insemination—and realized that scenario was indeed the stuff of drama. As a hero, Adam has a strong goal—to be a man. In fact, he discovers the pregnancy on his way to arrange for phalloplasty—a great dramatic reversal. So this story only makes sense for a transgender man. I’d been hearing more and more about trans male pregnancy in the last year and I wanted to create a story that was respectful and comedic before Hollywood did. The story is unique and one that I haven’t seen told in the form of a romantic comedy and I’m pleasantly surprised that it’s reaching a broader audience than I expected. While it’s about an unusual path to masculinity, it’s also about learning to accept yourself. We reach the universal through the specific. Filming it in Victoria was also important for many reasons. First, the community was incredibly supportive. I wanted to create a film set in Victoria. While there so much production here, the films and TV shot here are never set here. Second, the landscape supports another theme in the film—fertility. And finally, this is a small town story. I doubt Adam would struggle so much with acceptance if the story was set in San Francisco, Seattle or Toronto.

Adam’s mother is a strong character in this story. I appreciated her eccentricities and fleshed-out character. Her home mirrored her personality. I was particularly intrigued with her home. While the film is set in Victoria, where did you find such an interesting location for the mother’s residence?

So glad you asked about this. It’s one of my favourite aspects of the film. That shack is on Gonzales Bay. It’s in my neighbourhood and I basically knocked on the door and asked if I could film there. The owners get this request frequently and they always say no, but since the film was local, they said yes. It’s mostly used for storage and no longer lived in. The shack was decorated with art almost entirely from Ladysmith artist Sally Mann, a friend of mine. I wrote the script with her artwork in mind but with a Quebecoise earth-mother eccentric character in mind. When I couldn’t find a francophone actor in the area to play Marie-France, Gabrielle Rose came on as Franny. It was her idea to take the original bits of French dialogue and turn it into her Alzheimer-defying French lessons. The shack was only about 250-square-feet in size so it feels very full—there’s a lot of art crammed in there. But that reflects Franny. She’s a Buddhist hoarder. What didn’t come from artist Sally Mann, Gary Varro, our brilliant production designer, created.

I watched the film twice but did need to ask a friend to fill me in on what took place during two “non-dialogue” scenes because of my visual impairment. For instance, the scene where the mother is looking through a box of photos of Melanie (Adam pre-transition) as a young girl and woman contains no dialogue. I realize that “film” is all about the visual. As a writer and arts consumer with a visual disability, I wonder if you, as a working film professional, are actively aware of how differently consumers, the visually impaired, for instance, experience your art. And, do you feel that directors and producers should play a role in creating a more inclusive viewing experience or does that task belong to others through closed captioning and descriptive video?

What a great question! All the screenwriting gurus insist you “show don’t tell’ and that the most compelling story device is the visual reveal. I personally like “talky” films, Woody Allen being my biggest influence. But the orthodoxy is that deft writers and directors get the job done through visuals. That directive excludes many in our potential audience.

I must say, I feel pretty ignorant about what happens when the movie is done and it goes for closed-captioning or interpretive audio. I would very much like to be involved in that process or consider it more in production. With these low budget productions, we focus so much on production, anything that comes after is left with the dregs of the budget—if anything. When I travel to Québec, I often get called on lack of French subtitles on my ultra-low budget films. I wish there was a fund for translation—both subtitles and interpretive audio. So often you have no control with these services. One director was just telling me about his French film getting mediocre English subtitles then the Mandarin version was translated from the sub-par English version! I appreciate your question. It will broaden my approach to writing and get me to consider about audience accessibility earlier on. Many years ago, I attended a screening in Vancouver and was mesmerized when I saw sign language interpretation of one of my shorts. It was illuminating.

In terms of your film career, how does Two-4-One fit in with your previous works? Is it representative of the wider social issues you would like to pursue in future projects?    

A lot of my earlier movies and docs were overtly political. I do see Two-4-One on that continuum but in a strategic manner. The content and tone make the subject matter accessible. And I’ve reached a much wider audience with this film than anything I’ve done since coming out on national TV in the CBC series Road Movies way back in 1992.

All the projects I’m currently writing have politics subverted into the narrative in a similar manner to Two-4-One. I’m working on three series concepts right now. One is a series version of Two-4-One called Who’s Your Daddy. Another is a series about a band of midwives in New Brunswick fighting for inclusion in medicare and a third, also infused with politics, is top secret.

And I’m flirting with two web series right now that meld comedy, drama and politics.

I really enjoy writing and I’d like to focus on writing TV or web series because you get to delve into character in a more sustained manner. I haven’t ruled out directing, but it’s a slog! I do hope to collaborate with Two-4-One’s brilliant cinematographer Amy Belling again.

Women’s voices dominate film festival’s Indigenous program

Trick or Treaty?

Director: Alanis Obamsawin

My Legacy

Director: by Helen Haig-Brown

Bihttos (Rebel)

Director: Elle-Maija Tailfeathers

Reviewed by Joy Fisher

Four out of the five films comprising the first-ever Indigenous Film Program presented by the Victoria Film Festival this year were made by women. While highly unusual in the film industry as a whole, this eye-opening statistic is not surprising in the world of indigenous filmmaking, according to Michelle Latimer, curator of the Indigenous Program.

“About 60 percent of submissions to ImagiNATIVE Film Festival (in Toronto), the largest indigenous film festival in the world, are submissions by women,” Latimer said.

Latimer, an indigenous filmmaker in her own right, culled the five included in VFF’s program from 300-plus films she has seen through her work as a curator with other festivals. I managed to see two of the features plus one short.

The “master” – I use this term advisedly as Trick or Treaty? premiered as part of the Masters Program at the Toronto International Film Festival in 2014 – is Alanis Obamsawin. Obamsawin has been making films for the Canadian National Film Board since the 1960s and is currently working on her fiftieth film. I became a fan when I saw Kanehsatake: 270 Years of Resistance, which she made in 1993 about the Oka crisis.

Like Kanehsatake, Trick or Treaty? blends past and present in an effort to link history with current events and cause with effect. The treaty of the title is Treaty No. 9, also known as the “James Bay Treaty”, which was signed by Cree tribal leaders from Northern Ontario and Ojibways from Manitoba in 1905. A recent book, Treaty No. 9, by John S. Long, examined the journal of government commissioner Daniel George MacMartin and confirmed First Nations’ oral accounts of the Treaty’s contents. The film includes clips of the author discussing his findings with current First Nations leaders. MacMartin’s journal supports the contention that government negotiators misled tribal leaders by misrepresenting what was in the written document. Leaders signed based on those oral representations and didn’t discover the actual content – which deprived First Nations of land ownership and rights to natural resources — until a translation of the treaty was provided to them 25 years after the fact.

When the Canadian Government introduced Bills C-38 and C-45 in 2012 pursuant to the purported authority given by the treaty, First Nations resentment flared, leading to renewed activism. The film documents the hunger strike by Cree Chief Teresa Spence, the beginning of the Idle No More movement, and the 1,600 kilometre walk to the Canadian Parliament by then 16-year-old David Kawapit, who was joined along the way by a growing company of First Nations youth.

While Obamsawin’s film captures the anger of people deceived and cheated of their heritage and seeks to educate the general public, both The Legacy, directed by Helen Haig-Brown and Bitthos (Rebel), by Elle-Maija Tailfeathers, turn inward to reveal their own personal stories about the emotional “suppression” visited on them as a result of being raised by parents traumatized by government programs. Generations younger than the octogenarian Obamsawin, these directors focus their films on healing and forging a personal path for moving forward.

Haig-Brown, a Tsilhqot’in from the Cariboo-Chilcotin area, said at an audience Q&A after the showing of her film on Feb. 7 that she wanted to learn to put her “heart” into her films. In My Legacy, she does just that; one revealing scene shows her bare-breasted while a tiny flower bud superimposed over her heart grows to cover her chest with bloom — a metaphor for her growing capacity to feel love. My Legacy won the Alanis Obamsawin award for Best Feature Documentary at ImagiNATIVE Film Festival in 2014.

Tailfeathers, the progeny of a Blackfoot mother from Kainai First Nation and a Sami father from Norway who met at a World Council of Indigenous Peoples, recounts the story of her father’s chronic depression which eventually resulted in the dissolution of her parent’s marriage. The film documents her growing understanding and empathy for her father. Although this film focuses on healing, activism is in Tailfeathers’ genes. As a UBC graduate, she made Bloodland, a film about hydraulic fracturing on her reserve and promptly got arrested while taking part in a demonstration.

The last film in VFF’s Indigenous Program, Drunktown’s Finest, had its British Columbia premiere on Feb. 10 at the Vic Theatre. This film, first shown at the 2014 Sundance Film Festival, received the Jury Award at Outfest L.A.

The Victoria Film Festival continues through Feb. 15.

Joy Fisher is a Victoria playwright. 

Poet dissects the history of Frog Lake

Massacre Street

By Paul Zits

The University of Alberta Press

107 pages, $ 19.95

Reviewed by Lorne Daniel

Don’t expect a smooth lyrical narrative from Calgary poet Paul Zits’s first book, Massacre Street. The book takes an off-kilter look at the Frog Lake massacre of 1885, an event early in the North-West Rebellion in which a group of Cree men killed government Indian agent Thomas Quinn and shot eight other white settlers dead. Many writers have grappled with the telling of this defining event in Canadian and First Nations’ history, approaching it through poetry, fiction and various forms of non-fiction. Here, Zits pulls apart the pieces of history and patches them together in a jagged collage.

This is the author not as storyteller but as provocateur and questioner. Using archival records and sources like William Bleasdell Cameron’s The War Trial of Big Bear (a key source, as well, for Rudy Wiebe’s novel The Temptations of Big Bear), the poet invites the reader to create new meaning from the juxtaposition of voices and documents. Zits was recognized with a Stephan G. Stephansson Award for Poetry at the 2014 Alberta Literary Awards for his work.

Unlike much contemporary poetry, this is not a personalized, internalized exploration. Zits, the author, is not highly visible in Massacre Street. Certainly, the writer’s hand is evident in the selection and placement of the pieces that form this collage and in the poems that stitch the historic segments together. Consider, he says, the wildly differing worlds of those who participated in the rebellion, the police and informal militia, the court functionaries, the Metis people who remembered some of the events, or oral accounts of them.

Any writer trying to address multiple viewpoints in this clash of cultures must consider and integrate the perspective of “other” cultures – ones he doesn’t belong to. In this case, understanding and representing cultures that thrived on oral storytelling is particularly difficult. It is inevitable that a writer using primarily written archives, as Zits does, will be limited in expressing voices from an oral culture. To address this, Massacre Street pulls Metis and First Nations voices from tapes and transcripts and makes creative use of their different cadence and content to offset the dominant English Canadian voices.

In one section, “The Inadvertent Poetry of Major-General Thomas Bland Strange,” the book pulls phrases from Strange’s 1896 autobiography, Gunner Jingo’s Jubilee, and repurposes them in a newly fractured syntax.

The resulting book is challenging, in all senses of the word. Massacre Street is not an easy read. It forces readers to bridge the gaps and implicitly invites them to dig more deeply into questions of the post-massacre Canadian psyche. As is the way with works of deconstruction, it asks us to start over and reconsider what we thought we understood.

Lorne Daniel is at work on his fifth collection of poetry and a book about Alberta oil country that braids poetry with non-fiction.

Belfry double bill a study in contrasts

The Best Brothers

By Daniel MacIvor

Directed by Glynis Leyshon

How to Disappear Completely

Co-created by Itai Erdal, James Long, Anita Rochon and Emelia Symington Fedy

Directed by James Long

Belfry Theatre

January 27 – March 1

Reviewed by Joy Fisher

The Best Brothers and How to Disappear Completely, a pair of one-acts currently on offer at the Belfry Theatre, share a common theme: exploring the impact of a mother’s death on her adult children. But the approach to this theme and the manner in which it is executed provide an illuminating study in contrasts.

For starters, The Best Brothers is a “text-based” play written by an award-winning Canadian playwright and acted by professional actors; How to Disappear Completely was co-created by a team and is performed by a professional lighting designer who insists he is a “performer,” not an actor.

One look at the scripts (which are available from the Belfry box office for perusal in-house) reveals a stark difference: The Best Brothers script tops 100 pages; How to Disappear Completely is only 22 pages long. And yet they clock in at close to the same length when performed. Much of The Best Brothers’ brisk pace is due to short, truncated lines which reveal the conflict between the brothers, Kyle (played by Ron Pederson) and Hamilton (played by John Ullyatt), as they blunder through the post-death rituals of writing an obituary, planning a visitation and burying their mother, while confronting their longstanding sibling rivalry. The dialogue is clever and the delivery by both actors polished, but you probably won’t remember much of it after you leave the theatre.

How to Disappear By contrast, in How to Disappear Completely, the script often just points the way forward for the long monologue directed to the audience by Etai Erdal, the solo performer. Erdal meanders from one seemingly disconnected anecdote to another, winning the audience over with his warmth and openness as he confronts mortality and discourses on lighting design in the theatre as metaphor for death. Demonstrating with hand-held controls, Erdal shows the audience how a light called a PARcan has the unique characteristic of growing warmer in tone as it diminishes in intensity. It is at its warmest at one percent, just before the subject being lit disappears completely. When you leave the theatre after this play, you are apt to perceive many things differently, both literally and philosophically, and you may find yourself pondering these new insights late into the night.

Perhaps the greatest difference between the two plays is this: The Best Brothers is a lightweight comedy about fictional characters; How to Disappear Completely is a true story about the death of Erdal’s own mother and his coming to terms with her desire that he help her end her suffering.

At the beginning of The Best Brothers, the  brothers learn that their mother, Bunny, has been killed when a hefty transvestite who calls herself Pina Colada falls off a float at a gay pride parade and squashes little Bunny flat. Hamilton, who is straight and believes, not entirely without cause, that Bunny loved his gay brother better, blames Kyle for her death. Conflict ensues, escalating into physical violence during their eulogy at her funeral. The plot is furthered, but Bunny herself is not well-served, as the brothers alternately don her gloves and hat and deliver extended monologues to the audience in her guise. The introduction of Enzo, Bunny’s nervous Italian greyhound who eats Hamilton’s $250,000 kitchen, provides the one honest moment of feeling in this contrived play. The dog is not physically present, but when Hamilton looks into its cage and asks wistfully: “Why don’t you like me?” you know it’s not really the dog he’s addressing.

At the beginning of How to Disappear Completely, Erdal tells the audience that when his mother, Mery, was diagnosed with terminal lung cancer in 2000 and given just nine months to live, he boarded a plane in Canada and flew back to Israel where he was born and where his mother still lived. By way of introducing himself to the audience, he confesses that he has broken every one of the Ten Commandments, then corrects himself by declaring he has never made a graven image. The implication is clear, and the scene is set for the working out of one of the heaviest moral dilemmas that life can ever impose. Mery is very present during this struggle. Erdal, who at the time was studying to become a documentary film maker, was encouraged by Mery to film her illness and death. When Erdal pushes back a curtain onstage, her image is before us, projected onto a large screen. As she speaks in Jewish, Erdal translates into English for the audience. At various times, Erdal shows footage of his sister and best friend as well, not only translating their remarks, but also copying their movements in an extraordinary shadow play of empathy. The result of this co-created performance was thought-provoking and profoundly moving.

As a text-based playwright whose little experience with co-created productions has been particularly painful, I tend to class co-creations with the making of laws and sausages: to retain respect for them, avoid watching them being made. Measuring these two plays against one another, however, has altered my opinion.

Joy Fisher is a Victoria playwright and theatre lover.

Johnston’s stories an exercise in brevity

We Don’t Listen to Them

By Sean Johnston

Thistledown Press

144 pages; $18.95

Reviewed by Cole Mash

Continuing with the spare but complex minimalism that made Sean Johnston’s other works so satisfying to devour, We Don’t Listen to Them is a collection of stories with blind-depth that holds you at every turned page. Johnston was born in Saskatoon and grew up a few miles from the small town of Asquith. He is the author of two novels, two books of poetry, and two books of short stories, and was the 2003 winner of the ReLit Award for Short Fiction for A Day Does Not Go By. His newest offering of beautiful and fleeting short stories is a powerful example of the brevity that makes the form moving, and, arguably, the hardest to work in. Johnston has mastered the medium to the point of appearing effortless.

The plots of Johnston’s stories are subtle, often taking a back seat to characters, ideas and insight into the ontology of human existence. Each story is an opportunity for Johnston to explore the act of being. In the story “He Hasn’t Been to the Bank in Weeks,” he writes, “we make copies of all our legitimate responses to the material world, we see the copies we make the copies from on huge movie screens, loud as hell, or alone with tiny earbuds in our ears and the personal screens inches from our face. We have lines to say and whatever we say we know it is the approved expression from a genre we despise, and yet we do feel, we do”. Johnston makes moments feel like eternity, and then inhabits and examines those moments. This is the case right from the first story, “How Blue,” which takes place on a suburban sidewalk on a hot day in so little time that the young boy-protagonist’s ice cream cone doesn’t even melt.

Both directly and indirectly many of the stories are a reflection on the act of writing itself. “We Don’t Celebrate That,” follows a writer and his colleagues on the day they have “received the new rules” for writing. The story explores the fallacy that there are regulations that dictate the process of writing in a very literal, but almost satirical manner, exposing the ridiculous notion that the creative process can be boiled down to a set of rules that must be followed in order to be successful writing. In this story, Johnston writes almost as if describing the stories you hold in your hand, “These stories inhabited this very world, they grew out of our own concerns but they were about love, for instance.”

Other stories don’t tackle the subject of writing directly, but contain snippets that transcend plot to talk about craft. For example, in “It Cools Down,” a story about a man moving to a small town so his children can be closer to their biological father, Johnston writes, “There was nothing to do but your mind goes on. I could picture it all. The real story was in the car. A road trip gets things moving.”

When speaking of books they love, people often say, “I couldn’t put it down.” Such is not the case with We Don’t Listen to Them. In fact, after reading almost every story in the collection I had to put the book down, as it was all I could internalize in a day. I found myself living with the stories, often re-reading lines, or full stories to unravel the complexities of each one. A small disclosure: a few years ago I took a class with Sean Johnston and experienced first-hand how meticulous he is in the creation of fiction. He taught me a lot about the craft of fiction in a very short time, and reading his work does the same. If you read in order to learn to write, and you are looking for a blue print, or “the rules,” look no further; Johnston has offered you something better than a blue print: a finished home.

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.

British play a case of cultural disconnect

People

By Alan Bennett

Directed by Tony Cain

Langham Court Theatre

Plays through January 31

Reviewed by Joy Fisher

British playwright Alan Bennett once described his play People as a “play for England.”  How right he was! Which is why it was perhaps an unfortunate choice for a Canadian theatre.

The theme–the commodification of history–is universal enough in these neoliberal times when everything, as a character points out, “has a price, and if it doesn’t, it doesn’t have a value.” But Bennett’s satirical wit is focused specifically on the particular mission of England’s National Trust to restore and maintain heritage houses; so, for a foreigner like a Canadian (or, in the interests of full disclosure, in my case, an American) it’s a little hard to understand what all the indignation is about. Restoring heritage houses? What’s there to complain about in that?

There is not just a cultural disconnect; but also a class mismatch between this play and most members of its audience. The lead character, Lady Dorothy Stacpoole, played by Elizabeth Whitmarsh, is an aging member of the peerage. She lives, stoically, with her half-sister companion, Iris, (played by Geli Bartlett) in a mouldering country mansion that she can no longer afford to maintain. Dorothy stubbornly resists the entreaties of her other sister, June Stacpoole (played by Jan Streader), to turn the house over to the National Trust so that it can assume its rightful place as a piece of English history.

“This is not Allegory House,” Dorothy proclaims haughtily, refusing to see it as a metaphor for England. Voicing what one must take to be the playwright’s own view, Dorothy declares: “Gone should gone be, and not fetched back.” One suspects, however, that, in some vain manifestation of misplaced pride, she would rather see the house gone than tracked through by vulgar plebeians on a Sunday outing.

So horrified is Dorothy at the prospect of commoners on tour invading her private quarters that she grasps at other straws of salvation. One is an offer by a shady character representing a shadowy consortium seeking properties for undisclosed purposes. Another is an offer from an old friend from her youth (played by Toshik Bukowiecki) to rent the home as a location for a porno movie. Dorothy accepts the latter offer, and the play slips from satire into farce. The farce, it must be said, is much funnier than the satire. (The sex scenes in the four-poster bed are tastefully obscured from view by light reflectors held by members of the “film crew.”)

Porno films, however, are not a permanent solution to the cash flow problem, and, in the end, the National Trust has its way with the house. A scene showing its transformation from dilapidated ruin to fully-restored mansion was, I’m sure, meant to be satirical, judging by the robot-like march of the army of restorers–but it backfired. Clever lighting changes removed the dinge wall-by-wall and colorful pictures, too many to count, all painted by the unbelievably industrious set designer, Anne Swannell, completed the transformation. I think the playwright intended that I should despise the result, but I was enchanted.

Even Dorothy comes around in the end, agreeing to be a volunteer guide and throwing herself into her new role with all the gusto that only a stalwart member of the peerage could muster. To the aristocracy, I’m sure there was something of the tragic in the ending. But, commoner that I am, I couldn’t wait to buy my ticket for the house tour!

Joy Fisher is a Victoria playwright.

Pigeon’s dynamic story collection never bores

Some Extremely Boring Drives

By Marguerite Pigeon

NeWest Press

214 pages; $19.95

Reviewed by Traci Skuce

There’s a propulsion to the narratives in Marguerite Pigeon’s Some Extremely Boring Drives that’s anything but boring. Attribute this to Pigeon’s strong yield of language and voice, her ability to cut a clear and quirky character, and her deft hand at developing uncanny situations.

Vancouver-based Pigeon, a former radio and television journalist, is versatile. She has previously published a novel, the political thriller Open Pit, and a book of poems, Inventory, which was nominated for the Gerald Lampert Award. Some Extremely Boring Drives is her first short story collection.

“Endurance,” the opening story, plunks the reader into the strange and icy world of an Arctic cross-country race. Like other characters that populate this collection, Annick is motivated by getting “as far as possible from weakness”, and must confront her own callous heart when she stumbles across a fellow racer in trouble. In “Torera”, the thirty-one year old, Sheridan, unwillingly travels to Spain in order to flee her overbearing forty-five year old–pregnant–mother. In “Power Out”, Nicole is forced on a long march down Yonge Street during the Toronto blackout, navigating the dark and her own secret.

Throughout the collection Pigeon investigates how our mobile culture impacts the psyche. For example, Melanie in “Backup” is happy on the road, enjoying her life as a backup singer for “transfers between places, the requirement of alarm clocks, transportation, a strict rehearsal schedule, and the exhausting shows. On the other hand, returning from a routine team building regime in “An Overnight Business Trip”, Peter recognizes how blase he’s become about travel. Not only are the air plane and hotel “standardized”, so is the way he interacts with others. He doesn’t have  anything to hide, but is afraid of stepping on any of a dozen invisible social field mines.

There’s often an incongruity between what Pigeon’s characters feel, what they want to feel and what they present to the world. She does this particularly well in the experimental story “Makeover” where the narrator bumps into her “other self”, a doppelganger–her life set on a different path, one with a baby. The story is full of thwarted expectations:

“In stories, meeting oneself is supposed to be like that. Something important. Corrective or horrific. But nothing was happening. I had met myself. She had a baby. I wore a mask of cosmetics. She seemed short-fused. She had questions. So did I.”

But those questions don’t get asked. And here’s where Pigeon’s work is strongest, when she pushes the  narrative into the unexpected, arriving at a deeper, more compelling knowing.

After a brief fisticuffs with her alternate self, the narrator notices she used to “hide an inner battle against too much feeling. . . I shuddered at this insight; I’d never before understood how much people could know just by watching you sit and think.” This mirrored experience leads to her to a new and frightening uncertainty, she’s “no longer sure how to judge what I was putting into the world through my face or body.”

The final story, “The Woman on the Move” pays homage to Kaftka’s “The Hunger Artist”, and is its modern equivalent, replete with sponsorships and motivational speeches, exploring movement in its extreme, as art and sacrifice. The perfect end to this dynamic, never boring, collection.

Traci Skuce is a writer based in the Comox Valley. She recently completed her MFA at Pacific University, Oregon.

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.