Stories offer nuanced look at faith and doubt

Running the Whale’s Back:
Stories of Faith and Doubt From Atlantic Canada

Edited by Andrew Atkinson and Mark Harris

Goose Lane Editions

304 pages, $19.95

Reviewed by Jane Silcott

Running the Whale’s Back offers more than just complex and many-hued views of the uncertain territory between faith and doubt. It also offers a master class in short fiction. That’s not surprising when you see that it contains stories by many of Eastern Canada’s most celebrated authors including Alistair MacLeod, Kathleen Winter, Lynn Coady, Michael Crummey and many others.

The “class” begins with Michael Crummey, whose story “Miracles” includes a set of characters who play out the prismatic faces of belief, from the narrator’s passionate longing for miracles to his brother’s wholesale rejection, and their mother’s near military allegiance. The story twines the biblical and the secular through the narrator’s longing for some kind of connection. It includes some of my favourite images in the book, especially in the descriptions of the mother who, along with the Salvation Army Band, regularly “honked out metallic renditions of Christmas carols” on her silver trumpet and hummed “Onward Christian Soldiers” as she inflicted domestic order on her household.

In Kathleen Winter’s story, French Doors,” the central character Marianne rejects the inside world behind carefully-drawn curtains and walks out in the middens and woods where “women don’t walk anymore.” Winter’s sentences, lush and hypnotic, are like hymns calling our attention to the world outside our doors and away from screens. “All the days long the soul of the earth called out through the voices of the trees speaking in the hills, while the peat-and-needles-scented breath of the earth stole through the woods.” Marianne accepts an invitation from Larry, the only other person in the town who has “star-blood” in him. Together they sit in his truck and gaze at the path of moonlight on the sea and watch as sparks fly off it.

Where there are sparks, there’s also fire, and it seems in the beginning of the collection, at least, that it’s all about dire events: mine collapses, deaths, and other disasters. But other stories offer quieter communions: Deborah Joy Corey’s beautifully told tale about a young girl’s decision in “Discovery” where a woman calmly searches the riverbank for her lost grandbaby, while looking “like she’s listening to a far off message, something on the breeze.”

Alistair MacLeod’s story “Vision” feels like a tale from another time or world. It’s a long, slow unfurling where one story opens onto another, and we fall inside, not knowing where we’re going exactly, but having faith in the teller. Here, one of the central images of the story, the twisting and turning strands of the rope that pulls in the lobster traps, echoes the intertwining of the characters’ lives, curling and twisting around one another.

I hoped in reading a collection of stories about faith to come away from it with some new understanding. What is that notion that allows us to go up against death, or leap towards the unknown and survive to leap again, as the character in the title story does – jumping from one slippery, unstable piece of ice to another across a heaving and icy sea? But rather than some neat definition, I came away instead with the more nuanced and complex truth that there are as many interpretations of the word faith as there are people.

Among several other well-wrought stories in this collection (including Lynn Coady’s brilliantly elliptical “My Battered Heart” and Michael Winter’s “Stay the Way You Are,” Jessica Grant’s “My Husband’s Jump” stands out for its lighter-hearted tone. A story about a ski jumper who never lands, it takes the phrase “leap of faith” head on. “I lost a husband, found a deity,” she quips. Grant’s deliciously deft parsing continues to the end where she turns grammar into metaphysics: “But my husband’s jump was a verb, not a noun. Forever unfinished. What must it be like, I wondered, to hang your life on a single word? To jump. A verb ridden into the sunset.”

Jane Silcott is a writer, teacher, and editor living in Vancouver. Her most recent publication, “Cortical Folds,” appears in carte blanche magazine’s 10th anniversary issue.

Hold on for Czaga’s playful first collection

For Your Safety Please Hold On

Kayla Czaga

Nightwood Editions

96 pages, $18.95

Reviewed by Kelly Shepherd

It’s exciting to review a book with so many award-winning poems. I was a little nervous, even, when starting to read it. But I was quickly drawn in to Kayla Czaga’s large and eccentric (yet eerily familiar) extended family, and within the first few pages of her debut collection, For Your Safety Please Hold On, I willingly got into the car for the road trip, for the small town coffee joints and the provincial parks of northern B.C. But this is not a book about the road, although it is haunted by stories of leaving one place and arriving at another; its concerns are much more domestic. It’s a geography of interiors, landmarked with brown floral couches and potato salad on soggy paper plates and houseplants shivering in the cold.

Originally from Kitimat, Kayla Czaga lives in Vancouver where she recently completed an MFA in Creative Writing at the University of British Columbia. Some of the poems in this collection have won several of Canada’s most prestigious literary prizes, including The Fiddlehead‘s 23rd annual Ralph Gustafson Poetry Prize, The Malahat Review‘s 2012 Far Horizon’s Award for Poetry, and an Editor’s Choice Award in ARC Poetry Magazine‘s 2012 Poem of the Year Contest. Among others.

For Your Safety Please Hold On is divided into five sections that follow the narrator through sketches of her parents and family, from small town childhood to living alone in the city. Despite their often somber themes—the unspoken violence of childhood, family illnesses and deaths, the Sandy Hook school shooting—there is nonetheless a playfulness and an almost joyous energy running throughout these poems. There is wordplay: in the long poem “Many Metaphorical Birds,” a philosophical coffee barista “is Hegeling with a customer” and “Adornoing his pastry case.” There are surprising turns of phrase on every page. The family is “wicked with worry”; a nickel is a “slender metaphor.”

“The Drunk Uncle,” one of the family case-studies, wears “the same old skull T-shirts for thirty years / to unnerve his mother.” He has “buddies for every occasion”; he “yammers / the nails, beats the dead horse, bags the wind, / blows it hot and beery into your face.” Attending the same family gathering is “The Decorative Aunt,” who belongs to “the Ativan side of the family, / bejewelled and bleached, leather-shoed / from therapeutic tanning-bed snoozes.” In “The Other Grandmother” both the family legend and the immigrant experience are writ large, almost approaching hagiography.

“Your other grandmother walked barefoot across Europe with your infant father.

[…]

Your other grandmother drank her husbands
under the coffee table. She slapped your cheeks
with stories, kissed you with myth, carried
on into all hours, carrying children on
both her hips and shoulders.”

These irreverent family portraits, replete with awkward personal details and pop-culture references, are reminiscent of characters in an early Douglas Coupland novel. In some instances, however, their detached tone might be a little too effective: they feel disconnected, almost callous. It’s as if the narrator were an ethnographer attempting objective field notes, but unable to resist using playful figurative language at the same time. The reader isn’t quite sure what to do. When “The Grandmother” is compared to a “silly old child” with “lilac slacks / billowing out from her twig body”—and when the narrator confesses “[w]hen she died you had just started / university in a new city and weren’t / allowed to attend her funeral”—it’s hard to know if the poem intends wry tenderness, or alienation.

Nonetheless, I admire Czaga’s eye for minutiae, for the sense of glow and wonder in the smallest details. These poems are lyrical and funny, honest and sad, sometimes painfully so. The car is cold, the nighttime streets are lonely, and the dashboard is cluttered with distractions and nostalgia, but this is a ride I wouldn’t want to miss.

Kelly Shepherd lives in Edmonton and has a Creative Writing MFA from UBC Okanagan. His fifth poetry chapbook, Fort McMurray Tricksters, was recently published by Vancouver’s Alfred Gustav Press. He is a poetry editor for the environmental philosophy journal The Trumpeter. 

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.

Gaston’s characters drive stories and novels

University of Victoria creative writing professor Bill Gaston’s remarkable insight into human nature, his gentle sense of humour and his imagination make him one of Canada’s most highly acclaimed authors. His previous collections of short stories have received nominations for many national awards, so it is no surprise that his most recent collection, Juliet Was A Surprise, was nominated for the 2014 Governor General’s Award in fiction. Gaston recently took time away from his teaching and writing to answer reviewer Janet Ralph’s questions.

When you begin a story, do you always know it’s a short story and not a novel?

I always know, and always the main character determines it for me. It’s really pretty simple: some characters I get very interested in, kind of like we become close friends, and I want to hang out with them to see what they do with their life. That becomes a novel. But many of the characters I come up with are not good-friend material. Anyone who has read my short stories can see this. The main character is often someone you don’t want to spend more than twenty minutes with. They’re interesting, [I hope], but often in the way a car accident is interesting, and some of them are downright warped and nasty. But still worth probing, so to speak. Those become the short stories.

What authors and musicians are you currently reading/listening to?

At the moment I’m reading The Bone Clocks, David Mitchell’s newest, and just reread Pastoralia, by George Saunders. Next is Lee Henderson’s The Road Narrows as You Go. As for music, I’m checking out Alt J’s new album, and I often gravitate to old Eno. Otherwise I listen to our house background music, which is my 16-yr-old daughter’s playlist, and that’s anything from Dixie Chicks to vintage Chili Peppers and some really slimy hiphop.

Do you ever consciously turn off your powers of observation and analysis of people? What do you find most endearing, and most annoying, about human nature?

No. I’m frequently dull, blind, and stupid, but I don’t become that way consciously or deliberately. Though maybe that’s what I do when I grab one beer too many. What I find most endearing is kindness. Most annoying? Pettiness and lack of humour. I include my own sometime petty and humourless self in this, of course.

Cake is probably the most complex character in your recent book because of his peculiar power over people. What are your thoughts about this sort of “other power” some people have?

Well, I have encountered at least a couple—that I know of—people with an undeniable and somewhat magical “power” over others. But Cake I did make up. Mostly, he stands as a kind of metaphor for those who do have power over others, not necessarily a magical kind but the ordinary kind. We see it all the time: it might be charisma, or it might be more hidden, and we see it in families, and on the street. And of course in politics. I think that’s the point of Cake’s character: that often people don’t have a handle on what power they have.

Juliet, the title story, and others are so funny, I wonder if you are laughing as you write. Is there a part of you that identifies with the arborist?

I wouldn’t say I’m laughing out loud, but I might be caught smirking. I do often write what I consider to be funny characters and stories. My sense of humour might be of the driest sort because lots of people seem to miss the humour. Or maybe they just aren’t that funny, I don’t know. But I do identify with characters like the arborist. Here is a person who is socially awkward, with low self-esteem, and eyeglasses 20 years out of date, who thinks too much. He has a carnal angel throwing herself at him, in the form of Juliet—so what’s he supposed to do? It’s very much a set piece male fantasy, but I think everyone can relate to and find funny the dilemma of forbidden fruit and a lack of will power. And, of course, mindless rage and murderous revenge.

Janet Ralph is a UVic student.

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.

Imaginative poetry collection worth multiple readings

Astatine

By Michael Kenyon

Brick Books

135 pages; $20

Reviewed by Alisha Dukelow

“Are you as lonely as I am?” Michael Kenyon’s speaker asks Astatine, who replies, “Non è possibile.” Akin to Dante’s Beatrice, Astatine is a sassy, enigmatic Italian woman named after the rarest non-transuranic element that “has never been viewed because a mass large enough to be seen by the naked human eye would immediately be vaporized by the heat generated by its own radioactivity.” This may sound arcane but never did I feel alone with a self-consumed narrator throughout this West Coast writer’s fourth collection of poems. 

Astatine’s voice ghosts in and out of the four numbered sections, confounding and challenging the speaker to try to find words for transpersonal, perennial concerns—of the ephemerality of mortality, human loss, the relationship and bleed between past, present and future, the power of storytelling, as well as, paradoxically, the limitations of language. For instance, in “Fragile,” the poet wonders, “How fragile is the thread that refastens / this morning to one four centuries ago,” and, in the proceeding lines, Astatine nudges him to further articulate his metaphor:

“Si, riconnette. Che cos’è?  (Yes, it reconnects. What is it?)
The old man’s sorrow dying in his throat
after last words to his son, his daughter,
their words like ours stolen by the wind,
leaving a necklace of small hollow bones.
Sarebbe ossa vivere su un filo fragile? (Would bones live on a fragile thread?)”

Descartes, Darwin, Newton, Spinoza, Rilke, Plato, Aristotle, Laozi, Tu Fu and Pink Floyd are some of the “classic” figures (usually Western and almost always male) alluded to in this book. The poems are also haunts for recurring symbols and images—including birds, hospitals, nurses, water, light and chemistry—but the context and language in which they reappear is never the same.

For example, in “Song,” there is “A robin lit on the root of a fir . . . while from the topmost limb / the robin’s mate was a blur / of song” and the speaker is “in the least-lit room / on the fifth floor.” In “Hospital Grounds,” a “Limb of an Oak, Robin’s Mate, Blue Blur / of Song” echoes; then, in “July Traffic,” the speaker is “clutching a frame / in the least-lit room” where he “[keeps] robins.” In “Red Blooms,” the poet states that he intends “to split everything, / to dwell on isotopes, find new settings / for old arguments.”

Whenever a reference from the past or a visual from an earlier poem returns, it is like a variant of a preceding chemical element, slightly re-envisioned or re-dreamed. In this way, I think that Kenyon deftly succeeds in showing us how the present alters our interpretation of what has come before, and I was prevented from overtiring of the aforementioned motifs, allusions and imagery (which certainly are familiar).

The poems’ locational backdrops are far-reaching—many are British Columbian, but the reader also ventures to Beograd, a café in New York, the Aeneid and a multiplicity of ineffable emotional places. There is wide variety, too, in Kenyon’s use of syntax, grammar and form, which ranges from prose poetry and blank verse to a palindromic stanza and a pantoum. His diction, for the most part, is direct and conversational. I was grateful for this choice as I grappled with the answerless questions he raises and dream-logic of many of the pieces. I was continually, happily, doing a double read, a triple read, a quadruple read, without ever feeling as though I had landed on a fixed destination or conclusion. Astatine is a thickly layered, imaginative travelling experience with preoccupations that are worth continuing to puzzle over.

Alisha Dukelow is in her final year of the University of Victoria’s writing program, with a focus on poetry and fiction.

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…