Festival’s diversity focus unites writers

Victoria Writers Festival

At Oak Bay United Church

Nov. 6-8

Reviewed by Senica Maltese

If you were to pass me on the street, you would see a white, middle-class, straight woman. You would not be wrong to see me this way, but it isn’t the whole story.

This year, the third annual Victoria Writers Festival gathered writers from a variety of literary backgrounds, ethnicities, orientations and genders to tackle ideas around diversity and unity.

As Victoria Youth Poet Laureate Morgan Purvis stated in the first reading on Nov. 6, “the only thing that ends in death is the illusion of our separateness.” Though many of the events and readings focused on the unique pain caused by this separateness, and the labels that inevitably arise as a result, I think the closing line of Purvis’s stunning spoken-word poem remained relevant throughout the entirety of the festival.

The opening event on Nov. 8, a multi-generation panel on queer women’s writing entitled The Queer Sentence, was one of the first all-queer events to appear in a mainstream festival. The panel, which was hosted by early queer activist, editor and critic Chris Fox, included Betsy Warland, Leah Horlick, Arleen Pare, Jane Byers, and Alie Blythe. Each of these writers shared portions of their most recent works before engaging the audience in a supportive and open discussion on queer literature, history and the complexity of labelling oneself and labelling others.

Though the panel seemed to agree that having access to an umbrella term like “queer” is useful, Betsy Warland’s designation, “a person of between,” is the most inclusive and accurate definition that I have heard. Warland concluded the event, declaring, “There is no straight line.”

The lack of a straight line reappeared in this year’s Carol Shields Lecture, which also dealt with the complexities of separateness, but from an indigenous point of view. The lecture, entitled “Islands of Decolonial Love: Exploring Love on Occupied Land” was presented by Leanne Simpson (pictured above), a Nishnaabeg storyteller and activist.

Simpson’s presentation, told in four timeless Nishnaabeg stories, explored the impact of colonialism on the lands and bodies of First Nations peoples and fearlessly delved into the ways that colonialism has damaged their intimacy and caused generations of shame in indigenous communities.

According to Simpson, storytelling spurs the creation of what she calls “islands of decolonial love”; however, she clearly stated that story telling is only the first step in the long and labyrinthine path to indigenous resurgence.

Though complex in its implications, Simpson regarded her ability to give her lecture in a branch of the United Church, which was responsible for much of the pain in Simpson’s cultural history, as a tremendous success.

Darrell Dennis’s reading, which appeared in “The World Before Us” gala, also addressed the damage caused by colonial occupation on First Nation’s land, but from a place of searing wit. Reading from his newest book, Peace Pipe Dreams: The Truth and Lies About Indians, Dennis deconstructed some of the common misunderstandings and stereotypes pushed onto indigenous individuals.

As a person who is easily slotted into the mainstream, I am acutely aware of my privileged position in Canada, and in the world. The pain and historical weight behind these presentations allowed me access into worlds where I do not often feel openly welcomed. Without a doubt, the third annual Victoria Writer’s Festival has encouraged me to rethink and reread history, literature, the body and the self. I would call it a tremendous success.

Senica Maltese is a writing and English literature undergrad at UVic. 

Second album offers wide sonic scope

Victoria-based duo Jansz & June, a.k.a. Auto Jansz and Andrea June, has just released its second album, After We’re Here. The album’s wide sonic palette and varied lyrical content can be both soothing and striking. Janz is a former member of the Canadian roots band Barley Wik. She’s been involved in the punk music scene in Winnipeg and has released solo recordings that have earned a positive reception. Andrea is known in writing circles by her surname Routley; she graduated from the Canadian College of the Performing Arts and the University of Victoria. Her song “The Tide” was shortlisted for the Island Singer-Songwriter contest in 2010. Coastal Spectator writer Emmett Robinson Smith recently spoke with Andrea about After We’re Here and life as an artist.

You both come from expansive artistic backgrounds: Auto as a former member of Barley Wik, and you, Andrea, as a graduate of the Canadian College of Performing Arts. How have these experiences shaped your idea of what music is and can be?

The way I make music has definitely changed over the years. Like many people, as a kid I was introduced to music through piano lessons and choir, with the focus being on interpreting classical, notated music. I learned to look at music in a bit of a snobby way, with classical music being the top “real” music, and folk music, say, being at the bottom of this hierarchy, which is totally crap and also completely paralyzing when it comes to writing your own music. To make the long story short, I explored musical theatre, opera, jazz, pop, country, and finally landed on writing original songs. I think getting to know these various styles and techniques has completely eliminated any lingering insecurities about the value of any one of those types of music, and that stratified way of looking at it. For Auto, playing in Barley Wik really informed her idea of what playing music is all about. It’s about the collaborative work of playing together as a team, forming that musical connection. Coming from different music backgrounds, we had pretty different ways of talking about music or working on a song, but we found a way and I think these different backgrounds have brought a lot of energy to the songs we write.

I noted a diversity of sounds on your new album, After We’re Here. Who are your major musical influences?

We definitely have different musical influences, and it’s always interesting to hear from people what they think we “sound” like, because it is often not musicians we would name as influences. Many people comment that some of our songs remind them of Sarah McLachlan, who is fantastic, but not someone I ever listened to — although we have all heard her music! Maybe she is impossible not to be influenced by for someone of my generation? Paul Simon is another musician we’ve been compared to. For me, the influence can be on a particular song. In our first album, “The Tide” came out of “Bist Du Bei Mir,” by Bach, which I’d been playing on the piano. On this album, I wrote “Lucky” after listening to a lot of Neko Case — I wanted to write a song with that same direct, unadorned vocal quality. Auto is a lover of swing and ragtime and she tends to lean more toward this style. Doc MacLean is one of her favourite musicians and she had the chance to open for him this summer in Victoria!

There is a unique storytelling element in your lyrics on After We’re Here — “Devil And The Deep Blue Sea” is a good example. Where do you get these ideas for songs?

Auto loves to write songs about famous — or should-be-famous — Canadian women, and “Devil and the Deep Blue Sea” is one of those songs, a true story about a hard-working rancher’s wife, Irene Murdoch, who challenged the law in Alberta to award women a fair share (women couldn’t even own property in Alberta until the 1970s!). “Outlaw” is a song about my sister who can be pretty fiery and reached her tipping point many times in Victoria when it comes to the policing of each other that can happen and the many bylaws — all the bylaws referenced at the end of the song are real bylaws in Victoria! So be careful not to act too “contrary” in a public park.

Many moods are present on After We’re Here. I compared  the delicacy of “Paper Boats” to the brazenness of “Outlaw,” for example. How does your creative process vary from song to song?

Some songs start with a story, and it’s a matter of finding the music to match, while others might being with a melody line, or a chord progression, or just a hook. “Paper Boats” started with a chord progression and wanting to write a melody that was all one note, a delicate tapping kind of thing. The water imagery and the lyrics came out of that. “Outlaw” was definitely inspired first by my sister, and I also wanted to play a tune on piano that was a bit honky-tonk. I’m not sure if it ever totally sounded honky-tonk because it will be our own version of that…And the version of it on the album is more bad-ass than honky-tonk, which was really fun to see that evolve into something different. Auto is amazing at exploring the possibilities of a song, turning it upside down, altering the time signature, inverting the melody — she’s very playful in the way she works on a new piece, which is a wonderful quality and makes her a lot of fun to play music with!

What’s next for Jansz & June? Any upcoming shows?

Auto plays locally with lots of other musicians, but we’re mostly taking the winter off. Day-jobs are a reality of life in the arts, but we’re writing new songs and looking forward to performing together again soon.

Emmett Robinson Smith is a music reviewer and UVic student. 

Debut novel explores Japanese-Canadian prairie life

Prairie Ostrich

By Tamai Kobayashi

Goose Lane Editions

200 pages; $19.95

Reviewed by Chris Ho

The trials of finding one’s place in the world is something that everyone must go through (“yes, don’t remind me of high school,” you say), but Tamai Kobayashi’s distinct and cautious prose is woven with heart-wrenching elements of racial otherness, family fracture and religion. At times, Prairie Ostrich feels a bit like a diary of a young girl growing up, but what makes it unique is the way that Kobayashi intertwines and develops these themes while writing with powerful poetic voice.

Kobayashi’s debut novel is a heartbreaking story about the “only Japanese-Canadian family on the prairie” of Bittercreek, Alberta, in 1974. Kobayashi’s fictitious locale is a small town set in its ways and wholly non-accepting of diversity – whether it be religious or racial. Readers follow eight-year-old Egg Murakami through a grueling year in which she is bullied at school and feels isolated and neglected by her mother and father.

For Egg, stepping outside of her home often feels “like stumbling into a room where she does not belong, where Japanese turns into Jap.” Desperately and inquisitively, she searches for a sense of belonging, hiding away in the crevices of the school’s library to avoid the cruelest of bullies, Martin Fisken. While other kids might read fictional tales of talking animals and heroic kids, Egg finds comfort in the precision of the dictionary because “everything else [in life] is so muddled.”

After the mysterious death of her oldest brother Albert, her father exiles himself to the ostrich barn while her mother attempts to numb her pain through excessive drinking. Confused and alone, Egg somehow feels responsible for her family’s fractured spirit. Her sister, Kathy, tells her that stories help us make sense of life because they always having a purpose and a moral. But as Egg is surrounded by all the bad in the world, she can’t help but wonder: “What if there isn’t a Moral, or a Meaning? … What if God can’t do anything?”

Kobayashi seems to find a balance between the voice of an eight-year-old searching for meaning with the strong poetic language of the narrator – though at times I found it improbable that an eight-year-old would have the kind of intellectual depth that Egg expresses. This feeling took me out of the story from time to time: Egg is definitely not your average eight-year-old.

That being said, my only real criticism is that the dénouement seems rushed, and overly tidy. Throughout the novel, the narrator presents a few ways to look at adversity as Egg begins to realize that maybe there is no “moral to the story” in real life. But instead of transcending these viewpoints and concluding the novel with an enlightened and more complex moral message, Kobayashi opts for the predictable. I felt as though the “message” was that Egg turned out to be right in thinking that suffering is sometimes a blessing in disguise since it leads to personal growth. As for her other thoughts about life throughout the novel, well, she was just being naïve. Kobayashi rebels against that traditional feel-good ending; however she doesn’t take it far enough to avoid the clichés associated with those feel-good endings.

Chris Ho is a Victoria musician and freelance writer.

Debut poetry collection explores working class masculinity

Garth Martens’ debut poetry collection, Prologue for the Age of Consequence, is a finalist for the 2014 Governor General’s Literary Awards, to be announced on Nov. 18. While working class masculinity has been a throughline of Canadian poetry in the work of poets like Patrick Lane, Martens’ poems, eloquent and brutal, are probably the most merciless – yet starkly compassionate – portrait of a group of working men in Canadian poetry. In this interview with Julian Gunn, Martens takes some of his metaphors from flamenco. He has studied flamenco dance, cante (singing), and palmas (percussion) for seven years at Alma de Espana. He wrote the libretto for a major international flamenco production, Pasajes, staged at the Royal Theatre in July 2014.

The poems in Prologue for the Age of Consequence travel between portrait and myth. Where does the mythological impulse come from, and why this shifting back and forth in scale from microcosm to macrocosm?

Large forces act on us. We promote them through a passive agreement, fingers on the planchette of a Ouija board. If the ordinary lives of tradespeople need no embellishment, still, there’s a corresponding experience. The worker asleep. We’re faced with a lot of numbers, the death rate in construction, or an amount, in metric tonnes, of land disrupted through machinery for bitumen. Portraiture allows a coarser engagement. Immensity, intimacy—we live each of these. So I’m interested in character, loaded voices. I’m also in love with an everything diction. Shifts in scale, hybridized registers, these were right for the telling.

The voice of a poem like “The Bolt that Cracked” moves between collective and individual identity, and between first and third person. Were you exploring how a sense of self works under extreme circumstances? What did you want your readers to experience through this instability?

Halfway through the first draft of “The Bolt That Cracked,” I discovered I had changed from first to third person, accidentally, and I was annoyed, but then I liked the effect. I thought about why I had done that, why I had slipped: an attempt to avert the gaze, disassociate, move left. I like your word “instability” here. The shifts begin when the speaker’s in the hospital observing other patients, their injuries, until returning to himself: “and here, now, this one, hovering / in spacious anaesthetic.” We don’t, sometimes, want to speak “I”. We can’t place ourselves. There are two wounds in that poem, and one of them is much simpler than the other and given more attention. So yes, extreme circumstances, which in fact are commonplace: the self exerted on, the departures, by choice or death, of those we love. The characters in Prologue have their individual identity and their collective identity, and both of these are under assault.

Formally, the poems in Prologue tend to present themselves as prose poems or as long-lined free verse, yet they seem to me to have a subterranean structure—for example, of alliteration and especially assonance. Occasionally, passages of meter break through the surface, as in “Mythologies of Men”: “He built a motorbike from scrap, / he built a stair-rail ramp, he built a fire”—these bursts feel almost incantatory. Were there models you had in mind, and was there a conceptual purpose behind this tension between the form on the page and the sound of speech?

When I read “Mythologies of Men” out loud, I do it naturally, but toward the accent, which is how flamenco dancers work, and ancient Anglo-Saxon poetry. Line length is immaterial. Every syllable, when musically positioned, will read variably according to the hierarchy of accent, in triplets or dobles, a pounding of iambs, but also in a sinuous inflection, the language as spoken, which is richly idiosyncratic. Some of these poems have compact rhythm and others oxygenated rhythm. The bursts you refer to—these aren’t, you know, singularities—they’re in a musical context. See: “Myths, Metres, Rhythms,” from Winter Pollen: Occasional Prose, Ted Hughes.

As I read, I began to think of the language in this collection as stubborn—I don’t know if that resonates with you—it is dense, and it often turns aside from an expected word and chooses one near it, or suddenly knots syntax in a surprising way. It seemed to me that you wanted the reading process to reflect the physical labour of construction—the poems must be built in the mind, they don’t just drop easily in. Does that reflect your intention, or is it a more general strategy in your work? You’ve said that you don’t want to be “strafing the world with perfume.”

So much of the process is intuitive and appropriate to who I am in the world, and so I wrote these poems and I wrote them in this way, and I have at moments a myopic attention, an obsessiveness. My editor referred to the language in Prologue as, at times, baroque. “A tortuous vasculature,” my optometrist said, after a retinal scan. My comment on “strafing the world with perfume” was said with respect to rendering the world of construction workers, writing as resident and not tourist, neither gloving an ugliness nor ignoring a darkness.

As for stubbornness, I don’t disagree. Still, no one says flamenco music is stubborn, though it is complex.

This is a world composed almost entirely of men. Is the collection exploring ideas about gender, particularly masculinity? What does it excavate?

There is an odious masculinity on stage throughout Prologue. There aren’t many women, as on job sites. Apart from the cleaner, and the present absence of girlfriends or ex-wives, there is the mother figure in “Everything That’s Yours”. The men in Prologue regulate one another toward faces that are cruder but approved. I hope that, beneath a stereotype, complexities agitate.

I tried to write a poem from the perspective of a childhood friend. She was a bank teller in Kelowna who became an apprentice electrician, and went to work in Fort Mac, among three hundred men in camp. I tried, with her permission, but I couldn’t get it right. I was getting it wrong. And there wasn’t time to improve it. I wish there had been.

Garth Martens will be reading today Nov. 8, at 11.15 a.m., as a part of the Victoria Writers Festival, on a panel called called “Grit Lit: Writing the Rural” at Oak Bay United Church (1355 Mitchell Street). 

On Nov. 14, Martens will be a featured poet at Planet Earth Poetry. Open Mic begins at 7:30 p.m. Featured poets Garth Martens and Erina Harris begin at 8 p.m. 

Courageous memoir examines rape trauma

One Hour in Paris:  A True Story of Rape and Recovery

By Karyn Freedman

Freehand Books, 195 pages, $21.95

Reviewed by Marjorie Simmins

Everyone has single hours – even single minutes or moments – after which their lives are forever changed. But not all of us will need every scrap of bravery, determination and creativity we possess to make our subsequent days caring and meaningful. Karyn Freedman’s memoir, One Hour in Paris, which was recently nominated for the 2014 B.C. National Award for Canadian Non-Fiction, details one such person’s journey.

The title tells almost all: over the course of one hour in Paris, Freedman was brutally raped, and is still recovering. While her rapist was convicted to eight years in prison, Freedman is no freed woman 20 years after the event. Instead, she continues to struggle with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder and its cyclical, pernicious symptoms, for which she continues to receive counselling and treatment.

Undeniably, Freedman’s spirit and psyche are in some ways permanently injured; she herself refers to psychological trauma as a “chronic condition.” But do not believe for an instant that Freedman’s rapist even came near to vanquishing her warrior heart. First, it took keen, instinctive smarts and speed to eventually escape from her rapist – who used a knife to threaten and control her and frequently said he would kill her. Second, and years later, she looked on the horror of rape worldwide, and did not blanch. Third, and latterly, Freedman decided to pull rape out of the shadows of shame and indifference, by telling her own story, and bearing witness to the stories of others.

A lifelong feminist and an associate professor of philosophy at the University of Guelph, Freedman studied sexual violence around the globe, including Africa’s eastern Congo, which United Nations’ officials have called The Rape Capital of the World. In 2008, Freedman travelled to AIDS-devastated Maun, Botswana, to work in a human rights organization called Women Against Rape (WAR). There, she shared her story with other victims of rape, both adults and children.

When she did this, she learned from one young woman that she had “no idea people in countries like Canada were subject to rape.” Another had never heard anyone talk about rape as candidly as Freedman did – easing the pain and marginalization all of them felt. Yet another teenager told Freedman that hearing her story “would change her future because it showed her that recovery is possible.” It was, writes Freedman, “an indelible moment.”

Freeman continues to give back to the world that once hurt her so badly. She does this most profoundly by having written her memoir, an act that takes spine for writers describing even the gentlest of lives. In the end she views rape as “intensely personal and deeply isolating,” but also a “social problem … that is the result of the way societies are structured and resources and power distributed.”

One Hour in Paris is a gripping and courageous read; the writing is also graceful and accessible. Equally fascinating is Freedman’s focus on the field of trauma studies and discussion of “the nature and reliability of traumatic memories.”

Of her own memoir, she concludes: “And while it is a true story, from start to finish, it is in the end the story as I remember it.”

What a memory – and what a triumph beyond it.

Marjorie Simmins is a West-Coast-raised writer living in Halifax, Nova Scotia. Her memoir about life on the two coasts, Coastal Lives, was published by Pottersfield Press in 2014.

 

Mysteries abound in The World Before Us

The World Before Us

By Aislinn Hunter

Published by Doubleday Canada

400 pages, $29.95

Reviewed by Erin Anderson

The World Before Us, the second novel from Vancouver writer Aislinn Hunter, comes 12 years after her last fiction release, Stay. In between the two works, Hunter published The Possible Past, a collection of poetry which – in title at least – ties in best with the vision explored in The World Before Us.

Protagonist Jane seems to live in the past, cataloguing the antiques in the obscure museum where she works and wondering about the fate of the young girl, Lily, whom she lost while babysitting 20 years ago. She is also literally immersed in the past, unknowingly followed by a miasma of lost souls who believe her research will help them recover their own identities.

Jane’s personal and professional interests collide when Lily’s father is a scheduled guest speaker at the museum, which is being shut down. His visit acts as a catalyst and drives her to look deeper into the lives of several people who lived a century ago: a young woman who disappeared from an asylum, a man who founded his own eclectic museum and two competitive brothers from an upper-class family.

In clear, descriptive prose, Hunter lays out several possibilities for the lives under Jane’s microscope. Fictionalized versions of historical events emerge, extrapolated and inferred from Jane’s own discoveries and, later, from the memories pieced together by her cohort of ghosts.

The suspense in this ambitious novel sneaks up on its readers; what begins as a series of small unknowns coalesces into the larger mysteries at play. What happened to Lily? Who are the cloud of souls that surround Jane? Where did the young woman known as N. disappear to 100 years ago?

Hunter unravels these mysteries slowly and deliberately, examining the intricacies of the characters Jane knows only through letters, books and personal items, until even the smaller pieces of the past loom large. The World Before Us unfolds with the detachment and organization appropriate to a story with an archivist at its heart. Equally apropos is how the story shifts and switches focus as more evidence comes to light.

Though the historical events dominate readers’ imaginations, Jane proves to be an unpredictable yet thoroughly believable protagonist as she undergoes a metamorphosis of sorts. Forever marked by the loss of Lily, Jane has spent most of her adult life avoiding attachments. After her encounter with Lily’s father, she begins to break out of her passivity and engage not only with her own history, but the people around her.

The World Before Us is a subtle, evocative work that draws in its audience with ease. Even as Jane goes to great lengths to find answers to the questions that have bothered her for years, some mysteries can’t be solved. By threading Jane’s contemporary life through the lives of so many others, Hunter reminds readers that we are never really alone – we occupy the same space as those fallible humans who inhabited the world before us even as we face the world that lies ahead.

Erin Anderson is a marketing and communications professional who reviews books, music and theatre in her spare time.

Aislinn Hunter will read from The World Before Us at a gala event at Victoria Writers Festival on Nov. 8 at 7 p.m., along with Jordan Abel, Nancy Lee and Darrell Dennis. The festival runs Nov. 6-8 at Oak Bay United Church. 

Historian revives the story of the enigmatic Peter Pond

Dr. Barry Gough is a noted historian and a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society recognized for his scrupulous research and engaging narratives. He is the author of many books, including Juan de Fuca’s Strait: Voyages in the Waterways of Forgotten Dreams and Fortune’s a River: The Collision of Empires in Northwest America (Harbour, 2007) which won the John Lyman Book Award for best Canadian naval and maritime history and was shortlisted for the Writers’ Trust Non-Fiction Prize. Most recently, Dr. Gough explored the life of a fur trader who has long fascinated him in The Elusive Mr. Pond: The Soldier, Fur Trader and Explorer who Opened the Northwest (Douglas & McIntyre, 2014). He spoke to Margaret Thompson about this enigmatic figure.

The title of your book—The Elusive Mr. Pond—immediately suggests that Peter Pond is a shadowy figure, historically. What first drew your attention to him as a subject for a book?

The authoritative Dictionary of Canadian Biography, one of the great national literary institutions of [our] country…asked me to write for their pages a large biography of this unusual character. The staff of the Dictionary also knew of my fascination with the intersection of the fur traders, the First Nations, and the opening up of the Canadian northwest. Since then and even today I have been drawn to a personality who does not fit the norms of Canadian history—and who challenges us to think in new ways about our past, particularly that of the distant eighteenth century. Put differently, I could not put Peter Pond aside, could not consign him to the scrap heap of history. He deserved better, and therein lay the fascination of his incredible story—and my desire to tell it.

From your account, Pond’s life is not well documented by himself or others, and there are large gaps in the record. This must have presented a challenge even to an experienced researcher like yourself. Will you tell us something about the process of disinterring verifiable fact about Pond, and what caused you the most difficulty?

The art of the historian is to recount the past and explain this to the interested reader, the latter constituting an increasingly difficult task given the fact that fewer Canadians read of their history, more particularly that before the end of the Second World War. (It is a fact that Canadian history is disappearing as a subject of public interest, a reason for considerable worrry to those of us who have spent lifetimes trying to educate our fellow Canadians in the rich depth of our history.) The historian, however, often has to read between the lines—and go beyond the documents. I do not have a photo of Peter Pond but that did not stop me from writing a speculative pen portrait of the fellow. Peter Pond left a wonderful memoir, short though it is. But from other sources in the North West Company files, from other fur trade biographies, and from Hudson’s Bay Company papers, and above all Colonial Office papers in Kew, Surrey, we can complete a very wide and deep literary portrait. And by his maps shall he also be known. Of specific interest and importance are Pond’s various maps; and these are important historical records besides being quizzical and fabulous cartographic creations of the age.

If you have an inquisitive instinct and love the pursuit of the documentary chase, there is no shortage of material about Peter Pond. But the working historian has to know how to get at it and have the abilities to mine that particular vein of gold.

As you point out, Pond enjoyed good relations with the First Nations he encountered, and was even employed on occasion as a sort of diplomatic envoy. How much of his success would you ascribe to this quality?

He was not born in the wilderness or the frontier, but he took to it naturally, even intuitively. He welcomed the freedom of the frontier. That meant living with the First Nations, sleeping with the native women and encouraging the diplomacy with the various tribes—all part of “the custom of the country,” so called. The Peter Pond “gene pool” is probably well spread throughout the vast geography stretching north and west from Detroit running up to Lake Athabasca and beyond. But it was more than his ease of living with the First Nations, the American Indians. He had become a fearless fellow from his warrior years in the Connecticut and New York militias. He was hard-nosed and capable of the hardest physical demands placed upon him: he was a marathon runner of the fur trade. Among all fur traders, save Mackenzie, he was first among equals in capabilities.

In fur trade history most historians treat the fur traders as a class of equals; in fact, some were stronger than others. Pond and Mackenzie were among the toughest, and from them devolved the great expansive strength of the Nor’Westers that led them against all odds to the Arctic (or Icy) Sea and to the Pacific. It is shocking to my sensitivities, however, that Mackenzie gave Pond so little credit for his zeal, leadership and geopolitical vision—the essence of this biography. Why was Mackenzie so selfish? Was it his Scots disposition? Or was it the fact that Pond was a Colonial American? The book probes this question, and it speaks to the essence of who is a Canadian. Do we lose our Canadian status when we leave our country? And do we have to stay in this country to be famous in it? The Peter Pond story speaks, in a way, to the shallowness of the Canadian nationality and to the fragility of our collective belonging. But he was a significant figure in the creation of the Empire of the St. Lawrence, the political and economic system that was the progenitor of the modern Canadian state.

Looking at Pond’s maps, I was struck by the enormity of his undertaking—not so much the sheer size of the country, which he could not know, but the courage it would take to strike out into a limitless unknown. That he managed a successful trading career, as well as demystifying vast river systems and almost working out a route to the Pacific, suggests that he was a remarkable man. Why, then, is he not as much of a household name as Mackenzie and Fraser?

He was not Scottish. That’s the first answer, the primary one. The next answer is that he did not remain in Canada. He left the fur trade and Canada and retired or returned home, as some of us do, to his home town, in his case Milford, Connecticut, in my case, teasingly, Victoria, British Columbia. The Scots had a profound influence in our history; I proved that in my biography of Sir Alexander Mackenzie, First Across the Continent, a book which did so much to explain to Americans (as well as Canadians) and those beyond our borders, how important the fur trade was to our national alchemy. Yes, he spanned the greater northwestern scope of Canada, from Montreal out to Windsor and Detroit then up through the Great Lakes to all the river courses (often against the flow of current) right up to the English River and then the Methye Portage that took him into the new fur trade eldorado, Athabasca, and to the Canadian north leading to the Arctic and the rivers of British Columbia.

In your preface you make this comment: “It may be fashionable nowadays to engage in creative non-fiction, but I can assure the reader that I have declined this seduction, save where I have speculated on Pond’s appearance.” The phrasing makes it clear that you disapprove of creative non-fiction in a historical study, yet your own example of succumbing to the “seduction” illustrates the colour that fictional techniques can give a narrative without tainting its authenticity. Can you elaborate a bit on your take on creative non-fiction?

I am not opposed to creative non-fiction… [but] we who are biographers or historians are bound by the rigorous craft rules set down in our callings. We cannot create facts; we cannot create circumstances; we cannot change chronology; we must respect those who have written about the subject already. Someone writing creative non-fiction, by contrast, can exercise greater liberties. For myself as a working historian I am particularly bound by the main materials of my subject—a personal narrative or memoir, related trade narratives, business and political records of the age, maps and charts, and the views of others about the personality and circumstances that form the main subject. My search as a biographer has always been to provide an authentic representation of the individual under examination. That is my credo.

But the biographer’s calling also requires imagination and the perspective of the years and of the age in question. It is a wonderful challenge and I hope to find another figure as compelling as Peter Pond though, alas, I am not sure I will ever find it. He stands in the same category as Lawrence of Arabia and Sir Ernest Shackleton, and the world cries out for figures whose stories have yet to be told and retold.

Henderson’s new novel shocks with depth and heart

The Road Narrows as You Go

By Lee Henderson

Hamish Hamilton

512 pp. $32.95

Reviewed by Aaron Shepard

Set almost entirely in the mid-1980s, The Road Narrows as You Go is both satire and Künstlerroman, chronicling the rise and fall of Wendy Ashbubble, a budding cartoonist who dreams of a career like her hero, Charles Schulz. She resides at No Manors, the home of San Francisco’s beloved artist Hick Elmsdales, who succumbs to AIDS at the story’s beginning. The aftermath of his death includes a two-day wake attended by both fictional and real legends such as Art Spiegelman, Berkeley Breathed and Schulz himself. There’s also a cannibalistic ritual initiated by the mysterious artist Jonjay, Wendy’s muse, which establishes the novel’s anarchic tone.

Wendy’s strip, Strays, finds success thanks to Frank Fleecen, a financial wizard and junk bonds trader who hooks her up with increasingly lucrative syndication and merchandise deals. No Manors becomes a comic strip factory, a commune fueled by coffee, weed, sex and a collective love of comics and art.

Wendy’s story is narrated by her four assistants, who serve as a Greek chorus to this ribald tale. The assistants’ Sisyphean task of creating an animated Strays Christmas television special anchors the narrative and allows for interesting digressions on the history of animation and other art mediums. Much like A.S. Byatt, herself a passionate art historian, Henderson unapologetically fills pages with cultural quasi-lectures. It’s tempting to skim at times, but the patient reader is rewarded with moments of insight and arresting detail: “A drawing was the soul of all art….His fences weren’t Berlin Walls, they were barriers between childhood and adulthood, or between the imagination and its prey, easily climbed over, spied through, vandalized and whitewashed.”

Wendy is a conflicted character: ambitious but naïve, free-spirited but insecure. Among her quirks is her belief that Ronald Reagan is her father, though she’s largely ignorant of his politics and – like this reader – the world of finance in general.

If Reagan is the distant father figure, Frank is the sexualized embodiment of Reaganomics. Frank and Wendy rocket through the story riding the shotgun energy of frontier capitalism. As Wendy’s hunger for mainstream acceptance grows, a series of crises presages her downfall: the disappearance of Jonjay; a snooping Securities and Exchanges Commission; the emergence of her polar opposite, Bill Watterson, the famously anti-consumerist creator of Calvin and Hobbes.

John Ralston Saul recently remarked on Nikolai Gogol’s influence on dark comedy in the modern novel. Akin to Chichikov’s encounters in Dead Souls, Henderson’s frequently hilarious and raunchy scenes brim with a manic, moral energy. While the novel pays homage to the comic strip heyday of the ’80s, it is also concerned with the phenomena of excess, the creative impulse colliding with capitalist greed. Even set among motifs particular to that decade – the rise of AIDS, the hysteria over satanic cults – things like “the deregulation of the financial market and privatization of the prison industrial complex” feel immediate and urgent, the roots of our social and financial crises laid bare.

The final chapters, which speed through the next two decades while still engaging the reader, offer a poignant, surprising denouement that recasts the entire story in a wondrously different light. As in Henderson’s first novel, The Man Game, there is a note of yearning here, a desire for a world where aesthetics and the pleasures of art are accorded greater value than they’re given in our humdrum, market-driven reality. Like a good comic strip, beneath all the hijinks, The Road Narrows as You Go shocks you with its depth and heart.

Everything Aaron Shepard knows about Ronald Reagan he learned from reading Bloom County as a teenager in Salmon Arm. When is a Man (Brindle and Glass, 2014) is his first novel.

Balkan music inspires big brass sound

Victoria band Bučan Bučan brought its big brass gypsy sound to the Royal B.C. Museum on Halloween night. This year, they marched a coffin (complete with ladies in mourning) into the mezzanine in the Museum’s Old Town and accompanied it at the end of the night with a Dixieland/Romani processional march. The band also appeared at Open Space’s Day of the Dead Fiesta on November 1 in collaboration with Puente Theatre. Folk-dancer Terry Jones spoke to Bučan Bučan’s co-founder and frontman Chris Logan about why he is drawn to Balkan music and what revelers can expect from Bučan Bučan’s shows.

Chris, you’re an accomplished musician who seems to be able to play almost any instrument put in front of you. You currently concentrate on playing accordion, oud, bouzouki (a Greek instrument) and violin, among other instruments. You’ve fronted Bučan Bučan since its inception in 2009. How did the idea for a Balkan brass marching band come about?

I always wanted to start a gypsy band, and I was originally planning on getting something together more string-based like Taraf de Haïdouks. But there aren’t a lot of string players in Victoria that play this kind of stuff. However there are tons of brass players and woodwinds that are sort of trapped in the jazz or back-up genre. We put an ad out on Used Victoria, Craigslist and Facebook looking for members and we got a bunch of trumpet players, sax players, percussionists and a lot of trombone players. My good friend, Jonty Parker-Jervis, a violin player, joined the band so we had a little string department. And we had a clarinet player at the time and all the brass. So somehow it just happened. We took it to the other gypsy genre of Kočani, or the Macedonian and Serbian gypsy styles, rather than Romanian. It worked out really well and everybody accepted the music and enjoyed playing it. My partner, Natasha Enquist, was very media-savvy—really into social media and promotion and fashion. The look of the band was her thing and I dealt with the music.

You trace your roots to Yorkshire, Poland and the Ukraine, and many of Bučan Bučan’s members do not have a direct cultural connection to the Balkans. What are your views around authenticity? I’m curious about how you negotiate this ethical concern (if indeed it is one).

It’s not a concern. Sure, when I’m singing I make sure I learn the lyrics properly. I learned to read Greek so I could pronounce everything correctly out of respect for the song, but that’s just me. We don’t pretend to be anything that we’re not. As far as the authenticity of the music goes, we generally don’t play many “straight” folk songs; we always add our own feel to it. There’s no crime in putting a hip-hop beat to a cocek [Balkan dance]; it’s still danceable, right? I bet if we went to some small village in Macedonia, and played a cocek (or cacak) with a “non-authentic” beat, people would still dance.

When we started out, I had planned to have a proper “folk” band, but quickly realized that with the musical talent and diversity of our members, it wasn’t going to happen – nor should it! For us to play simple “folk” tunes would be a disservice to the music. Sure, we pay homage to the roots of the music, but for the music to evolve and carry forward, it needs to be made personal. If people want to hear the classic version of a folk song, that’s great. They can put on an old recording, but we’re not here to re-hash the classics, we want to make them our own! Listen to someone like Boban Markovic, he plays some authentic Serbian folk tunes, but with a very modern flare. It’s the same with dancing: a rachenitsa danced in the village is quite simple compared to the same dance performed by one of the “professional” dance troupes. Does that make it less “authentic?” Maybe, but who cares? We’re not ethnomusicologists. We’re musicians.

Your audience really enjoys the fact that you combine the wildness of a cabaret act with your Balkan musicianship. Does this come easily to band members and is it hard to maintain a balance between the party aspect and dedication to the music?

They kind of go hand in hand. That party aspect translates into the music very well and vice versa. If you go to events like Buca in Serbia—the big, massive worldwide brass fest—there are brass bands playing in a sea of people and everybody’s into it. They’re doing phenomenal stuff but it’s more about the energy of the band translating to the audience.

So, although most of the musicians in the band are classically trained or doing jazz and they have really good chops, they don’t play this kind of music very much. But the energy from the music helps them along. The techniques of classical and jazz musicians are different from gypsy players. But once you’re playing in the audience and the energy starts humming, you kind of take it on. The timbre and the trills and the articulation come with the energy. With this music, you can be overly technical. For example, it’s like when you hear an opera singer doing pop tunes. It’s one of the most painful things you could ever listen to. They have beautiful voices but they don’t work in certain genres. We had trumpet players who played with the embouchure of a classical or jazz musician—very pure, very clean, very beautiful. But this music is not at all like that. It’s very rustic. It’s a lot like Mariachi where all the trumpets are always over-blowing. The tonality is a lot different. If you listen to some of the down-to-earth bands from Macedonia, they sound sort of terrible—but it’s really good. They aren’t classically-trained. They’ve just been playing since they were out of the womb. And they can play for hours and hours on end.

You know that as a long-time folkdancer, I am totally in love with this kind of music, and have travelled to Macedonia and Bulgaria to attend dance and music seminars. My grandfather was Romani. But for someone who’s not familiar with this music and who’s never attended one of your performances, what can they expect?

Expect the unexpected! Be prepared to be surprised. It varies. It depends on the venue and it depends what kind of crowd it is. It can get a little crazy sometimes. Family shows are generally pretty tame, whereas, if we’re playing in a bar with a bunch of drunk people, it can get a little wild. We’ll be up on the tables… Our stage show is pretty mild. We do have a few members of the band that like to jump out into the audience and run around and play. In every show, we try to get into the crowd a little bit.

The phenomenon of Balkan brass bands is spreading throughout the world, with huge festivals from Trieste to New York. Why do you think this music is catching on and do you think it will become more mainstream?

I hate to say it, but the original Borat movie totally did it. He had Esma Redzepova and Boban Marković and all these players on the soundtrack. Apparently he didn’t pay them any royalties although he used one of Esma’s songs as the movie theme. In fact, Esma is in litigation with the producer. That movie was distributed worldwide and introduced a lot of people to this type of music. As well, Taraf played as the band of gypsies in Johnny Depp’s The Man Who Cried. Depp was enthralled by the band and invited them out to dinner parties… Certain events serve as lightning rods for this type of music. In the club scene in Europe there are a lot of “Balkanesque” type clubs. And it seems that high school marching bands are making a big comeback. People like to hear something a little different.

Patrick Lane embraces world as he refutes it

Renowned poet Patrick Lane will launch his new book of poetry, Washita, at Open Space in Victoria on Nov. 2, 2014 at 7 p.m. The event is co-sponsored by Planet Earth Poetry. Lane recently took time from his writing schedule to talk with Lynne Van Luven about the sere surprises of his most recent poems, which he began to type slowly following a frozen-shoulder injury. In 2011, Lane published his impressive Collected Poems with Harbour Publishing, who also released Washita. Lane, an Officer of the Order of Canada, has won numerous literary prizes, including the Governor General’s Award for Poetry.

Patrick, I’m intrigued by the title of your new collection. Some plains folks might recognize Washita as the Oklahoma river where Custer massacred the Cheyenne in 1868, but your focus with these poems is much wider and yet more particular. Can you talk a little about how the image of the Washita stone, a white quartz used for grinding and sharpening, signals your approach to language these days?

My father had a Washita sharpening stone in a narrow box. As a child I knew he treasured it, the stone somehow associated in my mind with being a man, the stone taken out by him to make an edge on a hunting knife, a chisel, objects that I wasn’t allowed to touch. It became then a talisman to me, a kind of holy ‘man’ object, and thus my vision of the future, captured as it was by his being in the war as well as him being a rodeo cowboy. Images of childhood, all kinds of holiness or unholiness depending on the view. The Washita symbol as representing the poems in the book…yes, the lines and images, the rhetorical flourishes however muted, all simple metaphors. Manliness, yes, something rarely spoken of in these new bright dark ages.

Is it correct to say you are trying an ever-more sere style in these poems?  Your tone to me seems always reflective, but here you are relying more on end-stopped and shorter lines. Does your continued struggle with vision, as well as the earlier frozen shoulder, contribute to this writing form?

It began the form, the writing with my left forefinger after my right arm and shoulder broke down from writing a novel on top of a novel, the former given up on entirely. The lines became compete sentences, end-stopped mostly with periods, though commas occasionally held them together. The slowness of the letters forming words with a typing finger, a right-brain, neither knowing where the keys were. So, a form, yes, however serendipitous, because when it began to evolve I began to explore its possibilities, the leaps between lines, the conjunctions of thought stressed to breaking points.

Yes, I like that. Breaking points.

Your many references to Japanese culture in such poems as “Hiragana,” referencing the feminine brush strokes in Japanese calligraphy, seem to echo the simplicity you are reaching for in your own work.  How does being – as I have heard you called – an “elder statesman” poet play into these approaches?

Elder? Yes, that too, advancing age. I was reading Confucius, his, “At seventy I followed my heart…” and I was seventy-one, following, willy-nilly, my heart. A man grows old in thought as much as deed, the imagination reduced to simple things, a tree frog the cat brought in this morning and offered to me, the tiny drum on its throat beating, exhausted by long effort and song, a sound made to draw a maiden and bringing instead the Minotaur. Japan? I love its OCD culture, the monk I saw at dawn at Ryoanji in Kyoto on his knees plucking pine needles from the moss. I too, OCD as I am, bring to language that same desire for order. Also, the words, iki, sunyata, uguisubai, sabi, words that express a presence in the human word that we require a paragraph to express. Thus the glossary at the end of the book. I have long admired Asian poetry, Japanese and Chinese poetry, since reading Kenneth Rexroth’s early translations in the early ’60s, and, of course, Waley’s earlier work.

Other writers, such as Albert Camus and Jack Gilbert, also create echoes in your poems. Can you reflect a little about how reading poetry from all over the world has shaped your own writing over the years?

I read a Penguin anthology of European poetry back in the early ’60s that left me quite shaken. Back then, there were almost no translations available in the outposts of the B.C. Interior, let alone the wilderness of barbaric Vancouver. The European forms didn’t shape my poetry so much as their perceptions of suffering, their witnessing the world, given the poetry covered a Europe of two great wars, their poets reporting back, [Austrian Expressionist Georg] Trakl and the rest. I loved German and Russian poetry. When I got to know [Yevgeny] Yevtushenko in Vancouver, our conversations ranged through my ignorance of his voice, his damnation.

To me, “The Ecstasy of No” is both a marvelous phrase and a wonderful poem. And yet in North America, we are beset with endless – and therefore mostly meaningless – words and images. Do writers need to protect themselves against that excess in order to keep their creative voice alive, their vision authentic?

I work daily on the word ‘no.’ No longer wish to travel, no longer wish to be distracted by humanity in its yearning for the destruction of all things, the desecration of all things. The poem “Off Valparaiso” reflects my waking in the night and weeping at the dream I had of the whales, Moby Dick, the ancient art of death, the song of the three-year voyages to fill barrels with whale-oil for the lamps that lighted the declarations of war, the pitiful please for peace. The distances between the words  “the” and “blue” and “heron,” are huge and unimaginable.