Tag Archives: Reviews of the written word

A box of memories reveals a life of curiosity

Sweet Assorted: 121 Takes from a Tin Box
By Jim Christy
Anvil Press, 194 pages, $20

Reviewed by Jennifer Kingsley

Jim Christy has been tossing souvenirs into a cookie tin–Peek, Frean & Co. Limited Sweet Assorted Famous English Biscuit tin, to be precise–for almost forty years. The items are various: receipts, photos, hand-written notes, plastic figurines, sketches, coins and even some human teeth. Christy unpacks the tin and catalogues each item with a photo, a title and a description. Put those elements together, and voilà: Sweet Assorted.

Some descriptions are only a few words long, like the sentence that accompanies a small, yellow-green plastic soldier, “In a hurry to be a hero, or a statistic.” Other entries spin out over a few pages and introduce us to some of the zillions of characters Christy, a former American who’s a BC resident when not traveling, has met in his life of frequent adventure.

I was drawn to this book by its form. I wanted to see what Christy’s accidental cookie-tin curation would produce. He scraps plot development, sustained characters (except himself) and recurring images in favour of, well, a bunch of junk. Some items and descriptions take us on flights of fancy to revisit Oaxaca in 1991, Maple Leaf Gardens in 1971 or New Zealand in 1989. Others lead us down memory lane where we learn about Christy’s tireless travel and boundless curiosity. The premise of the book is like a dare (to mention another cookie company) to find meaning amongst the scraps.

Three-quarters of the way in, Christy asks his readers two questions. The first does a fine job of describing the book; the second points out one of its main issues. “What is this entire book, if not an aside?” he asks, “But, then again, an aside to what?” That was the central challenge of this book for me; I struggled to find a vision that could propel it beyond the sphere of Christy’s personal life. Some of the entries occur as a device to drop names or revisit past achievements. Others are simply descriptions of the photo alongside or of an item with forgotten origin. That being said, perhaps our memories are nothing more than a unique, sweet assorted collection, and maybe it is unfair to ask for anything else.

There was a shine to this eccentric work that I appreciated. Christy is being himself. His tin alternately brings back memories and reveals what he has forgotten. He lays out his successes and his failures and leaves us to form our opinions. I closed the book hoping to meet Jim Christy one day. His curiosity, convictions and thirst for adventure have lasted decades, and they don’t seem to be fading with time. I admire that.

Jennifer Kingsley is a writer and broadcaster based in the small town of Almonte, Ontario.

Courageous writers come clean about mental health

Hidden Lives: Coming Out on Mental Illness,

Edited by Leonore Rowntree and Andrew Boden
Published by Brindle and Glass, 264 pages, $24.95
Reviewed by Arleen Pare

The well-known Dr. Gabor Maté writes the book’s foreword. He also writes a back cover blurb which describes Hidden Lives as “(a) privileged if uncomfortable close look at one of the most devastating of human tribulations. For all the honesty of its revelations, Hidden Lives communicates not despair but courage.” These key words, privileged, tribulations, and courage pretty much sum up the reader’s experience. I was keenly aware of the privilege I was being afforded, each page allowing me to regard the details, the emotional pain that mental illness brings to otherwise everyday lives. The tribulations are sorrowful. The courage shines through.

Because I spent two decades working in mental health offices, and because my niece has a serious mental illness, I am personally and professionally familiar with many issues described. Nevertheless, I was riveted. Every story gripped me; I had to keep reading. Each story surprised me with unexpected detail. In “Elm,” Shane Neilson writes “Well, once I wrote poetry. I fell ill. The poetry was in some way intrinsic to the illness. And now I don’t write poetry.” This is an association and a loss I could not have anticipated. Nor could I have expected, in the opening story, “Bad Day,” Joel Yanofsky’s hopelessness about his young son’s future to be so complete that he would welcome the world’s end after reading about an asteroid’s trajectory toward Earth. These are intimate illustrations of the effects of mental illness, the sadness of this human tribulation.

Each story/essay is different not only in terms of point of view (many are written by family members), writerly skill, and proximity to the experience, but also in terms of diagnostic type, intensity of illness, and range of symptoms. Symptoms vary, including threats to others, suicide, or inability to care for self. The results, though sometimes temporary, are often devastating for the individuals with mental illness and for the families who live with and care for and about them.

The order is interesting too. Sometimes a raw piece of writing is juxtaposed against a piece of polished, perhaps professional, writing. At first I thought this structure would be jarring, but in fact, the variety and arrangement worked. Hidden Lives is less about the quality of writing, than the impact of the telling. Even when the writing is raw, maybe especially when the writing is raw, we understand the courage it has taken to put that story on paper. I suspect if all the stories had been polished, the book’s impact might not have been so profound. And it was profound.

After I finished the book, I suggested that my sister, whose daughter has mental illness, might want to read it. She loved it. The sense of support, of not-being-the-only-one-going-through-this-on-her-own, was gratifying. She understood the privilege, and the courage. She understands the hiddenness of mental illness, and she now feels the need to hide a little bit less. Each writer has hidden a little bit less by writing his or her story. This is their courage. Each reader will understand in their own way, and will learn from this book.

Arleen Pare’s most recent book is Leaving Now, published by Caitlin Press

Spirited memoir rejects victim stance

My Leaky Body

By Julie Devaney
Published by Goose Lane Editions,
342 pages, $22.95

Reviewed by Jenny Aitken

It takes skill to centre an entire novel on bowel movements, and in My Leaky Body, Julie Devaney does just that. This memoir chronicles Devaney’s battle with ulcerative colitis, from her initial diagnosis to the surgery removing her large intestine years later. Devaney is unflinchingly honest about her inflammatory bowel disease, describing in detail the humiliating enemas, invasive treatments and the hours spent imprisoned in her own washroom.

I was hesitant to pick up this book, thinking, why would I want to read about that? The first few pages showed me I was wrong. Devaney’s conversational tone and dark humour makes her subject accessible, offering the reader an unfiltered view of her passage through the health-care system.

In her early twenties, Devaney attempts to juggle her diagnosis while dealing with the normal stresses of relationship, social life and grad school. Explaining her absences to professors, Devaney meets both hostility and suspicion. She worries, “I’m afraid that people will think I’m faking it – exaggerating to get attention – or, worse yet, that I’m actually ill and someone to be pitied.”

As her symptoms worsen, Devaney must decide whether to continue living in Vancouver or to move in with her family in Toronto: “I’m terrified of staying in Vancouver. But I’m even more afraid that people will be mad at me or judge me for giving up.” Although she wants to stay in school, the lack of support or understanding from her department make this impossible. After much pleading from her family, Devaney moves back to Toronto, acknowledging that she can’t be a full-time student when she is still a full-time patient.

Readers travel alongside Devaney through the overcrowded hospitals and frigid exam rooms. We are with her when she is left in a broom closet because there are no patient rooms available, or when a resident continues a procedure despite her screams that the drugs haven’t kicked in. We are outraged when she is accused of faking and exaggerating her pain, and shocked when she is left for eight hours after a surgery without being allowed to see a doctor or her family, and triumphant when she removes a tampon for a procedure in front of a disgusted medical student.

This memoir does not simply recount one dreadful medical challenge after another; instead we see Devaney when she is just being herself – planning her wedding, visiting her friends, enjoying DVD marathons and even starting to consider chronicling her experiences for this very memoir.

After finally receiving a surgery to remove her large intestine, Devaney questions how to feel sexy with a colostomy bag. Her insecurity builds until her husband makes love to her in a hospital shower.

Despite her harrowing experiences, Devaney remains good-natured throughout, never asking “Why me?” and instead focusing on how she can create positive change.

After recovering from her surgery, Devaney creates a critically acclaimed one -woman show; adorned in a patient’s robe, she recreates some of the most painful and humiliating moments of her life. Devaney also begins providing health-care workshops, to prod doctors and hospital staff to develop more respectful bedside manners.

Through her humour and frank honesty, Devaney demonstrates the importance of viewing patients as human beings rather than as broken bodies. This memoir is not just about illness, or the health-care system or therapy or love. It’s about all those things; it’s about being a patient without being a victim – and it’s about unceasingly rejecting the label “broken.”

Jenny Aitken is a UVic writing student

Amis’s anti-hero Lionel Asbo: violent seduction

Lionel Asbo: State of England
By Martin Amis, Knopf, $29.95

Reviewed by Lynne Van Luven

Witty. Profane. Excoriating. But possibly just a tad too long?

That’s my postcard review of Martin Amis’s new work of fiction, his 15th, written from his perch in Brooklyn, from which he does indeed have the long view on Britain. As ever, I derive readerly delight from Amis’s coruscating and corrosive view of society – in this case, London’s working class of Diston Town, a populace determined to either rise above or brandish a life of crime – and his relentless wordplay. But as I got to about page 175, I found myself wondering if, like so many satires (Amis says he’s being ironic) firmly embedded in the awfulness of now, Lionel Asbo would have much of a shelf-life, even with its dedication to Christopher Hitchens.

The novel proves Milton’s thesis in Paradise Lost: that evil is always far more entertaining than good. Lionel Asbo, self-named after the Anti-Social Behaviour Order, a restraining directive occasioned by his tossing paving stones through car windshields at the advanced age of THREE, is the dark, roiling heart of Amis’s novel. Lionel’s life of constant crime is derailed by his lottery win: he becomes Lotto Lout Lionel and bespoils many a bespoke suit, posh hotel and rich woman. His nephew Desmond Pepperdine, only child of Lionel’s deceased sister Cilla, is intelligent and earnest; Des acquires a wife and baby daughter after he gets over boinking his Gran, but he cannot hold a torch to the ceaseless revenge-drama of his Uncle Li’s life.

Of course, Lionel (a yob-oik hybrid) lurches from the page as a larger-than-life caricature, but he’s one in which Amis has invested his love. The reader can never escape the threat of Lionel’s fisted face, his slab-like body, his ceaseless appetite for crime and sex, his truisms (Skirts not worth the trouble. You know where you are in prison.), his horrific abuse of his dogs . . . Lionel’s sweat and semen ooze from almost every page.

So: not a novel for the tender-hearted then. But a tour-de-force, even though Amis signals his ending from the very first epigram: Who let the dogs in? . . . This, we fear, is going to be the question.

Lynne Van Luven is the editor of Coastal Spectator

Wagamese’s novel delivers sorrow – and hope

Indian Horse

by Richard Wagamese
Douglas & McIntyre
221 pages, $21.95

Reviewed by Candace Fertile

Richard Wagamese’s fifth novel, Indian Horse, is a must-read for Canadians as it marries two aspects of the country, one full of glory and one full of shame: hockey and the residential school system. Saul Indian Horse is a young boy when he is taken to one of the worst schools of a largely sorry lot, and he finds some salvation in the wonder of hockey.

Wagamese did not experience the brutality of a residential school, but his parents are survivors, and he has heard countless stories from others who endured horrific treatment, which everyone in the country needs to know about in order to have some small grasp of the challenges First Nations people face. Indian Horse offers readers the chance to see the harm caused by trying to erase another’s humanity, and this harm is not going to vanish quickly.

Saul’s early years are with his family in the bush of Northern Ontario, living a largely traditional Ojibway life. Naomi, Saul’s grandmother, is convinced that the family must hide the children from white people or they will be taken away. She’s right, of course, and the despair felt by Saul’s mother at the loss of children is heart-breaking. That Saul’s parents turn to alcohol is unsurprising. Their addiction further weakens the family even though Naomi tries her best to save Saul. Stories about his great-grandfather, who brought the first horse to Saul’s people, give him a sense of pride in his heritage, which is systematically destroyed when he ends up in the school. And Saul’s own story—the novel—may be his personal path to healing.

Wagamese excels at description. Saul’s narration of the harvesting of wild rice reveals his people’s connection to the land. It also reveals the split between his parents who have adopted Christianity and Naomi who maintains Ojibway beliefs. When cultures collide and one tries to crush the other, massive pain ensues. A belief system, such as Christianity, that celebrates suffering, tolerates and even encourages the infliction of suffering on others. The treatment of the children at the residential school is heart-breaking, and Saul shows how the degradation, both physical and emotional, affects the children and through them, whole cultures.

Relief for Saul comes through hockey, and the mysticism of Saul’s great-grandfather reveals itself in Saul as an extraordinary ability to see plays in hockey. The beauty of hockey motivates Saul to work hard, learning to skate, to pass, to shoot, and to move with an agility and grace that is the hallmark of the greatest hockey players. He does all this on his own after getting up early to clean the ice at the residential school. A kind young priest allows Saul to play hockey, and it’s clear that Saul has a gift.

Hockey becomes his salvation for a while. As Saul says, “We never gave a thought to being deprived as we travelled, to being shut out of the regular league system. We never gave a thought to being Indian. Different. We only thought of the game and the brotherhood that bound us together off the ice, in the van, on the plank floors of reservation houses, in the truck stop diners where if we’d won we had a little to splurge on a burger and soup before we hit the road again. Small joys. All of them tied together, entwined to form an experience we would not have traded for any other.”

Clearly having a community is central to happiness. When Saul moves away from his community, things change. On-going racism and the festering wounds caused by the crimes committed against him at the residential school take hold of him, and an excoriating anger results in alcoholism.

This novel had me on the verge of tears at several points, some full of sorrow and some full of joy. Throughout the novel, Richard Wagamese delivers an aching sensitivity and a wondrous hope.

Candace Fertile is a Victoria reviewer and a contributing editor to Coastal Spectator

Heart-breaking novel captures family disintegration

The Juliet Stories
By Carrie Snyder
Published by House of Anansi, 324 pages, $22.95

Reviewed by: Jenny Boychuk

Let me tell you what you need to know.

This is the assertive voice that, while it doesn’t promise to spare heartbreak, guides readers with a controlled hand through Carrie Snyder’s novel-told-in-stories, The Juliet Stories.

It is 1984. Ten-year-old Juliet Friesen moves to Nicaragua with her two younger brothers and peace-activist parents—who have moved the family from their Indiana home in order to protest American involvement in the country’s post-Revolutionary war.

The novel is composed of two equal parts. In Part One: Amulets, the stories progress over the family’s time in Nicaragua to cover a year and a half. Juliet’s father is often away with his troops, and her mother is left to care for her family, which is in its own state of turmoil. The Friesens are free to be killed in this state of destruction, but also to live without the rules they’ve been accustomed to.

Juliet is a restless child who is preoccupied with trying to understand the world, and her view is anything but isolated. She writes letters to Ronald Reagan and change settles easily with her. She asks questions and is not satisfied with definitions—she needs to know how humans connect. She senses her mother’s increasing distance and vulnerability, how the two are at war within a woman who is supposed to, above all else, make her feel safe. While Juliet doesn’t believe anything could harm her family, she is acutely aware of the endings of things (an eerie foreshadowing): “Imagine that someday everything in the suitcase will no longer exist.” Juliet slips through the home unnoticed as she sees and hears things a child shouldn’t. She asks adult questions but cannot come to adult conclusions; she is “a whole person who is only incidentally a child.”

“The children are watching, the fields are on fire, the animals are screaming from a shed where they have been shut up and set alight, and the bayonet digs into the mother’s belly and pulls out a baby. Tossed to the dogs. The children are watching.”

Part Two: Disruption begins when the family moves back to Canada because one of Juliet’s brothers is ill. It would seem there is no longer any need to fight for peace in this country that is already so “free.” But Juliet does not feel the same freedom she felt in Nicaragua. The Friesens stop fighting for each other and, as Juliet ages, the family falls further apart—one heartbreak at a time.

The stories often feel more like chapters, especially in Part One. The point of view and voice are consistent, the transitions are smooth and one story clearly sets up the next. Part Two covers a much larger span of time and more chaos. The point of view deviates, it seems, when the family is most vulnerable. While this is a bit jarring at times, the form matches the content of the stories wonderfully.

Snyder’s prose is sharp and controlled—simply poetic.

Reading this book was like watching a family after the dinner party is over, after the forced smiles are gone and no is pretending that everything is OK. This honesty is what it means to fill human bones with flesh and blood. It moves far beyond what is black and white and into the deep grey areas of life and of living.

The first sentence of the book is this: “Somewhere between Texas and Managua, their bags go missing.” This is how I felt after finishing the book: you know that things went terribly wrong, but can’t pinpoint where. The first half of the book is necessary for the second to exist, though it seems as though they never touch each other, tied to invisible threads. You can’t quite remember everywhere you’ve been, but you know you’ve experienced something profound. The book is remarkably human in this way. It is a story about humans as they stand next to each other—what they need to take from each other in order to survive.

Read the epigraph after you finish the book. It will shake you.

Jenny Boychuk is a recent graduate of UVIC’s Department of Writing now living in Vancouver.

 

Nothing Small About Gay Dwarves Stories

Gay Dwarves of America
By Anne Fleming
Pedlar Press
205 pp; $21

Reviewed by Arleen Paré

In the world of literary genres, the short story could be entering endangered-species status. Not because fewer people write short stories; quite the contrary, many writers enjoy the short story form, and literary journals still publish them. But because few collections of short stories appear on bookstore shelves — Alice Munro notwithstanding. This means that when a short story collection appears, it must be outstanding. Anne Fleming’s Gay Dwarves of America, with its audacious title, is such a book.

Anne Fleming is a B.C. writer with one earlier collection of short stories, Pool Hopping, and a novel called Anomaly. She is a humourist who, pleasingly, can’t help but highlight life’s ironies. She also displays a flair for the poignant. Her writing is smart, smart-assed, funny, and cool. You feel cool reading these nine stories. That doesn’t mean you won’t also feel deep sadness. Fleming’s writing is self-reflexive too. But mainly, Fleming creates unforgettable characters. She writes character the way some poets write extended metaphor. In Gay Dwarves of America, each story is a character, each crazily different. In an unthemed and unlinked collection, this is key: keeping each story distinct keeps the collection as a whole alive, compelling.
Gay Dwarves, unlike most contemporary collections, takes risks from the start. It begins with one of the least risky, “Unicycle Boys.” Curtis is the unicycle boy; Jenny is the narrator. Jenny is the story. She’s the perfect snooty high school girl. She’s cool, ironic and smart-mouthed. The dialogue, “I ran into (Curtis) at Caravan. He’s kind of a neat guy. In a loserish sort of way,” is perfect high school superior. Curtis of the unicylcle is how Jenny learns what the story conveys. It’s a good lesson.

The second story, the eponymous “Gay Dwarves of America” is considerably more quirky. As a short, gay woman, I read it with trepidation, alert to stereotypes and slurs. The story is about John and his college roommate, Pen. Neither is gay nor a dwarf. They exploit the idea to set up a website. But it’s an idea to keep out the sadness. In the end, both are sad.

The stories continue in this quirky manner. If the character isn’t quirky, and most are, then the situation is strange, or the point of view is unusual, or the subject matter is peculiar. Or the format is challenging. Take, for instance, “Puke Diaries,” about throwing up from six different points of view, including that of a cat. It begins with the cat. Each character has unique vocabulary for it, his or her own reasons for puking. The story grows into wholeness, comes together.
By the time we arrive at the final story, “Thirty-One One Word Stories,” which actually is one word centred on each of the final thirty-one pages, we are able to create our own story from each of the words. This is the tacit instruction. The words are inspiring: Thief, Martyr . . . Martha . . . . I began thinking about Martha. As the last story, it works, as each story does in its own exquisite way.

_______
Arleen Paré is a Victoria writer and poet. Her first book, Paper Trail (NeWest Press, 2007), won the Victoria Butler Book Prize and was short-listed for the Dorothy Livesay Prize for Poetry. Her most recent book, Leaving Now (Caitlin Press, 2012) was released this spring. She completed her MFA at UVic in June.

First Novel Levels Critical Eye on 1950s

Stony River

By Tricia Dower
Penguin Group, 350 pages paperback, $24
Reviewed by Joy Fisher

In an Author’s Note appended to her first novel, Stony River, set in the 1950s, Tricia Dower writes: “Nothing was as it seemed back then.” It was, she asserts, “an age when secrets crouched behind closed doors.”

The three protagonists in this coming of age novel, Linda, Tereza and Miranda, all struggle to come to terms with the unspoken and, sometimes, unspeakable, secrets which affect their lives.
Close in age—Linda is 11, Tereza 12, and Miranda 15 when the narrative commences in 1955—they are nevertheless contrasting both in appearance and in their life circumstances. Linda is middle class, plump and silently resentful of her over-protective parents. Tereza, beaten by her working-class step-father, is swarthy, functionally illiterate but street-wise. Miranda is a red-haired Irish lass whose deranged but brilliant father, James, known to the neighbours as “Crazy” Haggerty, keeps her locked up in a decaying, book-filled house.

Despite their differences, the lives of these three adolescents intersect repeatedly for the rest of the decade until the novel reaches its conclusion, and the stories of each protagonist a resolution.

Although Dower has lived in Canada since 1981, the novel is set in a small town in New Jersey not unlike the one in which Dower grew up. Stony River, nearly surrounded by a river of the same name, emerges as a character in its own right: a map of the town showing the locations of crucial settings in the narrative assumes pride of place as a kind of frontispiece.

The town and the book are peopled with a supporting cast of characters as colourful as the protagonists. “Dearie” is a pink-haired grandmother so vividly drawn the author has a hard time keeping her from stealing scenes. Buddy, who eventually becomes Tereza’s husband and the father of her child, is ultimately revealed as a homicidal maniac. And James, although dead at the beginning of the book, continues to haunt the narrative as Miranda gradually comes to realize that her son Cian was not the product of a mystical union of the goddess Danu and god Dagda, deities in the Pagan Celtic religion into which her father had indoctrinated her.

These characters are not caricatured as villains nor offered up as sacrificial lambs on the altar of conventional values, however. They are drawn in depth, with love. Even one of the detectives investigating Buddy confesses he sympathizes with him. And Miranda believes that “[s]eeing differently might be the truest gift James left them.”

Seeing differently is also the truest gift Dower has given to her readers. She says her goal was to write a “ripping good yarn,” but that the urge to challenge religious dogma as well as assumptions about right and wrong, sanity and madness, love and abuse crept in. She’s right, but her writing is so imbued with compassion that it never seems strident. By the time you finish this novel, you, too, will see differently, and you will be a better person for it.

I have heard it said that a good book has a soul, and all the characters in it have souls. Stony River is a good book.

Joy Fisher is a survivor of the 1950s and a fourth year student in UVic’s Writing Program.

 

Turn Up the Volume, Crank Down the Windows

Cadillac Couches

By Sophie B. Watson
Brindle & Glass. 217 pp. $19.95

Reviewed by Julia Kochuk

In her witty debut novel Cadillac Couches, Sophie B. Watson sets scenes of Canada’s cross-country landscape to a playlist of nineties favourites. Watson tells the journey of two “foul mouthed, Albertan, wannabe Edwardians” in their early twenties, chasing music and purpose .
It’s summertime in the late nineties under the prairie skies of Edmonton. The air is laced with Dan Bern and the scent of fresh onion cakes. Anxiety-ridden Annie is stuck in inertia: watching, not living; a fan, not a player. She nurses her broken heart with red wine, music, and cigarettes smoked on her “Cadillac couch,” a vintage couch she bought “for twenty-five bucks at the Salvation Army on the north side of the river one lucky Saturday.”
The inertia and heatbreak make Annie antsy. She must get her mind off her ex, and her butt off the couch. She must make real-life rock star Hawksley Workman fall in love with her. She decides a road trip to the Montreal Folk Festival, with her très chic friend Isobel, is in order. Hawksley will be performing.
Will Annie gain control of her anxieties? Will she get over Sullivan? Will she get the chance to meet and/or marry Hawksley? What is Annie’s purpose, her holy grail? Will she ever find it?
Sophie B. Watson is an award-winning freelance writer, published in several magazines including Canadian Dimension, Briarpatch Magazine, and Legacy Magazine. This is her first novel.
Cadillac Couches reveals Watson’s ability to create truthful character and voice: Annie is old enough to pay her own bills, but youthfully naïve enough to hope “sexy-ass troubadour” Hawksley Workman could pick her from a swarm and fall madly in love with her. Cadillac Couches effectively represents the stage between teen and adult: that in-between stage where responsibilities are low and expectations for life are high.
The novel unfolds chronologically, starting with the escape from Edmonton in a beat-up 1972 pink Volkswagen Bug named Rosimund. The action is staccatoed with flashbacks and daydreams, mirroring the road trip mind. Each chapter opens with a sketch and lyrics, as if you were doodling in your notebook and fiddling with the radio from the passenger seat of the car.
While life looks rosy through Rosimund’s windows, the story sometimes moves faster than the poor Bug can travel: the novel is packed full of road kill, fuzzy navel drunken nights, high school memories, a pregnancy scare, and many minor characters. However, this still rings true to the true road trip nature, where scenes flash by windows and people are forgotten as you pull away from gas stations.
Cadillac Couches is a marvelously quirky and enjoyable novel. It is as much a ballad to Canada, as it is to music. It captures all you feel about the scenery passing by, the songs you know the words to. It reminds you that you can escape, but also that seasons change; you can come home more you than you were when you left.

Julia Kochuk is a fourth-year writing student at the University of Victoria.

 

Journalists’ Courage takes Many Forms

A Thousand Farewells: A Reporter’s Journey from Refugee Camp to the Arab Spring

By Nahlah Ayed

Published by Viking, 356 pages, $32

Out of the Blue: A Memoir of Workplace Depression, Recovery, Redemption and, Yes, Happiness

By Jan Wong

Self-Published, 263 pages, $21.99

Despite many Canadians’ knee-jerk damnation of the print media, two new books prove beyond a doubt that journalists’ courage exists and that honest reporting can have a powerful effect upon readers.

Both Nahlah Ayed, who works for CBC news, and Jan Wong, now a former employee of the Globe and Mail, tell their stories in a direct and personable way. Both books demonstrate that standing up for oneself in the face of trouble is crucial to self-respect and good reportage. It is neither fair nor relevant to ascribe different layers of heroism to either woman. Both face challenging circumstances and are able to write clearly and decisively about their situations.

Ayed, now in her early 40s, was born in Winnipeg and grew up comfortably there, one of four children of Palestinian descent. Thanks to her mother, she became fluent in Arabic, which became a powerful tool in her career when she joined the CBC in 2002. Since then she has reported from Iraq, Lebanon, Egypt, Syria, Libya and Afghanistan. Talking to Ayed as I did recently in Toronto (I taught her years ago when I was a journalism professor at Carleton University) is like taking a vitally compressed short course in Middle Eastern history and politics. She’s a beautiful, soft-spoken woman with a spine of steel. Ayed says in her book’s Acknowledgements that her work as a reporter has “always been about trying to understand,” and that comes across clearly in her careful and honest narrative.

Despite her youth, Ayed truly is an “old hand” when it comes to the Middle East. Her family lived – by choice, as a way to reconnect with their culture – in a Palestinian refugee camp in Amman, Jordan, when Ayed was a child, and her tenure in war reporting began with the First Gulf War. She’s reported at all the conflicts leading up to and including the Arab Spring. Although her publisher wanted Ayed to write a fully personal memoir, the reporter resisted because she rightly believes the story is about the people she interviews, not herself. There are glimpses of what sort of a woman Ayed has become – feminist, principled, consumed by her job, steely under pressure but still capable of fear – but this is definitely a far cry from a tell-all. And that’s as it should be: Ayed may be off to a posting in London in the short-term, but she will continue to cover the world’s volatile places indefinitely.

“When I look back now,” Ayed writes towards the end of A Thousand Farewells, “the Middle East is often just a blur of guns and violence, of explosions and assassinations, of breaking news bulletins and conspiracy theories playing endlessly in my mind.” Despite that, she has managed to deliver a book of great humanity, one that reminds us that human beings – with the same flaws and flesh as the rest of us – inhabit those troubled places. “I always marveled,” she says, “that anyone would care to talk to us in the midst of so much turmoil, and yet they did, the hundreds of people I met and interviewed over the years . . . “ That they did is, I suspect, tribute to Ayed’s tenacity and compassion.

Even though Ayed’s reports have filtered relentlessly into Canadians’ living rooms for the past decade, Jan Wong is possibly the better-recognized journalist of the two, partly because she is nearly two decades older, with four previous books, and partly because of her famous/infamous “lunch with” column that everyone read in the Globe and Mail when she still worked there.

Wong’s dispute with her former employer — and her almost-publisher Doubleday — is complicated, but she outlines it crisply in Out of the Blue. Her inimitable brand of sardonic humor sparks the narrative as she tells of her own oblivious slide into depression, her battle with the Globe and its insurance company, and her subsequent recovery and new life. This may well be one of the most polished and professional “self-published” books you’ll ever read, but one would expect nothing less from the indomitable Wong. She says she’s invested over $30,000 in the venture, a sum that would give many writers pause. But in the first month of publication, she’s
already garnered more reviews and publicity than many senior authors receive even when touted by a prestigious publisher.

As Wong notes wryly, conflict and controversy always help to sell stories. But I would say Wong deserves whatever success this book brings her: she’s faced down the Dragon Despair, she’s stood up to a pusillanimous set of managers and she’s managed to write coherently about two of life’s most devastating experiences: falling prey to extreme depression and being fired.

Kudos to Ayed and Wong: proof that well-honed words can triumph over violence and corporate self-interest.