Tag Archives: Lynne Van Luven

Essays capture author’s past and present

Gabriola Island resident George Szanto writes fiction, including mysteries, and nonfiction. His most recent book is Bog Tender: Coming Home to Nature and Memory, a moving collection of essays about time, personal history and the natural world. Szanto was a university professor at McGill University in Montreal for many years but is also an inveterate world traveller. His most recent novel was The Tartarus House on Crab, which (full disclosure) Lynne Van Luven edited. He’s a past winner of the Hugh MacLennan Prize for Fiction and a National Magazine Award recipient. He recently answered Van Luven’s questions about Bog Tender, released in March 2013 by Brindle and Glass Publishing of Victoria.

George, you quote both Henry David Thoreau and Garson Kanin at the outset of your book. Can you comment on Kanin’s observation that “we do not remember chronologically, but in disordered flashes” and its relationship to the way you organized this new book of essays?

I’ve wanted to write about the bog on our property, and about some of the moments that have been the most consequential in my past life. They seemed like two completely different projects, until I found a structure for the bog narrative—since the bog changed so much over the year, I decided to follow its transformations for a twelve-month period. Then slowly, as I thought about each month, it became clear that many of those important past moments could be associated with specific months. Then it became relatively easy to let the months of the year give order to those past bits. On my website I cite the words of one of my favourite writers, Samuel Beckett: “To find a shape to satisfy the mess, that is the task of the artist now.” Kanin says we remember in disordered flashes, and he is correct. But to write a memoir as a series of disordered flashes would be not only uncontrolled, but deadly for the reader. So what I was looking for was a structure that rang true, a kind verisimilitude of disordered remembering, and it became the shape to satisfy my messy memories of past life.

When I finished reading Bog Tender, I thought that it represented rather elegantly the thoughts of a contented man who has lived his life well. Would you say that is accurate, or just a horribly mawkish misunderstanding?

The only misunderstanding there is that you put it in the past tense: I am still living my life well—or at least hope I am. It’s been a very good life, and continues to be. Though I had hoped to be able to write full time and make a living off it from the moment I received my BA, that was not to be. So I spent many years teaching at universities, which I often enjoyed—interaction with often very smart students—and sometimes had a harder time with— noxious administrations and toxic bureaucracies—but wished all the time that I could be writing and making a full living off it. When I retired it became clear that I didn’t need to make writing my financial livelihood, but I could write full time. And I’ve been doing that, and with great pleasure.

When I first saw the title of your book of essays, I took the word “tender” in the sense of loving something tenderly.  Now I see you mean it as in “caring for, attending to.”  Do you think attending to the natural world comes more essential to writers as they age?  If so, why?

I know a number of writers who, as they age, become less and less interested in the natural world. Far from attending, they prefer to avoid it. Personally I couldn’t do that—the natural world (and sometimes even the unnatural world) has been too important to me over my lifetime. Sometimes I find beauty and peace in nature; sometimes too, I have to add, I find squalor and corruption. But the latter two come mostly with the help of some of my fellow humans, both the aging and the young. And then nature truly needs tending.

I’m glad you ask about the title. The original title was Tending Bog, which I liked because it seemed more active. But then it was pointed out to me that if I called it Bog Tender I could bring in, with the pun, the tenderness, the gentleness and fragility of the bog. What never occurred to me, but was pointed out by the National Post reviewer, is that “tender” has a third meaning: tender is money. So I can say my wealth lies in my relation to the bog—it is my liquid tender.

George, I know you always have more than one work on the go. Tell me how many different books you are writing right now, and talk a bit about your writing methods.

For the most part, I find it uncomfortable to talk about present projects; if I talk about a book I’m working on and explain it well, then somehow I come to feel I’ve told that story and now I don’t have to write it. But I can talk about the book Sandy Duncan and I have just finished, the fourth in our Islands Investigations International series, Always Love A Villain, set on San Juan Island. We’ve dealt in the three previous novels with art forgery, transgendering and corrupt sports practices. Villain deals with plagiarism and other forms of intellectual theft. Aside from that, I’m at various stages in two novels of my own, different from what I’ve done in the past. One is an international caper story, the other a large family saga.

As to writing methods: when I’m in the midst of a project I try to write every day. I used to be able to do this for as much as eight hours a day. Now if I can do five, I’m lucky. We have on this property both our house and our guest cottage. The guest cottage is, as you know, on the other side of the bog. I head out to it between 10 and 11 in the morning—in the book I call it my daily commute—and get to work. This usually involves reading and re-writing what I’d done the day before, which also gives me the momentum to continue from there. I do a lot of re-writing, both as I’m going along and after the first draft is done. I know many writers can’t stand rewriting, but for me it’s one of the most rewarding aspects of the project. Writing is hard, facing a blank page or screen. Rewriting becomes a matter of shaping what’s already there, and that gives me great pleasure. I even enjoy (sometimes) cutting, when I can see that the elimination of what might be wonderful passages (but not part of this book) will make the story stronger.

I’ve only been on Gabriola Island a few times since I moved to the West Coast, but it seems to me that you bring your corner of it to life in a most convincing fashion. Do you, like Thoreau, now “derive more subsistence from the swamps  . . . than from the cultivated gardens in the village?”

A cultivated anything is a project that’s already done. I get pleasure in the making process, stepping into the unknown, trying something new. Swamps and bogs hide secrets, under their waters they contain mysteries, maybe dangers, much that is invisible to the human eye—often it’s the nose that begins to ferret out all that concealed material. That’s what makes the caper and the family stories intriguing for me—I’ve never tried those kinds of projects before. At least not in print.

Partners in crime . . . writing

Victoria residents Kay Stewart and Chris Bullock are partners in life and crime-writing. Their third mystery in the Danutia Dranchuck series was published this spring. The series features a female RCMP constable who grows more complex with each new book. The authors will be in Vancouver April 18 at 7:30 p.m. in the Peter Kaye Room, Lower Level, Central Library, 350 W. Georgia, for the Aurthur Ellis Shortlist event.  Stewart and Bullock recently answered Lynne Van Luven’s questions about the context for and development of  their new mystery, which they’ll launch in Nanaimo at The Coffee Vault (499 Wallace Street) on April 22 at 6:30 pm.

The two of you have logged a total of 50 years as professors of English at the university level. How difficult was the switch from that sort of intellectual work to the challenge of writing crime novels?

KAY: During most of my university years, I was a sessional lecturer, teaching writing and introductory literature courses. So I didn’t have the same stake in academic research and publication as Chris did. Before we began our first crime novel, I had published short stories as well as personal essays and writing textbooks. The stretch for me was moving from short fiction to the novel–no more sketching a character or setting in a few sentences.

CHRIS: In contrast, the switch from intellectual work to writing crime novels was very difficult for me. I discovered that knowing about the theory of fiction–about kinds of characterization and various ways of structuring plots–was little help in writing fiction. So the first drafts of chapters I wrote for our first novel, Deadly Little List, were hopelessly expository, full of reflection and very little action. The turning point for me was taking a writing class with Marilyn Bowering and learning to write in scenes. I also discovered that I needed to notice the life around me rather simply reflect on it, so writing fiction has involved an expansion of perception for me.

You both have lived in Alberta and taught in Edmonton, where there is a sizeable Ukrainian community. Did that influence the creation of your protagonist, who is named Danutia Dranchuk?

 KAY: Definitely. It was important to me that the book reflect something of the Canadian mosaic. I’d had Ukrainian students and neighbours, and I’d recently been fascinated by Myrna Kostash’s revisionist history of Ukrainians in Canada, All of Baba’s Children (reissued 1992). However, I didn’t want my protagonist’s ethnicity to be her defining trait. So I created Danutia Dranchuk, of mixed heritage like many of us. I expect that at some point she will be called upon to re-examine her cultural roots.

Unholy Rites takes Danutia and her “sidekick” Arthur Fairweather to England. Why did you move the action from Victoria, BC, to the wider world stage?

CHRIS:  We hadn’t intended to move Unholy Rites outside Canada, but were drawn by a particular area of England. The landscape and customs of that area seemed to ask us to set our novel there.

KAY: Changing the setting was also a device for keeping our interest as well as the interest of readers. We both enjoy exploring new places and trying to capture the flavour of their inhabitants. By moving into the wider world, we set new challenges for ourselves as well as for our protagonists.

Your acknowledgements thank the “well-dressing community of Derbyshire” for sharing their craft, but I am wondering when you knew this was going to be an integral part of Unholy Rites–before you started the novel, or part-way through?

CHRIS:  Initially, we went to the Peak District in Derbyshire to sell our first novel (A Deadly Little List) at a Gilbert and Sullivan festival.  While at the festival, we toured around a bit and became fascinated at seeing ancient hill forts and stone circles, and witnessing originally pagan customs like well dressing. Our original idea was to set our novel around a stone circle called the Nine Ladies. After mapping out this idea, we discovered that a local crime novelist had already written a book with exactly this setting. So we switched from monuments to customs, and started our second joint writing project with well dressing as a focus. As it turned out, our research into well dressing also led us to some other strange places and areas of interest.

Unholy Rites leaves the reader wondering about Danutia’s future as a RCMP constable. Without giving away any of the suspense, can you talk a bit about your plans for the novel series?

KAY: Like most young women of the last half century, Danutia is faced with questions about “work-life balance,” or, more accurately, “work-life imbalance.” These questions arise in the first book, A Deadly Little List, and intensify in Unholy Rites. The issue may–or may not!–come to a head in book four, which I’m working on now. I don’t know how it will turn out. If her life is like that of most women I know, her world will shift again just when she thinks she’s found some balance.

 

The authors will also appear in Victoria at Chronicles of Crime bookstore (1048 Fort Street) Thursday, May 23, 7 pm in At The Mike, a “conversations with crime writers” event. 

On May 25 from 9:30 to 1 p.m., they will be part of “Making Crime Pay: A National Crime-Writing Month Mini-Conference” at the Greater Victoria  Public Library, Central Branch and will be part of the afternoon “Speed-Dating” event as well.

Reid’s essays capture “inside” view

A Crowbar in the Buddhist Garden:
Writing from Prison
by Stephen Reid
Thistledown Press, 133 pages, $18.95

Reviewed by Lynne Van Luven

This is possibly the saddest book of essays I have ever read. Not sad because the writing is bad; not sad because the author has no insight. But, yes, sad because the essays seem to be written by a man perpetually divided against himself and deeply in pain about the schism.

On the quiet side of the ledger, as illustrated in the collection’s “Epilogue,” hunkers the introspective man, the poetic, sensitive observer: “The years have passed and I have watched the tides come and go, carrying their debris, real and imagined. I have grown old in prison and I am only interested in beginnings these days, but the string becomes harder and harder to find. It seems I am losing the plot of my own life.”

And on the wracked side struts the famously infamous Stephen Reid, the bank robber who revels in his bad-boy exploits, as brought to life in “The Last Score”: “We’re flat out, doing eighty maybe ninety clicks an hour, almost flying velocity on a residential street. I’m wedged out the window, the wind whipping my hair, and for one glorious moment, when that shotgun bucks against my shoulder and all four tires lift free of the ground, I am no longer bound to this earth.”

But of course, gravity always wins: the car lands, the cop on the motorcycle keeps on coming, and Reid’s cocaine-botched June 1999 robbery garners him 18 more years in prison. As these brief samples show, Reid has grown into a writer of both sophistication and energy. Although still haunted by his past, he’s confronted those first early transgressions when he was introduced to morphine at the age of 10 by a pedophile doctor named Paul; he’s lived through his Stopwatch Gang years, outlived his partner-in-crime Paddy Mitchell, contributed to his community, been Susan Musgrave’s husband and watched his daughters grow–always with the spectre of recidivism at his side.  .

While Reid hasn’t made his living as a full-time writer for the past 40 years, he is a man who ruminates and a man who writes–and when he’s able to subdue his addictions and the catastrophic decisions that usually follow, he demonstrates genuine talent.

This book of essays is a collection of work printed elsewhere, in Maclean’s, in the Globe and Mail, in an anthology and on salon.com, to name just four venues. I’m glad Thistledown has collected these pieces, even if here and there they could have been edited to pare away repetition. This is an important collection of essays, one that should be read by lawyers and police, by corrections officers and psychologists and, yes, most of all, by ordinary citizens and the politicians who purport to represent them. A Crowbar in the Buddhist Garden demonstrates what “inside” really means. It gives us a world shaped by both grief and joy, seen through the eyes a man often yearning to be free of himself.

Skidmore tells story of child migration

Patricia Skidmore (left), who lives in Port Moody, British Columbia, has written a moving book about her mother’s experiences as a child migrant to Canada in 1937. Marjorie Arnison was from Whitley Bay in northeastern England. She lived in Birmingham for seven months before being sent to the Prince of Wales Fairbridge Farm School in the Cowichan Valley when she was just 10. She could never properly explain her past to her children. The “mystery” caused Skidmore to write Marjorie Too Afraid to Cry: A Home Child Experience, published by Dundurn (295 pages, $30). Coastal Spectator Editor Lynne Van Luven read Marjorie’s story with great interest since her own grandfather was also sent to Canada as a “Barnardo Boy.” Skidmore’s book will be launched at the University of Victoria Bookstore on March 14 at 7 p.m. 

Can you remember the catalyst that set your mind to writing about your mother’s story?

After spending much of my childhood fighting my mother for her story, in an attempt to find out who she really was and why she was in Canada while most of her family was in England, I concluded that she was keeping some horrid dark secret from me. At 17, I gave up and left home.

It took another eight years before I faced the question again, when I was a mother myself and feeling overwhelmed. My father had died in 1957, leaving my mother with 5 children between the ages of three weeks and 8 years. My bout with one sick baby helped me realize that I was not stronger than my mother, as I had always thought. I began to see her in a different light and I wondered who was this “superwoman” who single-parented her little family and kept them together against all odds?

And I realized that I needed to find my way back to her–although I would still need to try to figure out who she was. I feared that I couldn’t be a good daughter without knowing her deeper, and if I couldn’t be a good daughter, then how could I be a good mother?

In June 1986, when I saw the Fairbridge Farm property for the first time, I was dumbfounded by the beautiful countryside. I had expected a gravel pit. It hit me that the stark image I had in my mind came from my mother’s emotional distress at feeling so alone and bleak when she was removed from her family and sent to a new country.

By this time, I had been single parenting my three sons for many years–so finding time to pursue this research was challenging. After my 2 older sons were through high school, I returned to Victoria in 1996 to complete a degree that I started there in 1969. And I found my way into Women’s Studies.

In 1999, Professor Christine St. Peter led us to the BC Archives, which opened an avenue for research that I had no previous knowledge of. And the archives are where I found my mother’s past (in the Prince of Wales Fairbridge Farm School records). I found a personal file for my mother, and together we discovered her immigration landing card, then her birth certificate, sent by her mother in 1948 when she wanted to get married, along with a couple of photographs. My mother seemed pleased as the research progressed: “Well they didn’t just throw me away, they kept records of me,” she said.

You have referred to your 20 years of exhaustive research on your book. What advice do you have for others who might be considering writing a family memoir?

For me, making my mother go back to that place she had buried all those years ago was a tricky business. I told myself I would stop if she became distressed. However my desire to understand the truth was so great, I wonder if I really would have.

My advice to anyone searching for a lost past is: don’t give up but don’t expect things to happen overnight.  Patience is important.

A number of factors enabled me to rediscover my mother’s past, but the most important thing was that she was with me while I did this research. I wrote my mother’s story because it was important to me to know about my past.

I am working on a sequel, which takes Marjorie through her years at the Farm School until early 1943. She was removed from the Farm School at 16 and was placed as a domestic servant in a home in Victoria. The working title for this sequel is Marjorie: The War Years. Today, my mother is offering her memories. The door is open to her past. The shame has dissipated. Marjorie now feels strong and proud about how she navigated her life and survived.

Have you or your mother heard from many other child migrants since your book was published?

Yes. I keep in regular contact with a number of the Former Fairbridgians sent to Prince of Wales Fairbridge Farm School, as well as several from the Rhodesian (now Zimbabwe) Fairbridge Memorial College, which ran from 1946 until 1962, and I keep in touch with some of the Old Fairbridgians from the Australian Fairbridge Farm Schools.

Since the publication of my book, I have had numerous new contacts, which include email  from offspring of former Canadian child migrants, now living in the United States and in Australia.

In a recent CBC interview, you said many of those transported as children, including your mother, felt “shame” about their history. Do you think Gordon Brown’s apology and the slow growth of books and stories about child migrants helps to dissipate that feeling?

Yes, but it may be that each personal journey differs – so I cannot speak for others. I saw my mother transform during her visit to England in 2010 for then-prime minister Gordon Brown’s apology. If you were not directly affected by the events that lead up to a formal apology, then that act would hold little meaning. But I will never again question the validity of a formal apology after witnessing the healing firsthand.

When Gordon Brown looked into my mother’s eyes and said, “I am truly sorry,” that formal recognition allowed for more healing than all my years of research. I believe a lot of the shame stemmed from an inability to talk about her past and what brought her to Canada. So much was hidden, she found difficult to speak openly.

 Do you think Britons and North Americans have learned anything useful about child migration since the practice first started, even since your mother’s time?

Child migration went on for so long: Britain first started “transporting” children in 1618, and child migration to Australia continued until 1974.  So many well-read people tell me that they have never heard of British Child Migration. I too was surprised to learn that child migration had a 350-year history, with the first group of children being sent to Richmond, Virginia, at the request of King James I.

I feel at a loss to understand why its history has not become better known. Perhaps the main reason is that the full history is not taught in the public schools. The Canadian government’s attitude may also be a factor.  In 2009, Immigration Minister Jason Kenney said there was “no need” for Canada to apologize for abuse and exploitation suffered by thousands of poor children shipped here from Britain.

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

Memoir explores author’s transplanted life

Kamal Al-Solayee    Photo by Gary Gould/Ryerson

Intolerable: A Memoir of Extremes
By Kamal Al-Solaylee
Harper Collins, 204 pages, $27.99

Kamal Al-Solaylee teaches journalism at Ryerson University and is a former theatre critic for the Globe and Mail. He answered Lynne Van Luven’s questions via-email at the end of September. He noted that his memoir has netted responses from “other Arab/Muslim gay men and women and they’ve all been supportive, inspiring.” In Yemeni media, he said, the book has been covered as a gay story, which he considers reductive. Mostly, Prof. Al-Solaylee is “disappointed in the lack of responses from the Arab community in Canada. They chose to ignore it. I was hoping that the book would kick-start a conversation about a number of issues: the pervasive nature of extremism here in Canada and back in our home countries, women’s and gay rights, and our civic participation in Canadian society. Maybe that’s a lot to hope for and maybe that’s to come.” Let’s hope so.
Clearly, you silenced and edited yourself for many years 
prior to writing this book. Can you look back now and see a “catalyst 
moment” that precipitated the idea of finally telling your and your 
family’s stories?

The idea for the book came to me after a particularly distressing visit to the family in Sana’a, Yemen, in 2006. It was my first trip in about five years and I couldn’t get over the rapid decline in both the material and emotional lives of my family. I also started to notice what I would term a disturbing level of religiosity. That visit put into focus the huge gap between my life in Toronto – a safe, privileged and even spoiled life – and that of my family. To illustrate the point, I returned to Toronto after that trip and within a few days I went to New York to review the Broadway opening of The Drowsy Chaperone, the Canadian-penned hit spoof musical about the roaring twenties. It took a few days and before I knew it a complete depression started to set in. A friend suggested I write about that experience which is how the book originated – in sadness and depression.

Towards the end of the book, as you worry on the page about
 your family members, and wonder about the viability of moving everyone to
 Cairo, I found myself thinking that you were suffering from something akin 
to “survivor’s guilt.” What can you say about that?

I never thought of it in such terms (survivor’s guilt) but I guess that’s how I felt and continue to feel. I believed that I betrayed the family, especially my sisters, and abandoned them when they needed me most. The events of the Arab Spring and the civil war in Yemen last year only exacerbated that. I can’t keep thinking that way, however, or I’ll go stir crazy. I have to accept that I made the decisions that were best for my personal, emotional and intellectual survival. Writing this book both helped me think through that and added to the sorrow associated with my decision to separate from the family and my helplessness about it all.

Do you think North Americans can ever begin to truly 
understand the complexity and convoluted cultural history of Arab culture, 
not just in Yemen, but elsewhere in the world? (I always remember
 Margaret Atwood’s veterinarian character Dr. Minnow in Bodily Harm, musing
 about the “sweet Canadians” who do helpful things like sending supplies of 
pork to countries whose inhabitants do not eat it.)

I don’t know if Arab people understand their own culture(s), let alone the North Americans. One of the most distressing aspects of the move to religious extremism in the Middle East has been the shutting down of debate and the marginalization of alternative and dissenting voices. Here in North America, I think we’re suffering from a kind of intellectual laziness. The idea of the general public educating itself on a part of the world by reading extensively about it has been replaced with the histrionics of 24-hour news channels and the banalities of the sound bites and the political messaging. Funny how having too much information – social media, cable networks, bloggers – has led to less not more real understanding of issues.

You comment several times in your memoir about how difficult 
your mother’s and sisters’ lives have been, yet at the same time you are
 frustrated by their tendency to self-sacrifice. Can you elaborate a 
little on how you feel about that now, in the wake of the memoir’s 
publication?

Writing this book has helped me understand the “choices” that all my family, male or female, have made. I put the word choices in quotation marks because I don’t believe that they had any. I should say “reactions” or “responses” because that’s more accurate. I must say that I don’t blame or accuse my family of anything. I’m just trying to reconstruct the sequence of events that led to where they (and I) are now. Strangely enough, the clarity that came with writing the book didn’t help mitigate my heartbreak or made the gap between us any less dramatic.

Had you not been gay, I wonder if you would have ever left 
your family and moved to England and then Canada. Do you ever imagine 
scenarios about what your life would be like if you still lived in the 
Middle East somewhere?

Being gay is so essential to my identity, to my life, that I can’t even think of one where I’m not. I came out of the womb gay! But, speaking hypothetically, it’s quite possible that had I been straight I would have settled with my family in Sana’a and led the proverbial life of quiet desperation. I’m glad that’s not what happened to me. I often say that being gay was the best gift that life gave me. I won the genetic lottery in the family. It allowed me to experience difference. I’m beyond grateful for that. Sometimes I think I would have been a very horrible straight man, given my instincts for self-preservation and my reluctance to sacrifice. My gay self made me more aware of the challenges and beauty of being a human being. I like to think I’m more empathetic because of my sexuality.

Lynne Van Luven is the Editor of Coastal Spectator.

 

Art gallery affirms artistry of kitty videos

By Lynne Van Luven
Dissing cat videos has suddenly become a vibrant pastime among the literati. Writers and film critics alike frequently bemoan the puerile focus and the cute factor. I don’t get it.

I’d understand if such critics were exercised by schlocky music videos or vile snuff films. Or if they took umbrage at screaming-chef videos or the blather of smarmy blonde actors who extol their new-found “lifestyle” wisdom.

But to bemoan kitty videos? Come on, folks, graft a bit of humour on to your humanity. Life is filled with awful realities: daily events in Syria; reporters being stifled and killed around the world; children starving, people using guns to express their political views . . . .

But kitty videos? How can you scoff at these witty, whimsical and loving expressions of man’s bond with felinity? When life is kicking you in the ribs, a quick viewing of the antics of Maru, the box-infatuated Japanese cat, will immediately alleviate your pain. And if you are on the outs with family or friends, there is nothing like a quick link to the furious cat video to remind you how
silly hissy fits really look.

That’s why I was thrilled to learn that The Walker Art Centre in Minneapolis, Minnesota, just sponsored an Internet Cat Video Film Festival, with 70 entries, as a social experiment — as well as a modern-art event.

And I was even happier to see some of my favourite feline performers entered: Keyboard Cat was represented (26.3 views since first posted in 2007) as was the obsessive Maru. Best of all, the winner of the People’s Choice award turned out to be my all-time favourite cat video: the inimitable Henri 2, Paw de Deux, by Will Braden.

So take that snobs! The rest of us already knew the truth: no matter how many times we listened to Henri’s lugubrious self-indulgent mewlings, we couldn’t help chortling.

Lynne Van Luven would be owned by 15 cats if left to her own devices.

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.