Two New Reviews: My Tarzan Tree and Other Farm Boy Memories by Doug Cameron, and Where the Cherries End Up: A Memoir by Sandra Ramberran

“My Tarzan Tree and Other Farm Boy Memories”

By Doug Cameron

Published by Cameron Narratives

Review by Shelley A. Leedahl

$25.00  ISBN 9-781738-687749

  

I grew up in small-town Saskatchewan and thus am familiar with folks who congregate daily at “coffee row” to remember the good old days, tell amusing stories, share gossip and passionately discuss current events. I continually thought about coffee row while reading Swift Current-area writer Doug Cameron’s memoir, My Tarzan Tree and Other Farm Boy Memories.

This 1945-born author is obviously a storyteller at heart, but more than that, he’s done what many people talk about doing—writing a book about their life—but few accomplish. Cameron’s light and informal tone; the emphasis on his rural upbringing (near Alcomdale, Alberta); and rambling reminiscences of boyhood escapades with eight siblings, cousins, and friends reads like coffee row conversation: I could even imagine Cameron’s coffee mates nodding in recognition as they stirred another spoonful of sugar into their coffee cups.

Cameron, who had a significant career in agricultural science (he was employed at Ottawa’s Agriculture Canada Research Station, and worked globally), has culled his varied childhood experiences into an easy and pleasurable read. He says that he’s “always wanted to write about [his] boyhood days as a toddler to a teen growing up on [their] farm,” and now that he’s “getting long in the tooth,” it was time to do it. The fact that he “loved writing this book,” shines through the short chapters, which include occasional black and white illustrations and maps.

The nearly 300-page book begins with the author’s earliest childhood memories, ie: playing with toy soldiers, and slowly becoming aware that he lived on a farm, complete with dogs and “oodles of elusive cats,” chickens, cows, horses, pigs and turkeys. This was back when chamber pots were in use, teachers gave students “the strap,” and everyone bathed in a galvanized steel tub on Saturday night. For Cameron, money was earned by picking bottles and picking rocks: the kids’ father paid a penny “for a pail and ten cents for a pile.” In those days, ten cents could buy a “box of Cracker Jack popcorn (with a prize inside), one large O’Henry chocolate bar, five licorice pipes, or, best of all, 30 jaw breakers.” 

Several food memories are shared, from church picnics and fall threshing meals to pilfered apples: “—there is nothing like the taste of stolen apples,” Cameron writes. He goes into detail about the type of candy cane in his Christmas stocking (“There would always be one peppermint candy cane with the barber pole stripes of red and white. Sometimes green got in the mix.”), and describes his first vanilla milkshake so well, it made me long for one.

Cameron presents a rosy picture of his childhood within a large rural family, including a home life filled with chores; church and community activities; school days; hobbies and sports. “We didn’t go hungry,” he writes, “and there was lots of love.”

Readers, if you recall playing “Kick the Can,” skating on sloughs, and making cattail torches, you’ll probably see some of your history in these merry personal tales.   

THIS BOOK IS AVAILABLE AT YOUR LOCAL BOOKSTORE OR FROM WWW.SKBOOKS.COM

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“Where the Cherries End Up: A Memoir”

Written by Sandra Ramberran

Published by Wood Dragon Books

Review by Shelley A. Leedahl

$19.99 ISBN 9-781990-863769

 

“You have not lived until you have shared a staff room with ten other women, sharing information about male genitals …” British-born Sandra Ramberran writes in Where the Cherries End Up: A Memoir. This quote exemplifies the brazen author’s honesty and matter-of-fact confessions in her tell-all, and clearly demonstrates that from the time she was nine and a fellow student “put his hands down [her] knickers,” her body’s been controlled by others. Soon an older man was also taking advantage of her and other “young, maturing school girls” by offering to “put money in their training bras.” The quick cash allowed them to “buy sweets or single cigarettes from the local shop.”

Born the eldest of six with an alcoholic father, Ramberran’s rape at age fourteen and the ability to drink “more than most women,” seemed to set the stage for several challenging decades among “the world of massage parlours, drugs, and sex.”

School was something to be endured, and as a teen, “done with childhood games,” her focus turned to “chasing boys and being chased”—and she had an eye for the bad boys. At sixteen she was sleeping with a married-with-family man. Pubbing, fighting, losing jobs … this was the writer’s experience before she met a dashing older man in “a three-piece suit and tie.” She was soon entangled with Richard, a “con man,” whom—after his divorce came through—she married and moved to Canada with. They set up house but happily ever after was not to be, and the marriage crumbled.

Harry, Ramberran’s next lover, introduced her to cocaine and quickly began “grooming [her] for prostitution.” Her career in the sex industry took place in “high-end hotels,” and she writes that in retrospect she was “desperate to be wanted, loved, and protected.” After a few months she briefly returned to England—back and forthing between Canada and England is a constant in this memoir—and upon her return began decades of employment with “Bob,” who owned a “fully licensed” massage parlour, where “full service” (there’s a euphemism!) wasn’t allowed, but sharing whirlpool tubs and shenanigans were. “Before long, I was literally throwing money in the air,” Ramberran writes. Bob rented her an apartment, took her on extravagant trips, made her the manager of his business (there were “25-30 girls working at the parlour”), and—although Bob was married with children—the pair had a son together with the help of a surrogate, who was also the parlour’s assistant manager. Surprisingly, Bob and his wife accepted this son as one of the family; he was provided with a university education, a car, and a home. “I am not proud of many things,” Ramberran writes, “but I am proud of my son.”     

 Now in her seventies, Ramberran lives in “a 55-plus building” in western Canada, “volunteer[s] in a food kitchen,” and says her life “has finally moved beyond all the drama.” After a lifetime of wildness and pain, it seems, thankfully, that she’s settled down and found peace.  

THIS BOOK IS AVAILABLE AT YOUR LOCAL BOOKSTORE OR FROM THE SASKATCHEWAN PUBLISHERS GROUP WWW.SKBOOKS.COM

 

 

Three New Reviews: “In the Light of Dawn: The History and Legacy of a Black Canadian Community” by Marie Carter; "Food for the Journey: A Life in Travel" by Elizabeth J. Haynes; and "Tales from the Silence," an anthology edited by James Bow

“In the Light of Dawn: The History and Legacy of a Black Canadian Community”

By Marie Carter, Foreword by Afua Cooper

Published by University of Regina Press

Review by Shelley A. Leedahl

$36.95  ISBN 9-781779-400468

   

 

Canada’s multicultural history is diverse and complex, and at times its narratives have been erroneously rendered. Take Black Canadian history, for example. Take the Dawn Settlement, a historical abolitionist community at the end of the Underground Railway (UGRR) in the area in and around Dresden, Ontario. Intended to be a “utopia” for emancipated American slaves, the Dawn Settlement has often been portrayed as a failure and its numerous founders overshadowed by the spotlit fame of one individual, Reverend Josiah Henson. The role of the British American Institute (BAI) has also been conflated in Dawn’s 200-year historical record. Furthermore, not all of the Black asylum-seekers who arrived in Canada via the UGRR were part of “a destitute band of fugitives” … many were members of the “Black Elite:” educated Pennsylvanian activists who migrated north and contributed intellectual and financial wealth to the “vibrant multicultural community.” These idealists fought for both the eradication of slavery and for securing equality, ie: in the segregated education system.

In her book In the Light of Dawn: The History and Legacy of a Black Canadian Community, historian Marie Carter shares quite a different tale of the Dawn Settlement’s past, and presents, as Afua Cooper (Dalhousie University’s Killam Research Chair in History) suggests in her foreword, a “historiographical intervention, a new history.”

Carter’s a fitting person to shed new light on the historical oversights concerning the Dawn Settlement. The “foremost expert of this story,” as Cooper asserts, Carter grew up next to “Uncle Tom’s Cabin Historic Site;” that’s “Uncle Tom” of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s anti-slavery novel, Uncle Tom’s Cabin—and she’s spent decades researching Rev. Josiah Henson, the actual man Stowe’s character was modelled after. Carter’s lived among the descendants of Dawn’s earliest 19^th Century settlers and possesses “lived experience of the land and the people.” What she reveals in her thorough study—including “land record investigations”—is that the Dawn Settlement was not a failure at all; the UGRR has been hugely romanticized; and Black history should not be “[restricted] to a single slavery to freedom narrative.” There were other leaders at Dawn prior to Henson’s arrival—men and women not immortalized by an American writer—and perhaps the idea that Dawn was the terminus of the UGRR is also a “mythologization,” at the very least metaphorically, as the “continuums of [Black] resistance and contribution” continue today.  

Carter’s non white-centric history is threaded with research concerning the troubled BAI and the manual labor school it established, managed by Rev. Henson—Carter corrects the fallacy that Dawn’s settlers were wholly “reliant on the BAI for their survival;” reports of the many other missionaries and pioneers present at Dawn before Henson (1789-1883); studies the challenge of establishing the community’s geographic boundaries; and examines women’s role in securing freedom.

Though Stowe star-rocketed Henson’s fame as “the real Uncle Tom”—he was honoured in a 1983 Canada Post stamp—Carter tells a more complete story of the era. Her meticulous retelling beseeches genuine multiculturalism, “ensuring equity and inclusion for all.”

THIS BOOK IS AVAILABLE AT YOUR LOCAL BOOKSTORE OR FROM WWW.SKBOOKS.COM

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“Food for the Journey: A Life in Travel”

Written by Elizabeth J. Haynes

Published by Thistledown Press

Review by Shelley A. Leedahl

$24.95  ISBN 978-1-77187-269-0

 

Calgary novelist and short fiction writer Elizabeth J. Haynes has just published a new book, and this time it’s an essay collection. Food for the Journey: A Life in Travel is the kind of book I can really sink my teeth into. As I read these engaging essays about the author’s far-flung travels, family dynamics, heartbreak, a health crisis, history, politics and her former profession (Haynes is a retired speech-language pathologist), I quickly ascertained that the “food” here is much more than literal.

Mining experiences from a lifetime of global travels, the introverted and interesting author comes by her love of travel honestly: her father worked on a fisheries project for the British Colonial Office in Nigeria in the 1950s. “He arrived on a freighter, squinting into a bloody sunrise on the Gulf of Guinea,” Haynes writes. She concludes her first essay with an observation of her father’s “big, gnarled hands holding the knife that sliced cleanly through ham and bread and cheese and the fire-red peaches.”

In my experience, one of the most exciting things about travelling is the surprises, and Haynes shares several. She and her sister spent eight months backpacking around Asia, and her “Souls of the Ancestors: Walking around Torajaland,” concerns their time among the remote, hilltop-living Torajans in Sulawesi. In a Batutumonga homestay, the sisters learned they were sharing a house with owner Mama Siska’s deceased grandmother: “Her partially embalmed body apparently lies, as it has for two years, in a room at the back of Mama Siska’s house.” Mama Siska takes in guests to “make enough money to buy a buffalo to sacrifice” at the funeral.  

I relate to Hayne’s assertion that in “coming to a new place … the senses are sharpened, and everything seems new.” She ably demonstrates this via many poetic turns of phrase in this poignant collection, ie: in North Carolina for her sister’s wedding, “The sky is drowning in stars.” In Peru at dusk: “the sky dark as a new bruise.” Her Cambodian experiences gave me goosebumps.

Cycling in Cuba with another sister—whom Cuban men continually hit upon—the Spanish-speaking Haynes learned much beyond what a regular “turista” might, ie: that “the whole country celebrates International Women’s Day.” In Bolivia she met a Cuban professor, Pedro, who “must give 75 percent of his wages to the Cuban government,” but fortunately he still earns enough to buy his ill wife’s medication.

Haynes is an adventurer after my own heart—cycling in Cuba, kayaking in the Sea of Cortez, canoeing past Floridian alligators, trekking in Peru—but she also recognizes the beauty in Canada. As a youth in Kamloops, she’d explore “the cactus-covered hills” and exult in “a field of mariposa lilies, a storm of tumbleweed, an arrowhead, burrs and cacti thorns sticking to our socks.”

Food? There are some mentions, ie: “fresh lavash” and “sharp-tasting sheep’s milk cheese” in Armenia, but the book’s titular food is indeed far more metaphorical than actual; it’s the essays themselves that are delicious.

THIS BOOK IS AVAILABLE AT YOUR LOCAL BOOKSTORE OR FROM THE SASKATCHEWAN PUBLISHERS GROUP WWW.SKBOOKS.COM

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“Tales from the Silence"

Edited by James Bow

Published by Endless Sky Books

Review by Shelley A. Leedahl

$26.99  ISBN 978-1-998273-22-5

 

James Bow spawned a stellar idea for an anthology. The fantasy and science fiction aficionado and communications officer (most Canadian writers have a day job) not only created a fictional universe, “Silent Earth,” he also bravely invited ten other sci-fi, fantasy and YA writers to share this post-apocalyptic universe by contributing their own diverse stories, each set within the confines he’d created for “the isolated colonies of the inner solar system.”

The Ontario writer and editor’s included five of his own stories—including the 48-page “The Phases of Jupiter,” set in 2151—and his contributors hale from across Canada and as far away as Australia. One commonality between the stories is that the characters all “operate independently but in tandem, encountering the same tragedies, occasionally the same joys, fighting the same battles, and making the same mistakes.” Readers will identify with the soup of human emotions the displaced individuals feel, and credible dialogue—something Bow’s particularly good at creating—helps “ground” the stories and makes them relatable.

Bow’s first piece, “The Phases of Jupiter, is significantly set on August 4^th, 2151. After climate disasters and civil strife, “nukes” obliterated much of Earth, and our little blue planet “[fell] silent”. “Riots and disasters multiplied … the old countries declared their independence, and nobody from the UN stepped up to stop them.” The Manhattan Sea Wall was destroyed and New York flooded. News stations “winked out one by one.” Prophetic?

Cameron Dixon, from Toronto, also set his story in 2151. His philosophical protagonist, Jericho Cavender, is “the last man on the Moon,” and readers are privy to his thoughts as he sits in the observation deck and considers the moon’s “grey landscape, all crags and plains stretching out to the mountains on the horizon, with the Earth hanging overhead like a broken marble.” Dixon’s a gifted writer, ie: “The ships and shuttles are silver, but that’s just grey pretending to have a twinkle in its eye.” Cavender is “alone in a place [he] never expected to be alone in,” yet he doesn’t want to return to Earth, now “a world full of weathers and wars.”  

Another highlight was Kate Blair’s “The Queen Can Never Win the Game,” set on the British Isles, “sometime around 2165.” This story read like a fairytale for adults: a British girl’s drunken father “decided to [marry his ‘hot’ daughter] off to the King of North Kent”. The polygamist King took the “hot” reference literally, and, considering the torrential rains’ effect on his crops, locked the girl in the barn to dry his soggy wheat. Three times she has to perform an overnight drying, and three times she’s aided by a mysterious woman with a “patchy hairline” and “deep pockmarks”.

Torontonian Joanna Karaplis wins the award for style: she includes letters and video interviews in her Mercury-set story about friendship and strong female leaders. 

Tales from the Silence may be about what happened after Earth went silent, but the characters in these assorted stories have much to say.

THIS BOOK IS AVAILABLE AT YOUR LOCAL BOOKSTORE OR FROM WWW.SKBOOKS.COM

 

 

 

 

Four Reviews: "Banana Capital: Stories, Science, and Poison at the Equator” by Ben Brisbois; "Dark Chapters: Reading the Still Lives of David Garneau” Curated by Arin Fay, Paintings by David Garneau, Edited by Nic Wilson; "Dog and Moon" by Kelly Shepherd; and "Walking Upstream" by Lloyd Ratzlaff

“Banana Capital: Stories, Science, and Poison at the Equator”

Written by Ben Brisbois

Published by University of Regina Press

Review by Shelley A. Leedahl

$34.95  ISBN 9-781779-400345

    

Dole. Chiquita. Del Monte. These banana empires are household names, and as a frequent consumer of bananas, I read Banana Capital: Stories, Science, and Poison at the Equator, by Montreal academic Ben Brisbois, with great interest. Frankly, though I’ve consumed a bunch of bananas in my lifetime, I’ve never peeled back their long and troubling story. Ben Brisbois has.

Over about fifteen years, Brisbois—an Assistant Professor in the Department of Social and Preventive Medicine of the Université de Montréal’s School of Public Health—researched, analyzed, and wrote about pesticides’ dangerous health effects on the often exploited workers at banana plantations and farms, with his PhD fieldwork centred in the self-proclaimed “banana capital of the world,” Machala, Ecuador. He ”laboriously designed a project that would try to bring about real change by valuing the lived experiences of pesticide-affected banana workers and farmers, and by being realistic about the political and economic power relations [both globally and locally] affecting coastal Ecuador.” 

There was much to unpack, and this reader got an education, beginning with the nefarious ecological and political history of banana production, including child labour. If I only retain one image from this comprehensive text, it will be of the exploitation of children. A 2002 Human Rights Watch report included interviews with “Children as young as eight, who worked long days in hazardous conditions with pervasive exposure to toxic pesticides such as chlorpyrifos and the fungicides constantly applied with backpack sprayers and fumigation planes. These children were often not allowed to exit the fields when planes passed overhead, instead hiding under banana leaves or cardboard boxes and using shirts or their hands to hold off the falling veneno (poison).” And this was daily life. 

For as long as banana farming’s occurred, it appears major issues have existed: a “toxic soup of pesticides;” subcontracted labour; environmental injustice “(a term describing the disproportionate concentration of environmental risks in racialized, poor, and other marginalized communities);” lack of unions; corrupt governments; racism; and “brutally competitive global banana markets,” which put producers of small-scale banana farms/plantations in extremely precarious economic positions. When pressure becomes too great on banana giants, “companies have nimbly moved their sourcing to cheaper and less-protected jurisdictions,” Brisbois writes. Colonialism, imperialism, and neo-liberal capitalism are part of the disparaging story, including “the granting of massive land concessions to US interests by Latin American governments.”  

Another major concern is banana farming’s “enormous carbon footprint.” And research into the medical fallout from various pesticides is challenged as chemicals are frequently combined, so it’s difficult to know if cancers, birth defects, neurological impairment, depression, etc. can be attributed to certain pesticides, or are a result of political, social and economic inequities. The global pesticide industry has continually passed the buck and “steered policy and science” in favour of commerce. 

It's grim to consider that “So long as the disparities that imperialism created … are in place, markets for fruits will always be so skewed that huge injustices will persist.” This is something to think about.

THIS BOOK IS AVAILABLE AT YOUR LOCAL BOOKSTORE OR FROM WWW.SKBOOKS.COM

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“Dark Chapters: Reading the Still Lives of David Garneau”

Curated by Arin Fay, Paintings by David Garneau, Edited by Nic Wilson

Published by University of Regina Press

Review by Shelley A. Leedahl

$32.95  ISBN 9-781779-400536

    

How did I not know about Saskatchewan-based David Garneau? The Governor General award-winning Métis artist, writer and educator initiates integral conversations about Indigenous identity and experience, colonization and the academy through politically-charged art and writing, and now 17 Canadian writers have responded to his large, compelling and highly symbolic still life series, Dark Chapters, in a striking new text. Titled Dark Chapters: Reading the Still Lives of David Garneau, the collection’s contributor list reads like a who’s who of contemporary Canadian literature, including poetry from Susan Musgrave, Billy-Ray Belcourt, Fred Wah and Rita Bouvier, and essays from Trevor Herriot, Jesse Wente, Paul Seeseequasis and curator Arin Fay.

“Dark Chapters” refers to Justice Murray Sinclair’s Reports of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, and many of the book’s contributors are of Indigenous heritage. Editor Nic Wilson shares how across Garneau’s lifelong art-making, “Each foray is soaked in [Garneau’s] incredible attention to the codes of history, meaning, emotion, sociality, and pedagogy.” The book contains numerous colour images of Garneau’s provocative still lives, which often feature juxtapositions between mostly title/word-less books and other items, ie: skulls, stones, tense or slack twine and other bindings, and Métis sashes. We find books and a bar of Sunlight soap; an upright red book “wicked” with burning, braided sweetgrass (at first glance, the image appears to be a stick of dynamite); an open-faced Bible on a Grandfather rock; a tomahawk paired uncomfortably with a teacup; fruit and flies. Fay writes that in these “salacious mashups,” the artist is creating “a new vernacular,” and his works “expand upon and challenge the vanitas and memento mori styles, introducing a modern Métis interpretation of still life painting.”   

In his poignant response, anthropologist and legal scholar David Howes says it bluntly: “David Garneau’s artistic work typically confounds the viewer” and it requires multiple “takes.” I concur, and would add that the myriad responses, too, should be read more than once. Howes examines the role of sage smoke in Ceremony and “the treaty-making process”—“No smoke, no pact”—and explores the significance of Garneau’s painting Scientific Method Applied to the Sacred. He also discusses the sentience of rocks—objects/beings that frequently appear in Garneau’s visual conundrums. 

Jesse Wente’s clear-eyed essay is among my favourite. The broadcaster, producer and activist writes about—and personally owns—Garneau’s still life “Formal and Informal Education,” in which a red book (symbolic recurring image) dangles from a spring trap. Beyond the formal vs. informal education represented in the acrylic, Wente appreciates the painting because his great-grandfather was a fur trapper who “live[d] on the land,” and the generations of family that followed received formal education. “The painting also suggests the violence that inevitably faces us when we seek the formal,” Wente writes, noting the influence of residential school on his grandparents. “This painting is us, and I think David depicted us beautifully.”

The images and writing throughout Dark Chapters are powerful, thought-provoking and wide-ranging. As Fred Wah aptly writes, “This life of the eye is anything but still.”  

THIS BOOK IS AVAILABLE AT YOUR LOCAL BOOKSTORE OR FROM WWW.SKBOOKS.COM

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“Dog and Moon”                                                                                                                                      

By Kelly Shepherd                                                                                                                          

Published by University of Regina Press                                                                                                

Review by Shelley A. Leedahl                                                                                                              

$19.95  ISBN 9-781779-400383

    

Quirky contradictions, interconnectedness, and more swerves than the North Saskatchewan—Kelly Shepherd’s Dog and Moon delivers an audacious selection of poems that’ll make you think and possibly cheer, thanks to wordplay concerning the natural world, domesticity, etymology, poetry workshops (“Describe snow to someone who has never experienced it before”) and metaphors against a backdrop of shadows, mirrors, moons, frogs, feathers, Canadian writers and “concrete-coloured snow.” In this third poetry collection, Shepherd’s used the ancient ghazal form for inspiration, but he gives his couplets a contemporary twist with reverberations, koan-like riddles, a dash of politics and lines that had me smiling. Even titles are a hoot: “The Poetics of Space Heaters,”  and “If Your Eyes Weren’t Prisms, Would You Notice?” Prediction: this book will earn awards. 

Firstly, the pairings and unusual juxtapositions. The book begins: “A man walks out of a forest. What walks out of him?” In the second poem: “Fish grow leafy fins and tails. Trees grow fish-shaped leaves./The trees, water, fire of childhood.” The poet takes two things, ie: fish and trees, then throws in a random third element, ie: “fire of childhood.”  

Ghazals often include questions, and Shepherd’s adopted this characteristic in several pieces, asking, for example, “Did we pray to the gods who would eat us/by eating them?” and the anti-capitalist “Happiness is only a purchase away,/but what happens when the box store runs out of boxes?” His questions range from the simple “Do you believe in dogs?” to writerly concerns, ie: “Who ever anywhere will read these written words?” 

In reviewing Shepherd’s first book, Shift, I noted several unique word combinations re: colour descriptions, and here he impresses again, ie: “sunrise-coloured seagulls,” “Daylight the colour of beets,” and “the silence goes violet.”

Childhood reminiscences can spread a warmth across poems. In “What’s it going to Be? Marie Kondo, or Tsundoku?”, we find this beauty: 

      Can you feel it? It’s the distant glitter of sunlight

      on lakewater between trees, first glimpsed from the back seat,

       in one of your earliest memories of summer.

In following lines, he leaps into a Walt Whitman quote, and a “bookstore customer, rough-bearded/and rough-handed,” and “So much fog on the lake.” Indeed, there’s much peculiarity throughout the collection, ie: the line “I prefer the onomatopoeic style of interior design.”

   

“Limn” celebrates personification: “Hands of sand hold on to the afternoon’s heat,” “The pale brown gravel road’s long legs/follow the shore,” and “The lake last night was so close/I could hear it breathe, its fingers on the glass.”  

And then there’s the humour, ie: 

   A journey of a thousand miles

   begins with a single schlep.

and “How to distinguish British Columbians from Albertans?/Look at their choice of Self-Help books.”

I can appreciate all the verbal backflips and hopscotching. The surprises. Like the Edmonton/Treaty 6 Territory poet, I believe that “A poem is a torch with a beam of shadow/instead of light.” I see the hills’ “nettle-coloured eyes,” and hear “The fire with its breaking-twig voice.” And I feel richer for it all. 

THIS BOOK IS AVAILABLE AT YOUR LOCAL BOOKSTORE OR FROM WWW.SKBOOKS.COM

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“Walking Upstream”

By Lloyd Ratzlaff

Published by Thistledown Press

Review by Shelley A. Leedahl

$19.95    ISBN 9781771872706

Saskatoon’s Lloyd Ratzlaff—essayist, former minister, walker in wild places—has released his first poetry collection, and wow. I know this man and have long believed that poetry lives in him; I’m grateful his mostly contemplative poems—alive with water, birds and creatures—have found a deserving home in Walking Upstream.

The first two sections map “The Old Path” and “The Irresistible Forces,” while the latter two, “To Grouse like a Mountain,” and “Afloat,” ferry readers from “Coffee at Starbucks” to a “Prairie Cemetery” and “Nirvana Big Rest Motel.” At the latter, the narrator waits out “a steady rain” and concludes “I can do nothing/for my mother in her care home bed/but think,/look Mother,/I am because of you.” Whew. For a piece with just eleven lines, this unsentimental poem packs serious emotional punch, aided by an image of the “white petunias [that] sag/under the water’s grey weight.”  

Ratzlaff possesses a gift for evoking emotion in just a few poignant lines—some might consider this poetry’s raison d’être—and his poems reflect that over a lifetime, the former counsellor’s mastered the oft-ignored art of listening. “The Realm” contains just nine lines, but in the second stanza we glean humility and the quiet nature of an individual “who likes to hide sometimes/in a copse of aspens/and listen.” This keen ear’s tuned as naturally to “Red-winged and yellow-headed blackbirds” and a ”mud hen in the reeds,/so near yet so hidden,/only the tinks on some tiny anvil/betray the place of [its] nesting” as it is to windchimes: “A small orchestra improvises/a jazz suite for spring.” How lovely.

Ratzlaff’s frequently addressed his Christian fundamentalist upbringing, and several poems in this smart collection demonstrate that he’s still processing “the old religion,” with its emphasis on sin, fear and “holy hullabalujah.” As a child, a “travelling evangelist” with a “flappy bible” warned that “children without Jesus in [their] hearts/will [writhe] in a lake of fire/and brimstone.” In “My Quarrel with Yahweh,” Yahweh is “a night spirit./The sun hurts his eyes.” The poet refers to a beetle “multicoloured like Joseph’s coat,” and offers a short “prayer for the river.” 

I prefer the reflective poems and the intimate concerns they sometimes reveal, but the collection never feels somber, as lighter poems—about the poet’s dogs, or adolescents’ overuse of the word “like”—braid through the book. I enjoyed the farewell poem, “Goodbye Little Apartment,” in which Ratzlaff said so long to the “last of the old fridges/that wouldn’t defrost” and the “shabby carpet,” and, more importantly, to “beloved friends” with whom he “walked to the riverbank,/got three sheets to the wind,” and “played hide-and-seek till five in the morning” before they settled “on a footbridge” and “looked into the stars.” It’s a profound example of how, if we’re fortunate, the child in each of us never leaves.    

Always, there’s great reverence for avian friends. Bluejays, chickadees, “The gulls of Wanuskewin” and the mighty magpie, of which Ratzlaff writes: “our people don’t think/highly enough/of your people.” Oh, I say, indeed. 

 

THIS BOOK IS AVAILABLE AT YOUR LOCAL BOOKSTORE OR FROM THE SASKATCHEWAN PULBISHERS GROUP WWW.SKBOOKS.,COM

Two Reviews: "Books and the City: Psychogeographical Wanderings Around Toronto’s Independent Bookstores" by Annabel Townsend, and “From the Ground Up: An Anthology of New Fiction” edited by Annabel Townsend

“Books and the City: Psychogeographical Wanderings Around Toronto’s Independent Bookstores”

By Annabel Townsend 

Published by Pete’s Press, The Wandering Series

Review by Shelley A. Leedahl

$24.99  ISBN 9-781069-000996

    

   

It’s entirely wonderful to finish a book and immediately recognize that the author could be your new best friend. Annabel Townsend is a British-born, Regina, SK writer, and her nonfiction title Books and the City: Psychogeographical Wanderings Around Toronto’s Independent Bookstores contains all the elements I require for a wildly successful read: it’s well-written and structured; its author is passionate and clear about her mission; and it opened my mind while delivering a plethora of fun. Huge points also for the adventure of big-city, solo travel; staying in hostels; and using Toronto’s Bike Share program. And, naturally, I share her belief in the “magic” that bookstores (and books) contain.

Books and the City details Townsend’s January 2024 pursuit to find a particular book, Stroll, by Torontonian Shawn Micallef, whom she heard present at the Toronto International Festival of Authors in 2022. Like Micallef, Townsend is a psychogeographer. Psychogeography, she explains, is “a marriage of psychology and geography but with a good dose of creativity and ethnography thrown in.” It’s “a lens through which we can view a place not as a static, lifeless entity, but as a living, breathing organism that shapes and is shaped by the people who inhabit it,” and through “a deliberate act of unplanned wandering” (aka dérive), one can discover her own personal narratives while tapping into the collective consciousness of a place. Trés exciting. 

Stroll is about “wandering aimlessly around Toronto with hand-drawn maps,” and Townsend has emulated this type of adventure, complete with her own colourful hand-drawn maps. She could have ordered the 2010 edition of the recently-reprinted Stroll, but she desired the original, and thus her quest—and her hope to find hope—began. On foot, on a Bike Share bike, and via public transit, the committed writer/bookstore owner wandered—coffee-fueled, and often in the rain—from indie bookstore to indie bookstore.

Entrepreneurial Townsend operated the Penny University Bookstore in Regina for four years. Economics forced her to shutter this indie labour of love—which opened a week after the COVID-19 pandemic kicked off—in the fall of 2024. Books and the City includes the challenge of owning her own bookstore—Townsend doesn’t drive, and she’d bike her book deliveries in Regina, even on days when it was “-28 ̊C with a -41̊ C windchill”; exceptional descriptions re: her discoveries of various indie bookstores in T.O.; her interactions with bookstore managers/staff; and end-of-chapter tallies on “Books bought,” “Copies of Stroll found” and “Coffees consumed”. 

Her ramblings took her from the Toronto Reference Library to Doug Miller Books, where she bought a dystopian horror. “I was having an excellent day and so needed a good dose of gritty depressing futurism to balance it out,” she writes. She adored Queen Books, which was “̒a little bit bonkers,’” and boasted an unrelated-to-anything “waist-height cuddly giraffe in the children’s section.” 

Townsend knows: “A simple book can change your life forever.” Perhaps her fabulous book will change yours. As for me, psychogeography has my name all over it.

THIS BOOK IS AVAILABLE AT YOUR LOCAL BOOKSTORE OR FROM WWW.SKBOOKS.COM

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“From the Ground Up: An Anthology of New Fiction”

Edited by Annabel Townsend 

Published by Anthologies of Pete’s Press

Review by Shelley A. Leedahl

$21.99  ISBN 9-781069-000965

    

   

Annabel Townsend loved the “From the Ground Up” theme of Regina’s Cathedral Village Arts Festival (2024) so much, she used it as the theme for an anthology featuring ten Regina area fiction writers. Townsend—a writer, editor, publisher and former bookstore owner—held a “Battle of the Pitches” event at the festival: short story writers were given three minutes to “pitch” a story before a live audience and judges, with the prize being publication in the first-ever anthology by Pete’s Press, From the Ground Up: An Anthology of New Fiction. A few other writers also contributed stories. 

The stories include a futuristic story by well-known, multi-genre author Alison Lohans. The piece, “Crystal Sister,” is set on the planet Terruggia, which contains a “massive crystal lode” that’s being mined. The main character is young Lytha, whose “job was to form and impress images into waiting crystal, which had the capacity to amplify and transmit halfway across a galaxy.” Legend has it that the Terruggian waters are unsafe, so what’s any self-respecting teenager going to do? You can guess.    

The anthology opens with a fantastical dystopian story by Andy Whitman. Creatures the media initially termed eruptions (the beasts are also called Dirtbacks and Oxodillos) are emerging from the earth daily. Whitman writes, “The creatures looked like a muskox with armadillo’s armour, fifty stories tall and half as wide,” and “Where they emerged from their ancient hibernation, they left craters which swallowed skyscrapers.” The destruction caused as these behemoth’s erupt is widespread and apocalyptic, as they “literally moved the world.” The story takes an interesting twist when the protagonist speeds to his parents’ farm—several hours away—for safety and reconciliation, and finds only his twin brother, who doesn’t believe in the “goddamn hysteria”. Then: “Things shifted quickly. The ground trembled and buckled.” Whitman’s skill is evident in descriptive lines like “The concrete sidewalk beneath my shoes sounded like the whole planet grinding its teeth” and “The clouds were fluffy but flat, old ships serenely sailing from one horizon to another.”       

Tricia Saxby’s contributed a realistic story about taking her materialistic and opinionated teenaged sons to work at a soup kitchen. Two stories feature kidnappings—including a financially-desperate bookstore owner’s kidnapping of Margaret Atwood. One can tell how much fun the writer had with this romp, ie: the bookstore owner’s name is Paige Turner. 

The diverse anthology includes a six-chapter novella concerning a downed Cessna and heaps of drug money; a Snow White tale; and a story involving a talking, kleptomaniac cat.   

I clicked on Pete’s Press website to learn more about the publisher: “Pete’s Press is a new, hybrid publisher intent on publishing books that make you think. The Press—named for “the late, great and bookish Cat”—which provides publication of books in various genres, “offers authors a unique blend of traditional and self-publishing advantages,” with a “one-off fee [that] covers editing and proofreading, typesetting and design, printing the books, distribution through global sales platforms and book marketing.” For more, www.petespress.ca. 

THIS BOOK IS AVAILABLE AT YOUR LOCAL BOOKSTORE OR FROM WWW.SKBOOKS.COM

 

Three Reviews: “Our Grandmothers’ Hands: Repatriating Métis Material Art” by Gregory Scofield; "Sam and the Big Bridge" by Maureen Ulrich, illustrated by Matt Gonya; and "Fierce, Fabulous, and Fluid: How Trans High School Students Work at Gender Nonconformity” by LJ Slovin

“Our Grandmothers’ Hands: Repatriating Métis Material Art”
By Gregory Scofield, Historical Overview by Sherry Farrell Racette
Published by Gabriel Dumont Institute
Review by Shelley A. Leedahl
$65.00  ISBN 978-1-988011-22-6

In Gregory Scofield’s introduction to Our Grandmothers’ Hands: Repatriating Métis Material Art, the multi-genre Métis author, academic and bead-worker immediately demonstrates his poetic prowess via a description of the said, titulary hands: “I always imagine them as fine-boned birds, taking musical flight over a pattern traced onto velvet, stroud, or hide.” 

This fine writing compelled me to sink into this 245-page treasure trove of photographs, descriptions, and necessary stories about the grandmothers’ beaded artifacts—what Scofield refers to as “grandmother-pieces”—and his years-long efforts to repatriate them from “antique stores and ‘Indian art’ galleries, e-Bay and Etsy, and online auctions”. It was the myriad pieces themselves, he explains, that “guide[d] and educate[d] him” to give voice and honour to these Métis women and their creations during “a time of reconciliation” and “colonial reckoning.” Scofield recalls his Aunty Georgina teaching him—a nicâniskôhpicanisak, or “little ancestor”—to bead at her kitchen table, and recounts his ongoing dedication to learning how to “properly care for historic beadwork and silk embroidery.”  

Scofield’s illuminating introduction is followed by Sherry Farrell Racette’s historical overview, “Looking for Stories: Seeking History in Visual Culture.” Her passion for “revitalizing traditional art forms” and “increasing the recognition and appreciation of contemporary traditional artists and their practices” has required “teasing information from the stitches, chosen materials, and techniques.” Métis art-making predated The Red River Settlement, she writes. Items (ie: beaded cloth firebags, moccasins, mittens, jackets, hats) were produced for the women’s own homes and families, and were also commissioned by or sold to collectors and traders. 

“The combination of movement and intermarriage blurred origins into a style that was distinctly ‘Métis,’” Farrell Racette explains. “The generative actions of beadwork and embroidery were deeply embedded in emotional and spiritual life,” and, she asserts, “the full spectrum of Métis art” encompasses much more than the “Métis five-petal flower.”

It was captivating to proceed through these pages and admire the photographs of the varied work, including pieces created in the Norway House Style, with floral embroidery “characterized by buttonhole stitches” and “red and pink rosettes and snake-like leaves” and the “use of tightly-twisted silk floss.” I tried to imagine the hands that stitched the items. The conversations between women as they worked. It was surprising to learn where individual items were eventually located, ie: men’s gauntlets in Middlesex, England; sleigh mittens in Philadelphia; children’s moccasins (“Smoked moose hide sole, sun-bleached caribou hide vamp embroidered with silk threads in chain stitch …”) in St. Boswell’s, Scotland, artist unknown. 

A beaded garden on a wall pocket, c. 1880-1900. A beaded panel that conjures “the beauty and wonder of a springtime bouquet.” From slippers to gun cases, the images illustrate how the grandmothers possessed the “skill and ability to make even utilitarian pieces beautiful.” 

“Our grandmothers are back into Métis hands and back into the hands of our scholars, historians, artists, and community members.” They are, Scofield writes, “coming home,” and he is “their momentary caregiver, ensuring they are loved and honoured and, above all, respected.”  

THIS BOOK IS AVAILABLE AT YOUR LOCAL BOOKSTORE OR FROM WWW.SKBOOKS.COM

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“Sam and the Big Bridge” 

Written by Maureen Ulrich

Illustrated by Matt Gonya

Published by Flatlands Press

Review by Shelley A. Leedahl

$21.99 ISBN 9781778296529

Multi-genre writer Maureen Ulrich has released a new illustrated softcover for children, and its moving conclusion left me with a lump in my throat. The Lampman-area author is no stranger to the pen: she’s previously published the Jessie Mac Hockey Series of novels; the YA alternative history series, Winds of Change; the middle grade novel Kimeto’s Journey; and a poetry book, Something’s Different, described as “A COVID journal in verse.”

When it comes to writing for young people, Ulrich clearly knows her audience. In her first children’s picture book, Sam and the Big Bridge, the former teacher-turned-author delivers a short tale about two brothers, Sam and Derek, and her initial three words set the stage for the story: “Sam was anxious.” Interestingly, Sam is the elder brother, and he’s concerned that his little brother might get hurt on the playground swing or monkey bars, or that he might leap into the swimming pool “without his waterwings,” or even fail to check for cars when he crosses a street.  Sam even worries in his dreams: his mother says she’s signed the boys up for “Ninja camp,” and that night Sam “dreamed of Ninjas with glittering eyes.” 

Ulrich effectively describes how Sam’s mental anxiety manifests physically via a dry mouth and itchy skin, and when they arrive at the large Ninja park, “Sam’s chest grew tighter when he saw children running and jumping on the huge equipment.” His mother assures him that he can opt out of the day camp, but the boy wants to try the various challenges, and shakily does so, but the rope bridge gets the better of him, and younger Derek asks his brother why he was “screaming” when “Everyone else [at the camp] was having fun.”

The book’s American illustrator, Matt Gonya, conveys Sam’s fearfulness via a strong use of colour and facial expressions. Gonya uses “gestural, digital illustrations” that “are designed to look like ink and watercolour.” The main character’s anxiety is particularly conspicuous when contrasted against the other children at camp, who are running, climbing and smiling. 

Sam is left with “a hard lump” in his stomach. Fortunately, he figures out on his own that he must return to the camp the next day and face his fears, completing the various activity challenges at his own pace, with his highly supportive mother and brother cheering him on. 

I won’t give away the ending of this touching story, but I will say that the book demonstrates how everyone is different, and that it’s okay not to be “a Ninja”—even in an innocuous, playground context—if one isn’t comfortable with what that requires. The ending is resonant and delightful, and it gently shows how confidence can be built step, by step, by step. It also conveys the important message that a mother’s love and pride in her children is unconditional. 

Writing is meant to evoke emotion; if it does, the author has done her job. Congratulations to you, Maureen Ulrich. Your story is indeed a success. 

 

THIS BOOK IS AVAILABLE AT YOUR LOCAL BOOKSTORE OR FROM THE SASKATCHEWAN PUBLISHERS GROUP WWW.SKBOOKS.COM

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“Fierce, Fabulous, and Fluid: How Trans High School Students Work at Gender Nonconformity”

Written by LJ Slovin

Published by University of Regina Press

Review by Shelley A. Leedahl

$32.95  ISBN 9-781779-400505

    

      

To write the academic text Fierce, Fabulous, and Fluid: How Trans High School Students Work at Gender Nonconformity, LJ Slovin (the Martha LA McCain Postdoctoral Fellow at the Bonham Centre for Sexual Diversity Studies at the University of Toronto) undertook a year-long ethnographical study in a Vancouver high school to explore the experiences of gender-nonconforming youth, who, Slovin found, were “often overlooked in discussions about trans issues, in part due to policies created by well-meaning educators that inadvertently perpetuated a narrow definition of trans identity.”  

Ethnography is the study of people in their own environment through methods including participant observation and face-to-face interviewing. Slovin, a non-binary researcher and Vanier Scholar, writes that in witnessing how six “gender-nonconforming youth navigated their genders … through different spaces and relationships at school,” they attended their grades 9-12 classes, “joined in during their extracurricular activities and clubs, ate lunch with them, attended their performances, and hung out” inside school and out, ie: in cafés. 

Slovin’s work focused on “youth who were not regularly recognized by others as trans,” and these youth identified as “gay, queer, bisexual, pansexual, trans, gender nonconforming, genderfluid, and nonbinary.” However, Slovin discovered that the students they studied were not particularly interested in labels; rather, being “uncategorizable” was part of the point.

How did these teens come to be considered “trans,” and how did they “[negotiate] being misgendered?” How did they manage to “survive and thrive in school?” Slovin uses the word “labour” to describe the youths’ complex efforts re: managing their gender identity, and how this labour often went unnoticed while simultaneously also being “demanded and required of them.” Teacher, administrator and staff support was often observed, but it was “framed within an accommodations approach,” (“the dominant strategy for pursuing trans-inclusivity in Canadian schools”); was always reactive; and relied on the students being visibly trans. 

Slovin argues that the accommodations approach presupposes that “trans identity” is “inherently risky,” and this belief is “an intentional strategy to argue for their protection in schools.” Slovin writes that education, even in liberal schools, “still aspired to socialize youth away from queerness.” The author deduced that trans youth had learned to care for themselves and each other, ie: by using “trapdoors” to escape and have safe places to exist in. These could be real, physical spaces, ie: a “tech booth,” or “fantastical spaces,” like “D&D campaigns”. 

Students in Slovin’s study felt that their “progressive” high school simply paid lip service to initiatives like Pink Shirt Day. Students Eliza and Tamar campaigned for five years for “a multistall, gender-neutral bathroom.” The author argues that East City High—with its “‘Safe space’ stickers”—is not a “diverse and progressive school” and it possesses a “preoccupation with image and optics.”

What Slovin learned through their ethnographical experience is that trans youth are paving their own way, but if their teachers focused less on “risk and concern” for these students and embraced “fostering a celebration of trans and gender-nonconforming youth,” that journey would be a whole lot easier.  

THIS BOOK IS AVAILABLE AT YOUR LOCAL BOOKSTORE OR FROM WWW.SKBOOKS.COM

 

Three Reviews: The Salmon Shanties: A Cascadian Song Cycle by Harold Rhenisch; Sticks & Bones: Haiku and Senryu by Allison Douglas-Tourner; and Uncut: A Cultural Analysis of the Foreskin by Johnathan A. Allan;

“The Salmon Shanties: A Cascadian Song Cycle”

By Harold Rhenisch

Published by University of Regina Press

Review by Shelley A. Leedahl

$19.95  ISBN 9-781779-400154

    

I was excited to read BC poet Harold Rhenisch’s The Salmon Shanties: A Cascadian Song Cycle, as I know him to be a respected writer working in various genres—including fiction, nonfiction and memoir—and his poetry’s been recognized with several awards. The latest of his thirty-three books swims upstream with salmon through Cascadia’s rivers, sings the songs of history as experienced by the English and Chinook Wawa, laments how humans have abused this earth and each other, and praises the natural world and its creatures, from grass to mountains to sky. The poems, scored mostly in couplets, are detail-rich and I recommend reading them slowly to savour the language, names and ideas. It’s also helpful to read them in tandem with the author’s notes on the poems and his extensive glossary of Chinook Wawa—a blended language “of trade and diplomacy … as developed by the wives of traders at Fort Vancouver on the Columbia River” that was commonly used across the Pacific Northwest.  

In naming these poems shanties (songs), one can rightfully expect that they’re musical. Readers hear grasshoppers “click-clacking in their bone song,” and the “crackle/of gravel from the wheels bringing us home.” There is, in fact, a lot of gravel in this book, including “glacier-washed gravel” and “platinum gravel,” and this demonstrates the poet’s particular facility with description. There’s also an abundance of grass: “wheatgrass,” “needle-and-thread grass,” “canary grass,” “porcupine grass,” “dune grass,” “bunchgrass,” “rye grass,” “cheatgrass,” and “mind’s/quick grass/braided by deft fingers around a black fire.” When a poet infuses this much effort into one element alone, we can appreciate how much consideration has gone into each poem, and can celebrate that the poet swapped out his early peach-picking “for the machine gun of free verse,” though he tells “young poets to run” and says “Books failed as keepers of men’s souls.”    

These are poems of journeys, place and legend. Of highways and “the light on the mountains, long after the beginning has ended.” And definitely, the themes of continuity and all things being “one” is woven throughout these accomplished pieces. “All of us star creatures are one breath,” Rhenisch writes in a poem titled “Round for the Mind of the World.” And in “Snass Shanty” we find “We are one substance,” and “Everything is rain. Everything is falling and then rising back up.” In a later poem, this truth: “Do we not/all have hands or wings or leaves or stamens or some damned thing/that can reach out and touch each other?” 

Indeed. And rare’s the bard who can make poetry of tossed whiskey bottles: 

     The empties flashed briefly, tumbling over and over, catching the Sun,

             blinding,

     before they landed among the tufted grouse, sagebrush sparrows, and

            sweat bees. 

They’ve been there ever since, home to spiders,”

Please do “Pull up a stump and share this campfire coffee.” You’ll rediscover what you may already know: “There is only the salmon and the salmon again,/and a boy’s going and our coming, and our coming and going.” 

THIS BOOK IS AVAILABLE AT YOUR LOCAL BOOKSTORE OR FROM WWW.SKBOOKS.COM

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“Sticks & Bones: Haiku and Senryu”

By Allison Douglas-Tourner

Published by YNWP

Review by Shelley A. Leedahl

$19.95  ISBN 978-1-77869-043-3

I’m fond of image-based poetry, and it’s one reason I enjoy reading poems written as haiku and senryu. Likely you remember haiku from school days: in its traditional form, it’s a three-line, seventeen-syllable nature-based poem with a five-seven-five syllable count. It conveys a single moment in which the poet suddenly sees or realizes something. An aha! moment, if you will. Senryu is similarly structured, but it’s more concerned with human nature and often contains irony or satire. Both forms originated in Japan, and both are unrhymed.

Victoria, BC’s Allison Douglas-Tourner recently released a lovely collection, Sticks & Bones: Haiku and Senryu, which reminded me of why I enjoy these concise forms so much. It’s easy to find inspiration from the natural world on Vancouver Island, and she explains that the island’s “beaches, woods, and meadows” have long been inspiring her. Ravens, those busy gatherers of “sticks and bones,” have also stirred her to write, and the attractive cover image of her small, square-shaped book features a single raven with twigs in its beak. There’s one page-centred poem per page with ample white space surrounding it … an ideal format for these untitled poems which invite one to linger, to roll the images and sounds and metaphors around in the mind before moving on to the next one. 

Consider the tenderness, the alliteration and the metaphor in the following: 

                                                 the gentle touch

                                                 of sunlight on stone

                                                 a tiny pair of shoes

I admire the poet’s ability to think of sunlight as “a tiny pair of shoes,” and this way of seeing and presenting things differently is the hallmark of good poetry. Here’s another wonderful metaphor:

                                                 last leaf to fall …

                                                 a threadbare

                                                 handkerchief

The ellipsis directs a reader to pause and it imitates the slow journey of a leaf from branch to ground. It’s autumn as I write this, so this seasonal piece especially appeals to me, and I love the idea of a leaf, probably shot-through with holes, being a “threadbare handkerchief.” And in this fall-themed poem, I drink in the warmth and revel, again, in the delicious metaphor:

                                                   autumn sun

                                                   a slow cup of 

                                                   smoky tea  

The following poem makes me consider mother-daughter relationships that can sometimes feel like a “broken clasp”.

                                                   broken clasp—

                                                   Mom’s cool hand

                                                   on my forehead

Douglas-Tourner is also adept at personification. She has a moth in a window “[holding] the storm at bay,” and a tree “scratches/at the shutters.” She uses assonance to great advantage in a poem that juxtaposes a blinking flashlight and a cricket “that/didn’t exist”. Her skill in writing about the senses is evident in several pieces. She writes of “the mildew scent/of mice” and of “coaxing the crystal/to sing”.

Many of these meditative and meticulous poems were previously published in international journals and on blogs. I will pick this book up again and again, as whether rooted in the natural or the domestic world, these tiny poems “[give] the imagination room to breathe,” and they make an impressive emotional mark. 

THIS BOOK IS AVAILABLE AT YOUR LOCAL BOOKSTORE OR FROM WWW.SKBOOKS.COM

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“Uncut: A Cultural Analysis of the Foreskin”

By Johnathan A. Allan

Published by University of Regina Press

Review by Shelley A. Leedahl

$32.95  ISBN 9-781779-4003307

    

Uncut: A Cultural Analysis of the Foreskin is a well-researched interdisciplinary book by Manitoba professor Jonathan A. Allan, and though it’s structured like most academic books I’ve read—with an introduction, an appendix, an impressive bibliography and index, and conclusions at the end of each chapter—the subject matter is completely unique, and perhaps not one my aunt will be discussing in her book club. Uncut gets up close and personal with foreskins. It includes the age-old debates concerning circumcision; aesthetics; the penis in art; the topic of cut/uncut sexuality; foreskin restoration; and it speaks of “the ongoing fear of the foreskin, since the foreskin is so absent from American culture.” 

Allan’s no stranger to sensitive topics. The Canada Research Chair in Men and Masculinities at Brandon University previously authored Reading from Behind: A Cultural Analysis of the Anus. I was curious to learn why he writes about “really rather odd topics”—like the pros and cons of foreskins—and found my answer in his introduction: 

     While it may be tempting to dismiss the foreskin as an irrelevant object of

     study, I argue the contrary by demonstrating not only how divisive debates

     about removing the foreskin have become, but also by showing ongoing

     confusion and curiosity about the foreskin.

He writes that “The medicalization of circumcision began in earnest in the nineteenth century,” as it was alleged that uncut males were more inclined to masturbate, which, it was believed, could lead to a host of medical ailments, including asthma and deafness. Today, most readers are likely aware of the debates for and against circumcision. The “for” camp cite reasons including medical, hygiene, religion, aesthetics (some parents want their infant boys to look like Dad), and even locker room bullying. The “intactivists” consider the pain and “mutilation” of the act, potentially decreased sexual pleasure, and economics, too, can play into the decision not to circumcise: in Canada, only Manitoba still covers the procedure, if completed within “the first twenty-eight days of life.”

Allan further states this his “interest is very much in the division and how the foreskin is represented and understood,” and he does a fine job of proving that division via a wide variety of resources, from Sex and the City quotes (“there was so much skin. It was like a Shar-Pei”) to Dr. Spock’s revised advice on circumcision (“he decided it was no longer necessary”). 

In his analysis of pregnancy/parenting books, he found that overall the advice re: circumcision is that the choice should ultimately be left up to the parents. The writer also found that bodily “norms” are in flux, and points to bodies in the history of art, ie: David and in pornography. 

The author presents an extensive and balanced debate re: the pros and cons of foreskins. Unlike pro-circumcision Charlotte in Sex and the City, Allan “[flips] the narrative that the foreskin is ugly, and instead [argues] that the foreskin is beautiful,” and he writes that “perhaps we ought to just leave the foreskin alone.”    

THIS BOOK IS AVAILABLE AT YOUR LOCAL BOOKSTORE OR FROM WWW.SKBOOKS.COM

 

 

Three Reviews: Soulworm by Edward Willet; Releasing Your Need to Please: Escaping Romantic Relationships with Narcissistic Women by James Butler; and Get Your Footprints Out Of My Garden by K.J. Moss

"Soulworm "

by Edward Willett

Published by Shadowpaw Press Reprise

Review by Shelley A. Leedahl

$22.99  ISBN 978-1-989398-80-7

 

I missed it the first time, but what’s old is new again—Aurora Award-winning author Edward Willett’s YA fantasy novel, Soulworm, has been auspiciously re-released. What a treat to read the book that launched the prolific Regina writer’s impressive career in 1997, especially as I’ve so enjoyed his subsequent books. And prolific is an understatement: the heralded author, publisher, podcaster, actor and singer has written more than sixty books, including science fiction and nonfiction titles.

The opening scene of Willett’s new and revised edition immediately pulled this reader in: it’s 1984, near Weyburn, SK, and seven paragraphs into the story, three teens are in a horrific car accident. After the “car rolled six times in a welter of mud and water, tortured metal, and breaking glass,” it landed upright, and, hauntingly, Van Halen was still “blasting, the thump of the bass like a club pounding the ground.” Exceptional writing. And that’s what one can expect from this seasoned writer, all the way through this adrenalin-charged tale.

The story’s simultaneously old-school otherworldly—complete with torches, a tower and drawbridge—and rooted in Earthly details. Sixteen-year-old Liothel is an “Acolyte” in female-only Wardfast Mykia. It’s 2967. She was orphaned as a baby and thus has never known a true, loving family, though she’s surrounded by other Acolytes, Warders (those who’ve Manifested their Talent(s) of “Detection” …. and/or “Exorcism”), “Sentinels” and her beloved chief tutor, aging Jara.

Liothel’s a late-bloomer: she wonders if she will ever Manifest a Talent, necessary for “[contributing] directly to Mykia’s most important work, the continuing battle against the soulworms.” The eponymous “evil” soulworms “live to eat and reproduce … they thrive on negative emotions … infiltrate their victims, influence their actions …. Feed, and grow; and then, when the time is right, in a paroxysm of physical violence, they spawn … and the cycle repeats.” Creator forbid one ever finds its way to “violent” Earth, the “parallel world,” through the hole that’s “hidden, guarded, and watched,” because it would thrive in the here and now. Lionel’s daily life is “unchanging,” apart from witnessing the odd exorcism, but soon there’s a new teenaged Acolyte (and new roommate) in Mykia. Before we return to Weyburn, we’re introduced to Kalia—and Liothel’s instantly wary of the battered refugee.  

Most of the story does take place in the “real” world. I won’t reveal the connection, but will tell you that on Earth, accident survivors and former best friends Maribeth and Christine are no longer themselves. After waking from a two-month coma, Maribeth suffers “moments of oddness,” and the television “[makes] her pulse race.” Christine’s flipped her proverbial lid, and heads up a new gang called the “Ice Devils.” Fortunately, new student Adam, becomes Maribeth’s ally … and more.

Willett’s rich imagination and his almost magical ability to create stories that simultaneously straddle the world we know—fluorescent lights, football, and all— and the unique one he authentically creates is the reason he’s gained so many fans, and I am surely among them.          

THIS BOOK IS AVAILABLE AT YOUR LOCAL BOOKSTORE OR FROM THE SASKATCHEWAN PUBLISHERS GROUP WWW.SKBOOKS.COM

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“Releasing Your Need To Please: Escaping Romantic Relationships with Narcissistic Women”

Written by James Butler

Published by Wood Dragon Books

Review by Shelley A. Leedahl

$21.99 ISBN 9-781990-863301

 

I wanted to review Releasing Your Need To Please: Escaping Romantic Relationships with Narcissistic Women because of the premise. It’s unusual, in my experience, to read about female narcissism, but Saskatoon counsellor and author James Butler writes that there’s a “growing phenomenon of women who perpetuate narcissistic abuse.” The men they’re in relationship with are the “pleasers,” and Butler says the only way for a pleaser to live a happy, healthy life is to leave the narcissistic relationship. “If … you are looking for help to escape your toxic relationship, this book is definitely for you,” the disclaimer states. The self-help book’s purpose is “to offer information about how to get out of unfixable, unsustainable, dangerous relationships.” Pleasers must break the “never-ending cycle” of “manipulation and accommodation,” once and for all, and Butler advises them to “lawyer up before [they] plan to escape.”  

It can be a “disease to please.” Narcissists and pleasers attract one another because of a deep need for love and acceptance that, Butler maintains, they didn’t get enough of as children. He speaks frequently of the “trauma bond”—“The connection created by the repetitive cycle of neediness and pleasing between a narcissist and a pleaser.” Pleasers continually repress their own thoughts, wants and needs to accommodate their partners’. Again, he points to child-parent relationships: “Since his emotional needs were rarely met, [the pleaser] did not learn that his feelings, wants, and needs mattered. In order to emotionally survive he had to please …”  A “desperate need for external validation” from one’s partner demonstrates an insecure attachment style.

Butler refrains from using the word “victim,” as he believes everyone has a choice to leave or stay. Choice equals power. It’s integral to “[get] honest with yourself,” however difficult that is, and to learn “the skills of disengagement and detachment.” Trusting one’s self is key.  

Doesn’t everyone know a narcissist and a pleaser? Narcissists feel “empty, lonely, powerless and needful,” Butler writes. Like pleasers, they have serious self-esteem issues. In relationship, they can be “irresponsible, controlling, volatile, manipulative, and unstable.” Pleasers are “adept at rationalizing the abusive relationship …. in order to repress deep trauma and fears of confronting the perceived pain of separation.” They “normalize” their mate’s control over them, blame themselves, and often believe that if they remain agreeable, she will change.

I feel it’s fair to say that many people believe that even a toxic relationship—rife with “confusion, anxiety, self-doubt, defeat, worthlessness, mental anguish, panic attacks, and loss of identity”—is better than being alone, so they continue to repress themselves rather than doing the hard work (including the “legitimate suffering of grief”) necessary to “escape the hell that has become their comfort zone.” Fear of abandonment is huge, and it ruins lives.  

I appreciated the occasional anecdotes in this thought-provoking text, and learned that “turning the mirror around” is an important step in regaining one’s power. Why? Because “Creating happiness and love is an inside job.” Sage advice from an inspiring, experienced professional.   

THIS BOOK IS AVAILABLE AT YOUR LOCAL BOOKSTORE OR FROM THE SASKATCHEWAN PUBLISHERS GROUP WWW.SKBOOKS.COM

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“Get Your Footprints Out of My Garden”

Written by K.J. Moss

Published by Wood Dragon Books

Review by Shelley A. Leedahl

$19.99 ISBN 9-781990-863509

 

Poetry can sometimes be obscure and leave readers feeling that they just don’t “get” the work, and thus, they’re unable to connect with it. No one could accuse Moose Jaw resident Karran Moss, a longtime Registered Massage Therapist and new poet, of writing ambiguous work: the poems in her fifty-piece collection, Get Your Footprints Out Of My Garden, are clear-eyed, plain-spoken and easily understandable.

Moss explains in her introduction that at age twelve, during a Grade Seven school trip, she was “trapped in an elevator with a predator.” Further trauma occurred when a “well-meaning group of people” tried “to ‘pray’ the trauma out of [her],” which served only to exacerbate her PTSD: “religion became a trauma trigger,” she writes, and this collection is her “journey of growth and healing.” During therapy, “these poems started flying out of [her] soul.” As she continued working on her diagnosed c-PTSD (Complex Post Traumatic Stress Disorder) with a psychologist, the healing began. The tone and “frenzy” of the poems changed, and her “life started to make sense.”

The vulnerable and hopeful meditations are organized into three sections, “Trauma,” “Healing,” and “Living,” and of these, I found the poems in the “Trauma” section the strongest. Here the poet speaks to her inner child, and the first poem begins with the effective line: “And just like that my world crumbles.” She outlines the transformation in her personality after the elevator incident, and over the course of the poem she self-talks her way toward peace and health. “You are a powerful beautiful soul,” she writes, and “You can manage this life. Find the light.” In the next poem her anger is evident. Of her abuser, she writes “You suck the life out of kids.” She says: “The rats and the serpents/can feast on you,” and she calls him “Festering puss.”

Too many girls have to live with the devastating effects of childhood sexual abuse, and among the saddest outcomes is that they’re robbed of childhood joy. In “Dear 12-Year-Old Self,” Moss begins: “Dear little brown-eyed girl./I lost you” and assures her inner child that she is “A caged animal about to have a new life.” A happy life. Sensory pleasures—ie: “subtle shifts in the wind—represent newfound joy, and a mind’s “Full of little listens.”

Another consequence of trauma is difficulty with interpersonal relationships, and Moss examines this in poems that reveal that though she “push[es] people away,” she doesn’t “want anyone to go.” A kind of exorcism of negative thoughts, habits and relationships is unveiled. A twenty-year marriage is examined, a stalker addressed. A healthier woman emerges.

The puzzle of putting herself back together is a challenge, but the poet is “so close to putting it all together.” Through stillness, deep breathing, therapy and writing, Moss survives and is on her way to thriving. Once “a lifeless broken glass” that was “not capable of holding any form,” the poet learns that her “authentic self is a masterpiece,” and as readers, we can celebrate with her.

THIS BOOK IS AVAILABLE AT YOUR LOCAL BOOKSTORE OR FROM THE SASKATCHEWAN PUBLISHERS GROUP WWW.SKBOOKS.COM