Four Book Reviews: Smith, Banks, Buffie, Wood

“Time After Time”

by Gaye Smith

Published by Your Nickel’s Worth Publishing

Review by Shelley A. Leedahl

$19.95  ISBN 978-1-927756-49-2

  

Before I even opened Time After Time, a colouring book (for mature colourers) by Lipton SK artist and all-round creative powerhouse Gaye Smith, I did some internet research. That may seem strange, for here I was about to review a book without text …shouldn’t it be, like, easy-peasy? I was vaguely aware that adult colouring books had become a hot new phenomenon, and I wanted to know why.

Turns out it’s about de-stressing. What I learned is that like reading, or doing jigsaw puzzles, or knitting, when we focus on the activity of colouring it calms the mind and takes our focus away from worries, while simultaneously stimulating motor skills, senses, and creativity. There’s a crossover with mindfulness and mantras: “Activities in which the brain is engaged just enough to stop it whirring, but not so much that the concentration is draining.” (The Guardian)

The writer of a June 2015 article (in The Guardian) reported that “Five of Amazon’s top 10 last week were adult colouring-in books, as were six of Brazil’s top 10 non-fiction list. Last year in France, the combined colouring-in industry sold 3.5m books.” Apparently it’s a universal phenomenon, captivating folks from all walks of life. Psychologists are studying it. An Algerian doctor stated that colouring books helped him lick severe depression. They’re huge in China. There are Facebook sites dedicated to this. Apps. And there are intricately-designed books galore.

Would Smith’s Time After Time meet the unspoken promise to keep me in a calm, focused zone? I opened the softcover (approximately 9 x 12”) and was bedazzled. Many of the images, including the cover image, depict a fantastical landscape with water; hills; ringed cones (trees); flowers; insects; hobbit-type homes; all-sorts-ish candy; and creatures, all graphically designed with swirls, stripes, dots, circles, checks, and squiggles (this sounds like a children’s poem). I can imagine the fun she had creating these images, and wonder if she imagined the adults who might take felt pen to paper and fill in the blanks while the prescient concerns of their worlds melted away like ice cream.

There are twenty-four images (not counting covers, inside and out) to play with, and each graphic faces a blank page. My favourites are the full-bleed candy page-perhaps because it brings back memories of when my parents hosted card games in their smalltown SK homes and served all-sorts candy-and the dragonfly page.

I can certainly admire the art, but now it’s time to put the efficacy of “colouring as a means to lessening stress” to work. Will I feel calmer? Like a child again? I search my desk, my junk drawer: no markers or pencil crayons! And the work is too fine to attempt with wax crayons. Well, I’m all out of Big Girl things like butter and eggs, so a trip to the store is called for. While there, I’m going to swing down the stationary aisle, grab a full pack of fine-tipped markers, because to be honest, I can’t wait to try this out.   

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“Exile on a Grid Road”

by Shelley Banks

Published by Thistledown Press

Review by Shelley A. Leedahl

$12.95  ISBN 978-1-77187-057-3

   

  

Robins, grackles, gulls, airport snow geese, a Great Horned Owl, iconic chick-a-dees that eat peanuts from the palm of a hand, pigeons, Ruby-throated hummingbirds in bougainvillea. Birds flutter in and out of Exile on a Grid Road by longtime Regina writer and photographer Shelley Banks. In her inaugural poetry collection, the multi-genre scribe demonstrates that she’s also paid attention to dogs and cats, insects, rain, the myriad plants (“natives and exotics”) that grow alongside gravel roads, and, of course, to the human heart.

Why is this all important? Because life whizzes by, and most of us don’t take the time to stop and consider how a grasshopper resembles a twig on a patio gate, or how-on a grave or anywhere else in a certain season-“lumps of clay jut\through the snow”. This is the very stuff of life; it counterbalances the tedium of work-a-day lives, the horrors of cancer and chemotherapy, the shadows that deaths leave behind. It’s good and necessary to celebrate what goes on beneath the glossy surface of life, and that’s what poets like Banks do so well.

The finely-tuned poems in this book are mostly short, and Banks has employed various styles: free verse, quatrains, couplets, haiku, a prose poem, a pantoum, concrete poetry, and even a found poem, “Swordfish,” “from text describing complex patterns in number puzzles from an online Sudoku Guide.” This diversity might signal that some of these pieces were written while the writer was in a poetry class, or perhaps she just enjoys the freedom of experimentation. The variety is aesthetically appealing, as is the range in subject matter.   

“Greed” is among the poet’s many considerations. An octogenarian is greedy for “dregs of wine, the last peanut skins,” and Banks examines the greediness of the photographer who’s compelled to “capture” the image of an owl and satisfy her “need not to believe\but prove this presence”. She continues:

     and the memory of the great

     owl’s soaring grace

     flounders in desire,

     reduced

     to just another checklist photo

     lost.       

Banks is competent in the mechanics of poetry. Note that in the above excerpt (from “Raw Desire”) she’s placed “reduced” and “lost” on their own. This gives these words more weight, so they reverberate and meaning is heightened. Great care’s also taken with line breaks in this collection: end-line words “swing” backward and forward, giving lines double meaning and impact. Phrases like “the clouds slate\submarines patrolling the horizon” and “a galaxy of farms” demonstrate originality and grace.

The “bird-stained window” in “The Strike Drags On” is, for this reader, an ideal metaphor for this accomplished collection. The poet is an acute observer (the window), who records and shares personal observations and experiences in poems that sometimes whisper, sometimes sing, and sometimes howl. Yes, there are “stains,” and that’s the reality of anyone’s flight through this world, but there is also joy, and praise .. for the moments, for oranges, for snow melt, and “one light\far off\along the wingtip”.

These are poems to let steep, and read again.  

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

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“Let Us Be True”

by Erna Buffie

Published by Coteau Books

Review by Shelley A. Leedahl

$19.95  ISBN 9-781550-506358

   

The unceasing mystery of “family” is at the heart of many a novel, and in Let Us Be True, Manitoba-based Erna Buffie employs a variety of characters to explore this complex subject across generations. When one considers how we often hurt those closest to us-including our kin-it’s easy to question whether blood is indeed thicker than water.

Buffie kicks this novel off on a WW2 battlefield. Henry’s a young soldier who doesn’t regret the death of his hometown comrade, as it frees up that soldier’s girl. He knows that Pearl “won’t be an easy woman to love, but he can’t think of anything else he would rather do.” In the chapters that follow-and through the voices of her two adult daughters and others-we learn that Henry pegged it: foul-mouthed, sour, and seemingly heartless, Pearl’s a difficult woman to like, let alone love.

In chapter two we meet the force that is Pearl Calder. Now seventy-four, she’s clearing out anything extraneous after Henry’s death, including items others might keep for sentimental reasons. Good details here help us understand these characters, ie: Henry kept a Tony the Tiger glass collection. “He’d collected with every refill at the Esso station, the one where he’d worked for more than thirty-five years.” And how about this for Pearl’s telephone answering machine message: “Is this thing working, Henry? Henry! Oh, hell, just leave us a message and I’ll try to figure it out.” Hilarious.

Early on, Pearl’s discarding her dresses: “They didn’t fit any more. Size twelve. When was the last time she’d seen a size twelve? The last time one of the girls got married, and it had taken her twelve months of dieting to get there. And for what? Two divorces, one right after the other, and two mother-of-the-bride dresses she’d never wear again.” I love the realism in this.   

Clearly, Pearl’s not close to her girls, and they’re not close to each other. Darlene’s a university professor in a relationship with Athena. Pearl believes this “silly ass” elder daughter “could use a bit of lightening up”. (Pearl’s especially fond of describing people and things as “silly”). The crotchety protagonist attacks her other daughter, Carol, for her pride in her fancy house, where she lives “with her two spoiled sons and that bland, blond-haired milquetoast she’d married.”    

Pearl mostly communicates via rant, whereas Henry, the daughters’ favourite, was much softer. She admits that she had “spent quite a bit of their married life shouting nasty things at Henry ....” Her place was for “bitching and scolding,” while Henry was for “fun and play.”

There are several twists and turns, shadows and secrets in Buffie’s debut book. Does Pearl’s dark history justify her coldness? Does she have any redeeming qualities? And how much do our parents’ experiences impact upon the adults we become?  

In life there are always more questions than answers. Let Us Be True is a book that lays it all out, and leaves it up to readers to make their own judgements.       

        

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

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“Love is Not Anonymous”

by Jan Wood

Published by Thistledown Press

Review by Shelley A. Leedahl

$12.95  ISBN 978-1-77187-056-6

   

  

It’s a happy coincidence when a poet’s name reflects one of his or her subjects. As I read Love is Not Anonymous, one of four books released as part of Thistledown Press’s 12th New Leaf Editions Series, I discovered that Jan Wood is an example of this synergy. Wood calls Big River SK home–anyone who knows this heavily-treed area will understand the name\leitmotif connection-and while the book’s back cover blurb addresses the poet’s handling of love, relationships and spirituality, I keep returning to the poems that indirectly honour the natural world.

Among these is “Awakening,” where the narrator’s night-driving on a rain-slick road, and “at the edge of the swamp-spruce” a bull moose appears. Though the poet tries to capture a decent photograph where “the Northern Saskatchewan forest\intertwines with moose, muskeg and sky,” her “Details of the night are\a thousand apertures and nothing”. She becomes philosophical in the final stanza, and it’s this layering-the real world of a bridge and rain and headlights juxtaposed against what it may all mean in the big picture-that marks this poem a success.

     Clumsily human, I teeter

     on the edge of oneness

     slow my breath until

     the beauty I behold can bear my weight.

More evidence of Wood’s fine way with the natural world is revealed in metaphors and personification. “Ringed moon in a January sky\a pale tambourine,” she writes in “Elle”. In “Dangerous as Whiskey,” which I’m assuming to be a spring poem, “water has its hands all over\the morning” and “night drips with a language\that it dares not speak.” Sometimes there’s a confluence of natural and religious images, as in this dandy from  “communion”: “on Sundays a week’s supply of holy\melts on her tongue like a snowflake”. This, friends, is first-rate poetry.

I know the poet’s doing her job when she writes so evocatively of winter I find myself missing the snow and engaging in prairie-type activities, like skating. Wood’s poem “Skating in the Exit Light” features a twelve-year-old girl and a boy she’s interested in sneaking into the rink to steal some alone time-and figure eights-on the ice.

In several of these poems we’re given the poetic outline of an event and are called upon to use our imaginations to fill in the details. Some are more forthcoming, like “Duplex,” with its theme of domestic abuse. For those new to reading poetry, I advise reading the back cover copy and perhaps the publisher’s online notes (if available) about the work before beginning a book; poetry is often spare, and the aforementioned texts can provide helpful hints on the content.

Finally, a word about this book’s gorgeous cover. The photograph of a female statue (perhaps representative of the biblical Mary?) among red-berried conifers could be enough to make anyone grab this book off a shelf. I hope you do just that.     

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

Review of Alix Hawley's All True Not A Lie In It (and woohoo! ... the novel's shortlisted for the Giller!)

All True Not a Lie in It

Written by Alix Hawley

Published by Alfred A. Knopf Canada

Review by Shelley A. Leedahl

$29.95  ISBN 978-0-345-80855-4

 

 

 

 

     Being of the slightly suspicious sort, I will refrain from making predictions about chief juries’ receptions of All True Not A Lie In It, and simply state that if the acutely-etched portrait Alix Hawley paints of American pioneer Daniel Boone even faintly resembles the real man, a stronger spirit has rarely roamed this earth.

     Here is quintessential Boone: “I thin down to sinew, I feel strung like a bow … I fashion myself a real bow and some arrows with saplings and gut … I shoot a wildcat with it just as it considers tensing to spring at me … It falls, shot clean. Killing it so, without touching it or hurting it, is a beauty to me, there is no other like it. I love that bow sending its quick arrow to the heart just as if it is stopping time.” The unlikely combination of fierce wanderlust and waxing poetic squarely hits the mark.

     In her foreword to this ambitious and mesmerizing first novel, Hawley writes that she knew little of this “slippery character, a peculiar mix of famous and forgotten” before she began scoring his tale. To that I say this: holy research, and readers: Take Notice Now. The frighteningly talented Kelowna writer (and Okanagan College professor) seized this reader like a rider on a fly-past horse; it is indeed difficult to reconcile that Hawley herself has only graced this earth since 1975.

      “Your sister is a whore,” the fictional story begins. These five words set both the book’s elegiac tone and introduce us to one of Boone’s three families—his childhood, Quaker family; his own wife and progeny; and the Shawnee family he is adopted into. All figure prominently. Central to Boone’s character is the early death of his elder brother, Israel. “Dan” drags a litany of dead with him, as if on a leash. He is similarly haunted by familial misdeeds (his grandfather built the Quaker Meeting House in Exeter, Pennsylvania “as a penance” for his “whoring” in England before arriving in America), and by the wild reputation that precedes him (his “woodman’s prowess” and “nobility of character” are propelled by Will, who tails him from childhood on and widely publishes accounts of Boone’s life), but Boone’s greatest ghost is his burning lust for settling paradisiacal Kentucky. Folks, there’s a lot going on.

     Hawley writes in First Person: “I watch for anything to shoot. Anything. I watch for signs, for tracks, for moving shadows, for twitches in the trees and grass”. From his earliest days, the larger-than-life protagonist possesses a hyper-aware ability to “follow the animals’ thoughts”. His own poetic and philosophical thoughts are often revealed in short bursts, which serve to emulate the bursting dramas that define his legendary life.

      Perhaps the author’s greatest talent lies in her cinematic ability to manipulate the focus and pacing. She handily moves between the everyday (ie: young Boone “suck[s] in the kitchen-garden smell of onions and graves” at his grandfather’s stone house) and between Boone’s rich interior life, and between the landscapes and brutal battles he experiences as he restlessly crisscrosses the early map of America. There is no peace for this man: he was fired up early on by Israel’s admonition to do as he likes. Our hero feels “Forting up is rotten,” and he “hate[s] wagoning down to the pit of [his] gut,” thus he repeatedly takes off in various configurations: alone, with his adventurous counterparts, or dragging his family and fellow pioneers along behind him in their “clanking parade” of carts, livestock, and “children always falling out of their baskets”.   

     The detailing is spectacular: “Under the splintery red face on the sign for The Indian Queen tavern, a man pukes neatly and then deposits a backgammon piece in the puddle.” Hawley’s not one to avert a graphic scene. There is a scalping “How To,” and she writes of Boone and company’s hazing-like torture—which includes running a gauntlet, being dunked in icy river water, and having fistfuls of hair wrenched from their skulls by Shawnee women—with such credibility one veritably experiences the pain.

     Although Boone’s cleverly portrayed in all of his man’s-manliness, Hawley equally reveals his flipside. The portrayals of this complex man as beguiled suitor (especially the slow-motion scene of Boone’s future wife sitting in a tree picking cherries) and loving father (particularly when he cuddles with his “far too old for this” son before a campfire) are well worth owning the book for.    

     Daniel Boone, as both history and Hawley attest, possessed an innate aptitude for not getting killed … by the Shawnee, Iroquois and Cherokee, by British and French soldiers, by cold, starvation, wild animals, and by his own omnipresent grief. “I am an empty house where sounds echo and have nothing to catch upon,” he confesses, after being separated from his true family for far too long. They have become “like a set of knives stuck in me and pulled out again, leaving holes.”

     Here is a prediction I do feel safe in making: All True Not A Lie In It will make an indelible mark.      

    

Shelley A. Leedahl is a multi-genre writer in Ladysmith, BC. Her latest book is the essay collection I Wasn’t Always Like This (Signature Editions, Winnipeg).

Four New Book Reviews: Butala, Besel, Haensel and Stehwien

“Wild Rose”

Written by Sharon Butala

Published by Coteau Books

Review by Shelley A. Leedahl

$21.95 ISBN 9-781550-506365

     After completing Sharon Butala’s epic new novel Wild Rose, I closed the book and thought: This is why she’s on CanLit’s “A” list. If you’re in the mood for getting completely swept up in a female pioneer’s adventure–and this means fully empathizing with the young Québécois idealist, Sophie, as she sets out in 1884 for the West and the freedom it signifies–then buckle up, because Butala assuredly leads readers back in time to a landscape where “the sun [pours] itself over everything: horses, the hats of the men, the few women’s entangling skirts, the children’s round eager faces, the …already weathered false-fronted buildings, piles of all kinds of goods on the ground from walking plows to stained sacks … to the teams of horses, the train itself …”.

     Butala has a masterly way with landscape, making it, too, feel like a character you enjoy spending time with. Given her many years of living on the Prairies-plus the fine craft she’s already demonstrated with sixteen highly-revered titles, including GG-nominated fiction and nonfiction-she comes by this gift honestly. This is a writer who’s experienced “a yellow wildflower quivering under the weight of a bee” and looked out to see “only grass and more grass, hills and more low, softly sloping hills repeating themselves until they reached the far, light-filled, wavering horizon.” I assume there were winters when she, like her realistic protagonist, felt that people “were nothing out here in the West … barely human beings here, just helpless animals in thrall to the unimaginable, implacable force that nature was showing itself to be.”

     Yes, the three big players in effective fiction - character, plot and setting – each get full marks in this cinematic book, set in “tiny, unprosperous Bone Pile,” but it’s Sophie’s rich interior life – the questioning of her Roman Catholic faith, her family, and what it is to be a woman; the reckoning with her unimagined challenges (including the shame of having her husband leave her, penniless and with a child); and the self-actualization she achieves in the story’s conclusion–that elevate this novel and should have it earning awards.   

 

     Butala’s capture of how an immigrant might feel upon arriving in a new land and culture – without language skills – seems both topical and, again, experienced. Sophie has the added challenge of coming from a privileged family–she was raised with a cook and housekeeper in the home–and thus has much to prove on the unforgiving prairie homestead, desperately breaking clumps of soil and carrying pails of water a mile so she might grow vegetables; and later, devising how she’ll provide for herself and her son after her husband abandons them.

     

    The distinct chapters, reeled out between past and present, offer clues to how forward-thinking Sophie came to make the choices she did, and the last paragraph is so fittingly wrought I cannot imagine it any other way.

     Wild Rose is a fully-realized and gloriously wild ride of a novel. It is a triumph, in every way.  

   

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

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“Lessons from a Nude Man”

Written by Donna Besel

Published by Hagios Press

Review by Shelley A. Leedahl

$18.95 ISBN 9-781926-710303

     “I hadn’t seen a penis in ten years.” So begins the first and title story in Donna Besel’s diverse collection, deliciously titled Lessons from a Nude Man. The Manitoba author, who previously published many stories in the respected literary journal Prairie Fire, identifies as a “boreal writer,” and indeed several stories make reference to activities and items only those who’ve experienced boreal \ northern climes might be familiar with, ie: the danger of hitting moose on the highway, or slipping into Sorrel boots when the temperature drops into danger zones. My hometown is Meadow Lake, SK; I can relate, but I also recommend this book to anyone who enjoys well-written and entertaining stories, regardless of where they call home.

     The crown jewel (pardon the pun) here is the title story. It had me laughing aloud, and I can imagine this tale being a huge crowd-pleaser at public readings. A 50-something woman supplements her widow’s pension by operating a B and B from her rural home, and in her online listing she’s included that she welcomes “alternatives.” She had “intended to solicit gays, artists, organic food-eaters, pagans,” and what she got was Roland, from Yorkton, who wants to inspect the property for a prospective week-long stay with his “group”. A few minutes after he arrives he says: “Can I take off my pants? So you can get a sense of it …” He then “shucked off his jeans and launched into an explanation of naturist philosophy.”

     The hilarity in this story-and others in the book, including “Hawksley Workman and the Worst Motel in Canada,” seems entirely natural, not forced. One would think that comedy is Besel’s oeuvre, but she’s equally adept at revealing life’s darker side. Stories concerning physical and sexual abuse in the nine-story collection are juxtaposed against stories about teaching Hutterite children, and a woman’s summer spent as a carpenter’s helper: “I remember the smell of marijuana, the echoing rumble of dynamite, the heavy Mennonite lunches, and the long hours we spent pounding on unyielding cement.”

     In “Fare Well,” where we find an abused woman crying in bed, her face buried in the sheets, the author writes: “Her head bobbed into the thin material-silent, but violent movements, like a swimmer breast-stroking into the waves.” This is strong writing. In the same story the protagonist is “booted face-down into half-frozen compost. By a stupid deer.”

     The first-time author takes readers on various road trips, and her evocations of a changing world are bang on. A character states how at one time Ontario resorts “might have catered to weekend anglers and families who liked dinky cabins or trailer villages. But these tourists had disappeared. The new ones wanted hot tubs, hot showers, hot bars, water slides and zip lines.” True thing.  

     This work is fresh and exciting, and I can’t wait to read the “Motel Hell” (my words) story to a friend; Besel’s account of a family staying in the “Worst Motel in Canada” are alone worth buying this book for.          

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

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“The Other Place”

Written by Regine Haensel

Published by Serimuse Books

Review by Shelley A. Leedahl

$12.00 ISBN 978-603-8919-58-3

     Regine Haensel’s first collection of stories, The Other Place, is so easy to read, one need only invest a few hours, yet the compelling linked stories and their credible protagonist – Greta, a young German immigrant – remain with the reader in the way one can still feel the warmth after a good friend has been to visit.

     Firstly, the book is physically enjoyable to read. The double-spaced lines are literally easy to see, and the paper used is noticeably whiter than in most books, so the black print stands out. This is rare and especially welcome. The attractive cover features multi-coloured circles (slightly reminiscent of a Spirograph design) against a lime green background, and offers no clue – not a bad thing! – as to what’s inside: nine stories about introspective Greta’s often difficult assimilation into a small prairie community. In her words, she “Wanted to get good at forgetting sad things.” 

     I believe Saskatoon-based Haensel has drawn deeply from her own personal experience, as a quick internet search reveals that she was born in Germany and moved to Canada in the 1950’s. Her work’s been recognized with several Saskatchewan literary awards, magazine and anthology publications, and CBC broadcasts: in short, she writes exceedingly well. Indeed, it would seem that as a child the author was taking notes on her experience, for these stories deliver images and events so convincingly they ring of memory.

     In this excerpt from “Goldenrod,” eight-year-old Greta is discovering her new rural landscape: “Land rushed away to meet sky, blue and dusty green undulating together in the distance, surging back, wind whipping my dress, then gone. Stillness like listening, like waiting.” This smacks of poetry, and may seem beyond the “voice” of a child, but in Greta’s case I believe it; the author has done such a fine job of characterization, I’m assured that the observant and mature-for-her-age main character would respond to the land in this way.

     The stories, all told in First Person, shed light on cultural challenges, ie: Greta’s shame about her long, braided hair (her female classmates sport short styles); her clothing (“dirndl skirts and aprons”; the other girls wear pants); and even the torte her mother makes, which is so unlike the apple pie her friend Susie’s mother serves. Greta emulates her classmates: “I practiced Susie’s laugh and the way Janet tossed her head.” So realistic.

     Greta’s father is the hired man for Mr. Bradley, and the immigrant family is at the mercy of the Bradleys for everything from accommodation to fresh chicken and Greta’s ride to school. The girl dreams of having her own room, and short hair. Some wishes materialize: in this passage Greta considers her shorn braid, which her mother’s stored in a dresser: “Sometimes I would take it out and look at it by myself, this piece of hair that had once been a part of me. How strange, I thought, it doesn’t look like it belongs to anyone or anything now.”            

     Lovely writing, fresh insights. A book very much-enjoyed.      

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

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“Fritz Stehwien: A Retrospective”

Written by Barbara Stehwien

Published by Landscape Art Publishing

Review by Shelley A. Leedahl

$9.95 ISBN 9-780991-964918

      The softcover book Fritz Stehwien: A Retrospective, originally published in 1993 and later released with an updated biography, was a family affair. The book-not unlike a gallery catalogue produced to accompany a major artist’s show-is prefaced by introductions to the German-born artist’s life and work by daughter Barbara Stehwien and daughter-in-law Nancy Robinson-Stehwien. What follows is 20 attractive pages of black and white and colour images of the prolific artist’s work, including landscapes, portraits, and still-lifes.

    First, the man. In the introductions we learn that Stehwien was the quintessential artist, always ready to capture the spirit of what was around him, and as such he lived a full and interesting life. “I have not known him to go anywhere without his materials,” his daughter writes, adding that if he didn’t have everything that was required, he would “improvise using the back of painted or printed matter, even restaurant napkins.” She says he would use “any old pen rather than lose an important moment.”

     The use of “moment” here lends a clue to the value the subject of this book saw in those brief snatches of time, when perhaps the sun was only momentarily striking the leaves of a tree and making them golden, or brightening a distant field in a prairie scene, like he illustrated in his painting “Old Farmyard, 1984”.    

       The author speaks of her father’s vocation as “an inherent part” of him. “Even at family get-togethers he will not rest.” This passion is reiterated by his daughter-in-law, Nancy, who writes of the artist’s “zest for life,” the “unerring perspective evident in his rendering of buildings and cityscapes,” and “his ability to see the subject of a painting in something most of us would pass by without a second glance.”

      Now, the work. Through his spontaneous charcoal and pastel sketches;

his oil portraits; his pencil, pen, and ink drawings; woodcuts; and his acrylics-indeed it seems he covered all the media-I agree with his daughter that her father was a “versatile” and highly-skilled artist. Apparently the “powers that be” at Saskatoon City Hall believe the same, as Stehwien’s name has been added to the list of those who will one day have a city park named after them.

     I was particularly moved by the book’s front and back cover images. On the front, “Autumn at the Lake,” an atmospheric acrylic painted in 1989; and on the back, a Saskatoon winter scene, revealing children playing on a riverside hill, the Bessborough Hotel rising proudly in the background. Lovely. I also much enjoyed his precise pen and ink renderings in “Russian Peasants” (1942), “Warsaw” (1944), and my favourite (perhaps because I know the subject so well), “White Pelicans in Saskatoon” (1993). The latter made me homesick.

     The book concludes with an impressive biography. Clearly Stehwien was as generous as he was gifted: in his final year, 2008, several paintings were donated to organizations, including the Saskatoon Symphony, Open Door Society, Boys & Girl Club in Saskatoon, and to St. Paul’s Hospital Foundation.

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

Three New Reviews: Sally Meadows, Rachel Wyatt, Deana J. Driver

“The Two Trees”

Written by Sally Meadows, Illustrated by Trudi Olfert

Published by Your Nickel’s Worth Publishing

Review by Shelley A. Leedahl

$14.95 ISBN 978-1-927756-43-0

 

     I love receiving new books to review, but sometimes I can’t get to them immediately. Before I had a chance to dive into The Two Trees, a children’s book by Saskatoon writer\illustrator team Sally Meadows and Trudi Olfert, myvisiting friend, Flo, picked the book off my kitchen counter and read it.

     “What did you think?” I asked.

     “Loved it,” Flo said. “It brought tears to my eyes.”

     Any children’s story that can move an adult to tears is one I don’t want to wait another moment to read. I took the softcover book to my deck and in the few minutes it took to engage with the sensitively-written and pastel-illustrated story – about the relationship between two brothers, and the younger’s difficulty with the elder’s inability to socially interact “normally” both at home and school – I too, experienced the proverbial lump-in-throat that signifies an emotional connection’s been made.

     “Wow,” I said, “what a strong metaphor for ‘otherness’”.

     “I know,” Flo said. “And that word at the end, ‘almost’ … that’s what got me.”

     This easy-to-read story begins with the side-by-side planting of two small evergreens by the young narrator, Jaxon. “One was for me. One was for my older brother,” Jaxon says. But brother Syd is nonplussed when asked about the tree, or most anything else. He is much more interested in sharing his gemstones, for example, and he can name them all. Time and again, Syd fails to interact with his family, neighbours and classmates. He is completely absorbed in his own world – a world which includes talking to himself, tearing paper “into tiny bits,” and having temper tantrums - and thus is ostracized by other children. Eventually even Jaxon stops trying to connect, opting instead to play with those who “played back”.

     Syd lives with high-functioning Autism Spectrum Disorder, and kudos to Meadows for bringing this issue to light in a non-syrupy, full-circle story that will appeal to all ages. In her Author’s Note, Meadows - a singer\songwriter, educator and speaker, as well as a writer - explains that her book is “intended to raise awareness about the challenges of having an ASD (Autism Spectrum Disorder) child … and to be a springboard for important discussions with ASD families, educators, students, and the general public.”

     The book’s an excellent springboard indeed, complete with “Questions for Readers” and a “Recommended Reading List,” and I hope it reaches a broad audience, as it concerns one quality that can actually change societies. I’m talking about compassion, folks.

     This is a story to spread and discuss. And Flo was right about that word, ‘almost’. I encourage you to buy the book, and find out why.           

 

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

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“Street Symphony”

Written by Rachel Wyatt

Published by Coteau Books

Review by Shelley A. Leedahl

$18.95 ISBN 9-781550-506181

 

     Rachel Wyatt’s short story collection, Street Symphony, opens with an epigraph from Emily Dickinson: “‘Hope’ is the thing with feathers –That perches in the soul-”. The epigraph is wisely chosen; in several of the 17 stories the protagonists are unhappy, and for good reason -  job losses, accidents, partners’ deaths – and thus hope for a brighter tomorrow is what they cling to. These are characters for whom “The universe had tilted.”

     There’s Jason, in the story “Salvage,” who lost his wife in a car accident after they’d had a fight about her desire to get a pet fish. In the aftermath of her death Jason empties much of his furniture into a dumpster, and accidently “bakes” some of his wife’s photographs in the oven with the lasagna. “But he sat on the floor and ate it as a penance, charred paper and all. He knew now that he had to suffer in order for the world to tilt back to its proper axis.” The story is a powerful examination of grief, which can certainly defy logic, and it’s also representative of how Wyatt laces her serious and often bizarre-situation stories with humour.

     In “Pandora’s Egg,” poor Dan, a soldier who’d served in Afghanistan, returns home with a man’s body and a child’s mind. His doctors recommend “creative work” to help aid his recovery, so he makes birdhouses. Wyatt writes that he “watched endless game shows in the afternoons and slept like a child in the spare room on a nest he’d made from blankets and pillows” while his wife, Erin, struggles with their new reality.

     I found Maura, the main character in “Falling Woman,” especially credible. The woman observes another woman falling – or perhaps being pushed – off a rooftop to her death, and Maura both suppresses the urge to “Facebook” the event (and take a “selfie” with the corpse), and lets the tragedy consume her to the point of paranoia.

     Eve from “It’s Christmas, Eve,” is a widow who lies to concerned family and friends about having plans for Christmas. What they don’t know is that Eve’s husband had been unfaithful to her, a fact she did not learn until after his death. “Posthumous betrayal could eat up your heart and soul and leave no place for life,” according to her counsellor.    

     The dark matter of these stories could make for an overly heavy book if it weren’t for Wyatt’s well-placed humour, like these lines regarding the writing course that seniors Roland and Ella enrolled in: “They spent an hour going over his little attempt at narrative and by the time they were done he was exhausted and wondered why he’d sign up for this form of torture” and “When he said goodbye, he’d hugged her and whispered into her hearing aid, ‘Thank you very much.”

     Wyatt has published numerous books and has had stage plays produced in Canada, the US and the UK. Dialogue is her strong point: to hear these characters talking is sheer entertainment.

      

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

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“Cream Money: Stories of Prairie People”

Compiled and edited by Deana J. Driver

Published by DriverWorks

Review by Shelley A. Leedahl

$14.95 ISBN 978-192757019-7

 

 

     I didn’t expect this. While reading Cream Money: Stories of Prairie People, I stopped several times and thought: we have no idea. “We” being anyone who did not live in rural SK in the early to mid-1900s, when even children worked hard to ensure that life ran smoothly on the farm. It was the era of large families and tight budgets, of rolling up one’s sleeves before the school bus even arrived, and of smothering foods of all kind in rich, delicious, straight-from-the-cow cream.

     Editor Deana J. Driver has collected 29 short and interesting anecdotes (plus several black and white photographs) from Saskatchewanians - from Abbey to Yorkton - who well recall how hard they worked and how different life was in earlier times, when cream was regularly sold to creameries. 

     It was not uncommon for farmers of that time to own at least one dairy cow, and the much-needed funds earned selling cream kept many families financially afloat during lean times. Within these pages we learn about specific animals, milking techniques, the cream-separating process and equipment used, the storing and transport of this precious cream, what earnings were used for, the various ways in which cream (and skim milk) were used, and about familial and community relationships.

     There are commonalities, ie: no one expressed joy at washing the separating discs, and several writers fondly remembered some of the candies they were treated with: Cracker Jacks, Lucky Elephant popcorn, Mojos, and jawbreakers (three for a penny). More than one writer expressed gratitude at receiving a dairy cow(s) as a wedding gift. Having a mouse fall into the cream can - or learning your cow got into stinkweed and cream quality was diminished- was also commonly bemoaned.

     Bryce Burnett, from Swift Current, presented his reminiscence in the form of a an ode called “Cream Can”: “At the country dance it served as a stool for the fiddler of the band,\Or was beat upon its bottom by the sticks of a drummer’s hand.” Weyburn writer Jean F. Fahlman poetically begins: “Thick farm cream ran through rural life, a river of richness and financial survival.” I chuckled about her Jersey cow that had learned to “[suck] herself dry before milking time.”

     This is an important book, both historically and culturally, as these plain-spoken reminiscences preserve the stories regarding a way of life that is now decades behind us. In many ways Cream Money is a cousin to “community books,” where people also include what family members got up to and where they are now, family photos, and even journal entries.

     Leroy-born Jerry Holfeld sums the experience up nicely: “In my young mind [dairy farming] seemed time-consuming and inconvenient when compared to the profit in the whole enterprise but in thinking about it now, it was rich in regards to the memories and the thinking process … in establishing values and character based on love … obedience … and honest work …”.

     Yes, a rich time. Rich as cream.

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

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

BOOK REVIEW: The New Wascana Anthology: Poetry, Short Fiction, and Critical Prose (ed. Medrie Purdham and Michael Trussler)

“The New Wascana Anthology: Poetry, Fiction, and Critical Prose”

Edited by Medrie Purdham and Michael Trussler

Published by University of Regina Press

Review by Shelley A. Leedahl

$49.95  ISBN 978-0-88977

 

     I've said it before: the beauty of an anthology – and particularly a multi-genre example, like the The New Wascana Anthology, is that readers can sample from a veritable banquet of hand-picked work. This book represents a “best of” combination of two earlier “Wascana” anthologies (poetry and short fiction), plus other important and entertaining work. Editors Merie Purdham and Michael Trussler’s intent was “to preserve the strengths of the earlier anthologies” and “add a variety of new selections to make a textbook that would be especially amenable to the twenty-first-century classroom.”     

     Within these 551 pages you’ll discover popular works from the canon (American, British, and Canadian) sitting shoulder-to-shoulder with pieces by contemporary Canadians, including many of Saskatchewan’s finest (current or former residents), including Lorna Crozier, Patrick Lane, Gerald Hill, Karen Solie, and newcomer Cassidy McFadzean, b. 1989. You may find yourself remembering poetic lines from Shakespeare, Wordsworth or Dickinson, and then be pleased to shake the metaphorical hand of contemporary short story writers like Eden Robinson, Dianne Warren, Rohinton Mistry, Alexander MacLeod (his “Miracle Mile” is placed next to his father Alistair’s Macleod’s evocative east coast tale “The Boat”), and Richard Ford.

      Many will be familiar with Frost’s line “Something there is that doesn’t love a wall” or Christopher Marlowe’s “Come live with me, and be my love”. To read these again and recall the sentiment and lilt of the words was, for me, a touchstone, connecting me to the first time I read these poems in university classes. I’m all for nostalgia, but what excited much more was to be introduced to writers I’d known of but not yet read.

     The aforementioned Alexander MacLeod delivers a compelling story about the stress suffered by professional runners. The narrator muses: “If I ever have a kid, I think I’ll them [sic] participate in the grade-school track meets when they’re little, but that’s it.” He continues: “ … because it never gets better than that.” I adore the long, visceral paragraph this is pulled from, which ends thus: “Maybe the newspaper takes a picture, you and the red-haired girl, standing on the top step of a plywood podium, holding all your first-place ribbons in the middle of a weedy field while all the dandelions are blowing their fuzzy heads off.” Yes!

      Sherman Alexie’s “The Approximate Size of My Favourite Tumour” was hilarious, sad, and relatable, and had me racing to my computer to find out more about this award-winning Seattle writer. This is the true beauty of anthologies: they introduce.

      The critical prose section includes five entries, most with an ecological bent. Trevor Herriot discusses Sprague’s pipits and chestnut-collared longspurs, and Barbara Kingsolver beachcombs with a daughter while meditating on our misdirected hunger “to possess all things bright and beautiful.”

     One certainly needn’t be a student to appreciate this eclectic collection.

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