Book Review: Small Reckonings, by Karin Melberg Schwier

“Small Reckonings”

By Karin Melberg Schwier

Published by Burton House Books

Review by Shelley A. Leedahl

$20.00  ISBN 9-780994-866950

Time stopped as I read Saskatoon writer Karin Melberg Schwier’s Small Reckonings. Characters in this Watrous, SK-based historical novel – set between 1914 and 1936 – are exquisitely and sympathetically drawn, the plot moves, and the portrait of this small town and its multi-ethnic pioneers rings true and clear as windchimes in a prairie breeze. Melberg-Schwier earned the 2019 John V. Hicks Long Manuscript Award for Fiction with this story. If there be gods, she’ll be earning many more awards: Small Reckonings deserves a huge audience.

This book – inspired by true events – begins with a great dramatic hook. Who is this Nik, hanging from the barn rafters, looking “not wild-eyed [but] more as if he’d given it some consideration and just preferred to get it over and done with”? We soon meet William, an earnest homesteader from New Zealand, and his future wife, the enigmatic Louise, who uses food to quell what befell her while she worked “at an institution for the feeble-minded”. Melberg Schwier expertly creates individuated characters readers will care deeply about, including the central figure, Violet, who, at birth, looks like “a large pink spider,” and of whom the attending doctor says “‘There are places for these children.’” Equally well drawn are Violet’s doting brother, John; kind neighbour, Hank; and the Ukrainian Yuzik family. The characters struggle through the Depression years, and with the disparate lots they’ve been dealt in life.

I know Watrous well, so it was especially fun reading the descriptions of this “boomtown”. William tells Louise that “‘Watrous has wooden sidewalks now, and shops and a bakery. A very decent butcher. A poolroom and barbershop,’” and that the mineral springs possess “‘healing powers, so say the Indians’”. I can smell the “sweet scent of [Scandanavian] rosettes just pulled from hot oil,” and hear the “‘Uff da’” exclamations. I easily see the “green apron with yellow rickrack,” and I almost sneeze at the description of the schoolboy “banging erasers at arm’s length on the bottom step, a cloud of chalk dust drifting away lazily in the afternoon heat”. I transported as I read about caragana seed pods “snapping and cracking” in the sunshine, and as the lead siblings spoke of “anti-I-over” and “Simon Says”. The “forlorn autumn sound” of honking geese was like an echo.

This book succeeds so well because the writer’s learned the tricky art of literary balance, ie, as skilled as she is at penning descriptive scenes, they never slow the pacing of this taut novel. The book’s structure is nuanced, and seemingly minor details – like a fishhook caught in an eye – have resonance. The characters are people we know or can very easily imagine. Here’s Hanusia, the raw Ukrainian midwife, upon the birth of John: “‘So quick first baby! Much hair. Strong boy, good for farm work. Your husband, he will be happy.’”) And the plot? Movie potential.

“No one was ever purely good. Or purely evil,” Hank thinks. This sums up Melberg Schwier’s sensitive and riveting story. I cried. You might, too.  

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

Four Reviews: “Sauntering, Thoreau-style" by Victor Carl Friesen; “The Vivian Poems: Street Photographer Vivian Maier” by Bruce Rice; "Wheel the World: Travelling with Walkers and Wheelchairs” by Jeanette Dean; and "Until We Are Free: Reflections on Black Lives Matter in Canada” edited by Rodney Diverlus, Sandy Hudson, and Syrus Marcus Ware

“Sauntering, Thoreau-style"

Written by Victor Carl Friesen

Published by Your Nickel's Worth Publishing

Review by Shelley A. Leedahl

$25.00  ISBN 9-781988-783468

    

I embraced daily outdoor explorations decades ago, so was delighted when Rosthern, SK writer-photographer Victor Carl Friesen’s book, Sauntering, Thoreau-style, arrived in my mailbox. Friesen, a multi-genre writer, has several books behind him - including nonfiction, short stories, poetry and children’s literature - and in this latest title he revisits a favourite subject: the writer, naturalist, and legendary Massachusetts walker, Henry David Thoreau. Many will be familiar with Thoreau’s Walden - his literary response to a two-year sojourn at Walden Pond. Friesen’s book – a compilation of essays; mostly Saskatchewan photographs; poetry; and Thoreau’s own quoted, poetic observations - is an homage to Thoreau, and the images “were chosen to reflect Thoreau’s world”.   

Friesen explains that Thoreau was a highly sensorial writer who practiced activities like looking at objects with “the under part of his eye,” and “[smelling] plants before and after a rain in various stages of growth,” to get different perspectives. Thoreau’s writing itself emulated “the course of a saunter,” and Friesen writes that his subject considered the act of consciously walking in nature as an art. I understand!

The colour photographs (there’s a single black and white), interspersed between Friesen’s engaging, Thoreau-centred text, are presented like a pleasant album. Each index-card-sized photograph is centered on the page within a thin black border. Ample white space on each page gives the nature scenes a “gallery wall” effect. Lily pads, shadowed reflections, and a moose in water are among the images in the first set, titled “Waters”.

In the chapter “The Art of Sauntering,” we learn that Thoreau tried to find a balance between observing nature and attempting to “‘walk with sufficient carelessness’”. The American writer kept “a notebook in his pocket … for much of his writing was a joint product of head and legs”. Interestingly, regarding sustenance on Thoreau’s longer walks, “If he had to buy bread or milk, he would readily find some odd job to earn the necessary coin”. It’s certainly easy to comprehend why Friesen found Thoreau such a compelling character. In the photos that follow in this chapter, Friesen provides a moody photographic study of clouds, ie: pg. 39 … a proper, dark-navy sky, and a cloud dropping torrential rain on the bare, golden prairie.

Solitude was sacred to Thoreau in his walks – “[his] communion with nature was lessened if others were present” – and he was extremely fond of the Concord township area. The “‘peripatetic philosopher’” was so tuned into the natural world, the connection elicited “a feeling that he was part of the woodland world and a feeling that that world was part of him”. Friesen says aside from woodlands, seas and rivers were also integral to Thoreau: he tried to “get the sea into him” while he “[perceived] it with all his senses”.

I admire the way Friesen sees the world through his discriminating lens. Leaves, sunsets, rivers, snow, flowers … these are the stuff of Thoreau’s world, and of Friesen’s well-written and well-photographed tribute to Thoreau’s “sensuous approach to the world of nature”.

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

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“The Vivian Poems: Street Photographer Vivian Maier”

by Bruce Rice

Published by Radiant Press

Review by Shelley A. Leedahl

$20.00  ISBN 9-781989-274293

  

Choosing a subject most readers will be unfamiliar with is a risky undertaking for a poet. Will readers care about a subject they don’t know? Has enough research been done? Will the poet sufficiently engage his or her audience with this new literary territory? Regarding Bruce Rice’s The Vivian Poems: Street Photographer Vivian Maier, I say Yes, Yes, and Yes.

Rice is Saskatchewan’s Poet Laureate, and this poetic portrait of Chicago photographer Vivian Maier (d. 2009) – whom Rice first learned of via CBC Radio – is the Regina writer’s sixth poetry collection. Maier, his “obsessively private” subject, was employed as a nanny, shot diverse subjects, and died poor, leaving a “legacy of 140,000 black and white negatives, prints, undeveloped rolls of colour film, Super 8 films, and audio recordings” that would later inspire several books, documentaries and “over 60 international exhibits”. Clearly, Rice – who’s frequently inspired by art – found an intriguing subject. He credits many – including the Saskatchewan Arts Board, re: funding his research trip to Chicago – for assistance in bringing this title to fruition.

I was unfamiliar with Maier and thus turned to Rice’s Afterward to learn more before I read the poems. Maier’s early life was “spent in a kind of serial statelessness,” affected by poverty and being raised solely by her mother, a French immigrant. Rice writes: “There are things we know about her choices, her gaze, and what attracted her whether it was beautiful or not, because we recognize it in ourselves and because we are human”. This shared humanity is as good a reason – perhaps the best reason – to explore a specific life via poetry.

Rice plays with light and shadows in these poems, much like a photographer does. Words like “mirror” and “fixes” are double-entendres, and when Maier narrates, we see the details of her images, ie: a “royal blue stag/knitted crudely into [a boy’s] siwash” and also a fictionalized philosophy, ie: “there are a few kinds of punishment/a hundred kinds of shame”. It’s this pairing – everyday details and elevated thoughts – that make these poems work so well. The way the subjects quickly shift between couplets is reminiscent of ghazals. In “Human River,” personification takes the lead, ie: “the snowy breath of Manhattan” and “this weather teaches/an avenue of empty benches”. Rice gives several of Maier’s subjects the narrator’s voice, ie: in “furniture mover,” the narrator says “you’re stuck in my mirror/don’t worry lady/I’ll get you out”.  

Window washers, gutters, “white-walled Lincolns,” “gravestones and the poses/of agreeable old men” … these are the photographic and poetic terrain. Rice has fun with colour throughout the book, ie: “white babushka,” “ruby flesh,” and “clowns /in red pantaloons”.

I’ll now find Maier’s work online, and see what’s so inspired Rice to imagine sublime lines like this: “a face is a face    and it’s hard to say/who has lived well and who simply waits/for the final punctuation”. My favourite line, however, is “Some days a light touch is all you need/to know you’ve been touched”. These poems touched me.

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

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“Wheel the World: Travelling with Walkers and Wheelchairs”

Written by Jeanette Dean

Published by Your Nickel’s Worth Publishing

Review by Shelley A. Leedahl

$19.95  ISBN 9-781988-783505

 I’ve just spent a pleasant afternoon with Jeanette Dean’s book Wheel the World: Travelling with Walkers and Wheelchairs. As the entire world’s currently anchored with the Coronavirus pandemic, we need travel books like Dean’s: over a few hours and 202 pages, she took me on well-described journeys around the globe, across Canada, and through my home province of Saskatchewan while I practiced social isolation on my comfortable couch. The title infers that this might be a “How To” book, but I’m suggesting it’s a wonderful armchair- adventure title for people with mobility issues or fully able bodies.  

Dean and her husband, Christopher Dean, are British-born educators – now retired – who share passions for travel and photography. Saskatoon’s been home since 1966, and there Jeanette spent twenty-two years teaching at the R.J.D. Williams School for the Deaf. In her latter years, Dean’s arthritis has seen her transition from walker to wheelchair, but these challenges have not metaphorically slowed her one iota. She states: “Above all, this book is intended as an expression of the joy of travelling itself, regardless of the challenges.” Yes, there are many tips for travelers with mobility issues, ie: cruise ship passengers can take accessible taxis at ports-of-call, and design their own tours; England’s cobblestone streets don’t lend themselves well to mobility aids; and one can take a handicap parking permit anywhere in the world, and it’ll be valid. Dean rightly states that maneuvering around the Cavendish, PEI beaches or across the rocks at Peggy’s Cove would be hard-going for those with mobility issues. She advises mobility-challenged travelers not to slow group travel or put extra stress on tour guides. Planning, she advises, is the key to successful travel for those with limited mobility, and one should “recognize what [one] cannot do easily and enjoy the rest without whining”.

I made copious notes while reading this well-written, interesting, and often light-hearted book. I reminisced as Dean described places I’d been, ie: Melbourne and Moose Jaw, and made notes about the destinations I’d like to visit. Dean’s anecdotes about a “safari-like park” in small-town Glen Rose, the River Walk district in San Antonio, and Moody Gardens in Galveston compel me to visit Texas. Similarly, the couples’ tour of National Trust properties in England appeals. The “leafy lanes of Kent” led to the one-time private home of Winston Churchill (“As we walked through the Grecian colonnade at the back of the house, we could easily imagine him pacing back and forth as he practiced his inspiring speeches”).

In Maui they enjoyed a visit to a lavender farm, and I was right there when she described Maui’s “twisting road to Hana,” and watching the sun set from the Haleakala Crater, where she arrived via a bus with a wheelchair lift. “Our driver was very helpful at all the stops,” she writes, “even pushing the wheelchair and singing when the path got very steep”.  

With our aging population and contemporary society’s penchant for travel, the subject of mobility-challenged travelling will become increasingly topical.         

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

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 “Until We Are Free: Reflections on Black Lives Matter in Canada”

Edited by Rodney Diverlus, Sandy Hudson, and Syrus Marcus Ware

Published by University of Regina Press

Review by Shelley A. Leedahl

$27.95 ISBN 9-780889-776944

This multi-voiced tour-de-force details the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement from compelling Canadian perspectives. It’s comprehensive, diverse, and explains the “origin story” and trajectory of BLM – praise-worthy, all - but I also commend the anthology’s structure. Editors Sandy Hudson (founder of the BLM’s Canadian presence and BLM—Toronto) and Rodney Diverlus (a Haitian-born artist, activist, educator and member of BLM—Toronto) have written a creative introduction set in “An Imagined Future” (2055 C.E.), after the world’s been decimated by “droughts, fires … class wars” and “race wars”. The narrator melts beneath the blistering sun under one of the few remaining trees on a “weekly water-sourcing trek,” and reflects upon this very book. “We wrote about our future,” he/she says, “and it was beautiful”. It’s a literary entry into a text that’s alternately academic, political, and also written for those just learning about the movement, which was spawned after the 2013 acquittal of George Zimmerman re: the shooting murder of the unarmed Black teen Trayvon Martin. “This case captured the public’s attention and triggered a global discourse on anti-Black violence not seen in a generation,” the editors write. (Californian Alicia Garza was first to pen #BlackLivesMatter, and the movement quickly spread “from a viral hashtag to an online platform”.)

The book’s invaluable for the myriad experiences it archives, and it’s hefty in both size and content: 320 pages of strong statements by those who’ve lived beneath the shadow of racism. “Police violence and anti-Black attitudes are realities that define the Black Experience in Canada,” the editors state. They’ve collected essays and conversations between organizers, activists, artists, academics - and the imprisoned-for-murder writer Randolph Riley - and document ideas, protests (ie: Tent City at the Toronto Police Service Headquarters), and victories, including The Black Lives Matter—Toronto Freedom School (“providing an avenue for children to be involved in the movement”) and the Canadian Freedom Intensive.

Riley’s story came painfully alive for me with the startling image of the young Nova Scotia student’s visit – “in cuffs and shackles” - to his mother’s funeral at Cherrybrook Baptist Church. “‘I’m sorry to come before you like this,” he says to his community. “There is no stopping the love” as people in the historically Black community “line up to hug him, to touch him, to cry with him”.

For some contributors, like poet Queentite Opaleke, being called “nigger”- by her Grade Four teacher! - started her activism. I learned that the Black community of Africville – formerly on the Halifax shoreline – was “bulldozed” in 1964 and its 400 residents forced into housing projects sans compensation for their properties and possessions; that scholar Tiffany King uses “fungible” to explain how “Black people were treated as interchangeably as seeds … to terraform the land in order to change it for the process of colonization;” and that the KKK received permission from Edmonton’s mayor to hold a rally at the Exhibition Grounds in 1932 (copies of the actual letters are in the book).

The stories are eye-opening, hopeful, and important.

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

 

Three Reviews: Field Notes for the Self (Randy Lundy); Loss of Indigenous Eden and the Fall of Spirituality (Blair Stonechild); and Performing Turtle Island: Indigenous Theatre on the World Stage (editors Jesse Rae Archibald-Barber, Kathleen Irwin, and Moira J. Day)

“Field Notes for the Self”

Written by Randy Lundy

Published by University of Regina Press

Review by Shelley A. Leedahl

$19.95 ISBN 9-780889-776913


It's official: Saskatchewan’s Randy Lundy is one of my favourite Canadian poets. His last collection, Blackbird Song, fueled my fandom for this erudite writer, but the recently-released Field Notes for the Self has secured it. This is a poet at the top of his game: one doesn’t so much read this new collection of mostly prose poems as she experiences it. This is Lundy’s magic: although the title indicates that these are works “for the Self” - and the second person “You” (the narrator) is addressed throughout - I felt these contemplative works so viscerally it was as if they were articulating my own intimate thoughts and practices. Move over, Mary Oliver.  

In Blackbird Song, many poems spun on the word thinking, and in this handsome new volume, knowing is central. Lundy writes: “you know you know the song, but nothing is clear to you anymore,” “Your heart knows and holds the key - meditate, live purely, do your work, be quiet,” and “You know that you almost know, and you know that is as close as you will get.”

There’s a tremulous acceptance in these quiet yet powerful poems. “You see so little and know so little, perhaps that is a kind of wisdom. But you don’t think so.” There’s also much consideration of death: “Today, the memory of all your dead drove you to your knees. It is the best place from which to see the beetles in the dirt, each a black, hard-shelled casket that will bear your flesh into the next world, and the next. Study that. Practise that kind of knowing.”

The poet’s dressing down of Self - “What you know is that everything you thought you knew, up until today, amounts to nothing. You know nothing” - contradicts the wisdom and beauty he imparts. The existentialist belief that the universe is unfathomable is a through-thread, but exquisite beauty exists and is frequently honoured: “meteorites like a necklace of fire,” a woman’s hands in dishwater are “moving like pale, lazy carp,” a doe’s “curved hooves leave quotation marks in the soft, clay-banked hillside,” and an “iris shoves its fist skyward, unfolds like a hand”.

I appreciated the journal-like openings, and the poems’ transformations: several begin with the time of day, season, place, and/or weather, ie, “Knowing What You Do Not Know” begins “Rain for hours this January afternoon and northwest wind at fifty-three kilometres an hour.” Lundy transports readers from that opening to this conclusion: “Here comes that something that’s always been consuming you—the way your yellow, whiskey-stink piss eats the white, white snow”.

The doors in are deceptively simple, ie: the seven-paged “Book of Medicine” begins “End of July, two days of rain/after two months of drought” but the poem also philosophically considers that “Maybe there is no way/to pass through this life, without/being lost over and again”.     

These are poems adrift between light and dark, between life and death, and “between metaphor and common sense”. These are poems for now, and always.   

THIS BOOK IS AVAILABLE AT YOUR LOCAL BOOKSTORE OR FROM THE SASKATCHEWAN PUBLISHERS GROUP WWW.SKBOOKS.COM
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“Loss of Indigenous Eden and the Fall of Spirituality”

by Blair Stonechild

Published by University of Regina Press

Review by Shelley A. Leedahl

$32.95  ISBN 9-780889-776999

   

Blair Stonechild’s made a name for himself as the skilled writer of numerous nonfiction books, and as a professor of Indigenous Studies at Regina’s First Nations University of Canada. Stonechild’s led an interesting life. He attended Residential School, obtained his doctorate and became an academic and historian, and he’s worked closely with First Nations Elders for more than forty years. He’s supremely well qualified to write on Indigenous spirituality, and that’s precisely what he’s mastered in his latest book.

In this ten-chaptered new title, Stonechild discusses how “the Indigenous world preceded that of modern civilization, that it contained values vital to human survival, and that the significance of ancient beliefs needs to be re-explained for today’s world”. The author’s travelled globally to visit other Indigenous communities, and writes that “we all share incredibly strong beliefs about the transcendent”.   

He begins by discussing the fundamentally-held belief among Indigenous Peoples of the world that they possess a “sacred obligation” re: protecting the land and environment, and hold a common belief that “spirits lurk in every corner – in trees, in animals, and even in rocks”. “All things … have spirit essence and all interact in a web of interrelationships.” Humans are here to learn, Stonechild’s mentor, Saulteaux Elder Danny Musqua, told him, and our time on Earth is a journey “back to the Creator and the spirit world, their real home”. One of many things I learned from Stonechild’s book is that “stars” figure prominently in many Indigenous origin stories, including the Dakota, Navajo, Cree, and Aztecs.   

So why, according to Indigenous spirituality, are we here? “To be the servant of the creator,” in the physical bodies we’re given, and, as Musqua professed, “physical life is intended to be a challenge”. Spiritual tools consist of Seven Disciplines: “fasting, sharing, parenting, learning, teaching, praying, and meditating”. (I know something of this: my brother, Ron Meetoos (RIP), a Cree from Thunderchild First Nation, was an Elder. I’ll never forget his dedication to his culture: he participated in a Sun Dance … I saw the wounds on his chest.)

I love to learn, and reading this book was a wide education. I didn’t know that the Dene that migrated from “what is now northern Canada to the American southwest” became Navajo. I didn’t know that when First Nations Peoples say “all our relations” in prayers, these relations include “natural and supernatural realms”. And I didn’t know that the Sweat Lodge represents “the womb of mother Earth and is for cleansing through symbolic rebirth”. But beyond Indigenous spirituality, Stonechild also shares information on several other diverse topics, from the history of world religions to globalization, from water degradation to depression and anxiety – “diseases of the soul”.

One need only consider the current Covid-19 pandemic to feel great despair for our world, but perhaps if more of us “maintain[ed] a strong belief in the cyclical nature of all created things,” as Indigenous Elders do, hope would supersede fear, and we’d all enjoy this journey on Earth far more.

THIS BOOK IS AVAILABLE AT YOUR LOCAL BOOKSTORE OR FROM WWW.SKBOOKS.COM
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“Performing Turtle Island: Indigenous Theatre on the World Stage”

Edited by Jesse Rae Archibald-Barber, Kathleen Irwin, and Moira J. Day

Published by University of Regina Press

Review by Shelley A. Leedahl

$29.95 ISBN 9-780889-776562


In many Indigenous cultures’ origin stories, “Turtle Island” refers to the North American continent, and its aptly used in the title of a new University of Regina Press anthology about Indigenous theatre and performance “in the land now called Canada”.  

In response to “Call to Action #83 of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission [TRC] of Canada” - in which artists are called upon to “undertake collaborative projects and produce works that contribute to the reconciliation process” - Saskatchewan editors and professors Jesse Rae Archibald-Barber, Kathleen Irwin, and Moira J. Day compiled essays by Indigenous and non-Indigenous contributors to promote “discussion around Indigenous theatre and performance practices … from a multidisciplinary perspective.”

The book’s partly the outcome of a September 2015 gathering at the University of Regina and First Nations University. This namesake event, “Performing Turtle Island: Fluid Identities and Community Continuities,” allowed scholars and artists “to focus on how Indigenous theatre and performance are connected to Indigenous ways of knowing and well-being, while also considering the role of Indigenous identity in shaping the country’s [identity]”.

Significantly, over the last three decades Indigenous playwrights including the esteemed Tomson Highway, Drew Hayden Taylor and Daniel David Moses, plus many newer writers, have been working to counter “hackneyed representations of Indigeneity by creating robust and dynamic expressions of Indigenous peoples”. The anthologies’ editors and contributors acknowledge the difficult ethics re: applying “Western theoretical approaches to interpret Indigenous literatures”.  

The book’s first section consists of pieces in which the authors “critique performance through an Indigenous knowledge system” to “replace or adapt old paradigms of settler colonialism with new models and methodologies.” Writer Michael Greyeyes - educator, dancer, choreographer and artistic director - concentrates on the “physical aspect of theatre training,” and the promotion of Indigenous languages through theatre. In his conversational opening essay - reprinted verbatim from his keynote conference address - he explains how he was cast for a period part (a miniseries for the National Geographic Channel) that was being shot in South Africa, and how he had to transform his “out-of-shape movement professor” body into one that was muscular and plausible for the Mayflower-era role. He writes that he respected the script for its “complex and sophisticated” portrayals of Indigenous characters. No stereoptypes here, just “vivid and breathing portraits” that revealed all characters as both saint and sinner. The Indigenous cast was coached to speak an endangered dialect -Abenaki - by one of the last dozen speakers of that language.  

Filmmaker Armand Garnet Ruffo tells the story of the challenging, ten-year making of his feature film Windigo Tale, which began as a two-act play. I enjoyed his candid anecdotes about quickly running out of money and searching for more; weather and continuity issues; and his frequent good luck (“Nanaboozho smiled on me”) in finding people willing to work with him.

The second section concerns “Performance in Dialogue with the Text” and includes Kahente Horn-Miller’s piece on the Sky Woman story and an interview with Daniel David Moses. All-in-all, a beautiful production.

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



 

Two Reviews: "Touched By Eternity: A True Story of Heaven, Healing, and Angels" by Susan Harris and “Angry Queer Somali Boy: A Complicated Memoir” by Mohamed Abdulkarim Ali

“Touched By Eternity: A True Story of Heaven, Healing, and Angels”

Written by Susan Harris

Published by White Lily Press

Review by Shelley A. Leedahl

$19.99 ISBN 9-780994-986948

Rural Saskatchewan writer Susan Harris wears a number of hats. I've previously reviewed two of her Christmas alphabet books, but her literary prowess also includes inspirational and nonfiction work. It's appeared in Chicken Soup for the Soul, and Sunday School students may have read her biblical literature in class. Outside of writing, Trinidad-born Harris can be found presenting on her extraordinary religious experiences, and hosting an Access7Television series called "Eternity".

In Touched By Eternity: A True Story of Heaven, Healing, and Angels, Harris explores her greatest passion, Heaven. Indeed, she claims to have an "obsession about Heaven," and if you read her new book you'll understand why. In clear, well-written prose, Harris tells the otherwordly story of her three near death experiences, each occasioned by a health crisis, and what she felt and observed on the proverbial "other side". Add anecdotes about angels, a description of fiery Hell, and a few visions, and you'll also glean why she's dedicated her book to "those who long for Heaven".

Born into a family of "old-fashioned Pentecostals," it wasn't uncommon for Harris to attend revivals where people spoke "in tongues," and the author writes of her own early ability to speak in tongues: "My English words ceased and strange words began to flow from my mouth in a foreign language I had not learned. It was a full-bodied, fluent sound that spouted at first then gushed like a stream from a rainforest mountaintop." Harris was eleven, and her own daughter spoke in tongues at age four. 

The book begins dramatically with a desperate phone call to her husband after her teeth began chattering, three days after a wisdom tooth extraction. I commend Harris for her ability to make readers feel they're in the room as she slowly drags herself from her dining room to a day bed in excruciating pain. It's 2005, and she's about to have her second near death experience. She sees "a spectacular castle," and writes that "The castle is blue, a luminescent, glorious, amazing shade that I haven't seen on earth. The sides and edges are trimmed with gold …" Heaven. And this is the beginning of the "remarkably ordinary" woman's drive to share her experiences, and "to carry peace, compassion, and the message that Heaven is gained only through Jesus Christ" to whomever will listen.

One of the angel stories is particularly interesting. After Harris and her husband marry at the Las Vegas Wedding Chapel, they're walking the Strip and get harassed and followed by a "youth of African-American descent". Suddenly a large man, "possibly of Mexican descent" with "black shorts that came down to his knees," appears and the youth halts, "as if he had bumped into something". Harris later reasons that the protector was an angel.   

Many may think of death as the ultimate negative experience, but Harris's deep grieving for a return to the peaceful "Heaven's meadow" of her second near death experience - while in the Melville Hospital - denotes that it's anything but.  

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

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“Angry Queer Somali Boy: A Complicated Memoir”

Written by Mohamed Abdulkarim Ali

Published by University of Regina Press

Review by Shelley A. Leedahl

$21.95 ISBN 9-780889-776593

Sometimes a single line succinctly underscores the depths of the valley a person's experienced. Deep into Mohamed Abdulkarim Ali's memoir, Angry Queer Somali Boy: A Complicated Memoir, the Torontonian's phrase "the first day I was homeless for the second time" leaps off the page, and it's an example of how this first-time writer both lives, and writes. Changes happen quickly, and the reader finds herself catching her breath.

Ali's memoir was published as part of the University of Regina Press's series The Regina Collection. These pocket-sized hardcovers emulate the U of R's motto, "a voice of many peoples," and "tell the stories of those who have been caught up in social and political circumstances beyond their control." Born in Mogadishu in 1985, Ali was removed from his mother's home at age five to join his father and the man's new family in Abu Dhabi, then relocated to a refugee camp in the Netherlands (sans Dad). The next move - with his abusive stepmother and her kids - was to Toronto's "Jane and Finch area," where in school "The relationships between the white teaching staff and the largely brown and black student body prepared many of [the students] for the cruel reality of a racist society and the undermining of [their] abilities." 

But uprooting, domestic physical abuse, school bullying, poverty, wondering how "to be Somali outside of Somalia," forced "Islamizing," and crime are only part of the story: effeminate Ali - nicknamed "ballet girl" - also recognized early in life that he was gay. As one who'd only known violence, the writer's early sexuality was also fused with pain, and he writes with brutal candour: "I … took to squatting by the highway and pushing thick branches in my ass. I kept going until I bled." 

After a fight in the Netherlands with a classmate compounded Ali's "diminished sense of self," he dived "headfirst, into the world of drugs," and by thirteen was numbing his life with Valium. He writes that by the time he'd moved to Canada, he could only observe other youth playing at a public pool: he "didn't know how to have healthy fun."

So many adjustments within such a short timeframe. From leaving the rebel-threatened country of his birth - where he watched wrestling on television while overhearing the screams from his stepsisters' bedroom as they were being circumcised - to experiencing the backlash of being a black Muslim post 9/11; from attending Ryerson (he was "kicked out" after three years) to a suicide attempt and living in a shelter, where residents had to "Watch out for broken crack pipes on the piss-soaked floors of the bathroom" … it's not a wonder that the "boy who felt unwanted by the world" grew into a homeless alcoholic.

But he also became a writer, praise be, and his "nomadic journey" would be of a different sort. "Revisionism to cover up our history has been pervasive," he writes of the immigrant Somali experience. Here's a story that speaks the truth.   

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

 

Three New Reviews: "Critters: Underdark" by Allan Dotson; “Raymond Raindrop" and "Swings & Things” by Eileen Munro; and "Finding Fortune" by L.A. Belmontéz

"Critters: Underdark"

by Allan Dotson

Published by YNWP

Review by Shelley A. Leedahl

$19.95  ISBN 9-781988-783437

  

  

How best to describe Regina writer, artist and teacher Allan Dotson's monster-inspired graphic novel, Critters: Underdark … a 153-page, 10-years-in-the-making labour of love, and black and white demonstration of great talent? An equally touching and humorous allegory for our socially-fractured and racially- divisive times? A textual and artistic tour de force? Each of the above applies, but at the heart of this fantasy's success is the creator's unique imagination, his skill at storytelling, and his deft ability to create individuated "monsters" - both visually and literarily - that readers of all ages will quickly care about.

It's easy to suspend disbelief and get wrapped up in the train-wrecked world of innocent Eddy - a pincered "ettercap" who looks like a louse - and his first friend, the snaggle-toothed monster Sally, who tells also-caged Eddy: "You're not alone. We're all scared." Eddy's toddler-like diction is adorable, ie: "Is we all getting' stuffs? Like weppins?" and "O nos! Thems gonna git us!" Many things are "skeery".

In the first few pages we learn that these creatures, captured along with several others by the dwarves at the bidding of the medusa queen, Dread Lady Linnorm, both miss their mothers. The train's taking a variety of critters "to the north to the wizards' market" where they'll be sold to humans. Lady Linnorm's daughter, Lena, is watering the imprisoned critters when the train crashes and releases Eddy, Sally, and monsters of all kinds. The pair bond with strong Gronk - part cat, part dragon - and journey toward "freedom," battling opponents and gathering comrades along the way, including spidery Uriel, who's in the habit of saying "Heehee," and ascertains that Lena, who's travelling with them, can be both "slaver" and "one of [them]".

The mother-child relationship is explored through Eddy, Sally and Lena. Sally's mother is a kindly swamp hag who taught her daughter "how to cook and stuff". Lena's powerful mother is desperate to find her. Eddy's mother will break your heart.

Dotson uses diction - and spectacular images; even caves have character - for humour and to create individuality. Lady Linnorm's minions speak with a Scottish brogue: "Thar be sum more o' tha wee beasties!" Evil, elephant-trunked Slithirgaddy is amassing an army to "follow [their] unsuspecting quarry deep into the stygian gloom of the endless underdark". Lena and sharp-toothed Sally exchange barbs, ie: Sally's superpower is the ability to turn invisible. Lena says: "That's great, Sally, then we won't have to look at you."

Dotson teaches science and art at an elementary school, and I can see how this novel would enthrall students and educators: he's made it user-friendly for classrooms via a teachers' guide, available online.

A longtime comic afficionado, sci-fi and fantasy fan, and founding member of Regina's Valuable Comics collective, Dotson also designs and publishes role-playing games. Critters: Underdark is his first novel, and the first volume in his Critters Saga. Readers can next look forward to Wandering Monsters. I wonder if foes Sally and Lena will become friends?

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

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"Raymond Raindrop" and "Swings & Things”

Written and illustrated by Eileen Munro

Published by Your Nickel’s Worth Publishing

Review by Shelley A. Leedahl

$12.95  ISBN 9-781988-783444 

I was introduced to the fun-filled illustrations and down-home text of Saskatchewan artist Eileen Munro in 2014 via her rural-themed alphabet book, ABC’s Down on the Farm. Now, five years later, she's followed up with another picture book, this time featuring two educational stories: Raymond Raindrop and Swings & Things. Munro's cover advertises "Facts and fun - 2 Books in 1" - it's a double treat for young readers and story listeners, and an ingenious way for a writer using YNWP's excellent publishing services to get the most bang for her buck.

As the title reveals, Raymond is a raindrop, which Munro visually presents somewhat like a grey Hershey's Kiss with simple facial features, three-fingered white hands and two black ovaline feet. Raymond's character, however, is far from simple. "Shy and a little bit proud," he "stayed by himself" while his fellow raindrops "bounced and bubbled" together. Our watery protagonist notes that the people on the land below him look worried re: the lack of rain for their crops.

The story is about the importance of working together. The prairie spirit of cooperation is equally as important among the raindrops as it is has traditionally been among farming communities. On each pair of facing pages Munro provides one fact about rain, ie: "Every second, about 16 million tons of water evaporates from the Earth's surface and falls back to the ground in the form of raindrops." It's a creative way to teach youngsters, and as these facts are visually separated from the story proper via a light blue text box, there's no confusing the two.

Swings & Things is subtitled Everyday Pendulums and Pivots, and it features ponytailed Henrietta, who "likes to swing," and "to find other things that swing too". As with the first story, this short tale also includes interesting and eclectic facts - about pendulums, spiders, monkeys, and more - presented in textboxes.

We discover that Henrietta loves to see the acrobats swing at the circus, and she aspires to become an acrobat one day. On this page I learned that the stretchy leotard gymnasts - and others - wear was named after the "French gymnast Jules Léotard, who developed the art of trapeze". It's the kind of trivia you could slip into a conversation at the next dinner party you attend, and then you can gift your host or hostess with a copy of this delightful, colourful and well-produced book, because we all have someone in our life who can use a small, happy story.

Congratulations to Munro, who "came from a family of storytellers who told tales that wove a path through her imagination," for putting her own storytelling talents onto the page for others to enjoy. Raymond Raindrop. Henrietta, in her red pinafore, who loves things that swing. Two "simple stories for small scientists," as is stated on the back cover. I wonder what kinds of characters will spill from Munro's imagination in her next book, and what readers will learn along the way.

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

__________

"Finding Fortune"

by L.A. Belmontéz

Published by QueenPin Books, an imprint of Garnet House Books

Review by Shelley A. Leedahl

$25.00  ISBN 9-781999-567606

  

It's astounding how frequently completely disparate parts of one's life intersect. I recently booked a flight to Colombia for early 2020, and recently received a review copy of L.A. Belmontéz's telenovela-type novel, Finding Fortune, which is set, in part, in Colombia. While reading I paid close attention to what I might learn about Cartagena through the former prairie resident and debut-novelist's 399-page debut title.

The book's main character, Las Vegas resident Valerie Verlane, has authored a book titled The Princess Problem: From the Pea to Prosperity. Verlane comes from money and much attention is given to clothing brands, vehicles, and other luxury-material matters. She has her nose and breasts "done," and is the type who "had never taken a bus and she never would". Verlane's told her daughter that the girl's father is dead, and for all Verlane knows, Dmitri - the worldly young lawyer-in-training who'd waltzed into her 24-year-old life in Los Angeles - has in fact died.

The Canadian-born protagonist was working in a high-end furniture store in Santa Monica when playboy Dmitri swept her off her stilettos. After a few passionate dates, Dmitri, who was supposedly going to Ecuador to surf with friends, went MIA. Though pregnant with Dmitri's baby, Verlane foolishly wed Pedro, a Mexican con who stole her family's inheritance.  She "had punished herself all those years after losing Dmitri by staying with Pedro," and in that time "all ideas of self-identity has been erased through marriage and motherhood".

After Verlane's lawyer manages to reinstate the inheritance, the California-prep schooled Verlane - her privileged education taught her things like never "to do anything that is considered the maid's job" - becomes determined to "show [Dmitri] what he'd been missing" in the troubled nine years that've passed. Verlane finds Dmitri as easily as you can say "Google Search" … he's registered for the "Third Annual Caribbean Master's Golf Tournament in Cartagena".  But first, she must return to her former glory, and rebuild her self-esteem. How? Via shopping. "One day I will have my yacht," she thinks. "Today I only want clothes." She "put fear aside" and "handed over her [credit] card, buying back as much self-esteem as she could carry".

Belmontéz is great at transitions, which is something new writers often struggle with, and she proves her writing chops with descriptions like this one, of a kitchen: " … almost smelling like a home with the aroma of cocoa taking shape, gathering itself like a ghost before dissipating into the rest of the house and out the windows."

I won't be seeing the same upscale locations in Cartagena as Verlane - no resorts for me - but I do look forward to seeing, from the plane, "the peninsula of Bocagrande curl up around the city like a serpent's tale," and "churches casting long shadows over cobblestone plazas in the late-day sun."

Finding Fortune is a thick soap-opera in text, and the kind of sun-soaked romp you just might be looking for in the heart of winter.

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

  

Three New Reviews: Lost Boys by Darci Bysouth, The Eater of Dreams by Kat Cameron, and Baxter and the Blue Bunny, written by Lorraine Johnson; illustrated by Wendi Nordell

“Lost Boys”

Written by Darci Bysouth

Published by Thistledown Press

Review by Shelley A. Leedahl

$20.00  ISBN 978-1-77187-175-4

Lost Boys is a short story collection with three-way heft: physical (eighteen stories), technical (diverse voices and plots; excellent characterizations; realism and magic realism are each employed to great effect), and emotional (wow). Effective art makes us think and feel, and in this, her first book, BC writer Darci Bysouth has mastered the tricky business of making the world seem both smaller and larger, and she's made this reader's heart turn over.

Innate talent? I expect so, but Bysouth also honed her craft at the University of British Columbia and the University of Edinburgh, and her work's appeared in respected literary journals and anthologies; these facts tell me that she paid her literary dues before breaking into the ISBN world with this fist-to-gut collection.

I could speak of the equally convincing male and female narrators; the recurring themes of sibling relationships, poverty, addictions, and mental illness; or of  settings that range from the "sheep and potholes" of Scotland to dark Canadian forests. I could write about the double entendre, the details, the poetic language, ie: "The water was such a long way below that it looked like some other thing," or how many of Bysouth's stories lead us inside lives that would make most of us squirm, ie: the girl who was a cutter: "My art is the razor notches on my thighs, oh God, daddy how I love those little mouths chafing against my jeans." There are so many "I coulds," but I want to concentrate on two stories I consider masterpieces: "Petey" and "Sacrifice".

      

Like most of the stories here, "Petey" is told in First Person, but it's told by an unreliable narrator - unreliable, because he's a drunk. He's a drunk because his wife left him with their daughter "before Lily had said her first word;" there's been an accident; and he's on leave from work and expects to be fired. Seven-year-old Lily brings home an injured bird and we follow this whisky-soaked father down a rabbit hole of fantastic destruction until the story's last impactful line, which carries so much gravity it compels one to reread the story, immediately.  

"Sacrifice" is written through the perspective of Rachel: a single, aging, childless social worker in an office where everyone else has dependents/loved ones and rich lives outside of work. Rachel's the employee who brings cupcakes to work because "there may be children visiting the office". She "always admires the accomplishments of other people's children." Because this story is so credible, when it moves from one nightmare to the next, any reader with a heart will feel theirs drop at what unfolds. Extremely well set-up, full circle story. 

The stories here do tend toward darkness. In other words, they reflect the world as it is experienced by many. I admire Bysouth's bravery and skill in writing about what hurts, and Thistledown Press for bringing her insightful stories to the world. Again, wow. I was so moved, I needed to sit and be still after reading these phenomenal stories.

  

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

__________

“The Eater of Dreams”

Written by Kat Cameron

Published by Thistledown Press

Review by Shelley A. Leedahl

$20.00  ISBN 978-1-77187-184-6

  

Kat Cameron, a Swift Current-born poet, fiction writer, and English Literature prof at Edmonton's Concordia University, has penned a place-specific collection of sometimes-linked stories with an intriguing title: The Eater of Dreams, and the 67-page eponymous story is a fascinating read, complete with a 100-year-old ghost, a grieving and disillusioned English teacher in Japan, and so many sensory-rich glimpses into Japanese culture - albeit from an outsider's perspective - readers might almost believe they are there.

The opening stories are Edmonton-based, and as a former resident of that city I enjoyed tagging along with the female protagonists to the Muttart Conservatory, Whyte Ave, and Jubilee Auditorium, even if these gals were not in the happiest moods. One was not having any fun being the sole woman in a trio at the Muttart Conservatory without a toddler, then she lost her friend's little girl among the poinsettas. Zoe lives in a university-area garret that's so cold her "breath fogged the air while she watched late-night TV, huddling under three comforters," and she's terrified an abusive ex will reappear. In a linked story, Zoe accompanies her new boyfriend to a family funeral in Calgary, and not only does she get put on the spot by being asked to sing "Amazing Grace," she forgets the words; a snowstorm forces them to turn around on the highway at the end of the miserable day; and she contends that her "problems trailed after her like plumes of car exhaust on a winter night".

Some of the descriptions really stand out, ie: in another Zoe story, her brother "has a small goatee, like a line of dirt extending down from his sideburns". In "Searching for Spock," Kalla's grandfather "smelled of peppermints, mothballs and wool" and her grandmother's early-morning baking filled the kitchen with smells of "crystallized brown sugar and yeast with a bitter overlay of smoke".

The sensory details are strongest in the effective title story. The protagonist, Elaine, is lonely and grieving the death of her fiancé while teaching at a Japanese high school. This is good: "The air smells of gasoline, hot tar, spilled beer, overlaid with a whiff of freesias and roses. The rain starts, a few sprinkles, then falls in thick, warm ropes" and it "drums on the iron stairs". See, smell, hear.

Elaine's estranged from her parents and apart from a connection with one kind student, her "longest conversations have been crank phone calls," ie: students calling to giggle and ask "Do you li-ku sex-u?". Elaine begins to appreciate the company of Lafcadio, a former writer and present ghost who frequently materializes as a misty shape in the teacher's cockroach-infested apartment. When the details take shape - "His hair is white and springs back from his forehead with a Mark Twain folksiness," - she thinks "If I had to attract a ghost, couldn't he be thirty-something and look like Laurence Fishburne". 

Sporadic humour, cultural insights, and the wisdom the narrator gains from intensive self-study make this long story a terrific accomplishment.   

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

__________ 

"Baxter and the Blue Bunny"

Written by Lorraine Johnson, Illustrated by Wendi Nordell

Published by YNWP

Review by Shelley A. Leedahl

$12.95  ISBN 9-781988-783413

Baxter and the Blue Bunny is the debut children's book by Yorkton writer Lorraine Johnson, and the story flows so smoothly along one would think it was penned by a veteran. Complemented by Alberta illustrator Wendi Nordell's colourful and "just right" illustrations of the canine character Baxter and his home and family, this simple, well-told story hits a surprisingly deep emotional chord.

The story, told in Baxter's voice, begins at a pet shelter, with "mom and dad, and two brothers" choosing the black and white Shih Tzu-looking dog. "I am looking for them … and they are looking for me," Baxter says, "each of us wanting to find someone special to love, to look after, and to grow up with." It's easy to read this story as an allegory, for isn't that what most of us humans want in life, too?

Through the text and Nordell's inviting scenes we experience the days in the life of a happy, well-loved dog: he plays tug-o'-war with the boys, hike-and-seek with the adults, and Grandma brings a "stuffed blue bunny" which "soon becomes [Baxter's] shadow". The dog loves - and even sleeps with - the bunny … until the day Blue Bunny goes missing. "Where could he be? Will I ever see him again?"

Baxter uses his nose to search for his beloved stuffed friend, but time and again, "there is no blue bunny" and life just isn't the same for our shaggy hero. Yes, he can chase birds and roll in the freshly-cut grass, but nothing is ever as much fun without his companion.

This softcover book is beautifully produced, with black, easy-to-read text against a white background, and full-bleed illustrations featuring Baxter inside the house or outdoors on each opposing page. To her credit, Johnson presents a dog that enjoys activities we might not consider "dog-like," ie: watching Blue Bunny spin in the dryer, and standing before the oven while cookies bake. Cookies mean treats, but - and this is the refrain once the bunny bestie disappears - "there is no Blue Bunny" to enjoy them with. 

In Johnson's bio notes we learn that she was raised on a farm near Stockholm, SK, and when her family was young they did indeed find "a four-legged furry friend named Baxter to grow up with". With children's books, I've frequently found that the story often does reflect a real-life experience. Art imitates life. And why not?

Nordell's notes reveal that she's been a lifelong artist, and as such, she "claims never to have been bored as long as she had a pen and pencil and blank surface to draw on".

It could be that I'm putting my own filter on this story as I equate it with the human need for companionship, and the profound grief one experiences when a relationship's "lost," but even without that comparison, Baxter and the Blue Bunny is recommendable. A touching story in a sweet package; I hope it finds its way into many hands, large and small.

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