Two Book Reviews: Gerald Hill, Miriam Korner and Alix Lwanga

“A Round for Fifty Years: A History of Regina’s Globe Theatre”

by Gerald Hill

Published by Coteau Books

Review by Shelley A. Leedahl

$34.95  ISBN 9-781550-506389

   

  

In his Foreword, commissioned writer Gerald Hill claims “no objectivity for [his version of the theatre’s history], no nose for the dirt (if any exists, other than bat or pigeon dung), no investigative-reporter zeal,” and affirms that what follows is his rendering of the story. To that I say: Hurray! Hill’s got a SK-sized mountain of excellent publications (mostly poetry) behind him, and the longtime professor at Regina’s Luther College also has personal ties to the Globe. I can’t name a more suitable writer to pen a close-up retrospective that celebrates the folks - on both sides of the Globe’s curtain - who’ve made Saskatchewan’s first professional theatre company such a long-standing success.

This book’s a classy package. The cover’s appropriately dramatic: a front-lit photo of the historic Globe theatre building contrasted against the night sky and skyscrapers. The generously-spaced text assures easy reading; the book’s saturated with photographs (mostly from performances); and it’s smartly organized into three Acts, with a comprehensive Appendices that includes selected show posters. Its presentation is coffee table-ish; you’d be proud to have this sitting out where friends could see it.  

Hill credits innovative English director\playwright Brian May for the Globe’s “in the round” performance style, which allows actors and audience to “[share] the same physical and psychological space”. (In short, the closer Joe and Susie theatre-goer get, the better their experience.) There are nods toward the SK Arts Board for early interest and investment, specifically through Drama Consultant Florence James, and theatre’s relevance is addressed: “ … the essential goodness of humans can be accessed and reinforced through theatre”.

If one were to make an analogy to fiction, the theatre company would be the protagonist in this story, and the setting would include the entire province of SK. Dynamos Ken and Sue Kramer founded the Globe in 1966 as a school touring company that performed interactive shows in gymnasiums around the province. It was extremely “grass roots,” with self-made costumes, props and sets that were “usually nothing more than six plywood rostrum blocks of various sizes.” The company’d set off in Kramers’ Vauxhall and a donated Ford van, plowing through prairie blizzards, and share their theatrical magic with thousands of SK youngsters. Actor Bill Hugli says that a good show was indicated by “wet spots on the floor – kids so caught up in the experience, they couldn’t hold it anymore”.

Financial crises, building moves and renos, major programming changes, fresh visions, fun anecdotes (ie: bats), and a large cast of players – from 15-year Playwright-in-Residence Rex Deverell to successive Artistic Directors Susan Ferley and Ruth Smillie – make this a stimulating read.

In Act 3, Hill delivers a nearly day-by-day account of the work required to mount a huge production (Mary Poppins), and for me, realizing what everyone from wardrobe people to musicians went through over one frantic preparatory three-week period was especially eye-opening. To the Globe’s many committed characters - and the collaborators in this wide-ranging and splendidly-written book - a standing ovation, of course.    

       

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

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“L’il Shadd: A Story of Ujima”

by Miriam Körner and Alix Lwanga, illustrated by Miriam Körner

Published by Your Nickel’s Worth Publishing

Review by Shelley A. Leedahl

$29.95  ISBN 978-1-927756-48-5

  

Saskatchewan’s history is so multi-culturally rich that there are, admittedly, elements of it that I’ve scarcely even considered. Take, for example, the first African-Canadian pioneers, including the trail-blazing Dr. Alfred Schmitz Shadd (d.1915), for whom two Melfort streets and a northern Saskatchewan lake are named. Dr. Shadd shared an affinity with First Nations’ folks, “due to the similarity of their experiences with colonization and racism,” and the Saskatchewan African Canadian Heritage Museum – with the assistance of other funders and sponsors - has brought just one of Shadd’s success stories to light in the delightfully-illustrated children’s book, L’il Shadd: A Story of Ujima.

The title character, L’il Shadd, represents Garrison Shadd, the real-life son of the good Dr. Shadd, who’s also recognized for his work as a politician, teacher, farmer, journalist and friend. Garrison was actually five years old when his pioneering father died, so the story itself is slightly fictionalized. The plot concerns the child accompanying his father (via horse-drawn wagon) to tend to the baby girl of a local First Nations’ family who lives in a tipi near Stoney Creek. This medical emergency coincides with L’il Shadd’s birthday, and the boy is remiss that it will interfere with his party. His father explains that he must treat the infant girl, as he is the only one who is able to, and the African philosophy of Ujima (a Swahili word that refers to “Shared work and responsibility,” and the idea that “our brothers and sisters concerns are out concerns”) is referred to.

There are crossovers with real life here. Garrison Shadd also had a baby sister, and when the sick child in the story is healed, her father, Nīkānisiw (Cree for “He is foremost, he leads”) plays a drum not unlike Dr. Shadd’s African drum, and thanks the doctor in Cree and English. Three of Nīkānisiw’s children were actually treated by Dr. Shadd in the 1890s – a fact derived from Melfort-area settler Reginald Beatty’s diary.

This uplifting and historically-relevant story celebrates family, community, and culture, and illustrates how even children are able to grasp the selfless concept of Ujima, which is one of seven important Kwanzaa (an African holiday) values.        

Personally, I can’t think of a better way to teach history and get a positive message across than by presenting it in a full-colour picture book. Körner’s culturally-sensitive illustrations spread right across the page, and this “full bleed” style helps keep one sealed under the story’s spell. I appreciated the suggestion of floral bead work on Nīkānisiw’s vest, and the baby’s homemade rattle. Even more so, I celebrate the mutual trust and respect the characters display for each other, and for each other’s cultures.

This Special Edition legacy project is beautifully rendered, and I hope it is widely read. Teachers may wish to consider sharing L’il Shadd: A Story of Ujima during their schools’ multicultural celebrations, and to make it extra inviting, a teachers’ guide is available at www.sachm.org. Congratulations to all involved in this fine publication. And tēniki\thanks YNWP!

 

      

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

Two Book Reviews: Marchildon & Robinson; van Eijk

“Canoeing the Churchill: A Practical Guide to the Historic Voyageur Highway”

by Greg Marchildon and Sid Robinson

Published by University of Regina Press

Review by Shelley A. Leedahl

$34.95  ISBN 9-780889-771482

   

Call me unusual, but activities that require great strength and endurance, are potentially fatal, and involve the outdoors are my idea of a glorious time. Thus it’s not inconceivable that at some point in my life I may participate in an extensive canoe trip, ie: the Churchill River. Now that I’ve read Canoeing the Churchill: A Practical Guide to the Historic Voyageur Highway, I couldn’t imagine that undertaking without packing along this book, though at a hefty 476 pages, I might be cursing that decision during the many portages on the 1000 km route between Methy Portage and Cumberland House.  

In this tour de force the authors merge historical fact, journal entries, maps (with all-important entry and exit points), photographs, paintings, legends, a packing list, safety tips, camping suggestions, and so much more while also delivering a veritable stroke-by-stroke (or at least section-to-section) account of what one can expect on this epic journey, including what current services one might find in the various small communities along the route. (If you’re from northern SK, names like La Loche, Buffalo Narrows, Patuanak, Dillon, and Île-à-la-Crosse will already be part of your lexicon.)

The Churchill was an important route for fur traders and voyageurs dating back to the 1770s, and the authors introduce us to several of these characters, including Connecticut-born fur trader Peter Pond – murderer, map-maker, and the first white man to cross the approximately 19 km Methy Portage: ouch. The grand Peter Pond Lake (largest lake on the Churchill route) is named for him. Explorer David Thompson’s “special connection” to the route is also cited: in 1799 he met and married his 13-year-old Métis bride, Charlotte Small, in Île-à-la-Crosse.

In 1986 Marchildon and Robinson canoed the entire journey over seventy days in an aluminum Grumman Eagle, and they’re to be thanked for many of the book’s photographs. They were excited about “camping on the same rocks and portaging the same trails as the early traders and their voyageurs.”

There’s so much to appreciate here, from the fine writing, ie: “Regrettably, much of the early history is lost in the mists of time” to the map of sites where Aboriginal rock paintings can be found; from a short history on beaver hats to current information (ie: “a few independent fur buyers [still] buy fur in the old way,” including Robertson Trading, in La Ronge); from clear directions to Cree legends, ie: the Swimming Stone near the northern tip of Wamninuta Island, where it’s believed a medicine man gave the flat-backed boulder the ability to swim. All this, and much humour, too, ie: they’ve written that Face #7 at a rock painting site “suffers from a natural exfoliation or flaking of the rock.”

   

Aside from an invaluable resource for canoeists, this book also makes for a well-written read for anyone who enjoys history, adventure, and armchair travel. The fact that this slightly-revised edition is actually the fourth printing of this title speaks well of its popularity. These men know of what they speak.  

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

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“These Are Our Legends”

Narrated by Lillooet Elders, Transcribed and Translated by Jan van Eijk, Illustrated by Marie Abraham

Published by University of Regina Press

Review by Shelley A. Leedahl

$24.95  ISBN 9-780889-773967

   

University of Regina Press is to be commended for its series, First Nations Language Readers, which allows a broad spectrum of readers to enjoy the wisdom, humour, word play, and moral lessons inherent in traditional oral stories and legends. Now the press has added These Are Our Legends to the series, and thus preserves seven short Lillooet legends, originally narrated by four Lillooet (Salish) elders from British Columbia’s interior and painstakingly transcribed and translated by Jan van Eijk, a Linguistics professor at Regina's First Nations University who’s dedicated forty years to studying the Lillooet language.

The volume offers an interesting juxtaposition. The academically-inclined will appreciate van Eijk’s depth of research, evident in his opening “On the Language of the Lillooet,” in which he discusses phonology, morphology, and syntax, and in the extensive Lillooet-English glossary that follows the bilingual stories. His methodology re: collecting the stories – or sptakwlh, which translates as “ancient story forever” – via tape recorder between 1972 – 1979 is also included.

These particular stories initially appeared together in a 1981 collection – Cuystwí Malh Ucwalmícwts (Lillooet Legends and Stories) – and van Eijk imparts the revisions made for the reprint. In explaining how one of the oral storytellers could not provide the precise meaning of two words in a story told to her by her grandmother, the author writes: “Sadly, one almost sees old words fading away before one’s eyes here, a fate that has befallen too many words in too many First Nations languages.” This is why a book like These Are Our Legends is critical.  

Linguistics aside, I am guessing that the majority of readers will be most interested in the seemingly simple animal-based legends themselves. “Coyote” is a major force here. This Trickster’s antics reveal both the high (ie: intelligence) and low (ie: carelessness) of his (and human) character. In the first story, “The Two Coyotes,” a pair of coyotes are “going along” and one claims that he is a coyote, while the other is just “‘another one’”. The former slyly proves his point via a humourous bit of word play. Another example of that original First Nations’ humour appears in “Grizzly Bear and the Black Bear’s Children,” in which a black bear-eating grizzly is encouraged to sit on an ant hill and “open [her] bum”. (Interestingly, the glossary includes the Lillooet verb npíg̓wqam̓ – “to open one’s bum”.)  

What I most appreciate here is the “real” - and sometimes surprisingly contemporary - way these stories have been documented in text. A coyote colloquially says “No way,” for example, and in “Coyote Drowns,” the speaker ends thus: “He kept on doing that until he got carried away by the water, and he died, I guess.” Another story includes this: “Gee, when they got there, were they ever amazed …”. Two stories end with the storytellers concluding “That’s all”.      

I have the strong sense that I am hearing these stories legitimately, as if the tellers have been drinking tea with me in my kitchen. That, my friends, translates as success. 

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

Four Book Reviews: Loewen, Bonny, Hart, Gereaux

“Sons and Mothers: Stories from Mennonite Men”

Edited by Mary Ann Loewen

Published by University of Regina Press

Review by Shelley A. Leedahl

$21.95  ISBN 9-780889-774032

   

I’m a fourth generation Canadian, and unfortunately haven’t been privy to conversations about ancestors’ “old country” lives, which, in my case, would have included several European counties. I’ve always felt a kind of longing for such tales, for knowing where we come from helps make sense of who we are today. After reading Sons and Mothers, Stories from Mennonite Men - a collection of a dozen essays commissioned by Winnipeg writer and educator Mary Ann Loewen - I recognize that the disparate contributors’ common heritage bonds them in an almost familial way. Yes, these Mennonite men have shared so many similar experiences they’re like one large family: a family that sings, reads, tells stories, and worships together; values hard work; practices altruism; and celebrates one other - even when individual beliefs don’t align.

Two of the most obvious threads in this affecting anthology are the prominent role that music’s played – for the mothers and for their sons – and how several offspring strayed from the church’s traditional doctrines. What distinguishes the essays are the ways in which they are told, plus specific anecdotes that give us a real sense of who these devout women were\are.

Certain essays possess an academic tone, while others are more conversational. Two writers chose poetry to express their thoughts. Humour and light-heartedness permeate some of the mother-son relationships (writer Patrick Friesen refers to his mother’s “trickster” character, and even the title of his essay – “I Give a Rip” – is funny, as it’s what his 87-year-old mother sarcastically uttered while she and her son were discussing her move into a “home”).

Byron Rempel’s mother was image-obsessed; he recalls a photo of himself in a sailor’s outfit, the cap “tipped at a jaunty, seafaring angle.” He must’ve been “on shore leave.” Lloyd Ratzlaff’s essay about his mother’s decline is particularly eloquent and heartfelt. He doesn’t sugarcoat the toll it takes on those being left: “We all need palliation,” he writes.

There’s also remorse. Regarding his vibrant, storytelling mother, Paul Tiessen regrets being “too dull, too inexperienced, too seduced by the attractions of the immediate present to be interested in what she had to offer”. When he abandoned his notion of heaven and hell, Nathan Klippenstein also felt he was “not only abandoning the religion of [his] youth, but that [he] was also abandoning [his] mother”. 

   

Song is everywhere – choirs, family harmonies, even mother’s singing goodbyes – and gratitude’s paramount. Lukas Thiessen shares that his mother was the kind who “loves you even when you’re an aggravating, drugged-up sex fiend vagabond atheist raising a son born out of wedlock.” 

It’s difficult to write honestly about one’s mother. Howard Dyck says: “To analyze such a relationship is to venture into treacherous shoals.” Kudos to Loewen for pulling these essays together, and for choosing exactly the right end-note in Patrick Friesen’s resonant lines: “Mother says sometimes that she is shocked when she hears how old she is. As far as she knows she was ten or eleven just yesterday. And she was.”

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

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“Yes, and Back Again”

by Sandy Marie Bonny

Published by Thistledown Press

Review by Shelley A. Leedahl

$19.95  ISBN 978-1-77187-052-8

   

I didn’t know Yes, and Back Again was going to be that kind of book. I picked it up in the evening, intending to read only the first ten pages or so, then planned to devote the following day to it. Well, I finally put it down on page 110, and only because it was hours past my bedtime. This novel swept me up like the roaring South Saskatchewan River snatches debris off banks in the springtime.  

Saskatoon writer, artist, and educator, Sandy Marie Bonny, has crafted an ambitious story that melds history and the present, addresses cultures

(specifically the Métis), and makes friends of wildly disparate people. There’s also a strong Tim Horton’s presence, text messaging, online police bulletins, and Facebook: talk about keeping it real. 

Bonny unrolls two parallel stories: one concerns a young high school math and Life Skills teacher, Neil, and his writer\researcher wife, Tanis. They’re tired but excited. They’ve just purchased an old home on Saskatoon’s west side (Avenue L), and their daily life includes making the former rental house livable (ie: removing the wheelchair ramp, “odour-busting” the basement with a product called “Piss-off Pet Stain Remover,” using a borrowed Shop-Vac to suck up mouse droppings), and meeting the neighbours in the apartment building next door.

The other story centers on the Métis family who built and first lived in the character house. This story, presented in italics between the present-day chapters, includes a dangerous river crossing in a single-axel cart; premature deaths (TB, scarlet fever, Spanish flu); trapping; and a mysterious, blood-like stain in the attic.      

The contemporary story heats up when two students – friends Melissa Arthur and Jody Bear – go missing from the high school (which might be modelled upon Bedford Road Collegiate, if I’ve guessed the geography correctly). Both are Neil’s students, and he takes some major and unconventional risks in helping to locate them. Were they abducted? Are they runaways? Is it all a hoax? While Neil’s busy being both suspected by and working with police, Tanis dives head-long into a research project and a relationship with a descendant from the home’s original family.

This could all become quite convoluted, but Bonny’s got it under control. She keeps the plot moving forward, the pacing tight, and it doesn’t hurt at all that she has both a keen ear for teenaged diction and understands the dynamics of married life. Plus, she includes several west side “landmarks” that ground this story, ie: the Farmers’ Market, the skate park by the river, the highway Esso. This compelling novel works so well because it pits mundane every-day-ness against a very real and topical danger (“Six in ten years is a lot of murdered women [mostly First Nations] for a city their size”).

Deep into the book there’s an interesting husband\wife discussion concerning

teenaged boys and where the line’s drawn between respect for \ objectification of women. Although not specifically billed as YA, this well-written novel would make a smart addition to high school reading lists.

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

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“Queen of the Godforsaken”

by Mix Hart

Published by Thistledown Press

Review by Shelley A. Leedahl

$14.95  ISBN 978-1-77187-063-4

   

  

I took a plethora of notes while reading Mix Hart’s SK-based young adult novel, Queen of the Godforsaken, because there’s a lot going on across the 293 pages it encompasses. The fictional driver of this story, Lydia, is a veritable storm-cloud of teenage hormones – part girl who still plays with Barbies, part woman who feels responsible for her entire family’s welfare – and she might do or say just about anything.  

Feisty Lydia; her year-younger and equally sarcastic sister, Victoria (Lydia alternately considers Victoria her best and only friend and also gives her the moniker “Prissy Tits”); their pot-smoking and under-employed professor father; and their dangerously-depressed mother move from Vancouver to the paternal homestead on the Carlton Trail near Batoche, and the adjustment’s hard on everyone.

First, there’s the weather. Hart ably details the brutal prairie winters, where eyelids have to be pried apart, snowstorms make prisons of homes, and even the family dog tries to avoid being outdoors. The physical cold parallels Lydia’s temperament as she navigates trials at home and school in nearby “Hicksville”. Lydia, the “ice queen,” warms to few people. Case in point: both she and Victoria refer to their parents by their first names, and teachers – when the girls do go to school - are ridiculed.  

The cold and imprisonment are prominent themes. Lydia’s father keeps the house at ridiculously low temperatures, and the characters are constantly trying to warm via toques, dressing in layers, and building wood fires in the basement furnace, where six mummified woodpeckers explain the home’s “smell of death”. Through Lydia’s lens we see “urine-coloured walls,” and easily imagine the lingering smell in her bedroom - formerly used as a chicken coop.

Lydia feels school “is a prison encased in barbed wire”. The sky is “prison grey”. Back-to-school shopping is done at Saskatoon’s Army and Navy – an iconic store, now closed - where the girls select their “prison uniforms”. A smoke ring “hovers, like a noose,” over her father’s head.

 

The sisters are both outsiders and originals: they collect bottled shrew and mouse skeletons, Victoria veritably lives in an old pink housecoat, and the pair often hide out in their frigid home’s unfinished basement. But despite herself, Lydia also starts to appreciate things about the prairie: she learns that the first coyote yip “means it’s almost eleven,” and her iciness begins to melt when she connects with a local hockey player. Love, however, also proves another storm front: “If this is love, I hate it,” she says.  

There’s plenty of humour here to help balance the tone, ie: when Lydia’s nominated as a school Snow Queen finalist, she says “… it is sort of flattering, I guess – like winning best pig at the country fair.”

The novel and its mercurial central character are best summed up by Lydia herself. “No one could possibly understand what I am going through,” she thinks. Any teenager who has felt the same – and show me one who hasn’t! - might be well served by reading this.

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

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“Size of a Fist”

by Tara Gereaux

Published by Thistledown Press

Review by Shelley A. Leedahl

$12.95  ISBN 978-1-77187-059-7

   

  

I recognized the anonymous town in first-time author Tara Gereaux’s teen novella, Size of a Fist. The mill’s closed, there are “many boarded-up shops,” and abandoned homes. I know this town because I was raised in a number of small towns that echo it and I’m familiar with many more, and because I could relate not only to the physical aspects of the town’s decline, but also to the disreputable activities of the youth who inhabit it - including Addy, the protagonist of this New Leaf Editions’ book – and the tangible desire to get away.

Drinking, drugs, driving while impaired, “colourful” language, bullying, adolescent sex, and generations of familial dysfunction: this is no Disney story, but Gereaux does shed light on the underbelly of small-town life that some might argue is the norm, rather than the exception. There’s value in holding up that mirror: it presents a truth. The Regina writer portrays a community where the only chance of upward mobility is to be outward bound.

This book is more documentary than commentary, and I like that, too: there’s no sense of authorial judgement here, and if after a near fatality Addy utters “Everything is always so hard,” her life is proof that she’s earned that pronouncement.    

The night before Addy and her boyfriend, Craig, are about to “escape” for “the city,” they go on a final bender with friends. There’s much alcohol, and roughhousing, and because Craig’s inebriated, Addy has to drive. Imagine seven people squashed into a vehicle. Imagine a party in a cemetery (same place Addy’s mother used to party). Imagine one couple partying with a baby in tow.

It’s the reality of the scenes that struck the strongest chord with me, ie: Craig, anxious to exit, tells Addy: “‘Look, the tank’s full, I downloaded tons of music. I called my cousin this morning, too, and he said they just got a fridge and stove for the basement. For us.’”

There’s a heartbreaking image concerning Jonas – a bullied boy who lives with his abusive and alcoholic father. The boy’s mother is dead, and at one point he smooths her long dress on the floor, “crawls on top of it,” and curls into a fetal position. Jonas plays a major role in the novella, and I encourage you to read it to learn how the plot surprisingly twists.  

Addy’s mother is another mean character: she says things like “Get outta my face,” drinks too much, and is having an affair with the local RCMP officer. It’s abundantly clear that Addy never really had a chance.

It’s a sorrow that this is real life for some people. Like those I know who refuse to watch the news (because it’s “depressing”), some folks would scan the back cover text and put Size of a Fist back on the shelf. Then there’s the rest of us, who prefer not to go through life wearing blinders. If you’re in the latter camp, good on you: you’ll appreciate what Gereaux has accomplished here.   

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

Three New Book Reviews: Fawcett, Haensel, MacIntyre

“The Little Washer of Sorrows”

by Katherine Fawcett

Published by Thistledown Press

Review by Shelley A. Leedahl

$18.95  ISBN 978-1-77187-049-8

  

  

This fall I heard a new writer present at the Whistler Writers Festival and I was so enchanted by her story I requested the book (The Little Washer of Sorrows) for review. I expected I’d be in for an entertaining read, but I couldn’t have guessed what a veritable fun house this short story collection would prove to be. You dive in and at first things seem normal. Characters are realistically portrayed, their situations fathomable, then metaphorical distorting mirrors kick in. Sometimes you laugh out loud, sometimes you recoil as the lines between fantasy and reality are cleverly blurred. 

Welcome to the estimable fictional world of Pemberton BC writer Katherine Fawcett. She’s an original, beginning with her comic dedication to her parents, who “did not ruin [her] life after all”. And here’s the first line of the book (from “Captcha”): “The day I discovered my true nature began like any other day: I woke up, gave Pete a blowjob, and went downstairs to fry up a pan of bacon.” Who is not going to want to continue?    

It’s Fawcett’s playful combination that both jolts and delights: real-world relationship situations, familiar settings, and pop culture references (from Starbucks and Storage Wars to YouTube and the Kardashians) share the page with mythical creatures (ie: banshees, mermaids, sirens, Father Time) and sleight-of-hand plot twists, and she controls it all with cracking-fine language, powerful doses of humour and irony, and spot-on pacing.

Several of the nineteen stories - told from a variety of perspectives, including precocious children and Mother Earth herself - are stylistically innovative. “Dire Consequences” is only four pages long but it packs a Poe-like punch while sporting contemporary references (“Tiger-Tiger in a waffle cone,” “Japanese manga characters”) and credible teen dialogue (“I feel like we can totally read each other’s minds”). The hilarious “Representing Literature in Music for You,” about an eager teacher who takes his lackluster high school students to Tim Horton’s for class, is all written in dialogue, sans quotation marks. One truly feels for how desperately the teacher tries to engage the youths. The title story, about a couple filing for bankruptcy, is told in Second Person, and illustrates how our imaginations can get the best of us. In the MNP office – where his wife’s making conversation with Fiona, Assistant Estate Manager “as if to a friend at Curves” - Greg fears Fiona is a banshee (from Irish folklore). Despite himself he stares at her legs and “feel[s] an erection coming on.” He “look[s] at the ceiling and think[s] of golf so it will go away.”

Numerous stories contain a sexual element. When “a stout old farm lady from the Ottawa Valley” approaches a young woman at a Mexican resort, the latter thinks the former may need help “adjusting her hearing aid or putting on her circulation socks or something”. She does not expect a startling erotic proposition, and nor does the reader.

These tales are unpredictable, daring, and often out-bloody-rageous. Read them. And tell your friends.

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

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“A Rain of Dragonflies”

Written by Regine Haensel

Published by Serimuse Books

Review by Shelley A. Leedahl

$14.25 ISBN 978-0-99390-320-5

  

Before reading a book, I wonder what new landscapes (internal and external) I’ll explore, what characters and situations I’ll be introduced to. With short stories, I’ve often found that those furthest from what I believe to be the writer’s personal experience are the most successful.

So it was with A Rain of Dragonflies, by Saskatoon’s Regine Haensel, a collection of fourteen short stories. The two that most captivated were “The Cage,” about a dumpster-diving recluse who cages a canary that’s flown into her two-room rooftop suite, and “Winter,” about a flowerchild-turned-teacher who picks up an elderly female hitchhiker during a “near blizzard,” and has her perceptions challenged. Many (if not most) writers do use “seeds” from their lives as inspiration, even when writing fiction. I don’t know how much of these particular stories was fabricated - Haensel did work as a teacher and lived in remote communities like the ones described in the book - but I do know that they really work.

Several characters are unsettled re: the way their lives have turned out, but unlike the rest, Aggie (from “The Cage”) doesn’t question her lot. “She had always accepted everything that went on around her, accepted it as the way of the world” and she “found ways to live within its limitations”. This story succeeds because Haensel never allows it to get sentimental. She portrays loneliness by having Aggie spend most of her days “listening to the cracked radio that only got local stations or looking at pictures in the tattered magazines that she collected.”

Aggie’s home decoration consists of magazine photos, her own drawings, and newspaper-clipped images of birds. She has a cracked plate and label-less tins in the cupboard, collects beer bottles, and is familiar with back alleys, where “garbage cans [spill] over with crumpled paper and old rags, boxes [smell] of rotting vegetables or wilted flowers”. These visceral details make the story credible, and the objective reportage of events allows readers to emotionally connect: we’re not being told what to feel, we’re allowed to experience it ourselves.

“Winter” succeeds because the writer first establishes how challenging Saskatchewan winters truly can be, ie “one snowfall leads to another and has to be shoveled out in the morning and sometimes again when you get home at night.” It also lasts “six months if you’re lucky, closer to seven if you’re not.” There’s a quilt in the truck because its heater doesn’t work well. (Been there).The teacher\narrator is begrudging winter and “the settled life” she’s fallen into when the hitchhiking woman appears. The teacher remembers her own days of hitchhiking – and freedom – and experiences a rainbow of emotions, including pity, and incredulity that her aged guest is bound for Winnipeg, five hundred miles hence. Where do both women belong? Suddenly, the teacher’s life doesn’t seem so glum.

Parents … spouses … a werewolf. Many characters in these fine stories have their eyes opened in one way or another; my bet is that most readers will experience the same.  

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

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“Mahihkan Lake”

by Rod MacIntyre

Published by Thistledown Press

Review by Shelley A. Leedahl

$19.95  ISBN 978-1-77187-053-5

  

Veteran writer Rod MacIntyre has combined his talents in scoring authentic and witty dialogue, evoking place to the point where you can actually smell it, and building both personal and physical drama in his seventh book, Mahihkan Lake. Well-known for his YA novels and story collections, now MacIntyre’s characters are all grown up and about to collide – with dark secrets and personal demons in tow – at a mouse-infested cabin beside a northern Saskatchewan lake. Cue gun shots, “a Jesus big storm,” and the cremains of a brother in a “strawberry-faced” cookie jar. Cue wolf (“‘Mahihkan’ - or a word like it - is Cree for wolf”), a gravel truck driver named Harold (with a man’s “boot in his brake hose”), and a mysterious letter. Cue a 1968 Martin guitar, a Road King motorcycle, and chaos.

Drama aside, this novel’s an existential story about self and an intimate exploration of family composed via equal shots of humour and pathos. If the book had a subtitle, it could be How Did We Get Here? MacIntyre’s also a playwright and screenwriter, and there’s a lot of talking in this tale as the characters both literally and figuratively warm. Several chapters are almost entirely dialogue between the underachieving and self-deprecating alcoholic musician Denny and his successful (her new Saab is “The colour of good dental work”) but haunted sister, Dianne. They contemplate talent, happiness, and familial history while tending to practical matters, ie: how to get the cabin’s ancient pump to work.

Denny describes himself as a “complete slob” who is drinking himself into “blissful oblivion”. He lives alone above a paint store. At the story’s inception Dianne retrieves him from his month at a rehab centre, and his fervent drinking is like a through-thread in this novel. At one point Dianne says, “You don’t have a heart, Dennis, you have an enlarged liver”. The three sections of the book - Blue, Sepia and Red - refer to his progressive states of drunkenness. In the “Red Zone,” he says he “start[s] hallucinating dead people”.

Denny co-wrote and toured two mildly successive albums back in the day. His “behemoth mega-hit” was “recorded in eighteen languages” and – in fine MacIntyre-esque comic style – “There’s a yodelling version from Switzerland that is playing on YouTube as we speak.”   

The author, who’s called both Saskatoon and La Ronge home, succinctly captures secondary characters with telling details, ie: the siblings’ father, who built the cabin, was a “terrible carpenter”: “His motto was ‘if it’s close, it’s good.’” Dianne’s husband, whom Denny refers to as “The Doink,” is allergic to leather and the colour black, and niece Kirsten is dating a guy with “Eat Shit” tattooed on his forehead.

Harold’s just plain unlucky. After the accident he sets out on his own journey across Mahihkan Lake and a) capsizes his canoe b) learns his tent’s missing a pole and sports a huge, mosquito-welcoming tear, and c) accidentally sets his tent on fire. 

Saskatchewan-style tragi-comedy anyone? Mahihkan Lake deftly fills the bill.

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

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