Three Book Reviews: The Medicine Chest: A Physician's Journey Towards Reconciliation by Jarol Boan; The Door at the End of Everything by Lynda Monahan; and What If You Could? by Lynne Harley, Art by Kiram Akram

“The Medicine Chest: A Physician’s Journey Towards Reconciliation”

By Jarol Boan

Published by University of Regina Press

Review by Shelley A. Leedahl

$29.95  ISBN 9-780889-779730

   

I was expecting an academic text when I received The Medicine Chest: A Physician’s Journey Towards Reconciliation by Regina-raised-and-returned-to physician and educator, Dr. Jarol Boan, but immediately discovered there’s nothing dull about this engaging, well-researched and important book. In fact, I flew through it.

Boan, an internist who spent twenty years practising and teaching in the US, returned home in 2011—at fifty-seven—to find “Indigenous people played a different role in Saskatchewan’s affairs than they once had,” and this book documents her poignant experiences while treating Indigenous patients within Saskatchewan’s health care system from 2011 to the present. Her accounts are balanced between compelling anecdotes about patients in Regina and on reserves in the Touchwood Hills, other healthcare workers, the system (ie: fee-for-service) and politics; and medical history (ie: the TB epidemic), research and statistics.

A few details about Boan’s own personal history (ie: challenging divorce and custody battle) are included, but the true focus concerns the inequities, oppression and racism inherent in the Canadian health care system. Moreover, she explains how she and a few others in the healthcare field, both settlers and Indigenous, are using a “team approach” to address “profound inequalities and injustice” through a program called “Wellness Wheel.” The name’s adapted from Medicine Wheel, “to show our desire to enhance every dimension of the human experience.” Although the logistics of delivering this program—with limited resources, personnel and physical spaces, plus inter-agency/jurisdictional confusion—have been a challenge since its inception in 2016, it boasts countless victories, and it's growing.

The book begins: “Imagine an Elder tells me a story.” The opening chapter then delves into the legend behind Turtle Island (North America); turns to the 1876 negotiation between Chief Ahtahkakoop and Commissioner Alexander Morris—the former requested a “medicine chest” for his people, so they’d receive “the same medical care the white settlers had;” returns to the present, with Boan writing the Elder a prescription for joint pain; explains the drug’s connection to willows; and finishes with Boan’s reflection that she’s “one of the keepers of the medicine chest,” which, for Indigenous people, “has often been empty or filled with horrors.”

Trust’s hard-won, but whether visiting patients on reserve or treating society’s most vulnerable at Regina General Hospital—sometimes the ER’s so busy there’s “no time to pee”—listening is the first step. She confesses to her own occasional “assumptions,” ie: being surprised that an unhomed, Indigenous ER arrival was reading Hemingway and Steinback, and he “grew up in Hollywood and went to a school in LA.” She cites Gordon Tootoosis, Allen Sapp, and Maria Campbell as Indigenous Saskatchewan talents who’ve shown “strength and resilience” to succeed, despite unjust treaties and prejudice.

Though “the road to reconciliation is messy” and “we need a reorganization of our health care system,” through “two-eyed seeing,” paying attention to “social determinants of health,” and using her settler-class power “for advocacy,” Roan’s working diligently and empathetically with “her Indigenous partners for a greater good.”  This book’s earned my highest recommendations.

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

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“The Door at the End of Everything”

By Lynda Monahan

Published by Shadowpaw Press

Review by Shelley A. Leedahl

$19.99  ISBN 9-781998-273133

 

The metaphorical title of Lynda Monahan’s fifth poetry collection, The Door at the End of Everything, is lifted from her long, forthright poem of the same name. The piece is set in a mental health facility, and several of these saturnine new poems—particularly those in the book’s middle section, “Saying the Unsayable Things”—are based on the veteran SK writer, editor and workshop facilitator’s experiences as writer-in-residence at the Victoria Hospital in Prince Albert. I’d bet my snow boots that her facilitation of the Canadian Mental Health Association’s Writing For Your Life group, and, much more intimately, personal and familial experience, also inspired these thoughtful poems.  

As Monahan writes, “there is poetry everywhere,” and bravo to her: she surely finds it. It’s on tattooed wrists that cover scars, the bulimic who “gorges even on [drinking water]”, and in the patient treated with ECT (Electroconvulsive therapy) who says he “returned home/like the dry cleaning/my mind pressed flat/as a pair of black dress paints”. These are plainspoken, powerful poems that speak to truth, hope and resilience, even when a donated coat (“buttons long since missing”) is “the closest damn thing” a man experiences “to anything [he’d] call a home.” There’s much empathy for the unhomed and residential school survivors.

The versatile writer’s free verse also delivers images of domesticity, ie: “laundry/heaped like a small unscalable mountain,” and there’s “an anarchy of wet towers and dirty shirts,” plus family poems. Like most of us, Monahan often writes from experience, and some of her most powerful poems concern a difficult father who was “bigger than all our lives.” She notes that joys seems easier for some people—like her sister—who finds it “in the wild asters at the road’s edge/on the filigreed wings of dragonflies.” For others, the “white lace of baby’s breath in ditches” is not enough. Sadness, loneliness, alienation and invisibility … these are the stones in this collection’s river, and sadness, especially, doesn’t reveal “the way stars sparkle up the sky/or when clouds are doing something to the moon.”

I appreciate how Monahan uses fire, the colour blue, food, and even the forest to manifest mood in her carefully-crafted work. Things decay and relationships stale. In “Poor Mary,” apples and peaches rot in “soggy cardboard boxes,” and, when visiting, the poet writes of “fruit lies flitting around our heads/like miniature Tinkerbells.” What a brilliant simile. The forest is seen both as sanctuary (“here where fox glimmers/in the purple shadowed snow/I know myself best) and, as in the poem “Clear Cut,” a “place of fractured branches/and broken spirit and loneliness.”

The book’s third and final section is rainbow-like. In “These Little Things That Save Us,” we find “a nest of newborn starlings” and “bits of beach glass.” Monahan knows and eloquently writes about the way the simplest things—skin “perfumed with wood smoke”—sometimes make everything better.

This new collection brims with poems that anyone with a beating heart must feel in the pit of their stomach. Bravo, Lynda Monahan.

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

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“What If You Could?”

By Lynne Harley, Art by Kiram Akram

Published by Lynne Harley-Mastery for Life Coaching & Consulting

Review by Shelley A. Leedahl

$16.99 ISBN: 978-1-77-821860-6

 

In my many years as a reviewer, I’ve noted that some of the best children’s stories are penned by those who bring professional knowledge—garnered after a career in a non-writing profession—to the page, and Lynne Harley’s a case in point. After four decades as a social worker and transformational life coach, the Camrose, AB writer has now published her first children’s book, What If you Could?, and I’m certain any youngsters who find this colourful softcover in their hands will feel just as empowered to dream big as the story’s green caterpillar does.

The story, told in rhyming verse, features a large-eyed caterpillar who is “Feeling bored” as he’s “munching and crunching” through leaves. On one “grey and gloomy day,” said caterpillar hears his inner voice, which suggests it’s time to turn over a new leaf (so to speak), and find “something new” in his life. Firstly, he begins observing the flora and fauna: “He saw squirrels, chattering noisily/playing a game of hide and seek,/and hungry baby robins gobbling/worms from their mother’s beak.” Even the wildflowers, as they “swayed freely in the breeze,”   seemed to be enjoying life more than him. The contrast between the caterpillar’s days—which are “glum and dull as rain”—and the creatures around him spurs the hero into action. “A voice as warm as sunshine” compels the caterpillar to “̒Dream Big!” and “̒Let [his] imagination run free.’”

It's a true thing that sometimes we need to be given permission to “dream big,” even if that permission comes from within. If an adult’s reading the story aloud, this might be a spot to ask listeners what they might wish to see or accomplish in their lifetime. The caterpillar imagines “travelling all around the world,” and realizes he “would love to fly.” If he had colourful wings, he could “drink the sweet, sweet nectar/of flowers kissed by morning dew,” and “people would point and admire” him. But is it all a dream?

The book also features the flipside voice, the one that “was cold and quite mean,” and encouraged the caterpillar to keep the boring status quo. “̒Who do you think you are?’” it harangues. After a “long and gloomy day,” the seesaw between hope and doubt plagues the cartoon-like creature, but in his dreams he does indeed soar—and is becoming a cocoon. Then “magically, one morning,” you know who “flew free” as a smiling, white-gloved, yellow and red butterfly, soaring over the green landscape.

The power of positive thinking is real, and sometimes we all—regardless of age—need to hear this: “̒Believe in your dreams, because I believe in you.’”

This story is also about transformation. Change can be difficult, but again, it’s definitely helpful when we’re able to silence the negative inner voice and embrace the one that says: Yes you can!

I’ll happily share this book with my seven-year-old neighbour, and as I do I’ll remind myself that even at my great age, it’s never too late to dream big.

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

 

 

Two Book Reviews: The Genius Hour Project by Leanne Shirtliffe, and The Time for Peace is Now by Marion Mutala, Illustrations by Kate Hodgson, Calligraphy by A. E. Matheson

“The Genius Hour Project”

By Leanne Shirtliffe

Published by Thistledown Press

Review by Shelley A. Leedahl

$16.95 ISBN 9781771872577 

 

As a sexagenarian, I never imagined I’d so enjoy a novel featuring an eleven-year-old protagonist, but here’s the thing: good literature is good literature, and Leanne Shirtliffe’s juvenile novel, The Genius Hour Project, certainly fits the bill. This engaging and realistic book was a distinct pleasure to read, with compelling characters and interesting relationship dynamics, and a few serious subplots (divorce, depression) that elevate it leagues above many middle-grade novels. It’s refreshing to read a story for this age group that doesn’t rely on slapstick humour or silly hijinks—the cast may be young, but they’re mature and intelligent.

Shirtliffe’s a longtime educator, a school counsellor and parent who writes credibly about the school and home life of Francine (aka Frazzy), a self-deprecating only child and audiophile with a passion for vintage vinyl albums like The Rolling Stones’ Sticky Fingers. Frazzy’s mother is the busy mayor of “Riverdale,” and her dad stays at home, upcycles lampshades and sells items at flea markets—he also suffers from depression. The Calgary author’s deft treatment of how this manifests for Dad and how his family and friends deal with it demonstrate literary skill and empathy. Although Frazzy occasionally thinks her family’s “the Weirdersons,” her best friend reminds her that “̒At least [her] parents are happy together.’” 

The novel delivers insight into contemporary education practices, ie: Frazzy’s teacher, Ms. Zalia, set up her classroom with “flexible seating options”—one can “bounce on an exercise ball instead of wiggle on a chair,” or choose the “Stand-Up,” “Independent,” “Pillow” or “Yoga Station” to work at. The book begins in September, with the Grade Six students—witty Frazzy; her best friend, Mel, a hockey captain; Frazzy’s Farzi-speaking crush, Ebrahim; and bothersome Jake—embarking on something called a Genius Hour Project: a student-driven research project in which students select, research, create and publicly share a project they work on all year.

Grade Six is “supposed to be [Frazzy’s] year for flying under the radar, for being normal, for not embarrassing [herself],” and to that end, she selects a project she thinks won’t cause much of a stir—genius female politicians, including her mother. But Frazzy’s heart’s not in it: music is her passion. Even Ebrahim, for whom she’s making a Spotify playlist, understands that “music is [her] genius.”   Should she be true to herself and surreptitiously change projects midway through the year?

Secondary characters have some of the best lines in this book, ie: schoolmate Lyza, who rocked an appearance on the show “The Next Big Voice,” says “̒Music is a gateway to feelings we don’t know we have.’” Jake (of the incessant teasing) tells Frazzy that “̒This world has no place for people like us.’”  Also noteworthy are all the nods to the here-and-now, ie: at the flea market, “People …. stream in like they’re squeezing through the doors of Best Buy on Black Friday,” and Youtube’s mentioned a few times.

Splendid on all levels—and a satisfying ending—The Genius Hour Project  deserves a gold star.    

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

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 “The Time for Peace is Now”

Written by Marion Mutala, Illustrations by Kate Hodgson, Calligraphy by A. E. Matheson

Published by Millenium Marketing

Review by Shelley A. Leedahl

$19.99  ISBN 978-1-7390670-5-2

 

Prolific and award-winning Saskatoon writer Marion Mutala now has twenty titles to her credit—including the acclaimed children’s series Baba’s Babushka, poetry and a cookbook—and, during these globally turbulent times, she’s aptly re-released her 2015 chapbook The Time for Peace is Now. The book’s minimally illustrated (a blue dove with a leafed olive branch appears on the cover and throughout the book) by Kate Hodgson, with lovely calligraphy by A. E. Matheson.

Mutala has a history of promoting peace, love and equality in her books, and in the dedication for this small book she considers “World Peace,” and writes: “In the 21^st century, society needs to teach children to find ways to solve problems peacefully. I ask myself ‘What am I doing today to promote peace?’” I would say the former longtime educator is doing much more than most with the publication of this title, inspired, she says “by the motto of Hazrat Mirza Nasir Ahmad Khalifatul Masih III: ‘Love of all, hatred for none.’”

Each page is a prayer in itself, beginning and ending with the phrase: “The time for peace is now; now is the time for peace.” Between these phrases we read about the various people who desire peace, ie: “Nurses heal for it. Doctors cure for it. Hospitals nurture it”. Mutala’s passionate about the arts, and this comes across in the text: “Singers vocalize it. Musicians perform it. Dancers dance it. Writers craft it. Painters illustrate it. Actors entertain it. Conductors direct it.” She writes that even flowers, birds, animals, the sun, mountains, the moon and stars crave peace—as so do people from various cultures around the world.

I particularly enjoyed the naming of Creators that appears on “Paix 12” of the 17- page chapbook. From those we’re familiar with, ie: “Buddha, Allah, and Jehovah” to “Gitche Manitou,” “Tenri-O-no-Mikoto” and “Divine Mother and Master of All Things in the Universe”. In her brief Author’s Note, Mutala explains “There are 104 different names of Gods listed on [a] world religions website,” and the final four pages of the book includes each of these in a colourful calligraphic font.

The Time for Peace is Now was initially released by Happy Leopard Chapbooks as a limited edition, handmade chapbook, with all proceeds going to the charity NASHI, “a Saskatoon-based organization dedicated to addressing human trafficking, particularly in Ukraine.” In a 2015 Saskatoon StarPhoenix interview, Mutala said: “When I first wrote the Peace book, I didn’t know if it was going to be a story or a poem … Now I reckon it’s my prayer for peace.”

Whether one’s Creator is “Great Interconnectedness,” “Infinite Mystery,” “The Evolutionary Absolute,” “God,” or any other deity, Mutala believes that love is at the basis of all faith. This tiny, inclusive book tenderly raises awareness about the imminent universal need and desire for peace, and good on Mutala for flying the peace flag in this unique way.

Her twentieth book, A Rainbow Makes A Promise, was released in the summer of 2024.

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

 

Three Book Reviews: Ghost Hotel by Arthur Slade; Invasion of the I.Q. Snatchers by Arthur Slade; and Realia by Michael Trussler

“Ghost Hotel”

By Arthur Slade

Published by Shadowpaw Press Reprise

Review by Shelley A. Leedahl

$14.99  ISBN 978-1-998273-02-7

Ghost Hotel, the 2^nd novel in prolific writer Arthur Slade’s Canadian Chills Series, is a spooky send-up for young readers and—abracadabra—it’s just been re-released. If you’re already a Slade fan, you may remember Ghost Hotel. First published in 2004, Shadowpaw Press Reprise has resurrected it … and lucky you if you have yet to discover it. The tone of this supernatural, middle years’ mystery—featuring junior detective friends “Wart” and Cindy—is light-hearted. Though the youthful leads are wise-crackers and the story’s a hoot, the author’s a serious writer with mad skills: you don’t have over thirty novels published if you’re a dabbler.

Disclaimer: I know Arthur Slade. Back in the day, we wrote radio commercials in the same office. I read his first novel, Draugr, when it was still in manuscript form. I attended his wedding. As lovely as these things may be, they don’t matter as far as this review goes, for even if I was inclined to bolster a book on account of a long friendship, there’s no need to here: Slade’s books consistently win awards and fly off the shelves because he is simply a damn good writer. The Saskatoon author earned a Governor General’s Award for his novel Dust, and his name frequently appears on SK Book Award lists.

Ghost Hotel is a Saskatoon-based story concerning Archie (“dressed in a nerdy grey suit-and-tie outfit and a bowler hat that made him look like a mini-version of Charlie Chaplin”), a young ghost who appears to novice sleuths Wart (CEO of the Walter Biggar Bronson Ghost Detective and Time Travel Agency) and his sidekick, Cindy, at Victoria School, post-badminton match. Wart has a few special possessions that would make him the envy of any grade seven student, including a watch that glows “whenever a supernatural presence comes near,” and a cellphone that works even during time travel episodes. Wart comes by his curiosity honestly: his parents are “both mad scientists”. His father suffers from “alienphobia” and wears a tinfoil hat, and his mom, with a PhD in “psychic and supernatural sciences,” has been phobic about vampires “ever since she was attacked by Count Spokula” while the family was on holiday in Transylvania. Why Transylvania? “Cheap flights,” Wart explains.

Kids must love this book. It’s original, funny (the asides are terrific), fast-moving,  and—the boy-ghost that leads Wart and Cindy to a 1936-version of the Delta Bessborough aside—Slade’s handling of language and characters is top-notch. The adults are wonderfully weird. There’s a magician whose face is “the colour and texture of mottled Swiss cheese;” a school principal obsessed with toy trains; and a “batty” librarian insists that “every child should read [The Wizard of Oz]”.

Slade takes a self-talking ventriloquist’s dummy (always frightening), loads of “ghost goo,” a time-travelling elevator, and a family’s untimely death in the wintery South Saskatchewan and puts them all—and much more—in the path of two adolescent detectives who are ready to kick some derriere.

Ghost Hotel: hard yes.        

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

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“Invasion of the I.Q. Snatchers”

By Arthur Slade

Published by Shadowpaw Press Reprise

Review by Shelley A. Leedahl

$14.99  ISBN 978-1-998273-04-1

The Canadian Chills Series is a trifecta of amusing middle-grade novels created by Saskatoon’s award-winning Arthur Slade, and I’ve just devoured the Nanaimo Bar-themed Invasion of the I.Q. Snatchers, the third book in the series. As with his earlier books, Slade’s chosen two clever and curious friends—Gordon Whillickers and Sophia Morrison—to team up against a threatening force, and futuristic technology, an amiable Sasquatch, and bizarrely-behaving adults are part of the package. It’s a recipe that works as well as combining custard, a chocolate ganache topping, and a coconut crumb base.    

Coastal Nanaimo’s the setting for Slade’s slightly clumsy and seriously science-minded pair. The novel begins thus: “A long, hairy arm reached through my open window and pounded around the top of my desk”. Meet Cheryl, a pink-fingernailed Sasquatch. She’s after the Nanaimo bars someone’s left on the Whillickers’ doorstep, and Gordon has yet to sample. His sassy talking parrot, Archimedes—who’s been listening to “ornithopetic IQ-raising songs” on an MP3 player (this reprinted book initially hit shelves in 2007) and is velcro-strapped into a tiny helmet with a bird cam—takes an investigative flight over Nanaimo’s rooftops and zeroes in on “a pan full of Nanaimo bars, shooting along the sidewalk all on its own”. Say what? In a cliff-hanging line at the end of the third (characteristically) short chapter, Gordon knows “things [are] about to get extremely and utterly weird”. 

It seems all of Nanaimo’s received the addictive Nanaimo bars on their doorsteps, along with a compliment: confidant Sophia’s reads “To the smartest girl in Nanaimo;” insert boy for girl, and voilà—Gordon’s note. The kids’ parents haven’t been immune, and after consuming the treats, they’re acting positively Stepfordian: the women wear curlers and are obsessed with vacuuming and watching Coronation Street; the men wear suits and ties, Brylcreem their hair, and watch Front Page Challenge. “All of Nanaimo has gone completely bananas,” Sophia says.

Can the kids discover who is turning the Nanaimoites into zombies? Is nanotechnology involved? Can Archie help? Who are the Denebians? And what about that “BHM” (Big Hairy Monster)?

As with Book 2 in this entertaining series, Slade’s had a load of fun with the book’s adults. Gordon’s dad’s an architect who’d “grown a goatee because he thought it would make him look younger,” and Sophia’s dad is a writer who “was never really working but spent most of his time with a cloudy, deep-thought look on his face”.

Slade’s sense of humour is matched by his wild imagination: Cheryl lives on Newcastle Island, and Gordon wonders if she’s “one of those hippie types who never shaves. That would explain the hairy arms”. The story’s interspersed with silly Sasquatch lore, Nanaimo history and landmarks (ie: the Bastion), and Slade’s typical veneration for libraries and librarians.

If zingers like “It turns out that Sasquatches aren’t the greatest drivers in the world” would delight a young person you know, do check out this romp of a book—and Slade’s multiple other titles—at arthurslade.com.   

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

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“Realia”

By Michael Trussler

Published by Radiant Press

Review by Shelley A. Leedahl

$20.00  ISBN 9-781998-926039

   

As a longtime reviewer, I occasionally receive a book that I quickly discern will require disproportionate time and patience to digest. If, for example, I don’t know what the title means—ie: Realia, by award-winning Regina poet and nonfiction writer Michael Trussler—I can expect that Google’s going to be my friend. In a review of Trussler’s The History Forest, I suggested that reading his complex work is “like walking through a forest under the cape of night”. I’m still mostly in the dark with his latest work, Realia, but surmise that this very perplexity is indeed the point. Non-sequiturs, unfinished lines, seemingly random symbols, footnotes, bizarre juxtapositions (“History = milkshake duck”) … colouring outside the lines is this writer’s style, and he’s nothing if not consistent. I needed to take a deeper dive.   

Trussler’s bio reveals that he’s “neuro-divergent,” and there are references to “phobic anxiety,” “OCD,” and “the psych ward [he] spent a week in downtown”. As I toddled through the pieces—frequently stopping to research names and words—and realized that much of what the poet questions is actually reality, I began to fall under the work’s strange spell and stopped looking for logical connections I might report on, like his litany of technological and cinematic references: microphones, voice-over, documentary, copying machine, TV remote, Zoom, mise en scène, database, televisions, film camera, Netflix, smart phones, iPhone, and various films and actors. Or his connection to colours: “The orange-red eyes of oystercatchers”.  

In a formidable poem titled “A Grammar of Spontaneity,” Trussler writes:

 

     a bit sketchy but for starters there’s

     been a lot of illness in the Family, the one

     real job is

 

     to keep, is to keep, is to

     avoid ending

 

     up like your father

 

There are quotes—sometimes mid-poem—from a variety of sources (from Hari Kunzru to Rachel Carson to excerpts from the Journal of Katherine Mansfield), but most of the most effective lines are Trussler’s own:

                                                        the moment in which the patient

remembers the mother-of-pearl cliffs of sunlight

                                                        asleep on a grandmother’s

                                                        bathroom floor—

 

(C.D. Wright quoting another, unnamed poet’s assertion that “̒Poetry is speech by someone who is in trouble,’” is also stellar.)

It’s about the journey, here, not the destination. These pieces (the book includes prose essays) never feign to make logical sense: the anxiousness that’s often part and parcel of Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder is represented in this collection. That Trussler, through these pieces, can make a non-OCD reader feel the experience of a busy and often fearful mind—struggling to ascertain the difference between “common” reality and one’s own reality—is testament to his talent and the works' power. 

“Realia,” by the by, has multiple meanings, but most relevant here is this Merriam-Webster adaptation: “̒Realia’ is also sometimes used philosophically to distinguish real things from the theories about them”. Also of note is literary/cultural critic and writer Lauren Berlant’s insightful, book-opening quote: “How does someone stay attached to life while repudiating the world of bad objects?” This question hangs in the air. 

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

 

 

Three Book Reviews: Reflections in a Farmhouse Window: A Prairie Memoir by Marilyn Frey; The Downloaded by Robert J. Sawyer, and Hanging Art: Noah Carey Mysteries-Book One

“Reflections in a Farmhouse Window: A Prairie Memoir” 

By Marilyn Frey

Published by Marilyn Frey

Review by Shelley A. Leedahl

$24.95  ISBN 9-780981-380346

   

One of the many joys of reading memoir is learning you share certain places, people or experiences with an author. I didn’t anticipate crossovers between my life and Saskatchewan writer Marilyn Frey’s, but I discovered multiple intersections while reading her candid, thought-provoking and beautifully-written book, Reflections in a Farmhouse Window: A Prairie Memoir. Like Frey, I’ve also lived in Middle Lake, Meadow Lake and Saskatoon, but overlapping communities aside, I really connected emotionally to the sixty stories this talented writer shares about her rural upbringing, the joys and trials of family life, weathering major transitions, and knowing when it’s time to take a few moments for oneself.

After a long career in banking—from teller beginnings to becoming a District Manager who frequently travelled—Frey now has the time to turn her attention to her passion for writing, and I’m so glad she does. It’s rare to read a first-time, self-published writer’s book that sings the way this one does: it’s clear that Frey has put the time in re: learning the craft of writing. Her use of literary devices (like personification), the inclusion of unique details, and showing rather than telling are just a few of the qualities that elevate this work.  

And there’s so much interesting material here. The book’s chronologically structured, beginning with Frey’s first memory (hot woodstove vs. toddler in a “cotton dress with puffy sleeves and a Peter Pan collar”), and one story rolls smoothly into the next. During her 1960s and ‘70s childhood, Frey and her siblings worked hard at farm chores and were “never short on ideas to keep [them]selves amused”. As a young wife, Frey and her husband lived four years in a poorly-heated mobile home with a “mouse invasion,” and when they moved to an acreage near Cudworth, they endured “ever-persistent snake issues”.  They often witnessed their affable St. Bernard, Butch, “slurping up a snake as though eating spaghetti”. “Herculean” Butch also got stuck beneath the family’s Pinto (while chasing a cat), and “lift[ed] the car on two wheels as he tried to break free”.   

Frey’s keen eye and ear also add to the impact of these sometimes edge-of-your-seat anecdotes. “The wind howled a devilish cry, and the willow trees reached their craggy arms to the sky,” she writes. A teacher’s “Nixon-like jowls shook when he moved his head and his thin lips seemed to be drawn in as if holding back something he wanted to say”.

The stories are often humorous (ie: getting shunted from a dance class) and always heartfelt, but Frey also portrays life realistically: a break-in, a rape, her daughter’s near-drowning and a suicide are among the serious disclosures.

The 272-page memoir concludes with a multi-generational family gathering, and a moving reconnection with Frey’s childhood home—where the book began. This reader experienced great satisfaction in the full-circle structure, and Frey’s graceful acceptance that the house—now with new owners and transplanted to Wakaw Lake—was “no longer [her] home”.

This is a mesmerizing and triumphant read.

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

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“The Downloaded”

By Robert J. Sawyer

Published by Shadowpaw Press

Review by Shelley A. Leedahl

$19.95  ISBN 978-1-98-939899-9

Robert J. Sawyer is well-known in the science fiction realm. He’s written over two dozen novels and won the sci-fi world’s Big Three: the Hugo, the Nebula, and the John W. Campbell Memorial Award. His novel, FlashForward, inspired a same-named ABC TV series, and he also scripted the finale of the web series Star Trek Continues. Sawyer’s also a member of the Order of Canada.

I don’t ordinarily read science fiction, but I am indeed aware of Robert J. Sawyer. I heard him present at a Saskatchewan Writers Guild conference decades ago, and remember thinking that his brand of sci-fi was something this fan of realistic literary fiction just might enjoy. Fast-forward to the present: I recently read his 2024 novel, The Downloaded, and appreciated how this talented author has created a reality where humans are still basically the same as the ones who currently walk the earth: they have complicated feelings, they make mistakes, they crack jokes. And, in the case of the twenty-four astronauts and thirty-five ex-cons who populate The Downloaded, they also make frequent movie references.

The story is relayed through a series of interviews with various characters, including Dr. Jürgen Haas and Captain Letitia Garvey, lead players among the team of astronauts (and robots) on an international mission to travel to the red dwarf star Proxima Centauri b on the starship Hōkūle'a  to “repopulate the Earth if a disaster happened”. The crew “uploaded” in 2058. Unbeknownst to them until 500 human years later (it’s four years for the astronauts in their simulated reality; their actual bodies have been frozen and their consciousnesses uploaded into a quantum computer while they remained stationary in the ships’ coffin-like “silos”), the ship never left Earth’s orbit. Something “ground civilization to a halt” after the bodies were frozen and before they could be transferred to the starship, and the astronauts and prisoners learn they’re still in Waterloo, Ontario at the Quantum Cryonics Institute, among “the twisted skeletons of buildings”.

What was this catastrophic event, why are criminals selected to spend their prison sentences in “cryosleep” alongside the astronauts, and who is the mysterious interviewer? Plus, what do Mennonites have to do with it all?

What Sawyer does well is take a serious situation like earth’s demise and, with lighthearted banter, unusual scenarios, and characters with major attitude, make it all seem like a romp. Dr. Haas says he’s “looked at clouds from both sides now”—a Joni Mitchell reference. He “first realized that things had gone to ratshit” in 2548. There was a “great privacy revolt” in the 2040s. COVID-50 has come and gone.  Mars has been colonized.

On top of all the other challenges the astronauts face in their strange new reality, they learn that a “whopping great mother of an asteroid will smack right into the Earth” in seven years. Combine a whole lot of science, a shipload of humanity and the chops of a veteran writer, and you’ve got a fun-filled futuristic novel for the here and now. 

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

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“Hanging Art: Noah Carey Mysteries—Book One”

By Jim Handy

Published by YNWP

Review by Shelley A. Leedahl

$24.95  ISBN 978-1-77869-033-4

 

Looking for a page-turning summer read that features a likeable sleuth, a zippy plot and is saturated with local colour ? Yes? Then do I have the book for you. Hanging Art by Saskatoon’s Jim Handy is the University of Saskatchewan Distinguished Professor of History-turned-novelist’s first in a series of novels called the Noah Carey Mysteries, and I found it hard to put down.

The book is equally divided between Saskatoon’s downtown core and Toronto. The bike-riding, Cross-Fit and martial arts’ practicing sleuth—a retired history professor, not-so-coincidentally—knows his way around both cities. Noah Carey is also a coffee afficionado, and if you’re familiar with Saskatoon, you’ll enjoy the references to places like City Perks, Night Oven Bakery and the Citizen Café, where he “got a Cubano instead of a latte to mix things up a bit”.

The Remai Modern art gallery (“a pile of cantilevered square boxes in rust-coloured cement”)  and a smaller gallery also feature large in this art-themed (note the title) story. Carey’s case concerns the dubious suicide of a promising young Saskatoon artist, Ronnie Robinson, who lives and paints in the city’s warehouse district. When his friend finds him “Swinging from a rope in the middle of the loft,” Robinson’s parents—who operate a market garden that employs immigrants­—elect to hire Carey to uncover the truth, and insist that “Ronnie did not kill himself”. Carey, the witty First-person narrator, says he “only take[s] cases that look interesting—and don’t seem like they’ll involve sitting in a car all night long”. This case qualifies. He believes “historians are basically private eyes already—digging through the evidence to find lost stories or set old ones straight”.

Carey’s well-connected. Close friends include a Legal Aid lawyer, a Saskatoon police officer, and an art gallery owner. He also knows other academics and has kept in touch with students. Of his Muay Boran teacher, Sidney, he says “For someone who looks more Russian than Thai, he has to work hard to pull off the ancient Asian wisdom stuff”. This highly-peopled mystery also naturally contains several unpleasant types, including senior artist Edith Maxwell, who claims that “Painting is a craft hard-won through decades of dedication and work,” and believes that Ronnie didn’t deserve his acclaim, and Robinson’s neighbour, an artist who “looked like a biker out of a ‘60s movie”.   

Carey’s a down-to-earth, affable guy who wears “almost nothing but mock neck shirts, chinos, and casual sport coats,” and, like me, believes that bow ties are “the worst kind of affectation—as if the wearer is deliberately trying to come across as a cheap southern lawyer”. He dates an Eritrean-Canadian economist, drives “a ten-year-old Audi A6 wagon,” and is not too proud to line dance. When the job gets tough and he has to employ his martial arts’ skills, he sends one goon “hobbling away … looking very much like a badly wounded Sasquatch”.

Hanging Art had me hooked; I look forward to seeing where Handy takes Noah Carey next.  

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

 

 

 

Two Book Reviews: Into the Continent by Emily McGiffin, and Isúh Áníi: Dátł’ìshí Ts’ìká áa Guunijà / As Grandmother Said: The Narratives of Bessie Meguinis as narrated by Dátł’ìshí Ts’ìká Bessie Meguinis and Ninàghá Tsitł’á Willie Little Bear, retold by Dit’óní Didlíshí Bruce Starlight, and illustrated by Treasa Starlight

“Into the Continent”

By Emily McGiffin

Published by University of Regina Press

Review by Shelley A. Leedahl

$19.95  ISBN 9-780889-779891

   

I wasn’t sure how to begin Emily McGiffin’s poetry collection, Into the Continent, with its similar but opposite-side-up covers, front and back, and a Page 1 at either end. On one cover, a bayonetted rifle on a creamy background. On the other, a “Big Old Axe” against the same. As I chose a side (the rifle) to start my reading, I hoped I’d find the answer to why the book—praised by Jan Zwicky and Tim Lilburn—was structured thus. What is McGiffin, author of Between Dusk and Night and Of Land, Bones, and Money: Toward a South African Ecopoetics, metaphorically saying with this either way-ness and dramatic images?

What I do know is that the University of Regina’s Oksana Poetry & Poetics book series, of which this book’s a part, concerns titles that “[probe] discussions of poetry’s cultural role”. I mined the internet and learned that the author/academic’s work “concerns the interplay of extractivism, empire, and expressive arts,” and she self-describes as “a multidisciplinary environmental humanities scholar researching arts, extraction, and environmental justice”. Currently a Research Fellow at University College London, she’s also studied and worked in British Columbia, Ghana, Scotland, and Toronto. The global sweep of her work—and her politics—became quickly evident.

The tone here hits like a blunt instrument: clearly the poet’s spotlight is on history, and particularly the violent history wrought by Colonialism and greed. The poems build upon one another, story-like, and the poet’s exclusion of titles supports this narrative flow. The Industrial Revolution, bleak landscapes, the sea and the natural world, a slave ship, land ownership, war, sheep farming, rape, and childbirth are grappled with via ingenious language, including some terms—"quern,” “quaggas”—that had me Googling.

The rifle side thrusts readers into Scotland, “coal-hearted” and with “feet in heathered depths,” “mud banks [standing] bleak along the firth” and “glens desolate”. Soon after, while “port lights wink and simmer on the bay,” a ship is “built for human cargo,” and the narration directs the plot: “i await my carriage”. Note the small i.

Things really get moving on the “age-old/murderous sea,” with “the hull a rising/reek as cargo vomits”. McGiffin demonstrates a sharp ear for cacophony: there’s “grunting hogs” and “planks’ and rigging’s groan”. I noted a reverence for creatures, and admire the image of a “purple-turbaned snail [dragging] a hind foot”. The juxtaposition of the industrial and the natural—ie: “pig-iron dawn” and a single vulture “scything under fisted bright”—is dynamite.

The ship docks, and we find “castaways, dispatched to master/a thorned land”. The linebreaking “master” is clever indeed, and it ushers in the next series of poems. What’s to be mastered? Oh, so much—and that’s just the rifle portion.      

The work’s original, musical, feminist (“the bible is the size and weight of one man’s hand”), and clearly not pro-Capitalism or Colonialism. The rifle? War, oppression and power. The axe? Settlement and divisions. Perhaps the inverted structure represents the ambiguity of beginnings and endings. History often viciously repeats itself.    

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

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“Isúh Áníi: Dátł’ìshí Ts’ìká áa Guunijà / As Grandmother Said: The Narratives of Bessie Meguinis”

As narrated by Dátł’ìshí Ts’ìká Bessie Meguinis and Ninàghá Tsitł’á Willie Little Bear

Retold by Dit’óní Didlíshí Bruce Starlight

Illustrated by Treasa Starlight

Published by University of Regina Press

Review by Shelley A. Leedahl

$24.95  ISBN 9-780889-779853

   

The University of Regina Press is doing important work with their commitment to honouring the traditional languages, legends and cultures of Canada’s First Peoples, and the list of books in their First Nations Language Readers series recently grew again with the landmark publication of Isúh Áníi: Dátł’ìshí Ts’ìká áa Guunijà / As Grandmother Said: The Narratives of Bessie Meguinis. This is the first book to be published in Tsuut’ina (“a critically endangered language”) in more than one hundred years. It contains nine traditional narratives originally narrated by Elders Dátł’ìshí Ts’ìká Bessie Meguinis (1883-1987) and her son, Ninàghá Tsitł’á Willie Little Bear (1912-1989). Here they’re retold by Dit’óní Didlíshí Bruce Starlight, the grandson of Bessie Meguinis. Dr. Starlight spent much of his early childhood with Meguinis, listening to her stories and teachings as he recovered from tuberculosis, and with the help of colleague Dr. Christopher Cox—and chapter-beginning, black and white illustrations by Treasa Starlight—he shares invaluable knowledge of this tonal language that less than twenty people now speak.     

According to The Canadian Encyclopedia (online version), “The Tsuut'ina language (often known as Sarcee) is an Athabaskan/Dene language of northern Canada,” and “Today, Tsuut’ina territory is in southern Alberta, bordering the southwestern city limits of Calgary.”

In the book’s foreword, Dr. Arok Wolvengrey, Professor of Algonquian Languages and Linguistics at First Nations University of Canada, writes “it is my hope that this book will be one small yet crucial piece in the multifaceted approach required in the Tsuu’tina’s efforts to retain and revitalize their beautiful language”. This collaborative publication is a “teaching tool” that incudes a linguistic analysis and a comprehensive Tsuut’ina-English glossary.

The stories themselves cover diverse subjects. In “How the Earth was Created—The Old Man and the Muskrat,” there’s a flood and an “Old Man” who, Noah-like, built a boat for “All of the animals”. He directed first a beaver, then a muskrat to “try to grab some dirt from the bottom of the water”. The muskrat succeeded in returning with “a little bit of dirt in his paws,” and from this, and with the help of “a fast-running bird,” the earth became “whole again”.   

The matter-of-fact “Buffalo Lake” concerns the water that flowed “uncontrollably” from a slaughtered buffalo’s bladder to create Buffalo Lake, beneath which “the buffalo turned into an island there”.

There are narratives about how the brave Tsuut’ina separated into northern and southern peoples; a tale about the Tsuut’ina meeting the Blackfoot (“they all intermarried … we were all initiated into different societies and ceremonies”), and a story about how a buffalo gifted a young man with the “holy” abode that is a teepee, and how the teepee is structurally representative of a buffalo.

I could almost hear the speakers in the above stories and others—about the Beaver Bundle, water monsters, Thunderbirds and Black Soldiers—and credit the entire crew responsible for sharing, translating and preserving these stories, word for word. How musical it must have been to hear them in their original Tsuut’ina.       

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

 

 

Three Book Reviews: The Good Walk: Creating New Paths on Traditional Prairie Trails by Matthew R. Anderson; What Fills Your House Like Smoke by E. McGregor; and Tanning Moosehides the Northern Saskatchewan Way: An Easy Step-by-Step Guide by Tommy Bird, Lawrence Adam, Lena Adam, with Miriam Körner, and photos by Miriam Körner and Tommy Bird

 “The Good Walk: Creating New Paths on Traditional Prairie Trails”

Written by Matthew R. Anderson

Published by University of Regina Press

Review by Shelley A. Leedahl

$27.95  ISBN 9-780889-779655

   

Uncanny timing. I recently completed a pilgrimage walk—the 300-kilometer Camino de Santiago (Portuguese Coastal Route)—and not a week after my return from Europe I was reviewing a book about a very different—but much closer to home—set of pilgrimages. The Good Walk: Creating New Paths on Traditional Prairie Trails, by Swift Current-born and raised educator, author and Lutheran minister, Matthew Anderson (who’s also walked the Camino de Santiago), is compelling, exceedingly well-written and researched nonfiction concerning three ambitious Saskatchewan pilgrimages across Treaty 4 and 6 pastures, valleys, roads, ranches and farms, abandoned homesteads, brush belts, villages, First Nations’ reserves and more via the Traders’ Road/NWMP Patrol Trail (2015), the Battleford Trail (2017), and the Frenchman Trail (2018), and creating “healthy new stories” on the journey. “By walking,” Anderson writes, “our group was attempting to pay attention”.  

These “good walks” were undertaken by an eclectic assemblage—including clergy, writers, Elders, family members, a hydrologist, naturalist Trevor Herriot, and book dedicatee and Saskatchewan History and Folklore Society president Hugh Henry—to connect to the land and its stories while respecting the First Peoples who walked these trails long before Henry Kelsey set foot on them and Colonialism dealt its calamitous blows. Anderson makes a connection between long-distance walking and decolonization. He writes that Canadians “need to create better narratives about this land and our place, past and present, in it” and to question “the bright and shiny pioneer narratives”.

This mind-expanding book is steeped in empathy for Indigenous Peoples. Anderson writes of broken treaties and the mass starvation of Indigenous Peoples, and includes several quotes from Indigenous and non-Indigenous scholars. Smudging and leaving tobacco were an integral part of these respectful pilgrimages.

Also noteworthy are the numerous poetic descriptions of prairie landscape and weather; anecdotes about group interactions and the hosts; and Anderson’s familial mission: to return a portion of his recently-deceased parents’ remains to the Shaunavon-area, “lonesome little grave” where the author’s infant older sister—whom he’d never met—is buried. Detailing the walk from Wood Mountain to Cypress Hills, Anderson says “gusts … scared up clouds of grasshoppers that would then be caught in the wind and ping off our bodies like flung gravel,” and “antelope zig-zagged away at our approach”.

The skilled weaving of the personal here-and-now (including Anderson’s serious leg infection during the final days of the Frenchman Trail), folklore and recorded—though not necessarily true—history brilliantly steered me through the sizeable book. A shocking revelation for this Saskatchewan-born and raised reader was that during the November 27, 1885 mass hanging in Battleford—eight nêhiyaw and Nakota were executed—Indigenous students from the Battleford Indian Industrial School “were forced to watch the hangings”. All these years later, racism is still prevalent in the province: the 2016 killing of Colten Boushie created a further divide.

This award-worthy book deserves a long slow read. Probably multiple reads. There’s much to take in with each of these prairie pilgrimages, and each “felt holy in its own way”.  

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

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“What Fills Your House Like Smoke”

Written by E. McGregor

Published by Thistledown Press

Review by Shelley A. Leedahl

$19.95  ISBN 9781771872522

 

I must admit, the title of E. (Erin) McGregor’s debut poetry collection—What Fills Your House Like Smoke—greatly piqued my interest. I’m partial to similes and metaphors, and McGregor’s title was a poetic hook—what, exactly, does fill this Winnipeg poet’s house with metaphorical smoke? I guessed that butterflies and sweet peas wouldn’t be at the heart of it.

McGregor holds a Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing from the University of British Columbia, and the sheer variety of poetic forms—prose poems; free verse; quatrains; couplets; concrete; and experimental, sound-oriented pieces—in the book is consistent with the range I’ve seen in other first books by creative writing students. What differentiates McGregor’s poetry, however, is its nearly singular focus on the theme of personal identity; often, first books “free range” across themes and subjects. McGregor’s poems weave pain into a story.   

McGregor is a “Euro-Settler/Métis,” and in her piece “Weeds”—another metaphor—she begins: “Don’t judge me too harshly/for not understanding the small things/that come with your blood”. In that same poem: “[white people] have me by the roots/it’s confusing”. The poet contends with her lineage, and, in particular, the maternal line, including her grandmother, Dora—to whom the book is dedicated—and her mother, both of whom had “the drinking disease”. She writes of the hardships Dora faced, including an abusive husband who “beat her up and cleaned her out,/stole her dogs”. Of Dora’s siblings, she writes of “The streets of Toronto that swallowed one brother, the train/wheels in the Fraser Valley that bisected/another. The sea of alcohol/that could not be swum.”

The poems are real and raw—full of hangovers and lousy partners, class disparities and Death Apnea. And they’re credible, though the back cover copy claims the book’s “an incomplete and wildly imaginative biography of [McGregor’s] grandmother”. I applaud this imagination. In the opening poem— “Instructions for the Death of a Grandmother”—McGregor writes about her grandmother’s “gurgle-thick breaths,” and the poet wonders if Dora can smell “the stale alcohol” on her granddaughter’s skin. Hyperaware in the hours after death, McGregor considers “the way gas-bar lights make everything look silver” and she notes “the song that is playing on the radio”. At times grandmother and granddaughter are close, sharing “Japanese chicken wings and rice,” and other times they struggle with the “finding of things to give words to”.   

The poems are set in a few different locations, including Edmonton (“Edmonton is a thin soup, at first”) and Winnipeg, with its “goose shit and shadows”. In Edmonton, Dora’s husband “retrieves her from toilet-stall floors/and carries her, like a hunter with his kill,/to the cold car”. This poet demonstrates deft, non-sentimental handling of intimate personal experience, poem after poem.

What fills this house with smoke? Bravery. Honesty. Curiosity. The matriarchal line contains all the strengths and “lesions” of three generations, and the youngest of these women—through examination, contemplation and literary skill—is doing her best to slowly clear the smoke, and understand who she is.

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

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"Tanning Moosehides the Northern Saskatchewan Trapline Way: An Easy Step-by-Step Guide"

Written by Tommy Bird, Lawrence Adam, Lena Adam, with Miriam Körner

Photos by Miriam Körner and Tommy Bird

Published by YNWP

Review by Shelley A. Leedahl

$49.95  ISBN 978-1-77869-032-7

 

In these modern times, when we want information our “Go To” is usually to Google or Youtube it. If one wanted to learn to tan moosehides, for example, they could indeed go online to discover how, but some steps might be missed. If tanning moosehides is indeed your intent, now there’s an excellent resource that you can hold in your hands or spread on a table: Tanning Moosehides the Northern Saskatchewan Trapline Way: An Easy Step-by-Step Guide. 

The softcover guidebook by northern Saskatchewan residents Tommy Bird, Lawrence Adam, Lena Adam, and award-winning La Ronge writer Miriam Körner takes readers through the twenty-four steps involved in the time-consuming process of tanning moosehides, “a skill passed down from generation to generation since time immemorial”. The book is filled with colour photographs provided by Miriam Körner and Tommy Bird, and it begins with a helpful introduction.

If you’re from the north, you may already know the various uses of tanned moosehide. They were and are “sewn into mukluks, moccasins, mitts, vests, jackets, pants, tent coverings, dog harnesses, toboggan bags, bedding, snowshoe straps, laces and a lot of other day-to-day items”. You may have also seen beaded moosehide purses, credit card holders, earrings, and dress clothes for Queen and King Trapper winter festival events. The introduction relays that historically, Woodland Cree families on remote traplines all worked together to process the hides—it’s a huge job. Now one can learn some of the tanning skills— and “get knowledge from Elders”—at hide camps or culture camps, but there may not be time to learn everything.

Recognizing that it’s important to pass on the skills they learned with their own families, Peter Ballantyne Cree Nation’s Tommy Bird and Lawrence and Lena Adam of Fond du Lac Denesuliné First Nation have combined their “decades of experience” in moosehide tanning to share with newbies, “so that the youth of today can once more pass this knowledge on to the next generation”. In Tommy’s back yard, the trio have tanned “more than thirty hides from start to finish, and smoked “more than a hundred that had been softened in tanneries”.

It takes strength, perseverance, skill and practise to do this traditional work. The materials list is surprising, including “A small pot to cook the brain mix in,” “Oatmeal,” and “Sunlight liquid dish soap and/or bar soap”. On the optional list of materials: “Common salt,” “Sawdust” and “Spruce cones”. A bone scraper is among the important tools for tanning moosehide, and the writers include the steps to make your own from “the leg bones of moose, elk, deer, or bear”.

I particularly liked Step 24: “Sit Back and Admire Your Work”. The accompanying photo shows Elder Lena Adams and her husband Lawrence holding a finished hide that looks “soft like a fleece blanket”.

The detailed instructions, helpful photographs, and “trouble-shooting tips” in this guide are inspiring, and I hope copies of it frequently find their way into the hands of those who desire to do this culturally significant work.

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