Wordworks Summer 2015 Edition

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WordWorks / Summer 2015

Publication of the Federation of BC Writers PO Box 16028, 617 Belmont St., New Westminster, BC, V3M 6W6 www.bcwriters.ca / communications@bcwriters.ca Editor Craig Spence | ExecutiveDirector@bcwriters.ca Business Manager Katherine Melnyk | booktailor@shaw.ca Editorial Board www.bcwriters.ca/wordworks/editorialboard Volunteers Arthur Soles, Mary Gavan, Rosemary Rigsby, and Christina Coleman © The Federation of BC Writers, 2015 All Rights Reserved Submissions Content of WordWorks is, with very occasional exceptions, provided by members of the Federation of BC Writers. If you would like to submit something, or if you have a story idea you would like to see included in WordWorks, please visit bcwriters.ca/wordworks/submit.

Join the Fed at bcwriters.ca/membership Advertising WordWorks is pleased to advertise services and products that are of genuine interest to writers. Space may also be provided to honour sponsors, whose generous contributions make it possible for the Federation of BC Writers to provide services to writers and poets in BC. For information about advertising policies and rates contact the Business Manager via the email address above or see bcwriters.ca/wordworks/advertisers Content Editorial decisions are guided by the mandate of WordWorks as ‘BC’s magazine for writers, about writing’, and its role as the official publication of the Federation of BC Writers. WordWorks will showcase the writing and poetry of FBCW members; provide news and feature coverage of writing and writers in BC, with an emphasis on stories about writing techniques and the business of writing; carry news about the Federation of BC Writers and its work supporting and advocating for writers.

Distribution WordWorks is published quarterly for members of the Federation of BC Writers and distributed by mail and email to a broad list of readers interested in literature in BC. From time to time special theme editions of WordWorks are also produced.

Inside This Edition Thanks for your travel ‘Writes of Passage’

Craig Spence, Executive Director

Sechelt’s Betty Keller – living two legacies

Jan DeGrass

Get up off your ass and sell your books!

Craig Spence, on J. Robert Whittle

Excerpt: Bound by Loyalty

J. Robert Whittle

Senanus Island, a short story

Judy LeBlanc, prize winning short fiction

Christine Lowther – at home

Deb Clay, WordWorks’ Poetry Editor

2 3 5 8 11 14

YOUR ‘WRITES OF PASSAGE’ ‘Catapult’ gives taking a trip new meaning

Elizabeth Templeman

Exotic places; exotic poems

Pat Smekal & Edythe Anstey Hanen

Saying goodbuy to Kathmandu

Kami Kanetsuka

AGM an exhilarating event for all

Board will focus on regions and engagement

Cascadia, a landscape of metaphor

Yvonne Blomer on poets connected to place

Summertime and the writing ain’t easy

Judy Millar’s take on lazy, hazy days

Six reasons young writers need the Fed

Shaleeta Harper, Youth Editor & Director

Fire up stories with intrigue, suspense

Jodie Renner opens up her tool-kit

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WordWorks / Summer 2015

Pacific Wordcrafters Words matter.

Pacific Wordcrafters works with a wide range of clients to produce clear, clean, and carefully crafted writing projects.

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‘Writes of Passage’ shared adventures We asked you to send us your best stories about your worldly travels, and as expected, we got more and better than we ever could have expected for our ‘Writes of Passage’ section (Page 17). What journeys our members have been on!

Traveling is a modern passtime. Unlike Marco Polo and other adventurers in olden times, we can get from A to Z, almost anywhere on the globe, in a matter of hours these days. The ‘trek’ is at worst an inconvenience; at best a first-class experience with all the frills. So the adventure isn’t usually going to be found in the journey – unless you’re a National Geographic type – it’s going to be found in the destination.

But then, destinations in the modern world are becoming increasingly similar on the surface. Often, you have to dig a little, meditate a little, and imagine a lot to distinguish what makes one city or region different from another.

And that’s where our members’ stories stand out.

They are creative non-fiction and penetrating poetry that uncovers the unique facets of places and the people in places in ways that can’t be captured with a point-and-shoot camera from the window of a passing tour bus. You have written penetratingly real stories and poems that remind us every place we go to is unique; that there are stories within stories opening up with every change of scene.

The delicious irony here is that the uniqueness of places is more often than not discovered in the details, not in the grand palaces, familiar statues and stunning vistas. When you get down to it, more often than not, the uniqueness of place is something the viewer adds with her own perspectives and sense of adventure.

Writers are used to seeking out experiences that reveal the soul of people and places. It’s a critical element of most story telling. To the writers who submitted their work to the ‘Writes of Passage’ section, thanks. You took us places we have never been, using words as the air under our wings. ~~~ Page 2

Caig Spence, Editor

WordWorks / Summer 2015

Sechelt’s Betty Keller – living two legacies Betty Keller was overdue for recognition, say many of those who know her best. But the Lieutenant Governor’s award for Literary Excellence, which she received this year, only honours part of her literary legacy for BC and the Sunshine Coast.

by Jan DeGrass Those who selected Sechelt’s Betty Keller as this year’s recipient of the Lieutenant Governor’s Award for Literary Excellence topped their list of reasons with her ‘greatest legacy,’ the wildly popular Sunshine Coast Festival of the Written Arts (FOWA). She founded and produced what has become one of BC’s highest profile literary gatherings 33 years ago.

And that crowning achievement didn’t eclipse Keller’s other accomplishments in a literary career spanning 50 years. The judges also pointed to her biographies, plays, fiction and history books.

But many published and emerging writers on the Sunshine Coast are bursting to tell the world of another Keller legacy, which slipped under the radar: She is also a teacher and a mentor. “I regard that as the most important thing I do,” she says. “You can’t teach a person to write, but you can help and encourage.”

She leads writing critique sessions every week— five small groups of writers who meet in each other’s homes to read their work aloud and accept constructive criticism from Keller and each other. She’s been doing this for almost thirty years. It’s no coincidence there has been an uptick in the number of published books and stories that originate on the Sunshine Coast.

So many authors would not have caught the interest of a publishing house if they had not first been grilled by their colleagues in a writing group.

Keller has the organization of the groups down to a science. “Three people in the group is the ideal number,” she says, with each person bringing a few

pages of current work. There is no ‘just sitting in.’

Everyone participates; everyone is equally vulnerable.

She is adamant that critique is not about readers telling you they like your work. She insists they go deeper. “But what did you like about it?” she asks.

“What connected? This part works, this part doesn’t.

Why doesn’t it work?” Everyone has an idea of how to make a story better – the writer may be overwhelmed at first, but she goes away to consider. She might not accept the feedback although she usually does. She thinks about it. She rewrites. The manuscript improves.

“Do I ever tell someone that they can’t write?”

Keller says. “No, they need to put it together and find a voice. Each writer’s voice is distinctive.” Sometimes people don’t continue with the group, perhaps from lack of commitment or because family life and other duties suffer when the solitary writer is working away on her computer.

The first of these groups came together in the 1980s and is still going strong, not so much as a writing group now as an institution – firm friends who support and encourage each other. The Quintessentials (quintessentialwriters.com) includes: Keller; Rosella Leslie, author of eight books, most recently The Cougar Lady: Legendary Trapper of Sechelt Inlet (a BC best-seller); Gwen Southin, author of five books in a murder mystery series that features the sleuthing Margaret Spencer, most recently in Death as a Fine Art; and Maureen Foss, who wrote The Cadillac Kind, (serialized on CBC for listeners) and the witty Scribes.

In the beginning they had a fifth member (thus the Next page

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name Quints), the late Eileen Williston, who wrote Rainbows at Noon and co-authored a biography about her husband, Socred MLA Ray Williston.

“Betty is our glue,” says Foss, “our go-to person for punctuation, editing, proofreading – our mentor.

She makes us better writers, better thinkers. She is remarkable in what she does for writers, new and old.

If not for Betty Keller, I would not have three books published. I didn’t even know I was a writer until she encouraged me.”

When the Quintessentials first came together in the 1980s, their writing careers were almost overshadowed by the organizing energy required to mount the first writers’ festival in Sechelt. Keller recalls that the idea was to bring in established writers to talk and teach novice writers, but that the group soon realized they’d have to invite readers to the event if they hoped to cover costs. They decided to host a separate Writers-in-Residence program taught by the visiting speakers at the same time as the Festival.

Foss recalls her first experience with Keller, likely in 1983 when she applied for that first program. It was being offered in an abandoned forestry building, which Keller, Southin and volunteers had to refurbish before receiving students. They scrubbed floors for days, beat back the blackberry bushes, and at the same time coordinated and brought together instructors and students for a helpful and successful program.

Quintessentials Keller, Foss, Leslie and Southin worked tirelessly to build FOWA into today’s shining show, taking on naysayers and fundraisers, never quitting. They are known as the Founding Mothers.

Southin says the group became a second family, helping her write her series as a second career after she retired to the Sunshine Coast: “I must admit that when I first started to write about Margaret Spencer it was just going to be a novel about a woman fed up with living with a stuffy lawyer husband and she takes up a job in a detective agency.” But with help from Keller and every writer who attended their sessions and classes, the series grew.

“Betty is always creating teaching opportunities,” says Leslie. “Eight books later and I’m still learning.”

Leslie has become known for her research abilities, but that wasn’t always her strength. When she first became involved with the Festival and with Keller’s

Rosella Leslie, Gwen Southin and Maureen Foss – the ‘Mothers’ of the Sunshine Coast Festival of the Written Arts – started meeting with Keller in the ‘80s.

group, she lived 25 miles up Salmon Inlet and rode by boat to her writing sessions. She learned to research on the job when she and Keller co-authored a history of the Sunshine Coast. That kind of commitment is key to being a writer.

“We’re all dedicated in the Quints,” Leslie notes.

“We’re all determined to be published.” But sometimes after a piece of critical advice, she admits she might go home thinking, That’s it—I’m not going back, she said. “But then I remember that nobody’s putting you down and nobody’s writing the book for you. We have trust. We believe in each other.”

That trust runs to helping each other in many ways (Leslie reports that the group has helped Southin move houses three times), but mostly in their encouragement and hosting of book launches. The Quints host many other authors’ launches too, not just their own – they book the venue, round up audience and even make the coffee and cake. It’s a huge step up in essential promotion to have someone else with experience organize a book launch for a writer with her first book. Many Sunshine Coast authors are grateful.

“If this group wasn’t in existence I would have to find another one,” says Leslie. It’s that important. ~~ Jan DeGrass is a long-time resident of the Sunshine Coast and Arts & Entertainment writer for the Coast Reporter. She is the author of Jazz with Ella, (Libros Libertad) and a member of The Writers’ Union of Canada as well as The Federation of B.C. Writers

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Get up off your ass and sell your books!

Rob Whittle isn’t shy when it comes to showing off one of two Independent Publisher Book Awards he and partner Joyce Sandilands have won; he thinks writers should never be shy about their books

by Craig Spence “I’ll tell you what drives me, ordinary people doing bigger things than they are supposed to. There’s a lot of big people in ordinary people, but it’s hidden in there.”

Robert Whittle is anything but ordinary. He’s bigger than life, his stentorian voice, wry wit and infectious laugh woven into the stories he has to tell about a young ‘lad’ taking to the mines at age 14, and becoming head of an international disaster response team by the time he hit twenty-four. He doesn’t blend in with the wallpaper when he steps into a room.

But Whittle is doing something he’s not supposed to, writing and selling books, more than a dozen of them since he took up the pen at an age most of us are thinking about retirement.

“I’m not really a writer,” Whittle said by way of introduction. “I’m very, very amateur. I am a mining engineer.” That job took him all over the world; it also resulted in gruesome memories of men buried alive underground, and multiple injuries to himself. And it was a knee injury he had sustained in Italy as a young man, which came back to ‘haunt’ him when Whittle turned 60, that led to his remake as writer.

An operation to fix the recurrent injury led to staff infection, which led to more operations, which resulted in an extended hospital stay. Not one to lay around twiddling his thumbs, waiting for his body to mend, Whittle took up writing. “I’m a guy who’s always been on the go, somewhere in the world at something or other,” he said. “I decided to start writing for therapy, sort of, for something to do.” His wife Joyce Sandilands, who is also Whittle’s publisher and publicist, had suggested he write his memoir.

That didn’t turn out to his liking. “It weren’t something that amused me, writing my memoirs,” Whittle recalled. “I didn’t much care for retracking over dead bodies.” He started writing historical fiction instead. “I

wrote something I knew about, English history, and it just came together from there.”

Sandilands recalls the first piece of historical fiction Whittle read to her, which he had pecked out on a spare computer at home during his convalescence. It tells the tale of a ‘Yorkshire lad’ who contracts tuberculosis as a result of his early start in the mines. “It just blew me away, his ability to put words together and make it interesting,” she said. “All his characteristics of telling a great story verbally came out in his writing.”

Their career as a writer-publisher team was launched then-and-there. But when Whittle says it ‘just came together’ he is playing down the years of hard work, shrewd strategizing, and unflagging determination he and Sandilands have put in. That’s become their story, and fellow writers, who want to learn a thing or two about producing and selling books, might find the irrepressible couple’s tale wellworth a listen.

In the summertime, if you enter Victoria’s Bastion Square off Langley Street, you will usually find Whittle at his stand. Framed by his books, he’s always ready to greet passers by – especially visitors from the tour boats that make Victoria a port-of-call, and whose passengers are on the look out for something unique as

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Whittle is a perennial at the Bastion Street Market; being engaging is the best sales technique there is, he says.

a reminder of their travels. What better than a work of historical fiction by a local author?

Getting to know potential readers is key to the success Whittle and Sandilands have had selling books But if you’re going to convince that person you’re chatting up to buy one of your books, first you have to have something to sell that you believe in yourself.

Whittle starts with real people, as the prototypes for his characters; he sets them in real places, complete with real historical referents. Then he weaves fictional plots through place and times. In short, he makes fiction out of reality, but never loses sight of the facts.

Whittle derives pleasure from placing real characters in real settings, and works hard at it: “All my historical facts are real, I like to blend real history in with the story. If you read my books about Victoria, you would be able to go find all the places; 70 percent of the people, you would find out they are real; and a lot of the families that are in there have expressed their thanks to me for including them.” How far will he go to get his history right: he’s read every Victoria newspaper from 1900 to 1920, ‘adverts and the lot’ to get his background information right. Staff at Victoria’s public library quietly refer patrons to him when obscure questions about Victoria’s past are asked.

That, to him and Sandilands, results in books they can sell, because there are readers who appreci-

ate attention to authenticity and detail. Talking about The Victoria Chronicles, Sandilands said, “He’s had people tell him that they rented a car, and drove the route going out of town… and this one particular man said ‘You’ve even got the bumps in the road in the right place.” Nor does the enthusiasm for confirming settings and events stop at land’s end; at least one person they know of rented a boat to check out Whittle’s descriptions of Puget Sound.

“I want to absorb myself in it,” he said about his research. “I’m a sponge. I want to know what it felt like to be a Victorian. I know what their emotions would be, I know where to go if I want to buy a bag of chips, where to get a beer and I even know the price of it. You could drop me down somebody’s chimney in that time, and I would not be out of place.”

It’s one thing to write a good book, another to sell it. Whittle and Sandilands agree that writers on the whole are ‘too reclusive.’ He attributes their standoffishness to fear of embarrassment. “They’re usually afraid of making a mistake, and everybody knowing about it,” Whittle said. Joyce is a little kinder, but the outcome is just the same. “It’s the nature of the talent,” she said. “A lot of them just aren’t outgoing people.”

There’s a contradictory response to Whittle’s gregarious approach to promoting himself and his books.

“He’ll get authors who come and say, ‘How can you

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find the time to do this?’, and then he’ll get the public that says, ‘Why aren’t you home writing?’”

For Whittle and Sandilands the answer is simple: Books – even good books – don’t sell themselves, and if authors don’t ‘get up off their asses and sell,’ then their books will likely remain in cardboard boxes in their closets and basements. For all but the biggest literary names the most effective way to sell a book is face-to-face. Set up a stall, like Whittle does in Bastion Square, have a book in your pocket and be prepared to talk about it when you’re walking down the street. Be out there.

“Authors just don’t do what Robert does, and what I do,” Joyce said.

Asked for three pieces of advice about promoting and selling books Whittle said, “The first one is to talk. I’ve sold books in supermarket checkout lineups.

Talk about what you do, what you’re doing, and have a copy of one (of you books) in your pocket all the time.” The next suggestion is have a title ‘that pulls,’ Sandilands said, and cover art, too. And sell direct, from your own stand, if you can, where you will have control over the display and earn better returns on every book sold.

Asked about platforms like Amazon, Whittle doesn’t mince words: “There’s no avenue to riches except yourself,” he said. “And if you’re not pushing the wheelbarrow, it’s not going anywhere.” Online marketing doesn’t work for most writers because there’s simply too many titles competing for attention. “If you’re going to put your book in the Internet, Amazon, e-books, whatever you like, you’ve now lost it in a myriad of other books, and you’re going to take your chances that somebody spots it. It’s very, very rarely going to make you enough money to go on a continental holiday.”

That flies in the face of modern trends, but Whittle and Sandilands have learned by experience that faceto-face is still the best sales strategy. They’ve got two Independent Publishers’ medals to prove it, won in 2007 and 2008, and books that have achieved best seller status by Canadian Standards. So in that department facts definitely trump fiction. ~~ Craig Spence is Executive Director of the Federation of BC Writers, author of two published YA novels, and editor of the Ladysmith-Chemainus Chronicle.

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Excerpt from Bound by Loyalty, Book One of the Victoria Chronicles Chapter 3 – A teenaged Nancy’s first trip to the Empress Hotel and meeting an old friend.

by J. Robert Whittle … she stepped out into the alley lit only by a single light bulb, pulled her warm woollen shawl even tighter about her slim body and hurried up to Johnson Street.

Turning east, she went one block and turned south. Most of the stores on Government were absolutely dark but at least the street was now paved and sported lights and sidewalks, new additions that were appreciated by all.

The roads had previously been so poor with many hidden obstructions and holes that few people dared venture out in the dark.

As she went past the Rogers’ grocery and chocolate shop, she looked down toward The Empress having a clear view of the newly paved road and seawall. The Empress had been built on reclaimed land once known as James Bay, a very smelly slough used for a garbage dump, she had been told. Now, a causeway stood on the site of the old James Bay Bridge and it was a wonderful area for walking.

Tonight, the lights on the causeway twinkled in the crisp October air, bringing a smile to her lips. A chill was definitely in the air and she was glad she had worn warm clothes.

In the background, the illuminated Parliament Buildings shone brightly as darkness enfolded the harbour, but tonight her attention was on the magnificent hotel which someone told her had over 200 guest rooms. Waiting for a break in the slowly lumbering traffic, she hurried across the road and made her way toward the steps, looking around to see if she could find Dan in the crowd.

Suddenly, a voice at her elbow startled her. “I’m glad you came, Nancy,” Dan said softly, stepping out from behind a group of people. “Let’s take a little walk before we go inside,” he suggested, reaching for her hand and tucking it under his arm.

Without speaking, they walked down to the end of the block and across the front of the Parliament Buildings, both deep in their own thoughts. Nancy’s mind was

in a whirl and completely out of character for this usually outspoken girl, she found herself unable to speak. She had been 8-years-old when she had last seen Danny and her memories were very vague. It had been amazing that she had recognized him. So much had happened since that day. She tried to remember … he said he was going far away on a boat … he said they would meet again one day … he had been right! Her vision blurred as tears began. I don’t want to cry the first time I see him. He taught me to be brave … keep calm, oh please be calm, she thought desperately.

Slowing his stride, Dan looked down at her but not being able to see her face, he could not imagine what was going through her mind. He turned into the breeze and looked out across the harbour. He realized this was going to be difficult for her. She was so young when I left. I need to give her time. What a beautiful girl she has become.

“That’s my ship over there, the Belfast,” he said, pointing to the dim shape of a ship with several twinkling red lights. “I once told you I was going whaling. Well, this is the ship I found, Nancy, and the Joyce brothers that I work for became family to me, and I stayed. We live on the boat and that building on the dock …,” pointing to a faint outline to the right, “is the company office.”

Taking her hand, he applied gentle pressure to emphasize his next statement. “The Joyce Bros. office, that’s where you can contact me. I spend a lot of time at sea but go see Meg MacDonald, she lives there. She’s a really nice lady and will be very glad to see you.”

Nancy returned his squeeze, looking up at him and moving a bit closer as she felt his reassurance. The wind picked up and Dan hurried her back across the street toward The Empress. They moved up the roadway, darting between cars and carriages lined up at the side entrance. Joining a group of elegantly dressed guests, he led her into the foyer where more guests milled about talking loudly.

To Nancy, it was as if they had entered another world. The room was huge with fancy chairs and heavy

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velvet curtains. Women in wonderful dresses and furs were everywhere but no one seemed to be in a hurry.

They heard music playing and Dan pulled her toward the Crystal Ballroom where a dance was just beginning. A few couples were dancing a waltz covering the floor in long gliding strides as an orchestra played in a corner. It was a breathtaking sight and Nancy stood with her mouth open as she looked at the huge chandeliers and wonderful flower arrangements. Ladies in beautiful gowns, trimmed in pearls and lace, swished by on the arms of grand-looking men in long-jacketed black suits and smartly-creased trousers.

Dan gently pulled her away and they made their way to a small dining room down a wide hallway. A man sat playing a piano in the corner, the soft music almost lost amongst the noises of conversation and cutlery. He gave his name to a uniformed man, he later told her was called a maitre’d. Taking her shawl, Dan handed it to a lady in a little room nearby. The maitre’d showed them to their table and held Nancy’s chair as she sat down.

Her eyes nervously swept the room. “But Danny …,” was all she managed before he interrupted.

“Listen, Nancy, you need to see this. We’ve experienced the other side, you and me. Well, this is how the rich live, and I can afford to treat you, so don’t worry.”

“I feel so out of place,” she whispered, as a waitress in a black dress with a white, highly starched apron, approached.

“Two teas and cake for me and my sister,” Dan said with authority, not looking at Nancy. The waitress bobbed a quick curtsy before turning away. “From now on, you’re my sister. I have no family and neither have you, so let’s invent one!” He watched her closely for her reaction. When she nodded shyly, he chuckled. “Right then, that’s settled!”

The waitress returned with a tray of little cakes and poured their tea. “Will that be all, sir?” she inquired, curtsying again.

Nancy finally began to relax and soon she and Dan were catching up on their missing years—getting to know each other all over again. Later, as Dan walked her to the back door of the Occidental, he announced that he was sailing again at the end of the week. However, he promised to see her tomorrow because they had things to look after before he went away. ~~ Page 9

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Agents & Editors Laura Bradford Naomi Davis Jess Finkelstein Holly Lorincz Chip MacGregor Jill Marr Laurie McLean Patricia Nelson Beth Phelan Elaine Spencer Nephele Tempest Elizabeth Wales Paige Wheeler Kat Brzozowski Abigail Gehring Michael Katz Wes Miller Ellen Niemer David Stephens Howard White

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Senanus Island Winner of the Vancouver Island Short Fiction Contest Senanus Island is published with thanks to the Nanaimo Arts Council and Vancouver Island University

by Judy LeBlanc The pebble-searing sea startles Mandy awake. She leaps to her feet with the feeling something is wrong.

She’s always trusted her gut that way and sure enough, there, just offshore in the whitecaps, her escaped kayak bucks for joy. She swims toward the kayak with Pearce’s voice nattering in her head. It’s not like him to not come after her.

The wind switches off and she grabs at the kayak, runs her fingers along the fiberglass and eases it toward shore. She loves this boat. When she and Pearce bought hers and his as wedding gifts for one another they joked that they might call them Effort 2. Both were marrying for a second time. His had a gold-colored rudder.

“Rooster tails,” she’d teased him. In the end she dubbed her own, My Tangerine Baby. He’d grinned and trapped her in his eyes, the way he does. She loves that look.

She loves how his eyes don’t reveal his mood, how he keeps her guessing.

Back on the beach, she pulls the boat over the rocks and drops onto a flat sun-heated stone. After all these years, she’s on Indian Island. It’s what her parents called it before you didn’t say Indian. Behind the marina, a jumble of condominiums interrupt the forest.

On the other side of the inlet a highway skirts the edge of a mountain from which drifts the hum of traffic. In between there is tiny Indian Island and the water.

Four o’clock. She left him an hour and a half ago.

Childish, the way they’d split off like that, their slick boats bouncing in opposite directions across the bay.

Childish, the way she’d said, “Fuck you, Pearce,” and dug her paddle deep, the weight of the whole ocean pushing against the blade. She faced away from him before the tears came. She never lets him see the tears.

“Mandy, calm down,” he’d called, the wind shredding his words so that she wasn’t sure if he’d said it at all.

She’s forty-one, too old to be cursing out her husband, Pearce once told her. He’d say, “let’s not fight,” and this would make her want to fight more because she felt that he was trying to muzzle her. She’d get angry and he’d match her anger and rev it up.

Mandy would let him go a bit wild and then she’d bring things down. She liked feeling in control that way, but hated the fall-out afterwards – the wasted hours and the shame.

She and Pearce have perfect days on the water.

How many couples have perfect days? He’d taught her the right strokes, made her match the movement of his arms, the subtle twist in his body, how to slide along the surface of the ocean side-by-side. Once he’d towed her when she was too tired to go on and one night under a full moon he’d gathered oysters on the beach and pried them open with his Swiss army knife. He’d poured raw oysters down her throat and they became something savory and secret in her belly.

Maybe he’s in the marina pub waiting for her. He’s not a drinker like her first husband, but he can nurse a beer with the look of a man who considers himself illtreated, the eyes narrow and small, eyebrows caving into one another. It’s early September, and the sun will be dropping into the sea within a couple of hours.

Something is wrong.

They’d been married for three years now and it was hard with her son, and these weekends when Gerard was with his dad she tried to make her time alone with Pearce precious. Today is her fault. Why’d she have to bring it up? On the other hand, is it too much to ask that he talk to his stepson?

“I try. He hates me,” Pearce had said.

They’d paddled a short way from the marina and were waiting for the Mill Bay ferry to get out of their path. A slight chop rocked the boats. She couldn’t see his eyes through his sunglasses.

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WordWorks / Summer 2015 From previous page

“He doesn’t hate you. He’s sixteen. Don’t you remember being sixteen and finding out, hey, it’s not like it’s supposed to be.”

He smacked the blade of his paddle on the surface of the water, distracted – how he gets. He can’t sit still for long, is always fiddling in the kayak, leaning this way and that, spinning in circles, fiddling with the paddle. Sometimes he tries to do Eskimo rolls – over and over again – he gets obsessed. But he hasn’t succeeded yet. He stopped. “And now what? You want me to solve your son’s anger problem?”

It was that he’d said, “your son,” not claiming his stepson, and therefore, in her mind, not claiming her. And it was the spit that came out of the side of his mouth.

Fuck you, Pearce.

She gets to her feet and faces the wall of trees along the bank. There’s no path in sight, and yet she’s certain it was this bay where her father dropped the anchor.

Where they’d lowered themselves into the shallow water and her mother had passed them the camping gear and the food. There’d been a grassy meadow near the beach where she’d helped her father pitch the tent. It’s still there, she’s sure, somewhere in the trees. She wades through a mat of gumweed up the bank. At the top, she turns and scans the water for any sign of Pearce. It’s not that he doesn’t know where she is though he’s not landed here before. They’ve passed it enough times in kayaks on their way down the inlet. He always says, “We can’t land on a First Nations burial ground.” It’s not that Pearce stands much on principle except when it comes to the dead.

Mandy wants Pearce to be with her here on the island, to get how perfect it was with her family all those years ago, how she came from stock that could be perfect. Pearce had finally agreed.

Standing above the beach she closes her eyes and tries to bring back the musty smell of a canvas tent, the sizzle of bacon frying on the Coleman stove, the collapsing driftwood as it disintegrated in the fire after dark. She strains to hear in her memory her brother, Brandon’s high-pitched laughter. He was younger than her and copied everything she did. They fashioned bows and arrows from sticks and fishing line and played at killing cougars and pirates. On the island, unlike at home, Brandon and she weren’t afraid of anything.

Pearce and she never talk about fear. Before they met, he paddled alone in the worst conditions and he never tells her not to paddle alone.

The underbrush thins as the trees get taller and the shade deepens. Mandy walks away from the shore, and it’s not long before the forest opens up and she steps into a clearing, yellow with grass and sunshine.

She’s on the other side of the island. She smiles at the sudden memory of slithering on her belly through the deep dry grass with Brandon. And how her parents had been there, also on the ground, grass flattened beneath them. Her mother on her back with pale breasts rising into the sultry air, eyes closed and her father lowering himself onto her as if he were doing pushups: all around the buzzing of cicadas, somewhere the stink of animal excrement. And it had struck her as comical – her father’s skinny buttocks and her mother’s sighs. Brandon had cried out and Mandy slapped her hand over his mouth, dragged him to his feet and back into the forest. By the time they dropped out of earshot beneath the trees, Brandon’s whimpering had pitched into tears, his cheeks damp and smeared with dirt.

When she rolled on the ground giggling, he finally giggled, too. It was after this that Brandon came to understand like Mandy that his family was different on the water than at home.

At home there were nights when Brandon would come to her room and she would bury him in blankets, cover his ears. And in the morning something was broken: a lamp or a glass and the space between her parents, jittery with shame.

They were allowed to stay up late on the island.

Their father would tell stories about the Indian people that were buried there, how when a boat sunk out on the bay or somebody drowned, it was the work of a vengeful ghost. Though her father had never said so, she’d always believed that as long as they didn’t fight, they were safe from the Indian ghosts.

Mandy returns to the beach and drops onto the gravel. Behind her the tops of the firs are ramrod straight. The air is windless and the light is shifting into evening’s purple hues. Even the gulls are quiet. She recognizes nothing. Pearce was right. There’s nothing here for her, only the water endlessly circling the island.

The ocean is flat now, so different than only an hour

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ago. She thinks every shape on the horizon is Pearce.

The sun has sunk on the other side of the island so that the trees and shoreline on her side cast long shadows. Her skin is covered in goose bumps. She pulls a fleece coat over her bathing suit, the life jacket and the sprayskirt.

Out on the water the light has given everything a brass finish and made the edges of rocks and trees as distinct as cedar carvings. She squints into the setting sun and is able to make out the marina across the bay. It takes her forty minutes to make the crossing. The ocean’s black surface smells cold. The ferry dock is empty.

That time on the island was the only time she recalls seeing her mother’s bare breasts where, unbeknownst to anyone, cancer cells were dividing and multiplying. Her mother has been gone more years than Brandon. Her father lives on a boat in Florida with a woman Mandy’s never met.

Her eye catches a movement, a violent flashing red light on the bank above the marina: an ambulance. She thinks she’ll turn back to the island because surely by now Pearce is waiting for her, but she can’t move.

On weekends when Gerard’s dad comes to pick him

up, Mandy goes somewhere in the house where she can avoid contact with her ex-husband.

In the dark she drifts toward shore until it’s shallow enough for her to fumble her way out of the kayak. The light on the ambulance is off now and there’s a murmur of voices coming down toward her. She stops a short distance from the ambulance where a kayak with a gold rudder lies empty on its side. She trembles in the cold.

The man from the marina who Pearce and her talked to earlier in the day steps up beside her and says something, though she can’t make out the words.

“We got separated,” she says.

He puts a blanket around her shoulder and its weight is insubstantial as water. ~~ Judy LeBlanc won first prize in this year’s Vancouver Island Short Fiction Contest. She has had stories and articles published in various magazines including Other Voices, Focus on Women, Get magazine, Wordworks and Grain. For several years she served as a board member and volunteer for the Victoria School of Writing. She has facilitated journal therapy groups and taught creative writing to teens.

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Christine Lowther – at home, at home “I don’t like to leave. Even for a writing festival – there is always a part of me extremely uncomfortable being away from home.”

by Deb Clay Christine Lowther – poet, author, editor, activist and feminist – lives/floats on the west coast of Vancouver Island. She has written three poetry books, a recently published memoir Born Out of This (a 2015 Roderick Haig-Brown Regional Prize finalist) and is the winner of the first Rainy Coast Arts Award for Significant Accomplishment from the Pacific Rim Arts Society.

We met briefly amid a gathering of poets at the Cascadia Poetry Festival in Nanaimo this spring, but it wasn’t until we began exchanging emails that I got to know the woman behind the descriptive words.

Following is our conversation.

When did you start writing poetry? Did it evolve out of journaling or other forms of writing, or did you make a conscious decision to write poetry at some point in your life?

What does writing poetry mean for you?

Both parents wrote poetry, so I sat scribbling in notebooks before I knew how to print. My older sister taught me to read very young. Poetry probably began later as elementary school assignments, but like most humans I began writing that way as an early adolescent, especially when I was 13 and living in a group home, in a lot of emotional pain. Thankfully, I threw away those efforts when I left that place to return to my Gram’s.

I wrote sporadically from then on. There was a Creative Writing course in grade eleven. The courses at what used to be Capilano College were off-putting and I was side-tracked by an excellent art history program, and by the punk movement. I put out zines.

My first poetry collection was published in my very early thirties after a lot of healing work, and I dried up for a long time after that. Something twigged my

curiosity later, and when I began reading (Canadian) poetry, I found myself falling in love with it. Third and fourth posthumous collections of my mother’s poems hooked me on various levels.

Happiness. I’m not happy unless I’m writing.

It’s my latest book, a memoir, rather than a book of poems that was nominated for a prize. I complain a lot about Canadians not reading poetry. Now I feel torn between the desire to write prose – gaining, it would seem, more readers – and a return to poetry, which I love and miss. I will have to find time to do both! I’m fascinated by unique and original ways of seeing and expressing, especially if they are melodious as well, when I read others’ work. I am moved by love of the natural world.

What is your process when you sit down to write?

I honestly don’t have one. There are times of writing and times of blockage, and both tend to the extreme. My creative life, like the rest of my life, is dictated by the demands of making a living in two jobs

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- one that’s retail and one that’s blue-collar. This is my excuse, at least. I usually hand-write, and reach for the lap-top after that initial eruption. I might close my eyes and attempt to ground myself, really shoot from the gut (and that other, loving and painful organ we may not always choose to mention since it’s a cliché).

At the Cascadia Poetry Festival, during a panel, Susan Musgrave jokingly said that you’re in trouble when your own work makes you cry. If I cry while working on a poem, I know I’m getting somewhere.

Cascadia was wonderful in that it made the CanadaU.S. border disappear. When I’ve had workshop students in the past, one of the first things I’d suggest to them was read and write Canadian and remember that Canadians are like women: We have to try twice as hard to be considered a fraction as good... or even on the radar. I lived in England for five years and was often presumed American when I spoke. I usually heard only ‘Margaret Atwood’ when daring to ask someone what Canadian writers they knew – they had heard of her novels, not her poetry. I live in Tofino. When I pick a random section of Tofinian town folk and ask what they are currently reading, it won’t be poetry, and when I ask them where the author lives, they probably won’t know, and when they check, it will be the States.

I’ve ranted about that sort of thing for years. But talking to a couple of publishers’ reps in the small press fair book room, I realized that I’m tired out from the struggle of reading only Canadian poetry and failing to grasp so much of it. And feeling unintelligent from that, because so many Canadian poets are extreme brainiacs who have extraordinary vocabularies.

At the risk of generalizing, I love clear, beautiful poems. Sam Hamill. When he read ‘Habitations’ at the festival, I nearly wept. I had been waiting for a poem like that. An expression of love for the natural world that I didn’t have to break my brain over.

I’ve heard one BC poet warn against using the word ‘accessibility.’ Nobody should dumb down for me; I do appreciate the geniusing. Life is short, though, and I want to enjoy it more. Every poem doesn’t have to be in code. Americans can be guilty of overly cerebral poems too. Obviously we should all write what we want to write, and I can stop reading so much of what I think I ought to read! The Cascadia Poetry Festival challenged my prejudice. How liberating.

Next page What are you working on now?

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Nuu-Chah-Nulth, Good Advice I’ve been told it’s time to decolonize my mind, that all the places I love carry the wrong rhymes: Lone Cone, Frank Island, Catface, Colnett: dubbed by and for missionaries, Kingdom-come, imposing replacement.

Ts’ix-wat-sats, Chitaape Waa naa chuus Hilth hoo iss: more than pretty names, words that came up out of the ground, as the loon learns his song from the lake.

Try to cover a mountain in concrete?

Language keeps emerging, the planet speaking its green poems.

The kind of petrification in pavement – the newcomers postpone mortality preserve everything in hard grey stop death by spreading it – lacks logic.

Listen for green, learn the names.

I’ve been advised not to study French or Spanish, rather to stand still, make roots from words, take in the language of the place I’ve made my home.

Nuu-Chah-Nulth, Good Advice, Christine Lowther from Make It True: Poetry from Cascadia, Edited by Paul Nelson, George Stanley, Barry McKinnon and Nadine Maestas, Leaf Press, 2015.

WordWorks / Summer 2015

Where is your home?

From previous page

I have been blocked since just before Born Out of This came out (October 2014). I mean, still journaling, obviously, but that’s not exactly writing. Then, as soon as Cascadia finished, I was writing lines of poetry. The affirming, friendly, community experience of those three festival days melted the clotted ink with a determination to listen deeply to this life and the ecosystems around me. The bioregion I live in, and that lives in me, is what I love and fear for; therefore it’s where my attention goes. Poems of place are activist poems even if they don’t sound or read like a protest chant, and Rita Wong is a saint.

I’d like to write another memoir, but this time I’d like it to sneak in some poems with the prose. After reading History Lessons by Clifton Crais, I applied recently to the Ministry of Children and Families under the Freedom of Information Act for the records of my years in foster care. There were too many gaps in my own memories. Of course, there is the whole controversy of making art from pain. But what else are we to make of it? Might as well be something meaningful, something beautiful, or something helpful. I also dream about indulging my infatuation with trees by writing a whole book of tree poems. This has been done by John Terpstra (Naked Trees) and arguably by Kate Braid (To This Cedar Fountain)... I am in love with trees.

Home the forest’s deep, aloof silence ferociously tender still as love shocks awake, cracks open with returned voices wild birds following the sun asking to be remembered their prolific world dancing double-edged a heart-green leaf cutting the air the ground is an ear, the sky a mouth, asking.

Where else is there to belong?

‘Home’ from My Nature - Poems by Christine Lowther, Leaf Press, Lantzville, 2010.

Clayoquot Sound. A float house in Tla-o-qui-aht traditional territory, near Tofino, west coast of Vancouver Island.

How does your home location inform you?

Through the education of storms, meteor showers, the habits and songs of birds, schools of fish, mammals that swim, and occasionally predators on shore. The creek and the temperate rainforest teach me a lot. Growing food and flowers keeps me hungry for knowledge.

How does your home inhabit you?

I don’t like to leave. Even for a writing festival – there is always a part of me extremely uncomfortable being away from home. I didn’t want to settle down, but 23 years ago the logging blockades were necessary to protect the forest. I was seized by a place on Vancouver Island called the Walbran River Valley.

Complacency is a mistake; salmon farms are taking their toll up and down the coast, mining continues to be a threat to Clayoquot and surely it is time to quit logging old growth trees? These local beaches suffered from the Exxon Valdez oil spill in 1989. That memory runs deep. In 2001 I found myself sitting down between an ancient cedar and a chain saw in downtown Tofino. I simply could not let such a tree fall. There didn’t seem to be a choice. That is inhabiting - or, a la Sam Hamill, habitation.

For more information on Christine Lowther see her author page at http://bcwriters.ca/profile/christinelowther and visit christinelowther.blogspot.ca/ Thanks to Leaf Press for a copy of My Nature – poems by Christine Lowther from which the poem ‘Home’ is printed here. And for ‘Nuu-Chah-Nulth, Good Advice’ taken from the recently published Make It True – Poetry from Cascadia. Both are reprinted with permission by author Christine Lowther and by the publisher Leaf Press. ~~ Deb Clay is WordWorks’ Poetry Editor. A Poet, Author, Web Developer, she says: ‘My interactions with other writers and artists enhance my process and progress.’

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‘Catapult’ gives taking a trip new meaning

by Elizabeth Templeman We are a knot of family, among so many scattered on the piazza in the centre of Montalcino, the hill town where we are staying for a week. On this, our second night, we are flush with the satisfaction of our second perfect dinner. It’s a gift, the experience of passing hours around a table in the cool corner of a stone restaurant.

The vino rosso della casa is, as we’ve come to expect, an earthy delight. The plate of eggplant slices that follows is its own work of art—each slice charred crisp and glistening with olive oil, so thin as to be translucent. Balsamic vinegar scrolls the surface. Fat looping ropes of handrolled pici are infused with the flavour of garlic tempered by tomato. Each dish is, in turn, a wonder (thanks in part to our never being sure of what we have ordered), and a delight. Now, dazed with satisfaction of fullness and gentled by wine, we are making our way back to our apartment.

As we climb toward the central piazza, we are not entirely surprised to discover a festival of some saint or another, forming itself in our midst. Of course we stop, finding a vantage point along the brim of this plaza, which forms a natural amphitheatre, an inverted bowl.

We can see and hear everything from our spot, just to the side of our favourite, by now familiar, café bar. The focal point is an orchestra, led by a stooped but energetic conductor. The musicians include girls who could hardly be twelve, playing alongside ancient, black-suited players. Their music fills the plaza, transitioning seamlessly from discordant, muted sounds of both instruments and musicians warming up, into melody, with no fanfare or discernible formality. Music wafts over the surrounding alleys and twisting cobblestoned roads, drawing out their residents.

More wondrous than the central performance is the audience, also amorphous, taking shape around us with increasing density. I stand on the curb, drenched in happiness, to the side of my daughter and her boyfriend.

My husband stands one step in front of, and below me.

Looking out over his head, I can take in the whole spectacle. Beside him cluster three earnest, fully costumed Carabinieri, protectors of peace and order. A long-haired, long-limbed beauty flirts with two of the three. In front of them a couple of far older men face one another, wholly impervious to the music or spectacle, engaged in an animated, impassioned exchange about work, or politics, or the price of beans.

It’s a vibrant mix of people that span three, maybe four, generations. After such a short time here it’s satisfying to recognize a few of them—a girl who’s served us pizza; a young man we sat across from on the bus. We are encircled, and feel benevolently embraced, a small knot of anglaise. The town is full of tourists, too, but out here on the square, this weekday evening, we have stumbled upon a local event, though we now notice the posters we’d missed (along with, apparently, all the other tourists).

Luck has carried us here, though, and I allow myself a moment of smugness thinking this is our reward for being so hopelessly, happily open to whatever this land serves up to us.

All this and more, I think, taking it in, knowing I am blessed. And then, with a suddenness that takes “suddenly” to a whole new level, a force drops out of the sky, sailing right past me, and, with nightmarish precision, drops my husband to the ground, flattening him. I feel my own breath sucked out of me even as I grasp for meaning, finding only the certainty that violence has befallen the man I love, and yes, take for granted. It’s absurd, but also undeniable: He is down, face first, sprawled helplessly

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WordWorks / Summer 2015

Exotic places; exotic poems Matterhorn She’s used to it by now, all the attention — temptress vamp drama queen looking down upon her admirers.

She knows exactly when to make an appearance, how to turn heads, get them gasping — a wisp of veil arranged across the face, one exposed shoulder, a glimpse of flank — lustrous half-naked dangerous.

She’s used to them, the infatuates.

They’ll be aroused, like thousands before, besotted by her sheer beauty, hot with thoughts of conquest.

They’ll plot ways to win her, penetrate her gelid airs, push upward, and breathless, mount her or die trying.

Pat Smekal

For the Rose Lady at the Xochimilco Canals Oars push into caverns, deep as old bones, you are wild like the river, you sing its life story.

Wide straw hat, a sweater, pink, your hair a weave of river mist, ribbons of silk and reeds, hands swift with memory.

Soft oar splash, your boat a rough scrape against the river bank. You rock back on bare feet, a flock of roses lifts from your hands, bird-like into the wind, showers us with petals.

I have waited all my life for such a miracle.

I live near water too, pinned to the earth by the creek’s cold rush. I want to tell you this, but language falls between us now, fractured by time and place.

You hold your fistful of roses like flags, like prayers, songs on the wind. I give you my pesos. This for that.

Edythe Anstey Hanen \Xochimilco, Mexico Page 18

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Saying Goodbye to Kathmandu

On the steps of Bagh Temple

Kami Kanetsuka I have always said ‘My big love affairs are with places, rather than people’ and the love of my life was Nepal. It was here after going overland from London to Kathmandu in 1966 my life changed for ever. As an elder and a grandmother I can now see that they were the most extraordinary years of my life.

In 2012 I was compelled to return to Kathmandu, to walk the streets for one last time. It was a grueling trip, but my last leg of flights, from Hong Kong via Dacca was on Dragonair. It was the Year of the Dragon, also my birth year in the Chinese calendar. I took this to be an auspicious sign for my farewell pilgrimage. …

I am full of emotion when the plane lands and we walk down the stairs to the tarmac, tears well up and I could kiss the ground. In the taxi on the way to Jan’s apartment where I will stay, a wave of nostalgia hits me again as I look out at shrines and temples with their welcoming deities. In the dimly lit streets they still retain their mystique.

Although in this town the dogs tend to bark all night and sleep all day, I manage to get a refreshing sleep.

On my first morning I am eager to immerse myself into

Kathmandu life. I follow a well-remembered route to the centre but with so much traffic I find it difficult to cross the roads. When I do step into the traffic and it maneuvers around me I secretly congratulate myself for reaching the other side.

I pass the lane of my old home Hitty Durbar, where I lived when I was newly married and where my daughter Anna was conceived. What I remember mostly is the garden with its little pond with the statue of Shiva in the middle surrounded by lilies. The gate is padlocked so I cannot see it. Across the road is Narayanhitty the old Royal Palace. Since the monarchy ended, Nepal is no longer a Himalayan Kingdom and the palace is now a museum.

I reach Asantole, the main bazaar and my heart warms at the sight of the Annapurna temple to the goddess of abundance. This market scene has not changed much; the vendors still sit on boxes selling fruit and vegetables.

Nearby in the open wooden framed stores there are bags and tins with turmeric, cardamom, peppercorns and many colorful, herbs, aromatic spices and incense. Standing next to the temple, surrounded by pungent odors and street sounds, I know I am truly home.

Each day I visit a different part of town and every area evokes memories. One day I am drawn to walk to the

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WordWorks / Summer 2015

Saying goodbye to Kathmandu From previous page

Dharadara tower, next to where the Bagh Durbar palace, now long gone, stood. Here Minoru, my former husband lived with members of the royal family. It is here that our marriage took place, officiated by a royal Brahmin priest.

I believed the nearby temple, where we had our wedding pictures taken, also to be gone but a young boy leads me there. Ungainly high-rises now shadow the beauty of this magnificent structure once in a lovely garden. The boy returns to his job selling tickets while I sit on the steps to reflect.

For three weeks I walk the streets of Kathmandu and the sister cities of Patan and Bhaktapur, noting the changes. Much of it is the traffic. When I first came in the sixties there were few cars but there were many taxis, painted yellow and black to resemble tigers.

I have coincided my visit to take in the International Council of the 13 Indigenous Grandmothers, of which Grandmother Aamo Bonbo a Tamang shaman is hosting.

When I lived in Kathmandu not too many foreigners had access to shamans. Aama Bonbo does not speak English but I have arranged an interview through her Englishspeaking granddaughter Pritty.

Today, my last full day, I wait to see Aama. Unfortunately Pritty is not available to translate and a teenage boy with limited English is summoned to help out. With a room full of people waiting for consultations I limit myself to one pressing question. Previously I had read

that Aama said we are nearing the end of the Kali Yuga, a period of thousands of years which in the Hindu scriptures is a time when everything is deteriorating and there are wars, violence and general degradation, alarmingly akin to what is happening worldwide. I ask her if it is true and Aama looks me squarely in the eyes and through the boy’s translation tells me, “I see no indication of the Kali Yuga ending at the present time.

Aama always ends with a blessing. She lifts her arms and in what seems like a trance state calls out in a deep sonorous voice “Ma Kali, Ma Kali, Ma Kali, invoking the fierce Goddess who destroys evil forces, she then reaches down and takes some rice and mixes it with oil and herbs and forcefully bangs it on the crown of my head hitting it three times and causing me to let out a startled aaah. She slaps my chest several times and the blessing is over. I place my rupees in her donation bowl and slowly leave the room.

I have one remaining place to visit, Pashupatinath, the sacred place of Shiva on the banks of the sacred Baghmati river. I walk the old familiar way, getting somewhat lost as the once yellow mustard fields are now shops and apartment buildings. I cross a tributary river of the Baghmati and climb the stairs by the side of one of the temples with a big sign ‘Entry for Hindus only.’ Two old sadhus, holy men, with beards and long white hair are feeding the monkeys who are climbing everywhere. I walk Top of next page

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WordWorks / Summer 2015

cautiously knowing these monkeys not to be benign.

I sit for a little across from where a body is being prepared for cremation – it is tipped on the bank so the bare lifeless feet reach the water and that is all the body that I can see. I have watched these burning bodies so many times but now as an older person, who has lost so many friends, this scene is rather more poignant. I have taken to heart the Buddhist saying, ‘you don’t know which will come first, tomorrow morning or your death.”

To leave Pashupatinath I have to pass the burning corpse I saw from across the river and note it is a women.

It is while looking death in the face that my pilgrimage

really ends. Tomorrow I will say goodbye to Kathmandu.

In those distant days of the 60s I lived and loved and spent my early days of motherhood. I do not need to return to Kathmandu – it has become part of me.

As I write this I am grieving terribly for Kathmandu after two earthquakes. Not only has there been a horrendous loss of life but devastation of many homes and unique Hindu and Buddhist temples. Again I remember the Buddhist teachings, planted when I lived in Kathmandu -- “The only thing we can be sure of is change.” ~~

‘Catapult’ gives taking a trip new meaning From page page 17

on this ancient, stony ground. The man whose strength I have grown comfortably dependent on has been taken out, in a moment of music and charm and benevolence. What kind of world is this?

Somewhere in the jumbled sequence of moments I have burst into tears, no doubt shocking our daughter who turns to comfort me, and perhaps provoking the handsome trio of police into action. Though it makes better sense to think they were already in motion—being just beside him and maybe noticing all on their own. However it unfolded, they have rushed to my husband, helping him up off the cobbles, restoring the wallet and coins which have flown from his pockets on impact. Assured that he is intact, the Carabinieri throw a glance my way, and redirect their attentions to search out the perpetrators. Not far from us they huddle, a mother and daughter, clearly as shocked as we are. None but the daughter seems to know what has transpired, and we can’t understand a word she says. Her mother is wailing and shouting. Daughters are consoling their mothers in two languages.

Those are the effects. Cause, which emerged with stupefying slowness, has been one protruding cobble in a narrow alley winding up behind us, steeper than you would imagine if you have never walked in the hill towns of Tuscany, nor noticed the sturdy bowled legs of their aged citizens, the fat muscled calves of their toddlers.

Mother and daughter, perhaps delayed by dinner or a telephone call or who knows what, had rushed down this ally, arm in arm, to get to the festival, when the mother, a woman not quite five foot but with a comportment of

impressive solidness, caught heel in cobble. The shoe, functioning as catapult, served to launch her from her daughter’s grasp, straight into my husband, who cushioned her nicely from the street. Though I must have seen this woman collapse upon him, my brain never registered her. I never even noticed her being righted, probably by the daughter. For me, it was only my husband upright one instant; hurled to the ground the next.

In the ensuing recovery—first of bodies, and then of meaning, and finally, of dignity—we grasped story from chaos. Satisfied, apparently, in the absence of criminal intent and with their own resolve to restore order, the police removed themselves from the scene. Which left us to assess the damage and then to exchange whatever civilities the circumstances required and linguistic barriers would permit. My husband, bleeding from the elbow and knee, but with his usual equanimity, brushed off any trace of sympathy and was soon reassuring the two women with all the courtesy his handful of Italian phrases would allow. Gestures of apology were extended and accepted. Tears of fear gave way to tears of laughter, and hilarity was the tone with which we parted ways, all to the soundtrack of the orchestra, who played on.

I wonder how others around us may have registered the story, and if some version of it might wind its way through the remembrance of that particular saint’s day.

Who knows? For a brief time, we may have played a noteworthy part in the lore of Montalcino. ~~

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AGM 2015, an exhilarating event for all

by Craig Spence The Federation of BC Writers has a new board, headed up by President Coco Aders-Weremczuk, and a new sense of direction, following an exhilarating and productive Annual General Meeting in Summerland May 22 to 24.

We had hoped for more members at the weekend event – which had the feel of a writers’ retreat as much as a business meeting – but we couldn’t have anticipated a better outcome… that seemed to be the general feeling coming out of the three-day program, which included: an open-mic on the Friday night; four workshops and the AGM itself on the Saturday; and two more workshops on the Sunday morning.

Your new Board of Directors is: Coco Aders-Weremczuk, President Ben Nuttall-Smith, Past President Edi DePencier, Secretary Loreena Lee, Treasurer & Fraser Valley Rep Douglas Reid, Fraser Valley Rep Ann Graham Walker, Island Rep Shellagh Simpson, Lower Mainland Rep Dawn Renaud, Central and Southeast Rep Shaleeta Harper, Youth Rep George Opacic, Member-at-Large Paul Seesequasis, Member-at-Large Rosemary Rigsby, Member-at-Large “It’s very encouraging to see so many members step up and join the Board,” Aders-Weremczuk said. “It’s especially encouraging to see reps coming forward for the Lower Mainland, Fraser Valley, Central and Southeast regions.” They join Ann Graham Walker, who has been doing an incredible job keeping Vancouver Island members organized and up to date on Fed and other literary activities in her region.

“We made a conscious decision to hold the AGM in the Central region,” Aders-Weremczuk said, “and we are feeling confident that writers throughout BC will respond if we continually reach out to them.

There’s a new awareness of the Fed as a provincial

organization, and we intend to build on that.”

Another important development is the confirmation of Shaleeta Harper as Youth Representative on the board. Harper also sits on the Editorial Board of WordWorks Magazine, and is the founder and Publisher of text magazine, an avant garde literary publication launched last year in Nanaimo. Bringing youth onboard is one of the priorities for the board in the coming years.

Finally, the blend of new and experienced board members bodes well for the future. Renewal is essential for an organization to thrive and survive in today’s complex world; but continuity is important too. The mix of talents and ideas that will be at the table in 2015-2016 is bound to take the Fed in new, exciting directions In delivering their reports, members of the outgoing board stressed over and over the need to activate and engage volunteers.

President – now happily stepping into the role of Past President – Ben Nuttall-Smith sums things up in a ‘Dear Volunteers’ message submitted to WordWorks: “…a volunteer driven organization like ours can never achieve all the things it hopes to without engaging and activating its membership. So we’re calling on you to make a difference by contributing your skills and enthusiasm to the Fed – a few hours a week, chipped in by a lot of dedicated members, can make a big difference.”

I concluded my own Executive Director’s report to the board in a similar vein: “While there is much to celebrate from the past year, I am going to conclude on a cautionary note. I have watched with deep concern as too few members do too much of the work needed to make the Federation of BC Writers successful.”

A round-table session at the AGM focused on what we can do to motivate our membership and get them more involved. Look for future developments and in the meantime, check out the Volunteer Opportunities page, under the Membership tab at bcwriters.ca.

January’s long gone; December’s only half a year away, but for people attending the Federation of BC Writers’ AGM it would not have been out of order to wish one another a Happy New Year! Things went that well.

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WordWorks / Summer 2015

Coco Aders-Weremczuk President

Ben Nuttall-Smith Past President

Ann Graham Walker Island Rep

Edi DePencier Secretary

Loreena Lee Treasurer & Fraser Valley Rep

Shaleeta Harper Youth Rep

George Opacic Member-at-Large

Dawn Renaud Central and Southeast Rep

Paul Seesequasis Member-at-Large

Rosemary Rigsby Member-at-Large Page 23

Shellagh Simpson Lower Mainland Rep

Douglas Reid Fraser Valley Rep

WordWorks / Summer 2015

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WordWorks / Summer 2015

a landscape of rivers and metaphors

Cascadia Festival particiants in a ‘Living Room’

by Yvonne Blomer How is it we do not know the face or our own home?

We live in a rare and challenging time, a time where we must make a paradigm shift on many levels in order to protect the natural world. Though we often forget it, we too are part of that natural world, we live in it. We depend on it. The natural world is not a resource, it is our home.

So, what do we want to focus on in this world?

Focus on the destruction or the beauty, or find a thin line between? Focus on what has been lost or what we can preserve from here? Focus on our differences and all the things that separate each person and each group from the other, or find ways to unite and link?

Recently I attended and participated in the Cascadia Poetry Festival. A four-day full-tilt festival of readings, panels, democratic open readings, celebrations, late night performances and early morning discussions on poetry and the bioregion called Cascadia. This is a unique festival in that it crosses political borders and its focus is both land and language; poetry and geography.

David McClosky, geographer and Professor Emeritus at Seattle University, kicked off CPF3 in Nanaimo BC on May 1 by asking how it is that we do not know the face of our own home? He then launched his most recent map and shared with the audience the process of understanding the landscape and the “necklace of

Photo by Chris Hancock-Donaldson

rivers” that have shaped the Cascadia bioregion.

The region is not about politics. It’s a map of “earth below, sky, winds, weathers, waters, the flora and fauna,” says McClosky. It is a map that captures the laminated world, as McClosky calls it, the compressed layers of geography and water which runs from northern California to Southern Alaska and east to Yellowstone in the south, then following the Columbia Ice Fields going north-west. McClosky is a geographer who speaks in metaphor about the land and our connection to it. He is awaiting the poetry that will come out of this region and deepen our connection and our language about it.

Not knowing the face of our home comes from a silencing, a shaping from political sources as to how the stories are being told and shared. Political maps leave off parts of the region. Our sense of climatology is fractured. “We don’t have a regional climatology,” says McClosky, “we have a global but not talking about local, about what is going on here. We have witnessing but we do not have a shared regional story.”

With that set up, festival participants moved from panels to readings with the compass of their minds attuned to the landscape we inhabit. The festival took place atop the hillside at Vancouver Island University, with the city of Nanaimo and the distant pacific and her islands, at the very center of Cascadia, in the background.

The first panel was on the anthology Make it True (Leaf Press, 2015) where the editors Paul Nelson,

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Barry McKinnon, George Stanley and Nadina Maestas discussed what they were looking for in a poetry of place. At CPF2 in 2014 in Seattle, George Stanley spoke of wanting poetry to move away from the play of language and the stance of irony, to move toward poetry of real things, of truth.

Countries that are in deep crisis revere their poets, while Canadian and American poets are barely heard.

To counter Auden’s often quoted and misunderstood notion that “poetry makes nothing happen,” someone on the panel said, “Poetry does make things happen, poems make other poems happen.” While someone else added that poetry’s future needs to move forward, not back, and begin to be “issue driven”. This was a deep and engaging panel with many in the audience agreeing or disagreeing vehemently with what the editors/panelists were saying, especially with the notion that form or formal poetry could not be brought forward from the past. Many brought up the anthology In Fine Form edited by Kate Braid and Sandy Shreve and how in form poetry contemporary poets were taking the old forms and making them new.

Other panels explored “Where Geography, Culture and Language Intersect”; asked why “The Ground is always shifting”; talked about living together in a diverse bioregion with diverse cultures. “Rewilding Poetry” focused on eco-poetics, and there was a final panel about living on the margins. The titles signalled the festival’s concern with poetry and place, with how our landscape is shifting due to extraction and environmental shifts, how culture shifts due to the insertion of other cultures and how language changes and grows out of the landscape.

This is the deep, important work of poetry and environment. It is the framework on which the festival was built, a festival that included panels, readings, living room readings (democratic readings of a single poem in a circle), not to mention late night events such as the Marmot Cascadia Spoken Word Bout – the winner, Amber Dawn, took home a stuffed (as in toy) marmot.

Post WWII poets in Eastern Europe began to discuss what poetry could do, or if poetry could do anything in a post-holocaust age. Now, in one of the richest bioregions on earth, the Cascadia poets are joining the conversation, they are joining in the march, they have been arrested in their fight to protect the

environment. Their poems are finding ways to deepen the connection between self and land, between the laminated landscape and how our immersion in that landscape can be deepened in understanding and lessened in footprint.

A few quotes from the weekend: “The listener is part of the process of creating a poem, a co-creator to the meaning, the witnessing, the receiver.” David McClosky “You will understand the grass when you understand that trees are weeds.” Harold Rhenisch, who lives in the grasslands above Okanagan River.

“Languages love water. Wide rivers become language boundaries. The Skeena and the Naas, navigable rivers, become language centers. Every language has a literature. If teaching humanities should start with the linguistic geography of place, with the first languages.” Robert Bringhurst “Every animal, ecosystem, waterway – all exploited and oppressed by capitalism.” Stephen Collis “If sound were a measure of wilderness, is there any wilderness left?” Christine Leclerc “Poetry, speaking to Christine’s work, the sound of imagination, language and sound too, is an ecology. By sound we navigate our language poetically.”

Sharon Thesen “WIFI is a blind spot in ecology. Electromagnetic radiation is a billion times higher today than 100 years ago. Nothing evolves rapidly enough to cope with that kind of environmental change.” Kim Goldberg “How do we become more responsible for the place?” Rene Sarojini Saklikar “Fear ringed by doubt is my eternal moon.” Susan Musgrave quoting Malcolm Lowry.

You can attend the festival in the virtual world by visiting www.cascadiapoetryfestival.org and watching the Youtube videos of panels and readings. ~~ Yvonne Blomer is Victoria’s poet laureate from 20152018. Her most recent book of poems, As if a Raven (Palimpsest Press, 2014), is concerned with birds, creation and destruction and our relationship to wild things when we make symbols of them. She lives in the Cascadia Bioregion, amongst camas and Garry Oaks on Coast Salish traditional land.

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WordWorks / Summer 2015

Summertime, and the writin’ ain’t easy

by Judy Millar June 21 Welcome, Summer Solstice!

Lucky me—sitting here on the patio, soaking up this sweet summer breeze. When I listen hard, I can almost hear Ella Fitzgerald humming about how the livin’ is easy, fish are jumpin,’ yada yada.

Dear Diary, just between you and me (and Ella, if she’s listening), I am going to write 50,000 words during the month of July! Yes, I know National Novel Writing Month is November. But between my hernia surgery and watching all 62 episodes of Breaking Bad while recuperating, NaNoWriMo came and went in a blur of morphine and exploding meth labs. A summertime novel-writing month makes more sense for me anyway. My teaching contract just concluded. My wicker chair in the sun awaits. And – BONUS – July has 31 days!

I’ll spend the rest of June on my outline, then start MY NoWriMo project July 1. Tackle my edits in August.

Harvest the fruits of my labour (fittingly) in fall!

July 1 9:00 a.m.

Sipping orange juice in the sunshine. Outdoor writing’s going to rock! I’ve got my laptop and my goal: a 50,000 word novel draft ÷ 31 days = 1,613 words per day. MYNoWriMo – here we go! I’ll report back, dear diary.

11:00 a.m.

Hmm. Sun getting high. Screen glare problematic.

Bit of a migraine. Took two Advil and switched to yellow legal pad. Gore Vidal wrote Myra Breckinridge on yellow legal pads. Maybe all the greats write on them? Although Richard Nixon loved legal pads and look at the mess he made. Getting off track. Talk later.

3:00 p.m.

How did Gore Vidal deal with hand cramp? Need more Advil. Taking short break for trip to pharmacy.

No idea of word count. Legal pads lack MS-Word count feature.

7:15 p.m.

Yes, it turned into long break. Took a harbour walk. Bumped into a fellow-writer. Compared rejection horror stories over a pint of Yellow Dog. 8:45 p.m.

Sun going down soon! 1,613 words = A LOT. I am not a verbose writer. Flaubert spent his life agonizing over “le mot juste.” I am more of a Flaubert. A Flaubert who writes on legal pads. A Vidalian Flaubert.

Sounds like an exotic onion. Procrastination alert! I have at least 500 words to go. Back to work!

9:30 p.m.

OMG. Explosions? No. Fireworks. I forgot about Canada Day! How can I possibly make my goal when big booms interrupt my train of thought? Plus, I love the ones that do that shooty thing. And the screamers that sparkle out. Wow – that one looks like a horse’s tail! Gotta go.

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July 2 9:30 a.m.

MYNoWriMo. Back at it! Fell short on Day One due to Canada Day curve ball. No wonder NaNoWriMo originators chose November. Never mind. I’ll catch up my count, no sweat. Well, some sweat – it’s already 80 degrees out here.

11:45 a.m.

Really warm now. Wasps sunning themselves on siding.

12:30 p.m.

Wasps everywhere! Can’t even enjoy lemonade while writing. Need one of those fake wasp nests to fool them into thinking this territory already occupied. Off to Canadian Tire for that. A sting operation – ha-ha!

2:00 p.m.

Decoy nests mounted. Wasps are thumbing their little wasp noses at phony nests. Showing off for new neighbours by doing dive bombs in nest vicinity.

3:00 p.m.

Wasps are settling down. My word count is climbing. YAY! July 4 10:00 a.m.

I love that summer-fresh smell in the air! I’m raring to write today. Life is good!

10:30 a.m.

RAHR-RAHRRR-RAHHHHHR. Oh no. Wally next door is out with his weed-whacker! Grrrr.

10:45 a.m.

Wally’s still whacking. Moving indoors.

11:00 a.m.

Hand cramp is killing me. Reverting to laptop.

Screw Gore Vidal.

11:15 a.m.

Doorbell rings. It’s the Hacketts from Humboldt!

Here? In Nanaimo? Cousin Carla and Rolf Hackett say they’ve sold their Saskatchewan hog farm. Claim that after a boozy pig roast at their place in 2006, I told them to drop in any time. Said I’d show them around Vancouver Island! If I were to run, full tilt, into Wally’s weed-whacker, would death occur instantly or would it really hurt?

July 9 Third rainy day in a row. The Hacketts aren’t happy hanging out on the blow-up air mattress in the living room. Rolf’s back hurts. Carla is crabby due to wasp sting. She wants to see killer whales jumping ‘like in the tourist brochures.’ I suggest a trip to Victoria for a whale watching outing. No boats, says Carla. Sea sickness issue. “Can’t we just watch them jump from shore?” Made her a margarita. Set her up watching orca videos on YouTube.

Snuck off to my laptop. Managed 800 words before she was orca’d out!

July 13 The Hacketts hate Cathedral Grove. Rolf has trouble looking up at ancient trees due to his aching back. Plus he finds tall trees intimidating. “I’m a prairie boy at heart,” he reminds me. Hourly. Carla tells him not to bother looking up. “If you’ve seen one Douglas fir, you’ve seen them all.” Prairie Girl wants to find a Wal-Mart.

3:30 p.m.

Dropped the Hacketts at a mall. Set myself up at Starbucks. Thumbed 500 words into my iPhone.

Somehow bumped delete. Watched them fade like the foam on my Frappuccino. AAGGH. July 15 12:00 p.m.

The Hacketts just set off in search of “wide open spaces.” (beer fridge empty) 1:00 p.m.

De-stressing, stretched out on a driftwood log here at Neck Point. Tide is out. Little kids are filling their pails with shells. This ocean breeze is so refreshing.

I’m nowhere near half-way to MYNoWriMo word goal. BUT… goofing off just gave me a great idea!

One I might develop during rainy November. Right now, Ella’s sultry voice is floating in on the breeze: Summertime, and the livin’ is easy... ~~ Judy Millar is a Nanaimo-based writer of humorous and serious short stories and essays, and the author of the humorous short story collection Beaver Bluff: The Librarian Stories. She has won numerous awards and been published in literary journals and anthologies including Island Writer, WOW!, Canadian Stories, Stones and One Sweet Ride.

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WordWorks / Summer 2015

Six reasons young writers need the Fed Antony Stevens, philip gordon, and Shaleeta Harper – the editors of text – enjoying an afternoon networking at the Cascadia Poetry Festival.

Photo by Kim Goldberg

by Shaleeta Harper As I was walking into my first year poetry class at Vancouver Island University five years ago, I was dreading making eye contact with the other aspiring writers. I was a working student fresh out of high school, so I figured the other students would outstrip me in any scholarly conversation. Eyes fixed on the industrial grey carpet, I took a seat front and center, blue bic poised over my empty notebook.

It took about three weeks for me to start doodling crows in the margins, and realize poetry 110 was a ‘bird’ class—more than half the people there saw an easy credit, and had no real interest in poetry. In later years, when my classrooms were finally full of likeminded individuals, I could begin to hazard a little real conversation on the written arts. These conversations opened many doors to me, and made me realize how desperately I wanted to start my own literature magazine.

I learned about The Federation of BC Writers (or, “The Fed”) when I first started university, but I didn’t see the benefits of joining at that time. After years of knowing it existed, I finally joined The Fed this year.

I joined because I graduated from university, and realized I needed more contacts in the writing world if I was ever going to succeed. I had just launched my own literature magazine, called text, and there’s

nothing like starting a business to make you realize how much you need other people. text is a free poetry focused publication based in Nanaimo, devoted to contemporary and found poetry. I teamed-up with a couple like-minded editors and a graphic designer through university, but it wasn’t long before we realized we needed more than just ‘us’ to succeed. We needed friends in the industry, who would be willing to share text around, submit material, and discuss our magazine in their own circles. The Fed provides connections through events and promotion.

It’s also providing direct benefits to me as a writer.

For instance…

1. An audience through WordWorks. You know what WordWorks is, because you’re reading it—this is a magazine put together by writers for writers, and members of The Fed receive it for free. All the content is written by members, and The Fed does its best to pay all contributors fair rates for their submissions.

For young writers, this means you can send in articles or creative writing, and get at worst constructive responses, and at best publication and a paycheque.

If published, you receive an audience of hundreds of other writers. Even if you aren’t interested in writing for the magazine, you can still benefit from it. I’ve had the opportunity to write for WordWorks in the past, and the editing suggestions I’ve received have helped me Next page

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WordWorks / Summer 2015 From previous page

write more effective ‘Letter from the Editor” passages in text.

2. WriteOn. This newsletter supplies current information that needs to be distributed between quarterly editions of WordWorks. It’s a biweekly message to all Fed members that includes coming events, calls for submissions, and workshop openings. As a young writer, you might not otherwise have the connections to get these notifications, and by participating in the events and workshops, you can begin to solidify relationships. As I’m writing this, I’m realizing this is an excellent avenue to direct calls for submissions, and to see where other members are devoting their energies.

3. Discounts. Fed members are eligible for discounts on programs, workshops, and events. If you’re a young writer, chances are you don’t have much money to devote to extra-curricular activities; The Fed will do it’s best to provide low rates and discounts to all its members for events and programs. Beyond event discounts, youth get a substantial discount on the Fed membership itself. The Fed also hosts completely free events, like the self-publishing conference held in Nanaimo last January. The self-publishing conference didn’t just have informative panels, but also the opportunity to mingle and network, which let us text editors discuss the magazine casually with other members, outside the discussion we had behind the podium.

4. Connections. The best reason for young writers to join The Fed is to open up discussions and meet like-minded people. It might not sound as exciting or tangible as receiving a magazine, or getting discounts, but connections are incredibly important in every industry, and writing is no exception. Open communication can help young writers find everything from careers and book publishers, to rides to events.

I’d love to see a forum included in the website in the future, to allow for even more open communication, but for now e-mail chains and frequent meetings provide ample opportunity.

5. Input. That open communication I mentioned before isn’t just there to help with networking—it’s there to make the big decisions, like how to spend grant fund-

ing. Of course, much of the finances go to maintaining the organization, but there is some left for events and activities… and The Fed is open to suggestions on what they do with it. If members expressed interest in a workshop on slam poetry, that could happen.

The Fed is a group who are there to provide services to new, emerging, and professional writers – and they have some flexibility on what that entails.

6. Workshops and Events. Whether they’re put on by The Fed, or just sponsored, there is always something happening that writers can take part in. Workshops are frequently being held, and these provide an opportunity to work on the craft of writing itself with the guidance and the company of many writers. This maintenance of the habit of writing is crucial as a young writer. If you continue to practice and share, you will continue to write – whether it’s personal or professional, writing is beneficial. Events are frequent, and they vary each year, but they’re always enjoyable and informative.

Last week, I paused in my discussion with Craig Spence, taking a moment to sip my icy latte and consider our conversation so far. Right then we were discussing youth involvement in The Fed, and the tangible and intangible benefits that The Fed provides new writers. We hadn’t gotten far, when he said to me that “writing is a transformative experience.” I thought he was getting off topic, but he persisted in that vein. He told me that as you write about an experience, you should be experiencing it again. Experiences make a person. This is incredibly important for new writers to understand and undertake, because writing isn’t just copying down events, it’s learning from them, re-experiencing them, and looking at them from new angles. At that moment, I realized that those Saturday morning coffee shop conversations are what are special about the Fed – it isn’t just being a part of something, it’s contributing to it, and discussing it. Conversations like those are what keep writers writing, and that is the most valuable aspect of The Federation of BC Writers. ~~ Shaleeta Harper - WordWorks Youth Editor; Editor in Chief of text Magazine; FBCW Youth Director; and Vancouver Island University Creative Writing graduate. See more at textlitmag.com

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WordWorks / Summer 2015

Fire-up stories with intrigue, suspense

by Jodie Renner All genres of fiction, not just thrillers and actionadventures, need tension, suspense, and intrigue to hook readers and keep them eagerly turning the pages.

And of course, you’ll need to ratchet up the tension and suspense a lot more if you’re writing a fast-paced, nail-biting page-turner.

Here are some techniques for adding tension, suspense, and intrigue to your novel or short story: First, create a fascinating protagonist character readers will care about. Make your main character likeable, appealing, smart, and resourceful. If readers haven’t bonded with your lead character, they won’t care what happens to her. And for intrigue, be sure to add some vulnerability, inner conflict, secrets, and regrets.

Get up close and personal. Start out in your protagonist’s head in the first paragraph, preferably the first sentence, using first-person or close third-person point of view. Use deep point of view for your hero or heroine to create a sense of intimacy and keep readers emotionally invested.

Put your character in motion right away. Create an opening disturbance of some kind, preferably on the first page. Something negative happens to shake up his world or get in the way of a main goal. He needs to take action.

Use compelling, vivid sensory imagery to take us right there, with the protagonist, vividly experiencing and reacting to whoever/whatever is challenging or

threatening her. And appeal to all five senses, not just the visual.

Create a worthy opponent for your protagonist.

You should have a nasty, cunning, determined antagonist. Your villain needs to be as intelligent, motivated, and resourceful as your protagonist – or even more so.

Make him a serious force to be reckoned with.

Threaten your protagonist. Now that your readers care about your main character, insert a major threat or dilemma within the first chapter or two, one that won’t be resolved until the end.

Create an overriding sentence about this to keep in mind as you’re writing your story: Will (name) survive/stop/find/overcome (ordeal/ person/difficulty/threat) on time to save himself or others?

Here’s a premise in a nutshell for a gripping, entertaining story your readers will love:

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(Hero or heroine’s name) wants ... (what will complete their life, make them happy, fulfill their main goal, satisfy their biggest hope or desire?). But he/she is hampered by... (describe the misfortune, conflict, dilemma, problem, villain), and she/he has... (time limit or other hindrance) to... (describe the almost impossible task) or... (describe a negative consequence that will happen). He/she has to choose between... and.... (Continue from there.)

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Show, don’t tell. Show all your critical scenes in real time, with action, reaction, and dialogue. Show your character’s inner feelings and physical and emotional reactions. Don’t have one character tell another about an important event or scene.

Enhance the mood and tone with just the right details. Take care with your word choices – avoid light, cheery, or relaxed-sounding phrases like ‘she strolled’ or ‘he leaned back in his chair’ at tense times.

Don’t tell us about the birds chirping and the brook babbling when your hero or heroine is racing through the woods, with the bad guys in hot pursuit! Make the terrain difficult and the weather nasty.

Maintain a forward momentum. Don’t get bogged down in lengthy backstory or exposition. Keep the action moving ahead, especially in the first chapters. Then work in background details and other info little by little, on an ‘as-needed’ basis only, through dialogue, thoughts, or flashbacks.

Use brief flashbacks at key moments to reveal your main character’s childhood traumas, unpleasant events, secrets, emotional baggage, hang-ups, dysfunctional family, etc.

Put some tension in every scene. There should be something unresolved in every scene. Your character enters the scene with an objective and encounters obstacles in the scene, so she is unable to reach her goals. Or she resolves one, only to be faced with an even bigger challenge.

Vary the tension. But of course, you can’t keep up tension nonstop, as it’s tiring for readers and will eventually numb them. It’s best to intersperse tense, nail-biting scenes with a few more leisurely, relaxed scenes that provide a bit of reprieve before the next tense, harrowing scene starts.

Use multiple viewpoints, especially that of the villain. For increased anxiety and suspense, get us into the head of your antagonist from time to time. This way the readers find out critical information the heroine doesn’t know, things we want to warn her about!

Create a mood of unease by showing the main character feeling apprehensive about something or someone, or by showing some of the bad guy’s thoughts and intentions.

Add in tough choices and moral dilemmas.

Devise ongoing difficult decisions and inner conflict

for your lead character. Besides making your plot more suspenseful, this will also make your protagonist more complex, vulnerable, and interesting.

Withhold information. Don’t tell your readers too much too soon. Dole out information little by little, to tantalize readers and keep them wondering.

Keep details of the past of both your protagonist and antagonist hidden, and hint at critical, life-altering experiences they’ve had that are impacting their present goals, desires, fears, etc. Add one tiny detail after another as you go along, or maybe a short flashback here and there.

Delay answers to critical plot questions. Look for places in your story where you’ve answered readers’ questions too soon, so have missed a prime spot to increase tension and suspense. Draw out the time before answering that question. In the meantime, hint at it from time to time to remind readers of its importance.

Use dramatic irony. This is where your readers know something critical and scary that the protagonist is not aware of. For example, your heroine is relaxing after a stressful day, unaware that the killer is prying open her basement window.

Add a ticking clock. Adding time pressure is another excellent way to increase suspense.

Keep raising the stakes. Keep asking yourself, “How can I make things worse for the protagonist?”

As the challenges get more difficult and the obstacles more insurmountable, readers worry more and suspense grows.

Plan a few plot twists. Readers are surprised and delighted when the events take a turn they never expected. Don’t let your readers become complacent, thinking it’s easy to figure out the ending, or they may stop reading. ~~ Jodie Renner is a freelance fiction editor and the award-winning author of three craft-of-writing guides in her series An Editor’s Guide to Writing Compelling Fiction: Captivate Your Readers, Fire up Your Fiction, and Writing a Killer Thriller. She has also published two clickable time-saving e-resources to date: Quick Clicks: Spelling List and Quick Clicks: Word Usage. You can find Jodie at www.JodieRenner. com, www.JodieRennerEditing.com, at The Kill Zone blog alternate Mondays, and on Facebook, Twitter, and Google+.

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