Geist 83 - Winter 2011

GEIST 83

GEIST Fact + Fiction • NORTH of AMERICA

Mavis Gallant In Paris.

Stephen Henighan, page 55

Issue 83 • Winter 2011 • $6.95

FACT & FICTION

Preoccupied Alberto Manguel on Facing the Camera • Daniel Francis on Touring the Asylum

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Randy Fred, New World Publisher • Veronica Gaylie Keeps an Eye on Trevor Linden

MADE IN CANADA

Caroline Adderson Finds the Past Lives of Her House • Susanna Moodie, Erasing It in the Bush

WINTER 2011

$6.95

GEIST.COM

GEIST WINTER 2011

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Stephen Osborne Sits In on the Vancouver Poetry Conference and a NaNoWriMo Brunch Seth • The Canadian Map of Men • Erasure Poetry Contest Winners • Hal Niedzviecki F R E E Z E - F R A M E E M B RO I D E RY • G RO U N D S F O R A R R E S T • A J O K E A B O U T S U P E R M A N

GEIST

Volume 20 · Number 83 · Winter 2011

F E AT U R E S

Lives of the House Caroline Adderson 32

The Place of Scraps Jordan Abel 40

New World Publisher Michal Kozlowski 42

As the layers of wallpaper and paint, lath and plaster, carpet and tile are scraped and stripped and peeled away, the past lives of the house come into view The place of scraps. I trudged on behind Barton, barely lifting my feet over the roots that muscled their way out of the forest floor. Barton spoke in Niskae and in endless breath about our destination—the place of First Nations poetmoons.” takes a sidelong scraps—and I translated what I could asAwe hiked.

“Two Brushed look light at thethrough relationship by pine needles. “The shadow of.” Filtered the between canopy. an “His and his Pacific grandson.” Salted air. “At peace with theethnographer wind.” A clearing up ahead. “To Aboriginal subjects Sakau’wan.” At long last. “The trail of stars.”Northwest The clearing.

I rested against the moss trunk of a great tree. I caught my wind. I gazed at Barton as he ventured into the middle of the barren circle. In English, he said, “There are no poles here.” He kneeled and his hand disappeared into the ground. After a moment, he withdrew a fistful of dirt and shavings of wood. He said, “Hold out your hands.” So I did. And he sifted the mulch profileofofdirt Randy into my palms. He was silent as the last A clumps leftFred—writer, his fingers and I activist,that husband, father, lawn-bowling knew then, standing in that sunstruck clearing, this was a sacred ritual, residential that I must remember each detail so that thechampion, world could know it, school too. survivor and “the greatest blind Indian publisher in the world”

Erasing It in the Bush Karen Press, Sam Helmer, Patty Milligan 52

Winners of the First Annual Geist Erasure Poetry Contest, in which the writing is all about the erasing

IN MEMORY OF WANDA OSBORNE, 1924–2011.

PUBLISHED BY The

Geist Foundation PUBLISHER Stephen Osborne SENIOR EDITOR Mary Schendlinger EDITORIAL GROUP Michal Kozlowski—Assistant Publisher, Chelsea Novak— Managing Editor, Lauren Ogsten—Online Marketing Manager, Ben Rawluk—Circulation Administrator ASSOCIATE EDITOR C.E. Coughlan INTERNS Jordan Abel, Jocelyn Kuang, Mary Leighton, Caroline McGechaen, Jennesia Pedri BOOKKEEPER Daniel Zomparelli ACCOUNTANT Mindy Abramowitz, cga ADVERTISING & MARKETING Clevers Media DESIGNER Eric Uhlich WEB ARCHITECTS Metro ­Publisher DISTRIBUTION Magazines Canada PRINTED IN CANADA

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N OT E S & D I SPATC HE S

Stephen Osborne Veronica Gaylie Ted Bishop

12 Preoccupied 16 The Guy Upstairs 18 Edith and Frank

F I N D I N GS

21 Hal Niedzviecki, Holiday; Aubrey Longley-Cook, Freeze-Frame Embroidery; ­Pat­ty ­Osborne, Grounds for Arrest; Calvin Wharton, Superman, You Prick; Carolyn Mark, Roller Derby Queens and Wayward Santas; Seth, Jacko Gumball Comics; Edna Ingalls, Your ­Impoverished; Joe Keithley, Joe Shithead, MLA; Amanda Lamarche, Fear of Dying to the Wrong Song; Eric Uhlich, Quiet Jungle; and more!

CO M M E N T

Stephen Henighan Alberto Manguel Daniel Francis

55 57 59

A Table in Paris Facing the Camera Deviance on Display

D E PA RT M E N TS

Christopher Grabowski Letters

Geist staff & correspondents Meandricus

Melissa Edwards

4 In Camera 6 63 Endnotes, Noted Elsewhere, Off the Shelf 71 Puzzle 72 Caught Mapping

Cover design by Eric Uhlich Geist is printed on 100% recycled, chlorine-free Lenza Green ­paper, with mostly vegetable-based inks, at an FSC-certified plant.

Cover photo by Mandelbrot 440 West Pender Street, Vancouver. The top floor was occupied by Pulp Press Book Publishers, a literary publishing house, from 1972 to 1977. The printing press was in the room on the left and the typesetting room was in the room on the right. The decorative bronze lions’ heads are modelled from door knockers. The building still stands, two blocks from the downtown core. Rumours of its imminent demise have been circulating for thirtyfive years.

in camera

The Bear Effect

Photo of Bear’s Belly by Edward S. Curtis in The North American Indian, 1907–30, Vol. 5, Plate 150.

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in camera

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he photograph opposite, of an Aboriginal man named Bear’s Belly, was taken in 1908 by the American photographer Edward S. Curtis, who had set out to photograph “the old time Indian, his dress, his ceremonies, his life and manners.” Curtis captured more than twenty thousand images between 1907 and 1930 for a project he called The North American Indian, a huge photographic study of North American First Nations people, who, he wrote in the introduction, “are rapidly losing the traces of their aboriginal character and who are destined ultimately to become assimilated with the ‘superior race’.”

I remembered this image of Bear’s Belly when I came across the snapshot on this page, among some old papers in my wife’s childhood home in Zary, Poland. The photo was taken in about 1958 during a national holiday, by a Mr. Dylinski, a professional photographer who in the 1950s and ’60s took hundreds of similar pictures and sold them as souvenirs to people attending holiday celebrations and other events. One of his props was the bear costume, which was made of sheepskin. The little girl in the photograph— my wife’s sister, Eva—was five years old. In the photo her body is tense and her face apprehensive. Eva tells me that she was very anxious because the man in the bear costume didn’t say a word or make any human sound.

Bear’s Belly was an Arikara man who lived in what we now know as North Dakota. In the photo he is wrapped in the skin of a bear that he killed, a requirement of membership in the medicine fraternity he had joined. Before killing the bear, he said to it, “I came looking for you to be my friend, to be with me always.”

The scars on his chest are the product of a successful vision quest; he holds the viewer’s eyes by looking directly into the lens of the camera.

A photographic portrait, as the writer David Beers once observed, is the trace element of a transaction made between two people of un-

Eva and the Bear in Zary, Poland. Photo by Mr. Dylinski, circa 1958.

equal power. From this perspective, I find it remarkable that Edward Curtis, a member of the “superior race” who set out to capture Bear Belly’s image before “the last opportunity for study of the living tribes shall have passed with the Indians themselves,” so perfectly preserved the powerful presence of Bear’s Belly in the picture.

Unlike the man in the sheepskin bear costume, Bear’s Belly is completely visible, entirely there.

—Christopher Grabowski

Christopher Grabowski’s award-winning photographs have been exhibited in Canada, Poland, Holland and Germany. His photos and articles have been published in many periodicals and anthologies in North America and Europe. See more at mediumlight.com and at geist.com.

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letters

TECHN O-DE CONSTRUCTION was so pleased with Todd McLellan’s photo essay “Instrumentation” (Geist 81), that I ruined my copy by dragging scissors along the spine and easing a page out. I’d forgotten that feeling since pasting my closet door with boy bands and actors when I was thirteen.

Thanks for bringing it back, and for doing it through some genuine, interesting beauty.

—Leah Schoenmakers, Fredericton See “Instrumentation” at geist.com.

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LEGACY LIT hanks so much for “Signs of Literary Life,” your selection of writers’ and publishers’ work from the 1970s and ‘80s (No. 82), and the memories of D.M. Fraser by Stephen Osborne and Michael Turner. My husband and I went to the launch of Fraser’s Class Warfare in 1974, in an old mansion in southwest Vancouver.

I was expecting one of those painful events, and it was so much fun. There was a roulette wheel, and a blackjack table—so glamorous. And a performance by Mandrake the Magician, who seemed to us (recently arrived from the “British” Isles) like a creature from another dimension. Everyone

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The Geist Foundation receives assistance from private donors, the Tula Foundation, the Canada Council, the BC Arts Council and the BC Gaming Branch. We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Periodical Fund (CPF) of the Department of Canadian Heritage.

was happy, especially the author. It was good medicine at a difficult time in my life. That memory is a treasure, and so is my signed copy of Class Warfare.

—Angela Mairead Coid, Vancouver See “Signs of Literary Life” at geist. com. And while you’re at it, read “The Sweetness of Life” by Stephen Osborne, another account of that party.

It was so exciting to see that Crossings

by Betty Lambert was chosen by the City of Vancouver and the Association of Book Publishers of BC as one of the ten Legacy Books (classics that were reissued for Vancouver’s 125th anniversary). Crossings was a very favourite book of mine. Here is part of what I wrote about the book in my column in the Vancouver Courier on June 19, 1979: “Lambert has searched deep into a woman’s soul to discover why and how we love the men we do. There are few of us who won’t relate to her struggle with passion over reason. One of Lambert’s many strengths in this novel is her open and honest handling of Vicky’s sexual relationship with her husband and with Mik. These scenes are as compelling, relevant and as funny as any I have read in a long time.” I am so glad Betty Lambert is getting the recognition she deserves.

—Johanne Leach, Vancouver Read an excerpt from Crossings, and a review of the new edition, at geist.com.

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special thanks to the tula foundation

Stan Smrke enjoys Geist 78-79, the 20th Anniversary Issue, at the Papagayo beach bar in Playa el Agua, Margarita Island, just off the coast of Venezuela.

www.geist.com

BLOOD SP ORTS a r m i n e S t a r n i n o ’s poem, “Pugnax Gives Notice” (No. 80), is an interesting reflection on the good old days of the Roman Empire. Not much has changed—take a look at kick-boxing matches, especially the audiences. I like the image of a combatant being

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stapled to the ground: it makes me think of the office jungle, where there are modern gladiators galore.

—Mark Lovell, Montreal The Romans at the time of the Colosseum were interested in both the blood and gore, and the bread and circuses, so Starnino’s description of gladiator events is both graphically poetic and sensitive to the times of the city. I’m in awe of some of his lines, and a little repelled by others.

—Anonymous, Cyberspace Read “Pugnax Gives Notice” at geist.com.

A RT F U L D I N I NG wish to thank Stephen Osborne for his story “Banker Poet” (No. 81),

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about “seeing” Robert Service in the window of the Café Kathmandu. About a month after the story appeared, a new customer arrived at the restaurant with his family and said that he had liked the story so much that he had decided to bring the family out to see the place where Robert Service had been seen. Then they enjoyed a fine Nepali dinner. Thank you to Geist for supporting art and good dining.

—Abi Sharma, Café Kathmandu, Vancouver Read “Banker Poet” and Stephen Osborne’s other work at geist.com.

P OIN T OF VIE W eading Stephen Henighan’s “Third World Canada” (No. 82) took me back to my trip to Europe a

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hour train ride from Amsterdam to Groningen depressed me to no end, and not just because the landscape was marred by graffiti on every exposed bit of fence and wall and bridge visible out the window.

Later I asked my friend Ineke about the building complexes on the outskirts of towns and cities we had passed through, and she told me they were housing projects for asylum seekers.

Immigration, unemployment, the resurgence of the right in politics—all were issues of concern to my friends, who were left-wing at heart but also scared spitMichael Hayward, a contributing editor to Geist, less for the future of their presents a copy of Geist 80 to Mirka Dvoráková of country, their kids and their Shakespeare a Synové (and Sons), an English-language grandkids. And that was bookstore in the town of Cesky Krumlov, Czech before the debt crisis in the Republic. Photo by Jean Karlinski. few years ago. Having lived there for six months as a teenager back in the ’70s, I was shocked to see how seedy it had become since then. The two-

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Euro zone. If Ineke were still alive, she would laugh out loud at the notion of Europe being in any way a model of “equality, efficiency and moral selfconfidence.” I guess it really is all about perception.

—Barbara Pelz, Calgary Read “Third World Canada” and other piquant articles by Stephen Henighan at geist.com.

P OSTCA R D L I T he Glamour” by Leslie Stark (First Prize winner of the 7th Annual Geist Literal Literary Postcard Contest, No. 81) is a perfect meditation on deception and perception.

—G. Wilson, Cyberspace

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“Under the Surface” by Leslie Vryenhoek (Third Prize winner, No. 81) is a masterpiece of compression. So much character, action, detail, mood,

surprise packed into a few words.

The opening sentence—nostalgia sandwiched between two tension-filled clauses—sets the tone perfectly. A wonderful story.

—Jean Van Loon, Cyberspace In an apocalypse-phobic world, Jen Currin’s story “East Van End Times Army” (Second Prize winner, No. 81) makes a rousing case for welcoming the end of the world with open arms!

—Jelvis Drawer, Cyberspace Tap into geist.com for Geist Literal Literary Postcard Contest winners and some feisty commentary from readers.

N OT SO FUNNY n opposing immigration to Canada

by Asians and Blacks, Stephen Leacock was “a man of his time,” as Daniel Francis writes (“Canada’s Funnyman: The Flip Side,” No. 76).

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This view might be a little more understandable had Leacock not been an immigrant himself. It reminds me of a day I stood on a Toronto subway platform, when two men started taunting a Pakistani man in a security guard uniform. “Why don’t you go back where you came from?” they roared in the broadest possible Scottish accents.

—Nigel Spencer, Montreal Read “Canada’s Funnyman: The Flip Side” and Francis’s other columns, offering unconventional comment on new Canadian books, at geist.com.

R EWR ITIN G CANADA s a new immigrant, I thought that Stephen Henighan offered a good analysis of Canada’s guide for prospective citizens (“Canada for Spartans,” No. 80). Beware of the conservative federal government and its spin on everything it publishes, as Henighan’s article shows.

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Can’t wait till we get rid of them.

—Johanna van Zanten, Cyberspace Thank you, Stephen Henighan, for bringing this to our attention. If Harper thinks his version of Canada should be in every school, your warning should reach every household in Canada, and we should all let him know that we object to his rewriting of our history to align with his distorted views. The sooner we get proportional representation, the sooner we will get governments more in line with the majority of Canadians’ views.

—Oli Cosgrove, Cyberspace “Canada for Spartans” and other writings by Stephen Henighan are posted at geist.com.

PACING etamorphoses” by Alberto Manguel (No. 81), about how fast things change in a seemingly

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sleepy rural place, is a lovely piece of writing. Its lyricism, melancholy and gentle nostalgia remind me of Borges and bring to mind the image of “a bar of sulphur in the drawer of a mahogany desk.” Thanks for this.

—Fabian Eric, Cyberspace Read “Metamorphoses” and other wrtings

by Alberto Manguel at geist.com.

CA RTO LO G I CA e would like to point out two omissions in the “World’s Largest,” a map in the Geist Atlas of Canada showing very large things: Sydney, Nova Scotia, is home to the world’s largest illuminated fiddle (roadsideattractions.ca/sydney.htm) and Mundare, Alberta, is home to the world’s largest sausage (bigthings.ca/ alberta/mundare).

—Josh Coles, Toronto

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“The Angst Map of Canada” (Melissa Edwards, The Geist Atlas of Canada) looks like a map of fictional murder mystery locales!

—Alex Ferguson, Calgary No Angst Map of Canada is complete without Misery Bay, Ontario.

—David Burga, Mississauga, ON Get your own Geist Atlas of Canada, with lots of other great big things and some offbeat cartographic notes, at geist.com.

SEND YOUR LETTER TO:

The Editor, Geist letters@geist.com Fax: 604-677-6319 #210 – 111 W. Hastings St. Vancouver BC V6B 1H4 Letters to Geist may be edited for clarity, brevity and decorum. Authors of published letters will receive a Geist Map, suitable for framing.

Winter 2011 • GEIST 83 • Page 11

NOTES & DISPATCHES Preoccupied STE PHE N OSBO R N E

The Vancouver 125 Poetry Conference took place on unceded First Nations ground, a few blocks from the Occupy movement; poetry within itself is also contested

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n the middle of October 2011, some two hundred poets and friends of poet­ ry from across the country descended on Vancouver for four days of readings, talks, discussion, gossip and high-level binge drinking. The event was the second Vancouver Poetry Conference (the first took place forty-eight years ago), the full name of which, to mark the city’s quasquicentennial, was the Vancouver 125 Poetry Conference, Page 12 • GEIST 83 • Winter 2011

and it occupied three downtown venues in succession: a recycled Bank of Montreal and two recycled department stores. Less formal venues extended to several east-side bars and restaurants, and lounges at the Listel Hotel in the West End and the Arts Club Theatre in the recycled industrial park on Granville Island.

No one could remember, or imagine, so many poets in the city, in public,

at the same time. The first panel session (there were twenty-five in all) opened in the ex-Bank of Montreal on Granville Street—an Edwardian temple with immense vaulted and coffered ceiling, marble pilasters, bronze newel posts and “decorative fire hose cabinet.” One of the panelists—an “avant-gardist,” I was told—presented a summary of Robert’s Rules of Order in place of a poem, or perhaps as a poem, and exceeded his photo: mandelbrot

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allotted time while demonstrating the “wind it up” signal (circling the hand in the air with index finger extended) employed by the Occupy movement to urge long-winded speakers to a close.

The Occupy movement had coalesced on the lawn in front of the Vancouver Art Gallery two and half blocks from the ex-Bank of Montreal, and over the next four days the flow of energy and ideas, confrontations and contradictions generated by the Occupists flowed into sessions of the Poetry Conference, where, as it turned out, Robert’s Rules, even in the modifed form developed by the Occupists (described by a tweeter as “Robert’s Rules on ecstasy”), were not required, despite the misgivings of organizers (and some of the poets) who feared that poets in large numbers might get out of hand.

On the second and third days of the Poetry Conference, I attended several sessions in the recycled Sears department store a block north of the ex-Bank of Montreal. Several panel moderators in their opening remarks cited the unceded status of the Coast Salish territory on which we were meeting and which the city has occupied since its founding in 1866, and one of them offered thanks for being welcomed onto that land by First Nations hosts at the opening ceremony—sentiments that one might be tempted to dismiss as merely polite, but as the discussions unfolded, and more poems were read aloud, recited and talked about, these polite comments began to take on an

edge, for the range of subject matter, the scope of imagination explored in the poems and in the discussion surrounding them, extended to the land and its occupiers at many levels: economic, historical, cultural, ecological, geological, technological. Every moment of the Poetry Conference could be said to be troubled or textured by occupation; it soon became clear that every moment was in some way politically charged.

Who were these poets who had appeared in such numbers? At a glance: women and men in equal numbers; youngish and slightly older, new poets and old poets; lyric poets, formalists, traditionalists, avant-gardists, nature poets, and perhaps even landscape poets and at least one geological poet. Those of us who are not poets (it seemed to me that we all resembled poets) wondered what it would be like to be a single poet among so many others. The book tables in the foyers were strewn with poetry titles; just to see so many pristine volumes awaiting their first owners was an unexpected thrill. Poets and nonpoets strolled in the hallway, browsing through the books, conferring in twos and threes: everyone seemed to be surprised or delighted, at the very least to be on good if not best behaviour; some seemed bemused by some perceived absurdity. I could discern there to be no typical poet or archetypical figure who could stand for all, a fact that was confirmed for me by A Complete Encyclopedia of Different Types of People by Gabe Foreman, a copy of which I picked up at the book table, and in which there is no Poet-type to be found, although poets no doubt can be found within the types listed in its pages, among the woolgatherers, underdogs, sweethearts, snoops, piano tuners, housesitters and adulterers among the lovesick, innocent bystanders, couch ­potatoes, control freaks, doormats, day

traders, eulogists, frequent flyers, history buffs, late bloomers, optimists, optometrists, colonels of truth, etc., etc.

Of the literary disciplines, poetry is the most economical; it requires the least space, the fewest pages, the shortest duration; it pays the lowest rates.

Poetry lacks the focussed attention of a large public; it is forever seeking an audience with ears to hear; its practitioners are dedicated to clarity rather than meaning, and the struggle for clarity is itself troubling and uncomfortable, and can lead into the arcane, the complex and the weird. The poets invited to speak on the panels were new enough to the art or craft to have had their first books published after 1990; older poets gave keynote readings; over the four days dozens of sonnets were read aloud, several rants, poems of love and loss and geology; one poet, a Canadian from Brooklyn, plucked a thumb piano as he read aloud, a response (thumbs up or thumbs down?), he implied, to the avantgardists and their arcane att­entions to constraints and controls, technologies of erasure, grammar, syntax, genetics, artificial intelligence. A poet from Montreal proposed a tactical rather than a procedural approach to achieving clarity: that being simply to track every moment of melancholy sadness. The politics of the family was not much in evidence until a poet from Commercial Drive observed that so many present were parents as well as poets, and that for them the task of poetry was informed, surrounded, blocked, circumscribed, by the task of parenting, the uncomfortable, difficult gerund derived from the Latin, to bring forth.

Someone in the audience proposed that poetry is a dialogue with the dead. I love this question, said one of the panelists.

The border between yes and no is porous, observed another poet in another context (the context of poetry implies all Winter 2011 • GEIST 83 • Page 13

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contexts); the same poet spoke as well of my dear, difficult, departed ones.

Poetry is inherently of the moment— the moment of composition, of memory, of speaking aloud; the moment extends far from the present instant, from the poet’s desk, this keyboard, this podium, this lectern. A poem yearns for space in which to be uttered, in which to be received. At the Poetry Conference such a place was staked out in these halls once intended for shoppers and bankers, all of this, as we learned, on unceded land, land that remains in a profound way unowned.

Poetry within itself is also contested: genre wars are part of the struggle for clarity; excavation and discovery are applied to the body of poetry, as well as to one’s experience of the world, and to continents and subcontinents.

A poet who applied an eraser to a sonnet by Shakespeare came up with nothing / is more / beautiful. On introducing it, he said, this one is for Wall Street, and thereby reassigned it to a moment in hand.

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n the evening of the third day I walked over to the art gallery and observed the Occupists in the plaza using the wind-it-up signal in their general assembly; the human microphone was in evidence as well, and slow ripples of speech moved through the crowd.

A repertoire of hand signals had been drawn on a sheet of cardboard, indicating consensus, disagreement, point of process, repeat, block, clarify, but the wind-it-up sign was not there. Among the tents and the loitering police officers were signs of occupation exhorting passersby to occupy their minds and hearts, to have hope, to $top corporate power, to wake up and smell the oppression, and citing, among other things, the contested status of unceded Coast Salish lands. The art gallery,

with its Ionic columns and vast central dome, is another recycled venue: it had originally housed the Van­couver Courthouse and served as a point of public display for visiting kings and queens; after its conversion (when the city began post-modernizing itself in the 1980s), it became a contemporary site of protest and demonstration; it retains on its exterior staircase a pair of enormous African lions carved en couchant from Nelson Island granite and whose stern, sightless gaze, fixed on the limitless domain of Empire, disregards equally the demonstrators, the police, the passersby and the passage of history.

On its final day the Poetry Conference moved east along Hastings Street another couple of blocks, to the ex-Woodward’s department store, recycled recently into a vestige of itself (original bricks and signage) fronting for various arts organizations and non-profits (Geist being one of them), certain departments of Simon ­ Fraser University, and in particular to a glittering add-on structure called the GoldCorp Centre for the Arts, a venue whose provenance was itself a troubling if not a vexing point; here in space endowed by GoldCorp (pronounced “gold corpse” by most of the speakers), one felt most clearly a poetics of tension, anxiety and contradiction. The closing panel, on the topic of “directions in contemporary poetry” opened with a reading of messages from Guatemalan villagers whose lives and livings, land and culture are the object of devastation perpetrated by GoldCorp, whose headquarters are just down the street from the art gallery (and which in September was removed from the Dow Jones Sustainability Index in light of “ongoing allegations of human rights violations and evidence of environmental contamination”).

The discussion that followed in this contested space moved from processes

of extraction that underlie our economy, to the problem of publicness, the place of poetry in our time, the contest between formalists and lyricalists. The moment from which poetry emerges is often a moment of crisis: in the GoldCorp Centre for the Arts, crisis permeated the air we were breathing. Poetry is the struggle between language and time, said one of the poets on the panel, and a moment later he asked: what is to be done? Poetry, which has so little purchase in the world, has nothing to lose; precisely for this reason, in poetry everything is at stake. At the close of the session, the city mayor entered the hall, along with four elders from the Coast Salish Nations, who offered a speech of welcome that did not overlook the unfinished business of history, and then performed a powerful, almost overwhelming song of welcome with drum accompaniment that in its emotional and formal power offered a challenge of its own. Brad Cran, the Poet Laureate of Vancouver, whose brainchild, or brainstorm, the Poetry Conference had been, read a splendid “civic” poem written on the occasion of a gray whale swimming into the middle of the city via False Creek before the astonished eyes of citizens and children who thronged to the seawall to express their wonder. He had given his poem an ambitious and risky title: “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Gray Whale, After Wallace Stevens and ending with a line from Rilke,” and the risk proved fully worth taking. When he came to the last line, I recalled the erasure poem from Shakespeare’s sonnet that we had heard two days earlier, and heard the two come together: nothing / is more / beautiful / you must change your life.

Hannah Arendt observes that the common element connecting art and politics is that they both are phenomena of the public world. Works of art, in her words, “must find their place in Winter 2011 • GEIST 83 • Page 15

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the world,” just as the products of politics—that is, words and deeds—also need some public space where they can appear and be seen, where they can fulfill their own being in a world common to all—that is, the public commons. Here in the GoldCorp Centre for the Arts, a glimpse of that commons revealed itself, as it had at the site of Occupiers at the art gallery.

When the Mayor of Vancouver (who, as I write, has unfinished business with the Vancouver Occupists) rose to introduce Evelyn Lau as the new Poet Laureate of Vancouver, I remembered what we call the old days, when mayors would call out the police to break the heads of poets before they would countenance standing up with them in public. In those old days, the contest for space was cloistered; today it is revealed: signs of unfinished business are everywhere. The Occupy movement, the First Nations presence, the challenge to make and to remake a relevant poetics in the recycled settings of a North American city: such are the entanglements and the preoccupations of a civil art.

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week after the poets had gone home, and records of the poetry conference had been lodged in the city archives, and the new Poet Laureate had been welcomed to her desk, a hundred or so aspiring novelists met for a NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) brunch at Moose’s Down Under Restaurant Bar and Grille, a walk-down joint that shares a wall with the Vancouver Bullion and Currency Exchange, two blocks from the recycled Bank of Montreal in which the Poetry Conference had opened its deliberations. The novelists, several of whom had visited the Occupists at the art gallery grounds, were a slightly more homogeneous group: predominantly

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twenty to thirty years old, a sprinkling of teenagers, one or two sexagenarians; a few were costumed (my young friend identified a “very good Doctor Who” and a “wonderful Carmen Sandiego”), and all were ebullient at the prospect of writing a novel in thirty days. Included in the “delegate kits” distributed at the door were strips of yellow crime-scene tape for securing privacy while writing, a 30-day calendar indicating an accumulative word count at 1,667 words per day; a lapel badge consisting of a large, elegant semicolon; and instructions for making a “plot-device generator” that resembled the bug snappers used by children as aids to prognostication. A woman with an air of experience sitting at the end of our table advised those who wished to hear to “simply start writing and don’t stop for anything at all.” A young voice in the middle of the room rose above the hubbub to testify that there is “nothing cooler than having fifteen or twenty friends and writers around when you hit the fifty-thousand word count.” An informal poll at one table elicited a sampling of novelsin-prospect: a Snow White remake; a post-apocalyptic quest; a re-look at vampires; crazy ass crap about Santa’s daughter; stories of my mother and me; people doing stuff that could turn into adventure, tragedy, horror or scientific miracle. A young man in glasses gazed along the table and said, “I’m not convinced that Harry Potter is over yet.” I want to tell you something: here is where the story starts.

Stephen Osborne is publisher and editor-inchief of Geist. He is also the award-winning writer of Ice & Fire: Dispatches from the New World and dozens of shorter works— most recently “Life on Masterpiece Avenue” (No. 82)—many of which can be read at geist. com. While you’re there, take a look at Brad Cran’s poem “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Gray Whale.”

The Guy Upstairs V E RO N I CA GAYL I E

The Greatest Canuck Who Ever Lived remains relaxed, even in economy class

A

t airport security I see the broken nose, the million-dollar smile.

Every jean-clad Canadian jostles to get a glimpse of Trevor Linden.

It is the second day of the playoffs.

We remove our jewellery and our laptops. We remove our liquids, gels, aerosols and creams. We empty ourselves of all metal: cell phones, memory sticks, drill bits and rosary beads. While we lumber through the gate—some of us stopped by the guard, who waves her wand over wedding bands and belt buckles—we wonder what Captain Canuck holds in his pockets. We wonder what a Member of the Order of British Columbia has up his sleeves.

Trevor Linden tosses a set of keys into the tray and sails through the scanner without a beep. He stands a few feet in front of me in his socks. Then he sits in a chair and puts on shoes one foot at a time. Men walk by, try not to gape.

At the gate everyone from floor cleaners to muffin salesmen stop by to shake the hand of the Greatest Can­uck Who Ever Lived. Every time he smiles, it is a million dollars. Grown men genuflect.

Now Trevor Linden sits across the aisle from me on the tiny ­ propeller plane. I wonder if Trevor Linden notices that I notice he is Trevor ­ Linden, and I believe the answer is yes.

Everyone here pretends not to see him.

He is the tallest one on the plane. The top of his head brushed the ceiling of the cabin when he came in.

But it is the way his friend walks up, sits beside him and says, Hi buddy, that

n ot e s & d i s patc h e s

tells you: this, truly, is Trevor Linden.

Trev. The word buddy has meaning in the presence of Trev. In the presence of the buddy of all buddies, the word seems to echo every time it has ever been said, so that it carries hues and blends and tones never before heard amongst other men who clutched beers on their couches during the regular season, or said, buddy, hand me that hammer, or hey buddy, what’s on tap, all the times when buddy was not said in the presence of other hockey players between periods of do-or-die playoff games, and thus not meant in any deeper way other than hammers and… hey.

To hear buddy in the presence of Trev is to realize that the stakes are rarely high enough to warrant the word being said. illustration: eric uhlich

And then, the response to Hi buddy, a mere nod, no sweat. No need to second-guess. In the presence of Trev, buddy is more felt than said.

Another man on the tiny plane leans over and says, softly: Hey. Trevor. Like he is saying, My lord. The King comes nigh. Trevor. (Soft.)

The guy says, We played together that summer. Oh yeah! says Trev, right away, not pretending he doesn’t know the guy. A conversation begins in sentences without endings: How is…?

Good… Did you hear about…? Yeah…

He had a tough… Yeah, says Trev.

Yeah, he says again.

As the plane glides over the former Coquihalla tollbooth, and then the Nut Barn in Merritt, Trevor Linden keeps up a stream of small, powerful words:

Oh. Wow. Yeah. Yep. Everything he says on an airplane is important. When he says Wow, we look. When he says Oh, we learn.

When he says Yep, we affirm. Trevor is the centre. When he turns, we turn.

All have abandoned their EnRoute magazine in order to listen to the syllables of the Canucks’ One Love.

Something is said about our chances for the playoffs and he says: Yep. But Trevor Linden’s yep is worth a million y­ eses from lesser men. We gather in the glow of his affirmation. Yess…

Yesss… Yess…

Now the friend says: Oh. Hey. Trev.

(Soft.)

Yeah?

How do they know the number of guys on the ice?

We all hold our breath, wait for the answer, and wish The Nobody in aisle five would stop rattling a bag of Bits & Bites.

Trevor Linden does not hesitate: There’s a guy upstairs.

Yeah. Says the friend.

He keeps track. On. Off. On. Off. On. Off. We are mesmerized. On. Off. On. Off. Of course. But it is the way he adds, with a hint of jocularity: Ask the goalies. They’ll know.

And that is what makes Trevor…

Trev. The perfect restraint. The understanding of time and place. This is why he is Trev and we are we, rattling our snack bags in aisle five and competing for the armrest while Trev remains relaxed even in cramped economy class.

Trevor folds his hands. Sleeps till we land.

Veronica Gaylie is a writer of poetry and prose, and a professor at UBC. Her writing has been published in Grain, Ditch, Room, Lake, Carte Blanche and thetyee.ca. Read her Geist work at geist.com.

Winter 2011 • GEIST 83 • Page 17

n ot e s & d i s patc h e s

Edith and Frank TED B I S H OP

They are both in their nineties, but one negotiates a rights deal on the phone and the other guns the little Honda up the driveway like a sports car racer

the apex. I’m sure he knows the road.

It’s just that he is ninety-six years old.

What if we nicked that gravel shoulder? What if someone was riding a bike or walking their dog—there! like that! missed ’em—just around the corner?

“Some of our friends say Frank drives too fast,” says Edith serenely.

Frank says, “All my life I’ve had to be somewhere, had to get down and pick up another load. You have to hurry when you’re a logger. That’s how you make money.”

F

S

till beautiful at ninety-three, the writer Edith Iglauer greets us on the porch of her seacoast house. “You see we are much older,” she says. I haven’t seen her since she was ninety, and she is a little shorter but she has the same mane of white hair, the same warm voice and wide smile. Fine lines radiate from her cheekbones and the corners of her mouth, like contours on a detailed topo map. She’s dressed for dinner in a ruffled white blouse, purple cardigan and tartan skirt.

Page 18 • GEIST 83 • Winter 2011

“We’re going to the golf club,” she says. “It’s not far. Frank will drive us.”

Frank bumps his blue walker to the car, grip still strong but knees gone.

He guns the little Honda up the steep driveway. At the top of their road he stops, takes a quick look and flings the car out onto the pavement. Just getting us launched, I think, but he zooms into the first turn, crowding a local pickup truck. He drives like a sports car racer—a quick dab at the brake, into turn, back on the gas, swoop through

rank has the halibut special without the jalapeno sauce, and an 1812 beer. “That’s what you usually have,” says the waitress, who turns down the volume on the overhead speakers for us. Edith fiddles with her hearing aids and orders the butterfly shrimp.

“What are you working on?” she asks me, and I tell her I’ve been travelling in China for my book on the history of ink. “Still? I thought you’d be finished by now.” I said I thought I would too. I remembered now that other register of her rich voice, the no-nonsense tone I’ve heard in other New Yorkers: Good. But get on with it.

Promise is nothing. Let’s see you deliver.

“Have you read Annabel Lyon’s book?” she says. “I really liked it. Then I read the earlier ones. I didn’t understand them. But this one about Aristotle is wonderful, don’t you think?” I did.

“How long does it take you to write a book?” she asks. Five years, I say; I thought we were off that. She says, “I couldn’t get through Pamuk’s latest.

It seemed the same as his other one.

Have you read Snow? I liked it. Maybe he’s one of those writers who are always writing the same book. He goes on too long.” Edith brooks no slack, even from Nobel Prize winners.

She is the author of scores of articles and five books of non-fiction (“Only photo by brian howell

n ot e s & d i s patc h e s

five books,” says Frank), and she speaks respectfully of William Shawn, her editor at The New Yorker, where she was a staff writer for many years. “I told Mr. Shawn it had to be a book and so he let me go back to Yellowknife.” Denison’s Ice Road, which came out in 1974, was turned into Ice Road Truckers for the History Channel, first as a special, then as a series. Fishing with John was nominated for a Governor General’s award for non-fiction and then turned into a movie. “Don’t watch it,” she said. “It’s terrible.”

Frank drives more slowly on the way home, and in the twilight the road seems almost devious, twisting round on itself, taking us into the heart of the rain forest and then magically leaving us on the edge of a bay, with the lights of a marina on the water, and the dark mass of a mountain beyond.

Their house has lots of little rooms opening out one after another. “I had a friend who was paraplegic,” said Edith, “and I tried to imagine what it would be like if he came here in his wheelchair.

Now I’m glad I did, because it works for us. It’s all on one level.” A lipstickred chimney pipe angles out of the old stove into the pastel green walls. “It rains a lot here,” says Edith, and she has made the place bright inside. A red wooden drying rack hangs above the stove, ready for gumboots and rain gear. The orange-yellow tablecloth is ringed with blue flowers. She puts me in the yellow guest room with the Bill Reid print on the wall. We talk in her study, where one wall of windows looks out to sea and the other walls are packed with books. Beside the Franklin stove hang framed sketches from her profiles for The New Yorker, which include Pierre Trudeau and Arthur Erickson.

The Erickson article also turned into a book, Seven Stones: A Portrait of Arthur Erickson, Architect.

I

n the morning Frank steers his walker round the kitchen, makes coffee, puts water on for eggs, finds bread for toast. “You just sit,” he says. He apologizes for the logging injuries that have come back to plague him. “My knees have no strength in them now—but I didn’t expect to be around at ninetysix.” He spreads his hands and smiles.

“So you see, it’s all profit.” We look out to the bay below, the spine of Vancouver Island beyond, sun streaming in. I say it’s a beautiful spot and Frank smiles again. “Yes, I can’t think of a better place to . . .” he pauses, “to run out my time.”

He heaves himself up out of his chair and puts a cup of tea on the seat of the walker. “I’ll just take this in to the cook.

She’s very tired this morning. I’m a bit worried about Edith. She’s starting to show her age a little.” They come back together, their two walkers like red and blue bumper cars. They have to cut through the living room because the hallway that comes in at the end of the kitchen is too narrow for the walkers to get through.

At breakfast Edith’s hearing aids aren’t working.

“I need new batteries.”

“What?”

“Batteries. I need new batteries, Frank.”

“I have some. Do you want me to get them?”

“What? Do you have batteries?”

“Do you want them?”

“Batteries! Just tell me where they are.”

She finds them and puts new ones in. “These still don’t work. Both of them.” She turns to me. “Now you see what it is to get old.”

The phone rings and Edith shouts into it. I gather it is the History Channel. They want to renew the rights they bought from her for Ice Road Truckers.

“I can’t hear you very well…”

“Please email me… yes, just email me…”

“I will get my secretary to handle this.”

After she hangs up I ask if she could understand what the call was about.

“Of course,” she says. “I just want to make sure they’re going to pay me.”

Edith says she is not good in the mornings, but as the toast and tea kick in she shifts, as always, to interview mode. I tell her I am reading Samarkand by Amin Maalouf, the Lebanese journalist and writer. She has never heard of him. I tell her it’s a historical novel about Omar Khayyám, whom I knew only as the author of the Rubáiyát, not as a scientist and astronomer.

Frank starts to murmur.

“What?” says Edith, tweaking her hearing aid.

Frank grins and keeps murmuring.

“What?”

I can hardly make out anything myself, just a few words in the flow. It isn’t the loaf of bread quatrain.

“Wine… love… garden…”

“What? What’s he saying?”

“Beloved… years… still…”

“What’s he doing? Frank! Is he quoting the Rubáiyát? What are you saying, Frank?”

He just keeps murmuring, eyes fixed on hers. Mischievous.

“Stars… caravan… dawn…”

I can’t tell if it is several quatrains or the same one over and over.

“Before we too…”

Edith gives up fiddling with her hearing aids, and gazes at Frank, and smiles.

“Ah, my Beloved…”

Ted Bishop is a writer and scholar living in Edmonton. His Riding with Rilke: Reflections on Motorcycles and Books was named a Best Book by the Globe and Mail, CBC and Playboy magazine. He is writing a history of ink.

Winter 2011 • GEIST 83 • Page 19

FINDINGS

HOLIDAY Hal Niedzviecki From Look Down, This Is Where It Must Have Happened, copyright 2011 by Hal Niedzviecki, reprinted by permission of City Lights Books.

Hal Niedzviecki is a writer, cultural commentator and editor who lives in Toronto. He is also the founder and fiction editor of Broken Pencil magazine.

I

ring the bell and wait. I ring the bell again.

There are things that happen that don’t have to happen. The intersection of people, the way one life collides with another. It all seems so simple, so obvious; we can’t ever come out and say what we want to say. I wiggle my toes, sweaty and trapped in a pair of thin gray socks.

Who is it?

Meals On Wheels.

Rose opens the door a bit. I push my way in.

Blink into the old woman translucence, shadows on dust. It’s just the way I would have imagined it, if I had imagined it.

You’re not Meals On Wheels, she says.

I shrug, heft my wicker basket. Oh yeah, I say. What am I then?

She steps back into the gloom. Her mouth an oval. I savor the moment, lick my lips, taste sediment and hallway knickknacks. She jerks her head backwards, calculates the distance to the phone, a distance she’s forced to measure in her own tottering steps.

You’re Rose Dimano, I say, taking her arm.

Special lunch today. Once-a-year treat. Fall equinox. Late-summer harvest. And it’s your birthday, lucky lady.

I pull a card out of my pocket, thrust it at her. She flinches, then grabs it. She works at the envelope with skeletal fingers. Happy Birth-

day. Love, everyone at Meals On Wheels. A clown holding a bouquet of—what else?—roses. She shakes a bit, holds on to wallpaper, blinks back tears.

Oh, she says, it’s so lovely. But I wish— Yes? I say.

She looks up at me, surprised, annoyed. I’m ruining the moment. I’m rushing her big day.

I wish Truman could be here, she says.

Who’s Truman?

Once a month I watch her creak out of the house and into a waiting cab. When I see her inching down the front steps in voluminous folds of funereal black I can’t help but think of crows circling one of their expired brood. They eat their own.

I wish he could too, I whisper diplomatically.

Well then, young man, she snaps. Let’s see what you’ve got in that basket.

Caviar. Foie gras. Pickled quail eggs. Crusty baguette. Poached salmon in lemon-dill sauce.

A bottle of something sparkling white.

Oh my, she says, leading the way to the kitchen. I couldn’t eat all that.

A young lady like you?

It’s my birthday, she says, getting used to the idea.

I spread a cracker. Help her into the seat with the view.

I

magine my wife as sweet, calm, still. Think of her as night’s descent, as a gossamer veil of distance, possibility, ocean horizons, sunset memories, vacations. She wants me to wash my feet before getting into the bed.

I’m already in the bed.

She stands in the bathroom yanking unwanted bits of eyebrow from the no-man’s-land above her nose. She uses the tweezers from my Swiss Army knife.

Outside, a truck clears its throat.

Winter 2011 • GEIST 83 • Page 21

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FREEZE-FRAME EMBROIDERY Aubrey Longley-Cook From Hoopla: The Art of Unexpected Embroidery by Leanne Prain, published by Arsenal Pulp Press in 2011. Aubrey Longley-Cook began embroidering while studying animation at the Rhode Island School of Design. Visit spoolspectrum. blogspot.com to see more of his work.

Wash your feet, she yells from the bathroom.

Wash your feet or I’m sleeping on the couch.

Have you looked at your feet?

I try not to make a big deal out of things. But sure, I’ve got a temper.

Little invisible hairs rooted in unwanted places.

Why can’t it be enough for us to climb into bed, our arms around each other, our breath in hot, cheek-tickling wafts? People want it perfect. They think it’s going to be perfect.

Finally, she comes into the bedroom. Crosses her arms, looks at me.

I’m not washing my fucking feet, I say.

Okay, she says. I’m sleeping on the couch.

Don’t even try it, I say. I grab her leg and hold on.

She pulls free.

I hate you, she says.

She has soft, smooth skin. She has long legs.

Two minutes later I’m standing in the tub with the soap in my hands. In the bathroom there’s a picture in a frame, sand and seashells in some sort of pattern, a gift to her from a cousin who died before we met. I’m not sure of the protocol. Do I run the bar of soap against the soles, or do I rub the soap on my hand then use my hand to lather up the foot bottom?

I close my eyes, exhale.

Wet foam shoots between my fingers.

S

ometimes she calls during the day. She almost always calls me during the day. On her lunch break.

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I go out on the deck and stare across at Rose sitting in her kitchen. She sits there for hours, looking down at her garden. Minutes and seconds slip by. She doesn’t move, barely breathes.

What’s she waiting for? C’mon, old gal, do something. She could go down there if she wanted to. I’ve seen her in the garden, a cape wrapped around her shoulders, a pair of old pruning gloves twisted onto her gnarled hands purely for effect—she’s too old to weed, and, anyway, what’s left to grow?

It’s not the garden she wants. She’ll get down there and stand next to the drooping bushes and wonder how she ever mustered the energy.

She’ll pull her wrap tight around her stooped shoulders and eye the back door—the steep steps up—as if she’s assessing the bother: Is it worth it? Is anything?

I’ve been spending a lot of time with Rose.

I’m in her mind, I’m occupying the stale strictures of her brittle bones. What is it to grow old?

My elderly neighbor longingly descends, and I watch her with keen interest because where she wants to go is the last place she wants to go.

Finally, the phone rings. It’s her, of course, my wife calling me from work. She wants to know what I’m doing.

Nothing, I say. I can hear her swallow. Rose drinks a cup of tea, sits with her back to me. I see the quaking of her shoulders, I feel the agony of impending departure, I’m sure she’s crying.

Looking in the want ads, I say.

She says: Why don’t you walk over to the store and get some pasta or something for ­dinner?

findings

It’s raining, I say.

It’s clearing up, she says.

T

hank you for watching. Stay tuned. Be right back after this.

The couch is hard and dark. Rose is happy, laughing. Guilty! she says. She’s in on the game, knows the rules for one last glorious moment.

We get a little carried away, giggling at daytime TV. Who can blame us? It’s the judge shows, mostly; acts of petty recrimination, smoldering ambitions, dreams that never take root. I take the liberty of switching channels. Judge Judy.

Judge Mills Lane. People’s Court. To save you the trouble, I explain. You’re so kind, she says. She dunks a chocolate cheroot in a mug of strong tea.

Suddenly, it’s the six o’clock news. I rush out to the car.

She’s waiting on the curb in front of her of­fice. She gets in, frowns. She isn’t talking to me. I stab buttons on the radio. Rose’s laugh, a murmur cackle, knowing, not knowing.

rid of the car. I announce plans for a holiday.

Cross country drive through. And then, at the end, a symbolic good riddance, a shedding. Over a cliff, we jump out on my count, laughing, free, synchronous. There’s a picture on the wall behind her head, blue water and white beach and giant hotels—looming vultures—Acapulco.

What are you talking about? she says. She blinks her limpid brown eyes, wants to say something other than what she said, wants to get right to the heart of the matter, and so do I, believe me, so do I. Her leg, her hand, her

GROUNDS FOR ARREST

S

he orders the taco salad.

I say: How can you eat that?

We have to be on guard against conformity, against theme parks and plastic palm trees and cellular phones and deep-fried artificially breaded frozen snacks. You pay $5.99 for six but they get two hundred for twenty bucks. The waiter says: And for you, sir?

While we wait for the food I suggest we get

Photo taken in Toronto by Patty Osborne.

Winter 2011 • GEIST 83 • Page 23

findings

cheek. I suppress the urge to touch, run my ­fingers through my bangs instead. Regret it immediately. Feel my hair poof up like a threatened porcupine.

S

hall I come over? I ask Rose.

I can see her soft mouth open in a wrinkle.

From the patio, the phone pressed to my ear, I can see everything.

SUPERMAN, YOU PRICK Calvin Wharton From The Song Collides, published by Anvil Press in 2011.

Calvin Wharton is the Chair of Creative Writing at Douglas College, in New Westminster, BC. He edited Event from 1996 to 2001. He is the co-editor of East of Main and the author of Visualized Chemistry.

H

ave you heard the one about the travelling St. Peter who put velcro tape on a rooster’s ass then jumped from the top of the Empire State building into a herd of elephants wearing suspenders until Tarzan took off his sunglasses the better to see a chicken dart into the roadway and in the meantime the farmer’s sons have been digging a hole in a field discussing hamsters wrapped in electrician’s tape and every few minutes one of them steps outside the circle to screw in a light bulb so the sunburned penguin turns to the American and says, “You know, Superman, sometimes you can be a real prick.”

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I’m in the area, I persist.

Rose, breathing. Hesitates.

What is it? I snap. Another engagement?

The light shifts, the kitchen in shadows.

Yes? I prompt.

It— she manages. It wasn’t my birthday.

I’ll be right there, I soothe.

T

he police arrive with a complaint. They make quite a scene, with their handcuffs and their pompous questions and their red flashing lights.

Seems that Truman, regular Meals On Wheels fellow for going on five years, put twoand-two together.

I think about how making love is like watching something on the screen. It’s entirely two dimensional. There’s the groaning and all of that, the soundtrack to some movie, simultaneous moans dubbed over the image, the wrong voices not quite in time with the action.

Be strong, I tell myself. They don’t understand. But Rose needs you.

I want to be inside. I want to be alive all the time.

I say: Am I under arrest, Officer?

Y

ou went to her house? she asks.

A treat, I explain. An act of compassion. I just wanted to— Oh my god. That poor woman. Oh my god.

You told her you’re from Meals On Wheels?

Well, not exactly from, but with. Part of, that is. I didn’t want to scare her, you see.

findings

You didn’t want to scare her? Oh my god.

She turns away from me, looks up at the framed poster we have on the wall of the kitchen. Sunset in black and white. Gray beach, bleached gold sky.

I’ve got an idiot for a husband, she says, throwing up her arms. I follow the curve of her back to the place where she swells out. She isn’t the kind of woman who appears beautiful to total strangers. You have to get used to the flaws that make up what’s perfect about her. They say it’s wrong to stare, but doesn’t it depend on what you’re looking at?

It was perfect, I say. I know that if she could just picture it, if I could have taken a snapshot of Rose’s lopsided smile, of the way the dust kicked up as we moved together up the carpeted stairs.

You see, I say, I just wanted to—you have to understand: I held her hand, I peeled her a kiwi. It was her first kiwi.

Goddamn you, she screams, covering her ears with her hands. What’s wrong with you?

She doesn’t even try to think about the magnitude of each passing temporal circumstance.

This way or that way.

It matters, of course, but maybe not as much as we think it does. What’s in a name? To get answers you have to listen. You have to climb into someone else’s skull. You have to be willing to visit.

I don’t understand, she says. What’s happening? she says.

A

t the funeral I keep a low profile.

After, I go into a dingy diner, order a cup of coffee and a slice of cherry pie. In the back, I use the pay phone. I dial her cell and listen to it ring.

I think of the way her thighs stretch on pale beaches. I think of the little dance she sometimes does when she gets out of the shower.

I’m not one of those people who is afraid to admit they were wrong about certain things.

Rose is dead, I say. I’ll call back.

I hang up the phone. The poster on the wall ripples. Sunset, tan beach, teal ocean.

Roller Derby Queens and Wayward Santas Carolyn Mark From Fresh at Twenty: The Oral History of Mint Records by Kaitlin Fontana, published by ECW in 2011. Carolyn Mark’s first band was The Vinaigrettes. She went on to perform with many other bands, including The Corn Sisters (a duo with Neko Case), and is now performing under her own name, solo or with a band. Kaitlin Fontana is a National Magazine Award-winning writer whose work has appeared in Rolling Stone, the Walrus and Maisonneuve, among other publications.

S

o, at my house, there’s a couple of roller derby queens. They’re half-drunk. And I had two fucking wayward Santas, all drugged out, and [laughs] then Tolan, my guitar player, brought out his pellet gun and was demanding Bill and Randy give us cocaine, if they were the record label.

They were looking pretty nervous, and then the roller derby girls were taking off Bill’s jacket, they’re like [slurred], “Take off your jacket!

We’re going to take off your jacket!” and unzipping him. And I was pouring them wine, and then Tolan kept saying that they should go run around the field while he took shots at them, and that’s why Bill would need his jacket on.

And then I laid out my next three-record plan for them. So it’s going to be the cabarettype, filthy comedy record, and then the really expensive orchestra record, and then the record people make to get out of their contract. Like Neil Young’s Tramp or the funky record. And they agreed.

And then the next day Randy apologized for drinking my wine. I said, “Why are you apologizing? Tolan was going to shoot you!” He’s like, “That’s right!” So that’s why I like them.

Winter 2011 • GEIST 83 • Page 25

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JACKO GUMBALL COMICS Seth From The Great Northern Brotherhood of Canadian Cartoonists, published by Drawn and Quarterly in 2011. Seth is a comics artist, illustrator and book designer, author of It’s a Good Life If You Don’t Weaken, Clyde Fans, and the series Palookaville, among other books. His award-winning artwork has been published and exhibited internationally. He lives in Guelph, Ontario.

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Winter 2011 • GEIST 83 • Page 27

findings

WHEN THINGS LOOK BLEAK

YOUR IMPOVERISHED

From Prairie Pantry: Homemakers In and Around Brandon Share Their Favorite Recipes, published by Sun Printing in 1962. The article was recommended by Manitoba Hydro to its customers with the suggestion that it be hung “over your automatic washer, and when things look bleak, read it again.”

Edna Ingalls From How to Write Letters for All Occasions, published by The New Home Library in 1942.

Dear Mother, This seems to be the season of the year when 1. Bild fire in back yard to heet kettle of rain we remember all with gifts. We have one for the head of the school, for our class advisor, water.

2. Set tubs so smoke won’t blow in eyes if wind for the chaplain, for all the maids, for the janitor, for the offering in chapel, and then there is pert.

3. Shave one hole cake lie soap in bilin water. are ones for the girls here in school. I’ve seen 4. Sort things. Make 3 piles. 1 pile white. 1 pile a few accessories I rather need for my dress for the dance, and as you may have guessed, I have cullord. 1 pile work britches and rags.

5. Stur flour in cold water to smooth then thin but two dollars left from my allowance. How am I to plan for all these expenses? Is it a good down with bilin water.

6. Rub dirty spots on board. Scrub hard. Then thing to borrow on my future allowance, can I bile. Rub cullord but don’t bile—just rench look for a bonus at Christmas because of good marks in exams, or do I just out and out ask for and starch.

7. Take white things out of kettle with broom- help? Can you send some sort of relief to your impoverished stick handle then rench; blew and starch.

8. Spred tee towels on grass. Hang old rags on Barbara fence.

9. Pore rench water on flower bed.

10. Scrub porch with hot soapy water.

11. Turn tubs upside down.

12. Go put on cleen dress—smooth hair with side combs—brew cup of tee—set and rest and rock a spell and count blessins.

A list of “Other books in the Pick-a-Plot™ Series!” from You Are a Cat!, published by conundrum press in 2011.

Obsessed with Johnny Depp!

Fun and Games for Parties A list of suggested party games from The Pearl Family Book, published by Pearl Soap with offices in Montreal, Winnipeg and Vancouver.

Movie Faces School of High Art Blindfold Penny-Magic Consequences Artists and Models Who Tapped Me? Jitters Magic Spoon

Page 28 • GEIST 83 • Winter 2011

Mind Reader Admiral Glugg Which Hand?

Guess What Vanity Candlelight Romances Who’s Your Future Wife?

Charades

You Are a Cat! You Are Doing 20 to Life!

You Are Committing Suicide!

You Are a Cult Leader!

You Are Homeless!

You Are Jesus Christ!

You Are Old! You Are a School Shooter!

You Are a Concentration Camp Cop! You Are Sent Back in Time to Kill Hitler!

You Are Obsessed with Johnny Depp!

You Are an Escaped Slave!

You Are Alice’s Mum!

findings

JOE SHITHEAD, MLA

FEAR OF DYING TO THE WRONG SONG

Joe Keithley

Amanda Lamarche

From Talk – Action = 0: An Illustrated History of D.O.A., published by Arsenal Pulp Press in 2011. Joe Keithley is the founder and lead guitarist of the Vancouver punk band D.O.A. He is an activist, the founder of Sudden Death Records and the author of I, Shithead: A Life in Punk.

From The Clichéist, published by Nightwood Editions in 2005, www.nightwoodeditions.com. This poem also appeared in Fist of the Spider Woman, a poetry anthology published by Arsenal Pulp Press in 2009.

Originally from Smooth Rock Falls, Ontario, Amanda Lamarche moved to Gibsons, BC, when she was eleven years old. Her work has appeared in Grain, the Malahat Review and the Antigonish Review, among other publications.

I

f elected your MLA in Burnaby-Willingdon, I would stand up for your interest first and foremost. Throughout my career I have learned how to overcome many obstacles that have been thrown in my way, by circumstances, and less than open minded people.

The NDP have be­come bankrupt of good ideas and in some cases, morally bankrupt as well.

Gordon ­Campbell and the L ­ iberals have borrowed their economic plaform [sic] from Ronald Reagan. Their trickle down theory of big tax cuts for huge companies and multimillionaires won’t help you and I (just check where their campaign contributions are coming from).

I believe in people first and the power that we, the people have. That power must be exercised.

“We in BC need a new direction, political will and leadership. One that puts YOU THE PEOPLE first!!. The Green Party can provide that. Our leader Adrienne Carr has made a career out of standing up for the people’s interest. I believe that I too, can do that for you, and would be honoured to serve as your MLA.”

There is no such thing as slowing this down.

You are on your way to a day you planned to spend alone. You now know only that you are alive in the taxicab, seconds before it pours itself around a pole. You hear the prayer of the driver, a woman yelling through the inch of your opened window, and then neither. Just the song coming softly through the system.

And it is not the kind of song that makes you hang your head in your hands, give up, not the gravelled voice of a poisoned smoker about to outlive you, or a hymn that lets you go. It is the soundtrack of a hand on your back, the way your mother hums when she picks up the telephone. You think of it as you clamour to the curb, as you prop yourself against the collapsed salt box.

You can still hear the strings. Kissed on the face by a leaf you cannot bother to remove it. You know when the song picks up. You picture the cello being crushed between the knees, the pianist pedalling in coal black shoes, the femur of the flute in the flautist’s lap, shining, geared.

There is the taste of that steel on your lips. You inhale to make any sort of sound. You almost place your mouth there and breathe.

Book Pirates The top five most pirated eBooks on July 13, 2011, according to piratebay.com.

Men’s Fitness—12 Minute Workout How to Answer Hard Interview Questions Excel 2010 Formulas Playboy June 2011 1000 Photoshop Tips and Tricks Winter 2011 • GEIST 83 • Page 29

findings

QUIET JUNGLE Eric Uhlich From “Quiet Jungle,” published in 21 Journeys by Cloudscape Comics Society in 2011. Eric Uhlich is an illustrator and designer living in Vancouver. He is the artist of the graphic novel Green Skies and is the designer for Geist.

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Winter 2011 • GEIST 83 • Page 31

Lives of the House Caroline Adderson Our house was exhaling, releasing the essence of everyone who had lived there for the last century

T

he house we bought had a shrine in the furnace room. I discovered it only after we moved

in, when I made the room a catch-all for the things I’d been unable to part with during the move but that we didn’t really need. My son’s first crib, for example, which he slept in for the first three months of his life. I’d rescued it from the dump, stripped away its many layers of pink and blue paint, and now I was attached to it. I attach to things in general, particularly old things, not just sentimentally but out of a belief that stories accrue like an electrical field around even ordinary objects, stories about how and where the object was made and all the people who used it. I could picture the boy babies and the girl babies who once slept where my son also had. And now I had discovered a secret shrine in my house tucked around the corner of the chimney. If anything radiated a story, it was the long black rosary beads from Italy, and the wooden crucifix hung on two nails in a way that made the small bronze Jesus seem twice crucified, and the tin medal that read I will bless the houses in which the picture of my sacred heart shall be exposed and honored.

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photo: caroline adderson’s house in 1931, courtesy of madeleine scott.

I wondered who had placed the shrine there, but I was busy with the move and a six-monthold baby and my vague dream of restoring the house, which had been built around 1925, but had been so wallpapered and brown-carpeted that little of its original character showed.

Through our next-door neighbour I asked the people we’d bought the house from, an older Czech couple, what they knew about the shrine.

They’d been aware of it, but not its provenance and, though not religious, they’d left it intact because, my neighbour reported, “They felt it was protecting the house.”

Over the next few years I peeled away more than ten different wallpapers. We took down the wood panelling in the living room and the mirrored wall tiles in the stairwell. In the tiny attic room that was to become my office, I catalogued these layers: Pink paint Green squiggled wallpaper with kelly green trim Blue squiggled wallpaper with sky blue trim Yellow paint Jelly bean wallpaper General Paint “Tequila” with Benjamin Moore “Elephant Tusk” trim Layer 6 was me. Stripping and scraping, pulling up the blue shag carpet and discovering a beautiful streaky blue-green linoleum, then prying away those tiles and uncovering virgin fir floors, I felt like an archaeologist bringing to light the tastes and materials of each era. And I found myself wondering not just who had put up the shrine, but who had made these particular aesthetic choices through the decades.

Then, after four years of showerless living, we renovated our bathroom. During the ordeal the plumber cut a hole in the lath-and-plaster wall of the master bedroom to access the pipes.

An extraordinary thing happened that night; a deep loamy smell filled our bedroom, so strong and so strange it woke me up. The house was exhaling, or so it seemed, releasing this graveyard odour. When I told the plumber about it the next day, he laughed. His grandfather had been a plasterer. The men used to urinate in the mortar, claiming it improved the mix. Even if it

was just workmen’s piss, in my half-dream in the middle of the night I believed I was smelling the lives of all the people who had lived there before me. Now I was sufficiently curious to find out who they were.

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he research turned out to be easy. There are annual city directories at the public library that list the residents of every address and their occupations as far back as you care to go. Our address first appeared in the 1926 directory.

A retired William J. Richardson lived in our house. The following year there was a new owner, Walter M. Scott, a salesman for “Can Prod.”

What was that? Canadian Products? Canada Produce? Because the old directories were on microfilm and most reels covered only one year, I had to keep getting up and walking across Special Collections to exchange the films. These little breaks created some suspense. Would my salesman with the literary name still be there?

Yes, he was! Each time I was relieved he had stayed on. Then, in 1934, a Clela P. was added.

He’d got married! Congratulations, Walter M. Scott, salesman! In 1937 he bought his own business, the None Better Dairy, but by 1939 he seemed to have lost it, as there was no occupation listed for that year. Luckily, he was able to start over the next year with “Scott Prod.”

It was sounding like a story. Walter M. Scott, salesman, was putting on flesh, his veins filling with blood. He was an industrious man, a risk taker who sometimes failed, but bounced right back. I pictured him in a fedora, Clela in a chignon (mostly because I like the word chignon), her arm wrapped tightly around his.

They were devout Roman Catholics, of course.

I felt like an archaeologist bringing each era of my home to light

1942—Dairy prod. and eggs, 2344 Granville 1948—mgr, Scott’s Prod.

1953—retired The cryptic listing for 1954 read: Scott, Mrs. CP Clela P wid. WM prop. Yorkshire Smokes 512 Hornby. I hunched before the microfilm reader trying to decipher this. Finally I understood; Walter M. Scott was dead. He’d bought a smoke shop and then he died. I felt a little pang for him, Winter 2011 • GEIST 83 • Page 33

this person whose existence I knew only through a strip of celluloid, yet to whom I was connected through the rooms we had both inhabited.

Clela lived on in my house for another year, then Rodney G. Dove, passport agent, moved in with his wife Helena. From 1960 to 1967 John F. Kerk-Hecker, an engineer, lived there with his wife, Jean, and his widowed mother, Rosemary. Mrs. Jean Kerk-Hecker became the secretary treasurer of the Vancouver Ticket Centre in 1964 and John the president and managing director. After that, J. Gordon Henderson, a ­ teacher, moved in with his wife Philomene, who had an MA. Then, in 1982, Josef Lampa, an engineer with BC Hydro and his wife Ivana, an aesthetician, lived there. These were the people we’d bought the house from.

Though I couldn’t match any of these previous residents to the scraps of wallpaper I’d saved, and I still didn’t know who had put up the shrine, by the time the library closed I felt I knew these people, particularly the Scotts who had lived there for so long, just from the sound of their names and the bare facts of them. This is the starting place for a fiction writer: a name, an occupation, a setting—in this case, an actual house—alchemized through memory, intuition and imagination. Presto, a character is conjured. But this is not how the non-fiction writer works, I soon discovered. About the salesman Walter M. Scott and his ­devoted Clela, I was entirely wrong.

T

hree doors down from us lived ninetyyear-old Pearl King. Though I knew her only to say hello, I saw her almost daily, usually brisking to the mailbox a block away with a clutch of letters in her hand, always in a hat. Once I met her in our shared alley as I was coming back from a run. She stopped to warn me about wearing shorts in cold weather. I would regret it. “Varicose veins,” she said, twinkling. You could have Page 34 • GEIST 83 • Winter 2011

a decent conversation with her even though she was so deaf her television was audible from the street. When my son was about six he took a daredevil ride down the pair of steps in her walk and had a stupendous wipeout. His hollering drew Pearl away from the blaring TV. He was so surprised she’d heard him that he immediately stopped crying. But Pearl was best known, almost legendary, for having lived in her house since she was eleven years old.

I went to see her in July 2004, and the next day she dropped off a card. Thank you for the beautiful plant. It was so thoughtful of you! (I don’t remember taking a plant.) I enjoyed your visit and hope I was of some help to you. I have fond memories of your home.

Wishing you much success and happiness.

When I told Pearl I was researching the history of my house, she started right away with the builder. A Mr. Quinnenville had built both our houses, she said, as well as the two in between.

He took on the mortgage himself in order that Pearl’s father, a travelling dry-goods salesman, could move his family from Lethbridge. (When they took possession, they owed him eighty dollars.)

Of course she knew the people who had lived in our house. The Doves moved to California in 1960. The Kerk-Heckers moved to Hawaii.

“What about the Scotts?” I asked.

Clela had been a friend of Pearl’s mother, Estelle. Pearl politely declined to say much about Walter, beyond: “He wasn’t home much.”

They had four children—a boy, Douglas, and three girls, Gertrude, Beatrice and Madeleine.

“I went to their birthday parties,” Pearl said.

I asked her if the Scotts had been Catholic, and she drew back. Pearl attended St. Mary’s Anglican Church in Kerrisdale. Someone picked her up every Sunday morning. Madeleine lived in Surrey now, a suburb of Vancouver, Pearl told me. And she offered me the phone number.

Before I left, I glanced around at the home Pearl had lived in for the last seventy-nine years. photos by noa neuman

Everything was original—the linoleum in the hall, the cast-iron vents, the light fixtures, the wallpaper—where all these things in my house had been replaced over and over. If I wanted to know what my house once looked like, all I needed to do was look at Pearl’s.

I phoned Madeleine many months later, nervous that she would think me nosy, or that the house wouldn’t matter to her after so many years. I said, “You don’t know me but I got your number from Pearl King.” And I told her my address.

She gasped and said, “1549L Kerrisdale,” which I later found out was the phone number I would have been calling her from had I called her from my house when she lived there.

M

adeleine was eighty in the spring of 2005 when she visited me. In her excitement to be back, she seemed much younger. Earlier, on the phone, she’d told me that she had driven past the house several times since returning to Canada after years in Hawaii (a second Hawaiian connection) and even thought about stopping and ringing the doorbell but, like me, had felt too shy. From the age of six months, when she was brought to Vancouver from Saskatoon by train in a dresser drawer, until she married in 1946, my house had been her home.

We walked together through the rooms, me armed with a Dictaphone to catch the memories that streamed out of her. The living room seemed so much smaller to her. After a moment’s reflection she realized this was only because our furniture was bigger. She remembered a sofa in the English style and a piano, which Clela had played beautifully. Gertrude and Bea, older than Madeleine by six and twelve years, took lessons. Madeleine studied tap dancing and practised on the hearth. Eventually the piano was sold and a radio replaced it. Clela loved the soap opera Stella Dallas and would listen, faithfully and tearfully, every day after

lunch. (The show, I have since discovered, ran from 1937 to 1955 and is available as a podcast.) The oak floors were the same, but instead of being varnished they were waxed. Clela used a push polisher, which little Madeleine rode on to give it weight.

We moved through the dining room, Madeleine pointing out the changes—there had once been a plate rail like at Pearl’s house, for example—to the kitchen, which in Madeleine’s time had had checkerboard linoleum, also like Pearl’s. (It may still be there under the asbestos-smeared plywood that someone without the benefit of foresight once laid down.) “The stove was here,” she said, gesturing to where we have cupboards and a built-in 1980s oven.

It was an oil stove and one of Madeleine’s chores was to fill the empty receptacle from the oil barrel under the veranda. Clela canned and cooked and baked, never consulting a recipe.

“What did she bake?” I asked.

Matrimonial cake, Yorkshire pudding, banana loaf, Eccles cake. The stove heated the whole kitchen and during the damp winter months, they shut the furnace vents to save on coal and practically lived there.

A lot of people lived there in its fifteen hundred square feet: Clela, Bea, Gertrude and Douglas, who was fourteen years older than Madeleine.

At one point a friend of Madeleine’s, Betty, who was adopted and being mistreated, lived there too. Gertrude and Bea eventually married, Bea eloping because Clela didn’t approve of the man. Then Gertrude divorced her husband, whom she’d met at the None Better Dairy, and moved back to the house with her son. And, of course, Walter lived there.

Until this point I felt I had been right about Clela. She was exactly the competent, radiolistening homemaker I had imagined, though this hardly makes me perspicacious. Homemaking was most married women’s lot. Not until 1934 did the city directory even include Clela, which

My ninetyyear-old neighbour remembers when milk was delivered by sleigh

Winter 2011 • GEIST 83 • Page 35

had led me to assume, incorrectly, that that was the year Clela and Walter had married. They’d actually been married at least fifteen years by the time they moved to Vancouver in 1926.

Madeleine and I were still walking a circle through the main floor of the house and had now reached the back bedroom, my son’s room.

Madeleine said, “This was Walter’s room.”

“Just Walter’s?” I asked.

In an instant their imagined devotion ­went the way of their imagined Roman Catholicism.

With my fiction writer’s bias, I had thought the way I had imagined the Scotts would be more interesting than the truth. In this case, especially Walter’s, it turned out to be the other way around.

W

alter Scott’s first venture after moving his family to Vancouver was Canada Produce.

Mainly a cheeseimporting business, it didn’t last and Walter ended up in egg candling (the Scott’s Produce listed in the directory). Egg candling is a method of inspecting eggs for imperfections, performed by beaming a high-powered light through the shell. All eggs sold in Canada are candled. Who knew?

Walter’s was a family operation. He would collect eggs from farms in the country and bring them back to Vancouver to be candled, graded, packed in flats and delivered to stores. Son Douglas helped with the deliveries while Bea and Gertrude candled. The business operated until 1953, when Walter had a stroke. During the time Scott’s Produce was active, Walter opened the None Better Dairy on Granville Street, where Gertrude and Bea also worked and to where Madeleine would ride her bicycle for ice cream. Yorkshire Smokes came much later, in 1950, purchased with Walter’s brother, much to Clela’s disapproval.

These ventures were probably the family’s Page 36 • GEIST 83 • Winter 2011

mainstay, but they were not Walter’s passion. He had both an avocation and an alias that are nowhere listed in the city directory: Walter M. Scott, salesman, was also Milton Walter Scott, magician.

In the same low-ceilinged concrete basement where the shrine now hangs, Madeleine used to roller skate around cages of doves and mice and pigeons, and other props her father used onstage. One of the pictures Madeleine brought showed a youthful, tuxedoed Walter posing with the arcane paraphernalia of his trade. Shackles and chains, a severed hand, a single egg on a black cloth. Once, when Madeleine was playing with a friend in the basement, she tripped over something concealed by a cloth. They lifted the cloth and discovered a pair of rubber legs jutting from a wooden box. Screaming ensued. When Walter found out about the incident he delivered a stern warning: “Don’t you dare tell anybody!” A magician relies on secrets.

No one was supposed to know about the magic storehouse in my basement, just as Walter’s alias and his performances at the Orpheum Theatre, his tours of the Pacific Northwest, seemed deliberately kept out of the city directory.

I was thrilled to be in on the secret.

Like the None Better Dairy and Scott’s Produce, Walter’s magic was a family business. Bea was his assistant, the one who huddled in one end of the wooden box after supposedly being cut in half and, with her arms, reached down into the hollow legs and wiggled the toes. Madeleine’s tap lessons were to prepare her to join Milton Walter Scott onstage, though this never transpired. Madeleine told me with some pride that her father, who used to come up behind her and produce a dove or a rabbit out of nowhere, was trained by Blackstone, the legendary American magician, who had his own comic book series, Blackstone the Magician Detective Fights Crime! and a radio show, Blackstone, The Magic Detective. (Like Stella Dallas, it is also available photo by noa neuman

on podcast with even heavier organ accompaniment.) On YouTube you can watch Blackstone’s son, Harry Blackstone Jr., perform one of his father’s signature tricks, the Floating Lightbulb.

Walter Scott was originally from Providence, Rhode Island, and probably met Blackstone in the States before emigrating. His famous mentor’s influence is obvious in Walter’s debonair tie-and-tails costume and his talent for sawing females in half.

First the shrine, then Walter’s magic. Now there was another secret Madeleine let me in on. When Walter was in town, he would be out all day at the None Better Dairy or the egg candling operation. In the evening there were performances and parties. As a teetotaller and anti-smoker, Clela couldn’t in good conscience accompany Walter socially, so Bea did. They, or Walter alone after Bea had eloped with her inappropriate man, didn’t return home until ten or eleven o’clock at night, just as Madeleine, a teenager by then, was standing on the porch saying goodnight to her boyfriend. Walter would retire to his room at the back of the house until the next morning, when he ate breakfast and left again. Not until 1953, after his stroke, walking unsteadily with a cane, did he really come home to stay, forcing Clela to put up full time with the drinking and smoking that were so repugnant to her. Walter had not been an alcoholic, Madeleine assured me. It was just that to Clela, even a glass of port was “terrible.” I wondered if the reason Madeleine never did tap dance in her father’s act was because Clela wanted to protect her, her youngest daughter, from the “social ills” her older sister had been exposed to. There are shades of Stella Dallas in this scenario, for the show was about a mother and daughter. Each episode opened with, “We give you now Stella Dallas, a continuation on the air of the true-tolife story of mother love and sacrifice…”

I

f Walter had magic as his secret passion, Clela had her own unsecret one—her only son and first-born, Douglas. Popular and charismatic, Douglas managed the Kerrisdale Hockey Team and was a star player himself, and an avid golfer.

With Walter so often away on tour, Douglas

stepped in as substitute father and man-aboutthe-house. He put the hard wax on the oak floors for Clela. He and Madeleine did the dishes, snapping the towels at each other and often chasing each other around the block. Douglas bought Madeleine her first signet ring, her first bicycle. He paid her a nickel apiece to polish his white golf shoes. The highlight of the week was the hockey games at the PNE on Sunday night when Douglas crammed his car with friends and Madeleine had to sit on someone’s lap.

All this ended when World War II broke out and Douglas enlisted. Madeleine showed me a photograph of Douglas looking pudgy and uncomfortable in his uniform, as though the wool itched him. Clela was holding his arm, much how I had imagined her holding Walter’s arm when I first read their names in the city directory.

Her expression is complicated, part concern for the camera, part pride. She does not know that within a few years she will experience a tragedy greater than the marriage of incompatibles.

When Douglas went overseas, Clela’s own true-to-life story of mother love and sacrifice began. It took the form of door-to-door corsetiering for Spirella Corsets. The job served to get her out of the house, where she couldn’t stop fretting about Douglas, and her beat was the nearby upscale neighbourhood of Shaughnessy. Not business-minded like her husband, she consistently failed to collect what was owed her. Madeleine knew this because she did the bookkeeping for her mother. Clela would say of some client in arrears, “I feel so sorry for her.

Her husband won’t give her any money and she does need this garment so badly.” Madeleine suggested monthly installments, but since Clela’s real motivation was distraction, she never followed through.

Douglas returned safely from the war, a married man with a son he named Walter. Six years later he died of kidney disease. I visited his grave in Mountain View Cemetery, one in a long double-row of veterans who also died in 1951, as though they’d earned a temporary reprieve that so many soldiers hadn’t. The cemetery is vast, over a hundred acres, with many of its headstones laid flat, so that in the middle of it away from traffic, you feel disconnected from

During the war, Clela worked as a door-to-door corsetier

Winter 2011 • GEIST 83 • Page 37

time. I would not have been surprised to run into the grieving Scott family around Douglas’s grave that drizzly morning.

I brought him a plant.

A

fter Madeleine’s first visit, we kept in touch intermittently by phone, mostly to talk about Pearl, whom Madeleine was concerned about living on her own. In 2007, I invited both women over for tea so I could listen to them reminisce. By then Pearl was ninety-three and extremely deaf. She seemed to have given up her hats, and her scalp showed through her fine white hair. Stooped in a cardigan she’d grown too thin for, she was fragility personified. As she refused to have our conversation taped, I took some sketchy notes. Milk used to be delivered by horse and wagon and, in winter, by sleigh.

Also blocks of ice for the iceboxes. A man called Yip would drive his truck through the alleys peddling groceries. There was the Watkins man who sold spices and extracts door to door.

Whenever he came by, Pearl’s mother, Estelle, would invite him in for tea.

Then Pearl piped up about New Year’s Eve, how the firehall across the street used to blow the siren at midnight. Whenever the fire truck went out, Madeleine said, she and her friend Betty would rush over to the hall and slide down the pole.

As they were leaving, Pearl said to me, “Caroline, you’re a brick!”

The next day she dropped off a card. Thank you for the lovely lunch & box of goodies. It was so pleasant in your house full of memories. Best wishes for your happiness. Your old neighbour, Pearl.

Around that time I made other enquiries about the shrine. Pearl gave me the number of Philomena Henderson, who had moved into our house in 1967. She knew nothing, but when I asked about the people they’d bought from, the Kerk-Heckers, and whether they might have put up the shrine, she offered an anecdote.

Shortly after the Hendersons moved in, Jean Kerk-Hecker phoned to ask if she could dig out one of the two magnolia trees in the backyard.

Her father-in-law had passed away the year before. They were supposed to have scattered his

Page 38 • GEIST 83 • Winter 2011

ashes in Stanley Park, but it had rained so much that year that Jean got fed up and dumped them under the magnolia. Now his widow, Rosemary, had found out and was livid. She wanted that tree and she got it. To this day the other clouds our yard with white blossoms every spring.

My most memorable exchange with the Lampas happened a few years ago. Cleaning the cupboards in my son’s room, I discovered a dead space just large enough to fit a hand. And I actually thought, “This would be a perfect place to hide jewellery.” I squeezed my hand in and felt something—a cosmetics case. It was indeed filled with jewellery, coral and ivory and jade.

A very grateful Ivana told me it had belonged to her mother. She’d put it where I found it for exactly the reason I thought, then had forgotten all about it.

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earl King died in 2010 at the age of ninety-­ six, leaving her house to American relatives.

Four houses in a row on our street had been built by Mr. Quinnenville. One had already been torn down when we moved in. The one next door to ours was recently gutted and renovated beyond recognition. Now Pearl’s museum, purchased in 1925 for $5,250, was sold for $1,633,000 and slated for demolition. It was as if Pearl were dying twice, that her stories and secrets, which were intertwined with the stories and secrets from my house, would be lost forever when the house went down. These old houses are repositories of narrative. Not only do they contain the histories of all the successive owners, but also they carry the history of all the materials that were used to build them. The original drain tiles, which we had to dig up, were made of terra cotta, each one stamped Italy. The floors are oak and fir. In what forest did they grow?

From what mine was the gypsum extracted to make the plaster? Does anyone even know how to lath and plaster a wall any more?

Early in 2011 an orange net corral appeared around the tree in front of Pearl’s house. They do this in Vancouver when a house is going to be demolished. The trees are protected, but not the houses. Walking past, I remembered listening to an episode of Blackstone, The Magic

Detective called “The Vanishing Pearls,” in which Blackstone catches with a fishing rod a live goldfish in mid-air. The trick segues into a story about Blackstone visiting the home of a rich woman with a fish pond who is having her pearls X-rayed for insurance purposes. In the middle of the process, the pearls vanish. Everyone is searched, but no pearls turn up. Then Blackstone executes his trick, reeling a goldfish through the air. Under the X-ray machine, the pearls are discovered inside the fish.

Madeleine Scott, the daughter of a Blackstone protégé, came to live in my house when she was six months old. Seventy-three years later, my son also moved in when he was six months old. Today he goes to the same school as Madeleine and Pearl, a block away. He plays in the same neighbourhood, but so much has changed, even in the dozen years that we have lived here. One by one the old houses are vanishing.

I saved as much as I could from Pearl’s house. I took her cast-iron grates and her light fixtures. I took her black wall-mounted rotary dial phone. Now every child who comes to our house is challenged to phone home on it. So far only one has done it without instruction. “I saw someone do it in a movie,” he said.

My neighbour carefully pried Pearl’s plate rail off the dining room wall while I removed the nails and, piece by piece, carried it three doors down to be resurrected one day in its sister house. No one was interested in these things.

No one wanted Pearl’s sewing kit with its wooden spools of thread, some with the price tags.

Woolworth’s 55¢. 13¢! No one wanted her hatbox or her baggie full of old watches. No one felt the stories sparking around them, so I took them.

photo by bruce sweeney

On February 7, 2011, Pearl’s house came down. I forced myself to go over and watch.

There was some delay at first, something about asbestos. It gave me the chance to talk to the inspector, who told me forty or fifty of these old houses are demolished every day in Vancouver.

He said he himself, just one inspector, approved about forty a month. Finally the all-clear came and the bulldozer rumbled as it started. It seemed prehistoric, like a slow-moving dinosaur.

If I were writing a story about Pearl’s house, I thought, I would run and stand in front of it. I would not write how the machine head-butted the kitchen wall, punching it in, how within minutes the whole back of the house crumpled under this assault. I would not describe the bucket rearing up and the jaws opening and biting down on the roof, or the sound it made, which was like ripping. A few bites later, half the top floor had been torn open so you could see inside it, like a dollhouse. I wouldn’t put that in the story. I wouldn’t say how the exposed ban­ ister at the top of the stairs was identical to ours.

How terribly fragile these houses actually are, though everyone says they are better built than the ones that replace them. It was over in less than half an hour, then I turned and walked back down my street. But will it still be the same street when all the houses have been replaced?

The Quinnenville houses have vanished. Ours is the only one left. Ours is the one with the shrine protecting it.

How terribly fragile these old houses ​ really are—it was over in less than half an hour

Caroline Adderson is a Vancouver novelist and shortstory writer. Her most recent book, The Sky Is Falling, was a Globe and Mail Top 100 and Quill and Quire Best Book of 2010. For more, visit carolineadderson.com.

Winter 2011 • GEIST 83 • Page 39

The Place of Scraps Jordan Abel This work is the title poem of a collection of erasure poetry in which Jordan Abel explores the relationship between the ethnographer Marius Barbeau (1883–1969) and the First Nations of the Pacific Northwest.

Abel begins with an imagined ethnographic text, then creates a poem by erasing selected words and lines to reveal new meanings and new truths.

The place of scraps. I trudged on behind Barton, barely lifting my feet over the roots that muscled their way out of the forest floor. Barton spoke in Niskae and in endless breath about our destination—the place of scraps—and I translated what I could as we hiked. “Two moons.” Brushed by pine needles. “The shadow of.” Filtered light through the canopy. “His grandson.” Salted air. “At peace with the wind.” A clearing up ahead. “To Sakau’wan.” At long last. “The trail of stars.” The clearing.

I rested against the moss trunk of a great tree. I caught my wind. I gazed at Barton as he ventured into the middle of the barren circle. In English, he said, “There are no poles here.” He kneeled and his hand disappeared into the ground. After a moment, he withdrew a fistful of dirt and shavings of wood. He said, “Hold out your hands.” So I did. And he sifted the mulch into my palms. He was silent as the last clumps of dirt left his fingers and I knew then, standing in that sunstruck clearing, that this was a sacred ritual, that I must remember each detail so that the world could know it, too.

The place of scraps. I trudged on behind Barton, barely lifting my feet over the roots that muscled their way out of the forest floor. Barton spoke in Niskae and in endless breath about our destination—the place of scraps—and I translated what I could as we hiked. “Two moons.” Brushed by pine needles. “The shadow of.” Filtered light through the canopy. “His grandson.” Salted air. “At peace with the wind.” A clearing up ahead. “To Sakau’wan.” At long last. “The trail of stars.” The clearing.

I rested against the moss trunk of a great tree. I caught my wind. I gazed at Barton as he ventured into the middle of the barren circle. In English, he said, “There are no poles here.” He kneeled and his hand disappeared into the ground. After a moment, he withdrew a fistful of dirt and shavings of wood. He said, “Hold out your hands.” So I did. And he sifted the mulch into my palms. He was silent as the last clumps of dirt left his fingers and I knew then, standing in that sunstruck clearing, that this was a sacred ritual, that I must remember each detail so that the world could know it, too.

Page 40 • GEIST 83 • Winter 2011

The place of scraps. I trudged on behind Barton, barely lifting my feet over the roots that muscled their way out of the forest floor. Barton spoke in Niskae and in endless breath about our destination—the place of scraps—and I translated what I could as we hiked. “Two moons.” Brushed by pine needles. “The shadow of.” Filtered light through the canopy. “His grandson.” Salted air. “At peace with the wind.” A clearing up ahead. “To Sakau’wan.” At long last. “The trail of stars.” The clearing.

I rested against the moss trunk of a great tree. I caught my wind. I gazed at Barton as he ventured into the middle of the barren circle. In English, he said, “There are no poles here.” He kneeled and his hand disappeared into the ground. After a moment, he withdrew a fistful of dirt and shavings of wood. He said, “Hold out your hands.” So I did. And he sifted the mulch into my palms. He was silent as the last clumps of dirt left his fingers and I knew then, standing in that sunstruck clearing, that this was a sacred ritual, that I must remember each detail so that the world could know it, too.

The place of scraps. I trudged on behind Barton, barely lifting my feet over the roots that muscled their way out of the forest floor. Barton spoke in Niskae and in endless breath about our destination—the place of scraps—and I translated what I could as we hiked. “Two moons.” Brushed by pine needles. “The shadow of.” Filtered light through the canopy. “His grandson.” Salted air. “At peace with the wind.” A clearing up ahead. “To Sakau’wan.” At long last. “The trail of stars.” The clearing.

I rested against the moss trunk of a great tree. I caught my wind. I gazed at Barton as he ventured into the middle of the barren circle. In English, he said, “There are no poles here.” He kneeled and his hand disappeared into the ground. After a moment, he withdrew a fistful of dirt and shavings of wood. He said, “Hold out your hands.” So I did. And he sifted the mulch into my palms. He was silent as the last clumps of dirt left his fingers and I knew then, standing in that sunstruck clearing, that this was a sacred ritual, that I must remember each detail so that the world could know it, too.

The place of scraps. I trudged on behind Barton, barely lifting my feet over the roots that muscled their way out of the forest floor. Barton spoke in Niskae and in endless breath about our destination—the place of scraps—and I translated what I could as we hiked. “Two moons.” Brushed by pine needles. “The shadow of.” Filtered light through the canopy. “His grandson.” Salted air. “At peace with the wind.” A clearing up ahead. “To Sakau’wan.” At long last. “The trail of stars.” The clearing.

I rested against the moss trunk of a great tree. I caught my wind. I gazed at Barton as he ventured into the middle of the barren circle. In English, he said, “There are no poles here.” He kneeled and his hand disappeared into the ground. After a moment, he withdrew a fistful of dirt and shavings of wood. He said, “Hold out your hands.” So I did. And he sifted the mulch into my palms. He was silent as the last clumps of dirt left his fingers and I knew then, standing in that sunstruck clearing, that this was a sacred ritual, that I must remember each detail so that the world could know it, too.

Jordan Abel is a First Nations writer whose work has been published in Prairie Fire, Dandelion and the Capilano Review. He is poetry editor for PRISM international and a contributing editor to Geist. He lives in Vancouver and at jordanabel.ca.

Winter 2011 • GEIST 83 • Page 41

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photos by brian howell

New World Publisher Michal Kozlowski Randy Fred thought that life after Indian Residential School would be drinking, drugging, watching TV and dying. Instead, he founded the first Aboriginal book publisher in Canada, took up blind lawn bowling, and got to work on the Encyclopedia of the New World.

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andy Fred, who jokingly introduced himself to me a few years ago as the “greatest blind Indian pub-

lisher in the world,” and his wife, Edith Fred, sailed from Nanaimo across the Salish Sea, also referred to as the Strait of Georgia, to Vancouver in the spring of 2005 to attend a dinner and ceremony where Randy was to be presented with the Gray Campbell Distinguished Service Award for his contribution to publishing in BC. After five hours of travel from their home by ferry and bus, they checked into the Sylvia Hotel, a Vancouver landmark famous for its resident cat, Mister Got to Go, and its terra cotta exterior walls covered with Virginia creeper. In the evening they changed into their dress clothes and walked over to Stanley Park, a thousand-acre park adorned with statues of Robert Burns and Lord Stanley and memorials to William Shakespeare, Queen Victoria and the Mohawk poet Pauline Johnson. The Gray Campbell Award dinner was held in the park, at an upscale restaurant that served as a clubhouse for golf and tennis players when it had opened in 1930, when all but one of the Aboriginal families living there had been evicted and the park was declared a wilderness.

Some ninety guests had paid seventy-five dollars each to attend the ceremony. Randy told me, when I first visited him two years ago, that he was surprised that so many people had spent that much money for a dinner in his honour. On the menu were tomato soup, prawns, BC salmon and fancy wines. Stephen Osborne, a friend and publishing colleague of Randy’s, introduced him as the publisher who had conceived the idea of the Encyclopedia of the New World, which would be the story of the people whose world had been remade by strangers from Europe, quick to name their own world old as soon as they encountered another one.

That evening Randy wore a steel-blue suit, white shirt and a silver eagle medallion on a silver chain. When Edith led him by the arm to the microphone he seemed almost frail, one of the guests recalled, an impression that disappeared as soon as he started to speak to the audience. He spoke of growing up on a tiny island off the west coast of Vancouver Island and of being sent to residential school as a child and of the abuse he had suffered there and of his subsequent addiction to drugs and alcohol. He spoke of gradually losing his vision over the course of his life as a result of retinitis pigmentosa. He gave an account of founding Theytus Books, the first Aboriginal publishing house in Canada. He told of the class action lawsuit against the United Church and the Government of Canada that he and other residential school survivors had been involved in and the court trial at which Edith finally got to hear about his life at the residential school and the dark days that Winter 2011 • GEIST 83 • Page 43

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followed. He spoke for nearly an hour and at the end of his speech he said, “Now, do you know what they call a publisher who’s been baptized?”

After a long pause, he smiled and said, “A Jehovah’s Witness.” Then he told the audience of book publishers that he and Edith had been baptized after the residential school trial, and that after their many difficult years together, it was his way of renewing his commitment to his wife and the life they shared.

One of the guests recalled that “a silence swept the room” when Randy said that he was a Jehovah’s Witness; another could recall no reaction at all; yet another didn’t remember him saying anything about religion. “The usual reaction when I tell people I’m a Jehovah’s Witness,” Randy told me in the fall of 2009, “is that people become terrified. A few years ago a Nanaimo reporter who was interviewing me at my house excused herself abruptly and left my house as soon as I told her I was a Jehovah’s Witness.”

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andy Fred is sixty-one years old. His hair is grey at the temples; the top of his head is bald.

His smile reveals a missing tooth. When he appears in public, he often wears a suit and tie and, around his neck, the silver eagle medallion or a turquoise stone necklace.

He is an Elder of the Tseshaht tribe, one of the fourteen nations that comprise the tribal council of the Nuu-chah-nulth, a people who had been living on the west coast of Vancouver Island for millennia when Captain James Cook stumbled upon them in 1778. Cook misnamed them “Nootka,” a term he had heard from the

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Nuu-chah-nulth on shore, telling him to sail around the bend.

Randy was born in a “shoebox shack” in Port Alberni on October 24, 1950. He was named after Randolph Scott, the actor known for playing cowboy heroes in Hollywood Westerns in the 1940s and ’50s. He grew up on an island in Barkley Sound, a huge body of water tucked between Ucluelet and Bamfield, protected from the Pacific Ocean by hundreds of tiny islands known as the Broken Island Chain. His father trolled the open sea off the west coast of Vancouver Island in his fishing boat, the Gabriola Belle. His mother stayed with Randy and his siblings. She gathered berries and gooseneck barnacles and sea urchins for food. The Freds had seven children at the time and they migrated among the tiny islands, living in oneroom cabins and, on occasion, on the Gabriola Belle. When his father was away on fishing trips, his mother kept the radio on all night.

From time to time the family would take evening trips by canoe—a big west coast canoe outfitted with oars—to visit relatives and friends in Ucluelet and nearby islands. The trips were short and the water calm as they cut along coves and through narrow channels between the islands. In those days, it became evident that Randy couldn’t see in the dark. His father allowed him to row the canoe because out there on the water, in the dark, wide night, he felt at ease as long as he had oars to hang on to. He canoed alone for the first time when he was four years old and he became so strong at rowing that when he became a teenager, his uncle would recruit him on nighttime fishing

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expeditions. Randy would row and the uncle would guide him and gradually fill the canoe with salmon, and all night they would listen for the sound of the engines of Canadian Fisheries boats that patrolled the waters for illegal fishing.

Randy’s mother had been sent to residential school when she was six years old; his father when he was fifteen. His father had sewing needles thrust into his tongue when he was caught speaking his language. He taught his own children English and forbade them to speak Tseshaht around him.

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n 1955, Randy was enrolled in Alberni Indian Residential School (which was later shown to have been one of the most horrific residential schools in the country), where his father had gone in the 1920s and where his older brothers and sisters were also enrolled. At age five he was thrown into an institution that housed boys as old as sixteen, organized by strict hierarchies based on how tough you were, or how tough your friends and brothers and cousins were. He was sexually abused for the first time by a fellow student when he was six years old. He was sexually abused for the first time by a staff member when he was eight. He fell prey to Arthur Henry Plint, a dormitory supervisor, who raped dozens of children over the years, and who, when he was sentenced for his crimes years later, was referred to by the presiding judge as a “sexual terrorist.” Over the years, Randy learned to use sex to get protection, food and money. When he was twelve, he started drinking, getting high

and chain smoking. At times his brothers and cousins were his enemies; at other times they were allies. He rarely saw his sisters.

The students at the residential school were sent to church every morning, twice on Sundays.

The boys wore grey shirts, denim overalls and heavy black army-style boots. They were served macaroni and cheese, scalloped potatoes and bologna sandwiches. At night, the other boys would sneak into the pantry stocked with fruit and sweets for the school staff; Randy always stayed behind, unable to navigate in the dark.

He boarded at the school for ten months out of the year, except for Christmas and Easter, and spent the summers at the family home. When he was ten years old, his father moved the family to a house on reserve land in Port Alberni, a few hundred yards from the school. At the beginning of summer, when school let out, Randy would take his things and walk home, along the chain-link fence that separated the school grounds from reserve land. In those summer months he would sometimes join his father on the fishing boat. The trips, he remembers, were unpleasant: the rough seas, the smell of bilge and exhaust, his father, who expected him to know how to handle himself on the water. Then, in the fall, Randy would walk back to the school, along the chain-link fence. For ten long months he rarely saw his parents, but he could see the family home by looking out the window of the school bus, on the occasional field trip.

Randy made his first contact with white kids in grade 7, when he and his classmates from the residential school were bussed to the public school in Port Alberni. The white kids and Winter 2011 • GEIST 83 • Page 45

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the Aboriginal kids attended the same classes, including social studies, in which the students learned about the customs of Huron and Iroquois people, and nothing of the nations of the west coast.

In grade 10 he stopped boarding at the school and moved home, where twenty-one people now lived: his parents, his siblings (twelve of them now) and a few cousins. His grades, which had been excellent (he had been class valedictorian one year), dropped because he had no place to study at home, and he took to sitting by the river with his books.

The following year, in 1967, Randy was diagnosed with retinitis pigmentosa, a genetic eye condition for which there is no cure. He was classified as legally blind and he learned that he would eventually lose his vision completely.

He says now that he could tell his life in Port Alberni would be filled with drinking, drugging, watching TV and dying. He had to finish high school because he couldn’t rely on manual labour jobs once he was blind. He persuaded the Indian Agent in Port Alberni to sign him up for the boarding-out program and landed a spot in Nanaimo, in the home of a United Church reverend. He enrolled himself in high school and in 1968 graduated with high marks.

After high school, Randy worked in logging camps, as a timekeeper and in payroll accounting. He was drinking and using hard drugs by then, keeping his life in balance between work and dissipation. He moved all over British Columbia: Mackenzie, Golden, Valemount, Zeballos. In Port Alberni he got a job doing Page 46 • GEIST 83 • Winter 2011

accounting for the West Coast District Council of Chiefs, but he had to give it up within two years because his eyesight was failing. He landed a job at a radio station in Port Alberni, in the news department, where he reported on school board meetings and produced a series of street interviews on fishing, governance and the activities of MacMillan Bloedel, a large forest products company. The interviews aired in half-hour segments, with musical interludes featuring Frank Zappa and Buffy Sainte-Marie.

When MacMillan Bloedel threatened to sue the station, Randy was fired. The Alberni Valley Times offered him a weekly column, which he called “From the Inside Out.” He says that the radio job and the column set him on the course for publishing: that is where he learned the power of media and became interested in using technology to address cultural and socioeconomic issues. These events in Port Alberni, a town of about twenty thousand inhabitants at the time, launched him into the public world.

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n 1975, Randy met Edith Shish, a young woman from Powell River, after Edith’s sisters had arranged for her to meet a guy they’d met in a bar, whom they referred to as Dandy Randy. Edith and Randy hit it off right away, but she soon returned to school and they rarely saw each other over the next year. Randy called Edith on the last day of school; they met up in Vancouver and then spent the summer in a tent at Qualicum Beach. Eventually they moved to a rented suite in Nanaimo, and they lived

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together for three years before they married.

Their son, Ralph, was born five years later, in 1983; their daughter, Teoni, was born in 1985.

Over the next few years, Randy immersed himself in the world of Aboriginal communications. In 1978 he founded the Quanatsustal Media Society, whose mandate was to give Aboriginal people a means to gain communication and media skills. He went to Edmonton to observe the Alberta Native Communications Society. He organized courses in photojournalism and newsletter production at Malaspina College (now Vancouver Island University) in Nanaimo, where finally he conceived the idea of an Aboriginal book publishing house. He named the company Theytus, a Salish term meaning “preserving for the sake of handing down.”

Theytus negotiated two-year funding from Canada Manpower (now part of Service Canada) and Randy rented office space above the Book Store on Bastion Street in Nanaimo. He filled it with drafting tables and second-hand furniture and hired staff from the prairies and the west coast. He hired one non-Aboriginal, Steve Guppy, an editor at Island magazine. Guppy was a former student of Ron Smith, a creative writing teacher at Malaspina, who helped Theytus get funding (and who was presented with the Gray Campbell Award in 2011).

In its first year, Theytus published Gone Indian, a postmodern literary cowboy tale set in Alberta (originally published in 1973), by Robert Kroetsch, a non-Aboriginal writer, who had won the Governor General’s Award in the 1960s. It was followed by a collection

of legends, Kwulasulwut: Stories from the Coast Salish, by Ellen White, an elder of the Nanaimo Nation. Theytus’s first biography was Queesto: Pacheenaht Chief by Birthright, the story of Chief Charlie Jones of the Pacheenaht Reservation, who was one hundred years old when the pro­ minent Hollywood animator Stephen Bosustow interviewed him for the book. Teachings of the Tides: Uses of Marine Invertebrates by the Manhousat People, which also appeared that year, deals with ethno-biology, food sovereignty and land use among Aboriginal groups on the west coast of Vancouver Island. It was written by David Ellis, a commercial fisherman, and Luke Swan, an elder from Ahousat. The study of ethnobio­logy and food sovereignty became an important focus for Randy throughout his career.

That year, Randy took on a children’s book project. He also connected with Pulp Press in Vancouver, looking for assistance in printing preparation and other book production techniques. There he met Stephen Osborne, publisher of Pulp. Osborne recalls getting a phone call from a “Native guy” who said he was a publisher and wanted to see him. On the afternoon they had arranged to meet, Osborne happened to look out the window and saw a Native guy walk by the Pulp office, heading uphill, then a few minutes later the same guy walked past in the opposite direction. When the guy walked past a third time, Osborne went out into the street and asked him if he was ­Randy Fred. He was. Randy had tunnel vision at the time and he couldn’t see the oddly placed address of the office; yet he just kept looking, Winter 2011 • GEIST 83 • Page 47

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without asking for directions. The two became close friends and collaborators.

In late 1981, when Randy learned that Theytus’s funding was to be cut, he met the financial officer for the Cold Water Indian Band in Merritt, a non-Aboriginal man named Greg Enright, who happened to be one of the founders of Pulp Press. With Enright’s assistance, Randy moved Theytus to Penticton, in the interior of BC. There it was taken over by the Nicola Valley Indian Administration and the Okanagan Tribal Council, and incorporated into the En’owkin Centre, an Aboriginal learning centre with a strong literary program.

Randy was hired to train staff for Theytus, and he and Edith moved to Penticton, where the culture of the Okanagan is embedded in the desert and mountain landscape, and where they felt a strong cultural divide between the Okanagan people and the west coast nations.

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andy conceived the idea of the Encyclopedia of the New World while he and three associates—Stephen Osborne; Jeannette Armstrong, a writer; and Jeff Smith, an editor at Theytus— were driving down the secondary highways of the Okanagan Valley to Merritt to meet the Cold Water Band. They had been discussing Mel Hurtig’s new Canadian Encyclopedia, which had just been published and in which Nuuchah-nulth history plays an insignificant role.

Since then, Randy says, everything he’s written and published has been a contribution to the ongoing encyclopedia. The term new world is used to describe the land discovered by Europeans when they arrived in North America, but

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it also refers to the remaking of North America when the Europeans landed here and created a strange and new world for the first people of this continent, a world that Aboriginals are still in conflict with.

Randy has been gathering material and thinking about the Encyclopedia of the New World for thirty years. In the first edition of his newspaper, Strait Arrow, published in 1993, he wrote that all of the research done for the newspaper would find its way into the encyclopedia; in fact, he has directed all of his subsequent publishing ventures in the same way: assembling materials for the vast conceptual encyclopedia.

In the mid-1980s, the Fred family moved to Vancouver. There Randy reconnected with Stephen Osborne and found a desk at Pulp Press, which was then populated by gregarious intellectuals and heavy drinkers who were publishing anarchist and anti-capitalist material, literary texts and poetry, and who had been attacked in Parliament as terrorists “operating in the style of the Italian Red Brigades.”

Randy set up Tillicum Library, an imprint of Pulp Press, and published Resistance and Renewal: Surviving the Indian Residential School

by Celia Haig-Brown, which won the ­Roderick Haig-Brown Regional Prize in 1989 and is, as of 2010, in its eighth printing. Resistance and Renewal contains the accounts of thirteen survivors of Kamloops Indian Residential School.

When Pulp Press sought funding to subsidize production of the book, one agency declined because the manuscript was “a one-sided account.” In the foreword to Resistance and Renewal, Randy wrote about his own experience at residential school. It was the first time his

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colleagues at Pulp had heard about those harrowing parts of his early life.

Throughout the late 1980s, Randy published several commercially successful books for Tillicum, including Stoney Creek Woman

by Bridget Moran, which has sold more than forty thousand copies. At this time he was going on drinking binges that lasted for days. After work he would go out for long walks and smoke marijuana, then come home and lie on the couch while Edith looked after the house and the kids. In 1989 the family moved back to Nanaimo. Randy says that the publishers and editors at Pulp Press who helped him with Tillicum were his first colleagues to treat him like a publisher, rather than an Aboriginal publisher, and that Stephen Osborne became a lifelong mentor in his publishing activities.

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n the late 1990s, Randy Fred, along with thirty-one survivors of the notorious Alberni Indian Residential School, sued the Government of Canada and the United Church of Canada, which operated the school, for their part in the abuse of students at the school in the 1950s and ’60s. At the trial, the government and the church maintained that the survivors had not been damaged in any demonstrable way by their experience at the school and, as a result, deserved no recompense. It became incumbent on the plaintiffs to prove that they were, in fact, damaged people.

Randy’s lawyers had to prove that as a result of his experience at residential school, he could not earn a living; and they called his friends, colleagues and employers to the stand. One af-

ter another, Randy Fred’s friends and associates, people he cared about and had worked with, took the stand to tell the court about the dark side of Randy’s life, that he was a terrible drunk, that he could not focus, that he performed poorly at work. Edith testified that her husband had contributed little to raising their children when they were young and that he had been an absent husband.

The psychologist brought in by the Government of Canada defence team testified that Randy’s problems had nothing to do with the sexual abuse he had endured at the residential school, but were a consequence of his bad character. The presiding judge concluded that Randy’s alcoholism could just as well have been a product of the friends he chose in residential school and after he left the school.

In the end, the court ruled that Randy’s “success” as a publisher was proof that he wasn’t damaged, that he could earn money and that he had done quite well for himself considering his vision problems. Randy had sought $1.2 million in redress; he was awarded $95,000, the third highest amount of all the plaintiffs, of which he got to keep half after the lawyers took their share. Most of the cases were dismissed, and only a few of the survivors received any recompense.

The court case dragged on for several years, during which time Randy was forced to recount again and again the suffering he had endured at the residential school, his subsequent depression and desire to kill himself; he had to hear his wife describe repeatedly how terrible a husband and father he had been; he had to listen to his colleagues and friends try to convince the judge that he was incompetent. It was the first time

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Edith had heard the full story of what had happened to her husband at the residential school, and for the first time she understood why he had always been so difficult and distant. She came to understand things about her own mother, who had also attended residential school. She found new respect and admiration for her husband, for his ability to survive and even to excel.

The trial, she says, was the defining moment in their marriage. She had been studying the Bible for seven years, and now she decided that she wanted to join the Jehovah’s Witnesses, whose values, she says, resemble the traditional beliefs she was brought up with. Edith and Randy Fred were baptized soon after the residential school trial, after twenty years of marriage, and it was a way of entering a new world, of renewing their vows to each other.

Sometime during the trial, Randy lost his vision completely. When I first went to visit him, I was worried about the proper way to meet a blind person. Do I ask to shake his hand? Do I just grab it and shake? Or perhaps, I thought, if I just hold out my hand, he will be able to sense it. When I walked into his house and introduced myself, Randy paused, welcomed me, and held out his hand.

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hese days, Randy works on a computer with the help of text-recognition software, which orally reads out everything on his screen.

He responds to emails almost instantly and types them out in perfectly composed prose, with complete sentences and appropriate paragraph breaks. He works in a corner of the living room at a desk littered with CDs, DVDs and papers. He told me that he once ordered a Braille reading kit from the Canadian National Institute for the Blind; by the time it arrived, a year later, he’d lost all interest in learning Braille, and he never regained it. Nor does he have any interest in acquiring a guide dog. He’s been in touch with a Chinese millionaire in the sea-cucumber-farm business who has invited him to Nanjing University, where, according to the millionaire, his researcher friends have cures for certain varieties of retinitis pigmentosa. Until a few years ago, when Randy fell into Page 50 • GEIST 83 • Winter 2011

a ditch that has been dug in the middle of a road in Nanaimo, he used to walk the town alone.

When he sits in the passenger seat, his feel for the landscape of the town allows him to direct the driver almost anywhere in Nanaimo.

In his early fifties, Randy started lawn bowling, as a way of getting to know other visually impaired people in Nanaimo. Then he started attending tournaments, and winning. He squats down at one end of the bowling green and his partner stands about eight feet in front of him.

From the other end, the marker calls out the distances between the jack and the end of the green. In this way, Randy has won gold at the Canadian National Blind Lawn Bowling Championships five times in eight years in category B1, which is completely blind. In the other three years he won silver.

A few years ago he and Edith ran a salmonsmoking business; then he started a consulting company called Aboriginal Visions, which arranges training, certification and mentorships to entrepreneurs in the fishing industry. More recently he’s been learning to play the guitar and the organ. On a sunny day he can be found out in the yard, pulling weeds and listening to Frank Zappa. He despises bologna, scalloped potatoes and macaroni and cheese, as he has done since his residential school days. As his mother did when he was a child, he puts on the radio at night; he uses earphones so as not to wake Edith.

Randy Fred’s latest publishing venture is a magazine called FACE, Aboriginal Life and Culture, of which he is publisher. In many ways, the territory staked out by FACE resembles that of Theytus and Tillicum. The first issue featured a long column about food sovereignty, literary fiction by Lee Maracle, an interview with Buffy Sainte-Marie and a review of Disrobing the Aboriginal Industry, a book by two white academics about the business implications of land claims, residential school trials and other Aboriginal issues.

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andy and Edith Fred’s house was built in 1912. For years it served as a farmhouse for the neighbourhood, which had once been farmland.

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Old fruit trees are still scattered on the surrounding properties. The Freds live there with their two children, and have raised many foster children there. Years ago they volunteered to care for children from the community for a few days at a time in emergency situations. Many of those children stayed longer, some of them for years. The Freds’ home is often filled with family members—siblings, cousins, nieces and nephews—either staying with them or passing through town.

On my first visit with Randy and Edith, we spoke for a few hours in their living room.

Edith, whose background is Polish, German and Manhousaht (her mother was the hereditary chief of the Manhousaht First Nation), is tall and thin and animated. She is nine years younger than her husband. She sat in a stuffed armchair and talked about her family and about the distance between her and her husband during the first twenty-five years of their marriage.

Randy sat at the end of the couch, stroking the cat, and said that after he was released from residential school he couldn’t have fun and he felt like something heavy was pressing down on his chest, and that recounting his experience over and over in court had led him out of all that.

He said that hearing his wife speak on the witness stand was a revelation and that he admires her for sticking with him. Now there is no more distance between them, he says, and they have a normal marriage, with its ups and downs. We are the people we want to be, said Edith Fred, and we’re always trying to improve ourselves and our lives, and love is the most important part of our life, for each other and our family.

And our cats, said Randy Fred.

Out on the deck, Randy told me that his wife is the only reason he’d lived to the age of sixty.

He said he wished he could be more zealous in his religion; that the line in the Bible, “fear of men,” applies to how he sometimes feels about admitting that he is a Jehovah’s Witness. He had to read the Bible in residential school, but it wasn’t until after the trial that it began to have an impact on him. Where we are in the stream of time right now, he said, is the fires, floods, earthquakes; these are all predicted in several places in the Bible, there will be famines and pestilence. Then he described Armageddon, and said that he looks forward to that day because when everyone who has died is resurrected, he will get to see his parents and his ancestors and he will learn the history of his people.

In a photograph taken at the Gray Campbell Award dinner Randy and Edith Fred stand side by side. Randy holds his white cane, which reflects the flash of the camera. The white cane, he once wrote, blinds people to my Indian-ness.

For him, learning to move through the world as a blind person has been a relatively painless ­process—people are kind, supports are in place— far more so than learning to move through his native country as a member of the First Nations.

Michal Kozlowski is the Assistant Publisher of Geist.

He immigrated to Canada from Poland in 1989 and has worked as a luggage handler, a fire hydrant painter and a Residential Care Worker at a group home. He is the author of the children’s book Louis the Tiger Who Came from the Sea (Annick Press). Read more of his work at geist.com. “New World Publisher” is one of a series of Geist profiles commissioned with the assistance of Arts Partners for Creative Development.

Randy and Edith at the Gray Campbell Award dinner, Stanley Park, 2005. Photo by Margaret Reynolds.

Winter 2011 • GEIST 83 • Page 51

Erasing Roughing It in the Bush Winners of the First Geist Erasure Poetry Contest Erasure poetry is created by starting with an existing text and erasing bits in such a way that the words left in place take on new shapes and meanings. For the Geist Erasure Poetry Contest, we posted an excerpt from Roughing It in the Bush, Susanna Moodie’s memoir (published in 1852) about the special challenges of life in the backwoods of Upper Canada, and we invited writers to erase until they found a poem somewhere inside the text. We like this excerpt for the distance it offers between the journal writer then and the poem writer today.

In judging the contest, Geist editors were surprised to find peculiar recurring threads in the entries, such as adultery and cannibalism. Patterns of words appeared and reappeared. In the end, we awarded prizes to the poems that interacted with the original text in unique ways, commenting on undercurrents in Moodie’s writing while breaking away from it, or building something strange and new out of what she left behind. Here, chosen from more than 250 entries, are the poems that we think are most evocative of the spirit of Erasure.

FIRST PRIZE MY WORD Karen Press

S

trangers ate my cunt, asking a thousand questions as to its use, the material of which it was made.

I screamed.

How eagerly, how intently their heads bent down, eyes fixed upon the strange lips.

I had in my possession a word.

My word.

A rough demand.

I told them it was a weapon, a fierce death.

Passed from one to the other.

God—God— and again.

A hideous image: one man, lewd hands, his face covered with feathers, his serpentine form.

K.I. Press is a Winnipeg writer originally from Alberta. Her most recent book is Types of Canadian Women.

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SECOND PRIZE A FAMILY GATHERING Sam Helmer

l

arge fingers pointed to his fellows uncle wilson’s a strange young lady, hideous and distorted;

his knees highly polished chris is bringing along some fresh eagle

Sam Helmer lives in Invermere, BC. Her work has been published in Scratch Magazine (scratchonline.ca).

THIRD PRIZE UNCOUTH Patty Milligan

M

y hus­band loves Mrs. D. (They grew friendly and com­mu­nica­tive. They were infi­nitely delighted. They screamed. How intently—black head bent down, dark eyes fixed, strange, uncouth excla­ma­tions of sur­prise from her lips. She begged hard. He would give more by-and-by.)

I felt sorry that I was unable to grat­ify his wishes; My husband, a moving snake. I never conceived.

His hands, his knees, his legs, his face, the upper part of his person, the lower; it fitted exactly.

I demand an explanation.

I pray.

I exclaim.

(For several days they continued.)

Vexed and annoyed by the delight they manifest, I refuse to gratify him again.

Patty Milligan writes freelance, primarily for food and agricultural publications. She lives on a farm northeast of Edmonton and is a small-scale beekeeper.

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A Table in Paris Mavis Gallant, the original nomad of Canadian literature, wrote some of Canada’s finest fiction at Pablo Picasso’s café table in Paris

Stephen Henighan

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café table in Paris stands empty. It is the Pablo Picasso table at Le Dôme, one of the four historic cafés at the slanting intersection where Boulevard Raspail crosses Boulevard Montparnasse. Early in the twentieth century, each of these cafés buzzed with writers and artists; all are now too expensive for aspiring writers. Today’s clientele at Le Dôme, Le Sélect, La Coupole and La Rotonde is a mixture of wealthy Parisians and visitors who are giving themselves a treat. Yet in 1950, when Mavis Gallant arrived in Paris, the cafés of Montparnasse were a welcome refuge for an impoverished artist.

The bohemian expatriates of the 1920s—Gertrude Stein, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald and their friends—had died or departed by then. The Parisian café culture of the 1950s revolved around the encounter of French intellectuals such as JeanPaul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Boris Vian and Albert Camus with writers of colour, such as the Americans Richard Wright, James Baldwin and Chester Himes, or writers from what were then known as “Third World” countries, such as Léopold Senghor of Senegal or, in the latter half of the decade, the young Mario Vargas Llosa. This scene took place farther down the hill and closer to the Seine, in the cafés of the Latin Quarter, such as Café de Flore, where Sartre is said to have written much of Being and Nothingness.

The move to the Latin Quarter

relieved the pressure on Montparnasse. Mavis Gallant, who often lived in apartments that lacked adequate heating, went to Le Dôme to write because she could keep warm there. Over the years, as her reputation grew, the café’s management began to reserve Pablo Picasso’s favourite table for her.

In later years Gallant lived in the seventh arrondissement (not, as readers of her fiction might suppose, in the fifteenth district), the redoubt of the city’s upper bourgeoisie. Yet writers, if they must live from their writing, cannot afford all the privileges of the well off. Gallant’s apartment on Rue Jean Ferrandi was located in a blank-faced, soulless modern building recessed in a niche that broke the stately progression of nineteenth-century façades. The respectful hush of the narrow streets of the seventh district feels very far away from the hubbub of the broad avenue of Boulevard Montparnasse, with its glaring cinema billboards, packed cafés and wandering pedestrians from all over the world. Mercifully, distances in Paris are short: one neighbourhood merges into another within a few blocks. Until her early eighties, Gallant walked from her apartment to Le Dôme; later she took a taxi. Now her table is empty.

photo: mavis gallant in paris in the 1950s.

In early 2011 I was in Paris with twenty-four Canadian students and a budget that allowed me to invite speakers to my classes. My first thought was to invite Mavis Gallant. Though I realized she was elderly, an online video from 2009 that showed Gallant responding to an interviewer’s questions with sprightly wit gave me hope. I wrote her a letter. Aware that Gallant was not a person who always enjoyed public appearances, I wasn’t surprised when I didn’t receive an answer. I made enquiries and learned to my dismay that Mavis Gallant had been in hospital for months. Her friends had serious doubts as to whether she would ever return to Le Dôme.

“Her mind is as sharp as ever,” one friend said, “but her body won’t let her get up and leave.” I thought of the epigraph from Boris Pasternak that leads off the introduction to Home Truths, Gallant’s selected Canadian stories: “Only personal independence matters.” No­­thing seemed sadder than that the original nomad of Canadian literature had lost her independence.

Anyone who has read Gallant’s superb novella, “Its Image on the Mirror,” grasps the importance of her having come of age in the 1940s, when the departure of Canadian men for the Second World War released women from traditional roles. Rather than submit to relegation to the kitchen when the men came home in search of wives, Gallant left for Europe. This decision was not a flight from Canadianness, as a certain unfair strain of commentary insinuates; rather, it became, over time, the image on the mirror of the Canadian predicament. No other writer explores with such piercing understanding the Winter 2011 • GEIST 83 • Page 55

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social and class assumptions that oldstock English and French Canadians bring to their encounters with other cultures; these dynamics are as important at home as they are abroad. In an age when we are all to some degree expatriates, Gallant is one of the charter explorers of modern expatriation.

This became clear to me on the only occasion when I saw her in person, in 1992 in Montreal. Gallant was on a panel on Anglo-Montreal fiction. The younger writers on the panel extolled multiculturalism as the force that distinguished contemporary Montreal writing from that of the past. Gallant grew impatient. “It’s always been a cosmopolitan city,” she said. “Why do you think I became interested in Europe?”

“In the third summer of the war I began to meet refugees,” opens “Varieties of Exile,” the third of Gallant’s

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six linked stories about Linnet Muir, a solitary young woman coming of age in wartime Montreal. This sequence is often seen as the work where an elusive author reveals herself. Yet Gallant reveals herself everywhere: her short stories are more direct and spontaneous than those of her only obvious peer, Alice Munro, whose confected ironies often act as a form of emotional selfprotection. The patterns of Gallant’s own childhood—the expatriate father who is dying at a young age, the selfcentred, unfaithful mother—are discernible even when the stories are not set in Quebec. Two of Gallant’s most striking achievements, “The Moslem Wife” and “The Remission,” gain their power from reworkings of these patterns among English families living in the south of France. Yet the emotions contained in ­Gallant’s stories are

accessible to anyone who has ever felt a sense of displacement. I discovered “When We Were Nearly Young” as I was about to turn thirty, when I had spent long months footloose in Europe and was convinced that no one back in Canada understood me. Gallant’s story showed me that others had felt this way, that someone did understand me.

Many Canadians, though, have never completely understood Mavis Gallant.

It will be left to future readers to recognize that much of our finest fiction of the post-1945 era was written at a café table in Paris.

Stephen Henighan’s (stephenhenighan.com) short story collections include North of Tourism (Cormorant, 1999) and A Grave in the Air (Thistledown, 2007). Read more of his work at geist.com.

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Facing the Camera How much does a photograph really capture the essence of a person?

Alberto Manguel

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hotography is the art of definition.

However objective or whimsical, measured or unfair, aloof or biased, experienced or amateurish the photographer, the eye of the camera determines the existence of a certain reality which then becomes for the viewer that reality, much like our histories become what we call history. No amount of learned skepticism succeeds entirely in diffusing the sense of conviction given by a photographic image. The mind knows that there are other ways of seeing, other aspects of that reality, other attitudes

photo by alfred cheney johnston

and poses. And yet the mind believes: “If the camera saw it, it must be true.”

The photographic image is always definitive.

This is certainly the case when it comes to photographing people. We humans think that we have a single, unique face: photography disproves us. The myriad unique faces that, throughout our lives, are captured by the camera, from babyhood to that final face that we will never see, create a multiple, ever-changing face that can never quite be pinned down to one we

can call uniquely ours. Who are these people? we ask, flipping through an album of our own faces. How can all these different features, tints of skin, looks and gestures, all be that single person we call “I”? Never was Rimbaud’s dictum so true as in the case of our portraits. The photographed “I” is always another.

But not any other. Across from our changing face, the photographer’s lens observes and chooses. The sitter may be the same one, over and over, altering position and attitudes according to the moods and seasons, but the eye of the camera captures one particular instant, one distinct face, one selected “I” from that plural subject. It may be that thanks to the perspicacity and skill of the photographer, seeing our portrait in black and white, or colour, fixed and framed, we arrive at an acceptance (or recognition) of a face we then can call ours. But behind every selected or official portrait are crowds of others calling out to the viewer: “Choose me! Don’t forget me! I too exist! I too am I!” Portraits, we are told, are mirrors, and mirrors, as we know, always lie.

Mirrors reflect what we wish or we fear might be reflected, and throughout the ages, in fairy tales and legends and moral fables, they have been the source of secret wishes, hidden faults, future visions, startling revelations about ourselves. Jews cover mirrors during mourning in order not to be distracted by seeking their mundane appearance at the hour of grief. Christians long saw in mirrors the emblem of our sinful vanity, and medieval iconography is full of devils holding mirrors for beauty to see that behind the rose is the worm that dieth not. For Islam, mirrors are symbols of self-knowledge, and under the name mir’ât hindiya (“Indian mirrors”), popular Islamic folklore attributes to the reflecting glass dangerous and Winter 2011 • GEIST 83 • Page 57

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dark forces, because it can reveal the inner workings of the soul. The great philosopher Abu Hamid al-Ghazali reversed the image, and saw our souls as rusty mirrors that can no longer reflect the Creator’s splendour, except (as St. Paul said) “through a glass darkly.”

Religion, psychology and art have all taught us that our reflection, our face and our person (in all their everchanging incarnations) stand for the plurality of the self. One of the Arabic words for “face,” wadjh, is often used to denote the person itself, as in “I came with my wadjh,” meaning “I came in person.” This identification stems from Aristotle, for whom the face was the mirror of the soul. If the Greek master was right, then the face is a deceitful mirror, telling us not to trust appearances. We wonder what Aristotle would have thought of the playful, silly, grinning man with a bulldog face (who turns out to be Winston Churchill), or the grim, gruff, haggard woman (who, we discover, is Mother Teresa). Photography, at its best, undermines our expectations.

A collection of photographic portraits, however, such as the ones that the National Portrait Gallery in London, for instance, routinely selects from its voluminous stacks, is not merely a social gazetteer, a choice of great and celebrated faces: it is, in a way, a twentieth- to twenty-first century chronicle of our own culture, of the men and women who shaped our imaginaire through words, forms, sound, images. Here are the architects, poets, photographers, playwrights, sculptors, filmmakers, musicians, even the odd millionaire or politician, who were the cast for the ongoing saga of our history. Like those colossal engravings with which the late Renaissance artists celebrated the triumphs of a king or emperor, depicting long pageants of personalities marching across a rolling Page 58 • GEIST 83 • Winter 2011

and idealized landscape, we are faced with a choice of famous figures in order to celebrate (we might say) the triumph of the educated imagination. Wandering through such an exhibition, gazing into the faces portrayed, we recognize the eyes that taught us to see, the hands that taught us to touch, the lips that lent us the vocabulary with which to reflect on who and where we are today.

Not everyone that counts is here, of course, and not everyone represented here holds a role as important as that of his or her peers, but all together, heroes and villains form an astonishing mosaic of our times.

In the twenty-third canto of Purgatorio, Dante alludes to the medieval conceit that the word OMO (man) is written on our face: the O’s are the eyes and the M the eyebrows and nose.

For Dante’s contemporaries, our face tells what we are. This is close to what seems to be photographer’s intention when portraying a celebrity: to define not the formal identity of the subject but the subject’s intimate nature, the essential being, that ineffable point that holds the self together. Our everyday activities can be labelled to satisfy bureaucratic requirements, but everyone knows that this is not enough to express the intricacies and moods of our existence. Language, even at its best, never succeeds in transmitting the core, but an image (a photographic portrait, for instance) can sometimes carry from one person to another, from the one who is observed to the one observing, a shadow of that truth, a face full of meaning (that is not our own) floating up from the depths of a dark mirror.

Alberto Manguel is the award-winning author of hundreds of works, most recently (in English) A Reader on Reading, All Men Are Liars, and The City of Words. He lives in France.

Read more of his Geist work at geist.com.

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Deviance on Display In the nineteenth century, a visit to the asylum or the penitentiary was as much a part of a tourist itinerary as Niagara Falls or Old Quebec

Daniel Francis

O

n her way home to Belleville from a visit to Niagara Falls in the summer of 1853, the writer Susanna Moodie paused on the outskirts of Toronto to make a tour of the Provincial Lunatic Asylum. As she dismounted from her carriage in front of the highdomed central wing of the recently opened building, she spied several male patients who were out stretching their legs. They looked at her, she wrote in her memoir, Life in the Clearings, “with an eager air of childish curiosity.” Once she had entered the asylum, it was Moodie’s turn to gawk.

At first her impressions were positive; she observed “no appearance of wretchedness or misery in the ward; nothing that associated with it the ­terrible idea of madness I had been wont to entertain.” But when she climbed to the upstairs wards occupied by the “more frantic inmates,” her feelings changed. Visitors were not allowed to stroll through these wards; they could only observe the scene through glass doors. “The hands of all these women were secured in mufflers; some were dancing, others running to and fro at full speed, clapping their hands, and laughing and shouting with the most boisterous merriment. How dreadful is the laugh of madness!” Comforting herself with the conventional religious pieties, Moodie made her escape. “We had seen enough of madness, and the shrieks from the outrageous patients above, whom strangers have seldom photo by william notman

nerve enough to visit, quickened our steps as we hurried from the place.”

What was Susanna Moodie doing wandering the corridors of a mental hospital like some visitor at a zoo?

That, I think, is our appalled, modern reaction. But as Janet Miron illustrates in her new book, Prisons, Asylums, and the Public: Institutional Visiting in the Nineteenth Century (University of Toronto Press), Susanna Moodie ­was not an insensitive voyeur. Quite the opp­osite. For much of the nineteenth century, public visits to asylums and prisons were not only allowed, they were encouraged. During its first year of operation alone, the Toronto asylum received fourteen hundred visitors.

Some of these were friends and relatives of the patients, of course, but many others were sightseers, curious to learn about these new institutions that were widely hailed as sure-fire solutions to mental disease and criminal deviance.

Joseph Workman, the Toronto asylum’s medical superintendent, was conscious of the fear and prejudice that characterized popular views of mental illness. He was a firm believer in allowing visitors to stroll the halls and grounds of his hospital so that they might see for themselves that

nightmare images of violent, hysterical lunatics were not true. In Mrs. Moodie’s case, his openness may have backfired. Nonetheless, Workman was determined to counter popular misconceptions of madness and to dispel any notion that sinister things were going on behind the walls of the asylum.

Our modern view of prisons and asylums has been conditioned by what they became: institutions of confinement where people who had violated the norms of society were isolated and “rehabilitated.” It is difficult for us to imagine a time when they were hailed as humanitarian reforms that their founders and administrators were proud to show off. As Miron points out, the walls of these early institutions were porous.

The inmates/patients may not have been free to leave, but visitors were free to come and go. Joseph Workman was not alone in putting out the welcome mat. “The Asylum is full from morning to night of people to see friends and people to see through the institution,” wrote another Ontario “mad doctor,” the London asylum director Richard Maurice Bucke. Like Workman, Bucke believed that the public had a distorted idea of the asylum, viewing it as “an immense prison, full of all sorts of horrors.” He thought that people needed to see first-hand the great work of healing that was going on there. To this end, Bucke groomed the grounds of his asylum so that visitors might feel they were visiting a park or a garden, and he included outsiders in a variety of social occasions at the ­institution, where they freely mingled with the patients.

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to visitors to a degree that would be unthinkable today. The warden of the Kingston Penitentiary, which opened in 1835, reported that “no concealment has ever been practised in carrying on the affairs of the Penitentiary, to which admission is freely given to all strangers desirous of witnessing its internal economy, nearly sixteen hundred of whom have visited the Establishment during the past year.” The Pen even collected an admission fee and used the money to defray the costs of operation.

Miron argues that institutional tourism was not voyeuristic, an embarrassing historical episode best forgotten. Rather it was a mainstream activity that served important social functions.

Most visitors had a genuine interest in the prisons and asylums, which were considered to be symbols of economic progress and moral improvement. They believed it was their role to monitor what was going on to confirm that the institutions were being well run and that inmates and patients were not being abused. For their part, administrators sought the validation that public visiting gave their institutions; it was a way to prove that there was nothing inhuman or illegal going on within them. In other words, there was a role for the public in the operation of the institutions, a role that has pretty much disappeared today—when, in the name of privacy, penal and mental health institutions occupy the margins of society beyond the public’s gaze.

What did inmates think about the appearance of visitors in their midst?

Miron goes to some trouble to seek out sources that answer this question. Not surprisingly, she finds that reactions were mixed. Some of the incarcerated seemed to welcome the distraction that visitors offered, the opportunity to break through the isolation of institutional life. Others were unsettled by the experience of being on display Page 60 • GEIST 83 • Winter 2011

and felt it betrayed their privacy. In general, public visitation was accepted as a useful, even necessary part of asylum and prison administration.

Early in the twentieth century, attitudes changed and institutional visiting ceased. Miron suggests that this was because the institutions themselves had lost their reformist cachet. By the end of the nineteenth century, mental hospitals and prisons had failed to live up to the expectations that had been held for them. Overcrowded and underfunded, they became holding tanks for the chronically ill and the criminal.

Administrators, embarrassed by this failure, no longer wanted the public sticking its nose in. And the public had lost interest anyway in institutions that no longer seemed able to resolve pressing social problems. “The ‘golden age’ of prisons and asylums had passed,” writes Miron, and the public did not like to be reminded.

Today public visitation plays no role in the operation of our penal and mental health institutions. But Miron’s book shows that we should not condescend to the past by dismissing the practice as shameful or exploitative.

Our large mental institutions closed because they were so ineffective, and our prisons have failed to meet the challenge of rehabilitation. We have little reason to feel superior to Susanna Moodie and her fellow visitors. As Miron concludes, “the distance between [the institutions] and greater society would grow with the end of visiting, and their interiors would become virtually unknown to the general public.” This is surely not a good thing.

Daniel Francis is a writer and historian who lives in North Vancouver. He is the author of two dozen books, most recently Selling Canada: Three Propaganda Campaigns that Shaped the Nation (Stanton, Atkins & Dosil, 2011).

Read more of his Geist work at geist.com.

ENDNOTES Reviews and comments by Geist staff, contributing editors and correspondents TYPOLOGIES Stephen Osborne

T

he lastest issue of Pilot Illustrated Literary Magazine is Pilot Pocket Book VIII, with Roman numeral, a tiny book-like volume in a yellow cover. It includes a marvellous story by Kris Bertin called “Make Your Move,” written as a series of startups in the usually impossible but here brilliantly deployed second person: you will not want to miss it: Let’s say you’re in the bad part of town; Let’s say, though, that you don’t hang on to that $100 bill; Let’s say that you don’t stay with Jessie; But let’s say you stay the night; A month later you’re at a pet shop buying tropical fish food.

The endings are nearly endless, miraculously circular and impossible to quote from. Robert Coover has a story called “Going For a Beer” in The New Yorker of March 14, 2011; it will remind you of “Make Your Move.” Pilot Pocket Books are a labour of love and considerable craft: the illustrational component is brilliant; the literary component is slightly rockier, but varied enough to keep you reading. Every now and then a masterpiece emerges. Make your move and get yourself a copy: thepilotproject.ca.

The indefinite article in the title of A Complete Encyclopedia of Different Types of People (Coach House) is either a logical impossibility or further evidence of the multiverse. Gabe Foreman is a “new” poet who lives in Montreal, and his first book is a real gem. His catalogue of types extends to Park Statues

(with a quote from Wittgenstein), Penny-­ Pinchers (see Piano Tuners) and Perverts (They have day jobs / just like you and me— / that is, if we had jobs) and ends with Zygotes (see Little Bundles of Joy). Foreman is a meticulous versifier with a sensitive ear. “Snoops” is one perfect line long: Dear diary, destroy my enemies; “Sitting Ducks” opens with a couplet that resonates like an organ in church: There will be tribulations. Perhaps / a tree falls, crushing your horse. These poems yearn to be read aloud, to be shown to the person next to you on the bus. This Complete Encyclopedia is a small masterpiece. Here is one more in its entirety, called “Ploughmen”: A few months of feeling ploughed under, ourselves.

A few months of feeling ploughed under ourselves.

section) to nickname him “Little Louis,” and to insist that Hiero not change a thing about his trumpet playing: “You the stuff. You perfect.” Jazz musicians—particularly black jazz musicians—were one of many groups targeted by the Nazis as they rose to power, and a pivotal moment in Blues comes when Hiero disappears after being taken into custody. However, the main narrative tension in HalfBlood Blues comes not from the Nazis but from internal jealousies that have arisen in the group itself. The novel is recounted in the slang-laced voice of Sid Griffiths, the group’s expatriate African-American bass player, and this vivid narrative voice is the real strength of Half-Blood Blues. Interleaved with events set in the late 1930s are sections set in Berlin in 1992, as Sid is finally forced to deal with his less-thannoble actions of half a century before.

GILLERED

Julian Barnes has finally (to use John Banville’s term) been “Bookered,” winning the 2011 Man Booker Prize for The Sense of an Ending (Random House). A slim,(150-page) novel, the book has at its core a friendship between three adolescent males— Tony, Colin and Alex— and the eventual decay of that friendship. At school the three formed a clique whose principal preoccupations were sex and philosophy. Their conversations were dotted with mentions of Eros and Thanatos, terms like Weltanschauung and Sturm und Drang, and with self-conscious references to Marx, Shakespeare and Ted Hughes. Tony, now

Michael Hayward

T

he writer Esi Edugyan must be thrilled with the response to her second novel, Half-Blood Blues (Thomas Allen)—winner of the 2011 Scotiabank Giller Prize and shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, Governor General’s Literary Award and Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize. Half-Blood Blues tells the story of a group of jazz musicians living in Berlin, and later in Paris, in 1939. The youngest of them, and the central figure of the novel, is Hiero: twenty years old, a German citizen, black. Hiero is a trumpet player gifted enough for Louis Armstrong (who gets a cameo appearance in the Paris

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retired following “a career and a single marriage, a calm divorce,” is the narrator of The Sense of an Ending. The arrival of a lawyer’s letter prompts Tony to reexamine the dissolution of that central friendship, a delicate balance that was disrupted by the arrival at school of a new boy, Adrian Finn. But what exactly happened all those years ago? Despite his apparent certainty, even Tony doesn’t seem to know. The Sense of an Ending provides a master class in fiction-writing: Barnes offering us a narrator completely believable in his lack of self-awareness, and a mystery that feels organic rather than contrived, one that is successfully maintained right to the end.

THE POETS, THE INNOVATIONS, THE JERSEY SHORE Jordan Abel

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asy Peasy by kevin mcpherson eckhoff (Snare Books) isn’t particularly easy, but it is extremely energetic and unwilling to linger in the same place for too long, which is a positive attribute in the current poetry climate. This slim book guides the reader through mcpherson eckhoff ’s experimental vision of an instruction manual on installing a laminate floor, a legal Canadian immigration kit and a medical survey checklist—all in the first twelve pages!— and it explodes from there, delivering numerous images coupled with hilarious subtitles. This would all be fine if there wasn’t so much squeezed onto a page.

“How To Build a Bomb Shelter” includes fifteen illustrations, fifteen explanatory notes underneath those illustrations and another fifteen notes under the first notes.

Did I mention that the page itself is only 7 x 4.5"? There’s not a lot of white space here, which is shame because the poems in Easy Peasy are fairly dense and would

benefit from some breathing room. But if you can deal with a small typeface, the constant innovation is a blast.

If you’re into poetry, you should be reading David McGimpsey. Not because his books are hilarious—which they are— but because his writing brims with a charming honesty that is both infectious and refreshing.

His latest book, Li’l Bastard (Coach House Books), is no different.

The collection comprises 128 “chubby sonnets,” meaning sonnets with two extra lines. Many of the stanzas are distinct, though, making me feel at times like I was reading a book of 512 quatrains. Which, arguably, would be a terrible subtitle for this book. But they work! Each quatrain offers clever perspectives on pop culture that are rarely discussed in poetry: Shania Twain, Archie comics, Jersey Shore, ratemyprofessor.com, Bauhaus, birthday cakes. I’m not advocating that more poets write about Jersey Shore, but it feels damn good to read a book that’s aware of the world. Even more important, McGimpsey offers up the figure of the poet as a living, breathing human being—an accomplishment well worth experiencing.

CONFIDENT IN HER MANHOOD

$200 or more Between $100 and $200 Between $50 and $100 Under 50 bucks which are then followed by the answer key: –15 points. Real men don’t pay that much for a washing machine or their hookers.

–10 points. $150 is a brand-new chain saw.

–5 points. Real men are frugal. They are cheap with their beer and food, so what the fuck makes you think they’d spend that kind of money on jeans? +1 0 points. Give yourself an extra +5 points if that favorite pair of jeans has an oil stain on them.

Readers are warned to score at least 20, ideally 40 points on the quiz before proceeding to the first chapter. Any less, and you’re instructed to put the book down.

Despite having scored a mere 15 (5 for paying on a first date, 10 for inexpensive pants), I was confident in my manhood and turned the page.

Like most warnings, such as height restrictions on roller coasters and hazard labels on pesticides, the results of the manliness quiz should be heeded. Got Fight is blandly humorous and ineffectively sexist, like an X-rated episode of The Red Green Show on steroids.

Lauren Ogston

G

ot Fight?: The 50 Zen Principles of Hand-to-Face Combat

by Forrest Griffin (itbooks) begins with a manliness quiz entitled “You Must Take This Test Before Reading My Book.”

Griffin, the winner of the first season of The Ultimate Fighter, a Reality TV show and mixed martial arts competition (really the same thing), asks: “How much does your favorite pair of jeans cost?” and lists the possible answers:

WHAT WAR CAN DO Patty Osborne

T

he pivotal events of Freddy’s War

by Judy Schultz (Brindle & Glass) take place in Hong Kong during six short weeks in 1941, but the damage done to Freddy lasts for the rest of his life and affects the lives of people thousands of miles away in Manitoba. During those six weeks, Freddy McKee, a seventeen-yearold member of the Winnipeg Grenadiers, Winter 2011 • GEIST 83 • Page 65

endnotes

sees battle enough times to lose his illusions about the glory of war, marries a young Chinese woman named Su Li and is captured by the Japanese and put in a POW camp. Five years later when Japan capitulates, Freddy goes back to Canada; but even in a tiny town in the middle of the prairies he cannot escape the memories of the things that were done to him and by him.

His pain reverberates through the lives of the people who love him, including Su Li (who manages to make her way to Canada), Joanna (the wife of Freddy’s dead army buddy) and Joanna’s daughter, Hope. When Freddy left home at the age of eleven he moved to Chinatown, where he lived in a room above a restaurant run

by Yip Lee (a man he had befriended), and the fact that Freddy has one foot in a Chinese world and one foot in a white Canadian world adds a layer of racial misunderstanding to a story where everyone misunderstands what war can do to us.

The writing is awkward in a few places, but this is a great read.

CULTURAL ERASURE Jocelyn Kuang

T

hings Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe (Anchor Canada) was recommended to me, and it was wonderful.

I honestly couldn’t put it down. The plot surrounds the highly respected Okonkwo of an Ibo village in Nigeria. We are established in his world and we are offered an understanding of his tribe’s customs, their way of life, and the extent that Okonkwo goes to in order to avoid being perceived as weak and lazy, like his father. As the story progresses, Okonkwo loses his tribal status and witnesses the invasion of Page 66 • GEIST 83 • Winter 2011

his people by European settlers. He tries to regain his respect at a time when the tribe itself is changing. As readers, we sympathize with Okonkwo. We understand how important the culture and lifeways of the village are, and how devastating it is for Okonkwo to have them taken away and to be unable to go back to life as he knew it in the Ibo village.

owner, even before she finds thousands of dollars squirrelled away in the attic like rumpled newspaper. It is the confidence of Boudreau’s voices that transports us through these strange spaces—these narrators put you there, they destabilize you on purpose, they trust you to situate yourself, enough that you forget the hand pressed to the small of your back, guiding you through the stories.

UNCERTAINTY PRINCIPLE OWNING THE FLESH

Ben Rawluk

T

he stories in Laura Boudreau’s Suitable Precautions (Biblioasis) are powered by narrative voices that move toward and away from their subjects effortlessly and withhold the certainty of solid ground; each story is an act of faith. In the story “Poses,” we move in so close to the narrator that we can barely see the scene and must hold on to her quick, sharp voice as the scene of a schoolgirl posing for pornographic pictures is revealed to us in slow, unsettling bursts. In “Monkfish,” we pull back and a dinner party is delivered to us as if we’re pressing our faces to a window to look in—we see the secrets of each guest, but there’s distance, something holding us back, as if the small revelations are whispered to us so that no one inside will hear. At times Boudreau twists the camera around, as in “Falling in Love,” plunging us into the second-person point of view; we’re suddenly aware of the “uncomfortable shoes and underwear that gives [us] a rash.” And her characters struggle to find their footing along with us. The children in “The Dead Dad Game” can only guess at the inner life of the adults around them, trying to gauge their reactions to the eponymous game.

In another story, a woman moves into a new house, uncertain how to respond to mail coming from the deceased former

Eric Uhlich

F

ew want to be misunderstood, even less so misrepresented. In Lynn Coady’s new novel, The Antagonist (Anansi), her narrator, Gordon “Rank” Rankin Jr., has the unsettling experience of encountering himself in a new book written by an old friend. He feels that he is portrayed inaccurately—indeed betrayed. The confidant for whom as a young man he was “always yanking off hanks of self flesh,” and sharing the details of his tortured psyche, has written those long-lost chunks into a creature all its own. Rank recognizes himself in the creature all too well, and not well enough. He needs to set the record straight; even more urgently he needs to provide some justification for things he did as a young man, and explanation for things that happened to him; a little fleshing out. Coady carries her narrative along as a memoir in the form of emails, Rank’s versions of longago events that he sends to his writerfriend. He narrates much of the story, including flashbacks to a musty and tarnished golden age of youth, providing backstory to the events he feels are misrepresented and glossed over. His life is not a shallow pool of reactions and reflex: he had reasons and context. More than anything, he tries to take back the meat of

endnotes

his history for himself, confirming the confusion, regret and evolution of youth.

Naturally, in the process, Rank discovers Facebook, the modern autobiographer’s tool. On “the wall” we make private events public, affirm and promote our authentic selves: there’s no need for a witness, because I will explain what quirky adventure I had last night when no one was around, or tell everyone else how great the party was on Saturday night— though rarely how bad I feel for punching that kid in the face as a teenager. Rank does feel bad, he feels awful, and he feels it wasn’t his fault alone. Facebook actually helps him learn a lesson about his past: that it doesn’t entirely belong to him. He keeps on writing to his friend, however, because the juiciest self flesh is still to come, and he needs to get it all out.

the last breath out of a gun-wielding, drug-crazed bar patron, or when he loses his faith in God, can these stories reveal Rank’s character, or do they only complicate our perception of him? Lynn Coady’s writing reaches its full breadth as she increasingly obscures our understanding of Rank and his understanding of himself. All the meat-headedness that Rank embodies—his threatening physique, his belowaverage grades, his penchant for 40s of rye—is cut with his continual refusal to settle with these characteristics. Whether this is a step toward truth or a step away remains unknown. And it’s beside the point.

Coady shows us that Rank is all of these things, and he will never entirely breach the confines of himself; however, once he has read his life at the hands of another and become a character in his own story, he has the ability to change the narrative.

SECOND OPINION Caroline McGechaen

W

ho owns your story? Not the physical signifiers of your life— your photographs or your diary, for instance—but rather your memories, what events shaped your identity and how you came to reconcile yourself with yourself.

Lynn Coady’s The Antagonist considers this question through the character of Rank, the adopted son of a loudmouth manager of an ice cream shop. The story follows Rank on his quest to rewrite the wrongs that have been written and collected into a moderately well-received book about his life by his former friend, Adam. Initially it would seem that Rank is correct in thinking that nobody knows his story better than he does because he is forced to live it every day, with or without Adam. At the same time, Rank may be too emotionally invested in the painful and life-altering moments in his story to tell it truthfully. When he delivers a knockout punch that turns a local street tough into a vegetable, or when he squeezes

LIGHTER THAN AIR HOCKEY Jill Mandrake

I

’m sad to report that Robert Lieberman’s film Breakaway (Hari Om Productions) has been receiving rather poor reviews, with an average rating (on the 5-star scale) of 2.5. I attribute this to two reasons: First, if you go to Breakaway expecting to see any stand-up routines by Russell Peters (who has a supporting role), you’ll be disappointed. There are only a few scenes in which he is given carte blanche to bust loose with his delightful and brilliant comedy.

Second, reviewers tend to treat feel-good films derisively, as though they’re merely a fidgety waste of time. Breakaway is about a Sikh-Canadian hockey team, the Speedy Singhs, who have the collective starry-eyed goal of breaking into the big leagues. At one point, they don some dazzling designer helmets. The highlight is an unexpected

finale where the cast breaks into a Bollywood production number, led by rap star Ludacris. In other words, it cannot be otherwise: A feel-good film. I’d give it a higher rating than its 2.5 average, but I find the film-rating system too fixed or, I daresay, too calculated. Instead, I’ll simply recommend Breakaway as a bit of entertainment to lift your spirits for a hundred minutes.

NOTED ELSEWHERE Recent news of Geist writers and artists, gathered from here and there.

While writing about Methodist Hatchet, Ken Babstock’s latest collection of poems (Anansi), a reviewer called Babstock “the best Canadian poet of his generation.”

Quill & Quire wrote that Babstock “wants more out of poetry, and is determined to produce language that sings in a new frequency.” The Globe and Mail wrote: “the vocabulary is lush, peppered with Canadian gems such as Moosonee and Tecumseh, but also Chekhov, Zizus and PVC.” Rover Arts said that Methodist Hatchet was “almost a barrage of language, poems sometimes so thick with sound it’s difficult for the reader to find a way in.”

This Magazine, referring to Hal Niedzviecki’s short story collection Look Down, This Is Where It Must Have Happened (City Lights), said that the author “repeatedly draws attention to the fact that in the abundance-of-information age, everyone’s a kind of hypocrite, but the message is ultimately lost in the insufferable exchanges of characters who can’t seem to think for themselves.” The Globe and Mail wrote: “unfortunately, these stories are not particularly good art. Niedzviecki is a cultural observer . . . and one senses that these stories are attempts at putting some halogens on our quotidian yet bewildering late capitalistic, everything-goes culture.” According to Quill & Quire, “the stories here are raw, energetic, and, like the author’s 2001 novel Ditch, tend to focus on individual moments of Winter 2011 • GEIST 83 • Page 67

endnotes

intensity, often leaving the connective tissue between scenes implied.”

On Evelyn Lau’s Living Under Plastic (Oolichan), ABCBookWorld wrote that there are “many scintillating lines in this collection [that] show Lau has lost none of her former poetry skills.” The Globe and Mail wrote that Living Under Plastic “offers readers a fleeting glimpse of that which endures despite the diurnal dejectamenta pooling in the deluge of contemporary existence.” The Georgia Straight opined that “Lau is gifted with eloquent precision, able to convey entire experiences through single words and exquisitely crafted lines.”

OFF THE SHELF Books received recently at the Geist office.

Carolyn Black wonders what it would be like to have a furry feral creature as a child (The Odious Child and Other Stories, Nightwood), Bruce Burrows explores

Page 68 • GEIST 83 • Winter 2011

the complexities of a one-eyed fish named Igor (The River Killers: A Danny Swanson Mystery, TouchWood), Eden Robinson tries to get a look at a Sasquatch (The Sasquatch at Home, University of Alberta Press) and Heidi Jackson writes the diaspora of giant rats (A Rat’s Tale II: Escape From Rattovia, Tate Publishing).

The Sense of an Ending eventually ends (Julian Barnes, Random House), The Everlasting Season is a finite experience (Daniel J. Brommer, Tate Publishing), The Quiet Gentleman speaks (Georgette Heyer, Sourcebooks Casablanca).

Michael Bronte envisions a supernatural world where dead presidents play a lethal board game that has realworld consequences (Presidential Risk, iUniverse), John Nielsen catapults a seventeen-year-old girl into an adventure through space and time (Time Hole, selfpublished) and Ken Ungerecht postulates that evolution is a logical absurdity (God Theories, Xlibris).

Life lessons are learned in Never Hug a Mugger on Quadra Island (Sandy Duncan and George Szanto, TouchWood); pitches are broken down in $ell Your Own Damn Movie! (Lloyd Kaufman, Focal Press) and ecstasy is achieved in Surpassing Pleasure (John Slater, Porcupine’s Quill).

George Bowering and Jean Baird compile an anthology of mourning (The Heart Does Break: Canadian Writers on Grief and Mourning, Random House), Adam Gopnik asks existential questions about a season (Winter: Five Windows on the Season, Anansi), Michelle Shephard analyzes the decade-long aftermath of 9/11 (Decade of Fear: Reporting from Terrorism’s Grey Zone, Douglas & McIntyre) and Stan Persky examines the triumphs and tensions of modern fiction and nonfiction (Reading the 21st Century, McGillQueen’s University Press).

Dany Laferrière unites poetry and prose (The Return, Douglas & McIntyre), Stephanie Bolster offers a vision of

endnotes

nature as constructed or framed (A Page From the Wonders of Life on Earth, Brick Books) and Stephen Gauer meditates on grief, coping and forgiveness (Hold Me Now, Freehand Books).

Cornelia Hoogland retells the Little Red Riding Hood story from the perspectives of the mother, the woodsman and Red (Woods Wolf Girl, Wolsak and Wynn), Brian Ralph reimagines the zombie apocalypse as an art-house piece (Daybreak, Drawn & Quarterly), Lynn Coady rethinks the depths of hockey enforcers (The Antagonist, Anansi), Jarett Kobek repeats a story within itself (ATTA, Semiotext(e)), Esi Edugyan revitalizes Paris in the 1940s (Half-Blood Blues, Thomas Allen) and Jenny Sampirisi reintroduces, mutilates and parades out a frog-and-girl opera that plays out like a YouTube mashup of midcentury cartoons set to a contemporary pop song (Croak, Coach House Books).

Artists in This Issue Brian Howell’s photographs have been shown across Canada and internationally, and published in the Guardian, National Post, Reader’s Digest, Western Living and Maclean’s, as well as in Geist. He is the author of five books, most recently Fame Us: Celebrity Impersonators and the Cult(ure) of Fame (Arsenal). He lives in Delta, BC, and at brianhowellphotography.com.

The photographs of Alfred Cheney Johnston (1885–1971) grew out of his work drawing and painting nude models at the National Academy of Design in New York. In 1917, he became an official photographer for the Ziegfeld Follies, and he ran his own commercial studio.

William Notman (1826—1891) was a Montreal photographer whose images

of the Grand Trunk Railway Victoria Bridge inspired Queen Victoria to name him “Photographer to the Queen.” He was well known for his photographic portraits, and for photos of fishing, farming, mining, resort life and commercial railway construction taken all across Canada.

Noa Neuman Spivak is a visual artist and photographer who has been “shooting” everything around her for twentyfive years. She lives in Vancouver.

Bruce Sweeney is a Vancouver photographer and filmmaker. He has written and directed five films, most recently Excited and American Venus, and has contributed writing, editing, production and sound work to many others.

Eric Uhlich is an illustrator, the artist of the graphic novel Green Skies, and the designer for Geist.

Winter 2011 • GEIST 83 • Page 69

crossword

The GEIST Cryptic Crossword Prepared by Meandricus Send copy of completed puzzle with name and address to: Puzzle #83 GEIST 210-111 West Hastings St. Vancouver, B.C. V6B 1H4 Fax 604-677-6319 The winner will be selected at random from correct solutions received and will be awarded a one-year subscription to Geist or—if already a subscriber—a Geist magnet. Good luck!

ACROSS 1 In a very short time he sold half of that overwhelming number but he went under anyway (2) 6 It was stolen over there beyond that barrier, where the west commences 11 Down there, those legal eagles are a bunch of old goats in camel-hair coats 13 Apparently that girl had a hand in our muscle-bound hero’s death—it sounds like it was her mayo 14 Put your name in the drywall where it’s soft and wet 15 You arrange the future while I organize the chairs 16 I got those messages about the lack of snail involvement 18 It’s unclear whether that’s not a nice way to get rid of our annual pest, isn’t it?

20 Did I hear wrong or was she her brother’s wife?

21 How did a nice Muslim like him end up in that dead-end town?

23 Don’t back up now—things aren’t so hot outside the store (2) 27 Look, she’s standing up. Isn’t that funny?

29 Spin that big one in the beginning of the ninth 31 The emperor settled in eastern Alberta 33 If all RNA was the same we’d have to measure the drops 36 Take cover—Bob says it’s gonna fall on that crooked highway (2) 38 If nothing more, he’s the one 39 I spy a ghostly circle 40 Sounds like she switched once they managed to contain all that water 42 The rarest one blew in from Labrador 44 She showed it to me but I was about to leave anyway 45 Put those drugs in the sterile slipper 47 In that zone the train goes like a cyclone (2) 53 Bad stomach? Drink this and you’ll feel no pain 55 What’s in here? A rose or a whatchamacallit?

56 What’s the total distance from one end to the other? (abbrev) 57 Paul had a blue one but the cattle team didn’t 58 Squeeze it together but don’t hog the money, my little love apple (abbrev) 59 Hiemal seems to be unfriendly but that could be seasonal 60 That blowhard is somewhere over the sea so we’ll have to take him by force (2) DOWN 1 That cold drops a finer zinger that will be solid (2) 2 This year that guy with a knack for

predictions will publish 3 When you blow up and down it seems like you’re giving us a very cold greeting 4 My receptors sense that a rat is at this meeting 5 In winter, is this type really colder? Not a sound idea 6 The cause is becoming obscure but he may be going deaf 7 In winter, that nosy fellow Jack often likes a wee dram or two 8 Okay, it’s bubbly, but is it the real thing?

9 Don’t go down the lane with that elegant fellow 10 Judy can certainly made an impression when she’s driving!

12 That optimist in the lounge is misrepresenting that old reptile (2) 17 In Pakistan, it’s devilishly complicated to say “Hi Satan!”

19 They have a real knack for the culture, eh? And in two languages! (abbrev) 22 Is he over her or is he just feeling exposed?

24 Jerry drove across the stream when he came to it 25 We had a whale of a time—one of them really killed me 26 Mrs. Dot Hunter says that modern truths can create strong currents and a lot of noise 28 Apparently the taller cola causes less damage but I wouldn’t bet the farm on it 30 Wipe with one and you’ll have a wet bum 31 That elementary combo would be sweet by any name (abbrev) 32 She says we should compromise on the rarebit 34 I think I will never tire of joining my brain cavities

Let’s go to meetings in Rome That bagpipe chanter likes grass Puppy presents, sometimes in gift bags (2) I have to get a uniform for Queenie’s favourite school (abbrev) 46 At 31, it’s easy to make a legal decision 47 Brrrr! Crystal wants a Coke with ice 48 Let’s just hack around here until our car comes 49 Oh, the boys always sign up beforehand 50 In that musical she tore herself away from her escort 51 A jar of stout for that fellow in the pointy hat, please 52 The second-highest member could be the lowest female 54 She says she’s surprised when she gets mixed up, even at 41 35 7 3 41 43

Jim Lowe and Brian Goth of Elizaville, NY, solved Puzzle #82 and won the winners’ draw—for the third time in a row! That’s a record.

P S Y C H E D E A E A I N C O L D B L H L L S T H O R E A L S I E L T D Y E T G R O P E A U D I O F G U A D M E N P S T A N J L O W E T F L O W I E A S N N E H R T A R

L I C H O O E A O O D K D U T M S P H I P R A D A U T I C A N E M A E M I C Z E H E R C H I C C U J A C K

A G R O U O V P Y R A T A P U N L D I E T

Winter 2011 • GEIST 83 • Page 71

Page 2 • GEIST 81 • Summer 2011

caught mapping

Guy Thing the canadian map of men by Melissa Edwards

Blue Man Cape (NU) Tie Creek (MB)

Mister Creek

Chap Creek (MB)

modified Geistonic projection

Pater Noster Islands Himdick Lake (ON)

Joe Lake (NU) Ken Lake

Beardmole (ON) Belcher Islands

Male Lake (ON)

Father Lake (SK)

Adam Creek Sweatman

Gallant Bay (SK)

Lac Ares

Lord Creek

Lac Sire Lac Letche

Three Kings Creek

Lazyman Island Lac Grandfather

Hairy Hill (AB)

Old Man’s Neck

Manly (AB) Three Brothers Peaks

Old Boy Shoals

Stag Harbour Duder Lake

Goodson Creek

Snails Head Snakes Bight

Bachelor Bay

Lac Playboy

Sperm Bay

Lac Butch Cap Fraternité

Knight Inlet

Lac Des Petits Garçons

Masterman Islands

Prince

Mount Romeo

Guysborough

Younghusband Ridge

Gentleman Cove The Brothers 18

Stud Islets

Tomcat Hill

Manning Park

Daddy Good Mountain

Le Desert-à-brave-homme

Armstrong Parc Joe-Beef

Groom Creek Buck Creek

Cowboy Lake

Kingman (AB)

Baldy Mountain

Lucky Man Handsome Lake (SK) Nut Mountain

(MB)

Lac Pop Lac Macho

Lac Fellah Jock River

Boys (ON)

The Adams Apple

Mars Hill (MB) One Man Lake

Baldcoot Lake

Dads Rest Island Ball’s Falls Lac Agressif

Hound Lake Goodfellow Beach

Other Man Lake

For more Geist maps and to purchase the Geist Atlas of Canada, visit geist.com

Page 72 • GEIST 83 • Winter 2011

see the companion geist map, “broadside: the canadian map of women,” in geist 82 (fall 2011).

GEIST 83

GEIST Fact + Fiction • NORTH of AMERICA

Mavis Gallant In Paris.

Stephen Henighan, page 55

Issue 83 • Winter 2011 • $6.95

FACT & FICTION

Preoccupied Alberto Manguel on Facing the Camera • Daniel Francis on Touring the Asylum

u

Randy Fred, New World Publisher • Veronica Gaylie Keeps an Eye on Trevor Linden

MADE IN CANADA

Caroline Adderson Finds the Past Lives of Her House • Susanna Moodie, Erasing It in the Bush

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Stephen Osborne Sits In on the Vancouver Poetry Conference and a NaNoWriMo Brunch Seth • The Canadian Map of Men • Erasure Poetry Contest Winners • Hal Niedzviecki F R E E Z E - F R A M E E M B RO I D E RY • G RO U N D S F O R A R R E S T • A J O K E A B O U T S U P E R M A N