Geist 98

THE 12 TH ANNUAL GEIST LITERAL LITERARY

POSTCARD STORY CONTEST Winning entries will be published in Geist and at geist.com.

D EA D L I N E February 1st, 2016 D ETA I L S at geist.com

CAS H ES PRIZ

“Just about the most fun you can have at the writing desk.”

—a happy Geist Postcard Story Contest entrant

GEIST Fa c t + Fi c t i o n

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North of America

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GEIST

Volume 27

· Number 98 · Fall 2015

F EAT U R ES

EXODUS Michel Huneault Syrian refugee photography 40

SHOULDN’T I FEEL PRETTY? Ivan Coyote When did I know? Since always.

48

FR AMED

Sara Cassidy Self-portraiture in Canada 50

PACIFIC MEATS & FROZEN FOODS, INC. Johnathan Fahey It all started with the forklift 57

Page 40. Refugee Photography

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GEIST

Who we are so far

N OT E S & DI S PATC H E S

F IN D IN GS

CO LU MNS

Michał Kozłowski Pillars of Salt 9

22

AFTERLIFE OF CULTURE

Always Waking Up in Montreal

City Apart Stephen Henighan 60

Luke MacLean Je M’Appelle Raphael 13

Surrounded by Ducks

Eve Corbel Greeting Cards for Tiny Occasions 14

Blood Keeper

NATIONAL DREAMS

The Real Poutine

Wolverine

Birth of a Nation Daniel Francis 62 CITY OF WORDS

In Praise of Ronald Wright Alberto Manguel 64

M.A.C. Farrant 4-Day Forecast for Wendy 14 Jeff Shucard Home Front 14

D EPA RT M ENTS

Catnip for Canadians LETTERS

Małgorzata Nowaczyk Knitting Class 16

Kafka in Clayton, OK

4 ENDNOTES

Bearded Ladies

Rob Kovitz What Kinds of Questions 18

I Don’t Read and more…

66 OFF THE SHELF, NOTED ELSEWHERE

70 PUZZLE

71 CAUGHT MAPPING

72 cover:

Two Pages From My Diary by Janieta Eyre. Eyre is best known for her distinctive self-portraits in which she often presents herself as a set of twins in fantastic and carnivalesque settings. She lives in Toronto and at janietaeyre.com. See more Canadian self-portraiture on page 50.

cover design:

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Eric Uhlich

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letters

GEIST

READERS WRITE

published by

The Geist Foundation publisher, editor-in-chief

Michał Kozłowski associate publisher

AnnMarie MacKinnon administration

Digital Publishing: Roni Simunovic Reader Services: Dylan Gyles Office Admin: Christine Novosel Volunteers: Rebekah Chotem, Patty Osborne, Jennesia Pedri brain trust

Stephen Osborne, Mary Schendlinger Co-founders, Consulting Publishers designer

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Helen Godolphin fact checkers

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& marketing

Clevers Media web architects

Metro ­Publisher distribution

Magazines Canada printed in canada by

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Barbara Zatyko first subscriber

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Jordan Abel, Bartosz Barczak, Kevin Barefoot, Philip Basaric, Trevor Battye, andrea bennett, Jill Boettger, Jesmine Cham, C.E. Coughlan, Brad Cran, Melissa Edwards, Robert Everett-Green, Daniel Francis, Randy Fred, Lily Gontard, Michael Hayward, Gillian Jerome, Brian Lam, Jill Mandrake, Becky McEachern, Thad McIlroy, Ross Merriam, Billeh Nickerson, Lauren Ogston, Patty Osborne, Eric Peterson, Dan Post, Leah Rae, Debby Reis, Kris Rothstein, Norbert Ruebsaat, Jane Silcott, Paul Tough, Michelle van der Merwe, Carrie Villeneuve, Kathy Vito support the geist writers and artists fund: geist.com/wafund www.geist.com

SNAIL’S PACE

Regarding the use of the phrase “snail mail” on your most recent renewal effort, one’s home address is used for more than just the post. And to deride the post as a “slow” method is to deny it as the model on which other “faster” systems are based. Stop using such an insulting term.

—Wiebe de Haas, post Obsessive Crossword Disorder

I just want to thank you for my latest obsession—the Geist Cryptic Crossword. I’d never gotten into crossword puzzles and was rolling my eyes while reading the clues of your most recent puzzle (Geist 97), when I understood one clue. That gave me the theme and the obsession took hold. Now archaic crossword hints dominate my day. Just when I give up, another clue is solved, hooking me again, luring me to continue. I have successfully avoided the obsessions of smartphones and the like, and seem to be free of the compulsiveness that plagues most people. I cannot feel so smug anymore. I now have my own obsession.

—Michael Rapati, Denman Island BC A friendly complaint regarding the puzzle that appeared in Geist 95, specifically about 31 Down, “That molecule has got us 71% covered (abbrev).”

We debated between HHO and H2O and opted for the latter. Nowhere were we told there might be a number in the crossword puzzle. So, what is the best crossword abbreviation for water? We didn’t have a definitive answer, but an acknowledgement

might be appropriate, n’est-ce pas?

The puzzle’s always a helluva challenge, but please warn us if anything is out of the ordinary!

—Jim Lowe and Brian Goth, Elizaville NY Right you are, Jim and Brian! We should have mentioned that 31 Down was an anomaly. Also, strictly speaking, HHO, known as Brown’s Gas, is the term for a 2:1 mixture of H2 and O2 gases, not water. Fringe scientists claim it could be used as fuel. —The Editors Bigger Picture

In the act of observation, our eyes don’t focus on a single, distinct image, but instead rapidly roam, collecting multiple, interesting parts of the scene. The scene we see, in fact, consists of a series of perspectives and alternative views that combine to form a more comprehensive observation. Ross Kelly’s layered cityscapes (In Camera, No. 97) appear to derive from David Hockney’s Polaroid collages (see Pearblossom Highway) from the early to mid-1980s. Hockney’s purpose was to expand the width and depth of the scene by integrating multiple viewpoints. He returned to this same “bigger picture” theme recently in massive, multiple-canvas paintings such as Arrival of Spring in Woldgate, which is 12' x 32' and is composed of thirty-two separate canvases. The mix of multiple perspectives, a fluid focal point and the balance between stability and change allow the viewer to wander a painting that simultaneously pulls a scene apart and holds it together.

—Edward Carson, Toronto

4 Geist 98 Fall 2015

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Geist is published four times a year.

Gravitas

I was happy to see the review of Gravity’s Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon (“Heavy Reading,” Endnotes, No. 97), but I would have enjoyed it much more had it been less of a brief overview of a not-so-brief novel. It is nice to finally see someone admit they do not understand the book and that this does not take away from enjoyment of it. Those who love Pynchon are very into discussing his writings.

—Connor Robinson, cyberspace Check out “Heavy Reading” by Dylan Gyles on geist.com.

workshops with a friend, and with Kathryn’s permission, I typed up her poem and cut each line into a long, thin strip of paper, put them into a hat and had our seven adult writing students draw out a few. The assignment was to read the lines both literally as a writing prompt, and metaphorically as inspiration for a new poem or short prose piece. The class came up with some pretty wonderful stuff!

—Frank Beltrano, London ON To read some of the work produced by Frank Beltrano’s students, visit geist.com.

It only has four colours but is very funny. Support print!

—@nickeagland You’re doing it wrong. Make and sell socks and actual maple syrup that come with a free magazine!

—@communicable Loved your collaboration in the last issue. I like a little giggle on the side of my #CanLit —@KellyS_Thompson Four-Legged Friends

I got a big kick out of seeing Kathryn Mockler’s piece “Your Poem Should Have Four Legs” in the summer issue (No. 97). I lead creative writing

write to geist G

Thoughts, opinions, comments and queries are welcome and encouraged, and should be sent to: The Editor, Geist letters@geist.com Snailmail: #210 – 111 West Hastings St. Vancouver BC v6b 1h4 Letters may be edited for clarity, brevity and decorum. Authors of published letters will receive a Geist map suitable for framing.

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Sweet Tweets

Re: the Geist/Syrup Trap collaboration in No. 97:

Contents copyright © 2015 The Geist Foundation. All rights reserved.

artists in this issue

Brandon Blommaert is an animator and illustrator. His short films include e:e:e:e:e and aaa[A]aaa. His films have been screened internationally. He lives in Montreal. Visit him at bblommaert.com.

Joey Comeau writes the comic A Softer World and is the author of a number of books, including Overqualified and One Bloody Thing after Another. He lives in Toronto.

Eve Corbel is a writer, illustrator, cartoonist, mom and grandma. Her writing and artwork have been published in numerous anthologies and periodicals, including Geist.

Randy Fred has worked in communications since 1974. He is the founder of Theytus Books. In 2005 he received the Gray Campbell Distinguished Service Award for his contribution to publishing in British Columbia. He lives in Nanaimo.

Michel Huneault is an awardwinning photographer whose work has appeared in the New York Times, the Globe and Mail and many other publications. He lives in Montreal.

Eric Uhlich, who designs and composes Geist, is an illustrator and graphic designer. He created the artwork for the graphic novel Green Skies and for several shorter comics. Visit him at oktober.ca.

Publications Mail Agreement 40069678 Registration No. 07582 Return undeliverable Canadian addresses to: Circulation Department, #210 – 111 West Hastings Street Vancouver BC Canada v6b 1h4 Email: geist@geist.com Tel: (604) 681-9161, 1-888-geist-eh; Fax: (604) 677-6319; Web: geist.com Geist is a member of Magazines Canada and the Magazine Association of BC. Indexed in the Canadian Literary Periodicals Index and available on microfilm from University ­Microfilms Inc., Ann Arbor, Michigan, USA. The Geist Foundation receives assistance from private donors, the Canada Council, the BC Arts Council and the Cultural Human Resources Council.

We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Periodical Fund (CPF) of the Department of Canadian Heritage.

Letters 5

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R A N D Y

A

fter sixty-five years of life in Canada I sadly report that racism is still alive and thriving, and its eradication appears unlikely in today’s world.

The missing and murdered indigenous women and girls situation is a clear example of racism. Indian residential schools were legislated racism.

The development of the Canadian justice system to protect the property of colonizers was blatant racism. The modern British Columbia treaty process is a continuation of legislated racism; treaties create a structure through which colonial governments will eventually take possession of the little land and resources remaining in the care of First Nations tribes.

The nine years I lived in the Alberni Indian Residential School were my formative years and they were fraught with racism. I had my language and culture beaten out of me, a well-documented experience that took place in every Indian residential school in North America. We were called horrible names and we learned to accept them. First Nations people have always been territorial. This was brought into the schools. Alliances among tribal groups in the schools were natural. As a body of victims, the kids came to hate the white authoritarian staff and it was easy to transfer this hatred to society in general; a lack of healthy social skills was the result.

Of course, racism is not experienced only by Aboriginal peoples.

Immigrants moving to Canada face bouts of racism, as do ethnic minorities who have called Canada home for generations. Fear mongering generates racism. The internment of Japanese Canadians during World War II is only one example.

I am puzzled as to how immigrants acquire racist attitudes toward Aboriginal people. Where do newcomers get information that breeds these attitudes?

I regularly come in contact with people

R E P O R T S

from many backgrounds in whom I sense racist attitudes. I continually hear about newcomers to Canada perpetuating racist myths, such as the notion that Aboriginals receive everything for free.

When I was in New Zealand in February, I found a much different situation. The country is cosmo­politan, with immigrants from all over the world, much like Canada. But they have come to appreciate each other. The Maori people are an integral segment of the population. It was very refreshing to hear the mayor of Wellington deliver a welcoming address fluently in the Maori language. Perhaps the fact that Maori language and culture are integral to the New Zealand education system can be seen as encouraging for the future of indigenous cultures all over the world.

My worst and best experiences to do with racism were in Golden, British Columbia, in the 1970s and ’80s.

My employer at the time put me up in a motel, so I had to eat in restaurants. I was refused service in every restaurant except a Chinese café. On weekends I would go up to Banff, and there I was treated like royalty. What a stark contrast! Once, in Lillooet, I was a trouble­ shooter for the BC Forest Service. I went to the local bar after work and was confronted by an angry white guy who told me to get out. The only other people in the bar were also white guys. So I went to the bar next door, where there were only Indians. I barely had time to sit down when this Indian guy came up to me and wanted to fight. The other Indians in the pub were glaring at me angrily. This was puzzling to me, but I left. Across the street was a Chinese restaurant. I went there and the Chinese owner told me he had seen what happened and I could have a beer in his restaurant, and that’s where I spent the remainder of my social time. I assume the Chinese family in Lillooet endured much racism. The fact they remained there is admirable.

Racism abounds in the fishing industry too. When fishing is good, there is peace in the Alberni Valley.

When fishing is poor, the commercial and sports fishing industries turn on Aboriginal fishers. Even the management of the fishery is racist. Court cases have legislated the order of priority to be conservation, Aboriginal fisheries, commercial fisheries and then sports fisheries. The federal government, through the Fisheries & Oceans ministry, turns this order upside down, so that conservation and Aboriginal fishermen get the short end of the stick and the sports fishery gets priority.

But I am trying to consider the positive, to acknowledge the advantages of being discriminated against.

When riding on a bus, ferry or train, you get to have your own private seat.

When supervising children at a park, you get to have an entire picnic table or bench to yourself. When swimming in a public pool, you are given a lot of room as people quickly move away from you. These things used to bother me but I have come to appreciate them.

Interracial marriages show that racism can be overcome. Actions and movements by individuals and groups to obliterate racism are honourable, if usually short-lived. These battles against racism prevent us from annihilating each other.

To be truly impartial is a huge internal challenge. It is difficult, sometimes impossible, to learn to love or even put up with people of other races when you have been taught to hate them. Living in today’s environment with so many ways to absorb information, young people face more challenges in warding off racism than past generations did. Racism can be blunt or subtle. Both are destructive.

And racism can go both ways. I am pleased to report, though, that some of my best friends are white guys.

—Randy Fred

6 Geist 98 Fall 2015

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Go to geist.com or call 1-888-434-7834.

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NOTES & DISPATCHES

Pillars of Salt MICHAŁ KOZŁOWSKI

Tchotchkes, pork chops and the search for the fifth dimension

W

e had just begun our tour when the tour guide said to us: every hour you spend down in the mine adds three minutes to your life.

He was muscular, in his late fifties, dressed in a black suit with brass buttons that looked identical or almost identical to the miners’ uniforms displayed at the entrance to the mine.

The tour will last three hours, said the guide, so by the time we finish today your lives will be extended by nine minutes. There were twenty-five of us in the group, part of an English-language tour of the Wieliczka salt mine just outside of Krakow, my hometown, where I was visiting with my girlfriend this summer.

We were in a huge cave-like chamber, 64 metres below the surface of the earth; the air was cool and you could taste salt on your lips. The ceiling and walls were grey and rough, like unpolished marble, with thick grooves running along the surface.

The guide held up his hand: the

colour of the salt in the mine results from certain minerals in the salt rock, he said; some salt mines are white, some are pink, this one is grey. He spoke English in the manner of Poles who have learned from the British: strained vowels and thick consonants.

The walls, the ceiling, the floor are all salt, said the guide, you may test this yourself by licking the walls. In fact, you may lick anything in the mine, he said, except for your tour guide.

We followed him out of the chamber and down a wide corridor. The ground was gritty, and as we walked it sounded like snow crunching under our feet. We entered a chamber bathed in amber light to behold an enormous effigy of Nikolaj Copernicus carved in salt, at least 6 metres high, holding an orb in his outstretched arms. The mine has hosted many famous visitors, as you will notice, the guide said. We pulled out our cameras and began to snap pictures of Copernicus towering over us. Forty million people have

photo (right): hmmmayor, flickr, bit.ly/1ikx9ck

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enjoyed the spectacular beauty of the mine, said the guide. Among the many facts shared by him: more than a million people visit the mine each year; in Poland, only Auschwitz is visited more often; the mine began operating in the thirteenth century and stopped producing salt in 1996; it was designated as a UNESCO heritage site in 1978.

We filed down another long, wide corridor to a clearing, where in a sort of stage set back in the wall three men carved from salt stood before a kneeling man extending his hand to a woman with a crown on her head; they too were rendered in salt. Now behold St. Kinga, the guide intoned, who led the Poles to discover this mine when her ring was found right here. He pointed at the hand of the kneeling man.

Farther along we paused to gaze at a massive bust of Casimir the Great, carved in salt, a fourteenth-century Polish king who decreed that miners were entitled to a portion of their Notes & Dispatches 9

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salt output. A huge beard spilled from his jaw and a grey crown was perched on his head, all dusted with whitish powder.

We pressed on with our bags and our cameras, down corridors, down

monochrome version of da Vinci’s Last Supper.

More tour groups crowded in, and we had to cram in close to each other to photograph the statues, one another, ourselves. Our guide called

notes of Frédéric Chopin’s saddest étude, “Tristesse,” drifted forth from somewhere in the dark.

We pushed forth, down tunnels, down corridors, down stairs. The guide said, and now we are at the

stairs, through chambers, past rubber mannequins with wooden carts, into a chapel containing a Crucifixion of Jesus statue (wooden) and a room full of gnomes (rubber), and into another corridor. St. Kinga’s chapel, known as the treasure of the mine, is just up ahead, announced the tour guide. We rounded a corner and were halted by two men in baggy suits whose job was to collect a fee from anyone with a camera. We paid up and carried on toward a balcony looking down into St. Kinga’s chapel, a huge, spectacular room, two storeys high, shimmering in the soft light of five chandeliers made of salt, hanging from the ceiling. From the balcony we descended into the chapel; the floor was polished smooth. The guide ushered us along to an effigy of John Paul II, rendered somewhat smaller than Copernicus but still looming, with his pope staff and his pope hat, his salty grey face carved chunky, gargoylish, unlike the handsome, delicate face of the human John Paul II as I remembered him.

You are now 105 metres below the surface of the earth, the tour guide announced; here you may have some free time to enjoy the scenery.

Elements of this scenery, adorning the chapel: several versions of Jesus rendered in bas-relief, the divine family in a group, a nativity scene, a

us over and we pushed on again, down corridors and along tunnels. At one point we reached a gift shop, snack bar and washrooms. On display in the snack bar were shiny red and silver bags of chips and chocolate bars, orange bottles of carrot juice and red cans of Coca-Cola; two chrome cappuccino machines with blue lights gleamed on the counter. In the gift shop, displayed in vitrines: bags of official Wieliczka salt, miniature wagons and wheelbarrows, pickaxes, crystals, salt and pepper shakers.

As we left, the guide said, we are nearly halfway through our tour. It felt as if we’d been walking for days.

Here it was, the labour of tourism: pay attention to every last banal detail, keep going at all costs, photograph everything, listen, see, experience!

The guide said, we have extended our lives by four minutes already.

The guide pressed on and we pressed on: more tunnels, more chambers, more stairs. Up next: the Weimar chamber, named in honour of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, who visited in 1787, the guide declared with some excitement. Inside the Weimar chamber a pool of water shimmered in the light. Then the lights cut out and from the darkness emerged the sound of thunder crashing. The lights flashed again and the first delicate

world’s first 5-D cinema. We waited in a line against the wall; as the door opened and thirty Japanese tourists marched out, we marched in and took our places on long wooden benches.

The lights went dim and the salt wall before us was flooded by a stream of watery images—grey and blue and green—rushing down from the ceiling, accompanied by sounds of trickling, bubbling and gushing. Where was the fifth dimension? No one asked.

Two hours had passed and the guide pressed on, and we pursued him, down stairs, through tunnels and chambers, past a row of kings, generals, emissaries, all carved in salt, looking unpolished and dull in the industrial-strength lighting. Our guide recited a list of names: Nikolaj Copernicus, Johann von Goethe, Frédéric Chopin, Holy Roman Emperor Joseph II, Alexander I of Russia, Emperor Francis I, Francis Joseph I, William II, Pope John XXIII, Charles de Gaulle, Alexander von Humboldt, Robert Baden-Powell, Bill Clinton. Many of them are here now, he said, in the salt mine.

Eventually we arrived at another gift shop, 125 metres below the surface of the earth, where the souvenirs were more spectacular than in the first gift shop: huge salt and crystal sculptures, turquoise rocks with crystalline

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photos: third from right: wikicommons; all others: brandon blommaert

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patterns, priced at hundreds of dollars. At one end, an enormous plastic sign advertising “the only restaurant in the world that is 125 metres underground.” On the menu a selection of beer and wine, cabbage soup, piero-

gies, pork loin, pork chop, chicken roulade, veal, baked salmon, Viennese cheesecake, fruit pie, millefeuille, panna cotta with raspberries, tea, coffee, juice. The washrooms were equipped with Dyson Airblade dryers,

the kind that dry your hands in twelve seconds.

On our way to the exit we passed a cluster of tour guides without groups, milling about, mumbling into walkietalkies. The tour is now ended, our guide announced; we could leave by the exit or we could hang around.

Finally we were stuffed into an elevator—ten at a time, shoulder to shoulder—and shot to the surface, where in the smothering heat of summer, half a dozen trinket stands offered miniature wheelbarrows, tiny bags of salt, postcards, pamphlets and maps of the mine.

The mine was 327 metres deep, over nine levels, connected by 300 kilometres of tunnels and stairs—we had traversed about 2 kilometres. A thousand miners used to labour here, digging tunnels, transporting slabs of

salt by rope, by trolley, by horse. At one point in the tour we had been shown a display of three life-size mannequins crawling along the ground, holding up long torches, a method used by miners in the middle ages to detect poison gas, which would explode in contact with the torches.

Later I found an article in Harper’s, published in 1862, in which the writer described a recent visit to the Wieliczka salt mine; he was lowered by rope deep into the mine, where he observed the miners at work: “a monstrous group: shocks of hair all powdered with salt; glaring eyeballs overhung by white lashes flashing in the fitful blaze of lamps; the brawny forms glittering with crystal powder and marked by dark currents of sweat!”

Michał Kozłowski is the publisher and editor-in-chief of Geist. Read more of his work at geist.com.

Notes & Dispatches 11

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two-handed in front of my chest. Raphael showed no expression, didn’t bat an eye.

I raised the camera. Raphael appeared in focus. I pulled the trigger just as he began to yell, “Ayyyy!” I apologized immediately on hearing his lengthy chain of Quebecois curse words and tried to explain that I thought we had an artist/muse connection in that moment, but the apologies were met with a squint of discerning eyes. So I wiggled my way backward between the parked cars and moved on.

who had strung together the mosaic awning, with his silver ladder.

I did end up running into him a short while later, around the corner from his house. He was all smiles on that afternoon so I asked him if he recalled our previous meeting. He said that he did, still smiling. Raphael explained that he had been hearing complaints from neighbours who had different ideas as to how an awning should look or be constructed. He said he thought I was taking a picture of his awning to send to the city council or something like that. I told

A week or so passed before I developed the film and was instantly drawn to the shot of Raphael. I had biked past his terrace a few times since our encounter, but hadn’t seen him about.

I was able to gather that what I initially thought was laundry hanging on a line stretched between the columns of his terrace was actually an awning made from rugs, blankets, a broom handle and a light rope. The humid summers in Montreal can be dangerous for the elderly without air conditioning. Someone had done a pretty good job tying the fabrics together for a makeshift barrier to the sun’s rays. I wondered if it was Raphael

Raphael that the photograph had turned out well and he was excited about seeing it. He extended his hand and said “Je m’appelle Raphael.” I told him that I would drop off a print in his mailbox when I got around to it, but he didn’t want to risk his portrait being stolen and gave me his phone number so I could call him when it was ready.

Je M’Appelle Raphael LUKE MACLEAN

Possum-style or straight up dirty

I

first encountered Raphael as I was biking down rue Clark in Montreal on a summer afternoon. He was carrying an aluminum ladder along the side of his home. I hit the brakes and offered some help. Raphael scoffed, backhanded the air and resumed his glacial pace. The second time I spotted Raphael on Clark, on the front terrace of a building, was from about a hundred feet away. He was poking his venerable mug through what looked to be some sort of laundry line orchestrated on his front terrace. I swerved my bike across the street and into the shade where I adjusted my camera’s aperture for a high-noon shot. In order to take full advantage of the photographic opportunity, it was evident that I would have to go in full-possum, which entails putting oneself in a face-to-face position with your subject.

There was a row of parked cars lined up on the street between me and Raphael. With a fifty-millimetre lens I would have to get in close, dilly-dally with the possum routine and hope for the best, or just shoot him like Robert Frank did all those Americans on a trolley in New Orleans, the direct approach. I decided to go in New Orleans-style, straight up dirty.

Without a beverage or cigarette to occupy, Raphael looked watchful, taking it all in. I pedalled toward my mark and braked between two car bumpers, face-to-face with my subject. In a fluid motion I removed the lens cap and held the camera

Luke MacLean’s photography and short films have appeared in magazines, festivals and exhibits across North America and Europe. He lives in Montreal. See more of his work at duckfirstfatelater.blogspot.com.

Notes & Dispatches 13

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4-Day Forecast for Wendy M.A.C. FARRANT

1. You have a keenness to never let your running mind rest. A keenness to be emotionally important.

You love dancing while wearing a bowtie and are not allergic to glee.

But you will never applaud a legend in the unmaking. Your dad, the retired banker, for one. His aging narrative has grown side effects.

Yesterday he was spotted exposing himself at a busy intersection while wearing see-through pantyhose beneath your mother’s curry-coloured coat.

This caused mild excitement among passing motorists. The police were called. A witness described your dad as not having much to show for himself.

He was quietly delivered home.

In light of this, your being an astrophysicist doesn’t seem like such a big deal today.

2. Today you are in the original mystery business, a former bride hoping to penetrate the story, deliver the goods. Elements of a leaping terrier appear, and devoted goats, elephants, flat floating fish. A festival of washing dishes, cooking, hauling garbage, weeping and laughing appears.

Mostly you are rushing from one beginning to another declaring, “Doesn’t the world look stunning? It almost feels natural!”

It’s hard to describe the look in your shiny chocolate eyes.

3. On this day you will mention to Gary, your husband of twenty-seven years, that you wouldn’t mind being your family’s head of state. You come from a long line of maternal control, you’ll explain, and so your request is not an unreasonable one. Furthermore, you will say, the men in your family do not

Home Front JEFF SHUCARD

Elders gizmo collection

S

ince my mother’s passing last year, my father has remained adamant about staying on in their home. He has been there for sixty years; his entire life is contained there. But the house is too big, too demanding and much too expensive to maintain. There are too many stairs for a ninety-year-old man to climb every day. His family and friends can’t convince him that he now needs to move to an assisted living community for his own safety and

well-being. He is entrenched in the house, steeled to defend his independence. “You fall down, Dad, and injure yourself,” I remind him on the phone daily, “then you end up in the hospital and I have to drive down and take care of you.”

“I’m not going to fall down again,” he assures me. “That was just a one-time accident.” “Yeah,” I reply, “one time too many.” “I don’t need your help,” he lashes out. “I’ve been taking care of myself since I was five years old.” “OK, Pops, have it your way. Just be careful.”

I hire a caregiver, Sophia, to come in for four hours a day. She does all the domestic work and shopping. In the evening, after dinner, he lies down on

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become heads of state, ever. They tend to drop back to their own devices and drink Scotch in a corner of the living room with the cat on their lap.

It will be late afternoon when you broach the subject with Gary. Good news! He’ll be in the garden shed smoking his daily joint. He’ll be sitting on the old white leather chair he dragged out there and he’ll be looking at you pleasantly. You, on the other hand, will be breathless. Still, you will tell him what’s on your mind.

Gary will be quiet for a long while after you speak. He’ll be staring at the dust on the shovel. Finally, he will say, “If that’s what you want, Wendy…”

And grin.

4. Today your dog will decide to end things. Your dog, who is wearing a red vinyl jacket and is tied to the tree on the boulevard outside the thrift store.

His name is Rusty and suddenly he feels like he’s dragging a rusty anchor.

This is because he now understands the truth of his situation: you don’t really love him. It’s what he’s suspected for some time. That for you, being with him is like being in a prison. Because he, Rusty, is never going to grow up and go to school and get a job and support you later. Very quickly he’s going to become an old dog and, possibly, an expensive and cranky one.

When you come out of the thrift store he can read the truth in your eyes.

Even though you say “Thank you so much for waiting for me,” he knows it’s a lie. Your mind is elsewhere. You’d sooner walk by him and visit that cat in the pet shop down the street.

Every dog should have a boy instead of a fifty-six-year-old woman, he thinks.

M.A.C. Farrant is the author of more than a dozen works of fiction, non-fiction and memoir. Her latest book, The World Afloat (Talon), won the 2014 City of Victoria Butler Book Prize. She lives near Sidney, BC.

his sofa and watches TV. After a few minutes he falls asleep. Then he wakes up and goes to bed. Out of twentyfour hours, he probably sleeps about sixteen. I call him twice a day from Quebec. He tells me he doesn’t go out much anymore, especially in the cold winter weather. He has no meat left on his bones, no muscle, no protective padding. Every fall, every little bump results in terrible damage. Much of his body is black and blue from even the slightest encounters with door frames, furniture and other benign objects.

Simple daily routines have become potentially dangerous actions for him.

“Use your cane and your walker,” I urge him. “You don’t want to end up back in the hospital.”

He tells me he has discovered a new pastime: shopping from mail order catalogues. “These catalogues are terrific,” he exclaims. “I’m ordering all kinds of things.” “Sounds great,” I say. I go online to see the catalogues for myself.

One is called Heartland America. Just a minute of perusing the eclectic array of medicine-show gizmos and trinkets, man-made leather footwear, clothing designed by Chairman Mao’s tailor, ill-conceived housewares and specious miracle cures is enough to make my heart sink. There is not a single item offered that anyone in their right mind would purchase. I see the “revolutionary” Fat Freezer, guaranteed to take off 20% of your body fat; the combination stun gun/flashlight/hunting knife; the

recording of James Earl Jones reading the entire Old and New Testaments; the bio-energizer spa that releases harmful toxins from your body; collectable statues of the saints made of holy clay from the Jordan River; portable tanning salons; dog bark eliminators, laser brushes, holistic hearing aids, dream catchers, sleep masks that massage the eye lids—a phantasmagoria of products to dazzle those whose minds are steadily slipping further and further away from reality, whose bodies are frail and whose pocket books are tight. I turn off the computer. I’ve seen enough.

My father began his shopping spree in the fashion department. He ordered jackets, sweaters, shirts, trousers and shoes. In his new wardrobe he looks like a mummy that has been dressed up for a big night of trick-or-treating.

The shapeless clothing hangs off his black and blue skeletal physique like oversized grain sacks. The colors are blinding: vibrant greens, purples, reds and yellows. He thinks he looks fine.

From there, he set his eye on this season’s Elders Gizmo Collection: glow-inthe-dark toilet seats, electric blankets that play soothing muzak favourites, talking atomic-powered watches, 3D eyeglasses that restore vision, wallets that say “I’m here, I’m here” every minute from their hiding places. Then there are all the miracle ointments, salves, oils, creams, capsules, suppositories and lotions that restore youth and vigour to bodies barely able to move. He has shelves of these. In our daily phone talks he keeps me up to date on his purchases. I say, “Didn’t you buy a pair of black plastic shoes last week, Dad?” “No, those were brown,” he replies. He doesn’t remember. Now he has three pairs of new black plastic shoes. Sophia puts his shoes and clothing away in the closet where they belong, but he forgets they are there.

Then he forgets he has a closet. I need to get him a glow-in-the-dark sign for the bedroom closet door that reads: Look in here before buying any new Notes & Dispatches 15

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clothing. “I just bought a new frying pan that turns colour when it’s hot.

You’ve never seen anything like this before,” he recently told me. “Probably not,” I reply. “Don’t worry, I got one for you too,” he informs me. “You’ll love it,” he says.

Right now he is focused on the miracle cure magnetic body wraps, pads and belts. These products are Velcro-tightened and infuse the body with magnetic energy that straightens the spines of hunchbacks, eliminates crippling arthritis and restores muscular strength and balance. My father has them for his arms and legs, back and neck. They are lying all over the house. He wears one for a day or two and complains that he doesn’t feel any better. I tell him that he has to be patient, give them a few weeks and then see. I explain that if they do anything at all, the improvement will probably be gradual and subtle. “No, no, no,” he retorts. “These magnets are powerful, they really work.” “OK, Pops,” I concede. “Good luck with them.” Yesterday he managed to get all of the magnetic wraps strapped on for maximum impact. He had Sophia help him. He walked back and forth letting the magnets do their thing on his emaciated, ninety-year-old body. Then Sophia went home. Sometime later, as he was passing in front of his fridge in the tiny kitchen, the combined magnetic force from all the wraps was so great he was sucked up against the door, wham, and stuck to it, unable to free himself. No strength. Sophia was gone. All the windows were closed and no one would be coming by. He was helpless, a victim of magnetic overdosing. He hung there by the power of the magnets all evening and all night in his purple trousers, lime green sweater and black plastic shoes until Sophia arrived the next morning to pry him off and revive him. Sophia is middleaged and a devout Catholic from the Philippines. She told me on the phone that she had screamed in shock when she found him on the fridge door,

his head hanging down and his arms and legs spread out just like Jesus on the cross and got down on her knees and began to pray. All her life she had worshipped before images of the crucifixion, now here was the real thing right before her. For weeks, she told me, my father had been having visions of people dressed in robes, holding crosses and walking through the walls of the house, but she had never heard of a saint being crucified in their own kitchen before. As she knelt there praying, he suddenly raised his head and began crooning “My Blue Heaven,”

and she just about fainted from fright.

The poor woman gathered herself together and dialed 911. She called me as the paramedics were prying him off the fridge. I listened carefully, poured a stiff Bushmills and packed a bag for another journey south.

Jeff Shucard was born in Paterson, New Jersey. He attended the Minneapolis School of Art and Franconia College. After a decade of foreign travel, he settled in Vancouver for twenty years and worked in education and music. He lives in Nanaimo.

Knitting Class MAŁGORZATA NOWACZYK

During World War II my grandmother ran contraband, hunted pigeons

M

y grandmother Zofia died in 1949, when my mother was eight years old, from tuberculosis she had contracted when she was running contraband cigarettes in the eastern part of Nazi-occupied Poland during World War II. In the photo above, my grandmother is the one sitting front row, left of centre. She has a broad and high forehead and strong chin;

she wears a dark sweater and grips a crochet hook in her right hand.

The photograph is dated March 30, 1935; a memento from the course is written on the back in my grandmother’s beautiful handwriting. It was taken in Niemirów-Zdrój, a once Polish hamlet, now in Ukraine, near the present Poland-Ukraine border, a popular spa in its day, nestled in pine forests on

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the sandy shores of a river known for its sulphurous smell. My grandmother was seventeen at the time and one of fourteen girls in a sewing and textile crafts course: they learned knitting, crochet and basic tailoring.

The girls sitting around the table could be Polish, Jewish or Ukrainian—in the tiny village the three cultures intermingled freely. Some of them were surely killed in the war.

Some were sent to labour camps in Kazakhstan, the Jewish girls were probably sent to the death camp in Bełżec.

Two years after the photo was taken my grandmother married the man who became my grandfather.

By the start of World War II, when Germany and the Soviet Union invaded Poland from opposite directions, she had her first child, a daughter, Lusia. In 1941, her husband was taken prisoner by the Werhmacht.

Their second daughter—Krysia, my mother—was born in a church cellar during the bombing raid that began

Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union.

In the winter of 1943, Lusia died of meningitis. A few months later, when Ukrainian nationalists occupied her village, my grandmother escaped with my mother, who was two, across the River San and found shelter in a small town called Leżajsk. There she eked out an existence for three years.

She caught pigeons and cooked broth in the spring, dug potatoes from the frozen fields in the fall. When the Soviet front stopped at the River San, she sewed cigarettes, which her landlady got from the German soldiers she befriended, into the lining of her coat and punted a small boat across the deep and fast-moving river to sell them to Soviet soldiers. She was in danger not only from the Nazi police and the Soviets, but also from the Polish armed resistance, who would have executed her for collaborating with the enemy.

In 1945, her husband, freed from a Nazi POW camp, made his way to Leżajsk. From there he and my

grandmother and my mother made their way to the town of Gliwice, in southwestern Poland, where they were assigned a flat abandoned by German civilians fleeing the Soviet Army. Here, in 1947, another daughter was born; she was placed in an orphanage because my grandmother had become sick with galloping consumption. In early 1949, my grandmother was admitted to a tuberculosis sanatorium in the mountains, eighty kilometres south of where she lived.

That fall her condition became terminal and she was transferred to an isolation ward at a nearby hospital, where she died on November 30, 1949, far away from her village and from her family.

This is one of a handful of my family’s photos that survived the war.

Małgorzata (Margaret) Nowaczyk was born in Poland and emigrated to Canada in 1981.

She has published two books on genealogy in Poland and is currently working on a collection of short stories in English.

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F A Q

What Kinds of Questions RO B KOV I TZ

So much of how life feels lies in the phrasing

The commander of the Afghan Local Police listens to a question while participating in a key leaders engagement with local Afghan elders in the Shabadeen village, Sarobi district, Paktika province, Afghanistan, Feb. 8, 2012. (U.S. Army photo by Spc. David Barnes/Released)

Q

uestion Proposed by the Academy of Dijon

What is the Origin of the Inequality Among Mankind; and whether such Inequality is authorized by the Law of Nature?

“sociological phenomenon” is to invite all manner of inconvenience for his government.

Tim Harper, For Stephen Harper, Governing Means Never Asking

Jean-Jacques Rousseau, On the Inequality Among Mankind

In Stephen Harper’s world, one does not publicly ask why.

To seek root causes is a sign of weakness.

To launch an inquiry, to bring decision-makers and experts together, is seen as an invitation for opponents to strike or a forum to extort money from the federal government or a waste of time when talk turns his black-and-white world grey.

So, while Harper endures well-deserved criticism for his refusal to consider a national inquiry into murdered and missing aboriginal women in this country, those slinging that criticism can hardly be surprised.

There is no nuance in the prime minister’s world. There are bad guys and good guys and there is no public questioning about how we got where we are.

A crime is a crime, it is to be solved and the perpetrator brought to justice. To concede a

He then desired to know what arts were practised in electing those whom I called commoners; whether a stranger, with a strong purse, might not influence the vulgar voters to choose him before their own landlord, or the most considerable gentleman in the neighborhood? How it came to pass that people were so violently bent upon getting into this assembly, which I allowed to be a great trouble and expense, often to the ruin of their families, without any salary or pension: because this appeared such an exalted strain of virtue and public spirit, that his majesty seemed to doubt it might possibly not be always sincere; and he desired to know whether such zealous gentlemen could have any views of refunding themselves for the charges and trouble they were at, by sacrificing the public good to the designs of a weak and vicious prince, in conjunction with a corrupted ministry? He multiplied his questions, and sifted me thoroughly

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upon every part of this head, proposing numberless inquiries and objections, which I think it not prudent or convenient to repeat.

Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels into Several Remote Regions of the World

And yet the question is a real one, And not for me alone, though certainly for me.

For even if, as Wittgenstein once claimed, That while the facts may stay the same And what is true of one is true of both, The happy and unhappy man inhabit different worlds, One still would want to know which world this is, And how that other one could seem so close.

So much of how life feels lies in the phrasing, In the way a thought starts, then turns back upon itself Until its question hangs unanswered in the breeze.

John Koethe, North Point North

“But what did happen at Megeve?”

She put this question so urgently that for the first time I felt discouraged, and even more than that, desperate, the kind of despair that overwhelms you when you realize that in spite of your efforts, your good qualities, all your goodwill, you are running into an insurmountable obstacle.

“I’ll tell you about it… Another day… ” There must have been something distraught in my voice or my expression, because she squeezed my arm as though to console me and said: “Forgive me asking you indiscreet questions… But…” Patrick Modiano, Missing Person

Who knew that a brief stay in a closet could have such lasting political consequences?

I’m obliged to pose this question after Stephen Harper made a “surprise” visit (there was, of course, nothing surprising about it) to Iraq last weekend, with select members of the parliamentary press gallery in tow.

Andrew Mitrovica, What the Hell Was Harper Doing in Iraq Anyway

“Questions? What kind of questions?” He set his feet on the bike pedals, ready to bolt.

“Don’t worry,” I said, pulling three twenties

from my wallet. “A couple of questions and you’re gone.”

He squinted at me and pulled away. “You ain’t into little boys, is you?”

“No, I prefer girls,” I said. “All grown up.”

“Okay then.”

Andrew Cotto, Outerborough Blues: A Brooklyn Mystery

The lives some people lived! And he was such a nice pink-cheeked boy to look at. “Reads detectives and westerns. Sports: hockey, softball, horse-shoe-pitching. Plays tonette.” Some kind of a whistle, wasn’t it? Ah, here was a clue: “Cannot swim. Questioned if he had a fear of water, soldier hesitated and replied: ‘I’m not really scared of it so long as I know it ain’t deeper than I am. But I’d just as soon not go in the navy.’ ” Earle Birney, Turvey: A Military Picaresque

I respond with a question of my own: “Have you ever heard of furries?”

My opportunity to see one in the “flesh” arrived in the form of Furnal Equinox, the largest furry convention in Canada (with 910 attendees). I attended in hopes of learning as much as I could about “the fandom” and uncovering the answers most sexologists are dying to know: Is this a genuine paraphilia? Or are the media exaggerating? Is it even about sex at all?

Debra W. Soh, A Peek Inside a Furry Convention

And who, I ask, can know that he understands anything, unless he do first understand it? In other words, who can know that he is sure of a thing, unless he be first sure of that thing?

Benedict de Spinoza, Ethics, Part 2

Do you need a special room? Do you need a special pen? Do you chant a special chant? Do you write on napkins in the middle of dinner parties? Do you walk a mile, read, then write?

Do you practice yoga before your writing hour?

Do you wake up early? Do you stay up late? Do you light a candle? Would you write after a particularly comical date? What’s the magic ingredient, all these questions ask, that makes a poet write a poem?

Camille Dungy, Question and Answer: The Top Five

Let N(Q) be the number of questions obtained from FAQ data, let N(Q+) be the number of questions produced by ten expert persons, let FAQ 19

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N(A) be the number of answers, let AVE(N(A)/ N(Q)) be the average number of answers to one question, let MIN(N(A)/N(Q)) be the minimum number of answers to one question, and let MAX(N(A)/N(Q)) be the maximum number of answers to one question. Table 1 shows information about the FAQ data.

Jun Harada, Masao Fuketa, El-Sayed Atlam, Toru Sumitomo, Wataru Hiraishi, and Jun-ichi Aoe, Estimation of FAQ Knowledge Bases by Introducing Measurements

p. 391–7 Appealing to the senses with metaphors and similes like those in answer explanations 6, the answer must relate to the type of descriptive language used.

B Henry Davis, Explanations for the Official SAT Study Guide Questions: Detailed Explanations for the Answers for Every Question

So, the book is intended for anyone who wants to write survey questions, as well as all those who want to use the results from a survey; neither statistical issues nor social science jargon should get in the way of any reasonably well-educated person being able to read and appreciate the messages herein.

Floyd J. Fowler, Improving Survey Questions: Design and Evaluation

“Also, don’t you think that it might be necessary to arouse her imagination?”

“In what way? How?” said Bovary.

“Ah, that’s the question! That’s definitively the question: ‘That is the question!’—as I recently read in a newspaper.”

But Emma, awaking, cried out, “And the letter? And the letter?”

Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary

And these varied with tenses, present, past, future, and conjugated with the verb see,—or with these questions added to them;—Is it? Was it? Will it be?

Would it be? May it be? Might it be? And these again put negatively, Is it not? Was it not? Ought it not?— Or affirmatively,—It is; It was; It ought to be. Or chronologically,—Has it been always? Lately? How long ago?—Or hypothetically,—If it was? If it was not? What would follow?—If the French should beat the English? If the Sun go out of the Zodiac?

Laurence Sterne, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman

p. 407–2 This sentence makes sense with the briefest construction eliminates unnecessary were words and keeps the active voice.

C Henry Davis, Explanations for the Official SAT Study Guide Questions: Detailed Explanations for the Answers for Every Question

…and the question may arise whether our results are seriously wrong from this cause. This question can best be solved by yet another method of estimating the average distance of certain classes of stars.

Simon Newcomb, The Extent of the Universe

Sources: Birney, Earle, Turvey: A Military Picaresque (1949), Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1977. Cotto, Andrew, Outerborough Blues: A Brooklyn Mystery, Brooklyn: Ig Publishing, 2012. Davis, Henry, Explanations for the Official SAT Study Guide Questions: Detailed Explanations for the Answers for Every Question. Henry Davis, 2010. Dungy, Camille, “Question and Answer: The Top Five,” Poetry Foundation, 2010, www.poetryfoundation. org. Flaubert, Gustave, Madame Bovary, translated by Raymond N. MacKenzie, Hackett Publishing, 2009. Fowler, Floyd J., Improving Survey Questions: Design and Evaluation. Sage, 1995. Harper, Tim, “For Stephen Harper, Governing Means Never Asking Why,” Toronto Star, Aug. 24, 2014. Koethe, John, “North Point North,” North Point North: New and Selected Poems, HarperCollins Publishers, 2002. Harada, Jun, Masao Fuketa, El-Sayed Atlam, Toru Sumitomo, Wataru Hiraishi, and Jun-ichi Aoe, “Estimation of FAQ Knowledge Bases by Introducing Measurements,” Knowledge-Based Intelligent Information and Engineering Systems: 10th International Conference, KES 2006, Springer Science & Business Media, 2006. Mitrovica, Andrew, “What the Hell Was Harper Doing in Iraq Anyway?” iPolitics, May 8, 2015, www.ipolitics.ca. Modiano, Patrick, Missing Person, translated by Daneil Weissbort, Boston: David R. Godine, Publisher, 2014. Newcomb, Simon, “The Extent of the Universe,” Scientific Papers, Vol. XXX, The Harvard Classics, New York: P. F. Collier & Son, 1909-14. Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, On the Inequality among Mankind, Vol. XXXIV, Part 3, The Harvard Classics, New York: P. F. Collier & Son, 1909-14. Soh, Debra W., “A Peek Inside A Furry Convention,” Archives of Sexual Behavior, January 2015, reprinted in Harper’s Magazine, March 2015.

Spinoza, Benedict de, Ethics, Part 2, translated by R. H. M. Elwes, Project Gutenberg, 1997. Sterne, Laurence, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, New York: J. M. Dent & Sons, 1912. Swift, Jonathan, Gulliver’s Travels into Several Remote Regions of the World, Boston: D. C. Heath & Co., 1900.

Rob Kovitz is the founder of Treyf Books. His other works include Pig City Model Farm, Games Oligopolists Play and Ice Fishing in Gimli. He lives in Winnipeg.

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Dear Geist... riting a creative w re d an ng ti ri w n ee I have b oI about a year. How d r fo ry o st n io ct fi nno y to send out? ad re is ry o st e th n he know w B

—Teetering, Gimli M

Which is correct, 4:00, four

—Floria, Windsor ON

o’clock or 1600 h?

Dear Geist, lot more about one person said I should write a In my fiction writing workshop, erfluous and said that the dad character is sup son per er oth An ter. rac cha dad the writers are very astute. Help!

I should delete him. Both of these —Dave, Red Deer AB

Advice for the Lit Lorn Are you a writer?

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FINDINGS

From A Sublime Vernacular: The Landscape Paintings of Levine Flexhaug by Nancy Tousley and Peter White. Published by the Art Gallery of Grande Prairie and Figure 1 Publishing in 2014. Levine Flexhaug (1918–1974) made a living by demonstrating “speed painting” techniques and selling his work at cafés, resorts, national parks and department stores throughout Western Canada.

He often worked on several paintings at a time and could complete one in minutes. Flexhaug never exhibited his paintings—many of

Always Waking Up in Montreal SHOSHAKU JUSHAKU

From The Cheese Stealer’s Handbook. Published by Pretati Press in 2014. Shoshaku Jushaku lives in Vancouver.

I

wake up in Montreal in the backseat of a car, my tongue stuck to the roof of my mouth, the sun blinding me.

The car belongs to a broken English beauty who was surprisingly polite when she woke me up. I follow my penis around town for a while, wandering aimlessly through all the women—why do I ever leave this city?

In front of the art gallery the police have set up a practice accident scene. There’s a guy measuring skid marks, and a morbidly realistic kid sprawled in front of the car. I’m not quite sure if it’s supposed to be art.

Sucks to be curious when the only person around to ask questions of is a cop.

I try window shopping for a bit, to kill some time until I regain my equilibrium. But it gets boring real quick. The stores just alternate: sex shop, pizza by the slice, sex shop, pizza by the slice, sex shop, pizza by the slice, and then on every few corners a dépanneur. I eventually find my rhythm and start buying single beers at every second dépanneur. Is Montreal closer to the sun? Everybody has shades on, every store sells them—even tables on the sidewalk in between shops. On a cloudy day the economy must go to shit.

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which were variations on the same idyllic scene: mountains, trees, lakes, deer—and many have been found over the last seventy-five years in bars, restaurants and thrift stores. Four-hundred fifty of his paintings have been collected in the Sublime Vernacular exhibition, now touring Canada; it is believed that thousands have yet to be discovered.

I walk past a girl in a window of a department store making a new display and stop to watch, pantomiming advice until we both feel uncomfortable.

I try to imagine living here. (I did live here for a while, but imagining is easier than remembering.) Eating nothing but pizza—walking around in new sunglasses every day. If they look cool you meet a girl and buy fifty sex toys. If not you go watch strippers for an hour and end up home alone laying on your couch wearing nothing but a new pair of shades to shield your eyes from the 100-watt bulb hanging

from the ceiling while you jerk off thinking about hockey… Maybe I am remembering.

Eventually I make my way to the Biftec to wait until I find someone I know. I really should get an address book. After a couple drinks I always start forgetting what city I’m in. The Biftec, Dominion, Dunnright Inn, Ship Inn, Strathcona… They all run together— all of my cities are a dive bar with thick wooden tables, two draft taps, chilled mugs, and a sexy tattooed waitress.

When I think about a city these are the places I visualize, as for other landmarks

or the skyline, I’m happily clueless to all those buildings and their purposes, and not in the least bit curious. Anywhere that requires an elevator to get to is not nearly as important as people seem to think. Eventually I run into Pat and he says I can stay on his couch. I foolishly accept his offer, even though the last time we lived together ten more sleeps till Christmas started sometime in October.   

“I’m going to bow down,” Pat says as he hands back the spliff and wanders Findings 23

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to a bedroom. I figure I should do the same. There are still five or six fat lines cut on the table, I blow them off onto a girl who’s sleeping on the floor before I can change my mind.

This is day three or four without sleep. I eat a handful of stale pretzels from a bag on the table. This is getting old—if they don’t invent a new drug soon I’m going to have to do something with my life. Either way I’m going to have to leave Montreal.

I’ve been at Pat’s a couple of weeks. So far I’ve been good and stuck to blow and pills, but I know it’s only a matter of time. I barely kicked last time, and that time I had five or six girls madly in love with me and I was still under the youthful delusion that somehow everything was going to turn out all right in the end. I know that if I ever start using again I’ll be a junkie till I

die. Funny thing is, I never truly hated life until I kicked H. If I was rich I’d just spend all day every day smacked out in a dark room.

The next day we have $10.25 between us. We agree to spend it on food, but can’t agree on who should go to the store for provisions.

“I need a woman to cook for me,” Pat says.

“Well, I need help even shopping.

I’m clueless in stores… And I steal cheese.”

“Make a list then.”

“I’m not making a rough draft of a receipt. And I’m trying to stop cheese thievery.”

I can spend $90 at a bar, but $16 on groceries makes me wince—it always seems like wasted money. I wander the aisles, feeling stupidly overly picky with my empty basket. I end up with

Drano or something just to get the basket started—I’ll need it one day.

You should see the stupid shit I buy: one microwavable item for immediate consumption ’cause I’m not in the mood to cook—then convince myself that for the rest of the week I’ll be Wolfgang Puck. I buy a bunch of ingredients, none of which, I find out later, can be combined to form a meal. I’m always stuck making fucked up meta-fusion retard MacGyver cuisine. Every once in a while they turn out okay. Olives stuffed with gummy bears was a highlight. I don’t even get normal canned food, whenever I’m foraging in my cupboard the cans are a surprise, the labels are always Arabic or such. I get one of anything from any displays I crash into. If there are free samples I buy one of them—to avoid any

Goodnight Skirt RAOUL FERNANDES

From Transmitter and Receiver. Published by Nightwood Editions in 2015. Raoul Fernandes is a writer and composer.

He was a finalist for the 2010 Bronwen Wallace Award for Emerging Writers. He lives in Vancouver.

Permission to use that snowball you’ve been keeping in the freezer since 1998. For a poem? she asks.

What else? I say. I’ll trade you, she says for that thing your mom said at the park. What was it?

“God, that mallard’s being a real douchebag”?

Yes, that one. Deal, I say. Okay, how about the Korean boy who walks past our house late at night, singing “Moon River”? Oh, you can use that, I say, I wouldn’t even know what to do with it. But there is something else.

I’ve been wanting to write about

OVERUSED WORD ALERT  Overused Word Alert: “Passion”

the black skirt we’ve been using to cover the lovebird’s cage. The goodnight skirt.

In exchange, I’ll let you have our drunken mailman, the tailless tabby, and I’ll throw in the broken grandfather clock we found in the forest. One more, she says.

Last night, I say. The whole night.

She considers for a while, then, Okay, that’s fair. But I really had something going with that lovebird. All right, I say, write it anyway. If it’s more beautiful than mine, it’s yours.

SOCK MONKEYS A PASSION FOR COUPLE:

Indeed, Lindner—known professionally as “The Sock Monkey

Lady”—has fashioned a career out of her passion for the Depression Era crafts icon for the last 25-plus

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freeloader looks from the beady-eyed sample ladies. I don’t use the coupon though. I’m obviously a povertystricken fucker, I don’t need to look cheap too. I usually buy a fancy condiment or a pound of anything I can’t comprehend, and any large, weird vegetable that I don’t recognize.

We finally settle it with a coin toss, which I lose. We smoke a joint, then I leave for the store.

“Bring back some cheese,” he calls out after me.

When I arrive at the store I glance in from the sidewalk. The produce is along the windows. I watch the people rooting through it—a lady in a sharply tailored suit picks up a red pepper: large, bright, red, shiny and symmetrical. If you needed a pepper for a television commercial this one would be perfect. Some others are rooting through, poking, squeezing and prodding, holding them up, inspecting them from every angle. The produce at this store seems to vary in quality quite a bit. Some people are in a rush—they grab the tattered and deformed fruit from the discount bin.

Maybe whoever gets the best fruit has the best life. When you die they tell you the great secret to life: if you had chosen your produce with more care you wouldn’t have been so miserable.

Fuck you God, and fuck you carrot. I take a deep breath and enter the store.

I’ve done pretty well getting $10 worth of groceries into the basket, and everything I picked up either only had one brand or one was significantly cheaper. I didn’t have to make any tough consumer decisions and I didn’t have to crunch any numbers. Usually grocery shopping is like Sophie’s Choice. In my basket there are calories, flavour, nutrients, and exactly nine items, so I can use the express checkout, which today has the cutest cashier, so there’s another decision

LA VRAIE AFFAIRE From Grande plaine IV, by Alexandre Bourbaki. Published by Éditions Alto in 2008.

Characteristics of an authentic poutine stand: 1. Horizontal sliding order window 2. Picnic tables on grounds (gravel or packed dirt) 3. Vinegar bottles at pick-up window and tables 4. Above all, no indoor dining area

made for me. I’m proud and happy that things are running so smoothly.

At the cash the two girls behind me are adding up their money, arguing about whether to buy Häagen-Dazs from the impulse display freezer perched precariously over the candy bars, or whether it’s too expensive. I ask the cashier how much it is for the ice cream and she scans one. Those minuscule containers come to $4.98 each. I get the cashier not to ring in my basket, but two things of ice cream instead.

“Sir, you forgot your ice cream,” the cashier calls out after me.

“No I didn’t, it’s for the girls.”

There’s a horse at the end of the checkout with a bored kid on it, so I stick our last quarter in, set little

Walter Mitty in motion, and leave the store broke.

It’s fun telling Pat. I didn’t even steal any cheese.

“Better be a big fucking tub of ice cream.”

“No, really tiny—Häagen-Dazs.”

“Maybe you didn’t do so bad after all. I love Häagen-Dazs.” “…Well I don’t have it.”

I explain what happened. Going into much greater detail than I’ve bored you with here about how smoothly the shopping operation had been going up until the point I got caught in the middle between a cute cashier and pretty girls wanting ice cream, then of course I panicked.

“Well, you could have at least brought the girls back.”

years. Islanders Write Displays Passion for the Craft: Ms. Young’s passion for writing includes an ongoing blog and plans for a book. “I write three times a week, and always on Friday. I call it Fabulous Friday,” she said. Clerk of Court Finds New Passion for ‘Golf with Guns’: She has been Sarasota County’s clerk of circuit

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I make him wait for a while before I tell him that we are going to their house for dinner.

Writing this I realize Pat and I could have gone to the store together.

The dinner those girls made was incredible. Maybe proper shopping isn’t a one man job. I’m also realizing how hungry I am. Unfortunately I’m broke. Next time I have some money

I’m going to try to assemble a grocery shopping/dinner cooking team.

I’ll get a bakery specialist, a dairy guy, an inside guy that works at the butchers—an Ocean’s Eleven for your belly.

We’ll all have our own basket, but we’ll also have someone pushing one of those huge family year-long supply carts, the ones on wheels. But I want the job done clean. No coupons. 

Blood Keeper IRINA KOVALYOVA

From Specimen. Published by House of Anansi in 2015. Irina Kovalyova is a writer and biologist. She lives in Vancouver.

M

y father, Viktor A. Mishkin, was the keeper of Lenin’s mummy.

Yes, the very same Franken-fish of the Great Communist Chief they still keep on display in the Red Square Mausoleum. Every week there, in a secret chamber, he conducted what he called adjustments, wiping the mummy with hydrogen peroxide, treating its wrinkles with acetic acid, and painting its waxy face with bifonazole. Every six months, his assistants moved the thing to a sterilized room, disassembled its body parts, and immersed all of them in a glass bathtub filled with glycerin. Yet, despite all attempts to curb life, fungi crept along the mummy’s neck, the skin of its ears turned blue, and brown spots became visible on the pads of its fingers.

Life went on as life always does.

I remember my father as clever. He was also inventive and good with practical things. He fixed refrigerators and cupboards, toilet bowls and mechanical clocks. He was fond of Romantic poets, especially Pushkin, and fine cognac, which he called balsam for the soul. Balsam was the embalming fluid

the Russians came up with in 1924.

Its exact chemical composition was a state secret my father would take with him to his grave.

Of course, I’d always thought of my father as trustworthy, the sort of man with whom one would not hesitate to go behind enemy lines. But his singular skill, his gift, as my grandmother put it, was people. He’d look at someone, ask them a question, and know their truth. Perhaps that ability came out of his work. Perhaps it was necessary to dissect human beings, to slice into their flesh, before one could begin to understand them.

My conjuror, my mother had called him, Doctor Faustus.

They met in 1964. There was a student production of Doctor Faustus, in which my mother acted the parts of all seven deadly sins. My father was in the audience, smitten, like so many others, with her. During that production, a bull raged on the stage. It was one of those mythological creatures, half beast and half man. After the performance, my father made his way backstage, presented my mother

with orchids, which were extremely rare in Russia, and said, “For you, I’ll kill a bull.” After they got married, it became a sort of joke between them.

Every year on the anniversary of their meeting, they’d go out to have steaks. I wondered sometimes if thirteen years of tenderloins amounted to a whole bull, in the end.

Although my father had never taken me to the Mausoleum, he’d brought me with him once to his other work. In addition to taking care of Lenin’s mummy, he also chaired the Department of Pathology at the Moscow Medical Institute. I remember the white-tiled room that smelled of disinfectant and the bile-green peristaltic pump. Pink, poisonouslooking liquids scowled through Erlenmeyer flasks. On the table in front of me that morning lay the body of a young girl. She was six, maybe seven, with a blue headband holding her hair back. I was told she’d been hit by a car that morning and died on impact.

One of my father’s assistants had extracted her liver and was weighing it in a tin balance pan. The expression on his face, I will never forget it, shone with absolute awe. He spoke some medical terms into the microphone wire that hung suspended from a ceiling beam. Then he turned to me and, holding out a chunk of liver, pointed to the dark channels inside it, filled with brown liquid. The child’s tissues were too delicate, he said, too fragile to preserve her hepatocytes.

Nausea flooded me. I lunged toward the window, looking for air, unable to breathe. But my mind was too fast for my body, and my foot slipped on the floor. I swooned, looking for balance, trying to hold on to something, anything, beating my arms through the air like a child who couldn’t swim. But it was too late. I was falling already. I hit

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my head on the table on my way down and passed out cold.

“I’d be worried about you if you didn’t feel sick, Verka,” my father said to me that evening at dinner, pausing to sip his borscht from a silver spoon.

“But you cannot deny that death is fascinating. No one can wrap their head around it.”

My grandmother, who sat at the table with us, knitting and watching my father with narrowed eyes, leaned forward to get a cube of sugar, lifted it out of the bowl with her fingers, and stuck it under her tongue.

“So speaks the one who was trained to heal the living, and ended up pickling the dead,” she said. 

Wolverine RAYMOND BOCK

From Atavisms, translated by Pablo Strauss. Published by Dalkey Archive in 2015.

Raymond Bock is the author of Des lames de pierre. He lives in Montreal.

I

t’s always been about the words for me. When I reread Vallières, Simard, Che Guevara’s journals, and even Martin Luther King, though his style is kind of weak, I know what I’m in for and prepare myself. History with a capital H. I mean, I was always the writer in our crew. So it’s my job to uphold our pact by telling the story of our engagement. The guys said I could embellish the less successful actions a little. Because they were a bit like

From Clean Sails by Gustave Morin. Published by New Star Books in 2015. Morin is a poet and the creator of The Etcetera Barbecue, A Penny Dreadful and numerous chapbooks. He lives in Windsor.

art when you get down to it, because when art works it changes things. But this one caper was so big it leaves me no choice. I have to tell it like it was.

I’ve thrown out a lot of drafts of this chapter, our last one. This here is the keeper. I can’t go on rewriting, trying to unearth more and better details, deeper meanings; I don’t have time. There’s been no news from Frank in over three years but I heard he got arrested, something to do with fake IDs. I bet someone ratted him out, someone he worked with and didn’t bother checking out properly. Something dumb like that. I know the guy well enough: Our secret’s safe with him. But even if he talks at least we’ll have my version to set the record straight. It’s the truest account and the one that reads best, if I do say so myself. I’m sure that dude’s still lying out there where we left him.

Otherwise we would have heard something by now.

It started off like any other night.

Frank was laid out in front of the stupid cooking show hosted by that guy with the beard. Every thirty seconds he would burst out laughing and call me over to see what was so goddamn funny. I stayed in my room writing.

We’d been drinking and joking around, same old same old. Frank quieted down for a while but was right back at it soon enough, chortling like a turkey. I was on my way over to shut him up when Jason came crashing through the back door, knocking over a bunch of bottles when he slammed it shut. He went straight to the fridge and cracked a beer, mumbling to himself, and staring off into space, his focus lost between two objects. I figured he’d gone and

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done something stupid again. We’d hear the story sooner or later, just like the time with the Buick or the one with the old janitor. I grabbed a beer too and got back to work. I still had a ways to go, a good hour and a half to finish my twenty daily pages. It was a critical moment in Chapter 19. An F-18 was flying over the jungle, getting ready to bomb the guerillas’ food cache. The words were shooting out fast and true like gunfire. I nailed a long description of some explosions in fifteen minutes flat. Just as a panther was rearing its head from the creepers, readying to attack the scouts mired knee-deep in mud, I heard Frank and Jason getting louder and went to the living room to see what was up.

“I’m telling you, it’s him. I recognized him.”

“How can you be so sure? And what was he doing there in the first place, all by himself? People like that never go out without hired muscle.”

“Not him, he’s old, out of the game. Been out a long time. But I’m telling you, it’s really him. I just know.

Frank, you’re coming. You too, Poet.

May as well.”

Out on the spiral staircase Jason turned toward us, finger to his lips, pointing at a guy laid out in the back seat of his car, hands tied behind his

back with duct tape. It was quiet out except for faint traffic sounds wafting in between the buildings. We got in the car to avoid attention. Apparently no one had noticed Jason or the old man he had dragged over fifty metres, by the armpits, after punching him out behind the bar.

Frank got behind the wheel, Jason took shotgun, and I had to move the guy’s legs out of the way to climb into the back seat. It was full of coffee cups, old shoes, plastic bags and the other crap that gave Frank’s old piece of junk its signature odour.

“What if he wakes up?”

“He’s way too drunk, we’ve got nothing to worry about. He’d be passed out by now anyway. I just gave him a little head start.”

Jason was looking at us, eyes shining like a nocturnal bird of prey.

He told us how he’d been on his way to the bathroom when he saw a man ordering a drink at the bar. He thought he recognized him and struck up a conversation. Jay let him babble on for half an hour, while his mind was on this new mission for us, and then they went out together for a smoke in the alley.

“So, what is it?”

“What’s what?”

“Uhh, our mission.”

SPEAKS Categories of “dead language”—words and phrases mis- and overused so often that they no longer hold sense or meaning—from Exhilarating Prose by Barry Healey & Cordelia Strube, published by Baraka Books in 2015. ad-speak media-speak techno-speak business-speak medical-speak

valley-girl-speak art-speak hip-speak sports-speak corporate-speak

government-speak doctor-speak lawyer-speak archi-speak

“We’re taking him to Morin Heights.”

Pictures ran through my head in vivid, novelistic detail. We would drive between two huge walls of black spruce, turn off onto a narrow trail that would close up again behind us, shadowy figures guided through the darkness by the forest’s scents. No one could find or follow us there. Frank was definitely the most wasted of us three so I took the wheel. You don’t want to hit a tree with a bleeding former cabinet minister handcuffed in the back seat. We probably could have come up with a credible story, something pretty—a dare, or maybe a historical re-enactment?—but you never know how things will play out with the cops. Always better not to take chances.

This night drive was a good time to tell my friends the story I was writing. It was a love story. A couple of depressed, coca-chewing revolutionaries were getting ready to take over a coffee plantation that had somehow escaped the forest fires and the clearcuts. Frank and Jason both thought I was really creative. I told them my novel would get even better if I could have five minutes’ peace without their squawking. That got me a good laugh and they started hitting me with their “sensitive poet” calls and every light on Papineau turned green and we were out of Montreal in ten minutes flat and onto Highway 15 toward the mountains, freedom, payback. A nice mission. The old guy was still passed out, face pressed against the glass like a kid tired out after a trip to the zoo.

Should have listened to his daddy.

“Are you sure, Jay? I don’t recognize the face.”

“I swear. Hold on.”

He fumbled around and pulled out a wallet.

“Jean-Paul Turbide. Told you I was sure. Has a nice ring to it, for a

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Liberal cabinet minister, eh?”

Frank laughed. Turbide. I laughed too. We started chanting his name, faster and faster.

“Too bad though, for a big shot like him: ending up shit-faced in some dive in a crappy neighborhood.”

“Whatever. He got what he deserved. Les câlisses.”

I put in a GrimSkunk tape with a hammering beat. Turbide didn’t bat an eye. We were getting close to the grandiose sounding Gateway to the

North, a rest stop. To keep our spirits up we smoked and told the same old stories, laughing in all the usual places. Frank wouldn’t stop swearing as he retold his classic expedition to steal a few pot plants from a cornfield out by his uncle’s cabin. We were in Grade 10. Frank was the only one who had his driver’s license. He and another guy just took off in the middle of a party. They showed up a couple hours later with garbage bags full of weed, white as sheets, on shaky

legs that seemed to be walking of their own volition. Frank was a hero after that, but he and the other guy couldn’t sleep for weeks. Everyone knew the happy ending but he never once told the whole story, not even to us. That was ten years ago. Since then Frank doesn’t take a whole lot of initiative when we get up to something.

We met Jason in college, in PoliSci. Finally, someone with half a brain you could also smoke a joint with.

To commemorate our epic nights of

Catnip for Canadians DAVID MCGIMPSEY

From Asbestos Heights. Published by Coach House Books in 2015. David McGimpsey is the author of several volumes of poetry. He lives in Montreal.

As vast as the vastlands of this vast land, poet, are you to yonder skies, breads and local cheeses.

Mon pays ce n’est pas un pays c’est $100 pour voir Bon Iver.

I am grateful for libraries (iPad) and poetry (iPad). Lorca’s line ‘La Clooney del bello Jorge sigue…’ is where George Clooney got his stage name.

Oddsmakers ask, what will happen sooner: will a Canadian team win the Stanley Cup or will Canadians develop new interest in the novels of Robertson Davies?

Many tried to be ‘The Lorca of Canada’ but stopped when being ‘The Octavio Paz of Sault Ste. Marie’ proved sufficient.

Entre la tarde Timbits y la noche.

The unmalled parts of Edmonton are cold, my friend, and for reasons I don’t know, the Cinnabon franchises in Montreal closed, giving the city the nickname Russia.

Life in Canada is just bear attack after bear attack. It always happens, as incalculable as the number of times Irving Layton used the word loins.

Limited atonement, one of the five points of Calvinism, is what Canadians think of as ‘catnip.’ Heaven is the ground where the Winnipeg Victorias still play.

In the animal kingdom, no creature kills for sport except the otter.

In the plant world, there are few things as objectionable as balsam fir.

I, of course, have never read Fifth Business, because pop music is better. But, unlike the speaker of Rod Stewart’s ‘Maggie May,’ I definitely could have tried a lot more. 

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Forget roses and date nights, husbands hoping to increase the amount of sex they have with their wives just need to change a few nappies. Crime

of Passion Killers ‘Less Intelligent’ Than Killers Who Plot:

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college drinking, and those epic college girls, we had another round of beers. Jason started in on the little pussies who threw us out of the Quebec Youth movement. All we wanted was to get involved, a taste of direct action. The hippies ran the student association meetings. All their talk never amounted to squat, just the same old two-hour demonstrations.

We wanted to take it further, rattle people, hurt people. After five meetings they’d had enough of us. I’d been in charge of communiqués with some old guy, and when I say old I mean old school—he never even told me his real name. Frank smoked in the corner during the meetings, while Jason just sat there and hijacked all the hippies’ brainstorm sessions. Their little elected dictator must have seen the writing on the wall: He had to get rid of us, and fast. They wouldn’t have had the guts to follow us where we were going anyway. We had better things to do than scrawl tired FLQ graffiti that didn’t scare people anymore, hack into federalist databases, or leave suspicious-looking packages that just caused traffic jams. The hippies didn’t need us to block roads. I stuck around long enough to pen a few decent manifestos.

We passed the waterslide park crowned by an idiotic giant flying faucet. Lit up in all its nighttime splendor it looked even more surreal than usual, like a bad omen or a joke played on us by giants, who knows. We were there. Turbide was looking torpid.

Jay must have hit him pretty hard.

Side two of GrimSkunk ended with a thunk. We were running out of tunes: The tape deck had already chewed up the Voivod and the Groovy Aardvark.

Jason combed through the debris on the floor and came up with something.

“Paul Piché? Dude.”

“It’s Martine’s. C’mon man, you

Kafka in Clayton, OK RÉAL GODBOUT

know that shit’s not mine. She’s all ‘respect for the classics.’”

“Yeah… yeah, why not. Put it on,” I agreed. “Let’s warm the old guy up.”

In Saint Sauveur you turn left at the church and you’re on the road to Morin Heights. It’s crisscrossed by thousands of little paths leading

to Discover Your Passion and Follow Your Pursuit of Happiness: Movement:

to the vacation estates of rich people who never show during the workweek. We’d spent more than a few nights as volunteer caretakers for these absentee owners. One time we’d come across some even narrower paths, shallow ruts in the long grass an axle’s breadth apart. They led

I had yet to discover my passion. ‘Tag, You’re It!’ Bring Back Young Athletes’ Passion for

I want tree climbing. I want racing to the big tree and climbing. Actually, I want racing to the big tree, climbing up and racing back. The Sultan of Slurs:

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From Amerika. Published by Conundrum Press in 2014. Réal Godbout is an illustrator and comic artist. He lives in Montreal.

to the cuts around the power pylons or protected, apparently unguarded, wilderness. No one had ever bothered us, anyway. We took a path that led to two million dollars’ worth of gables, cornices, pools, and double garages. But we weren’t in the market for accommodation; we were here

to show our guest a good time in the woods, so we took an embankment over the stream and back along our path through the ferns. Our favourite path. It’s hilly, rocky, and full of roots but after twenty minutes you come to a clearing far enough from the lights of Saint Sauveur to see a few stars and

Donald Trump Explains His Passion for Putdowns: For Economics of the Paddleboarding Industry: That

some massive pines. It’s ethereal in the twilight, orange like a fox, fragrant with pinecones; a place to take refuge when the end-times come, under this canopy, our very own Laurentie.

We stopped in front of a tree in the middle of the opening, then got out to stretch our legs a bit and chase the pins and needles from our asses. We had enough beer to finish the night in style.

Set the case on the hood and Frank passed around a joint. It was getting kind of chilly, but still warm enough to do what we had to do in T-shirts.

The clearing was bathed in soft moonlight. You could see okay but we left the headlights on anyway, pointed at the tree. We entertained ourselves for a while making shadow puppets with our bodies—forest elves, zombies, coureurs des bois, Indians. It could have been solemn but was actually pretty funny thanks to the tunes wafting through the three open car doors, our man Paul Piché just belting it out. One real gem reached its climax with a sax solo: hot dripping wax. But the next song was so horrible even Frank couldn’t handle it.

Jay killed the music.

Turbide was stirring now, waking up to a nasty headache. His moans were wrecking the nice silence you look forward to when a tape ends.

That was the signal. I opened the door he was leaning against. He dropped like a sack onto the pine needles, letting out a funny groan. I grabbed him by the arms and Frank took his ankles and we sat him up against the tree trunk. Jason was rifling through his tools in the trunk. He came back with an extension cord and we tied the old man up. He was limp, his head falling forward onto the blue shirt, a nice V-neck of blood down the front of his shirt all the way to his belly button.

Frank rolled his head around for a few seconds, tapping his cheeks as though spinning a globe. I kicked the soles of

more than a quarter-century, he’s chronicled in exhaustive detail his passion for putdowns. Passion Drives

explains why it is mainly driven by passion. Maths Passion Is a Simple Formula: Since he was three years old,

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DEAR NEOPOST JOEY COMEAU

From Overqualifieder, by Joey Comeau. Published by ECW Press in 2015.

I am responding to your job posting for a Credit and Collections Manager. I am currently in the market for a job in this field, and on one of my daily visits to your site I was thrilled to discover that Neopost was hiring. I have waited a long time for this opportunity, and I am including my resume for your review.

My resumé details my fifteen years of extensive experience in Credit and Collections Management. It sometimes feels like I have worked in Credit and Collections Management all my life. Do you ever feel that way, Neopost? Anyway. If you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to call me. This opportunity is once in a lifetime, and I assure you that I believe in what your company is doing one hundred percent. And I have certainly been watching closely.

My first encounter with Neopost came two years ago, while I was on the internet looking for alternatives to the traditional postal system (which had previously caused the death of my entire family). I found Neopost’s website to be pleasantly designed and informative, and I immediately saved the address in my “Bookmarks.” On a subsequent visit, I began to realize the full implications of the existence of services such as yours.

Using equipment purchased on your website, I have begun to construct my own post office in the basement of my house. Your company has provided me with the finest in mailroom furniture and high-volume sorting and folding machines. The newest addition is, of course, a 30-kg digital scale, for weighing mail and determining the rate. It’s interfaced with the mail machine, and I have named it Maggie because that was my youngest daughter’s name.

The chance to put my Credit and Collections Management experience to work for your company is something I am willing to die for. My post office is almost finished, but I know that I will need to build one in every town before I can fully replace the postal service. The employee discount that you will hopefully provide should make a helpful dent in the costs associated with that as well.

The depression and suicidal fantasies of three years ago are nothing but a memory to me now. I am a man consumed with passion, and your products have given a new meaning to my life. Without you I do not know where I would be, and I do not want to know. I am happy now, pursuing my goal.

My dead family and I are in your debt, and I long to help you in any way I can. I feel I could make a real difference at your company.

Thank you for taking the time to consider my resumé. I am willing to relocate to anywhere in Canada.

Yours, Joey Comeau

his feet with the toes of my runners, without much conviction. I wasn’t sure what Jason wanted us to do. The moans were getting louder and more frequent and the guy’s legs were starting to shake. I wouldn’t want to be in his head right now.

We stepped away to make room for Jason; Frank out of deference, me to better take in as many details as possible. As secretary it was my job to set it all down for posterity. Jason took a deep breath, went up to Turbide, and started punching him in the face. Every blow was accompanied by a manly grunt and the recitation of an entry in a somewhat random register of four hundred years of humiliation— the deportations, the British Conquest, the subsidies, the sham democracy— one by one they were all summoned forth, reaching a crescendo with the most recent batch of dirty deals. Jason went to town on the War Measures Act, fucking Trudeau, and Mirabel Airport, since Turbide hadn’t seen the expropriated land we’d driven by during his little nap. He needed his memory jogged to grasp the full extent of the excellent work done by him and his brothers in arms, that gang of scumbags who voted in whatever laws they felt like on the backs of us Quebecers, poor suckers who’ve been ceding ground since time immemorial, and if it wasn’t land anymore it was the provincial powers being stripped from us and our kids brainwashed in classrooms wallpapered with Canadian flags we pay for with our taxes, a flag whose emblem was stolen from the Saint-Jean-Baptiste Society just like they jacked the music of the national anthem from Calixa Lavallée and the words from poor Basile Routhier and if they’d known I swear to God if they’d known they’d start sucking our blood the moment that rag was hoisted in Ottawa, it’s not sap flowing from the

Alex Gunning has had a passion for maths. Sondheim’s Passion Delivers True Beauty in Stratford: It’s a deeply emotional piece, asking profound questions about what constitutes true love and genuine passion and it can prove incredibly difficult to realize on stage, but director Gary Griffin has pulled it off.

How Healthy Is

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maples anymore it’s our blood they’re tapping, year after year, why do you think the flag is red les tabarnacs and what’s your favourite colour motherfucker, I’ll show you concessions, you want to see compromise, you want to see Quebec brought into the fold “with honour and enthusiasm,” câlisse?

Jason petered out, short of breath, hands bloody, undisputed master of the lump of fat held in an unnatural posture by the extension cord. The crickets were chirping again. I thought that was quite enough payback for one night, but Jason lurched off and came back with a bottle of motor oil from the trunk. He untied what remained of Turbide, who collapsed on the ground, swollen face covered with pine needles.

Jason ripped off Turbide’s beige pleatfront pants and doused him in oil. I thought he was going to set him on fire and was about to tell him to at least move away from the tree, but Jason just stood there, shorts halfway down his thighs, hard as a demon.

We stood back and watched. In the glare of the headlights it looked like a wolverine dancing on a carcass.

We were rattled. We sat in the car staring at the body, ten feet from the bumper. The gentle sounds of the forest couldn’t quite pierce the silence.

After what felt like ages Jason turned over the ignition. We drove around the pine tree and back the way we’d come to the Morin Heights road, then headed north, just kept on driving. We had three quarters of a tank and a long way to go. As we crossed a bridge Jason tossed out the old man’s wallet. We stuck to the back roads for two, three, four hours, not exchanging a word, until we ran out of gas. We got out of the car. The doors banged shut like gunshots. The sky was growing light with dawn, the black road bordered by thick walls of trees. It smelled like ancient forest and motor oil. 

Your Passion for Running?:

From Anna Banana, 45 Years of Fooling Around with A. Banana, edited by Michelle Jacques. Published by Figure 1 and the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria in 2015. Anna Banana is a multi-disciplinary artist. She lives on the Sunshine Coast of BC.

The study surveyed 696 marathon runners about their passion for running and how they go about working toward a goal. Love, Pas-

sion Made Gollapudi Award So Popular: Chiranjeevi

believes the reason behind the popularity of Gollapudi Srinivas National Award is because of love and passion.

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I Don’t Read DEREK BEAULIEU

From How to Write. Published by Talonbooks in 2010. Derek Beaulieu’s work has appeared internationally in small press publications and magazines, and in visual art galleries. He lives in Calgary.

I

f a tutorial doesn’t have code I don’t read it. Ten Reasons Why I Don’t Read Your Blog. Sorry David I don’t read anything apart from stories. “I don’t read blogs, but I DO read…” I don’t read newspapers or magazines anymore, at least not printed versions.

“I don’t read Slate!” he snapped.

“Why would I read that?” I don’t read books. Five reasons why I don’t read mail on the Nokia 770. He says, “I suppose it would be interesting, but I don’t read reviews. I don’t want to believe the bad stuff and I don’t want to believe the good stuff.” I don’t read criticism. “I suppose it would be interesting, but I don’t read reviews.”

I don’t read my blog either. “I don’t read that much sports journalism.”

I don’t encourage this; even with friends, I don’t read things that aren’t finished. However, strictly as a matter of prudence, it’s best that I don’t read your work. I don’t read anymore, but I’d like to know what Steve Jobs has to say. I don’t read DAT files, Database

and Reporting. I don’t read enough.

Why I Don’t Read Mysteries Anymore. I don’t read Nigerian Newspapers. Why I don’t read Fox News.

Wow! Thanks for that! You’ve made me feel a bit better about the fact that I don’t read my Bible every day either.

I don’t read them—I don’t have time; I scan them. The title explains it all: I don’t read. I like his blog, I like him, I value what he has to say however for one reason or another I don’t read his blog that often. Sounds like… I don’t read INTO what is said. I don’t read that language, but there are some useful links from that.

I don’t read books, I read e-books, seriously though, I don’t read books, my reading skills are reserved. But I don’t read text printed in Braille font. I don’t read yellow journals, not even as I wait in the checkout line. I don’t read the sports section. Another reason I don’t read them is that I’ve got a great network of filters. Why I don’t read 8-Bit Theater. Oh no, I

From Don’t Get Eaten By Anything, by Dakota McFadzean. Published by Conundrum Press in 2015. Dakota McFadzean’s work has appeared in Mad magazine, Broken Pencil, Funny or Die and many others. He lives in Toronto.

Crean Talks Togetherness, Passion:

don’t read the blogs—you couldn’t pay me to read the blogs. I don’t read any women bloggers. Because I don’t read these books, I can’t comment on the review. Hey, I don’t read Arabic. As a result, I don’t read their work as often. If you ain’t a feed, I don’t read… I don’t read German. I don’t read books about surfers and other unrelated factoids. That said, I don’t read so much for fun on the side, because I am already reading so much I hardly have time and I enjoy what I do. Why I Don’t Read the Newspaper. I Don’t Read Nearly Enough These Days. I don’t read Maureen Dowd. Buy this—I don’t read your blog either. Agreed, I don’t read newspapers too often (prefer my Google reader—and no English one here for that matter…) for the news, but as for books? If I don’t read it, no one else will. That’s okay, I don’t read.

I suspect we were all exaggerating a bit. I don’t read MegaTokyo. I don’t read any sports any more, save for an occasional visit to MLB.Com. I track around 700 blogs—however I don’t read them all (I scan) and I wouldn’t do that on a daily basis. 40 Responses to “Why I don’t read theology blogs.”

I don’t read books. 5 Reasons I Don’t Read Your Blog and How to Change That. If I don’t read regularly, I feel stressed. Warning messages, but I don’t read Russian. “I don’t read newspapers or magazines anymore either.” Just because I don’t read the dead trees doesn’t mean other people don’t. Maybe I don’t read good but where does it say anything about reading skills? You might as well say “I don’t read books” or “my brain is full.” If I don’t read it my soul be lost, nobody’s fault but mine / Ah, Lord, Lord, nobody’s fault but mine / If I don’t read it my soul be lost. I don’t read BOOKS I read POETRY. I don’t read unless it is on a computer.

I don’t read stuff. 

The passion Fort Wayne residents have for their community is one of the reasons Indiana men’s basketball coach Tom Crean

said he enjoys visiting the Summit City so much. From Pen to Pulpit, Maggie Helwig Driven By Passion for Social Justice: On the last Sunday morning in July, Rev.

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Marcel, one of eight portraits in the series Bearded Ladies by Rosamond Norbury. Norbury is a photographer whose work has appeared in books and magazines, film and television. She lives in Vancouver. See page 66 for more on the film Bearded ladies.

Maggie Helwig, rector of St. Stephen-in-the-Fields Anglican church, takes her place at the pulpit to deliver the week’s homily. Can Dez Bryant’s Passion Ever Be Too Much?:

It’s the first tenet Jason Garrett preaches: passion, emotion and enthusiasm. 

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Surrounded by Ducks The Myth of Cultural Identity D.M. FRASER

This piece originally appeared in an undated issue of Alive magazine in the mid-’70s.

D.M. Fraser was born in Nova Scotia and spent most of his adult life in Vancouver. He was the author of two books, Class Warfare and The Voice of Emma Sachs, and many other works.

N

ot long ago (May 13, 1974), a local academic personage named Sandra Djwa was quoted in the Vancouver Sun: “You see, when (A.J.M.) Smith starts talking about trees blowing in the wind and ducks crying in The Lonely Land, he can only have been talking about Canada.” The remark would be comic in its fatuity if it were not, in a peculiar and limited—and, lately, unavoidable—sense, true. Yes, Mr. Smith can only have been talking about Canada, because nowhere else in the world, in this age, could such talk be taken seriously; nowhere else would it be cited, straight-faced, by a purportedly responsible scholar and critic, as an admirable example, a touchstone, for a national literature. Ten years ago, or twenty, in some snowbound tenthgrade classroom in, say, northern New Brunswick, the sentiment might have been forgivable, or at least understandable: after all, wasn’t it precisely that species of self-delusion most of us were raised under, taught to believe, value, emulate? The Lonely Land (ad mare usque ad nauseam). Ducks (and related quackery). Trees (preferably maple) blowing in the wind. The dingy Group of Seven reproductions that seemed to hang, wearily, on the mudbrown walls of every public institution.

“He (Smith) and his fellow poets,” Ms. Djwa tells us serenely, “did for poetry what the Group of Seven did for art.”

Yes, yes indeed.

This is, we’re reminded continually, the age of the New Nationalism. Billboards exhort us to “Stand together— Understand together.” Everything

from government agencies to a hockey team has the name “Canada” attached to its tail, as if the ritual incantation of the word alone could somehow make the phenomenon real. The airwaves wheeze with something called “Canadian Content,” imposed by quota. And virtually everyone, of whatever political persuasion, seems convinced that a latter-day Renaissance of Canadian culture is imminent, if it is not already in flower.

The presumption here—the one that recurs, relentlessly, in so much of the literary propaganda of our day— is that by now we’ve all grown up, reached “cultural maturity,” achieved an indigenous, independent Canadian identity, a culture peculiarly our own.

(In Quebec, something of the sort may actually have happened, but here I am writing specifically of the Anglophone culture, which still largely informs the popular notion of what is “Canadian.”)

Related historically to this presumption, and commonly thought to be inseparable from it, is the conviction that the achievement of the “uniquely Canadian” is de facto a good thing: the devoutly desired end of a process that began back in colonial times and has only now at least, triumphantly fulfilled itself. And, at a first glance, that would even appear to be the case: production of assorted cultural matter in this country is surely at an all-time high, the academic Canadian Studies industry is booming, and in general the national self-consciousness is asserting itself as never before in our modest history.

Not the least of the problems raised by these presumptions is that they are not, though they claim to be, an analysis of what is happening in, and to, our cultural life: they are merely articles of faith, bred out of chauvinism by way of national paranoia, and they define an aspiration which is, on the deepest level, simplistic and reactionary. It is simplistic because it presupposes the existence and cohesiveness of a single, identifiable “Canadian identity”; and it’s reactionary because it plays directly into the hands—and has already become the quasi-official policy— of a reactionary political order. One of the most pervasive ironies regularly encountered by publishers and other ostensibly “creative” workers in Canada is that, in producing and promoting “Canadian content” as such, they are in effect locking themselves into the repressive mechanism of exactly that state-dominated pseudoculture which, more often than not, they profess to oppose.

The obvious result, then, is both aesthetic and political disaster. Work of a distinctly mediocre character is all too frequently tolerated, even glorified, solely because it is Canadian, because it is “ours.” Third-rate talent is encouraged, subsidized, emboldened by the proliferation of outlets for its product and by the blandly uncritical acceptance—or, more probably, indifference—with which Canadians have tended to respond to whatever is offered them. And those artists who ideally could be—and might well wish

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to be—in the vanguard of revolt are instead patronized, supported, coopted and thus defused, by the very system against which they undertake to struggle. As a consequence, Canadian culture, in so far as it functions at all, becomes no more than a thin decorative coating, an obfuscation, on the surface of our collective experience.

This argument is not, of course, a new one, but it is one which, in the present nationalistic climate, is usually overlooked (or openly discounted) by apologists for things Canadian—even, perhaps especially, by those on the Left. “National pride” is clearly a higher priority, these days, than national self-criticism, which can always be interpreted as yet another symptom of that famous Canadian inferiority complex from which we’re traditionally supposed to suffer. Accordingly we are counselled (in, for example, the terms of Alive) “to build and maintain an independent and progressive Canadian literature and culture”; but we are given singularly little counsel on what the nature and criteria of that culture should be.

On the broadest level, the goal itself is inclusive enough, vague enough, to be at worst harmless and at best possibly commendable. But what, concretely, does it signify? Specifically, what is this new culture to be independent of? What is it to be progressive toward? And when it is built, how shall we recognize it, how evaluate it?

Here, essentially, is the root of the confusion which afflicts most of our attempts, as cultural workers of one kind or another, to determine just what our real work is, or ought to be. The confusion emerges, I suspect, from two fundamental misapprehensions: (1) that the kind of independence proposed is necessarily desirable, or even attainable, in the context of an authentic internationalism; and (2) that a culture is something which can be “built,” manufactured, by a conscious

effort of collective will. From these misconceptions, many of us automatically derive a third: that the independence sought is, immediately, from the powerful presence and influence of American culture—to which the genuinely Canadian product, if we ever manage to produce it, will magically provide an alternative, an antithesis, an antidote.

If we look closely at these propositions, it soon becomes apparent how insubstantially they are grounded in either historical or philosophical experience. The great indigenous cultures of Europe, for example, evolved through centuries in a continually shifting interplay of isolation and interaction; they were not willed arbitrarily into being, and when nationalism arose as a political force in Europe, the supportive cultures had long since developed naturally to shape and define it. The North American experience was, from the beginning, radically different, as it had to be: what was generated here—the native culture having been dismissed from the first, and in time effectively suppressed if not exterminated—was necessarily a colonial culture. That is, it was an amalgam, never very stable, of cultural influences imported from elsewhere, originally from Britain, then from the multiplicity of nations whose emigrants came to populate the “new world.” That amalgam was then fused together, acted upon, inevitably modified, by the new experiences and preoccupations of a developing continent, by the impingement of technology, by the workings of a new kind of history.

In Europe, then, the territorial and cultural aspects of nationalism were essentially coextensive, in aspiration if not always in political fact. A particular variety of cultural “identity” could in fact exist, because it had an actual place out of which it came and in which it functioned organically,

and actual people whose shared perceptions provided its animating spirit.

Even in the nineteenth century, it would have been absurd, because unnecessary, to crusade for an “independent” British or French or Italian culture; both language and geography ensured the relative autonomy of national cultures, and independence arose as an issue only in the political sphere. Not surprisingly, in such a context, influences could be transmitted from one culture to another and assimilated, without damage—or expectation of damage—to the integrity of either; that, after all, is how the whole complex of “western civilization,” so-called, was able to evolve and sustain itself.

North America was another matter. The liberation of what became the United States from the political domination of Britain was also a cultural liberation: it made possible the emergence of a culture that was recognizably, specifically “American,” capable of drawing its nourishment—and its content—from whatever was there to be drawn upon: from the history, the contingencies, the character of a nation in the process of creating itself.

Independence, in the American context, was from the outset a meaningful concept because it was an active one; consciously and concretely, the country was engaging in self-determination, and that activity was as vigorously cultural as it was territorial and political.

America was, quite literally, the New World, and its newness was the particular source of its strength. No wonder, then, that there the colonial culture was able so easily to transform itself, in a relatively short time, into an imperial one, and to assert its hegemony not only over the rest of this continent, but also—in the present century—over much of Europe as well.

In Canada, something else happened: to put it as simply as possible, one could say that Canada itself did

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not happen. Geographically part of the New World, and privy, in its years of expansion, to much of the same experience that shaped the United States, Canada nonetheless remained by choice colonial, remained attached, politically and culturally, to the Old World. The energy to break away was never there (nor is it now). Even when a semi-autonomous “Nation” was eventually legislated into being, it was in fact a pseudo-nation, a “country” only in the most purely formal sense: a territory arbitrarily established, arbitrarily defined, no less arbitrarily governed. And when, in time, the old colonial ties weakened, new ones were already being formed.

Canada was a natural target for American cultural and economic imperialism, not merely because of proximity, but because there was no force here strong enough, or concerned enough, to counteract it. The American culture could prevail simply because it was there, supported by the developing technology (and, increasingly, transmitted by it) and camouflaged, at least for a time, by Canadian receptivity to its inroads. After all, what else of interest was even available?

So much for history. The deed is done, and it cannot—despite the protestations of newly awakened nationalists—be undone now. Canada is what it has become, for better or worse, and it is neither practical nor reasonable to deny the presence, in our midst, in our roots, of a deep and enduring American influence, as there is scarcely less a British influence, a French influence, an influence from all the nations we are. Our culture, such as it is, may indeed have arisen outside our

territorial boundaries, but right now it is as much “ours” as “theirs.” We have no other. It could not have been otherwise, because no “authentic” Canadian culture—no different kind of culture—appeared, or was needed, within the country. The nationalist dream of “liberating” Canada from American input is, ultimately, a pipe-dream.

However it may seem, this is not a defeatist proposition. If we can relinquish, at whatever cost to our collective vanity, the old chimera of “Canadian identity,” we may discover in Canada, as elsewhere, a capacity we have been largely unaware of, and so far have failed to exercise. If we cannot and need not liberate ourselves from American culture, there is still a context in which liberation can occur, spontaneously, without invoking the spectre of national chauvinism: that is the context of truly continental revolt in which Canadians, for their part, would finally realize that the enemy is not “America,” as such, but the repressive and insatiable capitalist order to which we are, and have always been, as much in thrall as they.

It is not within the scope of this essay to formulate a program for the desired “cultural revolution”; such a program would be, in any event, selfpredictive and self-defeating. The thing itself will either happen, or it will not. But it is imperative to begin somewhere: to begin, perhaps, by examining our old assumptions and anxieties, and discarding those that no longer work for us, no longer apply to our situation. That, to some extent, a beginning has already been made (if only tentatively) is demonstrated by the urgency with which Alive, for

example, addresses itself to the problems of Canadian literature and criticism; it is demonstrated, too, by the proliferation of other publications which bring a more or less political analysis—or political consciousness— to bear on literary matters. And it has been demonstrated, in the experience of this writer, by the continuing activity of Pulp Press—which has never been, or tried to be, exclusively “Canadian,” which accepts and will go on accepting good writing from whatever source, and in which—at best of times—the editorial consciousness is as political as it is “literary.”

The very currency of the phrase cultural workers implies a new attitude toward the legitimacy, and the responsibility, of the cultural enterprise; it suggests, among other things, that there exists, should exist, a shared ground, a commonality of interest, between the individual artist and all other participants in the cultural process. We are all engaged, separately and multifariously, in cultural work, and it is by definition a collective activity, whether that collectivity is embarked upon deliberately (as in the case of Alive), or simply occurs by chance.

That is the beginning. We need not complain, now, of being dominated by the culture of the United States: have we not traditionally shared the same values, the same assumptions, the same economic and social orientation? Liberation from that could, not inconceivably, generate a literature and culture that would be neither American nor Canadian, but—at last—revolutionary: the culture not of a “new nation,” which we can very well do without, but of a new age. 

RECOMMENDED READING

“A New Canadian Myth for New Canadian Time” by Sheila Heti “How We Imagine Ourselves” by Howard White “Translated from the American” by Stephen Henighan “Re-hanging the National Wallpaper” by Daniel Francis“ The Self-Destruction of the CBC” by Ira Wagman

Read more Geist at

GEIST com 

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front l i ne p h oto g rap h y

Exodus

MICHEL HUNEAULT

Between September 5 and September 14, 2015, approximately eighty thousand Syrian refugees and asylum seekers streamed along a migration route that ran from Roeske, Hungary, to Munich, Germany, via Budapest, Nickelsdorf and Vienna. The migrants were initially welcomed and received provisions of food and clothing and free transportation. By the end of the nine days, stringent border controls in all three countries had been put in place, and in some instances barbed-wire fences and tear gas were used to repel migrants.

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Roeske, Hungary

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Roeske, Hungary

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Roeske, Hungary

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Roeske, Hungary

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Munich, Germany

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Vienna, Austria

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f l es h

and

fra m e

Shouldn’t I Feel Pretty?

IVAN COYOTE

Somewhere in the sweat and ache and muscle I carved a new shape for myself

O

n June 25, I received the following email:

Dear Ivan: I was just wondering if you always knew. When did you become comfortable in your skin? See, I always felt not quite right. I’d put on dresses or high heels and makeup and look in the mirror and I just didn’t feel right. Shouldn’t I feel pretty? Why didn’t I like what I saw? I’m forty-four years old and I think I’ve just realized that maybe girls’ and women’s clothes aren’t right for me. I feel stupid that it took me so long to realize what I am. It breaks my heart that it took me so long.

I don’t even know where to begin to feel right, to feel good, to feel beautiful. Any tips?

I wrote this person back and told them I needed a couple of days to think about this. Here is my response to them: I get these letters now. I get these letters from people who are hurting. It’s a terrifying thing, the pain of a stranger.

Impossible to bear it all, even on a strong day, even when the sun is shining and my back doesn’t hurt and the dishes are all done.

Mostly I think people just want to know they are not alone, not the only one trying to swallow and breathe around the big, empty abandoned town hall their heart is echoing inside of. Should I tell them the truth, I wonder?

Do they really want to know I feel just as lost as they do some days? And are two lost people any better off when they find each other?

Instead I make a cup of strong black tea with canned milk and one brown sugar and I sit down to find the trail into the truth of these things in the only way I have ever known how: by collecting up words and then walking around with them in my mouth, words arguing between my ears, words leaving my heart in lumps and then lining up in single file in my lungs to get said out loud.

In September 1974, when I first started kindergarten, my mom cut a deal with me that I could wear pants to school every other day. Which meant I wore a dress every day that wasn’t pants day. The night before a wear-a-dress-day I would have bad dreams, panic dreams about boys waiting under the backless wooden stairs that led into the portable trailer next to the school where my kindergarten class was

held. Sweating, fear-stained dreams of laughing boys looking up my skirt. And I couldn’t even kick them properly, because have you ever tried to do a high kick in a dress?

The harder you kick the faster your one raised leg pulls your other leg out from under you. Hot tears on my cheek and my bare thigh all torn up by the gravel. I am sure many people have perfected a technique to manage the high-kick-ina-long-dress phenomenon, but I never did. I just dragged myself to school for months, every other day afraid and exhausted, until my mom finally took pity on me and bought me two more pairs of brown corduroys on sale at the old Bay in the Qwanlin Mall. She sighed and put them into the third drawer of my dresser with a cutting look in my direction because I had disappointed her again.

And so began a lifetime of hating most of my clothes.

I spent much of my early years shirtless in the summers.

In most old pictures of me I am smiling and sunburned from the waist up, my pant legs stuffed into black rubber boots with red-brown toes, good for standing in the shallow water or for spin-casting. Until the tourist from Texas who was camped two sites down from us called me “young man” and my mom corrected him because I was seven years old and we were standing in the lineup for the ladies’ showers. Go and put a T-shirt on, she told me, and leave it on this time. I am not going to tell you again.

I used to be mad at her for squeezing me into everything, but I grew out of it. I know now that she was worried about me. I wish that she had named what I saw in her eyes when she looked at me back then, I wish that she had called it fear.

Because all those years I mistook that look for shame, and that mistake has cost us both so much.

I like to think that I suffered the same as every teenage girl does in her changing body. I don’t think that trans people hold the monopoly or wrote the only book on hating our bodies, and even if we did win at this contest I wouldn’t want the fucking prize anyway. Describe the pain on a scale from one to ten, the doctor always says, but no one knows where zero sits. Did I hate my tiny tits any more than the beginnings of these hips? Hard to say.

Shouldn’t I feel pretty?

I can count the times on one hand when I did, and even those moments were fleeting, always collapsing as soon as

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I moved or breathed, my elbows too sharp, my knees not folded right, my shoulders too wide, my all of me lacking a certain kind of grace. Why didn’t I like what I saw? Probably because I felt like nobody else did.

I kissed my first girl in 1988. She was a jazz singer. She wasn’t queer, she said, she just fell in love with me, and I said I didn’t mind when her parents came to town and she introduced me as her roommate. I told her I understood, because I did.

I was a baby butch who had never heard the word and so didn’t know what to call my own self until I first read that word out loud in 1992 in the back stacks of Little Sister’s bookstore. I wore second-hand army boots three sizes too big and cut my own hair with clippers and bought my first necktie. I met what I didn’t know at the time was my first femme lover and she called me handsome and that one word made up for two decades of knowing I was never really all that pretty.

The first trans man I ever met in real life was still a lesbian separatist at the time, who cornered me up against the wall at the Lotus Club and chastised me for wearing a mascara moustache out to the bar on women-only night. I see him sometimes on Commercial Drive, sporting his full beard, but we talk about other things, and I forgive, but I don’t forget how lonely I felt that night.

In 1995 I started to bind my breasts, first with Saran Wrap, then Ace bandages, then by wearing a double-front compression shirt. Flattening them and hiding them under my clothes didn’t make me hate them any less, but it did make it easier to look in the mirror, and leave my apartment.

In 2008 I was about to turn forty years old and my body was becoming something I could not even recognize. Every twenty-eight days my tits would swell and ache and get bigger. My hips were doing things I had long admired in others but could not reconcile with my own flesh and frame. I started to seriously lift weights.

Somewhere in the sweat and ache and muscle I carved a new shape for myself that made more sense. You should do more cardio and lift less weight, my mom told me when I was home for a visit and she saw me bulging in a T-shirt at her kitchen table. Don’t let yourself get any bigger, she said. Don’t get any more tattoos. I took this as a sign, and really buckled down on the bicep curls. I felt more like myself.

I wish I could say that I learned to be truly comfortable in this body of mine before I had top surgery two years ago, but that would be a lie. I try every day not to let it break my heart that it took me so long. I am forty-six years old and it breaks my heart that it took me so long.

When did I know, you ask me? Since always, I guess.

Probably just like how, somewhere inside of you, you have always known.

I look at pictures of shirtless me at five years old, and I can see the shape of my now flat chest foreshadowed in my tiny frame, even back then. I like my body now, from about the belly button up, and most days that is almost enough to say I nearly feel comfortable in my own skin. I nearly feel close to right. I love the shape of my ass when I am naked, but not so much when I am trying on dark denim skinny jeans in hipster stores that sprang up where greasy spoon diners and glove factories used to be.

I am grateful that I can now afford a well-cut shirt, a real silk tie and a tailor. A good haircut once a month. A fancy jacket with these cool elbows on it. I know these things make me lucky. These things make me feel more confident, more myself, but they don’t make me. I made me. This world made me. Struggle and fear and sweat and work and words made me. Did any of it come too late?

I don’t think so. I think everything happened when and nearly exactly how it needed to go down and now I am here, and I feel handsome and strong, and that, well, that is a beautiful thing.

Thank you for writing. I hope you are lucky like me. I hope you get this letter and it helps you somehow, helps you lift your chin and your eyes. I hope you learn to stand up full inside of yourself, I hope you one day wear yourself on your sleeve, on your French cuffs, on your chest, like a medal of honour.

Ivan Coyote is a writer and storyteller who was born and raised in Whitehorse, Yukon, and lives in Vancouver. Coyote is the author of ten books, has toured festivals and stages worldwide for nearly two decades, and plays the baritone saxophone. This piece will appear in Coyote’s eleventh book, Tomboy Survival Guide, due out from Arsenal Pulp Press in the fall of 2016.

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anna l s

of

p h oto g rap h y

Framed SARA CASSIDY Self-portraiture in Canada

Two pages from my diary. Janieta Eyre.

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Self-portrait with Inuit man’s two wives and child. William H. Grant. Library and Archives Canada.

T

he photographic self-portrait is like slow food. It takes planning and intent and time. There’s the lighting to consider, and the location, the struggle with the tripod’s finicky legs or the search for a satisfactory angle of reflection in mirror or window.

Meanwhile, the selfie—impulsive, wildly framed, instantly gratifying, in easy reach (literally and figuratively)— is fast food. The selfie descends from the candid family snapshot, itself consequent to the proliferation of the inexpensive, easy-to-use Brownie camera that put photography into amateurs’ hands early in the 1900s. (“Snapshot” is originally a hunting term for a shot fired without careful aim at a fast-moving target.) Easy to zoom, easy to shoot, with no clumsy film to forward, the digital camera made snapshots easier to take. The smartphone let us seamlessly turn the lens on ourselves.

The photographic self-portrait has a long history, with the first on record

Campfire Self-Portrait,

1939. William A. Norfolk. Library and Archives Canada.

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Self-Portrait. Caroline Monnet.

taken in 1839, the year the first camera design—developed by Louis Daguerre—was published for free public use by the French government.

As this survey of self-portraits by Canadian non-indigenous settlers and indigenous artists shows, this slower art form allows for complexity and resonance.

“A self-portrait should encapsulate much more information than a random selfie,” says Algonquin-French photographer Caroline Monnet. “It has great power to inform about social, political, cultural and economic contexts, while its meaning is completely manipulated by the artist.”

The selection of self-portraits here begins with the view through the colonizer’s eye. William H. Grant, member

of a 1922 Arctic exploration team, labels his self-portrait, Self-portrait with Inuit man’s two wives and child, failing to record the names of the people who welcomed him. The settler William Norfolk’s romantic self-portrait captures natural beauty, solitude, survival, even existentialism, also the pernicious idea of Canada as empty, all wilderness.

In the photo by Yousuf Karsh, who spent a lifetime capturing, in his words, “the essence of the extraordinary person,” the photographer turns the lens on himself. With its sharp black and white contrast, and mediating—wondrously—the inner life of its subject, the work is characteristically Karsh. The artist Art Zaratsyan frames himself repeatedly to express a distant state of mind. Janieta Eyre’s

surreal double portraits suggest the selves within us, perhaps the mirror “other” that our singularity evokes; in artist statements, Eyre has, playfully, claimed to be the surviving sister of Siamese twins separated at birth.

For contemporary indigenous photographers such as Metis Rosalie Favell the self-portrait can redress exclusion and proscription. For Haisla-British photographer Lisa Walker, the art form’s complexity is restorative. “Being a half First Nations woman in Canada is a sometimes confusing, sometimes beautiful, sometimes awkward thing to be. Self-portraiture helps me explore how it feels to inhabit multiple layers of my identity,” Walker says. “My selfportraits offer me a sense of empowerment, clarity, reflection.”

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The Artist in Her Museum/The Collector, 2007. Rosalie Favell.

The Artist in Her Museum / The Collector, 2007.

Rosalie Favell MÊtis artist Rosalie Favell digitally manipulated the painting The Artist in His Museum (by Charles Willson Peale, 1822), to shine a light on how museums display Aboriginal culture. As a way to assert her own and her community’s identity, She inserted herself and family photographs.

Collection of the artist.

No permission yet.

Self-Portrait, 1907, Sidney Carter. Library and

Archives Canada.

Autoportrait Au Rideau. Raymonde April. Courtesy of the artist.

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Self-portrait in elevator, Vancouver, BC, Canada on August 28, 2013. Art Zaratsyan. Courtesy of the artist.

With Cow, 2004

ry and Archives Canada Copyright: Benoit Aquin

Self-Portrait with Cow, 2004. Benoit Aquin. Library and Archives Canada. Courtesy of the artist.

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May 1, 2013. Lisa Walker. Courtesy of the artist.

By Sara C 1987, on articles, More at

Photographer Yousuf Karsh, 1938. Library and Archives Canada.

Sara Cassidy writes fiction and non-fiction. She lives in Victoria, BC. Read more of her work at geist.com and at saracassidywriter.com.

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Extras:

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s h ort

story

Pacific Meats & Frozen Foods, Inc. JOHNATHAN FAHEY

I worry the boss has mistaken my boredom for initiative

R

esumés. Cover letters. Phone calls. Repeat. By my own account, I’m not what you would call a skilled employee.

I’ll admit I’ve only had one job and I don’t believe I’m welcome back. I spent last summer working for Carter’s Campground and Nine-Hole Mini Putt, where I became: “Comfortable working outdoors” (mopping plastic grass and pouring blue dye into an artificial pond where mosquitoes meet to screw, and fall in love, and start a family); “Trained in customer service” (I fed an eight-year-old a hot dog that I’d dropped in the sink and then shortchanged him because we were out of five-dollar bills); and “Familiar with landscaping equipment” (Mr. Carter, I’m the one who knocked over the portapotties with the ride-on lawnmower).

I get hired by Pacific Meats & Frozen Foods, Inc., at their big storage warehouse outside of town. My family is thrilled.

“My son, the working man,” says my mother.

“Biking distance,” says my father.

The man who trains me is big and barrel-chested. He shaves his head and wears motorcycle T-shirts. The first thing Big Guy tells me to do is to climb up onto the forklift and go pick up a skid of chicken breasts from up front. I tell him I’ve never driven a forklift before and wonder whether there’s a certification process. This is funny to him and he has me do a practice lap around the warehouse. I skid around and bump into things. I’m nervous and uncoordinated, and he follows along and points to where certain products belong. When I hit into corners, he makes rough estimates of the damage, and says it’s all right. They’ll take it out of my first paycheque.

The warehouse is PM&FF’s Atlantic Distribution Centre. This means that food comes to us from all over (25 skids of premium Italian sausage from Germany, 8,000 pounds of frozen king prawn fresh from a shrimp farm in Thailand) and we ship it out all across the country (to supermarkets and butcher shops, to fast food chains and restaurants that serve $300 sit-downs eaten by candlelight).

During my second week, I learn shelf-stocking from a man with rotten teeth. He speaks enthusiastically of his ailment. Because, he says, he hasn’t used a toothbrush for thirteen years, all his teeth will now be replaced brand new. Which, by his account, will likely be much better than my own. “Have they ever given you nitrous oxide?” He’s much too keen to leave me with the chance to answer. “They’ll give me some of that for sure,” he says. “And maybe something stronger too, if I’m really nervous.” He relishes this thought and then lists off the post-op prescriptions he’s most excited about.

The foreman says a shipment wasn’t packed properly. We sent out twenty gallons of hot sauce whose bottles split and sprayed open and ruined an entire order. He says they have no way of knowing who packed it, but that he knows that I am new and that I am inexperienced. That order cost us $900… And this cannot happen again. When the foreman is gone, Big Guy comes over and says that he’s “one tall sack of shit.” Then he tells me about the time the foreman drank himself sick at the company Christmas Short Story 57

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party and threw up into a nativity scene. When the foreman walks past us again at the other end of the aisle Big Guy recalls, in a much louder voice, how he’s heard that the foreman now must blow through a plastic tube in order for his car to start. Quicker footsteps. This is when I realize that Big Guy is immune to authority.

A tiny man drifts around the shelves all day. He’s the one who tries to find the food that has been lost. We’ve never worked together, though I’ve seen him walking up and down the aisles looking up, searching, disheartened. Tiny Man is small in every way, and wears children’s shoes and speaks only in three-word sentences. He doesn’t seem to be very good at his job and he becomes confused easily. We read confusion off of his bald head, which turns pink whenever he becomes flustered. One day Big Guy leans over and asks if I think Tiny Man looks like an anorexic Elmer Fudd. I say that I think he looks like a miniature version of Big Guy. The bathroom stalls are painted in histories: odes to old bosses from former employees; bathroom poetry written in iambic pentameter. Someone’s gone and drawn a tally chart on the door. The title reads: “I wish ……….. would…” Below that, the two categories are Just Fuckin’ Retire Already (||| ) and EAT SHIT (|||| |||| || ). There’s someone sobbing in the next stall.

Big Guy claims he knows my father. When I question where they met, he says prison, then asks whether my father still fights dogs and sells dope to schoolchildren. I go along with him and he smiles, then asks if my mother is still a two-dollar-feature at Venus Exotic Show Palace. I go into my pocket and fish out a toonie and flick it at him.

He takes the coin and drops it down deep into his front breast pocket. Then he shows me how to pack an order properly.

In the afternoons I work with a hockey fan. The fan has made his allegiance clear by his choice of socks and jerseys, but still recites daily cheers as a precautionary measure.

Once he discovers where my loyalties lie, the terrible jokes begin.

Q: What’s the difference between [my team] and a dishwasher?

A: At least a dishwasher knows what a cup looks like.

The fan can only communicate through insults.

The sports section of the newspaper is off limits to all until he has checked it over twice and added his own perspective, with blue ink, into the margins. When his team is eliminated from the playoffs, I look forward to seeing him. I reword his jokes in my head and tool them to fit my own comic timing. But when we cross paths, he tightens up, as if he expects to be punched. I take pity on him and take a vow of silence. He eats lunch in his car that day.

When my work is finished, I mop up spilled grease and dried blood off the floors.

The foreman praises me for my work. He says he knows that I take pride in doing “a good job” and gives me more responsibilities. I don’t believe this is true and worry he has mistaken my boredom for initiative.

Big Guy has a fondness for practical jokes. He’s made a game of throwing wads of balled-up tape and plastic wrap at me while we’re working. So when I hear him shout “Heads up!” one morning, I turn around and make the catch. But this is not a ball of tape, it’s a dead mouse. I am holding a dead mouse and he hoots and slaps his knee.

“Good catch!” he says.

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Tiny Man has become his latest victim. We hide his work boots in the break room fridge and hang his lunch bag from a ceiling fan. And Tiny Man walks in circles and his tiny head turns pink. He has become an easy target and the jokes become more and more cruel. Big Guy’s favourite is sneaking up and startling him. We learn that Tiny Man is easily frightened. He jumps three feet off the ground when I drive up behind him with the forklift, honking and shouting, “Watch it!” Once when the power goes out, I swear Big Guy scares him so bad he’s wearing a different pair of pants when the lights go on again.

We have a seventieth birthday party for the mail clerk, who’s only sixty-eight. The foreman’s boss has come with cake and streamers to celebrate the occasion. As he begins to give a speech, I look over at Big Guy. He drags his thumb and index finger over top of his mouth, miming zip your lips. The workers try as best they can to bite their tongues and stifle laughter. The boss has realized his mistake but by now his speech is done. Afterward, the mail clerk stands, beaming, and gives thanks to all, to our whistles and applause. Once the food is served and the boss has gone, I spot the clerk looking down on his half-eaten cake. His smile is not a happy smile.

The foreman tells me to take home a pot roast because of my “good work.” They’re all laid out on a fold-up table, and I browse around and poke the fat. My mother cooks the roast in the oven. Me and Dad chop carrots and celery, and pour them in the pot with the meat. I slice a big piece for myself. When everything is finished and the plates are cleared away, Dad leans forward and says, thank you.

Sometimes I work the weekend shift alone for extra hours. The warehouse doors are locked on Saturdays and Sundays so I go in through the office. Both of the security staff workers look on, uninterested, when I say hello. They wear matching blue jackets and they drink from the same type of coffee mug. I wonder if they’re siblings but think it best not to ask.

Saturdays are quiet. I restock shelves and check on freezer doors. I check on temperature gauges and sweep up trash and garbage. Sometimes I play the radio through the PA system.

There’s a light on at the far end of the warehouse and I decide to shut it off so as not to be blamed on Monday. But before I find the switch I see that someone’s there. Tiny Man is over against the back wall sitting underneath a shelf. He turns and looks at me.

He has a box cutter against his neck.

“Go away now,” he says. I try to think of something sympathetic I can say. “Please go away,” he says. “I’ll hurt you.”

I’m still holding onto my broom when I rush into the office. I’m only halfway through explaining when one of the two security men stands up and goes off into the warehouse. I don’t know what happens next. I guess he’s a veteran. He goes and finds Tiny Man, talks him down, jumps him, and wrestles the box cutter out of his hands or something.

We never see Tiny Man again. I believe Big Guy is the first to joke about him.

Johnathan Fahey is a writer from Moncton, NB. Currently, he lives in Toronto and works for the Toronto Blue Jays. This is his first publication.

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after l i fe

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c u l t u re

City Apart STEPHEN HENIGHAN

Cities can divide their nations

T

he greatest European city is St. Petersburg. This statement might infuriate residents of Rome, Paris, Berlin or Madrid; yet these are merely the greatest cities of Europe’s common history. My claim overlooks Istanbul and London, Europe’s largest, most dynamic contemporary cities, which are dismissed by purists, and sometimes by their own inhabitants, as insufficiently European. If Europe is an idea, a vision of a civilization that rises in an arc from the monasticism of the Middle Ages to the humanism of the Renaissance to the freedoms of the Enlightenment, nowhere incarnates this ideal like St. Petersburg.

Russia’s second city was spared the travails of developing the heritage it exemplifies. It has no ancient monasteries, winding medieval streets or ruins from classical antiquity. Here achieved styles and symmetry dominate: the palaces line the canals in a procession of façades that recall glimpses from Paris, Venice or Berlin, others elsewhere, the parks are of geometrical perfection, the grand avenues meet at right angles, or at diagonals that are calculated to create an effect. St. Petersburg represents not the accumulation of Europeanness, but its culmination. The city is undilutedly European, in the mode that crystallized in the eighteenth century, because it did not exist before then.

Until 1703, when Peter the Great, Russia’s Germanophile emperor, laid two strips of peat on the ground in an

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inhospitable bog bordered by offshore islands and declared, “Here shall be a city,” few had considered living in this sub-arctic delta. Swedish soldiers had erected a ragged chain of forts in the region to deny Russia access to the Gulf of Finland. Frozen and dark in winter, notorious for endless sunlight and voracious mosquitoes in summer, prone to shifting and flooding, these swamps and channels were the worst terrain on which to found an imperial city. But, determined as he was to bring Russia into Europe, Peter needed a European seaport as his capital.

The land on which St. Petersburg is built was won back from Sweden in 1710. For the next forty years, more than 250,000 serfs laboured all year round to cart in fill and excavate the canals that would realize Peter’s dream of combining aspects of Amsterdam, Venice, Rome and Paris in a single metropolis. The city ruled by a Germanic royal family—Catherine the Great, Peter’s illustrious successor, was Prussian—was designed by Italian,

French and British architects, and advised by French philosophers, whose language dominated erudite conversation to the point that many nobles barely knew enough Russian to give orders to their servants.

The new city attracted visitors and residents from all over Europe. Like Paris, London and Madrid, St. Petersburg was built on colonial exploitation; but where France, Britain and Spain ransacked faraway continents, Russia pillaged its Central Asian heartland and conquered territories in Siberia and East Asia. Colonialism caused glaring contradictions in Russia from the moment of the new capital’s inception. Since European Russia was geographically contiguous with its colonies, these contradictions spawned a divided national identity. Slavophiles blamed St. Petersburg for cutting Russia in half, slicing its buoyant European head from its deep Eurasian soul. In Andrei Bely’s Petersburg (1916), the last great Russian novel published prior to the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution, the narrator says of the city’s foundation: “Russia was divided in two; divided in two were the very destinies of the fatherland; divided in two, suffering and weeping, until the last hour, is Russia.”

Though built of stone and marble in an era when Russian cities were made of wood, St. Petersburg did not become a chilly showcase capital. From the beginning, its canals attracted students and poets as well as generals and bureaucrats. The new

nevsky prospect in st. petersburg, 1896. artist unknown.

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metropolis enjoyed a vigorous artistic and bohemian life. Here the poet Alexander Pushkin refined a flexible, modern literary Russian; Nikolai Gogol negotiated in his fiction his passage from a Ukrainian to a Russian identity; Fyodor Dostoevsky, though he yearned for Russia to embrace its Orthodox religious soul, never abandoned the ambiguous city that was both Russian and European. Adolf Hitler and Josef Stalin both loathed St. Petersburg. Russian president Vladimir Putin, though raised in the city and exemplifying its cultural inclinations—like his predecessor Catherine the Great, he speaks fluent German—has built his political empire by promoting a nationalist chauvinism that is suspicious of St. Petersburg’s internationalism.

If St. Petersburg invites Russians to lose their prejudices about the outside world, it also obliges foreigners to confront their prejudices about Russia. Arriving in the city on Canada

day 2015 with my head full of Canadian media images of a revived Cold War, I struggled to reconcile Putin’s belligerence with the cosmopolitan acceptance I experienced. The friends I made were unlike the Russians I had known in former Soviet republics in the 1990s: xenophobic, wounded adults who had all married at twenty and seen their marriages sluiced away in torrents of alcohol abuse. My St. Petersburg friends were polyglot non-smokers who hadn’t drunk heavily since their undergraduate days; they had good jobs and went to the gym; though most were around forty, not one was married. They took me to Jewish and German cafés, to a rock concert in a former bomb shelter and an Eid-al-Fitr dinner with Central Asian food. “You must understand that there is a paradox,” a young journalist told me. “As our government retreats from the West, our cities become more Western. Putin cannot stimulate the economy without eroding

his support. The cities become more organized, and more people move to them and accept different ways of living. The big difference now is not between our cities and those of other countries, but between our cities and our countryside.” I replied that this was similar in Canada; in fact, it is similar in many countries. St. Petersburg anticipated by three centuries what is now a pattern: the metropolis as a link in a global chain of cities that bypass, offend or divide the nations where they are located. Such cities are more and more tightly tied to each other, and ever more estranged from their own heartlands. St. Petersburg will always be unique, but now more than ever, it is not alone.

Stephen Henighan’s fourth novel, The Path of the Jaguar, will be published by Thistledown Press in October 2016. Read more of his work at stephenhenighan.com and geist.com.

Follow him on Twitter @StephenHenighan.

He lives in Guelph.

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N A T I O N A L

D R E A M S

Birth of a Nation DANIEL FRANCIS

Lacking in drama and embarrassingly undemocratic, Canada’s origins owe a lot to old-fashioned politics and not much to European battles or transcontinental railways.

O

ne reason people so often accuse Canadian history of being dull is that the country is an administrative achievement, not a revolutionary one. No great burst of independence for us, no war or insurrection. Just a slow, incremental slog toward nationhood; accommodations made at meetings held in conference rooms involving lots of talk and not much action. In the absence of an actual “birth of a nation” event, a variety of symbolic ones have been proposed over the years.

The completion of the transnational railway is an old favourite.

The driving of the Last Spike at Craigellachie, BC, on November 7, 1885, has been held up as the most important single event in Canadian history. Without the railway to bind us together, it is said, there would have been no Canada. Other countries treasure dramatic images of citizens storming the barricades to seize their freedom; Canadians have photographs of bearded men in top hats banging on a nail.

Alternatively, it is argued that Canada found its way to nationhood on the battlefields of Europe during World War I. The Battle of Vimy Ridge in April 1917, where almost 3,600 Canadian soldiers died, enjoys a special place in our national mythology. “I witnessed the birth of

a nation,” declared one senior officer who was there. The giant monument that overlooks the battlefield is the country’s most famous memorial. According to this version of our history, Vimy, and World War I generally, transformed Canada from a dependent colony to an independent nation. The success of its soldiers, at great cost, gave Canada the right to be taken seriously on the world stage, by itself and by others.

But no matter how determined have been the attempts to locate a dramatic origin story, it is well to remember, as the 150th anniversary of Confederation approaches in 2017, that Canada was a nation eighteen

years before Sir Donald Smith drove the Last Spike and fifty years before our soldiers stormed the ridge at Vimy. These events, and others, may have strengthened our self-confidence but they did not create the country. Oldfashioned politics did that.

Christopher Moore reminds us of this simple history lesson in his new book, Three Weeks in Quebec: The Meeting that Made Canada (Allen Lane). In October 1864, thirty-three men— women were not welcome at the table—convened in Quebec City for three weeks of meetings.

Delegates to this get-together, known to posterity as the Quebec Conference, were a collection of politicians from the five colonial legislatures that comprised British North America: the United Canadas (Ontario and Quebec), New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, Prince Edward Island and Newfoundland. Some of them had met at Charlottetown the previous month and discovered, somewhat to their own surprise, that a federation of the colonies was possible. But, writes Moore, “the nuts and bolts of a formal union remained to be placed and tightened down.” That was the purpose of the Quebec City gathering.

Moore has written about these events before in 1867: How the Fathers

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Made a Deal (McClelland & Stewart), his 1997 study of Canadian nationmaking. In this new book his focus narrows to the meetings in Quebec, where solutions to so many of the contentious issues were debated.

The creation of an upper house, how its members should be selected and how much power it should have; how to share responsibilities between the provinces and the central government; whether the new country should be a federation or a legislative union; what would be the relationship with the Mother Country. Many of these constitutional questions are still with us. They all received their first, tentative solutions at Quebec in 1864 and they all receive a thorough airing in Moore’s book.

Interestingly, the question of Aboriginal people was not on the table at all. “The delegates talked ambitiously of expanding their confederation across to British Columbia,” Moore tells us, “and opening the lands of the northwestern plains for the sons and daughters of Ontario’s crowded farming counties, but their plans took no account of the people who actually lived there.” Nonetheless the conference took one decision that involved the First Nations: one of the resolutions placed responsibility for “the Indians” with the national government, not the provincial ones. No other group or community received the same specific mention, says Moore, and it implied a unique constitutional status for the First Nations, even if most of the delegates believed that they were rapidly dying out and would not long be around to pose any constitutional responsibility anyway.

As Moore points out, there was nothing inevitable about a united Canada. The idea had been knocked around for fifty years and never been accepted. By the mid-1860s, however, events had aligned to favour a federation, no matter what differences each colony’s delegates brought to

the table. The threat from an armed and bellicose United States made union urgent, the rapid development of railways made it practicable, the desire of local politicians to obtain a wider stage for their ambitions made it seductive, and the political stalemate in the Province of Canada made it expedient. Suddenly there were several good reasons why the individual colonies believed that their security and prosperity lay in a united front.

(Of course, as Moore reveals, the conference wasn’t all nose to the grindstone. At night the delegates were entertained at a series of balls and banquets that showed off the crème de la crème of local society. One diarist claims that John A. Macdonald was “always drunk,” though Moore doubts that this was true. More reliably, the prominent Irish-Canadian orator D’Arcy McGee, another legendary boozehound, got so plastered at a dinner party he was forced to leave the table. One wonders how some delegates found the stomach to resume work in the morning.)

Moore addresses the question of how democratic was the agreement at Quebec City that led to Confederation. Not very, it would seem by modern standards. The deliberations themselves were top secret, closed to the press and therefore the public.

Delegates were elected representatives, but elected by the few since the franchise was limited to male property owners. Once they hammered out a deal—known as the 72 Resolutions— it had to be taken back to the colonial assemblies for ratification, and only the Province of Canada voted to endorse. Newfoundland and PEI both decided to opt out of the union, at least for the time being. In Nova Scotia, opposition to what Joseph Howe called “the Botheration Scheme” was so strong that a decision had to be put off. New Brunswick was the only province where the voters got a chance to cast ballots on the issue, and they delivered a resounding No. In

Quebec many Francophones believed that union was a plot to destroy French/Catholic civilization in North America. In other words, Confederation was not the people’s choice. In the end it went ahead because of pressure from Great Britain, fear of American expansionism and the manoeuvring of the political elites.

Which is not to say it wasn’t a good idea; experience suggests that it was. Certainly Moore is unimpressed by the charge that the Confederation makers were not democrats. They “put less emphasis on how many voted than on who was accountable to whom,” he writes. “They were determined that the governments of their new federation should be accountable, not just to occasional elections but constantly, held accountable by lively independent legislatures that they believed to be representative of the people. They were parliamentary democrats…”

Democratic or not, the political horse-trading that led up to Canada’s creation is hard to fashion into a suitably dramatic birth of a nation, one that conforms to a flag-waving, drums-and-trumpets view of nationbuilding. Which may be why, as the sesquicentennial of Confederation (and the anniversary of Vimy Ridge) approaches, we hear so much about World War I being the crucible of the nation. In Three Weeks in Quebec City, Christopher Moore delivers a timely reminder that as important as the war was, Canada was a political creation, not a military one, born around a conference table, not on the battlefield. That may not be as sensational as a revolution or a war, but it is who we are.

Daniel Francis is a writer and historian who lives in North Vancouver. He is the author of two dozen books, including Selling Canada: Three Propaganda Campaigns That Shaped the Nation (Stanton Atkins & Dosil). Read more of his work at geist.com and danielfrancis.ca.

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C I T Y

O F

W O R D S

In Praise of Ronald Wright ALBERTO MANGUEL

An eye for the telling trifle, an ear for the revealing snippet “From time to time, God causes men to be born—and thou art one of them—who have a lust to go abroad at the risk of their lives and discover news—today it may be of far-off things, tomorrow of some hidden mountain…”

Rudyard Kipling, Kim

I

was discussing with a Peruvian friend the books that have been written in English about South America, and making a list of the few that (in our opinion) got things right and the many (also in our opinion) that got things wrong. Books by W.H. Hudson and Charles Waterton were high on our list of favourites. Then my friend mentioned one that he thought perfectly captured the complexities of his country and its deep and obscured history: Ronald Wright’s Cut Stones and Crossroads. I remembered reading it many years ago, and how impressed I was by its honesty and wisdom.

The great twelfth-century traveller Ibn al-Arabi defined the very origin of our human existence as movement. “Immobility can have no part in it,” wrote Ibn al-Arabi, “for if existence were immobile it would return to its source, which is the Void.

That is why the voyaging never stops, in this world or in the hereafter.”

With a malicious linguistic twist, Ibn al-Arabi confuses our endless movement through time, from cradle to grave, with a pragmatic movement through space. Certainly, even cloistered in one’s room for the whole of one’s life, one is condemned to travel through the years, hour after hour, each one wounding us, as a sundial

motto has it, until the last one kills us.

And yet, an opponent of Ibn al-Arabi might have argued, movement from one point of this earth to another is merely a succession of moments of being still: our geography exists only in the instant in which we are there, standing on our own two feet.

This notion of travel as moving through space but also being in one place at a time is vividly exemplified in the travel books of Ronald Wright.

After Cut Stones and Crossroads came the equally brilliant Stolen Continents and Time among the Mayas, which I read just as avidly. In all three books, Wright has diligently chronicled the ancient civilizations of Latin America, travelling through Peru and Mexico, and rooting himself in a succession of historical moments, visiting not only the present landscapes but also those long vanished, like the courageous Time Traveller imagined by H.G. Wells. Wright witnesses the past from the vantage point of the present, and reports back to us.

Because of this ability to see what once was in the context of what now remains, his books translate his observations into essays that artfully combine travelogues with archaeological research, and political science with anthropology. The strategies of political power in our time and the weight of a fading tradition, the social memory of past events and the construction of the idea of history, the confused or lost identity of a conquered people and the identities imposed by the conqueror—all these themes weave through Wright’s books forming complex and illuminating

patterns that allow the reader to share and begin to understand the crossroads to the past.

Wright’s writing, I later discovered, is not limited to essays: he is also the author of remarkable works of fiction. Aware that to a degree the material evidence of his travels curtails the scope of an explorer’s curiosity, Wright decided, a few years after publishing his travel books, to expand his wanderings into the realm of the imaginary. The result was two splendid novels of adventure: first, the prescient and terrifying A Scientific Romance and then Henderson’s Spear with its parallel universes of sea-travel and exploration. A Scientific Romance imagines a Britain turned tropical jungle in the climate changes of the not-too-distant future; Henderson’s Spear conjures up the tale of a South Sea voyage undertaken during the Victorian age. Both are also travel books, and the fact that they never took place in reality does not disqualify them from being authentic.

Authenticity is the essential quality of all travel literature, imaginary or real. The vocabularies of the culture that formed us can distort or make us see a reality that is not that of the land extending before us, unless we place ourselves in the position not of someone who knows the answers but of someone who is interested in the questions. Robert Frost’s dictum that “The land was ours before we were the land’s” is lethal to the observant traveller. Authenticity implies giving oneself over to the thing observed.

And yet, there is a paradox in the art of travel that seems impossible

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to overcome in order to achieve this required authenticity: that every discovery always entails some measure of recognition. Even as we set out, with unprejudiced eyes, to explore places where we have never been before, we are still incapable of seeing something entirely new if it were to appear suddenly before our eyes. We are all to a certain degree like Christopher Columbus, who, during his third voyage to the New World, saw three manatees swimming near the mouth of the Orinoco River and jotted down in his journal, written in the third person, that the Admiral “saw three mermaids.” (His honesty compelled him to add: “but they are not as beautiful as they are painted.”) Fortunately, it is not how Ronald Wright has travelled.

When Cut Stones and Crossroads appeared in 1984, it was immediately hailed as a new kind of travel book, made up of personal anecdotes, erudite observations, fragments of conversations and historical notes. The subtitle, A Journey in the Two Worlds of Peru, prepares the reader for the observation of a schizophrenic culture, half steeped in its Inca past, half suffering from the onslaught of the world of our century.

The guide on this journey is an affable, intelligent, humorous Canadian (Wright was born in England) with a profound feeling for the complexities of the land of Peru, an aesthetic and historical appreciation of the ancient culture of the Incas, and a deep respect for the survivors of what was once one of the greatest empires in the history of the world.

Wright’s generous, erudite mind illuminates the reader’s journey.

The reader learns on one page that “Missionary evangelism for its own sake was virtually unknown in preConquest American religions,” and on another of the “Latin American belief in the power of architecture to create institutions.” One passage dwells on the fact (incomprehensible in capitalist societies) that “Gold and silver had no monetary value to the Incas: they

were substances of beauty and religions meaning the ‘sweat of the sun’ and the ‘tears of the moon’,” another on the qualities of pisco and coca. And reflections like the following, this one on the Runasimi language of the native people of Peru, threatened with extinction, lend universal meaning and particular purpose to Wright’s story: “Languages describe the world; like art styles, they emphasize some facets of reality, ignore others, and create categories of their own for which there may be no ‘objective’ reason and no parallels in another tongue.

Languages shape, and are shaped by culture as a whole. When people lose their language for another, profound distortions may affect their vision of the world: as if Hieronymus Bosch were suddenly forced to paint in the style of John Constable.”

“I want to know everything,” says a character toward the end of Wright’s novel Henderson’s Spear. Conscious that such an ambition is beyond human scope, Wright has chosen to show the vast and complex history of Peru, from its origins to the present, through the scattered fragments observed by a contemporary pilgrim.

Wright has an eye for the telling trifle, an ear for the revealing snippet, a taste for the quietly heroic and the little absurdities of life. Like his English masters in the travel-writing genre— Robert Byron, Freya Stark, Alexander William Kinglake—Wright is capable of bringing a certain quality of both measured guesswork and irrefutable logic to what he observes, never allowing his personal experience to colour the entire picture. He is present in his story, certainly, as the narrator and the observer, but he never imposes his vision on the landscape, never translates the things he sees into a vocabulary that was invented to name other things. When Wright sees manatees they remain manatees.

Gustave Flaubert thought travel writing, as a genre per se, to be impossible. “To eliminate all repetitions,” he

wrote, “you would have had to refrain from telling what you saw.” Wright avoids the repetitions by judiciously choosing what to tell, and leaving the vast rest of the experience to be surmised in brief asides to the reader.

Many strangers are met but not all are summoned onto the page; not every ruin, every mountain path, every meal is accounted for. Travel literature, at its best, is selectively revealing.

Wright knows that even when we are confronted by the full picture, the eye dwells on details.

Wright travelled through Peru from Lima to the ruins of Cusco and Machu Picchu, from Chiclayo and Cajamarca in the north to Lake Titicaca in the south. Running like a red thread through his narrative, alongside his observations as an archaeologist with anthropological leanings, is the account of a people colonized, underprivileged, left on the margins of our century, but quietly strong and dignified, and still proud of their ancient blood; and of the richer nations’ failure to protect them from further exploitation.

In a series of lectures published in 2004 under the title A Short History of Progress, Wright wrote: “We are now at a stage when [...] we have the tools and the means to share resources, clean up pollution, dispense basic health care and birth control, set economic limits in line with natural ones.

If we don’t do these things now, while we prosper, we will never be able to do them when times get hard. Our fate will twist out of our hands. And this new century will not grow very old before we enter an age of chaos and collapse that will dwarf all the dark ages in our past. Now is our last chance to get the future right.”

Alberto Manguel is the award-winning author of hundreds of works, most recently (in English) Curiosity, All Men Are Liars and A History of Reading. He lives in New York. Read more of his work at geist.com and alberto.manguel.com.

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ENDNOTES RE V IEWS, CO MMEN TS , C U R IOSA

A Dream of Bearded Ladies

Rod Bush in Bearded Ladies by Sharon McGowan

B

earded Ladies, a wonderful film about the life and work of Rosamond Norbury, a renowned West Coast photographer, opened in September in Vancouver and gave me, for the first time in my adult life (I am a confessed straight white male of a certain age), the surprising sense that it might after all be fun to act like a man. The world of appearances, which is to say the world as it is, provides the multifarious subject of Norbury’s camera, which is often focused on cowboys and drag queens: what is especially moving in this movie is the transformation or metamorphosis of the appearance of several women of several ages and backgrounds by the application of facial hair, makeup and a change of clothing: a simple formula with profound consequences. The transformations take place slowly as the movie unfolds in a marvellous tapestry of faces, bodies, places, talk and laughter. The topics of the movie include gender and identity and their transmutation and in its exuberance the film reminds us, in the words of Hannah Arendt, that “we are of the world and not merely in it; we, too, are appearances by virtue of arriving and departing, of appearing and disappearing; and while we come from a nowhere, we arrive well equipped to deal with whatever appears to us and to take part in the play of the world.” See this film. Brilliantly directed

by Sharon McGowan. —Stephen Osborne

I

SKIP TO THE OBITS

n Death and the Penguin by Andrey Kurkov (Melville House), a man named Viktor Zolotaryov lands a seemingly cushy job writing obituaries of Ukrainian dignitaries who are not yet dead for a Kiev newspaper in the mid-1990s. Zolotaryov lives with his only friend, a forlorn penguin called

Misha, adopted from the insolvent city zoo. Soon, the subjects of Zolotaryov’s obituaries begin to die under suspicious circumstances; Zolotaryov is charged with the care of a child, hires a nanny, hooks up with

the nanny, and the mafia closes in, with bleak and absurdist consequences. Zolotaryov and the penguin attempt to navigate this world, each feeling out of their element, subject to machinations beyond their knowledge or control and ill-equipped to deal with them. The novel, first published in 1996, is particularly prescient of Ukraine’s present political climate. In a tamer, Canadian context, between reading this book and listening to CBC election coverage, I couldn’t help but relate to the penguin.

—AnnMarie MacKinnon

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dream-life of cities

ane Jacobs’s most famous work was on the death and life of cities, which raises the question: if cities can be said to be alive, how many of them dream of growing up to become Paris? Paris can claim many titles; Joan DeJean’s How Paris Became Paris: The Invention of the Modern City (Bloomsbury) makes the case that Paris started to become “the world’s first modern city” with the construction of Pont Neuf, in the mid-sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, under Henri IV; not (as many might believe) with Baron Haussmann’s remaking of Paris some two hundred years later. Pont Neuf allowed the city’s populace to see the river and the city itself from a central vantage point (all other bridges across the Seine were lined with houses, blocking the view).

The new bridge became a popular

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gathering spot, a place to spread the news, a place where nobles and ordinary citizens could mingle, could see each other and be seen. In subsequent chapters DeJean investigates the origins of the Île St. Louis (a speculative venture initially proposed by a property developer, who offered to build a new bridge across the Seine—the Pont Marie—in exchange for land grants) and the Place Royale (now the Place des Vosges), which was initially built to provide workshops and housing for the silk industry. The addition of services such as mail delivery and street lighting helped to cement Paris’s reputation as the preeminent modern city.

How Paris Became Paris is generously illustrated and highly readable, drawing upon material from many sources, including the Carnavalet Museum in Paris and the texts of contemporary theatrical performances that satirized events of the day. —Michael Hayward

I

ALL FOLKED UP

n the late 1970s, when I was a child, I went to my first Vancouver Folk Music Festival, held at Jericho Beach. I was awed by the music, the sunsets, the food and, particularly, by the American singer-songwriter Elizabeth Cotton, who was then almost 90, and was known best for her song “Freight Train” and for playing her guitar upside down because she was lefthanded. Folk music and festivals have changed a lot since then. This summer I attended Pickathon, a festival on Pendarvis Farm just east of Portland, Oregon, which features traditional folk and world music as well as rock and roll. This year’s Pickathon line-up included some of my favourite bands: Meatbodies, Wand, Ty Segall, Viet Cong and Summer Cannibals,

musicians from Western Canada and the US who rock out hard, influenced by punk and psychedelic rock and glam. Other impressive acts were Shabazz Palaces, an experimental hip hop group from Seattle, and Strings and Julin, a bluegrass duo from Michigan.

Most of the sets I saw were urgent and intense, probably because the organizers look for artists who are “creatively on fire.” Pickathon started as a party thrown by a bunch of friends, and it still retains that feel. Like the Vancouver Folk Fest, Pickathon is organized with an aim to leave no mark upon the land: we all brought our own plates and cups; stages were built with recycled materials, like wooden pallets, hay bales, branches and cardboard. All of this made for a particularly Pacific Northwest vibe. —Kris Rothstein

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H

GAGSTER MOVIES

ats off to DOXA for showing Seth’s Dominion, a short documentary about the brilliant, prolific Canadian artist, sculptor, designer and graphic novelist Seth, directed by Luc Chamberland (National Film Board). Seth’s drawn people tend to be muted and sober; he renders them and their surroundings with black brush pen and cool, greyish washes (the documentary itself is gently but firmly sepia-toned). These folks are pensive and wistful, rarely laughing and often looking at the ground or into the great beyond, hunched against rain and sun alike.

But their minds are full of memories and questions and what-ifs as they walk or rest or meet friends among the apparatus of a different era: factories, warehouses, trains, mid-century cars and trucks, lunchbox-shaped mailboxes on posts, motels along the two-lane highway—all pre-digital, all made and operated by humans. “The ’50s always seem very Canadian to me,” says Seth in the film, as he walks through an industrial area near his home in Guelph. He is dressed neatly to the point of severity in a suit, crisply pressed shirt and tie (words like bluing and starch fly out of my own past) and a fedora, which he wears even when toiling away at his drawing table. A gleaming leather pen holder in his breast pocket holds six pencils, erasers up, apparently unused.

This is Seth’s dominion; his Dominion (capital D) is an exquisite cardboard model of a city that he has been building for years, modelled vaguely on Hamilton, Ontario, and containing Clyde Fans, the North Star restaurant and other Seth-created relics of the Sputnik years. Each building has an open front, like a dollhouse or a stage, with tiny movable humans and their possessions, shown in the film being manipulated gently by

Seth’s hands. One hopes that these wonderful creations won’t end up like the models of Seth’s pre-adolescent years, thrown in a drawer as they “fell out of favour” and gradually reduced to rubble as more discarded models were tossed in on top. “All my work comes from the sense of loss,” he says into the camera. And if no loss is forthcoming, Seth will apparently bring one about: the day he initiated a “violent finish to childhood” by hanging his stuffed animals from a tree and shooting them to bits with a pellet gun, or the time he decided to stop kissing his mother goodnight (he felt he should have outgrown it), an act he regretted for years. Seth’s Dominion is already acquiring a certain air of yesteryear, for at the end of it Seth vows never to participate in another film.

A

bonus came along with the Seth film: I Thought I Told You to Shut Up, written and directed by Charlie Tyrell (LaRue Entertainment).

It’s a 13-minute documentary about David Boswell, an East Vancouver darkroom technician who in the 1970s developed photos of tires during the day and wrote and drew comics at night— most famously, the Reid Fleming, World’s Toughest Milkman series. In the 1980s, Reid Fleming got picked up by Ron Turner, proprietor of the underground distributor Last Gasp. Suddenly Boswell was enjoying sales figures in the thousands; a typeface—Milkman Sans—was inspired by his lettering; a mountain may have been named after Fleming (could not be confirmed by Geist fact checkers).

And then the really big break—Hollywood came a-knockin’. With enthusiasm. A screenplay was written, revisions were made, calls were placed, papers were couriered about. Whee! And then, at the last minute, the grand fromage of the studio had a look and said, “I don’t get it.” And that was that.

Because of the contract language, rights to the screenplay could not be sold or optioned to anyone else, so for thirty years it has lain in a vault somewhere in California. At this point Boswell and the others interviewed for the film can only shrug and tell their rollercoaster story with wry smiles: that film won’t happen. But this one did, and it is a very nicely built short documentary: modest, genuine, suspenseful and even funny. —Eve Corbel

I

UNHAPPY

n April 2015, Statistics Canada released a report, How’s Life in the City?, with figures showing that the least happy, which is to say the unhappiest city in Canada, is Vancouver, to which it assigns a happiness rating of a mere 7.7, followed

by Toronto, Windsor, Guelph and Edmonton, respectively, each of them only slightly less unhappy than Vancouver by factors of less than 1 point; whereas St. John’s, Newfoundland, and Saguenay, Quebec, are assigned the happiest (or least unhappy) ratings in the country by a margin of 40 percent on a scale of Life Satisfaction that can be seen on the Stats Canada website, along with the following disclaimer (or claimer): There is now international support for the measurement of subjective well-being. A less unhappy but weakly substantiated view of happiness in Vancouver is provided by a so-called premium content provider in BC best place for tourists, a post claiming that the province of BC, including Vancouver, is the best place on earth, and quite a bit more attractive compared to Saudi Arabia and many other locations. It is easy for a visitor to talk in Vancouver, says the post: no need to rely on the translation function on your phone. Further, you can say whatever you like in any

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language, not like China or Tibet.

And there is no need to worry about muggers, robbers or even pickpockets, the content provider says. BC has attracted some of the world’s best chefs to prepare our edible bounty, says the post, and there is always a McDonald’s or a Starbucks if one is looking for the globally familiar.

—Stephen Osborne

F

SPECTRUMS

reddie, the narrator of Do you think this is strange? (Brindle & Glass) by Aaron Cully Drake, is a geeky seventeen-year-old who reminds me of Adrian Mole (see the hilarious Secret Diary of Adrian Mole, Aged 13¾

by Sue Townsend). Both boys have unique views of the world and are articulate enough to share them with us, but Freddy’s narrative is more

interesting (and not always funny) because of his autistic point of view.

We first meet Freddy when he is fourteen and living with his long-suffering dad, who is not always sympathetic to Freddy’s perspective. Freddy spends his days at various high schools, trying to avoid eye contact and conversation and wondering why his mother left him. He takes everything literally, so when a school principal, on the verge of expelling Freddy, says “Having read the reasons for my decision, do you have anything to say?”

Freddy cannot keep himself from replying, “In order for me to tell you I have nothing to say I have to say it.”

Not easy to be understanding of this unless you, as the reader, can be inside Freddy’s mind, where things follow a rigid logic. One day, in the school

cafeteria, Freddy runs into Saskia, a girl he used to go to school with.

Saskia is also on the autism spectrum and she used to smile a lot but now she hides inside her pink coat and Bose earphones and doesn’t look directly at Freddy. The two begin to communicate through text messages, and soon the mystery of his mother’s disappearance begins to unravel. The author is not autistic (although his daughter is) so I’m not sure whether this is a true depiction of the autistic mind but as Cully Drake says, “Each kid on the spectrum is their own little snowflake so why couldn’t two of those snowflakes be Saskia and Freddy?” I loved this book because it’s well-written, funny and interesting, and also because it seems to be unfolding in the rainy, mountainous suburb where I live, and where, so far, few good books have taken place.

—Patty Osborne

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T H E

off the shelf

The Royal Canadian Mounted Polka and the get-off-my-land anti-government types plot to eliminate all hookahs in The Pet Radish, Shrunken by Pearl Pirie (Book Thug). Andy spends all day at the Factory trying to score in the bathroom and remember what happened last night in No Work Finished Here: Rewriting Andy Warhol by Liz Worth (Book Thug). Mothers on the daycare floor confide in one another about induced labour, lung failure and tendonitis in Radio Weather by Shoshanna Wingate (Signal Editions). Ewan Whyte recites salty Catullus poems to the nurses while they pick gravel bits out of his face in Entertainment (Exile Editions). Rachel Rose escorts her pet lesbian to Lake Wobegon so she can rest in the rarefied air in Thirteen Ways of Looking at CanLit (Book Thug). Christ’s miracles cannot stand up to Kevin Spenst’s ability to play Nintendo 64 with his eyes closed in Jabbering with Bing Bong (Anvil Press). Yang Hok turns his back on Gold Mountain and treks along the CPR to ditch his half-native son with his mother in A Superior Man by Paul Yee (Arsenal Pulp Press). Despite his excellent grades in law school, Walter Rogers obtains an education in only two areas: locations of the best pubs in Toronto and the going rate for forged essays in West Bengal in Showey Yazdanian’s Loopholes (Quattro Books). In Leslie Vryenhoek’s Ledger of the Open Hand (Breakwater Books) Daneen shares her dorm room, her makeup, her confidence and her money, and in exchange MerielClaire offers up her parents, her brother and her small town melodrama. In The Capacity for Infinite Happiness by Alexis Von Kongislow (Wolsak & Wynn) a mathematician finds inspiration for her thesis in her discovery of Harpo Marx’s indelible part in her family tree. The airline crew of Humanity Flight 101 has fastened your seatbelt, betrothed you to your neighbour and made you foster parent to the baby sobbing in the seat next to yours in Marry & Burn by Rachel Rose (Harbour Publishing).

W A LL

Trucks as big as Edmontosauruses wind their way through the Fraser Valley’s creeks and rivers and toxic glaciers in Foreign Park by Jeff Steudel (Anvil Press). Roby Sarah transcribes the subtitles for a movie of trees rustling in the wind in My Shoes Are Killing Me (Biblioasis). In Waiting for the Albatross by Jack Shreve (Oolichan Books) two blankets, three pairs of mittens, a heavy shirt, a pull-over sweater and a Mackinaw are not enough to keep the deckhands from freezing to death in Blue Hades. Philip Resnick finds no compassion betwixt the concrete condo towers of the most liveable city on the planet in Footsteps of the Past (Ronsdale Press). Larry Gambone contends that the modern American-style suburb is to blame for the decline in Halloween’s popularity in The View from Anarchist Mountain (Red Lion Press). Howard Akler’s father emerges from a coma as a different person in Men of Action (Coach House Books). At age 80, Alberto Camelo declares himself the World’s Greatest Lover in The Greatest Lover of Last Tuesday by Neil McKinnon (Thistledown Press). An ex-hipster turned elk farmer becomes a major suspect in the bombing of a new pipeline that spans from Cowberta through to PC Columbia in The Plotline Bomber of Innisfree by Josh Massey (Book Thug).

While his uncle is in a coma, Max befriends a styrofoam-eating zombie in the waiting room in Moving Parts by Lana Pesch (Arsenal Pulp Press). One Paul drinks whiskey alone in his kitchen, another Paul wanders through the forest after school, another Paul is pregnant, and another Paul watches the other Pauls in Pauls by Jess Taylor (Book Thug). The boys playing music down the hall sound like a team of horses, prisoners digging a tunnel, a battalion of ground soldiers in heavy boots, miners hammering within the walls, and the 2nd brigade of highland drummers in The Fire Extinguisher by Miranda Pearson (Oolichan Books). In Daddy Lenin

by Guy Vanderhaeghe (McClelland and Stewart) Jack Corbin reunites with his old domineering university professor

“Daddy Lenin” in an ATM line. Barry Healey and Cordelia Strube explain how writers can avoid dead language like ad-speak, media-speak, technospeak, medical-speak, valley-girl-speak, art-speak, hip-speak, sports-speak, corporate-speak, government-speak, and all other forms of “The Speaks” in Exhilarating Prose (Baraka Books). Lassie won’t stop barking about how much Timmy likes it down in the well in Diversion by George Murray (ECW Press). noted elsewhere

The Vancouver Sun says that The World, I Guess by George Bowering (New Star Books) “nails you with some hard truths”; blogger Frank Davey calls it an “affirmation of the persistence of poetry.” The Coast says that The Brief Reincarnation of a Girl by Sue Goyette (Gaspereau Press) “reads like an awkward mad-lib exercise”; Understory Magazine says it is a “powerful and counter-logical portrayal of a tragic reality”; the Chronicle Herald writes that “horror comes sugar-coated, or accompanied with teddy bears.” Chronicle Herald calls The Year of Our Beautiful Exile

by Monica Kidd (Gaspereau Press) “a half-sardonic, half-joyous study of life”; Catherine Owen says it “contains toovague delineations that ache towards elegy”; Rob McLennan says that Kidd is “attempting to make sense of the hows and the whys and the whats.” Winnipeg Free Press says that Ledger of the Open Hand by Leslie Vryenhoek (Breakwater Books) “occasionally feels like an extended counselling session;” the Winnipeg Review calls it “sad and juicy”; Atlantic Books Today writes “Vryenhoek has a poet’s taste for apt imagery.” The Globe and Mail calls Curiosity by Alberto Manguel (Yale University Press) “an eloquent blend of philosophical review, literary audit and memoir;” the Telegraph says it “oscillates between the exhilarating and the exhausting”; Kirkus Reviews calls it “literate and demanding.” congratulations

To Deirdre Dore, whose story “The Wise Baby” has been longlisted for the 2015 Journey Prize.

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The GEIST Cryptic Crossword

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Send copy of completed puzzle with name and address to:

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41 Let’s sneak around for some Baffin booty 43 Pearl dropped the putty in the crack 44 Let’s walk on the bottom rope to Pearl’s deli in the mountains 45 She puts on a couple of shirts and then starts on the pegs

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Down 1 That foamie belongs to Alli’s cousin 2 Calm down before things get tempestuous 3 Hey Beauregard, we heard two of them in the reeds 4 Hey lady, curb your enthusiasm 5 She sued rather than paying up 6 Don’t close down the Transmission Organization until you've talked to my mom’s doctor (abbrev) 7 That band really kills me—and a million others too!

8 To be safe, don’t let yourself be fooled by the rubber gym apparatus 9 Is he a smoker or does he just make fruit and biscuits?

11 Mark was quoted again and again 14 It’s patently obvious that Lewis’s tile arm was as good as a light bulb filament 15 Don’t stay out under there if you want to be part of things (2) 17 Sounds like Pat’s wacky aunt might have seriously injured him 18 Edith’s lifetime favourite was pink 21 When dancing he, too, pines for hot peonies on his sore feet (2) 22 I love purl more than knit when I drive off the road (2) 23 Look in that big box for a receptacle that will free up energy 27 Relax, soldier!

29 Will he beg our pardon for that clodhopper?

45

30 At 9 the living dead will renovate the footings 31 Is one of them echolocating at the shoe museum?

33 Flying to Ethiopia to research the outer limits is not a shallow endeavour (abbrev) 34 Alan’s codebreakers got it by dessert 35 Sounds like we’re critical when they go nasal 36 Put them up when you meet hazardous cowboys 40 The Asian bogie travelled by rail and street 42 Sounds like you should start the bar when Catherine’s pet comes in The winners for Puzzle 97 were Jim Lowe and Brian Goth. Congrats!

R A F T E R S T O E N A I L

A G S P A T T O L O O R S R A T Q U I V A E E N D T U D O B O N G U E A L G A O L D M L G E N D A U I I N T E L

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

U C K N R L A O F V E T E P D A P O V E V E R E T R O Y B I O I N G D G A

Puzzle 71

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C A UGH T

M A P P I N G

Cats & Dogs The Weather Map of Canada

by Rebekah Chotem

Meteorologist Peninsula Snow Dome

Rainy Islands

modified Geistonic projection

Storm Lake Gale Lake Rainbow Island

Little Wind River

Rapides Wind Ruisseau Sunny Gusty Lakes Sunny Mountain Lake

m Lake Monsoon Creek

Bad Weather Pond Thunder Bolt Pond

Snow Island

Rainbow

Hail Point

Mont du Blizzard

Mount De Wind Lac du Mauvais Temps

Storm Mountain

Sunny Brae Rain God Mountain

Hurricane Island Frosty Hollow

Rain Door Pass

Beaver Tail Foggy Hill

Mount Drought

Lac à la Pluie

Whiteout Peak

Île Fog Île Hurricane

Running Rain Lake Snowstorm Lake

Tornado Mountain Thunder Creek

Trail

Flurry Circle Thunder Beach

Gusty Point

Wind Lake

Beaufort Lake

Never Freeze Creek

Thunder Bay

Snow Sleet River

Belle-Neige

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

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