I recently reread Widdershins, the 11th book in Charles de Lint’s Newford series (published 2006). At 560 pages, it’s a hefty tome. I fell in love with it in chapter one when Lizzie Mahone’s car runs out of gas at a lonely crossroads in the middle of the night. Of course, you know when you’re stranded after midnight at a crossroads near an “enormous old elm tree, half dead by a lightning strike” that something extraordinary is going to happen. For Lizzie, it’s a savage attack by bogans, nasty-pants faeries with sewer-mouths whose evil plans include stealing her car.
Fortunately for Lizzie, Grey, one of the corbae (bird) cousins, arrives serendipitously and saves her. But the bogans have been hunting and left their kill in the trunk of her car. Lizzie can’t stand to see the butchered deer, so buries the pieces under the tree, then gets her fiddle and plays a lament to honour the deer’s spirit. This touching act draws the attention of Walks-With-Dreams AKA Walker, who we discover is the father of Anwatan, the butchered deer. To repay Lizzie for her kindness, Walker tells Lizzie to call on him if she’s ever in need. Well, it doesn’t take long before Lizzie’s in need.
I tell you this because the rest of this massive story plays off these different types of creatures—the humans (Lizzie and her friends), the Indigenous animal people, and the Settler faeries who invaded this land with the Europeans.
Politics is rampant and the plot and its connections complex. At its core is the conflict between the settler fae and the Indigenous animal people who call themselves cousins. A massive war is brewing, fueled by the vengeful Odawa, a cousin from the salmon clan who Grey accidentally blinded by pecking out his eyes one day. He thought Odawa was dead. Odawa betrays the animal people and joins up with the fae who refer to the Indigenous cousins disrespectfully as “Green Bree” or “pluikers.”
Meanwhile, triggered by Anwatan’s murder, Minisino and his buffalo soldiers rise up in solidarity to revenge past injustices inflicted on their ancestors by the settlers. This story is an anthropomorphic retelling of North American history. Even Lucius, the Raven who created the world, makes an appearance at the height of the conflict.
But it’s not all about faeries, transforming animals, and politics. At its heart is the ongoing love story between Jilly Coppercorn and Geordie Riddell begun in The Onion Girl (2001). Jilly’s story is dark. In order to heal and release the past horrors that are stuck deep in her subconscious to become whole, Jilly must face her childhood abuser. A lengthy piece of this book takes place within Jilly’s mind or as de Lint calls it her “heart home”. Lizzie ends up in there with her, and the pedophile who abused Jilly joins them, as horrific as he was back then. When Del turns them both back into little girls and magically makes Lizzie’s mouth disappear from her face, it seems hopeless.
As I said, this book is dark and deep, but ends with a glimmer of hope and understanding. Charles de Lint says,
“I’m a writer and this is what I do no matter what name we put to it. Year by year, the world is turning into a darker and stranger place than any of us could want. This is the only thing I do that has potential to shine a little further than my immediate surroundings. For me, each story is a little candle held up to the dark of night, trying to illuminate the hope for a better world where we all respect and care for each other.”
Along with light, Charles de Lint pours his musician’s soul into his characters. Lizzie and her cousin Siobhan play fiddle in a Celtic band. When Siobhan is pushed down the stairs by a vengeful bogan and sprains her arm, Geordie steps in to help. Reading this book inspired me to take up playing fiddle. I play piano and some guitar, but I’ve longed to fiddle all my life. Geordie says:
“Music needs to live and breathe; it’s only pure when it’s performed live with nothing hidden – neither its virtuosity nor the inevitable mistakes that come when you try to push it into some new, as yet unexplored place. It’s improvisational jazz. It’s the jam, the session. The best music is played on street corners and pubs, in kitchens, and on porches, in the backrooms of concert halls and in the corner of a field, behind the stage, at a music festival. It’s played for the joy and the sadness and the connection it makes between listeners and players.”
I get it. I’ve heard it. I want it.
Some people disparage fantasy just on principle. They don’t understand the scope and complexity of art that’s caught up by a label created by marketers. I love how Charles de Lint gets around that.
“I now call my work ‘mythic fiction,’ a term created with my friend, Terri Windling, when we were sitting around talking, trying to figure out what to call what we write. She is a wonderful writer, and her fiction travels along similar roads to what I do. MaryAnn often says that Terri and I were twins in a past life; we have a lot of the same sensibilities.
“We liked the term ‘mythic fiction,’ which fits perfectly. ‘Urban fantasy’ doesn’t work because a lot of what I do isn’t set in an urban setting. ‘Contemporary fantasy’ could work, but it’s kind of boring and doesn’t really say much. Besides, in 50 years you won’t be able to call my books ‘contemporary’ fantasy. ‘Mythic fiction’ works because it has broader resonances and alludes to the heart of this fiction, which is, of course, myth. It has the right tonality because these are stories that have modern sensibilities, dealing with contemporary people and issues, but they utilize the material of folklore, fairy tale, and myth to help illuminate that. It also omits the word ‘fantasy’ — a term for which people have too many preconceptions. I’m not trying to knock fantasy, because I love good fantasy and have had great support from the fantasy community throughout my career, which I very much appreciate. But I’m trying to engage an even broader audience — people who normally don’t read fantasy, who get scared by the word fantasy or by those types of covers. I think a lot of people who don’t like fantasy just haven’t had the chance to have the right book put in front of them.”
I agree completely. I also write mythic fiction. My books are rarely set in urban areas, so I’ve stopped saying I write “urban fantasy” although sometimes I still get stuck there as do all stories that are contemporary but venture into the realm of mythic creatures and the supernatural. My witches seek the wild places faeries frequent and dance under a mythic moon, so yes, it’s more mythic fiction than anything else.
The only thing I don’t understand about this book is the cover art. A church steeple and floating women? It’s a little too Practical Magic for me. Widdershins means to travel in a counterclockwise motion. Witches dance widdershins to unravel a spell or a circle they’ve cast. I understand what this means to the story. Jilly Coppercorn travels backward to unravel the spell cast over her mind by her abusive brother. She must untangle her future from her past. But the cover art? I think the artist never actually read the manuscript, and just went with what they knew about the word.
This book is so much more than its cover. So don’t let that scare you off. Venture into the mythic fiction of Charles de Lint. You’ll be captured by the first chapter. You might even get inspired to play the fiddle like Cape Breton legend, Natalie McMaster.
Cherie Dimaline never intended to write a sequel to her dystopian novel, The Marrow Thieves, but after earning the Governor General’s Award and the Kirkus Prize for Young Readers’ Literature, she went into schools to talk with teens about writing the book. When the kids asked if there would be a sequel and were told “no”, they booed her. They wanted to know more about seventeen-year-old Frenchie, his girlfriend Rose, and their road family. They wanted more “coming to” stories, more knowledge of this past/future apocalyptic world, and how these characters would survive this Indigenous holocaust by living as a tight, loving, bush community.
A bone-chilling tale of what could happen, Hunting by Stars is set in the not-too-distant future; perhaps 2050, certainly within the lifetime of teens reading today. When humans have all but destroyed the planet and been sickened by plague, the non-Indigenous people stop dreaming and go insane. Settler scientists experiment and find a cure. Woven within the DNA of Indigenous peoples is the ability to dream. Once it becomes apparent that this precious fluid can be extracted from bone and turned into a dream-enhancing serum, Indigenous people become a commodity to be hunted and harvested. Medical centres, termed “schools,” are constructed like space-age hospitals, and “recruiters” enlisted to track down and detain anyone who might hold the cure. Worse still, some of their own kind are “turned” and sent into communities to bring in their own people. Indigenous people should be proud to do their part in healing the world, shouldn’t they? This situation puts Frenchie’s small family on the run in northern Ontario, heading north into the wilderness, or what’s left of it.
This tale is, in some ways, prophetic; in other ways, a horror story. If you’re squeamish to tales of imprisonment and torture, this story may not be for you. If you’re anxious and afraid of the coming climate change—which is already revealing itself in floods, droughts, fires, hurricanes, and extreme temperatures—this story might not be for you. I actually had to put it down and stop reading during our recent B.C. floods. It became suddenly too real.
But know this: within the evil perpetrated by one race upon another, despite the genocide so graphically portrayed, and the ferocity of Mother Earth’s reaction to humanity’s ignorance, this is also an inspiring story of survival and hope. Case in point—though Canada is still intent on producing the serum organically, the President of the United States has put a halt to the genocide and scientists there are working on a synthetic cure. For Frenchie’s family, the underground railroad south might hold more promise than the sketchy north.
The intensity of love shown between the members of Frenchie’s family, the heart-wrenching loss, deep betrayal and depravity shown by the other, and the gritty reality of living a bush-life on the run, sink deep into our souls.
This is a political book, told in the language of reconciliation—settler versus Indigenous—and from the point-of-view of the hunted. It’s the settlers who created the problem, yet the Indigenous people are being mined as the solution. The schools, forced imprisonment, government-sanctioned hunting of Indigenous people of all ages, and the medical testing and torture that goes on within them, are all based on the Indian residential school model of the none-too-distant past. As such, past is future, and now a thin weave between.
Cherie Dimaline is from the Georgian Bay Metis Community and this story is her voice. She is both a dreamer and singer; her cinematic, poetic prose transports us where “bees swarmed broken streets, made hives out of green-clotted houses, the wallpaper shot through with moss” (389); while her fertile imagination warns us of our own ghoulish capabilities.
Hunting by Stars pulses with a rhetoric of resilience and reclamation. As Nature reclaims the Earth, so Frenchie’s family works to reclaim its culture and language, cherished word by word, action by action, dream by dream. Both books should be read and discussed in schools, for we’ve left this generation with a massive task, and books such as this and The Marrow Thieves are roadmaps to reclamation and hope.
At its heart, Under an Outlaw Moon is a love story about two kids trying to escape the Depression. Based on a true story, Dietrich Kalteis breathes life into a couple of real-life outlaws. This is not an easy thing to do. An author needs space to allow the muse to roam. Kalteis has the facts. But newspaper stories and novels are two very different genres. How does he bring this story to life and make these characters, not only sympathetic but our friends?
In his legendary clipped casual style, Kalteis creates personas from facts and those newspaper names: Bennie Dickson and Stella Mae Redenbaugh (soon to be Dickson). They meet on June 12, 1937 at a skating rink. Stella is fifteen, naïve, and impressionable; Bennie is over a decade her senior, experienced and sporting a criminal record: six years’ hard time for a bank robbery in Missouri. Still, this is love. Their romance boils and simmers while Bennie boxes under the name Johnny O’Malley, and Stella endures the pains of being a poor naïve girl in America. When they marry a year later, she’s already hurt, traumatized, and looking to escape with a romantic hero. She finds one in Bennie. An honourable, sociable, robber, Bennie reads philosophy and writes poetry; plus he’s head over heals in love with Sure Shot Stella. Who wouldn’t fall for Bennie?
These two are classically romantic. They want a house with a white picket fence. It shouldn’t take much—a couple of banks ought to do it. If only J. Edgar Hoover wasn’t the kingpin of the FBI.
Things I love about this book. Kalteis’s legendary writing style. He spins us around his short, clipped phrases and keeps us wanting more. Not many authors today write omniscient (given that agents and publishers warn us against it). But Kalteis is a literary rebel. Embracing the omniscient point-of-view, he provides us access to the thoughts of whoever has the most pertinent information at the time. The personalities of the characters shine in the dialogue. Bennie and Stella are constantly sniping at each other. Love banter. And Stella is cheeky. “You gonna call yourself unkillable again, I think I’m gonna throw up.” She loves her man; there’s no doubt about that. But she’s also spending hours and hours on the run with him, stealing cars, crossing state lines, sleeping wherever, and all in the first year of their relationship. I think she’s earned some cheeky rights. The bulk of the story spans two years: 1937-1939.
A few times, Kalteis spotlights the pursuers. Remember, this is the Depression—the days of Bonnie and Clyde, Ma Barker, Machine Gun Kelly, J. Edgar Hoover and his relentless G-men. We know it can’t end well, and yet, we don’t want it to end. Sitting in the back seat of Bennie and Stella’s stolen coupe is too real and we’re too invested. It’s hard to tell the good guys from the bad guys. A good writer is much easier to spot. You’ll find one here. And though he’d tell you he’s writing crime, in Under an Outlaw Moon, Kalteis is also writing a big-hearted romance.
I first read this story back in the early 90s. I say “story” rather than book. A book is a collection of paper glued together with a spine. A story has heart. And this story has a bloody muscle that pulses like the Mother Earth herself.
First published in 1988, The Bean Trees is Barbara Kingsolver’s debut novel. In case you don’t know it, I’m a Barbara Kingsolver fan through and through. Pigs in Heaven, Animal Dreams, The Poisonwood Bible, Prodigal Summer, all are heartfelt stories told with a lyrical literary voice that rings true and takes me so far inside it’s hard to find a way out. Not that I want to.
Like Kingsolver, Miss Marietta Greer, grew up in rural Kentucky and made the move to Tucson Arizona with her daughter. Like me, Miss Marietta Greer, changed her name (to Taylor on account of a street sign) packed up her car (a ’55 push-start-clutch-pop-Volkswagen) and headed west. There’s something about a new identity and the open road that initiates the hero’s journey and this, is a hero’s journey extraordinaire.
While driving through central Oklahoma, Taylor reminisces how her mother used to say they had “head rights” on the Cherokee Nation because her old grandpa was full-blooded Cherokee. Taylor finds her “head rights” in the form of a baby girl who’s pressed upon her by a desperate Cherokee woman outside a bar owned by, you guessed it, Earl. Having encountered the two men who are part of this affair inside Earl’s bar, and hearing the woman’s desperation: “My dead sister’s … This baby’s got no papers. There isn’t nobody knows it’s alive, or cares … This baby was born in a Plymouth,” Taylor accepts the child who clings to her so tightly, she names her Turtle, having never asked the child’s name.
As in any hero’s journey, Taylor and Turtle, find allies, in the form of new friends who offer a job and a place to live in Tucson. Mattie, who hires Taylor at her tire store, is part of an underground railroad for illegal refugees. She introduces Taylor to Estevan and Esperanza, a Mayan couple who managed to escape Guatemala but not before their child was kidnapped by their oppressors. They become family to Taylor and Turtle and aid in solving the legal problems that threaten to pull this mother and child apart.
Turtle, who we discover is actually a sexually-abused-three-year-old, remains mute for ages, but when she does speak she talks vegetables, rhyming them off like she’s reading a Burpee’s catalogue out loud.
This is a story of love, hope, friendship, family, and belonging that will stay with you long after you’ve turned the last page.
The subtitle of Elements of Indigenous Style is A Guide for Writing By and About Indigenous Peoples. I read this book to learn what is appropriate and what is not, as the two fiction books I’m now writing include references to Indigenous Peoples and are set on Indigenous territory. After reading, I made revisions to my manuscript. Younging wrote this edition in 2018, so it may already need updating as, in Canada especially, much is changing rapidly with regard to how Indigenous and non-Indigenous people work together. I highly recommend this book to writers, editors, students, and anyone interested in reconciliation; in fact, we all should read it because we are in relationship with Indigenous People and need to be much more aware. I’m not re-writing the book here, just providing a sampling and speaking to a few key points.
Naming
Merging the name of his Cree mother (Young) and his Chinese father (Ing), Younging forged his own identity. I appreciate this, as I created my own name, Hawkin. It means “kin of hawks” and expressed my need for freedom following my divorce. I was neither my father’s daughter nor my ex-husband’s wife, but was searching for self. I identified strongly with the hawks who lived nearby in Ontario and still identify with birds of prey.
About Gregory Younging
Younging died in May 2019 at the age of fifty-eight, and was posthumously awarded the Association of Canadian Publishers President’s Award. You can read more about his achievements here. He was a member of the Opaskwayak Cree Nation in northern Manitoba, and managing editor/publisher of Theytus Books in Penticton, British Columbia, for many years. Theytus Books was the first Indigenous-owned publishing house in Canada and continues to publish Indigenous authors. Gregory Younging also taught at UBC Okanagan and served as assistant director of research to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada.
As I said, I learned much from this book. He includes appendixes, case studies, and twenty-two principles of style. Here are a few key points to consider that struck me.
Characteristics of Contemporary Indigenous Literature
Contemporary Indigenous Literature gives authority to all voices rather than one; as well as the voices of animals, and messages given by spirits and natural phenomenon; and it crosses circular time—ancient past, present, future. These characteristics come from the work of Anishinaabe author, Kim Blaeser (13).
Protocols for working in Collaboration
Non-Indigenous authors, or, Indigenous authors writing about a nation that is not their own, should enter into a relationship with that source nation, get permission, and negotiate mutually agreeable terms. Younging stresses collaboration and the need to always ask in an appropriate way. For example, when I studied at Trent University, the Protocol was to respectfully offer tobacco to an Elder or Teacher if you wanted to ask a question. If the person accepted it, they could help, and you had permission to engage. Younging writes that the Protocol is still to ask respectfully and offer a gift, but tobacco might not be the right gift. You need to find out what’s appropriate by asking around the community or asking the Elder. Then listen. Finally, give them the right to read your text before publication.
Awareness of Sources
I appreciate the chapter on terminology because much of this has changed since I studied in the nineties. Also, in some classes, we used texts written by archaeologists or anthropologists who viewed Indigenous Peoples as static cultures of a distant past. That is not the case. Indigenous Cultures are resilient, adaptive, dynamic, and distinct. If you use content published by anthropologists or historians be aware that the author likely did not follow Protocols, and translations often use stereotypical language and concepts. For example, the anthropological theory that Indigenous Peoples migrated across the Bering Strait to North America is not part of The Oral Traditions of The People.
Terminology to use and not to use
A few words to be wary of using are artifact, band (use the People), clan (unless it’s a particular Clan System, pagan/heathen, land claim (use Indigenous title), legends/myths/tales (use Oral Traditions), self-government (use self-determination). Aboriginal is an adjective only and is being replaced by Indigenous.
Many words in our everyday vocabulary are of Indigenous origin, though we assume they’re English. Here’s a partial list: canoe, hammock, igloo, kayak, potato, raccoon, skunk, squash, tomato. Also many place names have Indigenous origin including the provinces of Manitoba and Saskatchewan. Alternatively, explorers and settlers renamed places after themselves or their foreign sovereign (investor) in many cases as a means of claiming territory for the colonizing country.
First Nations, Inuit, and Métis
In Canada, the government recognizes “First Nations, Inuit, and Métis.” First Nations is a political term that refers to someone from a First Nation. Inuit means “The People” and refers to The People who live in the Arctic. Métis is both a noun (she is Métis) and adjective (Métis heritage). The term Métis is complex as it has three possible meanings.
1) Métis means “mixed race” in French and refers to those who were involved in the Red River Resistance and their descendents. They may speak French, English, and/or Michif. Note it’s termed the Red River Resistance, not rebellion.
2) Someone may identify as Metis (without accent) if they are English-speaking people of mixed Indigenous and non-Indigenous ancestry. For example, my great grandfather’s father was Dutch and his mother was Tuscarora (a nation who moved north and were adopted into the Haudenosaunee).
3) Métis (with accent) can also be used by those who do not descend from Red River.
Use of Traditional Names
Use Traditional Names that The People use to refer to their distinct nation—Anishinaabe, Haudenosaunee, Nuu’chah’nulth, Mi’Kmaq, Gitxsan, and so on. Younging writes: “Names are part of the way we render identity” (91). Be particular and precise. Many of us acknowledge the name of the Traditional Territory on which we’ve settled and use it in our email signature: Settled on unceded Stó:lō territory—Ts’elxwéyeqw (Chilliwack) and Se:máth (Sumas) tribes
Capitalization
Indigenous style uses capital letters where non-Indigenous writers/editors may not—Survivor, Chief, Clan, Elder, Indigenous Voice, the Longhouse as an institution, Midewiwin, Oral Tradition, Seven Fires, Sundance, Sweat Lodge, Vision Quest, Warrior Society, Wampum Belt, Traditional Knowledge. I see this as a positive way of showing honour and respect.
Possession
The Dispossessed: Life and Death in Native Canada by Geoffrey York was one of the first books I read, and it’s always stuck with me. York was a journalist with the Globe and Mail in Toronto. He wrote about the legacy of abuses from land grabs, to diseases, to residential schools, to reserve land that afforded The People little to nothing. They were dispossessed of their land and culture. They are now reclaiming, so when you’re writing, it’s important not to imply Indigenous Peoples are “owned” or “possessed” by Euro-colonial states. They are not Canada’s Indigenous Peoples. Also, use present tense rather than past. The Nuu’chah’nulth potlatch or hold potlatches, not the Nuu’chah’nulth held potlatches.
Younging’s guide is political. It’s complex and much to absorb. As a former high school English teacher, I suggest this book be used in humanities classes. Younging has titled this book with an obvious poke at Elements of Style, an American English writing style guide written by William Strunk Jr. in 1918, that’s still used by high school and university students. It’s time to change it up and expand our awareness of how language informs thought and thought informs language, as both inform culture and cultural prejudices. Even those of a subtle kind.
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