I may be new to Campbell River, but I love it here and call it home.
I’m enjoying meeting readers this summer at the Campbell River Farmers Market. It happens every Sunday from 10am – 2pm in Spirit Square. I’ll be there with my books Sunday July 16 and again on Sunday August 6.
Yesterday, I chatted with AJ on 99.7 The River. Listen below.
I’m thrilled to announce that LURE: Jesse & Hawk just won a National Indie Excellence Award. I’m proud of LURE and how far it’s come. It was the first book I ever completed way back in the early 1990s when I deep into Indigenous Studies at Trent University. I wrapped it in brown paper and carried it around through many moves over many years. A couple of years ago, I rewrote it and launched it.
It’s hard for Indie authors these days. We’re often seen as inferior because our work hasn’t been accepted by a big publisher, so an award like this really makes me feel good.
Write what you know. That’s what writing coaches tell us. In the case of former small-town journalist Maureen Brownlee, the advice rings true. Her latest novel is set in the interior of British Columbia, 1995 – “Cache Creek to Kamloops and north” (65) – an area close to where Brownlee grew up and worked at her own small-town newspaper during the time the mountain pine beetle was rampaging through the forests of western North America, destroying millions of acres of pine forest. Brownlee’s insider’s view breathes life and truth into this literary text.
“When the beetles attack, they bring a fungus with them, and the fungus spreads into the tree and makes it easier for the beetles to chew through the cambium . . . It stains the wood, blue streaks all through it. The lumber buyers downgrade it” (156). With its blue cambium, prices drop, even though there’s nothing wrong with blue wood if it can be harvested before it dries out and cracks. There’s a metaphor here somewhere.
https://natural-resources.canada.ca/
An unscrupulous developer (aren’t they all?), smelling the potential for a quick buck, comes to Beauty Creek to romance the Creeksters into letting him cut the timber and build his townhouse development before it’s too late. The problem with development is that the locals end up being priced out of their own land. We’ve seen this time and time again as gentrification has crept through this province. But what else can you do when you’re about to lose the only resource that keeps your town alive? And so the debate begins.
The narrative meanders through the distinct voices of three central characters: Maggie, the widowed editor of the Chronicle, struggling to keep her late husband’s dream alive; Stevie, a bright, uneducated single mother of two, bent on independence; and Nash Malone, poet, junk aficionado, and veteran of the Spanish War of 1935. These three strong, independent characters come together when Maggie offers Stevie a decent job at the Chronicle and sends her off to interview Malone. In an unlikely pairing, the older wounded veteran and the young wounded woman strike up a friendship. When the gloves come off and the town experiences its own insidious violence, we are reminded that evil manifests itself in many forms and doesn’t always appear as strangers or insects. Small towns have a unique heartbeat, sometimes fluttering, sometimes pounding with the force of an axe.
As the mountain pine beetle threatens the economy of this small resource-driven town, we see how quickly a community can be brought to its knees. With a voice and writing style reminiscent of Barbara Kingsolver, especially her Prodigal Summer and Poisonwood Bible, Brownlee spins a tragically beautiful tale. A monstrous blue sadness chews its way through these pages, while the haunting memories of Nash Malone weave through the text like a magnificent memoir. I must confess that I was captivated by Malone’s richly sensual writing, but found the typeface, which I know was intended to evoke an old-fashioned smudgy typeface, very hard on these aging eyes. But that has nothing to do with Brownlee’s brilliant eco-fiction, and Nash Malone is a truly tragic hero.
Cambium Blue is a slow-burn winner and destined to become a B.C. classic. It has been shortlisted for the George Ryga Award, an annual literary prize for a B.C. writer who has achieved an outstanding level of social consciousness in a new book.
As reviewed in the Ottawa Review of Books (May 2023)
Cherie Dimaline never fails to enchant and VenCo is the start of something spicy, warm, and wicked. At least, I hope so. The prologue features three bad-ass hipsters collectively known as the Oracle—the Maiden (a Tender), Mother (a Watcher), and Crone (a Booker)—who reveal the stakes and premise. A sixth witch must be found and once she is, she’ll have seventeen days to find the seventh witch and complete the circle. In case you missed it, VenCo is a play on Coven. “She better be some kind of living-at-Hogwarts, spell-work-in-her-sleep legacy witch,” says the Maiden.
What sets Dimaline’s work apart is her original and impeccable writing style, which is both literary and lyrical, casual and raw, as befits the characters and situation. Vivid descriptions of urban grit pepper the pages, along with references to pop culture, and symbols such as little yellow witchy birds. In this magic carpet ride of a romp, we fly to various locations: Toronto, Salem, the California desert, and New Orleans. Chapter headings are casual, detailed, and comic. For example: “A Complete F* 180 over General Tso Chicken and Shitty Rice.”
I feel like the first half of this book offers a crucial backstory to a series and world-building as Dimaline introduces the members of VenCo, and we hear their individual tales. Circles within circles, stories within a story. We begin with protagonist Lucky St. James and her charming, dementia-prone grandmother, Stella Sampson. After her Métis mother dies a drunk, they are about to be evicted from their grotty home in East End Toronto when Lucky finds a key to a hidden basement room in her wet laundry. When she unlocks the door, she discovers a dirty, rocky, tunnel, and inside it, a tiny silver spoon engraved with a Halloween witch and the word SALEM. Lucky is the sixth witch. The other five: Meena Good and her Anishinabe partner Wendy; blond, gender-queer Freya; artist and rare-book collector Morticia from New York; and Louisiana Creole woman Letitia and her son, also joined the coven via enchanted spoons. Freya offers Lucky a writing job at VenCo and with nothing to lose, Lucky and Stella drive to Salem where they join the others whose personal tales are embedded within the larger narrative.
Jay Christos (obvious play there) is the smarmy antagonist taxed with stopping the coven from forming and keeping the Patriarchy in place. This immortal, bisexual, misogynist, Benandanti (witch hunter/killer) hunts at night through streets and dreams, and has mesmerizing skills of his own. Once he starts to move on Lucky, things heat up. This is a feminist kind of book; at least the job of VenCo is to “Hex the Patriarchy” of whom JC is the kingpin. This matriarchal coven has much work to do, enough to fill several more novels. With shades of Thomas King and Eden Robinson, this book will delight and enchant with its quirky, irresistible characters.
A member of the Georgian Bay Historic Métis Community, Dimaline is an Indigenous Canadian writer. Her YA book, The Marrow Thieves, won the Governor General’s Literary Award in 2017, was named Book of the Year by CBC, Quill & Quire, the NY Public Library, and was selected by Time magazine as one of the top 100 YA reads of all time. She followed it with the disturbing sequel, Hunting by Stars. Her stand-alone novel Empire of Wild was Indigo’s #1 Best Book of the Year and was featured in the New Yorker and the New York Times. Without giving too much away, “f* you” is the last phrase in VenCo. That takes courage and a certain amount of bravado.
As published in The Ottawa Review of Books, April 2023
Since it’s Mother’s Day here in Canada, I’d like to celebrate a daring Adventure Mom. I first discovered Capi Blanchet’s British Columbia adventure classic in a thrift store way back in 2002. Her literary tales captured me then, just as they do today.
The title derives from Maeterlinck’s theory that Time is a fourth dimension, relative to each of us, and can be plotted on a curve. This speaks to me. Time is anything but linear. It travels in circles and spirals weaving in and out of other dimensions. Capi says:
“Standing in the Present, on the highest point of the curve, you can look back and see the Past, or forward and see the Future, all in the same instant” (1).
The Curve of Time
This small, yet significant, book is a compilation of stories remembered by Capi—a nickname she took from her boat, Caprice—that chronicle her adventures exploring the British Columbia coast in the 1920s-1930s with her five children. I say loosely because I just read that her stories were highly fictionalized. Still, what she wrote is travel memoir and something now lauded as Creative Nonfiction.
According to Cathy Converse, author of Following the Curve of time: the Untold Story of Capi Blanchet, Capi’s depressed husband sailed off alone to Saltspring Island in September 1926 and never returned. The empty Caprice was discovered with his clothing onboard, but his body was never recovered. Blanchet was in her mid-thirties. To earn money to support her five children, Capi rented their seaside Little House near Sydney for four months each summer and took them boating. The 25′ Caprice was so small, they were only allowed to bring one bathing suit, one change of clothing, and one set of pajamas each. For the most part, they lived off land and sea, fishing and gathering, and were fortunate to meet generous homesteaders who sometimes offered them all the fruit they could pick and carry.
Capi was not only a risk-taker and independent woman, her prose is beautiful crafted and interwoven with natural history, archaeology, and dialogue AND she can fix a boat engine—something I’m most impressed with. Honestly, I’d love to pilot a boat but the thought of a breakdown out around the islands terrifies me. There were times too, that Blanchet was forced to row the dinghy for hours with Caprice in tow. She writes of lighthouses (most were built then), adverse weather and seas, and navigating tide rips like Skookumchuk and Seymour Narrows. They traversed rugged inlets with steep mountain walls and channels too deep to set an anchor, sighted bear and cougar, and survived all the strait threw at them.
Like her contemporary, Emily Carr, Blanchet discovered abandoned Kwakwaka’wak and Coast Salish villages, big houses, white shell middens, post carvings, hanging tree graves, artifacts, even bones. Out of respect, she doesn’t reveal the locations of these places.
The book began as a series of articles Blanchet sold to yachting magazines, Blackwood’s Magazine in Edinburgh, and the Atlantic Monthly. Perhaps that’s how they became fictionalized. In the 1950s, she compiled The Curve of Time which was published by Blackwood & Sons in 1961. It’s sad that only six months later, Capi died at her typewriter while working on a second memoir of their adventures at the Little House. She was just seventy years old, but it seems to me, most of those seventy years were packed with adventure and daring.
My 30th Anniversary Special Edition was published and introduced by Gray Campbell in 1968: White Cap Books, North Vancouver, B.C.
For more information, here’s a Tyee Review of Converse’s book, Following the Curve of time: the Untold Story of Capi Blanchet.