The Western Light by Susan Swan – 29 October – International Festival of Authors Parry Sound

The Western Light by Susan Swan Susan Swan is one of four authors coming to Parry Sound on Monday 29 October to take part in the International Festival of Authors at the Charles W. Stockey Centre.

Susan Swan knows Georgian Bay well, she was born in Midland and has since spent many summers on Georgian Bay north of Pointe au Baril. Her most recent novel The Western Light takes place on Georgian Bay, in a town that is 90 miles south of the French River. In this novel it is the fictional town of Madoc’s Landing. There is also a nearby, larger town, called Port Waldie, “It was famous for the Georgian Bay Trestle, the longest wooden railroad bridge in North America.” This is familiar landscape for local readers.

It is 1959 - 1960, and we meet Dr. Morley Bradford and his daughter Mary. Into their lives comes a convicted murderer, John Pilkie, now resident of the local “Bug House”, the Ontario Psychiatric Hospital, where Dr. Bradford is sometimes called for medical emergencies.

John Pilkie grew up in this town, became a hockey player, and after suffering any number of injuries, was forced to leave his team and faded into the past – until he murdered his wife and child. Or did he? Was he suffering a brain injury from his hockey related concussions, or was someone else guilty of the crime? The Western Light will thrill hockey fans, these are the heady days of the six original teams and the young men who wanted so desperately to play for one of these teams, practicing on their outdoor rinks and beginning their careers in small towns before heading to the big leagues.

What we soon learn is that Mary, a young adolescent ripe for an imaginary love affair, is infatuated with John Pilkie, his past, his present, and her dreams of the future. Into this mix are thrown Mary’s school friend, Ben, whose father Dr. Shulman, is the doctor in charge at the “Bug House”, the local psychiatric hospital, and a cast of astonishing characters that kept my head spinning from beginning to end. There are wonderful scenes of the lonely Mary listening to the adult conversations through the grates in the floor from above, in the home she shares with her father and extended family.

We have a story of a girl without a mother, whose father, a well respected local doctor, puts his patients and their needs before the needs of his daughter, despite her great need to come first in his life. There is the tale of Mary’s father talking to John Pilkie’s mother on the phone, while the Pilkie family is trapped during a storm in the lighthouse where they live, as she performs the surgery necessary to remove the seven-year-old John’s appendix and save his life.

On the bay there are limestone towers, anyone familiar with Flower Pot island will recognize, where Mary and her family go for picnics. Susan Swan describes that feeling of leaving the restrictions of mainland life behind physically and emotionally, as Mary observes her aunt and her father, “In that instant the grown-ups felt free of the mainland, where life unfolded in respectable rituals…” We all know it, but Susan Swan has put it into words.

Mary describes herself as “a child of the water” and anyone who has grown up “on the water” knows exactly what she means. Susan Swan’s great strength as a writer shows itself when she describes the landscape of Georgian Bay – here we see the author’s connection, and love, of Georgian Bay through the eyes of the young Mary.

So, join the audience to hear Susan Swan read from The Western Light on Monday 29 October at 7:30 pm. There are a limited number of tickets available to meet Susan Swan and the other authors at a reception before the readings – contact Parry Sound Books for more information and tickets.

Beth Powning – from New Brunswick to the Charles W. Stockey Centre

Beth Powning – from New Brunswick to the Charles W. Stockey Centre Beth Powning will be reading from her most recent novel The Sea Captain’s Wife at the Charles W. Stockey Centre on Wednesday 19 September at 7:30 pm.

The Sea Captain’s Wife by Beth Powning begins in 1861, at Whelan’s Cove – a fictional town – near Saint John, New Brunswick. The Bradstock family are ship builder’s; the eldest son, Nathaniel, captain of the schooner Traveller. The sea captain’s wife is Azuba. We meet Azuba as she is recovering from a miscarriage – she became pregnant the last time her husband was home – he is away again now and will not be back for some months. This is the life of a sea captain’s wife, long absences while her husband is at sea. Nathaniel and Azuba’s daughter, Carrie, did not meet her father until she was three years old.

The home of Nathaniel and Azuba is a grand house, on a hill above the town, facing the Bay of Fundy, built by Azuba’s father for his daughter as a wedding gift. Azuba and Carrie have a life here, visiting with the family, parents and grandparents, gardening, picking strawberries in the fields and periwinkles on the beach at low tide.

I found myself, reading these first few pages, with skin tingling. My grandmother was the daughter of a sea captain, of a boat building family in Saint John, New Brunswick, she lived in a house, built by her parents, looking at the Bay of Fundy – I often picked periwinkles with my mother on this same beach. Beth Powning is writing about the life my great-grandparents might have lived.

Nathaniel is still away in the spring of 1862. After her miscarriage Azuba was paid a visit by the local minister, Reverend Simon Walton. Simon is a young man, alone here, he paints and draws, and enjoys walking with Azuba and Carrie - they become friends. On a day when Carrie is with her grandmother, Azuba and Simon are hiking on an island when a storm comes up and they are trapped by the high tide – overnight. A night, of complete innocence, that becomes a scandal.

When Nathaniel returns home Azuba is unable to convince him that the gossip is false, that she is innocent of any deceit and loves only Nathaniel. Azuba has wondered about sailing with Nathaniel – some few wives do, but they are rare. Most wives live a life alone, raising children alone, but this is not the life that Azuba wants for herself or her daughter. Nathaniel agrees to allow her to come with him only to remove her from Whelan’s Cove and Reverend Walton.

Azuba and Carrie adjust to life aboard ship, with Nathaniel still hurt and resentful. We learn, as we read, about life aboard a schooner, trading goods from one part of the world to another. Azuba observes, and learns, navigation and the workings of the ship. There are good days of brisk sailing, sunny fresh days and starry nights - and days of terror. Rounding Cape Horn, navigation difficult in the rain, sleet and snow, freezing, fearful. There are fabulous sights of icebergs and seas of broken ice, and the sobering sight of an abandoned ship stuck in the ice.

Azuba, doubting her decision to accompany Nathaniel, fearing for the safety of her daughter, finds herself pregnant. She and Nathaniel have reached an uneasy peace. It seems that there was theft at the last port, and supplies that should be on the ship were stolen – food is short. From her studying Azuba realizes that they are carrying too much sail as they race toward Antwerp, only to be caught in the doldrums. Becalmed for weeks, the shortage of provisions becomes a prelude to starvation. Finally hearing rain – there is fresh water, they wash themselves – their clothing – and set sail. They are on ¼ rations, their sails are rotting – but they arrive safely in Antwerp. They unload their cargo and check into a first class hotel, their son is born.

Antwerp is a reprieve, they are clean and well fed, there is a nurse-maid to look after the baby, Bennett, and Carrie and Azuba explore the city while Nathaniel prepares to receive his next cargo and plan his voyage. The plan is for Azuba and the children to return to Canada by passenger steamer but something changes and they are once again aboard the Traveller, this time to Hong Kong. They are making safe passage – things are good, a lighter mood between husband and wife – so much so that I found myself fearing that a tragedy was to come.

And that’s all you get. I’ve already revealed far too much of the story – just pretend you know nothing except that this is a book I loved – the setting, the characters, the history, the writing – The Sea Captain’s Wife – and don’t miss the opportunity to meet this remarkable author and listen to her reading from this exceptional novel.

Shandi Mitchell reading 16 May 2012

The 2012 Reading Series at The Charles W. Stockey Centre continues with a reading on Wednesday 16 May, at 7:30 pm, by Shandi Mitchell reading from her novel Under This Unbroken Sky. I have been enthusiastically recommending Under This Unbroken Sky to readers since it’s publication in the fall of 2009. It is one of the best books I have ever read – an intense and absorbing story, brilliantly written and shaped. I have sometimes described it as a novel similar in intensity to The Kiterunner, but set on the Canadian Prairies – there is the same sense of impending disaster – you know that something terrible is going to happen to someone, but you don’t know when or to whom. It is an exceptional novel.

Under This Unbroken Sky was the winner of The Commonwealth Writers’ Prize, Best First Book Award, and The Thomas Head Raddall Fiction Award, and was longlisted for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award.

Most recently Under This Unbroken Sky was awarded the 2012 Kobzar Literary Award. Jury members Denise Chong, Nino Ricci, Randall Maggs and M.G. Vassanji, called Under This Unbroken Sky a "compelling and poignant narrative that honours the ancestry of many Canadian Ukrainians who worked for a better life during the depression era." The Kobzar award is presented biannually since 2006 awarding $25,000 to a literary work that best presents a Ukrainian Canadian theme.

Accepting the award, Shandi Mitchell said, "It did mean a great deal to come back to the Ukrainian community with this story. It meant a great deal to say a story that my baba could never speak aloud. Those silences are chasing generations. We are losing all our narratives, and we need to gather them."

Under This Unbroken Sky began as Shandi Mitchell resolved to gather her own family history after learning the truth about the death of her Ukrainian born grandfather. What she discovered was “stories untold, stories lost and forgotten”.

As she was “gathering up the pieces“ of her heritage she found that as she re-visited the Prairies where she had grown up, before living for twenty years in Nova Scotia, she was also finding the pieces of herself – making discoveries she had not known she was seeking.

Under This Unbroken Sky follows two families, related by birth and marriage, living on the Canadian Prairies in the 1930’s. Isolated by language and geography they struggle to clear the land, plant their crops, erect a shelter for themselves and their animals, to make a home for their children. Their challenges are great, and so is their courage.

Literary readings provide a great opportunity to learn about authors and novels and I know that this reading by Shandi Mitchell will be an exhilarating and intellectually stimulating evening for all.

Michael Crummey 18 April 2012

Michael Crummey, author of Galore, Wreckage and River Thieves will open the 2012 Reading Series at the Charles W. Stockey Centre on the evening of Wednesday 18 April.

Galore is a word not often used in everyday conversation – when I hear it I think of the east coast – it is from a Gaelic word meaning “to sufficiency” or “in plenty, abundantly”. The novel Galore has indeed sufficiency, and plenty and abundance. It is a rich, galloping story of galore and starvation – of body and soul - for the Newfoundland families we follow through six generations leading up to the Great War. This is a novel rich in character, language and the culture of Newfoundland’s history – and superstition. “Seven knots on a piece of string worn on your wrist to cure a toothache. A potato carried in a pocket to relieve rheumatism.”

Michael Crummey has created people who come alive on his pages – a fisherman, sitting alone by the water “overtaken by a puzzling nostalgia” for his long dead daughter – “and she was gone now, her childish secrets with her. There was no neater sum of how life unfolded, he thought, and he was ambushed by a crying jag, sobs tearing through him as ragged and relentless as a seizure”.

In June each year the priest is off to even more isolated communities “baptizing the children born and formalizing the marriages undertaken in his absence, saying a funeral mass for those who’d succumbed through the winter.” The days of plenty that came after Judah’s arrival are long since gone, now followed by “years of extravagant misery”. It is a grim trip that spring to the tiny outports where many are found dead of starvation in their beds – babies have been born and died.

But there is humour as well. When the first one room school house opens, a young man who has the mind of a child enjoys practicing his letters and numbers with the little children, and could be left by the teacher to supervise in her absence – until one day “she came back to find a row of boys standing with their pants around their ankles and James Woundy measuring their hairless peckers with her wooden ruler. The girls writing numbers in careful rows on their slates as James called them out.”

As we come toward the end of the novel those who we first met as infants are now men – many going off to war. Others are now elderly, and many have died. I loved my time with these people and was sorry to see this novel come to an end.

Galore was shortlisted for the 2009 Governor General’s Literary Award for Fiction, and the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award.

Wreckage, published in 2005, takes the reader to pre-World War II Newfoundland, to an outport village in the Fogo Islands. Aloysious – Wish – Furey meets Mercedes Parsons and our story begins. Wish is Catholic from the South Shore and Mercedes is Protestant. In those years this was a very big deal. They may both be Christians but it was no less scandalous to become involved with each other than if one had been a heathen. I grew up spending my summers in the Maritimes, so I am familiar with these attitudes – and the language used by the characters in Michael Crummey’s novels. The characters, their manner of speaking, the expressions used, are what you’d have heard across the kitchen table. A dipper for a drink of water – we had one in my grandmother’s kitchen – the expression “I’m sorry for your troubles” said to a mourner – crocheted doilies – does anyone under 60 even know what a doily is?! It is a world that is as lost to us as the outport villages, but it is brought to life in Wreckage. Woven into this storyline is the war in the Pacific, the experience of the prisoners of war there, the bombing of Nagasaki, and the life of a man who was not expected to return.

Flying out of Newfoundland, not to return for fifty years, Mercedes looks at the land of “craggy rock and the black circles of ice on the ponds, all of it bordered by the cold blue of the ocean” her home – one that you will discover reading Wreckage.

River Thieves, Crummey’s first novel, published in 2001 was nominated for the Commonwealth Writers Prize for Best Book, and the 2001 Giller Prize. This is a novel that follows the lives of John Peyton Senior and his son, John Peyton, through the early to mid-1800’s. At that time there were still Beothuk “red Indians” populating some of the remote in the north-east and central parts of Newfoundland. The story takes us into that remote land and introduces us to both the native people and the settlers who have come to Newfoundland, for a variety of reasons, to make new lives.

The women at the centre of the novel are Cassie, who keeps house for the Peyton’s, Mary, a Beothuk woman who was captured in a conflict between her people and the settlers, and Annie, a Mi’Kmaq woman happily married to an Irish settler. These are women who reflect Michael Crummey’s sense of the women of Newfoundland “strong willed, knowing who they are and what they want” as are the women in all of his books.

River Thieves is a novel of the tragedy of misunderstanding, of lies and omissions that have the power to destroy. At this time there were British officers who spent winters in England and returned to Newfoundland to do business in the spring each year when their involvement – or interference – with the Peyton’s and the other settlers who hunt and fish in the area of the few remaining Beothuk settlements.

Don’t miss the opportunity to experience the pleasure of hearing Michael Crummey read from his novels, and talk about this writing to an audience at the Charles W. Stockey Centre on Wednesday 18 April.

Enter the magic of the Midnight Sweatlodge with Waubgeshig Rice at the Charles W. Stockey Centre

Enter the magic of the Midnight Sweatlodge with Waubgeshig Rice at the Charles W. Stockey Centre

On Friday 21 October at 7:30 pm Waubgeshig Rice will introduce readers to his first book, a collection of connected short stories, Midnight Sweatlodge.

We will meet a group of young people about to enter a traditional Sweatlodge. On their hands and knees, as if returning to a mothers womb, they come for healing, cleansing, seeking an understanding of who they are as Anishinaabe people.

The first young man to speak talks about the childhood of two young boys. They lived near a town that was established by the white settlers, who pillaged the trees and prospered on what was once native land. We learn that in only three generations the people on the reservation have lost their original language. This young man is seeking solace twenty years after the tragic and violent death of his father.

We then meet David, a young man struggling to do well in school, to resist the easy access to alcohol and drugs that so many of his friends use. His parents are unemployed, lost to alcohol abuse. This boy has no breakfast, no lunch, yet he tries to be a good example to his younger siblings. Of all of his challenges, it is the racism he experiences at the high school off the reservation, that he finds most impossible to bear.

The Elder, listening to these young people, tells his own story of childhood abuse, despair and loss.

We also have a story of a native boy and his relationship with a non-native girl, in an urban setting. Many cultures discourage their children from becoming involved in relationships outside of their own culture and race – it is of course the road to assimilation, the loss of identity that their families fear. Another concern may be the risk that some of these relationships cannot survive the challenges they will face as a mixed-race family with very different beliefs and culture.

We meet another man, who chooses to leave the Sweatlodge, he cannot face what he knows he must acknowledge – his inability to give up alcohol abuse. He knows that he is causing harm to his wife and his child – his uncontrollable violent impulses when drinking are destroying his life. He witnesses the corruption on his reservation – the drug abuse. His own father died young in an “alcohol related hunting mishap”, but this young man must find his own way to peace.

The novel ends with a lovely passage about the power of nature, and a native interpretation of a naturally occurring rock formation on Georgian Bay. Those of us who know Georgian Bay will be at home with the setting of this little book. Native readers will see themselves and their culture portrayed with unblinking honesty as this young writer sees it. Those of us who are not of native heritage, and perhaps know very little of the culture of the Anishinaabe people, will find ourselves learning about both the strength and the tragedy of these people.

I had some questions for Waub Rice when I finished this well crafted and compelling book. I wondered about the terminology he uses – the words Anishinaabe and Indian are used interchangeably in his stories – and I wondered what words are now considered acceptable. Waub said that Anishinaabe is the preferred word when speaking about Canada’s native people, because Anishinaabe is their word, in their own language. In his opinion the word Indian may be acceptable when speaking among themselves, but not by anyone else, especially an authority figure, such as a teacher, or a policeman – it is a word that simply has “too much baggage”, says Waub Rice.

Waubgeshig Rice, now 32 years old, lived most of this life on the Wasauksing First Nation, he then attended Rosseau Lake College, and Parry Sound High School. I asked him about his experience growing up in both the native and non-native world, with parents of both cultures. Waub, unlike so many of the young people in his stories, grew up in a “totally harmonious, respectful and loving” environment. However, he is certainly not blind to the situation of many native people in our country, who live in poverty and desperation. Yet this young writer is, in fact, optimistic about the future of the people he writes about. Like the narrator in his first story, there is optimism that the community is now in healing, reclaiming their culture and their language.

Waub believes there is hope, even if it may sometimes to hard to find. He said he sees that “underneath complicated veils of darkness there is optimism”.

This is the first volume of fiction from this young writer. It has been very well received and I am sure we can expect more in the future. I wondered about the lack of a dedication in his book, and Waub answered that it was “written with gratitude to the community in which he grew up, and his family and friends”.

All of that community, along with family and friends, will have the opportunity to congratulate Waubgeshig Rice on the publication of Midnight Sweatlodge, and to hear him read from his work at the Charles W. Stockey Centre on Friday 21 October at 7:30 pm.