Atomic City Girls by Janet Beard

If you are looking for a quick March Break read for a day on a plane, or on the beach – or maybe even on the couch – The Atomic City Girls by Janet Beard is just the book.

A work of fiction, based on real events, complete with archival photographs, The Atomic City Girls tells the story of the people who worked at Oak Ridge, Tennessee, a top secret town and work place built and operated by the American Government during the Second World War.

The local girls and women who were hired to work, and live, there had no idea of exactly what work they were performing – or for what purpose. They spent days at machines carefully making adjustments, in top-secret surroundings. The work provided much needed employment, an opportunity to leave home and, of course, the chance to meet a potential husband, and a way out of rural Tennessee. We know, before they do, that they were, in fact, making enriched uranium.

We meet June Walker and her family, in the fall of 1942, as their land is being expropriated by the government for some top-secret purpose, and again later in the fall of 1944 when June arrives to work at Oak City.

Moving into a girls dormitory June becomes friends with Cicci Roberts. Cicci is very actively looking for a husband – a wealthy one. June is an innocent compared to Cicci, but with a little prompting and primping she is soon more comfortable, and enjoying time at the canteen and the dances. June is bored by the work she does but happy to be away from home.

In tandem with the story of the white workers in Oak City, is the story of the black workers. These are men doing manual labour and living in crowded conditions. They are lonely, having left their families for the work in Oak City, but they are happy for the pay cheque. It is only when some of the black men begin to demand better living conditions that there is a chance that things will change.

The other players in the story are the Military Officers who live with their families in purpose built new homes, and the scientists who come to work on what will become the nuclear bomb dropped on Hiroshima. One of the physicists working at Oak Ridge is Sam Cantor, a rather unhappy man several years older than June. But, there is an attraction and they soon become involved in an intense relationship that surprises both of them. The affair also leads to a much better job for June, one that brings an awareness of what the work in Oak Ridge really means.

Janet Beard grew up in the shadow of Oak Ridge, and while researching this book, discovered that her own grandmother worked for the Manhattan project in Knoxville, and a Great Aunt worked at Oak Ridge.

The Atomic City Girls is a bit of a fluffy love story, but it is also a fascinating picture of a unique time and place and a very good read!

THE MARCH HARE - FRIDAY 2 MARCH 8 PM at THE CHARLES W. STOCKEY CENTRE

Celebrate the Poetry, the Art, and the Music of Newfoundland

The March Hare, a celebration of words and music from Newfoundland, takes place at the Charles W. Stockey Centre this week. On Friday 2 March, beginning at 8:00 pm, you will find a crowd of some of he best musicians and poets from Newfoundland on the stage.

When I encouraged Rex Brown to bring The Hare to Parry Sound 4 years ago, little did I know that I would be living part-time in Newfoundland and flying in and out of the St. John’s International Airport several times each year. Everyone flying into that airport is greeted by a huge painting by Gerry Squires. Near the baggage collection, and sometimes hidden by carts, is Caribou on the Witless Bay Barrens.

Stan Dragland’s most recent project, involving years of research, is a great big beautiful book about Gerald Squires, splendidly illustrated with his paintings. Squires’ work is iconic in Newfoundland but less known in the rest of the country. Working with an extensive archive Stan Dragland has written a richly interpretive essay informed by Squires’ own uncollected poetry, fiction, letters, and essays.

Quoted as saying he fell “for Newfoundland like a lover”, Stan has made his home in St. John’s for many years. Part of the Canadian literary landscape for a good long time, Stan Dragland was a founding editor of Brick Books, a former poetry editor for McClelland and Stewart, a poet, a novelist, and editor, and writer of essays and criticism.

Kathleen Winter, born in England, grew up in Newfoundland, and now makes Montreal home. Well known internationally for her novel Annabel, her most recent novel Lost in September was nominated for the Governor Generals Literary Award for Fiction last fall, when she appeared with the International Festival of Authors in Parry Sound. While reading the letters of General James Wolfe in the archives of the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library, Kathleen’s imagination took flight and her book became a work of fiction, rather than fact, allowing her to tell the story of General James Wolfe in tandem with that of a modern day soldier.

Pamela Morgan returns this year to perform new work. Over the past seven years or so she has been concentrating mostly on refining and developing an original folk opera, The Nobleman’s Wedding. This beautiful folk musical was performed at The Rising Tide theatre in Trinity, Newfoundland last fall. Based upon the gorgeous melodies and classic stories in ballads from Newfoundland’s rich oral tradition, it is a story where love, lust, faith, hope, and betrayal come together.

Dr. Pamela Morgan has been learning and arranging Newfoundland ballads for forty years, concentrating on the more rare and obscure treasures with their timeless truths and intricate modal melodies. She is also working on a new musical based upon Tom Dawe’s poem The Frog Prince. The frog, finding himself in the stuffy dry palace after the metamorphic kiss, yearns for his wetland home and the friends he left behind there.

Pamela will be playing excerpts from both projects, as well as something from her book of piano arrangements of Newfoundland Ballads, and a new commissioned composition dealing with abuse of children by the clergy; timely in these days of truth and reconciliation.

With poets and writers Randall Maggs, Stephanie McKenzie, Stan Dragland and Kathleen Winter, and musicians Anita Best, Sandy Morris, Pamela Morgan and Douglas Cameron The March Hare will the biggest and best yet!

The March Hare - Friday 2 March 2018 8 pm at the Charles W. Stockey Centre

The Poetry of Hockey, The Music of Newfoundland - The March Hare Part 1

Music and Hockey are two words that perhaps do not seem to go together – except in Parry Sound! On Friday 2 March, at the Charles W. Stockey Centre, beginning at 8 pm The March Hare returns to Parry Sound, presenting an evening of words and music from Newfoundland.

Poet Randall Maggs will read from his poetry collection Night Work: The Sawchuk Poems, re-issued this year by Brick Books in a 10th anniversary edition.

Terry Sawchuk was a goaltender who played for a number of NHL teams in the 1950s and 1960s. His life was one of great achievement and great difficulty, a rough life by any standard. Dying at the age of only 40 years old in 1970, Sawchuk is remembered as one of the great goalies of all time.

Randall Maggs exquisite book of poems and photographs provides an intimate look at the man and the hockey player, as well as others of his era.

Joining his father-in-law on stage will be musician Casey Laforet, a founding member and songwriter of the Hamilton based band Elliott Brood. Formed in 2002, their brand of fuzzed-up roots music makes for a captivating and frenetic live performance. Their style has been called everything from ‘blackgrass’ to ‘death country,’ but those descriptions don’t capture the transcendent heights of their unique approach to roots music.

Anita Best and Sandy Morris are two of the most well known and respected musicians in Newfoundland. They have been playing together for 51 years, their first gig at a friend’s wedding. But, until now have not recorded together except as members of the band Bristol’s Hope on a recording made in 1997 for the Cabot 500 Celebrations.

Anita Best is one of Newfoundland’s most talented traditional singers, and has been collecting songs and stories, celebrating Newfoundland’s tradition all of her long career. Sandy Morris is a guitarist who has worked with hundreds of musicians, including one of the original incarnations of Figgy Duff, and one of few who has been able to make a living exclusively as a musician.

Anita and Sandy will perform pieces from their new CD, a collection of their own arrangements of traditional music as well as work by Ron Hynes and other Newfoundland songwriters.

Joining the crowd from Newfoundland is Douglas Cameron, part-time Parry Sounder, and a musician who has recorded several albums of original songs including his most recent, Riverdale.  A two time Juno nominee, Douglas has been composing and performing in Canada for over four decades.

In collaboration with David Macfarlane, Cameron co-created The Door You Came In, a two-man performance of music and text performed throughout Newfoundland and across Canada.

Stephanie Mckenzie, is not only a poet, but also an editor and publisher, and English Department Chair at Memorial University in Corner Brook, Newfoundland. She holds a Ph.D. in English literature from the University of Toronto.

In addition to her academic and literary work, Stephanie McKenzie is also the Artistic Director of The March Hare.

The March Hare in Parry Sound will also feature Stan Dragland, Kathleen Winter, and Pamela Morgan.

This celebration of poetry and music began in Newfoundland over 30 years ago, the tradition continuing on the Stockey Centre stage here in Parry Sound, and in New York, Toronto and, of course, across Newfoundland.

Our Lady of the Prairie by Thisbe Nissen

Iowa, the American Mid-west, rolling hills and cornfields, Amish and Mennonite farmers, and the setting of Thisbe Nissen’s new novel Our Lady of the Prairie.

Thisbe Nissen in an American author, in her mid 40s, she had two earlier novels, Osprey Island and The Good People of New York, published to much acclaim, and now Our Lady of the Prairie. When this book arrived in the store it went to the top of my “to read” pile and I read it over two days, not wanting to put it down for a moment except to catch my breath – to take a break from the emotional intensity.

This is the story of Phillipa Maakestad, her husband of 25 years, Michael, her adult daughter, Ginny – and Phillipa’s lover, Lucius. And Michael’s mother, Bernadette. Along with a great cast of secondary characters, friends and acquaintances, who enrich the lives of the Maakestad family and delight the reader.

It is 2004, but in many ways it could be America 2018. George W is president and he is running for a second term. This past year Canadians have been watching a great deal more American news than usual, and we have become well aware that political loyalty makes for a deeply divided America. There is a scene in this novel of the night of George W’s re-election that might have seemed completely over the top before the Trump election – but it is entirely believable now.

Woven into the story of a passionate affair, the unraveling of a long marriage, and the deeply complicated relationship between a mother and her adult daughter, is a portrait of one small part of America and what one affluent woman discovers when she spends time in a small village during a year of personal and political upheaval. 

Phillipa, I thought, was a great character. Immature in many ways, but honest and passionate, and caring. When she embarks on this affair she knows that she is crossing a line, one that she may regret, but she does it. She loves Lucius; she wants a future with him. But, the reality is she has a husband to whom she has been married a long time, they have, together, managed to bring their very troubled daughter to adulthood, and now should be the time they enjoy less responsibility and more time together. Some way into the story Phillipa says to herself “my old life seemed to live just on the other side of a flimsy screen door” and we can see how she could open – or close – that door and simply step back into her old life – or not.

Our Lady of the Prairie is a novel I bet you will not want to put down once you’ve started reading, this writer’s imagining of events in the past are as wonderful as the present day story. And, I bet you will cry, for Phillipa, her daughter, her husband – and perhaps for yourself.

The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead

“She was surrounded by men and women who’d been born in Africa, or born in chains, who had freed themselves or escaped. Branded, beaten, raped. Now they were here. They were free and black and stewards of their own fate.”

This sentence comes late in the novel The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead. Released in paperback this week, this book won both the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize for the 47-year-old author.

Described by some as a work of magical realism The Underground Railroad tells the story of Cora, born into slavery, and her journey to freedom. But, it is very clear that there is really no escaping slavery. In America the past is so very present, even now, as most African Americans have slave ancestors.

The Underground Railroad is a novel that presents much of what one expects, descriptions of life on a cotton plantation, the cruelty of the white slave owners, the suffering of the slaves, but, also, much more that is unexpected as the story unfolds. There is reality here – and there is something more, at times so plausible you’ll wonder what is fact and what is fiction – the complete unlikeliness of some events seeming so very possible. The image of the Underground Railroad as being an actual thing is at once fantastical and a literary device returned to again and again as the story moves forward. A museum display about slavery is not as absurd as one might think, considering that Inuit were brought from the north to New York in 1896 for display.

This is a novel with a full cast of intriguing characters, apart from the slaves and the free men, and those who helped them. There are also the “resurrection men” and a fascinating scene with these grave digging body snatchers at work. And, there are the men who made their living capturing runaway slaves and returning them to their owners for reward – a profitable job.

Always at the centre of the novel is the slave Cora, and the story of her young life on a cotton plantation. We learn about Cora’s mother, Mabel, who ran for freedom leaving her daughter behind, and the story of Cora’s grandmother, Ajarry, who had been kidnapped in Africa. And, we follow Cora’s run, her own attempt at freedom.

Author Colson Whitehead grew up in affluence, in Manhattan. Educated at Harvard, he worked as a journalist and was a well-established author before the publication of The Underground Railroad. Though he knew nothing of his own ancestors, his research for this novel included reading books about slavery, including first hand accounts written in the 1930s by former slaves.