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Issue # 125
| Pamela
Banting
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Going Some Place:
Creative Non-Fiction Across Canada |
Ed. Lynne Van Luven, Regina: Coteau Books, 2000. 283 pp., $19.95.
Reviewing an anthology is a different kind of task than reviewing a single-authored
book. There are many more variables, most of them unknown to the reviewer,
which can affect the final product. Most significantly, an anthologist
is dependent upon the quality and type of submissions available from writers
during the precise window of time when she is gathering material. If she
is working with a publisher in the creation of the book as opposed to
seeking a publisher for the final edited manuscript, there may be themes
or content which the publisher favours, and/or the publisher may push
to have his or her own stable of writers included.
As its title suggests, most of the varied contributions to Lynne Van
Luven's anthology Going Some Place: Creative Non-Fiction Across Canada
explore some aspect of travel or journey. Many of the journeys cross space,
others describe a specific place which the writer has either visited or
left, while a few others are more metaphorical, life journeys, passages
between stages of life or between life and death. "Counting the Rs
in London" is written as a series of journal entries by Edmontonian
Nancy Mattson who moved to London to make a new life there. Betty Jane
Wylie's "A Guest of Karen Blixen" describes her stay at the
home of Karen Blixen a.k.a. the novelist Isak Dinesen while working on
a play about the relationship between Blixen and a young male poet whom
she mentored. In "A Schooner in Memory" Don Gayton travels around
Nova Scotia with his elderly father tracing their Gayton ancestors. Eileen
Delehanty Pearkes writes a meditation on a single argillite stone and
the travels and deformations it has undergone in the space of geological
time. Myrna Kostash drives around Montana testing the conceit that Albertans
have more in common with Americans than eastern Canadians and writes about
her findings, focussing particularly on the subject of labour history
in Montana, in "The Ballad of Frank Little."
A corresponding number of the essays are about not going some place.
Sue Walsh writes about having grown up white in white South Africa and
about how, now that she has emigrated to Victoria where "black men
are in the visible minority," she is gradually unlearning the prejudices
and racism which she imbibed as a child. A common place of origin paves
the way for friendships which would have been prohibited on the basis
of race and gender in the Old Country. Another analysis of the social,
gender, racial and religious conditioning is found in Daniel Coleman's
"Not My Home." Quoting fragments from hymns and the Ethiopian
national anthem, Coleman, who grew up in Ethiopia as the son of white
Canadian missionaries, writes a poignant meditation on how his home on
native land is not one. His grade-one renditions of the hymn he sang before
he learned to read are in themselves telling comments on imperialism:
"I am a stain-er here withinna foar-in laan/ My home is far away
ah-pawna gold-en straan/ Am ass a door teebee of relmsby on da sea/ I
here on biss-niss for I'm King." The beautifully written "Pensive
Nude" by Kristjana Gunnars takes place entirely while its author
sits outside on her deck in the misty westcoast rain reading and thinking.
Caterina Edwards' "Under My Skin," which won second prize in
the Jon Whyte Memorial Essay Competition, is a moving account of her past
and present relationship with her mother, who now has Alzheimer's disease
or senile dementia. Other well-crafted essays in the collection are those
by Caroline Woodward on joining her local choir, Margaret Hollingsworth
on her deaf childhood, Ven Begamudre who in "Benny Hits the Big Four-Oh"
reflects on his parents and his childhood, and Pat Krause who explores
life after the death of her husband.
The weakest piece in the book is a collaborative effort by Rita Moir
and Shirley Scott-Bruised Head. The essay comprises alternating diary-like
entries, distinguished by regular and italic fonts, by the two women.
Moir is in mourning because she had her big black dog euthanized. For
sympathy and comfort she tracks down Shirley. Unbeknownst to Moir, Shirley's
daughter had been tragically killed in a car accident just two months
before. Call me unsentimental or simply not a dog person, but the piece
failed to convince me that because the dog Connor "has been with
me longer than any man. We live alone together in the mountains with our
cat Dylan" his death is of equal magnitude with someone's daughter.
Although animals can be very important members of the family, nevertheless
this essay reads as an exercise in the most striking self-indulgence on
Moir's part. Similarly, Merilyn Simonds's poetic essay would have been
much stronger if the dying person named Ross around whom it circles had
been given an identity.
Although it has been around for some time, creative non-fiction is still
not a very well-defined genre. Indeed there is no entry for it in my most
recent edition of A Glossary of Literary Terms by M.H. Abrams.
The pieces assembled in this anthology range from the literary (Coleman,
Gunnars, Begamudre, Edwards, Halfe) to the journalistic (Charney, McKinnon,
Wylie, Darbasie, Holdstock). Going Some Place points to a number
of the different directions - poetic personal journals, memoirs, reportage,
travelogues, tributes and so on - in which the genre is headed.
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