Book Review of Sustenance: Writers From BC and Beyond on the Subject of Food

A version of this review first appeared in the spring 2018 issue of the quarterly magazine, BC Bookworld and is reprinted here with permission. A great book to browse, graze or devour!


Book Review of Sustenance: Writers from BC and Beyond on the Subject of Food
Edited and with a Foreword by Rachel Rose
Published by Anvil Press
978-1-77214-101-6   $25 large trade paperback

Let me begin by putting on my bookseller’s hat and asking the key question: who will reach for this book?

Gardeners who sigh happily over the new batch of seed catalogues arriving in late January, cooks who read cookbooks like other people immerse themselves in books of short stories, amateur and professional chefs, readers and writers of compressed, powerful poetry and prose, those who appreciate photography and will discover Derek Fu’s gorgeous work…and that’s just for starters.

There are 151 tidbits to savour from writers who live in Vancouver, where Poet Laureate Rachel Rose envisioned this highly collaborative book, and from elsewhere around the world. There are contributions from nationally renowned poets like Lorna Crozier, John Pass and Susan Musgrave, nearly-anonymous librarians who write like angels, celebrated chefs like Karen Barnaby, Meeru Dhalwala, Vikram Vij and Frank Pabst, thoughtful children and wise elders, some speaking Arabic and Cree. There are farmers, beekeepers, fishers and backyard gardeners, First Nations, Metis, refugees and members of their welcome committees.

As Poet Laureate for the City of Vancouver from 2014-2017, Rachel Rose wanted a community project which offered another world view than the muttering and braying about walls to keep out the Other, meaning Muslims, Mexicans, and desperate refugees the world over. Rose had already spent years volunteering with Burmese families in Surrey, shopping for food, shampooing hair, attending graduations, weddings and funerals. Her genuine Canadian hospitality imbues this book project too because the money raised by sales, as well as every single writer’s honorarium, is donated to the BC Farmer’s Market Nutrition Coupon Program so that low-income families will have access to fresh, locally-grown food.

So as well as bringing so many wonderful writers together at the ‘table’ of Sustenance,  the book itself is a gift that keeps on giving, the Poet Laureate’s inspired “love letter to the city.”

The selected writings, as you’d expect from an editor and writer of her stature with award-winning work published internationally and an abiding focus on human rights, is unfailingly eloquent. This is not a book written by or for people scampering off to find the trending mustard de jour. As well as thoughtful, we have hilarious (Jane Silcott’s ‘Cooking Class & Marriage Lessons’ and Karen Barnaby’s ‘Blackberry Fever’), heart-breaking (Sophia Karasouli-Milobar’s ‘Fava Bean Stew’ and Elizabeth Ross’ ‘Milky Way’), sensual (Jeff Steudel’s ‘Recipe’), life-affirming (Brian Brett’s ‘I Want to Serve Food to Strangers’) and carnivorous, although I would also cross-file it under hilarious (kjmunro’s ‘hungry in Tofino’).

The voices are as diverse as the forms— interviews, memoirs, recipes, both literal and figurative, prose and poems of all kinds, some as paeans to moose meat, bees, bread, beer, tomatoes, rice, beloved grandmothers, salmon, maple syrup, elk heart and fresh berries. The writers tackle subjects as difficult as anorexia, obesity, starvation, sugar, animal deaths, and allergies, real and possibly, imposed (see the delightful, plaintive essay, ‘Check the Ingredients!’ by Charles Dickens Grade 6 student, Ayla Maxwell).

What makes this book important and substantial to me begins with the obvious, universal fact: we all must eat to survive. Secondly, food is served on a platter of emotional connections to people, place and experience, the things that really matter to each of us therefore,  the writing packs a visceral wallop. To sum up, food, sustenance, is intensely personal as well as political (read Billeh Nickerson’s smart, incisive poem ‘A Baker’s Dozen: 13 Vancouver Food (In)Securities’).

The final words, amid the cornucopia of offerings at this banquet for humanity, goes to ten year old collaborators, Bodhi Cutler and Gus Jackson, who both attend Charles Dickens Elementary School in Vancouver. ‘Every Dish is Unique’ is their short, sweet and perfectly apt essay which sums up Sustenance.

‘Every dish is unique because every Vancouverite makes it a tiny bit different. We all have our styles and our ingredients, our suppliers and our equipment. There are restaurants who will probably make great pasta with the best calamari. Your mom can make a great homemade meal she invented herself. No two meals taste the same because they are like humans, unique and great.’

                                              

Book Review of The Defiant Mind: Living Inside a Stroke by Ron Smith

This is a superbly-written book about the experience of a stroke, a "carpet bombing of the brain", and its psychological, physical and emotional aftermath, including early warning symptoms, the hospital experience, and returning to home life. It is such a remarkable contribution to our understanding of many things in this world, hence my tagging of it with "wisdom" as well as psychology and stroke recovery. The author typed the manuscript using the index finger of his left (non-dominant) hand, which, at over 300 pages is a testament to his determination, lucidity, and the rock-solid love and support of his wife in particular.

The only other book I've read about being trapped "inside" a stroke is the devastating "The Diving Bell and the Butterfly by Jean-Dominique Bauby, who dictated his slim masterpiece by blinking one eye while his editorial assistant showed him letters of the alphabet. Imagine that. Take your time. Ron Smith (full disclosure) edited one of my novels in 2010 during his busy life as a publisher, editor, and university English professor. He is also the author of books of poems, short stories and a major biography. His work has been translated and he has served as a visiting professor of English in several other countries. Which is to say, his fine mind, before and after the "brain attack", and his love of reading and books propelled him through the rubble of the ischemic stroke, the attack on his brain stem. Writing this book, claiming his memories especially, became a necessary part of his therapy, as vital as learning how to roll over in bed, to walk after learning how to wheel a chair, to sort out the tangle of his thick, disobedient tongue and sagging mouth muscles to speak to his beloved family.

There is humour here too, alongside its earthly cousin, despair, amid the analyses of how stroke survivors are treated. The essential point is: all strokes are different and all are experienced differently and furthermore, each survivor needs to be heard. Most of the therapists, doctors, nurses and hospital staff, including a perfectly lovely man who cleaned the wards, are generously portrayed as skilled, empathetic, and very caring but of course, there are always a few negative-thinking individuals who have chosen the wrong occupation. We learn about an older man in his eighties who could not speak after his stroke but who tapped the side of his hospital bed with his able hand. He seemed frustrated when family and staff treated his tapping as some sort of uncontrollable spasm until finally somebody realized he had used Morse code in WW2 and he was using it again, trying to communicate with them. The quest to communicate is so intense with locked-in afflictions of all kinds because the loneliness and depression is just as intense of course. We are privy to this subjective experience, rarely explored, thanks to this book.

Highly recommended to anyone who works in any capacity in hospitals, rehabilitative medicine, community nursing, and to families where a member has been felled by a stroke. But also, like Jean-Dominque Bauby's book, this brilliant book deserves a wide international audience because it is so beautifully written, so compelling and so hopeful, ultimately, about new medical techniques and the wonders we are still discovering about how the brain heals and creates new pathways. It's also a book about the importance of love and emotional support, about a healing connection to nature and the serendipity of the right healers coming into his life at just the right time. Ron Smith is a lucky man, despite the stroke, and his strength of character and sheer determination to communicate has contributed an outstanding book.

Review of The Light Between Oceans by M.L. Stedman

Light Between Oceans by M L Stedman by M. L. Stedman
My rating: 5 of 5 stars


This book was recommended to me by a friend, an avid reader who thought that since I lived on a Canadian lightstation, a new Australian book set on a station there would be of interest. Also, that it was a very, very good read. Well, what a pair of understatements.
This is a stunning first novel set in post-World War I Western Australia, well south of Perth. The Janus Rock Lightstation is strategically located between the Great Southern Ocean and the Indian Ocean, a place where the warm and cold currents collide and ships traversing the shipping lanes recognize its five second flash as entering or leaving the realm of the Australian continent.Urgent messages to and from the lightstation and the ships are infrequent but Morse code is used by all parties. Part of the lightkeeper's duties are to note the names of the ships passing by, time and date, and to log all such information.

Stedman's descriptions of lighthouse duties, of the island, the tower itself and the house provided, the supply boat which stopped by every three months and the mental strain suffered by a widowed lightkeeper are apt and accurate. She writes beautifully.

To this well-named island, comes battle-scarred Tom Sherbourne, a relief keeper and war hero, looking for a place to be still and solid.

At the kitchen window, the flame of the oil lamp wavered occasionally. The wind continued its ancient vendetta against the windows, accompanied by the liquid thunder of waves. Tom tingled at the knowledge that he was the only one to hear any of it: the only living man for the better part of a hundred miles in any direction. He thought of the gulls nestled into their wiry homes on the cliffs, the fish hovering stilly in the safety of the reefs, protected by the icy water. Every creature needed its place of refuge.
And to this sad, good man's life while on shore leave comes Isabel, a cheerful, pretty young woman who amazes him with her wit and her audacity, especially so because she has set her sights on him, of all people. Tom is advised by the supply boat's captain never to underestimate the importance of the right wife on the Lights, advice as sound in the early 1900's as it is in this century.

Then to their idyllic and adventurous island life comes more grief, in the form of two miscarriages and a stillborn child, and just the two of them out there alone, coping with the physical and emotional reality.

But then, then a rowboat adrift lands on one of their island beaches, a boat with a dead man and a very much alive baby girl.
What to do? By then the reader is mesmerized,watching Tom and Isabel succumb to their choices, making decisions that will undo them both but the skill with which the author sets the pacing of the novel, the slow unspooling of the days and the shocking jolts of tension, is guaranteed to undo the reader-- unless the reader has a heart of stone.

I'd like to add that the cover is lovely and the endpapers are simply wonderful-- early lighthouse logbook pages with graceful, copperplate penmanship, noting the wind direction and force, the barometric pressure and temperature, and remarks as to passing ships and special task performed.



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