Finding More Light Choka

 Sorrow Bay Grief Point

Sad Rocks Desolation Sound

Old Fears Blind Alley

Morbid Channel Grim Look-Out

Good Hearts Cove Safe Harbour 

from Light Years: Memoir of a Modern Lighthouse Keeper (Harbour Publishing: 2015)

The Choka form alternates five and seven syllable lines and ends with the second seven syllable line. Chokas can be any length and do not demand rhyming endings or even metre although the ear will always look for rhythm in any line or sentence. Or at least mine does. I always read my work out loud, prose or poetry, fiction or non-fiction and even then, my idiosyncratic take on some words may not please another reader's ears. I am often guilty of wanting to make people laugh by juxtaposing images as in this choka poem where I wrote down names from two wall-mounted maps in the Egg Island radio room, delighting in the nuances for some long-ago sailors who were obviously having a terrible, no-good, very bad day to call a stretch of water 'morbid channel' or a point of land 'grim look-out'!

Review of Thick Skin: Field Notes From A Sister in the Brotherhood by Hilary Peach

This review was originally commissioned by BC Bookworld for their Spring 2023 edition although it was published in Fall of 2022. It was my pick for "Favourite Memoir of the Year." Published by Anvil Press: 9781772141955  TP  $22.00

This is a wonderful memoir by a remarkable writer and human being about her experiences as a welder and member of the Boilermakers, Iron Ship Builders, Blacksmiths, Forgers and Helpers, Union Local 191. For two decades after completing her training in B.C., Hilary Peach worked mostly as a travel card welder. This meant responding to call-outs for skilled workers urgently needed at big projects like pulp mills, chemical plants, refineries and generating stations elsewhere. Off to Montana, Pennsylvania, Fort McMurray, Port Alice, Chetwynd, Nova Scotia, Prince George and Skookumchuk she went, constantly refining her skill set, learning from the best welders in the trade as well as dealing with the toxic and hazardous ones.

It is not explained exactly how she became interested in welding or learned she had an aptitude for metalwork with good eye-hand co-ordination, not to mention mental and physical toughness, fearlessness when working at dizzying heights or in cramped enclosed spaces. Or how she acquired the endurance needed for working in severe cold or heat for 10-13 hour days for weeks at a stretch. There is no mention of big brothers or a handy Dad with a workshop but her kind and thoughtful mother seemed fully supportive of her endeavours. So was a renowned instructor, Denby Nelson, at the former Malaspina College in Nanaimo who must have recognized a kindred spirit, a renegade artist needing a way to make excellent wages to finance her Gulf Island acreage plans and creative collaborations with other artists.

But when Hilary Peach set out, in her early thirties in the early 2000’s, with her TIG ticket (Tungsten Inert Gas), fully qualified to work as a welder, there were seven women in the approximately seven hundred member local union. Often the only woman working on a site, she was frequently told to “get a thicker skin.” Or, “don’t bleed in the shark pool”. One way to interpret that is to shudder at the number of electrical shocks, molten metal burns and assorted jagged edges which got past the cheap plastic rain gear and size 12 steel-toed gumboots she was issued at the Esquimalt Shipyard at the start of her career. 

The other reading, for any woman working in the trades, is the ability to withstand the verbal hazing, the filthy language and even malicious meddling with the intent to cause failure. From the belligerent foreman who refused to acknowledge she actually was the TIG welder he’d sent for and had her making coffee for three shifts at $90 an hour, to the airport security guard who was convinced she was travelling under her husband’s name, to all the times opportunities were kept hidden in some special men-only need apply vault of information, the self-described 5 foot 4 inch nerd with big glasses met sexist stupidity with unwavering stamina.

Fortunately, for every deeply insecure and mean-spirited individual depicted in this book there are at least a half-dozen decent, well-brought up union brothers who let her know they would back her up if she ever made a complaint. She never did. But several men scuttled off to complain about her! After one such encounter the foreman came over to talk to her about the tool crib attendant’s complaint after she refused to share his sleeping quarters, claiming she’d threatened him. 

“What did you say?” he asked.“I said that given the opportunity, I would stab him in his sleep and make necklaces out of his teeth,” I answered. “Did you?” he asked. “Well, good for you. Carry on.”

In one truly scary instance, the brothers made sure she made it safely to and from her car and everywhere else she walked on the job before they found a way to get a dangerous predator out of camp. In another, when she was recuperating from severe dehydration, she’d find a litre of orange juice or a jug of bottled water outside her hotel room door, left by the guys she worked with after the first aid attendant spread the word. When one or more other women were working on-site, the dynamics changed in a most gratifying way for the better. They made the guys blush.

Fortunately, Hilary Peach is no slouch at defending herself, possessed of a razor-sharp sense of humour. Here’s how she dispensed with a foreman who sidled up to her and whispered in her ear: <br />“If it had been up to me, you’d have been fired weeks ago. This is no place for women.” “If you don’t like your job,” I said, “you can go and work in a flower shop.” I sense an adjective went missing in that last sentence. As Red Seal carpenter and acclaimed poet Kate Braid says in her excellent Foreword, “Thick Skin reveals the challenges of the job, both physical and emotional, but it’s also a love story. It’s about choosing your battles, fitting in, getting along, and it’s a study in sensitivity and toughness.”

 

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 I Wasn't Always Like This by Shelley A. Leedahl

bookshelves: love-sex-messy-real-life, memoir, psychology, writing-process, wisdom

This is a brave and honest book of very well-written essays from a writer born in Saskatchewan, home of the first province-wide (or state-wide) arts council in all of North America. Yes, it could be the visionaries who determined that art was the distaff maiden to cereal grains more than forty years ago but whatever is in the alkaline water there, that flat landscape is remarkable for great writers, musicians, visual artists, scientists and Tommy Douglas, among others, you name it...this sparsely-populated province produces a disproportionate number of doers and dreamers. The hard-won wisdom contained in this book is proof of that.


Essays allow the reader to dip in and browse, waiting for something, a turn of phrase, a topic, a place name maybe, to catch and hold the eye. I took my time, savouring each one in the order it was presented (and knowing that author and editor would have spent a good while placing each essay just so, a logic which reveals itself to the careful reader). Essays can leapfrog entire decades, whole years, the pivotal labours to produce a child, then another, a book and then four others and then still more. (Leedahl is the author of many genres of published and broadcast work: poetry, young adult novellas, adult novels, collections of short stories, essays, radio ad jingles, magazine and newspaper articles, to name just a few.) The wild and fertile terrain of childhood is given short shrift and I am curious about this. I want to know why the child took the short-cut across the territory patrolled by the big boys, time after time. There is an undercurrent of menace and something else too, the something else that drew this particular child to take the short-cut again and again and not to avoid whatever happened to her there or whatever she initiated there. There is nothing to be gained or learned by taking the long and safe way to and from the school perhaps, a metaphor to set us up for the life she lived as an adult, an exciting life in many ways but also a life fraught with more than a few dodgy choices, fuelled by a predilection for romance or at least dressed-up lust, the compulsion to run many miles a day with surgically-reduced breasts to enhance her mileage and comfort versus static routine and family stability on a borderline budget.


Other essays are very forthcoming about the need for a writer to escape the hub-bub and relentless responsibilities of family life to the sanctity of a quiet room -or a small prairie house- wherein to sit and think and maybe get a page of writing accomplished every single day. Or craving the lively and stimulating community to be found with other writers and artists, in particular the exchanges between Saskatchewan and Mexico, where she obviously thrives and blossoms. But here is the rub, the hard and brave necessity of writing the truth, which gives us the kind of writing that other readers and especially other writers begin reading and then flinch, shrinking away, thinking, 'Oh, don't go there, don't, don't, oh, boy, now you've gone and done it.'


It is rare for writers (especially those with living relatives, old and young) to admit to feeling confined and constrained and Leedahl does it. She cops to the things about living one life and yearning for another that the rest of us can't or won't for fear of hurting feelings and blowing up fragile detentes and alliances with those who share our DNA or our bed. She puts herself out there, showing us her crappy taste in lovers who all seem to end up treating her rather poorly, and all the while her modest financial wherewithal is eroding as she chases the dream of writing, and making a living at it, which is increasingly difficult to do, especially in the Canadian market.


Which is why I was so heartened to see the tremendous exposure her title essay received in Medium, the online forum based in the US, spotted and gleaned from the newsletter produced quarterly by the Writers Union of Canada, earlier this year and where my heartfelt response (full disclosure) earned me a free copy of the book (I didn't remember until after it arrived in the mail unexpectedly that I must have checked a box saying 'Yes, I'd love a copy!', so unused am I to actually winning anything. This title essay is worth the reasonable price of the nicely-produced book on its own as the author fesses up to her Damn the Torpedoes, Life is Short approach to living and loving and creating art en route. Yes, sometimes it meant she was "selfish" and left her teenagers to forage in the fridge and her husband to maintain the home-front as well as his own work and hobbies (he's a fitness buff too).

Question: would we think, or even blink an eyelash, if we read about a male author with nine or ten books to his credit that he was self-absorbed and a 'bad father' if he spent two or four weeks in a village or a monastery working on a new book? No, I'll supply the answer, but even those of us who have made those choices to get a book finished have to still our small-town tongues from going, "Tut, tut, tut, those poor children/teenagers, that poor helpless fellow, all alone in a warm and dry house for fourteen days or even fifteen..." Same thing for affairs which end badly. Transpose the situation to a tragic male writer and see what happens to your head-set. Uh-huh. Highly recommended reading for those pursuing or helplessly ensnared in the writing life. I just hope this book or the next provides the author with more than a modicum of financial recompense for her hard-won wisdom and that she won't be foraging for blackberries in order to save lunch and breakfast money in earnest going forward. Foraging for the sheer pleasure of sun-ripened blackberries, sure, we all love that, but the hungry stomach roils with acids and undigested seeds after too many meals of them. This writer deserves a break and success for her unsparing, unflinching look at herself. Brava!