Moose Jaw, city of contrasts

Mac the moose greets those arriving in this lively prairie city. The plane in the background was once used by the stunt-flying RCAF Moose Jaw Snowbirds, smaller than Mac. Downtown is full of antique buildings and murals, and offers amazing Tunnel Tours. Temple Gardens Hotel and Spa has the lush and shady Crescent Park across the road. The river valley offers lovely views and trails. There's also an oil refinery.

Sage Hill Writing named for a cold war radar station

Photo from C and E museum

During the Cold War era, Canada and the US established the DEW (distant early warning) Line. This row of radar station resembled a bead necklace strung across the throat of the Far North. It was backed up by two further lines, the Mid-Canada and the Pinetree Line. The idea was to have advance warning in case Soviet aircraft flew over North America.

Part of the Pinetree Line, Canadian Forces Station Dana was also known as Sage Hill. Established by NORAD in 1962, it was decommissioned in the mid-eighties. It stood idle until being turned to service as a conference centre that hosted earlier incarnations of the Sage Hill writing experience. Larry Gasper, a Saskatchewan writer who attended Sage Hill there, remembers the bat guano that filled the abandoned tower.

Varied Saskatoon beers have wonderful names

At a Sage Hill reading, Caitilinn Terfloth offers nervous readers Saskatoon-made craft beers with names like Czech Mate, Melon Head, Bete Noire, Black Friars and Robin of the Wood.

Prairie wine is made with choke cherries and saskatoons, fresh picked and seen below.

Treaty 6 territory and a Benedictine Abbey

Here at Sage Hill, meetings open with the acknowledgement that we stand on Treaty Six territory, that of the Metis Nation. At the same time, we acknowledge that the place hosting our retreat is the home of the Benedictine monks of St Peter's Abbey. Thoughts about the rich earth of Saskatchewan and its occupants recall to mind Saskatchewan songster Connie Kaldor's song "Maria's Place," about Batoche, a historic battle site. A bell of significance the Metis people was repatriated in 2013.

Healthy state of the arts in Saskatchewan

The Saskatchewan Arts Board is a model for others to emulate. Knowing the arts feed the soul of the community, it nourishes artists. For 29 years, Sage Hill Writing has used the Board's support well. Along with many young writers, 1000 adult alumnae have published over 650 books. Many return to Sage Hill as instructors.

A recent innovation is the Micro-Grant. Each month, practitioners in under-served areas can apply for a thousand dollars to support a very specific work or practice of art. Saskatchewan is a province with many small towns, and these grants support a variety of artists, especially those outside the cities. One recent young recipient was the North Battleford musician Cole Knutson.

The rurally raised novelist and poet Robert Kroetsch, who both benefited from and supported the Arts Board, spent many sessions at Sage Hill. In this year's Kroetsch Keynote, CanLit specialist and woman of letters Tanis MacDonald spoke of how daunting it can be for artists from small places to value and develop their own work.

The CCF government led by Tommy Douglas, Saskatchewan's legendary premier, supported the arts and led the way where other provinces would follow. Founded in 1948, the Saskatchewan Arts Board is the second oldest Arts Council in the world. The Arts Council of England was created two years earlier, in 1946.

Sage Hill Reads

I'm thrilled to be part of the annual Sage Hill Writing retreat, held this year at St Peter's Abbey near Muenster, Saskatchewan. With thirteen monks still in residence, this oldest Benedictine Abbey in Canada has been a wonderful host. This morning we breakfasted on abbey-grown saskatoons.

Friday, we heard readings by award-winning poets Sandra Ridley and Daniel Scott Tysdal. Edmonton novelist Jacqueline Baker is seen reading in the picture. She's the mentor for the six of us struggling to shape our novels during these ten precious distraction-free days.

Words heard at the reading:

"Memories...like ghosts, can only be glimpsed from the corners of the eyes." Jacqueline Baker

"We cannot act until we have all the facts.
We never have all the facts.
We act."
Daniel Scott Tysdal

"The inevitable rupture in the chest, for the heart opening." Sandra Ridley

Pacific by Simon Winchester

Pacific was a great choice for my road trip. The joy of learning and recognition was enhanced by the luscious prose and trustable voice of Simon Winchester, who read his own work.

From the atomic explosions on Bikini atoll to Prince Charles's off the record thoughts on the handover of Hong Kong, and from the Sony corporation's introduction of transistor radios to the market to the resurgence of ancient South Pacific navigational genius in the voyage of the Hokulea, the book was full of surprises.

A journalist who originally trained as a geologist, Winchester handily describes plate tectonics in the Pacific. He tells of the hydrothermal vents called black smokers and white smokers that erupt continuously on the deep ocean floor, spewing out molten metal where seawater meets magma. Recent discoveries of life in the lightless depths include giant white clams, and enormous worms so adapted to the deep pressure of their home that they explode when brought to the surface.

With equal aplomb, he discusses geopolitics. For instance, we learn that the persistent and terrible consequences of the division of North and South Korea can be traced back to a marking placed cavalierly on a map by a military man. He relates tragic stories of how repeated colonizations damaged the lives of South Sea Islanders. In a more positive vein, he describes how a Japanese scientist devoted his life to bringing back a certain kind of albatross from extinction.

Today, China is hugely influential in the Pacific. This influence can only grow as the world's most populous nation quietly expands its military and economic might, and takes control of more and more islands, both unoccupied and disputed ones that lie near its coastline.

We learn too how economic decisions trump ecosystems. We hear about the mysterious die-offs or coral in the Great Barrier Reef, exacerbated by a two-mile long hole torn by a coal carrier, and about Australia's decision to build more coal ports to facilitate sales of coal to China.

Is Australia part of Asia? The author muses on this question. Geographically it's close, and trade ties are strong. Yet Australia, like Canada and New Zealand, has a government founded on the British model. Indeed, the Australian representative of the Queen once used a little-known part of the Australian constitution to "fire" a popular Prime Minister whose budget didn't pass, and then ask his opponent to form a government. The two politicians later became good friends, but the Governor General's life was blighted by his action and he left Australia under a cloud.

The Sydney Opera House, a cultural icon of Australia and now a UNESCO heritage site, was many years in the making. From the selection of the Danish architect who won the international competition, the design and creation of the building involves a web of strange happenings.

The Pacific ocean is vast. Larger than all of our planet's landmass combined, it covers 30% of the earth. Winchester calls it the ocean of the future, as the Atlantic is the ocean of the recent past and the Mediterranean the sea of the ancient world.

Narrated by the author, this audiobook is informative, thoughtful and wide-ranging. I love Simon Winchester's work, which always seems to touch on matters that I personally find fascinating.

Home Fire by Kamila Shamsie

Winner of the 2018 Women's Prize for fiction, this novel by Kamila Shamsie riveted me in with its intimate portrayals of a variety of characters who are obliged to struggle with challenging cultural, political and historic forces.

Long since abandoned by their terrorist father, three siblings have been left completely alone by the sudden death of their mother. Isma, the eldest, has managed to raise her twin sister and brother, who are now nineteen.

As the novel opens, Isma is flying to Boston, having accepted a scholarship in America. She worries about leaving her siblings in London, and fears for her sister especially. "With her law student brain," Aneeka knows "everything about her rights and nothing about the fragility of her place in the world."

That fragility is amply demonstrated in an early scene when Isma politely thanks an immigration official at Heathrow "whose thumbprints were on her underwear" and whose long interrogation has caused her to miss her plane. Exercising the utmost self-control, she expresses her gratitude without "allowing even a shade of sarcasm to enter her voice."

Another family of Pakistani origin has fared better and integrated well. Home Secretary Karamit Lone has a wealthy and well-connected designer wife, a daughter, and a son called Eamonn. His mother is of Irish descent, but in the Pakistani community, Eamonn's father is assumed to have used an "Irish spelling to disguise a Muslim name--'Ayman' became 'Eamonn' so that people would know the father had integrated."

These two families share some bad history, and when they connect by chance, conflict is inevitable. Interestingly, the struggles of the 'integrated' politician and his wife and son are no less complex and vexing than those faced by the children fathered by a jihadi, who are probably still watched by MI5. All these characters are forced into hypersensitive awareness of various tribal loyalties dictated by birth rather than choice. 

The tightrope-walking over identity and belief is seen in small and large ways. When Isma wears a turban rather than a scarf to cover her hair, British strangers ask her "whether it is a style thing or a Muslim thing." Americans tend to ask whether she's undergoing chemotherapy. 

"Cancer or Islam--which is the greater affliction?" jokes Eamonn. Then he apologizes, saying "it must be really difficult to be Muslim in the world these days." To which Isma responds that she would find it "more difficult not to be Muslim."  

In the US, Isma finds a certain relief in thinking about "how much more pleasant life was when you lived among foreigners whose subtexts you couldn't hear." Eamonn, however, is from London, and she picks up the meaning behind his polite social code loud and clear.

Back home, the politician's son Eamonn crosses the street to avoid a mosque. Then, thinking about his father, he crosses back, "so as not to be seen trying to avoid a mosque." He reflects how people talk of "the racism his father has to face when a section of the press tried to brand him as an extremist, but it was London's Muslim population who had turned their back on Karamat Lone and voted him out, despite all the good he'd done for his constituents." The son attributes this rejection to the fact that his father "spoke of the need for British Muslims to lift themselves out of the Dark Ages if they wanted the nation to treat them with respect."

Again and again the novel portrays the obsessive concern of the characters about the gaze of others -- their determined zeal to control how others perceive them.The recruiter Farooq irons his underpants and employs the "faux-Arabicized accent of a non-Arab Muslim who is trying too hard." He knows exactly how to speak and behave to Parvaiz in order to harvest the trust and confidence of the young man he knows to be without a father figure in his life.

Sadly, Parvaiz, "the terrorist son of a terrorist father," sees through the mask of the recruiter too late. By the time he realizes he's been sucked in, he no longer knows "how to break out of these currents of history, how to shake free of the demons" he has "attached to his own heels." One strategy involves hiring a PR company to advise him on what to say and what to wear to minimize his trouble.

Trapped in the ISIS camp, Parvaiz observes that it is "impossible here to know who was a true believer and who was playing along for any of a host of reasons, from terror to avarice. "The price of letting your mask slip" is "far too high for anyone to risk it."

 Shamsie was born in Pakistan and educated in the US. A British-Pakistani dual citizen, she lives mostly in London. She characterizzes this tale as a contemporary working of Antigone, an ancient Greek tragedy. Like her protagonist, Shamsie is an academic; indeed, Isma studies in Amherst, Massachusetts, also an alma mater of the author. Kamila Shamsie's work has been critically acclaimed and widely translated. This book was long-listed for the Man Booker Award.