Richard Van Camp, story teller extraordinaire enthralls kids at Semiahmoo Library

On Friday Richard Van Camp told stories at Semiahmoo. The tales were intended for children in Grades 1 to 5, but I was there too. Along with the little kids, I learned how to call the northern lights, and how to repel them if they get too close, with their hissing and popping and their fishy smell. Did you know that frogs are indicators of clean water? Were you aware that bears can read your thoughts? What a privilege to watch Richard enthrall the kids, gifting them with aboriginal stories they'll long remember. Mahsi Cho, Richard.

Peace Tower emerges at last against a complicated sky

Phew! Finally finished this last puzzle of the season. The image of the Parliament Buildings with the Peace Tower pops, and so it should, as the symbolic expression of our national ideals.

I first saw Parliament Hill when I was sixteen. After winning an essay contest, I was on a tour to New York and the UN. Oddly, my daughter was also sixteen when we spent some time seeing Ottawa after a power outage caused the airport to close, altering our travel plans.

Jarvis didn't touch this one

Here's one puzzle Jarvis didn't get his mitts on. For the past five years, he's been creating puzzle mischief. The first Christmas jigsaw anomalies came to light in 2013.

Is it possible that Jarvis been caught at last? Or perhaps he's just not an art fancier.

In any case, all the pieces were there, and no extra ones came to light. I can hardly believe Jarvis has retired from the field. In a weird way, I kind of miss him.

Write with JJ Lee September 12 in downtown Vancouver

Canadian Authors -- Metro Vancouver hosts the noted memoirist JJ Lee for a writing workshop, followed by Q & A with JJ. No pre-registration required -- just bring paper and come prepared to write. The event takes place September 12, at 7 pm at the Alliance for Arts and Culture in Vancouver.

Former CBC radio journalist JJ Lee is the Non-fiction Mentor at The Writers Studio SFU. Now working on a second memoir, he'll share his technique for uncovering memories you didn't know you'd forgotten. We'll be working on paper, using JJ's exercise sheet.

Expect to surprise yourself with what you come up with. It's going to be amazing.

Monia Mazigh and daughter Baraa read at Kogawa House

Last evening Historic Joy Kogawa House hosted a reading featuring current Writer-in-residence Monia Mazigh (left) and her poetic daughter. Dr. Mazigh read from her fiction, and from the memoir Hope and Despair, which describes the shocking arrest of her husband Maher Arar, his imprisonment in Syria, and her efforts to clear his name.

Baraa Azar discovered spoken word poetry at Carleton University. "A poem begins as a lump in the throat," she began, continuing, "This poem is not about politics, but about people;" it "transcends caste, color, and religion." Another spoken poem juxtaposed two historic events that took place in 1776. As Jefferson penned The Declaration of Independence, a slave fort was built in Africa. Slaves dropped through the door of no return, and "bare feet wrinkled the sand for the last time."

Baraa's poignant meditation on home ended: "My polaroid picture of home is fading on the back of my eyelids."

Surrounded by lit candles as evening fell, an appreciative audience listened to the work of this remarkable mother and daughter in Kogawa House garden.

Afterwards, we chatted over refreshments that included cherry juice and Monia Mazigh's homemade cake.

Having heard the author read from her novel Hope has Two Daughters, I came away with a copy of this book, which takes place in Canada and Tunisia.

Left: Short story writer Cynthia Flood, Baraa Azar and others relax in the garden.

A bit of Quesnel history

It's mid August, and the sky is pink with forest fire smoke as West Quesnel, on the other side of the Fraser, waits under evacuation alert. Opened in 1929, this footbridge once accommodated horses, wagons, and the occasional car, and served the area until 1970. As we trotted across the wooden planking, making the expected noise, I kept expecting a voice to cry out from below, "Who is walking across my bridge?" like in The Three Billy Goats Gruff. Across the street stands the Hudson's Bay store, opened in 1867. Nearby lies an old boiler from the first steamboat to serve the Upper Fraser, the S.S. Enterprise. Another Heritage Corner artifact is a Cornish water wheel used in the Gold Rush.  The Collins cairn marks the successful overland telegraphic connection of Quesnel with New Westminster in 1865. The telegraph arrived in Barkerville three years, but it took until 1907 to reach the Yukon.

 

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.

Remembering Dr. Hanna Kassis

This is what Dr. Kassis looked like when I met him in 1967. A seventeen-year-old from a small northern town, I was almost as fascinated by the crimp of my prof's hair and his foreign-accented speech as by his lectures and stories.

My residence buddy Rena recommended his class. I learned about the city from her, and she depended on me to keep pounding on her door till she rose for her 8:30 class. I was interested in archaeology, and she assured me I'd love Dr. Kassis's class. I did.

I learned eventually that Rena was Jewish; her mother had escaped from a death camp, and my friend kept putting off a promise to take me to her house for a visit because her mom was having another bad day.

Today the funeral of Dr. Kassis was held in the Anglican Cathedral on Burrard. I was surprised to learn he was a Christian. Back in 1967, I had only the sketchiest notion of the background of this Gaza-born Harvard-trained professor who went on to spend so many years teaching at UBC. A professor emeritus, he taught Hebrew language and Religious Studies as well as archaeology. He was a great member of the UBC and wider community, and will be sadly missed. An obituary by Douglas Todd in The Vancouver Sun calls him a "Canadian pioneer in Islamic Studies."

Rest in peace, Hanna Kassis.

Children of God at the Citadel in Edmonton

Image of the cast from Windspeaker

I attended this amazing show with friends. With all the elements of a musical, it's far from the usual light-hearted entertainment we associate with the genre. Instead, playwright and Director Corey Payette reveals a new approach to reconciliation and healing. The evening ended with a literal coming together.

Audience members who were not holding hands in a long chain were on their feet in the centre of the theatre. As we chanted together with the cast, I was far from the only one with tears on my cheeks. The story is harshly intense, and its relentless unfolding has an allegorical inevitability. Yet the staging of the worst scenes is done with sensitivity, and the ending brings hope and upliftment.

For me, Dillan Chiblow, who played Tommy, was the stand-out actor. By tossing off of a school cap and jacket, he transformed himself from an endearingly optimistic and mischievous kid into the troubled young man his early suffering presaged. The scenes between him and his guilt and grief-ridden mother, ably played by noted musician Sandy Scofield, felt poignant and utterly real.

The theatre program contains Ry Moran's five questions for people who want to be involved in reconciliation (aired on CBC in October 2017 by Rosanna Deerchild). After seeing this remarkable show, anyone who would have previously answered no to the question "Have I ever participated in ceremony?" can respond with a resounding yes.

The ice, the ice

At dusk, people approach Edmonton's amazing Ice Castle. This structure is made by hand with farmed icicles born of water from the North Saskatchewan River that flows through the city. The fresh water used in construction will be returned to the river when the season ends. The city of Edmonton hosted Canada's first Ice Castle; this is its third year in Hawrelak Park.

Ice Castles began when Brent Christensen, an artistic American dad, built a small one in his midwest front yard for his daughter.

The castle has a fountain, slides for kids, a real fireplace, and a gorgeous throne, sculpted of clear ice and flanked by leaf- shaped side tables. It's all sheer magic. But the ice in the river is softening, the weather warming. The castle will only be open for another few days.

John MacLachlan Gray's novel inspired by dark Shaughnessy history

Image from cbc

The premise of John Gray's mystery novel is a real and unsolved 1924 Shaughnessy murder. While the fictional powers-that-be stonewall the police investigation into the shooting death of a young Scottish nanny, Gray introduces the fictional team who will fight racism and corruption to get to the bottom of the matter.

Hook is an honest policeman, Mildred is an educated British emigre with a job as a telephone operator in the Hotel Vancouver, Sparrow is a one-eyed WWI veteran and hearse driver, and McCurdy is a failed poet turned journalist. Gray's tale takes the reader on a tour of Vancouver as it was a century ago, with city landmarks both unchanged and dramatically altered.

This murder mystery highlights various aspects of the city's seamy social history, a time when the worst fear of the incompetent toadying police chief is "the danger of causing a scandal." As the tale unfolds, we are shown clairvoyant mediums, sasquatches and early brassieres.

We pass through the Hogan's Alley, a black neighbourhood with jazz clubs patronized by wealthy whites, and home to the Pullman Porters Club, and Vie's Fried Chicken. We enter movie theatres where Chinese patrons are seated in a separate section, and glimpse unemployed WWI veterans as they booze it up in shabby establishments like the Lumberman's Club and the Amputees' Club.

The tone of the book is deceptively light and jocular. Meanwhile, we're reminded of real and  uncomfortable history. Following on from the Head Tax era, (starting in 1885), the infamous Chinese Immigration Act of 1923 disallowed all Chinese except a few students and diplomats.

Gray shows readers he's done his research on the city of a century past. In Stanley Park, we see "cedar posts in the shape of what must have been the big house" and "the caved-in remains of tiny shanties whose inhabitants were chased away" when the land became a park. We witness demonstrations by a local branch of the Ku Klux Klan, some of whose members don't bother keeping their identity secret.

We glimpse Centre Lawn, part of the mental institution at Essondale. As seen through the eyes of a jaded reporter, this "treatment facility for seriously ill men is not to inflict punishment," implying either that the punishment is accidental, or that punishing sufferers is the expected reaction to mental illness caused by war trauma. The jaded McCurdy's assessment is that the unit is there "to provide storage" and "to amuse the doctors in charge."

We view Chinatown's Shanghai Alley, a haven for illegal gambling as well as a studio space for practitioners of Chinese music and other arts. The novel also portrays how businessmen from Chinatown and Shaughnessy, affiliated with their respective Freemasons' societies, work together to make money from the illegal drug trade.

Other intriguing historical references mention the recent opening of an Egyptian tomb, the special trains that left Vancouver to cross Canada loaded with Chinese silk, the quasi respectable Balmoral Hotel of the time (still standing, no longer respectable). The narrator describes the post-prohibition city as "dependent on speakeasies as ever," and says "the Dry Squad are far more diligent defending government revenues than public morals."

Gray is at pains to tell the reader that the story is entirely made up. Even so, his novel reads like a sort of time capsule. Late in the story, the hearse driver and the journalist engage in a bit of philosophizing as they enjoy a drink together. The conversation reveals that the march of progress that was supposed to follow the war has not materialized. Money still talks and class carries the day. In a misguided sop to unemployed male war vets, intelligent and educated women like Mildred, a veteran of Whitehall communications, are downgraded and thrown out of work.

Veterans like Sparrow reflect back on their experience of war as a gong show. An essential skill was avoiding friendly fire, and as Constable Hook explains, in the army, "deniability" was an accepted part of "the chain of command." When Sparrow speaks of the coming revolution, McCurdy remains cynical, "Maybe it's called a revolution because you end up where you started."

A failed poet, McCurdy also deplores "the journalese he himself writes" as "sentences that fill the spaces between the advertisements the way concrete fills a hole." Another journalist, Shipley, when contacted by a dishonest spirit medium, sees himself as a writer "who doesn't find news; it comes to him." Unfortunately, this gardener must tend to "his expanding acreage of unverifiable sources," and "befriend people he would prefer not to know."

By the end of Gray's story, "A new level of cynicism has cast a pall over the city...the police can no longer be trusted, the press no longer delivers facts, the legal system is biased in favour of power and money, and the governing of the province is nothing but a charade."

Police Chief Quigley, one of the "chaps who are better at keeping their jobs than doing their jobs" reflects on which of his personal ambitions he can achieve, concluding that "Once facts become manufactured products, anything is possible."

Does this ring any bells today? Only the reader can decide.

Leacock speaks to the Canada of the Dirty Thirties

Image from Online Literature

A 1929 stock market crash plunged the world into the Great Depression. In Montreal, Stephen Leacock was a public intellectual and a McGill economist, as well as a world-famous humourist. 

In 1933 the USSR, Josef Stalin ruled as dictator. Here in Canada, the newly Co-operative Commonwealth Federation established its platform, a welfare state with universal pensions, health insurance, child allowances, workers' compensation, and unemployment insurance. In 1935, this party would take 8.9% of the federal vote. Under Tommy Douglas, the CCF would be elected in Saskatchewan, and establish Canada's first universal medicare system. Under the same leader, the socialist CCF/NDP would earn a record number of consecutive mandates, lasting until 1961. Later, with Douglas in Parliament, the federal Liberals would enact universal medicare.

Written in the depths of the Depression, the words and ideas that follow offer a fascinating glimpse of the era as seen Leacock's eyes. He was 64 when he published them.

"The principle that my house is my own is the only true basis of society." However, in the "present distress," a movement has arisen "for a new co-operative commonwealth, as vague as it is sanguine." The danger here is that each person in the movement wants to "'socialize' the others, but not himself."  With tart cynicism, he describes socialism as "a bright soap bubble, light as ignorance and floating with its own gas," and says it would only work in the presence of "impossible people, guided by impossible leaders, and inspired by an inconceivable good-will." 

He then goes on to outline the failures of the Russian system, comparing the sufferings of the people there and in Canada. In both countries, people stand in long lines in the "bitter cold," while Canadians are "waiting to get into hockey matches," starving Russians are "waiting for food." As they wait, Canadians talk and laugh freely, unlike Russians, who dare not speak "lest someone might hear them," dare not laugh, "in case someone reports them." Here in Canada, even in "the humblest homes...there is at least freedom and hope. We will not let one another die. In Russia, even behind the best locked door there is fear. They will not let one another live."

Leacock acknowledges the challenges of our failing economic system, and suggests some ideas for alleviating them. "Short of socialism," he says, "lies the regulated state." One recommendation is for the government to organize slum clearance in the cities. This would offer employment and investment opportunities for citizens, who could participate in the rebuilding of livable neighbourhoods. But he admits that the "one crucial difficulty of the rebuilding scheme is the question of public honesty." The only way to get around this challenge is to turn "the searchlight of publicity" on "every square inch" of the government plan. Other ideas to spread wealth more evenly and "obliterate super-power" include the raising of wages and the shortening of hours. 

Yet Leacock admits that to re-start the economy using the same system is a temporary solution; the cycle that rises will fall again. In the meantime, though, "we can carry forward for at least a generation." Fortunately, says this believer in human progress, "We do not need to solve the problem. We only need to raise the kind of children who can solve it."

To explain how that may be done, he produced another pamphlet on the challenges of providing the young with a good education. Seven years earlier, British philosopher, logician and social critic Bertrand Russell had tackled the same topic in his famous work, On Education.

May Shaughnessy stand against a tide of speculation

Venerable houses like these are part of the city's history. I hope the historic homes and enormous trees of this unique neighbourhood with will not fall with Vanishing Vancouver, as Caroline Adderson calls it. Thankfully, a recent walk around the Crescent revealed none of the empty homes that are seen too often in the city today, bought not for occupation, but for speculation. But what does the For Sale sign below presage? Will these two beauties fall, or worse, be left unoccupied by owners who live far away in other countries?

Tired snowman rests at Hycroft Christmas fair

Christmas at Hycroft offers many wonderful and expected sights, sounds and smells. But there can be surprises too. Today this tired snowman draped himself across the roof of the food kiosk, apparently in need of a nap.

 

The usual Christmas decor, treats, and music included the Langley Ukelele Ensemble, who played carols in the courtyard, while pianist Michael Molnar played indoors.

The Northwest Passage 170 years later

Image from National Geographic

In 2009, Brian Payton published a gripping true story based on British naval records that hadn't been opened for a century and a half.
The Ice Passage, a story of ambition, disaster and endurance in the Arctic wilderness begins in 1845, when the HMS Investigator left England, crossed the Atlantic, sailed around Cape Horn, stopped in Hawaii for supplies, and continued north into the elusive Arctic corridor called The Northwest Passage.

The HMS Investigator crew was tasked with learning the fate of the Franklin expedition. As seen above, icy seas froze the ship in place, holding it at an angle for months. This grueling expedition led to no trace of Franklin's ships. Instead, the crew had to abandon their own and be rescued by another. The fate of Franklin was unknown until the 21st century.

Recently, both Franklin's ships were found off Nunavut. The HMS Investigator was found in 2010 in ice-free waters off Banks Island, NT.

This year, during The C3 Expedition, a Canada 150 Signature Project, the Polar Prince (above right) made the voyage from the Atlantic to Pacific via the open water of the Northwest Passage in just 150 days between June and October. Its mission was to inspire a deeper understanding of Canada's land, peoples and nation.

Raiding the Canadian Shield and the Peace-Athabasca delta

Taken in 1996, this photo shows how nickel tailings at Sudbury have drastically altered the landscape and waters of the region.
The shots below show petroleum extraction operations at Fort McMurray, Alberta.

Edward Burtynsky photographs our human depredations as we scramble to harvest the treasures of Mother Earth. Exhibited as The Scarred Earth, these chilling photos were recently on display at the Audain Museum.