Atlantic Books

Atlantic Books

Locate me
FR

Memoir

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When reading Beyond the Trees, one gets the impression of author Adam Shoalts as a kind of Jack Kerouac meets Jack Reacher: an obsessive wanderer at his calmest in the midst of catastrophe.

Beginning in Eagle Plains, Yukon, on May 28, 2017, Shoalts, now Explorer-in Residence with the Royal Canadian Geographical Society, spent nearly four months paddling and portaging through some of the most remote and challenging conditions imaginable, enduring run-ins with grizzly bears, chest-deep traverses in swollen Arctic rivers, and clouds of blackflies thick enough to draw blood from a stone.

I suppose it was a mad idea,” the Fenwick, Ontario-raised Shoalts writes of his near 4,000-kilometre solo trek across Canada’s Arctic, the inspiration for Beyond the Trees. Shoalts had set his sights on Baker Lake, Nunavut, a hamlet of 2,000 some three-hundred-twenty kilometres inland from the Hudson Bay. To get there, he would need to travel for miles against the current, beginning with the longest river in Canada: the mighty Mackenzie.

“At the time, I really wasn’t sure if I could pull it off,” he admitted to Atlantic Books Today. There were August snowstorms, ice floes and winds that bent tent poles like drinking straws.

It’s mesmerizing to be guided through Canada’s wilderness through Shoalts’ eyes. Behold, a mind that can identify spruce trees and sandpipers, muskox and mergansers. From Shoalts, one learns that sphagnum moss, with its naturally-occurring iodine, can be used for treating cuts; that caribou lichen can be boiled and eaten as emergency rations.

Shoalts also wields a wicked wit—important for any guide. Of a run-in with an overly-aggressive muskox, he jokes his first instinct was to shield his body with a life jacket: “Of course, the rational side of my brain was immediately dismissing this as nonsense.” In choosing to drink straight from lakes and rivers, he mentions that if he were to fall sick with giardia, his journey might end quite badly, “though perhaps well for medical science.”

But for all of Shoalts’ good humour and incredible wealth of knowledge, the question still remains: why do this trek alone? Why do it at all?

“I wanted to see the wilderness while it still exists,” he explained Atlantic Books Today. Still, one wishes he would offer more introspection.

At times throughout the book, Shoalts admits to feeling lonely, though he seldom lingers on the thought for longer than a paddle stroke. Even when he confesses to feeling demoralized—rare though the occasions may be—he tends to skate over the emotion, as if it were an inconvenience to the story and not part of the story itself. (Here, the Jack Reacher comparison returns.)

Beyond the Treesis a remarkable tale—and a staggering feat, no doubt. But it is largely a tale about adventure, and not the adventurer himself. Instead, it seems Shoalts counts upon his exploits to carry the book, where another author might dig within for meaning. (What is Wild without Cheryl Strayed’s confessions?)

Perhaps that is to be expected of a geographer and historian: stories about others come more easily. But one wishes for Shoalts’ full story—blemishes and all.

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The Guru in Your Golf Swing
Ed Hanczaryk
SSP Publications

Ed Hanczaryk, author of The Guru in Your Golf Swing, is a golf pro who spent decades helping others learn and perfect their golf game, even as he struggled with a severe case of the yips for most of his adult life. It was as a young man attending university on a golf scholarship that Hanczaryk developed the yips, and it was in 2007, when he was invited to teach a youth golf program in the Kingdom of Bhutan, that he met the young Buddhist monk who helped him finally rid himself of the condition.  

This book is a magical tale of Hanczaryk’s time in Bhutan and his friendship with the monk. It is the story of how he taught the monk to golf and how the monk taught him to meditate, setting Hanczaryk on a path towards enlightenment where he discovered the deeply rooted cause of his yips.

In an intimate and conversational narrative, Hanczaryk takes readers to Thimphu, Bhutan, where we meet his amazing young students, experience some of the country and join him as he exchanges meditation lessons for golf lessons with the monk. The book is dotted with his use of teaching techniques, like the game of “Golchery” (golf–archery) that he created after attending an archery tournament, and anecdotes like the author’s ill-advised day walk to the Motithang Takin Preserve to see the Takin, a strange-looking antelope-type beast. 

Part memoir, part golf instruction, part exploration of the self and the mind, this book reads as any or all of these. If you are a golfer, you may find some helpful tidbits in the golf lessons and, like the author, you may discover a hidden cause for some of your golf failures through meditation. If you don’t golf, but have an interest in meditation, then the golf can become more of a backdrop. Each golf and meditation lesson has a key takeaway. As an undistinguished golfer myself, and someone who has never meditated, I found the summaries to be helpful in the short term and the actual lessons something to study over a period of time. Unusual for this sort of a book, there was a surprising twist at the end, but you will have to read the book to discover it.

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For a writer to elicit tears and exuberant laughter in the same book is an accomplishment. Such is the triumph of Manjusha Pawagi’s memoir, Love and Laughter in the Time of Chemotherapy.

For those who have not had to endure the anguish, nausea, depression, fatigue of cancer treatment, Pawagi’s memoir informs us. When she goes to the hospital for a minor procedure, doctors discover she has leukemia and must be treated immediately. “Usually you’re never tested,” she says. “You skate on the surface of an ordinary life, not realizing how lucky you are that the ice is holding you up.”

The reader is right with her as she describes agonizing pain. A nurse or doctor saying, “You may feel a little pressure” is a statement to dread. The fevers, diarrhea, vomiting and nightmares that chemo induces are so relentless, Pawagi starts hallucinating and must force herself to open her eyes to realize she is not wandering in a post-apocalyptic war zone. We are privy to the indignities and discomfort of an ileostomy bag, of having her diaper changed, of being finally able to go to the bathroom in her wheelchair only to find the door won’t close. Walking on her own after months of being bedridden is just the beginning of a slow stumble up an enormous incline.

But interspersed among these horrors is Pawagi’s humour. She says that rather than “First do no harm,” the Hippocratic oath should more accurately be, “You can’t say we didn’t warn you.”

Describing an episode in her youth when she is unable to respond after fainting, her mother is asked if her daughter speaks English. “‘She went to Stanford,’ my mother informed him, which to an Indian parent is a more pertinent piece of information for a medic than a blood type.”

Finding the bread in the hospital uneatable, she says, “I think it was toasted outside the city somewhere and then trucked in.”

When she chooses the memoir “Wave” to reread in the hospital, a memoir about a woman who lost her parents, husband and two sons in the Sri Lankan tsunami, her husband wants to know if there were no memoirs about the holocaust or the Rwandan genocide at the library that day.

The playfulness, generosity and devotion of her husband is another moving component of the book. Reading about him, readers agree when Pawagi writes, “Love is a rock, not stone that crumbles into dust. It’s the Canadian Shield itself, granite as old as the Earth, solid and unwavering beneath my weak and unsteady feet.” Family and friends are instrumental in her cure, mobilizing to help her survive.

Her husband and mother are with her every day. She has a friend who has connections with the CBC and a radio documentary is made about her. Senator Asha Seth pleads with the Ottawa Senate to establish stem cell registration that reflects diversity among minorities. Fortunate to recover enough to have a stem cell transplant, Pawagi tells the story of finding a match. Meeting her donor after recovering is one of the moving experiences described in this memoir.

Pawagi has had a remarkable career, from CBC journalist to children’s author to lawyer and then judge, but after only one week in the hospital she writes, “I’d already forgotten…that I’d ever been anything other than a sick person. …I never used to want to be anyone other than myself, and now I constantly look at people and wish I were them.”

Yet as soon as she begins to feel better, in between hospital stays, her generosity prevails. Learning that one of her doctors is single she tries to set him up with her colleague. She suggests restaurants where they can meet. “Because,” she writes, “of course, a hematologist and a judge cannot be trusted to make a dinner reservation in downtown Toronto, where they both live, without careful supervision.”

She has poignant perceptions about her children in this memoir. She also has insights about writing. “It seems counterintuitive that writing about being sick could serve as a distraction from being sick, but it’s true.”

Manisha Pawagi deftly explores the harrowing recovery of cancer through chemotherapy, radiation and surgery, though of necessity it is a narrow subject, one with few surprises. Every reader will celebrate her recovery. I believe they, like me, will want to read another book by this intelligent, funny, generous writer, one yet unwritten and of a subject unknown, one that gives her the freedom to surprise us all.

Love and Laughter in the Time of Chemotherapy
Manjusha Pawagi
Second Story Press

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Brazil Street is the final book in Robert Hunt’s trilogy on his life growing up in downtown St. John’s, Newfoundland, in the 50s and 60s.

Hunt lived on Brazil Street from his birth in 1949 until he married in 1976. Similar to the earlier titles in the trilogy, the book is written in an unassuming, just-the-facts-mister style, the narrative uncluttered with either self-reflection or re-examination of past events through present day lens.

Each chapter title introduces a main story thread, which Hunt populates with one or more related anecdotes from his life, in the era before malls, smart devices or 21st-century ‘enlightenment.’

Hunt writes of a rough-and-tumble life, exploring the nooks and crannies of place, people and situations. Adventures and friends occupy the foreground, while parents and adults exist outside daily life to be feared or revered and called upon only when needed. Stories are of murdered ‘Chinamen,’ confession boxes, gathering metal to sell as scrap and other ways to hustle a buck and starting fires just to see what would happen. He references a woman he dates as “a beautiful sight” and “pretty as a picture,” and in our times, underscored with broad brushstrokes of politically correct dogma, the phrasing and sentiment read almost as poetry.

His recollections are lively and packed with a hefty cast of family, friends and characters, many of whom make brief, albeit one-time-only appearances. Although charming in this inclusiveness, at times Hunt’s proclivity for naming every building, business or soul in the neighbourhood, lest they be forgotten, serves more as a distraction of the too-much-information sort.

The chapters are written as stand-alone pieces, disconnected to any bigger narrative arc, with little orientation or transition between. The result is unadorned, staccato storytelling whereby the book is held together with loosely connected pastiches that document life in another place and time. Whether Hunt is aware of it or not, it is the rhythms of this past, told simply and without artifice, that most resonate. And it is this unfettered storytelling that actually offers most of us, those not from Brazil Street or Newfoundland, a reason to read this book in spite of a few too many exclamation marks.

Hunt’s passion for his neighbourhood is sure and strong and in his last chapter he explains the motivation behind the trilogy, sharing his intent to tell “everything that I could remember from my childhood… so that my children, their children and the next generation will know how we lived, how we survived and how we became the people we are today.”

That seems to be an honest and noble endeavour.

Brazil Street: A Memoir
Robert Hunt
Flanker Press

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Blank bookcover with clipping path

Disclaimer: This book is not about outhouses and does not contain bathroom humour. Instead the 70 short (very short) stories are filled with wry observations, self-deprecating humour and homely wisdom told by a natural-born, down-East storyteller.

And Grandpa Pike is not a grandfather (at least not at time of writing) but got the nickname when his hair turned grey in his twenties and which he accepted as a preferable alternative to Fish Face, his childhood moniker.

Not only did he accept it, he took it and ran with it, once branding the rural store he bought in Albert County, New Brunswick as Grandpa Pike’s. He’s continued to use it for his charity work with the Newfoundland & Labrador chapter of the Children’s Wish Foundation of Canada and as his stage name as he’s also a performer and recording artist.

All of which provides material for his stories, along with his tales growing up in a dysfunctional family in Nova Scotia. He quit school at age 16 and made his way to Ontario where he worked at a series of retail jobs and where, while living in a boarding house, finally experienced a happy family life.

The stories are amusing as he explains why cats are better than dogs, why he’s hopeless and even dangerous in the kitchen and what’s wrong with golf: “Not much I s’pose. If you’re single and have a high-income job.”

They’re also reflective and poignant. When he made the choice to move back to Atlantic Canada he had to find a new home for his beloved rescue cat, who he’d named Dawn in recognition of her pale gray fur. Recalling his first lonely night without her sleeping under his beard, he writes, “A quiet night has a way to focus your mind on seemingly little things that are important to you. It is indeed a long night that has no dawn.”

Grandpa Pike’s Outhouse Reader
By Laurie Blackwood Pike
Flanker Press

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The memoir, Be Feel Think Do is a self-help book in disguise.

The author, Anne Bérubé, begins her story with her own recollection of a dreadful car crash, during which she mystically sees an alternate version of her life unfold before her eyes like a movie. This life is not the one she’s currently living; however, it is the life she feels she should be living. A reality where her true feelings speak to her and guide her to prioritize being and feeling over thinking before doing.

Bérubé develops her story by presenting her life, her decisions, her relationships and her surroundings. She then moves on to reflecting on her own experiences of opening herself up to accepting this new life with a focus on self-healing, breathing, accepting and being. Allowing her “inner eye” to be her guide and realizing just how her actions and decisions may serve rather than benefit. Realizing that she must love and accept herself before she can love and accept others. She emphasizes the importance of learning from teachers, whether they be her professors, workshop leaders, mentors, parents, partners or her own children.

Bérubé’s gripping tale takes us through her healing, not only of her body after the crash but also of her heart, mind and soul. This is Anne’s story of self-discovery, changes, learning and teaching. But she is also teaching us how to heal and breathe and accept life’s offerings, and to not settle for the things we think we need or want. Her story teaches us to let our own being and feelings influence our choices.

Written as a gripping autobiographical memoir, this self-help book in disguise tells Bérubé’s story of self-discovery but also leads us to our own self-discovery. Along with Bérubé, we are taught to breathe, listen and learn. As someone who generally doesn’t read self-help books, this memoir tricked me. I appreciate Anne’s natural ability to teach through this memoir and thank her for sharing her story and wisdom.

Be Feel Think Do
Anne Bérubé
Hay House

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This peppy memoir of a life on the road and at home finds Alan Doyle, singer-songwriter and erstwhile front man for Great Big Sea, in fine form. Doyle has an eye for details and an ear for a good story, and a well-honed ability to play out a yarn of his own.

Where Doyle’s first book, Where I Belong, told the story of his poor-but-happy childhood in Petty Harbour, Newfoundland and set the stage for his rise with Great Big Sea, A Newfoundlander in Canada offers some of the gritty details of that rise. Doyle covers everything from the business-like way the band always conducted itself (finding ways to get paid not just by the venue they were playing, but also beer companies whose banners they flew on stage, paying themselves two-hundred-and-fifty dollars a week each, while putting all other proceeds into a band bank account for the future) to the realities of life on the Canadian road when your starting point is Newfoundland and Labrador (epic ferry crossings to Cape Breton, followed by hours and hours in cars just this side of breaking down, to crummy motel rooms shared with bandmates).

Doyle is an easy companion in these stories of a life on the road. He wisely breaks them up with vignettes from Newfoundland and Labrador. This book is as much a musing on Canada, and Newfoundland and Labrador’s place in it, as it is a memoir of the early days of a soon-to-be-famous travelling band.

Though Doyle doesn’t come to any deep or particularly surprising insights about this country or its parts (Ontario is Newfoundland’s most popular and successful sibling; Manitoba is the sister you think you know everything about but you really don’t; Alberta is Newfoundland’s big brother who moved away before you were even born and on whose couch you will inevitably sleep sometime), his travelogue reveals a kind and gentle Canada where the people may occasionally be a little odd, but their hearts are in the right place.

There is one fly that sticks in the ointment Doyle slathers on. He writes of Great Big Sea being invited to play on Parliament Hill before the Queen and the band’s rightful excitement about the gig—only to discover organizers planned to drag the band on stage in a dory and introduce them as Newfies.

Doyle reminds us that while he was born in Canada, his parents and his grandparents were not. They were born Newfoundlanders, through and through. Not that long ago, Newfoundland and Labrador was still the punch line of a mean national joke.

Even in the relating of this tale, and the determined way in which Doyle dug in his heels with the show’s producers, he is deft enough to bring a light and comedic touch to the telling. It’s a generous spoonful of sugar Doyle deals out to help the medicine go down.

And really, that’s as political or controversial or revealing as this book gets. This is a book that entertains, provides a few comfortable hours in the thrall of a pretty great storyteller and a warm and cozy feeling about the Canada in which you live.

For all Canada’s actual diversity, it’s a pretty homogenous rendering Doyle serves up. His final words on the subject are a ringing endorsement of multiculturalism and its success, and to a critical reader, this conclusion arises out of a pretty shallow bed.

Still, there is good company and charm to be found on every page.

A Newfoundlander in Canada: Always Going Somewhere, Always Coming Home
Alan Doyle
Doubleday Canada

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Adrian Payne’s “Life on the Great Northern Peninsula” is a combination of memory–its 24 chapters include “Growing Up Near My Grandparents”; “Starting a New Life and Family”–and more personal observations–“Procrastination is one of the dirtiest words in the English language. I just don’t like it…Don’t get trapped into putting off until tomorrow what you can do today. People will pick up on that very quickly.” Befitting such good advice, the book is dedicated to his grandchildren. “Life” is illustrated with occasional personal and archival black-and-white photographs

Memoirs are associated with the genre autobiography but are composed more of stories from a life as opposed to the story of a life. They are very popular these days–among many other best-selling examples are Cheryl Strayed’s Wild and Jeannette Walls’ The Glass Castle. You don’t need to be famous to have a good life story, though you do need some deftness in portraying it.

Payne’s voice and text is straightforward and detailed. He begins in the 1940s and basically proceeds from there (although he does include some material from his family’s past) and ranges from Cow Head to Hawke’s Bay and other sites along the Long Range Mountains. He also migrates to the mainland for work but finds “no comfort…in Toronto, and no streets of gold.”

He wants to be home, where he can go hunting, logging and lobster fishing, solo. Labour doesn’t daunt him. From his early boyhood, Payne was always at something and picking up new skills. “Much of the appeal of rural Newfoundland lay in the freedom of being your own boss…You never got bored.”

Life on the Great Northern Peninsula: A Memoir
Adrian Payne
Flanker Press

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Adrian Smith grew up in a house full of secrets. Born in 1961 to churchgoing parents in small-town Prince Edward Island, he had what appeared to be a fairly normal life. His namesake father, an aloof man who favoured intellectual pursuits over the more “manly” hobbies of sports and drinking, had considered the priesthood before opting for a career as a child psychologist in the employ of the public school system, while his mother was a dutiful homemaker. The youngest of two boys, the author grew up adoring his father, while also doing his best to fit in with his peers. In many ways, this book tells the story of growing up and finding one’s place within rural Prince Edward Island for the two Adrian Smiths.

The story takes a decidedly different turn after the father’s death in 1988. While going through his father’s belongings, the author found photographs and written materials that led him to realize that his father had lived his life as a closeted homosexual. Having grown up in what he admits was a homophobic environment, the author went through an array of emotions, ranging from hurt and anger to eventual acceptance, with the latter only coming after years of therapy and introspection. Reconciling his father’s spirituality and apparent devotion to the Catholic liturgy proved difficult and led to many questions concerning his own sense of faith. As the nephew of a priest, this crisis of faith proved particularly disruptive for the author.

For many years Adrian kept his father’s secret. In part this was due to the stigma associated with homosexuality, but it was also out of fear of how this news would affect his aging mother. (While his parents slept in separate beds, the author believed his mother was oblivious to her husband’s true sexual orientation.) Following her death he began to open up, first to those closest to him and eventually to the broader community. He grew to appreciate the situation his father had faced, being born into a religious family in rural Prince Edward Island at the outset of the Great Depression, as well as the limited options available to him. With this, the sense of betrayal he once felt was replaced by an understanding of difficult choices. Besides, he reasoned, it was better to focus on the good he was told his father had done for the community working with troubled youth in the school system.

As the author came to grips with his father’s secret life and began the long road to addressing his reaction to this, sinister allegations emerged. As he shared his plans to write a book about his father with friends and family, multiple allegations of child molestation were levelled. Instantly the narrative changes from the sadness of repressed homosexuality in a society that did not accept it to the realization that his father, a seemingly pious man who worked with children for a living, was apparently guilty of such heinous actions.

This book was written as part of Adrian Smith’s healing process. Throughout, he attempts to understand why his father made the choices he did, the role of societal norms in all of this and how he was affected personally. It is, at times, very difficult to read due to its raw emotion and subject matter. Not only does the author address his quest to understand his father, he also provides an incredibly frank look into his own life and his ongoing difficulty with intimate relationships. Finding Forgiveness presents a rare glimpse into the long taboo subject of homosexuality in rural Prince Edward Island. As a book that addresses homosexuality, mental health, child molestation and the two Adrians’ relationship with the Catholic Church, it will undoubtedly raise eyebrows. Uncomfortable, but important, conversations are sure to follow. Many questions are raised in Finding Forgiveness and many remain unresolved. Such is to be expected in a work heavy on soul searching and self-evaluation. One thing is certain: whereas Adrian Smith was raised in a house full of secrets, his life today is, quite literally, an open book, and it makes for a most provocative read.

Finding Forgiveness
Adrian Smith
Acorn Press

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Having recently been diagnosed with a devastating illness, for me reading Meryl Cook’s book, One Loop at a Time was like a healing balm. It doesn’t fix my problem, but it adds to my kit of positive, calming and practical tools to deal with a calamitous event.

After Cook was diagnosed with breast cancer, it set her back, and she had to reassess who she was and who she was going to be going forward. Like Cook, I came to realize that my diagnosis was a gift in disguise because it is a clarion call to self-care. Up until that point, Cook hadn’t really listened to the messages her body was giving her to take better care of herself, which was ironic because she had been in the healing profession for many years at that time.

Cook admits to being frightened when she was forced to slow down because of the cancer. But she saw the unfolding events of her life in a positive light. “To be expected,” Cook says, “I had some fears going into surgery [but] I didn’t realize that one of the surprises would be the joy I feel, the permission I can give myself to heal and to find new ways of being. It has been such a gift. In a way the surgery felt like I was getting rid of old, unhelpful parts of myself, making room for new cells and new ways of being, showing me how much I am loved. I’m so thankful.”

They say that if you don’t have your health, you have nothing. Surprisingly, it can be when our health is threatened that we find we have a lot more than we realized. That’s what Cook’s little book brings home so succinctly.

On her road to healing, Cook scaled back on work and she eventually stopped working altogether while she concentrated on herself and her individual healing process, a process that involved hooking a series of rugs. Eventually, these mats and her journals became the basis for her book, One Loop at a Time.

“These mats follow my path from health wake up call to wellness,” explains Cook. “I invite you to share in my story as I hooked and wrote my way to recovery and beyond. I hope you will enjoy my journey and be inspired to express your own healing journey in a creative way.”

Cook has now reinvented herself as a creativity and healing-mats instructor and speaker. Her aim is to help others play with colour, fibre and writing as they journey towards their own healing.

Another woman, a medical doctor who has made extraordinary strides in dialling back the effects of her multiple sclerosis, Dr Terry Wahls, is of the opinion that “the public will soon be far ahead of the medical community when it comes to understanding the power [we have] to reclaim and maintain health.” That power is ably demonstrated in Cook’s book and the more we hear these stories from each other the more we can help each other reclaim our health on many levels.

One Loop at a Time
Meryl Cook
Full Circle Publishing

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Identity formation is a slippery, shifting and mutable affair, especially for children of immigrants. In the absence of extended family and a village infrastructure with common memory, the gaps in family history can be keenly felt. Being the child of immigrants who fled Poland after the Second World War, this was my experience, and it’s the experience that Jennifer Bowering Delisle captures so lyrically in her book The Bosun Chair.

“When I was growing up, I was angry with my parents for leaving Newfoundland,” confesses Delisle. “I wrote sentimental stories and poems set there, describing the pattern of tide against the rocky shore or the smell of salt in the air. On visits from St. John’s, my grandfather told tales of a conspiracy behind Confederation, how St. John’s was draped in black on the day Newfoundland joined Canada. We were taught in school that Canada is a mosaic. My friends were Ukrainian, Indian, Chinese—we were all born in Edmonton. My heritage was Newfoundland. This was where I looked for rootedness, a kind of belonging.”

In Delisle’s case, it was a family that moved within a country, but uprooting themselves in that way still has significant consequences for children born into the new or “foreign” landscape. When that dislocation happens, instead of being born into a sense of continuity, we have to actively search out who we are and make sense of our place in the world.

In my case, my grandparents were largely silent about their life in Poland, and I only ever met one relative, my great aunt, who didn’t speak English, my only language. She visited us for just 45 days and then went back behind the Iron Curtain, never to be seen again.

With what little information I was able to glean from my family over the years, I wrote poems and made a short film as a way of making sense of my origins. But there were always gaps in this construction of identity and it is those typical gaps that form an integral part of how Delisle has structured The Bosun Chair. It is a hybrid story that incorporates poetry, memoir fragments, news clippings and letters in a chronological yet elliptical narrative.

On the one hand, that structure is a bold choice and solves the dilemma that many people who do genealogy research have when trying to fashion a coherent story out of it all. I often have students who attend my writing classes believing that the story of their ancestry will reveal itself just by the mere fact of so much accumulation of facts, documents, photos and other artifacts. They soon realize that research and story are two different animals.

How we tame those animals into a coherent flowing narrative becomes the next challenge. The Bosun Chair artfully compiles Delisle’s research into loosely connected fragments and in doing so she allows the structure to mimic the gaps we necessarily experience when constructing an identity through snatches of stories.

On the other hand, it’s this exact brave choice in structure that makes The Bosun Chair a challenge to read. It doesn’t rest easily within the conventions of memoir and a lot of the work of constructing the story is up to the reader. However, the element that makes this challenging read such a rewarding one is Delisle’s  deft hand at planting evocative images that refer back to each other and build the narrative layer by layer. For example, in the Ballycater chapter, we’re introduced to the ice blocks called ‘ice pans’ that would fill the harbour and on which kids would play, trying to jump from one to the next without falling into the sea. Later in the chapter when Delisle talks about her ancestor who left the area: “She leaves this place to teach school in other towns on the coast. She worries about for her pupils balanced on the ice pans.” Then this remark from the narrator: “Stories too slippery to stand on.” The link is beautifully made between the physical location, the imagined place and the precariousness of forged identities.

It’s this poetic linking throughout the book that reminds us of the gaps in our own identity. In the end, Delisle helps us realize that construction of identity is an ongoing, slippery and deliberate journey.

The Bosun Chair
Jennifer Bowering Delisle
NeWest Press

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Born and raised in rural New Brunswick, author Deborah Joy Corey has now spent the majority of her life in the United States, with regular returns to Canada. For her, the border between the two countries leads from one home to the next.

“In so many ways,” she writes towards the end of her evocative new memoir, Settling Twice: Lessons From Then and Now, “Maine is New Brunswick’s twin sister. They line up together, shoring each other like siblings. Like the settlers that landed in Castine in 1773, believing they were in Canada, I often think I am in Canada as well.”

In fact the first section of the book is set in the present, where the launching of a neighbour’s boat introduces us to Corey’s life in Castine, a small coastal village in Maine. She and her husband, two daughters and a poodle named Max, “a miniature apricot posed like a Shakespearean lion in a bleaching splash of sunlight,” have recently moved into a sail loft, which is to be their home for the summer. It is a Maritime world all right, full of sailboats, commercial vessels, dories, “glossy emerald seaweed,” cormorants and seagulls, and the smell of “morning sea musk.”

The writing in the first section of the book is assured. It also gracefully raises a major theme, the deaths of her parents. While the separate passages are neither premature nor unexpected, their aftermaths still tilt the world ever after for Corey, as parental deaths do for so many. The father’s death, she says, was “as powerful and physical as the most hostile Maine winter.” To heal, she seeks out the beaches of Maine and those of sunnier climes, where the warmth coaxes her tears, “the way the sun coaxes water from the earth.” Six years later, the mother’s death comes, along with the belated realization for Corey that she, the adult daughter, is still “… not ready to be without her mother’s … intent gaze, her intuition, her instructions, her prayers.”

Despite the importance of both settings and themes in section one, for me, Settling Twice settles into top cruising gear on page 65, which is chapter one of the second section of the book. (The book has three sections, for which a table of contents and titled sections and/or chapters would have served well. I was often confused about the timeline in the author’s life.) On that page, I was rewarded with a wrenching, mesmerizing story that could have been titled “Pony,” the name Corey uses for her small equine friend. This masterful offering shares the stolen adventures of a girl and a pony from a dusty summer long ago. The writing is exquisite, the invitation into childhood terrain irresistible.

While this story is my favourite, it is from that point on that Corey shows her full command of the memoir form. Death scenes; unexpected violence; near-catastrophes; sibling friendships and their evolutions; addictions; our human ties to different, sometimes mirroring landscapes; the gift and menace of the natural world; the wonder of our remembered child-hearts and the staggering blows these receive–Corey handles all these subjects and more with grace and precision.

“Imagine,” Corey’s mother often remarked about the Loyalists’ journey from the Penobscot River in Maine to the St Croix River in New Brunswick, “moving your whole life on a ship. What a job. Those poor women having to settle twice.” (italics mine)

Years later, Corey thinks on her love of place and family. Of her daughters, during that same soft summer that begins the book, she writes, “Their sleeping faces beckon me, their gardenia musk is a breath of necessary absolution. They hold my story, my two selves. They are my sweet settling twice.” For some, and for Corey, certainly, the complicated interactions of geography and spirit are rich fishing grounds for life, and writing.

Settling Twice: Lessons From Then and Now
Deborah Joy Corey
Islandport Press