Creative Nonfiction in Banff

The Canadian Way

Welcome to the annual Creative Nonfiction Collective Conference at the Banff Centre. Decorated with music rehearsal huts separated by deer browse (the little brown huts behind the oh-so-out-of-place truck in the above photograph) and famous for mountains hidden behind buildings meant to look like mountains,

The Mountains of Banff

the Banff Centre is a little piece of Canada tucked into an ancient, sacred aboriginal site in the Alberta Rocky Mountains.

This year, I gave a talk there, called Truth and Myth in Creative Nonfiction. To make a long story short, here is my thesis:

The Truth About Creative Nonfiction

My talk cast a wide net, between John Dee and Goethe, between Newton and Terry Glavin, to argue that the literary genre otherwise known as Creative Nonfiction has the potential to be more than journalism or memoir or even literature, and certainly more than 'the use of fictional techniques in nonfiction.'

Monica Meneghetti added the important gloss that it's more than a genre. It's a mode of writing in the world. I sure do look forward to exploring this idea with her more.

Monica Meneghetti Hanging Out at Banff

And then, west of Edmonton, on my long way home again, I found this:

Nonsense in Northern Alberta

I was on my way to McCleese Lake, where deep in the bush outside of the Gibraltar Mine I spent two days with the horse logger and poet Lorne Dufour, editing his new book of creative nonfiction Jacob's Prayer.

Here's a teaser from the publisher's teaser:

In 1974 Lorne Dufour moved to Alkali Lake Reserve, a Shuswap community near Williams Lake in British Columbia, to help reopen the local elementary school. Like many First Nation communities across Canada, Alkali Lake had been ravaged by decades of residential schools and forced religion. Colonialism had robbed them of their language and culture and had left a legacy of abuse and alcoholism.

We're all on this path, I think. Other paths? I think Banff wants the last word on that:

The State of the Status Quo

Mountains, you might say, take up a lot of space. And that, too, is the Banff way.

Pox!

The Hanging Tree of Dog Creek

In 1871, in the town of Dog Creek, six Secwepemc sisters fell in love with the same stranger, probably a Métis packer working for the Hudson's Bay Company. Since none of them could have him, and all of them couldn't have him, they settled the matter by hanging themselves from this tree on the edge of the grasslands north of town. Their father cut them down in the morning and buried them on the hillside in behind.

That's the story. Given that British Columbia joined confederation in 1871, given that the Indian Act was radically altered, and that the ranching economy had collapsed and was being consolidated, I really think there was a lot more power involved in this story than that.

The play, Pox!which won in Theatre B.C.'s National Playwriting Competition explores white/native relations in the context of ongoing land claims struggles in the B.C. Interior. It is a black comedy, a trickster and gambling comedy, in which Smallpox and The Hanging Judge change places as they struggle for control over the ghosts of the six Secwempemc girls, and it's going to be workshopped in Kamloops on the Easter Weekend. It's kind of a love story for fifteen years that I spent on those grasslands, and was two years in the making. I'm looking forward to seeing how it looks as it starts to climb onto the stage.

Here's the shadow the tree casts into the bunchgrass.

The Green Man

Goethe in the Italian Countryside.
Note the Oak Leaves.

A few weeks back I was in Germany. I spent five weeks there, and came back and saw Canada for the first time. Actually, I saw it there.

I chased Napoleon across the country. I kept off the freeways and followed the old roads he marched on, back and forth, back and forth, back and forth, whew.It often seemed like he was over the next hill.

And I kept running into Goethe! He was, like, everywhere. Seems the young rich kid went to Italy in 1786 and fell in love with Italian landscapes. He did the usual thing that writers and painters do: wrote a diary, filled it full of sketches, and published it. It's still being done today. (Like this blog.)


If Goethe Were Alive Today He'd Write a Cookbook

Goethe did something really different, though. He had an Italian landscape built in Weimar, full of lovely old ruins. It was like standing inside his sketchbook.


A Page From Goethe's Sketchbook

Think of it as the first Disneyland. Really. No more did you have to stand in a gallery and look at a painting. Now you could be the painter, and experience what he saw himself. You could be there. I was. I wasn't just following Napoleon. I was on the trail of the Green Man.


The Green Man in Leipzig

Who's the Green Man? Why, he's Parzival, from the Grail legend. I found him in downtown Leipzig, and I found him at the Volkerschlacht Monument, which is, like, this huge stone bell sitting on an old battlefield in the southern part of the city to commemorate all the poor buggers who died there to defeat Napoleon. The bell doesn't make a sound, but look what's happening to it!


The Dead are Sprouting Dandelions
A Victory for Floral Arrangers!

And he kept showing up. Here he is a few hours further East in the old Slavic fishing town of Großenhain, looking, again, more like Pan than Parzival. Um, hint: don't look for fish. It had a Luftwaffe base in a war a while back. I think the pilots fried all the fish on their days' off.


The Sign Says: Don't Drink the Water!

Here he is again, in Riesa. He's lost the Pan get-up and is looking like himself at last. Or like something from Disneyland, maybe.


Notice the Oak Leaves.
It's a coat of arms, sure, but so's that picture of Goethe we started with. The Green Man is What German Nationalism Was Before Goethe Introduced Them to Pizza

Oh, and in Radebeul. Radebeul's on the Elbe River. It's also the former home of the German writer of Arabian adventure stories and Wild West stories, too: Karl May. The East German government put up a campground in the trees just outside of Radebeul, so Germans could have a place to dress up as North American Indians, because that was important to the East German government. Funny thing, though: the Indians at the Karl May Museum look like East Germans.Funnier: the museum claims to be one of the most important museums of Indian artifacts in the world. It ain't. But it is one of the most important museums of tourist artifacts.


The Green Man Dressing Up As a Concrete Indian
The Concrete Totem Pole is Also Not to Be Missed!

And in Görlitz, on the Polish border, the Green Man was still with me.


If My Beard Was Made of Leaves, Maybe I'd Look a Lot Like This

Let's see.


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And Canada?

Well, this is all Canada.

CBC Poetry Prize

The Pow-Wow grounds in the Esket meadows, waiting for another season of fancy dancing.
Catching a Snare Drum at the Fraser's Mouth
I came to earth on the grasslands, and it's only hours later that the wind that blows over my new house here on the east coast of Vancouver Island eases through the bluebunch wheatgrass there. My poem about the pow-wows of the Interior Grasslands has won second prize in the 2008 CBC Literary Awards, and will be published in the June issue of Enroute Magazine. Prizes were given out in Montreal on February 21. I first entered this contest in its first year, 29 years ago.



British Columbia culture is the creation of the confluence of first nations and European cultures. This poem celebrates that heritage, and brings it into confluence with the new cultures of multi-cultural Vancouver, as British Columbia strips down to her voice and sings in a jazz club in the city, with all the heartbreak and joy of the pow wows behind her and the new cultures of Mumbai and Hong Kong before her.



The Chilcotin River appears, with its salmon, in the heart of this poem. The poem opens at Redstone in the Chilcotin, and quickly moves here to Sugarcane,



where the horses of the Williams Lake Band run free below the pow-wow grounds. It was the 2006 Fathers' Day Pow Wow which brought me to this poem. From there, the poem moves downriver to the Coast. Here we see it in the Thompson Canyon,



above the railroad, the highway, an old village site, and a blood-red outcropping that the glaciers buried in gravel ten thousand years ago and which is slowly falling away. Sometimes it pays to stop the car and climb up a hill for the view.

Next, it's off to Marpole, at the mouth of the Fraser.



Thanks to Arthur C for this great pic.

And the rest is song.

Raven Creates People

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I shared this new version of the old Haida creation story — the one in which Raven creates humankind on North Beach — with Grade 8 and 9 students in White Rock on Monday.

It looks like he's still watching from that beach, too! (Or is that out of the side of his head?)

Just say the whole poem out loud, and you can hear him telling you the whole story. Still laughing.

The Haida knew that laughter made for serious literature, and that a four dimensional world could be represented in two dimensional art.

My first poem on the coast!


The view from Tao Hill, Haida Gwaii.

Readings and Workshops in White Rock

Put your foot on the gas!

I will be in White Rock, B.C., on January 20 and 21, 2008, for a bit of mid-winter post-turkey and truffles celebration of writing. It is going to be a special pleasure to bring my poem Song for a Beached Whale at White Rock to town. She was beached there on the sand a few years back, and after she lay there, beached again, in my mind for a few years, she came out in this poem. A bit of the old testament, a lament for lost innocence, and a prayer for the voice, ah, I love this poem.

On Sunday, January 20, I will offer morning blue pencil sessions at the South Surrey/White Rock Community Arts Council Gallery. Editing doesn't have to be painful. Sometimes it's like this:



See, that's not so bad!

In the afternoon, I will present a writing workshop, that I call Getting Unstuck Without Coming Undone

I mean, what with the fog one day and the stars that night, this is no time of the year for getting stuck in the back eddy of a plot. To get us all out of that, I've designed this workshop, to get us into the new year with style.

So, if writer’s block is peering at you from your breadbox, like this:


July 1, 2007, Spences Bridge, B.C.

or if you have a character that has taken over and left your story behind, or if you can’t find the turning point to get your plot moving again, or have a poem that just won’t end, or can’t get an opening paragraph that will grab your publisher by the collar, or are writing a non-fiction piece that threatens to run away into fiction, well, nothing new there, is it. It's just any other day in a writer's world. I've been facing these ghouls down for 35 years, and have created a toolbox of techniques to get past them, and even to use their difficulties to drive my writing forward into new (well, I hope so!) directions.

So, bring a piece of your writing, or several pieces – or work on one of my many hand-outs, or on a piece you write in class. By the end of the day, I'll have passed along a good number of my own writing tools. By the time the day is over, you'll have a path to follow, and a good walking stick, too.

For more information or to register for the workshop or editing sessions, call 604-536-8333.

Hey, there's more!



I'll also be reading from my work at the Community Arts Council Gallery on Monday, January 21st. This event begins at 7 pm and is free of charge. Expect to hear my whale sing, selections from Return to Open Water, my selected poems, and from The Wolves at Evelyn, which won the 2007 George Ryga Award for Social Awareness in BC Literature.


Thanksgiving Sunday, 2007, Penticton, B.C.

I look forward to seeing you there.

Can a Story Change?

According to traditional stories, in the dreamtime a grizzly bear tried to jump across the water from the mainland to Vancouver Island. It almost made it, too, but, unfortunately, landed just on the edge of the water, which instantly turned it to stone. This is that rock. It's in Campbell River, a 30 minute walk from my house, and right across Discovery Passage from Quadra Island.

But look what's happened to it! I walked there last week to take pictures of the graffiti, because I think graffiti is the art of our time: so many people just wanting to write their names, to get some kind of permanence. I mean, how honest!

Since the tide was low, I walked around to the water side of the rock, to see what was painted there. When I saw this eye, I just had to take a picture of it, but it was only when I put my own eye to the camera lens that I saw the salmon, instantly take shape from the rock. When I lifted the camera away from my eye, the salmon vanished; it needed the camera to flatten the depth of the rock, like looking at a constellation deep in the night sky.

Well, that's the news from here in Campbell River. I'm making notes to write a book about the dreamtime. Up in the Interior of British Columbia it happened along the rivers. These megalithic rocks, beasts turned to stone, line the Fraser and the Thompson Rivers, and the salmon that fight their way into the grasslands to spawn must swim past them all. Here, the dreamtime took place under the sea, and in the tidal zone.

That's where the dreams are. That's where civilization started here. And art.

If you have any stories about the undersea world, I'd love to hear.

Happy New Year!