Hey mum, especially,
The Collectors series took gold at the BCYs. Exciting! Shown here on the right is BCYCNA President Scott Nelson.
thought you’d get a kick out of this photo. This was taken at the River Rock last week at the BC and Yukon Community Newspaper Association shin dig. Fun. Cheers K
Posted in My blog/ silly stuff
Squamish Nation placement worker Jeanette Baker addresses the students at Queen Mary elementary about environmental stewardship during the afternoon of the school's salmon blessing. Daniel Pi photo
Jeanette Baker doesn’t have time to stop. The guests for the salmon blessing will arrive shortly, and the last bits of artwork need to be hung, the gifts laid out, the blankets folded neatly on the table. She needs the kids to focus, a tough assignment when they’re this excited.
In 10 minutes the gym will be packed with kids, all 400 at the school and every teacher. Distinguished guests will include the principal Mr. Reid, two hereditary chiefs from the community – Ian Campbell and Floyd Joseph – plus Squamish Nation council members, representatives from the school board, and parents too.
Quentin Nahanee and his brother Marcus burn off some energy as they dart around the empty gym, reliving their favourite body slams from the amateur wrestling match Friday night at the Chief Joe Mathias Centre. Their cousin Tristahn Nahanee circles the pair, lobbing affectionate jibes, teasing the boys about girls they like.
“Did you know that all of us are cousins?” exclaims Latisha Jefferson, pointing to the 10 or so kids scattered around the gym at Queen Mary elementary.
These kids, most around 10 or 11 years old, take guided reading class together with Jeanette, studying the Squamish Legends reader (the story of Qalqalil, the cannibal woman who roams the North Shore mountains, and the story of how Raven stole the light from Seagull are big favourites). With Jeanette, the kids perform plays in the community and study other indigenous cultures from around the world. They just finished a unit about the Maori people.
When they call themselves cousins, it could mean close friendships, direct family ties or ones that go back generations. Most importantly, it denotes community.
“A lot of families on the reserve have grown up together. There’s a tight sense of community,” explains Brad Baker, Carson Graham teacher and Aboriginal education liaison for the district. “My best friend’s grandparents are like my grandparents; it’s about taking care of each other.”
“We’re all family. We’re all related,” explains Jeanette.
Today these closely-knit kids will share a Squamish ceremony with their school. Events like this happen a few times every year at Queen Mary and some other schools in the district, as encouraged by Squamish educators and district staff in the Aboriginal Education Enhancement Agreement laid out three years ago.
That agreement, one of 43 in the province, outlines collaborative plans for schools and classrooms where all Aboriginal students in the district feel safe and respected and where the children have the opportunity to share their culture with the other students.
Whenever an opportunity like this salmon blessing comes up, says Baker, her students line up to participate.
“They want to understand it (the ceremonies),” she explains. “It’s important to stand up. It’s being able to share with people who they are and where they came from – the families they come from, the clan they came from. It gives them strength.”
Learning to say Skwxwu7mesh
Nearly hopping from foot to foot with excitement, Latisha and Francisco Wagemann show a handful of other kids how to pin the laminated cedar hat drawings to the walls around the gym. The Nahanee boys throw one another a few quick elbows, grabbing a stack each and getting down to work, too. Jeanette helped them make these drawings last year, and several classes in the school contributed as well, decorating the halls for National Aboriginal Day in June.
This year the kids have coloured little salmon fry drawings to populate the walls, in honour of the two tanks of coho that will call Queen Mary home until the spring, one tank out in front of the main office, the other in Mrs. Stearn’s Grade 1 and 2 classroom. Then they’ll be released in Mosquito Creek come spring – hopefully.
The last time Queen Mary fostered salmon, the kids were devastated as one after another of the hundreds of tiny fish dropped to the bottom of the tank.
Only seven survived the mysterious blight.
So this year Baker and her classes decided to do something to help the salmon: a blessing and a ceremony where all the students will promise to look after the little fry.
One week before the big day, Jeanette’s class practices a salmon song with district support worker Latash (Maurice Nahanee). He wrote the song and gifted it to the school.
Francisco counts them in by slapping on the table, one, two, one, two.
It means “Welcome home salmon people. Take care little ones. Take care salmon people.”
“Here’s a word for you guys,” says Latash. “Schayilhn” (pronounced Shy-al-thin).
Salmon.
“It means to give of oneself for food.”
“Does that mean all fish or just salmon?” Francisco leans in closer.
“It’s to honor the salmon people,” says Latash.
As they set up for the assembly, Francisco and Latisha wonder with some other kids when they’ll get to sing Latash’s salmon song today.
Jeanette hurries over to the group.
Boys, she says, summoning the Nahanee trio and a couple other kids from their work with the cedar hats, come here.
“This is for the guests,” she pulls thick pill plaid blankets from her bag. “One blanket and one headband go to one person.”
As he aligns the blankets, the older Quentin mutters for the younger Marcus to pay closer attention. Marcus looks sharp.
“Each witness gets two quarters.” Baker plunks a margarine tub of coins on the table.
Latisha and Francisco watch carefully. They remember that at Squamish gatherings, some people act as witnesses, “like the newspaper,” says Latisha.
Witnesses tell the other Nation members what happened. It’s an honour and a responsibility that forms a pillar in the traditional Skwxwu7mesh (sounds like Skwa-hoat-mesh) oral culture – the Nation worked with a linguist in the ‘60s and ‘70s to create an alphabet for the fully oral language.
In language classes at schools around the district, elder and language teacher Alroy Baker, also known as Bucky, has the students repeat the word after him.
“Skwxwu7mesh,” he’ll say slowly.
“Skwxwu7mesh,” they’ll test in staggered unison.
“It means ‘the people of the river.’ How did we travel before, does anyone know? Did we walk, did we drive, did we use horses, did we use big balloons?”
The kids giggle.
“What did we do?”
“Walk?”
“What else?”
“Canoes?”
“Canoes,” he nods his head. “We had some small canoes and some really big canoes… The one we paddle in (are) about 40 feet long, a thousand pounds. Some even bigger than that and that’s how our people traveled.”
“So Skwxwu7mesh, can you guys repeat that again?
They do, this time with more success.
“And it means Squamish, people of the river.”
Where do salmon keep their money?
In the halls builds a crescendo of little voices, long lines of kids streaming out of classrooms at Queen Mary.
The Nahanees discuss the handing of quarters while Jeanette outfits Malcolm Paull and Brian Skellenger with blanket wraps and headbands. The two boys will stand at the doors to greet the guests today and they scurry to get set up before the first visitors trickle in.
Speaking softly, their hands folded and their eyes wide, Francisco, Quentin and Latisha sit at the front of the gym with the blankets.
Jeanette, in her cedar paddle jacket, introduces hereditary chief Ian Campbell.
“My name is Xalek, and Xalek was the third son of Kitsilano … I come from the Squamish and Musqueam peoples.
Huy chexw a.”
He tells a joke.
“Before we start, does anyone know where salmon keep their money?”
The younger kids shake their heads.
“In the river banks!”
Giggles.
Queen Mary principal Bill Reid chuckles appreciatively, noting, “You have to be a chief to pull off a joke like that!”
Campbell, lead negotiator for the Squamish Nation, works more with government and business partners these days, but has a long history as an educator and ambassador in local schools.
“It’s crucial for Squamish kids to learn how to apply traditional knowledge – language, stories, traditions – in modern contexts,” he says.
Campbell sees the future of the Nation as “an ancient culture of professionals and entrepreneurs,” an evolving organism rooted in the stories and legends of its ancestors.
“We will assert our own self-determination and along with that comes a resurgence in culture … we have to move away from blame and shame and judgement. The way we do that is a recognition of our territories and our community, supporting one another, inclusiveness.”
With 60 per cent of the nation under the age of 25, inclusive education and what some support workers, like Latash, call “culture transmission,” is paramount to the future of the Squamish Nation.
“I see us as relay runners,” Campbell explains later. “Ultimately we have to pass on the baton or the eagle feather to our future descendants.”
The history of the Squamish people and the stories and traditions of the lands here should be front and centre in local schools, he says. “There’s an ancient culture in this land and we should all take ownership.”
For the kids today, that means welcoming the return of new life.
Campbell sings a canoe song while Quentin, Latisha, Francisco, Malcolm and Brian brush the salmon mural with cedar boughs. The 400 students pledge to look out for the creatures.
Then Campbell asks the kids which animals like to eat salmon.
Bears!
“What else likes to eat salmon?”
The kids shake their heads.
“I know one: eagles love to eat salmon, right? … We see two or three thousand eagles in our rivers along Squamish coming down to catch the salmon.”
What about in the water, what else eats salmon in the water? You in the back, shout it out.”
A Grade 5 boy yells “Orca!”
“Orca! Absolutely,” encourages Campbell. “They (salmon) have a hard life. So many things are always trying to eat them.”
A moment later the gym is teeming with dancing kids. Campbell sings one of the nation’s chief songs, originally by Jimmy Jimmy. Today he modifies the song to get the kids moving. The middle-ages mimic the Grizzly Bear, led by Jeanette and her students. Other students dance as Yew yews (Killer Whale), and Spakwus (Eagle). The youngest ones dance as the salmon people, slapping their hands at their sides and jumping on their tip toes.
Malcolm Paull is right into it, leading the kids from the front of the gym, bopping around Campbell in huge leaps, his headband slipping down his forehead.
“Schyalihn – the salmon people!” calls Campbell.
When the gym empties, Latisha and Francisco discuss the fish.
Francisco’s little brother is in Mrs. Stearn’s class, so he’ll be able to keep a close eye on the one batch.
“And yah, we’re going to watch them in the tank too,” says Latisha of the fish outside the office. “I’m happy the salmon are going to live.”
Imagine each of their Squamish words as an endangered, little salmon fry. Chief Campbell, Jeanette Baker and a whole community of elders, leaders and education workers are doing everything they can to give them a fighting chance. With 3,500 Nation members and only 12 fluent speakers, the language in the Coast Salish linguistic grouping is classified as critically endangered. In less than a decade many of the words could be gone forever as the fluent elders pass.
But the Squamish say they won’t settle for that.
Alroy Baker explains, “The language and the culture go together – that’s what our old people, our elders say. Without the language there’s no culture and without the culture there’s no language.”
To Campbell, there’s “absolutely” an imminent crisis. “The language is in peril for sure. But it’s not a new story. If I look at my own mythology one of the universal stories is the great flood … each time, it’s cyclical.”
Next week, Squamish leaders, educators and students tell the story of language and culture revival and what they’re doing to protect the Squamish legacy. It begins with a 30-day canoe voyage to Bella Bella, over 15 years ago…
Posted in Feature writing
Grace Quintero is the woman of John Burns’ dreams. She’s a Mexican beauty — long, dark hair, even longer legs. A mechanic by trade, she’s into hot rods and Rockabilly and she’s slathered in more tattoos than L.A. Ink’s Kat Von D.
The only problem is she’s a dead chick.
So begins Charles De Lint’s latest novel, The Mystery of Grace. At a Halloween party the unsuspecting John woos this inky, dreamy Grace and the two share a hot tryst. But Grace vanishes from his apartment at sunrise, leaving John dejected. He combs the city, hoping she didn’t find him coyote ugly.
Grace’s excuse is much more complicated: She was recently murdered in a convenience store robbery and meets John on a one-day visitor’s pass to the land of the living on La Dia de los Muertos (The Day of the Dead). Worse than pumpkins at midnight, she’s whisked back to the afterlife at sunrise.
The Mystery of Grace, by Charles De Lint, Tor Books, 272 pages, $27.95Leave it to the industriously prolific fantasy writer De Lint to marry Corpse Bride and Cinderella with L.A. Ink. World Fantasy Award winner De Lint’s “mythic fiction” has been billed as fantasy for people who don’t otherwise dig fantasy. He often uses the ethnic and spiritual melting pots of North American cities as fodder for his modern mythologies. In De Lint’s books, ancient legends and superstitions simmer beneath the surface of contemporary urban life.
Once again the author has nicely fused his mythic patchwork (black magic and prehistoric Hohokam lore, Mexican festivals and Catholic imagery) with the every day (old American cars and the music of Dick Dale, The Torquays and Link Wray), creating a punchy, interesting story that surprisingly isn’t bogged down by all the talk of death and walking spirits. De Lint may not have intended this, but with Grace’s soliloquies about the lost art of American automobile craftsmanship, the story does occasionally read like a creative eulogy for the big three in the shadow of the auto bailout; but that’s a quirk, not a defining feature of the narrative.
In the afterlife, recently deceased Grace is thrilled to learn that twice a year — on Dia de los Muertos and on Beltane (May Day) — the veils weaken between life and death and the dead can cross over.
Grace has reason to walk the world as a ghost. Her afterlife is a drag. She’s trapped in a two-block representation of her neighbourhood, all encased in a grey, misty orb. Joining Grace are those who also died in the neighbourhood surrounding the old Alverson Arms building.
Is it heaven, hell or limbo? No one’s really sure, but most have the hunch that there should be more to the hereafter than their little prison.
Grace longs for the desert and the mountains of the American Southwest, where she raced for the horizon in her painstakingly restored ‘48 Ford coupe. She longs for John, who miraculously works out the mystery of her disappearance and meets her on Beltane, proposing a creative relationship that transcends the bonds of death.
John provides an anchor for De Lint’s depictions of the living world, with John’s perspective represented in third person narration and Grace’s in the first person, and this is where De Lint’s otherwise excellent story falters. The effect of jumping back and forth in the love plot proves distracting. Grace is a fascinating character, and De Lint might have done better to explore her more fully.
As Grace broods on the meaning of life, death and love, she fixes cars in limbo. She thinks about the legacy of her feisty, tattooed grandfather, her Abuelo, who taught her everything she knows about hot rods, imbuing her with quiet confidence. “Tattoos,” he tells her, “are the stories in your heart, written on your skin.”
Lucky for Grace she carries her tattoos with her in death. While the “Mi Vida Loca” or “FoMoCo” (Ford Motor Company) tats might not do her much good, the enormous portrait of her namesake, Our Lady of Altagracia, inked on her shoulder, proves a powerful protection from the bruja (witch) who has created the Alverson Arms world.
The fruits of Grace’s quiet soul searching make for a satisfying ending that upholds the mystery of death behind the misty grey veil. “Wherever you go,” she concedes, “you take yourself with you.”
Kelly McManus is a writer and journalist.
Posted in books and author chats
Doing some research for the Collectors series in an antique tank. Daniel Pi photo
This week’s news: my Collectors series took second in the feature series category at the Better Newspapers competition through the Canadian Community Newspaper Association (CCNAs). You can read the results here. I’m very excited and so thankful to the North Shore collectors who opened up their homes and hobbies to be profiled.
Cheers, KM
Posted in My blog/ silly stuff
Kevin Vallely, polar explorer. Daniel Pi photo
KELLY MCMANUS, North Shore Outlook, Mar. 12, 2009
Kevin Vallely waited at the edge of the world with nothing but his skis and an 85-kilo sled.
Standing on the land-locked ice at Hercules Inlet, he gasped. From his shore-side view, Antarctica rose up in the distance like a monstrous, white dune.
Vallely held a video camera at the time, but the scene was promptly interrupted as the growl of the bush plane engines crescendoed behind him. Vallely’s pilot doubled back to say farewell, pulled a hard barrel roll, the airplane wing passing six metres overhead.
“(The pilot) did this crazy straight ascent and dove off to the side,” Vallely remembers. “That was the scariest point of the trip.”
Vallely hit the ground. Prostrate at the shores of Antarctica, he played out an ironic rendering of explorer tableaus stretching back through the centuries – picture that scene from Ridley Scott’s 1492, where, fresh off the boat, Christopher Columbus (Gerard Depardieu) kneels in the surf, his cape streaming behind him as he grips the sand of the New World, pressing it to his lips.
Swaddled in super-efficient cold weather gear, carrying solar panels and satellite phones, GPS equipment, a video camera, battery packs and 40 kilos of calorie-dense food, Vallely would follow in the footsteps of the great Antarctic explorers Scott and Amundsen. Except in 21st century expeditions, the “firsts” are all snapped up, and explorers like Vallely boldly go where others – sometimes many, many others – have been before. They just do it faster, and in Vallely’s case, fastest.
As he stood in Antarctica in December 2008, the North Vancouver adventurer had already achieved international notoriety for his grueling endurance treks – skiing 1,860 kilometers of Alaska’s frozen Iditarod trail, retracing the deadly 200 km of the infamous Sandakan Death March in Borneo, riding bikes for 2,000 km along a deep-winter Klondike route, climbing volcanos in Java. In 2002, his team placed 8th in the grueling Fiji Eco-Challenge. Eighty one teams started the race and only 10 crossed the finish line.
He even made a space for family adventures, paddling Siberia’s Lake Baikal with his wife and nine month old daughter, later hiking Ireland with his young family. Photos from last summer show him slogging up the road on roller skis in Lynn Valley, dragging his two delighted girls, 5 and 9 years old, in a car tire.
In short, Vallely is a 44-year-old human tank.
The Globe and Mail named him one of Canada’s top adventurers, citing him as a leader in the new breed of multi-sport adventurers taking endurance challenges to a whole new level.
And here, on the shores of Antarctica, began the North Vancouver architect and family man’s latest test of mettle, his dream for nearly 15 years.
He and his two companions – arctic explorer Richard Weber and ultramarathoner Ray Zahab – now had 1,130 kilometres of windswept ice between their crampons and their destination, the South Pole. They hoped to set the world record for fastest unsupported trip across Antarctica, leaving them less than 40 days to complete the trek.
As their plane boomed off for the horizon, it was evening, so they bedded down, listening to the wind beat at the walls of their tent.
Vallely felt the pressure come crashing in harder than the 120-km gusts that can sweep the continent. Would they succumb to numbing cold snaps or fall into a 100-metre-deep crevasse? Could they last on their high-fat food supply of deep fried bacon, butter and peanut butter? What if they had to call for help? What if they took too long and missed the record? Could they really do this? After a full year of planning and training, it was time to find out.
“The key is to have confidence in your 20 years experience,” says Vallely. “The reality is you’re going to ski every day, 14 hours a day … you suffer for the first two weeks. Then you finally become this automaton.”
The bowels of the glacier
It’s a masochistic urge – to push oneself beyond exhaustion, often in the world’s most inhospitable places.
Vallely’s not really sure how he caught the adventure bug. But he thinks it has something to do with a journey that began in a Montreal department store.
He was 9 years old. His little brother, Michael, was 5.
Their parents asked them to wait by the escalator while they ran an errand. An overzealous security guard shooed the boys out into the cold. It was 9 p.m. and along Rue St. Catherine, a bitter February blizzard pelted down.
Michael started to cry and the young Kevin Vallely did the only thing he could think of. He started walking home.
“I didn’t have money. I didn’t know where I was. I knew I was downtown and I knew I lived somewhere but I had no sense of how to get there,” he remembers.
They lost their way a few times, until, finally, four hours and roughly 10 km later, they stumbled to their home in Old Montreal, where the police were taking statements from their distraught parents.
He counts the experience as his first polar trek.
Vallely remembers thinking to himself, “Wow, that was pretty awesome.”
He surmises the misadventure translated in his adult life as, “This ability to be put in a hostile situation and come out of it with this sense of confidence.”
Vallely has a way of speaking nonchalantly about those “hostile situations,” like the bottomless crevasses that waited at the top of that monstrous, continental dune he saw from Hercules Inlet.
For two days Vallely, Zahab and Weber climbed the long slow hump that marked where, beneath ice millions of years thick, the continent rises up from the sea.
“There’s no sense of scale,” Vallely explains. “It (the Antarctic landscape) just goes and goes. You’re maybe looking one mile away or 100 miles away.”
Casting perpetual daylight, the sun ran tight little circuits overhead. In full sun, 2 a.m. looked the same as 2 p.m.
The skis would have to wait, as the ice was rock-hard. Vallely used crampons, dragging the sled behind him.
“It’s a pain. It’s a pig. Your sled, it’s always pulling you back. It’s awful fitting, but it’s your life line. Without it, you die.”
The team devised one way to lighten their sleds; they left their ropes at home.
They needed to cross brittle snow bridges over a network of 100-metre deep crevasses, and had decided that roping up would slow them down.
“It’s all bravado when you’re in Vancouver,” Vallely remembers, but with day three came the crevasses. If they fell, they would disappear into the bowels of the glacier.
They probed some snow bridges only to have them collapse, the ice chunks careening off into the abyss.
Zahab crossed a narrow bridge, and when his sled followed him, the structure crumbled.
The sled fell too, pulling Zahab back toward the deep fissure. Vallely watched in horror as Zahab lost ground, his crampons scraping slowly backwards, until Zahab managed to pull himself out.
“It was okay,” remembers Vallely. “We were expecting it (a harrowing time over the crevasses). We were ready for that. We said let’s get this thing and get over it. We were all pretty level-headed.”
7,000 calorie days
The next 30 days were an escalating slog.
They quickly established a routine: on the snow at 9 a.m., then off again at 8 p.m.
From their tent, they filed reports via satellite phone to their website, southpolequest.com, where thousands of school kids across North America followed their daily progress.
The temperature ranged from -15 to -40 C. The wind ranged between 10 and 50 knots, sneaking through the seams in their gloves. Two weeks in, Vallely battled altitude sickness.
“Think about the most exhausted you’ve ever been. You’re completely baked. Every day was like that and then some. You could never even fathom that you would do it all again the next day.”
Burning an estimated 1,000 calories per hour, the men ate sticks of butter, chocolate truffles, macadamia nuts, and deep fried bacon grease (Pemiken) to fuel their raging furnaces. But they still lost weight – they were “man-hauling monster sleds” and putting in close to a marathon every day.
Vallely switched from crampons to skis for a little “kick and glide relief,” but essentially, he was cross country skiing with weight equivalent to a full grown man in tow.
“I looked at my legs. They were sticks. I was metabolizing muscle,” says Vallely. “We realized why people like Scott had died out there. It was a matter of time. Your body just eats itself.”
Vallely had plenty of time to think about the unlucky Robert Falcon Scott. Using his iPod, he listened to The Worst Journey in the World, Apsley Cherry-Garrard’s account of the fatal 1912 expedition where Scott and two fellow explorers succumbed to the Antarctic void.
He quickly turned off that audio book.
Then he tried Life of Pi, but salivated too desperately at one passage where the characters, lost at sea, fantasize about food.
“God,” he thought, “I’m sick of Pemiken,” and he daydreamed of fresh fruits and vegetables.
“In the end, you cope with it (the drudgery) by drifting in and out of thought,” says Vallely. “And you get into these strange emotional states, dredging the depths of your mind … it’s a cool place to be, when nothing matters – how much you have in RRSPs, all those money worries peel away, all that matters is existing, surviving.”
By the last push, in one 20-hour day, they burned 20,000 calories, logging 30 nautical miles or 55 km miles, the longest single-day push in polar history.
Their hips and shoulders bruised and shredded under their pack harnesses, and Vallely was even frightened of peeing blood.
But Zahab is a world-class ultra runner, Weber one of the world’s leader polar adventurers and Vallely a proven endurance machine. They did what they do best: they persevered and they took the record, standing at the pole five days earlier than any other expedition in history.
“It was complete anti-climax,” shrugs Vallely.
At first they couldn’t find the marker for the true pole. After hunting around in the snow, they found a lonely wooden stake.
With a strewn landscape of discarded equipment the South Pole station looked “like a Walmart on stilts. It’s like walking into the opening scene from Terminator.”
Still, they found a tetrapack of wine. At 8:45 in the morning, they toasted their success, set up the tent and collapsed from exhaustion.
Hours later, they were back at Patriot Hills base camp via airplane, where Vallely called The Outlook from his satellite phone in their little tent near the airstrip. He was tired. He was happy to have the record. He couldn’t wait to eat some vegetables. The most important part of the trip, he explained, was coming home:
“Taking the long journey, the whole point is to come back to where you started from and see everything differently.”
There and back again
Before Vallely made it home in mid-January, he, Zahab and Weber sat out a storm at Patriot Hills. They ate and read books, sleeping for 20 hours a day.
Vallely was ready for what was coming – a post trip low where the body and the mind are exhausted, and the emotions are too. He had experienced the dejection before, and knew this time it might be worse.
Vallely had smashed a career goal, getting to the pole and doing it faster than anyone. Even their moment of victory had been anticlimactic, as the three men searched for that shabby marker in the snow.
He was happy to finally see his family. He was happy to put on some weight and, for a welcome change, take a break from exercise. After 1,130 km of manhauling, his body needed one hell of a holiday.
Sitting in a coffee shop just over a month after returning home, Vallely speaks frankly.
“It’s been a low,” he explains of finally getting to the South Pole and breaking the record. “You achieve something and the second you achieve it you realize, well now what?”
This question must have plagued explorers through the ages – the ones who lived, that is. What’s the next big adventure, the next big high, the next, as Vallely puts it, “hostile situation?”
Sure, he says, he’ll plan some more extreme expeditions, but not yet.
For now he wants to “go inward,” maybe write a book, definitely speak to schools and groups about pushing the limits of endurance.
His daughters are getting to that age, the age when he and his brother found their way home in stormy Montreal.
Vallely won’t leave little Caitlin and Ariana standing alone by the escalator, but he does want to take them climbing, hiking and paddling. He wants to venture with them to other countries to show them how other families live, maybe witness that moment when the passion to go harder and farther awakens in them, just as it did for him.
Most importantly, he wants to share rare and exceptional moments with them, like the ones he experienced in Antarctica. Zahab and Weber would be prepping in the tent after a long day of slogging. Vallely would be the last man outside. He remembers the perpetual sun, the winds racing over the continental ice sheet. He would stop and spin, taking in an unforgettable 360 degree view of pristine ice, an untouched, unforgiving wilderness. Nothing but challenge and possibility stretched out to where the ice met the sky.
TALES OF ADVENTURE
Kevin Vallely speaks next week at The Great Outdoors Show, March 20-22 at Abbotsford’s TRADEX. Hours: March 20, 12-9 p.m., March 21, 10 a.m.-6 p.m., March 22, 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Tickets: $4-$10. For more info, go to www.thegreatoutdoorsshow.com. For more about Kevin Vallely’s adventures, visit www.kevinvallely.com
Posted in Feature writing, Sports/first person
I’m very pleased to announce that my Collectors Series has been nominated for a Ma Murray Community Newspaper Award (B.C.-wide) in the category of Best Feature Series. The winners will be announced April 3 at the River Rock Casino.
You can read the series in the “Top Stories” page of this website.
Posted in My blog/ silly stuff
Ugly cruising
Black humor and miraculous tenderness characterize Fierce, collected short fiction by Hannah Holborn.
KELLY MCMANUS, North Shore Outlook, Feb. 19, 2009
FIERCE – Pastor, non-profit worker, and now fiercely gifted fiction writer Hannah Holborn appears at the Silk Purse, Feb. 26 at 7 p.m. SUBMITTED PHOTO
She called it ugly cruising.
The premise was simple: a group of healthy young women made themselves as hideous as possible with theatre makeup. Otherwise, they went for the ancient-and-rickety look. Then they prowled the streets, looking for a reaction.
“It was strange,” remembers author Hannah Holborn. “I had moved to Calgary for a year, and I had kind of broken free of the constraints of theological school (she has since worked as a pastor on the Downtown Eastside). I was really into dressing punk that year, but I only listened to classical music.”
She still remembers “Hee-hawing and running off down the road,” when onlookers were mortified by a set of huge-nosed, black-toothed women hollering for attention, or a troupe of seemingly elderly ladies kicking up their skirts and sprinting down the street.
“It was a lot of fun. I think the humor helped a lot of the pain I was still in. (Ugly cruising) was about just having fun, shouting back at the world.”
Holborn spent her teen years in foster care, living with multiple families in the Lower Mainland, after the death of her mother (when Holborn was nine years old) and an abusive past with a resentful girlfriend of her brain-damaged father.
“I was a good child,” she remembers. “I got excellent grades in school. When I hit my teen years, I became reactive just to normal life but to a lot of things nobody knew had happened.”
Gallows and black humour became one of her staple coping mechanisms.
“There was this birthday song that we’d been singing – after I was adopted into one family I lived with: people dying everywhere, pain and sorrow and despair, happy birthday, happy birthday.”
Holborn and her family still chant the death-march long and slow, in a minor key, “kind of like monks,” banging their fists on the table.
“Of course, some people just don’t get it.”
That same humour characterizes Holborn’s just-released collection of short fiction, (Fierce, McClelland and Stewart). In “Ugly Cruising,” teenaged Cricket coerces her girlfriends into menacing joy rides through the streets of White Rock, donning hideous defacements made possible by spirit gum and latex paints.
These cruises are a desperate coping strategy for Cricket’s home life: a deformed, terminally-ill brother, an alcoholic mother, a grieving father like a “gaping wound” who tells woefully unfunny leper jokes over the breakfast table (Why did the referee stop the leper hockey game? There was a face off in the corner).
Ugly Cruising is Holborn’s favourite story in the collection of varied tales: of a hermaphroditic prospector in the Yukon, the breakdown of a marriage as seen through the eyes of God, ghost towns, foster care, tragedy and violent drama crackling with comedic noir and irony that borders tenderly-spun farce.
Holborn, who writes in her small patches of spare time on evenings and weekends, has spent 20 years working in community outreach and non-profit sectors. She served as women and children’s pastor with the Vancouver Native Penticostal Church, as a support worker with the Homes Society and currently as a manager at a rehabilitation facility with the Cheshire Home Society of B.C.
“I just really care about the outsider population,” she explains. “I always have. I was a foster child myself and being raised as an outsider gave me a lot of compassion and empathy for people who are on the so-called outskirts of normal society.”
Her stories are “peopled with struggles, of those trying to reach their full potential.”
Holborn’s sense of humour is directly related to “keeping sadness at bay. Sometimes things are so tragic (in her line of work). If you focus on that, you can’t do what you’re there to do – which is help people as much as you can. All you can do is offer and share skills with people. You can’t make people be okay.”
Joking in the face of sadness, “keeps you balanced.”
Holborn’s next book, a novel tentatively titled Cold, explores the depths of dark humour in the face of tragedy and bitter irony.
“It’s even a little darker, because it’s dealing with an abducted boy and the people in his life who try to find him … There’s a lot of humour, that kind of sharp humour.”
Holborn will appear at the Silk Purse Thursday, Feb. 26 with authors Andrea Gunraj and Alan Bradley for readings, book signings and question periods. For more info, visit www.silkpurse.ca or www.hannahholborn.com.
Posted in books and author chats
Wee audience, big theme
Chris Patton’s Jack Pine comes full circle as a children’s opera at Centennial Theatre this week.
KELLY MCMANUS, North Shore Outlook, Feb. 12, 2009
Chris Patton's Jack Pine tours the Lower Mainland as a children's opera with Vancouver Opera. SUBMITTED PHOTO
Chris Patton grows apples, cherries and pears in the summertime.
It helps with the writing – a sprawling orchard and a little farmhouse on Salt Spring Island.
He spends the rest of the year at the University of Utah, where he currently teaches and studies as a doctoral student in creative writing.
Not a bad set up at all.
“It’s quite beautiful,” agrees the former West Vanner about his summer residence. “It feeds my writing … the pendulum just swung in the opposite direction for me.”
Ten years ago Patton was ensconced in New York City life, teaching writing classes after scooping up an MFA in creative writing from Columbia University.
Around the same time, he was looking for a home for his kids book, The Watermelon Lion, about a lion who possesses watermelon-like qualities, and struggles to figure out what kind of sound a creature like himself might make.
“It’s a silly, goofy idea,” he says. “You write for kids out of a few different impulses. One is you want it to be fun to write and fun for the kids to read.”
Around 2005, after multiple turn-downs from publishers, Groundwood books asked to see Patton’s other manuscript; it was a poem about a character named Jack Pine, a burly, under-appreciated tree, named for the species.
Jack Pine, the illustrated children’s poem, was published in 2007 by the Anansi imprint, the same year Patton’s collection of adult poetry, Ox (Signal Editions) hit the bookstores.
By 2008, the Vancouver Opera had scooped up Jack Pine for a children’s opera.
“When I first got the news I was delighted and I was really not sure how they were going to make an opera about a book of trees because people generally move around on stage.”
Composer Veda Hille took care of story arcs and staging. An entire opera focused on a standing tree would prove problematic, indeed.
“I was really inspired by the language which is why I picked the poem,” explains Hille. “Often with poets you have too much of the same meter or not enough … his use of consonants was really great.”
She wrote a story around the tale of Jack Pine to suit the demands of children’s theatre.
Four young characters go walking through the forest after a tough day at school. They meet a botanist who teaches them about the forest wildlife, including the likes of Jack Pine, short and gnarled, who thrives in bad soil, holds his own against wind and fire, and nurses young saplings under his low branches.
Patton’s poem becomes “a story within a story,” complete with tragic moments as expressed in an aria for a dying calf.
Here comes a spoiler: Jack Pine dies too, but eight new seeds come of it.
“I thought the kids could handle that, given the essential life cycles in the natural world,” explains Hille.
The opera has tested well with Hille’s first audiences, kids in Grades 2 through 7. After premiering at Centennial Theatre, the show will tour elementary schools in the Lower Mainland, Vancouver Island and the Sunshine Coast, with stops on Salt Spring Island (Mar. 11, 12) and Kelowna (April 2) before heading to Ottawa in late April.
For the Salt Spring performance at the ArtSpring Island Arts Centre, Patton plans to fly home.
It will be a short trip, because Patton is now deep in his PdD comprehensive exams and preparing to turn out another book of adult poetry, but says he’s planning to spend the summer on Salt Spring.
Will his gnarly orchard inspire another kids’ epic about the natural world?
“Maybe not for another couple years,” he says. “I’ve got a book of (adult) poetry to write.”
But Patton continues to make schools visits with Jack Pine and his manuscript for The Watermelon Lion, which some classes kindly offer to illustrate for him.
“There were some pretty imaginative interpretations,” he laughs.
He tests new ideas on his niece and nephew as well, or the children of friends.
“But really the kid I tested on (for Jack Pine and Watermellon Lion) was the man-kid inside my skin. I would have gotten a kick out of this when I was a kid.”
For more about Jack Pine, visit www.vancouveropera.ca or www.groundwoodbooks.com.
The opera premiers at Centennial Theatre (2,300 Lonsdale Ave., 604-984-4484) Feb. 15 at 2 p.m. Family Festival single tickets: $18.
Chris Patton’s Jack Pine comes full circle as a children’s opera at Centennial Theatre this week.
Posted in Uncategorized
I am very pleased to announce that the North Shore Outlook (the newsroom I currently call home) just took seven awards from the SNAs (Suburban Newspapers of America editorial competition).
All three reporters (Daniel Pi, Sam Cooper and myself, and our editor Justin Beddall) are very proud of our team.
Here’s a little about my winning stories.
My review of the Arts Club show, Glorious! (Murder on the High C’s) took a Best Arts Criticism win. Starring Nicola Cavendish, this was the story of Florence Foster Jenkins, the tone deaf diva who sold out Carnegie Hall with her horrific renderings of Mozart’s Queen of the Night Aria. The real life Flo Fo Jo spent her inheritance on a night club, donned a pair of angels wings, and despite laughter and derision, pursued her life long dream of becoming a great Soprano. What a lady.
Together with Daniel Pi, I won a joint gold in Young People’s Coverage. Dan and I get out into the schools quite often, and I have to say working with kids’ groups and students has been a highlight of my time so far at the Outlook. My story Talking Trash followed four sixth-graders in their quest to reduce the garbage output at Dorothy Lynas elementary. Singing in the rain was maybe one of the most hilarious assignments in my career. On the one-year anniversary of the Stanley Park wind storm, the BC Boys Choir gave a concert on Ambleside beach. The winds picked up, the rain pelted down, and 80 or so blue-rain-slickered boys did their very best to sing Silent Night and God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen. They started the show grumpy and ended with a delighted bang. Dan’s story Book Buddies, completed our submission. All stories were shot by Dan, who does incredible work.
The research for my Collectors series involved a little more than I expected... Daniel Pi photo
My Collectors series, near and dear to my heart, especially because it kicked off with a 32-year-old dude with a Transformers collecting compulsion (Optimus Prime, I wish I could quit you), took an honorable mention. Get tanked followed two local gents who started a military museum after their wives announced there were no more vintage tanks allowed on the front lawn. A Leaf among wolves was a profile of a die hard Leafs fan, Chris Mizzoni, who, once transplanted to Vancouver, had a seat from Maple Leaf Gardens sent out to complete his basement hockey shrine, even in a Toronto-hostile town where being a Leafs fan doesn’t help a guy’s popularity.
It’s been a great year and a half at the Outlook (and the other Black Press papers too). Big congratulations to Sam Cooper and Daniel Pi for their 1-2 wins in the illustrious Feature category, and for their other exciting wins too (Sam: Best Sports coverage; Dan: Best Arts Feature). Go Outlook!
Most importantly, thank you to all the parents, teachers and kids who invited us into their schools. Thank you to all the people who invited us into their homes. Community journalism in North and West Vancouver has been a terrific adventure and I look forward to meeting more fascinating people.
Posted in My blog/ silly stuff
