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Harold Macy was "born on the prairie, caught between the stubble and endless sky. The mountains and the forest beckoned and he moved to the coast." He has lived in Merville, halfway up the east side of Vancouver Island B.C., for more than forty years, "a tectonic splinter off the left shoulder of a restless continent, where he is surrounded by old hippies, fundamentalist Christians, faded cowgirls, broken old loggers, gimpy rednecks and urban refugees with their new plaid shirts and attitudes---all great sources of character and story."
During that time he has worked for the BC Forest Service Research Branch, been a silviculture contractor for a local forestry company, fought wildfires, had rain in his lunch pail heli-logging up in the mid-coast inlets, and for many years was the forester at the UBC Oyster River Research Farm, where he wrote and delivered on-line and weekend courses in small scale forestry and agroforestry.
According to Merville-raised novelist Jack Hodgins, Harold Macy's first book The Four Storey Forest: As Grow the Trees, So Too The Heart (Poplar 2011) is part autobiography, part spiritual journey, part historical fiction, and part arboreal adventure... a four-pillared exploration of life as it is lived by the people and the forests of north-central Vancouver Island.
Macy's second title, the historical novel San Josef came out under the imprint, Tidewater Press.
His third title, All the Bears Sing (Harbour Publishing $24.95), captures the magic of the West Coast. His characters include everyday fishermen and loggers, gardeners and wildland firefighters, and rock blasters and island homesteaders. First-growth fallen trees on mossy mountain slopes and the brassy orchestra of trumpeter swans play just as big a role as people in Macy’s stories.
Macy studied writing with the UBC Mentorship Program, Victoria (BC) School of Writing, Sage Hills (SK) and North Island College. His work has appeared in PRISM International, Malahat Review, Orion, Eye & I, Broken City, Rhubarb and others. He was an invited author at the Fanny Bay Fat Oyster Reading Series in 2016.
*****
All the Bears Sing: Stories by Harold Macy (Harbour $24.95)
Review by Trevor Carolan (2023)
Spend time with working folks in the towns of upper Vancouver Island or BC’s interior and you’ll recognize the characters in Harold Macy’s unexpectedly fun collection of stories—men and women who still get their hands dirty when they work, usually in tough jobs and marginal, resource-based economies. Or, if you’ve yet to discover the natural grandeur and salty tongues in the bush, then All the Bears Sing will serve you like a Lonely Planet guide to community life where conventional wage-earning is always a good idea, but typically in short supply, and where dynamite-blasting, heli-logging, smoke-jumping with summer fire-fight crews, and bottle and junk collecting from the dump in winter endure as local employment options.
Women who’ve put up with all the crap that men and life can throw at them, old hippies, young stump-farm migrants from the city scuffling to live rural on soil that’s hard to till—Macy’s tales aren’t necessarily about lovable losers or roughnecks who eat nails for breakfast, although you’ll meet a few. He writes what used to be called “yarns:” stories that sound so believable they might even be true. There are 23 of them in this collection, ranging in the 2-, 3-, 8- or 10-page length; just don’t expect the cultivated, ideologically approved fiction that gets nominated for the usual CanLit awards. Macy’s style is less predictable, yet familiar. Written in simple language with twists, occasionally gripping plots, the contingency of urgent decisions, and told with surprising effect from either male and female character points of view, these are “entertainments.” That’s not to dismiss the form: some of Graham Greene’s books and stories that rank among the finest literature of the 20th century he called entertainments.
The skill in making small-town talk work is to bring quirky characters alive in the reader’s mind, so that in an ordinary sense even when their experiences don’t make sense, they still have a way of pointing to a deeper truth. Raymond Carver, the Yakima, Washington, storyteller who revitalized American fiction from its New York-centered neuroses during the late seventies/early eighties understood this too, pioneering his “K-Mart Realism.” A gentle guy who had to fight his way through life, this was Carver’s honest response to South America’s “Magic Realism.” His version was tales from the tired late-night shoppers you see in the glare of US discount stores, people who missed out on the dream, people with trouble coming down. What Harold Macy delivers is a kind of homegrown “Lucky Buck Mart Realism”; the kind you find in BC’s struggling mill-towns, where nobody passes the day-olds without a long look. His characters don’t lug around a grievance that they’ve been wronged somewhere—they bump along with fate and the ordinariness of their limited futures. If there’s magic it’s in a kid’s laugh, a lucky break, a moment of faith, or in the humble joys of what Buddhism calls “everyday sacraments”—loyalty in a marriage, the constancy of old friendships, good neighbours. That’s the real magic Macy understands.
Bill Kittredge, another Cascadia-affiliated writer, has noted that as a writer if you’re not flirting with sentimentality, you’re not in the ball park. Macy’s stories sometimes flit near that candle flame, but that doesn’t mean nostalgia for a romanticized past with the moral narrowing that can bring. Smart artists know nostalgia never goes out of fashion. It reinvents itself a step away from the age confronting it. Macy’s Vancouver Island isn’t too far off Jack Hodgins’ fabled territory. People complain, help each other out, indulge in superbly rendered platitudes during family gatherings as in “House, Waving Goodbye,” where no one’s life has turned out quite as hoped for by a widowed mom and grandmother. Even the title story itself is a bittersweet hymn to hermits and off-the-grid loners that the Courtenay-Merville area has always attracted, including a loopy old geezer that the story narrator says he’d “been carrying in my heart the past week.” There’s a glimpse here of the realizations that might come from long, solitary retreats along the Tsolum River in close company with wild critters that pad around in frozen winter without any shoes or socks on.
“Gelignite,” one of the collection’s best, offers insight into why an Okanagan farm–raised wife might simply drive off one day after thirty years of marriage, encounter a stranger in a Princeton pub, and venture even further. You can hear echoes of Jane Rule and Anne Cameron in her voice when she says, “How often do you get another chance?”
The bush is another country. Macy’s known it forever. “Unclipped” and “Into the Silverthrone Caldera” depict the shattering side of life when horrendous job-site accidents or catastrophic mash-ups crash like lightning, destroying everything utterly. Taut moral fables like “Donkey Shame” and “Ditch Clothes” depict paying-it-forward justice when The Other finally arrives in a strange reversal of fate reminiscent of Alice Munro at the controls.
The book’s one long-form contribution, “Overburdened,” relates a tale of Gulf Island migrant newcomers, land developers and the mechanics of sub-soil resource “harvesting.” Achieving moments of real narrative sophistication, there’s plot and a mystery that’s too BC to be purely invented, but what a fine yarn it is. Unless you’ve lived your entire life in downtown Vancouver, everyone in BC has a little bit of country in them, don’t they? That’s just enough to savour these welcome accounts from a wily storyteller who knows what it’s all about. 9781990776007
Trevor Carolan’s most recent book is Road Trips: Journeys in the Unspoiled World (Mother Tongue, 2020).
--
BOOKS:
The Four Storey Forest: As Grow the Trees, So Too The Heart (Poplar Publishing, 2011) $20 978-0-9685838-0-7
San Josef (Tidewater Press, 2019) $20.00 9781775165989
See ORMSBY REVIEW for a review of the above title
All the Bears Sing: Stories (Harbour Publishing, 2022) $24.95 978-1990776007
[BCBW 2022]
During that time he has worked for the BC Forest Service Research Branch, been a silviculture contractor for a local forestry company, fought wildfires, had rain in his lunch pail heli-logging up in the mid-coast inlets, and for many years was the forester at the UBC Oyster River Research Farm, where he wrote and delivered on-line and weekend courses in small scale forestry and agroforestry.
According to Merville-raised novelist Jack Hodgins, Harold Macy's first book The Four Storey Forest: As Grow the Trees, So Too The Heart (Poplar 2011) is part autobiography, part spiritual journey, part historical fiction, and part arboreal adventure... a four-pillared exploration of life as it is lived by the people and the forests of north-central Vancouver Island.
Macy's second title, the historical novel San Josef came out under the imprint, Tidewater Press.
His third title, All the Bears Sing (Harbour Publishing $24.95), captures the magic of the West Coast. His characters include everyday fishermen and loggers, gardeners and wildland firefighters, and rock blasters and island homesteaders. First-growth fallen trees on mossy mountain slopes and the brassy orchestra of trumpeter swans play just as big a role as people in Macy’s stories.
Macy studied writing with the UBC Mentorship Program, Victoria (BC) School of Writing, Sage Hills (SK) and North Island College. His work has appeared in PRISM International, Malahat Review, Orion, Eye & I, Broken City, Rhubarb and others. He was an invited author at the Fanny Bay Fat Oyster Reading Series in 2016.
*****
All the Bears Sing: Stories by Harold Macy (Harbour $24.95)
Review by Trevor Carolan (2023)
Spend time with working folks in the towns of upper Vancouver Island or BC’s interior and you’ll recognize the characters in Harold Macy’s unexpectedly fun collection of stories—men and women who still get their hands dirty when they work, usually in tough jobs and marginal, resource-based economies. Or, if you’ve yet to discover the natural grandeur and salty tongues in the bush, then All the Bears Sing will serve you like a Lonely Planet guide to community life where conventional wage-earning is always a good idea, but typically in short supply, and where dynamite-blasting, heli-logging, smoke-jumping with summer fire-fight crews, and bottle and junk collecting from the dump in winter endure as local employment options.
Women who’ve put up with all the crap that men and life can throw at them, old hippies, young stump-farm migrants from the city scuffling to live rural on soil that’s hard to till—Macy’s tales aren’t necessarily about lovable losers or roughnecks who eat nails for breakfast, although you’ll meet a few. He writes what used to be called “yarns:” stories that sound so believable they might even be true. There are 23 of them in this collection, ranging in the 2-, 3-, 8- or 10-page length; just don’t expect the cultivated, ideologically approved fiction that gets nominated for the usual CanLit awards. Macy’s style is less predictable, yet familiar. Written in simple language with twists, occasionally gripping plots, the contingency of urgent decisions, and told with surprising effect from either male and female character points of view, these are “entertainments.” That’s not to dismiss the form: some of Graham Greene’s books and stories that rank among the finest literature of the 20th century he called entertainments.
The skill in making small-town talk work is to bring quirky characters alive in the reader’s mind, so that in an ordinary sense even when their experiences don’t make sense, they still have a way of pointing to a deeper truth. Raymond Carver, the Yakima, Washington, storyteller who revitalized American fiction from its New York-centered neuroses during the late seventies/early eighties understood this too, pioneering his “K-Mart Realism.” A gentle guy who had to fight his way through life, this was Carver’s honest response to South America’s “Magic Realism.” His version was tales from the tired late-night shoppers you see in the glare of US discount stores, people who missed out on the dream, people with trouble coming down. What Harold Macy delivers is a kind of homegrown “Lucky Buck Mart Realism”; the kind you find in BC’s struggling mill-towns, where nobody passes the day-olds without a long look. His characters don’t lug around a grievance that they’ve been wronged somewhere—they bump along with fate and the ordinariness of their limited futures. If there’s magic it’s in a kid’s laugh, a lucky break, a moment of faith, or in the humble joys of what Buddhism calls “everyday sacraments”—loyalty in a marriage, the constancy of old friendships, good neighbours. That’s the real magic Macy understands.
Bill Kittredge, another Cascadia-affiliated writer, has noted that as a writer if you’re not flirting with sentimentality, you’re not in the ball park. Macy’s stories sometimes flit near that candle flame, but that doesn’t mean nostalgia for a romanticized past with the moral narrowing that can bring. Smart artists know nostalgia never goes out of fashion. It reinvents itself a step away from the age confronting it. Macy’s Vancouver Island isn’t too far off Jack Hodgins’ fabled territory. People complain, help each other out, indulge in superbly rendered platitudes during family gatherings as in “House, Waving Goodbye,” where no one’s life has turned out quite as hoped for by a widowed mom and grandmother. Even the title story itself is a bittersweet hymn to hermits and off-the-grid loners that the Courtenay-Merville area has always attracted, including a loopy old geezer that the story narrator says he’d “been carrying in my heart the past week.” There’s a glimpse here of the realizations that might come from long, solitary retreats along the Tsolum River in close company with wild critters that pad around in frozen winter without any shoes or socks on.
“Gelignite,” one of the collection’s best, offers insight into why an Okanagan farm–raised wife might simply drive off one day after thirty years of marriage, encounter a stranger in a Princeton pub, and venture even further. You can hear echoes of Jane Rule and Anne Cameron in her voice when she says, “How often do you get another chance?”
The bush is another country. Macy’s known it forever. “Unclipped” and “Into the Silverthrone Caldera” depict the shattering side of life when horrendous job-site accidents or catastrophic mash-ups crash like lightning, destroying everything utterly. Taut moral fables like “Donkey Shame” and “Ditch Clothes” depict paying-it-forward justice when The Other finally arrives in a strange reversal of fate reminiscent of Alice Munro at the controls.
The book’s one long-form contribution, “Overburdened,” relates a tale of Gulf Island migrant newcomers, land developers and the mechanics of sub-soil resource “harvesting.” Achieving moments of real narrative sophistication, there’s plot and a mystery that’s too BC to be purely invented, but what a fine yarn it is. Unless you’ve lived your entire life in downtown Vancouver, everyone in BC has a little bit of country in them, don’t they? That’s just enough to savour these welcome accounts from a wily storyteller who knows what it’s all about. 9781990776007
Trevor Carolan’s most recent book is Road Trips: Journeys in the Unspoiled World (Mother Tongue, 2020).
--
BOOKS:
The Four Storey Forest: As Grow the Trees, So Too The Heart (Poplar Publishing, 2011) $20 978-0-9685838-0-7
San Josef (Tidewater Press, 2019) $20.00 9781775165989
See ORMSBY REVIEW for a review of the above title
All the Bears Sing: Stories (Harbour Publishing, 2022) $24.95 978-1990776007
[BCBW 2022]
