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the berry takes the shape of the blame (Talonbooks $18.95) unfolds as a narrative born from optimism amid loss, pain, difficulty, and fear. Initially, a linear portrayal of a contented and secure trans person's life, the poems evolve into snapshots of diverse moments. These verses resonate with varied emotions, surfacing as anxiety, anger, love, or eagerness, reflecting the complexity of human experience.
The collection weaves around intertwined themes of gender, family, trans pregnancy, abuse, fear, and the process of becoming. Each poem acts as a witness, some holding grudges while others break free from them. Drawing a parallel to the growth of blueberries, where the berry assumes the shape of the bloom preceding it, the poems explore the intricate connections between past and present, much like the evolving stages of a bloom transforming into a berry. The narrator's reflection on displacement and the question of whether they "berry" encapsulates the overarching theme of identity and the intricate dance between individual growth and familial influence.
As a UBC Creative Writing graduate, Hamilton, Ontario-raised andrea bennett, is a nonbinary National Magazine Award–winning writer, editor, and illustrator who lives in Ayjoo mixw (Powell River), BC. Their first book of essays, Like a Boy but Not a Boy: Navigating Life, Mental Health, and Parenthood outside the Gender Binary (Arsenal Pulp Press, 2020), was a CBC Books’ pick for the top Canadian non-fiction of the year. andrea’s poetry and non-fiction have been widely published in magazines and newspapers such as the Walrus, the Atlantic, Hazlitt, Maisonneuve, the Tyee, the Globe and Mail, Reader’s Digest, Vice, Geist, CV2, Grain, the Fiddlehead, the Malahat Review, and Arc. With Kim Fu they co-host The Rough Puffs, a Great British Bake Off rewatch podcast now entering its third season.
***
the berry takes the shape of the bloom
by andrea bennett (Talonbooks $18.95)
Review by Heidi Greco i (BCBW 2024)
A recent encounter with work by andrea bennett was an article they wrote for The Tyee. The piece was about a “ghost trestle”—an old wooden bridge that was once used to transport newly-felled logs to the water, which then (in the early 1900s) was the standard means by which timber was moved. Part of that article dealt with some history regarding the issue of how to rename the town of Powell River, where some of the citizens were having problems with their home being named after Israel Powell, a provincial superintendent of Indian Affairs.
Israel Powell was a man who’d played a role in sending Indigenous children to residential schools and in enforcing laws in the townsite that severely restricted access for the local First Nation people.
Those of us in the settler population have grown more accustomed to these place name changes, just as those of us remaining in the cis-gendered populace are learning more about what it means to be non-binary like bennett. Some of the prose poems in their new poetry collection address bennett’s life experiences and speak directly to this:
People visited our town on the weekends because there was a natural-food store whose name recalled Biblical plenty. Archways into the alleys where horses used to be kept. A bookseller who rescued orphaned raccoons. Waterfalls off this road and that. Down that street I got called one name for wrong gender and then another and a Frosty burst at my feet. Another time I was still the wrong gender but a man slowed his car down and told me all the things he’d do to make my wrong body his.
Some of the poems (all untitled) track subjects bennett has written about before. The subtitle of Like a Boy but Not a Boy (Arsenal Pulp, 2020), their previous nonfiction book, reveals its content: Navigating Life, Mental Health, and Parenthood outside the Gender Binary. Many of the topics covered in those essays resurface here, but this time those subjects reveal themselves through poetry.
Food serves as the predominant metaphor, not surprising from a book with berries on its cover. The imagery is most evocative in the pieces that track their pregnancy, with “…the embryo…likened to food: sesame seed, chickpea, kidney bean” and later to lime, or fig; then “Bell pepper, half a footlong, a small cantaloupe.”
Those berries on the book cover provide substance for a poem that’s too long to cite, but one that describes how blueberries grow from “a bloom that looks like a proto-berry” and that the berry later resembles its predecessor. They extend this descriptor to the role of parent and child where “…the daughter is the blueberry and the mother is the bloom who came before it.” Yet that is not the case here, with bennett addressing in another piece what seems like a “non-relationship” with their mother:
They want me to love my mother but I nothing my mother.
Despite the many uses of food in bennett’s poems—melons, eggs, chickens, pigs, pineapples—the pivot for these is the counterpoint of hunger. And along with hunger comes its contemporary bugaboo, our obsession with weight: “I can tell you how many calories are in an apple and how many calories make up a pound,” bennett writes. But they also acknowledge hungers beyond those of physical cravings when they write of anger as a kind of appetite that can get stuck inside, and conclude one poem with the line, “I swallowed it all and I was still hungry.”
In addition to their work as a reporter and a creative writer, bennett is a skilled graphic artist. Their artwork graces the covers of a number of books that I love—poetry collections by Jennica Harper and Arleen Paré, and a wonderful novel from the Québecois author, Christian Guay-Poliquin. Interspersed between the sections of this book are a few of bennett’s fine line drawings. Their skill in so many artistic pursuits, not all that uncommon in many who write, seems to be yet another aspect of the freedom implied by the non-binary “label” (if the term “label” can be applied)—a freedom to explore, to avoid being pigeon-holed into any one genre or mode of expression. 9781772015515
Heidi Greco is a cis-female who works in Surrey on the land of the Semiahmoo First Nation.
++++
BOOKS:
Canoodlers (Nightwood, 2014) $18.95 9780889712973
Like a Boy but Not a Boy: Navigating Life, Mental Health, and Parenthood outside the Gender Binary (Arsenal Pulp Press, 2020) $21.95 9781551528212
the berry takes the shape of the bloom (Talonbooks, 2023) $18.95 9781772015515
[BCBW 2023]
***
Points of Interest: In Search of the Places, People, and Stories of B.C.
Edited by David Beers & andrea bennett (Greystone $24.95)
Review by Heidi Greco (BCBW 2024)
Readers of the online news provider, The Tyee, will be familiar with the names of many of the writers whose work is included in this anthology. Their articles take us the length and breadth of the province, from Atlin to Victoria; Bella Coola to Creston. Better than any road trip I’ve yet managed, these stories about our province make me hungry to explore.
Points of Interest editors David Beers and andrea bennett have selected a range of writings that span more than geography. “Many people are drawn to this far western side of Canada because spiritually, intellectually, viscerally, they know they belong on that edge,” says Beers in his introduction. “This book offers thirty opportunities to sample such essences, through voices as varied as our sprawling, geographically and culturally diverse province.”
And sprawling they are. Neil Griffin offers an array of facts about the always-intriguing monkey puzzle tree, from its prehistoric origins in the mountainous regions of Chile to tracking how it made its way to Vancouver Island and beyond. Another treasure revealed, this time a human one, is a down-to-earth conversation with the late author, Anne Cameron at her home in the remote village of Tahsis. Cameron’s publisher, Howard White, has called her “the William Faulkner of the B.C. coast,” an accolade that rises from her skill at describing our coast. An author with opinions both strong and plainly put, when asked how she’d like to be remembered, Cameron replied, “I don’t think we should make a big point of remembering anybody. We should maybe just put all our energy into making things better for the next bunch.”
Several writers concern themselves with ways that indeed are making things better, like Jim Grieshaber-Otto who runs a family farm in Agassiz. With help from UBC’s Community Supported Agriculture program, they’ve learned to grow wheat, along with rye and oats. As journalist Christopher Cheung points out, “the vast majority of B.C.’s grain comes from the Peace River region,” yet by the time you read this, a great deal of that valuable farmland in the Peace will have been flooded by the extensive reservoir of water at Site C. It’s probably a good thing that farmers in the rainy Lower Mainland are learning how to grow the grains we rely upon for our daily bread.
Meghan Mast’s piece puts its focus on Gina Laing, now in her seventies, who endured ten years in residential school as a child. Laing’s memories range from idyllic scenes of bathing in the river with her grandmothers (before being taken away) to the day she sat planning her own death, a gun held to her mouth (after returning home). Luckily for her—and us—she was saved from suicide. Among many accomplishments in her life, she testified at the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s hearings. The stories she shares are heartbreaking and include having to hide from her own father, who’d also gone through the residential school system. Mast cites an anthropologist who compares the intergenerational trauma felt by our Indigenous sisters and brothers to those of the children of Holocaust survivors.
Some of the pieces raise more questions than they answer. Michelle Gamage writes about the aftermath of 2021’s White Rock Lake fire “north of Kelowna...along the highway toward Kamloops.” It burned “an area seven times the size of Vancouver and caused at least $77 million in insured damage.” As with any fire—forest-based or restricted to a single dwelling—there are challenges when it comes to dealing with insurance providers. In the fire Gamage writes about, such matters are further complicated because many of the victims include those unable to acquire the small protection afforded by insurance, all because companies often refuse to sell a policy to those who live in situations deemed high-risk.
And no book about our beautiful province would be complete without discussions of the natural resources here, and about the ways they’ve been depleted. Arno Kopecky’s piece, originally published on The Tyee in 2021, brings voices from both sides of the dispute at Fairy Creek. Still, it’s hard to think about “trees that range from 250 to two thousand years old” being felled. The current state of dwindling wild salmon populations is in stark contrast to a comment included in Colleen Kimmett’s piece, “Xwìsten” where Chico Williams, a ferry operator on the Fraser River claims that “migrating sockeye would be so thick…you could walk across the river without getting your feet wet.”
As Michael John Lo points out in his piece about Cumberland, “A museum is a place that holds stories of the past…also a place that holds space for the present.” Like just such a museum, this book takes us on adventures most of us will never experience: a cattle drive, a rather pokey train ride, hours of travel by boat to simply pick up the mail. You might like to think of it as a road trip of the mind—full of promises of places to go, come summer again. 9781778401381
Heidi Greco lives on the territory of the Semiahmoo First Nation in Surrey where, according to one of the “Quick Facts” at the end of each chapter in Points of Interest, Lady Gaga once played a gig with tickets going for $25.
The collection weaves around intertwined themes of gender, family, trans pregnancy, abuse, fear, and the process of becoming. Each poem acts as a witness, some holding grudges while others break free from them. Drawing a parallel to the growth of blueberries, where the berry assumes the shape of the bloom preceding it, the poems explore the intricate connections between past and present, much like the evolving stages of a bloom transforming into a berry. The narrator's reflection on displacement and the question of whether they "berry" encapsulates the overarching theme of identity and the intricate dance between individual growth and familial influence.
As a UBC Creative Writing graduate, Hamilton, Ontario-raised andrea bennett, is a nonbinary National Magazine Award–winning writer, editor, and illustrator who lives in Ayjoo mixw (Powell River), BC. Their first book of essays, Like a Boy but Not a Boy: Navigating Life, Mental Health, and Parenthood outside the Gender Binary (Arsenal Pulp Press, 2020), was a CBC Books’ pick for the top Canadian non-fiction of the year. andrea’s poetry and non-fiction have been widely published in magazines and newspapers such as the Walrus, the Atlantic, Hazlitt, Maisonneuve, the Tyee, the Globe and Mail, Reader’s Digest, Vice, Geist, CV2, Grain, the Fiddlehead, the Malahat Review, and Arc. With Kim Fu they co-host The Rough Puffs, a Great British Bake Off rewatch podcast now entering its third season.
***
the berry takes the shape of the bloom
by andrea bennett (Talonbooks $18.95)
Review by Heidi Greco i (BCBW 2024)
A recent encounter with work by andrea bennett was an article they wrote for The Tyee. The piece was about a “ghost trestle”—an old wooden bridge that was once used to transport newly-felled logs to the water, which then (in the early 1900s) was the standard means by which timber was moved. Part of that article dealt with some history regarding the issue of how to rename the town of Powell River, where some of the citizens were having problems with their home being named after Israel Powell, a provincial superintendent of Indian Affairs.
Israel Powell was a man who’d played a role in sending Indigenous children to residential schools and in enforcing laws in the townsite that severely restricted access for the local First Nation people.
Those of us in the settler population have grown more accustomed to these place name changes, just as those of us remaining in the cis-gendered populace are learning more about what it means to be non-binary like bennett. Some of the prose poems in their new poetry collection address bennett’s life experiences and speak directly to this:
People visited our town on the weekends because there was a natural-food store whose name recalled Biblical plenty. Archways into the alleys where horses used to be kept. A bookseller who rescued orphaned raccoons. Waterfalls off this road and that. Down that street I got called one name for wrong gender and then another and a Frosty burst at my feet. Another time I was still the wrong gender but a man slowed his car down and told me all the things he’d do to make my wrong body his.
Some of the poems (all untitled) track subjects bennett has written about before. The subtitle of Like a Boy but Not a Boy (Arsenal Pulp, 2020), their previous nonfiction book, reveals its content: Navigating Life, Mental Health, and Parenthood outside the Gender Binary. Many of the topics covered in those essays resurface here, but this time those subjects reveal themselves through poetry.
Food serves as the predominant metaphor, not surprising from a book with berries on its cover. The imagery is most evocative in the pieces that track their pregnancy, with “…the embryo…likened to food: sesame seed, chickpea, kidney bean” and later to lime, or fig; then “Bell pepper, half a footlong, a small cantaloupe.”
Those berries on the book cover provide substance for a poem that’s too long to cite, but one that describes how blueberries grow from “a bloom that looks like a proto-berry” and that the berry later resembles its predecessor. They extend this descriptor to the role of parent and child where “…the daughter is the blueberry and the mother is the bloom who came before it.” Yet that is not the case here, with bennett addressing in another piece what seems like a “non-relationship” with their mother:
They want me to love my mother but I nothing my mother.
Despite the many uses of food in bennett’s poems—melons, eggs, chickens, pigs, pineapples—the pivot for these is the counterpoint of hunger. And along with hunger comes its contemporary bugaboo, our obsession with weight: “I can tell you how many calories are in an apple and how many calories make up a pound,” bennett writes. But they also acknowledge hungers beyond those of physical cravings when they write of anger as a kind of appetite that can get stuck inside, and conclude one poem with the line, “I swallowed it all and I was still hungry.”
In addition to their work as a reporter and a creative writer, bennett is a skilled graphic artist. Their artwork graces the covers of a number of books that I love—poetry collections by Jennica Harper and Arleen Paré, and a wonderful novel from the Québecois author, Christian Guay-Poliquin. Interspersed between the sections of this book are a few of bennett’s fine line drawings. Their skill in so many artistic pursuits, not all that uncommon in many who write, seems to be yet another aspect of the freedom implied by the non-binary “label” (if the term “label” can be applied)—a freedom to explore, to avoid being pigeon-holed into any one genre or mode of expression. 9781772015515
Heidi Greco is a cis-female who works in Surrey on the land of the Semiahmoo First Nation.
++++
BOOKS:
Canoodlers (Nightwood, 2014) $18.95 9780889712973
Like a Boy but Not a Boy: Navigating Life, Mental Health, and Parenthood outside the Gender Binary (Arsenal Pulp Press, 2020) $21.95 9781551528212
the berry takes the shape of the bloom (Talonbooks, 2023) $18.95 9781772015515
[BCBW 2023]
***
Points of Interest: In Search of the Places, People, and Stories of B.C.
Edited by David Beers & andrea bennett (Greystone $24.95)
Review by Heidi Greco (BCBW 2024)
Readers of the online news provider, The Tyee, will be familiar with the names of many of the writers whose work is included in this anthology. Their articles take us the length and breadth of the province, from Atlin to Victoria; Bella Coola to Creston. Better than any road trip I’ve yet managed, these stories about our province make me hungry to explore.
Points of Interest editors David Beers and andrea bennett have selected a range of writings that span more than geography. “Many people are drawn to this far western side of Canada because spiritually, intellectually, viscerally, they know they belong on that edge,” says Beers in his introduction. “This book offers thirty opportunities to sample such essences, through voices as varied as our sprawling, geographically and culturally diverse province.”
And sprawling they are. Neil Griffin offers an array of facts about the always-intriguing monkey puzzle tree, from its prehistoric origins in the mountainous regions of Chile to tracking how it made its way to Vancouver Island and beyond. Another treasure revealed, this time a human one, is a down-to-earth conversation with the late author, Anne Cameron at her home in the remote village of Tahsis. Cameron’s publisher, Howard White, has called her “the William Faulkner of the B.C. coast,” an accolade that rises from her skill at describing our coast. An author with opinions both strong and plainly put, when asked how she’d like to be remembered, Cameron replied, “I don’t think we should make a big point of remembering anybody. We should maybe just put all our energy into making things better for the next bunch.”
Several writers concern themselves with ways that indeed are making things better, like Jim Grieshaber-Otto who runs a family farm in Agassiz. With help from UBC’s Community Supported Agriculture program, they’ve learned to grow wheat, along with rye and oats. As journalist Christopher Cheung points out, “the vast majority of B.C.’s grain comes from the Peace River region,” yet by the time you read this, a great deal of that valuable farmland in the Peace will have been flooded by the extensive reservoir of water at Site C. It’s probably a good thing that farmers in the rainy Lower Mainland are learning how to grow the grains we rely upon for our daily bread.
Meghan Mast’s piece puts its focus on Gina Laing, now in her seventies, who endured ten years in residential school as a child. Laing’s memories range from idyllic scenes of bathing in the river with her grandmothers (before being taken away) to the day she sat planning her own death, a gun held to her mouth (after returning home). Luckily for her—and us—she was saved from suicide. Among many accomplishments in her life, she testified at the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s hearings. The stories she shares are heartbreaking and include having to hide from her own father, who’d also gone through the residential school system. Mast cites an anthropologist who compares the intergenerational trauma felt by our Indigenous sisters and brothers to those of the children of Holocaust survivors.
Some of the pieces raise more questions than they answer. Michelle Gamage writes about the aftermath of 2021’s White Rock Lake fire “north of Kelowna...along the highway toward Kamloops.” It burned “an area seven times the size of Vancouver and caused at least $77 million in insured damage.” As with any fire—forest-based or restricted to a single dwelling—there are challenges when it comes to dealing with insurance providers. In the fire Gamage writes about, such matters are further complicated because many of the victims include those unable to acquire the small protection afforded by insurance, all because companies often refuse to sell a policy to those who live in situations deemed high-risk.
And no book about our beautiful province would be complete without discussions of the natural resources here, and about the ways they’ve been depleted. Arno Kopecky’s piece, originally published on The Tyee in 2021, brings voices from both sides of the dispute at Fairy Creek. Still, it’s hard to think about “trees that range from 250 to two thousand years old” being felled. The current state of dwindling wild salmon populations is in stark contrast to a comment included in Colleen Kimmett’s piece, “Xwìsten” where Chico Williams, a ferry operator on the Fraser River claims that “migrating sockeye would be so thick…you could walk across the river without getting your feet wet.”
As Michael John Lo points out in his piece about Cumberland, “A museum is a place that holds stories of the past…also a place that holds space for the present.” Like just such a museum, this book takes us on adventures most of us will never experience: a cattle drive, a rather pokey train ride, hours of travel by boat to simply pick up the mail. You might like to think of it as a road trip of the mind—full of promises of places to go, come summer again. 9781778401381
Heidi Greco lives on the territory of the Semiahmoo First Nation in Surrey where, according to one of the “Quick Facts” at the end of each chapter in Points of Interest, Lady Gaga once played a gig with tickets going for $25.
