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Imagining British Columbia
According to Howard White's guest foreword for Imagining British Columbia: Land, Memory & Place (Anvil $18), a new anthology edited by Daniel Francis, when Knowledge Network broadcast a documentary on the life of coastal pioneer Jim Spilsbury, it drew the highest weekday audience the network ever had. So, as White puts it, "Culture is not the symphony, any more than transportation is a Lear Jet.";
Editor Daniel Francis obviously concurs, having gathered a diverse and far-reaching collection of nineteen creative non-fiction works from the Federation of BC Writers members such as George Fetherling, Jan Drabek, Deanna Kawatski, Trevor Carolan, Harold Rhenisch and Pauline Holdstock.
Working on seiners in Barkley Sound. Encounters with grizzlies. Family road trips in the Sixties. Revisiting the family farm. Recalling Shuswap family history and a shell-shocked father's suicide. Mostly these attempts to locate our identity with a place veer towards the deeply personal. The noteworthy exception is Margaret Thompson's astute essay about how land itself can provide solace and fortify us with a sense of geological time.
Thompson, a former Federation president, recognizes one of the great shortcomings of contemporary life in B.C., a lack of what she calls "the weight of history."; In Europe, where she was raised, she was always reassured by the presence of the past, that sense of being with a continuum of human existence.
"Over there,"; Thompson writes, "the past is everywhere present: Roman roads march across country, like their legions, ruler-straight and still used; their aqueducts still straddle the rivers and fields; traffic whirls about their theatres and coliseums; the fractured remains of ancient columns support pots of herbs in Greek gardens; in Dr. Johnson's favourite tavern, The Cheshire Cheese, modern backsides polish his customary bench every day; city dwellers hurry down streets whose names still spell out the identities of those who lived and worked there hundreds of years before-Pudding Lane, Rue des Martyrs, The Shambles, Rue des Juifs.";
As a former European, Thompson now grapples with her Old World sensibility that thrived on things ancient. "On Canada's western edge nothing seemed to carry the weight of ages.";
And so the importance of land-the ancient land-takes on deeper significance in British Columbia as a compensation for the relative newness of our buildings, of our man-made leavings. 978-1895636-90-1
-- Alan Twigg / BC BookWorld
Editor Daniel Francis obviously concurs, having gathered a diverse and far-reaching collection of nineteen creative non-fiction works from the Federation of BC Writers members such as George Fetherling, Jan Drabek, Deanna Kawatski, Trevor Carolan, Harold Rhenisch and Pauline Holdstock.
Working on seiners in Barkley Sound. Encounters with grizzlies. Family road trips in the Sixties. Revisiting the family farm. Recalling Shuswap family history and a shell-shocked father's suicide. Mostly these attempts to locate our identity with a place veer towards the deeply personal. The noteworthy exception is Margaret Thompson's astute essay about how land itself can provide solace and fortify us with a sense of geological time.
Thompson, a former Federation president, recognizes one of the great shortcomings of contemporary life in B.C., a lack of what she calls "the weight of history."; In Europe, where she was raised, she was always reassured by the presence of the past, that sense of being with a continuum of human existence.
"Over there,"; Thompson writes, "the past is everywhere present: Roman roads march across country, like their legions, ruler-straight and still used; their aqueducts still straddle the rivers and fields; traffic whirls about their theatres and coliseums; the fractured remains of ancient columns support pots of herbs in Greek gardens; in Dr. Johnson's favourite tavern, The Cheshire Cheese, modern backsides polish his customary bench every day; city dwellers hurry down streets whose names still spell out the identities of those who lived and worked there hundreds of years before-Pudding Lane, Rue des Martyrs, The Shambles, Rue des Juifs.";
As a former European, Thompson now grapples with her Old World sensibility that thrived on things ancient. "On Canada's western edge nothing seemed to carry the weight of ages.";
And so the importance of land-the ancient land-takes on deeper significance in British Columbia as a compensation for the relative newness of our buildings, of our man-made leavings. 978-1895636-90-1
-- Alan Twigg / BC BookWorld
Submitted on June 16, 2008 in By David.
