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Imagining British Columbia: Land, Memory & Place
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 Howard White maintains in his guest foreword to Imagining British Columbia: Land, Memory & Place (Anvil $18), "Culture is not the symphony, any more than transportation is a Lear Jet.";
Editor Daniel Francis obviously concurs in his selection of 19 far-reaching creative non-fiction works from 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. Recalling Shuswap family history and a shell-shocked father's suicide. Encounters with grizzlies. 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 can fortify us with a sense of geological time.
Thompson suggests that contemporary B.C. life can often lack "the weight of history."; In Europe, 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...";
And so the importance of land in B.C.-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
[BCBW 2008] "Non-Fiction"
So, as Howard White maintains in his guest foreword to Imagining British Columbia: Land, Memory & Place (Anvil $18), "Culture is not the symphony, any more than transportation is a Lear Jet.";
Editor Daniel Francis obviously concurs in his selection of 19 far-reaching creative non-fiction works from 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. Recalling Shuswap family history and a shell-shocked father's suicide. Encounters with grizzlies. 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 can fortify us with a sense of geological time.
Thompson suggests that contemporary B.C. life can often lack "the weight of history."; In Europe, 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...";
And so the importance of land in B.C.-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
[BCBW 2008] "Non-Fiction"
Submitted on September 5, 2008 in By David.
