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In 2014, the much-nominated M.A.C. (Marion) Farrant received the $5,000 City of Victoria Butler Prize for her fiction collection, The World Afloat: Miniatures.
Farrant's work had been nominated for many awards including The Butler Prize, the Commonwealth Writers Prize, the Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize, the VanCity Book Prize, the National Magazine Awards, the Gemini Awards and two Jessie Richardson Theatre Awards for her play My Turquoise Years.
Born in Sydney, Australia, M.A.C. Farrant of North Saanich is the author of mostly satirical and philosophical short fiction [see list below], as well as the novel-length memoir, My Turquoise Years, a book of essays/humour, The Secret Lives of Litterbugs, and the stage adaptation of her memoir, My Turquoise Years, which premiered April 4- May 4, 2013 at the Arts Club Theatre's Granville Island Stage in Vancouver.
Her stories have been described as absurdist skewerings of family life. [See John Moore's review of The World Afloat: Miniatures -- provided below] Her work has been dramatized for television and appears frequently on CBC Radio. She has published in magazines such as Adbusters and Geist. Her many anthology contributions include "And Other Stories"; (Ed. George Bowering, Talonbooks, 2001) and a commissioned piece on the work of Leon Rooke, (Exile Editions, 2003). She has been the West Coast organizer of the annual Canadian small press ReLit Awards, Co-Organizer, with Pauline Holdstock, of the Sidney Reading Series, 1994-2003, 2005-2007, and a faculty member at UVic's Creative Writing Department, the Banff Centre, the Victoria School of Writing, and was Writer-in-Residence at Macquarrie University in Sydney Australia. Also a former social worker, she has since become a full-time writer.
Farrant's memoir My Turquoise Years mainly focusses upon her family life when she was living in Cordova Bay in Victoria. It became the basis for her stage play, My Turquoise Years, a comic coming-of-age story set in 1960, a time of postwar optimism. In the stageplay, the narrator is fourteen. Plastic reigned and the colour turquoise was the height of chic. Marion, raised by Aunt Elsie, has grown up hearing tales of her glamorous, globe-trotting mother, Nancy. Just as Marion is blossoming into womanhood, Nancy suddenly announces a visit to Canada, throwing everyone into a tizzy.
The Days: Forecasts, Warnings, Advice (Talonbooks 2016) is an absurdist guidebook made up of 90 short stories collected into three sections that delve into the mundanity of life as well as what makes it special day after day. Farrant captures the ordinary moment in an average day and brings overwhelming truths to the readers' attention.
BOOKS:
Sick Pigeon (Thistledown, Press, 1991)
Raw Material (Arsenal Pulp Press, 1993)
Altered Statements (Arsenal Pulp Press, 1995)
Word of Mouth (Thistledown Press, 1996)
What's True, Darling (Polestar Books, 1997)
Girls Around The House (Polestar Books, 1999)
Darwin Alone In The Universe (Talonbooks, 2003)
My Turquoise Years (Greystone/Douglas & McIntyre, 2004)
The Breakdown So Far (Talonbooks, 2007)
The Secret Lives of Litterbugs And Other (True) Stories (Key Porter, 2009)
Down the Road to Eternity: New & Selected Fiction (Talonbooks, 2009)
The Strange Truth About Us - a novel of absence (Talonbooks, 2011) 978-0-088922-668-5 $16.95
The World Afloat: Miniatures (Talonbooks, 2014) $12.95 978-0-88922-838-2
The Days: Forecasts, Warnings, Advice (Talonbooks, 2016) $14.95 978-1-77201-007-7
The Great Happiness (Talonbooks, 2019) $14.95 978-1-77201-221-7
One good thing: a living memoir (Talonbooks, 2021) $19.95 978-1-77201-284-2
Chapbooks:
Raw Material (Berkeley Horse/1989)
childless (Berkeley Horse/91)
Poor Norman (Berkeley Horse/93)
MAC (Prose & Contexts/94)
Three (Prose & Contexts/96)
Diana Ross In Wax (Prose & Contexts/97)
Gifts (Hawthorne/Reference West/99)
The Art Tree (Far Field Press/01)
Television:
"Rob's Guns & Ammo" (from "Sick Pigeon" made into a 30 minute feature by Bravo! Television, 1995. Replayed many times.) Nominated for a Gemini Award for the actress Liisa Repo-Martel who played the lead role.
Awards:
Grain Magazine Writing Contest, 1st prize for "We Keep The Party Going", Saskatoon, Sask., April/02
BC Alternative Writing & Design Contest, 1st Prize for "Darwin Alone In The Universe" (fiction), Jan/02
Canada Council Grant to Creative Writers: 1994, 1998, 2001, 2003
British Columbia Arts Council: 1992, 1993, 1994, 1995, 1997, 1998
British Columbia Arts Council: Travel Grant (Australia), 1998
Canadian Department of Foreign Affairs & International Trade: Travel Grant (Australia), 1998
1996 Gemini Awards: Nominated for "Robs Guns & Ammo", Best Actress in a Short Dramatic Program
VanCity Women's Book Prize: 1994, Nominated for Raw Material (Arsenal, 1993)
Toronto Star Fiction Contest: 1994, Runner-up, "The Best Time"
Literary Writes V11, Fed of BC Writers: 1993, "Refusal"
Commonwealth Writers Prize: 1992, shortlisted for Sick Pigeon (Thistledown, 1991)
B.C. Book Prizes: 1992, shortlisted for Sick Pigeon (Thistledown, 1991)
Also:
- ReLit Awards, Host & organizer, West Coast event, June 28, 2003
- Judge, Fiction, 3Rd Annual Alternative Writing & Design Contest, Ripple Effect Press, Vancouver, B.C. January 2003
- Bowen Island Arts Festival, August 2002, Fiction workshop & reading
- Juror/(Fiction)/Organizer/MC, ReLit Awards, West Coast Event, June 2002
- Victoria School of Writing, Co-Judge (with Susan Mayse), Postcard Fiction Contest, May 2002
- Victoria School of Writing, Spring fiction course, April 2002
- Judge, Canadian Author's Association, Fiction Contest, Nov/Dec 2001
- Victoria School of Writing, Fall fiction course, October 2001
- Organizer/MC, ReLit Awards, West Coast Event (Pat Bay) June 16/01
- Victoria School of Writing, July 16-20, 2001, Faculty, Short Fiction
- Sidney Reading Series, 1994/95, 1995/96, 1996/97, 1997/98, 1998/99, 1999/2000, 2000/2001-- Co -Host & organizer with Pauline Holdstock, sponsored by the Sidney & North Saanich Community Arts Council & the Canada Council
- Reader/Judge, 1999 TWUC Short Fiction Contest
- Judge, Prism International Literary Magazine, University of British Columbia, Short Fiction Contest, Spring 1998
- Judge, Monday Magazine Fiction Contest, Victoria B.C. May 1997
- Correspondant, "Geist" magazine, Vancouver B.C. 1996 -
- Reader/Judge, 1995 TWUC Literary contest for emerging writers
- Consultant (representing TWUC), Ministry of Education, Language Arts English K - 12, Curriculum Review, Vancouver B.C. December 9, l994
- Jury, BC Cultural Fund Scholarship, Dept. Tourism and Culture, July l993 (with Linda Rogers & Michael Kenyon)
[BCBW 2021] "Fiction"
+++
One Good Thing: A Living Memoir by M.A.C. Farrant
(Talonbooks $19.95)
Review by Valerie Green
One is nearer God’s heart in a garden than anywhere else on earth,” wrote Dorothy Frances Gurney in her poem God’s Garden.
M.A.C. Farrant and gardening expert Helen Chestnut would likely agree. The two women are brought together in Farrant’s latest book, One Good Thing: A Living Memoir in which the creator of 17 works of fiction, memoirs and two plays has produced a collection of sixty-four short anecdotes in the form of letters written to Chestnut, the long-running Victoria Times-Colonist gardening columnist.
Chestnut is known for ingeniously weaving stories about people into her descriptions of gardening. By blending Chestnut’s columns with her own writing and thoughts, Farrant expands stories of mere vegetables, fruit and compost into larger matters of life.
“By now I’ve completely become beguiled by what you write,” Farrant says on her opening page to Chestnut, “as you offer so many metaphors with which to form one’s thoughts.”
Connecting gardening columns with universal themes would seem an impossible task, especially as Farrant admits to being “beyond the pale when it comes to gardening knowledge.” Nonetheless, through stories about producing ‘one good thing’—a cucumber—to tales about roses, daffodils, peas, the weather, geraniums, compost, soil, snapdragons, parsley, epic potatoes and even flies, Farrant profoundly and humorously takes her readers on a journey of discovery about life.
I admit I had not thought I would enjoy numerous short stories about gardening. Unlike my father and others in my family, I have never had a green thumb. Perhaps that is why I immediately connected with Farrant when she too admitted to her failings as a gardener.
The metaphors used by Farrant are especially relevant for everyone over the last eighteen months as we were all forced to adapt to a different life in a pandemic. She offers her readers numerous pearls of wisdom on coping and I appreciated that she also uses many motivational quotes from other writers such as Chinese poet Lu You, who wrote in The Classic of Tea:
The clouds above us join and separate, / The breeze in the courtyard leaves and returns. / Life is like that, so why not relax? / Who can stop us from celebrating?
Another quote Farrant uses comes from Diana Beresford-Kroeger’s The Sweetness of a Simple Life who tells us that by planting a tree, “together we can hold hands across the planet and repair the damage done in the past five hundred years. We will make a difference to nature, one by one and tree by tree.” What an empowering concept.
In Chapter 37, Farrant uses an operetta in three acts to describe how you can distinguish new gardeners from experienced ones. It’s a delightfully humorous example of Farrant’s wit and I especially enjoyed the reference to marigolds—possibly because my husband, who was new to gardening in his retirement years, now prides himself on his skill at growing those flowers. Farrant describes a dream in which she asked about marigolds and whether they counted for much when you were a beginning gardener. She was told: “Ah, marigolds, I don’t praise them. Their blooms hang on too long. They’re like opera singers performing way past anyone’s interest.” I told my husband that although I did admit his marigolds are indeed beautiful, they have no aroma and do tend to hang around too long. I then went into my rose garden.
Farrant often employs humour in her comparisons between gardening and life. In addition, she offers her readers many nuggets of information about her own life growing up and her current years living with her husband Terry in North Saanich. She is an accomplished observer of life and her experiences make for some thought-provoking prose. Farrant’s Zen-like, satirical views are both powerful and entertaining.
Her final observation is profound. She talks about the importance of a food garden in the backyard: “How ironic this must seem for a person lacking in gardening passion. But a phrase from the last century comes to mind: Needs must. And so we will plant, Helen. Calmly, with love.”
If you only take ‘one good thing’ away with you after digesting Farrant’s new title, I think it will be that you will want to read more of her work and more of Helen Chestnut’s columns. There is much to learn from both. 9781772012842
Valerie Green is the author of over twenty non-fiction historical and true-crime books. Her debut novel Providence will be published by Hancock House as the first in the “The McBride Chronicles” trilogy, an historical four-generational family saga bringing early B.C. history alive.
Jigsaw: A Puzzle in Ninety-Three Pieces
by M.A.C. Farrant (Talonbooks $17.95)
Interview by Beverly Cramp (BCBW 2023)
Puzzles “found me,” says M.A.C. Farrant in her book of short stories Jigsaw: A Puzzle in Ninety-Three Pieces. Friends had given Farrant and her husband a jigsaw puzzle during the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic to help cope with stress. “I wasn’t looking for them. But if a door opens, I always figure walk through it. You might end up in a closet, but you might also end up heading in a playful new direction, one you hadn’t considered before,” she adds. Farrant’s 93 short stories, inspired by her “puzzling,” are full of humour, irreverence and insights into the puzzle that is life. (If you want to know why there is a cow lounging on a sofa on the book jacket cover, read story #22, “With Reference to Cows.”)
BC BookWorld: Was the Covid lockdown really the first time you attempted a jigsaw puzzle?
M.A.C. Farrant: No, the Covid puzzles weren’t the first. There was one other, an ill-fated jigsaw years ago of a bear holding a salmon. It was Christmas and I had a Christmas card image in my head of a happy family working together on a jigsaw puzzle over the holidays. When the kids saw the pile of unsorted pieces on the card table, they balked, then laughed and said: “No way, not ever!” Terry (my husband) and I carried on with the puzzle but managed to only piece the sky, the head of the fish and a few trees. By then it was nearly March and the puzzle had become a burden. You could spend hours and hours working on it and find only one matching piece so that soon enough night would be falling with no supper in sight. It was a revelation when I told myself that some things in life could go unfinished and Terry agreed. Actually, pretty much everything could go unfinished, we decided, and especially this jigsaw puzzle, which we had come to hate.
BCBW: How often do you work on jigsaw puzzles?
MF: I came to my current interest in jigsaw puzzles as a jaded innocent. That one experience years before had killed my interest in them. Then, mid-way through the pandemic, friends loaned me two Wentworth Wooden puzzles, the elite of jigsaw puzzles with their “whimsy” pieces, inviting images, and smaller piece-count: 250, or 500. My friends thought the puzzles would help take my mind off case counts, death tolls, and variants. And they were right! Not only that, I enjoyed doing them.
So that is how it started, how jigsaw puzzles found me again. This curiosity and playfulness about jigsaw puzzles are what propelled me to write Jigsaw.
Now, I’ve become a happy assembler. I enjoy the fabulous sense of completion when I finish one. It’s called the “puzzler’s high,” I’m told.
BCBW: What is the most insightful thing you learned from puzzling?
MF: There are several:
Jigsaw puzzles are something we can control, unlike most of life, and most definitely, unlike time.
The picture on the jigsaw puzzle box is your guide to solving the puzzle. In life the guide is seldom as clear.
Working on a jigsaw puzzle is like riding on a train; it’s a single-track experience. Over and over you are sorting through and then interlocking puzzle pieces. This can be an exciting thing to do because your journey has a destination. Unlike your life, you know exactly where the journey ends.
In assembling a jigsaw, start with the edges then everything will fall into place.
As a beginner, never attempt a puzzle that has over 250 pieces. Once you have completed the requisite ten thousand hours of puzzle labour and are now a Master Puzzler, you can you move onto the larger puzzles.
Working on a jigsaw puzzle is an act of devotion.
BCBW: How long did it take you to recognize the metaphor for art in jigsaw puzzles?
MF: This happened pretty quickly, after my initial research into the history of jigsaws, that is, and coming upon some astounding facts such as, the global dollar value of jigsaw sales in 2019 was 9.96 billion and that in North America seven jigsaw puzzles are sold every minute. Every minute! The jigsaw puzzle industry is an enormous one. What, I began wondering, is going on?
Jigsaws as metaphors, speak to our continual efforts to solve the miraculous puzzle of our own lives and to the questions these puzzles pose. For example, The Puzzle of Good and Evil, Of Staying Sane, Of Discord, Of Love, Of Raising Children, Of Beauty, Of Why Are We Here? Of What Happens Next? These puzzles are endless!
A jigsaw as a metaphor can also be a mystery, a conundrum, a riddle, an enigma.
BCBW: When did you get the idea to tell your short stories about people, jigsaw puzzles and the puzzle that is life?
MF: As I leaned into the subject of jigsaw puzzles, both actual and as metaphors, many subjects presented themselves. Besides art as guides to the ineffable, roads and pathways, other things appeared: Buddhism, faith, bits of memoir, science, the universe, haiku poems, surrealism, and chickens. Even cows beckoned and found a place in the book.
BCBW: Not everyone becomes as enamoured with puzzles as you did (your husband, for example, became a “jigsaw dropout” after completing his first puzzle). What is it about your personality that makes you a “puzzler?”
MF: I, too, was a jigsaw dropout but, really, that state of mind can change. Jigsaws can enter your life as a source of meditation, pleasure, even joy. For me, curiosity, perseverance, focus, and the need for play in my life, (and the need for occasional distraction from the world scene) are what I now bring to a puzzle.
BCBW: Anything else you want to add?
MF: Yes, I’d like to return to the cows. They began wandering through the book as I was writing it like a herd of friendly muses and were such a delightful presence that I had to include them. There was something earthy, solid and grounding about them and I hope some of these qualities entered the book. Cows are why there’s an image of one on the cover—a painting by American artist Ethan Harper.
They took such a hold of me that, in support of Jigsaw’s release, I created several videos about a fictional Literary Cow Festival, which are posted online at thinairfestival.ca. My “interview” with Artistic Director, Bill Bovine (aka Bill Farrant, my son), is my favourite of the three I did. Here’s a bit of that interview:
Bill Bovine: I was quite taken aback by the cow on the book cover. It’s a fine representation of my friend, Larry, may he rest in packaging. Did you have any contact with his family? Were they aware of his likeness being portrayed on the cover?
Author: No, uh, this is an artistic, uh, endeavour, uh, the painting. I think it’s a generic cow. Any, uh, likeness to your friend, Larry, is I, I, I, uh, believe, purely accidental.
Bill Bovine: Fair enough, fair enough.
9781772015430
Farrant's work had been nominated for many awards including The Butler Prize, the Commonwealth Writers Prize, the Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize, the VanCity Book Prize, the National Magazine Awards, the Gemini Awards and two Jessie Richardson Theatre Awards for her play My Turquoise Years.
Born in Sydney, Australia, M.A.C. Farrant of North Saanich is the author of mostly satirical and philosophical short fiction [see list below], as well as the novel-length memoir, My Turquoise Years, a book of essays/humour, The Secret Lives of Litterbugs, and the stage adaptation of her memoir, My Turquoise Years, which premiered April 4- May 4, 2013 at the Arts Club Theatre's Granville Island Stage in Vancouver.
Her stories have been described as absurdist skewerings of family life. [See John Moore's review of The World Afloat: Miniatures -- provided below] Her work has been dramatized for television and appears frequently on CBC Radio. She has published in magazines such as Adbusters and Geist. Her many anthology contributions include "And Other Stories"; (Ed. George Bowering, Talonbooks, 2001) and a commissioned piece on the work of Leon Rooke, (Exile Editions, 2003). She has been the West Coast organizer of the annual Canadian small press ReLit Awards, Co-Organizer, with Pauline Holdstock, of the Sidney Reading Series, 1994-2003, 2005-2007, and a faculty member at UVic's Creative Writing Department, the Banff Centre, the Victoria School of Writing, and was Writer-in-Residence at Macquarrie University in Sydney Australia. Also a former social worker, she has since become a full-time writer.
Farrant's memoir My Turquoise Years mainly focusses upon her family life when she was living in Cordova Bay in Victoria. It became the basis for her stage play, My Turquoise Years, a comic coming-of-age story set in 1960, a time of postwar optimism. In the stageplay, the narrator is fourteen. Plastic reigned and the colour turquoise was the height of chic. Marion, raised by Aunt Elsie, has grown up hearing tales of her glamorous, globe-trotting mother, Nancy. Just as Marion is blossoming into womanhood, Nancy suddenly announces a visit to Canada, throwing everyone into a tizzy.
The Days: Forecasts, Warnings, Advice (Talonbooks 2016) is an absurdist guidebook made up of 90 short stories collected into three sections that delve into the mundanity of life as well as what makes it special day after day. Farrant captures the ordinary moment in an average day and brings overwhelming truths to the readers' attention.
BOOKS:
Sick Pigeon (Thistledown, Press, 1991)
Raw Material (Arsenal Pulp Press, 1993)
Altered Statements (Arsenal Pulp Press, 1995)
Word of Mouth (Thistledown Press, 1996)
What's True, Darling (Polestar Books, 1997)
Girls Around The House (Polestar Books, 1999)
Darwin Alone In The Universe (Talonbooks, 2003)
My Turquoise Years (Greystone/Douglas & McIntyre, 2004)
The Breakdown So Far (Talonbooks, 2007)
The Secret Lives of Litterbugs And Other (True) Stories (Key Porter, 2009)
Down the Road to Eternity: New & Selected Fiction (Talonbooks, 2009)
The Strange Truth About Us - a novel of absence (Talonbooks, 2011) 978-0-088922-668-5 $16.95
The World Afloat: Miniatures (Talonbooks, 2014) $12.95 978-0-88922-838-2
The Days: Forecasts, Warnings, Advice (Talonbooks, 2016) $14.95 978-1-77201-007-7
The Great Happiness (Talonbooks, 2019) $14.95 978-1-77201-221-7
One good thing: a living memoir (Talonbooks, 2021) $19.95 978-1-77201-284-2
Chapbooks:
Raw Material (Berkeley Horse/1989)
childless (Berkeley Horse/91)
Poor Norman (Berkeley Horse/93)
MAC (Prose & Contexts/94)
Three (Prose & Contexts/96)
Diana Ross In Wax (Prose & Contexts/97)
Gifts (Hawthorne/Reference West/99)
The Art Tree (Far Field Press/01)
Television:
"Rob's Guns & Ammo" (from "Sick Pigeon" made into a 30 minute feature by Bravo! Television, 1995. Replayed many times.) Nominated for a Gemini Award for the actress Liisa Repo-Martel who played the lead role.
Awards:
Grain Magazine Writing Contest, 1st prize for "We Keep The Party Going", Saskatoon, Sask., April/02
BC Alternative Writing & Design Contest, 1st Prize for "Darwin Alone In The Universe" (fiction), Jan/02
Canada Council Grant to Creative Writers: 1994, 1998, 2001, 2003
British Columbia Arts Council: 1992, 1993, 1994, 1995, 1997, 1998
British Columbia Arts Council: Travel Grant (Australia), 1998
Canadian Department of Foreign Affairs & International Trade: Travel Grant (Australia), 1998
1996 Gemini Awards: Nominated for "Robs Guns & Ammo", Best Actress in a Short Dramatic Program
VanCity Women's Book Prize: 1994, Nominated for Raw Material (Arsenal, 1993)
Toronto Star Fiction Contest: 1994, Runner-up, "The Best Time"
Literary Writes V11, Fed of BC Writers: 1993, "Refusal"
Commonwealth Writers Prize: 1992, shortlisted for Sick Pigeon (Thistledown, 1991)
B.C. Book Prizes: 1992, shortlisted for Sick Pigeon (Thistledown, 1991)
Also:
- ReLit Awards, Host & organizer, West Coast event, June 28, 2003
- Judge, Fiction, 3Rd Annual Alternative Writing & Design Contest, Ripple Effect Press, Vancouver, B.C. January 2003
- Bowen Island Arts Festival, August 2002, Fiction workshop & reading
- Juror/(Fiction)/Organizer/MC, ReLit Awards, West Coast Event, June 2002
- Victoria School of Writing, Co-Judge (with Susan Mayse), Postcard Fiction Contest, May 2002
- Victoria School of Writing, Spring fiction course, April 2002
- Judge, Canadian Author's Association, Fiction Contest, Nov/Dec 2001
- Victoria School of Writing, Fall fiction course, October 2001
- Organizer/MC, ReLit Awards, West Coast Event (Pat Bay) June 16/01
- Victoria School of Writing, July 16-20, 2001, Faculty, Short Fiction
- Sidney Reading Series, 1994/95, 1995/96, 1996/97, 1997/98, 1998/99, 1999/2000, 2000/2001-- Co -Host & organizer with Pauline Holdstock, sponsored by the Sidney & North Saanich Community Arts Council & the Canada Council
- Reader/Judge, 1999 TWUC Short Fiction Contest
- Judge, Prism International Literary Magazine, University of British Columbia, Short Fiction Contest, Spring 1998
- Judge, Monday Magazine Fiction Contest, Victoria B.C. May 1997
- Correspondant, "Geist" magazine, Vancouver B.C. 1996 -
- Reader/Judge, 1995 TWUC Literary contest for emerging writers
- Consultant (representing TWUC), Ministry of Education, Language Arts English K - 12, Curriculum Review, Vancouver B.C. December 9, l994
- Jury, BC Cultural Fund Scholarship, Dept. Tourism and Culture, July l993 (with Linda Rogers & Michael Kenyon)
[BCBW 2021] "Fiction"
+++
One Good Thing: A Living Memoir by M.A.C. Farrant
(Talonbooks $19.95)
Review by Valerie Green
One is nearer God’s heart in a garden than anywhere else on earth,” wrote Dorothy Frances Gurney in her poem God’s Garden.
M.A.C. Farrant and gardening expert Helen Chestnut would likely agree. The two women are brought together in Farrant’s latest book, One Good Thing: A Living Memoir in which the creator of 17 works of fiction, memoirs and two plays has produced a collection of sixty-four short anecdotes in the form of letters written to Chestnut, the long-running Victoria Times-Colonist gardening columnist.
Chestnut is known for ingeniously weaving stories about people into her descriptions of gardening. By blending Chestnut’s columns with her own writing and thoughts, Farrant expands stories of mere vegetables, fruit and compost into larger matters of life.
“By now I’ve completely become beguiled by what you write,” Farrant says on her opening page to Chestnut, “as you offer so many metaphors with which to form one’s thoughts.”
Connecting gardening columns with universal themes would seem an impossible task, especially as Farrant admits to being “beyond the pale when it comes to gardening knowledge.” Nonetheless, through stories about producing ‘one good thing’—a cucumber—to tales about roses, daffodils, peas, the weather, geraniums, compost, soil, snapdragons, parsley, epic potatoes and even flies, Farrant profoundly and humorously takes her readers on a journey of discovery about life.
I admit I had not thought I would enjoy numerous short stories about gardening. Unlike my father and others in my family, I have never had a green thumb. Perhaps that is why I immediately connected with Farrant when she too admitted to her failings as a gardener.
The metaphors used by Farrant are especially relevant for everyone over the last eighteen months as we were all forced to adapt to a different life in a pandemic. She offers her readers numerous pearls of wisdom on coping and I appreciated that she also uses many motivational quotes from other writers such as Chinese poet Lu You, who wrote in The Classic of Tea:
The clouds above us join and separate, / The breeze in the courtyard leaves and returns. / Life is like that, so why not relax? / Who can stop us from celebrating?
Another quote Farrant uses comes from Diana Beresford-Kroeger’s The Sweetness of a Simple Life who tells us that by planting a tree, “together we can hold hands across the planet and repair the damage done in the past five hundred years. We will make a difference to nature, one by one and tree by tree.” What an empowering concept.
In Chapter 37, Farrant uses an operetta in three acts to describe how you can distinguish new gardeners from experienced ones. It’s a delightfully humorous example of Farrant’s wit and I especially enjoyed the reference to marigolds—possibly because my husband, who was new to gardening in his retirement years, now prides himself on his skill at growing those flowers. Farrant describes a dream in which she asked about marigolds and whether they counted for much when you were a beginning gardener. She was told: “Ah, marigolds, I don’t praise them. Their blooms hang on too long. They’re like opera singers performing way past anyone’s interest.” I told my husband that although I did admit his marigolds are indeed beautiful, they have no aroma and do tend to hang around too long. I then went into my rose garden.
Farrant often employs humour in her comparisons between gardening and life. In addition, she offers her readers many nuggets of information about her own life growing up and her current years living with her husband Terry in North Saanich. She is an accomplished observer of life and her experiences make for some thought-provoking prose. Farrant’s Zen-like, satirical views are both powerful and entertaining.
Her final observation is profound. She talks about the importance of a food garden in the backyard: “How ironic this must seem for a person lacking in gardening passion. But a phrase from the last century comes to mind: Needs must. And so we will plant, Helen. Calmly, with love.”
If you only take ‘one good thing’ away with you after digesting Farrant’s new title, I think it will be that you will want to read more of her work and more of Helen Chestnut’s columns. There is much to learn from both. 9781772012842
Valerie Green is the author of over twenty non-fiction historical and true-crime books. Her debut novel Providence will be published by Hancock House as the first in the “The McBride Chronicles” trilogy, an historical four-generational family saga bringing early B.C. history alive.
Jigsaw: A Puzzle in Ninety-Three Pieces
by M.A.C. Farrant (Talonbooks $17.95)
Interview by Beverly Cramp (BCBW 2023)
Puzzles “found me,” says M.A.C. Farrant in her book of short stories Jigsaw: A Puzzle in Ninety-Three Pieces. Friends had given Farrant and her husband a jigsaw puzzle during the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic to help cope with stress. “I wasn’t looking for them. But if a door opens, I always figure walk through it. You might end up in a closet, but you might also end up heading in a playful new direction, one you hadn’t considered before,” she adds. Farrant’s 93 short stories, inspired by her “puzzling,” are full of humour, irreverence and insights into the puzzle that is life. (If you want to know why there is a cow lounging on a sofa on the book jacket cover, read story #22, “With Reference to Cows.”)
BC BookWorld: Was the Covid lockdown really the first time you attempted a jigsaw puzzle?
M.A.C. Farrant: No, the Covid puzzles weren’t the first. There was one other, an ill-fated jigsaw years ago of a bear holding a salmon. It was Christmas and I had a Christmas card image in my head of a happy family working together on a jigsaw puzzle over the holidays. When the kids saw the pile of unsorted pieces on the card table, they balked, then laughed and said: “No way, not ever!” Terry (my husband) and I carried on with the puzzle but managed to only piece the sky, the head of the fish and a few trees. By then it was nearly March and the puzzle had become a burden. You could spend hours and hours working on it and find only one matching piece so that soon enough night would be falling with no supper in sight. It was a revelation when I told myself that some things in life could go unfinished and Terry agreed. Actually, pretty much everything could go unfinished, we decided, and especially this jigsaw puzzle, which we had come to hate.
BCBW: How often do you work on jigsaw puzzles?
MF: I came to my current interest in jigsaw puzzles as a jaded innocent. That one experience years before had killed my interest in them. Then, mid-way through the pandemic, friends loaned me two Wentworth Wooden puzzles, the elite of jigsaw puzzles with their “whimsy” pieces, inviting images, and smaller piece-count: 250, or 500. My friends thought the puzzles would help take my mind off case counts, death tolls, and variants. And they were right! Not only that, I enjoyed doing them.
So that is how it started, how jigsaw puzzles found me again. This curiosity and playfulness about jigsaw puzzles are what propelled me to write Jigsaw.
Now, I’ve become a happy assembler. I enjoy the fabulous sense of completion when I finish one. It’s called the “puzzler’s high,” I’m told.
BCBW: What is the most insightful thing you learned from puzzling?
MF: There are several:
Jigsaw puzzles are something we can control, unlike most of life, and most definitely, unlike time.
The picture on the jigsaw puzzle box is your guide to solving the puzzle. In life the guide is seldom as clear.
Working on a jigsaw puzzle is like riding on a train; it’s a single-track experience. Over and over you are sorting through and then interlocking puzzle pieces. This can be an exciting thing to do because your journey has a destination. Unlike your life, you know exactly where the journey ends.
In assembling a jigsaw, start with the edges then everything will fall into place.
As a beginner, never attempt a puzzle that has over 250 pieces. Once you have completed the requisite ten thousand hours of puzzle labour and are now a Master Puzzler, you can you move onto the larger puzzles.
Working on a jigsaw puzzle is an act of devotion.
BCBW: How long did it take you to recognize the metaphor for art in jigsaw puzzles?
MF: This happened pretty quickly, after my initial research into the history of jigsaws, that is, and coming upon some astounding facts such as, the global dollar value of jigsaw sales in 2019 was 9.96 billion and that in North America seven jigsaw puzzles are sold every minute. Every minute! The jigsaw puzzle industry is an enormous one. What, I began wondering, is going on?
Jigsaws as metaphors, speak to our continual efforts to solve the miraculous puzzle of our own lives and to the questions these puzzles pose. For example, The Puzzle of Good and Evil, Of Staying Sane, Of Discord, Of Love, Of Raising Children, Of Beauty, Of Why Are We Here? Of What Happens Next? These puzzles are endless!
A jigsaw as a metaphor can also be a mystery, a conundrum, a riddle, an enigma.
BCBW: When did you get the idea to tell your short stories about people, jigsaw puzzles and the puzzle that is life?
MF: As I leaned into the subject of jigsaw puzzles, both actual and as metaphors, many subjects presented themselves. Besides art as guides to the ineffable, roads and pathways, other things appeared: Buddhism, faith, bits of memoir, science, the universe, haiku poems, surrealism, and chickens. Even cows beckoned and found a place in the book.
BCBW: Not everyone becomes as enamoured with puzzles as you did (your husband, for example, became a “jigsaw dropout” after completing his first puzzle). What is it about your personality that makes you a “puzzler?”
MF: I, too, was a jigsaw dropout but, really, that state of mind can change. Jigsaws can enter your life as a source of meditation, pleasure, even joy. For me, curiosity, perseverance, focus, and the need for play in my life, (and the need for occasional distraction from the world scene) are what I now bring to a puzzle.
BCBW: Anything else you want to add?
MF: Yes, I’d like to return to the cows. They began wandering through the book as I was writing it like a herd of friendly muses and were such a delightful presence that I had to include them. There was something earthy, solid and grounding about them and I hope some of these qualities entered the book. Cows are why there’s an image of one on the cover—a painting by American artist Ethan Harper.
They took such a hold of me that, in support of Jigsaw’s release, I created several videos about a fictional Literary Cow Festival, which are posted online at thinairfestival.ca. My “interview” with Artistic Director, Bill Bovine (aka Bill Farrant, my son), is my favourite of the three I did. Here’s a bit of that interview:
Bill Bovine: I was quite taken aback by the cow on the book cover. It’s a fine representation of my friend, Larry, may he rest in packaging. Did you have any contact with his family? Were they aware of his likeness being portrayed on the cover?
Author: No, uh, this is an artistic, uh, endeavour, uh, the painting. I think it’s a generic cow. Any, uh, likeness to your friend, Larry, is I, I, I, uh, believe, purely accidental.
Bill Bovine: Fair enough, fair enough.
9781772015430
Articles: 7 Articles for this author
Darwin Alone in the Universe (Talon $17.95)
Info
Exploring fiction's relationship to the corporate construction of reality, these stories show literature is an antidote to the media's stranglehold on imagination. Sounds heavy, but Farrant's writing is known for its playfulness. 0-88922-471-4
[Spring 2003 BCBW]
Girls Around the House (Polestar $18.95)
Info
Self-declared "anthropologist of the absurd";, M.A.C. Farrant is author of the award-winning What's True, Darling and co-producer of the Sidney Reading Series. Her alter-ego Marion in Girls Around the House (Polestar $18.95) is a fiction writer 'in a smallish town on a large-ish island'. In these stories she's a reluctant Mother Hubbard to a bingo-playing mother-in-law who lives in the basement like an ancient mysterious troll and three randy teenagers who have only one question in life: "Where's the party?"; Marion's husband forms a "Spouses of Writers Support Group"; and dreams of escape to a shed in the woods. When she's not writing haiku, former-hippie Marion embarks on monthly condom runs for her brood or cooks a book while composing supper. Domesticity wrestles creativity-and wins. 1-896095-93-3
[BCBW AUTUMN 1999]
The Congress of Human Wonders (Polestar $16.95)
Info
"The Care and Cultivation of Boring Relatives" is among the survival tips proferred by M.A.C. Farrant in The Congress of Human Wonders (Polestar $16.95), a collection of stories and advice.
1 896095 28 3
[BCBW 1997]
The Breakdown So Far
Promotional Copy
The Jonathan Swift of the bingo hall and elder-care, the Alexander Pope of pet-care and the dinner parties of the liberal intelligentsia, Marion Farrant continues her assault on the unaccountably disaffected and disillusioned of the Western world with The Breakdown So Far, her eighth volume of extremely short stories for those of us who seem to have lost both our way and our attention span. Unsparing in her critique of the New Age syncretism the mall culture has substituted for authentic emotion and belief, our adoption of Buddhism appears in her work as a rationalization for our ubiquitous materialism of the soul, Zen as our guiltless doctrine of neglect.
Yet as in all such relentlessly dystopian social parodies, there resides behind each of these brief entertainments a stifled scream for help, a trapped yearning for genuine human contact and sympathy, an arrested existential lust for meaning. Where has our sense of order, propriety, history and community gone? Farrant's stories beg to wonder-stories that span the stylistic range of personal journal, objective reportage, fiction, fantasy and writers' workshop exercise? In order to answer these questions, Farrant's new stories meticulously trace the breakdown of our language by ridding it of everything unnecessary and excessive: the breakdown of the post- Kierkegaard, post-Sartre existential position through its extension into the absurd; the breakdown of sense and sensibility through its alienation from perception; and the breakdown of discourse in literary craft, the social occasion and the commoditization of the individual and its attendant merchandizing of desire. Each of these stories is a new instance of the author's ongoing attempt at understanding language ironically-through itself-a willingness to let the deadly serious be as playful as it wants to be, a courageous shedding of what Tom Robbins called "the tyranny of the dull mind.";
-- Talonbooks, 2007
Down the Road to Eternity: New and Selected Fiction
Review
Down the Road to Eternity: New and Selected Fiction by M.A.C. Farrant (Talonbooks $19.95)
A self-proclaimed "archaeologist of the absurd,"; M.A.C.(Marion) Farrant of Sidney is perhaps Canada's most ascerbic and intelligent humourist. Farrant's stories are not fiction in any conventional sense. Don't expect to find much character development, or conflict, or plot (in other words, realism) on her pages.
Down the Road to Eternity: New and Selected Stories is a fantastic trip through twenty years of metaphorical and metaphysical imaginings.
Most of the stories are short, some no longer than a page. Other selections are essays, vignettes, stream-of-consciousness musings and internal monologues.
Throughout it is the author's wild imagination, her willingness to break the rules, that is on display, that creates the fireworks.
It seems Farrant can (and does) write convincingly on just about any subject, finding humour (and pathos) in the most unlikely places.
Where else would you find a conversation between Barbie and her younger sister Skipper, a funeral for a budgie who has committed suicide, or a man serving as material for his wife's fiction who lives in a cage?
Farrant's stories can be wickedly funny, but they are rarely clever for the sake of being clever (okay the description of the nativity scene made out of luncheon meat may be an exception).
Generally, though, there is a seriousness, an awareness of uncomfortable truths anchoring the metaphorical flights, and of course this is what the absurd is all about: finding a way to talk about things we can't talk about any other way.
Farrant is a trapeze artist of the imagination, swinging over the existential void.
We meet a hermit who digs himself a trench as a bulwark against a postmodern age, a man suffering from EDT (end times trauma), street poets facing extinction, and a husband who won't get off the couch until the polar ice cap stops melting.
The selections from Farrant's earliest collection, Sick Pigeon, though still fanciful, read more like conventional stories than her later ones, with their tales of the lonely and the dispossessed.
One story is about a nineteen-year-old welfare mother with seventeen cats who barricades the door against the social workers. They are always asking, "How does it feel, Sybilla, to be on welfare? Oh terrific. No, really Sybilla, how does it really make you feel?";
In her second collection, Raw Material, Farrant unleashes her genius for the absurd. Her writing becomes more daring, more zany.
In The Comma Threat, a woman is giving away commas. "I gave some to my aunt to decorate her curtains; she flung handfuls of them against the drapes hoping for a Jackson Pollock effect."; When all the commas are gone, the piece turns into one long run-on sentence.
Bright Gymnasium of Fun is an absurd riff on the people who make laugh tracks. Who are these people? Who pays them? Without them, how would we know what is funny?
One of the funniest stories, The Heartspeak Wellness Retreat, spoofs the pseudo-profundity of New Age beliefs. The characters include a couple who consult a book called Instant Feng Shui. They decide they must bomb their house to get rid of bad karma.
Farrant frequently invokes the names of the great masters of literature and art, musing on the works of Blake, Borges, Nabokov, Chekhov, and Georgia O'Keefe, among others. Sometimes she writes stories about actual writers, one involves eating beans with Leonard Cohen and another recounts Dorothy Parker's rounds of cocktail parties at the Algonquin Hotel.
My favorite of the stories in this vein is Alice & Stein, a mini-biography of the literary icon Gertrude Stein and her life partner Alice B. Toklas.
Stein, who is busy "building platforms"; for herself from which to make her pronouncements on art, is juxtaposed with her amanuensis (Alice) who sweeps floors and types manuscripts, but nonetheless manages to have her own "white wine with breakfast"; period. The reader is left wondering whose life has been better, the one who creates, or the lover who loves.
The selections from the most recent work, North Pole, tend to be more philosophical as the mature artist contemplates the diminishing days, struggles to define what writing should be, and considers the surreal prospect of the nursing home.
But shot through the darkness are explosions of light: small epiphanies, unexpected revelations, quiet affirmations.
"There are times when the experience of living in this world is rapturous. And there are times when it curls us crying in our beds. Between these extremes we tell each other what we know...";
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A new collection of Farrant's personal essays on family life, The Secret Lives of Litter Bugs (Key Porter Books $17.95) was also published earlier this year. These complement her coming-of-age memoir, My Turquoise Years, published in 2004.
-- review by Sheila Munro, a freelance writer in Powell River.
[BCBW 2009]
Sheila Munro
My Turquoise Years at Arts Club
Press Release (2013)
VANCOUVER, BC - Memoir of a Canadian girlhood. Based on M.A.C. Farrant's memoir of her fourteenth summer, My Turquoise Years is a comic coming-of-age story set in 1960, a time of postwar optimism, when plastic reigned and the colour turquoise was the height of chic. Marion, raised by Aunt Elsie in sleepy Cordova Bay, has grown up hearing tales of her glamorous, globe-trotting mother, Nancy. Just as Marion is blossoming into womanhood, Nancy suddenly announces a visit to Canada, throwing everyone into a tizzy.
"Farrant's book was first brought to our attention by Nicola Cavendish, who, after reading it on CBC's Between the Covers, thought it would make a lovely play. She was right,"; said Rachel Ditor, the play's director and dramaturg. "Part nostalgic look at daily life in 1960, My Turquoise Years is also a reminder of the social constraints of the nuclear family back then. What makes the play contemporary, though, is its affirmation that family is more than biology; it's who you choose to share your home with. That life is up for invention.";
Farrant, born in 1947 in Sydney, Australia, but resident of Vancouver Island since 1953, is the author of thirteen books, predominately short and humorous fiction. Once described as "Canada's most acerbic and intelligent humourist,"; she weaves dry observation and absurdity with a knowing eloquence. An alumna of Simon Fraser University and the University of Victoria, Farrant is a full-time writer. She is a contributor to Adbusters and Geist, a frequent book reviewer for TheVancouver Sun and The Globe and Mail, and organizer of the Sidney Reading Series. Nominated for multiple literary awards, Farrant has received several writing grants at the national and provincial levels. Her work has been anthologized widely, and adapted for radio, television, and now, for the first time, the stage.
By M.A.C. Farrant. Starring Peter Anderson, Georgina Beaty, Bridget Esler, David Marr, Wendy Noel, Dawn Petten, Mike Rinaldi. Director and Dramaturg Rachel Ditor. Set Designer Alison Green. Costume Designer Christine Reimer. Lighting Designer Adrian Muir. Sound Designer Mike Rinaldi. Stage Manager Ingrid Turk. Assistant Stage Manager April Starr Land
ABOUT THE ARTS CLUB
The Arts Club Theatre Company, now in its 49th season, is the largest not-for-profit organization of its kind in Western Canada. Led by Artistic Managing Director Bill Millerd and Executive Director Howard R. Jang, it offers professional theatre at three venues-the Stanley Industrial Alliance Stage, Granville Island Stage, and Revue Stage-as well as on tour throughout the province.
The World Afloat — Miniatures by M.A.C. Farrant (Talonbooks $12.95)
Review (2014)
Like everything else on this planet, fiction faces a simple choice; evolve or become extinct.
M.A.C. Farrant continues to make it clear she has no intention of walking with the dinosaurs.
With her new collection of surreal 'miniatures,' The World Afloat, Farrant reappears to remind us that CanLit still has a few bats in the attic.
While university creative writing departments from coast to coast are no doubt preparing a new generation of authors to follow in the footsteps of the Nobel Prize-winning Alice Munro, Farrant's The World Afloat is tuned to an FM wave-band in which brevity is the soul of writ, perhaps because contemporary narrative fiction has to compete with texts composed on cell phones.
A perceptive Globe & Mail reviewer once called Farrant "the bizarro Alice Munro,"; a particularly apt description of the narrative style of her collection, Darwin Alone in the Universe (Talonbooks, 2003).
While many of those stories superficially resembled traditional short stories in length and opening lines, we quickly found ourselves sucked through the looking-glass by a seductively subversive parody of conventional narrative that is disrupted by filmic jump-cuts and tectonic clashes of inner and outer reality. The cumulative effect leaves us feeling like patrons trapped in a fire-bombed cabaret where the comedy duo of Franz Kafka and Groucho Marx are working the smoldering stage because the show must go on.
The 'miniatures' of The World Afloat are briefer, and as wild as colourful birthday helium balloons released into a hurricane; small points of cheerful light whirled in a dark and violent wind.
In painting, Rene Magritte and Giorgio de Chirico represent the extremes of surrealist art-Magritte's playful, cheerful juxtapositions in which defiance of gravity, 'floating,' is a recurrent theme, versus de Chirico's dark and deserted distorted cityscapes, anchored by unspeakable anxieties. These are the emotional poles of our inner lives, our dreams, and it's clear which side of the table Farrant hovers weightlessly above, tipping a signature bowler hat.
Necessarily surreal because of their extreme brevity, stories like those in The World Afloat used to be called 'postcard stories'-though nobody younger than your grandmother actually sends postcards anymore. It's not a new concept; Franz Kafka and Ernest Hemingway both struggled to write very short stories because they recognized that such stories demand not only more from the writer; they force readers to slow down, go back, re-read, and make sure they haven't missed not just something, but everything-the literary equivalent of Slow Food.
Nobel Prize-wining Japanese author Yasunari Kawabata wrote numerous (what he called) "palm of the hand"; stories, some of which were attempts to condense his already notably brief novels into a few terse paragraphs. In 1987, Quebec writer Gilles Archambault won the Governor General's Award for French language fiction for L'obsedante obese, (published in English as In a Minor Key by Oberon Books in 1990), a classic of the genre probably little-known to most English readers other than, possibly, M.A.C. Farrant.
Since the early 1990s, these kinds of stories have been called 'flash fictions' and published extensively on websites. Most of them are not memorable in the conventional sense. There are no ironic, dramatic plot twists in the manner of Maugham or de Maupassant. Like poems, or recalled fragments of dreams, these kinds of stories are meant to resonate, rather than reveal, to stir up the mental sludge, flush out the septic tank of the subconscious, to make us feel more truly aware and alive.
M.A.C. Farrant has made a career-a dozen books thus far, and counting-of literary subversion. It's a dirty job, but somebody has to don the rubber gloves and apron and put an edge on the knife if fictional narrative is to be more than a self-indulgent hobby for egoists or a domesticated cash cow for cynical hacks who'd rather be writing film scripts. 978-0889228382
John Moore reviews fiction from Garibaldi Highlands.
John Moore
