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Marcia Maguire earned her B.A. in English literature from the University of Toronto and a master's degree in Creative Writing and Translation from the University of British Columbia. She was mentored by Dorothy Livesay, for whom the BC Book Prize of Poetry is named. In 2020, Maguire published the satiric novel, Too Late to Barter (Black Rose 2020) about a woman named Bella who was damaged by painkillers prescribed when she was a child and later as an adult by alcohol, marijuana, L.S.D. and other drugs. Bella turns to plant medicine and the outdoors to heal.
Maguire's work has appeared in several Canadian magazines -- Fiddlehead, Malahat Review, The Canadian Forum and Prism International. Doctor of Natural Medicine for thirty years -- Marcia writes novels, poetry, short-stories, and edits PATCHWORK -- a small literary magazine of Canadian literature. She lives in Kimberley.
Books:
Too Late to Barter (Black Rose 2020) $17.95 978-1-68433-461-2
[BCBW 2020]
*
by Dean Fogal
Marcia McGuire creates, in her novella Too Late to Barter, a unique blend of poetry and 'novel' prose. She writes and thinks like a micro- biologist and astronomer both. She lets her eye and voice travel quickly through a microscope to give us a minute look at the underworld then suddenly flips this instrument around to become a large telescope to let us see the same scene from a cosmic perspective.
We go inside trees together, "trees that were once kings and princes on the high banks, but are now chunks of slippery iron wood, sunk and sinking, reflecting the sun occasionally to seem to be green arms and legs -- marble now -- forever."
There is a valuable lack of sentimentality in her descriptions. She just points out long lived connections between what is alive, and what we now pronounce 'dead and gone'. The spirit 'there' is still here and needs to be felt to be 'with us' even now. Nothing is really dead after all, it has simply gone around a corner in space where we lose direct access to it. But whatever form or formlessness it is now in, it still reverberates for us and excites the quality of our experience. Our histories resound in all of us.
McGuire demonstrates the quickness of a jack rabbit as she moves from micro biologist to astronomer, dropping her self-importance and her pre-judgement of all that she encounters in her travels.
"Go ahead and bite me," she yells at a black fly, "you've got a right to live too." Her own character is just as fragile as any she runs into. "I'm often distracted by my knitting", she admits.
Yes, bridges and dams are footpaths to 'over there' perhaps, "but importantly, they killed people in their building phases, so are graveyards too. Lest we forget."
Her character Maddox "travels light beams in the day and the stars at night." He thinks aloud, "not sure when we'll be back, maybe Christmas maybe not. We need time to think about where we've been, where we're headed. We're searching for lift off, like all of us, when distractions are shoved to the side."
McGuire is fascinated (no surprise here) with rural towns and rural people who, like the rest of us, are carried along on "rubber conveyor belts." They babble on about this and that, just like the rest of us. "They speak plainly about the depth of their ignorance, their neediness and their co-dependence on anyone who can help."
They tell all those of us who know the isolation of cities and the broken cultural ties we all work so hard to repair, that "the big diesel transports that go whizzing by endlessly, are carrying nothing that have anything to do with them."
As Camus once said, "we have arrived somehow in a quicksand world. The only thing we can do with all this change is take a stand."
Marcia McGuire's stand is multi-dimensional. She has no patience in her rage against the nuns who beat their students in Catholic school when her own little girl within was on the receiving end of leather straps. But she is full to the brim with empathy for the simple person who looks at the dog's breakfast of a world they find themselves in, and says, "why build a boat when there's no water."
She has learned Buster Keaton's phrase off by heart, "Oh words are ok as long as they can improve upon the silence." At times the words come like tsunamis in this work. The waters fall upon a thousand landscapes real and imagined. Inner and outer. But when they get prescriptive, they pull back, they fall silent as if to say, 'wait a bit, walk in those shoes, then see if the words are still there.' We cannot afford to forget the forgotten. If the words ARE there, then we'll talk. We may play. No, for sure we WILL play. We will celebrate the brilliant day when words, to our surprise, have actually improved upon the silence. The words and the spaces between the words will shine brightly to light up the lost people, the lost moments, the lost times that are not lost at all , just around the corner somewhere, waiting to enrich our humanity in THIS time, THIS moment, THIS sunlit place.
Maguire's work has appeared in several Canadian magazines -- Fiddlehead, Malahat Review, The Canadian Forum and Prism International. Doctor of Natural Medicine for thirty years -- Marcia writes novels, poetry, short-stories, and edits PATCHWORK -- a small literary magazine of Canadian literature. She lives in Kimberley.
Books:
Too Late to Barter (Black Rose 2020) $17.95 978-1-68433-461-2
[BCBW 2020]
*
REVIEW
by Dean Fogal
Marcia McGuire creates, in her novella Too Late to Barter, a unique blend of poetry and 'novel' prose. She writes and thinks like a micro- biologist and astronomer both. She lets her eye and voice travel quickly through a microscope to give us a minute look at the underworld then suddenly flips this instrument around to become a large telescope to let us see the same scene from a cosmic perspective.
We go inside trees together, "trees that were once kings and princes on the high banks, but are now chunks of slippery iron wood, sunk and sinking, reflecting the sun occasionally to seem to be green arms and legs -- marble now -- forever."
There is a valuable lack of sentimentality in her descriptions. She just points out long lived connections between what is alive, and what we now pronounce 'dead and gone'. The spirit 'there' is still here and needs to be felt to be 'with us' even now. Nothing is really dead after all, it has simply gone around a corner in space where we lose direct access to it. But whatever form or formlessness it is now in, it still reverberates for us and excites the quality of our experience. Our histories resound in all of us.
McGuire demonstrates the quickness of a jack rabbit as she moves from micro biologist to astronomer, dropping her self-importance and her pre-judgement of all that she encounters in her travels.
"Go ahead and bite me," she yells at a black fly, "you've got a right to live too." Her own character is just as fragile as any she runs into. "I'm often distracted by my knitting", she admits.
Yes, bridges and dams are footpaths to 'over there' perhaps, "but importantly, they killed people in their building phases, so are graveyards too. Lest we forget."
Her character Maddox "travels light beams in the day and the stars at night." He thinks aloud, "not sure when we'll be back, maybe Christmas maybe not. We need time to think about where we've been, where we're headed. We're searching for lift off, like all of us, when distractions are shoved to the side."
McGuire is fascinated (no surprise here) with rural towns and rural people who, like the rest of us, are carried along on "rubber conveyor belts." They babble on about this and that, just like the rest of us. "They speak plainly about the depth of their ignorance, their neediness and their co-dependence on anyone who can help."
They tell all those of us who know the isolation of cities and the broken cultural ties we all work so hard to repair, that "the big diesel transports that go whizzing by endlessly, are carrying nothing that have anything to do with them."
As Camus once said, "we have arrived somehow in a quicksand world. The only thing we can do with all this change is take a stand."
Marcia McGuire's stand is multi-dimensional. She has no patience in her rage against the nuns who beat their students in Catholic school when her own little girl within was on the receiving end of leather straps. But she is full to the brim with empathy for the simple person who looks at the dog's breakfast of a world they find themselves in, and says, "why build a boat when there's no water."
She has learned Buster Keaton's phrase off by heart, "Oh words are ok as long as they can improve upon the silence." At times the words come like tsunamis in this work. The waters fall upon a thousand landscapes real and imagined. Inner and outer. But when they get prescriptive, they pull back, they fall silent as if to say, 'wait a bit, walk in those shoes, then see if the words are still there.' We cannot afford to forget the forgotten. If the words ARE there, then we'll talk. We may play. No, for sure we WILL play. We will celebrate the brilliant day when words, to our surprise, have actually improved upon the silence. The words and the spaces between the words will shine brightly to light up the lost people, the lost moments, the lost times that are not lost at all , just around the corner somewhere, waiting to enrich our humanity in THIS time, THIS moment, THIS sunlit place.
