"Honey, if you're not on somebody's shit list, you're no damn good!" -- Rita Moir's mother.

While living in Vallican in the Kootenays, Rita Moir published her first travel diary, Survival Gear in 1994, based on her views and travels from the fishing community of Freeport in Nova Scotia. She had worked as a journalist in Nelson, Prince Rupert, Vancouver and Edmonton. Active in the NDP, she also wrote for The Fisherman and the UFAWU newsletter. She became president of the Federation of B.C. Writers and won the VanCity Book Prize, as well as the Hubert Evans Non-Fiction Prize, for her second Canadian travel memoir entitled Buffalo Jump: A Woman's Travels (Coteau, 1999). It's a feminist narrative that takes its title from a place called Head-Smashed-in Buffalo Jump in Alberta. It's also a story about taking off into new territory, making a leap of faith and trusting the counsel of her mother. With her trusty 12-year-old dog named Connor, Moir drove to Nova Scotia in a rusty Toyota in search of her female heritage. By finding her past, she opened up her future. The book received the Hubert Evans Non-Fiction Prize in 2000. Her third memoir is The Windshift Line: A Father and Daughter's Story (Greystone, 2005) in which she recalls her relationship with her father as he is dying. For a review of The Third Crop (2011), see below.

The old adage is that in the “natural order,” parents die before their children. Moir explores her family history of the opposite happening in Not of Reason: A Recipe for Outrunning Sadness (Caitlin $22.95). Both her mother and beloved sister underwent heart surgery in the same week. But it was her sister who died within the year while Moir’s elderly mother lived many more years. “I could recite a dozen instances of children dying before parents, three in my immediate family, four if we include my extended family, six if we go back another generation,” she writes. Moir finds solace in her rural B.C. community and takes her mother’s advice to “opt for joy.”

Born in Minnesota on January 17, 1952, Rita Moir first arrived in Canada at Brandon, Manitoba in 1966. She came to live in the Kootenays, in Winlaw, in 1975.

Photo by Linda Crosfield

Review of the author's work by BC Studies:
The Third Crop: A Personal and Historical Journey into the Photo Albums and Shoeboxes of the Slocan Valley, 1800s to early 1940s

BOOKS:

Survival Gear (Polestar, 1994)

Buffalo Jump: Woman's Travels (Coteau Books, 1999)

The Windshift Line: A Father and Daughter's Story (Greystone, 2005)

The Third Crop: A personal & historical journey into the photo albums & shoeboxes of the Slocan Valley 1800s to early 1940s (Sono Nis, 2011) $24.95 978-1-55039-184-8

Not of Reason: a recipe for outrunning sadness (Caitlin, 2021) $22.95 978-1-77386-063-3

[BCBW 2021] "Women" "VanCity"

* * *

Not of Reason:
A Recipe for Outrunning Sadness
by Rita Moir (Caitlin Press $22.95)

by Portia Priegert

Slocan Valley author Rita Moir found the impetus for her latest memoir, Not of Reason: A Recipe for Outrunning Sadness, in the deaths of her beloved older sister, Judy, and their Irish-born mother, Erin. Moir reflects on love, loss and family with more openness than you might expect from your closest friends.

The book is set partly in St. Paul, Minnesota, where Judy dies first at 66, and then, six years later, Erin at 98, both from heart disease. Moir details days filled with the emotional labour of care-giving—sleepless nights, cycles of hope and despair, urgent family enclaves and, eventually, the making of funeral arrangements and the dismantling of homes.

Her writing is most sure-footed, rich in detail and oozing love of place, when she is back home in the Slocan. But she is also coming to terms with the loss of her sister. “Each night, unless I am so exhausted from physical work that I fall straight to sleep, I relive her death, her last minutes struggling and letting go,” she writes. “And with it, I rip up my insides …”

Moir won both the BC Book Prize and the VanCity Book Prize for her 1999 memoir, Buffalo Jump: A Woman’s Travels (Coteau), about her cross-country journey of rediscovery. She has worked as a journalist, stringing for both the CBC and The Globe and Mail, and has a reporter’s ability to zoom in on the telling details of poignant moments. Several times, I found myself weeping.

Given the book’s subtitle, I had hoped for helpful strategies for moving through grief. Instead, I found myself wondering whether sadness might be contagious and, if not literally spread from writer to reader, at least rekindled, the way the chicken pox virus can linger latent in our bodies until stress triggers it as shingles decades later.
Moir sets out her path in the book’s prologue, saying she wants not only to tell the stories of her family, but to “recompose the harmony of our days.” She adds: “This story is my attempt at restoration.”

But knowing how the narrative would unfold left me restless as Moir paged forward, setting the stage and getting readers up to speed on the history of a family hardy and resilient, but not especially remarkable, except in the way that all families are worlds unto themselves—their idiosyncrasies entangled in the conjoined twins of story and memory, shored up by love, duty and camaraderie. Or not. Families can be complex, though Moir’s portrait is largely positive. She has no scores to settle, nor dirty laundry to air. She admires her sister for her strength, her leadership, her ability to organize.

We often avoid uncomfortable discussions about death and many among us are ill-prepared for our parents’ final decline, typically a mid-life rite of passage. The transition can be profound, not only stirring up the past but also reminding us in sobering ways about our own mortality. While the death of a parent can offer the consolation of a life, if not impeccably well-lived, at least long, a particularly painful grief often arises when a child dies first. This affront to our sense of generational order is an underlying premise of this book, although, as Moir points out, such premature passings are not as rare as we would like to think. Many people, myself included, have sat with their parents as a sibling dies, and then, years later, watched their parents succumb.

Canada’s cultural mores make grief a largely private affair. People are expected to adjust and move on. It’s almost unseemly to feel deeply and mourn at length. Eight months after Judy’s death, Moir wants to be happy and light footed, to outrun sadness. “I want to be magnificent, competent, ethereal. I want to rise above it all, but instead, I stumble.”

Her mother offers common-sense wisdom: “The bad days come at you unbidden and can take you over, but you have to choose joy and laughter. You simply have to opt for joy.”

Eventually, Moir outruns her grief. Her recipe is to give herself space for sadness, but also to plunge into life. She cooks, spends time with friends and adopts a puppy, a golden retriever that she takes to agility training, while also finding solace in yoga classes and solitary walks in nature.

Not of Reason left me feeling fragile. Your experiences likely are different than mine, as are your emotions and personality. Perhaps immersing yourself in this difficult trajectory will trigger challenging emotions. Or, perhaps, you will find a soothing salve in the kinship of story. 9781773860633

Victoria-based Portia Priegert is the editor for Galleries West and a former reporter for the Canadian Press.

[BCBW 2022]