Bill Engleson's Blog, page 7

Till the end of time…

I believe, having little proof to the contrary, that I was born with a lucky horseshoe and that it no doubt must have been located on some comfortable, albeit hidden, part of my anatomy. First off, I am a Canadian who never had to go to war; I grew up in a smallish town; I had a rather calm, somewhat uninteresting adolescence; I had parents who didn’t divorce (each other, that is.)

I had a brief flirtation with peacetime soldiering, the Reserves in my hometown, and the Signal Corps in Kingston. Some of it was satisfying; some of it not so much.

It is quite probable that I lacked some of the component parts to succeed at a regimented life. Still, I learned quite a lot about what I believe about war and peace from my military dabbling.

Subsequently, I was a participant in the great cultural revolution of the late sixties. I lived communally. I let my thinning brown hair grow a bit. I have forgotten some of my lesser moments, so I must have been there. I emerged pretty much unscathed, though others may have a different opinion.

I was thinking about my rather bucolic early formative years as I watched Till the End of Time a few days ago. Made in 1946 by Edward Dmytryk, it tells the story of three returning veterans of WW2. It also renders a powerful story of a war widow also adjusting to a post war America.

Dymtryk, Canadian born but American raised, was an excellent director and directed some of my favorite classics including his award winning Crossfire and two excellent Dick Powell films, Murder, My Sweet and Cornered. He was also blacklisted shortly after Crossfire and in short order moved to England to salvage his career.

As Remembrance Day approaches, I am, as always, drawn to films that try and depict how soldiers and civilians readjust. For me, two films, Till the End of Time and the more well known, The Best Years of Our Lives, also a 1946 production, offer a sense of the complexity of what young men and women who lose a measure of their lives fighting in wars, face as they try to rediscover themselves.

Though I will remember the awful toll of the dead on Remembrance Day, I much prefer to consider the silence and the sorrow and the re-emergence of those who returned, who had to patch interrupted lives back together.

I also hope that those who cannot find an alternative to war, those who vote for war, who send troops to theatres of conflict and who, in doing so, escalate and perpetuate war and destruction, work just a little bit harder to bring about a less pointless and repetitive outcome.

A day of memorable characters…

It is a wet mid-October Sunday on Denman. While there are sporadic streaks of sun, the deluge is poised to let loose. It is not going to be pleasant, unless you are of a mind that torrential rain is a good thing. I often stay indoors when it rains. Today, this afternoon, my monthly writers group gathers in the Activity Lounge in order to enjoy and comment on a selection of each other’s work.

I almost do not go. I am feeling somewhat under the weather; likely from watching too many Ebola news reports this past week. Still, this gathering of local writers is a highlight of each month. It is not only the getting together with an eclectic gathering of fellow scribes; it is also the taking of whatever journey each of the presenters takes us on.

Today, we begin our travels with a journey back to a small eastern Canadian elementary school 60 year ago. For nine gentle minutes, we are in that classroom, that small town, competing in a delightful spelling bee, held over a number of days. The storey is paced; the characters palpable.

Next, we are invited into a drab 1961 Liverpool wedding, a hurried affair, the bride three months pregnant, the groom…from the Middle East. The story juxtaposes this unadorned ceremony with the much later and grander marriage of a child of that earlier union.

Then we venture to the Fraser Valley sometime in the more recent past. The time is unclear. The story is stark and beautiful. A fire! The aftermath! The impact on the small farm, the owner, and the community around.

The author reads a second story; almost a poem, futuristic, some apocalyptic event, perhaps.

The final programmed reading; the briefest of poems…read slowly…surely…

We are ahead of schedule. I offer to read a turkey fantasy. I fear I may have ruined the mood. Or at least, Turk Hammer, my fabricated Spillane-inspired Turkey private eye character, may have.

As we leave, the rain is walloping the Island. I feel well-travelled. And ready to get back to writing.

“the type of petty clawback mentality that is not associated with success.” Mary Ellen Turpel-Lafond

I am usually of the view that government is a positive thing. This is not an especially popular opinion in my neck of the woods. However, I believe government is how we can best combine our individual resources to provide a collection of amenities and services, all of those wonderful things that we as citizens agree are for the greatest good. Generally, Health, Education and Transportation top the provincial list.

Lots of smaller items sometimes get lost, or undervalued, in the topsy-turvy, occasionally competitive world that is the B.C. political arena.

It may be that the needs of those young people who have come under the ostensibly protective wing of the Ministry of Child and Family Development are seen by some within and without government as having been met simply because the state has intervened.

Like all young people, like all of us, really, the youth who are need of State protective services at some point in their lives also often need some measure of guidance, respect and support well into adulthood. We know full well that being in the care of the State can frequently be an off-road excursion. The struggle to complete high school, to even attend school is sometimes a daunting task. To go beyond all that, to attend post secondary training of any kind, requires resilience and resolve. And, most of all, support in all of its meanings.

Lori Culbert’s article in the Vancouver Sun on September 26 spoke eloquently about this topic and left no doubt about the mean-spirited thoughtless act of Government to strip youth of bursary money.

When I was writing Like a Child to Home, my working title was Next of Kin. My intention in using that rather overused title was that I thought it conveyed how I view the relationship that government often has with young clients adrift. There is a bond, a kind of institutional kinship.

Clearly my view, as expressed in my letter to the Sun and published on September 30, is not shared by the Christy Clark Liberals. For them, it appears that young people in care and formerly in care are simply debtors, worth a small investment but not much more. Thankfully, others, a growing number of educational institutions and caring groups the likes of the Adoptive Families Association of BC, have an awareness of the struggle facing these youth and have stepped up even as government steps back into the shadows of punitive reward.

The Representative for Children and Youth, Mary Ellen Turpel-Lafond, continues to fight the good fight against an intractable system that seems to find it awfully difficult to simply do the right thing.

 

“Writing is its own reward.”-Henry Miller

I have had an excellent writerly week.

The week kicked off on Monday with my interview by Marvin Smith on the latalkradio.com program, Answers 4 The Family. I have listened to the podcast of the interview (here for those of you with the patience to listen) and am of the slightly biased view that I didn’t totally screw it up. It comes across as a casual conversation about social work and my novel attempt to portray the profession in a credible, caring and gently creative way. There were, at the end, two questions/comments that reinforced for me that good social work is happening out there and having impact. Still, Like a Child to Home, for that brief ¾ of an hour, got some sizable promotion.

On Tuesday, I was advised that a short story of mine, Hell is a Holiday, had been shortlisted in the Federation of BC Writers Write On contest. The fact that the main character, private detective Turk Hammer, is an actual turkey (of the fowl persuasion) may have impaired the ability of the story to go much beyond the short list. Still, it was nice to be noticed.

That same day, Editor and poet Holly Harwood e-mailed me an Author’s copy of Words Fly Away-Poems for Fukushima. (Here is the Face Book link for the project.) This fine book, on the verge of release, and whose genesis was the horrifying tsunami that overwhelmed Japan in March, 2011, has poems from poets around the world. My contribution, Japandemonium, was written for a fundraiser for the people of Japan and read (I would like to say performed but will stick with “read”) at the March 2011 Audio Arts Open Stage on Denman.

So, this coming week I will spend a bit more time actually writing. That fundamental activity sort of went out the window this week.

Priming the writer’s pump & my internet radio debut…

Writing is such a solitary activity that any opportunity to emerge into the light of day and share your work seems to me to be well worth taking. For the past year, I have belonged to a small Denman Island writers group. We meet monthly and typically up to 4 of us share some of our productivity. While our “products” are not as tasty as homemade pastries or savory treats, they do have a measurable nourishment to them.

Tomorrow is our next gathering. I may share a chapter from my latest work from my friends. I expect feedback. Hopefully it will be positive but I think all writers like to get some response, good bad, or even, regrettably, indifferent.

Writing in a vacuum is not stimulating for me. Over the past few years, until very recently, I have written a mostly humorous column for the local Island magazine, The Flagstone. I stopped doing that because I wanted to devote my possibly flagging creative energies to my larger project. Sadly, I soon discovered that I need these little deadlines. A monthly opinion piece served that end for me.

So, I have begun what I hope will be a new monthly column for the Flagstone. I call it “In 200 words or less.” The trick for me will be to bring the column in under 200 words and keep it somewhat humorous. Foolishly, when I conceived the column, I thought to call it “In 100 words or less.” I totally underestimated my penchant for verbosity. My previous Flagstone submissions generally hovered around 1200 words. Two hundred words will be a test of my succinctness, my precise use of language. It is a sad thing to know about yourself that it takes forever to get to the point. Novel writing allow you to enjoy a more leisurely pace as you wend your way to the heart of your subject.

On a totally other note, here is the link to my radio interview on Answers 4 the Family on Monday, September 22 at 11:00 a.m.

I am really quite excitedly nervous about it. I hope a few of you can tune in or listen to the podcast at a later date.

“Yesterday’s gone and we can’t get it back.” Gus McCrae (Robert Duvall) in Lonesome Dove

I graduated high school in 1964. And, for reasons solely within my control, though I wouldn’t have admitted it back then, I also graduated high school in 1965. I have been to three high school reunions; my 10th, my 25th and, this past weekend, my 50th.

My singular inability to extricate myself from the structured life-sucking tentacles of my high school octopus on time and under budget surprises me to this day. High School for me was not a time of large memories. This is not to say that there were not pleasant times. During those high school years, my best moments, aside from Mr. Marty’s guided tour of Europe in the summer of 1963, were outside the system. I was not a joiner. I belonged to no clubs to speak of. In hindsight, there were many I could have easily joined. As an aging adult, I am actively engaged in my community, albeit often exhibiting some distance, some remoteness. But in high school I was not a sign-me-up-right-now kind of guy. I was a class rep on my 1964 Grad Committee. I’ve mentioned how well that went.

I did spend some time in the local military Reserves, the Princess Patricia Canadian Light Infantry. While my later brief sojourn in the Canadian Armed Forces (a 5-month getaway to Kingston where my ability to appreciate most things military was found wanting) was life-changing, the Princess Pats was a convivial and relatively gentle experience. Though I often cavalierly reference the ability to legally drink underage whilst engaged in defending Nanaimo and its unincorporated areas from space invaders as my prime motive in signing up, I truly enjoyed pretty much every moment in the Reserves, with the minor exception of the time a tank ran over my glasses.

So, my temperament, if that’s the right word, has always been somewhat detached. Nevertheless, I think I had a reasonably average time as a teenager growing up in Nanaimo, B.C. This is not to ignore how difficult adolescence can be. I have a few vivid memories of bullying (both on the receiving and giving end), of obnoxious clique behaviour that seemed to me to dominate the culture, of my own occasionally questionable behaviour to others (such as asking two young women to Grad and, of course, not taking one.)  I have yet to work up an apology. Likely it is my issue more than hers.

Some of my best and most challenging social experiences, cubs, scouts, dating and the like, were within my local church. As a young Mormon (I should note I fell away from organized and unorganized religion by age 17) I had a social network separate from, and only occasionally wedded to, high school.

At my 50th reunion this weekend, neither of those two worlds collided. In fact, the most enjoyment I found was in a few conversations that tweaked or resuscitated old and not especially cataclysmic memory. The organizers did a bang-up job and I was glad to be able to attend what I imagine will be my final reunion. I wish I had found the opportunity, or taken them, to have a few more heartfelt discussions with old acquaintances.

Later on in the evening as I read through the names of those listed “In Memoriam”, I was overcome by an absolute loss of youth, of possibility, which I had not quite up to then felt. At the same time, totally inappropriately, I wondered about the one name that had been crossed off the list in thick black ink. Was it a simple mistake; a resurrection? But some of the other names were a shock. They spoke silently, yet so loudly, of missed opportunities to say hello and ask how life had fared.

I withdrew, dragging my morose and brooding self from the gala affair. This was not unlike skipping school, a favorite pastime of mine once upon a time. Then, the act of skipping school always took me towards the light of an elusive but much sought after freedom. Reunions offer a less intense light, flickering and fading.

Yesterday, if I had any doubt, was truly, irrevocably gone and it was time to return to the present.

 

My inadvertent spammer apology….

In my enthusiasm to notify a whole new community of social workers, and others, about my upcoming September 22 Internet Radio interview on latalkradio.com , I apparently spammed the message at least 5 times.

Please accept this incredibly humble poem as my apology if my tidal wave of trivia swamped you in any way.

Spam is such a noxious thing

It is not sweet, it does not sing.

It is so repetitive

It takes but it does not give.

I would like to apologize

For setting spam before your eyes.

My recent missive was way too much;

I swear I’ll get a lighter touch.

A labour day post from Denman Island…

As a novice author, I am continually surprised and pleased by the support I have found by others to share my work and the work of others. Jane Dougherty is a poet and novelist, a blogger and a mother who lives in Bordeaux, France (as opposed to any other place in the world called Bordeaux- a point I make because there appears to be a few dozen cities in the US of A alone called Paris.)

People like Jane Dougherty are both creative and generous and I much appreciate her recent post of a sample of my work. This link contains an excerpt from Chapter 8 of my novel, Like a Child to Home, as well as one of my Gentrified Soul articles, this one called   Part 39-Confessions of gentrified soul-A how-I-learned-to-work-then-leave-it-all-behind reminiscence.

On this Labour Day, 2014, my modest bit of work–life nostalgia seems appropriate to circulate.

“Maybe,” she said. “But not really.”

 

I was particularly struck by Kristy Hoffman’s article in the August 27th Globe and Mail. Titled “For Tina Fontaine’s cousin, a lesson on the dangers of running away,” it focuses on Destiny Lameman, the 15 year old cousin of the recently murdered aboriginal youth, Tina Fontaine.

In my day as a social worker, youth, both in care and not, were forever running away. I imagine it hasn’t changed. Within the child welfare system, an absence has to be reported. It becomes habit, routine; both the running away and the reporting. Most of the running ends harmlessly. Death is not often the result.

In my own small way, I try, in Like a Child to Home,to explore the running away and the odd exigencies of fate that can get in the way of wishful thinking.

Ms. Hoffman’s article ends with a question asked of Destiny by her mother about what lessons she had absorbed from her cousins murder. With a truth only the young can appreciate, she honestly says that she believes her cousin’s fate could never be hers.

It might, she allows but then qualifies it with a youthful expression of optimism, “Maybe,” she said. “But not really.”

Two books I could never write…

There are some books I was never meant to write. Nor could I have even imagined them. Recently, amongst all the books I have immersed myself in of late, two have so affected me that I can barely leave them to the side.

One is One Native Life, the engaging and powerful memoir by Richard Wagamese.  Each chapter is like a small but significant stream in his winding river of life.

The second is Renee Sarojini Saklikar‘s evocative and fiercely personal elegy, children of air india.

Both of these books, memoir and poem, are written from as close to misfortune and heartbreak as any human can get. Both works, I think, share similar emotion and perspective. One evolves from a terrible set of government policies which amounted to, which was certainly cultural genocide. The other was a single explosive act, built of the same, or a similar, genocidal evil. One is essentially one man`s tale of recovery. The other, perhaps, but not solely, how one devastating act (built on a series of connected evils) consumed and strengthened a poet so very personally involved.

Though I sometimes found myself too close to the many sorrows and somewhat fewer joys of the people I served, and now try to write about, these are but two of many books I was never meant to write.