Song of the Peace River Valley

Two years ago, when Shelter was nominated for a BC Book Prize, I had the good fortune to make a tour of several communities in the Peace River region of BC: Dawson Creek, Fort St. John, Fort Nelson and Hudson's Hope. Near Hudson's Hope, when we stood and looked out over the Peace River, we were told that where we stood would be permanently under water, a drowned valley, if the Site C dam was approved. Site C would add a third dam to the Peace River, at a time when large dams are being reassessed and dismantled on thousands of US rivers.

As we drove through the aptly named Peace River valley, we saw stakes hammered into farmers' fields, meadows and mountainsides, marking the flood levels that would result from a dammed river. I knew what the arguments would be in favour of the dam. It's always the same refrain. To borrow a phrase from Unikitty, in the Lego movie, it's "business, business, business, numbers," or more specifically, "the economy, the economy, jobs." But as David Suzuki argues, "what good are a growing economy and increasing consumption—and their environmental and social consequences—when people are not healthy and happy and when we destroy the things that keep us alive and well?"

After Unikitty's business performance, she whispers: "Is it working?" and she's assured that it is. I can't help but feel the proponents of this dam are whispering the same thing. It's all they have in the face of evidence that this dam is a bad, outdated idea.

Ken and Arlene Boon on their Peace River farm.

Maybe I'm too sensitive

David Eddie, who writes a funny advice column in the Globe and Mail, sometimes uses the word "questionsult," which is an insult thinly disguised as a question. His example: "Oh, you finally got new curtains. Were those your first choice?" Following his lead, I invented my own word: the compliminsult, but I see that he has a version of that too. (He calls it the insultiment.)

Justin Ng photo

I received a compliminsult recently from a fellow writer who said, "Your writing is so action-packed! It's always so plot-driven!" Maybe I'm too sensitive (how many times in my life have I started a sentence that way?), but I couldn't help but detect a note of dismissal in the comment -- that somehow plot is simplistic and elementary, not a complex enough way to tell a story. I disagree.

I think that action and events are a natural by-product of story-telling. People tell stories to help themselves piece together cause and effect. They recall events that led to things. They select certain events as significant and disregard others as irrelevant. They are trying to answer the question: how did this happen? Or, how did I end up here?

I don't think we re-hash the minutiae of our lives without a sense that we're seeking to shape it. It's a bit like star-gazing. On a slightly overcast July night, the patterns of the constellations seem obvious and timeless. It's almost like we can see the lines drawn between stars, the Big Dipper scooping, the Little Dipper pouring, and the big W of Cassiopeia. The clouds, or light from the moon, obscures the profusion of stars, and patterns clearly emerge. But if the night is very clear, and if you're out in the middle of nowhere under a black sky, the riot of stars can be overwhelming. On nights like that, I can be hard-pressed to identify even the Dippers. It's disorienting, and it makes me understand why early cultures looked not only for patterns, but stories in the stars.  

Fighting words

One of my favourite moments when I write is when I have to stop and search for the perfect word. This morning I was sitting at my desk, everything going well, and then a word stopped me. I looked out the window at the rose about to bloom on the arbour, sun splashing the grass, someone out for a morning run. The word that had come to mind wasn't quite the right one. In the scene, my character has the urge to punch someone. But punch isn't right. I sifted through the possibilities: smack, slug, wallop. None of those are right. It's 1968 and my character is a young man, not quite a hippie, but inclined that way.

I reached for my thesaurus, a weighty 1300 plus pages that has that rich well-used book smell when I crack it open.. And that's it. That's the moment I love: the pleasure of weighing the options. I leaf through the pages to find "punch." It leads me past n. alcoholic drink to v. hit. Some of the words I consider: smite (okay, not seriously); coldcock (maybe; first I have to look it up and confirm that it means what I think it does, which is to knock unconscious in a single blow, and it does); clobber (too comic book); pound; hammer; pummel (all possibilities); paste (maybe; it's a term we used in the 70s); crack; belt. I reflect that pound, hammer and pummel all suggest repetitive hitting which isn't what my character has in mind. I go back to coldcock. It seems too calculated. It's more what someone would say after someone else had done it. Eventually, I find the word I need. That's good. But it's the looking for it that I really love.

Just a love story

From a recent interview with Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie in the Guardian: "Don't we all in the end write about love? All literature is about love. When men do it, it's a political comment on human relations. When women do it, it's just a love story. So, although I wanted to do much more than a love story, a part of me wants to push back against the idea that love stories are not important. I wanted to use a love story to talk about other things. But really in the end, it's just a love story."