One of the first pleasures of taking pictures is finding out what something looks like when it gets into a photograph. This is often what motivates young photographers, who are always surprised (sometimes delighted and sometimes horrified) by what they discover when their film is developed.
Richard Ford (who I always think is John Ford) writes stories in the third person which read like stories in the first person, and I wanted to find out how and why he did this. I read the first story in his book Women With Men (Little, Brown) in Australia in 1995, when it was published in the British journal Granta, and the story stopped me short in my journey, in a way: it seemed addressed to me personally in that moment.
Roger Dunsmore is the author of Earth’s Mind, a collection of essays published last year by the University of New Mexico Press, and he is an old friend of mine. I met him thirty years ago in Europe when he had just finished reading Black Elk Speaks, the remarkable collaboration between Nicholas Black Elk and John G. Neihardt, a book that in the 1960s opened a door that most non-Native people did not know was there to be opened, and in the pages of which Dunsmore heard for the first time words “of the deep human past of North America, carrying the wisdom and pain” of 40,000 years of tradition into his own time.
Another reflection of Earth’s Mind can be found in the pages of The Arctic Sky: Inuit Astronomy, Star Lore and Legend, by John MacDonald, just published by the Nunavut Research Institute with the Royal Ontario Museum. This is a gathering of the celestial knowledge of the Inuit, especially around Igloolik, where the author, who manages the Igloolik Research Centre, has been involved in oral history projects with Inuit elders for the last ten years.
Aritha van Herk’s Restlessness (Red Deer College Press), though, ought to go missing from hostel shelves. It is a meditative novel which begins on a dramatic and Gothic note with a woman in a Calgary hotel room waiting for her “chosen assassin.”
Over Christmas I read my friend Stephen Osborne’s book Ice & Fire (Arsenal Pulp Press), which is also a Geist Book, and felt I was reading a handshake: familiar and new. I knew many of the stories, or versions of them, and, indeed, was in one or two of them (and in the introduction), and this added to the effect of being touched by something known and strange.
If you’ve never read a story about dry cleaning, try Miss September by François Gravel (Cormorant, translated by Sheila Fischman). In it, Geneviève Vallière, a disenchanted twenty-two-year-old, pulls off the perfect bank robbery and puts the money into a dry cleaning shop to launder it.
Laurence, by France Théoret (Mercury, translated by Gail Scott), is also about a young woman in Quebec, but in the 1930s a woman’s struggle to make her life her own was harder. Laurence comes from an impoverished farming family whose daughters have two choices: marry a man or marry the church.
