CONTENTS

Introduction

JOHN BARTON

[6]

Local, Not Locale

Poetry

JULIE PAUL

[9]

Esquimalt Road

TIM LILBURN

[10]

Two Poems

KAREN ENNS

[12]

Changing the Clocks

JIM ROBERTS

[25]

Public Transport

MIKE_DOYLE

[26]

The Night Watches

MARILYN BOWERING

[28]

Soul Leading

LINDA ROGERS

[30]

Old Stones

PATRICK LANE

[37]

Two Poems

KATE KENNEDY

[39]

Parallax

DANIELLE JANESS

[40]

Habitude

PATRICIA YOUNG

[53]

Three Poems

LEAH CALLEN

[56]

Little Bugger

P. K. PAGE

[65]

Two Poems

LORNA CROZIER

[69]

Two Poems

DOROTHEA GRÜNZWEIG

[71]

Two Poems translated by Derk Wynand

EVE JOSEPH

[73]

Two Poems

SHANE BOOK

[80]

Two Poems

KYEREN REGEHR

[82]

Neti Neti

JAMIE DOPP

[97]

My Father with Jesus Hair

TERENCE YOUNG

[99]

Legacy

MICHAEL KENYON

[101]

Extraction

YVONNE BLOMER

[105]

Craning his neck from the back of the class photo

PHILIP KEVIN PAUL

[116]

Ceremony

ARLENE PARÉ

[118]

Two Poems

JANET ROGERS

[120]

Snow Storm

ROBIN SKELTON

[122]

Christmas Day, 1979

SUSAN STENSON

[126]

Two Poems

RHONDA GANZ

[130]

Sojourn to a minor planet

PATRICK FRIESEN

[133]

Two Poems

ALISA GORDANEER

[135]

Two Poems

Fiction

BROCK ZAWILA

[13]

The Lake Blouin Symphony: A Listening Guide

MORGAN CROSS

[75]

Folding

JASON JOBIN

[83]

Before He Left

TERENCE YOUNG

[129]

Parallax

Creative Nonfiction

EMILY CARR

[31]

Afterglow

ANNABEL HOWARD

[41]

Runner's High

PAIGE LINDSAY

[57]

Moving

MADELINE SONIK

[105]

Stay Sick, Turn Blue

CHARLES LILLARD

[123]

A Perfect Place to Write

SHEILA MUNRO

[137]

The Tragedy of Reticent People

145

Book Reviews

JOHN WALL BARGER

JUNE HALLIDAY

LAURA RITLAND

BARDIA SINAEE

MICHAEL ROBERSON

RITA DONOVAN

CLARISSA FORTIN

SEAN JOHNSTON

CLARISSA FORTIN

CORINNA CHONG

DANIEL PERRY

NORMA LUNDBERG

ROBERT FINLAY

JOHN REIBETANZ

187

Notes on Contributors

LUKE RAMSEY

Ripples, 2013

Ink on paper, digital colour

Collection of the artist

JOHN BARTON

Local, Not Locale

Today—September 6—is the first day of term at the University of Victoria, the Malahat’s home since preparation for its first year in print began in 1965. The late-summer closeness is made worse by the smoke from B.C.’s forest fires, which presses down over the campus like suffocating cotton wool. I may feel annoyingly breathless, but no equivalent mist obscures the legacy of a magazine I knew of first when I enrolled in UVic’s Department of Creative Writing in the autumn of 1978 and found myself studying with the magazine’s two inaugural editors, Robin Skelton and John Peter. As my poems found their feet under Robin’s guidance and I tried my luck at placing them in magazines, I grew conscious of the sense of occasion arising from having work accepted by The Malahat Review in particular. One had “arrived”—a chance for notice by no means limited to Victoria but shared by writers and readers coast to coast. While Canada’s literati has since not divided between those “often in” and those “persistently out,” a Malahat acceptance still appears to elicit excitement, with that landmark sense of arrival also on offer from the many other hagiographic literary journals that have given a spine to Canadian literature before and since the Malahat’s first issue appeared in January 1967.

Assuring a sense of occasion, felt by contributors and readers alike, is key to any magazine’s success. Issue by issue, Robin Skelton, John Peter, Constance Rooke, Derk Wynand, and Marlene Cookshaw, with the support and expertise of staff and volunteers, chose and prepared the work of Canadian and international writers for their readers. Looking back at the accomplishments of my predecessors, onto which those of my tenure may or may not be tacked, it’s an enviable record. Work appearing in the Malahat has gone on to win regional, national, and international awards, which sometimes in turn launched the careers of writers now read worldwide. With this issue, the magazine’s staff and volunteers have now championed writers two hundred times. What a half-century it has been.

Except in the title of these remarks, I’ve not yet used the word “local.” It brings to mind memes like small-is-beautiful and the one-hundred-mile diet. While Ezra Pound and Chinua Achebe feature among the Malahat’s past contributors, it has also published the likes of P. K. Page. To mark its fifty years in print, the magazine’s chosen to celebrate the writers it finds itself in the midst of. Like Munro’s Books, the iconic downtown bookstore founded by Jim Munro and Nobel laureate Alice Munro, Malahat strives to serve—and represent—the needs of our own authors without losing sight of readers’ curiosity about those from elsewhere. For magazine and bookstore alike, it’s a curatorial process, with one eye turned to a home-grown backlist and the other looking toward who’s new and nearby in each season’s publisher catalogues, all the while maintaining a cross-eyed awareness of who’s in the middle distance, the writers of the present.

Two years ago, when we decided to commemorate the magazine’s contribution to Canadian literary-magazine culture through a focus on things local and writerly, an avatar of who a Victoria writer is had to be mocked up before casting its nimbus across Can Lit’s green screen. It came down to two qualities. First, only writers currently living in Victoria (defined as the Capital Regional District) would be considered. Were the catchment widened to include any writers who had once lived here, long or short term, the flood of submissions would be as daunting as the asylum claims starting to mount at the Canada-U.S. border. Writers don’t leave Victoria, one hopes, because they fear persecution for what they write; instead, they go willingly (if that’s possible to believe) and cross the horizon—to Toronto or Saskatoon, or Berlin and Katmandu—submitting to the unfamiliar winters of someone else’s discontent and, if not embrace it, go to ground and hopefully not hibernate. The second criteria pertained to subjects or themes of interest: none were stipulated. Often, when a call for submissions for an issue of this ilk circulates, there’s a misapprehension that it is to be slavishly about place. We were neither looking nor not looking for the goods on Victoria, though, inevitably, some aspirants did float work before us that is about where they—and we—live. Mostly, we sought to catch glimpses of what preoccupies Victoria writers—not necessarily about here, but now.

With this issue, the Malahat comes full circle, with the circle turned inside out. In that January 1967 issue, you’ll discover that just one contributor is from Victoria, one of only two from Canada. The rest hail from the British Isles., the United States, Europe, the Philippines, and South Africa, Skelton and Peter bringing their work and viewpoints to a fledgling local, national, and international readership. In contrast, in “Victoria, Past, Victoria Present, Victoria Future” a cross-section of local writers reflects a vast, if partial, contemporary world—one much different from that of 1967—back to itself.

JULIE PAUL

Esquimalt Road

warrior on a longboard—

no, really,

the word’s written in cursive

on his tank top,

a perfect match to his tattoo

sleeves;

face flat

as his ride

the zeal’s all

inside

as he makes

a perfect turn—

killing the corner,

really slaying it

fighting the war

cry, rising from his belly:

who says that battles

lack beauty?

who knows what he’ll face

down the block?

TWO POEMS BY TIM LILBURN

Shame

burn-reachable

mountain grass    ironwood

in bloom, long air

turkey-tailed

with new storm

curls off the Pacific

burn       wind

frictioning in infinite parts as it tumbles

off sea

catanyxis (X̱IXEX̱E  spiritual

shame) tastable

in the smoke

anticipation

mouth inside tastes

torn purple starfish

lapping at the shore

ironwood.

Arrange

yourself, sunken in rock

cleft staring

straight up at that bottom

passing over.

Where

snow that a minute ago

was rain

sails in cedar

saturated moss stiff

crackling at the step

rivulets have been burnt

solid by cold

on Deer Home mountain

but one is open still

merest waterfall.

in the afternoon

in all beds

plasms of liquid

form alter under ice cap

figures in a womb.

wind torn cedar fronds

redden on the forest floor.

when distress comes

asks Po Chu’i

where is the self to greet it?

KAREN ENNS

Changing the Clocks

Thirty years of sadness, says the woman walking toward me

in the coastal fog and rain of Gordon Head. It is enough,

she says, not to herself or me, but to the gods of streetlights

or the souls of dripping trees. Too early for darkness,

but the clocks have been set back an hour

or a year, or is it years? The sound of rain is decades long.

One more day of this, she says, stomping over sidewalk cracks,

and I am finished. I see her head toward the beach

where I have stood and watched the sea

cut in, where I have noticed how the grey insinuates itself,

slowly loosening the cells of my optimism,

leaving them to drift off, details of a dream,

how it presses down on what is left

with the full weight of monochrome.

BROCK ZAWILA

The Lake Blouin Symphony: A Listening Guide

Side A

1. Overture

There are fourteen bars of silence at the beginning. That’s fourteen bars at four seconds, counted by a Mr. Roberto Aleman—I don’t conduct my own work—his arms up, probably twitching and sore, anticipating the flutes.

Is it possible to hear the stories that music tells? I’m reminded of an old cliché, art imitates life, and the idea that a painting representing a male figure is more than a veneer, more than the length or the quality of a brushstroke. Let us speak of art as we would of life, because if successfully realized, a painting puts life on display. Lake Blouin has been called many things, magnum opus by the le Conservatoire de musique and post-FLQ-Crisis swansong by others, but far be it for me to stir up all that chaff back into the public atmosphere. And while its inspiration was rooted two months before October 1970—after my mother ceased speaking English with my Alberta-born father, but before she’d moved to Montreal by herself—the overture began on the wetlands outside Val-d’Or, past all manner of chain-link-guarded mines and deep into the leafy heart of the Canadian Shield where a tutorship in music composition awaited me. Let me begin.

Dal niente, the cello seeps from the recording, and forty years ago, seeped in the car window by timbre of motorcycle’s growl, its dynamo forte sudden with the winched croak of emergency brake to a semi-silence of bull-fly whine—woodwind in A minor, or the haunted fracas of a Quebecois summer. A friend once described the overture as “flaying.” The flooded saturation of flutes playing that one note reminded him of childhood days spent poking at dead trout that had washed up on the banks of Minnow Creek, Manitoba.

That early fall morning, this is what I woke to, though what roused me in the station wagon’s back seat smelled of candlewick and was accompanied by the crashed cymbals of a match being lit. Mother had snapped a paper match, perhaps along the seam of her jeans, like she’d done time and time again. I can still remember the last words she spoke to me—a cutting request for me to wake up, atonal as though I wasn’t the point. She wore eggplant-shaped lenses and had shrouded herself behind brown roots and fake blonde. With her back to me, I couldn’t see her face, but I imagined her lips were cracked from cigarette, with a spot of amber gloss in the corner of her mouth. My father turned and shook me again. His persimmon hair and freckled sweat caught in the dashboard sunlight while Mother dropped the burning match onto the asphalt as if to say goodbye. Dedicated listeners might notice the crescendo the insipid flautists have summoned up, which syncopates the intensity of the noise that enveloped me as I’d got out the car.

Sodden flats of meadow grass surrounded this curve of two-lane highway and sloped down into a cratering goose marsh. At the centre of this was a cottage that barely peered over its ivy-laden fence. The only indication of an address was an iron-branded piece of driftwood—Du’bois—athwart a road-hock driveway hairy with dandelions. We walked under a wooden trellis laced with the white chalices of Jimson weed and into a grassless lawn of sunflower and iris. And it was all so volatile, not a single aspect of space was negative and it was contained only by the small square of contorta shrubbery that lined the property.

At the time, I might’ve been confused. What was a boy of fourteen doing all the way out here and under whose authority was he being left? The violas roll with notes of severance, pan out to prairie-like melodies from the 40s. There’s a complicated emotion going on here, I’m tempted to place it somewhere between indignation and ambedo, like a child breaking through the skin of a former self and leaving it behind.

I first met Gehrman at the side of his cottage eating hot cereal on a breakfast patio no larger than a spare tire. He was dressed in teal pyjamas and wore a nightcap, and had a face similar to Claude Debussy, if Debussy had lived to see past the age of fifty-five and had worked in a coal mine. His forehead, both broad and tight despite the greyness of his hair, was perforated with craterous pores and had yellowed from years underground. He looked tight-lipped and squinted as my father addressed him in his best Franco-Albertan. From what little I’ve since learned about their relationship, they’d shared an interest in classical music for the ten years they’d worked together in the mines. However, it was clear that the stagnation had ruptured the bond they once shared. Gehrman broke eye contact as his thickened stout hand had shook my father’s, and retook his seat after a grunt.

Cue the brass, the trombones and trumpets muted and bleating in sustained blasts, trailed to the backbeat of a ride cymbal. A formation of strings pluck their bows and draw reassurance from their rubbing moan about the sky. If I may, these are the sounds I recalled, not chirping birds nor the rustle of maple, but an imitation of what I heard when I closed my eyes and thought of that morning and the months that proceeded it.

I explored the snug corridors of his yard while they spoke. He had composed the garden to feature sunflowers along fencing, and harlequin-blue flags of plum black aside the house. A marble birdbath decorated with cherubs stood centre-yard at the property’s rear and geraniums coated hanging baskets at every guttural corner. These baskets were accompanied by charms of wound twine that hung from their bottoms. Each charm hung had been shaped like a housefly similar to the fishing flies Father would make in our basement, however these lacked the vibrancy that false bait often has. It was then that I noticed their crude craftsmanship punctuated each point of interest on the property. Some dangled from fence posts in balls of twine-wrapped pebbles; the birdbath sported a twig knotted in a bow then rubbed with what smelled like nutmeg; each iris and sunflower had been tagged with a loop at their base.

I knelt cottage-side and hummed into the largest iris I could find, putting my ear against it, listening for the cellist. I’d heard not a buzz but a sweep; not a whisper but a thought. The strings swelled into heated conversation, then fell back, something had ended the men’s conversation. By the time I’d returned, neither were speaking.

Father gnawed at his ring finger. He had tight ears, which fit to his head in a useless manner, and wore a rain jacket fit loose. I thought of this stance when I eulogized him decades later. A sad old dog, nary of spry readiness nor emotional preparedness. Loving him forced one to be cruel, and I know that he was simply doing his best to stop Mother, to shake off her separatist radicalism and bring her back into our family as men like my father were expected to do. But he was nervous, his brow had widened while Gehrman got back to his breakfast. A friend once told me that the truth of absence, in particular the absence of parental figures, is less about being left behind and more about not knowing what to believe.

He didn’t lie to me before he left, but cupped his hands round the rim of my shoulders and told me not to read the newspaper.

The first thing Gehrman asked me was if I knew how to play the piano, specifically if I knew how to play the basic compositions one is taught when learning scales. These songs were notable for their historic context—Beethoven’s Fifth and Moonlight Sonata—both surged with adversarial tones like the gatecrashing boom of his Fifth, or the sad-chanting spiral of his C#minor sonata that embraces its own anomie before frantically rejecting it. I did not want to come off as braggadocios so I nodded despite the fact that my actual ability had long since surpassed them.

“Sit,” said Gehrman.

I sat on the gravel pathway that partitioned the rows of flowers and waited for his further instruction, but he gave none. He had a shrewd wealth to his eyes, seldom blinking and socketed loosely. A mouth breather of habit rather than need, he was the kind of man to observe with his face resting against his knuckles. “Peter, is it? Saint Peter. Peter, Peter Pumpkin Eater, picked a peck of pickled peppers.” He picked his nose. “Do they tease you about your red hair?”

“I can take a joke.”

He nodded towards my hands. “A great sense of humour, I’m sure.”

“I can also take a punch.”

“Looks like you’ve thrown more than you’ve taken,” said Gehrman. “Fingers like tree branches, though.” He tapped his spoon against the bowl and coughed, didn’t respond for a couple bars. “Well, I ask you if you know the scales and you say you know the scales so if you want to compose music all you’ll need is some empty sheets. To this I say, Godspeed to you.” He picked an iris and twirled it between his fingers. He did not blink. “What do you want from me?”

“I don’t know.” I truly didn’t. Like this, his thoughts were roots that curled toward the surface.

He pulled one of his silken teal sleeves back and revealed a leather-strapped watch, faced with a cream backdrop behind its needle arms. “How long can you hold your breath?”

I considered this to be a question of musical ability, referring to my sustainability for brass or woodwind. “Minute and a half.”

“Prove it,” he said. “I’ll give you a tour while you’re inflated.”

The cottage was two-storeyed, wooden, and ran off a gas generator kept in a cramped cellar. It could’ve been shown to even the most eager of guests in seconds, though the ghastly creaks and pops that can be expected from such places would’ve spooked most before they had a chance to consider where to put their bedding.

The main floor had two sources of light from open bulbs that crackled when turned on and wasn’t divided into rooms save for a washroom wallpapered in gold pinstripe. The kitchen smelled of boiled onion, the source of which was a soup pot bubbling upon a convection stove. Beside the front entrance, wood-panelled cabinets and cupboards with an average collection of non-perishable goods. A corner with couches, one white and one blue, both floral linen fabric aged in sun and coal. A teak coffee table of little design covered in union newsletters and coupon books, the waste basket reading of a niche clientele. I found more charms of a subtle genre throughout the space, including the cast-iron stairway railing that cost me my breath.

Gehrman checked his watch, “Minute twenty will have to do.”

There were two rooms on the top floor. Gehrman’s quarters had no electricity and was illuminated only by a cross-paned window, not that there was much to see. The room was sparsely furnished with two single-mattress bedsteads and a dresser. The other room I never saw. Bolted and padlocked, devoid of light from the gap beneath a door recently painted white. According to Gehrman the room contained instruments available for use when I was ready. And as arbitrary as that requisite was, it didn’t raise much colour from him; in fact, when asked when I would be ready, he waved me off and said tomorrow.

As the movement winds down there are two bars of silence before a cordial solo from the cellist. It’s very difficult for me to listen to this section of music. It’s as though the start of this symphony were the makings of its end. These low notes echo the movement’s introduction in a forgetful manner. It dips keys and cycles back to the melody’s starting point a number of times, growing quieter with each repetition.

2. Backwater in C Minor

The accordion solo is improvised. Mr. Aleman must have been not a man of scruples to allow these flourished stylings. Of the twelve performances I’ve witnessed, the most distinguished involves a bearded fisherman who played in Charlottetown’s church orchestra. He had small eyes, green, I think, and had the patience of an obelisk. This is the only part in the symphony that calls for the accordion and the solo itself lasts no more than forty seconds. Still he waited, eyes on the conductor, page-flipping through notes he would read, but not play. His interpretation, tense like a thin bicep, seemed to lull his dreams into the performance. He dipped his head, breathed with the bellows, and I could’ve sworn I heard him humming before ending the improvisation with a minor key. I approached him after an admirable performance from this small-town orchestra, and asked him what had drawn him to indulge in such happiness in a movement of such uncertain emotion.

For the first three weeks of my two-month stay I received letters from Father. They weren’t long—a paragraph or two about what it was like in the city, some reassurance that he’d be home soon and that Gehrman would take the utmost care in my education. And although Gehrman put some effort into a marginal curriculum, it must have been years since he’d composed anything other than anti-Catholic rants. In the mornings, we performed fruitless tasks such as whistling sheet music and morning walks to the treeline where we’d clap to the beat of our footsteps. As pitiful as his teaching was, it was undeniable that Gehrman had once dived into a creative force. Be it his ability to identify and annotate the key from natural sources—loon calls or coyote howls—or even the way he identified the rhythm from passing military vehicles.

I remember his hands, perpetually conductive and callused, once found a time signature in a sauce he’d watched me cook.

“Peter, have you added the tomato?” He stood window side, soot-coloured beard curling upward from his jawline, gazing out at the wilting sump of purple in the yard. A series of September rains had drowned his flowers, which must have bothered him immensely as I’m sure he’d wanted at least another week of flora.

“Still pink.” I held the pot askew so he could see the meat.

He stomped four times, then tapped the window on an off-beat. “Sometimes I wish those irises would bloom all year. Beauty is a treacherous quality to have—add the sauce.”

“Won’t we get sick?”

“Should we be so lucky.” He took the pot from my hands and inspected the meat, checked the element dials and the convection spiral with the back of his hand. Then looked at his watch as the cast-iron handle dangled from his fingers, sung a bit of C’est l’aviron while swinging the fingers of his free hand: one and two and three and four. “Stove is broken.” He booted the white oven drawer.

I spat on the element and clapped a bar then finished the chorus to C’est l’aviron. “Sounds fine to me. Maybe your metronome is broken.” Then snatched the stew pot back. “Besides, we still have one more refrain and a chorus till the meat is cooked.”

He laughed with his eyes and grit his teeth. “A good musician. You know, your father once sung that song in English. Butchery, I could’ve hit him, you know?”

“I prefer neither.”

“Yeah, well hey, don’t tell your mother that.” He nudged me with his elbow.

“What kind of name is Gehrman anyways? Spanish?”

“It is a fisherman’s name.”

“Antiquated fisherman’s name.” I stirred the meat with a wooden spoon and sung, “Gehrman the fisherman had a cod on the line. Was swallowed by a whale because he took his time. He begged for forgiveness, for the whale to spit up… Uh—”

“But his soul was heavy with sin and the whale needed fat!” Gehrman swung his arms out. He’d taken a low note for “…fat.” So low that it surprised me.

I shook my head. “What melody would be so obtuse?”

“Only songs with happy endings rhyme.”

The accordion is overtaken by the full symphony at this point, cut off for a three-note rise to melody, decisive and unwavering, without an ounce of tremolo from the strings and woodwinds and most of the brass, but pinches of trill from the French horns.

This was how our lessons went. Lacking in both purpose and formality, they often drifted into the abstract. To him, music was more of a sightseeing tour than a practiced art. Gehrman’s subjective and anecdotal approach to music lacked a centre, it was fundamentally rambling. On walks he would do his best to impart knowledge, such as a Sunday one week later. We’d barely reached the highway from his drive and he’d already assumed a look of thought formation. Beard combed to a point beneath his chin, his moustache cleaned and waxed and long. So long that it hid his mouth when he pursed his lips, but not to give him an appearance of being unkempt or bohemian.

“Peter, what is your favourite symphony?” he asked.

I thought about it. I’d not heard many symphonies back then. My parents owned few records. “Mozart’s Requiem, because it reminds me that I’m going to die someday.”

“A simple truth but, looking at you, I can see you are in possession of few.” He walked in silence amid the setting morning dewdrops for what seemed like an eternity. “But I like how he ends that symphony. Like sunlight through rainclouds, a precious acceptance of circumstance before our dear composer is carried away to the afterlife and God’s open arms.”

“Yes, it’s beautiful,” I said. “I could only hope to reach such mastery.”

“There are no secrets to what he did. You’ll see, someone will go missing. A friend, parent, brother, sister—people you know so well they become metre sticks in your history. And they’ll be gone one day, for reasons you’ll either know or not, and they’ll be gone and what’s left becomes air. Mozart wasn’t brilliant, he was just another songbird.”

“It doesn’t matter,” I said.

At the time, September had begun to bare its teeth. The marsh had a grass-frosting chill to it. Frigid humidity and the sensation of wearing wool in the sun, beaded an uncomfortable sweat beneath my arms. All the while, awoken herons wheezed before flight alongside wild pigeons and swarms of starlings. Dawn was the loudest time of day in rural Quebec.

We followed the marsh to a point where the trees had rooted, continued past the car and found the mouth of a tributary that likely fed the Harricana River, then sat at its grassy bank. The dew soaked through my grey joggers, but I took it like a bit lip and feigned no discomfort. Gehrman didn’t seem to notice, although he wore thick loose-fitting herringbone slacks that had been suspended round his girth. Crowned with what I’d describe as appropriate hat wear, he sported a modest coloured bowler to hide the liver blotches on his forehead, and a cross-knit turtleneck. It looked sentimental. Around us, sun-cracked white pines ate their way into the bedrock while yellow birch and maple bronzed for the season’s change.

“When you write your symphony, make sure you curse God at the end. D minor might piss him off. Mozart knew that much.” His expression was punctual and wide-eyed, bottom lip languishing.

“I’m afraid of what that would do to my reputation, I don’t want to end up like you. You’re no Mozart, anyways.” I shifted my wet buttocks but only found more discomfort. “Teeth aren’t long enough, brain is too small.”

He pulled some loose twine from the thicket of his pocket and wrapped a twig he snapped from a nearby bush. “You’re still with me, aren’t you?”

I swept pebbles into the shallows. They drippled into the water, metred into half-note clicks by some chaotic maestro. “What kind of composer are you?”

He bit the broken end of the twig, sucked the sap out then tied it off in a bow. I thought he might give it to me, but he left it on a flat rock, placed as precisely as he’d made it. “You ever been to the lake at the end of this?” he asked. “It’s shallow. Which is interesting because on a bright day much like this you’re able to see all the algae, water-logged stumps, and fish. And I was once quite fond of it. If you can believe it I was once a boy. My parents never owned a gramophone so the earliest renditions I heard were abreast of my mother, a superb whistler. She would take me to the lake at an early age and blow entire renditions of Beethoven’s Fifth, substituting the call of loons for violas and splashing trout for crash cymbals. No recording nor live performance of that music can match the joy I got from hearing her chirped vibrato. And so when she died of typhoid I came to love Lake Blouin especially as a boy who swam it July to September, skated it January to February and, if winter went right, to the start of May, skated it till the ice cracked beneath the blades. And it was all good and it was all fun.” He picked up the cocoon-shaped charm and ran it through his palms. “No, that’s not true. See I had this brother, Murray, went in over his head. Younger brother, little bit pale-skinned, little bit stupid, wanted to prove he had bigger balls than my friends and me so he soared out something like halfway in these long strides only greased by the slurry of melt that pooled as the ice thinned. We all tried to stop him, hollered for him to come back, but I suppose at that age warning can sound much like encouragement. Soon we could yell no more, only watch as his figure slipped through the surface. I remember the initial thump—like a horseshoe thrown onto wood floor, and then the ice cracking like broken lead. I remember sprinting up the shoreline to the mining docks. Spent five minutes in an argument with some horn-nosed nickel head who didn’t want to interrupt production to save some stupid kid. I can’t remember how I convinced him to send an icebreaker out there…” Gehrman held his mouth and, closing a fist round the charm he’d so carefully made, he whipped it into the creek. “Music isn’t about the instruments. Well it is, but it’s not just about the sounds they make. It’s in the—” He smacked two stones together. “Everything has a sound. Some matter more than others.”

“What happened to your brother?”

“My brother had been in the water for ten minutes. His body had stopped pumping blood to his brain and he was colder than a corpse, but only half dead.” He took off his hat and tapped a liver spot. “Permanent brain damage. I ended up taking him with me when I left home. He disappeared three years ago after a fight.” Gehrman turned to me. “I don’t want to talk about this anymore. We should go back.”

But we didn’t. And the tempo slowed to a passing breeze that brushed through my loaves of curl, taking horseflies and mosquitoes and dandelion seeds downstream, past small rapids to a bend out of sight, all of it likely wound through irrigation trenches till the water frothed with pesticide and runoff and flowed into the Harricana, where it slipped beneath yellow canoe hulls, peeling around sandstone boulders and on to Lake Blouin. I looked at the sky because I wanted to think about nothing, but Gehrman heaved phlegm from his throat and it became another note in this erratic interlude. The rest is fuzzy and the music trails off, coattails the overture’s quartet of buzzing flutes, and maybe I made a remark about how peaceful the spot was, and maybe he responded with a pat on the back before he got up and started back.

Side B

3. October

I modelled the symphony’s third movement, appropriately titled “October” after Claude Champagne’s Symphonie gaspesienne. Like a haunted cask of bad wine it breathes steady, the cellos rub the rhythm to a sway while violas pizzicato the unrest of their piano harmonics. French horns trigger bars and bars of string-borne anxiety. Crash cymbals, and an overzealous timpani player hits the drum like a mailbox just blew up.

At the time, I’d known nothing about the happenings of Montreal and Westmont. Gehrman never spoke of it at length other than a passing comment about the “hippy’s plight” as military trucks drove by the house at an increased rate. He also began to talk about his younger brother more and more, in an obsessive way, I might add. He’d deliver lectures only to falter halfway after getting lost in a memory. His yard had become a floral graveyard, full of slithered brown leaves that hadn’t the decency to keep off the narrow path and sunflower stalks blown over in recent storms. We stopped taking breakfast outside. Spent more time indoors, in that tiny cottage where personal space was constantly infringed upon.

I began to feel overcompensated for—as though my father, whose letters had all but stopped, left me stranded on a marshy island. And Gehrman grew irritable when not reminiscent, lost what little social tact he had for me as a guest and would go full days naked in flabby stature, sometimes itching his pubic hair while I cooked lunch. The stay had turned into an encampment I was not comfortable with.

“Peter, where do you think Murray ran away to?” He’d once asked, lying naked on the living-room floor.

I had been sitting in the kitchen, rereading a copy of one of his union newsletters. “North,” I said. “Father said nobody cares about the north. Seems like a good place to run away to.”

“You don’t know that.”

“Never said I did.”

“What if he never left?”

“I don’t understand why you haven’t composed. He’s been gone for years. Wasn’t that why you stopped? Taking care of him too much work that it crippled your brain?”

Gehrman sat up and turned away from me. He pulled at his beard, now so long that it dusted his collarbone whenever he ducked his head. “I think it’s time I shaved. Going into town this afternoon, hopefully I’ll get hold of your father.”

Incidentally, our worst night together was the same night Mr. Laporte was assassinated. After his shave, Gehrman spent the day in town trying to get a line out to Father. I’m not sure if he was successful in this, but he had stopped by a liquor store on the way back. Thumb over the wine-spout, he came in. He stomped dirt clods from a pair of work boots, then hit them against the wall. I grabbed a nearby shoe heel, knowing the downbeat he had prepared on his drive back. He glanced my weapon off his shoulder and grabbed me by the neck of my shirt, gurgling incoherent threats. I traded a blow to my eye with a boot to his shins, but he was not so feeble as to go down from a single youthful strike. His fragile cries in pain quickly melded back into anger as he came at me again, this time with a cast-iron candlestick. Nearly clobbered me whole but his aim was poor due to his drunkenness. I followed up with a rock to his plexus and made him vomit on the floral couch, then scuffed his head open-handed till he could apologize no clearer.

“I’m sorry, Peter.”

I picked up the wine bottle, most of its contents pooled on his wood floor and finished its final gulp. “Are you filled with God’s wrath?”

“No,” he cried, “I’m just a coot. God has no more wrath left for me. He can’t be spared. Oh Lord, he can’t be spared. The wrath is my foul pleasure.”

He went on in tears, and I went to the kitchen to fix some tea. Seeing a man cry has never been a comfortable sight. When I returned with a kettle and two cups he’d adjusted his pants back above his hips and hid his girth back beneath his black turtleneck. He accepted the beverage with a look that once again reminded me of Claude Debussy. His eyes held pity but the rest of his face tightened, mouth rigid-fixed, into a frown at the vomit he’d left on the couch. We sat at the kitchen table, left ourselves to the sparkling tingle of porcelain cups on porcelain saucers. When he finished, he took some twine from his breast pocket and began the process of wrapping the cup handle.

Gehrman looked up at me. He smiled slightly then cast his gaze back to the handle. “I’m an angry fool. This is what angry fools do when their cup is empty.”

“Your brother teach you that?”

“A gypsy, actually. Came recommended by an angry priest.” He licked his thumb and pressed it to the length of handle, kept the twine taut.

“How does it work?”

“You put the bad thoughts into the object. Anger is a constricting ritual that chokes out the heart first, then the brain.” He double-knotted the ends together.

“Can I try?”

With the length that Gehrman gave me, I was able to wrap the wine bottle’s spout with five tight layers.

“Can we go to Lake Blouin tomorrow?” I asked.

“Tomorrow.”

That night, I swore I heard the air raid sirens of a nearby military base rev out a shrill peel of warrant. We faced each other as we slept that night, who remembers who fell asleep first, but I’m sure he watched me, just as I watched him.

4. Lake Blouin

Alone, the lake’s temper had the potential to steal all volumes of activity. When I came with Gehrman, the thrum of his boot steps and wheeze of his breath kept an allegrazza melody. Lake Blouin is difficult to hide from, its deepest quarters go no more than twenty-five feet, and the shallows extend metres beyond the shore. Subsurface life is greened with algae, and on a sunny day in a skiff one might see minnows dart between sunken logs. The boat we’d rented drifted far from shore and there was something speechless between us. Ah, the birdsong. You’ll be hearing it now. For this performance, the composer seems to have chosen the stylings of a chickadee. It’s funny how much of the sheet music I left blank toward the end or, rather, how strange how much room for the soloists to take the reins, as it were.

There are parts of me that remember what happened on that day and when I come across that memory, I feel as though I’ve let an old friend inside for a cup of tea, and the conversation is riveting for perhaps a half hour before we’ve run out of things to say. We don’t say much after that. Just study each other’s faces for the nuances of change before he takes his leave. Back to the foothills of Quebec.

There’s another fourteen bars of silence at the end. That’s fourteen bars at four seconds, though the recording label cut it off at five. I doubt most would notice, the negative space of music is difficult to show.

GET THE MALAHAT REVIEW

In issue #200 (Autumn 2017)

The Malahat Review celebrates its fiftieth anniversary with “Victoria Past, Victoria Present, Victoria Future.” To observe this milestone, the magazine devotes the pages of this theme issue to the writers living in the city where it was established in 1967. Each genre—poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction—is represented by local authors. Some, like Emily Carr and P. K. Page, are no longer with us; others, like Lorna Crozier and Philip Kevin Paul, continue mapping out distinguished literary careers; and still others, like Jason Jobin and Julie Paul, belong to a remarkable new generation of writers who call this city home.s

Notes on Contributors

JOHN WALL BARGER’s third collection with Palimpsest, The Book of Festus, was a finalist for the 2016 J. M. Abraham Poetry Award. His poem, “Smog Mother,” was co-winner of the Malahat’s 2017 Long Poem Prize.

YVONNE BLOMER, Victoria’s Poet Laureate, just released Sugar Ride: Cycling from Hanoi to Kuala Lumpur. This fall, Refugium: Poems for the Pacific, an anthology she’s edited, will appear with Caitlin.

SHANE BOOK’s latest collection, Congotronic, shortlisted for the Canadian Authors Association Award, Ottawa Book Award, and Griffin Prize, won the Archibald Lampman Award. He recently joined the faculty of UVic’s Department of Writing.

MARILYN BOWERING, a poet and novelist shortlisted for the Orange Prize, twice nominated for the Governor General’s Award, has won the Dorothy Livesay, Gwendolyn MacEwen, Ethel Wilson, and Pat Lowther prizes.

LEAH CALLEN is a poet and playwright. Her play, The Daughter of Turpentine, was produced at the Victoria Fringe Festival.

EMILY CARR (1871–1945), a pioneering locally-based artist whose canvases are today exhibited around the world, was also a memoirist. Her first book, Klee Wyck, won the Governor General’s Award for Nonfiction in 1941.

CORINNA CHONG lives in Kelowna, where she teaches at Okanagan College and is co-editor of Ryga: A Journal of Provocations. Her novel, Belinda’s Rings, appeared in 2013.

MORGAN CROSS is a writing major at the University of Victoria.

LORNA CROZIER’s latest book of poetry, What the Soul Doesn’t Want, came out in 2017. God of Shadows, also poetry, will be published by M&S in 2018.

RITA DONOVAN lives and writes in Ottawa.

JAMIE DOPP teaches Canadian literature at the University of Victoria. He has published two books of poetry, a novel, and a number of short stories.

MIKE DOYLE (1928–2016) published 17 books of poetry and wrote or edited many works of criticism, biography, and political commentary. Of Irish descent, he lived in Victoria, a city he loved, for 48 years.

KAREN ENNS’s poetry books are That Other Beauty, Ordinary Hours, and Cloud Physics.

ROBERT FINLEY lives in St. John’s, where he teaches creative nonfiction at Memorial Univerisity. His books include The Accidental Indies, A Ragged Pen, and K. L. Reich.

CLARISSA FORTIN is an Ottawa-based freelance writer. You can find her work at rabble.ca, in the Winnipeg Review, and Quill and Quire.

PATRICK FRIESEN’s book of poetry, Songen, is coming out in 2018 with Mother Tongue. His play, A Short History of Crazy Bone, will be staged in Winnipeg in 2018.

RHONDA GANZ has published poems in The Malahat Review, Rattle, Room, and several anthologies. She is a regular open-mic reader at Planet Earth, Victoria.

ALISA GORDANEER works as a writing teacher and communications consultant. Her book of poems about food, Still Hungry, was published by Signature in 2015.

DOROTHEA GRÜNZWEIG, born in Germany, has lived in Finland since 1989. Her collected poems, Sonnenorgeln, was published in 2011.

JUNE HALLIDAY is a Métis writer who lives in Nanaimo.

ANNABEL HOWARD, originally from Norfolk, England, has lived in Victoria for three years. Set up in 2016, the Miles Frost Fund aims to provide free genetic testing across the U.K. In June 2017, the fund saved its first life with a diagnosis ofhcm.

DANIELLE JANESS’ poems and translations have appeared in literary journals in Canada, Germany, France, the U.K., and the U.S.

JASON JOBIN grew up in the Yukon. He enjoys teaching, mentorship, and hip hop.

SEAN JOHNSTON lives in Kelowna. His latest book is We Don’t Listen to Them.

EVE JOSEPH’s two books of poetry, The Startled Heart and The Secret Signature of Things, were both nominated for the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize. In the Slender Margin won the Hubert Evans Award for Nonfiction.

KATE KENNEDY’s poetry has been published in numerous journals and has twice been selected for Best Canadian Poetry in English.

MICHAEL KENYON has published several books, mostly recently Parallel Rivers (stories) and Astatine (poems). He was once a Malahat Review board member under Constance Rooke, Derk Wynand, and Marlene Cookshaw.

PATRICK LANE has published widely over a half-century career. The Collected Poems of Patrick Lane was released in 2012.

TIM LILBURN’s last book of poetry was The Names. The University of Alberta Press published The Larger Conversation: Contemplation and Place this fall.

CHARLES LILLARD (1944–1997), a prolific, award-winning poet, historian, teacher, and journalist, co-edited the Malahat’s three West Coast Renaissance issues.

PAIGE LINDSAY, a visual artist and writer, was longlisted for the 2016 CBC Short Story Prize. Her recent solo show, Thank You! Call Again!, was a featured exhibition in the 2016 Scotiabank CONTACT Photography Festival.

NORMA LUNDBERG lives and writes in Toronto.

SHEILA MUNRO, author of Lives of Mothers and Daughters: Growing Up with Alice Munro, has published articles and reviews in BC Bookworld and Saturday Night.

P. K. PAGE (1916–2010), a poet, novelist, children’s writer, memoirist, critic, and artist (under her married name P. K. Irwin), published more than forty books and won many awards, including the 1954 Governor General’s Award for Poetry.

ARLEEN PARÉ’s latest book of poetry is The Girls with Stone Faces. A nominee for the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize, she has won the Victoria Butler Book Prize, the CBC Bookie Prize and the Governor General’s Literary Award for Poetry.

JULIE PAUL has published two books of stories, The Jealousy Bone and The Pull of the Moon (Victoria Butler Book Prize), and a book of poetry, The Rules of the Kingdom.

PHILIP KEVIN PAUL, a member of the WSÁ,NEC Nation, works with the University of Victoria to preserve SENCOTEN. A nominee for the Governor General’s Literary Award for Poetry, he lives in Brentwood Bay.

DANIEL PERRY (@danielperrysays) is the author of the short story collections Nobody Looks That Young Here and Hamburger. He lives in Toronto.

LUKE RAMSEY,the City of Victoria’s 2017 artist in residence, won a National Urban Design Medal from the Architectural Institute of Canada for a collaborative mural with Josh Holinaty. His book, Intelligent Sentient? (Drawn & Quarterly), was nominated for a Doug Wright Award.

KYEREN REGEHR’s poetry has appeared in literary journals and anthologies in Canada, Australia, and the U.S.

JOHN REIBETANZ’s ninth collection of poems, Where We Live, appeared in 2016. The Essential John Reibetanz is due from Porcupine’s Quill this fall.

LAURA RITLAND, an ma graduate in creative writing from the U of T and a PhD candidate in English at UC Berkeley, won the 2014 Far Horizons Award for Poetry.

MICHAEL ROBERSON holds a PhD in English from the University of Calgary. He lives in Nanaimo.

JIM ROBERTS’ books are From an argument I’ve taken with me and Left Shoulder Voices.

JANET ROGERS, a Mohawk/Tuscarora writer from the Six Nations territory, has lived as a guest on traditional Coast Salish territory since 1994. She has five published poetry books, the latest being Totem Poles and Railroads.

LINDA ROGERS has written poetry, fiction, song lyrics, criticism, and screenplays. Current titles include Bozuk and Cli-Fi: Canadian Stories of Climate Change. Repairing the Hive, last of her Empress Trilogy, is forthcoming.

BARDIA SINAEE lives in Toronto. His poems have appeared in Maisonneuve, The Walrus, and The Best of The Best Canadian Poetry in English.

ROBIN SKELTON (1925–1997) was born in England and came to Victoria in 1963, where he helped establish UVic’s Department of Writing, UVic Libraries’ Special Collections, and The Malahat Review. He published over one hundred books.

MADELINE SONIK, a B. C. National Award for Canadian Nonfiction nominee and Charles Taylor Prize finalist, won the Victoria Butler Book Prize.

SUSAN STENSON is a poet, teacher, and bodytalk practitioner.

DERK WYNAND has published eleven books of poetry, one of fiction, and several books of German translation. A former editor of The Malahat Review, he is a professor emeritus of the UVic’s Department of Writing.

PATRICIA YOUNG’s most recent collection is Short Takes on the Apocalypse. A new book of poetry is forthcoming from Goose Lane.

TERENCE YOUNG teaches creative writing and English at St. Michaels University School. His most recent book is The End of the Ice Age (short fiction).

BROCK ZAWILA, a recent graduate of UVic’s Department of Writing, has had work appear in This Side of West.

Table of Contents

Inside Front Cover

Content

John Barton - Introduction

Julie Paul - Esquimalt Road

Tim Lilburn - Two Poems

Karen Enns - Changing The Clocks

Brock Zawila - The Lake Blouin Symphony: A Listening Guide

Notes on Contributors