It was Friday of the long Thanksgiving weekend and I was at the Shaw Center for Christian Community Day, the big annual school board powwow. I was sitting there with the lulled educated masses when my phone chirped. It was a message from Marie with a photo telling me I'd received a brown manila envelope with the University of New Brunswick logo embossed upon it. My heart flipped halleluja. It was my author copies of the new issue of Camel, the illustrated journal of narrative curated by Clarissa Hurley and my literary Wayne Gretzky- the great one, Mark Anthony Jarman. This issue has been the harbinger of many great things in my life as of late. It was enough to be accepted for publication in it, but it had also been announced that the story was in the shortlist for the magazine’s Gilmer Prize. Being able to mention to shortlisted story when I write my literary cover letters is a huge affirmation for an emerging writer like me, so I was over the moon proud of being even considered. Reading that list, I found that I would be sharing a cover with Elisabeth De Mariaffi, Zsuzsi Gartner and lit phenom Jowita Bydlowska among others leaving me startstruck. But in it all, the greatest reward is that it solidified a friendship through correspondence with Mark Jarman, which is something I had never expected but now deeply appreciate. Thanksgiving, indeed.
I came home from the PD event earlier than expected to find the front (and back) door locked while Marie was out with a friend. To this, I shrugged and turned to trudge over to the Bridge Pub where I treated myself to a Perth Brewery Mocha Stout (nice!) and a G.O.A.T. burger. It wasn’t the greatest actually, but the goat cheese and 6oz chuck beef patty hit the spot well enough. Once Marie was home, I was able to tear into the envelope and hold the two copies in my hands. I was delighted at how very heavy and thick it was, always an indicator for the sheer volume of good stuff in it. At this, I made it my mission to spend this long weekend delving into the stories stuffed into its pages not unlike a good cabbage roll, some spice, some meat, some veggie healthiness, some things that might cause gas later but all in all a hearty meal for an autumn indulgence.
The next morning, I awoke early while the sun had yet to rise, had my first coffee then decided to take the air before diving into my reading. It's become cold now at the shallow end of October, so I threw on my tattered old work jacket, pulled my union toque over my cranium and set out for Strathcona Park just over the Adawe footbridge.
As I'd hoped, the ducks were in attendance, dipping their silly heads under the water lofting their silly duckbutts in the air, as always, making me smile. There was no one in the park so I could sit on the embankment of the river soaking in the rich sensory orchestra around me without interruptions. I stayed until people started arriving and to preserve my good mood, I set off back home to start on Camel 2.
Proof - Elisabeth de Mariaffi
Winner of the first annual Gilmer Prize, Proof explores the contrast between public and private narratives. The story centers around a compelling murder mystery, reports of which a local newspaper must censor for public consumption, frustrating the rookie reporter covering the case. This creates a familiar scenario: a small town, seemingly idyllic, is shaken by a senseless tragedy while a macabre story unfolds beneath the surface. De Mariaffi skillfully navigates these two tiers, the public and private, ultimately demonstrating that the uncensored, ugly truth is more compelling than the sanitized version. The cerebral burn that I felt after reading it told me unquestionably why this story took the prize.
Father Eduardo - Elaine McCluskey
In "Father Eduardo," we meet Anthony, a neurodivergent young man whose life revolves around his lucrative, yet isolated, stay-at-home job. The story's premise, as conveniently stated within the narrative itself, is that "life is a surprise party of the incongruous and the unexplainable."
Anthony lives a rigidly calculated life, finding the randomness of the neurotypical people around him clashing with his concise and ordered world. He reacts without emotion to the crazy things that happen under his watch, offering chilled observations or annoyance when they arrive. Even when calamity strikes close, he still analyzes it with a cold remove. Behind it all the subject of a priest that Anthony’s grandfather once knew appears in the intrusive conversations he has with his mother, acting as a conduit into the familial complexities that Anthony actively ignores. However, the minimal mentions of the title character of Father Eduardo makes his inclusion in the story enigmatic. It’s never concluded what the priest’s actual relationship with the grandfather is, which brings up a lot of question marks in my head. I think more clues into the priest’s story might help, but perhaps McCluskey’s intent was to keep the subject buried in conjecture to illustrate the depth of the family’s historical mystery. If that’s so, then it’s effective, but I can’t help but feel that the character was left unattended and the story without closure.
Cult Film - Jowita Bydlowska
Jowita Bydlowska's work first caught my attention through the praise of fellow authors on social media. Intrigued, I read her novel Possessed, a dense, psychologically rich work layered with metaphor, where the lines between reality and dream were blurred. While Marie, who'd read the book first, found the enigmatic narrative frustrating, I was captivated by the challenge of deciphering its meaning. Bydlowska's "Cult Film" echoes the style of Possessed, featuring similar narrators and a shared commitment to metaphor. The story revolves around an obscure short film curated by two lovers, loosely based on the myth of Hades and Persephone. The narrative alternates between a film student's obsessive analysis of the film and the perspective of the woman who co-created it. As in Possessed, we oscillate between a dream state and real time though even the boundaries between the two remain a thin place. In the end, my mind was buzzing so much I wanted a second read, which always makes a story a keeper to me.
Meat Bingo - Darryl Whetter
Meat Bingo, a nonfiction piece, follows the author in their conversion from an ethically conscious young person to a gun toting middle aged deerhunter in order to preserve his late father-in-law’s gun collection. It’s a beautiful elegy for a good man as he faithfully maintains the family cottage property deep in la forêt acadienne in Nova Scotia. He approaches both tedious processes of applying to a gun registry and for euthanasia with a calm humour that never descends into the macabre or the satirical. Sometimes Whetter’s use of pseudonyms pulls me out of the story with question marks buzzing my head, but it's nothing sharper attentiveness as a reader can't remedy. All in all, it’s an engaging read, marrying two very different perspectives to coexist in one narrative and paying proper tribune to the good man his father-in-law was.
My Piece, A Hierarchy of Needs
The impetus of this story comes from the ice storm that once gripped the St. Lawrence Basin in 1998. Those that will remember know that it was a precarious situation back then, hanging by the thread of just a few power grids, the threat of long-term blackout looming with menacing possibility. It was through this near-disaster when my brother and brother-in-law hunkered down in my sister’s house to protect it from possible looters while the rest of the family vacated to somewhere that had power. Entertained by nothing more than a few bottles of wine and conversation, they led a nearly prehistoric existence for a few days before the power finally came back on and life returned to normal. Their experience intrigued me enough to start writing notes for a story. The resulting train of thought brought up memories of my father teaching me how to cut wood, stack it and get a fireplace going to warm my parents’ house for winter. Later it was me purchasing my own three cords of wood each fall and spending the winter chopping it all up into woodstove-sized bits for my own house. I fell in love with the whole culture of wood and it informed much of the short story as it was developing.
When the story came together, I was very proud of the finished product and always considered it my favourite that I had written, if not the best. When I started submitting it to magazines, I was always surprised and somewhat dejected when it was declined. I edited it, revised it and workshopped it and still it never seemed to catch anywhere, much to my frustration. So it was a deep affirmation when the editors at Camel accepted it at long last, most of all because my favourite author, Mark Anthony Jarman, was on the panel that accepted it. Over the editing process, it was such a delight to have Mark offer suggestions, especially towards adding an end part that brought substance to an otherwise sudden closing. This, with the story’s inclusion on the shortlist for Camel’s Gilmer Prize, makes this story a huge source of esteem and pride. It will always be a glowing moment for me in my writing career.
Paintings by David Woods-
David Woods is an artist with many awards and accolades for his work in the black community in Nova Scotia. It shows in the three paintings that are included in this issue. In the three, there are vivid primary colours arranged in an almost cubist style on the fringes of the frame while the colour becomes dark and in that darkness you find his human subjects, members of the community, huddled as family or as a series of masks collected within the urban surroundings. Like modern Inuit art or the early paintings of Vincent Van Gogh, Wood shows the spirit of community candidly placed in its environment, present, active and vibrant.
A Pearl of Great Price - John Metcalf
I first saw John Metcalf at a reading at the Manx Pub here in Ottawa, which is also the time and place of my first true meeting ever with Mark Jarman. There was much adoration surrounding the man at this event, which brought together the Bookhug launch of Mark’s book of selected stories, Burn Man, with John’s birthday and the launch of a chapbook of his story, the same one I am reviewing, republished in Camel. I remember John reading a portion of this piece with an actor’s diction and to hear that voice speak of such things as a foreskin examination was just an uproarious treat. Many times during the reading, Marie and I looked at each other, mouthing ‘did he just say that?’. In print, you can sense the innovation that flowed from those halcyon days of CanLit when Metcalf started out, the same innovation that charts our progress today. The brave candidness and the deep descriptive passages fold into a great comic discourse between a man and his doctor, in the end taking the reader on a wild ride.
And So In Conclusion…
It’s only every so often that I feel like keeping a literary journal. There are times when I read one and none of the stories stand out for me and they never really ever end up on my bookshelf for keeps. Sometimes though, a story or two will resonate with me and I have an increasingly full shelf of such copies that I return to now and again for inspiration and entertainment. Camel does this for me from cover to cover and I’m not speaking from the bias of having my own story included, or my admiration for its editors.
Every story is chock full of meaning for me. All of them speak to and for a part of me and this is what I find most special. Camel has a deep respect for tradition as well as an eye for modern innovation. I really do hope that it will succeed in Canada’s literary landscape as one oasis of strong cultural contributions. I want to thank Clarissa and Mark for bringing all of these components together and I trust that future editions will be just as momentous. Camel is something to watch for, mainly because it means so much to the community and industry in which it functions.
Here are some more pictures from my walks along the riverside trail...
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| GOOSEBUTT!! |
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