39 good reasons to read

Roots To Branches Volume 3: Federation of British Columbia Writers 2023 Anthology
Selected by JJ Lee, Finnian Burnett, Kerry Gilbert, and Norma Dunning

Courtney: Federation of BC Writers Press, 2025
$17.95 / 9781069008701

Reviewed by Brett Josef Grubisic

*

Brimming with information, the handy website of the Federation of BC Writers also outlines the organization’s impressive purposes. Among them: aims to promote excellence and professionalism in the literary arts, improve the status of the literary arts, encourage greater recognition of British Columbia writers, provide information on literary resources, and encourage and support young and emerging writers. (The author of this review, that’s me, received no incentives, financial or otherwise, to aid, promote, or favour this venerable provincial organization with origins in the early 1980s!) 

Admirable goals and services aside, the FBCW also holds an annual literary contest—with cash prizes, yes, and, perhaps better, a publication credit. A bit delayed, the latest, Volume 3 of Roots to Branches, packs in 39 pieces from four genres—creative nonfiction, flash fiction, poetry, short fiction—with the genre-specific winner opening each section and runner-up and shortlist pieces following from there.

The work selected by judges JJ Lee, Finnian Burnett, Kerry Gilbert, and Norma Dunning—and that includes M Summer Long, “a sixty-something-years-old reluctant writer,” Cynthia Pronick, who follows James Thurber’s advice, “Don’t get it right, just get it written,” and Nicole Ardiel, who returned to poetry and fiction after taking “a twenty-five-year break from writing anything other than diary entries”—satisfies like a star chef’s multi-course meal. And (to belabour the metaphor) whether an individual morsel is sweet, delicate, savoury, toothsome, salt-forward, imbued with bitterness, or with a burst of effervescence, the composition is something to both admire, savour, and enjoy. 

“This story will stay for me for a long time,” judge Burnett writes of “Three Thing I Like About My Cactus,” the flash fiction winner written by Susan Down. In Roots to Branches, Burnett’s comment has widespread applicable. 

That’s particularly true—for me, I should add—in the opening section, creative nonfiction. The essays may be economical (the literary contest establishes a word limit) but within the 4-5 pages of each essay, the authors introduce an audience to a writer with abundant skills and a tale to tell. In “Normal and Natural,” for example, Nancy Yakimoski recounts—with an appealing lightness of tone and humility—her experiences with “learning to recognize [her] mistakes.” Formatted as a series of lists, the essay describes a mother’s experiences of attending a presentation—titled Adults with Down Syndrome and Sexuality—with an aim of figuring out the “specific issues” she faces as a parent. 

Whether it’s recounting the ups and downs of a spiritual pilgrimage in Spain (in “Hunting Down Jesus” by Linda Hughes Pfeil), working in the Empress Hotel as a teenager in 1973 (that’s “Parfait” by Dianne Massam), or pondering the wonders of elevators (Wanda Hurren’s “Elevator Love”), the inquisitive essays are immersive and invitingly told, as well as both interesting and edifying. What more can one ask for?

The winner, “This Boy” by Angela Kenyon, and runner-up “My Heart is a Cedar” by Fay Roth begin with “I was eleven years old the first time I lied to my father” and “You sparkled as you watched the pines sway in the Chinook wind outside your hospice room,” respectively. Just over eight pages in total, they’re lovely and touching as they memorialize past moments and relationships in such a way that a reader may feel they held the vivid memory themselves. 

Short fiction closes the volume. (By the way, I read by whim: nonfiction, then short fiction, then back and forth between poetry and flash fiction). Winner Cheryl Knopp’s piece, “Fear No Evil” delivers. Set in Pistolcross (“population thirty-seven—and dropping”) and alive with characters named Missus Edna Plunk, Widow Black, and Catherine Von Trigger, it’s a delirious Western where creatures from Greek myth happen to roam. Tyler Finley’s “Triumph,” a vivid piece of west coast Gothic, tells a trippy family tale that somehow manages to wed Nanaimo to Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi. Equally enthralling, stories that centre on a timid traveller in Spain (Jann Everard’s “Climb On”), a diving accident (Ace Baker’s “Wave Rider”), homelessness (Roy Innes’ “View from the Sidewalk”), and an accidental front row view of a drug deal inside a taxi (in Long’s “Opportunity Knocks”), the stories selected by judge Norma Dunning are unified by novel settings, sharp points of view, and notable characterization.

Between creative nonfiction and short fiction: poetry and flash fiction. They’re the definition of eclectic, with the 1- and 2-page flash fiction vignettes ranging from Down’s winning meditation on Life from a child’s perspective, “Three Things I Like About My Cactus,” and runner-up Linda K. Thompson’s prickly and humorous snapshot of a venerable marriage, “Harold and Peg,” rounded out by fictional flashes about childhood (Jana Danniels’ “1963: Lush, Wet, Sweet”), a fable about a bear (“The Grizzly” by Laurène Boutin), a unique view of the hereafter (Keith Digby’s “Afterlife”) and, in Bill Engleson’s “Maisie and Norm,” an “egregious case of hubby dumping.” 

Weird, funny, captivating or disturbing—Geneviève Goggin’s “Chosen to Leave” begins, “It’s my turn to sacrifice a neighbourhood boy”—the pieces are tantalizing exactly because they’re so brief. 

Poetry, likewise eclectic, includes a ghazal—well, “(an imperfect Ghazal for my mother)” is how Lynn Easton subtitles “Deadheading”—free verse, concrete poetry, and two prose poems. In contrast to the flash fiction, though, the poetry selections made by judge Kerry Gilbert are palpably serious-minded, if not mournful. Loss and lament are strong themes that course through them.

Nicole Ardiel depicts a traveller in Bosnia and Herzegovina who’s contemplating a meal after a morning visit to the Museum of War and Genocide Victims, while the speaker of runner-up “Jacob’s Ladder” relates a mother’s observations of her autistic son’s challenges—“his word concatenate on a quick brisk torrent of thought, his mind hard set on a thing, so hard he could not hear a bomb drop.” Pensive short poems capture an anguished personal evolution (Veronika Gorlovka’s “In the Belly of a Prairie Wolf”), the addiction of a child “lost inside a twenty-dollar crystal” (Laurie Mackie’s Then   and   Now”), and a parent lost—“the whirling one-armed bandit / of your brain”—to dementia. Joanna Streetly’s “Ringtone,” the winning entry chosen by Kerry Gilbert, is equally hallucinatory and claustrophobic as its speaker opens with “Morphine is a grey army helicopter coming at me, no clearance,” and descends into a panicked state of mind.

Just shy of 220 pages, the third volume of Roots to Branches showcases labours of love—from writers, judges, and the FBCW—and a quality of literature that’s a quiet testimony to the health (if not wealth) of the province’s widespread community of writers.

My Two-Faced Luck, the fifth novel by Salt Spring Islander Brett Josef Grubisic, published in 2021 with Now or Never Publishing, is reviewed here by Geoffrey Morrison. A previous novel, Oldness; or, the Last-Ditch Efforts of Marcus O (2018), was reviewed by Dustin Cole. [Editorial note: A BCR editor, Brett has reviewed books by Kung Jaadee and Kristen Pendreigh, Sam Wiebe, Maureen Young, Daniel Anctil, Adam Welch, Andrea Bennett, Patrick Grace, Cole Nowicki, Tania De Rozario, John Metcalf (ed.), Brandon Reid, Beatrice Mosionier, Hazel Jane Plante, Sam Wiebe, Joseph Kakwinokanasum, Chelene Knight, Lyndsie Bourgon, Gurjinder Basran, and Don LePan for BCR.]

*

The British Columbia Review

Interim Editors, 2023-26: Trevor Marc Hughes (non-fiction), Brett Josef Grubisic (fiction and poetry)
Publisher: Richard Mackie

Formerly The Ormsby Review, The British Columbia Review is an online book review and journal service for BC writers and readers. The Advisory Board now consists of Jean Barman, Wade Davis, Robin Fisher, Barry Gough, Hugh Johnston, Kathy Mezei, Patricia Roy, and Graeme Wynn. Provincial Government Patron (since September 2018): Creative BC. Honorary Patron: Yosef Wosk. Scholarly Patron: SFU Graduate Liberal Studies. The British Columbia Review was founded in 2016 by Richard Mackie and Alan Twigg.

“Only connect.” – E.M. Forster