Where change is the only constant
Born of the Storm: Stories
by Don McLellan
Vancouver: Page Count Press, 2025*
$20.00 / 9781777361617
Reviewed by Ryan Frawley
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We live by decisions. The ones we make, and the ones that are made for us. But what do you do when you’re out of options?
That’s the question asked again and again in Vancouver writer Don McLellan’s short story collection, Born of the Storm. The eight tales in this book, told mostly in the breathless present tense, focus with a tender and disarmingly gentle eye on characters who have seemingly run out of road.
The collection begins with the title piece, “Born of the Storm.” Set at a religious juvenile detention facility, it follows the inmates through lives that have come off the rails before they have even fully begun.
St. Joseph Training Center for Juveniles, we learn, was once a residential school. But now, First Nations inmates like Geronimo and Cochise are exempt from the labour the other boys perform if they instead pursue a cultural activity like carving totem poles or building birchbark canoes. As if these severed ways of life are punishment enough by themselves.
“Lights out, candles flare.” With curt, economical prose McLellan (Ouch: 20 Stories) adds to the breathless feeling of these pieces, a sense that anything could happen, and is almost always about to. And in the candlelight, the boys roll cigarettes and talk casually about the sexual assaults they’ve suffered or are destined to suffer, about the crimes that put them there. Sean Cooper, known as Coop, was arrested as a peeping Tom, and Father Bernard tells him the story behind the name, of Lady Godiva’s ride through medieval Coventry. But Coop’s peeping was not prurient so much as it was envious. An attempt to see through the glass into the lives of others more stable, more successful, presumably more happy than him and the other inmates of St Joe’s.
The phrase, ‘Born of the Storm’ is written on Coop’s file. Underlined twice.
Coop, a workout fanatic, finds a sense of purpose in teaching the other boys to exercise. Inevitably, he gets into a conflict with the Pasha, the dominant kid in the institution with “a fag tucked into smirking lips”—one of several unexpected Anglicisms in the story. Coop’s trajectory, at least, seems to be an upward one, as far as it can be in his circumstances. But he knows all too well the same can’t be said for many of the other boys. The occasional escape attempt notwithstanding, this is just one more stop along a sad road.
There’s a different kind of melancholy in “A Change of Skin.” This story follows Anthony, the editor of a local newspaper in the coastal BC town of Port Lopez. The town, like so many others, is dying, its single employer falling victim to the tumbling price of lumber, and “security guards at the eerily silent mill doze like old dogs in a heat wave.”
What starts off seeming like a character-driven examination of decline turns into a BC noir. A First Nations woman from the town goes missing, and she’s not the first. As the editor of the local paper, Anthony knows about the disappearances, so far unsolved and currently under investigation by the town’s single policeman Ken. Like all good mysteries, the story gives us an easy scapegoat, only to pull the rug out from under us and leave us floundering, much like the characters in Port Lopez, struggling to adjust to a world in which the old certainties turn out to be no more solid than the stories we tell ourselves.
In “Blown Off Course,” we find ourselves in Son La Phu in in Vietnam’s Central Highlands, in the company of a Canadian traveler recently broken up with a girlfriend in Vancouver and desperate for something different. Layla is a chameleon, a people pleaser, but her natural self is “a scrappy, steel-toed butch who doesn’t take guff from anyone.” The island she visits, known to international travellers as Avalon, was first settled by fishermen blown off course, and she feels the same way as she stumbles from one misadventure to another on money she stole from her cheating girlfriend. It’s only in the company of a local family that she rediscovers, through a facility for sand sculptures, what Buddhists call satori. An understanding “that this, now … is the finest moment of her life.”
Uncle Frank is a war veteran with a secret. Sonny T is a desi on an illegitimate student visa, looking to pull off his next big score. Olga Petrovich is a widow navigating the loneliness of city life after the loss of her husband, surrounded by a group of women in the same situation.
Elsewhere, a writer embarks on a mission of vengeance against the publisher who snubbed him, while three young travellers on a road trip to Mexico encounter an enigmatic woman they only know as Cuatro.
McLellan’s imagination takes us through the city of Vancouver, up the haunted coast, down to the sunny south and across the Pacific. But all the way along, we are confronted with characters struggling to find a place in a world where change is the only constant. What makes us who we are is not the circumstances we find ourselves in so much as it is our reaction to them. Born of the Storm asks us, again and again, what it means to live life fully, to choose when all choices seem wrong. In a collection that dives again and again into the motivations behind actions that sometimes seem incomprehensible, the author gives us a deeply meaningful way to get lost.
[*Editor’s note: Born of the Storm can be purchased via the author website.]
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Ryan Frawley is a novelist and essayist whose short fiction has won numerous awards in BC and across Canada. He is the author of a novel, Scar, and a travel writing collection, Towers Temples Palaces: Essays from Europe. He also writes essays on medium.com and can be contacted at ryanfrawley.com. [Editor’s note: Ryan previously reviewed Vijay Khurana and Cynthia LeBrun in BCR.]
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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