Lice Savers, lifesavers, & more

Not the Same Road Out: Trans Canada Stories
by K.J. Denny (editor)

New Westminster: Tidewater Press, 2025
$24.95 / 9781990160509 

Reviewed by Brett Josef Grubisic

*

As the scope of Not the Same Road Out initially befuddled me, so did its aim. 

The pleasant, evocative title was also ambiguous, and it suggested several possibilities. Ditto for the book’s attractive cover, with the painterly sky, lake, trees and narrow gravel road. But I really stumbled on the subtitle. Did “Trans Canada Stories” mean stories by and/or about Canadian transpeople? Stories where a handful of stops along the 7,476 kms of the Trans-Canada highway play a crucial role? Or, had K.J. Denny, the editor of the anthology, chosen short fiction pieces that take place somewhere across the enormity of Canada’s 9,984,670 square kilometres?

Denny’s introduction was no help because the anthology lacks an introduction, and that’s unfortunate. Besides the beneficial guidance, an anthology’s introduction typically supplies the raison d’être. Humans appreciate raisons d’être. They’re often useful and edifying. 

Those moues of dissatisfaction aside, the pieces—a rambunctious road trip poem by Karen Solie, “The Road In Is Not the Same Road Out,” which identifies the source of the anthology’s title, plus thirteen short stories—are uniformly enjoyable. Accomplished too, I should add. 

As a collection of Canada-set stories by Canadian authors, then, Not the Same Road Out succeeds as a reading experience. The stories are definitely not focussed on transgender characters; and with each story having a subtitle that identifies its location—“Ontario | Friendship Trail,” in the case of Ann Baldo’s wise-cracking opener, “Field Notes on Cryptids,” and “Nunavut | Frobisher Bay” with the anthology’s sobering closer, Patrick Woodcock’s “The Boat”—I surmised that my former guess about the Trans-Canada highway wasn’t exactly close: briefly known as the Great Trail, the Trans Canada Trail, “a coast-to-coast-to-coast trail connecting Canadians to nature and to one another,” which was dreamed up by an Albertan and a Quebecker in 1992, is the thing.

Regardless of location, the stories tend to be realistic and hinge on close—in both positive and negative ways—relationships. Baldo’s, for instance, is broadly comical, and centres on a couple who run a lice removal business (called Lice Savers!). When they reunite with another couple they were close to decades ago, the narrator, who always takes “things too far,” learns that the dysfunctional dynamics and wounds left in the past can flare up with the least encouragement. In the case of North Vancouver writer Lillian Au’s propulsive but lighthearted “Invasive Species” (“Northwest Territories | Canal Heritage Trail, City of Yellowknife—Frame Lake Trail”), the lesson for big game hunters and their paid guides involves the phrase “Pigs are lifesavers.” 

Elsewhere, Seyward Goodhand’s wry “Eirenopolis” (“Manitoba | City of Winnipeg”) captures the worn-thin narrator’s “perfect moment” in a time and place where such a moment seems unlikely. The lovable, mid-age loser in Tricia Snell’s “So Late in the Season” (“Nove Scotia | Rum Runners Trail”) discovers that dating anecdotes that are “neither remarkable nor completely boring” pretty much sum up single life at 55. A few thousand kilometres east in Dee Hobsbawn-Smith’s “Static” (“Saskatchewan | Wakamow Valley Trail”), one “batshit old lady” learns much the same during a run in the arid landscape. Even a piece narrated by a boat—Woodcock’s “The Boat”—that once believed it would be “an instrument of care, of labour, of movement” and now ferries “a quartet of the most self-absorbed souls” it’s ever borne, arrives at a state of mind where being jaded and regretful appears to be the only possible response to circumstances.   

Others authors look back. Set in Vancouver and a “desert called Alberta” in ’48, “Red Shoes in the Dust” (“Alberta | Meadowlark Rail Trail”) by Terry Watada, recounts a boy’s solitude and isolation as he learns he and his family belong to a pariah category—“Enemy Alien”—and that he, despite being born and raised in Vancouver, has a burden to carry for as far into the future as he can see. Taking place on a summer night circa 1969, “Movie Night” (“Newfoundland and Labrador | Corner Brook Connector”) turns a routine small town event into an epic comedy of errors that will be re-told for generation to come. 

With pieces like Bev Vincent’s “Adrift” (“New Brunswick | Fundy Nation Park”), Denman Island author Bill Engleson’s “Roadside Reunion” (“British Columbia | Cattle Valley Rail—McCulloch to Midway”), and Falkland writer Matthew Heneghan’s “Soldiers Summit” (Yukon | Dempster Highway”) masculinity is poked and prodded and held up to the light, with winning results. Read back-to-back, they’re remarkable for their portrayals of guys and their distinctively intense relationships with other guys. And for how violence, or the threat of it, surfaces as a matter of course. 

And while many of the anthology’s stories, such as Sharon Hunt’s lovely and elegiac “The Light in the Sky” (“Quebec | Parc Linéaire des Bois-Francs, La Traversée de Charlevoix”) are less about specific locations or a Trans-Canada tie-in than about the nuances of a specific relationship (in this case a daughter and her curmudgeon of a father, who has a secret or two that he needs to share before he dies), they’re enjoyable on their own even as they do not really develop the anthology’s (elusive) theme any further.

Similarly, in Lauren LaFrance’s “Kick-Ass” (“Prince Edward Island | Confederation Trail”) the narrator is recovering from her Gothic phase—thanks to tart quips along the lines of “What the fuck are you wearing that black shit for?” from a no-filter aunt—and must choose between appeasing her homophobic dad and standing her own ground as a young woman with girlfriend. Acceptance, she comes to see, is easier said than done. And the story, whether set in Kelowna or Moose Jaw or Truro, Trans Canada Trail or not, would play out as it does.

An editor at BCR, Brett Josef Grubisic worked on four anthologies as an editor: Contra/diction, Carnal Nation, National Plots, and Blast, Corrupt, Dismantle, Erase. He’s recently reviewed books by Sonali Zohra, Carrie Anne Vanderhoop, Kristen Pendreigh, Sam Wiebe, Maureen Young, Daniel Anctil, and Adam Welch 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.

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