Sandy Frances Duncan, an appreciation

by Phyllis Parham Reeve

Sandy Duncan came into our island bookstore one day in 1989 and wondered if we would like to carry her new novel. 

We’d known about her since 1976 when our youngest daughter read Cariboo Runaway. Other kids’ books had followed: Kap-Sung Ferris and Finding Home accompanied young people through the coming-of-age dramas of racism, adoption, and the intricacy of family relationships; The Toothpaste Genie was, well, The Toothpaste Genie, already beloved by two generations. But Pattern Makers was not a kids’ book. Like her first adult novel, Dragonhunt, it belonged to the particularly contemporary genre of feminist fantasy. 

Reviewing Dragonhunt  in the Toronto Star, Ken Adachi wrote, alarmingly but perceptively: “Duncan obviously has weighty qualities: Obsessional energy, a relish for archetypes, a nightmarish imagination. She also has a kind of verbal chastity—each sentence is perfectly lucid in isolation – but it is mated with a wild metaphoric promiscuity. The symbols clash, as if Northrop Frye had wedded Hieronymus Bosch.”

Pattern Makers is a sequel to a short story, “Yvonne, A Feminist Fable,” first published in the journal Room of One’s Own in summer 1975, subsequently anthologized, read aloud, performed as a skit, adapted into a film (twice), and issued by MotherTongue Press in 2003 as a chapbook shaped like a tiny refrigerator.

Duncan’s feminist fable begins: “One morning Yvonne got out of bed, made her toast and coffee, opened the refrigerator door and climbed in.” Things escalate. Yvonne furnishes and decorates the fridge, and lives inside it apart from her family. After she moves the bathtub into the fridge, her husband has to build a shower stall: “The children wouldn’t take showers so they just went dirty, but since that was the style no one minded.” The story ends there, but eventually Sandy began to rethink: “After Yvonne had existed in my fridge for some years, I wondered what would happen if she exited. I wrote Pattern Makers to find out.”

And so Pattern Makers begins: “In the middle of the night Yvonne opened the refrigerator door and climbed out.” She steps into post-apocalyptic (?) sand and sets out on a quest, in due course joined by two other women—or is one a turtle?—and a spider. Like all good quests, theirs leads to themselves, but not to their former selves, and Yvonne does not return to the fridge. 

“Yvonne” was one of numerous short stories that appeared in journals and anthologies. Sandy liked to imagine herself into the story. In “Updating Lysistrata,” she meets the Greek feminist on Wharf Street in Nanaimo and brings her home to Gabriola. On a shore near North Vancouver she wonders, “Was that Malcolm Lowry?” In “I Have Blinds Now,” she listens to the love (lust) story told by “a vibrant woman with grey-blonde hair and her life on her face.” 

Sandy could make anything readable, even a public document such as Final Report of the Gabriola Island Community Plan Review Committee May 31, 1993. Or a fifth-grade textbook, British Columbia: Its Land, Mineral and Water Resources.

1993 was a year of heated controversy on Gabriola and protests at Clayoquot Sound. On Gabriola a forestry company offered to donate most of the forest to the island for park, in exchange for permission to develop one portion. This involved adjustment of density bylaws and tweaking of the Official Community Plan, as well as negotiating with a multinational corporation. Sandy threw herself into the battle for compromise, serving on the Islands Trust Advisory Planning Committee and the OCP Review Committee.

Along with four other Gabriolans, including myself, she edited Witness to Wilderness; the Clayoquot Sound Anthology. Our introduction stated that the dilemma “forced all Gabriolans to reconsider their ideas about logging practices, corporations, government and community on a deeply personal level.” Therefore, the editors had to “deplore the simplistic and frequently artificial polarization between environmentalists and forest industry workers.” The anthology differed from other Clayoquot collections in respecting alternative possibilities. Drawing on her wide acquaintance through The Writers’ Union and other organizations, Sandy attracted gems from CanLit stars, who we mingled with logger’s memoirs, journalists’ investigations, and contributions from the Gabriola Writer’s Group. Reviewing in Harrowsmith Country Life, Merilyn Simmons Mohr called the anthology “a curious mixture of polished journalism, deeply affecting personal memoir and high art.”    

At the time we seemed to have lost. Much of the forest designated for parkland was sold and logged.  Even so, thirty years later the amount of land saved by density swaps and covenants is growing. It took a while but maybe we won after all. 

Then came Jeremy. Gold Rush Orphan, her fifth juvenile/young adult novel, evolved from the journal kept by Sandy’s grandfather James Fraser during his trek to the Klondike in 1898. His group veered away from the route taken by most other gold seekers. Why? He doesn’t say. Sandy explains in her afterword: “Gold Rush Orphan has grown out of my

attempts to answer my questions about the trip. The storyline follows the journal record, and the entries at the beginning of each chapter are authentically my grandfather’s… I created Jeremy so that he—and I—could have an imaginary place to exist within the factual trip. The motives, the rationale, and the explanations for the trip are my own, made plausible from my research on the Klondike gold rush.” Again her research was meticulous. Jeremy may be an imaginary street urchin, but everything that happened to him and around him could have happened.

He presented his creator with a further challenge. Unlike her previous protagonists he was a pubescent male. She was an only child and the mother of two daughters and no sons. Jeremy’s voice changes during the trek and he thinks a lot about a certain girl in a red dress. But this story is less about physical changes than mental. Jeremy learns to think and thus emerges as the only person to profit from the trek. 

While Sandy was writing Gold Rush Orphan she and I exchanged emails almost daily. Maybe because I was not a fiction writer, family member, or childhood chum, she was comfortable and candid in her blow-by-blow reports of Jeremy’s progress.

After an anguished cry—“I have written 173 pp of THE MOST TEDIOUS NOVEL IN THE WORLD and am only at Fort Selkirk. What am I doing?”—she acknowledged she was “writing against the grain of perceived mythology about the Klondike.” One publisher objected to the group not finding gold, which, she asserted “is exactly one of my points.” Most days’ reports were along the line of “I killed the black horse today. V.sad. Now the men from Dawson have arrived. They’re starving.” She was having fun: “They’re wrecking the raft today—this part of diary becomes slapstick. I might have to tone it down. A tragi-comedy of greenhorn errors.” The novel was shortlisted for the Sheila A. Egoff Children’s Literature Prize.

Finally came the Islands Investigations International Mysteries, four novels co-authored with George Szanto: Never Sleep with a Suspect on Gabriola Island, Always Kiss the Corpse on Whidbey Island, Never Hug a Mugger on Quadra Island,and Always Love a Villain on San Juan Island. Writing for readers on either side of the border, Sandy and George conjured up sinister characters and chilling events in familiar settings—meticulously researched, of course.

For some occasion, perhaps an introduction to a reading, Sandy provided me with a CV of her writing life from 1978-1988—

1. Was on the Writer’s Union National Council twice.
2. Founded and chaired for 14 months the Federation of BC Writers.
3. Worked on Women and Words Conference.
4. Worked on at least 3 or 4 other conferences.
5. Worked on the Summer Writing School for Women.
6. Worked on the Women’s Peace Write.
7. Founded 1986 and edited (F.)lip Magazine [a quarterly publication of innovative feminist writing].
8. Did a writer-in-residency.
9. Taught intensive courses.
10. Wrote 5 books.
11. Had a personal life which was considerably more active on all fronts.
12. Kept psychiatrists busy for 5 years.
13. Moved three times.
14. Did a reading tour each year, sometimes more.

All that happened before I met her. I have tried to tell what came next: four more solo books and five written or edited collaboratively; intensive participation in local politics; continued encouragement of other writers; and the acquisition of five grandchildren.

In front of an audience, Sandy was a consummate reader of her work, delivering outlandish narratives in a matter-of-fact voice that made us believe anything. 

She was obsessed with words, how they looked on the page, how they sounded, what they could do. So, instead of last words from me, here are some words from Sandy and Yvonne near the end of Pattern Makers.

Yvonne looked at her hands, her arms—they were covered in words, words of all different colours and sizes and shapes, words in all different sorts of type, script, calligraphy, writing, printing, hieroglyphics, signs and symbols of every kind. She was hirsute with words… Words on her palms stuck to words on her cheeks, some changed places, some overlapped others, and some transformed themselves completely.

Sandy Frances Duncan, 24 January 1942 – 7 September 2025.

Phyllis Parham Reeve has written about local and personal history in her three solo books and in contributions to journals and multi-author publications. She is a contributing editor of the Dorchester Review and her writing appears occasionally in Amphora, the journal of the Alcuin Society. She co-founded the bookstore at Page’s Resort & Marina on Gabriola Island. More details than necessary may be found on her website.

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The British Columbia Review

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

Formerly The Ormsby Review, The British Columbia Review is an on-line 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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