‘Sense of disconnection and alienation’
Off the Map: Vancouver writers with lived experiences of mental health issues
by Betsy Warland, Seema Shah, and Kate Bird (eds.)
Vancouver: Bell Press, 2025
$22 / 9781738716784
Reviewed by Lee Reid
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The secret of happiness, you see, is not found in seeking more, but in developing the capacity to enjoy less. -Socrates
I chose Socrates to introduce this review because Off the Map, an anthology of stories and poems from Vancouver writers, illustrates our tragically human capacity to endure life with less of everything. Especially less joy. And to keep going! “Don’t give up,” cry out the creatures, birds, plants, and characters in the book. “Never give up!”
The stories, which explore mental illness, are powerful and raw and vulnerable. For readers who experience unrelenting pain, there may be relief or reprieve…possibly gratitude…to see the ugliest buried aspects of one’s self mirrored in others’ lives. “Maybe I am not so bad, maybe I can grow and learn, maybe this will ease with time,” we might think, as we strive for self-compassion. Many of the stories touched compassion in me: compassion for the courage it takes traumatised lives to survive. But I did not find the fragmented scenes on the cover to be appealing. The cover design is a collage of grey on black sharp edges, unappealing because it lacked emotional tone for a book leaden with emotions. Perhaps this was intentional. Except for the design, photographs are absent, emphasising the prevailing sense of disconnection and alienation.
My caution is that this does not mean avoid the book!
The book is divided into 3 sections: fiction, creative non-fiction, and poetry. We meet thirty or so inventive, witty, and smart people, writers from diverse cultures and gender choices, wearing labels or diagnoses like schizophrenia or bipolar or ADHD.
This book offers expression and relief from the wounded land of immobilisation, where people must shrink their lives and selves to fit into hell. Redemption appears in unusual ways. The stories are not completely mired in torture or isolation. Overall, the atmosphere emanates a compassionate moonscape, revealing people trapped in numbing routines or chaos, getting through each day with no hope, yet most keep going. Themes of suicide and addictions dominate [l]ike brown skin pricked by a thousand needles, the maple tree oozes droplets of crimson pearls.”
A path emerges in the darkness. Throughout stories of anguish, hate, and loneliness appear rare moments of glimmering connection. How could warm-hearted contact be possible in rat-cold grime? Or in locked psychiatric facilities and jails? If personally you find that hope feels extinct to your days, then you may need to read these darker stories about people who want to give up, but they don’t! We must ask, ‘why the hell not?’
The first story to beguile me was a cat. Linus, a lovable killer stray, arrives in the lonely and hostile life of a suicidal woman who had never bonded with another life. Neither had Linus. Slowly and angrily, they connect.
Recurring throughout the book are themes, like theirs, of trauma from broken or cruel bonding, or of sexual abuse and assault on children by parents. Although these are globally called ‘adverse childhood experiences,’ in reality, broken attachment and abusive parenting form the foundation for many traumas that emerge later in life. In Off the Map, we meet our cultural shadow surviving in slums, alleys, hospitals, jails, and dark basement rooms.
So, what happens when care knocks?
What happens when a Linus arrives?
“Mom helped me with my very first drag performance,” is the young and cherished memory of one writer. Another, recalling the birth of her daughter, wrote: “I am bigger than myself and filled with a faith like a train.”
Wasn’t it the poet David Whyte who stated that “despair is a failure of imagination”? I did not find the stories unimaginative, nor the lives drab, although they are dark with despair. In fact, I would have preferred more metaphor to lift the concrete and dense colours of barely surviving. In survival landscape, feelings magnify into tsunamis of grief or rage and abandonment: “Their shoulders fell like a cleaver to a salmon’s head.” “I only knew safety in handfuls of pills, stones along a pathway.”
Author Amy Wang states: “I do not trust the mind that holds my memories any longer.” In her story about embodied memories, Amy describes memories as somatic sensations that happen from the neck down. They are felt in the body, if you pay attention, as “the trauma returns, folding along my spine, taking root as tension. It grows hostile in my arms, shoulders, chest, and I must pay attention…”
Yes, this book wakes us up, and makes us pay attention! Mindfulness, the ability and skill to notice inner sensations, can save a life. ‘You can’t tell a book by its cover’ is an old adage about judging others by their appearance. Within the dark covers of this book live many gems of insight for the mind that is curious to understand what lies below appearances. Amy Wang speaks of an instinctual knowing and a hunger to learn…to read…to study. “You only wanted to know stories beyond your own….you had no expectations for this knowledge. Nor where it could exist.”
In the closing words of anthology writer Bruce Ray: “I believe that we must struggle for justice and share stories…all those who bear the stigma of mental illness…I think that optimism and positivity are both necessities for our lives…we must offer our talents and contribute to society…I would say that the only solution is empowerment and self-direction.”
I agree with Bruce. The personal growth this requires is relentless, and liberating. Off the Map offers a technicolour testimonial to the work.
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A retired clinician, formerly with Nelson Mental Health, Lee Reid has written books about BC rural and coastal communities. Her stories centre around the values and health care needs of BC seniors. She was recently interviewed by Interior Health about her work with seniors. Lee has also written stories about intergenerational education, rural home support care , trauma, and dementia. Recently, she has written and self-published a fourth book: Stories of Mount Saint Francis Hospital: 1950-2005, which illustrates a legacy of compassionate nursing care in the West Kootenay. Her books are: From a Coastal Kitchen (Hancock House, 1980); Growing Home: The Legacy of Kootenay Elders (Nelson, 2016), reviewed by Duff Sutherland, and Growing Together: Conversations with Seniors and Youth (Nelson, 2018), reviewed by Luanne Armstrong. Visit her website here. [Editor’s note: Lee Reid has recently reviewed books by Liz and David Amaral, Theresa Southam, Ralph Milton, Gordon Wallace, Stefanie Green, and Alison Acheson for The British Columbia Review.] In 2018, she contributed a popular memoir of growing up in the south of England and North Saanich: The Spider Hunters. Lee received the Nelson 2024 ‘Citizen of the Year’ Award.
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The British Columbia Review
Interim Editors, 2023-26: 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.
“Only connect.” – E.M. Forster