‘Sticking with things Canadian’

Meanwhile, Back in Nokomis: Tales from Canada & Elsewhere
by Will Ferguson

Madeira Park: Douglas & McIntyre, 2026
$24.95 / 9781771624848 (paperback)

Reviewed by Sheldon Goldfarb

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It is perhaps not a good sign when a writer prefaces a collection of old essays by saying, Here’s some old things I found in storage that never got published or that got published once in an obscure magazine and then were forgotten.  Still, you never know what gems may emerge, and there’s at least one in Will Ferguson’s latest collection, Meanwhile, Back in Nokomis: his essay on the Calgary Stampede.

This is not a touristy guide to the Stampede.  Ferguson distinguishes between touristy guides and travel memoirs, and this is definitely in the memoir class: a story of his visit with his wife and young son.  My son is four and in love with cowboy hats, he begins.  I am not four, he goes on to say, reeling you in to an amusing account of jaded father, excited son, and a perhaps too excited wife (a little too impressed, her husband thinks, by the rugged manliness of the bronco busters).  It’s a great little story, complete with an aperçu about how fireworks may seem wonderful at first, but if you get too much of them, it frays the nerves.

And there’s his wife’s frown (“trust me, not a good sign”) and his son crying over the calf-roping (they like being roped, he lies to him).  And there’s even some interesting history about how the Stampede was invented in 1912 (invented? you mean it’s not a natural phenomenon?).

If only all the essays were like this one, but alas, Ferguson too often falls into travelogue and tells us about the cultural mores of Montrealers or a library in Quebec City.  Or he does earnest reporting of the nice bookstore owners on Denman Island or the Maori performers in New Zealand.

You’ll want to skip those pieces, but then you come across his anti-travelogue account of Niagara Falls: the fact that this one didn’t get published is actually a mark in its favour; it’s a gleefully subversive discussion of the Falls mythology which somehow the Niagara tourist board didn’t want to include in its brochures.

Then for a complete change of pace there’s his exploration of the dangerous concept of Utopia and his sad story of trying to restore a lost toy mouse to its owner.  Throughout there’s an interesting fascination with Canadian symbols.  What is the iconic Canadian bird, he asks?  And the iconic food?  He plumps for maple syrup and the Canada Goose, but in contests he entered neither emerged victorious.

Then what about the quintessential Canadian word?  He dismisses poutine as being “equally disgusting in both official languages” and lingers over the word “deke,” which he used to think came from the name of an actual hockey player named Johnny Deke (or Dique).  But no, it actually comes from the word decoy.  So he gave up on deke and turned to Katimavik.  Hmm.  (Or should I say, Eh?)

Sticking with things Canadian, he praises our supposed knack for not resolving problems: non-solutions are much better than things like final solutions, he says: just let things be.  Other times he questions the whole notion of Canadianness: is there such an abstraction as Canada?   There’s only a collage of Hudson Bay and the Saguenay, Prince Edward Island and Victoria.  But other times he makes it sound like the country is more than a miscellany, more a unified collection, unified by hockey perhaps.

And then he muses about writing: there’s always this ideal book in your head, he says, which you can never get down on paper.  I remember Margaret Laurence saying something like that.  Very Platonic.  But is it true?  Another time he writes about Graham Greene, and I remember Greene saying how when he began one of his novels his hero was up on a balcony and he didn’t know whether to get him down or not.  No Platonic ideal there.  It’s like the difference between travelling with a map and just wandering and seeing where you end up.

In one of his pieces his characters end up in a mountain pass.  One of them went there looking to escape his destiny and another went there to seek it.  And the moral of the story?  Unclear, but it’s a haunting piece nonetheless.

As you read, you think, He has certainly written a lot of essays, and some of them deserve a better fate than the discard pile.  As for the others, well, let’s not talk about them.

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Sheldon Goldfarb is the author of The Hundred-Year Trek: A History of Student Life at UBC (Heritage House, 2017), reviewed by Herbert Rosengarten. Sheldon’s latest book, Sherlockian Musings: Thoughts on the Sherlock Holmes Stories (London: MX Publishing, 2019), was reviewed by Patrick McDonagh. He has been the archivist for the UBC student society for over twenty years; he’s published a murder mystery and two studies of William Makepeace Thackeray. His mystery, Remember, Remember (Bristol: UKA Press), was nominated for an Arthur Ellis award. Originally from Montreal, Sheldon has a history degree from McGill University, a MA in English from the University of Manitoba, and two degrees from UBC: a PhD in English and a MA in archival studies. Here is the link to his segment in The British Columbia Review Interview Series. [Editor’s note: Sheldon has reviewed books by Darcy Ingram, Septimus Brown, Rodney DeCroo, J.A. Weingarten (ed.), Catherine Lang, and Reed Stirling for The British Columbia Review.]

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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.

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