‘The archival process’
Acquainted with Grief: Stories & Essays
by Alex Rose
Victoria (Oak Bay): Walhachin Press, 2025
Aquainted With Grief is for sale at Bolen Books in Victoria and The People’s Co-op Bookstore on Commercial Drive in Vancouver.
Reviewed by Linda Rogers
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Grief, the alleged “other side of love,” is the catchword of our time. As we collectively grieve all that we cherish: civility, family, good government, and pristine oceans and forests, artists struggle to archive what is lost and anxiously anticipate the recomposition that is necessary for survival.
A perfect case in point is the absolutely stunning series of mixed media paintings in red, white, and black by musician and zen philosopher Lance Austin Olsen, who is recording the aftermath of international threats to peace and the murder of a good woman in Minneapolis by ICE.
The archival process, aka grief, is the means by which we formulate a future because, as sentient beings, we need maps. What have we done and what are we prepared to do?
Alex Rose’s collection of six stories and four essays looks to the personal past as he retrieves snapshots to assemble in his comprehension of now, the shocked realisation of imminent end times and removal of empathy in the equation of human existence. He has in his own words “…turned away from conventional fiction to those forms where he still finds meaning-fragments, dabbles, diaries, poems, essays, bits of email, frozen constellations, obscure and random readings of old book reviews, oncology reports and tracts on whether humans have free will or not.”
This is an interesting challenge as we wonder about free will in the context of “oncology reports” and obituaries not just for individuals but for the family of beings we call life on Earth. Diagnosis is the process and he undertakes this task in his analysis of voices witnessing the human condition, since humans are the agents of universal death.
Yes, there is a cancer. It is eating at all human constructs from world government to self-government, civilisation itself, the Earth itself, and, piece by piece, Rose examines specimens of failure as his eye passes through the ruined landscape of his life.
It is in the microcosm of his writer’s eye and ear since he is listening for the music of time, the score that can explain and elevate chaos, that he finds evidence of grief, the emotion that demonstrates empathy, the essential ingredient, the glue that joins notes until we have a song.
In the words of his one-armed girl, a moment of illumination that he promises redemption, “I felt I was coming into a clearing, an opening to the sky, a brightening.”
The very juxtaposition of elements in this collection demonstrates the need for legato as we jump from death to death and the spirit-traveller moans.
With “O Father in Absentia” he begins with the most personal, the sperm donor who fails to connect. Father on the run is dying of congestive heart failure, a metaphor for his time, where witnessing meant spending time moving without feeling.
He “wondered if his father meant geological time, going back 380 million years. At that time, trees and ferns changed the oxygen level, and so time began, a clock to understand the earth.” Tick tock. Clocks in the phenomenal world, he already understands, do not measure the life of the spirit.
This is where the illustrations by various photographers in his autofiction matter. The portrait of the father in the first story has “a gaze you could not meet.” The posing dandy, never daddy, is a construct, alternate truth in the words of one MAGA apologist.
Scrapbooking is popular with the lost artists of middle class capitalism, empty nest housewives looking to sort and organise the faces that might define them. Similarly, art practitioners of greater confidence collage, seeking defining narrative in the places where random images touch and begin to speak. The images in this collection, never touching but offering silent witness between stories and accounts, are the mucilage that adds coherence and punctuation to the legato of one narrator’s trail of tears.
They assist in the process of hearing the dead and giving meaning to their existence and ours.
Whether this works or not depends on our willingness to suspend belief in linear journeys and take this lateral plunge into the consciousness of a writer who learned to riff in the back alleys of North American fusion music.
Acquainted never means known. It is in brief encounters with the faces and spirits of the dead that he attempts to understand the living. The “Leisure Pioneers” in this collection are not a random selection. They are Rose’s stations of the cross and we are asked to consider the ways in which they avoid and confront human contact so that we understand our own nomadic impulses.
Left without a spirit guide, the truthful fictitious narrator takes us on a journey through his life, death after death, until there is no life left, or is there? Perhaps his record, a capsule buried the group psyche, is the heartbeat we are waiting for.
In “Ten Things About Nisga’a Chief Joseph Gosnell,” the narrator travels through Germany with his mentor, who has pondered, as many of us have, the German fascination with British Columbia wilderness. ” ‘I knew something was missing here,’ he pointed out the window with a chuckle, ‘They’ve cut all the trees down. There are no forests left in Germany.’ “
In his sometimes-scorned alliance with First Nations, the author raises a point of impossible futility. Having ravaged the forests that were Indigenous cultures, we are now looking to them for leadership in the restoration of what we have destroyed.
In a world of sound bites and received truths, this is news we can hardly believe, the irony of ironies.
“We broke it, now you fix it.” How that goes remains to be seen as some leaders struggle to restore the balance that worked for thousands of years after denigration of a vital component in balance, demoralising the fathers, slandering the mothers (drunkards and whores), and denying language and history in the brutal education of their young.
He describes the greatest grief of colonialism, and can only offer the comfort of hope that enough trees have been left standing.
As we ramble through the forest of these pages, we might be compelled to reach for the glue that will ensure the compelling story of survival, because he is showing us what we need to survive ourselves.
The last note is about Alzheimer’s and MAID, as we are left to consider the anthem Never Forget or accept oblivion. He leaves it up to us.
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Linda Rogers, a past Poet Laureate and Canadian People’s Poet is observing the demise of the great Canadian publishing experiment so writers are left to self-publish and self-promote. [Editor’s note: Linda has reviewed books by Christine Gervais, Amanda Watson, and Shanisse Kleuskens, Donna Seto, Dacia Maraini, translated by Genni Gunn, Liz Hammond-Kaarremaa, and Edward H. K. Ho 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.
“Only connect.” – E.M. Forster