Interview channel update by Richard Mackie * Since January 2023 Trevor Hughes, interim non-fiction editor of The British Columbia Review, has branched out as Video Segment Producer and curator of our new Interview Channel, hosted by YouTube. So far, Trevor has uploaded thirteen interviews that capture in words a broad spectrum of British Columbian authors,…
Read more 1841 BC Review interviews update
Welcome Trevor and Brett by Richard Mackie * On behalf of the Board of the Ormsby Literary Society and our Advisory Board I’d like to welcome Trevor Marc Hughes and Brett Josef Grubisic as interim editors of The British Columbia Review for the year May 1, 2023 to May 1, 2024. The position was made possible…
Read more 1813 Welcome Trevor and Brett
Well Aged: Making the Most of Your Platinum Years by Ralph Milton Madeira Park: Douglas and McIntyre, 2021 $24.95 / 9781771623100 Reviewed by Lee Reid * “Why did I wait until age eighty before I grew up?” quips author and retired publisher of Kelowna’s Wood Lake Books Ralph Milton, now aged 89. Growing old means…
Read more 1807 A worthwhile anecdotage
Announcing the BC Review interview series by Richard Mackie * In November 2022, at the most recent board meeting of the Ormsby Literary Society, the chair, Byron Sheardown, suggested that we open a YouTube channel and start an interview series. Board member Trevor Marc Hughes jumped at the suggestion. “I’ve got filmmaking experience,” he said,…
Read more 1757 Announcing interview series
Dance Me to the End: Ten Months and Ten Days with ALS by Alison Acheson Victoria: TouchWood Editions, 2019 (also available as an audiobook) $22.99 / 9781927366868 Reviewed by Lee Reid * “What will become of me? Who will take care of me? Will you stay with me to the end?” People ask these questions…
Read more 1734 Moving to the end
Feeling Feminism: Activism, Affect, and Canada’s Second Wave by Lara Campbell, Michael Dawson, and Catherine Gidney (editors) Vancouver: UBC Press, 2022 $34.95 / 9780774866507 Reviewed by Phyllis Reeve * Increasingly I feel myself becoming historical. The feeling comes with advancing age, enhanced by encountering the work of a younger generation of scholars such as Lara…
Read more 1713 Getting emotional
Holden After and Before: Love Letter for a Son Lost to Overdose by Tara McGuire Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp Press, 2022 $24.95 / 9781551528939 Reviewed by Colin James Sanders * Human beings, not unlike other creatures, contend with the death of loved ones, navigating grief and mourning in varying ways. Tara McGuire of Vancouver channeled her…
Read more 1702 Fragments of grief & mourning
Michael Turner reviews In My Day by Rick Waines Produced by Norman Armour, Rick Waines and Zee Zee Theatre presented by The Cultch Theatre, Vancouver December 02-11, 2022 * As a late-born North American Baby Boomer, I am not old enough to remember all the defining moments assigned to my generation. I was barely fifteen…
Read more 1694 A history play for the ages
This is Assisted Dying: A Doctor’s Story of Empowering Patients at the End of Life by Stefanie Green Toronto: Simon and Schuster Canada (Scribner), 2022 $24.99 / 9781668004784 Reviewed by Lee Reid * MAiD. Medical Assistance in Dying. I don’t see assisted dying as ending someone’s life; the underlying illness and suffering are doing that….
Read more 1686 Options at the end of life
Wired for Music: A Search for Health and Joy Through the Science of Sound by Adriana Barton Vancouver: Greystone Books, 2022 $32.95 / 9781771645546 Reviewed by Derek von Essen * The afternoon Wired for Music arrived in the post was the same day I tested positive for Covid-19. I wasn’t surprised by the result. While…
Read more 1669 An essential need
Darkness at the Edge of Town by Stan Rogal Montreal: Guernica Editions, 2022 $20.00 / 9781771836975 Reviewed by Bill Paul * Taking place in the town of Weyburn, Saskatchewan, Stan Rogal’s Darkness at the Edge of Town follows the psycho-sexual odyssey of young man in his late twenties, a misfit and hell-raiser named Ray. The…
Read more 1657 Unresolved in Weyburn
Dancing in Small Spaces: One Couple’s Journey with Parkinson’s Disease and Lewy Body Dementia by Leslie A. Davidson Victoria: TouchWood Editions (Brindle & Glass), 2022 $22.00 / 9781990071089 Reviewed by Lee Reid * When married retired teachers are double diagnosed, he with dementia and she with Parkinson’s disease, there is not much space to dance….
Read more 1646 Every day has its gold
Facing the Sweating Horse by Calvin White Surrey: Now or Never Publishing, 2022 $19.95 / 9781989689424 Reviewed by Harold Rhenisch * Houses have views. They face them. Some face the street outside, or a garden, a fence, a city, a lake, a river or mountains. Some face fields and grasslands. Some face the sea. The…
Read more 1645 Ferlinghetti of the Shuswap
Heroin: An Illustrated History by Susan Boyd Winnipeg and Black Point, NS: Fernwood Publishing, 2022 $34.00 / 9781773635163 Reviewed by Connor Robinson * Susan Boyd’s Heroin: An Illustrative History is a timely and illuminative record of how heroin, and opiates/opioids at large, moved from a drug with continued therapeutic relevance to a political tool for demonization…
Read more 1638 Regulating opiates & opioids
Psyched: Seven Cutting-Edge Psychedelics Changing the World by Amanda Siebert, with a foreword by Julie Holland Vancouver: Greystone Books, 2022 $21.95 / 9781771648790 Reviewed by Colin James Sanders * While the title of Amanda Siebert’s latest book may be overreaching in its claim that psychedelics are changing the world, psychedelic-assisted therapeutic practices are definitely experiencing…
Read more 1636 Siebert’s seven psychedelics
The Save of My Life: My Journey Out of the Dark by Corey Hirsch, with Sean Patrick Conboy Toronto: HarperCollins Canada, 2022 $32.99 / 9781443461092 Reviewed by Daniel Gawthrop * It must be hard to write a good topical hockey book these days. The goalposts, as it were, keep shifting on the zeitgeist as Canada’s…
Read more 1618 Goaltender, heal thyself
Love in Vile Places: Military Hospitals as the Site of Care and Nurture by Jo-Anne Fiske * For Remembrance Day 2022 we present a memoir by Jo-Anne Fiske of Fraser Lake, in BC’s north-central interior, of her father Humphrey William Fiske (1886-1959). At the time of his enlistment in Kelowna in 1916, the Norfolk-born Fiske…
Read more 1617 Love in vile places
A Time of Light and Shadow: To Asia, Africa, and the Long Way Home by Ella Harvey Victoria: Rocky Mountain Books, 2022 $28.00 / 9781771605694 Reviewed by Margot Fedoruk * Come come, whoever you are Wanderer, worshiper, lover of leaving. It doesn’t matter. Ours is not a caravan of despair. — Rumi Ella Harvey’s life…
Read more 1616 Nurse on the front line
Front-Wave Boomers: Growing (Very) Old, Staying Connected, and Reimagining Aging by Gillian Ranson Vancouver: UBC Press (On Point Press), 2022 $22.95 / 9780774890502 Reviewed by Ginny Ratsoy * Did you know that the United Nations has declared 2021-2030 the Decade of Healthy Ageing and the World Health Organization has recently begun its “Global Campaign to…
Read more 1554 What boomers really need
The Acid Room: The Psychedelic Trials and Tribulations of Hollywood Hospital by Jesse Donaldson and Erika Dyck Vancouver: Anvil Press, 2022 $18.00 / 9781772141863 Reviewed by Ron Verzuh * Acid Test in New West: LSD entered the world through the doors of a BC Hospital Before LSD guru Timothy Leary (“tune in, turn on and…
Read more 1524 LSD & Hollywood North