Seeking peace through retreat
“So it’s good for me, I guess. I mean, if that hadn’t happened, I wouldn’t be doing this. I’d just be at home, like, getting high and probably eating candy.”
In the preceding sentence, just one sample from Hider/ Seeker, the debut story collection of Vancouver-based poet Jen Currin, a guy driving a car littered with hamburger wrappers and cigarette packs is describing a mandatory blood test following a car crash at work. The result: his latest attempt at getting clean, this time at a Buddhist monastery in the Pacific Northwest. Subsequently assaulted by the reek of the man’s feet (“A rotting graveyard, the deadest of animals, the dankest pit of groin”), the woman listening to him is judging him while simultaneously on a quest for mindfulness, peace and respite. Alternately grieving, angry and lonesome, she’s hopeful that meditation or a guru’s wisdom will grant her some relief. Or at least a strategy to lessen old wounds … or maybe the knowledge to not repeat past mistakes.
Currin’s characters return from, head off to or suffer through retreats; whether the mundane work and compulsory silence is helping them is an open question.
Spare, understated and consciously plainspoken, Currin’s collection is filled with those in search of peace, frequently though silent reflection in rainforest spiritual getaways. The stories reflect characters, often queer women, after enlightenment. They’re hopeful creatures within stories that are largely ambivalent about attaining lasting happiness or contentment that’ll endure.
Currin has selected 20 stories for Hider/Seeker. Though quest attempts form an overall motif, she’s hardly a one-note thinker. There’s feminist fable (“The Sisters and the Ash”) and surreal allegory (“Insomnia”). Just one page (“Midnight”) depicts a woman whose apartment is visited by horned angels. A drunk woman on a starvation diet (in “The Shape”) and a man in a bathhouse left with a “dowry of sadness” by his deceased mother (in “The Rash”) conjure pockets of solitary madness.
Several stories scrutinize love (lost, ailing, star-crossed, or complicated: “The sexy one fell out of lust and fell into bed with someone else. The serious one fell out of trust”). They prompt the thought that romance is yet another vehicle for attaining nirvana that never quite works out as planned.
As a writer, Currin suggests a certain kind of knowing: she understands the aspirations for peace, freedom and unburdening and yet fully senses the difficulty of attaining any of them. Brett Josef Grubisic’s fourth novel, Oldness; Or, the Last-Ditch Efforts of Marcus O, is out in October.