SPINDRIFT TELLS THE STORY OF CANADIANS AT SEA
Spindrift is an anthology of 170 pieces of writing from over 130 of Canada’s significant literary voices with a few foreign writers, such as Malcolm Lowry and E. Annie Proulx, among them. The Canadian writers include Farley Mowat, Wayne Johnston, Neil Bissoondath, Yann Martel, Rudy Wiebe, Peter Pitseolak, Michael Crummy, Gabrielle Roy, and Alice Munro.
Editors Michael L. Hadley and Anita Hadley were inspired by an evening of nautical readings at the Maritime Museum of British Columbia in Victoria. For five years, they took on the momentous task of searching for Canadian nautical writing in a variety of forms.
The Hadleys offer their book as a gift in celebration of Canada’s 150th anniversary and of the nation’s unique relationship to “the three great oceans that bind us.” As many acknowledged during Canada Day celebrations on July 1, the history of the land we know as Canada is much longer than 150 years. In a section entitled At the Edge, that includes pieces by Emily Carr, Robin Skelton and E. Pauline Johnson (Tekahionwake), James P. Delgado writes of the first people of B.C. who “discovered that when the tide falls, the table was set.” He notes that “eager traders, fishermen and hunters built a series of settlements in the region 8,000 years ago.”
Delgado speculates that “Asian seafarers may have reached the ocean coast of British Columbia long before any European explorers touched these shores.” His excerpt is from Waterfront: The Illustrated Maritime History of Greater Vancouver.
Migration and Exile includes an excerpt from Joy Kogawa’s Obason describing “Grandpa Nakane number one boatbuilder.” Kogawa writes: “The native Songhies of Esquimalt and many Japanese fishermen came to his boat-building shop on Saltspring Island, to barter and to buy.”
The excerpt is introduced with a description of the Canadian government forcibly removing some 20,000 Japanese Canadians from the Pacific Coast, confiscating the fishing boats of the fishers among them. Other writers in that section, including Judy Fong Bates and Wayson Choy, describe the experience of Chinese Canadians.
A selection from Martine J. Reid’s book about her husband, Bill Reid and the Haida canoe, is in a section entitled Vessels. She writes: “From the time of the Great Flood to the long potlatch journeys of the mid-19th century, the canoe connected the people to the land, the sea, the creatures that inhabit them, other people and the underworld (or spirit world).”
Readers will no doubt delight in selections from favourite books such as M. Wylie Banchet’s The Curve of Time, about the author’s explorations of the B.C. coast along with her five children and family dog.
They’re bound to be enticed to learn more about the tragedy, reality and beauty of Canada’s long and varied connection to three oceans.
There will be a Spindrift book signing on Oct. 4 at 7 p.m. at The Book Warehouse (4118 Main St.)