Written in each of the author’s voices, Back to Vietnam: Tours of the Heart  follows a journey from the horrors of the battlefield to to the authors’ peaceful and rewarding humanitarian work. Throughout, Elaine and Bruce struggle to understand a country of contrasts and contradictions, beauty and blemishes; a communist government and a capitalist economy; government control of the press and eloquently expressive people; a male dominated society where women are pillars of courage and strength; docile, fatalistic religious beliefs and aggressive entrepreneurialism; a progressive, industrious population plagued with social problems.

The friendships Bruce and Elaine forge with the Vietnamese, and the trust they earn through those friendships, will provide riveting reading for travellers whose interests go beyond touring the highlights of a country. Bruce’s experiences during the Vietnam war are juxtaposed with stories of Vietnamese who survived the American war and offer friendship forty years later. The challenges and tribulations the couple face living in a communist third-world country are rendered in rich detail, alongside heartening and exhilarating moments of immersion in a culture of forgiving, caring, resilient and courageous people.

Back to Vietnam provides a picture of life for Westerners in the Socialist Republic of Vietnam, a glance at how its turbulent history has molded the modern country, and an often humorous glimpse of the confusion involved in overcoming language and cultural differences.

For elder adventurers, the book answers questions about how the Vietnamese feel about the war and how they view Westerners in general and Americans in particular.

Back to Vietnam: Tours of the Heart  reflects a personal odyssey of hope and reconciliation for a Vietnam veteran and his wife, a couple surprised and delighted by this unexpected turn on their path to retirement.

Authors’ Note 

We believe our descriptions of experiences and lessons learned in Vietnam will be of interest to several audiences.  The stories of returning veterans, and their struggles with demons and ghosts in the form of PTSD, paint a picture of the lasting legacy of warfare.  In contrast, readers will fall in love with such colorful Vietnamese characters as Le Ly Hayslip, author of two books about her childhood in war-torn Vietnam; and Le Nguyen Binh, a wheelchair-bound paraplegic devoted to improving the lives of persons with disabilities in a country which has a long tradition of merely warehousing the disabled.

Retiring baby boomers, seeking ways to maintain their vitality, may see a way to apply the wisdom of their years. We hope our memoir will provide inspiration and valuable insight into how Boomers might put their energy to work helping the marginalized of a third-world country.

Veterans, whether they have served in Vietnam, Iraq or Afghanistan, will relate to Bruce’s recollections of combat and struggles with PTSD. Veterans, along with their families, survivors or care givers may find enlightening the healing journeys of those who have returned to Vietnam on tours of peace and reconciliation, many seeking answers to their disquietude.

We also hope that professional military associations, which advise and counsel their members and also list current book releases, will find in Back to Vietnam  a fresh approach worthy of their libraries.

Author Bios

As a career officer with the United States Army, Robert Bruce Logan served two tours of duty in Vietnam, 66/67 and 70/71. Upon retiring from the military, he moved to Canada and became a consultant to businesses as an expert in Organization Development and Corporate Strategy. He has a master’s degree in organizational behavior and completed doctoral studies (ABD) in Adult Education at the University of Southern California.

Bruce is an “armchair” scholar of the history of the Vietnam War. As a member of a team which conducts tours of reconciliation, he puts this knowledge, along with his expertise in research and map reconnaissance, to work assisting groups of returning veterans eager to find the sites where their significant battles were fought and memories forged. He has been featured in two television documentaries, filmed in Vietnam by government sanctioned programs, about his return as an American veteran involved in humanitarian work. A third Vietnamese documentary, to be released in 2015 to celebrate the 40^th Anniversary of the “Reunification,” will feature Bruce and other returning veterans as emissaries of the new peace with the USA.

Elaine Head retired from a large Canadian food retailer where she managed first the Human Resources Department, and then the Training Department, where she developed management training materials and taught team building and communication skills. Elaine has written magazine and newspaper articles about the humanitarian trips to Vietnam on which she and Bruce have embarked for six years. She writes and edits newsletters, articles, blog posts, and/or promotional materials for a Vietnamese client and for the CEO’s of organizations with which she works in Vietnam.

Bruce and Elaine make presentations to church, business, social and veterans’ groups about their experiences. Their presentations and radio interviews have shed light on Vietnamese culture, historical aspects the Vietnam war, the plight of veterans suffering from PTSD, and the effects of Agent Orange on veterans and the Vietnamese. They also discuss their work with victims of leprosy, school children in remote villages and the disabled.

Elaine Head and Bruce Logan live on Salt Spring Island, where Bruce teaches sailing and Elaine gardens, raises funds and maintains the blog for their humanitarian trips, Journeys of the Heart (http://ebtovietnam.blogspot.com).  They share four grown children and many “adopted” Vietnamese family members.

Praise for Back to Vietnam: Tours of the Heart

~ Back to Vietnam is a feast of a book. It doesn’t just talk about Vietnam; it takes you there. This book simmers and shimmers with the smells, sounds, flavours, sights and insights of an endlessly fascinating people and their wonderful, ever-surprising homeland. The authors subtitle their book Tours of the Heart. For the reader, it’s a “tour de force.” – Arthur Black, author and broadcaster.

~ A significant book about the reconciliation possible between those who have been cast into bloody conflict; a compelling story of one American veteran and his wife who find purpose by serving in Vietnam, forty years after the war. The renderings of the beauty of my country Vietnam and the warmth of our people are vividly interwoven with heart wrenching images of the poverty and illness that the authors encounter in our humanitarian work.
— Le Ly Hayslip, author of When Heaven & Earth Changed Places, and Child of War, Woman of Peace 

~ Thumbs up to an outstanding book about war, its toll, and a journey of reconciliation and redemption. Bruce Logan was a superb Infantry officer and combat leader who served in Vietnam, experiencing the violence of war – “up close and personal.” I was privileged to serve with this tough, brave leader who always led from the front and took care of his men.

He and wife Elaine have written a remarkable book about a 46-year journey through memories, good and bad, and their quest for reconciliation. They continue to demonstrate outstanding leadership through their service to soldiers and civilians, Vietnamese and Americans who suffer in various ways from the war. They quietly and without fanfare serve humankind with honor and passion.

Their gripping account chronicles their adventures in a beautiful but enigmatic, third world country filled with contrasts and contradictions and social problems including a forgotten group of South Vietnamese veterans and their families; generations affected by Agent Orange.

The reader and especially those who served in Vietnam will feel like they are there with them immersed in the rich culture and steamy climate.
— Major General (Ret) C.A. “Lou” Hennies 

~ This is an important story. The world did not end with the last American helicopter out. Vietnam has found the grace and strength to move forward, and has been joined by caring people like Bruce Logan and Elaine Head, whose volunteer work supports the country’s efforts to alleviate the lingering effects of the war. What they have seen in war and peace is a lesson for all of us.
— George Vecsey, New York Times sports columnist, and author of over a dozen books, most recently, Stan Musial, an American Life, in 2011.

Visit the authors’ WEBSITE to purchase this book

Title:  Back to Vietnam: Tours of the Heart 
Author:  R. Bruce Logan and Elaine Head
Genre:    Memoir
Publisher:   First Choice Books
ISBN:    978-0-9917623-0-9

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For those familiar with the work of Dorothy Speak, it may be enough to know that Reconciliation is the author’s best book yet, the prose as tight and polished as previous books, but the observations arguably more mature and generous.  Admittedly, I am already a fan of Speak’s work— having read her novel, The Wife Tree (Random House, 2002), and one of her other collections of stories, Object of Your Love (St. Martin’s Press, 1998)—but these powerful stories grew roots when I read them. They’re still growing now.

Speak’s talent for creating believable characters makes Reconciliation an intimate, occasionally uncomfortable read. I sometimes felt as if I were learning the unwelcome secrets of close friends, and rather than judge, I needed to examine my own flaws and inconsistencies. Speak points unerringly to weaknesses in relationships and character, perhaps more often than she points to strengths, and this unsentimental ability gives her writing clout.

Benta, in “The Opposite of Truth,” jogs every day in a neighbourhood “that has more to do with what Benta once had and threw away than with what her life is now.”  She hopes that her friend Lourdes, ill with cancer, “her raw temples, pale and smooth as soap,” has “left her something in her will…She hopes their friendship is up to at least that. She’s not Lourdes’ friend because of this prospect, but it’s an inducement not to cross her.” Nevertheless, any pity you feel for Lourdes won’t last.  She dates Benta’s former husband for a while when he and Benta divorce, her explanation that “they connect on an intellectual level.” Her friendship with Benta is forged on familiarity and perhaps a desire for deeper intimacy, not on the mutual respect that might allow it. In defense of her behaviour, Lourdes says, “Isn’t that the precept of modern relationships? To fracture and wound and betray and humiliate?”

Certainly in the lives of Speak’s characters, this feels true, and yet the overall tone of the book is hopeful, not bleak. Speak’s characters are strong; they survive their pain gracefully.  They adapt, and move on, sometimes harder because of what they’ve learned, and sometimes softer, but always altered. They live the adage, “We can’t choose what happens to us, only what we do about it.” And as Benta notes, “There don’t seem to be any purely right choices.”

In “Windfall,” a wife accepts the inevitability of her divorce and adapts, as others around her have adapted, perhaps even to recognize that she’s better off on her own. “Life has its own ebb and flow,” she’s learned, “and it’s wise to swim with the tides, keeping your chin above the crest of the waves as best you can.”

In the title story, “Reconciliation,” even nine-year-old Imogene must learn to carry on as best she can when her mother leaves. When her mother tells her she doesn’t need to take sides, Imogene cares little about why her mother left her father. “What she wanted, without knowing it, was to understand why her mother had left her behind as well.”

Reconciliation is about not having all the answers, about how people of all ages move forward when unexpected events change everything. The one certainty in love, Speak seems to say, is that it both rewards and wounds.

These are high-calibre, thought-provoking stories about love and loss, beautifully written.

Read more about Reconciliation

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Other reviews by Pearl Luke

The Road to Keringet by Maggie Ziegler

The Whole Clove Diet by Mary W. Walters

Stony River by Tricia Dower

The Boy by Betty Jane Hegerat

50 Shades of Grey by E.L. James

Western Taxidermy by Barb Howard

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Guide to The Shore Girl by Fran Kimmel

Fran Kimmel’s debut novel, The Shore Girl, illustrates the havoc of a young girl’s upbringing in a way that is both raw and heartbreaking. Rebee has a mother with a terrible secret, one that shapes both their lives. She’s the girl trapped in the white van, dragged from place to place, no clue where she is on the crumpled map. Everywhere she goes, Rebee transforms the lives of the people she encounters. But it’s not until she gets carted back to Chesterfield after her grandfather’s funeral that she learns of the dark forces that have torn her family apart. Along the way, Rebee learns that hope can be built from grief and that some love can last.

Questions for Discussion

1. The Shore Girl begins with a section told from the perspective of toddler Rebee Shore who is left alone in a run-down motel. Does this child’s limited viewpoint make for an effective entry point? Why or why not?
2. The book is written as a mosaic told from multiple viewpoints that provide a window into Rebee’s life. Why might the author have chosen this structure?
3. Rebee’s youth is chronicled through the eyes of four main characters: Aunt Vic, Miss Bel, Jake and Joey. What do these characters have in common? Can you relate to any of them? Who do you like most or least? Why?
4. Miss Bel and Rebee have an unusual teacher-student relationship. Miss Bel herself admits she’s a lousy teacher. Does she have Rebee’s best interests at heart when they first meet? When they part ways? How is Rebee ultimately changed by this teacher?
5. What in Jake’s life compels him to reach out to Harmony and Rebee? Why does he choose to stay involved in their lives?
6. How do Joey’s feelings towards his mother echo Rebee’s feelings towards Harmony? How does Rebee serve as a catalyst for Joey’s growth?
7. In what ways do “clippings” play a role in this book?
8. Are Harmony’s actions forgivable given the dark circumstances of her past? Why or why not?
9. People can have a lasting impression on our lives, even if they pass through for only a brief season. How might you react if a girl like Rebee and her mother showed up?
10. In many ways, The Shore Girl is about hope, redemption and starting over. Has Rebee escaped the mistakes of her ancestors? Do you believe Rebee has a chance for a good life? Why or why not?

Buy The Shore Girl at fine bookstores or online at Amazon.com, Amazon.ca, Chapters Indigo, Kobo, or Barnes & Noble,

www.frankimmel.com

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BCB: What do you think readers will find most notable about this book?


Frank Burnaby:  Well from reviews and conversations from readers, I gather that people are amazed that Island Born is a true story, and that the truth is palpable in every step of it.  And that we were able to accomplish what we did. Island Born threw open the windows on the spirit of adventure for many.  Readers have also appreciated the vulnerability of the characters, and the honesty in the story telling. One comment I particularly liked on Amazon: “Even having finished the book, I come back to it wondering, did they find their paradise on the island, or was it on the boat beforehand, or was it not a place at all, but in the intimacy of shared space and in days filled with purpose?”

BCB: Who do you feel is most memorable in your book, and why? 

Frank Burnaby: Well Gayle, most certainly.  I did not find out what Gayle wrote home to her mother from the Maldives till much later:

I waited for Dr. Rashid at his house cause I couldn’t understand all the wish wash of the pregnancy test results. I had a cup of tea with his wife, Patricia, who came from Malaysia. She was about 28 and very nice. When Dr. Rashid came back, they both congratulated me, and I felt I deserved congratulations. I felt proud, and in a state of ecstasy over the news. Then I flashed on Frank’s face after I’d tell him and thought, Oh no, this is terrible. I went over about 600 ways to tell him, some sad, some happy, some just the facts. I talked Patricia’s head off for a half an hour and then zoomed home on the bike with a gleaming smile on my face that I couldn’t get rid of, no matter how many people stared at me. 

BCB: What is one of your favourite lines or passages in the book, and why?

Frank Burnaby: For me there are many favourites but here’s one: “Gayle was referring to an account of some islanders blown across the sea in their boat, unable to fight their way back against monsoon winds and currents. They had helmed their way over unfathomable depths for thousands of miles in an open boat with a patched lateen sail. They had uplifted their palms to the rain, coaxed fish to a hook, and had sailed on with nothing but the baking sun and shivering stars for a compass. One can only imagine how thin the skin of their small open boat, and how deep their will to survive. But after weeks turning around in the stars they sighted the blue anvil-headed clouds over land. In my heart I knew those men. How they trudged ashore with their stories that nobody could understand. I knew the sea-eye that would steady generations of mariners born to them, as O’Riordan’s had steadied mine.”

I love this excerpt because it says what much of this book is about, that when there is complete submission to intimacy with nature, our potential as human beings can be realized.

BCB: When you look at “Gayle and Frank” as characters, now that they’re on the page, what most interests you about them? 

Frank Burnaby: Seeing them (us) as characters, I have to ask myself how they knew to do what they did. Where did they find the confidence, the spirit to take on the challenges that they did.  And most importantly why? One person said to me, “You and Gayle could have died a dozen times, but you would not let that happen, and you never gave up on her or Joya.” So finally what kept them alive and pushing on?

BCB: Have you acquired any good anecdotes surrounding this book? 

Frank Burnaby: I was always amazed after signing with two very good literary agents in succession that Island Born wasn’t purchased by one of the big publishing houses. Even editors in those houses spoke highly of the story. So why? I was pretty depressed about it after so many years of effort. Then it struck me that the story, even a true story such as this one, was too far out of bounds to fit onto their book lists. Several houses even said so themselves. Was it a sailing story, a romance, a birth story, or what? They just did not know how to fit it in. So now I see it as a blessing in disguise not being published by them, because it forced me to take my story directly to people. And I am so happy it turned out this way. To be in touch with my community was the only reason I wrote Island Born in the first place. It’s back to being a poet and deeply moved after a reading, when even one person appreciates my work. 

BCB: Did writing this book teach you anything new or influence your thinking in any way?


Frank Burnaby: Hugely, even though Island Born happened when I was much younger, the resonant themes in the book challenge me every day, to trust decisions in life that might seem uninformed or impossible, but clearly reside in the heart. At the time, most of what we did was intuitive and relatively unencumbered by cultural restraints and pressures from other people in our lives. We were just out there. But since, I have gathered a fair amount of support and understanding, even compassion for our decisions from a medical point of view as well as an anthropological one. It is interesting to note now that the book ended with the word “backs,” not to suggest a looking back, but rather a person’s capacity for intelligent independence which is the backbone of our human nature.

BCB: Can you suggest one question readers might find interesting to discuss, concerning you, your writing in general, or this book?


Frank Burnaby: One question an editor asked from one of the major publishing houses that rejected the book was: How did ocean sailing, and in particular that last 41 days across the Indian Ocean, transition into having a baby completely alone and unassisted on a desert island? Is Island Born two stories or one?

BCB: Is there any new or established author whom you feel deserves more attention, and what is it that strikes you about his or her work?

Frank Burnaby: Paul Shepard. He calls himself an ecological perceptionist. I came across his writing after our Island Born experience. He affirmed a lot of my feelings about the intuitive motivations for Island Born. One of my favorites was The Tender Carnivore and the Sacred Game. This from Wikipedia:  “Based on his early study of modern ethnographic literature examining contemporary nature-based peoples, Shepard created a developmental model for understanding the role of sustained contact with nature in healthy human psychological development, positing that humans, having spent 99% of their social history in hunting and gathering environments, are therefore evolutionarily dependent on nature for proper emotional and psychological growth and development. Drawing from ideas of neoteny, Shepard postulated that many humans in post-agricultural society are often not fully mature, but are trapped in infantilism or an adolescent state.” (Wikipedia.org)

BCB: Is there anything else you’d like readers to know about you, your book, or your writing process?  

Frank Burnaby: I want everyone to know how grateful I am that Island Born is being read. I have been alone with this story for a long time, except for the support of my family, and am deeply appreciative to be able to share it now.

Read MORE about Island Born

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Island Born, a memoir, challenges what is possible in love and nature. The author and his partner, from vastly different backgrounds in Los Angeles, resolve to follow their intuition and sail “the wrong way around the world” – eastward across the Arabian Sea. Pitted against treacherous conditions that included the volatile social and political situation of the world ashore, they discover what it takes, and what it means, to surpass all previous personal and cultural expectations so that they might truly live.

When twenty-one year-old Gayle becomes pregnant in the middle of their sailing adventure, the couple discovers a tiny uninhabited island in a remote atoll, as barely discernible as a shake of pepper in the vast blue of their Indian Ocean chart. There they give up their dream ship, and begin a real life journey neither of them could have imagined. With the help of an old chief on a nearby island, they build a thatched family home with no electricity, no running water, no telephone, no address, no bills, and no neighbors.

ISLAND BORN seeks to answer the question of whether it is still possible to voyage to an unspoiled place, not only on the globe, but within ourselves. Together, Frank and Gayle pull up anchor from the seabed of their culture and travel to a place where their determination, their romance, and their lives are challenged beyond the limits of each horizon, and yet they keep going.

Author’s Note  

I love to tell a good story, and I lived one with the experience of Island Born. The voyage taught me to trust that resources existed within me  of which I was unaware. Nothing stopped us, and the challenges were huge and often unexpected. It was remarkable to later examine what enabled us to keep going, and in the writing process themes emerged that never occurred to me at the time. For example, sailing a small boat into vast and indomitable oceans distilled my relationship to nature and heightened my capacity to survive.  Childbrith alone on an uninhabited island was only part of the journey. I wrote Island Born to inspire others to stretch further. Within every person is a treasure trove of intelligence and knowledge that could lead to freedoms and forgotten capabilities.

Author Bio 

Frank Burnaby is a poet, traveler, sailor, and storyteller. He worked as a successful lighting designer in Los Angeles for many years before retiring to Salt Spring Island. For the last several years he has devoted his time to writing, raising his younger sons, and to the creation of a wilderness school focused on the developmental needs of 7-13 year old children, as they experience nature.

As a youth, he survived his parent’s good intentions when they enrolled him in military school in the seventh grade. There he learned to disassemble and reassemble his rifle with his eyes closed, and to pull weeds for not having a mirror shine on his shoes. He spent his high school years at a boarding school in New Jersey.

In 1969, after a stint at San Francisco State University film school, Frank boarded a freighter bound for North Africa. Hitchhiking across Turkey, Iran, Afghanistan, and Pakistan, he made his way through India and South East Asia, to remote islands in Indonesia by native boat, and finally on to Hong Kong where he taught English.

Landing back in New York City he drove a taxi at night, and studied acting at Herbert Berghof Studios. He found work as an actor and was offered the principal part in a travel adventure feature film, but instead of pursuing an acting career he opened a vegetarian taco stand, which thrived on the edge of the meat packing district.

Drawn to the sea and his dream of sailing to a tropical wilderness, he took a job as an apprentice shipwright in a Los Angeles marina. Soon after, he set off with his soon-to-be wife, Gayle, to purchase a small vintage sailboat in England. He was 27, and she was 17. The ensuing five year voyage, eastward across the Indian Ocean, and their experience living on an uninhabited island changed his life forever. This is the story, Island Born.

Read an INTERVIEW with the author

Read PRAISE for Island Born

Visit Frank Burnaby’s WEBSITE

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BCB: What do you think readers will find most notable about this book?


Caroline Woodward:  I think that even if children are not growing up in a village like Silverado, they will understand that their own world is a special and possibly magical community too. Sometimes it just takes a nudge, or a book, to open one’s eyes to the fine, strong webs of connection all around us and to know that kind people of all ages really are looking out for us.

BCB: Who do you feel is the most memorable character in your book, and why? 

Caroline Woodward:  For a writer, it’s like being asked which one of your children is the most memorable when to me; each one is memorable for different reasons. I think, though, that little Sara really ‘got’ to me, even if actually writing about talented and kind Madame D’Oiseaux or the wonderfully nasty Francie Oldham was easier and more fun for me. Sara is so sick that the rest of the family has to revolve around her and her needs for sleep and medical care but she is the furthest thing from an attention-demanding diva imaginable. I have personally found this depth of character to often be the case for children who have suffered a lot and been confined to bed, waiting for a cure, or an operation or just to get well again. Her big sister, Gina, is the narrator.

“Sara has her own bird picture book for kids and Mom has a big one for adults. We made sure to find the birds mentioned in Dr. Barber’s column. Then Sara would know who was flying north or south over Silverado while she slept.

‘I don’t want to miss anybody or anything,’ she’d say, with that great smile and her big brown eyes shining. Sometimes her eyes were like soft dark tunnels. A person could fall way down into those tunnels, somehow knowing the landing would be soft. Everything will be okay no matter what. That’s what her eyes seemed to say even when she was so tired she couldn’t talk anymore.

Sometimes Sara seemed like she was a hundred years old inside.”

BCB: What was one of your favourite passages in the book to write, and why?

Caroline Woodward:  Near the end of the book, I describe an outdoor New Year’s Eve Party in the snow of this mountain village.  It is, with artistic license flourishing here and there of course, as true to my memory of the New Year’s Party to welcome the new millennium in New Denver. We actually did have waterproof messages on fishing line flying along the village green beside our bookstore and we did have a most wonderful parade of homemade lanterns past the hospital and snow sculptures and sleigh rides and so much more. The village only had about 500 people as year-round residents and a good half of them turned out to welcome the year 2000. So it was great fun to recreate and celebrate that happy snowy party in my book. Also, a second draft of this story, which I thought was a picture book, is in the time capsule collected by the village council and stored under the cenotaph in the Park where we had the party. How I’d love to be around when they open it in 2100 but alas, I’ll be pushing up daisies.

BCB: Which of the relationships between characters most interests you, and why?

Caroline Woodward:  The relationships between Gina and her teacher, Ms. Freeman, her neighbour, Ms. Harlock, and especially the hat-maker, Madame D’Oiseaux interest me because Gina’s mother is so wrapped up, understandably, in Sara’s life-threatening illness that she simply doesn’t have any emotional energy to spare for Gina. This isn’t fair, of course, but it’s the reality, the way it is. But in a village or small farming community, people notice things like whether or not wood smoke is coming out of a neighbour’s chimney or animals are behaving oddly and of course, if families are going through a tough time. The good people step in and mobilize others to help out as well.  It’s how the social fabric of a place is woven; lumpy bits and thin bits and beautifully harmonious stretches too.

BCB: Have you acquired any good anecdotes surrounding this book? If so, could you share one?


Caroline Woodward:  Yes! Life imitates art and art imitates life! I was in the Kootenays doing readings from my adult novel, Penny Loves Wade, Wade Loves Penny in the fall of 2010 and discovered that the provincial government had decided to make up for lavish spending at the Olympics by cutting 100% of its meagre funding to volunteer-run Reading Centres around the province in small communities like Mayne Island, Wardner, Dease Lake and New Denver among others. I immediately wanted to do a fundraiser and was inspired by my writer friend, Theresa Kishkan, who had auctioned off a role for an architect in her novel, The Age of Water Lilies, to donate funds to the Sechelt Arts Council. I asked my friend, the Mayor of New Denver, if he would handle the auctioneering and he did a stand-up job on five roles for The Village of Many Hats: hero, villain, antique/junque store owner, professional dog-walker and bird columnist for the local newspaper. We raised nearly $900 and as of 2012, I’m happy to report the New Denver Reading Centre is still going strong as it has been for decades.

BCB: Can you suggest one question readers might find interesting to discuss, concerning you, your writing in general, or this book?


Caroline Woodward:  Re: this book, what virtues would each of us choose to stitch into a real or imagined hat for ourselves to wear before tackling a tough situation? Or: Sometimes we get so stifled by powers-that-be or are so swamped by our immediate needs for food, shelter and clothing that we don’t fully participate in our community life. How can we make life better/friendlier/happier for more than just ourselves?

BCB: Is there any new or established author whom you feel deserves more attention, and what is it that strikes you about his or her work?

Caroline Woodward:  I especially admire the work of a Danish writer, Bodil Bredsdorff, and have read three books in her Cove Children series, translated and published by Farrar Straus & Giroux in North America. Whenever I felt stymied while trying to get that elusive ‘tone’ alchemy of language just right for my own book, I would reread The Crow-Girl by Bredsdorff to be inspired and energized by the clarity and wisdom and sheer toughness of the rural children in her book. It’s hard to know if the book is set in the far past or the post-apocalyptic future, which speaks to the timeless feel of her settings and characters. Highly recommended.

BCB: Is there anything else you’d like readers to know about you, your book, or your writing process?

Caroline Woodward:  Despite all my warm and joyous village and farm life writing, I am so happy to live as a semi-hermit lightkeeper on BC’s west coast! I work shifts and I am surrounded by wilderness and peacefulness so it’s the perfect environment for me as a writer. Others require coffee shops and the sound of sirens and brakes screeching but not I. Seagulls, pounding surf and eagles chittering away suit me to a T!

Read more about The Village of Many Hats

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Description of The Village of Many Hats

It takes a village to raise a child and to care for families in crisis. In The Village of Many Hats, we learn that it takes a child and a wise hat-maker to save a village. Nine year old Gina struggles with her little sister’s illness and a tragedy within her village which ultimately brings her community together.

Author Note 

I began this book when I lived in New Denver, a village on Slocan Lake in the West Kootenay region of southeastern British Columbia. We had a book and toy store there for eight years and during that time, as an active member of the community, I realized so many wonderful people of all ages quietly helped other people cope with all kinds of things in their lives. So that got me reflecting again on the “fabric of a community” which of course got me rolling on how we all contribute our time and talent and treasure (though a lot more of the first two than the latter) to make things better for the place we live in. Once a talented friend started making hats out of recycled clothing (I donated a red wool Hudson Bay coat among other things), the metaphor-mulling increased!

Author Bio 

Caroline Woodward is an exceptional, multi-talented woman who herself wears many hats! She is the author of children’s and adult fiction, a performer and storyteller, singer, arts producer, editor, publicist, writing instructor, bookstore owner, and relief lightkeeper, keeping watch at lighthouses when needed.

She was a finalist for the 1994 Arthur Ellis Best First Mystery Award, and the 1991 Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize. She was a 1993 Globe & Mail Editor’s Choice, and has served on cultural juries or advisory committees for the National Book Week Festival, Canada Council Explorations, BC Arts Council, BC Festival of the Arts, BC Book Prizes and BC Arts Millennium Awards.

She has also served on the boards of Selkirk College, Theatre Energy, the Slocan Lake Gallery Society, the Kootenay School of Writing in Nelson, the B.C. Arts Council and on the advisory group for the Arts & Culture Committee for the Vancouver Foundation.

Praise for The Village of Many Hats

~ Sometimes the story behind a novel is as good as the one it tells. While writing this magic-infused tale of a girl coping with her younger sister’s serious illness, Caroline Woodward (author of the acclaimed Singing Away the Dark) discovered that all of the provincial funding for the volunteer-run reading centre in her hometown of New Denver, B.C., had been slashed. So to raise money for the centre, Woodward auctioned off the names of five characters in the book. To top it off, she’s donating a portion of the royalties to B.C. Children’s Hospital, in honour of the sick little girl at the heart of this drama for readers seven to 10 years old. ~Brian Lynch, The Georgia Straight

~  I was pleased to find that everything I loved about Singing Away… was present here in this story of a small community surrounded by nature in the Kootenays, whose spirit refuses to be permeated by economic hardship, a novel whose heart is a young girl who knows that bravery is not the absence of fear, but instead fear harnessed. ~ Kerry Clare, Pickle Me This

Read a fascinating INTERVIEW with Caroline Woodward about The Village of Many Hats

Visit Caroline Woodward’s WEBSITE 

Paperback: 120 pages

Publisher: Oolichan Books (April 15 2012)
ISBN-10: 0889822840
ISBN-13: 978-0889822849

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Book Club Buddy: What do you think readers will find most notable about Intersecting Sets: A Poet Looks at Science?

Alice Major: I hope they find that it’s engaging. Many people think poetry and science are nerdy and difficult of access, and conclude that the combination must be astronomically esoteric. But this is a very personal exploration and if I had a reader in mind for it, it would be my mum – someone intelligent and interested in the world, but not in any way academic.

BCB: Is there a character or persona in your book that stands out for you?

Alice Major: Well, as a book of essays, it doesn’t have characters in the way that fiction does. But various people wander in and out of it. One that I rather like is my cat Pushkin, who pounces throughout the essay on metaphor:

I’m rinsing out the bathroom sink. At my feet, Pushkin is poking a toy mouse under the blue plush of the bathmat, then pouncing on it where it is hidden. He scoops it out of its soft cave, tosses it in the air a few times, then pokes it back into the hole. Then he lurks with his chin on the floor, his tail twitching, until he pounces again and the toy mouse is sent spinning into the air.

 It suddenly occurs to me that he is pretending it’s a real mouse. He’s not under any delusions that it is a real one – he’s not fooled into trying to eat its straw stuffing. He is imitating the instinctive actions that a cat uses to hunt but the activity is quite voluntary. He’s having a great time.

For the first time, I realize that ‘play’ is a process of metaphor. It acts ‘as-if.’ It draws on an ability to hold two situations in mind at once – a real world and a pretend one – and to fool around with the combo.

BCB: What is one of your favourite lines or passages in the book, and why?

Alice Major: This passage comes from close to the end. I like it because I feel it sums up some of the major points – and goodness knows, it was hard to end a book that seemed like a constantly spiraling fractal while I was writing it.

We do not value what comes easily to human beings, because we do not realize how enormously complex it is to move, to recognize a pattern, to tell a story, to love. In the last century, we felt that we had made poetry ‘better’ by making it hard. The greatest gift of science in our time may be to help us understand how wonderfully sophisticated our simple abilities are, how long it took to evolve them, how they fit into the natural world as part of a continuum.

As scientists continue their investigations we will come to understand in greater and greater detail how the brain does its easy things. But science is also increasingly aware of its limitations – that the sheer volume of information required to understand even a single experience exceeds the descriptive capacities of laws and equations. “Events are denser than any possible scientific description,” writes Nobel-winning neuroscientist Gerald Edelman. Ultimately the poet’s description is as complete a description of experience as the scientist’s.

BCB: Have you acquired any good anecdotes surrounding Intersecting Sets?

Alice Major: One of my huge insecurities while writing it was that I am not a scientist or mathematician, and I can’t speak the language of mathematics. On the strength of the book, I was invited to speak at the Banff International Research Station for Mathematical Research and Discovery. I have never been so terrified in my life! (There’s a BLOG ITEM on my experience). I fully expected to be drummed out of the room. But the mathematicians were very kind and when I mentioned how awestruck I was at being with a group of people who find math easy, the response was, “But we would find what you do very difficult.”

BCB: Did researching and writing this book teach you anything or influence your thinking in any way?

Alice Major: The whole book was a learning experience! I learned everything from relatively small factoids (how hardy roses survive winter by concentrating sugar in their cells) to big things. Especially, I came away with an increased sense of how patterns that work at the tiniest scales of the universe are also relevant at the largest ones.

BCB: Can you suggest one question readers might find interesting to discuss, concerning you, your writing in general, or this book?

Alice Major: Well, maybe they would be interested in how the science actually finds its way into my poems as well as the essays. These links lead to poems on my website  inspired by concepts from various disciplines:

Astronomy

Cosmology

Quantum physics

Embryology

Engineering/technology

BCB: Is there any new or established author whom you feel deserves more attention?

Alice Major: Oh, help – so many of them, but my brain has gone blank on individuals. But there is an essay in the book about the vagaries of literary reputation, and an excerpt from that has been published HERE.  I guess my main point would be that we can’t all be famous, but we need to make an effort to recognize the local writers who help create our community (in so many ways).

Read more about Intersecting Sets: A Poet Looks at Science

Buy at Amazon

About Intersecting Sets: A Poet Looks at Science

We are living in one of the most exciting ages of science, shifting from the mechanistic universe that made science seem so cold a century ago to a world shaped by fractal wiggles and unfolding complexity. The probing of brains and the sifting of DNA are helping humans understand how we are related to the natural world in which we evolved.

But poets practice an art that humans have been sharing since the dawn of language, from the ancient campfires of the OMO people to 21^st-century rappers. All this time, poetry has been used to understand the world’s patterns and explore our central questions: Who are we? How did all this begin? What is change? What is time? (And what time is it, anyway?)

These are the two sets – the work of poets and the work of scientists – that Alice Major allows to intersect in this book, like spots of coloured light overlapping to form new shades of illumination for every reader who is engaged with the world.

Author Note 

Art and science have been presented as polar opposites, but that is a division that just never made sense to me. There’s an anecdote in the introduction about getting a book on relativity when I was ten or twelve – an arbitrary Christmas present that opened up a world stranger than Narnia. Only it was my world. I didn’t have to sit in the coat cupboard and hope the back of it would open up into someplace else.

I suppose I also wanted to understand more about why and how people create poems – or art in general. Some of the literary theory that I grew up with was deeply unsatisfying, and I have spent a lifetime working out an alternative basis. The recent studies of brain science and evolution have helped me do that for myself, and I wanted to engage others in the discussion.

But this is not a book of literary theory. Really it’s a  celebration of the glorious interconnectedness of this universe, where everything from the cat to my father’s comic poems to chaos theory is one tangled and endless opportunity for exchange.

Author Bio

Alice Major has published nine highly praised poetry collections, three of which have been shortlisted for the Pat Lowther Award, given annually for best book of poetry by a Canadian woman. In 2009, she won that award for The Office Tower Tales. She has also received the Stephan G. Stephansson Award (for Memory’s Daughter). For Intersecting Sets: A Poet Looks at Science, she has received the Wilfrid Eggleston non-fiction prize by the Writers Guild of Alberta and a National Magazine Award gold medal.

Praise for Intersecting Sets: A Poet Looks at Science 

“For the elegance and precision of its language, the encyclopedic reach of its knowledge, and the daring of its thought, this book is a winner. Every page offers fresh insight and challenging intellectual vistas, yet the text never loses itself in a fog of abstraction. There’s always someone or something – a cat named Pushkin, a bird on a credit card, an old man walking, walking, reciting his poems—to ground the conceptual universe in the sensory world. Measured against the writer’s intentions and the pleasure it offers to readers, this book is practically perfect.” - Jury Comments, Wilfrid Eggleston Award

“Canadian poet Alice Major considers confluences between science and poetry in this lyrical and insightful meditation on perception, language, and creativity. … Drawing on a broad range of scientific inquiry, including neuroscience, mathematics, physics, biochemistry, astronomy, psychology, and botany, Major argues that emotion is central to both poetry and science, and that the cognitive processes of scientists and poets are fundamentally aligned…. Recommended. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty; general readers.” - L. Simon, Skidmore College, Choice: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries, March 1, 2012

“I have not done justice to the delight I felt in reading these essays—it was a joy to take in their looping, fractal structure. Major offers us the pleasure of watching another writer’s mind in motion at every scale, from conversation with her cat to theories in cosmology, from the personal questions of why we write or practice science to the evolutionary questions of what makes us human and where language comes from. As a scientist, I wanted to research and debate one question after another. As a poet, I encountered the questions I ask myself, along with wise advice about writing.” - Robin Chapman, American Scientist, May, 2012

“Anyone who enjoys juxtaposing ideas, or who thinks it might be possible to toss thoughts back and forth from one hemisphere of the brain to the other, probably needs this book. It could well lead to a change in the way you see the world.” - Heidi Greco, Prairie Fire, July 2012

“The essays do not form a rigorous argument as to any one “side” but rather range widely and expose the reader to new ideas as they arise in many contexts. I liked this approach, as it provided room for the reader to graze and discover things that they might not even realize they were interested in.” - The Indextrious Reader, April 30, 2012

“If poets can read this book and have their minds altered by new scientific understanding, a scientist may read this book and gain a deeper appreciation for the nuances of poetry, perhaps even gain an understanding of how the expressiveness of language, and the emotionally laden potential of poetry, can provide a new way of expressing scientific concepts. While science may be seen as a cold and analytical field, scientists themselves are human—and that’s where the emotion of poetry can reach across the divide.” Alison Gordaneer, Malahat Review, Summer 2012

Read the Book Club Buddy INTERVIEW with Alice Major about Intersecting Sets: A Poet Looks at Science

Visit Alice Major’s WEBSITE 

American Scientist

Prairie Fire

Banff International Research Station on Mathematical Innovation and Discovery 

Paperback: 296 pages
Publisher: University Of Alberta Press (Nov 15 2011)
ISBN-10: 0888645953
ISBN-13: 978-088864595

The Road to Keringet is unique in that it is both a biography of Maggie Ziegler’s mother, Mary, and Maggie’s memoir covering the brief period of time before and after her mother’s death. If this presents cataloguing challenges for librarians and bookstores, it only makes the book doubly interesting for readers.

As a young woman Mary is conscripted into the British army and volunteers for overseas duty. Assigned to Kenya, she meets, is pursued by and marries Wolfgang, a Jewish refugee from Berlin. Thus starts a passionate but difficult relationship that in one way or another endures “until death do us part,” despite a series of breakups and eventual divorce.

When the couple immigrates to Canada, Mary—at home with children—makes use of her passionate intellect by writing well-reviewed nonfiction and by rewriting portions of her life, romanticized and shaped into good fiction. She successfully sells these semi-autobiographical stories to romance magazines, despite Wolfgang’s derisive attitude toward her work. As a writer, she plans to pen her memoir someday, a desire stymied first by brain cancer and then by dementia.

And so Mary asks Maggie Ziegler to sort through numerous boxes of journals, letters and other material to write the story for her.  Ziegler is at first ambivalent and unenthusiastic. However, as her mother declines, Ziegler not only promises to write, she becomes keenly interested in Mary’s story. Finally, she finds a path into the narrative by acknowledging and sharing the significant demands of her own role.

When she and her brothers must make the terrible decision to put her mother in a supervised environment, Ziegler writes:

There was no way to patch this up. We kissed her goodbye and left her standing behind doors that opened to a code she did not know. . . . I was sure we had done the wrong thing. I was sure our mother had been misdiagnosed and that she would suddenly come to herself and find her life thrown away. I was afraid they would drug her without consulting us. I was afraid she’d start hallucinating again and no one would notice, and that she would slide into a suspicious and lonely terror. (75)

In response to her mother’s emigration from Britain, she writes:

Mom, stay in England! … Or if you must get on that train to Liverpool, don’t board the ship, just keep wandering past the building skeletons and the heaps of rubble. Linger by the bombed out churches and watch the pigeons fly through empty window frames and think of arriving in Liverpool a few weeks earlier, just after the government signed a document of unconditional surrender… (126)

She writes of the frustration of being thousands of miles away when her mother needs immediate surgery, of trying to obtain basic information:

The long distance telephone calls continued. I called the ward nurse.

          “There’s no point trying to talk to your mother right now. She doesn’t understand anything,” she said.

           ”Could I please speak with Doctor Smith?” I asked.

           The nurse gave me his office number. The receptionist was apologetic. “I’m sorry, Dr. Smith has just left the country for a week.”

           I called Ward 4Y again. “I don’t know anything,” the nurse said. “Call Ursula—she’s the head nurse. She’s on her break, so call back in fifteen minutes.” (139) 

Of her parents’ early romance:

I had read the letters of my parents’ courtship until my eyes burned with the yearning rising off the faded paper folded into envelopes marked with military censor stamps. The letters ached with the possibility of a love that would free them from what constrained them. They had written every day and they had fallen in love with their own words. (140) 

On realizing she may have more in common with her mother than she once thought:

How I had wanted to be different from what I viewed as my mother’s martyrdom. I had fled across the continent determined to find some other way to be a woman. But we weren’t so different, my mother and I. Just look at me now. Nose stuck in old documents, fading letters and yellowing paper, sniffing for truth or enlightenment, obsessed with reconstructing old stories. Have I become my mother, my deepest terror? Writing was part of the package that I rejected, something that she did, not me, and yet here I was closing my door and immersing myself in her papers and her story. Now, like her, I inhabited a private world of words, words that slid out of their boxes and knocked against my heart. (157-158)

Perhaps most surprising to me is that Ziegler’s parents attempted an open marriage in the 1940s. For this, Ziegler shares her parents’ most intimate exchanges, details that would make most offspring cringe. A gifted psychologist, she turns her compassionate eye on her parents and chooses excerpts that show them as both complex and fascinating individuals.

The Road to Keringet is everything good memoir should be. It offers frank insight into the author’s experience, and allows readers to understand and feel what might otherwise be impossible to know. It acknowledges the fallibility of memory, but presents emotional truth. As a biography, the book is equally strong—compassionate and nonjudgmental, tasteful and kind in its exposure. Most importantly the story is difficult to set aside and remains with one long after the reading is finished.

Early on in the book, we learn of Mary’s desire to write well and of her admiration for Katherine Mansfield:

She expresses what I can only feel. Her flow of language is so effortless, so simple and her expressions sometimes so unorthodox. She does not think, she just lives and feels. Her writing is she herself—emotional, passionate, full of the joy of life, tasting all its sorrows. (63)

One could say the same of the Ziegler’s writing, mother and daughter.

Maggie Ziegler has intertwined both stories with exceptional skill.  Her writing is evocative and engrossing, her editing masterful, making The Road to Keringet a riveting read.

This gem is an independently published book and may be purchased from the author’s WEBSITE.

Read an INTERVIEW with Maggie Ziegler.

Pearl Luke is the author of Madame Zee and Burning Ground and is the founder of BookClubBuddy.com www.be-a-better-writer.com

Other reviews by Pearl Luke

The Whole Clove Diet by Mary W. Walters

Stony River by Tricia Dower

The Boy by Betty Jane Hegerat

50 Shades of Grey by E.L. James

Western Taxidermy by Barb Howard