TWO POEMS BY ULRICH WENDT

MOOSE AT BOG LAKE

As though they had always been there, they appeared at dusk
silently from among the cedars, through the dead grasses,
and knelt to drink at the star-filled water.

What wind there was came from the east and like a sigh
one by one they raised their improbable heads with the sad, calm eyes
and turned to fade into the gathering mist, fade into the forest and away
as though they had never been there.


FOR LAURA

Lost in what looks from below like pleasure,
the crane is beating hard against the wind.
Come with me soon to Birch River.
He will not be held on the air like this
forever.

Ulrich Wendt is a former resident of Thunder Bay

THROUGH THE TALL GRASS


By Rona Shaffran

Come walk with me
through the tall grass
to the edge of the world,

where the coastline
careens away untamed
into the rousing sea below the volcano,
that hulk fuming against a swollen sun.

Come with me,
climb that black back
breathless, our feet quivering
on the earth
as the underground roar rises.

There we are,
bayonets of flame leap up,
pierce the smoky clouds,
edge them florescent orange.

Then, all at once,
in celestial counterpoint,
a silver-white shooting star
plummets past us,
blazing a trail of golden light.

Come,
stay here with me
all the night through,

here
at the edge of the world.

© Rona Shaffran
Rona Shaffran is an Ottawa poet. She has been published in Bywords.ca and won Honourable Mention in the John Newlove Poetry Award 2006, for her poem Burnt Forest. The poem featured here is part of her first collection of poetry, due to be published by Fall 2008. Rona Shaffran’s poems have been read in Australia, at the Melbourne Poets Society 2005 and International Poetry Festival in 2006, and exhibited there in conjunction with five life drawing exhibitions. Her poems has also been translated into Italian and read in Italy

SO WHAT ARE YOU READING….???

The Butlerian Jihad by Brian Herbert and KevinAnderson. Brian Herbert is the son of Frank Herbert, author of the Dune series. This book is a prequel to the series. “Good battle scenes and a killer plot,” says Paul Gooding, Confederation College teacher.

Brian Spare of the Writers’ Circle is reading historical fiction right now. “I like Steven Pressfield and Mary Renault.”

Bonnie Gauthier, Club Manager at Curves on Arundel Street likes To Russia with Fries, by George Cohon and David Macfarlane. Cohen, the senior chairman of McDonald's Canada, wanted to raise the golden arches in a corner of the world untouched by Big Macs. His account describes how he finally succeeded in opening the world's largest McDonald's just blocks from Red Square.

Norma McCracken, a member of the No-stress Book Club, loved Human Amusement by Wayne Johnson. “Wild and crazy,” she says. Also not set in Newfoundland.

Fellow book club member, Hilke Grunys, laughed at Kafka’s Soup by Mark Crick, a good recipe book and spoof on great literature. Luckily for us, we not only have Kafka’s directions for miso soup but also Jane’s Austen’s for tarragon eggs. Nearby, Marcel Proust prepares Tiramisu and Raymond Chandler presents Lamb with Dill Souce. But the main dish has to be the Marquis de Sade’s stuffed poussins.

My pick is a children’s book, The Boy from the Sun by Thunder Bay’s Duncan Weller. A charmer with marvelous illustrations that get more intense as the book goes on. This is a story about the joys of life blended with an environmental sub text. A great Christmas gift for a preschooler or first reader.
Weller is short listed for the Governor General’s award along with Jean Pendziwol’s Marya’s Skis. Pendziwol is also a Thunder Bay-ite.


Both Pendziwol and Weller were signing books at The Finnish Book Store on October 20.

I also loved The Right Attitude to Rain by Alexander McCall Smith. This is the third book in the Isabel Dalhousie series. Here Isabel, an Edinburgh philosopher, solves her love problems. Meandering and slow and held together by the most tenuous of plot, the book just drags you in as do all McCall Smith’s books.

BOOK PRICES. Although The Hudson’s Bay Company (which includes Zellers) is lowering prices to reflect the power of the loonie, Heather of Chapters has not stirred. If you are a mega book buyer, it is almost worth going to Barnes and Nobel at the Miller Hill Mall in Duluth or, closer, Drury Lane in Grand Marais. Savings run from 10$ and up and are especially good on audio books.
Meanwhile, Heather, an admirer of Ayn Rand, has further dehumanized Chapters by removing all the comfortable chairs. To see a wonderful bookstore in operation, hit McNally Robinson Booksellers in Winnipeg – easy chairs, a fine restaurant, outstanding magazine selection and, duh!, books.

Short Story by Sue Blott

This story by Thunder Bay's Sue Blott won first prize for fiction for 2001 in the annual contest of the Northwestern Ontario Writers’ Workshop. It was published in the Thunder Bay Guild's first anthology: Forty Below in the Shade


SILVERY BELLY UP
By Sue Blott

"Helga Schmidt!" the nurse calls into the waiting room. Helga rises and shrugs her shoulders to dislodge germs, which she feels swarm around her like feasting blackflies, then she follows the young woman.

They stop at a bright room and the nurse points inside. Fluorescent light bounces off white, glossy walls. Helga remembers a paint commercial that promoted thousands of shades of white and wonders if Doctor's Office White, a tint all its own, was one of them.

“What seems to be the problem?" asks the nurse.

Well, the crows that roost on my brain stem are heavy these days. They flock to haunt me with their October smell of wood smoke and ripe apples, and flutter their wings like a shimmering death cloak. A murder of crows…killing me softly with their weight until brain stem branches snap and fall on the ground so crows can use them to build nests elsewhere in my brain.

"Oh, I'm here for a physical. And I've been feeling a bit down," Helga says. "Can't seem to shake it."

The nurse nods, understanding nothing. "Just undress. Doctor'll be with you shortly."

The door clicks closed and Helga's alone with a pale mirror face and kaleidoscopic fears. As she unzips her skirt, the noise echoes like a sudden fart, unmentionable in the sterile room. Helga slips out of her skirt and peers at her face in the chrome soap dispenser. Her nose, big and spreading, obliterates her eyes and mouth. She giggles and, in a sudden fit of childish glee, hums the striptease song and tugs on a sweater sleeve. "Ta-dum-de-dum, da dum de dum…" Then she pulls the other sleeve so her arms are free, graceful hands twirling in the air, the sweater like ten saggy chins around her neck. The doctor knocks, the door opens, and Helga freezes like a Greek statue in briefs too brief beneath rolls of abdominal fat and a grubby underwire bra.

"I'll--ahem--come back later," says Dr. Henderson. He turns and bumps into a scrub-faced, fine-haired student who follows too closely.

"No, wait, please come in!" Helga presses a hospital gown, crisp linen cold, against her chest.

"I'll only be a minute, promise." The doctor smiles, mutters something about privacy, and leaves. Helga undresses quickly, contorts herself to tie the gown, decides she can live with the top tie open and perches high on the crinkly white paper of the examining table. She sits with hands under thighs so her legs swing free. A good girl now.

Helga's hair brushes a mobile of insipid-coloured, rice paper fish, making it spin. One colour in particular, salmon-pink, makes her stomach heave. An image of a dead quail assaults her mind. She discovered it lying, stiff-feathered, on a neighbour's porch one frosty morning as she delivered flyers. The quail had no eye, only a salmon-pink glistening socket. After the shock of seeing it, she looked away, but too late--the sight had been branded on her mind, a morbid image which floats like dead fish, silvery belly up, to the surface of her memory at moments when she least expects it, like now in the doctor's office. Her shoulders sag. Another crow settles.

A knock on the door disrupts her thoughts. "Come in," says Helga. She smiles, understanding the visible relief on her doctor's face as he discovers her, decent and covered, on the table. She imagines being a dead fish image to him--a sudden vision of herself, dancing in bra and panties, which rises in his mind during Neebing Roadhouse luncheons when he sees plumply folded white napkins.

Helga tells the doctor and the student her problem is the crows and their nests, their presence, their weight, their blackness which blocks all light. The doctor listens and scribbles, nibbles on a blue pen top, seems to recall an image, then writes more. He prescribes pills which he promises will stop the birds from pecking and nesting further.

Everyone smiles. The doctor and student briefly examine her, but prescribe nothing else before leaving. Helga dresses quickly, clutches her prescription, and walks to the pharmacy next door. She stands in a line of three people and looks around. On the far wall is a poster: a red apple glazed with dew against a black background, one leaf twisting upwards. Helga sways and closes her eyes as a paralyzing image sweeps over her.

Five years old, 1939, in Czechoslovakia, Helga was lagging behind her father and three older sisters on the way to church across muddy fields. She buttoned her woolen coat against the biting autumn wind and wished her mother and the baby had come so everyone would slow to their pace. But they had stayed home, feverish, by the coal fire. Helga's rubber boots squelched in the mud as she struggled to keep up with her family. In trees, crows cawed. Helga's left foot slid and stuck in the muck making her stumble forward. Her pigtails flew in front of her face, but she caught her balance. As she tried to lift her foot, mud oozed around it and her boot sank deeper.

"Dad! Help! Da-a-a-d!"

Her father turned, saw her trouble, and strode towards her while her sisters snickered. With strong hands, he lifted her up, right out of her boot, and carried her to a grassy knoll by her sisters. They waited together, with Helga perched on one foot, while their father walked back across the field to retrieve the boot. He pulled it from the mud and held it up over his head.

"Yaaaah!" Helga and her sisters clapped and cheered as he walked towards them, the boot dripping globs of mud, high in the air. Then they saw an arm, caked in muck, rising behind him. It lifted stiffly out of the ground and rested fist up towards the grey October sky. No one screamed; Helga pointed. Their father looked, then ran back through the mud. The sisters followed. Helga hopped first, then ran, one booted foot, one clad in a sock, to where her father scrambled on his knees digging in a frenzy to expose the body.

With both hands, Helga tugged at her father's jacket sleeve, pulling hard. "Daddy, stop! Your trousers are dirty. Mummy'll be angry. Please stop!"

But her hand jerked with each pull of her father's arm and she knew he had no idea she was there any more. When he growled, "Go into town. Get help!" Helga's sisters scurried away. Helga started to follow them, then stopped. With a stone cold horror, she recognised the red shirt sleeve and the fisted hand: Wilheim Strauss.

On Wednesday the week before, she had spied Wilheim Strauss coming down the lane as she played with her rag doll by the hollow oak tree. He came closer, carrying a bushel of apples from his father's orchard. Helga stopped chattering to her doll and hid behind the tree trunk. But Wilheim had seen her.

"Hello? Helga? I have something for you."

She peered out. With a grubby hand and nails embedded with dirt, he offered her an apple, red as his shirt. "It's for you," he said with a smile and a flash of white teeth. Helga ducked behind the tree again and hugged her doll.

"I'll leave it here. They're best after first frost, juicy and ripe."

She watched as he nestled the apple in grass at the tree base, then sauntered down the lane, whistling. When he was almost out of sight, Helga grabbed the apple and bit into it. Juice trickled down her chin and, as she crunched, she offered the apple to her doll.

"Eat up. It'll put roses in your cheeks," she whispered.

From the end of the path, Wilheim hollered, "Told you they're the best!"

Watching her father madly dig, Helga finally understood late night whispers around the kitchen table about young farm lads being hustled into Hitler's army and dark days for those who refused or ran. She knelt on her woolen coat beside her father and clawed at the cold ground with tiny hands to uncover Wilheim Strauss lying silent, eyes staring blankly.

"Hey, move up there, lady!" a man from the back of the pharmacy line calls and Helga edges forward, the weight of the crows almost unbearable, their incessant noise echoing in her head. She reads the apple poster: "An apple a day keeps the doctor away." Her boots puddle muddy slosh from outside. Two blurry prints, her mark in life. In one corner of the pharmacy, a young girl, with hair stringy as her mop, cleans between aisles. She advances and the line-up side-shuffles. But Helga refuses to move. What if her muddy footprints were the only impression she left on the world? The birds' wings flap together like an oily tidal wave and panic seizes her. Her name is called, her prescription filled. Somehow she reaches the counter and picks up her bottle of pills. On the way out, Helga walks past the cleaning girl who mops up Helga's marks with a gleam in her eye.

Helga drives to the Kaministiquia boat launch. Mount MacKay's reflection ripples in the river and, as she walks towards the water, it splashes over the toes of her boots. A single crow caws and Helga stops. On a jutting rock, she sees a crow crowd, with toddler greed, around its carrion--a fish head. The fish's eye glares; the crow's eye winks. In a rapid movement, the crow plucks the fish eye from the head and swallows it with a neck-stretching gulp and repulsive pleasure.

Helga cradles the plastic pill bottle. Then she shakes it in the silence, louder, harder, until it rattles like a shaman's medicine stick. Crows scatter in flight.

What we’re reading. What we’re writing. Where we’re going

What astonishing creativity inhabits Thunder Bay. This blog is for anyone interested in books, writing, film and the local arts scene.

STARTING WITH A POEM…

OVER THE ROCKS

Walking to school
And home again
Over the smooth brown rocks
Carved with cracks and crevices
And punched with stony basins
Full of puddle sky.

Our eyes were on
The lake
The Giant and,
The grain elevators.

On this lake
Of deep blue icy,
Diamante water,
Tugs, grain boats, freighter and passengers
Came and went.

On a frigid morning
Sunrises blessed the sky, elevators and the Giant,
Blushing them rose.
The frosted lake-scape caught
Forever in the mind….
Margaret Rose Cunningham is a former Thunder Bay resident and poet.

SO, WHAT ARE YOU DOING???

Book Club in a Bag. The Thunder Bay library loans sets of books to book clubs. The latest title is The Other Side of the Bridge by Mary Lawson. Lawson is the author of the beloved Crow Lake.

Thunder on the Bay, the upcoming anthology of poetry and fiction by local writers and produced by the Writers’ Circle, should be available in the new year.

The Curious Savage, Cambrian Players' new offering, is opening November 7, Kathleen Savage directing. This play, by John Patrick, is a warm-hearted tale of a widow committed to an asylum by her greedy step-children but who eventually gets her revenge. Should be fun.

Random Acts of Poetry can hit you anywhere. On October 7, the fearless poets swarmed Brodie Street Library dressed in orange construction suits (they construct with words) and read their poems to bemused patrons. Some hid behind their newpapers but others applauded - great fun.

A makeover team hit the Confederation College Library. Now called the Paterson Library Commons, the new facility is upscale and elegant.

Farewell to Hyphens. Away with them says the latest edition of the Shorter Oxford Dictionary and with gleeful hits of the delete key eliminated hyphens in 16, 000 words. Nice for writers who are always checking the spelling of compounds. Most hyphenated words now become two words or one. Thus water-bed is water bed and leap-frog becomes leapfrog. Will other dictionaries follow? Most major dictionaries allow alternative spelling so are we edging closer to “any way is OK.”?

The Giller
Elizabeth Hay for Late Nights on Air,
Michael Ondaatje for Divisadero,
Daniel Poliquin A Secret Between Us
M.G. Vassanji The Assassin’s Song,
Alissa York, Effigy
And the $50 thou winner is….. My money goes on Elizabeth Hay.

Thunder Bay’s most celebrated author has to be Sheila Burnford the author of several books, among them The Incredible Journey. This book have never gone out of print and has become a children’s classic as have the three movies based on it, particularly the 1993 Homeward Bound, The Incredible Journey. The first of the movies had its world premier at the Paramount Theatre in Port Arthur in 1963. So where in Thunder Bay is the street or park named for Sheila? Is there any recognition in the city that Sheila Burnford lived here and wrote here? None. Shouldn’t we start to honour our artists? How about a Sheila Burnford Street?

SO, WHAT ARE YOU READING???

I’ve just finished The View from Castle Rock by the incomparable Alice Munro. I’m amazed at the looseness of her prose, her long, often awkward, sentences and her use of colloquial language that would send the average writing teacher into fits. For example, the title of one story, “What do You Want to Know That For?” would be immediately red penciled to “Why do you want to know?” Many sentences start with “The thing that..” or “Where I went was …” “What he did was…” or memorably “She could not bear not to be on the distributing end of that sort of thing.” I imagine Alice, notebook to hand, lurking in her local Tim’s, jotting down every idiom and Canadianism she hears—not such a bad idea for a writer, actually.

Recommendations from around town:
Fiona Karlstedt and Margaret Phillips of the Northern Woman’s Book Store loved Lullabies for Little Criminals by Heather O’Neill.
Fiona also loved Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert, an Oprah pick topping the non-fiction list .
Murray Becotte, investment advisor at TD Waterhouse, enjoyed Immortal, a thriller by Brain Freeman set in Duluth.
Meghan Eddy, Hammerskjold High School student says The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebald was a great book and her sister Sarah Eddy, also a student at Hammerskjold recommends Suite Francaise by Irene Nemrovski.
Phyllis Meadows at the Folino’s Supparette enjoyed Sandra Brown’s police procedural set in Savannah titled Ricochet.