February Plus

Love, love, love. NOWW February readings spotlight L-O-V-E. February 20 at the fireside room at Brodie at 7 p.m. Free to all. Readings by Deborah deBakker, Robyn Lewis, Bob Hoffman. Step up to the mike with a short poem.

On the other side of town the Writers’ Circle will share ideas on authors’ bios. Bring a brief bio of your favourite. Waverley at 7 p.m. of February 27, 2008.

Women Fully Clothed arrive in Thunder Bay. I saw this comedy review in Toronto with a couple of Thunder Bay cronies and yes, we laughed! Five Canadian comedy artists touch nerves and funny bones at the Community Auditorium on April 17 at 8 pm.

Check it out!! On Saturday, February 16, 2008, exclusive to this blog, an excerpt from Charles Wilkins latest work, Land of Long Fingernails: A Gravedigger in the Age of Aquarius. Published by Penguin Books, the memoir will be released in September.

During the hazy summer of 1969, Charles Wilkins, then a student at the University of Toronto, took a job as a gravedigger. The bizarre-but-true events of that time, including a midsummer gravediggers’ strike, the unearthing of a victim of an unsolved murder, and a little illegal boneshifting, play out amongst a Barnumesque parade of mavericks and misfits in this macabre and hilarious memoir of mortality, materialism and the gradual coming-of-age of an impressionable young man.

Charles Wilkins has made a career of writing about his adventures among a variety of North American subcultures, including circus performers, contemporary conquistadors and merchant seamen. He lives in Thunder Bay, Ontario. He is one of Thunder Bay's premier writers.

The picture at right sees Charlie leaning toward a Wilkins grave stone.

ALIBI CREEK

The prologue of a mystery thriller by Ted Fryia

Andy Wells had tested what was left of the shore-bound ice, poking at the glazed surface with a tree branch and leaning his weight out in front. He had anticipated the edge breaking away. But what he didn’t know is the secret it would give up.

Hoping to get ahead of the season and luck into a winter-starved book trout or two, Andy had wedged the pole into the fracture and pushed. A mass separated from the shore. There it bobbed, rolled and rotated. With it was a body, shirt, hands and hair fixed to the under side.

The breath startled out of Andy in a burst of vapor. His feet slipped and he thumped down on his tailbone. He scrambled to his feet, his rod still in hand, slipping in snow and mud as he crawled over the bank to solid ground. There he pulled off his muddied gloves, reached inside his fleece jacket and palmed a cell phone out of the pocket. With fingers so cold they felt like flattened nubs of stone, he poked at the numbers.

After explaining to the 9-1-1 operator that he’d discovered a body, then his location, Andy hiked through the trees to the highway and waited. It was his first encounter with death. Real human death. It was encounter enough to tell him that he didn’t want to be alone with it.

Now a creek slaps around rock. It punches through ice then empties into the pond. Mist rises while shivering evergreens crowd the shore and leafless birch trees flick strips of white bark at the breeze. Andy sits on the bank straddling a fallen log, a wool blanket draped over his slumped shoulders. Clutching the fishing pole he received as a fifteenth birthday gift, colour still absent from his sallow face, he’s reminded of market fish he’d seen stretched on beds of ice; the image of the man’s clouded eyes are frozen in his memory forever.

A diver is chest-deep in the bitter water, his gloved hands looking like black paws nudges the body around jags of ice. A grey-haired officer waits on the shore.

“Who is it?” the officer asks as he reaches down to help heft the rigid body out of the water.

Once the body is on the shore the diver shoves and slides it further from the edge. “Don’t know,” he says. “Been here a while though; looks like decay started before winter set.”

A young officer comes to assist. He helps his partner turn the bloated body onto its back, then his baby-face pales and he gags. The ballooned face has a sickly white pallor, all pigmentation leeched away where bleached eyeballs stare at him.

“Jimmy, get the boy home,” the older officer instructs. “Radio in and see about any missing persons.”

Fighting to keep his breakfast down, Jimmy nods then trudges up the bank on long legs. He stops in front of Andy. “Hey, you wanna go now? I’ll take you home,” he offers with a sympathetic face, then points to the trees where a path leads to the highway.

Officer Jimmy Dole drops Andy Wells at his home, talks briefly to Andy’s mother and heads back. Wipers move intermittently, streaking the windshield of the police cruiser. Tires lick the asphalt then spit back the morning rain. The radio squawks and the dispatcher calls; none of the missing persons’ reports describe anyone tall enough to be the corpse from the pond.

He wonders what kind of man goes missing with no inquiries made. Could be a drifter or some homeless person migrating from a big city where shelters and food banks can’t keep up. Likely, foul play, Officer Dole has already decided. But by the time he can get back to the pond where the forensic unit will already have the area taped off, he’s sure that evidence will be scarce. Time, rain and snow, high and low water levels, sun and wind would have scoured the site.

Jimmy Dole had been a deputy for a little more than a year, and in that time he couldn’t help but notice that Solomon City, considering its size, had seen more than its share of strange goings on. Many were connected to the Crowthers property in either proximity or kinship. And what had just surfaced in the pond, tucked away in the forested part of the Crowthers’ estate, was just the latest in a series.

So why didn’t he see it in the dead man on the bank? Why did he just realize that this too would lead back to the old house and the old woman’s last days there? Keeping his eyes on the road, Jimmy picks up the radio transmitter, squeezes, then speaks.

Two New Blogs

1) Garden Thunder Bay. The diary of a Thunder Bay flower garden and its ever optimistic gardener. Nice photos, good info and some literary stufff too. See http://www.gardenthunderbay.blogspot.com
2) Poetry galore and wondrous it is. Check out http://brianspoetryjournal.blogspot.com/. Poem after glorious poem.

Also watch for the prologue of Ted Fryia’s new mystery thriller in this space.

A useful workshop for writers

Writers’ Alert for upcoming workshop titled Performing Your Work: Giving a Successful Reading. Preparing for it. Delivering it. Led by by Peter Raffo. Part 1 – Tuesday February 5 and Part 2, Tuesday March 11. At Waverley Library, 7 pm to 9. Sponsored by NOWW (Northwestern Ontario Writers’ Workshop) and the library. Free to NOWW members and 5 bucks for non-members. See ya there