SwissAir Flight 111: A Tragic Tale Told with Skill and Compassion

/ Lynne Melcombe / Leave a comment

Full disclosure: Gina Leola Woolsey, author of Fifteen Thousand Pieces: A Medical Examiner’s Journey Through Disaster (Guernica, 2023) was a member of my cohort (class of 2015). That’s how I know that, before signing up for the MFA program in Creative Nonfiction Writing, she had already completed a Bachelor of Fine Arts in creative writing at UBC. 

Gina’s extensive skill and training show in every word. From page 1, I’m hooked. It’s a rainy Wednesday evening—September 2, 1998—when the phone on Dr. John Butt’s bedside table rings. Swissair Flight 111 has gone down, killing all 229 souls aboard. Butt, Nova Scotia’s Chief Medical Examiner, takes a moment to absorb the news.

“The information doesn’t go straight to the action center in his brain,” Gina writes. “His plausibility muscle bats away the news so his mind has a minute to rev the mental engines.” In a classic example of writing so well the reader forgets they’re reading, her use of metaphor is so smooth that, after forty years as a writer and editor, I barely notice it. And when I do, I’m impressed.

Within the first chapter, she’s laid down an immense amount of exposition without ever slipping into information dumping. In a scant seven pages, she introduces nine characters, including just enough about each to make them memorable. Throughout the book, she most often refers to the multitude of people she interviewed by their first names, no doubt a deliberate choice to create intimacy in a story that might more easily be kept at arm’s length. 

She uses verb tense to set mood: present tense when she writes about the disaster, conveying anguished immediacy, switching to past tense to for her present-day relationship with Butt. When done without thought, tense-switching can be jarring; I’ve critiqued dozens of editing clients for doing it unconsciously. In Gina’s hands, it’s as smooth as glass. 

Focusing on Gina’s facility with the small choices a writer makes is not intended to minimize the skill with which she tackles larger issues. I remember her talking in class about a unique problem this story presented. Invited by the central character to write this book, he requested that it tell not only about the disaster that ended the lives of 229 people, forever changing life for countless bereaved friends and family and leaving an indelible imprint on everyone involved in recovering and identifying 15,000 bits of bodies instantly torn apart on impact with the cold, dark Atlantic. He also wanted to share his own story, that of a sensitive but difficult man, raised in an oppressive environment, who repeatedly alienated friends, family, and colleagues until coming to terms, late in life, with his homosexuality. 

I recall wondering how she’d reconciled these two stories as I began reading. But I quickly forgot about it as I devoured the book, barely noticing the two disparate stories unfolding.

To say Gina’s writing is seamless, visually rich, alive with detail doesn’t do it justice. I wish I could find one passage, short enough to include in a blog post, that would show everything that impresses me about it. The following is just a taste:

A Sea King helicopter transports John from the morgue-in-construction at Shearwater to the Preserver. Above the scene of destruction, he gets the first glimpse of debris. Small boats dot the surface with larger boats stationed at the edges of the scene. The entire area, a portion of the sea that many fishermen call their workplace, is closed to all but those working on the recovery operation. 

The ship’s doctor shows John to the bridge where Commander Town is waiting. During the night, it was Commander Town who managed the fishermen, military personnel, and other helpers on the water. Rick Town was the beacon in the dark. After a night receiving one horror after another from the small vessels on the scene, Town might need a guiding light of his own. From the Preserver’s bridge, John gets a closer look at the water. To the untrained eye, it’s a largely unidentifiable mass of scattered debris, but John sees the human remains for what they are. Floating viscera mingles with hunks of caramel-coloured foam from the seat cushions, clothing, teddy bears, and luggage. Now he understands why they don’t know how to deal with the situation. It’s not as easy as putting bodies in bags and counting them off in whole numbers. 

In lesser hands, this could have been an impossible story to tell. Instead, it’s a deeply personal, profoundly compassionate, extensively researched, and intimately told tale of one of the worst air disasters in Canadian history, and the enigmatic man who had the grizzly task of sifting through the eponymous 15,000 pieces of humanity. I can’t recommend this book highly enough.

For more on disaster, read my reviews of: 

Chasing Smoke: A Wildfire Memoir, by Aaron Williams.

On Borrowed Time: North America’s Next Big Quake, by Gregor Craigie.

For more Canadian history, read my reviews of:

Acadian Driftwood: One Family and the Great Expulsion, by Tyler LeBlanc.

Cod Collapse: The Rise and Fall of Newfoundland’s Saltwater Cowboys, by Jenn Thornhill Verma.

Craigdarroch Castle in 21 Treasures, by Moira Dann.

Highway of Tears: A True Story of Racism, Indifference and the Pursuit of Justic for Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls, by Jessica McDiarmid.

Murder on the Inside: The True Story of the Deadly Riot at Kingston Penitentiary, by Catherine Fogarty.

The Heart of Homestay: Lessons from Hosting International Students

/ Lynne Melcombe / 3 Comments

As fall and the start of the school year approach, I’m reminded of what these days meant for my family for many years: the arrival of homestay students, some new, some returning. So, when I read Jennifer Robin Wilson’s (class of 2025) book, The Heart of Homestay: Creating Meaningful Connections When Hosting International Students (Page Two; 2025), almost every page brought back memories. (Full disclosure: Some of our students may have come to us through Wilson’s business, the Canadian Homestay Network.)

Cover of the book 'The Heart of Homestay: Creating Meaningful Connections When Hosting International Students' by Jennifer Robin Wilson, featuring colorful geometric patterns.

In chapter 1, when a student stays out long past her curfew leaving her host mother in a state of panic, I remembered the time a Japanese girl fell asleep on the bus, missed her stop, and got off the bus disoriented and confused. With very little English, she approached a random house, knocked on the door, and explained her predicament. Shortly after, we got a phone call from the people in the house grilling us to make sure we were decent enough people for them to drive this sweet and innocent young traveller to our home.

Chapter 2 includes a section on homesickness, which we encountered often. What I remember most clearly is bonding with a lovely young Chinese girl over her homesickness. All of fifteen years old when she arrived, dressed like a little sk8tr girl and kicking her legs like a small child in the passenger seat of my car, she stayed with us two-and-a-half years until she went off to McGill University in Montreal. We still see her sometimes when she’s passing through Vancouver on her way to or from China. 

Wilson goes on in other chapters to talk about creating emotionally safe spaces for children, such that one Russian boy was able to come out as bisexual, which he hadn’t been able to do at home. While reader a whole chapter on food, I remembered the time our Thai “daughter” and her mother, who stayed with us for her daughter’s first nine days with us, spent a whole day cooking the most delicious meal for us. In one chapter, Wilson touches on household chores. As parents, we expected everyone in the family to do chores and never had a problem with our students—except the time a Chinese student (who’d clearly never cleaned a bathroom) used the handheld shower nozzle to spray down the WHOLE room and then tried to clean up the water with a Swiffer mop WITHOUT the absorbent mop head. 

It’s clear from the subjects Wilson covers and the anecdotes she shares that she writes from extensive personal experience. And not only as a homestay coordinator and parent: she also experienced homestay personally when her mother, who started the company, took students in, and later as a mother when her own daughter went to France as an international student.

Over and above writing from a deep well of experience, Wilson researched The Heart of Homestay broadly, citing books ranging from Amy Edmondson’s Right Kind of Wrong: The Science of Failing Well to Seth Godin’s Tribes: We Need You to Lead Us, and a dozen-ish more that this anthropology undergrad would be happy to read. Not to mention dozens of articles from peer-reviewed journals like the Journal of the Acoustical Society of America (on the ubiquity of noise in Brazilian culture, the journal of Adaptive Human Behavioral Physiology (on the human need for touch), and the Journal of Personality (on shame).

Wilson’s thorough research combines with her warm, friendly authorial tone to make her book a positive and helpful introduction to homestay—even when she’s describing the aftermath of a terrible incident when a student’s stray cigarette ignited a fire that gutted the homestay family’s home. Astonishingly, the homestay parents curbed their anger and not only allowed the boy to stay in their home, but worked hard at ensuring he wouldn’t carry guilt about it through his life. How could they do that? Because they’d formed a bond of familial love with him, Wilson says:

The family bond that Liz described came up again and again in my interviews, the host survey comments, and student testimonials. While some hosts are quick to identify this as love, others use related words like “bond,” “connection,” or “friendship,” but they share the characteristic of familial love. Psychology professor Barbara Fredrickson, who is known for her work in positive psychology, defines love as “the preoccupying and strong desire for further connection, the powerful bonds people hold with a select few and the intimacy that grows between them, the commitments to loyalty and faithfulness.”

In a nutshell, love is large. It is an emotion, but it’s also a verb. All loving actions, gestures, words, and commitments produce meaningful connections between hosts and students, but some of the most profound examples come at moments when we are most vulnerable. In the anguish of a devastating loss, or the depths of grief, or the intense pain of heartbreak, love persists. 

Over the years, my husband and me must have hosted fifty-ish students, for as little as a week and as long as three years; it’s been nearly thirty years since we hosted our first student and over a decade since our last one left, but several are still in touch with us. For us to have had Wilson’s book when we started out would no doubt have helped us a lot. Which is why I know what a boon it will be to all the new homestay parents who are setting out, as we once did, to welcome the world to their doors. 

If you’re interested in other cultures, whether by travelling yourself or getting to know people from other cultures here at home, check out my posts on these other books:

Peace by Chocolate: The Hadhad Family’s Remarkable Journey from Syria to Canada, by Jon Tattrie.

Halal Sex: The Intimate Lives of Muslim Women in North America, by Sheila Benembarek.

How to Clean a Fish: And Other Adventures in Portugal, by Esmeralda Cabral.

Winter in the City of Light: A Search for Self in Retirement, by Sue Harper.

And for something a little different:

The Worst Songs in the World: The Terrible Truth about National Anthems, by David Pate.

Surviving the Big One: Life in North America’s Earthquake Zones

/ Lynne Melcombe / 5 Comments

I live in Port Coquitlam, a small city just outside Vancouver. Among the many amazing things Vancouver is known for—mountains, ocean, a temperate climate, and unreal real estate prices—is something no city wants to be known for: we’re in an earthquake zone. 

So, I read Gregor Craigie’s (class of 2019) book On Borrowed Time: North America’s Next Big Quake (Gooselane Editions, 2021) with interest, generously laced with a sense of foreboding. And Craigie’s book is, indeed, frightening. His descriptions of people surviving (and not surviving) earthquakes are spine chilling. Of the 2011 earthquake that hit Christchurch, New Zealand, he writes: 

People outside watched in horror as the [Canterbury Television) building twisted and lurched in multiple directions. The windows exploded in unison as the concrete columns on the fifth floor collapsed and floor after floor plummeted to the ground. … Many of the more than two hundred people who were inside the building were crushed almost instantly, but some survived the collapse. When Kendyll Mitchell regained consciousness, she saw [her preschooler and her infant] were very much alive [but] covered in blood, which Mitchell quickly realized was coming from a wound in her head. She’d also suffered a large gash to her leg and a triple fracture to her pelvis. … The three were protected inside a small hole roughly one metre high by one metre wide. A steel beam directly above them protected them from a fatal blow. They were now entombed in a tangle of shattered glass, broken concrete, and bats of pink insulation. Mitchelle wiggled her foot out of the rubble but soon realized the broken bits of building above her were just too heavy to move. The elation she felt at surviving the building’s collapse was soon eclipsed by the smell of smoke. Would she survive an earthquake only to die in the fire that followed?

But On Borrowed Time is not only frightening: it’s also encouraging. In addition to vivid detail about what can happen in the wake of a quake (tsunamis, nuclear meltdowns, economic collapse, homelessness), he also offers solutions. Not that any of them will prevent the next big one, but that there are things we can do to prepare on a personal level (preparedness kits that can be pooled with neighbours’ supplies to bring communities together in the face of calamity); inviting a seismic expert into our homes to advise on improvements that might help these structures withstand a temblor; and a community level (lobbying municipal and other governments to tackle expensive retrofits as possible and having clear disaster response plans in place). 

There was a reason I chose to write about Craigie’s book as September approaches. When my kids were small, at the start of each school year, parents were reminded that the next big quake could happen anytime in the next century. Of course, that was 40 years ago, so now they’re rounding it down to 50 years. 

So, every year at this time I’d pull my earthquake backpacks off the shelf by the door and check whether the clothes would still fit my kids, whether any of the food or medication (Tylenol, Epi-pens) had passed its expiry date, whether I could afford to add anything this year. (One year I added solar-charged flashlights; the next year, solar-powered radios.) 

My kids are grown now, and I live alone, but I still have an emergency backpack in my front closet. I haven’t updated it in a decade but after reading Craigie’s book, I might get on that. And that’s really Craigie’s main point: we can’t predict when the next big one will come. And no matter what we do, we might not survive. Some folks use that as their fatalistic approach to not preparing. To me, though, preparing as much as I can is about a different kind of survival: if I do nothing, my anxiety will keep me awake all night. If I know I’ve taken control of what I can, I sleep. 

Right. Next weekend, I’m hauling down my own disaster preparedness kit and making sure it’s up to date.

On Borrowed Time won the Writer’s Trust of Canada’s Balsillie Prize for Public Policy

Want to read about some very different types of disasters?

Chasing Smoke: A Wildfire Memoir, by Aaron Williams.

Overrun: Dispatches from the Asian Carp Crisis, by Andrew Reeves.

Understanding the Acadian Expulsion: A Personal Journey

/ Lynne Melcombe / 2 Comments

It’s a story that’s been played out thousands—no, tens of thousands of times in thousands of locations over many centuries. It’s a story of imperialist colonization, most often in the last 500 years by the British Empire, that led to the expulsion or oppression of countless souls. 

Book cover of 'Acadian Driftwood: One Family and the Great Expulsion' by Tyler LeBlanc, featuring a map background and illustrations of coral-like red branches.

I confess that, until I read Tyler LeBlanc’s (class of 2018) book, Acadian Driftwood: One Family and the Great Expulsion (Gooselane Editions, 2020), I knew nothing about the Acadian expulsion. I can’t feel too badly about that as LeBlanc himself confesses to knowing little about it, much less his family’s connection to it. Then one day, a fellow bicycle tour guide along Nova Scotia’s South Shore who knew a lot about the subject, provided LeBlanc with enough information to pique his interest—especially about how his French surname suggested a very personal connection. 

LeBlanc’s subsequent historical and genealogical research led to his participation in the University of King’s College Master of Fine Arts program in Creative Nonfiction, and his writing of this book. In the introduction, the author describes the historical background:

“After more than one hundred years of successful settlement across a tract of land that spread over the modern-day Canadian provinces of Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, and Prince Edward Island and part of the American state of Maine, the French-speaking settlers who called this place home had become a distinct people situation on the edge of what was quickly becoming the largest imperial battlefield of their time. Their realm was known as Acadia (Acadie in French) … They had forged positive relationships with the Indigenous People who had called the land home for thousands of years. Allies in battle, and friends and traders in times of peace, the two groups coexisted in greater harmony that nearly any other settler-Indigenous cultural interaction of the time.”

But Acadia sat on a piece of land inhabited by the French but coveted by the British in their ongoing quest to make the world English. 

“The land was British, at least on paper, given by the French to the king of England during the settlement of a war earlier in the century. Because of this legal ownership, and in response to the fear of an Acadian uprising against them [the Acadian settlers and the Mi’kmaq people greatly outnumbered the British], colonial administrators drafted a plan to remove all the French-speaking colonists—and waited for the opportune time to implement it. Toward the end of the hot summer days of 1755, the chance presented itself. After a brief battle on the border between Nova Scotia and New France … Charles Lawrence, the then lieutenant-governor of the British colony of Nova Scotia, set in motion a great crime against humanity, the after-effects of what are still felt today.”

The expulsion was brutal: men were called to meetings and imprisoned. Women and children were burned out of houses they’d called home for generations and forced to flee, often with little more than the clothes they were wearing. According to this short video, “half of the total Acadian population were of starvation, drowning, and violence,” while this longer video describes this event as the “first state-sponsored ethnic cleansing on the continent.” 

The survivors were scattered elsewhere in North America, many ending up in Louisiana (where they became known as Cajuns, giving rise to a whole new culture, language, and cuisine), while others sailed back across the ocean to France. The author’s family were among those who survived and stayed in what is now Nova Scotia, where their history was obscured until LeBlanc’s encounter with a co-worker, who happened to be an Acadian historian. 

LeBlanc tells this story in ten chapters, each one sharing a part of the overall story from the perspective of one of the ten siblings who lived through this dreadful period in their previously unremarkable lives. It would be a compelling piece of historical nonfiction regardless, but telling the story from ten different personal perspectives makes it all the more so. 

LeBlanc received multiple honours for this book: in the Nova Scotia Book Awards, he won the Evelyn Richardson Award for Non-Fiction and was a finalist for the Dartmouth Book Award for Non-Fiction and the Margaret and John Savage Award for Best First Book (non-fiction). He won the Democracy 250 Atlantic Book Award for Historical Writing. And he was selected for the Hill Times’ 100 Best Books in 2020 list and was included on Canada’s History’s Bestseller List. 

National Acadian Day is celebrated annually on August 15.

Here’s another book about injustices done in Canada’s history:

Highway of Tears: A True Story of Racism, Indifference and the Pursuit of Justice for Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls, by Jessica McDiarmid.

And a book about trying to do things differently:

Ring of Fire: High-Stakes Mining in a Lowlands Wilderness. by Virginia Heffernan.

Exploring Craigdarroch Castle: Victoria’s History Told Through 21 Objects

/ Lynne Melcombe / 2 Comments

I’m pretty obsessive when I go into museums. I like to take my time, consider each object, read every placard, watch every video, listen to every audiotape. I don’t feel most museums are meant to be gone through in a single trip. There’s too much to take in and the brain tends to tire of all that information with no place created to file it yet. So, I’m quite happy to go back to museums time and again to see whatever I didn’t get to the last time. 

Book cover of 'Craigdarroch Castle in 21 Treasures' by Moira Dann, featuring a tag with the castle's name and a pencil, dated September 21st, 1897.

I know I’ve been to Craigdarroch Castle in Victoria, BC, which now houses a museum of the way wealthy white settlers lived in Victoria (and elsewhere) in the nineteenth century. I can’t recall exactly when I was there, but there’s no way I could have taken it all in in just one trip. Which is why it’s such a delight reading through Moira Dann’s (class of 2016) Craigdarroch Castle in 21 Treasures (Touchwood Editions, 2021). 

Like Richard Levangie’s Secrets of the Hotel Maisonneuve, this was not Dann’s project for the Master of Fine Arts in Creative Nonfiction at University of King’s College in Halifax. (I’ll never understand why that book didn’t get picked up: it was about The Mothers of Confederation, the wives of all the men who are touted as The Fathers of Confederation, who most assuredly played a role.) And therein lies a hint about the author, who was in the class immediately after mine and became a friend: she loves history. And Craigdarroch Castle is nothing if not a walk through history. 

Built by coal baron and shipping entrepreneur Robert Dunsmuir, who’d immigrated from Scotland in 1851 with his wife and newborn daughter, theirs is a genuine rags-to-riches story. Dunsmuir started out as an independent coal miner, found a rich coal seam near Nanaimo, and “turned that into wealth, influence, and power.” So much so that by 1887, less than four decades later, he started construction on the castle he had (according to rumour) promised his wife, Joan, when they left Scotland. 

In an introductory chapter called “Why I Wrote This Book,” Dann explains why she chose to tell the castle’s story through a series of objects: a clock, some chairs, keyboards, stained glass, photographs, drawings, paintings, radiator brushes (to show what a servant’s life was like), dance cards (with pencils provided), and more.

Many of the stories in this book and elsewhere start with objects of the time, placed in a restored context. Objects are also the jumping-off point of the post-Dunsmuir stories this castle holds. 

Some might say it’s preposterous to think an overview of a massive story repository such as Craigdarroch Castle can be reduced to not even two dozen objects. 

“In the particular is contained the universal,” said James Joyce … and I agree. We can view the wide expanse of meaning just as well, if not better, through the lens of a microscope as we can through that of a telescope. …

But Craigdarroch Castle houses more than just the stories of the “fractious, fractured” Dunsmuir family, Dann writes. In 1909, after Joan Dunsmuir’s death (Robert had died before it was completed), it was sold and went through several incarnations. From 1919 to 1921, it was Craigdarroch Military Hospital, for veterans returning from the Great War. Later, it housed Victoria College (predecessor to the University of Victoria), the Victoria Conservatory of Music, and the offices of the Victoria school board. It was sold to the Craigdarroch Castle Historical Museum Society in 1979 and turned into the museum it is today.

The collection described in loving and impeccably researched detail in this book “allows us a peek into the lives of different people in a different time and provides us a bit of context for our lives in the twenty-first century …” Dann writes. “These objects can set our imaginations alight. Imagining an earlier time helps us create a better now and imagine a better future.”

And a better future is something we can all strive to imagine. 

August 4 is BC Day. Here are some other books about BC:

Chasing Smoke: A Wildfire Memoir, by Aaron Williams.

Highway of Tears: A True Story of Racism, Indifference and the Pursuit of Justice for Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls, by Jessica McDiarmid.

The Rise and Fall of Newfoundland’s Cod Fishery

/ Lynne Melcombe / 1 Comment

I can barely remember a time when I wasn’t intrigued by Canada’s easternmost province, Newfoundland and Labrador. I’ve never been there, but it calls to me in much the same way many distant parts of Canada, like Haida Gwaii and the far north, call to me. I hope someday I’ll be fortunate enough to visit more of our country’s far corners. 

Book cover of 'Cod Collapse: The Rise and Fall of Newfoundland’s Saltwater Cowboys' by Jenn Thornhill Verma, featuring an illustration of colorful fishing buildings and boats in a vibrant marine setting with a Canadian flag emblem.

In Cod Collapse: The Rise and Fall of Newfoundland’s Saltwater Cowboys (Nimbus Publishing, 2019), Jenn Thornhill Verma (class of 2019) paints an intimate portrait of the island portion of her home province—not only how physically beautiful it is, but where it’s come from, what its people have endured, and where it’s going. 

In the early chapters of this moving memoir, Verma depicts in vivid detail what life was like for her grandparents, Pop and Nan, and great grandparents. They raised their family in a one-room wooden house. Wood was the only fuel used for cooking and heating, in a home that lacked indoor plumbing and was lit by a kerosene lamp. Wood was also used to build the boats that kept the island’s bountiful cod fishery alive.

Fishing was a hard life, one most parents didn’t wish for their children. And indeed, Verma’s parents did not grow up to be fishers but became skilled professionals in a hospital in Corner Brook. Yet the fishing way of life is also one that many remember fondly, in spite of both hardships and risks that most of us can barely imagine. Verma writes:

When it comes to a career at sea, practice brings some degree of perfection, but luck comes into play a lot of the time too. That’s what comes to mind as I recall what Gene told me about navigating tricky weather in his fishing days. “People used to say to me, ‘It’s thick with fog. You’re not going out today.’ I said, ‘Honey, I got a compass, I knows where I’m to.’ But I said, ‘The other fellers can’t find me.’ On a fine day, yes no trouble. Anyone could go to fish on a fine day, but I often went forty days out here and never saw land. Forty days in the fog day after day after day, nothing, only fog. I could only see to the end of the boat. But I was happy. I would sooner be out there than in here.” And yet, Gene is well aware of the risks of being “out there.” He told me of one dicey situation when he went overboard.

“I went in with an anchor. One Saturday evening, it was thick with fog and mad rough. We were setting a net from here to there somewhere. I was … hauling up the anchor and I don’t know what happened. It happened so fast. Rope come off … and I went down. It got dark. I could see a rope, so I grabbed the rope. The anchor was hauling me down. When the anchor got on the bottom, I got the rope off me and I started to come up. And next thing, I could see the propeller on the boat spin because I had only just slowed the gear. Anyway, I come up and I grabbed the rail of the boat and I got a bit of air.”

The cod fishery supported Newfoundland fishers for hundreds of years. But after World War II, as fishing methods improved, drawing fleets from as far away as Portugal to the Grand Banks and taking far more fish than could be sustained, the government of Canada finally admitted that without dramatic changes, the once-teaming cod population was in danger of extinction. 

The cod moratorium, announced July 2, 1992, immediately put 30,000 fishers out of work—the largest layoff in Canada’s history. It was supposed to last two years; it lasted three decades. Within ten years, Newfoundland’s population dropped by a record ten percent. The moratorium was finally lifted in 2024, but whereas total allowable catch (TAC) at the fishery’s peak was around 240,000 tonnes, it’s now 18,000 tonnes.

Cod Collapse is a story of hardship and loss, but it’s also a story of survival and recovery. It’s a story about a young woman moving away and distancing herself from the place she grew up, not least because “Newfies,” as I remember myself (with shame, now) referring to Newfoundlanders as a kid, who were for many years the butt of Canadian jokes. It’s a story about reconnecting with a past and feeling deep pride in it. And it’s a story about finding other ways to make a sea-faring life work—other fisheries, such as lobster; other ways to use the ocean, such as the offshore oil industry; and other ways to make a living off the land, such as tourism in one of the most ruggedly beautiful corners of our country. 

I’m immensely proud to be a Canadian, proud of every corner of this country, the many I haven’t seen as much as the relatively few I have. Books like this only make me prouder. It’s an amazing land we live in, from the Atlantic to the Pacific to the Arctic. And in an era when our sovereignty is threatened by outside forces, writers like Verma help us all to build that pride by telling the stories of those who make this country what it is. 

Here’s another book about fish, with a very different perspective:

Overrun: Dispatches from the Asian Carp Crisis, by Andrew Reeves.

And here are some books about Canada that inspire pride:

Peace by Chocolate: The Hadhad Family’s Remarkable Journey from Syria to Canada, by Jon Tattrie.

Ring of Fire: High-Stakes Mining in a Lowlands Wilderness, by Virginia Heffernan.

The Ring of Fire: Balancing Resource Extraction and Indigenous Rights

/ Lynne Melcombe / 3 Comments

One of the things I’m enjoying about this project I’ve undertaken to read and review all the books published out of the University of King’s College Master of Fine Arts program in Creative Nonfiction Writing on is that I’m reading a lot of books I wouldn’t otherwise pick up. (Like Overrun and The Minister’s Wife, both great reads!)

Book cover of 'Ring of Fire: High-Stakes Mining in a Lowlands Wilderness' by Virginia Heffernan featuring a map of Ontario with geological lines and text in orange and yellow.

Because of that I’m learning a lot of things I wouldn’t otherwise learn. And I love learning. I’m a bit of a learning junkie. 

Virginia Heffernan’s (class of 2021) book Ring of Fire: High-Stakes Mining in a Lowlands Wilderness (ECW, 2023) is not one I would have picked up. And I have to admit that I struggled through Part 1: Prospectors and Promoters.

But I didn’t struggle because it’s not well researched and written; Heffernan is top-notch at both. Rather, my ADHD brain made it difficult for me to keep track of the enormous cast of corporations, characters, and deals that have been attempting to shepherd the Ring of Fire from its discovery through to the extraction of an abundance of critical minerals that will be crucial to Canada’s continued development as a sovereign nation. 

I honestly don’t think I could do what Heffernan did in these opening chapters, and she tacitly acknowledges the complexity in Part 1: Prospectors and Promoters by including, at the back of the book, a complete list of key players along with a timeline of crucial developments from 1987 to 2022. But as difficult as it must have been to untangle all that information and keep it straight, it was essential that she did it. This complex history laid the foundation for Part 2: People and the Planet, which looks at the critical importance of appropriate development of the Ring of Fire to the well-being of northern Ontario’s Indigenous communities; and Part 3: Power and Protest, which examines how protest movements have influenced related developments in Ontario’s halls of power. 

What is the Ring of Fire? In the opening pages of the book, Heffernan writes:

The Ring of Fire is a 5,000-square-kilometre crescent of ancient volcanic rock rich in nickel, copper, and other metals considered critical to the global transition to renewable energy. The metal deposits lie hidden beneath the remote swamps of the Hudson Bay and James Bay Lowlands of northern Canada, the second-largest temperate wetland in the world. The area is home to several thousand Indigenous people in communities accessible only by plane or winter road. The deposits, too, are stranded by a lack of infrastructure. In 2022, Canada and the province of Ontario pledged billions of dollars towards a critical-minerals strategy, including building an all-weather road to the Ring of Fire.

Resource extraction has a long and dubious history that’s included significant steps in the advancement of civilizations along with unchecked environmental degradation, impoverishment of local Indigenous populations, and enrichment of the few on the backs of the many. But, as Heffernan argues throughout Parts 2 and 3, it doesn’t have to be that way. Her hope for Ring of Fire mines, based on social and political changes that have been slow in coming, is considerably more optimistic. In her conclusion, she writes:

In my vision, the federal government has scrapped the Indian Act and stopped clawing back resource revenue from First Nations. The majority of government funds required to administer the Indian Act has been redirected towards delivering much-needed capacity to northern communities.

The First Nations of Ontario’s James Bay Lowlands have seized the opportunity to become self-governing and self-sufficient … [with] the power to write their own laws on a variety of local governance issues affecting their communities, including environmental protection, public order, and land and resource use and planning. 

Marten Falls … has become a hub for education and small business. Acrid wafts of burned diesel no longer permeate the air because diesel generators have been replaced by wind turbines supplemented by hydro power humming its way along transmission lines ….

Heffernan goes on to envision mine funds being invested in schools, hospitals, and community centres staffed by Indigenous locals, some of whom are working hard to bring back Indigenous language and culture. She sees sustainable housing, suited to the cold-but-warming climate, that has become available for all, supplied by clean water and connected to sewers, electricity, and high-speed internet access. 

In other words, with the approach to development that Indigenous People have been fighting for, Ontario’s northern and Indigenous communities could thrive and prosper, as so many southern communities have been doing for so long. 

I never would have pictured myself reading a book about mining, but Heffernan’s book has opened my eyes to the possibilities. I don’t think I’ll ever look at mining through such stubbornly jaded eyes again. 

July 1 was Canada Day. Here are some other books about Canada’s history, geography, and culture, for better and for worse:

Louisburg or Bust: A Surfer’s Wild Ride Down Nova Scotia’s Drowned Coast, by RC Shaw.

Murder on the Inside: The True Story of the Deadly Riot at Kingston Penitentiary, by Catherine Fogarty.

Highway of Tears: A True Story of Racism, Indifference and the Pursuit of Justice for Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls, by Jessica McDiarmid.

Peace by Chocolate: The Hadhad Family’s Remarkable Journey from Syria to Canada, by Jon Tattrie.

Chasing Smoke: A Wildfire Memoir, by Aaron Williams.

Understanding Disability: A Journey Through Parenthood (and other essays)

/ Lynne Melcombe / 2 Comments

The closest I can come to understanding what it’s like to have a child with a disability is that all three of my kids, when they were very young, were in and out of hospital with asthma, and felt like they stuck out at school because they were the only ones with food allergies, some of them life-threatening. 

Cover of the book 'I Don’t Do Disability And Other Lies I’ve Told Myself' by Adelle Purdham featuring a blue background with artistic illustrations of leaves, a bird, and a horse.

It doesn’t begin to compare to learning the child you’re carrying has Down Syndrome, or to waiting many extra months for your child to figure out a pincer grip. Where it does compare is the understanding that your child is your child and they are absolutely perfect the way they are (even though it doesn’t always feel like it when they’re in the middle of a raging tantrum).

In the series of essays that comprise I Don’t Do Disability and Other Lies I’ve Told Myself (Dundurn Press, 2024), author Adelle Purdham (class of 2022) walks us through the emotional wreckage of finding out that your unborn child has a disability, the prejudices we are likely to uncover within ourselves when that happens, and the fierce protective instincts that then compel that parent to become a disability activist, advocate, ally. 

But that’s not all she walks us through because these essays also cover the terrain of love and marriage, of being a mother/writer who feels guilty when she’s mothering about not writing and when she’s writing instead of mothering (boy, do I know that one well), and who tries in every moment of her life—okay, as many moments as possible—to be a good person. In a deeply touching and achingly honest essay called “A Thin Line,” she writes about an encounter with a homeless woman. 

I see her as I drive past, stumbling down the street, decrepit. Please, I think, I don’t want us to run into her. She is a mess. I’m Ronald from The Paper Bag Princess …

We are on our way to the cottage. The SUV is packed full. The girls have their cupholders folded down in anticipation the bottles of iced tea I will be buying them to go with their dinner. …

I park the car and notice the Freshii on the corner. “What about Freshii? You girls can get bowls.’

While these girls have not yet been exposed to the ways of the world, the underworld, they are well versed in the vernacular of a privileged life. They speak the dialect of healthy takeout well. As do I. … the girls and I can afford to cruise around until we find an open takeout place that suits our tastes. This idea of accessibility to food as an immense privilege will sit with me and my uneaten burrito, afterward, when I find I no longer have an appetite.

As we cross Hunter Street, directly in front of us is the woman, doubled over …

“Please, can you help me?”

She asks for money, and I immediately reach for my wallet and pull out a loonie, the only coin I have. Why have I not pulled out a bill? Is it because I believe she will use it on drugs or alcohol instead of food? Yes….

“I need help,” she repeats. “I’m scared.”

With the enunciation of her fear, that is it. The thin sheath between us slips away and the world stops for her and me. Our lines cross, her path and mine, like asteroids colliding, and intergalactic even. I feel the presence of the girls over my left shoulder, standing stone still, watching. If I turn my back on this woman and hurry the girls away, it will be like turning a shoulder on myself, on my daughter, on my daughter’s friend, on the very stardust I am made of.

“Do you need to go to a shelter?” I ask her. Clearly, I think she needs to go to a shelter. She can’t stay here … 

On my iPhone, I quickly google the number for the shelter. …

“It’s so good to see kids,” she says, squeezing her eyes shut, then opening them. “It’s been so long since I’ve seen any kids.” …

Springing into action is what privileged women like me know how to do. We ascertain the problem and create a plan. My plan is to call the shelter. Make sure this woman is safe. Show my kids that I care, that we should all care, that a person in need is a person in need. That we don’t turn our backs on a person in need, no matter how destitute, forgotten, and discarded they seem. Especially when that is the case. Why is that the case? And why do I need to remind myself of this?

I won’t spoil the outcome for you. I will just say that this is some of the best literary writing I’ve read in a while—clear, compelling, compassionate. Purdham’s voice pulls me in; I could be standing next to her, watching the scene in each essay unfold, whether it’s at the lake listening to the loons, in a rocking chair nursing an infant, or on a street trying to help an unhoused woman through a state of extreme distress.

July is Disability Pride Month. Add to your pride in knowing a bit more about disability tomorrow than you did yesterday by reading this book.

Here are some other books about disability:

Just Jen: Thriving Through Multiple Sclerosis, by Jen Powley.

One Strong Girl: Surviving the Unimaginable—A Mother’s Memoir, by S. Lesley Buxton.

Scream Therapy: A Punk Journey through Mental Health, by Jason Schreurs.

Surfing in Nova Scotia: ‘Louisbourg or Bust’

/ Lynne Melcombe / 2 Comments

When I was a little girl in the 1960s, and it would come to bedtime, I would have my radio playing quietly in my bedroom—lights off, door open. I was supposed to be going to sleep, but most evenings I’d stay up for at least an hour past my bedtime listening to the Beach Boys and dancing in the dark in my baby doll pyjamas, mastering the Jerk and the Monkey and the Twist and the Swim and the Pony. 

Book cover of 'Louisbourg or Bust' by RC Shaw featuring a bicycle with a trailer that includes a surfboard and camping gear, set against a backdrop of green trees.

I was pretty wild when I was eight years old. And of course, I wanted to be a surfer girl, just like Gidget. 

I still wish I’d learned to surf at some point, but I doubt I will now. I tried windsurfing a couple years ago and I couldn’t get my balance. So much for Gidget. 

But it sure was fun reading RC Shaw’s (class of 2017) Louisburg or Bust: A Surfer’s Wild Ride Down Nova Scotia’s Drowned Coast (Pottersfield Press, 2018) and imagining myself out there on the waves. I didn’t even know you could surf in Nova Scotia. My mental images of surfing are in places like California and Hawaii and Australia, where the waves get big, man. 

But apparently there’s some great surfing in Canada’s Atlantic provinces. Shaw tells us all about it in his memoir/travelogue of a trip he took for no explicable reason from his comfortable home in Cow Bay (where he lives with his wife and two little girls) up the Nova Scotia’s Eastern Shore to Fort Louisbourg on Cape Breton Island. He does the trip on a rickety bike towing a trailer—he calls it The Rig—carrying his camping supplies, many cans of Hungry Man Stew, a copy of Don Quixote, and his surfboard, Old Yeller. 

And it is an adventure. An adventure during which he rides up way too many hills, meets an awful lot of the type of people who make Nova Scotia what it is, camps in some out-of-the-way and perpetually damp places, has many encounters with the Fog Monster, and does it with the kind of humour that leaves me imagining him standing by a campfire on a beach, in his trunks and hoodie (the uniform of the Nova Scotia surfer), sucking back a beer while telling stories and laughing. 

Back at Camp Sog, I perked up with a fresh coffee and another can of beans. The sandpiper who attacked me earlier had gathered his crew and they were going ballistic in a stand of sea grass across from the tent. They paced on stilted legs, hitting me with sharp and insistent peeps. I must have camped near their nest. The Nova Scotia Bird Society would hate me. 

“Sorry, guys,” I said. “Really, I am. I’m not here to bother you. I’ll be gone in a bit.”

More aggressive peeps — they sensed my submissiveness.

Or how about this for a picturesque description:

By the time I reached St. Peter’s, a bustling town on a bay with the same name, I was in code red bathroom mode. I scanned the storefronts for eating establishments and nearly crashed when I spotted the word CAFÉ painted on glass. Through gritted teeth and clenched muscles, I unceremoniously tipped The Rig against a brick wall and dashed for the door. It took every last ounce of strength to politely request a table — it was a sit-down, lacy tablecloth kind of café — and not sprint for the bathroom. I just made it. When I emerged into the rosy light of the warm dining room, the world had taken back its beauty.

This is a really fun book—yet another one I probably wouldn’t have picked up but for this project I’ve taken on, but I’m so glad I did. It’s quite likely I never will learn to surf—or maybe I will. Who knows? I might make it out to the West Coast of Vancouver Island for a women-only surfing school. But even if I don’t, it was fun remembering my days of dancing to the Beach Boys in my room—lights off, door open—and pretending I was Gidget. 

Here’s another travelogue:

How to Clean a Fish: And Other Adventures in Portugal, by Esmeralda Cabral.

Here’s a book about making the world come to you:

The Heart of Homestay: Creating Meaningful Connections When Hosting International Students, by Jennifer Robin Wilson.

And here’s a completely different way to look at the world:

The Worst Songs in the World: The Terrible Truth about National Anthems, by David Pate.

Changing Our Tunes: A Critical (but Amusing) Look at National Anthems

/ Lynne Melcombe / 1 Comment

We all know them, but how often do we think about them: the lyrics to our national anthem? In The Worst Songs in the World: The Terrible Truth about National Anthems (Dundurn Press, 2024), author David Pate (class of 2023) looks at anthems around the world from every imaginable angle and comes up with a terrible truth: they’re violent, racist, sexist, war-mongering tunes that do far more to divide people than unite them. 

Cover of the book 'The Worst Songs in the World: The Terrible Truth About National Anthems' by David Pate, featuring a blue background with a trumpet and a flag graphic.

But do we think about that as we stand at attention and spew forth words we learned as children and have sung for years without question? In some cases, maybe; in others, not at all.

Think about the Canadian national anthem: “O Canada, our home and native land/True patriot love, in all thy sons’ command …” Or, as some have suggested: “O Canada, our home on native land/True patriot love, in all of us command …” Then there’s the most recent controversy, brought about by US President Donald Trump’s threats to Canadian sovereignty, which prompted chanteuse Chantal Kreviazuk at a recent hockey game to tweak the same words to “True patriot love that only us command.“

And what about “God save our land”? I’m an atheist, as are a growing number of Canadians; why would I beseech god to save our land? Besides, as one of the most multi-ethnic, multi-faith countries in the world, even for those who believe in one or more gods, which of those many gods should we, as a collective, appeal to?

Of course, I’d had some of these thoughts long before I read Pate’s thoroughly researched and often humorously written tome, but he’s covered the topic in far more detail than I imagined possible, reporting things like: 

  • Most anthems have many more verses than are typically sung at public events because if they were, the anthem could go on for too long—in the case of Greece’s anthem, at 158 stanzas, nearly an hour. 
  • The lyrics to some anthems were abandoned after a significant change in power or politics, such as the death of Franco in Spain; other nations with wordless anthems are Kosovo and Bosnia, both due to divisive civil wars, and the tiny nation of San Marino—who knows why? 
  • That copyright on national anthems has become a serious legal issue in countries as diverse and widespread as Kenya, Uganda, Barbados, and South Korea; 
  • That some national anthems, such as the Republic of Ireland’s, started as songs for outlawed rebel movements but now demand that people stand at attention for them, even though they refer to violently defeating a head of state who may be alive and present when the song is being performed.

Yet for all the contradictions and concerns with national anthems, the question of how to address the issues anthems raise is fraught with challenges. As Pate explains in a chapter called “A Kinder, Gentler Way”: 

When you remove all the anthems that feature religion or violence or both, you’re left with fewer than forty songs. Take out the ones that are sexist (by honouring only sons and fathers) or describe their country as a Fatherland or Motherland, and you are down to a handful of anthems that are non-violent, non-sectarian, and non-sexist. Out of the 193 full UN members, just thirteen have anthems that meet that criteria. And three of them have no lyrics. 

Think about that. Only ten countries in the world have national anthems that meet the kind of basic criteria that we’d expect from an elementary school play. And even some of those are problematic.

But is anyone doing anything about the issues? Apparently, the Swiss tried to by staging a national competition beginning in 2013. By 2015, they came up with a winner that satisfied all the parameters—a song the Swiss government promptly put in a drawer, where it has remained ever since. 

Do we need national anthems? Such things didn’t even exist until relatively recently—Saturday September 28, 1745 to be precise, as one of many interesting stories in the book explains—although something like the Maori Haka could be seen as akin to a national anthem. 

For a subject I’d never given much thought to over the years, the question of national anthems is full of issues. And David Pate, who unfortunately and unexpectedly passed away before Worst Songs was published, has raised them in ways that are far more entertaining than any national anthem I’ve ever heard—except for Jimi Hendrix’s version of Star-Spangled Banner at Woodstock.

Now that was an entertaining version of a national anthem!

Other interesting perspectives on global history and culture:

The Heart of Homestay: Creating Meaningful Connections When Hosting International Students, by Jennifer Robin Wilson.

Press Enter to Continue: Scribes from Babylon to Silicon, by Joan Francuz.