University of King’s College

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

/ Lynne Melcombe / 6 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.

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

/ Lynne Melcombe / 3 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.

Understanding the Acadian Expulsion: A Personal Journey

/ Lynne Melcombe / 3 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 died 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.

The Ring of Fire: Balancing Resource Extraction and Indigenous Rights

/ Lynne Melcombe / 5 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.

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.

Finding Success with YA Fiction After the MFA in Creative Nonfiction

/ Lynne Melcombe / 1 Comment

I don’t usually review fiction in this space, but this week I’m making an exception. 

Cover of the book 'Secrets of the Hotel Maisonneuve' by Richard Levangie, featuring stylized flowers and an ornate staircase.

The University of King’s College Master of Fine Arts program in Creative Nonfiction has, to date, produced more than 50 published authors of creative nonfiction, most of which are listed here. Assuming each cohort comprises about 20 talented and experienced writers, as did the inaugural class of which I was a very lucky member, that means about a quarter of us have had the good fortune to hold a copy of our published work in our hands—an amazing success rate. 

Sadly, that means three-quarters of us are either still searching for a publisher (read excerpts of my as-yet-unpublished manuscript here) or, alas, have moved on. But moving on often leads to other successes. Starlit Simon, a member of the inaugural class, is working on her PhD as well as perfecting the traditional Indigenous craft of porcupine quill art. Moira Dann (class of 2016), whose MFA project about the mothers of confederation sounded fascinating to me, went on the publish Craigdarroch Castle in 21 Treasures (which I’ll write about for BC Day in August) and more recently Fat Camp Summer: Advice I Would Have Given My Parents. And Richard Levangie, another member of the inaugural cohort (class of 2015), went on to write the excellent middle-grade YA novel, Secrets of the Hotel Maisonneuve (Nevermore Press, 2020). 

Hotel Maisonneuve focuses on 13-year-old Jacob Jollimore, who is having the worst summer of his life. Then he finds a 100-year-old letter hidden in a bureau in the Edwardian hotel his parents are renovating, which sends him on a treasure hunt that would challenge even the great Sherlock Holmes. It’s a great plot, and I have no idea how Richard thought up the incredible puzzle clues.

But that’s not all that makes it a worthwhile read. Richard’s writing, replete with references to books like Lord of the Rings, The Hound of the Baskervilles, and The King of Attolia, is also full of clever imagery, like “the minutes dripped by like a leaky faucet,” “paint stripper oozing from his pores,” and “[her] bruises were as purple as pansies.” The book even includes a haiku:

Jacob was so intent that he forgot where he was. An ancient woman crashed into his cart with almost-lethal force, but she didn’t apologize. No wonder everything was so heavily dented. Jacob decided to pay closer attention before someone sent him flying into the. Mangoes where he’d die a quick but horrible death, buried under hundreds of pounds of hard green fruit. 

Maybe that would be his epitaph. He composed a haiku.

Here rests the fool who

Could not solve hard puzzles

Crushed by rock-like fruit.

Not bad, but it needed work. 

One of the things I admire most about Richard is his ability to move on, not just from the creative nonfiction project he worked on for his MFA, but in life. As he writes about himself:

If I couldn’t be a hockey player in the NHL, I wanted to be a doctor. But when I was studying to be a doctor, I realized that what I really wanted to do was tell stories. As a journalist, it started with artists and artisans, and with food and wine, but then real life intervened in the form of a rare brain tumour that knocked me flat. For nearly two decades, I wrote nothing worthy.When an unexpected respite from the pain took hold in 2012, two novels sprang into my head, waiting for me to write them. I cherished this rare gift, for it felt like Divine Intervention into a life that had forgotten what it was like be alive. I believe that the stories we tell offer us a chance to truly understand ourselves, and come to understand each other. It is a sacred gift, and I feel blessed. 

Not surprisingly, Richard recently inked a deal for his second novel, this time an adult fantasy called Red Tiger. Read an excerpt on his website. I have no doubt it will do well.

Other books to come from grads of the class of 2015:

Run, Hide, Repeat: A Memoir of a Fugitive Childhood, by Pauline Dakin.  

Her Hat in the Ring: Toronto Milliner El Jamon and Her Circle, by Deirdre MacDonald. Review to come.

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

Fifteen Thousand Pieces: A Medical Examiner’s Journey Through Disaster, by Gina Leola Woolsey.

The Girl in the Woods, by Stacey May Fowles.*

(*This book was published, but it appears to have been pulled from sale.)

And coming soon:

No Such Thing: A True Story of “Mild” Traumatic Brain Injury and My Twenty-Year (so far) Recovery, by Lynne Melcombe.

Resilience and Chocolate: A Refugee Family’s Remarkable Journey

/ Lynne Melcombe / 4 Comments

I’m finding it hard to live in the world at this moment in history. Over and above the daily headlines about Gaza and Ukraine, there is a major violent humanitarian crisis in Sudan, which has been largely overshadowed by the focus on the former two. In fact, the website for the Geneva Academy tells us that there are currently over 100 armed conflicts raging across the globe. None of these affect me personally, and yet in a way all of them do. Edited to add: And now, Israel has started a war with Iran.

Cover of 'Peace by Chocolate' book featuring the Hadhad family on a beach, with text highlighting their journey from Syria to Canada.

So, you can imagine how I felt reading Jon Tattrie’s Peace by Chocolate: The Hadhad Family’s Remarkable Journey from Syria to Canada (Goose Lane Editions, 2020), perhaps the most uplifting book I’ve read in—well, maybe ever.

Okay, Anne of Green Gables, but that’s fiction. 

Peace by Chocolate is the story of a large family that had a successful, internationally renowned chocolate business in Damascus, a business the father had created from scratch as a young man. This business was the reason he met his beloved wife, which led to the births of seven children. It was the reason his family home, a single-story building when his own father was young, grew into a 10-storey home for much of his extended family. It’s a story of success and love and plenty …

… until the Assad regime responded to the arrival of the Arab Spring in Syria by turning on its own people, killing hundreds of thousands and turning hundreds of thousands more into refugees. The Hadhad family survived, but their beloved family home and their chocolate business did not. 

After three years of languishing as refugees in Lebanon, the Canadian government finally chooses the eldest son, Tareq, to come to Canada. Meanwhile, a group of people in Nova Scotia have come together to welcome at least one family, to save at least one person, from this horrible conflict by bringing them to Canada and helping them settle in the small town of Antigonish. 

When Tareq arrives at Halifax airport on a snowy night just before Christmas, to his surprise, he is greeted by dozens of people who have been making calls and filling out paperwork and fundraising for a couple of years. Tareq’s arrival is the first of the fruits of their labour. 

What follows—the way things come together, the barriers that fall away, the pieces that fall into place—is nothing short of remarkable. Within months, he is joined by most of his family. His father begins making chocolate in the kitchen of their new home and selling it at a winter fair. The chocolate business outgrows the kitchen, and then the basement, and then a shed. Within less than a year, the Hadhads open a factory in the small town that’s welcomed them—and several other Syrian families—and Peace by Chocolate, the company, becomes a major local employer. 

The farther their remarkable story spreads, the more remarkable it becomes, leading to international speaking engagements, meetings with heads of state—and a request by CBC journalist and author Jon Tattrie to write a book about them. As Tattrie writes of his first meeting with Tareq in the Author’s Note:

I’d been watching Tareq Hadhad for almost two years. I knew the names of his mother, father, sisters, and brother. I knew of his dreams to be a doctor. I knew of his family’s passion for chocolate. I knew they’d lost everything in the Syrian war and rebuilt it in Canada. But I didn’t know how. How had they turned from refugees into pillars of the community so quickly?

And I didn’t know how small-town Canada had truly reacted to a Middle Eastern Muslim family dropping out of the clear sky to take up residence. My previous books had documented the intense and often violent racism minorities face in Nova Scotia. Eddie Carvery was a young black man in the 1960s when Halifax bulldozed Africville, his family home for generations. He moved into the ruins in 1970 to plant his body as a living protest for justice. He was still there forty years later when I asked him if I could tell his story. And I’d written about the notorious Edward Cornwallis, the British soldier who founded Halifax and tried to exterminate the Mi’kmaq First Nation. I’d written about Daniel Paul, the Mi’kmaw elder who campaigned for decades to get the city to take down its Cornwallis statue.

Would I find the same grime under the shiny story I’d been reading about the Hadhad family and Peace by Chocolate?

The answer is no. But to find out more you’ll have to read Peace by Chocolate, which quickly became a national bestseller and was later made into a multi-award winning motion picture. Whichever way you choose to find out more about this story, I caution you to do so with a box of tissues at hand. I’m getting misty again just writing this.

Other books about food:

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

The Fruitful City: The Enduring Power of the Urban Forest, by Helena Moncrieff.

How to Share an Egg: A True Story of Hunger, Love, and Plenty, by Bonny Reichert.

Connecting Communities Through Urban Fruit Gathering

/ Lynne Melcombe / 3 Comments
Cover of 'The Fruitful City: The Enduring Power of the Urban Food Forest' by Helena Moncrieff featuring colorful leaf illustrations and a floral design.

One of the sweetest memories I have from my childhood is my mom making preserves and canning or freezing fruit. My favourite was her strawberry jam. One June day my dad would take us all out to a pick-your-own place. Our parents paid us by the basket we picked. We always ended up eating almost as much as we put in the basket. 

Then we’d go home and help my mom sort through the berries: the firmest went into the freezer and the mushy ones into the jam pot, often with rhubarb picked fresh from our garden. She’d always make bread the same day so we could feast on warm strawberry jam on oven-fresh bread. 

I remembered those days fondly while reading Helena Moncrieff’s The Fruitful City: The Enduring Power of the Urban Food Forest (ECW Press, 2018). At its heart, it’s a book about making good use of the thousands of fruit trees in any city that bear fruit, only to rot on the ground while people are going hungry. It’s about connecting property owners willing to share the fruit, volunteers willing to pick it, and neighbours in need. It’s about reducing food waste, connecting people to their environment, and rebuilding the food literacy we’ve lost over the last few generations.

The Fruitful City explores the concept of fruit gathering and sharing in many more dimensions than I imagined were connected, in the process sharing a wide range of fascinating facts. Here are some of the interesting things I learned from this book:

  • “Tree Climbers International [who knew?] touts the benefits of being up a tree, including exercise, accessibility and a full sensory experience with hands on bark and the sound of the wind whistling through leaves. Japan is home to a tree-climbing school and has led the way in using trees for therapy.”
  • Neuroscientists have used functional MRI to show how acts of giving, such as volunteering for an organization that picks fruit and donates it to those in need, activate the brain’s mesolimbic reward system—the same system engaged in feeling good from monetary gain.
  • The Canada Food Guide was developed during WWII to combat nutritional deficiency during rationing. But since that war ended, food illiteracy has grown steadily with the advent of convenience foods that mean we no longer need to know how to grow anything, or how to tell what’s poisonous from what’s safe. 

Like Andrew Reeves’ Overrun, Laura Pratt’s Heartbroken, Lezlie Lowe’s No Place to Go, and Sue Harper’s Winter in the City of Light, among many others, The Fruitful City is thoroughly researched; I learned a lot and for me that’s one of the biggest pleasures of reading. And Moncrieff’s writing is always high quality and, well, clever. Consider this:

Bohemian waxwings are said to get drunk on winter berries. Whitehorse residents have rescued the wobbly birds from wonky flight paths and window crashes, incarcerating them in hamster-cage drunk tanks until they sober up. … In a freeze-and-thaw cycle through the fall, the fruit ferments. The little creatures either can’t tell the difference or they like the experience.

Who wouldn’t love that image? Not to mention the recipes at the end of every chapter.

Full disclosure: Helena Moncrieff is the partner of one of my dearest friends from the class of 2015, Havard Gould. But that in no way influenced how much I enjoyed this book, not least because of the memories it evoked of my mother’s many varieties of jam or the canned peaches that came from the tree in our backyard or the strawberry-rhubarb crisp that she served up warm with ice cream after a summertime dinner.  

My mouth is watering with the memories. 

Read my reviews of other books from the prolific class of 2016:

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

Craigdarroch Castle in 21 Treasures, by Moira Dann.

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

A Cure for Heartache: Life’s Simple Pleasures, One Moment at a Time, by Mary Jane Grant.

Sit Still and Prosper: How a Former Money Manager Discovered the Path to Investing with Greater Clarity, Calmness, and Confidence by Stephanie Griffiths. Review coming soon. 

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

Nowhere to Go: How Public Toilets Fail Our Private Needs, by Lezlie Lowe.

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.

F-Bomb: Dispatches from the War on Feminism, by Lauren McKeon.

A Distorted Revolution: How Eric’s Trip Changed Music, Moncton and Me, by Jason Murray. Review coming soon. 

Conspiracy of Hope: The Truth about Breast Cancer Screening, by Reneé Pellerin. 

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

The Tides of Time: A Nova Scotia Book of Seasons, by Suzanne Stewart.

Chasing Smoke: A Memoir of Firefighting in British Columbia’s Interior

/ Lynne Melcombe / 5 Comments

Long ago, in a previous life, I worked in archaeology. One summer in Hat Creek Valley, 26 kilometres beyond Cache Creek, BC, our 26-person crew was dawdling over breakfast when local ranchers drove by to notify us that a few small fires had broken out at the north end of the valley. Would we help put them out?

Book cover of 'Chasing Smoke: A Wildfire Memoir' by Aaron Williams, featuring a forest scene with smoke and an orange sky.

We put down our breakfast dishes, piled into our trucks, and sped off (like the heroes we thought we were) to spend the morning digging small fireguards and throwing dirt on flames that kept cropping up here and there. It was hot, hard work for a bunch of university students who spent most of our time sitting on stools in one-metre-square holes in the ground excavating millimetres at a time with trowels and paint brushes. 

I was thinking about that as I was reading Aaron Williams’s Chasing Smoke: A Wildfire Memoir (Harbour Publishing, 2017), which tells of his firefighting experience during the summer of 2014 (he’d been firefighting since 2006). Of course, there’s no comparing my miniscule experience with his, yet I can’t help thinking that the memory of how easily a single spark can jump 20 metres, or a small flame can travel underground along a tree root and pop up 10 metres away gives me a tiny bit of perspective on what real forest-firefighters are up against. 

Chasing Smoke provides insight into how firefighting works, why forest fires have been getting worse with climate change, and what the whole experience of firefighting is like, from a brutal training camp in May to sheer exhaustion in August. The author’s descriptions of fire are intensely visual:

A thunderstorm approaches. Little pockets of fire, previously resting in the moss, are brought to life by the strong winds preceding the downpour. The flames look tenacious under the dark clouds. I stand and watch a pocket of heat thrash around as it starts spitting rain. The flames, billowing and wide on the forest floor, find a spruce tree. One more kill before they lose the battle to the rain. 

The fire grabs on to the spruce and its lower limbs being to sizzle. Flames climb the tree and when they reach the top they balloon out, feasting on the fat clump of recent growth crowding the tree’s peak. The fire burns slow up there and the rest of the tree cools down and fades to a less intense orange. But the top still burns bright, the colour of a street light against the storm.

Many moments in this memoir are reminders that this work is decidedly dangerous:

Trees start coming down like I’ve never seen before. They’re limbless save for their very tops, where wind catches the foliage and pushes the tree over. … 

At first I’m calm as the trees fall. But suddenly a mess of wood, bent horizontal and cribbed into the trees above us, comes down in a rush of a hundred machine-gun snaps. Trees caught in the nest flail around before hitting the ground. Our eyes dart everywhere, trying to keep track of every moment. Trees break free and swing themselves like catapults. Splintered chunks of wood slash through the air like propellers. Tabes and I look in opposite directions, standing guard for each other. We don’t dare move, as that would take our complete focus from the storm of debris. 

As soon as it’s over I turn to Tabes. “Fuck this, let’s get out of here.” 

For all its intensity, though, Chasing Smoke is also an entertaining read. Williams has a sardonic sense of humour and laughs at himself and his crew at least once every few pages:

Dan holds the after-work meeting while we grill the steaks. The crew is paying more attention to us than to Dan’s end-of-day spiel. The pressure of getting the meat right is immense. Is it too rare? Or the ultimate shame—is it too cooked? It turns out fine, and Tabe and I share a moment when it’s all done. A stern nod to each other acknowledges that our integrity as men has never been stronger.

This was one of the first books I read when I decided to pursue this project of working my way through and reviewing all the books published by alumni of University of King’s College’s MFA program in Creative Nonfiction Writing. And it’s a great example of why I keep coming back for more. 

Books on different types of disasters:

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

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

Fifteen Thousand Pieces: A Medical Examiner’s Journey Through Disaster, by Gina Leola Woolsey.

Exploring the Asian Carp Crisis: A Riveting Read

/ Lynne Melcombe / 5 Comments

I like to eat fish. That’s about the extent of my relationship with them. Before I married, I had a boyfriend who loved fishing and took me with him once; I couldn’t understand what he thought was so great about it. Before our children came along, my ex-husband had several large fish tanks where he bred African cichlids, which he sold to a pet store to support his aquarium habit. 

Cover of the book 'Overrun: Dispatches from the Asian Carp Crisis' by Andrew Reeves, featuring various fish illustrations against a light blue background.

But I’ve never been much interested in fish beyond what they taste like. So, when I first saw Andrew Reeves’s book, Overrun: Dispatches from the Asian Carp Crisis (ECW, 2019) I wasn’t immediately drawn to it. I received it as a gift one Christmas after deciding to pursue this project to read and review all the books to come out of the University of King’s College Master of Fine Arts program in Creative Nonfiction Writing.

Overrun sat on my shelf for a year or three before I cracked the spine. And then, as happened with Karen Stiller’s The Minister’s Wife—another book I would not have chosen but thoroughly enjoyed—I found myself utterly absorbed. As author Maude Barlow reflects in her advance praise for the book, “A riveting, ‘can’t put it down’ book about fish? You bet!”

Reeves opens the story where the crisis began, close to the mouth of the Mississippi where, in the 1950s, an enterprising judge bought some land, created a lake, and stocked it with fish to be caught for a fee. When aquatic grass threatened to choke out the fish, the judge’s son, now in charge of the business, looked for a way to deal with it. 

With the publication of books like Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring in the 1960s, environmental awareness was growing. Importing Asian carp, which eat aquatic grasses like nobody’s business, seemed a better choice than trying to control it with chemicals.

That was before the environmental community began to appreciate the threat posed by invasive species—species deliberately or accidentally imported, many of which have caused untold damage to ecosystems because they didn’t evolve there, have no natural predators to keep them in check, and therefore threaten to choke out species native to an area. (As an avid gardener, plant species like dandelions, morning glory, and English ivy spring to my mind.)

Reeves follows the carp as it moves north, taking over lakes and rivers, leaving devastation in its wake. Incorporating research that must have seen him crawling through archives for weeks and conducting interviews that took him on land and water journeys south along the Mississippi and north to Illinois, he builds tension, eases off, builds more tension, and eases off again as he moves toward the climax like the author of a great mystery novel. 

Reeves’s skill as a writer goes well beyond finding a compelling way to shape a CNF story and deep into descriptions of people and landscapes that hold readers’ attention between peaks in the narrative. Here’s a sample: 

I had one last stop before leaving Arkansas. Ninety-two of the White River’s 720 miles flow through the White River National Wildlife Refuge, a 160,000-acre boomerang of land eight miles north of where the White River meets the Mississippi. Three hundred oxbow lakes are the dominant feature in the refuge. Here, the Mississippi shows signs of its constant movement: as the river erodes its banks, u-shaped meanders form that grow deeper with time. As the horseshoe becomes more pronounced, the neck of land between bends in the river grows narrower until it finally caves. Cut off from the river, the once-vibrant meanders sit dormant waiting, like lost children, for the river to come collect them.

I generally start my day by drinking coffee and reading for about an hour. While devouring Overrun, I had a hard time cutting myself off after two or three hours. At 330 pages, it’s a hefty book chock full of deep and thorough research crafted into a compelling narrative by a masterful storyteller. 

As I work my way through this project I’ve created, I’m learning not to judge a book by its cover (which in this case is quite creative) or its subject matter, but to keep my mind open to whatever comes my way. What came my way this time was a completely unexpected but very welcome treasure that I can’t recommend too highly. 

Books on environmental issues:

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

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

The Fruitful City: The Enduring Power of the Urban Food Forest, by Helena Moncrieff.

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

Chasing Smoke: A Wildfire Memoir, by Aaron Williams.