Review

Beth H. Piatote, Beading lesson (#Review)

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Beth Piatote’s “Beading lesson” is the thirteenth of fourteen stories in the anthology, Great short stories by contemporary Native American writers, and with it, we move from the 1990s to the 2000s.

Beth H Piatote

Anthology editor Bob Blaisdell provides very little information about Piatote. It simply says that she is Nez Perce and a Professor of Native American Studies at University of California, Berkeley. Wikipedia provides a little more, but not much in terms of life history. It tells us that she is a scholar and author, that she is “a member of Chief Joseph’s Tribe and the Colville Confederated Tribes”. And it expands on her academic qualifications and achievements a bit more. It seems most of her writing is academic, but she has had one short story collection published, The beadworkers, published by CounterPoint Press in 2019.

“Beading lesson”

“Beading lesson” is the shortest story in the anthology. Blaisdell gives its original date as 2002, but the source for the story is a 2008 Oxford University Press anthology, Reckonings: Contemporary short fiction by Native American women. However, I believe, from the GoodReads description of The beadworkers, that the story was also included there.

GoodReads describes The beadworkers, starting with, “A woman teaches her niece to make a pair of beaded earrings, while ruminating on a fractured relationship”. This perfectly captures the setting of “Beading lesson”, but of course there’s much more to it. Before I get onto that, however, I’ll add that the collection sounds interestingly varied, as it includes stories set in the 1960s and 1890. GoodReads concludes its description/promo with “Formally inventive, witty, and generous, the works in this singular debut collection draw on Indigenous aesthetics and forms to offer a powerful, sustaining vision of Native life in the Americas”. I haven’t read the other stories, but my guess from reading “Beading lesson” is that the collection explores the cultural, social, political and economic role and implications of beadwork, and that it also uses the idea of beadwork literally, as a practice, and symbolically, to represent the wider culture.

So now, “Beading lesson”. The fractured relationship mentioned by GoodReads is with the aunt’s sister, that is, the niece’s mother. The story is told first person by the aunt, who gently and patiently shows her niece the intricacies of beading, as they make some earrings for the mother. However, as she passes on to her niece an important cultural skill, she also shares values and information that she believes are important for her niece to know. In other words, the skill teaching is part of wider mentoring, which is what all good skill teaching is about.

What makes this story interesting is the subject of this mentoring. It’s multifold – to pass on cultural traditions, to teach the niece some life-skills, and, eventually, maybe, to lead to a repair in the broken relationship with her sister. It appears that this sister, the youngest in her family, had been spoilt. As a result, she had not learnt the skills our narrator had learnt, and has lost culture. The aunt tells her niece:

I think sometimes she wishes she learnt to bead, but she didn’t want to when she was little. She was the youngest, so I think she was a little spoiled but don’t tell her I said that. She didn’t have to do things she didn’t want to, she didn’t even have to go to boarding school. 

The boarding school reference is intriguing. Our narrator is positive about her experience, when, quite often, such schools were sites of cultural loss.

As the lesson progresses, we learn that the narrator is passing on beadskills to men in prison, which gives them skill and pride. The subtle message here of course concerns Indigenous incarceration. We also learn that her beadwork has supported her in tough times, through times of “livin’ skinny”. And, we gain some insight into the politics of, let us say, “Indigenous arts and crafts”. The aunt tells her niece that when some people

buy your beadwork, they think it should last forever. Somebody’s car breaks down, he knows he got to take it to the shop, pay someone to get it goin’ again. But not with beadwork — not with something an Indian made. No, they bring it back 10 years later and they want you to fix it for free! They think because an Indian makes it, it’s got to last forever. Just think if the Indians did that with all the things the government made for us. Hey, you got to fix it for free! 

The use of vernacular for the aunt’s story could lull readers into thinking she is a sweet but simple old lady. However, as the story builds, it becomes increasingly clear that she knows exactly what she is about. We see her to be kind, wise, and generous, where it is warranted, but not stupid. She knows the value and importance of what she does, but she also knows exploitation and is resilient in its face. She knows that maintaining cultural practice is important to her people’s continuation. This a story in which the personal is quietly, but absolutely, infused with the political. It’s clever and delightful to read.

Beth H. Piatote
“Beading lesson” (orig. pub. 2002)
in Bob Blaisdell (ed.), Great short stories by contemporary Native American writers
Garden City: Dover Publications, 2014
pp. 100-103
ISBN: 9780486490953

Available online at High Country News.

Sebastian Barry, The secret scripture

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What follows here is an edited version of the first ever review post I wrote – back in December 2008 on a Blogger blog I set up for my reading group. I’ve been meaning for some time to bring it over here because I’d like to have Sebastian Barry represented on my blog! However, my review was written in a different style to the one I use now, so I’ve tried to update it a bit. This is difficult given it’s a long time since I read it! I apologise for its awkwardness.

I read The secret scripture because I’d heard great things about his previous novel, A long long way, which, like The secret scripture, was shortlisted for the Booker prize. The book is set in Ireland in contemporary times, with flashbacks to the 1930s, and is told through the voices of two characters: Roseanne, a centenarian who has lived in a mental hospital for over 50 years, and Dr Grene, a psychiatrist at the institution for 35 years. As Roseanne writes her life-story, which she hides under boards in her room, Dr Grene investigates the reasons for her being there with a view to deciding her future, because the hospital is slated for demolition. His understanding of her story and her own telling of it differ. What falls out is a tortured story of religion, family and politics at a time in Ireland when sides had to be taken, rules took precedence, and humanity was in short supply.

As he investigates Roseanne, Dr Grene, who is grieving over the death of his wife, Bet, spends a lot of time with Roseanne, and shares his own story with her.

“the assault of withering truth”

There was so much to like about the novel – the language, the characters (albeit most are loosely drawn), and the themes. I particularly liked Barry’s musings on “truth” and “history”, which is not new of course. I also liked the connection made between truth and health, that Roseanne’s “truth” was a healthy one.

Roseanne is intriguing as a narrator. I would call her reliable not because she tells us the correct facts necessarily (as it appears that she may not have) but because, as Grene says at the end, she tells us “her” truth and this truth “radiated health”. It may not hold up in a court of law but it gets to the heart of who Roseanne is. It is “vexing and worrying”, though, as Roseanne says, when different people’s truths (such as Fr Gaunt’s and Roseanne’s) cross each other. How true is (the perfectly named) Father Gaunt’s anyhow? His conveys the facts but contains no humanity, let alone empathy. He has no idea of who Roseanne is, but he does know the “law” (of the church at least).

“History, as far as I can see, is not the arrangement of what happens, but a fabulous arrangement of surmises and guesses held up as a banner against the assault of withering truth.” 

As those of you who know me might imagine, the exploration of truth was one of my favourite aspects of the book. In this novel it is so humanely nuanced, suggesting that we should look out for two truths – the facts and inner meaning – and decide which one should take precedence in any given situation. Facts, as we know only too well, are important but we should also heed the “hidden inner” truth as well. In relationships, for example, perhaps the “hidden inner” truth is equally if not more important. Why a person is saying or doing something, for example, may be more critical than what they are saying or doing.

Then there’s the language. It is beautiful, poetic. Poetic usually means two things to me, mostly in combination – language that is rich in imagery and that has a strong rhythm. Barry’s writing has wonderful rhythm, which he creates through the use of repetition, and particularly thought the careful use of punctuation, and long sentences interspersed with short sentences to give a lovely flow. This example near the opening almost reads like blank verse:

“That place where I was born was a cold town. Even the mountains stood sway. They were not sure, no more than me, of that dark spot, those same mountains.

There was a black river that flowed through the town, and if it had no grace for mortal beings, it did for swans, and many swans resorted there, and even rode the river like some kind of plunging animals, in floods.

The river also took the rubbish down to the sea, and bits of things that were once owned by people and pulled form the banks, and bodies too, if rarely, oh and poor babies, that were embarrassments, the odd time. The speed and depth of the river would have been a great friend to secrecy.

That is Sligo town I mean.”

He sets a powerful tone in these opening few paras – the rhythm is slow but with just an edge of awkwardness that catches you off guard. And the language conveys something untoward – “cold”, “dark”, “black”, “rubbish”, “secrecy”. These are not repeated but, used in combination in such a few concentrated paragraphs, they give a sense of the story to come. It’s an evocative opening and it engaged me quickly.

As for characters, Roseanne engaged me from the start; she always felt authentic. I wasn’t always so sure of Dr Grene. Did we need all the Bet stuff, albeit was moving? Perhaps, given the role of men in women’s lives, and in Roseanne’s in particular, we are meant to be on guard. However, he particularly started to lose me towards the end, when he started to more actively investigate Roseanne’s history. From a plot point of view it was logical and understandable, but the voice became more prosaic, ordinary, in some sense that seemed to lose Grene’s particularity.

My main issue with the book was, in fact, the ending. It was contrived. Maybe Dr Grene’s voice felt more forced towards the end because even Barry knew his plot resolution was a bit too neat and didn’t quite know how to do it! Fortunately, plots aren’t the main indicator for me of a good read.

Dr Grene’s choosing, in the last para, the bright and open rose rather than a uniform neat one, suggests an acceptance of being open to many truths, to the imperfections of the world, than to that tidy, dry version of the world that we get from Fr. Gaunt. This softens the neat plot conclusion somewhat – as does the fact that Barry doesn’t go in for the full cliched emotions that such a story might commonly close on. Consequently, despite some misgivings, I’d happily read more Barry because I loved the heart and openness in his exploration of truth, and his writing is so engaging.

Kimbofo also reviewed this way back when!

Sebastian Barry
The secret scripture
London: Faber and Faber, 2008
300pp.

Donna M. Cameron, The rewilding (#BookReview)

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Quite coincidentally, earlier this month, I read and posted on Willa Cather’s short story “The bookkeeper’s wife” which commences with a young man, Percy Bixby, sitting in his office deciding to do something in order to keep his flashy fiancée Stella. That was published in 1916. I have now just finished Donna M. Cameron’s novel, The rewilding, which was published in 2024. It commences with another young man, Jagger Eckerman, is sitting in his office deciding to do something that will lose him his flashy fiancée Lola. Both young men are caught up in fraud, Percy of his own making, Jagger unwittingly, though that doesn’t make him entirely blameless. From here the stories part company, so we will leave Percy, whose story I’ve already told, and look at 27-year-old Jagger.

Jagger has been living the high life. Caught up in his own privileged lifestyle, he’s been carelessly signing documents he shouldn’t, until finally the penny drops and he wakes “up to the fact that every aspect of his life is a farce”. So, he clicks Send on his whistle-blowing email and scarpers. The problem is that the only place he can think to scarper to is a cave in a national park south of Sydney, and when he gets there he finds someone else already holed up in the same spot, the 24-year-old “feral” eco-warrior, Nia Moretti. As the accompanying publicity sheet says, it is hatred at first sight, but they soon realise they need each other, whether they like it or not.

The rewilding starts with a bang and barely lets up for the length of its 300 pages. It’s a genre-bending work of eco-literature that combines thriller, road story and romance. The central thriller-driven plot is not my favourite type of story – I’m not much interested in watching or reading about chases, violence and suspense – but Cameron handles her material confidently, creating a book that I enjoyed reading despite myself. I just hurried through the bits that were less interesting to me. Why I was happy to read it is what I want to focus on here.

First, there’s the genre-bending aspect. Cameron balances the thriller components with more reflective and tender sections, with moments of interpersonal tension, with touches of humour, gorgeous natural descriptions, and serious themes. Second, the story is well-paced, and the writing fresh but accessible. It is primarily told third person through Jagger’s perspective, but this is occasionally interspersed with short chapters in Nia’s voice, in which she speaks to a mysterious “you”. These provide additional insights into Nia that Jagger can’t know, while also increasing the mystery. Who is this “you”? What has happened to Nia? Third, the two main characters are nicely developed. Jagger is on the run, scared and uncertain about what his future holds. Still grieving his mother’s death and the mistakes he’s made, he is fundamentally decent and an optimist. Nia, on the other hand, is an uncompromising idealist, and pessimistic, but reveals a softer side. Gradually, as is typical of the romance genre, the antagonism between them is relaxed, although not, of course, without setbacks.

“a capitalist suit” versus “the feral”

And finally, there are the themes. For me, a good story isn’t enough. I need some meat, some ideas that make the time I put into reading worthwhile, and this book has meat – personal and political. In the personal realm, Jagger is a young man who had lost his way but, when some truths become clear to him – when he realises his relationship had been built on a lie and his workplace was engaging in a waste removal scam – his better self, the one his recently dead mother had so carefully tried to engender in him, comes to the fore. In his suit and fancy shoes, he surprises Nia with his deep knowledge of and love for nature. Likewise, Nia is struggling with a personal loss. She is resentful of the “capitalist suit” who comes into her cave, and finds ways of using him – and his money – to her own ends but, despite her toughness, she has a heart. So, on the personal level, The rewilding is a novel about values, about the lines you draw, about the life you choose to live and what that means personally and …

politically, because this is also a novel about climate activism. Nia and her radical Earth Rebellion mates, the Lorax, are determined to save the planet. Their focus is a mining operation in northern Queensland which is about to proceed without permission. First, though, she has something to do in disaster-struck, flooded Brisbane, something that puts her and Jagger’s lives at risk. On the run, and being followed by hit men, he has no option but to go along with the only person who can help him. It is at this point, before the final dramatic confrontation at the mine, that Nia starts to unbend a little towards Jagger and his perspective.

“Why be scared of change?”

The rewilding is a wild, dramatic novel. It does push the boundaries of credibility at times, but probably no more than you expect in a thriller. Ultimately, through her characters and their fierce, lively conversations, and through her fast-paced plot which offers a few scenarios, Cameron explores the critical issues confronting us and asks the big questions we are asking, without resorting to overt didacticism.

Climate change novels can be bleak, but many authors, even those writing the bleakest of stories, talk at writers festivals about wanting to leave their readers with some hope. That this was Cameron’s intention is foreshadowed in the epigraph from Tolkien’s The lord of the rings, “Where there’s life, there’s hope”. So, at the end, certain rapprochements are achieved, but the conclusion is real rather than simplistic. It recognises that life is messy and change is hard but that it’s worth keeping on trying. The rewilding is a worthy addition to Australia’s eco-literature field.

Donna M. Cameron
The rewilding
Melbourne: Transit Lounge, 2024
309pp.
ISBN: 9781923023062

(Review copy courtesy Transit Lounge, via publicist Scott Eathorne of Quikmark Media)

Jane Austen, Lady Susan, revisited (#BookReview)

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I have read Jane Austen’s Lady Susan several times, including with my local Jane Austen group in 2014 (my review). That now being ten years ago, we decided it was time to read – and consider – it again. However, as my time was tight, I decided to try an audiobook version, and found a Naxos edition in my library. Mr Gums and I listened to it on our 650+ km drive home from Melbourne, and found it excellent.

For those of you unfamiliar with Austen’s minor works, Lady Susan is, as far as we know, the first novel (novella) that Austen completed, but it was not published during her life-time, for the simple fact that she never sent it to a publisher. Written, scholars believe, in 1793/94, when she was still a teen, it was not published until 1871, decades after her death, when her nephew James Edward Austen-Leigh included it in his memoir of her. It has since been adapted to film, television, stage and book. The best known of these is probably the 2016 film, which was titled Love & friendship, a strange decision given that is the title of another work of Austen juvenilia (my post).

I gave a brief plot summary in my previous post, but will again here. Lady Susan is a bewitching, 35-year-old widow of four months, who is already on the prowl for a new, wealthy husband. The novel opens with her needing to leave Langford, where she’d been staying with the Manwarings, because she was having an affair with the married man of the house, and had seduced his daughter’s suitor, Sir James Martin. She goes to stay with her brother-in-law Charles Vernon and his wife Catherine, whom she’d done her best to dissuade him from marrying. She’s not long there before Reginald, Catherine’s brother, arrives to check her out because, from what he’s heard,

Lady Susan possesses a degree of captivating deceit which must be pleasing to witness and detect.

After all, she is “the most accomplished coquette in England”! Of course, the inevitable happens and the artful Lady Susan captivates him. Meanwhile, Lady Susan wants her shy, 16-year-old daughter, Frederica, to marry Sir James, the man she’d seduced away from Miss Manwaring – but sweet, sensible Frederica wants none of this weak “rattle” of a man. And so it continues …

Lady Susan, then, is a fairly simple tale, containing the deceits and silliness common to its 18th century genre, but also showing restraint and innovation which hint of the novelist to come – her wit and irony, her commentary on human nature, and her themes. I wrote about this too in my last post and don’t plan to repeat it here. There are many angles from which the book can be considered, and this time I’m interested in another, its form as an epistolary novel.

The epistolary novel was common in the eighteenth century. It’s something Austen tried again with Elinor and Marianne, which she wrote around 1795 to 1797, but later rewrote in her famous third person omniscient voice. Retitled Sense and sensibility, it became her first published novel in 1811. Pride and prejudice’s precursor, First impressions, may also have started as an epistolary novel. It’s interesting, then, that although she made a “fair copy” of Lady Susan in 1805 she didn’t rewrite it too. Why she didn’t is one of the many mysteries of Austen’s life. Perhaps it was the subject matter, because this is not Austen’s usual fare. Lady Susan belongs more to the 18th century tradition of wickedness, lasciviousness and adultery, forced marriages, and moralistic resolutions. Characters tend to be types rather than complex beings, and the novels are racily written, with a broad brush rather than a fine pen. This is true of Lady Susan, but there are departures. For a start it’s a novella not one of those 18th century tomes!

I might be going out on a limb here, because, while I have read a couple of 18th century epistolary novels, including Samuel Richardson’s, my memory has faded somewhat. However, Wikipedia helps me out a bit. Its article on the epistolary form says that there are three main types: monophonic (comprising the letters of only one character); dialogic (using letters of two characters); and polyphonic (which has three or more letter-writing characters). Lady Susan is an example of the last one. The main letter writers are Lady Susan (mostly to her friend Alicia Johnson in London) and her sister-in-law Catherine Vernon (mostly to her mother Lady De Courcy), but we also see some letters back from these correspondents, making four letter writers. But wait, there’s more! There are also letters – albeit just one in two cases – from others, namely Reginald De Courcy, his father Sir Reginald De Courcy, and Lady Susan’s daughter Frederica.

So, in this short book, we have 7 letter writers. But wait, there’s even more. To conclude the novel, Austen discards the epistolary-form and writes a first person denouement, which includes commentary like this:

Whether Lady Susan was or was not happy in her second Choice — I do not see how it can ever be ascertained — for who would take her assurance of it on either side of the question? The World must judge from Probability; she had nothing against her but her Husband & her Conscience.

The thing that intrigued me most as I was “reading” Lady Susan this time was the form. Austen used it for Love and Freindship, Lady Susan, Elinor and Marianne, and perhaps First impressions. But she abandoned it for the style for which she is recognised as a significant innovator – a third person narrative characterised by free indirect discourse, meaning the narrator’s voice embodies the perspectives of the characters. As John Mullan, writing primarily about Emma, explains: “Before Austen, novelists chose between first-person narrative (letting us into the mind of a character, but limiting us to his or her understanding) and third-person narrative (allowing us a God-like view of all the characters, but making them pieces in an authorial game). Austen miraculously combined the internal and the external”.

So, my thinking is that she started by using a form with which she was familiar as a reader and which was popular with readers of the day, but whose limitations she soon started to feel. Her using a relatively large number of letter writers, enabling us to see Lady Susan in particular from different perspectives, and her turning to an over-arching first person narrator for her conclusion, suggests that she understood the limitations of writing a novel-in-letters in terms of developing complex realistic characters, of managing plot, and of incorporating narratorial commentary. The rest, as they say, is history.

Thoughts anyone?

Jane Austen
Lady Susan (Classic Literature with Classic Music)
Naxos Audiobook, 2005
Duration: 2hrs 30mins

Available in e-text.

Willa Cather, The bookkeeper’s wife (#Review)

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Willa Cather
Willa Cather, 1936 (Photo: Carl Van Vechten; Public domain, via Wikipedia)

It’s nearly two years since I posted on a Library of America (LOA) short story, and it’s over a year since they published Willa Cather’s “The bookkeeper’s wife” as their Story of the Week. However, this morning I had a quiet moment and decided to check over my little LOA TBR list. Willa Cather’s seemed just the ticket because, as I have written before, I like her “robust, somewhat terse and yet not unsubtle style”. I have read three novels by Cather, and a few short stories, starting with, “Peter”, which was first published in 1892. “The bookkeeper’s wife” was published much later, in 1916, after her first three novels were published, but before My Ántonia (1918). (You can check out my Cather posts here.)

One of the notable things about her stories is their variety. Not all are about the tough life of the pioneer, or even about midwestern landscapes, albeit these were among her favourite preoccupations. She did write about urban environments, and this story is one of those.

“The bookkeeper’s wife”

LOA’s usual introductory notes explain that in 1917, Willa Cather was working on a new book, a short story collection called Office wives. These stories would be published in Century magazine, and would then be published in book form. The book never eventuated, and only four stories were written, of which three were published. The fourth manuscript has, apparently, been lost.

LOA suggests that the proposed title for the series, Office wives

seems to have been a subtle act of provocation; of the five working women featured in Cather’s three stories—stenographers, typists, clerical workers—only Stella Bixby, “the bookkeeper’s wife,” is married … Cather explores the ways in which working women and their male supervisors mirror, in a distorted fashion, the domestic arrangements between wives and husbands. 

The stories offer a different look at the “New Woman” type which was the vogue in popular magazine fiction of the early twentieth century. These women were financially independent employees in warehouses, shops, and offices, but Cather – as was her wont – had a more realistic take on the situation. She understood the prevailing power structures in such work environments, and her stories, says LOA, “depict how the freedom and independence available to women in the workplace” were “still limited by their dependence on and subservience to men”.

Cather knew whereof she spoke, having worked herself in the business world. LOA says that she had worked “as an editor, columnist, and occasional business manager at Home Monthly in Pittsburgh; as the telegraph desk reporter and headline writer for the Pittsburg Leader, a daily newspaper; and, most significantly, as a staff member from 1906 to 1912 at McClure’s magazine, where she became the managing editor”.

Interestingly, despite the planned book title, the protagonist of the first story she wrote for it, “The bookkeeper’s wife”, is the man, the bookkeeper. But, his wife, Stella, as the title implies, is the story’s linchpin. Superficially, the plot set-up suggests something predictable. It starts with our bookkeeper, Percy Bixby, sitting at his desk at work. He’s the last one there and he is about to embezzle (sorry, “accept a loan from”) his company in order to marry Stella, a stenographer working for another company, and offer her the lifestyle she expects. He has won her over a flashier man, salesman Charlie Greengay, whom Stella knew “would go further in the world” but who didn’t have Percy’s “warm, clear, gray eyes”. We think we know where this will go, but, pleasingly, it only partly plays to expectation.

The story is told third person, mainly through the eyes of Percy, but we do have moments in Stella’s head, and in that of Percy’s similar-aged boss, Oliver Remsen Junior. What makes the story so enjoyable to read, besides its plotting, is Cather’s tight, spare writing. Her words carry weight. Look at the names for a start, the stolid Percy Bixby, the exciting Charlie Greengay, the aspirational Stella Brown, and the classy Oliver Remsen Junior. Description is minimal, but there’s just enough to layer meaning, like Percy and Stella’s “clock, as big as a coffin and with nothing but its two weights dangling in its hollow framework”, and their “false fireplace”. Five years in, the marriage is clearly “hollow”, “false”. It’s worth noting, however, that they have had a baby die, but we only hear this via Oliver, so how it has impacted the marriage is left to us to think about.

Of course, Percy is found out – part-way through the story – because he ‘fesses up, in fact. There are no histrionics, no high drama. Each character behaves in accordance with their nature as established by Cather. Percy, who like so many young men got caught up in the competition for a pretty girl with high expectations, is fundamentally honest and sensible, albeit rather ordinary. Charlie’s “dash and color and assurance” sees him win, even when he loses. Oliver, a new-style humane boss, was prepared to help Percy, but has to be realistic in the end, while the titular Stella – she of the “hair [that] had to be lived up to” – ultimately sees the fundamental difference between her and Percy. Needing excitement and show, she decides to go for it, but we are told enough to know that it is still a man’s world and that, for all her independence, things may not turn out the way she so confidently expects.

“The bookkeeper’s wife”, from its title to its ending, is so beautifully nuanced that, even today, one hundred years later, we might see that things are, perhaps, not as different as we might have expected.

Willa Cather
“The bookkeeper’s wife”
First published: in Century, May 1916. 
Available: Online at the Library of America

Melissa Lucashenko, Edenglassie (#BookReview)

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Broadly speaking, Melissa Lucashenko’s latest novel, Edenglassie, does for southeast Queensland what Kim Scott’s That deadman dance does for Noongar country in southwest Western Australia. Both tell of the early days of their respective colonies from a First Nations perspective; both are written in a generous spirit but with absolute clarity about the dispossession that took place; and both suggest things could have been different.

Unlike That deadman dance, however, Edenglassie, is a dual narrative story. The main storyline, featuring two young people, Mulanyin and Nita, is set around the Magandjin or Meanjin (Brisbane) region during the mid-1850s, making it just a little later than Scott’s first contact narrative. Dispossession, massacres and other brutalities from the colonisers were met with armed resistance, but there were also attempts to work together. Paralleling this historical story is a modern one, featuring Granny Eddie, Winona, and Dr Johnny, set in the same area at the time of its 2024 bicentenary. These stories, one using historical realism and the other modern humour, riff off each other to provide a complex picture of the colonial project – then and now.

Melissa Lucashenko said much that interested me in the conversation I attended for this book, but here I’ll focus on two points she made. One is that the book’s central question is “what was going through these people’s [the colonisers’] minds?” Things could have been different then, she said, and could still be now. The other point is that she wanted to counteract the trope of the dying race. This idea has been slowly changing since Mabo, she said, but is still evident. The modern storyline, with its confident and politically involved Goorie characters, ensures that we see a vibrant, living culture in action.

Realising these two ideas is a big ask, and in my reading group there were some equivocations, but I think Lucashenko pulls it off, through creating engaging characters who come alive on the page and narratives that ring true to their times. Mulanyin, the kippa (young initiated man) from the historical period, and Winona, the fiery young woman in modern times, represent the passion of youth. They are impatient and want things to happen – or change – now. Both, however, also have elders guiding them – in the Goorie way, which is to encourage people to work it out for themselves and to remedy their mistakes.

“needing to endure the unendurable” (Mulanyin)

So, what is it that these young characters must contend with? The novel starts with two pointed events. In the modern storyline, Granny Eddie trips over a jutting tree root and is ignored by passersby until two young brown faces – Malaysian students as it turns out – help her up and get her to hospital. The modern scene is set, and all is not well.

We then flash back to 1840 where members of the Goorie Federation are looking forward to the imminent departure of the dagai, only to be told that this is now unlikely. A Goorie mother wonders what

If life never returned to normal. If the rule of law was never restored. What would her son see as a man? … Would her daughters be subject to the terrors the dagai brought?

What indeed?

Having asked the question, Lucashenko then moves her historical story to 1854-1855. Mulanyin is living with his law-brother Murree north of his own saltwater Nerang/Yugambeh home. Here, he is in close contact with the colonisers, and particularly with the Petries. At this time, the Petries, particularly the young Tom Petrie, were sympathetic to, and tried in their own way to work with, the Goories on whose land they resided. Lucashenko seems to be saying that, given colonisation was happening and wasn’t going to be undone, there were ways in which it might have been made to work (or, at least, work better). Conversations between Tom, Mulanyin, and other characters, explore their differences, particularly regarding attitudes to country. Mulanyin wants to know

what goes on in the brain of an Englishman? When he arrives in another man’s country to steal his land, and water, and game, and then with a straight face, calls those he steals from thieves? Is this how it is in Scotland? Is this why your people have fled that terrible place?’

The ensuing discussion has Tom struggling to explain the English, but admitting that “in their ignorance, they don’t understand that the land here has its own Law. They think that only their British law exists”. However, he says, they “respect some boundaries still … Those that are well defended”.

What did ‘well defended’ look like, Mulanyin wondered, if not like a thousand Goories assembled at the Woolloongabba pullen pullen? If not like Dundalli, leading the warriors who had willingly assembled under him, from Dugulumba to K’gari?

Fair point, Mulanyin.

Meanwhile, the modern-day characters are living with the fall-out from the failure of the colonisers to make it work and of the colonised to succeed in their resistance. Goories are still here, yes, but life is a struggle, and Winona wants to fight back, wants “to bite em hard onetime, while we got the chance”. She can’t understand why Granny Eddie, who grew up “with a dirt floor and empty belly” doesn’t think she deserves more. Granny, though, is two things. A pragmatist who sees that “Dagai not going away! We gotta get on with them”. And she’s an elder well-versed in her culture, so when Winona takes a hardline with Dr Johnny, who claims Aboriginal heritage, Granny says

“You’re thinking like a whitefella when ya close him out. That’s not our way. We bring people in, we bring our Mob home, and we care about them. We teach them how to behave proper way…”

Further, she argues,

“We can’t be sunk in bitterness … Or stuck in the past. We need to focus on the good dagais, like Cathy and Zainab, and them Petries, and –.”

Winona, Granny Eddie and Mulanyin all make sense, but they speak from different angles. What makes Edenglassie so interesting is the way Lucashenko gives space and respect to these angles. She certainly shows what was lost – and the utter unfairness of it. But, with the generosity of spirit we keep seeing, she also shares through her characters what living with deep connection to country means. And, she encourages everyone to think about alternative ways we can do this.

Towards the end of the novel, Gaja (Aunty) Iris shares an important story with our modern protagonists, introducing it with

we all know how important our stories are … People all over the world keep their stories close. Middle Eastern people believe … that by telling a story you can change the world, and nothing is as powerful as the right story at the right time.

With ideas about truth-telling and decolonisation becoming part of modern Australian culture, now feels like the right time for stories like Edenglassie. It might be an uncomfortable time to be a settler Australian, but that’s nothing compared with what First Nations people have endured and continue to endure. The least we can do is try to understand. Books like Lucashenko’s not only help us along this path but give us a lively read at the same time.

Melissa Lucashenko
Edenglassie
St Lucia: UQP, 2023
306pp.
ISBN: 9780702266126

Myfanwy Jones, Cool water (#BookReview)

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When I was a little girl, I was allowed to watch a limited amount of television, and what I loved – yes, you can laugh at me – were the singing cowboys, like Roy Rogers and Gene Autry. We are talking the 60s and I was constrained by what was on at the times I was allowed to watch, but still, I gave my heart and soul to these cool dudes. At least, they were to me. All this is a long way around to say I love that Myfyanwy Jones’ third novel, Cool water, features one of my favourite songs from that era, the titular “Cool water”, but I’ll return to that later.

Cool water is a strong, but thoughtful novel about fathers and sons, about what makes a good man, and, particularly, about family and what we inherit (whether we like it or not). I have read a few novels since blogging that explore manhood and fatherhood, including books by Christos Tsiolkas and Steve Toltz. This is another, and I found it absorbing. Set in tiny Tinaroo in Yidindji Country on the Atherton Tablelands of Queensland, Cool water is structured around two storylines, one, set in contemporary times, and the other set over 1955 and 1956 during the building of Tinaroo dam. Threading through these two time-frames are three men, Frank, his father Joe, and grandfather Victor.

“Life was an extreme sport” (Frank)

The novel opens with a Prologue, featuring Victor, the town butcher, appearing supremely confident at a town event. But immediately there is something a bit askew in the way he is described. Not only is he “imposing”, but he’s “horribly handsome”. We are introduced to many of the characters who will appear in the story to come, but the Prologue closes at “the end of the hall, where fatherly embrace has become stranglehold: Joe, white-faced now, wide-eyed and wheezing, as Victor Herbert uses the crook of his arm to apply an unrelenting pressure …”

From here, we jump to the present and Victor’s grandson Frank. His father, Joe, has died in the last year, and he, his wife Paula and daughter Lily have returned to Tinaroo for Lily’s wedding. But all is not well. Joe casts such a shadow over Frank that his relationship with Paula is suffering. They are drawing apart. The novel is told third person, but in the contemporary story, it is all from Frank’s perspective, whereas in the earlier story we switch between Victor, young Joe, and a woman named Evelyn who, unhappy in her marriage, catches the philandering Victor’s eye. Jones handles the storylines well, but it is Frank’s voice which carries the novel as he struggles to make sense of his complicated father and be the man, husband and father he wants to be:

… he feared all the men in his family were cursed. And that however hard he tried to be good, he would not be able to escape his shadow.

By contrast, Joe is the murkiest character. We see him as a young boy, caught in an adult drama between Victor and Evelyn that he doesn’t understand. A sensitive boy, he has promise as a human being, but is the youngest and least tough of Victor’s three sons and bears more than his share of Victor’s brutality. Unlike Victor and Frank whom we know as adults, we only know adult Joe through Frank’s eyes. This can feel frustrating because a strong sense of intergenerational trauma underpins the novel but the Joe Frank describes doesn’t match the child we’ve met. However, through seeing how his father treated him, and hearing Frank’s (and his sister’s) recollections, we gradually fill in the gaps to see a man who didn’t fully shake his father’s brutal volatility. As the story progresses, we realise that Joe’s dreams of a different life to that mapped out by his butcher father had not been realised. His death seems to Frank, “a measured suicide” through “deliberate self-neglect”. He is the saddest character in the story.

All this is told against the backdrop of the dam and its lake – first the building of the dam, and later as a drought-stricken recreational facility. This three-generation story could have been set anywhere, so why choose this? I had some ideas, but wanted to see if Jones had been interviewed about it, and I found she had, at Good Reading Magazine. Jones says that her novels “always seem to start with place”, and so it was a visit to Tinaroo Dam which inspired this novel. She says that, “in 2017, Tinaroo Dam was at 25 per cent capacity and full of blue-green algae; pieces of the old, submerged town of Kulara had begun to surface – an eerie manifestation of the ever-present past”. 

And there you can see the inspiration. The dam is a powerful place, with a complicated history worth exploring but it also works as a useful metaphor for the “ever-present past” (and thus perfect for Jones’ exploration of intergenerational trauma). Dams and lakes, too, are intrinsically paradoxical, with dam-building representing violence and a desire to control, and lakes offering opportunities for beauty, peace and recreation. Jones uses this to full effect, including well-placed references to colonialism and First Nations dispossession, starting with subtle humour in the Prologue, where we are told that a visiting magician had “come a long way by ship (that said, so had most of the crowd, one way or another). In such ways can writers both truth-tell and decolonise our literature, without telling stories that are not their own.

As for the song, “Cool water”, lines from it appear a few times in the novel, always associated with Victor and always conveying some sense of menace, but also just a little perhaps of a lost soul, a war-damaged man who has lost his way. (In case you are interested, here is the version of “Cool water“, by Frankie Laine, that was popular in 1955 when the novel is set, but there are many versions out there which convey different senses of its meaning.)

Ultimately, Cool water is a hopeful novel, one that recognises and conveys unapologetically the very real damage that can happen in families, but that also sees, as Frank hopes early on, that “a different ending was always possible”. A sensitive novel that leaves much unanswered. I like that.

Myfanwy Jones
Cool water
Sydney: Hachette Australia, 2024
296pp.
ISBN: 9780733650024

(Review copy courtesy Hachette Australia)

Hell Herons, The Wreck Event

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In late June I attended the 2024 ACT Literary Awards which were held in the Canberra Contemporary Art Space. In my post on those awards, I shared the MCs’ acknowledgement of CCAS’s ongoing sponsorship. They made the point that this space is an appropriate venue because there are links between all artists, including the fact that many have interdisciplinary practices. At the end of that week, on 29 June, a work was launched that epitomises that idea.

The work is called The Wreck Event, and it is a spoken-word-and-music album, produced by the Hell Herons. While I had gradually become aware of it through my various social media channels, it was an email from one of the creators, Nigel Featherstone, which filled me in on the details. The Hell Herrons are, he said, a “new ACT-based (mostly!) spoken-word/music collective”.

This collective comprises four inspiring creators:

  • Melinda Smith (ACT): won the 2014 Prime Minister’s Prize for poetry with her collection, Drag down to unlock or place an emergency call (still on my TBR); author of multiple poetry collections
  • CJ Bowerbird (ACT): won the 2012 Australian Poetry Slam, in addition to performances at literary, poetry and folk festivals in Australia and internationally
  • Stuart Barnes (QLD): won the 2015 Thomas Shapcott Poetry Prize, was shortlisted for the Montreal International Poetry Prize, among several prizes and commendations for his poetry including his most recent shortlisting for Like to the lark published by Upswell.
  • Nigel Featherstone (regional NSW, neighbouring the ACT): shortlisted for the Queensland Literary Award, and ACT Artist of the Year 2022; author of several novellas/novels, many of which I have loved. (See my posts.)

I described them as inspiring, not only because of the impressive body of work they have all produced over years of commitment to their practice, but because of their willingness to take risks and push boundaries, including this latest project.

Nigel wrote that over the last two and a half years, the Hell Herons worked “more or less in secret, combining spoken-word poetry with original music”, their aim being “to play, experiment, and test the limits of what’s possible with the way recorded spoken-word interplays with music, specifically the electronic kind”. For Nigel, this project has been “one of the most exciting, surprising and exhilarating projects” he’s ever worked on. It’s the first for which he has been responsible for all the music. (The closest he has come before was being librettist for The weight of light, which I reviewed back in 2018.)

All four wrote and performed the words, while Nigel wrote, performed and recorded all the music. Then, with funding from artsACT, the final 16-song album was mixed and mastered by Kimmo Vennonen of kv productions. Kimmo re-recorded all the vocals and added elements of noise manipulation to round out the sound.

More about Hell Herons’ story and detailed artist bios can be found at their website. But, I’m not sure that the site explains their strange name, Hell Herons. Apparently, it comes from the nickname for a dinosaur whose fossilised remains were found on the Isle of Wight some years go. The scientific name given to it, Ceratosuchops inferodios, translates to “horned crocodile-faced hell heron”. Project-supervisor Neil Gostling of the University of Southampton is quoted in the The Guardian as saying “This is a really exciting piece of news for the dinosaur world as these are some of the most charismatic and enigmatic predators.” I don’t think our four Aussie Hell Herons see themselves as predators, but they can lay claim to being both “charismatic and enigmatic”.

The Wreck Event is available on 40 music-streaming platforms, including Spotify, Apple Music, and Deezer. It can also be download through Bandcamp. Singles from the album are planned, with “Nocturnal” featuring Melinda Smith, already released. This will be followed soon by “Bitumen Stitches” featuring CJ Bowerbird, then “Off-World Ghazal” with Stuart Barnes, and Nigel’s “The Literaries” later in the year. It is categorised in AppleMusic as Electronica.

My thoughts

Some of you, I know, are like me and enjoy poetry but don’t always find the time to put in the effort it often needs to truly appreciate. I have enjoyed poetry since I was a child, but it hit me recently that it was introduced to me orally, via my parents reading it to me. And that, I think, is the best way to experience and understand poetry – read it out loud, or hear it spoken. In this blog, I have talked about spoken poetry before, including posts on an interactive app for TS Eliot’s The wasteland, with its compelling spoken performance by Fiona Shaw.

Now, I am speaking about spoken poetry again, this time set to music. I can imagine what an exciting, fun, demanding, uplifting – and yes probably also challenging – time the Hell Herons had putting this work together, but the end result is something beautiful and mesmerising. Interestingly, the tracks list and liner notes do not identify which poet is responsible for which. Because it’s a collective? If you know them you can work it out.

There is a trajectory, or arc, to the order of the pieces, starting with a wake-up poem, “Wake into you”, which commences,

Here it comes:
the first breath
of a new day

And ending with the beautiful and almost elegiac, “Be this your peace”, which closes on us going to bed,

A nap on the couch in the afternoon, another 
the next day if you need, nine 
novels piled high beside your bed,
light out before dark comes on,
dreams that lift you up, silence. 
when the moon lies beside you

Be this your peace. 

These have both narrative and symbolic value to the whole. Between them are poems that express things in the poet’s lives or of concern to them, some personal (like “Nocturnal”, and “True shelter, for Robyn”), some political (like “Off-World Ghazal, for Judith Wright”), and some of course both (like “Little Gods”). As this was a project which started during the pandemic, its impact is felt, indirectly, but also directly in poems like “Lockdown Week 9 (show me)”. Nature, which was probably more dear to us than ever during the pandemic, features strongly, but especially in poems like “Paperdaisies”.

The whole album is worth listening to, but of course, some poems and performances stand out. I can’t name them all, and anyhow, for each of us it will be different. Poetry, and music, are personal. I will close on one that I found both powerful, and interesting, “Off-World Ghazal, for Judith Wright”. This poem was inspired by Judith Wright who, at the end of her career, wrote a series of poems in an Arabic/Persian form called Ghazal. Ghazals, says Wikipedia, “often deal with topics of spiritual and romantic love and may be understood as a poetic expression of both the pain of loss or separation from the beloved and the beauty of love in spite of that pain”. They have a strict form, and must not exceed 15 rhyming couplets. Wikipedia also says that some argue that, traditionally, the poem is “addressed to a beloved by the narrator”. Stuart Barnes’ ghazal seems to encompass this, with the beloved being the “World”. It is cheeky, angry and sad all at once about what is happening to the World, and the separation or loss which feels imminent. The distorted voice, and Nigel’s insistent music, further enhance the poem’s power.

Do check out The Wreck Event on your preferred music streaming service. It’s an inspired project, and I’d love to hear what you think.

Charlotte Wood, Stone Yard devotional (#BookReview)

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Charlotte Wood’s most recent novel, Stone Yard devotional, is set in the Monaro, a region just south of where I live. It’s a landscape that is much loved by many of us, including Nigel Featherstone, whose My heart is a little wild thing (my review) is also set there. The Monaro is expansive country, a dry, golden-brown plateau, characterised by rocky outcrops here and there, much as the cover shows. There are also hills in the distance, and big skies. Perfect country for contemplation, I’d say, which is exactly what Wood’s unnamed protagonist is doing there. (In fact, it’s also what Featherstone’s protagonist went there to do, for a very different reason – although, coincidentally, both books have something to do with mothers).

Stone Yard devotional is a quiet and warm-hearted read, one that asks its readers to not rush ahead looking for a plot, but to think about the deeper things that confront us all at one time or another. These things are hinted at by the two epigraphs, one being Australian musician Nick Cave’s “I felt chastened by the world”, and the other American writer Elizabeth Hardwick‘s “This is what I have decided to do with my life just now. I will do this work of transformed and even distorted memory and lead this life, the one I am leading today”. Add these to the title – with its hardscrabble sounding “Stone Yard” set against the gentle, inwardness of “devotional” – and you have a sense of the intensity to be found within.

“a place of industry, not recreation”

While this is not a plot-driven novel, there is a definite narrative arc. Taking the form of undated journal entries, the novel covers a period in the life of a middle-aged woman who has left her city life – her husband, her job in threatened species conservation, and her friends – to live in an abbey on the Monaro. It starts with a five-day stay, which is followed by more stays until the time comes when she arrives and doesn’t leave. Why she does this is not explicitly explained but through her contemplations we come to see that there’s unresolved grief in her life over the death of her parents some three decades earlier and, alongside this, a level of existential despair which has built up over time.

This is the set up. The narrative arc comes from three “visitations” to the abbey – a mouse plague which ramps up as the novel progresses, and the celebrity “environmental activist nun” Helen Parry, who accompanies the bones of the murdered Sister Jenny who had left the abbey decades ago to work among poor women in Thailand. These three events, both real and metaphoric in import, present practical and moral challenges, “a rupture” but also “a frisson of change”, for our narrator, and for all at the abbey.

So, we follow Wood’s narrator as she settles into life at the abbey, taking on the role of cooking for the group, and, as their non-religious member, the shopping and other errands that need to be done. Much industry is required to keep the place running when there is no financial help from the church, but the main industry is emotional and spiritual (in its wider meaning). Early on, our narrator recognises that prayer and contemplation “is the work … is the doing”. For her, as an atheist, this is not religious in origin or intent, but nonetheless contemplation is the real work she does while living at the abbey.

Much of this contemplation is invoked by flashbacks to and memories of events from the past, some experienced by her and others that happened around her (like the suicide of a farmer). Many involve her beloved and humane mother, who, like nuns Helen and Jenny, was an “unconventional”, determined to continue along her path despite what others thought. Such contemplation is hard, and our narrator is tested by the “visitations”, particularly Helen Parry with whom she has history involving bullying at school. Our narrator wishes to apologise but, as she comes to see, the hard work is in coming to that point of apology, not in having the apology accepted. But, forgiveness and atonement are only part of the bigger questions posed in this novel. Grief, despair and, ultimately, how to live are also part of its ambit – and are set against the shadow of climate change and its implications for our lives and choices.

This sort of exploration, however, can only work if we like the telling, and I found it thoroughly compelling. Stone Yard devotional is delicious for its details about life in an abbey on the “high, dry, Monaro plains, far from anywhere”, and for its insights into the women living there. No character is fully developed, but each, from the “business-like but soft-looking” leader Sister Simone to the distressed Sister Bonaventure, feels real in the role she’s been given in the narrative. While there’s not a lot of dialogue, our narrator reports on interactions between the women, and these contribute to her contemplations about life. She is not perfect and admits to moments of pettiness and poor judgement in her dealings with her co-habitants. Contrasting this little community is local farmer Richard Gittens, who supports the abbey in many practical ways and who represents, as our narrator recognises, “decency”.

All this is told in spare but expressive writing that maintains a tone which is serious and reflective, but which never becomes bleak.

There is no single, final enlightenment, but rather, as the narrator says earlier in the novel, “an incomplete, unhurried emergence of understanding, [a] sitting with questions that are sometimes never answered”. This is the sort of writing I love to read. In some fundamental way, it reminded me of my favourite Wallace Stegner quote. In Angle of repose, he wrote that “civilisations grow by agreements and accommodations and accretions, not by repudiations”. Through living this life in retreat, Wood’s narrator comes to know herself better. In so doing, she is able to lay some of her demons to rest, not through any major crisis but through quiet contemplation. The abbey does, indeed, turn out to be a “place of refuge, of steadiness. Not agitation”.

Interestingly, and perhaps pointedly, the novel ends on an anecdote about the narrator’s mother and her “reverence for the earth itself”. Ultimately, Wood invites us, without exhortation, to not be “chastened by the world” but to do the hard work of thinking about what is really important. A compassionate, and gently provocative, book.

Kimbofo (Reading Matters) also liked this book.

Charlotte Wood
Stone Yard devotional
Crows Nest: Allen & Unwin, 2023
297pp.
ISBN: 9781761069499

Eli Funaro, The dog pit (#Review)

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Eli Funaro’s “The dog pit” is the twelfth of fourteen stories in the anthology, Great short stories by contemporary Native American writers. Like the previous stories by Thomas King and Duane Niatum, it was written in the 1990s.

Eli Funaro

Anthology editor Bob Blaisdell provides very little information about Funaro, and I have to say that I have very little more to add. Blaisdell says that he “seems to hail from Minnesota, where he is a video director” and that his “plain-spoken and shocking story was written for a program at the Institute of American Indian Arts at Santa Fe”. That’s it.

All I’ve found is that someone called Eli Funaro – presumably the same one – is part of a media company called A Tribe Called Geek, which describes itself as

an award-winning media platform for Indigenous Geek Culture and Stem. But we are more than just a media platform. We are a community of intelligent, imaginative, innovative and creative Indigenerds acknowledging and advancing the visibility of our contributions to pop culture and STEM. From indigenous superheroes to Harry Potter and more, our podcasts, website and social media are a celebration of Indigenous Representation and Geekery.

When I tried to enter the “A Tribe Called Geek” website, I got one of those “Not Secure” warnings. While it’s probably OK to proceed, I’m not prepared to take the risk.

So, all I have is a list of 35 articles by Eli Funaro at a site called Muck Rack. Clicking on the articles takes me to that website with its “not secure” warning, and to find out more about Funaro at Muck Rack I have to join, which I’m not going to do. Funaro is not in Wikipedia, and nor is A Tribe Called Geek, but Muck Rack is. It’s a software program that “connects public relation offices and journalist listing on social media”.

What all this says to me is that Funaro seems to be more a journalist than a writer of fiction, and that his affiliation and ongoing interest is Indigenous. His articles – some of which are dated “three months ago” – seem to be mostly reviews, such as of the Wolverine movie, and of Marvel comics. The list provides a brief summary, or the opening sentence, and it’s clear that most reference “Indigenous” issues. For example, on Marvel’s Echo comics, Funaro writes that “of all the Indigenous Heroes appearing in the Marvel Universe, Echo stands out as one of the more unique comic book characters”.  Echo – or Maya Lopez – is a Cheyenne woman.

“The dog pit”

“The dog pit” is one of the shortest stories in the anthology. It is told first person in the voice of an eight-year old boy who lives on the “rez” – reservation – where, he tells us, “no garbage trucks … came to pick up your trash”, the implication being that other people had this service. So, Saturday is Garbage Day, and our narrator and his dad’s job is to haul their garbage to the dump.

The story opens with “It was a sunny Saturday, the day that dog died”. A few paragraphs in we are introduced to our boy’s dog Corky, for which his father seems to have little time. “You fed that mutt yesterday” he says, when the boy wants to feed his dog before they head off. But soon they are on their way, along “untitled roads”. Another indication of their second-class status.

The boy finds a pink ball in the glove-box and starts playing with it. However, when his father, having told him he can have it, also tells him he’d taken it from a dead man at the hospital where he works as a janitor, the boy is not so sure he wants it. His father, we are learning, is a practical man. Life is tough and he doesn’t have time for sentiment.

So they get to the dump, with its piles of burning trash and rancid smell, empty their bins, and go through their routine of bleaching their bins before they leave for home. While this is happening, the boy picks up the ball again, only to be told by his dad that the old man who had died holding the ball had probably not been the only person to have died holding it. This makes him anxious; he fears there will be many dead people angry with him if he keeps the ball.

Then we get to the death of the dog mentioned in the opening sentence. It involves the titular dog pit, and is cruel. The boy doesn’t know what to make of it, but doesn’t want his dog to end up there. HIs father, who might be practical, is not hard and says this wouldn’t have to happen. The story concludes with the boy creating his own stories about death with his new Zartan and Stormshadow toys, but also on a sense of a childish ability to put it aside. This is where I come a bit unstuck, because a point is being made in referencing these GI Joe-series figures, but there are cultural nuances that I am not fully across.

On the surface, “The dog pit” is a story about the innocence-versus-experience aspect of youth, on the gradual way we become aware of the darker side of life without taking it all in at once, but there are deeper socioeconomic and sociocultural issues being explored here, ones that Funaro seems to have continued to explore.

It’s not a perfect story. The language doesn’t always stay true to an eight-year-old’s voice, but this is probably the work of a young writer. It works overall, however, because it’s tightly told.

Eli Funaro
“The dog pit” (orig. pub. 1994)
in Bob Blaisdell (ed.), Great short stories by contemporary Native American writers
Garden City: Dover Publications, 2014
pp. 95-99
ISBN: 9780486490953