Tag: Kim Fahner

57. Iryn Tushabe, Everything Is Fine Here

Here’s my last blog post of 2025: a brief appreciation of Regina writer Iryn Tushabe’s Everything Is Fine Here. Before I get to that welcome task, I want to express some gratitude the fact that I’ve read some 60 books this year (I didn’t blog about a couple here but did elsewhere). I love my job, but it takes all of my energy, and the fact that I managed to read these (mostly short) books is a wonder. I have friends (I’m looking at you, Tanis MacDonald and Kim Fahner, but I know many other friends fit this description, too) who seem to read a book every day and even post capsule reviews of them online. My average of one book per week will have to do for now, even though it doesn’t feel particularly ambitious. I mean, one of my students, a talented and prolific poet, has set out to read Moby Dick over the holidays. That’s ambition. By comparison, I am a lazybones.

But I did read Iryn Tushabe’s Everything Is Fine Here. I wanted to read it earlier, and it became my holiday treat, filling the space usually occupied by Great Expectations, which contains my favourite Christmas dinner in literature (poor Pip!). Not that Everything Is Fine Here is a Christmas story: it isn’t. It’s a story about a family that’s divided by religious bigotry exported to Uganda by American evangelical Christians. One of the latest shapes colonialism takes, I suppose, although I’d hazard to bet that the British left sodomy laws behind when they decamped. It’s also a coming-of-age novel; the protagonist, Aine, is 18 years old, an aspiring naturalist and writer (is that a nod to another Regina writer, Trevor Herriot? I should ask Iryn the next time I see her), caught between her “savedee” mother and her courageous sister. I don’t want to say anything more about the narrative, which moves in surprising directions, because I don’t want to spoil this book for anybody.

What can I say, then, that won’t give anything away? How about a list of what I liked about this charming first novel? I really liked the book’s representation of Kampala, for one thing. I doubt I’ll ever go there, and my experience would be different from Tushabe’s, since she was born in Uganda, but she caught what I imagine to be the complexity of an African capital. I liked the chapters at Aine’s boarding school, too. They’re different from the boarding schools in Alpha Nkuranga’s Born to Walk–Nkuranga went to school in Uganda as a Rwandan refugee, and the cruelty she encountered shocked me–and I was heartened by the idea that not all such institutions are so horrible. Not that there isn’t cruelty in Everything Is Fine Here: the worst possible outcomes of Uganda’s laws prohibiting same-sex relationships shape the narrative, but the cruelties are smaller, more domestic and familial. Not that small cruelties are acceptable or easy–no. Even the savedees ought to understand that their God must’ve created people who love in different ways, and that if those kinds of love are acceptable to that God, they ought to be acceptable to us, too. Besides, those verses about same-sex relationships in Leviticus? That book of laws is full of lots of things that, if taken literally, would lead to our executions, including the shirt I wore yesterday, a mix of polyester and merino wool. No blended fabrics, according to Leviticus! Breaking that rule meant death. Yes, I know we’re probably supposed to understand that metaphorically, as a commandment against marrying unbelievers or something, but too many people take the commandments in Leviticus literally. If we’ve put the one about blended fabrics aside, if we’ve decided that makes little difference to us now, maybe we could put some of the other laws aside, too. Things have changed.

I loved this description of reading fiction, too:

Aine stayed outside on the veranda, engrossed in the novella. Time always flew by when she read fiction. Her senses sharpened, connecting her to a world where people were dealing with problems much like her own, making her feel less alone.

I’m reminded of the Life magazine interview where James Baldwin talks about the way that reading lets us know that our challenges are not unique to us, and I know Tushabe is aware of that interview, but the notion that reading sharpens our senses is new to me. If I ever get a chance to teach a course on fiction, I’ll offer this quotation as a hypothesis for my students: is this what happens to you when you read fiction?

I liked so many other things about this book: the straightforward incorporation of African languages into dialogue, the description of life in a small town, the recitations of the names of birds, the characters who are good and bad mixed together, whose behaviour can be understood even if it’s unworthy of them. So Everything Is Fine Here did turn out to be my holiday treat.

48. Kim Fahner, The Pollination Field

I missed the launch of my friend Kim Fahner’s new book, The Pollination Field, this past week, so I slid a copy into my carry-on bag to read on the flight to Ontario. It’s a book about bees, although other insects, including wasps, monarch butterflies, and especially dragonflies, also make appearances. Sometimes the bees are themselves, in all their apparently cruel and honeyed lives; sometimes they are ways of thinking about heartbreak, grief, and illness. The Pollination Field goes in other directions, too, including solastalgia, notably in “An Elegy for Australia, Burning”:

The kangaroos rush ahead of the flames,

try to outrun the impossible. Days later—

after the firestorm has passed—they are found,

charred statues of bodies caught up in wire fences,

echoes of a shattered nightmare, coloured in inferno.

Among the lyric poems, which draw on the work of artists (Mo Hamilton, Sara Angelluci, Andrea Kowch) and other poets (Jericho Brown, Roo Birson, Carolyn Forché, Vijay Sheshadri), along with marine signals and a wide range of knowledge and lore, are imagined tales about bees. The first, in which a beekeeper becomes enveloped in wax by her bees, reminded me of the art of Aganetha Dyck, except that rather than an object becoming part of the hive, a human does. Fahner also uses a variety of fixed forms, with encourages me to learn more about such things.

So yes, I missed my friend’s launch, but that spurred me to finally read her beautiful book: something good coming out of something bad.

My copies of Walking the Bypass: Notes on Place From the Side of the Road have arrived!

I posted on social media last week about this milestone in my writing career, but one photograph and a couple of lines of text didn’t manage to convey my excitement about getting my copies of my forthcoming book, Walking the Bypass: Notes On Place From the Side of the Road.

When I got home from work last Wednesday, I immediately saw the box on the kitchen table. The contents were obvious even without looking at my publisher’s return address on the shipping label: copies of my book. Ten of them, to be specific–tangible evidence of years of writing and editing. And, of course, walking.

It took an hour or so before I summoned the courage to open the box. This is my first book. I never expected to write, never mind publish, one. Ten years ago, I played a dull-witted university dean in Brian Stockton’s feature-length comedy, The Sabbatical. My character, Dean Vernon, tells the film’s protagonist, James Pittman, a burned-out photography professor who’s afraid he’ll perish if he doesn’t publish, that publishing a book is a big deal, because it means someone thinks so highly of your work that they’re willing to kill trees for it. And here, in this box, is evidence that someone was willing to do that for mine. Walking the Bypass, as my character tells James, has weight and heft. It’s unique and ambitious, too. I hope it finds an audience and has a long life. I’ll do everything I can to help, but as my writer friend Kim Fahner tells me, it’ll find its own way. I trust her, because she knows about writing and publishing: she’s published several books of poetry and a novel, and she’s working on a creative-nonfiction manuscript. Her new book of poems, The Pollination Field, arrived two weeks ago, and now that the summer course I’ve been teaching is finished, I’m looking forward to reading it.

The striking cover design is by Duncan Campbell, one of the last ones he did before he retired from University of Regina Press. I took the photograph: it’s what you see if you’re walking north on the Regina Bypass as it approaches the Highway 1/Ring Road interchange. What the photograph doesn’t convey is the sound of pigeons roosting beneath the overpasses and the loud, hollow banging of trucks hitting the expansion joints of the highway above. For those kinds of details, you’ll need to read the book.

Alex McPhee drew the map that graces the first pages of Walking the Bypass. When my copy of his full-colour map of Saskatchewan arrived, I knew that if I ever needed a map for a publication, I would ask him. His work is beautiful. If you’re not from Regina, and you need a visual guide to where I’m taking you, Alex’s map will help. There are photographs inside the book as well. One of my goals in writing this book was to give its readers a vivid sense of what it’s like to circumnavigate Regina by walking on the shoulder of the new highway that goes around it. I sometimes joke that I walked the Bypass so that you don’t have to–although after you read Walking the Bypass, you might be inspired to follow my example. Like other journeys I’ve made on foot, the one I write about in this book was transformative. It changed the way I think about this place.

Two writers I admire immensely wrote blurbs for the cover. Candace Savage calls Walking the Bypass “original, unsettling, and provocative,” and Louise B. Halfe-Skydancer says that the book “reminds settlers of the need to remember intergenerational responsibility, atonement, and decolonization–words that might describe a path forward.” To have writers of their calibre say such things about something I’ve written–well, it’s overwhelming.

Walking the Bypass: Notes On Place From the Side of the Road will be officially released on October 14. There will be launches in Regina and possibly elsewhere, and I’m looking forward to reading from it in Ontario later this fall. In the meantime, you can preorder it from University of Regina Press, from online retailers, or from your favourite independent bookseller.

5. Kim Fahner, The Donoghue Girl

Kim Fahner is a poet, an essayist, and a playwright. She’s also publishes book reviews on what seems to be a weekly basis! She teaches high school full time, too. I don’t know how she manages to be so productive.

The Donoghue Girl is Kim’s first novel. It’s a historical novel, set mostly around Sudbury (where Kim lives) between 1938 and 1940. It tells a story about a family, the Donoghues, who live above a general store in a village called Creighton Mine. That family has one son, Jack, and four daughters; as I began reading, I wondered which of those daughters was “the” Donoghue girl of the book’s title. That definite article got me curious. It doesn’t refer to Nellie, the daughter who is in a convent, preparing to take holy orders, because we never see her. It can’t suggest Maisie, because she’s a relatively minor character. It could be Ann, the oldest sister, who is the narrative focus of some of the early chapters, but she shares that position with Lizzie and an outsider to the family, Michael Power, who works at the nickel mine in the village. I’m not going to spoil anything here, but as the book continues, it becomes clear that the title refers to Lizzie. She’s the protagonist.

My questions about the novel’s title aren’t a criticism. They’re an example of how the book uses the phenomenon that the French literary critic Roland Barthes called “the hermeneutic code,” the aspect of narrative that generates questions that readers want answered, mysteries they want solved. Of course, the only way to answer those questions or solve those mysteries is to keep reading. The hermeneutic code propels us through the narrative; it keeps us engaged. And it’s hard at work in The Donoghue Girl. As I read, I kept asking myself: what’s going to happen next? Surprise followed surprise. Characters developed in ways that took me off guard. Events were unpredictable. It was all much like life itself–things happen we don’t anticipate. We know from the time period that war looms on the horizon, but it comes into the story in surprising ways. And while we might be expecting, or hoping for, a love story, that desire, and desire itself, becomes complicated as the story progresses.

One of the blurbs on the novel’s back cover refers to its consideration of “binding gender roles,” and that’s definitely one of The Donoghue Girl‘s main themes. The women in the story work within the limitations imposed on them, or struggle against those restrictions. In a different way, the men do, too. We learn about the trauma of one of the male characters, and the way that trauma shapes his surprising weaknesses. At least, that’s how I understood him. I could be wrong. His behaviour is unacceptable, yes, but Fahner is generous in showing us why he acts that way.

I’m trying not to give away any spoilers here, because Kim is a friend, and I want you to read her book. I thought the writing was lovely, something that doesn’t surprise me at all, given her poetry and essays. Take this paragraph from the middle of The Donoghue Girl as evidence:

Long after everyone else had gone in, turned from waving down the road, Lizzie stood there, solitary, her arms wrapped around her waist, as if to gather herself in so that she wouldn’t fall apart into a million pieces. Tears ran down her face, drying there in the late spring breeze, as she stood watching down the dirt road, until the bright glint of sunlight on the car’s back bumper sent a streak of silver across her eyes, until she knew he had moved away from her.

I wish I could write like that.

I’d say more about this book, but the morning is progressing, and I need to gather myself together for the day. I’m glad, though, that I couldn’t sleep last night, because I got up, lay on the living room sofa, and finished The Donoghue Girl. Right now, I’m willing to trade sleep for a good book. Sleep won’t come to me anyway, so I’d better make the best of things.