Anne Cameron died last week. Her publisher, Howard White of Harbour Publishing, said of her, “I don’t think anyone has captured the working-class, B.C. coastal … community as well as she has,” going on to describe her as “the William Faulkner of the B.C. coast.”
While I’m a loyal member of RaWBC, it strikes me that my part of the world is under-represented in its selections. Furthermore we folks here have a unique perspective on contemporary issues, and some world-class writers working on them. Therefore this the first of a series of reviews of writing from here.
In 1997 I wrote a chapter on social capital for a textbook on Community Economic Development that our post-bac class went on to publish, and included Cameron’s novel, The Whole Dam Family, in the bibliography. I was already at odds with the starry-eyed social justice warriors of the CED department and their naïvely judgemental outlook on the world around them. I included Cameron’s book as a kind of wake-up call, so that they would have to acknowledge the lived reality of those who they would someday supposedly be working with—and for. It scared the hell out of them. “Very disturbing,” was the verdict. But not one person claimed it was false, exaggerated, or sensationalized, because it could have been lifted from the police report of any town on the coast.
Cameron’s writing is like her characters, short on finesse, but ferociously alive. There are probably Booker prize winners who would auction their first-born on eBay for her gift of vital, compelling characterization. Her characters dont just convince us; they are so real that they almost light matches on our furniture, blow smoke in our faces, touch us for a loan or a drink. Here are the brawling, boozing, bawdy, defiant, wistful, confused and sometimes tragic working people of the B.C. coast. I’ve lived next door to these people, sat next to them in school, in the next chair in the pub.
In their own tough, ribald speech laced with gallows humour, women and children, loggers, truckers, and fish-packers, hammer out survival between logging shows, welfare, one-nighters, foster homes, the streets and the ‘crowbar hotel,’ insisting on the ornery individuality of real human beings that overwhelms all the tidy categories of social programs. The wonderul language drives the story the way rhythm drives a dance. To read Cameron is realize what a flabby, empty carcass most media writing is. Her work makes Hillbilly Elegy seem like it was written by a tourist.
None of Cameron’s books are available as ebooks, but any good library should have them. And almost all of them are available as actual books from her publisher, a gutsy little outfit that deserves some love:
Cyberwyrd Media 