“50 Stories and a Piece of Advice” by David Arnason

In his three recent publications, Marsh Burning, The Icelanders, and 50 Stories and a Piece of Advice, David Arnason experiments with language and form, revealing experience through incredible feats of storytelling, expressing a poetic voice that is unique in Canadian literature.

Marsh Burning is a long poem in which Arnason describes his geographical journey from the Maritimes home to Lake Winnipeg; his emotional journey from confusion into a personal awareness of his fully human self and his mythic, double-edged quest into his past and forward towards the creation of his own mythology. The poem becomes, for the reader, not only a journey into another person’s consciousness and search for awareness, understanding and synthesis, but a quest towards poetic and mythic discovery. Through both the making and the breaking of the poem, poetic actions are held within the open-ended structure of the book, and through the mythology that informs the poem, the poet attempts to synthesize his past, a communal mythic heritage, with his present—empty and barren of a vital mythology. Arnason, deconstructing a mythic past and suffering through this breaking, expresses himself more and more clearly as the poem finds form, as his poetic voice is created. For the voice that emerges, clear and resonant, even as it is perplexed with its own story, creates the vitality of this quest and pushes into the openness of the future. It is a unique voice, rich not only with image and metaphor and myth, but with a wonderful honesty and humility. The structure of the poem is like the form of Lake Winnipeg itself: the making and breaking that informs it, that constant beating against and within the outline of the form is much like the waves within the lake; the rhythm of their beating is the rhythm of the poem itself. The poem is intensely sad, powerfully human; it reveals the growth of the poet as he struggles towards an acceptance of his own loneliness, towards a vision of his life as fragmentary, contained only within the form of the poem.

In The Icelanders, a documentary/collage, compiled with artist Michael Olito, Arnason articulates his vision of his ancestors as they settled on the shores of Lake Winnipeg. The book, a collage of poems, stories, statements and recollections of the settlers, as well as beautifully evocative photographs, is a personal testimony to the settlers’ unique experience on the prairie landscape. Unconcerned with creating a book that is “representative or fair or complete,” Arnason wants to reveal and create the stories that affirm the communal integrity of their lives. Central to his vision, he comments: “Let’s get rid of one lie. Let’s not assume that our ancestors were any simpler than we are or any better either … They were fully human, neither mythic giants nor simple primitives. Let’s give them that.” The book, then, attempts to portray them as they were, in all their complexity; the language and photographs work back and forth, forming correspondences towards a greater whole. Like Marsh Burning, The Icelanders reveals a mythic quest home to a new place; and again, the rhythm of the collection reflects the rhythm of the lake.

In 50 Stories and a Piece of Advice, Arnason experiments with the full range of his poetic voice, with the rich possibilities of language and structure as they connect to form the short story. Each of these stories is exciting and innovative—and all are different from each other. Even as Arnason experiments outrageously in language, with narrative technique and voice, forming stories that move towards both fragmentation and wholeness and burst upon each other, his personal voice, vital within each story, harmonizes the collection. Like Lake Winnipeg, the setting of many of the stories, the work is “an ambiguity”: each story, unusual to begin with, changes as the others in the collection bear down upon it, becoming fuller, more complex.

The title story consists of 50 anecdotes that capture the oral form, and a “piece of advice” from the innocent, often perplexed narrator: “I’ll tell you a secret. If you look in a mirror, you don’t really see yourself, because everything is backward.” Each succinct anecdote, describing an event or an opinion that moves the narrator, is a complete unit:

I used to have this crazy habit of trying to keep my direction clear. I’d figure out how many times I’d turned left, and then I’d turn right enough times to make it even. I’d wait till all the other kids had gone into school after recess, then just stand there and spin until it was right. One day the teacher caught me and asked me what I was doing. I didn’t tell her, but I never did it again.

These momentary glimpses of character run the gamut of human emotion, for the narrator records extremely funny events, detailed descriptions of acts of cruelty, and ordinary occurrences in an objective voice, delivering his memories in a dead-pan style:

There were two sisters who lived just down the road from us. Irene and Eileen Johnson, who were both albinos. They had white hair and pink eyes and thick glasses that make their eyes look huge. Irene had lots of boyfriends and finally ran away with an airman. Eileen never went anywhere except to school and ended up with a nervous breakdown. I could never tell the difference between them.

Through his use of a narrator who is involved in telling his own story, recalling and inventing his own past through his storytelling, Arnason creates a synthesis of character and experience that is constantly changing, in much the same fashion that all spoken stories change in the process of their telling.

All of the stories in this book are worth reading at least once: as the anecdotes of 50 Stories and a Piece of Advice work collectively to form a whole image of human experience, so each individual story functions within the whole of the collection. Arnason’s strong sense of story and language, evident in his earlier work, is synthesized here: the result is a collection of poetic, graceful stories. ■

Kathie Kolybaba is a Winnipeg freelance writer with special interests in contemporary Canadian poetry and fiction.