BC authors deliver authentic products

Sometimes our jobs keep us so busy we don’t really have time to cogitate. Occasionally, we are granted a hiatus in the relentless pulse of the ordinary, just enough time to give the brain a space to do its deep work. And thus I recently found myself worrying over a question that I never thought much about when I was younger: what makes something “authentic”?

True, we are surrounded by cultural “junk,” most of which we would do well to ignore -- were it not so sleazily accessible and comfortably seductive. But I’m not talking about derivative movies or objects featured on the Antiques Road Show. I’m thinking about those current expressions of culture we consume, sometimes passively, sometimes intimately and sometimes from afar. Who will forget the sight of those fluttering orange nylon banners as the Christo/Jeanne-Claude exhibit unfurled in New York's Central Park last week? Authentic? Yes, I’d say so, since it is based on 25 years of effort on the artists’ part.

According to my Concise Oxford Dictionary, the word authentic springs from the Greek, authentikos, meaning principal or genuine. Thus, for anything to be authentic, it must be “reliable, trustworthy; of undisputed origin, genuine.”

Aha, there’s the rub: reliable and trustworthy according to whom? Is this another way of asking that a piece of art or writing be “honest” or represent the “truth” before it is considered genuine? Yes, and no, because authenticity is often far more complicated than that. On my desk right now I have three non-fiction books, each of which I would say is unique in its authenticity. (Each of these books was released by a small regional press; none is the product of the national and international behemoths that bring us mass best sellers.)

For me, the most affecting of these is Bruce Serafinís memoir, Colin’s Big Thing, published by Ekstasis Editions of Victoria. Despite its lamentable (copyeditors, wherefore art thou?) spelling errors, this is a serious intellectual work in which Serafin struggles to understand influences that shaped him over the past three decades, mostly spent in Vancouver. The author, a founder of The Vancouver Review, worked for Canada Post for many years, and his segments on workplace anomie and demoralization are fantastic and frightening. This is a funny, frank and at times painful book to read, but I am glad Serafin had the courage to write it.

In almost the exact middle of the book, Serafin speaks directly to the question of authenticity as he reports his younger self musing over the difference between the books on his bookshelves (“conventional books: Benjamin Kafka, Barthes”) and those of his roommate (“chapbooks and pamphlet-type books”), a man nicknamed Popeye with whom he shares a house on Odlum Drive. “Those books are connected to the local world almost by an umbilical cord,” Serafin writes “My books are cut off from the world in which people grope for words. They’re achieved things. The barrier between them and the language I hear and speak every day seems like a steel wall. But when I open Popeye’s books and read a good line, it’s as if between the world of the Hastings bus and the world of words a hot spark has jumped.”

That hot spark of authenticity is also evident in a quite different book, Victoria ethnobotanist Nancy J. Turnerís impressive Plants of Haida Gwaii, published by SonoNis Press, now located in Winlaw, B.C. A product of 30 years of work passionately pursued and scrupulously researched, Turner’s book is beautifully produced; its pages resonate with the author’s humility before her subject. She thanks and acknowledges generations of Queen Charlotte elders, especially the late Florence Davidson and her family, who assisted her studies. When you look at this book, don’t mistake it for a textbook; it is an invaluable, intimate recording of an indigenous people’s lived life and of the 150 species of native plants they use so ingeniously and know so well.

Past events and present concerns impelled Andrew Struthers to write The Last Voyage of the Loch Ryan, published by New Star Books of Vancouver. Struthers’s book melds both humour and fine writing -- call it an idiosyncratic history-adventure-memoir. Here’s a bit of the flavour of his voice: “Some are born to adventure, some find adventure and some are dragged ass-backward through adventure, screaming for mercy to gods they no longer believe in. I’m in the last group. Still, it’s better than a day job.”

Struthers is a sharp observer and a fine storyteller; that’s more than enough reason to forgive the occasional excesses of his larger than life buccaneering persona. “I love this ragged coast,” he writes at the end of his adventures. “Long after the rest of the world had hardened into nouns, this place remained a bright, soft verb. Now a great tide was sweeping us from adventure into capital, and . . . . you can only buck the tide until your arms get tired.” We are lucky that Struthers bucked the tides long enough to write this book and share his insights into Clayoquot Sound history and a certain irrepressible segment of West Coast zeitgeist.

So, three claims for authenticity, all from one subjective reader -- me. Thinking about the above troika of unlike books , I've concluded that authenticity may be achieved in several ways: by lived experience, honestly reported; by experimentation leading towards reasoned conclusions or by thorough research, based in actual events and places. Certainly, the fact that we tend to recognize the authentic instinctively or viscerally does not add clarity to any discussion of its existence. So don’t take my word for it: go out and discover some authentic books of your own. And if you have the time and the talent, write us a few of them, too.