When we published our Cultural Master Plan for Bowen Island back in 2017, I had the observation that the best way to make a living as an artist on this island was to sell Bowen Island to Bowen Islanders. It seems that every household has paintings of the scenes that lie just outside their windows. Songs I have written about life on the island have been taken up as markers of our collective experience. Poems about the place always make people nod with approval about the beauty and deep currents of the place.
And then there is The View.
Jackie Minns and David Cameron are two of our cultural treasures (link opens in Facebook). They are playwrights and actors with a particular knack for capturing the absurd and funny and the tender in their satires about island life. These last two weeks they have remounted their production of The View, originally staged in 2007 at the Legion, before we had a performing arts centre to work in. This week, finally – after 30 years or so on the island and numerous productions staged in pubs, parks and pop-up venues – they brought it home to our new performing arts centre. Under the direction of their son Andrew Cameron and featuring two other stalwart Bowen Island actors, Kat Stephens and Fraser Elliot, The View was unleashed upon us.
The play is about neighbours. A new couple from well to do West Vancouver, Deborah and Kenneth, begins building a house on the west side of the island and find themselves next door neighbours to Zorg and Angel, long time islanders who practice tantric yoga, chakra healing and chainsaw sculpture. The fifth character in the play is the never-seen Douglas-fir that grows on their property line. Zorg and Angel love the tree, Deborah say it blocks her view of the sea and wants it gone. Kenneth just goes along with whichever person is yanking his chain at the moment.
Somehow, on a single set, with merely four actors, the cast finds a way to skewer almost everyone on Bowen. The old timers, the newcomers, the artists, the community builders, the wealthy and the just-scraping-by. The developers and the eco-greenies. The stoners and the sophisticates. It is a feature of the play that every single person in the audience has at least one little squirm, all the while having a good belly laugh at who we are.
There was truly something for everyone. Little cultural anomalies like “Just take my truck. The keys are in it and you can leave it in the Cove…” The cast themselves aren’t spared either. Ironies such as the fact that the hapless Kenneth, the stunned but up-for-it newcomer to the island is played by local real estate agent Fraser Elliot. Jackie Minns is a yoga teacher. David does many of the things that Zorg does for a living. Kat is the furthest thing from her character. She grew up on Bowen, acted since she was a little kid, babysat the director Andrew when he was small, and survived as the only girl a well-loved family of fastball-playing brothers.
Every community needs its bards and storytellers. On Bowen we are lucky to have these ones. They capture a little piece of our character, tender self-deprecation, that lightens the sometimes intensely specific conflicts that can divide a small community. If you can’t laugh at yourself, you aren’t doing it right. These folks help us do it right.
Anyone who knows the Salish Sea in the summertime will recognize this image of still, flat water at slack tide reflecting every imaginable colour at sunset.
This week we were travelling by sailboat through the Hul’q’umi’num speaking territories of the Gulf Islands in the Salish Sea. The posts this week reflect both my usual monkey-mind reading habit and some travel notes from the trip.
- July 27, 2025: systems and cycles: economics and other system
- July 28, 2025: quiet, prayers, and landscapes of war and peace: some theology, a book to read and blessed quiet
- July 29, 2025: place noting and place making: noticing place, making notes and making trade.
- July 30, 2025: connected through tsunamis, contentment, austerity and football: we weather a tsunami advisory, and I think about the good life, suffering and how football advocates.
- July 31,2025: a miscellany of things about time and pay warm water begs us to stay at anchor, and so I read about time and getting paid.
- August 1, 2025: leaving Hul’q’umi’num territories and good questions to ask: a really cute seal to wake up to, humpbacks in the Strait and some questions worth asking.
We’re on the ferry home from Departure Bay to Horseshoe Bay and then from Horseshoe Bay back to our own home island, where a weekend of fun is about to unfold featuring the annual Firefighters’ Dock Dance, and a remounting of the classic Bowen Island play The View, in which every possible island archetype is skewered by the ingenious satire of David Cameron and Jackie Minns. It’s a long weekend in British Columbia and the beginning of Lughnasa, the Celtic season of harvest and generosity.
I hope you enjoy reading these posts.
A chonkster of a seal resting on logs at Wakes Cove
Happy Lunghnasa! Our last day out on the water. Caitlin’s observation is that being on a boat puts one deeply in touch with what living on the west coast is all about. Indeed until very recently all life on the coast was oriented to the sea. Historical names refer to sites accessible from the sea and — surprisingly to many settlers — islands don’t necessarily have names. Instead place like Valdes Island, where we anchored last night, are covered in names relating to bays and points and fishing spots and clam beds.
The waters around the north end of Valdes Island and the south shores of Gabriola Island are churning narrows full of rapids and upwellings and whirlpools when the tides squeeze through the narrow passages. That makes these waters rich in nutrients and full of seals and pigeon guillemots and kingfishers scooping up fish. The pier’s around here are covered in plume-nosed anemones and giant barnacles raking the currents for plankton. We are anchored in Wakes Cove which is connected to a provincial park. We walked yesterday through that park, on an old logging road that winds through coastal douglas-fir and arbutus and Garry oak forest until it reaches the gates of the Lyackson reserve lands. Along the eastern shore of the island there is a trail with views out across small rocky islets to the Strait of Georgia and an old midden site on the shore. Today we headed out through the narrows called Hwqethulhp in Hul’q’umi’num on our way to Nanaimo harbour. This passage was traditionally a place for the harvest of herring roe in the spring and oceanspray wood which is used for bows and other tools, including herring rakes. The passage marks the boundary between the Hul’q’umi’num speaking tribes and Snuneymuxw. Outside of Gabriola Island we came across four humpbacks feeding in the Strait.
Here are a couple of blog posts with useful questions and principles. Dan Oestreich shares some guidelines for giving and receiving feedback in the context of a more durable relationship. Lynn Rasmussen offers some questions to ask to see a system you are a part of a little more clearly.
I’ll never get tired of promoting RSS as a way to read blogs. Molly White provides a good introduction to RSS here. My own blog publishes an RSS feed and you can subscribe to the blog by email as well (it’s not a newsletter) and receive featured posts that I send to subscribers.
Richard Wagamese, from What Comes From Spirit:
True silence is more than just not talking. It’s responding to that deep inner yearning I carry to feel myself alive, to exist beyond my thinking, to live beyond worry and frustration. True silence is calm being. True silence is appreciating the moment for the moment. Every breath a connection to my life force, my essence. It’s the grandest music I have ever heard.
Richard Wagamese is the John O Donohue of Canada. In many ways.
“You can’t spreadsheet your way out of injustice” writes Coty Poynter in the Non-Profit Quarterly. This is a critical set of observations about how the neo-liberalisation of the non-profit world has undermined its ability to create lasting and participatory initiatives all in the name of accountability. I am struck by the way that the inappropriate measurement of “impact” and other things is itself never factored in to why initiatives fail. Jara Dean Coffey’s Equitable Evaluation Framework helps to address this.
We stayed another night at Ruxton Island. The day was hot and still and quiet in our little bay. Oystercatchers and heron raised the occasional fuss. A baby crow complained all afternoon and in the water fried egg jellyfish and otters slid by. The sea is warm here – more than 23 degrees and only the slightest breeze riffles the water. We are sleeping and reading and some of us writing a little and that is the story of summer on the coast.
So many links and thoughts today, scoured from a day of mammoth reading yesterday. Thank my ADHD brain for all this fun. I do.
If you thought enshittification was just your favourite apps jumping the shark, then you aren’t seeing what Cory Doctorow is seeing. Here is a grand chronicle of current surveillance and gouging practices used by big retailers to make everyone more poor.
A short story about an uploaded consciousness and its desire to be deleted. Being able to do all the things that can be done seems to be no substitute for being stuck with an unstructured memory. Petition to a Council by Justin Smith-Ruiu
I loved reading collections of letters when I first got into literature. They were right sized chunks of text for my brain, and thoughtful letters penned by authors lie somewhere between poetry, travelogues and aphorism. And I loved reading epistolary novels for the same reason. One of my favourite books of all time, From a Broken Bottle Traces of Perfume Still Emanate by Nathaniel Mackey is a masterful epistolary about jazz, and West African mysticism and friendship and art. The Griffin and Sabine series by Nick Bantock (birthed on Bowen Island, where he lived at the time) is an incredible work of art that has to be held in one’s hands to be fully appreciated. This form, whether actual or fictional is probably why I enjoy blogging so much, especially now that I’m writer here again regularly instead of on social media. I was reminded of all this when I came across this selection of letters from the exiled Harlem Renaissance writer Claude McKay published in the Paris Review. Letters written in the 1920s to Langston Hughs, Louise Bryant and others written from France and Spain and Morocco.
My friends in Turkey who run the ATÖLYE design studio are doing some really interesting thinking about how to work with AI while still using the inefficient and trust-based mechanisms of community:
“In a world increasingly driven by acceleration, where machine learning predicts behaviors and algorithms shape what we see, hear, and value — communities still resist the fast lane. Why? Because communities, unlike networks or audiences, are not transactional. They are deeply relational, slow-growing organisms — woven together through shared purpose, mutual recognition, and collective, compounding trust.”
I don’t follow the WNBA, but I do have a stake in women’s football in Canada, and this analysis of the current WNBA labour negotiations is an interesting path forward for leagues like the Northern Super League and the Professional Women’s Hockey League. In essence, the strategy focuses on growing the pie rather than reducing the costs, and I would even add, giving players (and supporters too, why not?) direct financial stakes in increasing revenues.
In my area, the saying goes, if you can’t afford to tip your server well, you shouldn’t go out to eat. Tipping culture has been a subject of discussion recently in Canada. In Europe, wages are built into the price of food and tipping is uncommon. There is a move to do this in North America too, but predictably, the restaurant industry isn’t having it. Let’s push for fair wages, and in the meantime, tip your server.
It is said that time slips away here in the languid BC coastal summer, but on parts of our coast, time sometimes speeds up.
If you love David Mitchell (I do) and also struggle with eggs Benedict (I do) then you will appreciate this piece of whimsical Masto-art.
I just finished Benjamín Labatut’s remarkable book When We Cease To Understand The World. It’s a book that blends non-fiction and fiction, that tells the stories of scientists of the twentieth century and teh price they paid for their discoveries. It is a subtle book, neither a collection of short stories or a single novel, but it is all tied together. Remarkably, the book begins in the world of non-fiction and gets more substantially fictional until the end. The last piece in the book is the most concrete – and teh most fictional- and references all the stories that were told before in a very fine-grained way. It is a book about uncertainty, singularity, probabilities and the price of seeing the world as it is.
What fascinates me is not so much science per se, but the limits of science: those ideas and discoveries that we are unable to fully comprehend. Science is a theme, but the larger theme is mystery. What I believe is captivating about these stories is not just their information content, but the enigma which lies at the heart of them. They seem to point past us, towards what is incomprehensible, or marvellous, or, indeed, monstrous. What I admire most about science is that it is completely unwilling to accept the many mysteries that surround us: it is stubborn, and wonderfully so. When it comes face to face with the unknown, it whips out a particle accelerator, a telescope, a microscope, and smashes reality to bits, because it wants – Because it needs! – to know. Literature is similar, in some respects: it is born from an impossible wish, the desire to bind this world with words. In that, it is as ambitious as science. Because for us human beings, it is never enough to know god: we have to eat him. That’s what literature is for me: putting the world in your mouth.
You say that ‘the quantity of fiction grows throughout the book’ – why is that?
Several reasons: the ideas become increasingly complex and abstract as the book moves along, so it was necessary to increase the fictional content to captivate the reader, and to make very complicated (and usually very boring) ideas come to life. Another reason is that I was not merely interested in the outward development and impact of science, but on the personal cost of these strange epiphanies, and only fiction can delve into that particular void, the inside of the human mind. There is a lot of fiction in all the texts of the book, except the first, where there are only six lines. But it is a very specific type of fiction, one that tries to approach what non-fiction cannot achieve. I use it reluctantly, not merely as an ingredient to sugar the pill, but as a chemical fix, a shot in the arm that allows the reader to crawl into the strangest areas of reality, those deranged landscapes that, even if where to bump into them head-on, in plain daylight, with both your eyes wide open, you would have a hard time believing they are real.
I love a book that says what it needs to in 200 pages or so. More often than not a writer needs to rely on both dense narratives and rich language to do this, much as a movie maker uses image and plot, or a lyricist use the music and the words. It’s remarkable to read a book in translation that preserves this richness.
Samantha Harvey’s book Orbital was the last book I read that does something like this with imagery and a rejection of traditional narrative structure. I found both through the Booker Prizes website, which seems to be revelling in this type of literature these days.