The man stood up and started chanting the morning call to prayer. “Shut up!” shouted the Israeli commando, aiming a handgun at the Muslim’s head from three meters away. Kevin Neish, sitting nearby, knew if he didn’t divert the soldier’s attention, the Muslim would be shot dead. The Israelis had already shot and killed nine men. Plastic cuffs binding his wrists behind his back, knees swaying, Kevin Neish stood up. The soldier pivoted and swung his body to the left, pointing the gun at Neish.

For two long minutes, Neish stood there facing death, a lone white man among three hundred subdued Muslim passengers. As the Arabic chant cut through the salty sea air, three men tensed—stone-still—caught in a triangular standoff. Neish stood in solidarity, willing to take a bullet to save the life of a man he did not know.

Neish was not supposed to be on the Mavi Marmara that day in May, 2010. The ship he’d been on, part of the five-ship Free Gaza Flotilla, broke down in the middle of the Mediterranean, and the Mavi had picked up all its passengers. The Turkish ship had left Istanbul with over 500 human rights activists, journalists, and several European parliamentarians on board, carrying 10,000 tons of international aid supplies to the blockaded Palestinians in the Gaza strip. With the Mavi 100 miles off the coast of Gaza, Israeli commandos boarded the ship at 4:00 o’clock in the morning. Their mission: prevent the running of the blockade. The five other ships in the flotilla had already been taken over without incident. The Mavi was different. Some of the unarmed Turkish volunteers resisted. They had even managed to capture three Israeli commandos who had rappelled down to the deck from a Navy helicopter.

While all this was going on, Neish was taking pictures with his SLR. Some of his photos, posted on his blog, show the Turks carrying injured Israeli soldiers into the passenger lounge to receive medical attention. Others show dead Turkish men lying on stretchers.

In a film of the incident, Neish holds up a stack of laminated sheets taken from one of the captured Israeli soldiers. Some of the pages show head shots of Free Gaza flotilla passengers, next to personal information. In the Mavi passenger lounge, there are mostly men. But there are also women. Young and old. Some sit, some walk. Some pray. Several wield long pieces of metal handrails in their hands. A few of these wear gas masks. They line up in a stairwell leading to the outer deck, ready to repel Israeli soldiers who might try to break through the door. Everyone wears a bright-orange flotation device.

Neish takes photos. He would later recognize one of the head shots on the Israeli hit list as a match for the dead Turkish man with the blood-red hole between his eyes.

**

Kevin Neish is a volunteer human rights activist. His specialty is international accompaniment. NGOSs such as Peace Brigades International, War Resistors International, and the International Solidarity Movement, arrange volunteer accompaniers to protect people fighting for human rights. These volunteers serve as a witness, a foreign presence, a shield from violence.

Neish first went to Palestine in 2002 as a volunteer with the Palestinian-led International Solidarity Movement. For Neish, solidarity is more than just a word; it’s a way of life.

Neish remembers being in Grade five while his teachers were on strike, and his dad—a commercial fisher—walked the picket line with the striking teachers. This was an act of solidarity, an act revered in the labour movement. Neish recalls being outraged by the treatment of Palestinians under Israeli occupation. So he signed up as a volunteer with the International Solidarity Movement in the West Bank.

Arriving in Ramallah on a sun-filled spring day in 2002 (while the second intifada was in full swing), Neish was billeted with a Muslim family. Then he spent two days in an ISM volunteer orientation. Here Neish learned nonviolent resistance tactics and participated in sessions about team decision making, meeting facilitation, and living and working in Palestinian culture.

A few days after the training session, Neish was in an apartment in Bethlehem with two Palestinian boys while Israeli tanks and armoured personnel carriers were poised in convoy in a nearby street. He could see Israeli snipers perched on rooftops, and Neish urged the boys to stay down and out of sight. But when the tanks started rumbling forward, one of the boys couldn’t resist sneaking a peek and went out to the balcony. Bullets whistled in the air and Neish grabbed the boy and they all went inside.

**

By the time Neish was on the Mavi Marmara, he’d had twenty years of experience as an international human rights activist. His first assignment was in 1989, when he accompanied Marta Torres, a Guatemalan labour lawyer and civil rights leader in exile in Canada, on a journey back to her homeland. At the time, Neish, a trained diesel mechanic, had been working as a marine engineer at the Victoria dockyards, and while he’d had experience as a union activist, he’d never been an international volunteer before.

As with all important decisions, before he took it on, Neish and wife Georgina and teenage daughter Jennifer held a family meeting in the kitchen. And they had all agreed that it was important to do their part to help the workers of Guatemala in their struggle against an oppressive regime. It was all about solidarity.

**

According to Christine Schweitzer of the London-Based charitable organization War Resistors International, “accompaniment has certainly saved the lives of many activists. But as with all nonviolent action, it must not be seen as all-powerful. It can fail.”

Less than a year after Neish’s first Palestine trip, 23-year-old Rachel Corrie from Olympia, Washington—an ISM volunteer in the Gaza Strip—was intentionally run over and killed by an Israeli military bulldozer as she was trying to prevent the demolition of a Palestinian pharmacist’s house.

**

Before leaving for Guatemala, Neish had been warned in advance of the potential danger. There had been whispers of a planned coup attempt. Sure enough, as they were landing in Guatemala, the expected coup had just begun, and Torres and Neish were whisked away to a safe house.

Those two weeks in Guatemala gave Neish his first intriguing taste of international accompaniment work. A typewritten death threat had been tacked to their door one morning. And the next day, they discovered a bomb attached to their car’s undercarriage. It was removed and detonated without harm.

Neish remembers being shocked by the tactics of the death squads in Guatemala. And the violence continues. In March, 2013, Amnesty International reported that human rights activist and trade unionist Carlos Hernández had been shot dead in Eastern Guatemala, two weeks after receiving a telephone death threat. It’s not known if international accompaniers had been with Hernández at the time.

**

Neish lives in the house that has been his family’s home for thirty years. He and Georgina built the modest two-story in a working-class neighbourhood of Victoria in the 1980’s. They did much of the work themselves. The lower level is devoted to storage, a place for tools and equipment and spare parts for all kinds of machinery. And half a dozen bicycles. The narrow driveway barely accommodates Neish’s white 1973 VW Eurovan. And there’s a separate entrance to the suite where the boarder lives.

Neish lives upstairs in an apartment-size space. A poster of bereted Che Guevara greets visitors. Hundreds of books fill shelves and bookcases. Neish is casually dressed in short sleeves and denims. His deep-furrowed face suggests wisdom and stress. Or years working outdoors. In many of his blog photos he’s wearing a baseball cap. And a genuine affable smile. I remember a sentence from his blog: “In a nutshell, I just don’t like bullies, regardless of their colour, religion, size, nationality or race.” Here at home, he seemed more gentle bear than fighter of bullies. But as I will soon learn, Neish is not one to back away from a fight.

I couldn’t help but notice his grotesquely deformed left arm, with two long surgical scars running in opposite directions from his left shoulder. He showed me how his left wrist and fingers couldn’t move the way they were supposed to move. Neish said he’d been shot by a crazed man in Port Renfrew twenty years earlier.

In the early 1990’s, Kevin and Georgina bought a small farm just outside the village of Port Renfrew, on the very western edge of Canada’s West Coast. They enjoyed the serenity. And they loved to walk in the mossy woods on sunny days, and take the occasional trek to have a look at the diversity of life in the nearby tide pools.

Early on, they’d been warned about Bruce, the local terror who intimidated people with brazen intimidation and not-so-random acts of vandalism. But Kevin and Georgina decided not to let Bruce scare them off or harm their neighbours, so they organized an RCMP-supported block watch.

One night in 1994, Neish was doing the rounds, flashlight in hand. Bruce and his sidekick came at him with a powerful searchlight and shotguns, shouting at Neish that he was trespassing. Neish stood up to the bullies, shouting back and refusing to back off. Suddenly, Bruce’s friend fired a shotgun blast. The bullet passed through Neish’s upper arm, leaving a hole the size of a quarter in his humerus. Clutching his disabled left arm with his right—and in great pain—Neish ran-hobbled back to the house. Georgina called for an ambulance.

“When I got to the hospital,” says Neish with a sardonic smile, “a hospital union activist I know saw me and said he could have understood it had I been shot in Guatemala, but not in British Columbia.”

**

Georgina died in 2007 after a long fight with cancer. Neish had promised he’d help her die with dignity. When she could no longer function, and after she’d said her goodbyes to friends and family, doctors allowed Neish to gradually increase her dosage of morphine. Georgina wanted nothing to do with hospitals, and so in their bedroom, in that house they’d built together in Victoria, Georgina died one dreary March night. The next morning, Neish says, he knew she was gone. “I never felt so alone in my life. I couldn’t hear her anymore.”

Neish’s journey in life and in activism veered onto a different path that day. “Trundling around looking for kindred spirits is probably what I’m doing,” he says. “I find them here and there. I found a couple in Palestine. Fellow activists, from the United States, and El Salvador.” He tells me about an American woman named Leslie Shulte; how she’s committed her life to improving the lives of ordinary people in El Salvador. “Amazing stuff she’s done. Really making a difference. Different people can do different things. I could never do what she does. I can’t work with other people. I don’t function that way. I work alone as much as I can.”

**

While Neish is a hero to many – a protector of the oppressed, the bullied, and the underdog—some aren’t so sure about the efficacy of what he does. And others have nothing but derision for what they consider a meddlesome and unnecessarily risky activity.

Andrew Vallance, a close friend, says Neish is the bravest human he knows. “I wish I had the kind of inner strength he has. But he’s also a compassionate human, and damn good company.” On the flip side, Andrew also wishes Neish were a bit more bourgeois in his activism and chose less dangerous options when carrying on The Struggle.

Mark Forsythe of CBC radio interviewed Neish after his deportation from Israel in June, 2010. Forsythe asked if he had any worries that he’d been co-opted by a group with ulterior motives (referring to the mainly Muslim Turkish international aid NGO IHH, which sponsored the Free Gaza Flotilla). “I’m not an idiot,” Neish answered defiantly. “I’ve done this all my life. I’ve been in Guatemala, El Salvador, Colombia, and Palestine earlier. Nobody co-opts me.”

To prevent any apprehension of being co-opted, since 2002 Neish has done all his activist work as an independent volunteer. While he’ll often need help to overcome restrictive government regulations—Canada refuses to give Canadian nationals who want to enter Gaza a release of responsibility required by the Egyptian government—or to find a visa sponsor, he’s always made his own travel arrangements. And he’s not affiliated with any organization or movement.

**

Neish’s Finnish great grandparents helped found the utopian socialist communal society that, in 1901, created the community of Sointula (place of harmony in Finnish) on Malcolm Island, near the northern tip of Vancouver Island. “It was a center of communism, cooperative socialism and unionism on the west coast,” says Neish.

When he was growing up, Neish’s house would sometimes be packed with union people sleeping in spare rooms and on the living room floor. And he remembers one time, after a native family’s house had burned down, two of their kids slept over at the house for a few weeks.

The Neish household was always a loving home. And a very political home. But Neish recalls with a sigh, both his parents were so busy with their peace and justice activism, he rarely saw them just kick back and relax. He doesn’t remember them ever taking a vacation; every trip had a political purpose.

Neish is circumspect about the danger he encounters on his volunteer accompaniment trips. “If I’ve ever put myself at risk,” he says, “it was a calculated action.” He’s always weighed the potential benefits against risks to his personal safety. And he knows his white skin and Canadian passport make him an effective shield.

On the other hand, he’s been physically and verbally assaulted by zealots in his home town of Victoria. And he’s received anonymous threatening phone calls and letters. Even death threat emails. And while he’s been shot at several times, he’s only ever been hit by a bullet once—and that was in Port Renfrew.

He remembers his father telling him more than once that if the enemy is mad at you then you must be doing something right.

On that May day on the Mavi Marmara, Neish placed his confidence in his white face with the white beard. On his blog, he writes “I don’t remember being scared, I only remember being outraged.” He remembers making the kind of calculations he would have made as a mechanic diagnosing a dysfunctional diesel engine. The kind of strategic decision he’d been trained to make as a volunteer with the International Solidarity Movement. Had he done nothing, the soldier might have shot the man dead. But with three hundred witnesses, and his white skin, Neish felt the odds were in his favour.

**

One of the major challenges for Neish, as for all international human rights volunteers, is the double culture shock—both outgoing and returning. Pablo Stanfield, a long-term volunteer with Peace Brigades International, says: “No matter how much you love your home, you return changed from any intense overseas living experience. You can’t go home again, not because it is like the river that changes so you never step in the same river twice, but because you will have changed. It is not the same you who returns. The challenge of holding onto one’s identity when going into an unfamiliar culture becomes as great a challenge when returning.”

Since 2007, Neish has been returning to a home missing Georgina.

“Living in Victoria is like living inside a bubble,” says Neish, “insulated from the real world. A person has to work hard to see what’s real, and then it’s bizarre and disorienting to return to being inside that bubble. You can’t just take a blue pill, like in the Matrix movie, and forget what you’ve seen or experienced.”

**

After five weeks in Gaza, no one would fault Neish if he’d taken some time off and went to Port Renfrew for a few days of relaxation. But Neish is driven and dedicated. What needs attention right away is to reconnect with people he’d met in Gaza. Using five fingers of his right hand and one finger on his left, Neish hammers out emails. To let people know he is safe, and to arrange his next trip to Gaza.

Gaza is not on anyone’s list of favourite tourist destinations. With hundreds of bombed out buildings and scores of moon-like craters—Neish says the Israelis bomb and destroy, and the Gazans rebuild—Gaza is a ghetto-prison to its million-and-a half inhabitants. For Neish, though, it is home to a bullied people doing their best to survive under treacherous conditions. For Neish, reaching out to help the Palestinians is a natural act of solidarity.

He wants to go back to help fix the fire truck (yes, the only ladder truck on the strip) and other machinery and equipment in desperate need of repair. He expects he’ll be limited mainly to an advisory or supervisory role, though, because he can only use one arm.

Israel has etched out a series of off-limit buffer zones along its land and sea borders with the narrow strip (40 kilometers long and 12 kilometers wide). Fishers can only go out three miles from the coast. On land, anyone setting foot in the mile-wide buffer zone risks being shot.

In Gaza, Neish gave talks at schools and showed the film shot on the Mavi. He also worked side-by-side with local farmers, harvesting peas and strawberries in fields no more than a kilometer from an Israeli military border post.

While he enjoyed meeting other local activists and volunteers from all over the world, one of the most interesting moments for Neish was meeting the only woman fisher in Gaza. One day walking on the beach, Neish noticed the modestly dressed 18-year-old mending her net. Through an interpreter he told her that as a kid in Canada, he’d often watch his dad mending the fishing net with a netting needle just like the one she was using. The young woman, Madeleine Kulab, explained that her father wasn’t able to fish anymore, and that she and her brothers now do the fishing for the family. She invited him to come out fishing with her. Neish is looking forward to his next visit so that he can accept her invitation.

**

Looking back, Neish reflects on his most rewarding activist moments. He remembers accompanying the indigenous Mayan activist Rigoberta Menchu in Guatemala. Without foreign accompaniment, Neish says, Menchu might have become one of the ‘disappeared’. She might not have been around to receive her Nobel Prize for Peace in 1992. And being in the right place at the right time on the Mavi Marmara, standing in solidarity with the Muslim who defied the Israeli commando, is another experience he cherishes.

Neish eschews the accolades, but says “if you do good things there’s always somebody that’s going to praise what you do.”

Kevin Neish, like thousands of human rights activists around the world, walks in the footsteps of Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr. King said that the believer in nonviolence knows that in his struggle for justice he has cosmic companionship. I doubt if even cosmic companionship could possibly make up for losing Georgina. But I have a feeling that, for Neish, at least for the time being, it might be the next best thing.

 

I came to creative writing in middle-age. 57 when I started, 60 when I graduate. I’ve never been a creative writer, though I have written for work: instruction manuals, educational materials, and advisory publications for accountants. More than four decades have passed since I’d been a high school student in Israel (quit in grade 12). I had no interest in high school subjects, and English class was about the language, not about literature.

I’d never developed imaginative thinking – until I came to creative writing I couldn’t tell a metaphor from a hermaphrodite – and my years of training and work in accounting and law had ossified my thought processes into literal, linear, and pragmatic blocks of petrified wood.

My reading over the years had been mainly for work, and what I’d read for pleasure was by Ludlum, Grisham, Rex Stout, and later a great deal of journalistic nonfiction, a few works of literature in poetry and fiction, and books I would call wisdom philosophy.

In many ways, I was unprepared. And out of my league.

Everything I say here, then, flows from my own unique perspective. My hope is to start a conversation rather than to criticize the good work many people are doing in CW instruction. My reluctance to criticize is one of the personality drawbacks for CW workshop participation (more on that later).

In my first creative nonfiction writing workshop, our instructor asked what we thought of the assigned essays we had read. My response had been awe mixed with puzzlement, as I saw a wide gap between my novice skills and the skills demonstrated in what I had read. I asked the instructor, a published writer of short nonfiction and poetry, how I, a novice, could “get there from here”. She replied that I should find a writer I admire and emulate.

Nothing has changed over the years of doing workshops. Instructors hand out brilliant examples of literary art and point out elements we for us to learn from and emulate. The problem remains the same. While CW instructors harp on the “show don’t tell” maxim (except for Philip Lopate – see his book To Show and to Tell), they rarely do. Invariably, we read a great work, spend a few minutes talking about its strengths, and are expected to use elements of craft exemplified in the work. There is no demonstration of how to do this with our draft. There are no examples given that we can relate to our work.

Such is the nature of the workshop method. Students learn to write by reading the professionals, analyzing their techniques, and practising these techniques. This traditional approach emphasizes production of publishable writing. It is focused on the product of the creative writing activity rather than the process.

 

Product and process

In my review of the literature on creative writing instruction, I discovered that there have historically been two prevailing dominant and distinct approaches. The first focuses on the product, an approach that dominates creative writing instruction today. And the second focuses on process, an approach that gained popularity in the 1970s, primarily in teaching of composition in America. With the focus on process, the instructor facilitates development of specific writing skills in a learning process that mirrors the writing process.

The challenge I had experienced with the product-focused approach is the mystery around how professional writers do what they do, something I had been missing from the beginning to the end.

To compare the two approaches, consider the topic of structure design for personal essays. With the product-focused approach, students read essays by professional writers, identify design structures, and practice writing essays with these design structures. In addition, the instructor might assign an article that deals specifically with design structure in personal essays, such as Tim Bascom’s “Picturing the Personal Essay: A Visual Guide”.

In his essay, Bascom, who teaches creative nonfiction at the University of Missouri, explains several design structure options with reference to essays by well-known writers, with excerpts and pictograms that serve as visual metaphors for each design structure discussed. The focus here is on writing by emulating. The reader/writer can select the best design structure for her essay from options used by masters of the craft.

However, on the journey to becoming a literary artist, students (some more than others) need a bridge to narrow that skill gap between beginner and professional. Knowing something of the writer’s process helps the novice emulate the professional. All writers create one step at a time, repeating steps and skipping steps, and using different processes for different projects. As creative writing pedagogy researcher Wendy Bishop points out, “it is worth looking into these writers’ complicated and semi-obscured writing processes, for writers’ knowledge can illuminate why some writers succeed at their art.” Process improves product. If students are going to learn by emulating, it makes sense for them to know the process used to create the writing they are emulating.

Another proponent of process-focused creative writing instruction is Carolyn Mamchur, a teacher of creative writing pedagogy at Simon Fraser University. Inspired by Donald Murray, she developed and teaches a process-focused method centered on four skills:

• finding a subject
• sensing an audience
• searching for specifics, such as concrete detail, imagery, symbols, and metaphors, and
• creating a design structure.

 

To see how a teaching process could mirror the writing process, one can look to American nonfiction writer John McPhee. William Howarth, editor of The John McPhee Reader, notes in his introduction that students always ask how McPhee writes. While McPhee “does not believe one writer’s method should be a recipe for another,” it makes sense to know the process that produced writing one wishes to emulate. “When McPhee…stops interviewing… he begins the tortuous process of composition,” explains Howarth. “His working methods vary from project to project, but some steps are fairly constant.”

McPhee transcribes his notebooks, reads additional material to flesh out more facts, chooses a structure, drafts a lead, and divides different parts of his material into topical segments. Howarth points out an interesting parallel between McPhee’s writing process and his need to make order out of chaos: “McPhee’s writing method may seem excessively mechanical…but it runs a line of order through the chaos of his notes and files. Structural order…is the main ingredient…that attracts his reader.”

Order establishes where the writer and reader are going and when they will arrive at a final destination.” This desire for order attracts readers and writers alike. And for writing students, this insight into the professional writer’s process provides a valuable link for developing her own process, which makes her better equipped to emulate McPhee’s writing.

 

Blending product with process

CW instruction does not require choosing between a product-focused and a process-focused approach. Blending both gives instructors the flexibility to weigh one or the other more heavily depending on what suits their students’ needs. Carolyn Mamchur’s four-skill method is a process–focused approach that empowers students and instructors alike. Instructors are empowered because teaching process serves as a scaffold for organizing lessons and activities, as well as developing students’ skills, and students are empowered because the process respects their innate curiosity about how “to get there from here.” The process helps to demystify the magical genius of literary art.

Bascom’s essay on choosing a design structure proves the efficacy of Mamchur’s teaching process. While Bascom’s focus is on product, the very topic of his essay – creating a design structure – is the fourth skill component of Mamchur’s teaching process. We could say that when both approaches converge, students experience the benefits of the natural overlap between product and process.

My beginner’s experience with the product-focused approach, my sense that something was missing, represents a need to know the “how” as well as the “what” of creative writing.

 

The CW workshop and my discontents

After a recent blended (poetry and creative nonfiction; undergraduate and graduate) workshop yesterday, I’d had a middle-of-the-night visitation. A peculiar thought – the “guards and prisoners” experiment I’d read about some years back, and the German feature film based on that experiment, “Das Experiment.”

Curious, I thought, that a CW workshop at UVIC would bring about such a thought process, perhaps a symptom of my paranoia. Stanley Milgram, a social psychologist, actually conducted two different experiments, one in 1962 and another in 1971. The first I’ll call the “shock experiment,” and second the “guards and prisoners” experiment. Both were designed to measure the extent to which people would obey an authority figure who instructed them to perform acts conflicting with their conscience.

In both cases there was a surprising amount of harm and abuse caused by volunteers following instructions – just doing as they had been told. So what was it about my supposedly tame workshop experience that brought about this grotesque thought process? Sitting by and listening to students heaping abuse another student’s work for participation marks and an A+.

Maybe I’m too sensitive, but so often I feel I have nothing of value to contribute. Or, maybe I just don’t like being told what to do. My workshop experience has come with many compulsory requirements to do what I would rather not do, over and over and over again. Who am I to critique someone else’s writing? There is so little I can add to others’ writing process or craft.

But I think my three years of experience with workshops leaves me feeling the workshop group dynamic is the very antithesis of community. Often polite. But lacking authenticity. The workshop is home to the largest mountain of bullshit north of Fox News.

Wouldn’t it be great to have a sense of community in our CW workshops? Extraordinary, yes. But why can’t community become normal? Yes, people need to learn how to do it. But it’s possible a sense of community would make the workshop experience a pleasant incubator for literary writing, and a safe environment for lesser talents to practice the craft.

 

Adding development and a notion of community to the mix

Further along my research into CW Instruction literature, I found a development-based process-focused model proposed by two creative writing instruction researchers in the United Kingdom. They propose a model that views the learner as a developing writer, progressing through stages of development.

Andrews and Smith review theories of writing and development in their book Developing Writers: Teaching and learning in the digital age (2011). They distinguish between development and learning, and advocate switching the term “writing development” to “developing writers”. In other words, they believe the focus should be on student writers, instead of on the act of writing – the product that is produced.

Also, I found an interesting article by two American instructors who have “invented” the better workshop, calling their method a “learning community”. The creative writing learning community features smaller peer groups of 3 – 5 students (with a mentor) critiquing drafts, and then presenting a revision plan to the whole class and the instructor. In using this method, these American instructors have found that there is less criticism, greater intensity and engagement, and the natural creation of a community of writers.

With all I had found in the literature, I decided to propose a model for creative writing instruction I call the “DPP” model, a model that integrates the three components of development, process, and product. With this model, instructors view the learner as a writer-in-development (alongside the notion of writing in development), and structure their instruction along the lines of Mamchur’s teachable writing process, or another process-based method. Where the workshop is used, the community-of-writers method of workshop could improve on the traditional method. Finally, since so many examples of craft, technique, and style that make writing literary are available in published works, student writers will always benefit from reading and emulating literary art. Good writers are invariably good readers.

 

A best practice creative writing program, I submit, integrates these three components:

A          Development

Instruction focuses on facilitating the learner’s development as a literary writer.

B          Process

Instruction facilitates literary writing practice structured around the literary writing process and demonstrates process models for different genres and sub-genres. The process approach provides an instructional structure that mirrors professional writers’ creative process. The structure helps the instructor by providing a teachable method, and helps the student by revealing the complexities of creative writing process.

C          Product

Instruction facilitates literary writing practice by analyzing literary works for strengths, techniques, and artistic qualities. Recognizing that good writers are invariably good readers, instruction encourages learners to emulate, model, and adapt from literary works.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

What CW teachers and writers have to say

Carol Bly’s Beyond the Writers’ Workshop: New Ways to Write Creative Nonfiction (2001)

is radically critical. For example, she notes a fundamental mistake made in how we learn to write: skipping the long middle stage of writing. This long middle stage Bly calls the psychological stage. In this stage a writer relies on psychological tools rather than artistic tools. The problem is, however, that writing teachers for the most part “muddle along using ineffective, even damaging pedagogy because they don’t learn anything else to do.” Bly describes using empathic questioning to deepen a writer’s first draft, something I picked up for the first time from my second level CNF workshop and had reinforced with greater impact in my first third level CNF workshop.

Bly advocates an alternative workshop method that omits the cardinal rule that a writer must remain silent when his work is up for workshop. The idea here is that the instructor should ask certain important questions and direct them to the whole class, including the writer whose work is being scrutinized.

 

Graeme Harper, editor. Creative Writing Guidebook (2008):

Harper says that creative writing is both a set of actions as well as the final product of these actions. “As creative writing is both act/action and end result, it is sometimes thought that the primary critical understanding of creative writers rests in considering the end-products of their endeavors.” But, claims Harper, this is very far from the truth. Understanding in creative writing happens before, during, and after the act of creative writing. “Often creative writing proceeds by way of organized actions combined with fortuitous circumstances. Often it involves the very human activity of making mistakes, and then seeking to correct them; of thinking one way, but finding it impossible to articulate those thoughts in action; of imagining, initially, that a piece of work in progress is well structured, well voiced, well pitched, only to decide later that it is none of these things.”

 

Joseph Moxley, editor. Creative Writing in America: Theory and Pedagogy. (1989):

Moxley describes the standard workshop as “the heart of most creative writing programs.” While Moxley believes the workshop method is a convenient and sometimes effective way to teach creative writing, with many advantages to its credit, he also feels that despite these advantages, “the workshop method has a few limitations.” Such limitations include focusing primarily on revising and editing, which fails to address pre-writing strategies, an omission Moxley finds “particularly troublesome.” There is an assumption in the workshop method that students already know “how to gather, shape, and revise material. Most teachers direct the group’s analysis by asking, ‘Does the text work?’”

The problem with this approach is that it assumes students are already proficient with literary writing, that they can tell whether a piece ‘works,’ that they know literature, and that all they need to master the craft is a little practice before a critical, peer audience. Moxley recommends:

• the primary focus of all writing courses should be on the students’ writing
• students also need a strong background in literature
• writing can be learned, if not entirely taught; we should teach students about the successful practices of professionals
• writing is valuable in and of itself and does not need publication to validate it; writing promotes thought, empathy, learning
• we need to talk about writing holistically; discussions of elements of craft must be placed in the context of the creative process; writing is not learned from the parts to the whole, but holistically, from the whole to the parts
• we don’t know enough about the developmental stages writers go through; but, from recent research we do know that learning to consider the needs of external readers, to empathize, is both emotionally and intellectually demanding
• successful writers take risks, and we should be careful to give student writers room to do the same
• writers have to learn to draw on their felt sense, on that intuitive, prelinguistic, bodily feeling
• writing is not solely a cognitive process, but a deeply affective one; we intellectualize beyond value when we ignore personality in our theories and practices

 

And, Moxley has this to say about the writing process:

• writing is a generative, recursive process of forming meaning; our classroom exercises and goals must be grounded in an awareness of what process goals students are considering as well as their content goals
• we need to familiarize students with the mysterious nature of composing; doubt and uncertainty are inevitable; writers (and readers) seek the mysterious and the surprising
• there is no all-purpose writing process; writers use an array of different strategies

 

Donald Murray. A Writer Teaches Writing. (1985):

Murray’s philosophy of writing instruction includes:

1. A) Writing is thinking – “The act of writing is an act of thought.”
2. B) Writing is a process – “Writing is a craft before it is an art; writing may appear magic, but it is our responsibility to take our students backstage to watch the pigeons being tucked up the magician’s sleeve. The process of writing can be studied and understood. We can re-create most of what a student or professional writer does to produce effective writing. The process is not linear, but recursive. The writer passes through the process once, or many times, emphasizing different stages during each passage. There is not one process, but many. The process varies with the personality or cognitive style of the writer, the experience of the writer, and the nature of the writing task.”
3. C) Effective teaching is responsive.
4. D) Writing is an interaction of the global and the particular.
5. E) There is no one way – “We do not teach writing effectively if we try to make all students and all writing the same. We must seek, nurture, develop and reward difference.”

 

For Murray, conference teaching is the most effective and most practical method of teaching composition (I contend he would say the same is true for teaching creative writing). Conference teaching is the tutorial – one-on-one, teacher with student. In Murray’s view, the workshop – the group response, naturally evolves from the conference response. When students know how the response of a single reader helps improve their writing, they are ready to test drafts with a group of readers.

In Murray’s approach to the writing workshop, the workshop pattern follows this sequence:

• The writer COMMENTS on the draft
• The workshop members listen and READ the draft
• The workshop members RESPOND to the writer’s comments and the draft
• The writer RESPONDS to the workshop members’ responses

 

Murray stresses that the pattern he uses was not the workshop pattern that he used when he was a student, and it also is not the pattern that he used for many years as a teacher. “The normal workshop pattern was a trial by fire, in which the student’s draft was subjected to as much criticism as possible by workshop members. The student’s work was under attack, and the student was required to keep quiet. The writer could not establish the agenda and certainly could not defend the draft.” Murray describes how he had realized at a certain point “how much the workshop was a macho test, a walking-on-coals, a trial by fire. And having just been burned, I was ready to be critical of it.” He writes that when he decided to experiment with his own pattern of workshop teaching, he invited the student whose work was being workshopped to speak first, saying, “How can we help you?” Here is how Murray describes what happened next: “The student was startled, but answered, telling us very specifically the doubts she had about the draft and what she thought worked pretty well. She wanted us to tell her if the good parts worked for us and to make suggestions about how the weaker parts might be strengthened. It was the best session I could remember, and that is now the way I start every workshop: ‘How can we help you?’.”

 

Donald Murray. Read to Write: A Writing Process Reader (1990):

Murray reproduces an anonymous student essay, followed by a brief history of the essay including comments by the student describing how difficult it was for her to write about a very painful experience. Murray then goes on to describe some of the feedback that he provided as a teacher and then the various changes the student made to her essay over a series of drafts. He then provides, by way of final evaluation, the student writer’s own description of her writing experience and process.

 

Donald Murray. The Craft of Revision. (2004):

Murray says our attachment to the traditional workshop approach can sometimes make it more difficult for students to take on the revision process efficiently. Students are encouraged to present a draft for workshop that is as near to publishable quality as possible. But students are not given a chance to say where the draft is along the process. And they are not given the opportunity to ask for specific help until the end of the critique. “We need to suggest the reading,” proposes Murray, which “we need to get effective help.” It is not of much use to the writer for someone to give feedback about voice when the writer is mainly concerned with structure, for example. On page 38, Murray offers 17 questions, or requests for feedback, as examples of specific help a student might be interested in.

 

Donald Murray. Write to Learn. (1990):

This book is devoted to Murray’s description of the writing process as he sees it. One of the most valuable parts of the book is the last segment, beginning at page 250. Here, Murray presents a writer’s case history, and the writer he is speaking of is himself. What he decided to do, and what he describes in this last part of this book, is to create one piece of writing that would demonstrate the many writing techniques that he has described in the book. So his section headings are “collect, focus, order, develop, clarify,” and “the final draft.” Following his description of his process in writing a particular short piece, Murray provides the first part of his marked up edited draft and then the complete finished article. After he presents the finished article, Murray gives us an annotated version, with his commentary, explaining his process along the way, together with how the process produced the final version.

 

Carl Vandermeulen. Negotiating the Personal in Creative Writing. (2011):

Vandermeulen questions practices many CW teachers accept as standard: the full-class workshop, early emphasis on critique over other kinds of response, and the tradition of the silent writer. Vandermeulen prefers an active writer who questions her writing and sets some of the agenda for response. He discusses how reflection makes creative writing teachable “by making writers more open to response by giving them responses they can use and by giving teachers a window into their thinking and feeling about their writing.” The author also believes that small writers’ groups are more productive for beginners than the workshop.

Vandermeulen also talks about setting up groups and “training them in reader-response so that their members are more able to support each other…especially early in the composing process.” He also devotes a whole chapter to teacher response, including how one-to-one conferences contribute to the process of becoming a writer.

 

Stephanie Vanderslice. Rethinking Creative Writing in Higher Education: Programs and Practices that Work. (2011):

Vanderslice notes that the creative writing workshop, as implemented at the University of Iowa, had as its primary intention to provide a post-graduate incubator where young writers could come for a year or two and have their work critiqued. What the Iowa workshop constructed was a place where “seasoned writers could be hardened to the critics, where success could be claimed if a student (usually a female) occasionally… fainted after a particularly rigorous session.” She notes that in some circles the Iowa workshop was considered the Bobby Knight school of writing pedagogy, named for the abusive, chair-throwing American college basketball coach, and that it was also designed as a kind of boot camp that would “toughen students so that they could withstand inevitable adversity and criticism as an artist.”

The problem with this method of pedagogy, says Vanderslice, is that the creative writing landscape has changed since the early days of the Iowa workshop. Most creative writing workshop students are nothing like the polished writers who came to the workshop as it took hold in creative writing mythology.

 

Michelene Wandor. The Author is Not Dead, Merely Somewhere Else: Creative Writing Reconceived. (2008):

Wandor traces the roots of a variety of methods and approaches for teaching creative writing and hones in on the workshop. She points out that the process of workshopping “is driven by procedures of re-writing, rather than writing.” The problem is an “inbuilt tension between the theoretically egalitarian responses of the peer-friendship group, and that of the tutor, which might be quite different.” It is not fair for students whose writing receives praise in the workshop to then be criticized in assessment and feedback by the tutor. Also, criticism in the workshop involves value judgments, value judgments that are “inevitably concealed, because not taught and shared. The CW literature does not theorize or discuss its critical values.” In addition, Wandor reports that the workshop model of peer-reviewing “cannot fail but be discouraging and educationally disempowering.”

Donald Murray. “Teach Writing as a Process Not Product.” The Leaflet (November 1972):

Murray believes that most creative writing teachers are trained by studying a product: writing. The skills of creative writing teachers “are honed by examining literature, which is finished writing.” Because teachers are trained this way they also teach this way, they teach writing as a product, focusing critical attention “on what our students have done.” The problem is that what the students create usually is not literature. “Our students knew it wasn’t literature when they passed it in, and our attack usually does little more than confirm their lack of self-respect for their work and for themselves; we are as frustrated as our students, for conscientious, doggedly responsible, repetitive autopsying doesn’t give birth to live writing.” The product doesn’t improve.

Murray’s main complaint is that year after year the student suffers “under a barrage of criticism” much of which is irrelevant or contradictory.

Murray believes that instead of teaching finished writing, we should teach unfinished writing, “and glory in its unfinishedness.” He feels writing is a process of discovery through language, which can be introduced in the classroom as soon as the creative writing teacher “achieves a very simple understanding of that process and accepts the full implications of teaching process, not product.”

“We have to be quiet,” advocates Murray, “to listen, to respond… We have to be patient and wait, and wait, and wait… We have to respect the student, not for his product…but for the search for truth in which he is engaged… We must respect our student for his potential truth and for his potential voice… We are coaches, encouragers, developers, creators of environments in which our students can experience the writing process for themselves.”

 

Murray lists ten implications of teaching process, not product:

• students examine their own evolving writing and that of their classmates; they study writing while it is still a matter of choice
• the student finds his own subject; the teacher supports but does not direct this expedition
• the student uses his own language
• the student writes all the drafts necessary for him to discover what he has to say; each new draft counts as a new paper, because you are not teaching a product, you are teaching a process
• the process that produces ‘creative’ and ‘functional’ writing is the same; you teach a process students can use to produce whatever product the subject and audience demand
• mechanics come last; first it is important for the writer to discover what he has to say
• there must be time for the writing process to take place and time for it to end
• papers are looked at to see what kinds of choices the writer might make; the responsibility for seeing choices belongs to the student; he is learning a process; his papers are always unfinished, evolving, until they are graded; the student is graded on what he has produced at the end of the writing process
• students are individuals who must explore the writing process in their own way, some fast, some slow
• there are no rules, no absolutes, just alternatives; all writing is experimental

 

What these implications require, asserts Murray, “is a teacher who will respect and respond to his students, not for what they have done, but for what they may do; not for what they have produced, but for what they may produce, if they are given an opportunity to see writing as a process, not a product.”

 

More of my discontent with CW workshops

My greatest frustration is the requirement to provide critical practical feedback for fellow students. Most of the time, I found I had little interest in what others had written, and I found myself in a double bind: my wish to help others with useful feedback would be tempered by my feeling that they knew what they were doing and “Who am I to help them improve their writing? I’m required to do it, but I can’t do it” is what I think most of the time.

My frustration had exacerbated when I realized I was falling behind, that what I had brought to the workshop was hardly worthy of being called literary, or even creative, writing. Certainly, I don’t fault instructors and classmates who had the courage to tell me the truth about the failures of my writing. I noticed how many workshop critique sessions (especially my drafts) involved about 10 percent of the time on strengths and the remainder on weaknesses.

I’ve been told my writing is academic, journalistic, unemotional. And all of that is true.

One of my workshop instructors handed me a page of typed feedback on a personal essay draft. Typically starting with a noted strength, the feedback included a series of criticisms, one of which suggested I should consider changing the chronology to a non-linear structure. Another comment proposed I needed to use more imagistic language, to display to the reader an agile mind at work. But it’s hard to believe a mind can grow more agile with practise.

My take on all this was to face the truth, which is that I am simply not a proficient literary or creative writer. Another failure I could add to my list. I am certainly not the only one to come to this conclusion while a student in a creative writing program. And besides, this is not necessarily a bad thing. I would rather instructors (and everyone) be honest with me.

One problem with workshops at the upper levels is that most students probably have a good idea of who has talent and who has less talent. When I started to see myself as a writer lacking in talent, my desire to give others constructive feedback dropped to zero. And as far as feedback from others, all that mattered to me was the feedback from my instructor. After all, my grade is determined only by my instructor, and my instructor is the only established literary writer in the room. I couldn’t find a benefit in heeding feedback from any other source, whether good or bad. If it hadn’t come from the instructor, it was, as far as I was concerned, unreliable and without authority.

So often I would sit and listen to a critique session where weaknesses were discussed that contradicted each other. Other times, students got into debates about the content of the piece from a political or veracity perspective. All irrelevant in my mind.

And on more than one occasion (including one or two involving my draft) I’d witnessed a negative comment about a classmate’s draft send many in the group into frenzied, prolonged, harsh criticism. (Even worse is the realization I might have participated myself in such a frenzy.) I wonder if the requirement to score participation points, even if it involves heaping abuse on a fellow classmate, makes some students lose any sense of sympathy or compassion for their peers. Others may be ambitious, and eager to show off their elevated critiquing skills and superior knowledge. I prefer collaboration to competition.

I’ve found that I cannot write with the workshop group as audience. Although a few workshop readers over the years have given me honest, useful, tactful feedback, I’ve found most of the group do not have the mindset or worldview or interest in reading what I am interested in writing. Since my audience is almost exclusively my instructor, whose feedback I respect as authoritative, and who determines my grade, I have no interest at all in finding out what other students have to say about my work.

This practical habit had been cemented by my experience seeing contradictory feedback from students. Students are required to give feedback, so they give feedback. There is nothing to suggest any of it is carefully thought out or even sincere. And feedback about matters of taste or feedback from ignorance of the world due to immaturity is not helpful either.

 

Improvements?

My sense is that abolishing the workshop is a utopian dream, so I offer suggestions for improvement.

Why not blend fiction with nonfiction? After all, CNF uses techniques of fiction to make factual writing more engaging. Fiction writers could benefit from the techniques of veracity and the research for concrete details that are the mainstays of the nonfiction writer, while nonfiction writers could benefit from the imagistic storytelling techniques so integral to fiction.

Early in my CW education, a smart grad student let on that if I wanted good grades I’d have to see instructors during office hours. Makes sense. Why not make individual (conference) time an integral component of the workshop? Maybe allocate two to three hours of one-on-one time between instructor and student. Students who felt they do not need the help could waive the meeting. And the idea of starting a workshop critique session with strengths and ending with weaknesses seems to me a misguided application of child psychology. We remember most what we hear last. Why not end all critique sessions with a brief summation of ways the draft could be improved, followed always at the very end by a recap of the strengths and a positive note to encourage the student?

I think that talented writers must love the workshop. They receive a great deal of often well-deserved positive feedback. Great for the self-image of an aspiring writer. But those who are not talented writers (and I’m sure everybody knows who’s who) feel more and more uncomfortable, something not alleviated when instructors tell the whole group, as they do, that we are all writers. Not everyone in the group will succeed in a literary career.

Why not revisit degree requirements, reconsider the BA and BFA options? Is it still appropriate to require the workshop path to graduation for all CW students? Why not have two paths to the BA degree – the workshop path and the workshop is optional path? I wonder what would happen to enrolment numbers. Seems to me, though, if you have compulsory workshops only because you know if they were not compulsory enrolment numbers would make them prohibitive financially, then maybe you are forcing something on people they don’t really want to do. Is that the current state of the workshop as CW method?

 

Final thoughts

Wallace Stegner was right. Only those with talent who are willing to work hard will succeed. For the rest of us, there are, nonetheless, still benefits. I have become a better reader, and I have certainly developed a greater appreciation for the CW craft. I doubt I will publish anything as literary, creative, or artistic writing.

It’s also possible that I am at a stage of development where I need to put in a great deal more effort and time before I achieve artistic proficiency. On the other hand, I feel like the kid who loves high school basketball who knows he isn’t good enough for a university scholarship. Relegated to playing in local house leagues or outdoor pick-up games. Good exercise and enjoyable. But not quite good enough.

I’m grateful. I’ve encountered writers I love to read, writers I would not have discovered on my own. I’ve met a few instructors I admire as people, as writers, and as brilliant thinkers. And I’ve admired the writing of some of my peers, and even noticed the year-over-year artistic development in their pursuit of their craft. The few who have real talent leave me in awe, almost like the awe I have for the works of Didion and Orlean and Wallace and Snyder and so many others.

Rituals for Fun and Fitness

 

The city of Victoria is, of course, named for the former queen (1837 – 1901) of the United Kingdom, and Canada. It’s certainly no surprise, then, that the city has a Victorian flavour you can taste by taking a stroll around the harbour or afternoon tea at the Empress Hotel. But Victoria is also home to a social club that contrasts its British colonial heritage and the social mores you might associate with Victorian England. Times change.

We gather at 3:30 on a grayish Saturday afternoon just before Thanksgiving. A group of joggers – 12 men, five women (and a two-year-old girl) – at the Horner Park parking lot, a kilometer from University of Victoria grounds. Inside the circle stands the group’s acting “religious advisor,” (AKA the RA). These are the Victoria Hash House Harriers (VH3), the local chapter of an international affiliation with almost two thousand chapters all over the world (two in Antarctica). Members publish newsletters, directories, and magazines and organize regional and international Hashing events.

Members get a “hash” name after a particularly notorious escapade, a personality quirk, or a notable physical feature. I find out later that it’s not cool to ask someone’s real name. Double Hump, middle-aged and stocky, in his sky-blue shorts and scarlet VH3 running jacket is the RA. We begin with introductions, and as a virgin participant, I’m invited into the circle to introduce myself. At the RA’s request, I take off my hat, and I tell them how four weeks earlier I’d first encountered hashers when, among a hundred or so awed Saturday shoppers, I gawked at a group of about twenty men (and a few women) descending the Bay Centre escalator wearing red dresses, a few of the men with wigs of shoulder-length black hair (including one with a full beard). It’s called “Red Dress Run,” an annual traditional hasher event. The Hash House Harriers (abbreviated to HHH or H3, or referred to simply as hashing) is an international group of non-competitive running social clubs. An event organized by a club is known as a hash or hash run, with participants calling themselves hashers or hares and hounds. Each chapter is called a kennel.

The hare for this “Turkey Run” (I guess we’re the hounds), is Premature Evacuation (Preemie for short). Slim and fit, with a referee’s whistle around his neck, he comes into the circle holding a black plastic water bottle with a squirt spout. He squirts white flour markings on the ground inside the circle and reviews examples of the symbols he’s drawn out on the trail just before. A circle with a dot in the middle means look around 360° to figure out which way to go; an X means go back, you’ve gone the wrong way; an arrow tells you what direction to take; two short parallel lines indicate go back to some earlier point in the trail; a large capital E with an arrow off to the top corner means this is the trail you want if you are an “ego” runner; a T with a direction arrow means this is the trail you want if you jog like a turkey; BC stands for beer check (drink beer); and HH means Hash House (everyone gathers).

Stroke Alone, a svelte and lanky man in his 40s has arranged my day with VH3 after our first encounter at the Bay Center. One of the hashers tells me Stroke Alone always runs ahead, although he often doubles back to encourage stragglers; “and he always runs alone,” I guessed. Deep Shit got into the habit of saying “I’m in deep shit” so often the RA tagged him with a new name to match his proclivity for getting into trouble. As we leave the park and head for UVIC grounds, I notice the 60-ish looking pudgy hasher wearing a red T-shirt with white capital letters “DFL” on the front and “FRB” on the back. The gray-haired wisp of a woman with the tights and knee-high white socks that say “ON-ON” vertically on their sides tells me DFL stands for “dead fucking last” and FRB stands for “front running bastard” (which sometimes extends to FFRB, or “fucking front running bastard.”)

Hashing started in 1938 in what is now Malaysia, when a group of British colonial officers and expatriates would meet on Monday evenings to run in the traditional “hare and hounds” event. Their aim was to purge the excesses of the previous weekend. The name “Hash House Harriers” comes from the “Hash House” (cheap restaurant) where several of the founders dined. The objectives of the Hash House Harriers were recorded on the club registration card in 1950:

• To promote physical fitness among our members
• To get rid of weekend hangovers
• To acquire a good thirst and to satisfy it in beer
• To persuade the older members that they are not as old as they feel

 

Hashing fizzed out during World War II, but was restarted in 1946 by some of the original group. Then, in 1962, a second chapter sprung up in Singapore, then many more throughout the Far East and the South Pacific. Westerners heard about it and set up chapters all over Europe and North America. The movement expanded greatly during the1970s.

We’re in Mystic Vale and I walk beside 65-year-old diminutive High Beams. With a pleasing smile, grey hair in a pony-tail, and a steady gait, she seems glad to have me for company. (We are the only ones walking; about every 15 minutes the rest of the hashers gather and wait for us.) A few years before, on a New Year Polar Bear Hash at a local lake, she had, along with other hashers, high-stepped into the lake. When she ran out of the icy water one of the men looked at her and shouted “high beams.” At first, I’m puzzled. “Well,” she explains, “When I come out of cold water my anatomy changes.”

High Beams says she’s been coming out to Hash events for ten years, though she’s missed a year to rehab a badly torn hamstring. For High Beams, “hashers are family.” HB feels safe enough with this family to act like a child when she feels like it. As we crossed Henderson Road and walked on the chip trail, she stopped at the clearing with the metal exercise equipment, just to play around. We then stepped up the pace to catch up with the others, and she yelled out “Are you?” which is what you do when you fall behind and you want to make sure you don’t lose contact with the group.

With clouds dispersing and the sun making an appearance, we caught up with the others at Henderson-Gyro Park, in the parking lot, for the beer check. Preemie lifts the lid on the beer cooler and invites me to have a beer, although he is pleased to tell me there is water in the cooler too. An eight-inch white logo on Preemie’s red running jacket looks like a raging granny in full stride hoisting a beer mug up in the air. This is the VH3 “kennel” logo. Queen Victoria (“Vicki”) in a skirt, knickers showing, proudly hoisting a mug full of foamy beer. On the run.

HB Beams flew like a six-year-old on the swings in the adjacent playground. The rest of us spent about fifteen minutes chatting and drinking beer, and then we returned to Horner Park, where Double Hump gathers everyone for the “after” circle. The woman with the toddler finds out where the “after after” event will be and drives off. It soon becomes clear to me why she skips this part.

I learn later this circle is an opportunity for the “down-down,” a fun way for rewarding or recognizing a hasher for eccentric behaviour or notable talent. Down-downs also serve as punishment for misdemeanours real, imagined, or blatantly made up. Such transgressions may include: failing to stop at the beer check, pointing with a finger, or the use of real names. Stroke Alone tells me hashers who wear new shoes to an event have to drink from one of their new shoes (which he did at the last run).

DH calls me into the circle to commemorate my loss of virginity and invites me to tell a dirty joke or sing a song. He asks me to take off my hat, again. I don’t have a joke or a song, but the hare’s assistant hands me a cup of water (I’d had a beer at the beer check) to toast the group and be recognized now as one of them. To enthusiastic shouts of “down it, down it,” I gulp it all down in one swig. And someone starts to sing a bawdy song, and they all join in. I’m flushed. Then DH calls five or six hashers – one at a time – those deemed by DH to have committed a serious offense on the trail, to come in to the circle to be chastised. The wispy woman with the “ON – ON” socks, for example, is guilty of snobbery for drinking her own beer instead of the beer supplied by the hare. They guzzle their beer from the super-size plastic cup in a long, drooling swig. Then they fling their hand with the empty cup back over their shoulder as if to spray any last drops of beer behind them. Here are the lyrics to the song (more of a chant, really) for the wispy snob, bellowed with extreme zest by hashers, while all I could do was etch out a barely-perceptible smile.

 

FINGER IN YOUR BEER

How would – you like – my finger in your ear?
How would – you like my finger in your ear?
Not fucking likely! Not fucking likely! Not fucking likely!

Second verse: substitute “rear” for “ear.”

Third verse: substitute “beer” for “ear.”

 

As he sings, Deep Shit gesticulates and points his finger towards the mentioned orifice or object (his own ear, rear, and beer). With the shout of each “Not fucking likely,” they all put their beer cups on their heads and twirl around. Slowly. No one topples over.

Members often describe their group as “a drinking club with a running problem,” indicating that the social element is as important, if not more so, than any athleticism involved. When the hash officially ends, hashers may continue socialising at an “on-after” at a nearby pub or restaurant. Family hashes welcome children (sometimes called hash house horrors or ankle biters) with soft drinks replacing alcoholic beverages and drinking songs toned down appropriately.

For today’s “on after,” we haul over to the 1550s Pub Style Restaurant on Cedar Hill Cross Road. More beer, this time with food. I sit to the left of Cockaleeky. She got her hash name at an event where hashers brought food for soup to share, and her contribution had been a leek pinned to her shirt. I didn’t need to ask why the “cock” preceded the “leeky.” We chat about travels and I mention my excursions to Australia and New Zealand. Her eyes widen. With a minimum of coaxing, she tells me her New Zealand story; how it happened that a few years ago she’d spent two weeks in Auckland. Seems 170 years ago her great-great-great grandfather was a missionary to the South Pacific, sent by an English religious society founded by evangelical Anglicans and Nonconformists. Tragically, when he arrived he was killed by cannibals. Descendants of the cannibals had felt cursed all these years because of the actions of their vicious and voracious ancestors. When UBC anthropologist Carol Mayer found out, she helped arrange a reconciliation and forgiveness ceremony, which was held in Vanuatu in 2009. Cockaleeky, together with seventeen family members, had been in Vanuatu for the reconciliation ceremony when she fell stepping down a rocky path and broke her leg. She hadn’t missed any of the ceremony, but had to fly to Auckland for surgery and a two-week hospital stay.

By a quarter past seven, beer lovers, diners, and sports fans pack the restaurant. Hashers eat, drink, chat, and laugh. DH tells me he loves to travel and incorporates hash events into his travels. On his first run in Malaysia, he had run with about 125 hashers, mostly ex-pats and all men, in Borneo, up a steep hill on a one-foot-wide trail twisting along treacherous jungle escarpments. It’s not unthinkable for someone to get lost or fall off the side of a cliff, so before they set off everyone chucks their car keys into a barrel. When it’s over, they check the barrel to see if there are any keys left inside, and that’s how they know if they need to go on a search. DH still remembers the look and feel of the jungle. Vivid greens and yellows and reds spread out in a panorama of foliage, amid a plethora of screeching birds and wildlife. Squishy terrain softened by days of pummeling rain had caused a few slips, but the highlight had been the 12-foot crocodile staring not-so surreptitiously at potential prey. “I can still hear that song we were all singing throughout that two-hour run,” he told me with a grin, “A one-word song. Over and over and over. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.”

For DH, hashing is all about fun. “If you look at photos of hashers anywhere in the world,” he said with pride, “You will always see smiling people.” VH3’s 200 hashers, aged 19 to 82, welcome kids of all ages. The international symbol for hashers is “ON-ON,” which is what a hasher on the trail yells out to those following as he passes an arrow direction marker. “Wherever you might be, anywhere in the world, if you see a symbol of a bare foot with the words ON-ON, you’ll know you’re looking at a hasher.”

By 8:30 the restaurant is almost empty and the hashers have all left except for Double Hump and High Beams. We say goodbye. Double hump shakes my hand and High Beams hug me snugly. I take my time putting on my jacket and hat. Sling my backpack over my shoulder and step out into the chill darkness of the city. I wonder how Double Hump got his hash name. A bet over camel species? Or maybe he’s known for being able to run and run without drinking water.

 

 

 

Cain’s Creation  

 

Adam and Eve conceived Cain (he who is created),

And later his brother Abel.

And Abel became a shepherd, and Cain a farmer.

 

When he became a man Cain offered

The first fruits of his harvest to God,

And Abel brought the fattest young from his flock.

And God accepted Abel’s offering

But not Cain and his offering.

 

This troubled Cain.

 

Cain said to Abel let’s go for a walk

And when they were alone,

Cain killed his brother Abel.

 

Then God said to Cain listen

Your brother’s blood is crying out

To me from the earth.

Now you are cursed.

When you till the earth, it will not yield harvest

You shall become a wanderer and a vagabond.

 

And Cain said my punishment is too much to bear.

You have banished me, and

I must become a restless wanderer

But anyone who meets me can kill me.

 

And God said if anyone harms you,

You will be avenged seven times over.

And God marked Cain’s head,

So that anyone who met him would know

And Cain went away and settled in

The land of Nod (restlessness), east of Eden.

 

Joesph Flexer, born in Brooklyn,

Dropped out of Yeshiva and became a socialist.

1951, age 18, Zionist pioneer in the

Negev Kibbutz Urim (lights).

 

As Be’er Sheva Region military commander

Patrol with Jeep and Uzi;

His task: ambush Palestinian infiltrators.

Shoot to kill. On sight.

 

Isaac Flexer, born in Winnipeg

1974, age 18; soldier AWOL

Evening hitchhiking to Zophar military base,

(Transitioning to an agricultural settlement;

A border stronghold, “facts on the ground”).

 

In uniform (but unarmed), standing alone at

Crossroads near Sodom.

No vehicles pass. Nothing stirs. Not a sound is heard.

Nowhere a bird or a lizard or a snake.

Embraced by silent void and emptiness

(Must be what it’s like to be on the moon.)

 

Eerie. No fear. No concern whatsoever.

Yellow stars and white moon in a black sky,

Glow of orange from stacks and towers of the phosphate plant.

 

Zophar is named for one of Job’s three friends

Job who came from some unknown place.

Beside Zophar is the military post named Bildad.

Twenty kilometers to the south another military outpost

Eliphaz, where Daveed Flexer, in 1984, at age 18

Serves in the military in a similar border stronghold.

 

North shore of the Dead Sea

South of Jericho, the caves of Qumran.

At the lowest elevation on earth,

In a lifeless, silent, and desolate place,

Ancient Jewish religious community – the Essenes

Climb the ragged cliffs; cache scrolls of biblical scripture.

Undisturbed for 2,000 years.

In the spring of 1947, last days of the British mandate in Palestine,

Young Bedu shepherd Muhammad edh-Dhib finds

The Dead Sea Scrolls (probably looking for a lost sheep).

 

Archaeologists and biblical scholars retrieve hundreds of leather fragments,

Including an incomplete Isaiah manuscript, a scroll of Hymns, and

The story of the War of the Sons of Light against the Sons of Darkness.

 

Abraham cast out the slave Hagar and her son Ishmael,

And Hagar went into the wilderness of Be’er-Sheva.

Soon without water they were close to death

And Hagar wept. God’s angel: Arise, lift up the lad

For I will make him a great nation.

And God opened her eyes, and she saw a well of water.

And Ishmael grew, and lived in the wilderness.

He had twelve sons, ancestors of twelve tribes.

 

Bedu society is a swarm of independent families

Surviving in the desert on meager subsistence.

Each family part of a clan (for security);

The clan (khamsa) part of a sub-tribe (ruba);

Part of a tribe (ashira), part of a sub-confederation (fakhdh);

Part of a confederation (gabila), a bedu nation.

 

Head of the clan is an elder (kabir)

Head of the tribe is a chief (shaikh).

People without a state and without a central government.

Agreements made by consensus;

(It is better to destroy a people’s interests

with their consent than to enhance them on one own’s initiative.)

 

Winnipeg. 1964. Flexers watch Lawrence of Arabia (at the North Main Drive-in).

Hawitat shaikh shoots and kills Lawrence’s bedu guide,

Not allowed by law to drink from Hawitat wells.

Later Lawrence to Sherif Ali: So long as the Arabs

Fight tribe against tribe, so long will they be a little people,

A silly people, greedy, barbarous, and cruel, as you are.

 

Murder is like a witch’s cave. Easy to enter but impossible to leave.

Sleep with regret, but not with murder.

Even he with the long sword must submit to the law.

Murder marks a weak clan; damages reputation for strength;

Blood-revenge restores strength. Revenge dispels shame.

Often, to avoid retaliation, clansmen of the murderer

Pick up and flee, abandon all possessions, become exiles.

But exile is constant humiliation with

Dependence on the tribe that offers refuge.

 

Murder compels migration.

 

Rage rises in Joesph Flexer, fulminating.

Loses faith in the Israeli-Zionist cause.

Festers in his own complicity

Obliterates his ability to love.

 

When Cheryl Strayed is a college senior,

Her mother dies of lung cancer.

Family scatters; her marriage ends.

She calls this loss her genesis story.

 

Four years later, at 26, driven by blind will,

She hikes the 1100 miles of the Pacific Crest Trail.

Three months, Mojave Desert through California

To Oregon and Washington. Alone.

A journey of strength and healing.

 

Robyn Davidson’s mother commits suicide

When Davidson is 11.

In 1977, at 27, leaves Alice Springs

For the west coast of Australia, 1700 miles away.

With her dog Diggity and four camels.

Across desolate outback, riding camel Bub.

 

A lunatic gesture of independence

Survival in a landscape of sandstorms, prickly rain, unbearable heat,

Poisonous snakes, charging bull camels (and a mass of tourists).

Six months later soaks in the Indian Ocean.

Transformed by the journey.

 

1972. Isaac in high school in Arad

(20 kilometers from Massada, 24 from the Dead Sea),

Shuns History and the Hebrew bible.

Unprepared for bible mid-term exam,

Writes 5-page essay in exam booklet arguing against teaching scripture

As compulsory subject in a secular democracy.

Days later stops going to classes. Drops out.

Gets a job as a welder’s assistant.

Soon IDF call-up notice comes in the mail.

 

Isaac Flexer’s lineage: maternal side Russian Jewish colonizers of Palestine;

1923: buy cheap land; toil the barely-arable soil.

Paternal side Jewish socialist pioneer in Palestine

Ensured Palestinians would never return.

Later Joesph/Joe Flexer seeks redemption by taking up Palestinian cause.

 

Poetry: the gem of Arab culture,

But Bedu masters of oral verse.

Recited from memory.

Metaphor a way of life.

 

Rarely do Bedu answer a question directly;

Direct answer suggests shallowness.

Answers rather, given in verse, story, or parable.

To understand, you must decipher.

 

Bedu children grow up with metaphor, proverbs, and poetry.

Unchecked emotions weaken group’s solidarity,

So poetry expresses sadness, love, anger;

Conveys feelings difficult to express.

 

A fog of despair shrouds

The eye, just when it starts to clear

 

When cousin kills cousin in a squabble,

This poem expresses sadness, triggered

By the painful memory of the murdered young man.

 

Adam and Eve’s three children: Cain, Abel, and Seth.

Cain and Seth become grandfathers of every human.

Cain, banished to a life of wandering and homelessness,

The essence of volatility and rootlessness.

 

Seth founder of the stable world

(Seth in Hebrew means “to set” or “to establish”).

Cain the disruptor of life. Seth the patriarch.

Cain the nomad, Seth the settler.

 

1997. A small unrecognized Bedu village in the Negev

Two hundred of the Azazmeh tribe live here

(Should have relocated to the state-planned town of Segev Shalom.)

Suleiman El-Hrenik runs a tourist business;

Hosts 50 tourists a year, mainly Jewish Israelis.

In a tent large enough for 100 visitors.

 

Suleiman, in his 70s, flowing grey-white beard,

Long white cloth covers head and shoulders.

Forehead wrinkled by decades of wind and sun.

Wears a T-shirt and cargo pants

Sits comfortably on the floor, legs crossed.

Pours tea. Describes his situation.

 

We are the original Bedu.

We have sheep, goats, camels, everything here.

We make pita on the saj. We have tea, coffee, lebaneh, humus,

And bread we cook on the fire.

We slaughter sheep for our guests right here.

 

We take the people to see the local area.

They can sleep here in the guest side of the tent.

We have a kitchen, and I have set up bathrooms for them.

They can come here and see how everything is open.

 

This is how we live, not in a stone house in town.

That’s no way to live, we can’t live like that.

I can’t live in a stone house, a house that’s closed in!

That’s not the life of the Bedu!

 

We do everything in this country,

We are guards, we serve in the Army.

We just want to be left alone.

But they want to destroy our houses.

There is a demolition order on my son’s house right now!

 

Where will we go, what will we do?

I am a Bedu! I have chickens, camels, goats, sheep! I cannot live in a city!

 

I was in the Yom Kippur War, in the tank corps.

There were seven Azazmeh in the unit.

Look at this situation! Everything here is in turmoil.

This country treats me like this.

It makes trouble for me and my family all the time,

Wanting to destroy our homes, to destroy our lives.

This country is shit.

 

Awlad ‘Ali Bedu tribe think it shameful

To complain publicly about one’s personal life,

Relations between spouses or family members;

Emotions such as pain, grief, vulnerability, and love.

Poetry speaks veiled social messages.

 

This poetry is called the ghinnawa (little song).

Can be recited in a regular speaking voice:

Tears increased,

The beloved came to mind in the time of sadness.

 

Or chanted to a repetitive, mournful melody;

Gradually pealing layer after layer of emotion:

 

In the time

In the time

In the time of sadness

In the time

The beloved in the time of sadness

In the time

In the time

The beloved in the time of sadness

In the time

In the time

In the time my tears

My tears increased oh Lord

In the time

In the time

The beloved came to mind

The beloved came to mind in the time of sadness

 

The Awlad ‘Ali say beautiful poetry makes you cry.

 

Proverbs from the common people are like salt for the food.

 

One’s maternal uncle is like a loop.

Bedu Boy’s qualities come from his maternal relatives,

His personality depends on theirs.

The loop is the loop of a saddle bag or sack

By which it hangs, as a boy’s personality is hung on

Or tied to his mother’s men folk.

 

Anez abu Salim al-Urdi, born in 1920,

(The finest living poet in Sinai).

While in prison (led smuggling ring; spent 15 years in prison),

Two of his wives ran off with men of his own tribe.

He composed this poem in prison,

At the time of the Feast of the Sacrifice:

 

Last night I slept unsound

Yet how few to whom I’d complain of my pain.

O how pleasing’s the cup one sips under palms

And the gun’s sound where the wadi bends.

And lamb’s meat we’ve heaped on embers of broom

With friends in the shade of a booth, reclining

Near darkened-eyed lasses with fine even teeth,

Their tattoos as green as the pasture of spring.

But today I’m trapped in the tangles of fate,

Imbibing, by draughts, purest poison.

Others are covered but we are exposed,

As jerboa-mice frolic within my abodes.

Though I’ve whitened the withers of mares, I’m despised;

Even those who wear the black shawl shun me.

My clan’s like hyenas at small stinking pools,

Crouched to the ground like hyenas drinking.

 

During the first world war, the Hashemite Sharif of Mecca,

(With T. E. Lawrence), organized a revolt against

The Turks in western Arabia; many Bedu joined,

Leaving womenfolk despondent:

 

I’m sad out herding goats today,

Crying for those who’re far away,

Who’ve pitched their tents where death goes by;

What luck if we see them again someday.

And woe to the walker or he who rides slow

When chargers veer, their sticks asway.

Looking out as far as anyone can,

I see only tattered dresses swaying.

All that remain are virgins and flocks,

And asses, in the wormwood, braying.

 

A Bedu child hears proverbs on every aspect of life, many in rhyme:

A child is a child, though he rule a town;

You must live with a neighbor, though he oppress you;

What’s done is done.

A trial is called an assembly and a full coffee pot;

Or a semicircle of kneeling men.

When they water their camels, they make

A simple rhyme called an “urging”,

Sung over and over again while

Urging the camels to drink.

 

The village of Al-‘Imara, (more a hamlet than a village),

Once located in the middle of a wide plain

Linked by roads to Be’er Sheva, twenty-seven kilometers to the east

And to Gaza, twenty-two kilometers to the north.

Arid. Agriculture not possible.

But villagers cultivate beds of nearby wadis.

 

December 26, 1947: small-scale battle;

Jewish patrol clashes with local residents.

Fall 1948: Israeli army seizes the village;

Clearing operations: Arabs expelled;

Livestock confiscated; wells blown up.

 

1948. Kibbutz Urim sprouts on Al-‘Imara land.

Two kilometers southeast of the kibbutz

Are ruins of several stone structures;

Houses of Bedu families from before 1948.

Today, kibbutz farmers cultivate village land.

 

My own search for freedom,

For the Self obscured by Isaac/Jerry;

Tarnished by lineage.

No need to be right in a place.

Better to wander out of place from home to home

Not at home anywhere in particular.

 

Shepherd, farmer, wanderer; harmonization is futile.

Currents of water and grains of sand can be out of place

But combine in unpredictable motion and synergy.

Unpredictability is freedom.

 

Job suffers: possessions gone, children lost, no wife.

Endures loathsome sores, bad advice, and much anguish.

Why does blameless Job suffer?

Why does God allow his suffering?

 

Job grieves; not for lost possessions or children.

Job mourns for the lost belief that righteousness protects.

Pleads for the chance to reason with God.

 

Three friends Eliphaz, Bildad, and Zophar,

Say he’s being punished for his sins.

But Job knows this is false.

 

Then God’s voice from the whirlwind.

And Job submits.

And God restores his world: possessions doubled; a new family.

 

Job has come closer to God.

Before, he could hear God

But now he sees.

Drifting

We are all just visitors to this time, this place. We are just passing through.

Our purpose here is to observe, to grow, to love – and then we go home.

Aboriginal Proverb

Bruce Chatwin’s The Songlines is a collection of philosophical and anthropological meanderings quilted together by encounters with Aboriginals in Central Australia under the guidance of Arkady, a local expert originally from Russia. Bruce, the main character and narrator, explores human migration in parallel with his search for the etiology of his own restlessness. In one scene Bruce is in the British Museum library in London researching animal migration. He comes upon “the most spectacular of bird migrations: the flight of the Arctic tern, a bird which nests in the tundra; winters in Antarctic waters, and then flies back to the north.” Later, as he steps out into the street he sees a beggar rebuffed by a well-heeled gentleman and offers to buy the tramp lunch in exchange for the man’s travel stories. Over two generous helpings of steak, the tramp tells his life story, and then as they part, the tramp says: “It’s like the tides was pulling you along the highway. I’m like the Arctic tern, guv’nor. That’s a bird. A beautiful white bird what flies from the North Pole to the South Pole and back again.”

In the desert town of Alice Springs, Arkady tells Bruce that, unlike the creation myth in Genesis, aboriginal ancestors created themselves from clay in the Dreaming time. There are hundreds of thousands of ancestors, one for each species. Each scattered a trail of words and musical notes along these Dreaming-tracks – the Songlines, which became “both map and direction-finder. If you knew the song, you could always find your way.”

 

Jean “Django” Reinhardt (1910 – 1953) was a Belgium-born French guitarist. Django developed a fingering style to suit his injured fretting hand, mangled in an accidental fire that left him only two usable fingers in his left hand. Thousands still emulate his jazz guitar style and many more flock to Django festivals and workshops in over 30 countries. His music, a lugubrious but bodacious bounce, emanated from a soul who’d known suffering and displacement, with a heritage weighed down by years of oppression. A heritage of the road. Of exile. Django had been a descendant of Gypsies. Travelers. Roma roamers.

Django Reinhardt was famous for his blend of American jazz with traditional European and Roma music. Reinhardt’s father was also a musician, and his mother was a dancer (according to some reports). They were Manouches, or French gypsies, and they eventually settled in a caravan camp near Paris. Raised without any formal schooling, Reinhardt was practically illiterate.

Gypsies (Gitano, Tsigane, Rom, Roma, Romani) left India over a thousand years ago on what is believed to have been a forced migration, for reasons uncertain. As they travelled and settled foreign lands, they held on to their culture, and especially to their music and dance.

As a teenager, Reinhardt learned to play an instrument that was a hybrid of guitar and banjo. He was self-taught and never learned how to read or write music, always dependent on others to transcribe his compositions. He started playing popular French music in Paris clubs when he was twelve, but soon became interested in American jazz in the mid-1920s, especially the works of Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong and Joe Venuti.

 

My four grandparents were Russian Jews. In 1905, thousands of Jews are killed in anti-Jewish riots in Western Russia (What was then called the Pale of Settlement: The archaic English term “pale” comes from the Latin palus – a stake, referring to demarcation of land enclosed within a fence or boundary.) My maternal great-grandfather, Asher Cucuy, finds out the Canadian government is offering 160 acres of prairie agricultural land for $10 in exchange for a commitment to work the land and build on it a home. This Canadian settlement project means to attract new immigrants to the western prairies. The plan provides an additional enticement of a further 160 acres for those who stay at least two years. And settlers who stay five years become the outright owners of the land. Asher’s life’s dream – to own his own farm in a free country – is now within sight, in a faraway land.

Asher leaves Russia, alone, and labours three years in the Canadian wilderness; sends money to the family back home in Russia for them to join him at the farm he builds in Oliver, Saskatchewan. The family lives in a mud house and tries to make a living from farming. But the chill and snow of prairie winters, crusty soil that refuses to yield to cultivators’ teeth, and the social isolation – from community but especially Jewish community – all contribute to a harsh life. So Asher and his family pack up and roam Canada working as salaried laborers or lessees of farms, engaging mainly in plowing, sowing, and threshing. For years they live in huts on wheels, carted around by horses. Five more children are born, and Asher’s family is now eleven souls to feed. Salvation comes from the East.

With the Balfour Declaration of 1917 expressing British support for a Jewish state in Palestine, as wells as growing prominence and financial health of the Jewish National Fund, Asher now looks to the biblical Jewish homeland of Zion.

When the first British high commissioner for Palestine arrives in Jerusalem in June 1920 he is met with a seventeen-gun salute and profuse words of welcome. Sir Herbert Samuel serves as high commissioner for five years, to the delight of Jews. For his part, Samuel is moved by the outpouring of emotion that greets him in Palestine. Having been raised in an Orthodox Jewish home, he is keen to help resolve the Jewish problem.

On January 18, 1923, Herbert Samuel grants Asher Cucuy a 99-year lease over 420 acres near the mainly Arab city of Akko (an area called al-Rakayek in Arabic). Jews in those times rarely live outside the city’s walls (populated then by Arabs, of course), and the only building near Asher’s house is a match factory. They settle in. The younger children attend a Jewish school in Akko. But the water they have for irrigation is too salty and the family is forced again to find work in various menial labors nearby and also further afield.

 

On a vacation to visit family in Israel in the mid-eighties, we made a day trip to Akko. I walked around the old city not with a camera but with my cassette player. Akko is a city with a four thousand year-old port, ancient stone walls, mysterious passageways and tunnels, stone-paved alleys and houses of worship signifying its value to four religions: Christianity, Judaism, Islam, and Baha’i. I remember looking up at the rooftops of large stone houses that might have been a thousand years old with hundreds of television antennas aimed up to the blue sky like modern towers of Babel, alongside towering minarets with muezzins’ chants calling Muslims to prayer.

In Old Testament times Akko was part of Judaea, ruled by King David and King Solomon. As part of the land of Canaan, Akko was conquered by the Hebrew Tribe of Asher. The Romans came in 63 B.C.E. and Parthians from Persia invaded. Jesus walked here during Herod’s rule, and after the fall of the Second Temple, and the last stand at Masada in 73, the Jews dispersed.

In the 13th Century, Akko was captured by Crusaders from Europe and became the capital and stronghold of the Christian Crusader Kingdom. The Crusaders were ousted by Mamelukes, an army of warrior slaves, in 1291 and the Turkish Ottoman Empire fought its way in and controlled Akko from 1519 to 1919. In the 1800s, Baha’u’llah, a pillar of the Baha’i faith founded in Persia (Iran), was expelled to the Ottoman jail in Akko, and in the 1900s the British took control of Palestine after defeating the Turks. Palestinian Arabs resisted British rule and after Akko’s Arab revolt in 1939, Jews left the Old City and formed New Akko just beyond.

But perhaps the most interesting ancient visitor to Akko was Marco Polo, the world’s first great travel writer. In 1271, Marco Polo, then 17 years old, with his father and uncle, sailed from Venice to the city then known as Acre, and made it their point of departure to the East. They rode camels to the Persian port of Hormuz and continued on across the deserts and mountains of Asia, arriving at Kublai Khan’s summer palace in Shangdu three years after leaving Venice.

 

Soon, all of Asher Cucuy’s descendants make a home in Palestine, which in 1948 becomes the Jewish State of Israel, except for my grandmother Leah. Her husband Saul, whom she had married in Winnipeg in the 1920’s, prefers the relative comfort of Winnipeg to a pioneer’s austere life in Palestine’s wasteland. My mother is born in Winnipeg in 1932. And I am born in Winnipeg in 1955 (although conceived in Israel) after my mother leaves my father in Israel and comes to stay with her mother.

My Brooklyn-born father and Winnipeg-born mother meet in New Jersey at a Jewish youth movement agricultural prep camp. They become Zionist pioneers; settle and marry on a kibbutz in the Negev desert. On a clear day, from Kibbutz Urim, “lights” in Hebrew, you can gaze out to the West to Gaza and Egypt, 15 kilometers away, and maybe catch a glimpse of whitish blue that is the Eastern Mediterranean.

My mother named me Yitschak Shlomoh (Isaac Solomon). But when we return to Kibbutz Urim someone tags me with the nickname Tziki. I celebrate my first birthday on the kibbutz, and then when I am two or three my mother leaves my father again and the two of us shuttle around for a couple of years between friends and relatives, like vagabonds almost. After our peripatetic wandering, my mother and father reunite and we move to the city of Beer Sheva, where a sister arrives, and then a brother. But we’re not done traveling. The family makes two more cross-Atlantic moves Israel to Canada (where I become Siggy) and back (where I become Itzik), until I leave Israel for Canada on my own at 21, now adopting the name I use now. To fit in.

It was while living in Winnipeg in the late 80s that I first heard Roma music, over pizza at an Italian restaurant on Corydon Avenue. Winnipeg’s Little Italy is located on Corydon Avenue between Stafford Street on the west and Pembina Highway on the east. Nowadays, the term “Little Italy” is somewhat anachronistic, since several of the Italian restaurants have closed and non-Italian restaurants and shops have filled in the gaps.

I remember Corydon Avenue as a working class family neighbourhood, where I had once lived in a rented apartment for a year or so, and where, at the intersection of Corydon and Arbuthnot I found my first job in Canada after three years in the Israeli military. For six months I sold Filter Queen “Home sanitation systems,” the Cadillac of vacuum cleaners, on commission, earning a weekly pay check one Friday in July 1977 of 888 dollars. It would be another fifteen years before I would earn that much money in just one week.

At the restaurant on Corydon Avenue, I don’t remember who I was with that evening but I do remember excusing myself in the middle of our conversation to go and find out the name of the group performing the music streaming from the speakers, and that is when I first heard the Gipsy Kings. I’d never before heard music like it. I was entranced by an arresting barrage of four or five Spanish guitars and deep male harmonies, fast-tempo Spanish folk songs with mellow laments and love songs in the mix. A distinctive and exotic chromatic of emotion.

One song I remember distinctly is “Bamboleo”. The refrain says: “Bamboléo, Bamboléa, Porque mi vida yo la prefiero vivir asi” (Swaying, swaying, that’s how I prefer to live). Part of the song is an adaptation of a Venezuelan folk song called “Caballo Viejo,” composed by Simon Diaz. But “Bamboleo” is originally Brazilian and had been performed decades earlier by Carmen Miranda. Julio Iglesias, the Spanish singer-songwriter known for singing “the language of love,” performed it as “Caballo Viejo (Bamboleo)“.

Iglesias has Jewish ancestry on his mother’s side, referring to her in an interview as “de la Cueva y Perignat” (“of the cave”), which in Spain refers to people in hiding and is associated with Jewish people. Iglesias had studied law and had once been a professional soccer goalkeeper for Real Madrid Castilla, a career that came to an abrupt end when his spine was fractured in a car accident. He couldn’t walk for two years but when he was rehabilitating in hospital, a nurse gave him a guitar to keep him occupied. He taught himself how to play and discovered his musical talent.

 

The Gipsy Kings grew up in Arles, France in an idyllic countryside setting, among Roman ruins and immersed in the Roma culture, traveling around the south of France. From the festivals and weddings, to the dancing and the music, the Reyes and Baliardo children had grown up celebrating life and love through song. Their father, Jose Reyes, had been a renowned Flamenco singer, admired by the likes of John Steinbeck, Charlie Chaplin, Pablo Picasso, Miles Davis and Salvador Dali. In the 1970’s, the Reyes boys came together as Los Reyes, playing traditional Flamenco locally and performing with their father until his death.

The Reyes brothers kept up their music around the campfire and at parties and then one summer they made the traditional Roma pilgrimage to Saint Marie de la Mer Gitan, where they discovered the musical talents of their cousins, the Baliardos. After playing together around the fire, they quickly realized that there was magic in their musical mix, so they joined together to form the Gipsy Kings, bringing their uniquely boisterous Rumba Flamenco to Europe, and then to the world. And to me sitting in a pizza restaurant in Winnipeg.

 

Most of the world’s Roma live a more or less settled life in Europe. Some say when they first arrived 700 hundred years ago, people assumed their dark skin meant they were Turks or Egyptians. One legend claims they descended from 12,000 musicians gifted to the Persian king in the fifth century, and were sent away after the king grew tired of them. Linguists, though, figured out they must have come from the deserts of northwestern India, spreading in waves over many generations westward. First to the Balkans and Egypt; then to central Europe, France and eventually to Spain, where they settled in Andalucía and gave the world Flamenco.

 

In 1940, the Nazis occupy Paris and declare the Roma undesirable. Thousands of Roma die in concentration camps. Remarkably, Django Reinhardt is allowed to continue performing in Paris nightclubs, in the Nazis’ military entertainment playground. Reinhardt’s sadness over the occupation inspires his song Nuages (“clouds”). In 1953, Django Reinhardt, now a legendary guitar improviser, jams with Dizzie Gillespie. He records his final album while touring in the U.S. On May 16, Reinhardt dies of a massive stroke in Fontainebleau, France. Jazz aficionados consider Reinhardt the most prominent European performer to have influenced American jazz.

 

The migration of the Gypsies brings to mind the exodus of the Israelites. But the Israelites, enslaved by the pharaoh in Egypt, had a very powerful ally. With God’s help, they persuaded the pharaoh to let them go. A journey of forty years, with a thirty-eight year sojourn at the oasis of Kadesh Barnea in the Sinai, took them out of Egypt to the east; to Canaan, the Promised Land. To Gaza and the Negev desert, and eventually the kingdoms of Israel and Judea.

Dr. Ian Hancock, director of the Program of Romani Studies at The University of Texas at Austin, and author of The Pariah Syndrome, tells me in an email that while there are several historic similarities between Jews and Gypsies, “the difference between these two peoples is that Jews are outsiders on the inside, while we are outsiders on the outside.” Jews are also a literate people, adds Dr. Hancock. “We are not. Jews have always had Israel, and in 1948 finally got it back. We forgot our roots in India, and we are only now rediscovering these roots, but not with any desire to return.”

 

Legend tells of persecuted Lazarus expelled to sea in a boat with his sisters Mary Magdalene and Martha, Mary Salome, Mary Jacobe and Maximin. Arriving in France, they were looked after by Saint Sarah, also known as Sara-la-Kali (Sara the Black) and in Romani Sara e Kali. Sara was known for her charitable work, which led people to believe she was a Roma, and ever since, Saint Sara has been the adopted patron saint of the Romani. To this day, Gypsies make an annual pilgrimage to Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer, in the Camargue, in southern France, in veneration of Saint Sara.

In France today, many Tsigane still travel in horse-drawn caravans; possessions onboard, always on the move. If they do settle, word soon gets out and locals come and persuade them to move on. And they move on, like the migrating starlings in the sky. If you come to see your Tsigane friends, and find them gone, you can follow their tracks by finding the string-bound clumps of wildflowers they leave behind along the road they’ve traveled.

 

Today I’ve nowhere to go and no one is chasing me, but like the Wandering Jew who taunted Jesus, cursed to walk the earth until the Second Coming, I am a homeless fool. Legend from the 17th century gave the name Ahasver to the Wandering Jew, adapted perhaps from Achashverosh, the Persian king in the Book of Esther, who some believe was a benevolent king, but he had actually been wicked from the very beginning to the very end.

 

Carl Gustav Jung had something to say on the psychological aspects of Ahasver, the eternal wanderer. Perhaps the most striking and controversial concept in Jungian theory involves the archetype; part of what Jung calls the collective unconscious. One archetype, for example, is the “shadow,” the dark or negative side of the human psyche. The idea that the Wandering Jew might be related to biblical Cain and other wandering figures in various cultures was suggested by Jung himself in an essay first published in 1912. Jung even offered a solar interpretation of the legend of the Wandering Jew. He claims “the wish-fulfillment idea of the legend is very clear. The mystic material for it is the immutable model of the Sun’s course. The Sun sets periodically, but does not die.”

In contrast, other scholars suggest the Wandering Jew can be associated with the waxing and waning of the moon. Both the moon and the wanderer seem to be dying, and, yet, they are both always rejuvenated. An old Ukrainian text, for example, tells the story. Every four weeks the moon is reborn, and, with that, the Jews who crucified Christ and kept watch over the Lord’s tomb in Jerusalem are also reborn. These Jews are still standing there, and when they are asked by passers-by, “When were you born?” they answer, “Yesterday.” “When will you die?” “Tomorrow.”

In a Galician story of the Wandering Jew linked with the moon, from the 1880s, when the Romans were taking him to be crucified, Christ, with the heavy cross on his back, wanted to lean awhile against a Jew’s house to rest, but the Jew cried: “Go hence! Go hence!” Christ turned to the Jew and said: “I shall go, but you too must go, and roam the earth until the Last Judgment.” That Jew is still wandering. But it is hard to recognize him, because when the moon is old he is very, very old, and when the moon is young he turns young again.

Jung’s comments on the Wandering Jew aren’t limited to his solar interpretation. In an essay on Wotan (another name for the archetype of the wanderer) published in 1936, Jung describes Wotan as a wanderer who creates restlessness and stirs up strife, or engages in works of magic. Christians change Wotan into the devil, one who lives on in local tradition as a ghostly hunter and appears with his retinue on stormy nights.

But the role of the restless wanderer, says Jung, was taken over in the Middle Ages by Ahasuerus, the Wandering Jew, which is actually not a Jewish legend at all, but a Christian legend. Jung proposes that the motif of the wanderer, who has not accepted Christ, was projected onto the Jews, “just as we always rediscover our own psychic contents, which have become unconscious, in other people.”

Other scholars suggest that the Jewish people, collectively, and individually if they live in the Diaspora, carry inside themselves an Ahasverian base structure; that the myth of Ahasver reflects Jewish character traits expressed by an inner restlessness and drive to move. The cause of this inner turmoil and restlessness can be attributed to the inner conflict between the originally nomadic and later sedentary way of life of the Jewish people in their exodus from Egypt and their subsequent arrival in the land of Canaan.

Astonishingly, with this perspective, we could see in the Jewish people collectively, but also in every single Jew, a tendency toward nomadism, a life in a foreign country and among a foreign population. Jews could be said to live in continuous inner conflict between two mutually opposing tendencies. On the one hand is the tendency towards assimilation, integration, and identification with “the foreigners.” But, this leads to the denial of the characteristic Jewish nature.

On the other hand, the ancient drive toward nomadism leads towards an escape from sedentarization. In this sense, the soul of the Jew who lives in the Diaspora struggles with the conflict between longing for the lost homeland and self-denial in a foreign land. And in this struggle, Ahasverian destiny prevails in the end. The Jew is forced to wander from within.

 

I’ve finally identified that mysterious arresting quality in the music of the Romani. It’s what the Spanish poet Federico Garcia Lorca called duende. Duende embraces both light and shadow. Perhaps I am bedazzled by Flamenco because it is infused with the dark sorrow of loss as it exposes my inner struggle of not being able to choose between my lost native land and never feeling quite at home anywhere else.

Duende or tener duende (“having duende”) means having soul, a heightened state of emotion, expression and authenticity, often connected with Flamenco. The musical term was derived from the duende, a fairy or goblin-like creature in Spanish mythology. El duende is the spirit of evocation. It comes from inside as a visceral response. It chills while it excites; brings laughter as well as tears.

The music and dance of Flamenco express an authenticity that comes from a people whose culture is enriched by Diaspora hardship and sorrows. Drawing on popular usage and Spanish folklore, Federico García Lorca first developed the aesthetics of duende in a lecture he gave in Buenos Aires in 1933, La Teoria y Juego del Duende – The Theory and Play of the Duende. Lorca says:

“All through Andalusia . . . people speak constantly of duende, and recognize it with unfailing instinct when it appears. The wonderful Flamenco singer El Lebrijano said: ‘When I sing with duende, no one can equal me.’ . . . Manuel Torres, a man with more culture in his veins than anybody I have known, when listening to Falla play his own ‘Nocturno del Genaralife,’ made his splendid pronouncement: ‘All that has dark sounds has duende.’ And there is no greater truth. Thus duende is a power and not a behavior; it is a struggle and not a concept. I have heard an old master guitarist say: ‘Duende is not in the throat; duende surges up from the soles of the feet.’ Which means it is not a matter of ability, but of real live form; of blood; of ancient culture; of creative action.”

 

Just after the turn of the millennium, on my two-year round-the-world backpacking quest to find a small community to live in harmony with nature, I visited the ecovillage of Tamera in the dusty south of Portugal. After a week of encounters with eco-types from all over the world, but mainly Germans, a week that had included two one and only experiences for me, one of which was helping to construct a concrete bio-composting toilet house and the second an almost threesome with a thirty-something woman from Austria and a Swiss man my age (I was the squeamish one), I hitched to the station and took the train to Seville.

I’d seen the Tony Gatlif film Latcho Drom in Vancouver a couple of years earlier, and I’d had it in my heart to witness Flamenco up close, although it wasn’t until much later that I came to know Lorca’s notion of the duende. In Seville the hostel manager recommended a local tapas bar for authentic Flamenco.

On a hot August evening I walked the stone alleys through the Tablao Huelva and past the Plaza del Salvador. About twenty people sat casually at small round tables sipping cerveza and munching on appetizers, waiting expectantly for the show to begin. The restaurant, small and modestly decorated, made me feel welcome, and I presumed by the sounds of voices and accents that most of the people were Spanish. A painting of an older black-haired Flamenco queen hung on the wall and candles flickered on a fireplace hearth. At the back, three sturdy wooden chairs sat empty.

When the musicians arrive, everything goes quiet. Two young men and a woman in her thirties or forties, all dressed in sharp-looking greys and blacks. It is the guitar player who sends us on our journey, flinging an avalanche of chords with powerful right-hand fingers as his left-hand fingers nimbly slide across the fretboard. In the middle sits the singer, the canto. But the singing itself is called quejillo, which means “to complain,” though I hear it as a lamentation.

Quejillo cries out against one’s fate in a raging, roiling plea aimed at once at the gods and at men. The canto starts as the guitar’s accompanist but gradually asserts herself more and more. She clenches her fists to her heaving chest, bellowed cries engulfing the room and beyond. Her face grimaces in pain; eyes closed. Her soul stands there naked before us.

Just then the third of the group comes in with staccato handclaps, called palmas, a vigorous and steady rap-rap-rap; then the singer, raising her own hands, joins in, clapping in syncopation with the first. The guitar player stops and listens for a moment, then pounds his instrument with even greater fervour as they all march on to an astounding climax.

 

Lorca’s duende was born of the Gypsy tradition of the “Deep Song,” a predecessor to Flamenco. He had stayed in New York in 1930, and he’d been influenced by American jazz, blues, and spirituals, leading him to hone his notion of the “dark sounds” and their relationship to life and art. Lorca said everything that has black sounds in it has duende, what he calls an emotional darkness, a mysterious energy we sense but can’t explain. It is the spirit of the earth, bringing radical change and “feelings of freshness, with the quality of something newly created, like a miracle, and it produces an almost religious enthusiasm.” All arts can express duende, says Lorca, but it manifests most fully in music and dance, “for these arts require a living body to interpret them, being forms that are born, die, and open their contours against an exact present.” Like the moon and the sun.

 

Dr. Hancock thinks an oppressed people need their own nation state. But I wonder who we should admire more, the Jewish people, with their obstinate determination to return to Zion by resettling Palestine, “a land without a people for a people without a land,” (except for the Palestinian inhabitants), or the Romani people, not seeking a state of their own. Wanting only to live free of oppression.

Oh, do not mistake the sadness of my face.

It is the sister of joy.

Oh, do not mistake the lunacy of my heart.

It is the source of my pain.

• from an old Roma song

 

Jimi Hendrix played electric guitar like Django Reinhardt played the acoustic jazz guitar; both infused with the spirit of Lorca’s duende. Hendrix was born in Seattle in 1942 and given the name Johnny Allen, but his father later changed that to James Marshall. Friends and family called him Buster, and later a fellow musician gave him the name Jimi. Jimi was In London in 1970, working on the album Cry of Love, when one night he swallowed too many sleeping pills and died choking on his own vomit. “Drifting” is Jimi’s lament. Jimi, two guitars, gentle drums. Reminds me of the soft whoosh of the sea, the tides, the moon, and the sun:

Drifting….

on a sea of forgotten teardrops.

On a lifeboat

sailing for

your love.

 

Drifting….

on a sea of old heartbreaks.

On a lifeboat

sailing for

your love,

sailing home.