Short and sweet

Award-winning travel writer, novelist and humourist Will Ferguson has collected 48 pieces, mainly magazine articles and essays that haven’t appeared in previous books, for this collection that highlights tales designed to celebrate Canadian identity and idiosyncrasies while introducing readers to people and places across the land.

He does wander farther afield — to mud pools in New Zealand and to Iceland for a short walk across the Arctic Circle, for example — but concentrates more on varied Canadian locales such as prairie towns, Montreal’s varied neighbourhoods, Sable Island’s famous horses, Niagara Falls daredevils and the politics of the Confederation Bridge connecting P.E.I. to the mainland.

Ferguson discovers an unexpected (but practical) use for a Juno Award, and includes the recipe and back story of scorched-flour gravy (his mother originally wrote the recipe in a piece for the Calgary Herald). If a national music award and a practical solution to feeding a pack of kids when money is short aren’t Canadiana, then there is no such category.

First, the Juno. The title story takes Ferguson to Nokomis, Sask., in a paean of sorts to Streetheart singer Kenny Shields, where it seems everyone he meets in the rocker’s hometown knows the family and has a story.

One local man shared anecdotes about visiting the Shields farm, of Kenny’s mom baking cookies, gold records on the walls, and how she casually used his Juno to prop open the front door in the heat. Well, it beats gathering dust on a shelf somewhere, and small-town folk are generally practical.

The essays/magazine pieces are generally short, either because Ferguson makes his case quickly, or because that’s all there is to the subject. The piece on the Confederation Bridge is one of the longer and most substantial in this collection, capturing the hope of some that the bridge will open the island to tourism and other economic advantages, and the fear of others who don’t want the island lifestyle ruined by crowds.

Many of the other essays lack that depth, others are humorous anecdotes and the occasional one reads like filler. That disparity can be expected from a collection drawing on material that appeared elsewhere as far back at the late 1990s into the 2000s and whose defining factor is that they haven’t appeared in book form.

The generally short, disconnected pieces are better read two or three at a time rather than straight through, but there are enough witty anecdotes and clever observations by Ferguson, a three-time winner of the Leacock Medal for Humour as well as the 2021 Arthur Ellis Award for Crime Fiction and the 2012 Giller Prize for fiction, to bring a smile to readers’ faces.

​ There is an exceptional piece, Bedouins of the Minibar, where Ferguson steps out of his travel/humour role in 2019 as he faces the prospect of covering the massacre of more than 50 people in a mosque in Christchurch, New Zealand, by a lone gunman. He had finished a month of travel assignments in New Zealand and had just arrived in Australia when his Postmedia editors called him to get back to Christchurch.

As he approached the city, he pulled off the road. “I couldn’t do it. I wasn’t strong enough to shove my way into the tragedy… He livestreamed the massacre, the f—≠er,” he writes.“I still can’t decide if that was principled or cowardly of me, not wanting to peer into the abyss like that.”

That’s a hard call to make, but it does show a humanity not available in Furguson’s usual lighthearted writing.

Chris Smith is a Winnipeg writer.