Small-town stories weave a tapestry of weird

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This article was published 13/01/2024 (996 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

The latest published work by Winnipeg writer Sheldon Birnie is hard to describe. Where the Pavement Turns to Sand is, on the surface, a quirky collection of short stories, a number of which have appeared in a plethora of small literary journals in recent years. But these stories range from entertaining to melancholy and from sacred to the profane.

Birnie is a reporter and photographer for the Free Press Community Review and the author of Missing Like Teeth: An Oral History of Winnipeg Underground Rock (1990-2001).

Birnie’s writing and editing may also be well-known to many Manitobans, as he was editor of University of Winnipeg music magazine Stylus following his graduation from the University of Manitoba, where he also edited the Manitoban and the Gradzette. He’s more recently been stretching his freelancing skills by writing for various publications such as Vice, Canadian Dimension and Briarpatch.

Along the way, his fascination with stories and characters outside of the mainstream led him to produce dozens of curious vignettes on diverse and unusual themes.

And so, Where the Pavement Turns to Sand was born from his far-reaching and slightly skewed imagination.

Many of the stories in this collection are centred around the mythical Lake Manawaka, the fictional setting of Margaret Laurence’s epic works.

But be warned: this ain’t your grandma’s Manawaka.

Instead, Birnie takes the reader on a whirlwind tour of regional sporting events and everyday life, where odd things happen, such as refrigerators falling from the sky, partly to entertain aliens watching from above.

And yes, there are aliens — at least we think so. Aliens who possess golfers playing on the prestigious Lake Manawaka Golf and Country Club because our terrestrial air is toxic to them. As one character notes: “When you stare up into the night sky long enough out here, away from the lights, nothing but woods and fields and bogs all around, you know you ain’t alone and you ain’t special.”

Yet many of Birnie’s characters are very special. Apart from the fact that they are stoned or drunk most of the time, Manawaka residents seem to experience some very weird things indeed.

Take Eddie Franklin, who tried on a used pair of Bauer Selects hockey skates and was never was the same afterwards.

Or the jackalope that Tony desperately tried to catch, planning his strategy carefully and almost succeeding, foiled only by his sampling of the best jackalope bait: Canadian whisky. (Jackalopes, it seems, are very clever and generally impossible to corner.)

In Soo-Soo Go Bye-Bye, a noble quest to purchase a replacement soother for his child freaks out a father who is shocked to see “something big and white and lumbering along the tree line.” In the story Chasm, meanwhile, there’s a bottomless pit that has opened up, to no one’s surprise. And in Ogopogo Lives, Kevin wonders: “How does a monster as ancient as Ogie [a reference to Ogopogo, Canada’s answer to Loch Ness’s watery denizen] measure the passage of epochs?”

In Right on the Button, “eggheads” from an unnamed university challenge the locals at the Lake Manawaka Curling Club to a match against their robot, with an expected result. We will draw to avenge our robot overlords.

Then there are the stories that are simply snapshots of life, such as the partying at a lakeshore wedding, or a page describing how someone lobbed a bowling ball through Gord’s windshield.

Where the Pavement Turns to Sand weaves a tapestry of the weird, mundane and menacing that harangue a small town somewhere on the Canadian Prairies, all drawn from the (possibly) personal experience and creative mind of Birnie.

Meanwhile, Lyle and Dwight Are At It Again, as the story’s title says, for no reason other than to taunt one another about seeing a werewolf — or was it a Bigfoot? “You just never really know what can set someone off during the darkest depths of winter,” notes the unnamed narrator. Maybe it’s just what happens at Lake Manawaka.

Winnipeg writer Chris Rutkowski is no stranger to Manitoba weirdness.