Unflinching essays meld coming-of-age story, travelogue

Fans of Tara Westover’s bestselling memoir Educated and Lydia Yuknavitch’s Chronology of Water will find much to love in this debut collection of essays from an exciting new Canadian voice. Danica Klewchuk’s memoir-in-essays, Standing in the Footprints of Beasts, explores similar themes of growing up in the shadow of abusive religious leaders, sexual violence and misogyny.

The northern Alberta writer weaves in what it means to be a girl among men and boys in a rustic oil patch town. Poverty, isolation and exposure to a fierce kind of sexism are examined through the lens of someone who came of age on the outskirts of industrial expansion, labour camps and rampant exploitation of women and girls.

“The town, with its transient crush of oilfield workers, grew ever more menacing,” Klewchuk writes, describing how men would often drop by their teenage parties to look for underage girls. “We never went off to pee by ourselves and even had a name for things that happened to you when you were passed out. We called it being ghost ridden.”

Klewchuk develops an eating disorder and body dysmorphia that coincides with the onset of puberty. She navigates a complicated relationship with her own bodily autonomy against a memory as a nine-year-old girl when she finds her father’s Penthouse magazine in the glove box of his truck and wonders, “Would I look like this one day?”

The namesake essay in the collection begins with an assessment of early childhood in a dysfunctional environment that send her parents searching for help. To fix the family woes, they turn to local homegrown religion with cult-like fanaticism, a decision that ultimately leads to further abuse.

“Even in those salad days, the church had the whiff of something not quite right.”

Klewchuk is sent to a Christian school and taught by an exploitive, abusive teacher she identifies as Mr. R, a pious man with a spidery gait who wallpapers the classroom with pictures of the unborn. “He would sidle up too close to my body and its new breasts, those soft vulnerable things I hated.”

Escape is eventually found through travel as Klewchuk searches for new meaning in foreign lands as an early adult. An extended trip to Thailand lands her in deep water with a new lover who cannot swim. After nearly drowning while saving his life, she makes it to dry land to contemplate her near-death experience.

“It occurred to me only then I could still get hurt here, that I could still die,” she writes. “I’d been thinking of this place as a reprieve from reality, a sort of simulation. As if nothing I did here mattered.”

Told with spare prose and unflinching humour, Standing in the Footprints of Beasts is part coming-of-age story and part travelogue — a fearless invitation to anyone brave enough to confront their deepest pain and emerge with a story to tell.

Rochelle Squires is an avid reader who loves discovering new voices in Canadian non-fiction.