One big stone in the
wall that separates my turf from the green pastures of great literature is an inability
to assume other perspectives and other voices.
I struggle to find even
one voice and to focus on a single point of view.
For this reason,
Susan Juby’s book Republic of Dirt: A
Return to Woefield Farm, the 2016 Leacock Medal winner, intrigues me.
Like its predecessor The Woefield Poultry Collective, it tells its stories from four
different angles with four narrators. The
gruff and elderly Earl, the young adult Seth, eleven-year-old Sara, and
Prudence Burns, the young, but matron-like owner of the farm, an imperfect plot of Vancouver Island
land that provides a base and a sometimes home for all of the narrators.
The four get equal
air time and have distinct personalities, problems, and perspectives. All of them speak about themselves, each
other, and peripheral characters: human, mule, and chicken.
It could have been
confusing and complex, but the multiple narrators hold the book together with
their intertwining concerns over the rebellious mule, Sara’s forced departure
from the farm, the sensuous drama teacher that haunts Seth, and, most often,
the vague illness that drains Prudence.
The four storytellers
touch us by expressing their affection for the farm and each other in that
gentle but quirky Leacock-Medal-style humour: the type that loves community, free-form
family, and the kind of caring that sees the best in us. The other characters, for example,
persistently see Prudence as a strong and driven person who is temporarily
impaired whereas a stranger might only see the tired exterior cloaking the
strength inside.
It’s easy to see Sunshine Sketches in these stories as
well as to feel the echo of other Leacock Medal winners like the family of farming
hippies of Bill Conall’s Promised Land
(2014) and the Gulf Islands Bed and Breakfast run by Bill Richardon’s Bachelor Brothers(1994).
Certainly, Susan
Juby, whose Prudence came to her inherited Vancouver Island farm from Brooklyn,
would recognize a debt to the Wingfield
Farm plays written by Leacock Medalist Dan Needles (2003) and to city girl
Marsha Boulton who celebrated farming and family-like friends in Letters from the Country (1992).
So, city-meets-country,
fish-out-of-water-on-the-farm models abound.
But Juby’s stories stand apart with those different voices driven by
common concerns.
In this, Juby does
more than demonstrate a writing technique and ability that eludes trainee
writers like me. With her four narrators,
she creates something greater than the sum of those parts.
Like a vocal group
that can conjure a discrete voice from the blending of others (The Mamas and Papas called theirs
“Harvey,”), four narrators can swirl around another entity and probably come
closer to a truth than a single perspective on the whole of the interactions.
When I read W.O.
Mitchell’s According to Jake and the Kid (1990), I recognized that whether a story was told
with the voice and perspective of Jake or that of The Kid, the protagonist really
was a separate boy-man who hovered between the two and between youth and
adulthood. That might be the key to
creating a coherent story with four narrators – always keep that hovering
synthesis – that unidentified fifth voice in mind.
My guess - and maybe
the obvious one - is that this other hovering character in Republic of Dirt is the author whose heart contains fragments of the
little girl, the troubled teen, and the
crusty old man while suspended between can-do strength and draining impairment.
Susan Juby could have
tried rolling these features into a single character-protagonist, but her
four-narrator approach lets the reader to do their own rolling, imagining, and,
for walled-in writers who aspire to more than one perspective, learning.
Writing
Exercise
Describe the process
of breaking a wild mule from the perspective of the muleskinner, then from the
perspective of the mule, and then from the perspective of a turkey vulture hovering
overhead.
DBD
June 2016