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David Beers and andrea bennett | Greystone Books
$24.95 | 288pp.
When some of us want to dismiss an opinion or an artistic performance as without sophistication, we often refer to it as “provincial.” A recent collection of essays from the B.C.-based online magazine The Tyee, Points of Interest: In Search of the Places, People and Stories of B.C. proves that content can be province-specific without being in any way provincial in the pejorative sense. Edited by founding Tyee editor David Beers and senior editor andrea bennett — who does not use capitalization for their name — the volume gathers items published between 2005 and 2023 plus two items newly commissioned for the book. Doing so, it creates a multi-faceted gem of a text, with each essay depicting a place in B.C., each from a different and unique perspective.
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Full disclosure: I wrote for the Tyee in its early years and like most people involved in journalism in Vancouver, I know and respect David Beers.
The Britannica online defines a magazine as a printed or digitally published collection of texts — essays, articles, stories, poems — often illustrated, that is produced at regular intervals excluding newspapers.
The Tyee, on the evidence of the articles in this volume, answers well to this first definition. But a magazine can also be a clip of bullets for an automatic handgun or a storage area for explosives, and viewed properly, those secondary definitions could apply to all this exemplary online journalism. The Tyee, like any good magazine, features items that are provocative, closely observed and well written, with all the explosive potential for genuinely new thought that implies.
The essays are wide ranging in their subject matter, location, and style. The volume opens with a hilarious essay on learning to drive in Creston from the journal’s long-serving culture critic Dorothy Woodend. Other points of interest covered along the virtual tour of the province provided by the contributors include the Tsilhqot’in territory that settlers call the Chilcotin, where veteran CBC film maker and author Ian Gill presents a thoughtful account of colonialism and resistance in To the Tsilhqot’in With Gloves.
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Another location celebrated is Cumberland on Vancouver Island, where Michael John Lo tells the story of this former coal town and the Chinatown created by Chinese miners in the 19th century. Also terrific, David Ball’s essay on Surrey social justice organizer Charan Gill and farm worker organizing in the Fraser Valley.
There are 30 essays in this exemplary collection of intelligent travel writing, each one yielding unique pleasure.
Highly recommended.
Tom Sandborn lives and writes in Vancouver. He has added many of the book’s points of interest to his future travel plans. He welcomes your feedback and story tips at tos65@telus.net
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