Our Place in Literature: A Selected Bibliography of Literature Relating to Kamloops

These poems, stories, and personal and journalistic essays penned by students, academics, and professional writers emanate from several university courses and were compiled to mark the tenth anniversary of the Institute’s partnership with Simon Fraser University. The inclusion of black and white photos and such historical documents as “The Laurier Memorial”, a letter sent in 1910 to Sir Wilfrid Laurier by area chiefs, add an important dimension to the collection.

Bose’s collection includes such works as “Sarcos”, which hauntingly depicts the confluence of the North and South Thompson Rivers as viewed at twilight.

Bose explores the well-known Kamloops locale Peterson Creek in “A tight knot.”

A passionate and provocative collection of poetry, Glass Tepee finds its roots in the experiences and traditions of Canada's first peoples. Some pieces draw on the landscape, philosophy and culture of the Secwepemc (Shuswap) territory and original inhabitants, while others comment on Aboriginal reserve politics and the complicated realities experienced by Natives in urban centres.
Critical and compassionate, Gottfriedson's imagination is infused with a contemporary political and cultural awareness that is disarming and unpretentious.

Today's youth, Gottfriedson says, are "afraid of themselves." He finds that both individuals and bands end in "tangles," that they write "nonsense words in the sand" or exploit images painted on rocks, those "the postmodern Indian calls / visual poetic expression." As the collection continues, however, his love for the land emerges. He draws attention to the rape of the natural environment through clear-cut logging. He speaks of the damage caused by the pine beetle, of "forests being / eaten from the inside out." And here it is that Gottfriedson introduces the mysterious Horsechild, who is to prepare the drying racks for the returning salmon "so that beneath your skin / the mountains will be forever abundant": a prayer for us to protect the migrating salmon with their multi-year cycles, to protect the bears and eagles that feast upon them, so as to assure that the transformations will continue, that there will be abundance for both humans and the earth itself.

Eloquent, poignant and witty, Garry Gottfriedson's new collection of poetry, Whiskey Bullets, approaches an old genre with a new flare that will challenge your expectations of cowboy poetry. This edgy collection explores themes of duality that exist in the parallel worlds of cowboys and Indians.Often satirical, Whiskey Bullets is a testament to adaptability, turning tragedy into humour and pain into passion. It speaks to the unique experience of growing up aboriginal, on the Tk'emlupsReserve (Secwepemc) near Kamloops, with strong First Nation values and traditions, while at the same time immersed in the cowboy and ranching culture of the interior of BC.

Many of Lane's poems are set in or inspired by the BC Interior.

Jacqueline Turner grew up in Chase.

Kamloops' own cowboy poet. In "Conservation?", Puhallo writes of the shooting of "problem" bears inside city limits:

Fuzzy Wuzzy was a bear
That wandered into town.
And just because he was a bear,
They shot poor Fuzzy down. (Puhallo 50).

Based on a deposition signed by 14 Chiefs of the Thompson River basin on the occasion of a visit to their lands by Canadian Prime Minister Sir Wilfrid Laurier in 1910, Ernestine Shuswap Gets Her Trout is a ritualized retelling of how the Native Peoples of British Columbia lost their fishing, hunting and grazing rights, their lands, and finally their language without their agreement or consent, and without any treaties ever having been signed. It is one of the most compellingly tragic cases of cultural genocide to emerge from the history of colonialism, enacted by four women whose stories follow each other like the cyclical seasons they represent. Written in the spirit of Shuswap, a "Trickster language” within which the hysterically comic spills over into the unutterably tragic and back, this play is haunted by the blood of the dead spreading over the landscape like a red mist of mourning.

Kevin Loring’s 2009 Governor-General’s Award winning play, Where the Blood Mixes, from its title (according to Loring, a translation from the N’lakap’mux place name Kumsheen) lives and breathes the landscape, past and present, of Lytton. It is at once a humorous and warm examination of the complex friendship that emerges from a shared history and culture and a profound indictment of the legacies of the residential school system that existed in Canada for over 150 years.

This is a collective creation very much in keeping with the documentary tradition in Canadian theatre as examined in Alan Filewod’s Collective Encounters : Documentary Theatre in English Canada: it is community based, populist, and a response to a perceived need to define local or regional culture. The play, which begins with a Native story about pre-contact not unlike that which begins George Bowering’s Shoot!, also provides a panorama of post-contact Kamloops history, with excerpts from Hudson’s Bay factors’ journals, glimpses of Chiefs Nicola and Tranquille, references to the McLean gang, and extensive satirization of the folly and imperialism of the British settlers.

A two-hander play with one character, Coral Slater, a Kamloopsian, who acts as narrator and antagonist to former Socred cabinet minister and Kamloops mayor Phil Gaglardi and assumes various characters, including Mel Rothenburger, journalist Jack Webster, and various politicians, this work, although it emphasizes various scandals in which Gaglardi was implicated and repeats such Gaglardiisms as :If I ever tell you a lie, it’s only because I think I’m telling you the truth”

This novel of one woman's simple but passionately lived life reminds of us of the pleasure to be found in human contact and simple things, including the keeping of bees.

Set on an isolated Canadian farm in the midst of World War II, this book evokes a life at once harshly demanding and rich in sensory pleasures: the deafening chatter of starlings, the sight of thousands of painted turtles crossing a road, the smell of baking.

Kat has returned with her disabled husband and young son to her family’s homestead in Turtle Valley, in British Columbia’s Shuswap-Thompson area. Fire is sweeping through the valley in a ruthless progression toward the farm and they have come to help her frail parents pack up their belongings.

Fever and delirium in a Delhi hotel, a highjacked bus in Mexico, a ghost in the mountains, an outlaw in a Camaro - with cinematic immediacy, Elizabeth Haynes captures people at those moments in their lives when the past catches up with them. Sometimes that past is invited, sometimes it lies in ambush, waiting for a trick of light or a twist of fate to reveal it.

A museum curator finds a cache of century-old keepsakes and attempts to reconstruct the life of the young native girl who hid them.

When Flora Oakden leaves her English home in 1912 for the fledgling community of Walhachin in British Columbia's interior, she doesn't expect to fall in love with the dry sage-scented benchlands above the Thompson River and with a charismatic labourer who is working in the orchard.

This novel an evocative portrait of a family and a small town torn apart by losses. At the heart of this subtle, textured novel is a wrenching disruption - the death of a young girl in a sleepy town.

Arachne Manteia is a road rider, a traveling sales rep who drives a classic Mercedes and peddles women's underwear for a living. A rogue sales rep with a man in every town, she lures each into her web of desire.

At six years old, Seepeetza is taken from her happy family life on Joyaska Ranch to live as a boarder at the Kamloops Indian Residential School. Life at the school is not easy, but Seepeetza still manages to find some bright spots. Always, thoughts of home make her school life bearable. An honest, inside look at life in an Indian residential school in the 1950s, and how one indomitable young spirit survived it.

In spare, allusive prose, Sheila Watson charts the destiny of a small, tightly knit community nestled in the BC Interior. Here, among the hills of Cariboo country, men and women are caught upon the double hook of existence, unaware that the flight from danger and the search for glory are both part of the same journey.

Walking out on a demoralizing second marriage, Maggie Lloyd leaves Vancouver to work at a fishing lodge in the interior of British Columbia.