Each year at Christmas I sew up some chapbooks for friends and family with bits of poetry or CNF I’ve published during the year. This piece poured out after reading Daniel Mendelsohn while thinking about my current WIP on fantasy. It’s not the sort of thing I can send anywhere, so call this blog a small Christmas gift. (please don’t take the footnotes too seriously—I didn’t… And excuse the extent of the allusions. They’re on purpose)

Tying Three Loops: A Spell for the Modrybedd

The farm boy stepped across the threshold into the den of the three modrybedd. They were purveyors of magic in a grotto smudged by tobacco and the steam of black sludge roasting on the burner until brown rings encircled the glass pot a finger’s width apart. That acrid knot of smoke and roasted coffee bound something up that slipped beyond its own moment and place. He’d been nervous to enter, not really knowing why, which is the way of young boys, but the shelves of books in spine-broken paperbacks with tales of adventure called. The front window had copies of Robert E. Howard’s Conan stories with the muscled Cimmerian in a variety of flexing postures and titles in coloured inline and outline typefaces. It promised much more inside and on the shelves. Something beyond the Black River. Something to salve his disappointment in the unkept promise of Mundania.

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Daniel Mendelsohn’s Three Rings: A Tale of Exile, Narrative, and Fate¹ hinges on the role of ring composition, by means of which he revised his stubborn drafts for An Odyssey: A Father, a Son, and an Epic.² He also reflects at length on the traumatic experience of researching and writing his family’s history in the Holocaust.³ I knew him primarily from his translations of C.P. Cavafy⁴ and then our fleeting interaction about Lawrence Durrell’s translations of the Greek poet that I had edited.⁵ That’s what brought me to his slim book of reflections deriving from the 2019 Page-Barbour Lectures at the University of Virginia.⁶ I thought his nostos⁷ to Charlottesville might echo the homing pain of a dear friend who also made an odyssey out of returning to the Dell.⁸ For Mendelsohn, “In ring composition, the narrative appears to meander away into a digression…, although the digression, the ostensible straying, turns out in the end too be a circle, since the narration will return.”⁹ This derives from Homer, and Mendelsohn mostly dispenses with the repetition of “a formulaic line”¹⁰ in his own rings. In An Odyssey, these are certainly rings, but in Three Rings the reader cannot help thinking of how we teach braided form in the creative writing seminar.¹¹ His three stories weave rather than encircle. Like many parts of the creative writing workshop, braided form is useful because it is teachable, like “show don’t tell” and “less is more.” For academics, however, these rings recall the chiasmus,¹² and Mendelsohn’s frequent contrasts between Homer and the Bible may make us mindful of studies of chiastic structure in the story of the flood¹³ and even the Sermon on the Mount.¹⁴ While not exactly rings, these cycles of recurrence are familiar ground, and at the scale of Three Rings they feel distinctly more like a plait rather than the formal recurrences of the chiastic structure in Homer.

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The farm boy entered the world as a foundling. Swaddled like a tiny three-pound bundle of butter, he grew up not remembering the loving arms that held him for his first week. When he had grown large enough for adoption, a young couple chose him to travel north to a new home in a tiny village amidst the weavings of the Skeena River, nestled between soaring mountains capped in snow and rich forests of cedar and hemlock. He was also marked as an infant with a small, circular scar in the middle of his chest as if a tiny circlet had been raised on his skin from a missing chain hung around his neck. It felt like magic. Later they moved again to the Fraser Valley where the Village Bookshop in the centre of a grove of alder offered magic and dreams of a world larger and distant. No matter how far he travelled later in life, he always remembered the comforting smell of trees dripping in rain redolent of verdant evergreen and moss. He would climb, happy, in the trees and hide under them with a book, and the boughs around their home were fecund with apples, cherries, bitter plums, and the bright berries of the ash that can only be eaten after cooking. Only years later did he learn that the berries of the dogwood could also be eaten, like tiny, thin-fleshed lychee.

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Piers Anthony is one of the fantasy writers from my childhood, and I share with Dennis Wilson Wise a keen memory of his Author’s Notes at the end of his novels (Wise 86). These set me thinking of a writing life. I also share Wise’s hesitations over the hermeneutics of suspicion, or at least a recognition that authors earning a living wage will rarely chastise their readership’s biases for the sake of placating future critics. In his memoir How Precious Was That While, Anthony tells a story about Lester del Rey and his fellow fantasy novelist Gordon R. Dickson. It is hauntingly prescient of Mendelsohn’s meditation, as if some kind of rope bound the two together, both of them meditating on the writing labour of building a saleable book:

I read [Dickson’s novel The Dragon and the George] and liked it, though I could see where he had used a loop — that is, an inserted episode that didn’t relate to the rest of the novel — to lengthen it to exactly 100,000 words, to make Lester del Rey’s minimum for the fantasy line. (How 266)

His observation is that del Rey set a word requirement, neither under nor over, and this was part of the commercial target of the industry, parallel to its target market of pubescent boys. It was readers of fantasy buying by the pound and expecting weight to match the scale without any thumbs or lead dropped on to tip it over. The mechanism to meet this is the “loop” by which a separate short story makes up the necessary ballast to keep the book aright and stable in the rough waters of industrial production. Books need to be well-balanced on the wine-dark sea. And like shipping, the ballast can be tossed in or out as needed based on the cargo, with some name swaps and new descriptions to shift it over to another ship that’s too light on cargo to stay upright. We see it most often now in the trivial side stories or interruptions in TV or streaming shows that add length to meet the 45-minute hour.

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Perhaps the most surprising thing for Mendelsohn’s book is the primacy of the academic. Of his Three Great Rings of elven kings, the “Exile, Narrative, and Fate” of the subtitle, there is also One Ring to rule them all: an unnamed, unspoken ring of power. Sauron’s ring is scholarship — this can be no surprise to academics thinking of “Reader B” and the timelines of peer review (hint: slow…). The editor who suggested the ring composition form to Mendelsohn called him with feedback “within a day,”¹⁵ a process that made this scholarly editor laugh out loud at its implausibility for any academic who doesn’t occupy an endowed chair.

Beneath and behind all three rings of the book is a series of connections to the scholarly life of research, citations, academic power-plays, and the exigencies of library access and publishing. Fantasy novels trace the hidden lineage of the boy who would be king — academics trace the pedigree of institutional affiliation, supervisors, and committee members. Like the other rings in the book, this is truly a thread that weaves in and out of the braids. We are far closer to hair threading here with parallel braids of the three narratives sharing a common cotton threading to hold them all in place. His third person narration of the towering academic Eric Auerbach’s scholarship runs in line with gestures to Mendelsohn’s own research work and classroom preparations, as well as W.A.A. van Otterlo’s work on ring composition¹⁶ and various scholars’ work on François Fénelon’s novel The Adventures of Telemachus.¹⁷

The book is mercifully bereft of footnotes, but the academic reader can’t help but glance for them every other page. I later discovered that I’m also not alone in seeking annotations here.¹⁸ There’s also a lingering feeling that a less masculine approach might have lingered over Mary Douglas’ final book, Thinking in Circles: An Essay on Ring Composition,¹⁹ itself the product of the Terry Lectures²⁰ established at Yale University over a century ago. Perhaps the secularism of Jefferson’s vision and the leaning of the Page-Barbour Lectures is simply incompatible with the sacred perspective of the Terry Lectures.

Academia, of course, follows the funding in a world of fellowships and endowments that remind us that the ivory tower is more costly than actual ivory. To be free from crass commercialism is to be a gracious and grateful guest in the house of patronage.

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Anthony also points to structure and commercial pressures in fantasy form. It is not, however, the Homeric form of ring composition that captures his eye. For his own commercial work, he recounts parting ways with the Del Rey imprint and having Lester del Rey as his editor. He asks himself,

Did I regret leaving Del Rey? I watched David Eddings fantasy series at Del Rey rise up and pass mine in sales, his income advancing accordingly, and yes, I was sorry to be gone. But I wouldn’t pay the price Eddings may have paid, sacrificing the integrity of my text…, even with such seemingly frivolous fantasy as Xanth. There are elements there the critics know nothing of. (How 168–169)

He rightly recognizes that “Lester del Rey was an apt editor who knew a commercial novel when he saw one… and became arguably the most successful book editor the genre has seen” (How 479–480). Yet behind the scenes, the David Eddings archives at Reed College²¹ show that the limping gait of his Belgariad books series derives from del Rey’s insistence that the trilogy Eddings wrote be marketed as five distinct novels. The outcome was a 60% increase in sales revenue from the same writing project but a narrative climax that only arrives a quarter of the way into the second book and another halfway into the fourth. Imagine, if you will, recutting the Lord of the Rings films this way. It would be even worse than what Peter Jackson did to The Hobbit. Let us also remember that the ubiquity of the trilogy form based on Tolkien’s magnum opus is likewise a publisher’s imposition based on market forces and the binding limitations of producing a codex commercially. The publisher and Reed College’s endowment fund certainly feel that del Rey made the correct choice because the money absolutely followed it like a hooked fish, but it does make some readers squint.

The prospect I wonder over is this meeting point between form, the hermeneutics of suspicion, and commercial forces of production. Hermeneutics of suspicion means that nagging feeling that a text means something other than what it says, like how we interpret (“hermeneutics”) everything our politicians say (“texts” if we’re generous…). This previous sentence is, of course, a telling rather than a showing, so some would say it’s an error in creative writing, but perhaps not you, my readers. I suspect that Anthony had the same instinct for his readers too. My New Critical suspicion wanders into the division between Anthony and Mendelsohn here. We expect a literary writer like Mendelsohn to mean more than his words are limited to. He exceeds language, or at least we hunt for clues hidden under the stones of his verb tense choices and vocabulary, just like my Homeric epithets earlier in this damp squib. So why not Anthony in his fantasy romp for juvenile readers with pimply 1980s hormones running wildly against our enlightened 2025 sense of gender parity? (Well, parity in name and tone just not in pay and security, because not all parities are equal…) Couldn’t my suspicions as a reader already be anticipated by a commercial author?

The answer was probably in the first Magic of Xanth book I read by Anthony, which wasn’t his first. The Source of Magic has the narrative voice step in and guide the reader by asking “Where was the ethical course?” (63–64), which shapes the reader’s focus. This is, under my professorial guise, an instance of free and indirect discourse, or a voice speaking without quotation marks or the tag “he said.” We readers tend to read this inside our minds as our own voice, so it’s naturally the voice to which we give the most credence and find most appealing.

In any case, this novel ends in an ethical dilemma with options weighed between three distinct hermeneutics of ethics: the deontological, the consequentialist, and virtue ethics. That is, does the young adventurer whose story is told for young boys find what is intrinsically good in itself, what is most good for the greatest number of people (shades of Star Trek’s rationalist futurism here), or does he act in a way that is true to his own inherent personal goodness? For the hero,

“I cannot let a living, feeling creature suffer because of my inaction. It doesn’t matter that the Demon would not free me, were our positions reversed; I am not a Demon, and shall not act like one. It only matters that a man does not stand by and allow a wrong he perceives to continue. Not when he can so readily correct it.” (Source 268)

When the young hero reflects on his integrity and its price, he wanders dangerously close to Socrates’ fate in Plato’s Phaedo and his contemplation of justice (which is itself a frame narrative tremblingly close to a ring). What must be surrendered to remain true?

“I would have respect for nothing, and love for nothing, if I did not respect and love justice. If I let personal attachments and desires prevail over my basic integrity of purpose, I would lose my claim to distinction as a moral creature. I must do what I think is right.” (Source 265)

It’s a tale sold by the pound to Walmart bargain hunters conscious of the shrinkflation hitting reading markets, yet we are left with Socrates’ willing self-sacrifice for a wrong judgment by his peers, because to evade justice when it’s wrong makes it impossible to seek justice when it is right. It’s a sentiment and source very much at home in Mendelsohn’s learned references but likely outselling it by miles and shaping hundreds of impressionable readers for every nodding approval of an academic who enjoys catching the clever gestures in Three Rings. My point isn’t to criticize Mendelsohn but rather to say our suspicious readings of Anthony should go beyond finding his flaws to also include where he too exceeds language and where his plans for his text mean more than what his words say.

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The farm boy came to the three modrybedd where they sat on the other side of a passage, a chancel marking the division between the room of books he could explore and the private space with an old table, three chairs, three mugs, and a single ashtray that was theirs alone. He deposited a codex of inestimable age on the rough, horizontal board that divided the two worlds, his and theirs. The book’s browned pages cracked at the edges, and he clasped it before setting it down, sensing the unreality of an entire world turned in a sideways dimension to fit between its covers. One of them groaned to her feet and stumped slowly to where he stood, looking with one eye slightly squinted at what he’d set down before her.

“Are you sure about that one?” He nodded.

She grimaced slightly. “Your books are safe. While you’re reading them you get to become Tarzan or Robinson Crusoe or even Bastian Balthazar Bux,” she said. “Afterwards you get to be a little boy again.”

He wasn’t sure what she meant and pointed at the ouroboros on the cover, “What does this mean?”

“You’d have to read it to find out,” she said, then added more forebodingly, “All sales are final.”

He nodded vigorously.

She licked one finger and turned the cover to the colophon, then tapped the clicking machine on her counter.

He rummaged six silver-coloured coins from his pocket and lay them on the board where she quickly wiped them off and into her pocket. It was a spell against taxation. With one foot slipping, she turned and stumped back to her table, the three of them going back to the blue haze enveloping them and the growling words they traded.

The boy turned and slipped out. He could sense a howling forest, a rockbiter, and the warp and weft of words woven into spells in a prose pile of great density. World without limit and story without ending. He had not yet realized that there is no “afterwards” to a story because every descent into narrative, every disguise we put on when we slip into a character and try on their costume of a world seen through their eyes, leaves us changed. We never get to be the same “little boy” again. We’re now a self who, mere moments ago, eluded a dragon, stilled an earthquake with a word, or whose silvery scar made a rushing sound inside the mind that allowed will and word to change a world. Just as we cannot step into the same stream twice because the waters have changed, so too is the self that steps made into something new.

His step out into the sun was like a return from an underworld, and he was changed, just like every moment he looked up from the dreaming world of a book.

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What we need, then, isn’t so much a loop as a braid, or rather a loop made up of braided rope. At one point, Mendelsohn says “It is as if there, at the beginning of the Odyssey, Homer were dreaming of Sebald…” (Three 102), a twenty-five century anachronism, and I can’t help but feel Anthony was dreaming Mendelsohn in a strange, uncanny way. How Precious Was That While appeared in 2001, the same year that Mendelsohn first visited Bolechow, the village of his family, to bear witness to the brutal murders of the Jewish community in the Holocaust. Mendlesohn’s book adores finding these synchronicities among his texts, and Anthony’s memoir recounts how he was being raised in a pacifist Quaker community in 1941, the same year as the horrors in Bolechow. Anthony was “in Spain as the German blitzkrieg swept south through France, stopping short of the border” (Bio of an Ogre 10), and he would also pause to remember how his own pacifism learned to be worldly, paralleling how the teachers in his Quaker school “wouldn’t have approved of the price of nonviolence had they taken the trouble to look into it. Reality can differ sharply from idealism” (How 29). It has Anthony “remembering” the future in Mendelsohn.

And ultimately, that is what my own short telling shows and now finally says: the braids here make the loops like bunny ears that knot together in the middle. That’s my modrybedd, the aunties of the Village Bookshop, whose gnarled and knotted grimaces, hair, and arthritic hands bind together Mendelsohn and Anthony with my farm boy self. The modrybedd’s books and coffee and acrid smokes were weaving a tapestry for young readers, passing along copies of both Fionavar and Castle Roogna, Shannara, the Mrin Codex, all weaving fate with a tangled skein. And why not refuse the too easy Gap Chasm between commercial property forces shaping fiction and the academic rituals of propriety and suspicion. Both demand loops, braids, and rings, and both work to serve the reader’s expectations. The truth that two readers differ is to be expected. As with allusions and Easter Eggs, we may find gold bullion hidden among the commercial ballast to avoid the eyes of tax collectors and editors.

For me, this all means that somewhere between the moment when Mendelsohn sees Homer dreaming of Sebald and my own reading journey, I could envision Anthony dreaming Mendelsohn… Reading is our slack tide in the river of time. In that moment, I had to admit that my own dreams may be the makings of the modrybedd dreamweavers looping a red thread guiding me to cross the highways of fantasy.

Works Cited

Anthony, Piers. How Precious Was That While. Macmillan, 2001.

———. Bio of an Ogre: The Autobiography of Piers Anthony to Age 50. Ace Books, 1989.

———. The Source of Magic. New York: Ballantine Book, 1997.

Mendelsohn, Daniel. Three Rings: A Tale of Exile, Narrative, and Fate. U Virginia P, 2020.

Wise, Dennis Wilson. “Just Reading A Spell for Chameleon: An Appreciation with Caveats, and an Elegy.” Mythlore: A Journal of J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Charles Williams, and Mythopoeic Literature, vol. 40, no. 1, pp. 85–102.

1. Mendelsohn, Daniel. Three Rings: A Tale of Exile, Narrative, and Fate. Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press, 2020. ↩︎
2. Mendelsohn, Daniel. An Odyssey: A Father, a Son, and an Epic. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2017. ↩︎
3. Mendelsohn, Daniel. The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million. New York: HarperCollins, 2006. ↩︎
4. Cavafy, C.P. The Complete Poems. Trans. Daniel Mendelsohn. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2009. ↩︎
5. Durrell, Lawrence. “A Cavafy Find.” From the Elephant’s Back: Collected Essays & Travel Writings. Ed. James Gifford. Edmonton, AB: University of Alberta Press, 2015. pp. 123–128. ↩︎
6. It is worth noting that the University of Virginia was founded, built, and designed by Thomas Jefferson, and it embodies the American Founding Father’s perspective on the world. The Page-Barbour Lecturers were established in 1907 and invite the lecturer to speak to their area of expertise rather than a defined theme or disciplinary field. ↩︎
7. In Greek this is the turn toward the homeward journey, as in Homer’s Odyssey where Odysseus returns home to Ithaca. It is also the root of our English word “nostalgia,” which combines “home” from nostos with “pain” from algos. ↩︎
8. The Dell is a small lake on the grounds of the University of Virginia. The reference here compares Homer’s Odysseus travelling across the Mediterranean Sea to the author’s friend Charles L. Sligh returning to this small lake at his academic alma mater. ↩︎
9. Mendelsohn, Three Rings, p. 13. ↩︎
10. Ibid. ↩︎
11. Creative writing seminars ubiquitously focus on the most teachable elements of writing, which is not the same thing as the most essential or the most innovative. Hence, braided forms are ubiquitously taught even though they are of varying efficacy with readers. “Less is more” works even though (as I tell students) sometimes more is more… ↩︎
12. A Chiasmus is typically an “X” pattern in writing where parts of the text mirror or link to each other in succession. “‘Tis pity ‘tis true, and ‘tis true ‘tis pity” has an ABBA shape. The chiasmus can follow this nesting pattern many, many times. It is also common in Biblical texts, such as “The sabbath was made for man, and not man for the sabbath” in Mark 2:27-28, which is again ABBA. Genesis is known for even more complex patterns, such as “Whoever sheds the blood of man, by man shall his blood be shed” 9:6 with a ABCCBA structure. See note 14. ↩︎
13. Wenham, Gordon J. “The Coherence of the Flood Narrative.” Vetus Testamentum, vol. 28, no. 3, 1978, pp. 336–348. ↩︎
14. Lund, Nils Wilhelm. Chiasmus in the New Testament: A Study in Formgeschichte. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1942. ↩︎
15. Mendelsohn, Three Rings, p. 12. ↩︎
16. Van Otterlo, W.A.A. “Untersuchungen über Begriff, Anwen-dung und Entstehung der griechischen Ringkomposition.” Med-deelingen der Nederlandsche Akademie van Wetenschappen, ns 7, no. 3, 1944, pp. 131–176. ↩︎
17. Fénelon, François. Les Aventures de Télémaque, fils d’Ulysse. Paris, 1699. ↩︎
18. See Mendelsohn’s interview for the Harvard Book Store with James Wood as recorded on YouTube. https://youtu.be/ItDEVwwYu-g?t=2847. ↩︎
19. Douglas, Mary. Thinking in Circles: An Essay on Ring Composition. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007. ↩︎
20. The Dwight H. Terry Lectureship was endowed in 1905 and began in 1923 to address religion from a humanitarian perspective. ↩︎
21. Reed College holds the David Eddings Papers in the Reed Library Special Collections. https://archivesspace.reed.edu/repositories/2/resources/45 ↩︎

(first published in the Quarantine Review 2021)

Near the southern tip of Alaska, in a tiny propeller plane jostled by turbulence, I flew back into Terrace. I was seated beside a crying baby. He cried like I cried four decades ago finding my first home for the first time—and now I was returning. It was a repetition, a once again to places already seen but unremembered. 

The flight in along the flow of the Skeena River is like looking over tangling hair rolling down between the broad shoulders of the valley, the river running under a bridge and me following it in as the channel of my life. I was eddying back to pass this place before flowing away. While flying in over the plateaus of the valley, the river became visible as forest gave way ground to farmland that becomes a wall of cedar once Terrace itself came into view. But the return was aslant and with a significant shock. Our pilot, the anxiety-inducing “Captain Ron,” did not steer our flying galley smoothly through the choppy crests and troughs, and the baby echoed through the cabin as we thundered abruptly down onto the runway, listing heavily to the right, then gripping the ground again to finally turn true and straight, every vertebrae chattering in my spine.

That first day back in Terrace was all for business. It was the work of “hello” and “hello again” with smiles and handshakes among old and new colleagues and friends. It centred on a small college at the top of a hill, overlooking the valley and the Skeena River, and each of us was intoxicated with the shockingly clean air, so free that each breath inward shivered down to the fingernails. The trees were in spring’s mad race, most dark green but others lighter along the edges or burrowing their way into dead stands with pale bark and quaking green leaves exhaling their verdant air everywhere with spring buds yawning awake. Still, work has to be done, and only minor adventures befall a band of bespectacled professors shuttling up that hill to meet in that college, some burly, bearded giants, others weasel-faced with quick curious eyes, but all bound up with the written word. 

I was thinking about the place though, not the people, and wondering how many visitors to Terrace come to see the town. How many who are travelling from a city to a town to consider the place itself and not its recreational enjoyments—the habitation of place and not its proximity to other pleasures? Our day’s work was all, at its heart, establishing trust across distances to give our students mobility. It’s a great risk to pass young lives to each other and to entrust their learning to new hands in different places, especially knowing that there are no homeward turns, no nostos, in those academic journeys, only going forever forward. By the time we cleared our agenda, the old friendships and camaraderie were restored. Out from the college at the end of the day, the sloping walk back to our group’s hotel showed the spilling valley overlooked by walls of mountains, thick with snowpack and the high plateau. As we gathered along the Yellowhead Highway after a confused stroll down, we eventually diverged in our separate streams. One group fell into a watering hole with only local beers—no ciders, wines, or spirits, and no food or fuss to dilute the buzz. Just beer and sausages akin to hotdogs in case of emergency levels of intoxication. I played it safe, breaking faith perhaps, and went with the crowd seeking a meal before most would scramble for a shuttle back to the airport in lieu of spending the night up in the north. But I wasn’t scrambling. I was staying on.

We had our table, broke bread, and remembered the same faces at different tables in Yellowknife, in Carcross, in Castlegar, in Kelowna. That was one part of my remembering while I tried to think through the aching nostalgia of washing up on a shore that wasn’t actually buried in memory. It’s a place that was wholly unfamiliar to me, not only for forty-four years of absence but for not even remembering my departure from it as my home. 

As an adopted child, there are many things unremembered. I remember my parents raising me, but I hadn’t known that I’d been held and visited by my birth mother before first flying to Terrace, and I hadn’t known it until twenty years after I’d met her. What is the nostos in this place then, an arrival back at an unremembered departure? Is there really such a thing to anyone, anywhere in the world? 

I’d come home to Terrace for the first time since I’d grown to the point I could start in the world. I was brought to a loving home here but I couldn’t remember the home itself. I hadn’t even seen the photographs of this home since I was as young as my own sons are now. My childhood memories, if I’m honest about them, are not images. They are all filtered through the prose of the books that I read, their words sieved my memories, thoughts thick with texture and glowing in their chain of language. And those books are few and deep-rooted as the landscape of my earliest origins. They are the tributaries flowing into me, swallowed whole into the basin of my thoughts and experiences and carried along my course.

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As the table broke up, most off to the airport and back to the city life as quick as possible, I said my goodnights and turned to the heart of Terrace in the opposite direction: the Skeena Mall. It was a spot I needed to find under the acropolis of these mountains. Walking in from the Nisga’a Highway and Kalum Lake Road by the steelworks is longer than it looks on the maps. Each road crossing was punctuated by the “sol mi re do” of the street crossing’s chimes that rang so unfamiliar to my ears, ears that are used to Vancouver’s minor third. Eventually reaching the mall, I passed the bright fuchsia sign for “Ardene” and the anchor store “Winners” and went in to see if this northern agora could tell me something about my childhood or what life might have waited here for me. Like every mall, teens sat in the aisles and seniors shuffled through the shops. An empty store space gave me good luck. The local high school repurposed it to tell the history of the Skeena Mall—not the story of the people of the Skeena River but a history of the shops and stalls that give their peculiar comforts in small towns. It had started by destroying the original church to clear the land—a flow of history from faith to capital, giving the nation state the slip by skipping ahead. That was in 1975, just as I left. I’d never been strolled, swaddled up against the cold, down the nave through the transept (the tobacconist) to the altar of this building. Whatever it might reveal to me about Terrace, it could tell me nothing about myself and offered no sacraments.

I exited beside the chancel by the pharmacy without offering a tithe and went North on Sparks Street to find my other planned visit: the bookstore, the closest thing to a sanctuary and votive. I already knew Misty River Books came from after my own departure, but I wanted to know what Terrace read. I wanted to know if the books that shaped my life would have been different had I stayed here. The descending “sol mi re do” chimed me across the streets up from City Hall until I reached the little window filled with books. I entered the one-room shop that smelled to me like a shrine to find it bursting with the written word. Almost immediately, I was staring down titles from an author whose brother I had taught and helped apply to law school (he got in, and his own fast flow ran away from another northern small town simmering in his homeward turns). I saw a new book of poetry from someone who would teach that summer, and poetry in small shops is always a gift. There were so many unexpected and familiar faces, all welcoming me home. This was a devotional space, a votive to mark a form of salvation. I let my hands slip along the smooth then textured spines. I found some small gifts for my sons, and as it was, the Misty River had a novel for evening story-time before bed. It was a mystery about young boys on the shores of Harrison Lake, a part of my own childhood that I did remember, and I picked it up immediately. 

But as I turned, I met my surprise. I had spent most of my adolescence and teen years reading and rereading a handful of novels that the used bookstore of my small town in the Fraser Valley made available. They were all here. Every single one. And they filled a whole shelf. 

I was a boy again on Faldor’s Farm with the rich smells of a kitchen and a childhood idyll of comfort and love and safety and home. I might not remember being adopted, but somehow those books of a laughing, loving acceptance that could fill any child’s heart as the perfect atonement for anything and everything came racing back. That they were not only here but here in full seemed unexpectedly reassuring. I knew now that my relationship to those books was more complex. The dry voice whispering in some corner of my mind knew it too, and the books’ atonements, their confessions and penance to some other child of Omelas a decade before me, were already kindled. Our human hearts, our sins and our sorrows are entangled with everything in the slim stream of a life that unfolds and flows like a skein or a river overflowing its banks and never in the same pathway for another. These were the books I was already reading for my sons at home despite knowing the secret shame they confessed for another adopted boy in another adopted home beside another eddying river. I asked the owner about the Harrison Lake mystery. “Oh yes, it’s great fun for reading out loud. They’d like it.” I noticed too the full shelf of my childhood nostalgia. “I always keep them in stock. I think everyone grew up reading those.” So I bought my worlds of words for my sons and exited into the dimming early night of verdant and violet horizons.

❦ ❦ ❦

By the time I reached my hotel, the sun was behind the hills. I smelled dusty with sweat, and my legs and feet were warm with the welcome ache of doing what they were made for. I went up to my room, pulled out my notebook, opened my window to the shocking clarity of the night air with its crust of green scents from the forest world around me, and started to make plans for the morning hours I’d have before flying home. Time then to walk and time now to write.

I thought, nostalgia may be our familiar, peculiar homing pain, but I’ve no idea when the moment of nostos actually arrived in my life. I can date my return to Terrace in a notebook, but that’s not what I meant. Not the arrival, but that singular moment of turning back toward home. 

There has never been a point at which the agon is done, the work set down, and the life’s rudder turned backward, and maybe that’s the point—I know for a certainty that I was not, at the moment of arrival here, in any way who I had been when I left, even if that flow from past to present was a continuous clear stream, swift-flowing and many-channelled. 

It’s foolish to imagine it this way though, because I could never possibly navigate past the rapids. Who can? The eddying of nostalgia in time is really at best a momentary slack tide or stasis, a yawning, momentary mindfulness opening in Spring. The Skeena has no tidal stream here, and neither does life circle back on itself as seasons repeat. They’re born, not born again.

As I made these jottings, my phone buzzed beside me with an audio message. The wail of a banshee howling for all it could never have and all it had ever lost came through. My youngest son missed me, his world was empty, and I was supposed to be there to read the adventures I’d just seen on the banks of Misty River. What would happen to Garion? Would Old Wolf protect him? Who was trying to steal him away from his home? 

My heart was tripping over itself. I called and was immediately handed over to the tiny wailing voice calling across the distance. He was tired. He needed to know if the story was safe. He wanted to go to a carnival when I came home. He wanted to go right now. And like some consequentialist calculation around a child of Omelas, I wondered how to calculate the greater good of my being away from family. Should I have planned on an early ending like everyone else? Why was I stepping outside of life for this momentary slack tide?

I calmed the crying voice down, told him I loved him forever and always, and I tried to describe just how green and clean the world around me was and how much I wanted to show it to him. The crying calmed and quickly made its sudden turn to the snuffling snoring. I said my goodnights to unhearing ears and went back to my plans. My parents sent a message too, in response to my own call. They wrote to confirm that after I’d stayed as a tiny preemie with my birth mother in hospital until my lungs worked well enough, they had brought me back here to the corner of Kalum Lake Road and McConnell Avenue. 

That was my first home, remembered only through ill-lit and fading photographs of my parents looking like plaid-clad hippies. Nostos. Algos. I had the address for Faldor’s Farm. It was the half-remembered dreamlike wound, the traumof childhood. And tomorrow I would wake to it. I fell into the fitful dreaming sleep that comes in a place of unfamiliar scents and sounds, like the echo of train horns resounding from mountainsides unheard for decades and the rich foliate chlorophyll of a green world on all sides. There was a woman with a white lock in her black hair, my sons calling for me to be home and one wailing against my absences—there was also another tiny adopted child hollowed out for the love that is so hard to find in rough rural towns, and me tossing through the night restlessly, thinking of a farm and a ringing smithy and laughing through an idyll of childhood I’d read as a gift, folding it into the bed of my life’s stream.

What need to atone drove an author to write such books for the young? What drove me to read them? He’d gone to jail for it. I went to college. But was the engine behind it so different?

❦ ❦ ❦

I rose early the next morning. I’d left my window and blinds open to have the chill air and early sunlight to drive me from bed. I showered, packed, pulled on my hoodie against the cold, and went downstairs to pluck a few hard-boiled eggs from the breakfast set as they were just being put out, still warm, and a large cup of coffee. I put the eggs and a napkin in the front pocket of my pull-over where they would keep my hands snug against the cool. I started off out the doors onto the Highway of Tears and then turned onto the Nisga’a Highway.

The road wrapped round from the steelworks and ran uphill with a narrow soft bed on the side of gravel and the ground-down softness of shed cedar and pine washed to the sides in the winter’s thaw. It was muffled and soft underfoot, nearly grainy, and I walked swiftly under the trees, rising past rousing neighbours with barking dogs and the sun over tall grass meadows. The shade of the sun over the Kitsumgallum cemetery for settlers at the top of the hill gave way as everything opened into a high and flat plateau. An old man with rope for a belt walked past slowly on the other side of the road, and I offered my “morning” to him, met by a nod, though I had my earphones in to listen to a lecture by two friends on ethics, the banality of evil, and a fantasy story whose child was smouldering into my thoughts from some other time. I was blessed by loving parents, and also a loving birth mother who could give me up to their love. I had been too lucky. I ate my hard-boiled eggs, pitched the shells into the ditch with their short sulfur smell, and revelled in the freedom of a choice made to bring me to meet this world, to taste its clean air, and to walk my way through it.

With the sun on me, the coat of sweat’s salt and oil on my forehead, and a thin and cool bead of perspiration running down the back of my neck, I reached the crossroads. Here on the corner of Kalum Lake Road and McConnell Avenue, I had to see the past as an anchor into the future. The promises and failures, the flow of guilt driving unexpected atonements, the forgotten roots still growing, and the past as some dark basement to the present beside the upward-climbing path of the future. I reached the crossroad of my earliest life and my first home. 

It was a void. 

On the west side, the north and south by the church had homes too new and too unlike mine in the faded photographs to be connected. These were from later than me. To the east was an empty stand of forest in the north and the impossible to the south. My home was not there. 

The first home in which my swaddling clothes were warmed in the oven, one button once too hot burned itself in to mark me for life, the silver scar carried all the way out into the world and now brought all the way back home again. The snows buried the roof my father would dig out, wild dog packs passed outside, and the poorly lit photographs of my childhood held firm roots. It was not there. 

There was only the Waap Sa’mn House of the college, the same campus I had seen the day before to find pathways for students to move through their studies seamlessly. It was the Birch House of the campus, and the Celtic sense in me called out to new beginnings, but the settler hesitation I carry was unsure how to read the Sa’mn here on a site not my own and with my roots floating, even racing down the stream of the misty river to be washed away. 

My childhood home was torn down to make land for the campus that was founded the year after I left. My shallow roots became a college. 

I stood dumb and stilled. I had been here only a day before to say that students from anywhere are owed a pathway to anywhere else. Yet my own feet were calling to a rootedness not my own and a recognition that the cosmopolitan mobility that made my life’s riverbed possible might itself be a trauma to another. 

I thought back to that small bookstore, itself filled up with books written as atonements for the harms done to a child like me, atonements every day repeated and everyday incomplete. And I could only think of my tremendous gift, to be on that precipice of impasse and able to look into it with love for Terrace, thinking less of my debts to the past and a history that formed me and more to the needs of my future that called, wailing in discontent over my absence, and my service to a debt from my own past that forgot my debt to the future. I took my photographs and thought of how I would read my son those books from my own childhood that he had come to love, and how I would tell myself something about the child toward whom those books were an act of atonement. In that moment of another beginning facing the birch, I saw the future as a departure outward that I could never fulfill but also a possibility to give this beginning place a portentous purpose, a direction, and a pathway always uphill to be run through, laughing.

My walk back in a long circle was tiring, and my trip to the airport shortly after was too brief to recall with the friends who were also stragglers. But as I flew out of Terrace later that morning with propellers churning, I had no aching pain of home. It was only the strange anagnorisis that the future of others needed my presence and not my past, and the same from the stories I was telling them—stories whose atonement may have driven their telling but whose futures would drive my sons with their aching wish for love. 

I was eddying back again in the stream before flowing and resuming the current. In that moment looking down from the airplane shaking with the buzzing thrum of propellers, I lost nostalgia to the future after the return itself. The lost third Nostoi is always yet to be written.