The Island in Winter
"Young is a storyteller and his ability to marry storylines to strongly crafted, richly imaged poetry, is a rare gift, indeed. [...] The Island In Winter is a truly remarkable first book and, by blending his considerable expertise as both fiction writer and poet, Young has made sure that it is one that can be read and appreciated by anyone who enjoys truly fine writing."
—Ronnie R. Brown, Canadian Bookseller
"Young's work is sure-footed and entertaining, and he's adept with humour, at times using it to ground romanticism. ...This is a book that will have a wide range of appeal; even those readers not normally drawn to poetry will enjoy the poet's compassionate, forthright, and fresh vision. ...Young is an exceptional poet, and he's only going to get better."
—Kelly Parsons, Malahat Review
"This is a wonderful collection of joyful meditations in lyric narrative mode. The bulk of the poems are written in free verse strophes, but the occasional prose poem and exploration of parallel syntax in open form lyric add spice to the mix. Music and image are splendidly handled throughout, and Young is especially adept at creating the telling image. An auspicius beginning indeed." —Richard Stevenson, Books in Canada
—Ronnie R. Brown, Canadian Bookseller
"Young's work is sure-footed and entertaining, and he's adept with humour, at times using it to ground romanticism. ...This is a book that will have a wide range of appeal; even those readers not normally drawn to poetry will enjoy the poet's compassionate, forthright, and fresh vision. ...Young is an exceptional poet, and he's only going to get better."
—Kelly Parsons, Malahat Review
"This is a wonderful collection of joyful meditations in lyric narrative mode. The bulk of the poems are written in free verse strophes, but the occasional prose poem and exploration of parallel syntax in open form lyric add spice to the mix. Music and image are splendidly handled throughout, and Young is especially adept at creating the telling image. An auspicius beginning indeed." —Richard Stevenson, Books in Canada
Rhymes With Useless
Oddballs With Problems by Aaron Hamburger, Tuesday, Jan 16, 2001, in The Village Voice
From David Foster Wallace's invented affair between LBJ and a male black aide to Stacy Richter's date with Satan, a good deal of '90s short fiction glittered with high concepts—the sitcom pilot as literature. Terence Young's debut story collection, Rhymes With Useless, solves the high-concept genre's inherent superficialities by wedding imaginative scenarios to a minimalist voice and attention to detail best exemplified by older writers like Anne Beattie and Raymond Carver.
The characters range from a former construction worker who has his hair cut by Joni Mitchell to a retired English professor who inadvertently inspires one of his students to get a sex change. But instead of making easy jokes at their expense, Young makes the reader feel implicated in his characters' dilemmas, even their pain. In the title story, about a married couple's sex life ruined by the wife's conversion to veganism, the husband-narrator notes wryly: "No meat, no eggs, no dairy. No sex wasn't part of the plan. It just happened. These days we look forward to a nice baked potato with a splatter of homemade salsa." We can enjoy the cute sarcasm, but we also feel a sense of uneasy recognition of our culture's fit-living, fit-eating obsession documented in such a small, domestic space.
Unlike Carver, Young's minimalist style doesn't read like a tic; it's a fitting stylistic response to his subjects. His use of the quick, clipped poetic metaphor captures the disjunctive associations made by the eight-year-old girl in "Yellow With Black Horns," whose mother's voice reminds her of "walking on the lawn." And in "The Berlin Wall," the author's use of a fragmented narrative neatly parallels the sense of loss felt by a mother deprived of her kids because her husband got caught selling pot out of their home.
Toward the end, Young's gloomy tone, repeated in story after story, starts to leave the reader numb. Still, his sharp renderings of oddballs in distress remind us that stories can do more than amuse with clever conceits—they have the power to disturb us, to bump us out of our comfortable grooves.
Rhymes With "Breathtaking"
Reviewed by Margaret Gunning in January Magazine
The question you have to ask yourself when reading Terence Young's short stories is, "How does he do so much with so little?" Young is an outstanding example of the art of minimalism, conveying whole worlds with the smallest detail. The resulting stories glint like finely cut gems, multifaceted, enigmatic and beautiful.
Young's prime emotional territory is ground that is familiar to all of us: the family, that tender and excruciating realm where relationships intertwine like pulsing blood vessels. To write so simply and directly about all of this complexity requires keen powers of observation. But a great deal of the clarity in Young's work comes from the fact that it is uncluttered by any moral baggage. It is not his place to judge, but to present people as they are, flawed, paradoxical, both broken and whole and human in a way we can viscerally recognize.
Like an artist who can create a likeness with a few deft strokes, Young introduces his characters by telling us just enough that we can fill in the rest. In the title story, Eustace (whose name, he likes to tell people, rhymes with useless) describes his wife Billie: "She's got a tongue that'll run you down the second you step off the curb." Instantly the dynamics of the relationship spring into 3-D: the forceful, vocal wife, the "useless" husband who has literally become impotent from Billie's strictly enforced vegetarian diet. ("There are two types of people in this world," she says. "Those who eat meat and those who don't. It's that clear, Eustace.")
As if to regain some sense of power, Eustace regales Billie with a long, rambling, suspiciously tall story about how he once had his hair cut by a then-unknown Joni Mitchell. As the story comes out bit by improbable bit -- the work gang up north, the car wash where Joni had a summer job -- Billie's curiosity begins to show through her scorn: "The girl at the gas station," Billie said. "You're not about to tell me you stumbled on Joni Mitchell killing time as a pump jockey. Not the Joni Mitchell who sang at Woodstock. You can't expect me to buy a lie as dumb as that."
Yet the spell of the story works, as this bit of dialogue reveals:
"What did she look like?" Billie asked."Blonde, thin."
"So was I, once."
"I remember."
By the end of his rather odd, convoluted story we know more about the balance of power between Billie and Eustace -- not to mention their abiding affection for each other -- than we would have thought possible in a mere 14 pages.
Though Young's stories deal with what could be called everyday people -- teachers, Xerox technicians, clerks at the liquor store -- there is almost always an undercurrent, even a macabre one. In "Too Busy Swimming," Tony, a teacher away from home at a conference, stays at a "no-star" motel called the Scotsman's Palace and contemplates adultery with the tempting Leona: "She was one of those bullets a man has to dodge, and I did, but only just." His wife Doreen is a cleaning contractor who deals with the aftermath of fires, floods and other domestic messes. Young does not have to point out that Tony is an insensitive jerk, but lets him reveal it himself in this scene:
I was telling Sam about a boy in my class who'd found his older brother shot in his living room."The news said the kid shot himself 'to death'," I was saying. "Have you ever heard anything so stupid?"
"Well, he did, didn't he?" Sam asked.
"That's not the point," I said. "You'd think the guy was just sitting there on the sofa plugging away until he was so full of lead he finally died. All they needed to say was he shot himself."
The fact that Tony is more concerned about redundancy than a boy's life reveals volumes, but the murky subtext becomes even creepier when he reveals that Doreen had to clean up the bloody carpets and walls after the suicide: "She found bits of bone and brain all the way into the dining room." When the "conference" turns out to be an inquiry into allegations of child sexual abuse at Tony's school, the story's thin veneer of normalcy is peeled back to reveal its heart of darkness.
Young is especially concerned with the tender area of family estrangement and our groping, imperfect attempts to reach across the gulf. In "Pig On A Spit," 13-year-old David Mayhew has been living in glittering Paris with his mother, who is about to marry a man David can't stand. He demands to spend some time with his real father, Peter, a rough-edged character who writes poetry and makes candles on a remote island off the coast of British Columbia. At first it is as if David has landed on an alien planet. The main social event on the island is a pig roast:
An electric motor from Bill's defunct washing machine turns a sprocket that moves a bicycle chain connected to a propeller shaft salvaged from a beached trawler. Transfixed through both anus and mouth, a pig that had spent his days fattening himself for this very occasion stares straight ahead, as though in death, as in life, he is performing his duty. But by story's end, some subtle alchemy has taken place in the connection between David and his taciturn father as they play a game of bocci:
David moves toward his father. They stand close together now, as though seeking protection from rain or wind. David hands him a green ball and, as Peter lofts a shot into wavering obscurity, David follows it with his eyes. "Good one," he says. "Good one." It is in the little moment, the unexpected flash of soul-nakedness that Young's gift truly shines. A mother and her estranged daughter quarrel over her newfound fundamentalist religion. "Sometimes," Avril spits at her mother, "I don't understand why you don't just kill yourself." A retired teacher whose wife has just died clears out junk from his attic, lamenting to himself, "If only there were a garage sale for all the garbage we carry around in our heads." Another character is "disfellowshipped" from the Jehovah's Witnesses when he marries a nonbeliever. "Shunned: the standard punishment for smokers, adulterers, skeptics .... Letters to his mother still come back unopened. Allan closed his eyes, hung on, like Jacob. He let the anger burn until it flaked away like sunburned skin, tender underneath, healing."
Young knows about the subtle miracle of healing and how it can happen even under the most adverse circumstances. There is a valor in these characters as they struggle towards each other, sometimes clashing in the kind of anger that can only come from love. Though Young is not exactly detached, he does leave enough space to let the people in his stories reveal who they are in word and gesture. This is an enviable grace, yielding a prose that is clear and unforced, breathing out an unmistakable sense of reality. | March 2001
Margaret Gunning has reviewed over 130 books but never gets tired of the grand adventure of reading. Her poetry has appeared in Prism International and Room of One's Own. She has written a novel (A Singing Tree) and a book of poems (Nonsongs and Neopsalms), and is currently at work on her second novel, Better than Life.
From David Foster Wallace's invented affair between LBJ and a male black aide to Stacy Richter's date with Satan, a good deal of '90s short fiction glittered with high concepts—the sitcom pilot as literature. Terence Young's debut story collection, Rhymes With Useless, solves the high-concept genre's inherent superficialities by wedding imaginative scenarios to a minimalist voice and attention to detail best exemplified by older writers like Anne Beattie and Raymond Carver.
The characters range from a former construction worker who has his hair cut by Joni Mitchell to a retired English professor who inadvertently inspires one of his students to get a sex change. But instead of making easy jokes at their expense, Young makes the reader feel implicated in his characters' dilemmas, even their pain. In the title story, about a married couple's sex life ruined by the wife's conversion to veganism, the husband-narrator notes wryly: "No meat, no eggs, no dairy. No sex wasn't part of the plan. It just happened. These days we look forward to a nice baked potato with a splatter of homemade salsa." We can enjoy the cute sarcasm, but we also feel a sense of uneasy recognition of our culture's fit-living, fit-eating obsession documented in such a small, domestic space.
Unlike Carver, Young's minimalist style doesn't read like a tic; it's a fitting stylistic response to his subjects. His use of the quick, clipped poetic metaphor captures the disjunctive associations made by the eight-year-old girl in "Yellow With Black Horns," whose mother's voice reminds her of "walking on the lawn." And in "The Berlin Wall," the author's use of a fragmented narrative neatly parallels the sense of loss felt by a mother deprived of her kids because her husband got caught selling pot out of their home.
Toward the end, Young's gloomy tone, repeated in story after story, starts to leave the reader numb. Still, his sharp renderings of oddballs in distress remind us that stories can do more than amuse with clever conceits—they have the power to disturb us, to bump us out of our comfortable grooves.
Rhymes With "Breathtaking"
Reviewed by Margaret Gunning in January Magazine
The question you have to ask yourself when reading Terence Young's short stories is, "How does he do so much with so little?" Young is an outstanding example of the art of minimalism, conveying whole worlds with the smallest detail. The resulting stories glint like finely cut gems, multifaceted, enigmatic and beautiful.
Young's prime emotional territory is ground that is familiar to all of us: the family, that tender and excruciating realm where relationships intertwine like pulsing blood vessels. To write so simply and directly about all of this complexity requires keen powers of observation. But a great deal of the clarity in Young's work comes from the fact that it is uncluttered by any moral baggage. It is not his place to judge, but to present people as they are, flawed, paradoxical, both broken and whole and human in a way we can viscerally recognize.
Like an artist who can create a likeness with a few deft strokes, Young introduces his characters by telling us just enough that we can fill in the rest. In the title story, Eustace (whose name, he likes to tell people, rhymes with useless) describes his wife Billie: "She's got a tongue that'll run you down the second you step off the curb." Instantly the dynamics of the relationship spring into 3-D: the forceful, vocal wife, the "useless" husband who has literally become impotent from Billie's strictly enforced vegetarian diet. ("There are two types of people in this world," she says. "Those who eat meat and those who don't. It's that clear, Eustace.")
As if to regain some sense of power, Eustace regales Billie with a long, rambling, suspiciously tall story about how he once had his hair cut by a then-unknown Joni Mitchell. As the story comes out bit by improbable bit -- the work gang up north, the car wash where Joni had a summer job -- Billie's curiosity begins to show through her scorn: "The girl at the gas station," Billie said. "You're not about to tell me you stumbled on Joni Mitchell killing time as a pump jockey. Not the Joni Mitchell who sang at Woodstock. You can't expect me to buy a lie as dumb as that."
Yet the spell of the story works, as this bit of dialogue reveals:
"What did she look like?" Billie asked."Blonde, thin."
"So was I, once."
"I remember."
By the end of his rather odd, convoluted story we know more about the balance of power between Billie and Eustace -- not to mention their abiding affection for each other -- than we would have thought possible in a mere 14 pages.
Though Young's stories deal with what could be called everyday people -- teachers, Xerox technicians, clerks at the liquor store -- there is almost always an undercurrent, even a macabre one. In "Too Busy Swimming," Tony, a teacher away from home at a conference, stays at a "no-star" motel called the Scotsman's Palace and contemplates adultery with the tempting Leona: "She was one of those bullets a man has to dodge, and I did, but only just." His wife Doreen is a cleaning contractor who deals with the aftermath of fires, floods and other domestic messes. Young does not have to point out that Tony is an insensitive jerk, but lets him reveal it himself in this scene:
I was telling Sam about a boy in my class who'd found his older brother shot in his living room."The news said the kid shot himself 'to death'," I was saying. "Have you ever heard anything so stupid?"
"Well, he did, didn't he?" Sam asked.
"That's not the point," I said. "You'd think the guy was just sitting there on the sofa plugging away until he was so full of lead he finally died. All they needed to say was he shot himself."
The fact that Tony is more concerned about redundancy than a boy's life reveals volumes, but the murky subtext becomes even creepier when he reveals that Doreen had to clean up the bloody carpets and walls after the suicide: "She found bits of bone and brain all the way into the dining room." When the "conference" turns out to be an inquiry into allegations of child sexual abuse at Tony's school, the story's thin veneer of normalcy is peeled back to reveal its heart of darkness.
Young is especially concerned with the tender area of family estrangement and our groping, imperfect attempts to reach across the gulf. In "Pig On A Spit," 13-year-old David Mayhew has been living in glittering Paris with his mother, who is about to marry a man David can't stand. He demands to spend some time with his real father, Peter, a rough-edged character who writes poetry and makes candles on a remote island off the coast of British Columbia. At first it is as if David has landed on an alien planet. The main social event on the island is a pig roast:
An electric motor from Bill's defunct washing machine turns a sprocket that moves a bicycle chain connected to a propeller shaft salvaged from a beached trawler. Transfixed through both anus and mouth, a pig that had spent his days fattening himself for this very occasion stares straight ahead, as though in death, as in life, he is performing his duty. But by story's end, some subtle alchemy has taken place in the connection between David and his taciturn father as they play a game of bocci:
David moves toward his father. They stand close together now, as though seeking protection from rain or wind. David hands him a green ball and, as Peter lofts a shot into wavering obscurity, David follows it with his eyes. "Good one," he says. "Good one." It is in the little moment, the unexpected flash of soul-nakedness that Young's gift truly shines. A mother and her estranged daughter quarrel over her newfound fundamentalist religion. "Sometimes," Avril spits at her mother, "I don't understand why you don't just kill yourself." A retired teacher whose wife has just died clears out junk from his attic, lamenting to himself, "If only there were a garage sale for all the garbage we carry around in our heads." Another character is "disfellowshipped" from the Jehovah's Witnesses when he marries a nonbeliever. "Shunned: the standard punishment for smokers, adulterers, skeptics .... Letters to his mother still come back unopened. Allan closed his eyes, hung on, like Jacob. He let the anger burn until it flaked away like sunburned skin, tender underneath, healing."
Young knows about the subtle miracle of healing and how it can happen even under the most adverse circumstances. There is a valor in these characters as they struggle towards each other, sometimes clashing in the kind of anger that can only come from love. Though Young is not exactly detached, he does leave enough space to let the people in his stories reveal who they are in word and gesture. This is an enviable grace, yielding a prose that is clear and unforced, breathing out an unmistakable sense of reality. | March 2001
Margaret Gunning has reviewed over 130 books but never gets tired of the grand adventure of reading. Her poetry has appeared in Prism International and Room of One's Own. She has written a novel (A Singing Tree) and a book of poems (Nonsongs and Neopsalms), and is currently at work on her second novel, Better than Life.
After Goodlake's
After Goodlake’sby Terence Young, Raincoast Books (2004) ISBN 1-55192-683-0
—Jacqui Hunt in Word Works, Winter 2005
After Goodlake’s is a first novel by Victoria writer Terence Young. His earlier published works were a volume of poems(The Island in Winter 1999) and the short story collection Rhymes with Useless (2000) which won high praise for the way he explored what one critic called that “hapless institution, the modern family”. His characters exhibited the gamut of human foibles but the delineation was always tempered with sympathy and often with humour. Young, who confesses that he finds every aspect of writing hard, did not deliberately set out to write a novel. He was working on a number of sketches for possible short stories but nothing seemed to quite gell. However, he became increasingly attached to some of the characters—an off-beat young woman attracted to an older man; a 12-year-old boy cursed with angry, bitter parents and a school bully; a young man enduring a dead-end job for the sake of musical ambitions. Unwilling to abandon these creatures, he suddenly decided that they ought to meet each other, maybe even somehow become related. And that, unlikely as it sounds, provided the genesis of the current novel.
Goodlake’s is the name of a third generation Victoria delicatessen now run by Fergus and his wife Annie, who is in charge of its hugely successful sideline catering business. The jacket blurb suggests that the novel is centered on the fact that Fergus, despite apparently loving his wife, has embarked on an affair with a much younger woman. However, the novel involves more than a mid-life male identify crisis. Rather it paints the picture of two people so engrossed in work that they have become blinkered to the rest of life until each, in quite different ways, experiences a sudden subconscious desire to get free. Following a brief prologue which features the delicatessen itself as the main character, and incidentally contains some of the most poetic writing, the novel is shaped by frequent shifts of time and focus so that although third person narration is used throughout, we gradually acquire an in-depth understanding not only of Fergus and Annie, but also of their weirdly named son Helios, the would-be musician, and their long suffering, astute but tight-lipped employee, Doris. This episodic development gives a layered effect, revealing not only the interconnectedness of these lives but the private thoughts and feelings of each individual. The only disconnect I felt was between the young 12-yearold Fergus and his middle-aged self. But this, after all, is a novel, not a psychological study and I would not gladly give up the wonderful incident in which young Fergus, despairing of his parents’ unconcern about a possible tsunami, flees on his bike to higher ground, secretly hoping that the wave will destroy everyone and everything that is making his life difficult. Young seems acquainted with a variety of lifestyles and he is able to depict these with accuracy and amused insight. Thus Helios alleviates the crushing boredom of mail sorting with the odd joint. Annie caters for a teachers’ development day where the workshop’s captive audience is learning to get in touch with a personal spiritual guide. Then there is a surreal scene in which Fergus gets involved with erecting an enormous wooden cross. After the climactic fateful dinner party, the pace slackens considerably as Young works through a denouement that leaves his characters somewhat wiser. The reader is glad for Fergus and Annie, but this reader was also glad to have enjoyed Young’s command of language. His writing exhibits a fine sense of irony, both situational and tonal, and he has a poet’s eye for metaphor. Fortunately, he uses both these literary devices sparingly and to good effect, at times producing prose the reader wants to relish and reread. For anyone who needs to grope for words, his description of Annie’s attitude is a delight.
“Annie congratulated herself on finding the precise term for what she was feeling. Unlike Fergus, who assumed every instance of forgetfulness, each failure to retrieve a word was a precursor to complete synaptic collapse, Annie dwelt in the land of her own language like a foreigner. It was enough for her simply to approximate meaning, to come close to what she meant, the way a tourist in Paris might be content to ask for ‘the little metal object that opens the door’ when the word for key declines to surface.”
—Jacqui Hunt in Word Works, Winter 2005
After Goodlake’s is a first novel by Victoria writer Terence Young. His earlier published works were a volume of poems(The Island in Winter 1999) and the short story collection Rhymes with Useless (2000) which won high praise for the way he explored what one critic called that “hapless institution, the modern family”. His characters exhibited the gamut of human foibles but the delineation was always tempered with sympathy and often with humour. Young, who confesses that he finds every aspect of writing hard, did not deliberately set out to write a novel. He was working on a number of sketches for possible short stories but nothing seemed to quite gell. However, he became increasingly attached to some of the characters—an off-beat young woman attracted to an older man; a 12-year-old boy cursed with angry, bitter parents and a school bully; a young man enduring a dead-end job for the sake of musical ambitions. Unwilling to abandon these creatures, he suddenly decided that they ought to meet each other, maybe even somehow become related. And that, unlikely as it sounds, provided the genesis of the current novel.
Goodlake’s is the name of a third generation Victoria delicatessen now run by Fergus and his wife Annie, who is in charge of its hugely successful sideline catering business. The jacket blurb suggests that the novel is centered on the fact that Fergus, despite apparently loving his wife, has embarked on an affair with a much younger woman. However, the novel involves more than a mid-life male identify crisis. Rather it paints the picture of two people so engrossed in work that they have become blinkered to the rest of life until each, in quite different ways, experiences a sudden subconscious desire to get free. Following a brief prologue which features the delicatessen itself as the main character, and incidentally contains some of the most poetic writing, the novel is shaped by frequent shifts of time and focus so that although third person narration is used throughout, we gradually acquire an in-depth understanding not only of Fergus and Annie, but also of their weirdly named son Helios, the would-be musician, and their long suffering, astute but tight-lipped employee, Doris. This episodic development gives a layered effect, revealing not only the interconnectedness of these lives but the private thoughts and feelings of each individual. The only disconnect I felt was between the young 12-yearold Fergus and his middle-aged self. But this, after all, is a novel, not a psychological study and I would not gladly give up the wonderful incident in which young Fergus, despairing of his parents’ unconcern about a possible tsunami, flees on his bike to higher ground, secretly hoping that the wave will destroy everyone and everything that is making his life difficult. Young seems acquainted with a variety of lifestyles and he is able to depict these with accuracy and amused insight. Thus Helios alleviates the crushing boredom of mail sorting with the odd joint. Annie caters for a teachers’ development day where the workshop’s captive audience is learning to get in touch with a personal spiritual guide. Then there is a surreal scene in which Fergus gets involved with erecting an enormous wooden cross. After the climactic fateful dinner party, the pace slackens considerably as Young works through a denouement that leaves his characters somewhat wiser. The reader is glad for Fergus and Annie, but this reader was also glad to have enjoyed Young’s command of language. His writing exhibits a fine sense of irony, both situational and tonal, and he has a poet’s eye for metaphor. Fortunately, he uses both these literary devices sparingly and to good effect, at times producing prose the reader wants to relish and reread. For anyone who needs to grope for words, his description of Annie’s attitude is a delight.
“Annie congratulated herself on finding the precise term for what she was feeling. Unlike Fergus, who assumed every instance of forgetfulness, each failure to retrieve a word was a precursor to complete synaptic collapse, Annie dwelt in the land of her own language like a foreigner. It was enough for her simply to approximate meaning, to come close to what she meant, the way a tourist in Paris might be content to ask for ‘the little metal object that opens the door’ when the word for key declines to surface.”
After Goodlake's, Terence Young's first novel, looks like a hefty family saga in the traditional mode. It's a tale of three generations of British Columbians, a story about a midlife crisis involving an adulterous man and a younger woman, and a coming-of-age narrative. It's also significantly more than the sum of these things. Young's plot is a familiar one. Fergus Goodlake, the proprietor of a Victoria deli, is having an affair with a much younger woman, but he's not sure why. He tries to feel guilt about compromising his reasonably pleasant marriage, but he fails. His wife, Annie, senses his dissatisfaction but suspects nothing. Meanwhile, his son, Helios, has rejected bourgeois life and settled for a life as a postal worker and hotel clerk, and is all the happier for it. What sets After Goodlake's apart from the thousands of "adultery threatens a middle-class marriage" novels that have been written since Madame Bovary? Curiously, it is Young's take on religion that makes the book feel fresh. He uses faith to set up some decidedly odd puzzles, conundrums that aren't easy to solve. Fergus is an unlikely Christ-figure, but he awoke from a childhood coma on Easter Monday, and, as an adult, is nearly killed by a falling crucifix. From these plot points, fault lines radiate through the characters' beliefs, calling all of their actions into question. It's this side of the novel, not the Goodlakes' neuroses or Young's manically descriptive prose, that reveals its author's promise. At its best, After Goodlake's recalls the novels of another West Coast author: Jack Hodgins. Young isn't as comic as Hodgins, and he doesn't go in for the magic-realist flourishes that pepper Hodgins's best work, but the two writers share a wild expansiveness and a willingness to read the past and present in almost mystical terms. Young falls short of Hodgins in his storytelling, which is often so cluttered that the characters trip over the writing, but his willingness to think big, even in the midst of a mundane story, augurs well. --Jack Illingworth
Moving Day
Terence Young’s second collection of poetry, Moving Day, bears earmarks of both Lamothe and Adams. While Young’s collection is rooted firmly in the recognizable present of Vancouver Island, it warns, like Lamothe, of the danger of forgetting one’s history. Similarly, almost all of Young’s poems are relayed through the dusty lens of re-memory that is reminiscent of Adams.
Young’s subject matter is the usual fodder of poems—youth, aging, marriage, love, regret—and in the hands of a lesser poet, the collection would be banal. Young has a talent for weaving the epic into the everyday; in the opening poem, “Saturday Wine Tour on the E & N,” a bourgeois afternoon becomes a self-effacing reflection on entitlement: “The city conforms, divides itself into triangles along the right- / of-way, which was here first . . . At each vineyard on the circuit, I raise a toast to the past and listen to the pretty speeches of the oenologists . . . I am a / student out on a school field trip waiting for my free sample.” While, in the text’s title poem, the narrator claims that “there was so much to say / that we said nothing, / convinced / as we had been that the Age of Miracles / was over for us,” Young’s latest collection is nothing short of an everyday miracle: a deft rendering of the bittersweet process that is life.
---Erica Wunker, Canadian Literature
Perhaps it was the prospect of reading a book on the cover of which was the ancient converted barn where I attended one of the most enjoyable parties I’ve been to that enticed me to read Terence Young’s newest book of poetry, Moving Day (Signature Editions, 2006). The party, hosted by the Youngs as a summer celebration for the Victoria School of Writing, featured much revelry, dancing and general merry-making on the squeaky (but sturdy) porch of the 116-year-old-structure as Terence spun records from his extensive collection of classic rock and bubble-gum pop hits—pausing only to waggishly dismiss the tasteless song requests of an increasingly high-spirited literary crowd. If it was a memory that drew me into Moving Day, it was the immense magnitude of the verses inside that held me. Young seems to approach his writing as he approaches life: with generosity of spirit, a powerful sense of humour and a keen eye for observation. The house in this book stands as glorious metaphor for the heart of the family. Never cliché, it is a place where the possibilities of love are “like the sound of a window giving way/under the weight of a shoulder.” Young moves through personal history with the ease of someone flipping thorough the weathered pages of a favorite family photo album, discussing the past and present, but also noting the imminent future, a time when, after all is said and done, “everything will seem too brief.”
--- Leah Rae, Poetry is Dead
Young’s subject matter is the usual fodder of poems—youth, aging, marriage, love, regret—and in the hands of a lesser poet, the collection would be banal. Young has a talent for weaving the epic into the everyday; in the opening poem, “Saturday Wine Tour on the E & N,” a bourgeois afternoon becomes a self-effacing reflection on entitlement: “The city conforms, divides itself into triangles along the right- / of-way, which was here first . . . At each vineyard on the circuit, I raise a toast to the past and listen to the pretty speeches of the oenologists . . . I am a / student out on a school field trip waiting for my free sample.” While, in the text’s title poem, the narrator claims that “there was so much to say / that we said nothing, / convinced / as we had been that the Age of Miracles / was over for us,” Young’s latest collection is nothing short of an everyday miracle: a deft rendering of the bittersweet process that is life.
---Erica Wunker, Canadian Literature
Perhaps it was the prospect of reading a book on the cover of which was the ancient converted barn where I attended one of the most enjoyable parties I’ve been to that enticed me to read Terence Young’s newest book of poetry, Moving Day (Signature Editions, 2006). The party, hosted by the Youngs as a summer celebration for the Victoria School of Writing, featured much revelry, dancing and general merry-making on the squeaky (but sturdy) porch of the 116-year-old-structure as Terence spun records from his extensive collection of classic rock and bubble-gum pop hits—pausing only to waggishly dismiss the tasteless song requests of an increasingly high-spirited literary crowd. If it was a memory that drew me into Moving Day, it was the immense magnitude of the verses inside that held me. Young seems to approach his writing as he approaches life: with generosity of spirit, a powerful sense of humour and a keen eye for observation. The house in this book stands as glorious metaphor for the heart of the family. Never cliché, it is a place where the possibilities of love are “like the sound of a window giving way/under the weight of a shoulder.” Young moves through personal history with the ease of someone flipping thorough the weathered pages of a favorite family photo album, discussing the past and present, but also noting the imminent future, a time when, after all is said and done, “everything will seem too brief.”
--- Leah Rae, Poetry is Dead
The End of the Ice Age
Contrary to the codes of cliché, there’s more to men at midlife than Ferraris and pharmaceuticals. In his fifth book, the excellent short story collection The End of the Ice Age, Terence Young trains his sharp eye on the tricky state of being between young and old. His meaningful stories catalogue an array of possible experiences that reach beyond the platitudes so heavily relied upon by lazy advertisers, and reveal more nuance than can be expressed in 30 seconds.
Not every man has a so-called crisis, not every man acts out upon reaching a certain age. Some don’t even notice they are aging at all. In the book’s title story, an unnamed he is informed by his lover, an unnamed she, “Your problem is you still don’t think you’re old.” Indeed, he observes, he does feel like he’s younger than everyone else, even those who are officially younger, but he’s perplexed as to why he should consider it a problem. With this character who feels immune to getting older, as if he alone is capable of resisting the march of time, Young alludes to our tendency to feel self-important. He shows, however, that the clock is undeniably ticking, unstoppable, literally and figuratively. The lover is too absorbed in her compulsive reading to ever check the time. Instead, she repeatedly asks Mr. Ageless to check for her. Even if he doesn’t get the message, the reader does. And with a deft switch to the present tense for the last sentence of the story, Young reminds us time stops for no one, not even his own characters.
Resentment and redemption figure importantly in “Fair Market Value.” Ted, married with two children, has an epiphany when his childhood home unexpectedly goes up for sale: the reason “he’s never been truly happy all these years” was his parents’ sale of the place and his subsequent departure from it. To right the wrong, he buys it. Ted’s decision constitutes a move to a new town for his family. It quickly becomes his wife and children’s turn to bear a grudge; she for the costly and time-consuming renovations the old house requires and they, more significantly, for the uprooting. Both kids talk of buying back their own old house when they are old enough, and the cycle of indulgence and injury is firmly set in motion.
Other themes treated to Young’s precision include mortality angst (“Fair Enough,” “That Time of Year,” “Last of the Silent Movies”), the search for meaning in one’s existence (“Dream Vacation,” “Suburbs Going Down”), the unease of bumping into a past lover (“Mole”), and becoming what you purport to abhor (“Infestation”).
Young’s sense of humour is sharp and often delightfully morose. A bizarre roadside accident in “The Garden of the Fugitives” involving a windsurf board, a gun, some beer bottles and a moving van is a case in point. Young’s style is concise and uncomplicated, but nothing feels incomplete, nothing feels unsaid. He can, in only a few words, evoke feelings intrinsically understood. His description of the awkwardness of a party buffet, for example: “It’s not easy to balance a beer and scoop up a spoonful of rotini at the same time.” One sentence and the reader is there, in the character’s skin, wishing to grow a third arm adapted for efficient rotini scooping.
Men the world over will continue to age and, undoubtedly, the cheap jokes will persist. But for a reminder of midlife’s true and diverse face, men of middle age and those who love them can always come back to their copy of The End of the Ice Age. As long as they can recall where they left it.
Mark Paterson’s story “Spring Training” won the 5th Annual Geist Literal Literary Postcard Story Contest. Author of the short story collections A Finely Tuned Apathy Machine and Other People’s Showers, Mark is currently writing a novel called With the Lights Out.
The End of the Ice Age
By Terence Young
Biblioasis
168 pp.; $19.95
A teacher in Victoria, Young is also a poet and the co-founder of The Claremont Review, a journal for young writers. His new book is a short-story collection for adults, by which I mean that these characters have usually lived long enough to know — though not to behave — better. Young’s stories often focus on embittered, alienated men. Usually, this is at least partly their own fault, and they are kept alert to their failings by clear-eyed women. The settings differ — Mexico, Vancouver, Ireland — and each is vividly and succinctly drawn, but most of the stories in Ice Age share a single emotional world. Young seems to struggle to bring his stories to a close; they may telescope suddenly shut or simply stop. But they move confidently, their pacing is swift and they tend to be strongest when the material is most difficult. The almost elegiac tone suits the long suffering of its characters, left beautifully understated. Julian Gunn, Victoria Times Colonist
Not every man has a so-called crisis, not every man acts out upon reaching a certain age. Some don’t even notice they are aging at all. In the book’s title story, an unnamed he is informed by his lover, an unnamed she, “Your problem is you still don’t think you’re old.” Indeed, he observes, he does feel like he’s younger than everyone else, even those who are officially younger, but he’s perplexed as to why he should consider it a problem. With this character who feels immune to getting older, as if he alone is capable of resisting the march of time, Young alludes to our tendency to feel self-important. He shows, however, that the clock is undeniably ticking, unstoppable, literally and figuratively. The lover is too absorbed in her compulsive reading to ever check the time. Instead, she repeatedly asks Mr. Ageless to check for her. Even if he doesn’t get the message, the reader does. And with a deft switch to the present tense for the last sentence of the story, Young reminds us time stops for no one, not even his own characters.
Resentment and redemption figure importantly in “Fair Market Value.” Ted, married with two children, has an epiphany when his childhood home unexpectedly goes up for sale: the reason “he’s never been truly happy all these years” was his parents’ sale of the place and his subsequent departure from it. To right the wrong, he buys it. Ted’s decision constitutes a move to a new town for his family. It quickly becomes his wife and children’s turn to bear a grudge; she for the costly and time-consuming renovations the old house requires and they, more significantly, for the uprooting. Both kids talk of buying back their own old house when they are old enough, and the cycle of indulgence and injury is firmly set in motion.
Other themes treated to Young’s precision include mortality angst (“Fair Enough,” “That Time of Year,” “Last of the Silent Movies”), the search for meaning in one’s existence (“Dream Vacation,” “Suburbs Going Down”), the unease of bumping into a past lover (“Mole”), and becoming what you purport to abhor (“Infestation”).
Young’s sense of humour is sharp and often delightfully morose. A bizarre roadside accident in “The Garden of the Fugitives” involving a windsurf board, a gun, some beer bottles and a moving van is a case in point. Young’s style is concise and uncomplicated, but nothing feels incomplete, nothing feels unsaid. He can, in only a few words, evoke feelings intrinsically understood. His description of the awkwardness of a party buffet, for example: “It’s not easy to balance a beer and scoop up a spoonful of rotini at the same time.” One sentence and the reader is there, in the character’s skin, wishing to grow a third arm adapted for efficient rotini scooping.
Men the world over will continue to age and, undoubtedly, the cheap jokes will persist. But for a reminder of midlife’s true and diverse face, men of middle age and those who love them can always come back to their copy of The End of the Ice Age. As long as they can recall where they left it.
Mark Paterson’s story “Spring Training” won the 5th Annual Geist Literal Literary Postcard Story Contest. Author of the short story collections A Finely Tuned Apathy Machine and Other People’s Showers, Mark is currently writing a novel called With the Lights Out.
The End of the Ice Age
By Terence Young
Biblioasis
168 pp.; $19.95
A teacher in Victoria, Young is also a poet and the co-founder of The Claremont Review, a journal for young writers. His new book is a short-story collection for adults, by which I mean that these characters have usually lived long enough to know — though not to behave — better. Young’s stories often focus on embittered, alienated men. Usually, this is at least partly their own fault, and they are kept alert to their failings by clear-eyed women. The settings differ — Mexico, Vancouver, Ireland — and each is vividly and succinctly drawn, but most of the stories in Ice Age share a single emotional world. Young seems to struggle to bring his stories to a close; they may telescope suddenly shut or simply stop. But they move confidently, their pacing is swift and they tend to be strongest when the material is most difficult. The almost elegiac tone suits the long suffering of its characters, left beautifully understated. Julian Gunn, Victoria Times Colonist
Smithereens
By Terence Young
September 3, 2021 by Pearl Pirie
Smithereens is Terence Young’s 3rd book of poetry and 6th book. It feels polished but not pat. It is not wrestling against itself or bogging down in complex language and structures. It is comfortable in its poetic skin of stories. There’s something like Richard Harrison, Bruce Taylor, John Lent, and Michael Dennis to how these poems are common days unfolding in an orderly way.
His previous collections won many accolades. Smithereens, like these, aim for the lyrical in the everyday. There’s a gentle tender prodding of what’s around.
Anecdotes are voiced in couplets and lines, even in lengths as cordwood. There’s a certain low-key equanimity mixed with melancholy. For example, in “Mixed Blessing”, p. 11:
"For a while we called it the good fire, the best fire, the fire that saved us because we were insured, and the insurance paid for all the things we could never afford,"
It relates a list of missing objects. It adds a razor-cut ending of what couldn’t be replaced, a turn to the smallest pathos,
“our youngest’s kindergarten rendering of a tugboat—blue hull, aquamarine ocean, blowing billows of smoke into a cloudless and benign sky.”
Even a child knows the world intends no harm. The quotidian and concrete opened to the profound. We try not to take the world’s injury personally. It ends with a gesture opening out to the universe, considering our small place in it. The ending is a send-off, as it is in most of his poems. Not an elaborately tied bow but a definite crisscrossed ribbon.
“My Mother’s Cigarette Case” is three pages associating memories, how the case is a synecdoche for her and for his childhood. Years after her death the memento gains instead of loses significance. p. 12
"I want it even now, years after I have given up the habit, if only for the sound it made when she snapped it shut."
The lyric gaze is kindly, even to the bear in the garbage. The poet rendered himself philosophical and safe. One can be sympathetic to a bear who by luck of geography and past encounters, has a clear run at food and not at you.
'the garbage can’s rectangular lid and four neat punctures, arranged in a fan, an arc, like a winning hand of poker, jokers wild.
One gets the feeling the relating to bear is a humble recognition of another place and time it all wouldn’t be so smooth, an acknowledging the other, who isn’t the bear, but the path other people have to live. It is not fully a chance operation of who gets to profit but at the same time, misfortune is as easy as a step left or right in traffic.
p. 66 “Fern Island Candle” is a meditation on the Big Themes of Death and Lost Youth through the vintage wick of a scented candle. There’s a tribute for Gary who “Praised the mycelial mat/and the healing powers of tea tree oil.”
Once you get to a certain age as a writer, your principal occupation is at risk of becoming an obituary writer. You risk bringing a certain nostalgia to any topic. “On Aging”, p. 74 reflects on how many doors that have closed by talking about its opposite “pencil marks ascending/the door jamb, the numerical advance/ of grades, height, years, their growing /importance and prestige, life for them/ a series of doors opening”.
Judging from the poems I was surprised he wasn’t a much older man than he is. There are good stories and rich with details. I can’t say I learned any insight or new way of seeing. Which is not to say he does not surprise himself as he writes. There is a new awareness dawning, self-aware in light of insects in the kitchen, dutifully put outside, out of humanly claimed territory. “The Things They’ve Ruined” (p. 80-81) starts as a list (he likes lists) of what bugs have gotten into and the grandiose generosity of response of not killing them but taking them outside which “ own pastoral yearnings” say is good.
"a pair of them slide down the drain mat into the sink, climb back up and do it again."
There’s the sense of feeling invaded, having what is rightfully yours taken. It’s a recognition of human sense of property. And human, or perhaps male-specific, sense of goodness and validity being protecting the weak. It is knowing nothing you could profit by is lost by this involuntary sharing and yet feeling usurped as an authority. Duped to think there is an ideal world that they live in, apart from the world you live in. A sense of perhaps admiration of the ants who can outwit and outmaneuver and despite you, survive you. The ending then loops back to the title. What is it they have ruined? The pie or the sense of other and superior?
This reconciling with colonial ideas of conquer is wrestled again in “On First Viewing the Extent of the Beaver Invasion” where beavers are recast from pest rodent to “e voracious vegetarians, monogamous good parents” who also have colonial aspirations. Maybe that’s not bad he concedes. Maybe we all change our world given any chance. There’s a lot of self-comforting and reassurance in the next as a buffer against all the strife.
There are also light comic poems, such as navigating one’s ambivalence about parties. “The Party” p. 92.
"Do we go to parties, they asked themselves. Do we like parties, they asked themselves. Now they were getting somewhere."
Now there’s a poem for the Covid era. Except that they went and drifted home. Event as non-event.
The poems are a good comfortable middle-class white read. It is well-written, well-considered and not heart-wrenching. (Who needs everything to be heart-wrenching.) He speaks from where he is and aims to reach to whoever will listen about this fleeting human condition of life and loss.
By Terence Young
September 3, 2021 by Pearl Pirie
Smithereens is Terence Young’s 3rd book of poetry and 6th book. It feels polished but not pat. It is not wrestling against itself or bogging down in complex language and structures. It is comfortable in its poetic skin of stories. There’s something like Richard Harrison, Bruce Taylor, John Lent, and Michael Dennis to how these poems are common days unfolding in an orderly way.
His previous collections won many accolades. Smithereens, like these, aim for the lyrical in the everyday. There’s a gentle tender prodding of what’s around.
Anecdotes are voiced in couplets and lines, even in lengths as cordwood. There’s a certain low-key equanimity mixed with melancholy. For example, in “Mixed Blessing”, p. 11:
"For a while we called it the good fire, the best fire, the fire that saved us because we were insured, and the insurance paid for all the things we could never afford,"
It relates a list of missing objects. It adds a razor-cut ending of what couldn’t be replaced, a turn to the smallest pathos,
“our youngest’s kindergarten rendering of a tugboat—blue hull, aquamarine ocean, blowing billows of smoke into a cloudless and benign sky.”
Even a child knows the world intends no harm. The quotidian and concrete opened to the profound. We try not to take the world’s injury personally. It ends with a gesture opening out to the universe, considering our small place in it. The ending is a send-off, as it is in most of his poems. Not an elaborately tied bow but a definite crisscrossed ribbon.
“My Mother’s Cigarette Case” is three pages associating memories, how the case is a synecdoche for her and for his childhood. Years after her death the memento gains instead of loses significance. p. 12
"I want it even now, years after I have given up the habit, if only for the sound it made when she snapped it shut."
The lyric gaze is kindly, even to the bear in the garbage. The poet rendered himself philosophical and safe. One can be sympathetic to a bear who by luck of geography and past encounters, has a clear run at food and not at you.
'the garbage can’s rectangular lid and four neat punctures, arranged in a fan, an arc, like a winning hand of poker, jokers wild.
One gets the feeling the relating to bear is a humble recognition of another place and time it all wouldn’t be so smooth, an acknowledging the other, who isn’t the bear, but the path other people have to live. It is not fully a chance operation of who gets to profit but at the same time, misfortune is as easy as a step left or right in traffic.
p. 66 “Fern Island Candle” is a meditation on the Big Themes of Death and Lost Youth through the vintage wick of a scented candle. There’s a tribute for Gary who “Praised the mycelial mat/and the healing powers of tea tree oil.”
Once you get to a certain age as a writer, your principal occupation is at risk of becoming an obituary writer. You risk bringing a certain nostalgia to any topic. “On Aging”, p. 74 reflects on how many doors that have closed by talking about its opposite “pencil marks ascending/the door jamb, the numerical advance/ of grades, height, years, their growing /importance and prestige, life for them/ a series of doors opening”.
Judging from the poems I was surprised he wasn’t a much older man than he is. There are good stories and rich with details. I can’t say I learned any insight or new way of seeing. Which is not to say he does not surprise himself as he writes. There is a new awareness dawning, self-aware in light of insects in the kitchen, dutifully put outside, out of humanly claimed territory. “The Things They’ve Ruined” (p. 80-81) starts as a list (he likes lists) of what bugs have gotten into and the grandiose generosity of response of not killing them but taking them outside which “ own pastoral yearnings” say is good.
"a pair of them slide down the drain mat into the sink, climb back up and do it again."
There’s the sense of feeling invaded, having what is rightfully yours taken. It’s a recognition of human sense of property. And human, or perhaps male-specific, sense of goodness and validity being protecting the weak. It is knowing nothing you could profit by is lost by this involuntary sharing and yet feeling usurped as an authority. Duped to think there is an ideal world that they live in, apart from the world you live in. A sense of perhaps admiration of the ants who can outwit and outmaneuver and despite you, survive you. The ending then loops back to the title. What is it they have ruined? The pie or the sense of other and superior?
This reconciling with colonial ideas of conquer is wrestled again in “On First Viewing the Extent of the Beaver Invasion” where beavers are recast from pest rodent to “e voracious vegetarians, monogamous good parents” who also have colonial aspirations. Maybe that’s not bad he concedes. Maybe we all change our world given any chance. There’s a lot of self-comforting and reassurance in the next as a buffer against all the strife.
There are also light comic poems, such as navigating one’s ambivalence about parties. “The Party” p. 92.
"Do we go to parties, they asked themselves. Do we like parties, they asked themselves. Now they were getting somewhere."
Now there’s a poem for the Covid era. Except that they went and drifted home. Event as non-event.
The poems are a good comfortable middle-class white read. It is well-written, well-considered and not heart-wrenching. (Who needs everything to be heart-wrenching.) He speaks from where he is and aims to reach to whoever will listen about this fleeting human condition of life and loss.
