JOUR3440

Hi all,

So I ran into Jenner today and we were reflecting back on the course and how it was such a great learning experience. We were also wondering how everyone was doing with their stories and whether anyone was still reading the blog. Anyways, I’ve decided to pitch my query to The Walrus and see what happens. Here it is. Comments are welcome!

I’m in a stuffy warehouse in Moncton on a sunny day in May. My shoes are soaked with beer washing onto the concrete floor, and my ears ring with the clink of glass and hiss of machinery as men shout to be heard over the noise. Every so often, there’s the shatter of glass as a bottle breaks in machine behind me with a crooked “Save the Ales” sticker slapped onto it. At one end of the warehouse, bottles are being capped, labeled and boxed, then loaded into a truck that’s headed for Alberta tomorrow. At the other end, a man wearing a forest green shirt and baseball cap, with multiple ear piercings, a studded leather belt and lime green glasses climbs up steep metal stairs. Lifting the lid of a large stainless steel vat labeled “Mash Tun,” he peers inside its steaming depths, then runs back down and lopes over the tangle of red hoses on the floor to a counter screwed into the wall where he make notes in a binder. Turning around, he gives the finger to a man loading empty bottles onto a conveyer belt, then chuckles. This is Greg Nash, head brewer for Pump House brewery, winner of the 2007 Canadian Beer of the Year award and the bad boy of Canadian brewing.
“They’re bottling fucking Cadian and fucking assberry, err I mean blueberry today. None of those are really worth drinking,” jokes Nash, who is well known for his tendency toward extreme beers. Today he’s brewing Pump House’s Special Old Bitter, which has just started to be sold in six packs across the country. “I wish I could make it as hoppy as I wanted to,” he says, waving his arms in frustration. My fiancé, a home brewer and one of Nash’s biggest fans, has also joined us and is thrilled that Greg has offered to send him a recipe for “the craziest fucking hop bomb.” A former home brewer turned pro, Nash is well known among beer geeks in the Maritimes, with whom he freely exchanges his knowledge and experience. “We’re helping change the fucking face of brewing in Canada. More people making great beer means more people will be turned on to craft beer,” is his answer to critics who say he shouldn’t be sharing trade secrets. “Brewers making bad beer hurt my business,”
Nash’s brewing career started at the age of 15, with bottles exploding under his bed in his parents’ home outside Amherst, Nova Scotia. Although not much would have been available to an under-age drinker, there was also very little available to home brewers other than tinned kits sold in the local grocery stores. The results were mostly sugary beers that tasted like cider and weren’t very drinkable, although they did offer a temporary solution to Nash’s supply problem.
A self-confessed rebellious teenager, always in trouble with the law, Nash dropped out of high school and spent most of the next 15 years working as a car painter and on his parents’ blueberry and Christmas tree farm, all the while continuing to experiment with home brewing. Still not satisfied with the beer he was turning out from the tins, he ordered a copy of Charlie Papazian’s Complete Joy of Home Brewing and later started a local home brew club. Over the course of 600 batches, many of them botched and with the occasional exploding bottle, he discovered he wanted to turn brewing into more than a hobby. He returned to night school at the age of 31 to complete his high school diploma and qualify for admission to American Brewers Guild in Davis, California, then worked for two years at a small microbrewery and brew pub in Green Bay, Wisconsin.
When he returned to Canada in 1998 to brew for the River City Brewing Company in Winnipeg, Nash says he was slapped in the face by how different the beer scene was. Like so many other things, Canada’s craft brew scene is the smaller, gentler version of its American counterpart, where extreme brewing is now the norm. Up until a decade ago, most Canadian beer aficionados had to look south of the border if they wanted anything similar to a West Coast Style IPA. Whereas there are currently more than 1,400 craft breweries in the U.S. producing more than 1,600 India Pale Ales, at last count there were only about 150 small breweries across Canada that account for approximately five percent of the beer market. This makes for a highly competitive market where brewers are reluctant to exchange trade secrets. But much like the increased popularity of the local food scene, craft brewing in Canada is on an increasingly rapid boil, with a growing clientele of drinkers who would rather buy from the little guy down the street rather than commercial breweries.
Greg Nash is now a household name among craft brewers across the country, and he is credited with bringing hoppy West Coast beers to the Maritimes, where light beers like Ten-Penny Ale and Moosehead used to be standard fare. In the last decade, he has worked in three of the region’s main craft breweries – Propeller, Garrison and now Pump House – and has developed a following of beer geeks loyal to his brew.
Nash approaches brewing like any good chef approaches a recipe, and calls beer “the new wine.” He is on an infinite quest to create the perfect double IPA/aka “hop bomb” (his iPhone name is “iHopBombPhone”), and he has come close a few times. He continues to push the envelope wherever he brews, which can occasionally create conflict with owners who want to keep their beers more marketable and would rather produce tamer beers. Yet Nash is still optimistic that there is currently a revolution happening in the Canadian craft brew scene.
I’ll admit it: I’m more of a wine girl than a beer drinker, but for the last two months I’ve been immersed in the strangely compelling world of Canada’s microbrew scene. I’d like to propose a 4,000-word profile of Greg Nash in The Walrus, both because he is a colourful and interesting character and because his story offers a window into Canada’s burgeoning craft brewing scene. We’re still five to 10 years behind the scene in the States, which is why it makes it even more interesting. There are a number of extenuating circumstances restricting the growth of craft brewing that I’d like to explore, including Canada’s liquor laws and the management of its liquor stores. I plan to follow Nash’s success at the 2009 Canadian Brewing Awards in September, where he intends to enter three beers.
I’ve spent several hours interviewing Greg Nash, along with local beer geeks, former colleagues, his mother, certified beer judges, the editor of Taps magazine and organizers of the Canadian Brewing Awards. I am also familiar with the local craft brewing scene in Halifax, now that my laundry room has been overtaken by bubbling carboys and the citrusy aromas of hoppy IPAs brewed by my fiancé. I recently took an advanced narrative nonfiction course with Stephen Kimber of King’s College’s Journalism program, and have also completed Ryerson’s Certificate in Magazine Publishing, where I studied with David Hayes. During my “day job,” I work as the editor of the Nature Conservancy of Canada.
My writing has been published in ON Nature magazine, The Coast and The Toronto Colourguide, among other publications. I include some clippings of my formerly published work for your perusal, and would be happy to discuss this idea further with you and how I feel it fits with The Walrus’s audience.
Thank you in advance for your attention to my query. I look forward to hearing from you.
Sincerely,
Christine Beevis
cbeevis@eastlink.ca
h: 902-406-2110 w:902-480-3238
PS – I should add that I also have a connection to a good portrait photographer in Halifax who would be willing to photograph Nash in action, should you be interested. Samples of his work can be found here: http://www.andrewmurphy.ca/

Reading through Baghdad Without A Map brought all the stories my Lebanese friends in Toronto used to tell me to life from the eyes of Tony Horowitz. What captured my attention most in this story was the way he constructed his quotes from the people on board the ferryboat and in Eastern Beirut. It was all constructed very naturally as if he had the time to take precise notes while shells flew over the two boats he was on. I suppose that when you’re in a situation like that, you’ll remember every single detail vividly whether you want to or not. I felt the bravery of the Lebanese, and their willingness to go back to their country under dire circumstances, was portrayed accurately in this story.
The frank attitude towards death from the characters in Horowitz’s story stuck in my mind. This attitude provided a glimpse into the strange apathy towards war some people develop through adolescence. In the story, Marwan, the person who convinced Horowitz to leave the ferry, was the example of this attitude. In terms of technique, I like how Horowitz repeated the small detail of Marwan’s clattering beads. The beads made for a marker of sorts, that kept the reader focused on the exact moment in the story with an ironclad grip, never allowing him or her to drift away.
Landing from the Sky was an interesting story detailing the rapid rise and fall that comes with the territory of the drug trade. Adrian Nicole LeBlanc was able to capture a different angle to how this story would be covered, the obvious angle being centering the story on Boy George himself. It was interesting to see the parallels in Jessica and Serena’s lives, and the patterns of disappearance that Jessica mimicked from when her own mother, Lourdes, raised her.
This story gave the reader a first hand view of the horror in the South Bronx in the late 1980s and how easy it was for young women like Jessica to dream of being “rescued” by another man, as opposed to getting an education. It is the first time I’ve read a story that was written to help the reader understand the situation in places like this on human terms, as opposed to resorting to the stereotypical portrayal often found in movies. The amount of interviewing Leblanc did for this story was tremendous and it must have taken a lot of time for her to cultivate the relationship necessary with Jessica’s family in order to be able to write a story like this.

Roy Peter Clark’s story on the Morse family provides an interesting perspective into the mind of a woman who finds out her marriage and her life is not what she thought it was. Throughout the reading, I couldn’t help thinking how she could have not noticed the subtle signs in Mick’s character that revealed another aspect to his personality. Perhaps she noticed, but refused to take action because of the life he had given her. Perhaps it was the influence of religion that comforted her and made her think his lack of passion was a normal thing. Either way, the story held my interest up until about chapter five or six when I felt needless background information was thrown in. I think this story could have hit much harder if it was considerably shortened and certain background details about the family were taken out. Then again, I didn’t read past chapter ten so maybe it gets better.
Keegstra’s Children brought back memories of grade 12 law class where I first heard about this story. Robert Mason Lee was successful in showing the powers of persuasion and how easy the mind can be molded during the teenage years in this story. The answers he was able to get from the children in Keegstra’s class were creepy because the quotes made it clear that these kids either still believed what he taught them, or were skeptical of his views but did not dismiss them. The story started off in a very clever manner, with Lee detailing the daily events of a teenage girl and contrasting those events in between paragraphs with the outrageously warped answers she wrote on Keegstra’s exams. It’s amazing how in spite of everything that happened to Keegstra, many of his students and their parents still stood by his conspiracy theories. This story shows that humans can drift directly towards the fantastical and implausible if persuaded correctly. It’s frightening to think how malleable the human mind can be in a closed environment like Eckville if Keegstra was able to accomplish the spread of his ridiculous conspiracy theory to this degree.
The Boy Behind the Mask provides a personal glimpse into Sam’s life for the reader. It is obvious that a tremendous amount of inner strength is necessary in order to live Sam’s life but this story put that amount into perspective with the description of what he has to go through everyday. I like that the story was written simply without the creative liberty that some writers take. I think this was necessary in a story like this where the character is so extraordinary, the author had no need to do anything else except let the story tell itself. I thought the most powerful moment in the story was when three-year-old Sam ran by the full length mirror in the hallway and started crying when he saw himself in the mirror. This is a defining moment in Sam’s life and Tom Hallman painted that picture well. The way Hallman used “the boy” in some parts of the story instead of Sam’s name universalized the story for me because instead of thinking of him as an individual with an unfortunate condition, I was thinking of his condition as something that could happen to anyone and how I would deal with that personally in his situation.

The readings this week were human tales of pure anguish, which made it difficult to read through them at times. Tom French’s story on the Rogers family was done with the perfect amount of sensitivity necessary to tell a story of this magnitude. I imagine it must be one of the hardest things in the world to tell a story like this when a whole family has been decimated by such a tragic event. It must be incredibly difficult to go about the task of depicting each character in the most truthful manner possible while keeping in mind that there is a grieving family who will read your story. How do you portray someone’s deceased daughter or wife accurately in a few thousand words in a story that will be scrutinized most by the people who knew the deceased best? Maybe those people will never read the story, dismissing it as another part of the media spotlight grief tends to shy away from. Or maybe they’ll appreciate a story like this; a story that humanizes the event and sets itself apart from your average dose of daily hard news written in a “sound bite approach” as Barry Siegel puts it. This is something I thought about a lot as I tried to put myself in French’s position and imagine having to write a similar story.
What made French’s story powerful for me was a feeling of knowing the people that died. This was due to the way he began the story with full detail of the Rogers’ lives, which signifies that he must have done a lot of difficult, emotional interviews with those close to the Rogers. The way he described Michelle’s rape by her uncle so carefully without getting into too much unnecessary detail was a testament to French’s craftsmanship. The description of the “essential piece” missing inside her kept in a room “under glass” stuck with me, as did the polarized description of her eyes as “both playful and haunting.” These minor details are what bring out the emotion in a reader and French did this very well.
Teresa Carpenter’s Death of a Playmate was an interesting story, but I didn’t notice anything particularly special about the writing. I found the actual story more intriguing and the ways in which the misplaced desire for fame and glamour crept its way into Paul Snider’s heart. I found nothing as human and I guess kind of charming in the writing as I did in French and Siegel’s pieces. It was too much Hollywood for me and I don’t particularly like reading about the excesses in the lives of famous people.
A Father’s Pain was written so well I’m sure every reader felt some sort of pain, or at least raw sympathy, when going through it. Again, the skillful construction of the character of Paul Wayment was what gave this story its emotional power, just like how French constructed the Rogers family. His deep connection to nature and the subsequent consequence made it easy to see that Gage’s death was a simple accident and at the same time something that a human being would have a very hard time reconciling with in that situation. I liked how he included the element of religion into the story and detailed Judge Hilder’s disenchantment with a black and white way of looking at things and then acknowledging them as the only answer sometimes. This allows the reader to realize that no one, not even a judge, really knows the answers to the questions in this world.

How come nobody ever logs in to Site Admin to approve my comments? Am I really that unpopular?

POETRY-prizings-writing-finds

Moira

this: (once you get toward the end it turns into muttering)

“Hello?” She breathed into the phone, her faux-high-pitched telemarketer receiving voice in place, chirping into the phone. The caller-id flashed  an out of province number, 516 and she wanted to be prepared just in case she needed to say “No, my mother isn’t home right now.” 

She started with disbelief, “I won?” 

“You won.”

“Really?” The conversation when much live this, with the CBC woman patient on the other end, doting a few nice remarks on her poems, but continually replying “Really, You won.” Before this moment Sue Goyette had been moments away from dismissing this phone call as a telemarketer, abandoning her identity in hopes of a quick disconnect, but instead found herself on the receiving end of ‘congratulations’.  Found herself accepting, or rather receiving,  the CBC Literary Prize for Poetry. 

She gawked. Musing on the idea that maybe her sister was behind this. Her middle-little sister. The one who has been reading her journals since they were little, giving them her own reviews;  Great! But uses the word “horses” one too many times– says New York Review of Books. This was definitely something she would conjure up, all in good fun of course. It was only after hanging up the white-cordless, the phone that never reached more than ten feet away from its base, that she remembered what the woman had said. “You can’t tell anyone.” She had been adamant on that point. Now this would be complicated, it was like putting a firework down her throat and telling her not to explode. 

“What was that about?” Her husband asked.

“I won.” was all she said. Maybe she would tell only a few people. But then not telling would mean no drinks, or only one, at events just so the news wouldn’t force itself out. It was two months until it would be announced, how could you keep a secret so brilliant trapped inside its own gilded-cage of glory? The only thought she had, that perhaps silenced and outburst of the victorious kind, was the simple thought they could maybe take this away from her if she told. She wouldn’t let them have that chance, even if they couldn’t do it.

She moved around the unpacked boxes, remnant of a “new move” although they had actually moved in a year ago. The house had been owned by a mysteriously cranky old woman, who had, full of purpose, decided to paint the whole a frightening shade of Pepto-Bismal pink. Of course they had now painted it over, tranquilized the pink, coaxing it into a lighter shade of a less aggressive beige. The old woman had in fact been very mysterious, if not crazy and it took a while for Sue to figure out why all the school kids would cross the street when they got her house. Now she knew, it was in fear of the old woman. The woman had banned anyone from walking near and upon her lawn, as if it was some sort of ancient prized heriloom. She was either very proud of it or eerily obsessed Sue had decided, learning sometime later the woman had planted tulips all around the sides of the house, in hopes they would grow up a familiar shade of pink. When they did not, she beheaded them all.

—- Sue decided only a run would be able to help clear this muddle of surprise and victory in her head. Foot hit pavement and she was walking toward Chebucto, her head exploding with the possibilities of the win, her mouth vowed to silence. 

She hated running, but she also hated gaining weight, so she literally forced herself to run. To walk to the corner of Harvard and Chebucto cajoling herself into a certain state of mind the whole way. You can do it, just run until Quinpool. Running wasn’t all that bad. Sometimes in the adrenaline rush the right word would come to her, the hard candy of a poem, the kind that would couldn’t force of it would break. A right word that would never have surfaced otherwise. She would find it often in a run, capture it and repeat it as mantra the entire way home, triumphant. Running could be good in that way.

But this run was different, almost like a parade, a victory lap through town, a grin directed to of all the glances and smiles. In her head she was saying,  “Yes, you’re right. It’s me, I won the CBC literary prize for poetry.”  She continued this parade down Quinpool, in the typical Halifax winter day, cold and unendingly gray.  She would examine the business signs, searching their shiny-platic for some sort of spelling mistake. The Spartan, for instance, hadn’t seemed to get the spelling for “moussaka” right. 

And so she continued, fixing her glasses and trying to avoid stopping to talk to familiar faces, not wanting to hinder the momentum that she was building, knowing it was possible if something happened she would… But also feeling as if this was her personal procession of winning through the city.

The lights reflected — from the large posh hotel that faced the corner of — and —-. It modernist design a marker of the new bustling money– of Montreal. OPUS gleamed in  letters across the…

It was different, this Montreal, different from the home she had grown up in, perhaps even completely separate. The ground full-French, not —- of her Irish and — heritage. The night before she had stayed with her  mother, knowing that if she didn’t make some sort of — that she was in town, there would be trouble. So she had returned, half- to her childhood home, the rooms the same, the smells —-, except now cats were allowed on the counters, and that bothered her.  Her mother listening to — the radio, cooking meals back-to-back with no room for breath, and. She could only — a maximum of 24 hours. Possibly because she knew it would be her at some point in her life, possibly. 

So this, the hard-clean lines of the hotel, the swanky pink paint and glistening appliances, was — compared to beige rotary phone and — she had left with her mother.

— She thought how was, telling her mother she’d won. “—- is going to be reading my poems on CBC, at this time.” 

“On what?” He mother replied. “Oh, yes but did you hear about Octo-woman”

Sue knew her mother was happy for her, knew she was proud, but this was the kind of — she received. Similar thus with her daughter, “What did you win again Mom? Everyone is talking about it.”

What had she won? 6,000 dollars which mean time to write really. Time to spend writing…What else? REcognition?

But wining used to mean something else. When she was a single mother raising two kids, it meant, Pizza-Hut and dentist’s appointments. It was then she had told her kids if this didn’t work out she promised to get a “real” job.   But she was a writer, blood and bones of ink and pen. But she wasn’t necessarily looking for that It’s nice to be praised once in a while, writing needs to be nourished, but it’s the writer who nourishes their writing not the —-. Time to —–

She has also won a seat on the Celebrity Bird Watching —. Her first book of poetry had birds in the title, so she assumed that was why. 

—–

There she was, sitting in the middle of the dining room, her typewriter on the kitchen table. No office, no writing space. She would sit there, trying to write, finding hearts and doodles, stick men lowering men in cauldron, scribbled all over her work. 

—– kids and writing - hard not writing about them

at first they didnt want her writing about them and she respected that. Sometime she did write about them. 

first child when she was 21

first husband, wasn’t sad or depressed just low point. Bought her a typewriter from Canadian tire, brought it home on his bike—

said “You are a writer, you should write.”

—When she won the prize for Lures,—told her kids if she didnt win she would get a “real job”

- never wanted a real job, liked teaching and writing, needed her space- not good at having a boos

– Montreal youth

not too great, crazy family

One shelf of books in English at the library so used to order a box of books in the mail each week. read all those. Read from A-Z when she was here.

- money will last as long as the soap she stole from her hotel room

“I keep doing these tests. They say I should write.”

about the test you take to see what job you should have.

—- House in Halifax, was owned by a crazy old woman. Pepto pink, haunted. 

they have painted it beige-ish. Wants to have a board outside with poems on it everyday for the kids to read as they go to school. Poetry readings in her backyard.