Nancy Jo Cullen's The Western Alienation Merit Badge

Reviewed by Marcie McCauley

(Wolsak & Wynn, 2019)

Nancy Jo Cullen published three books of poetry and a collection of stories before Wolsak & Wynn published her first novel, The Western Alienation Merit Badge, in spring 2019. The novel’s epigraph is drawn from the 1965 Guide Handbook: “You will often come across things to do and learn that will relate back to things you have already done and learned.” Here, the importance of experience and practice is underscored, the road between past and present illuminated.

It is followed by a one-page scene which presents a young girl pointing a cap gun into the air and firing, then tracing the Guide Handbook’s central image on the cover, before aiming to throw the book into a field and then tucking it into the waistband of her shorts instead: “She was keeping it because this book was for her, right? Even if she was no goddamn Guide Recruit.”

The traditional hierarchy in Guiding directs a girl to be a Spark, then a Brownie, then a Girl Guide: but not every community has leaders at all levels of the organization. Never had I heard of Sparks when I was studying my 1975 Brownie Handbook. The two white girls on this cover are dancing, wearing their Brownie uniforms and holding hands with pixies, around a toadstool on which a brown owl sits.

That uniform with its scarf and pins, that scene of camaraderie: how I longed for that. There was even a way to spell out words using flags, and members could gain a badge for learning how: a seemingly magical way to communicate. After the handbook’s instructional stories, near the end of the volume, the badges shift into focus:

How many badges did you win
While you earned your Golden Bar?
Wouldn’t you like to work for more?
​Ask your Brown Owl what they are!

My handbook is well-worn and the line drawings have been augmented with careless pencil-crayoned shading: but the last two pages, intended to record a successful Brownie’s achievements, are blank. The Western Alienation Merit Badge is about “no goddamn Guide Recruit,” so as a failed Brownie, I felt an immediate kinship with her.

There she is, on the first page, with this symbol of belonging: treasuring it, nearly discarding it, still valuing it. These passages could replace the marketing copy: they summarize the emotions at the core of this novel perfectly.
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And Cullen has written about this kind of loneliness before. In her poem “Damage”, for instance – in her debut collection, Science Fiction Saint – she writes:

… isn’t that how damage goes
like the turn of a wind you couldn’t predict
ripping you out so you are left
with the frame of a house no roof ...

In the first chapter of The Western Alienation Merit Badge, “Frankie” (Frances) is going home because her father, Jimmy, has lost his wife, Frankie’s step-mother.  It is 1982, and returning to Calgary means leaving her lover, Reena, in Europe. Already at home is Frankie’s sister, Bernie (Bernadette), who says: “It is so good to be together again … I think it will be a healing time for us. It should be a healing time for us.”

Despite her commitment to stay, however, Frankie’s experience of home has more in common with that “frame of a house no roof” than with the kind of Thanksgiving dinner that Bernie has planned. And even Bernie has her doubts, viewing the three of them as “three separate planets orbiting around anything but each other.” Perspectives shift in short, two- and three-page-long chapters, and readers soon realize that, whether or not it should be a healing time, it’s going to be a painful one.

Cullen also writes about pain in an earlier poem. In “being very happy,” also in Science Fiction Saint, she writes: “when i was 7 there was a scab on my elbow that lifted off in one complete piece like the top of a cupcake     who would have guessed it would bleed so much.”

Like this scab, some of the sensory details in The Western Alienation Merit Badge also underscore the small discomforts of everyday life. A sunburned nose, a mosquito clapped between two hands, the furnace abruptly kicking in, “some fool dog in the distance barking like a maniac”: such details support the narrative with a quiet but cumulative power, which swells into unease, anxiety, and – eventually – a sense of futility.

Sometimes pain is obliquely addressed: “He [Jimmy] didn’t want to answer questions right now, not about his needlework and sure as hell not about his daughter’s taste in people, or whatever you wanted to call it. He kept his eyes on his work until he felt her leave the room.” In a given scene, one particular character might be averting their eyes, but in a later scene, they might be the character wishing to be unseen or overlooked.

Silences and separations also appear in the form of omissions. After the narrative begins in 1982, it moves to 2016, then 2015, and later again in 2016, before ending in 1974. In one sense, this reflects a curiosity about the length of time a past injury requires to heal (or maybe it scabs over again). In another sense, this suits the content of the story, as family members deal with grief and its relationship to other losses and lonelinesses: things done and learned in the past that still echo in the present.

Pop culture details secure the novel’s setting and characters’ experiences: watching The Rockford Files in reruns and drinking Freshie, a Pinto and a copy of Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm, a Father-Knows-Best sweater and a shelf of paperback romance novels. (These matter not only because of the heteronormative relationships conjured up with the image of the bookshelf, but also because this is a genre and format readily available to a working-class family.)

​Geographically, the story unfolds in Calgary, “with its newly bankrupt oil barons, out-of-work rig hands, jobless heavy-duty mechanics and unemployed secretaries.” It’s beautiful, with its view of the mountains, but the “snow and cold could happen any time after Thanksgiving.” In this sense, the mountains are not a saving grace, not even a picturesque backdrop, but become something menacing instead: this is a place where the disappointed and disillusioned remain. As Bernie drives Frankie “home” from the airport, they pass a string of repair and service shops. Readers wonder: what can be repaired and what must be endured?

In The Brownie Handbook, on a double-spread which describes all the other magical beings (other than brownies, that is), each has a two-line poem to capture its essential nature: “Here you see the laughing Gnomes Helping mother in our homes,” for instance, and for the Scottish Ghillie Dhu: “Ghillie Dhu it is our name, We guard the bairns And lead them hame.” Home is where many of the tasks required to complete a Brownie’s record should be practiced. She must, for instance, be prepared to set a table and help wash dishes, serve tea or coffee and toast, launder a pair of socks, and sew two buttons onto a garment. And she must want to: even a chipmunk in the handbook wants to join the Brownies.

Membership comes with a clear rule-set: you can hardly help but succeed. But belonging is not so easy. It remains unresolved in the story, but it seems unlikely that the chipmunk’s dream will come true. Conventional expectations are not necessarily achievable, nor even desirable, but there is a simplicity to the familiar, well-worn track.

Consider the narrator in “Regina”, a short story in Cullen’s Canary (2013): “I wished I were already old. I wished I’d already lived my life and had kids and a husband I hardly talked to. I wished I had adoring fans and I wished it wouldn’t bother me so much that we were going to blow ourselves to smithereens. It was such bad luck to be born in the nuclear age.” Even when what we wish for does come with a check-list, that doesn’t make you lucky.

It could have all been different: a girl alone is not necessarily a lonely girl. As another character muses, a blank page can be a symbol of promise or futility: “No wife, no work, nothing at all coming down the pike. Everything a blank page and not the kind you tell a kid is good and that they have their whole life ahead of them … a blank page where you look back at your own life and ask yourself, what the hell did I ever do but screw it all up?”

And, so, might it be different yet? Can omissions and failures be corrected? How do you build a life when you don’t see another life around you worth wanting? Can you fill in the frame of that house without a roof? Can you fill a blank page so that you never have to wonder what the hell you ever did?
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With the assignment of her ISBN, Nancy Jo Cullen resolved that issue: she is the proud recipient of her First Novel Badge. And I’m “no goddamn [Brownie] Recruit,” but I do have a copy of the handbook: she appears to be well on the way to completing some related badges as well, including Best Stitching Dad, 80s Pop Culture, Trailer Court Fiction, and Hopeful Not Saccharine. 

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Marcie McCauley's work has appeared in Room, Other Voices, Mslexia, Tears in the Fence and Orbis, and has been anthologized by Sumac Press. She writes about writing at marciemccauley.com and about reading at buriedinprint.com. A descendant of Irish and English settlers, she lives in the city currently called Toronto, which was built on the homelands of Indigenous peoples - Haudenosaunee, Anishnaabeg, Huron-Wendat and Mississaugas of New Credit - land still inhabited by their descendants.