McCauley Van Camp

Richard Van Camp's Moccasin Square Gardens

Reviewed by Marcie McCauley

(Douglas & McIntyre, 2019)

My first trip to Moccasin Square Gardens was in “The Last Snow of the Virgin Mary,” a short story in Richard Van Camp’s The Moon of Letting Go. It’s been ten years since that collection of stories was published, and the building still stands. Read this in your most exuberant announcer’s voice: “Welcome to Moccasin Square Gardens. Tonight I, Kevin Garner, am your play-by-play M.C. as Fort Simmer tries to down Yellowknife for the territorial championships.”

As an M.C. in that earlier story, Kevin did a fine job, but since then, the cast of characters has grown, and many individuals are now equipped to guide new visitors through Van Camp’s 2019 story collection, which is titled after the Roaring Rapids Hall in Fort Smith, Northwest Territories. The town, fictionalized as Fort Simmer, has a population of about 2,500 people that speak five languages: Chipweyan, Cree, English, French and Tłı̨chǫ. It’s a “beautiful town – a fierce town when it comes to politics, history, pride, love, exes, peace bonds, child support payments, hand games, Nevadas, bingo and hockey, right?”

For readers of Van Camp’s previous books, this will be familiar: straightaway, you will be scanning the crowd for people you might know. Me? I’m always on the lookout for Larry (from The Lesser Blessed) and Torchy (from several stories, beginning with 2002’s collection Angel Wing Splash Pattern). You don’t meet either of these characters in Moccasin Square Gardens, though one of them gets a mention, but you do catch up with Valentina (and trust me: you’d rather not).

If you’re starting to feel a little like you’ve just arrived at a house party, when you were expecting an intimate dinner for two, that’s good preparation. There’s a lot of energy in this collection’s ten stories, the fifth collection Van Camp has published. There’s a lot of emotion – laughter and loss – and a lot of interconnectivity. With connections between stories and connections between collections, the sense of community swells.

Fortunately, Van Camp is an exceptionally welcoming storyteller. Even when he’s talking about the end of the world, he’s got this way of making you feel like you could move closer to the fire and all will be well. It’s easy to forget that the fire could be apocalyptic: there are two new stories in his Wheetago War cycle designed to disorient and disturb (“Lying in Bed Together” and “Summoners”).

Consider his essay contribution to the glossy-paged art book about Ligwilda'xw Kwakwaka'wakw artist Sonny Assu, published by Heritage Books in British Columbia in 2018. Here’s how it begins:

The first Sonny Assu piece that I ever saw was, oh, probably ten years ago at my friend Erin’s place. East Vancouver. Off Commercial. A supper. Friends. Fear freezing me as I looked up and witnessed a million crows flying over us flocking to Burnaby. “It’s all right, Richard.” Erin looked at me and smiled. “They do this every night and the sun still rises every day.”

The reason I mention this essay is because it perfectly illustrates Van Camp’s style, complete with an “oh” just where you can hear it flow naturally, a blend of fragments and full sentences, and a glimpse of the themes that resurface in his stories: friendship, land, food, community, familiarity, comfort, and fear.

Whether or not someone has edited out the “oh’s” in Moccasin Square Gardens’ stories, you can still hear them. Whether or not the stories are printed on paper, you can feel that they are meant to be told and heard as much as, in this format, they are to be read. Oral storytelling is a keystone in Richard Van Camp’s Tłı̨chǫ Dene community, and his collections offer a glimpse of his skill and the world he inhabits: a world with smudged sweetgrass, lip pointing, and long braids, but also with Star Wars collectible card packets, Galaga high scores, and the West Edmonton Mall.

His syntax and language are straightforward, with only an occasional flourish, like the image of two aunties “like budgies with Bingo dabbers” (in “Knock Knock”). More often, the stories are structured around scenic detail, like this description, in “I Am Filled with a Trembling Light”:

Benny stood slowly, holding his side. White wife beater. Gold chains. Skinnier than when he went in. Faded tattoos: a snake, a woman dancing with a dagger behind her, syllabics – Cree, Inuit. He shimmied around his table. When you play cards, you gotta sit at the table. Everyone has their spot. All these pillows. Fancy.

Some of the characters have more privilege – there’s an occasional university student or band chief – but most of Van Camp’s characters have lives in which “the bills don’t stop”: one is a receptionist and another a wildlife officer, one a researcher and another owns the hardware store.

As a girl, I fell in love with linked stories like these, about ordinary people with work to do. Like the ones about Avonlea, the fictional Prince Edward Island town in which L.M. Montgomery set most of her books, including her 1908 classic, Anne of Green Gables. As a teenager, I studied Margaret Laurence’s linked short stories in A Bird in the House, set in the western prairie town of Manawaka. Later I travelled further west with Holley Rubinsky’s British Columbian stories (beginning with the linked collection At First I Hope for Rescue). Montreal-born Mavis Gallant’s linked collection The Pegnitz Junction is set in post-WWII Europe, but Québécoise writer Catherine Leroux’s The Party Wall (translated by Lazer Lederhendler) is set across Canada. And, more recently, I moved into Paul Carlucci’s The High-Rise in Fort Fierce, sharing an apartment building in the Northwest Territories with this collection’s inhabitants.

Readers who appreciate linked short story collections like these will find the breadth of Van Camp’s work particularly satisfying. Readers who enjoy the work of Indigenous storytellers from other nations – like Sherman Alexie (Spokane-Coeur d’Alene), Dawn Dumont (Cree-Métis), and Thomas King (Cherokee-German-Greek) – will want to add Van Camp’s books to their stacks. And readers looking to expand their worlds on the page beyond the 60th parallel, who are keen on short fiction by writers like Junot Díaz, Simon Rich, and Helen Simpson, also will be pleased to visit Moccasin Square Gardens.

Welcome to Moccasin Square Gardens. Today I, Marcie McCauley, am your play-by-play M.C. as Fort Simmer tries to down other fictional locales for the territorial championships. Today I, already a firm fan, declare the venue a winner. And if you’re new to town, I would suggest starting with Van Camp’s earlier collections, but if you’re a returning visitor, sit right down.

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.