Project and content management for Contemporary Authors volumes
WORK TITLE: The Break
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE: 1/29/1977
WEBSITE: https://www.katherenavermette.com/
CITY: Winnipeg
STATE: MB
COUNTRY: Canada
NATIONALITY: Canadian
RESEARCHER NOTES:
LC control no.: no2016131725
LCCN Permalink: https://lccn.loc.gov/no2016131725
HEADING: Vermette, Katherena, 1977-
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010 __ |a no2016131725
035 __ |a (OCoLC)oca10593936
040 __ |a CaBVa |b eng |e rda |c CaBVa
046 __ |f 1977 |2 edtf
100 1_ |a Vermette, Katherena, |d 1977-
374 __ |a Novelists |2 lcsh
375 __ |a female
670 __ |a The break, 2016: |b title page (Katherena Vermette) page 353 (a Metis writer from Treaty One territory, Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada)
670 __ |a Amicus, viewed Sept. 29, 2016: |b (access point: Vermette, Katherena, 1977-; usage:Katherena Vermette)
PERSONAL
Born January 29, 1977, in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada; children: two daughters.
EDUCATION:University of British Columbia, M.F.A.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer. Began career as a kindergarten teacher in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada; former operator of a training and employment program for Indigenous artists. Aboriginal Writers Collective of Manitoba, member; codirector and interviewee for the short documentary This River, National Film Board of Canada, 2016; workshop presenter for marginalized youth; gives readings; advocate for the equality of Indigenous Canadians.
AWARDS:Governor General’s Literary Award for Poetry, Governor General of Canada, 2013, for North End Love Songs; CODE Burt Award for First Nations, Inuit, and Métis Young Adult Literature, Canadian Organization for Development through Education, 2017, for The Break; Coup de coeur du jury, Montreal Présence autochtone, 2016, and Canadian Screen Award, best short film, Academy of Canadian Cinema and Television, 2017, for This River.
WRITINGS
Work represented in anthologies, including Manitowapow: Aboriginal Writings from the Land of Water, edited by Niigaanwewidam James Sinclair and Warren Cariou, HighWater Press, 2012. Contributor to literary journals, including Canada and Beyond: Journal of Canadian Literary and Cultural Sturies.
SIDELIGHTS
Katherena Vermette is a Métis woman of the Treaty 1 territory of Manitoba, specifically the urban heart of the Métis community in Winnipeg. She owes her Métis (mixed) ancestry to her Métis father and Mennonite mother. Vermette grew up in the North End of Winnipeg, a neighborhood with a majority Indigenous population, a reputation for violence, and an ingrained perception that justice would always be compromised by prejudice and apathy.
For Vermette, the concept of home was complicated. On one side was the violence and poverty that affected everyone who lived there, beating them down even as it bound them together. On the other side was the character of the city: beautiful old houses and mature trees, the distinctly urban mix of flora and fauna, and the storied Red River running alongside. Vermette grew up with mixed feelings of fondness and frustration. She left the city for a time, only to realize that Winnipeg was the place where she belonged.
Vermette became an advocate and activist for the marginalized people of Canadian Indigenous communities, especially the Métis who, by reason of their mixed ancestry, had never achieved official recognition. Her activism takes shape in her writings, in the themes that she explores through poetry, film, and fiction. “Storytelling has a role,” she told Christine Fischer Guy in an interview in the Hamilton Review of Books ;website “fictionalization of fact has a role.” Through her fiction, Guy explained, “Vermette poses questions about the cycle of violence, the meaning of survival and the weight of history.”
Vermette’s first poetry collection was many years–a lifetime–in the making. Natalie Zina Walschots observed in the Walrus: “The love that sits at the core of … North End Love Songs … is not simple or serene, but pugnacious and ferocious.” She writes of a young girl on a city street, proud and vulnerable at the same time. She compares the beautiful elm trees that hug the riverbank to the protective arms of a family. Then she touches on the stories of the lost and missing, embraced by the river that welcomes them with arms of ice, their absence all but ignored by the arms of the law.
One of the missing was Vermette’s stepbrother, who disappeared at the age of eighteen. His body was found six months later upstream in Lake Winnipeg. Her anger at the dismissive attitude of the police and the media inspired Vermette to make the documentary film This River. She and codirector Erika MacPherson filmed interviews of several Canadian Indigenous families who has lost loved ones, enabling her to frame her own story within the larger Indigenous experience. Both the film and the poetry collection received prestigious awards, but Vermette was ready to expand her activism into the genre of fiction where she “puts human faces on a problem that remains a remote abstraction for too many Canadians,” as Robin Maitzen observed at Open Letters Monthly.
The Break
“The Break” is a narrow gash of land that slices the North End in two. The corridor created by the Manitoba Hydro-Electric Board is barren, save for the utility towers looming into the sky. In The Break, on one snowy winter night, a thirteen-year-old Métis girl is the victim of a violent sexual assault. Young mother Stella witnesses the crime from her window and calls police. Four hours later they arrive, but Emily and her attackers have fled. The investigation takes time–too much time–even though one of the police officers is himself a member of the Métis community.
While they wait, an extended family of Métis women reflect upon personal experiences of poverty and violence, including the family of the primary attacker. Every life has been shattered, sometimes beyond hope. It is the grandmother figure–the kookom–who holds this family together, and it is their shared experience that sustains them.
There are at least ten narrators of this story, mostly women, and each has a unique perspective on what happened that night, and how, and why. Maitzen wrote that the “revelations involve social, political, and personal issues far more deep and complicated than we expect.” The result is “a harrowing mosaic,” observed a reviewer in Publishers Weekly. These women “survive, endure, and heal,” commented Booklist contributor Emily Dziuban, but the burdens they bear and the prices they pay are “exceptionally heavy.” At his self-titled website, Brett Josef Grubisic expressed dismay at their testimony of “shame, regret, sadness, anger, loneliness,” stemming from a bleak “culture of poverty, violence, addiction, racism, subsistence, and entrenched hostility and mistrust,” but “Vermette shows readers the true resilience of the human spirit,” reported Opelie Zalcmanis-Lai in This magazine. “This is slice-of-life storytelling at its finest,” concluded the Publishers Weekly commentator. A contributor to the BookWitty website summarized: “This is a beautiful[ly] written book … that all Canadians need to read.”
Pemmican Wars and Red River Resistance
Vermette’s advocacy begins with the children. The former kindergarten teacher published a picture-book series for preschoolers on the traditional seven teachings of the Anishiabe grandfathers. The parables on love, courage, and other moral attributes feature Indigenous children in a contemporary urban setting. The stories legitimize their presence in the classroom and open windows of understanding for all young people.
Pemmican Wars introduces “A Girl Named Echo,” a series of graphic novels for older readers. Echo Desjardins is a Métis girl who finds herself, at age thirteen, separated from her mother, uprooted from her home, trying to adjust to a new school and peer group. Lonely and disconnected from everything familiar, her mind wanders. In a history lesson about the Pemmican Wars, she is transported to Saskatchewan in the year 1812. A young girl named Marie introduces her to daily life in a Métis encampment and to her native heritage, until the peace is shattered by bloody confrontations that would change Métis life forever. Echo drifts between past and present, layering the lessons of the past over her conflicted life in the real world. In Voice of Youth Advocates, Meghann Meeusen credited the author with “a unique examination of a fascinating time of history.”
Red River Resistance is the second volume of the projected four-volume series of historical graphic novels. In this installment Echo is beginning to adjust to her new life. She continues to slip through time, in this case to the year 1869, when government surveyors arrive in the Red River Valley. The Métis territory is about to be absorbed into the Canadian province of Manitoba. The displacement and resistance of traditional landholders will reverberate across generations. Even Echo will be affected by the lingering ripples.
There are signs that the work of Vermette and others like her is beginning to make a difference. In 2016 the Canadian Supreme Court designated the Métis, along with so-called full-status Indians and the Inuit, to be the official responsibility of the federal government. A few months later, the government announced an official national inquiry into missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls. There is still much work to be done, but Vermette works from a vantage point of hope.
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Booklist, February 15, 2018, Emily Dziuban, review of The Break, p. 23; March 15, 2018, Snow Wildsmith, review of Pemmican Wars, p. 31.
Herizons, winter, 2014, Mariianne Mays, review of North End Love Songs, p. 42.
Kirkus Reviews, May 1, 2018, review of Pemmican Wars.
Publishers Weekly, January 29, 2018, review of The Break, p. 166.
This, January-February, 2017, Ophelie Zalcmanis-Lai, review of The Break, p. 40.
Voice of Youth Advocates, April, 2018, Meghann Meeusen, review of Pemmican Wars, p. 67.
ONLINE
BookWitty, https://www.bookwitty.com/ (May 4, 2017), review of The Break.
Brett Josef Grubisic website, http://blogs.ubc.ca. (September 11, 2016), review of The Break.
Canadian Broadcasting Corporation website, http://www.cbc.ca/ (January 19, 2018), author interview.
Globe & Mail Online, https://www.theglobeandmail.com/ (May 18, 2018), Marta Iwanek, author interview.
Hamilton Review of Books, http://hamiltonreviewofbooks.com/ (June 23, 2018), Christine Fischer Guy, author interview.
Katherena Vermette website, https://www.katherenavermette.com (June 23, 2018).
Muskrat, http://www.muskratmagazine.com/ (August 4, 2016), Akeesha Footman, review of This River.
Open Letters Monthly, http://www.openlettersmonthly.com/ (June 18, 2017), Rohan Maitzen, review of The Break.
Raidió Teilifís Éireann website, https://www.rte.ie/ (February 14, 2018), Eileen Dunne, review of The Break.
University of Manitoba website, http://umanitoba.ca/ (June 23, 2018), author interview.
Walrus, https://thewalrus.ca/ (April 6, 2017), Natalie Zina Walschots, review of North End Love Songs.
Yiara, https://yiaramagazine.com/ (March 14, 2017), Laureen Wildgoose, author interview.
The Seven Teachings Stories Series
0 primary works • 7 total works
The Seven Teachings of the Anishinabe—love, wisdom, humility, courage, respect, honesty, and truth—are revealed in these seven stories for children. Set in an urban landscape with Indigenous children as the central characters, these stories about home and family will look familiar to all young readers. The heartfelt stories serve as cultural bridges to non-Indigenous people wishing to familiarize themselves and their children with contemporary Indigenous culture.
7. What is Truth, Betsy?: A Story of Truth (The Seven Teachings Stories) Paperback – March 16, 2015
by Katherena Vermette (Author), Irene Kuziw (Illustrator)
Age Range: 4 - 8 years
Grade Level: Preschool - Kindergarten
Lexile Measure: 460 (What's this?)
Series: The Seven Teachings Stories (Book 7)
Paperback: 24 pages
Publisher: HighWater Press (March 16, 2015)
1. Amik Loves School: A Story of Wisdom (The Seven Teachings Stories) Paperback – March 16, 2015
by Katherena Vermette (Author), Irene Kuziw (Illustrator)
3. The Just Right Gift: A Story of Love (The Seven Teachings Stories) Paperback – November 20, 2014
by Katherena Vermette (Author), Irene Kuziw (Illustrator)
2. The First Day: A Story of Courage (The Seven Teachings Stories) Paperback – November 20, 2014
by Katherena Vermette (Author), Irene Kuziw (Illustrator)
5. Misaabe's Stories: A Story of Honesty (The Seven Teachings Stories) Paperback – March 16, 2015
by Katherena Vermette (Author), Irene Kuziw (Illustrator)
4. Kode's Quest(ion): A Story of Respect (The Seven Teachings Stories) Paperback – November 20, 2014
by Katherena Vermette (Author), Irene Kuziw (Illustrator)
6. Singing Sisters: A Story of Humility (The Seven Teachings Stories) Paperback – November 20, 2014
by Katherena Vermette (Author), Irene Kuziw (Illustrator)
=====
Red River Resistance (A Girl Called Echo) Paperback – September 1, 2018
by Katherena Vermette (Author), Scott B. Henderson (Illustrator), Donovan Yaciuk (Illustrator)
Echo Desjardins is adjusting to her new home, finding friends, and learning about Métis history. She just can’t stop slipping back and forth in time. One ordinary afternoon in class, Echo finds herself transported to the banks of the Red River in the summer of 1869. All is not well in the territory as Canadian surveyors have arrived to change the face of territory, and Métis families, who have lived there for generations, are losing access to their land. As the Resistance takes hold, Echo fears for her friends and the future of her people in the Red River Valley.
Katherena Vermette is a Métis writer from Treaty One territory, the heart of the Métis nation, Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada. Her first book, North End Love Songs (The Muses Company) won the Governor General’s Literary Award for Poetry in 2013. Her novel, The Break (House of Anansi), was bestseller in Canada and won multiple awards, including, the 2017 Amazon.ca First Novel Award.
Ms. Vermette is also the author of the children's picture book series, The Seven Teachings Stories, and recently published the first book, Pemmican Wars, in the young adult book series, A Girl Called Echo. Ms Vermette’s second book of poetry, river woman, will be published in the fall of 2018. Her National Film Board documentary, this river, won the 2017 Canadian Screen Award for Best Short.
Vermette lives with her family in a cranky old house within skipping distance of the temperamental Red River.
Katherena Vermette
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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a'sKatherena Vermette
Born 29 January 1977
Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada
Occupation Poet, children's literature, anthologist, documentary filmmaker
Nationality Canadian
Period 2010s-present
Notable works North End Love Songs
Website
www.katherenavermette.com
Katherena Vermette is a Canadian writer, who won the Governor General's Award for English-language poetry in 2013 for her collection North End Love Songs.[1] Vermette is of Métis descent and originates from Winnipeg, Manitoba. She was a MFA student in creative writing at the University of British Columbia.[2]
In addition to writing, Vermette advocates for the equality of Aboriginal peoples in Canada, vocalizing her dissatisfaction with the apathy shown towards Indigenous issues by the Canadian government and the Canadian media.[3]
Contents
1 Early life
2 Career
2.1 North End Love Songs
2.2 "Heart"
2.3 The Seven Teachings Stories
2.4 The Break
2.5 Film and digital media
2.6 Other work
2.7 Accolades
3 Activism
4 Works
5 References
6 External links
Early life
Katherena Vermette grew up in the North End of Winnipeg, Manitoba,[3] a neighbourhood distinguished by a relatively high population of Indigenous people (approximately. 25%), primarily First Nations and Métis people. Winnipeg, a city often singled out for its high rate of reported crimes, garners further negative outsider attention in its North End because of its dense number of reported crimes.[4] In an interview with CBC Radio, Vermette described her childhood as not being “picturesque”, in the usual sense of the word.[3] For Vermette, growing up in the North End of Winnipeg meant that things were not always simple and, from a young age, she bore witness to the kind of injustice and prejudice that young people are typically spared from.[3] An example of this injustice came when a 14-year-old Vermette lost her older brother, the just 18 year-old Donovan, who was missing for six months prior to being found dead.[5][3] Vermette asserts that the combination of Donovan’s young age, the circumstance at his having been at a bar with friends prior to his disappearance, and because he was Cree meant that his disappearance did not get adequate coverage by the media. Vermette cites the general apathy shown by the people of her community and the media surrounding her brother’s disappearance as being the factor which instigated her own sense of the unfairness of the discrimination against the Aboriginal populations of Canada by non-Aboriginal Canadians, leading to her desire to activate for change.[3]
Career
Katherena Vermette is known primarily for her poetry, although she is also a writer of prose.[3][6] From her viewpoint, Vermette’s penchant for poetry stems from the fluidity and complexity of it as a medium; it combines singing, storytelling, and even painting, yet is something entirely different.[3]
North End Love Songs
Vermette’s first published volume of poetry, North End Love Songs functions as an ode to the place she grew up,[7] Winnipeg’s North End, and her intimate perspective on a place that is looked down upon for its high levels of reported crime.[4] In the work, she describes her neighbourhood with respect to nature, highlighting the animals, foliage and rivers that coexist within it.[6] In writing North End Love Songs, Vermette sought to replace the prejudiced perceptions held by people outside of the North End with the beautiful way that she knows her community.[3] The collection depicts a “young girl or woman struggling with identity and place,” says Vermette.[8] This conflict between a simultaneous deep sense of affection and of defiance to one’s place of origin is precisely what constitutes the idea of home, in Vermette’s view.[8]
"Heart"
A poem commissioned by CBC Aboriginal, “Heart” similarly depicts the North End of Winnipeg from Vermette’s personal point of view. Vermette aims to change the narrative from “that North End”, known for being “broken”, “tired”, a “lost cause”, and “beaten”, to the way she knows it; rather, a place that is “healing”, “working”, “seeking [for a cause]”, and “rising”.[7] The poem gets its name for being about the North End which, from Vermette’s perspective, is the “heart of the Métis nation”.[7]
The Seven Teachings Stories
Vermette's children's picture book series The Seven Teachings Stories was published by Portage and Main Press in 2015. Illustrated by Irene Kuziw,[9] the collection aims to present the Anishnaabe Teachings of the Seven Grandfathers in a way that is easily digestible for young people.[9] The series depicts Indigenous children in a metropolitan context, fostering a sense of representation for historically and continually marginalized Indigenous groups, among those who they are, and have been, marginalized by.[10] The series comprises seven individual volumes: The Just Right Gift, Singing Sisters, The First Day, Kode's Quest(ion), Amik Loves School, Misaabe's Stories, and What is Truth, Betsy?.[10]
The Break
Her debut novel The Break was published in 2016, and was a shortlisted finalist for that year's Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize[11] and Governor General's Award for English-language fiction.[12] In November 2017, it won the Burt Award for First Nations, Métis and Inuit Literature.[13]
Film and digital media
In 2015, she and Erika MacPherson co-directed the 20-minute National Film Board of Canada documentary This River, about Canadian Indigenous families that have had to search for family members who have disappeared. Partly based on Vermette's own experience, the film received the 2016 Coup de coeur du jury award at Montreal's Présence autochtone (fr) festival, and premiered in Vermette's hometown of Winnipeg on October 5, at the Winnipeg Art Gallery.[14][15] It was named best short documentary at the 5th Canadian Screen Awards. Vermette and NFB producer Alicia Smith also created a related Instagram work, What Brings Us Here, a companion piece to The River, which offers portraits of volunteers behind the community-run Winnipeg search teams the Bear Clan and Drag the Red.[16] Smith has stated that it was Vermette’s North End Love Songs which helped draw her attention to the perspectives of indigenous youth from the North End and the experience of having missing family members.[17]
Other work
She is a member of the Aboriginal Writers Collective of Manitoba, and edited the anthology xxx ndn: love and lust in ndn country in 2011.[18]
In addition to her own publications, her work has also been published in the literary anthology Manitowapow: Aboriginal Writings from the Land of Water.
Accolades
In 2013, Vermette won the Governor General’s Literary Award for poetry, for her collection North End Love Songs,[3][19] an accolade she dubbed a “goal” for poetry,[3] as well as being “completely unexpected”.[8] In an interview with CBC Radio, Vermette discussed having considered not accepting the award, as a means of protesting the Canadian government’s treatment of the many missing and murdered Aboriginal women at the time, and disagreeing with the government’s policies in general.[3] After consideration, Vermette decided to accept the award because the people who voted for North End Love Songs were a collection of her literary peers, making it a reflection of the Canadian poetry community, rather than the Canadian government.[3]
In 2017, Vermette won the Amazon.ca First Novel Award for The Break.[20] Its French translation, Ligne brisée, was defended by Naomi Fontaine in the 2018 edition of Le Combat des livres,[21] where it won the competition.[22]
Activism
In addition to writing herself, Vermette also works with young people, ostracized for their circumstances and labelled as being “at risk”.[6] This workshop focuses on utilizing writing as a means of coping with the struggles associated with growing up marginalized because of that which makes one different from the majority.[6] Vermette seeks to promote the development in young people’s artistic voice, through the medium of poetry.[6]
Vermette has described her writing as motivated by an activist spirit, particularly on First Nations issues.[3]
Works
North End Love Songs (2012, poetry)
The Seven Teachings Stories (2015, children's)
The Break (2016, novel)
References
"Eleanor Catton wins Governor General’s Literary Award for The Luminaries". Toronto Star, November 13, 2013.
"Local poet didn't know it". Winnipeg Free Press, October 3, 2013.
Interview with Katherena Vermette. As It Happens, November 13, 2013.
"Winnipeg neighbourhood hotbed for crime". www.cbc.ca. Retrieved 2016-03-30.
"A broken family: Katherena Vermette's life changed when her brother disappeared". CBC. 9 May 2014. Retrieved 27 April 2014.
"University of Manitoba - Centre for Creative Writing and Oral Culture - Katherena Vermette". umanitoba.ca. Retrieved 2016-03-30.
"Métis poet Katherena Vermette defends Winnipeg's North End in video". www.cbc.ca. Retrieved 2016-03-30.
"Katherena Vermette". thewalrus.ca. Retrieved 2016-03-30.
"The Seven Teachings Stories". www.cbc.ca. Retrieved 2016-04-05.
"CM Magazine: The Seven Teachings Stories". www.umanitoba.ca. Retrieved 2016-04-05.
"Two debut novelists among this year’s Writers’ Trust nominees". The Globe and Mail, September 21, 2016.
"Governor-General’s Literary Award short list a serious case of déjà vu". The Globe and Mail, October 4, 2016.
"Katherena Vermette wins CODE’s 2017 Burt Award for First Nations, Inuit, and Métis Young Adult Literature". Quill & Quire, November 24, 2017.
King, Randall (9 August 2016). "Local film about tragic Red River searches honoured at Montreal festival". Winnipeg Free Press. Retrieved 11 August 2016.
"Redemption on the Red: this river". NFB/blog. National Film Board of Canada. 2 October 2015. Retrieved 11 August 2016.
Cram, Stephanie (29 October 2016). "Instagram project asks what attracts volunteers to patrol Winnipeg neighbourhoods". CBC News. Retrieved 8 November 2016.
Larkins, David (6 November 2016). "New doc explores search for missing people". Winnipeg Sun. Retrieved 8 November 2016.
"Manitoba writers explore Indigenous erotica in self-published book". CBC Manitoba, June 27, 2011.
"Katherena Vermette Wins Governor General's Award for Poetry | UBC Creative Writing". creativewriting.ubc.ca. Retrieved 2016-03-30.
"Katherena Vermette wins Amazon.ca First Novel Award". The Globe and Mail May 25, 2017.
"Combat des livres is back!". CBC Books, April 24, 2018.
"Ligne brisée, the French translation of The Break by Katherena Vermette, wins Combat des livres". CBC Books, May 11, 2018.
External links
Official website for This River
What Brings Us Here on Instagram
Vermette at "Voilà. Catalogue du Canada / Canad Catalogue"
Katherena Vermette gets her big break: A debut novel starring Winnipeg’s North End
Open this photo in gallery:for the Globe and Mail
Author Katherena Vermette, photographed in Toronto on Tuesday, just released her first novel, The Break.
MARTA IWANEK/THE GLOBE AND MAIL
MARK MEDLEY
PUBLISHED OCTOBER 28, 2016
UPDATED MAY 17, 2018
Although she recently bought a house on the other side of the Red River, not too far away, for many years Katherena Vermette lived in Winnipeg's North End, a working-class neighbourhood with a complicated history.
It was, she says, "an interesting place growing up, because on one hand we were very proud of where we lived – it's a neighbourhood that has amazing old houses, and there's so much character, and there's these great big trees, and there's the river right over there. It's a gorgeous place. But it has a very bad rap. We used to go to other neighbourhoods in the city and, of course, everyone always thought that we were from the rough part of town."
Vermette, who spent the majority of her teenage years in the North End, and moved back as an adult, was both prideful and defensive of her home turf, but "at the same time there [was] kind of this sadness. Yeah, you want to run away sometimes, too."
There are 10 different narrators in Vermette's virtuosic debut novel, The Break, which was published last month, but the city's North End might be the most important character of all.
The novel's homographic title also refers to an area, "about three or four lots wide," that cuts through the neighbourhood like a scar; it's a corridor for hydro towers, which loom for nearby businesses and houses like "a frozen army, standing guard," as Vermette writes. "In the winter, the Break is just a lake of wind and white, a field of cold and biting snow that blows up with the slightest gust." It is here, in the opening chapter, a young mother named Stella witnesses a terrible crime, the profundity and tragedy of which reverberates through the rest of the novel.
Vermette, 39, is sitting in a quiet corner of the lobby of her Toronto hotel last Tuesday afternoon. She's tired. "It's been busy," she says. "I wouldn't complain about it, because it's what I worked for."
The previous evening she had an event in Ottawa; the previous weekend you'd have found her in Vancouver for a writers' festival; a few days before that she was in Toronto for the imagineNATIVE festival, where she was presenting her first film, this river, a short documentary produced with the National Film Board, about family members searching the Manitoba waterway for their missing loved ones. ("The river has become a focal point because the river is where so many things are found. And, unfortunately, some of those things are bodies.")
The film came about after she won the Governor-General's Literary Award, in 2013, for her first collection of poems, North End Love Songs; the book contained a longer piece, November, about her own stepbrother's disappearance, almost exactly 25 years ago. (He was eventually found north of the River, in Lake Winnipeg; the circumstances around his death remain a mystery.)
The Break was nominated for the GG as well, this time for fiction, but a few hours before our interview it was announced the prize went to Madeleine Thien. Still, that evening, Vermette was scheduled to give a public reading alongside the other nominees for the Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize, for which The Break is also a finalist. The winner of the $25,000 prize will be announced on Wednesday.
Vermette reads the same passage every time, preferring, she tells me, to keep things light – a tall order for a novel whose plot hinges on a violent sexual assault.
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"There's a lot of heaviness in the book, so I avoid that for audiences' sake," she says, and motions to the copy of the novel sitting on the table. "I put a trigger warning at the front of the book. I acknowledge that there's a lot of things in the book that are jarring for people. And, especially, in an audience setting, I don't want to bring that out without warning.
"I wrote this book for indigenous women," she adds. "I wrote this book for the people I know who have been through very similar circumstances, including myself. Again, it's completely fiction, but there are so many parallels with so many different realities, and that's who I wrote it for. That's who I based the characters on, and it's important that people seem themselves in [them]. But I also recognize that people going through stuff like this don't necessarily want to read about it."
The Break tells the story of a group of people (mostly indigenous women, many related) living in and around the city's North End; there's the aforementioned Stella, witness to a brutal crime; Lou, a social worker mourning the end of a relationship; a young teen named Emily and her mother, Paul; Tommy, an idealistic Métis cop; Phoenix, a troubled adolescent who's recently run away from a group home. There's even a ghost, who floats in and out of the narrative, acting as a guide, of sorts.
"This was a really hard book to write, and it was a really hard book to put out in the world," Vermette says. "I wanted to talk about the impact of sexual violence, and the impact of the legacy of sexual violence. You can't really do that lightly."
Vermette, who is Métis, used to live in a house, like Stella's, overlooking the Break. About a decade ago, she says, she began noticing a lot of news stories and reports about acts of violence being committed by young women, which left her shaken. "I remember this overwhelming feeling of hopelessness. This idea where, if we're hurting each other, then colonialism has won. Patriarchy has won. There's no hope. We're just going to start destroying each other."
She tried to write about the subject, but "I never quite got it right. I mull things quite a long time. My books have very long gestational periods. I was thinking about it quite a bit. I was trying to write around it."
As she wrote, and new characters, new voices, muscled their way into the narrative, the book's structure eventually began to resemble "a restorative justice circle, which is when a person who has perpetuated harm sits in a circle with those that they have harmed, and everyone is telling their story. It's the idea of seeking understanding. It's the idea of accountability for harm and actions. And that's really what the book became about. So in writing around it, I developed this circle. And the great part about it was through that circle I found all these incredibly strong women who were incredibly capable and better than anyone able to deal with this situation. So I kind of wrote myself into hope.
"I needed to find that hope," she continues. "I needed to find all the good, beautiful bits. Otherwise it would just have been an incredibly sad story with no hope. That would have been bad. It would have been the Morrissey song of books."
Although Vermette couldn't have known this when she began the novel years ago, some of the novel's resonance is circumstance of timing, coming days after the Liberal government launched an independent national inquiry into missing and murdered indigenous women and girls.
Vermette knows The Break has become part of the conversation, but, as an artist, "we can only make certain contributions to the conversation," she says. "What I was trying to do is tell the story of a family. I was trying to be very specific, and very fictional. I didn't want to take from anyone's story that I didn't have permission to take … If anything, I hope this story talks about these legacies that I think many people, many indigenous women, can relate to. And it also talks about the capabilities, and especially the fundamental necessity, of family and community in order to keep everyone strong."
Vermette has two daughters, 17 and 15, and I ask about her hopes for them, and how she wants this conversation to have changed by the time they are her age.
"I want them to be proud of who they are, first and foremost. I want them to be happy people. I would love for them to live in a city that honours them. A friend of mine said recently, about the missing persons in Winnipeg, and she's an indigenous woman: 'Women who look like me go missing every day.' Those descriptions fit so many indigenous women. And that gets scary. That's your daughter, that's your cousin, that's your friend. It's something that is very close. If my children went missing, would someone look for them? My daughter's about to be 18. If she decides to go to a bar, and doesn't come home one night …"
Her voice trails off.
"All those things are realities and they're fears. I hope that they don't have those fears for their children. I hope that they're able to walk in their city, take a cab in their city, safely. I want them to live in a world where they feel that the world is watching out for them."
Katherena Vermette
Katherena Vermette, Métis poet, short-story writer, novelist, filmmaker, teacher (born 29 January 1977 in Winnipeg, MB). Métis writer Katherena Vermette is a rising star of Canadian literature. In her poetry, prose and film, she explores some of the most vital issues facing Canada today: the search for identity and the ongoing effects of historical and institutional prejudice. She won the Governor General’s Award in 2013 for her first collection of poems, North End Love Songs, and is the author of the acclaimed 2016 novel The Break.
Katherena Vermette
At Versefest 2014, day 6.
(COURTESY PEARL PIRIE/FLICKR CC)
Early Life and Education
Katherena Vermette was born on Treaty 1 territory, in the heart of the Métis Nation in Winnipeg, Manitoba. She is the daughter of a Mennonite mother and Métis father and grew up in Winnipeg’s North End, a heavily Indigenous neighbourhood known for its high levels of crime and poverty, but also for its thriving culture and community.
Vermette’s first book of poetry, North End Love Songs, reflected her intense and conflicted experience of life in this neighbourhood. “I spent years trying to run away, get away, and be any place else before I realized there was no other place I wanted to be, or could be, really,” she said of her life in the North End, in a 2013 interview with The Walrus. “It’s like family, isn’t it? They annoy…us, but no one loves or knows us more.”
Vermette began writing poetry as a child, a passion that has continued throughout her life. To support herself, she has worked many jobs, such as teaching kindergarten. She has also led writing workshops, facilitated early literacy training, and run an Indigenous artist-training and employment program.
With growing success as a poet, Vermette enrolled in the University of British Columbia’s master of creative writing program. At age 35, she published her first book of poetry, North End Love Songs (2012, The Muses’ Company).
Poetry
Katherena Vermette has been published in many literary journals and anthologies, including Canada and Beyond and Manitowapow: Aboriginal Writings from the Land of Water. Fascinated with the birds and birdsong she heard every morning, her poem “Selkirk Avenue” describes young women on Selkirk Avenue in Winnipeg, using the fragility and beauty of birds to express their extreme physical and emotional vulnerability while providing an image of the hardships of life on the streets:
robin
girl stands on
selkirk avenue
head down
her body cries
like a baby alone
paces
a round circle way
too young body squeezed
into too tight clothing
breathes out
with her whole chest
puffed out bright
and red
as if she’s
beautiful
as if she’s
proud
Vermette’s first collection of poetry, North End Love Songs (2012), is at once sad and inspiring, beautiful and picturesque. “Lost,” for instance, captures a desperate time for the poet and her family. When Vermette turned 14, her brother, Wayne, aged 18, visited a bar with friends. It was the last time he was seen alive. The Vermette family had little support or help in finding Wayne, due to what they perceived as apathy on the part of police, informed by stereotypes of young Indigenous men. “Her brother is missing / like a glove / or a sock / or a set of keys,” she writes. Vermette describes how the official response was a generic one, and then, in the last lines of “Indians,” turns that into bitter irony:
they said
he’ll turn up when
he gets bored
or broke […]
this land floods
with dead indians
this river swells
freezes
breaks open
cold arms of ice
welcomes indians
North End Love Songs also contains great beauty. “Family” is an ode to elm trees, and the power of family. American elms, not native to Canada, line the streets of north Winnipeg. But it is the Canadian elms by the river that have captured the heart and soul of the young girl in the poem. Vermette’s imagery and use of metaphor lifts the ordinary elm from the mundane to the memorable:
elms around us
like aunties
uncles
cousins
all different
but with the same skin […]
her favourites
are the ones by the river
they spread low
and stay close
to the earth
those ones she can
climb into
lean against
the strong dark bark
rest her small body
within their round arms
their sharp leaves
reach out over the river
she watches how
the waves fold
into each other
like family
North End Love Songs went on to win the 2013 Governor General’s Literary Award for English Poetry, propelling Vermette into the public eye. “This collection is an intensely personal story, but it is also nothing new,” she said in a 2013 interview with The Walrus. “It’s about a young girl or woman struggling with identity and place. That pretty much describes the whole ‘Canadian experience’ right there. More than that, it is a deeply Indigenous story, and I think Canada is hungry for stories about its first people.”
Books
Katherena Vermette’s first career as a kindergarten teacher in Winnipeg fostered her deep belief in education for Indigenous children (see also Education of Indigenous Peoples in Canada). This is seen in her collection The Seven Teaching Stories (2014–15), a series of seven books for young children that teaches about the seven sacred teachings of the Anishinaabe tradition, including love, respect, courage and honesty. In The Just Right Gift: A Story of Love, a boy searches for just the right gift for his grandmother: “he wants to find something as sweet as her kisses and as warm as her smiles.”
In 2016, Vermette published her first novel, The Break (House of Anansi Press). It opens as a young Métis mother witnesses a crime outside her window. The narrative expands from this event into an intricate web of perspectives, growing into an intergenerational family saga about life in Winnipeg’s North End (see also Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls in Canada). The Break was nominated for the Governor General’s Award and the Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize, and was a finalist on Canada Reads. In 2017, the book won the Amazon.ca First Novel Prize and the Burt Award.
That same year, Vermette released Pemmican Wars, a graphic novel and the first of the series A Girl Called Echo. Illustrated by Scott B. Henderson and coloured by Donovan Yaciuk, the book is about the adventures of a 13-year-old Métis girl, Echo, who finds herself transported into the past during her history class at school. Going back and forth between the present and the past, Echo explores Métis history and culture as she journeys along historic fur trade routes, spends time at a Métis hunting camp and learns about the pemmican trade and bison hunt.
Film
The year 2016 saw the premiere of Katherena Vermette’s first documentary film, this river. Co-directed by Erika MacPherson and featuring activist Kyle Kematch, this river explores the horrifying experience of searching for a loved one who has gone missing. In the film, Vermette speaks about the experience of losing her older brother. this river won the Canadian Screen Award for Best Short Documentary in 2017.
Significance
Katherena Vermette is a powerful young female Indigenous voice and a rising star of Canadian literature. In her poetry, prose and film, she explores some of the most vital issues facing Canada today: the search for identity and the ongoing effects of historical and institutional prejudice.
Awards and Honours
Governor General’s Literary Award for poetry (North End Love Songs), Canada Council for the Arts (2013)
Best Short Documentary (this river), Canadian Screen Awards (2017)
Burt Award (The Break), Canada Council for the Arts (2017)
Published Works
North End Love Songs (The Muses’ Company, 2012)
The Seven Teaching Stories (Portage & Main Press, 2014–15)
The Break (House of Anansi Press, 2016)
Pemmican Wars: A Girl Called Echo, Volume 1 (HighWater Press/Portage & Main Press, 2017)
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Katherena Vermette brings Métis history to life in new graphic novel series
CBC Radio · January 19
An image from Katherena Vermette's graphic novel, Pemmican Wars. (Portage and Main Press)
Listen8:42
She started out with poetry, wrote, The Break, a national bestselling book and is now delving into the world of graphic novels. But Katherena Vermette said she didn't even know she wanted to write it.
"I was at Portage and Main, my publisher, and I was talking with the ladies there and talking about how cool comic books are and how it's exceptionally cool when women write graphic novels because they are still an underserved audience in graphic novels," Vermette explained.
"I was also telling them how they have to get on Métis history because there's lots of Cree writers, there's lots of Anishinaabe writers but there's not a lot of Métis history. So I said, 'You have to get on that, you have to write about Metis history.' Which suddenly became me writing a graphic novel about Métis history," she added.
Author Katherena Vermette's new book, Pemmican Wars, is the first in a series of four graphic novels. (katherenavermette.com)
Then along came the character of Echo Desjardins. She's a young Métis girl who transports back in time to important moments in Métis history. Vermette described her as a quiet teenager trying to find a sense of community and identity.
In the series titled, A Girl Called Echo, Vermette said the main character is a slipstreamer. She moves from present day to the past. In the first book, Pemmican Wars, she visits Saskatchewan in 1812 where she witnesses a bison hunt, visits a Métis camp and travels along fur trade routes. But Vermette said she didn't want to explain the details of how Echo moves between worlds.
"It's just magic. It just happens."
She did say the visual representation of Echo and her worlds were created by a team. Scott B. Henderson was the graphic artist and Donovan Yaciuk was the colourist.
"I felt like that she kind of thrived in that collaborative space," Vermette said. "It felt like collaborating with Scott and with Annalee, our editor, it really felt like that's how she worked best."
For Vermette, writing about Métis characters and history is and important part of her work.
"Especially when I research into this history, it's not always told from a Métis perspective. And I think that is wrong and I think that is something many Métis historians are correcting now. And I think it's exciting to tell these stories and reclaim these stories as our own. They belong to us."
KATHERENA VERMETTE is a Métis writer of poetry and fiction, whose work has appeared in several literary magazines and anthologies, most recently, Manitowapow – Aboriginal Writing from the Land of Water (Highwater 2012), and upcoming in cv2 and Canada and Beyond: A Journal of Canadian Literary and Cultural Studies. She has won numerous awards and accolades, including the 2013 Governor General's Literary Award for Poetry, as well as including grants from the Canada Council for the Arts, Manitoba Arts Council and Winnipeg Arts Council. She is an active member and performer with the Aboriginal Writers Collective of Manitoba, and editor of their last collection xxx ndn (2011).
An experienced workshop facilitator, Vermette has worked extensively with marginalized groups and at risk youth. Her workshop pedagogy concentrates on the basic creative process and the use of writing as a means of developing coping skills. Her goal, first and foremost, is to assist people to find their own voice and tell their own story - a process that leads to pragmatic (increased communication skills) as well as emotional (increased resiliency skills) benefits.
In her award-winning book of poetry, North End Love Songs, she depicts Winnipeg's North End as a neighbourhood filled with birds, great big elm trees and winding rivers.
Vermette has an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of British Columbia. Vermette lives, works, and plays with her two daughters and two cats in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada.
To learn more about her, please visit her website.
These Characters Affected My Core:
Christine Fischer Guy In Conversation with Katherena Vermette
Katherena Vermette 1.jpg
Katherena Vermette’s debut poetry collection, North End Love Songs, won the 2013 Governor General’s Award for poetry. Her debut novel opens in a place locally known as The Break, a barren strip of hydro land in that same Winnipeg neighbourhood, as the sole witness to a violent crime recounts what she saw to police. As police piece together the events that led to the sexual assault of a 13-year-old Métis girl, the community makes a reckoning of its own. Through the voices of Emily’s friends, relatives and one of the investigating police officers, <
Vermette and I talked by email about her complicated relationship to the place she calls home, the transition from poetry to fiction and the multigenerational impact of trauma.
Katherena Vermette. The Break . House of Anansi Press. $22.95, 288 pp., ISBN: 9781487001117
Katherena Vermette. The Break. House of Anansi Press. $22.95, 288 pp., ISBN: 9781487001117
CHRISTINE FISCHER GUY: Congratulations on the publication of your first novel and belated congratulations for winning the 2013 GG for your first book of poetry. How have you found the transition from poetry to fiction?
KATHERENA VERMETTE: I've always gone back and forth between poetry and fiction. Different stories call for different genres. I'm pretty sure this novel was the hardest thing I've done, but maybe writers just feel like that about their newest work. The poetry book was incredibly hard, too. Novels are so big and cumbersome. It felt like there were a lot more technical things to manage to make it all make sense. I did this a fair bit with the poetry collection, but this felt like the poetry collection supersized! It took a long time to stitch it all together.
On top of that writerly stuff, this was a very hard, emotionally gutting story to live inside for as long as I did. It's a sad story, a rage-inducing story, and I haven't quite figured out a way to write about things and not be deeply affected by them. I've heard of writers doing this, but I don't or can't. These characters affected my core.
CFG: How long were you writing The Break?
KV: It's hard to say how long I've been writing this. The central story idea and some of the characters have been with me for years. They stuck with me as I figured out how to write it all properly. I wrote a few short stories on this during my MFA, and then developed them into a novel after. So the short answer is, the novel itself took about two intense years, but these girls and women have been living with me for years.
CFG: It makes sense to me that you’d be deeply affected. Like North End Love Songs, The Break is also set in Winnipeg’s North End, and it continues to explore your complex relationship with the place and people that you call home. You’ve said that relationship was “complicated.” Has this novel brought you any closer to resolving those feelings about it?
KV: In the poetry book, I call my relationship with the river “complicated” and I guess the neighbourhood and I are kind of the same. But like many "complicated" relationships in their longevity, I have accepted my companions for their gifts. I love my neighbourhood. I love and am proud of being from where I am from. There are situations, stories and elements that hurt, but as much as I see the issues, I see the solutions. I see people working every day to make the world better. That heals. I have always had hope, but as a younger person, that was sometimes a struggle. One thing this book really helped me resolve was to live in hopefulness. Even in the worst circumstances, you can still have hope.
CFG: The Break explores the harsh realities of the North End and paints a portrait of a community turning on itself as well as one strengthening its ties. That creates an interesting tension that propels the story. When did you know that the assailant would come from within the Indigenous community?
KV: I always knew who it was. The seed of this came from one of those mysterious writerly happenings — a dream or vision, nightmare really about the violent incident that Stella sees in the first chapter. In my dream, I saw both the victim and the perpetrator and their whole lives, too. I have known violence happens but never knew how someone could do that. That's where I started, with how. A shaking my fist at the sky sort of — how can someone do this?! I don't know if I really found an answer. I don't know if I or anyone can ever really know what makes a person commit violence. What I do know is that the violence that happens in someone, anyone, isn't divorced from the violence that has happened to that person. When someone lives in violence, it becomes normalized, to some extent, and sometimes they respond to violence with violence. It's a tragedy that begets more tragedy.
And I didn't want to tell that story in isolation. What's more important than the how or why it happens, is how we survive, how these women and girls get through and end the cycle. I see more strengthening than turning myself.
CFG: There is a quiet strength that comes through the tragedy in this story in the uniting of family and community. There are also hard truths about the North End community that put me in mind of Sherman Alexie’s collection Ten Little Indians — Phoenix is a tragic figure driven to violence by the direst of circumstances. Truthtelling takes heart and courage, and when violence has had a multigenerational impact, we need our storytellers more than ever. According to her Kookom (grandmother), Stella should take on that mantle. Can storytelling break the cycle of violence?
KV: I’m glad the strength comes through. That, for me, was the most important part. It's what got me through the writing of this. My madeup sisters and their incredible resilience and love.
In Lee Maracle's Celia's Song, Mink — the shapeshifter/witness — says, "The stories that really need to be told are those that shake the very soul of you." <
I think Stella is, as her Kookom calls it, a story keeper, someone who collects stories, but Stella is not a very empowered person. These stories debilitate her, keep her sad and unable to deal with, well, anything. This is an effect of trauma, too. Different people react differently. Someone like, say, Rita would have reacted to the situation of witnessing very differently. Rita wouldn't have stood there frozen with fear; she would have had the power to react. I love Rita.
CFG: That’s interesting. Stella didn’t have the power to act in that moment, but she had the courage to strike out on her own, first when she went to university and then when she married outside her community. Those things make her not quite an outsider, but an estranged family member — she’s the one who left, while the others stayed. This is a theme that’s very much alive in Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan novels. Do you see Stella as courageous in that way? How does the distance from family and community affect her?
KV: I don't really see Stella's moving away as courageous. More so, it felt like she was responding to the trauma of her childhood by running away. Not staying in touch with her family was an extension of that and it weakens her, I think. She rejects her family, insults and hurts her grandmother and it doesn't help her. She is an emotional wreck, really, incapable of helping herself and others.
But I'm hard on Stella, I know.
Lou and Paul are also educated and married out of their community — "city half breeds" and "real Indians" are colloquial for urban Métis and rural Status Indigenous persons, very different groups. Cheryl, too, is accomplished and did move away for a time as well. There are differences between all of these, of course, but I don't think I would call Stella's actions brave.
CFG: They’re all wonderfully subtle characters with complex motivations. Lou comments on that sense of inbetweenness felt by the urban Métis. “A real house in a real community with a real family,” she says. “Real Indians! Not city half breeds like us.” What do you think she’d say about the new ruling by the Supreme court, that the Métis are now considered Indians* under the Constitution? Would it shift that sense of psychic homelessness for her, do you think?
*Even though “Indigenous” is more correct, “Indian” is a constitutional artifact and still used in that context.
KV: Well, I know for myself, it felt very validating to be acknowledged for being a part of a larger group we were purposely excluded from, but it's only a ruling. It's a good step in the right direction, but there is over a century of impositions and injustices to unpack there. And, as much as all Indigenous nations have common threads, relatives and ground, it's very important to recognize our individual nationhood. Métis is its own culture. It is distinct and diverse in and of itself. We've often suffered from a "not enough" complex, and I think that might be what Lou is alluding to here.
CFG: We can see another dimension of that “not enough” complex in Tommy, the Métis cop investigating the crime with his non-Indigenous partner. He’s a character straddling two worlds and often feels that conflict. Looked at that way, his decision to go into law enforcement is heroic. It’s not just a job for him, is it?
KV: I've always been sort of intrigued by Indigenous people who join law enforcement. As a younger person, I only saw contention between the two groups, so it seemed like it would involve a lot of issues. Of course, that experience, my experience, is not universal. As an adult, I have met several officers who have taken on their job and community membership so admirably and have a certain belief in the system that I kind of envy. That's how I framed Tommy, anyway. He really wants to be a hero, and to make the world right. Reality has made him waver a bit, but he does try, in his way.
CFG: He really does want to make a difference, but he’s always caught between worlds. The community doesn’t completely trust him, and he puts up with a lot from his partner. When Emily’s attacker is still unknown and Lou’s new boyfriend comes under suspicion, Cheryl says, “Not everyone is a monster.” That theme of trust — who can be trusted, who can’t — is reflected in various ways throughout the novel.
Who did you trust as you wrote this novel? Was there anyone besides Lee Maracle who inspired or guided you, whose work you returned to as a polestar? Who are you reading now?
KV: Trust is a big theme, isn't it? I think that might be one of the worst results of trauma — when you can't trust. I had and have a beautiful circle of trust, of women, my mother, my best friends, my daughters who always teach me something. I do have a strong partner, Reuben, who really saw me through a lot of this stuff. My father, my brother, too, are great supports for me. My dog — I mean really, I can't tell you how much my dog heals me. He always needed a walk when I was really stuck and worried about something in the book.
Who am I reading? This year I've been reading almost exclusively women, Madeleine Thien, Lee, Kathleen Winter, finally got to Ann Marie Macdonald's new one recently. I was reading a lot of Toni Morrison while in the last edits of the book. I don't recommend that; it made me feel wholly inadequate. On the flip side, I'm also a huge fantasy fan — anything with sword fighting and/or dragons — and I anxiously wait for anything George R.R. Martin puts out.
CFG: As you wrote, did you have an ideal reader in mind? Who do you hope will read this novel?
KV: I don't really have an ideal reader. I know when I was writing I was thinking about other Indigenous, inner city women. Those from my city specifically, and Métis and Anishinaabe, like the characters. I want them to feel as accurately portrayed as possible. Those who have experienced similar traumas. Of course not everyone reacts the same way, but as long as that felt authentic then I feel like I've done my job.
CFG: It’s a very moving novel. Cheryl, who is involved with young artists, muses on that desire to get it right. She says she “remembers that feeling, that fear of what people will think of you and your art, your whole spirit up there, out there.” How do you feel about this contract on the eve of the publication of your second book? Does it become any easier?
KV: It doesn't get any easier, no. I think it just gets different every time. I thought it would be easier because it's fiction, but even the made up stuff has a way of sneaking truth into it. That, and I haven't quite figured out a way not to rip myself wide open when I write these things. I don't think there is a way to do it halfarsed. It's heavy stuff and I have to be there to witness it, embody it, over and over. I think this is the least I can do for the characters and all they represent. Sometimes it's the only thing.
Editor's Note: The Break has been nominated for the 2016 Writers' Trust Fiction Award.
Photo credit: Diana Renelli
Christine Fischer Guy’s debut novel is The Umbrella Mender. Her short fiction has appeared in Canadian and US journals and has been nominated for the Journey and Pushcart prizes. She’s a fiction critic for The Globe and Mail and contributes to Ryeberg.com, themillions.com, Hazlitt and The Los Angeles Review of Books.
christinefischerguy.com
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The Break: A Conversation with Katherena Vermette
MARCH 14, 2017YIARAMAGAZINE
By Lauren Wildgoose
Katherena Vermette is a Metis poet and author from Winnipeg. I interviewed Katherena after being mesmerized by her first novel, The Break. The novel is a complex and beautiful layering of the voices of 9 Indigenous women (and one Metis man) as they deal with the sexual assault of a young girl in their community.
The Break was shortlisted for the Governor General’s Literary Award for Fiction, the Rogers Trust Fiction Prize, and is now a finalist for Canada Reads.
Katherena has also published a poetry collection, North End Love Songs, which tells the stories of Winnipeg’s North End neighbourhood. The collection won the 2013 Governor General’s Award for Poetry.
LW: Whose voice in the novel came most naturally? Whose was the most difficult to write?
KV: The voices all came at different times but most of them were quite natural, in their way. I started with most of the women – Lou, Stella, Cheryl – and they felt very close and familiar to me. They’re each aggravating in their own way, but getting to know them was a very thoughtful, endearing process for me. They are like family now.
One of the last voices I wrote was Tommy, who was probably the easiest and oddly the most fun, if I can call it that. He came after the story was set and filled in a lot of gaps, so maybe that was the easy part. His story is also set apart from the main narrative so he was safer, and because he got to flow through some casual racism and Metis identity issues, he allowed me vent some frustrations, so that’s always fun, yes?
LW: How do women’s roles in Metis and other Indigenous cultures feature in your writing?
KV: In this book, most of the characters are Metis and / or Anishnaabe, so the quick answer is: prominently.
I write from where I am – Metis urban female. I do this for several reasons. One, selfishly, because my work starts from a very personal place where I am reacting and/or interacting with my world. But also because I don’t think there are enough Indigenous voices, points of view, or characters out in the world, and writing a few from my limited vantage point is something I can do. This is also why I encourage, support, and love to hear from other Indigenous and other marginalized communities’ voices. We need them.
LW: What was the transition like from writing poetry to writing a novel?
KV: I always say, poetry is my home. It’s where I feel the most like myself. Writing the novel was incredibly difficult. Piecing it all together and hoping it all made sense part was crazy-making. The heartbreaking subject matter didn’t help either.
LW: Who are your literary and personal role models?
KV: Hmmm, I am going through a pretty decisive Toni Morrison phase. I open her books trying to learn something but then just get swept away and forget everything but the story. So I have to keep reading them. Jeannette Winterson is very close to my heart. Beatrice Culleton Mosionier is my hero. Maria Campbell. Louise Erdrich. Marilyn Dumont. Okay, these are all literary… I am researching Metis history right now, and I am pretty sure there are more than a few women there, most with names and stories unrecorded, who were exceptionally bad ass.
LW: Are there any particular challenges you face as a Metis writer? As a female writer?
KV: I’m sure there are. But never having not been one of these things, my vantage point is biased. I have also been incredibly lucky and my situation is not the norm. Most writers from marginalized communities that I know are struggling. As with most of the world, literary Canada still has a long way to go to properly represent and accommodate all of its demographics. Collectively, we are learning. But we still have a long way to go.
LW: What projects or goals do you have in mind for the future?
KV: So many projects! I am trying to write a graphic novel series, on the afore-mentioned Metis history, and I am also working on a poetry book. My overall literary goal is self-satisfaction. But I think I have to write a few more things to get there!
Image by Lisa Delorme Meiler, via cbc.ca
April 6, 2017
Natalie Zina Walschots
<
Natalie Zina Walschots: When North End Love Songs was nominated for a GGLA, you described your reaction as shocked, that the honour as completely unexpected, and you first heard the news via social media while at brunch. How did you receive news of the win, and is the shock still present, or has it become something different?
Katherena Vermette: I was eating breakfast when I read about the nomination on my phone. Brunch makes it sound much fancier than it was! When I got the call about the win, I gasped. I didn’t have much time to process it because I had to figure out how to get myself to Toronto, and my life’s pretty jam-packed these days. I am not as stone-cold shocked as I was before, but I’m thankful I have so much to do so I can use up all my nervous energy.
Book by Katherena VermetteMuses’ Company/J. Gordon Shillingford Publishing
Natalie Zina Walschots: What is it about North End Love Songs that you believe has caused the book too connect to its readers in such a deep way? What about this poetry strikes home?
Katherena Vermette: My friend Duncan has always told me the most personal is the most universal. This collection is an intensely personal story, but it is also nothing new. It’s about a young girl or woman struggling with identity and place. That pretty much describes the whole “Canadian experience” right there. More than that, it is a deeply indigenous story, and I think Canada is hungry for stories from and about its first people.
Natalie Zina Walschots: You’re a passionate and active member of the Writers’ Collective of Manitoba. Do you think this win will draw attention to other work being produced by your colleagues?
Katherena Vermette: Gosh, I hope so. I know and am blessed to spend time with so many amazing writers and storytellers. I would love to share them with anyone who wants to know them: Duncan Mercredi,Marie Annharte, Rosanna Deerchild, Beatrice Mosionier, and Trevor Greyeyes. That’s just in Manitoba and off the top of my head.
Natalie Zina Walschots: North End Love Songs is characterized by both a deep love of place and a resistance to it. Why did you think it was important to capture this sense of conflict in the book?
Katherena Vermette: Well, that’s home, isn’t it? We always love and hate our home. I have a complicated relationship with this place I call home. I spent years trying to run away, get away, and be any place else before I realized there was no other place I wanted to be, or could be, really. It’s like family, isn’t it? They annoy the crap out of us, but no one loves or knows us more.
Natalie Zina Walschots: In pieces like “treegrrl” and “parkgrrl,” it seems you are attempting to create an alternative to the very city-oriented, punk rock riot grrl persona that speaks more accurately to your Metis, Mennonite, and Winnipeg identity.
Katherena Vermette: I am rather proud of being a pseudo-riot grrl back in the day. I loved the ideas of the movement, the rejection of conventional definitions of “pretty” and the reclamation of the female body. Little girls are little riot grrls. My daughters were, anyway. They had no body image issues, were proud of what their bodies could do, and dressed however they flippin’ wanted—as long as I thought they were warm enough, that is. I like the word grrl. It’s a great word and means a lot to me. I also wrote a story “nortendgrrl” a few years ago, and wanted to connect this collection to that story if I could. You can find it in Manitoapow, a wonderful collection of indigenous writings from Manitoba.
Natalie Zina Walschots: As an avowed metalhead I have a soft spot for pieces like “heavy metal ballads” and “mixed tape.” How does music and poetry generally intersect in your work?
Katherena Vermette: Yay, metalheads! I think art begets art begets more art. Music makes poetry and makes more music, and then more poetry. Music is a fun theme to explore, especially when it’s early ’90s glam rock. My brothers and I were all headbangers of one kind or another. Mötley Crüe, AC/DC, G’n’R, even KISS, were big in my house. Heavy metal ballads are my favourite because they are vulnerable lyrics sung by the ultimate machismos—long hair and spandex pants aside. What a perfect image to show in poetry. Music is also a great way to show and define a time and place. We all remember what we were listening to when those memories happened, don’t we?
Natalie Zina Walschots: What does winning the GGLA for poetry mean for you as a poet? What does it mean for you personally?
Katherena Vermette: This award is incredibly validating and a huge honour, but gosh, I have no idea what it all means. I’m just trying to enjoy the ride as much as I can. That, and working, taking care of my kids, and occasionally remembering to breathe.
This interview has been condensed and edited for publication.
Print Marked Items
Vermette , Katherena: PEMMICAN WARS
Kirkus Reviews.
(May 1, 2018):
COPYRIGHT 2018 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Vermette , Katherena PEMMICAN WARS HighWater Press (Indie Fiction) $18.95 3, 15 ISBN: 978-1-55379-678-7
In this YA graphic novel, an alienated Metis girl learns about her people's Canadian history.
Metis teenager Echo Desjardins finds herself living in a home away from her mother, attending a new school, and feeling completely lonely as a
result. She daydreams in class and wanders the halls listening to a playlist of her mother's old CDs. At home, she shuts herself up in her room.
But when her history teacher begins to lecture about the Pemmican Wars of early 1800s Saskatchewan, Echo finds herself swept back to that time.
She sees the Metis people following the bison with their mobile hunting camp, turning the animals' meat into pemmican, which they sell to the
Northwest Company in order to buy supplies for the winter. Echo meets a young girl named Marie, who introduces Echo to the rhythms of Metis
life. She finally understands what her Metis heritage actually means. But the joys are short-lived, as conflicts between the Metis and their rivals in
the Hudson Bay Company come to a bloody head. The tragic history of her people will help explain the difficulties of the Metis in Echo's own
time, including those of her mother and the teen herself. Accompanied by dazzling art by Henderson (A Blanket of Butterflies, 2017, etc.) and
colorist Yaciuk (Fire Starters, 2016, etc.), this tale is a brilliant bit of time travel. Readers are swept back to 19th-century Saskatchewan as fully as
Echo herself. Vermette's (The Break, 2017, etc.) dialogue is sparse, offering a mostly visual, deeply contemplative juxtaposition of the present
and the past. Echo's eventual encounter with her mother (whose fate has been kept from readers up to that point) offers a powerful moment of
connection that is both unexpected and affecting. "Are you...proud to be Metis?" Echo asks her, forcing her mother to admit, sheepishly: "I don't
really know much about it." With this series opener, the author provides a bit more insight into what that means.
A sparse, beautifully drawn story about a teen discovering her heritage.
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Vermette , Katherena: PEMMICAN WARS." Kirkus Reviews, 1 May 2018. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A536570960/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=f9a798fa. Accessed 22 June 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A536570960
Vermette, Katherena, Scott B. Henderson, and Donovan
Yaciuk. Pemmican Wars: A Girl Called Echo, Vol. 1
Meghann Meeusen
Voice of Youth Advocates.
41.1 (Apr. 2018): p67.
COPYRIGHT 2018 E L Kurdyla Publishing LLC
http://www.voya.com
Full Text:
4Q * 4P * M * J * S * (G)
Vermette, Katherena, Scott B. Henderson, and Donovan Yaciuk. Pemmican Wars: A Girl Called Echo, Vol. 1. Highwater Press, March 2018. 48p.
$18.95 Trade pb. 978-155379-678-7.
Thirteen-year-old Echo Desjardins's life seems a tedious drudgery back and forth from school, a monotony only broken by listening to a playlist
comprised of songs from her mom's old CDs. Separated and estranged from her mother, Echo knows little of her past as part of the Metis nation.
History begins to come alive for Echo as she drifts back in time, among her people in the early nineteenth century. Experiencing both the unique
qualities of everyday life and fear of the violence surrounding the Metis people as they are pulled into the Pemmican Wars, Echo's adventures--
and her understanding of herself--are only just beginning.
The first installment of the A Girl Called Echo graphic series, Pemmican Wars begins Echo's story in a way that demonstrates its potential,
especially in terms of the text's nuanced characterization and adventurous storyline. The graphic novel delves into a time period that many readers
may know little about, offering particular resonance by connecting the past to a contemporary teen. Using only sparse text, the artist brilliantly
includes details that give the story depth and specificity, not only in terms of the representation of the Metis nation, but also in Echo's family
dynamics and the intensity of her loneliness and isolation. Strong use of comics technique,<< a unique examination of a fascinating time of history,>>
and the thoughtful narration by an aboriginal teen make this a must-read and a strong classroom or library choice.--Meghann Meeusen.
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
Meeusen, Meghann. "Vermette, Katherena, Scott B. Henderson, and Donovan Yaciuk. Pemmican Wars: A Girl Called Echo, Vol. 1." Voice of
Youth Advocates, Apr. 2018, p. 67. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A536746182/ITOF?
u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=d675d3b2. Accessed 22 June 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A536746182
A Girl Called Echo, v.1: Pemmican Wars
Snow Wildsmith
Booklist.
114.14 (Mar. 15, 2018): p31+.
COPYRIGHT 2018 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist/
Full Text:
A Girl Called Echo, v.1: Pemmican Wars.
By Katherena Vermette. Illus. by Scott B. Henderson.
Mar. 2018. 48p. HighWater, paper, $18.95 (9781553796787). 741.5. Gr. 8-12.
Echo is just trying to get by in a new home and a new school when she slips through time during a class lecture and finds herself with the Metis
people--her Nation--in 1816, just before a deadly battle. Vermette and Henderson's graphic novel has flaws, but where it is strong, it shines. At
only 50 pages, including the supplementary material, there isn't enough time to dive into the story or the history of the Pemmican Wars. The small
timeline at the back and snippets of Echo's class lessons on the topic help, but it's not quite enough to flesh out the drama of Echo's experiences.
Despite these weaknesses, Echo's story is compelling, mainly because Vermette isn't afraid to let the art do the talking. Henderson's realistic art
and perfect pacing, particularly in the pages of wordless panels depicting Echo's daily routine, highlight her silent nature and hint at the source of
her unspoken sadness. Solitary teens are likely to strongly identify with Echo and look forward to more of her adventures. --Snow Wildsmith
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
Wildsmith, Snow. "A Girl Called Echo, v.1: Pemmican Wars." Booklist, 15 Mar. 2018, p. 31+. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A533094490/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=9f03e787. Accessed 22 June 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A533094490
The Break
Emily Dziuban
Booklist.
114.12 (Feb. 15, 2018): p23.
COPYRIGHT 2018 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist/
Full Text:
* The Break.
By Katherena Vermette.
Mar. 2018.368p. Anansi, paper, $16.95 (9781487001117).
Vermette (North End Love Songs, 2012) deserves the many accolades this novel about four generations of Metis women has earned since its first
publication, in Canada in 2016. An apt trigger warning appears on the title page before the inciting incident: the sexual assault of teenage Emily.
In the days immediately following the attack, the family's women--and, to a lesser degree, its men--gather and support, which prompts them to
contemplate their own life experiences and choices. Each of the women has scars, and a member of the second generation suffered an early,
violent death. Police work to identify Emily's attackers, but Vermette wisely shifts the focus to powerful "why" questions that fold in culture and
identity. Multiple narrators combine into a collective experience of being on the outside, being subjected to poverty and violence, and being seen
as inferior. The family matriarch, Kookom, provides the gravitational pull grounding the family, but she's in decline. The Metis women in this
novel<< survive, endure, and heal>>, but they also carry exceptionally heavy burdens and pay<
look at their lives succeeds both as a novel and as a work of social justice.--Emily Dziuban
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
Dziuban, Emily. "The Break." Booklist, 15 Feb. 2018, p. 23. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A531171516/ITOF?
u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=ae5fde72. Accessed 22 June 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A531171516
The Break
Publishers Weekly.
265.5 (Jan. 29, 2018): p166.
COPYRIGHT 2018 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
* The Break
Katherena Vermette. House of Anansi (PGW, U.S. dist.; UTR Canadian dist.), $16.95 trade paper (368p) ISBN 978-1-4870-0111-7
Vermette's piercing debut novel (following the poetry collection North End Love Songs) begins on a cold, snowy night, when Stella, a young
Metis woman, looks out her window and witnesses an attack on a girl out on the Break--a tract of isolated land in Winnipeg's North End.
Frightened, she calls 911, but the girl and her attackers scatter into the night. The next day, the full weight of the situation is revealed: Emily, the
13-year-old daughter of Stella's cousin Pauline, has been viciously assaulted and raped with a beer bottle. This is not a typical crime story. It is
instead<< a harrowing mosaic,>> the fragments of which reveal the stories of Emily and her extended family, a young Metis police officer working on
the case, as well those of the girls who attacked Emily. The story paints a broad picture of a family separated and brought together again, in
different capacities, by varying forms of grief--and of another family, that of the perpetrator, shattered in ways seemingly impossible to mend, by
drugs, crime and violence. Vermette portrays a wide array of strong, complicated, absolutely believable women, and through them and their
hardships offers readers sharp views of race and class issues. <
(Mar.)
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"The Break." Publishers Weekly, 29 Jan. 2018, p. 166. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A526116504/ITOF?
u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=f05a9eef. Accessed 22 June 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A526116504
The Break
Ophelie Zalcmanis-Lai
This Magazine.
50.4 (January-February 2017): p40.
COPYRIGHT 2017 Red Maple Foundation
http://www.thismagazine.ca/
Full Text:
THE BREAK
By Katherena Vermette
House ofAnansi, $22.95
"In the end, all that matters is what is right here." These words by Metis writer Katherena Vermette perfectly capture the heart of the stories
within The Break. Vermette, who won the 2013 Governor General's Literary Award for Poetry, offers alternative perspectives surrounding a brutal
crime--each point of view so raw, readers won't be able to pull away from the story.
Equal parts heartbreaking and beautiful, Vermette tells an important story audiences must hear. Amid all the pain felt through the characters'
remembered histories, there is a strong sense of survival: <
--OPHELIE ZALCMANIS-LAI
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
Zalcmanis-Lai, Ophelie. "The Break." This Magazine, Jan.-Feb. 2017, p. 40. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A480992494/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=91e096b2. Accessed 22 June 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A480992494
North End Love Songs
Mariianne Mays
Herizons.
27.3 (Winter 2014): p42.
COPYRIGHT 2014 Herizons Magazine, Inc.
Full Text:
NORTH END LOVE SONGS
KATHERENA VERMETTE
The Muses Company
RIOT LUNG
LEAH HORLICK
New Leaf Series
I SEE MY LOVE MORE CLEARLY FROM A DISTANCE
NORA GOULD
Brick Books
Katherena Vermette's North End Love Songs opens with an epigraph from Jeanette Winterson: "A tough life needs a tough language--and that is
what poetry is. That is what literature offers--a language powerful enough to say how it is."
Vermette's book, which won the 2013 Governor General's Literary Award for Poetry, illustrates just how powerful language can be. One poem at
a time, these polished gems muster language back to its potent centre: push it up towards the light, propel it forward.
The book's opening section catalogues urban prairie birds. "blue jay" sees one "poised for flight/ one small foot/ on the curb/ like a sprinter/ this
girl/ with such rough skin/ the colour of concrete/ in the rain/ this girl/ is ready/ to fly// her eyes pierce/ the wind pulls/ her hair back/ like a
mother's hand/ making a ponytail/ she looks/ for a break// falls into/ a clumsy run/ dodges cars with more/ luck than precision/ lands triumphant/
on the other side."
With words stark and deliberate, lean lines that stir for survival, the Metis-Mennonite writer recounts her coming-of-age in Winnipeg's North End.
Inspired by ghostly heavy metal ballads that thrum and throb their particular emotional undertow, she retraces her brother's disappearance after a
night at the bar in November 1991, when Vermette was 14. His body was found in late spring, having drifted from river to lake. He was 18.
The book's penultimate section is titled "November." In the poem "lost" she writes, "her brother is missing/ like a glove/ or a sock/ a set of keys/
gone// his room empty/ the sheen on his posters/ dull from lack of light/ curtains closed// her brother is now/ a picture/ stuck to a tree/ a light post/
on tv once// he could be/ lying on a road/ in a field/ in the river/ maybe/ lost/ in the snow/ in nothing/ but his thin/ jacket/ his bare/ hands."
Riot Lung by Leah Horlick is published in Thistledown Press's New Leaf Series, which specializes in first books by emerging writers. Another
"prairie grrl," Horlick is a Saskatchewan poet from Treaty Six Cree territory who is also a 2012 Lambda Literary fellow in poetry.
Like its title, this book of poems mixes the emphatic and the delicate, an outburst of protest and a shelter for all that carries oxygen in "towns too
small/ to name ourselves." Like Vermette's work, it celebrates coming of age. A clamant intensity and quivering hope coexist in lines like "a
tempest larkspurred in your eyes," and make the work sing, whether in extolling the right to a first love or describing love's sweetness and sting.
In "Itchy Legs," she writes, "Here, the welts from the two-hour river walk/ wading in sweetgrass up to my knees:// new tattoos swollen with red
from mosquitoes/ [...] and further up, a memory of your hands/ on the one spot you like so much,/ a place I never thought about before."
Nora Gould's debut is another that develops links between love and landscape. Its intimacy is founded in respect for the gap between things, all
life, plants, species, people.
With the precise eye of a veterinary doctor (her other profession), Gould's equanimity takes language beyond passion to "wakefulness." She also
rehabilitates injured wildlife. In the piece "Grief submerged with her brilliant feet, tucked up in flight," the poet vacillates scenes of a "Northern
Shoveler [which has] lost her eggs to crows," combing in tiny circles for food, with the momentum of a foaling mare.
The poem "I'd walk that path back to wakefulness" maps the deficient grace of our interconnectedness: "Now/ October, photo albums over tea,
you rearrange time and/ I'm anguished by the cuckoo out of sync--you wait// for no bird as you push the hands. I've thawed/ blueberries and you
stop reading to me the same poetry book/ you read aloud straight through yesterday..../ [...] I'm wondering when you will leave me// blueberry
prints through the light background, a trail through the trees./ I'm perversely hoping./ I'd set that path with hot salt water."
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
Mays, Mariianne. "North End Love Songs." Herizons, Winter 2014, p. 42. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A361848071/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=c05f14b3. Accessed 22 June 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A361848071
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Broken: Katherena Vermette, The Break
Written by Rohan Maitzen on June 18, 2017 — 4 Comments
We have all been broken in one way or another.
I probably wouldn’t label Katherena Vermette’s The Break as “crime fiction,” but it’s a good example of the difficulty and, at some level, the inutility or pointlessness of genre distinctions. It is certainly a novel organized around a single crime, and its plot includes an investigation into “whodunit” and why: its <
I was thinking about this question of labels and categories because reading The Break I found myself wondering if it would be appropriate to assign it in the class I teach on “mystery and detective fiction.” I kept thinking how well it lends itself to the basic interpretive approach we often take: looking at the central crime as a symptom of whatever is wrong or broken in the world of the novel, and then at its investigation and (when it happens) its solution as the novel’s proposal for what it would take to fix things–to end up with what, on the novel’s terms, looks like justice. We often focus on who helps and who hinders the investigation, and about who is and who isn’t able to solve the crime: in a lot of the books we read, paying attention to these basic elements of the plot reveals patterns about who is or isn’t listened to, who does or doesn’t have authority or power–thematic patterns that usually turn out to reflect whatever moral rot or societal failure has led to the crime.
The crime at the heart of The Break can definitely be read in this “symptomatic” way. Though on one level it is a vicious act by a particular person, the novel sets it in a wider context of prejudice, hardship, and (sometimes worst of all) callous indifference that, while not mitigating at all the horror of the violence or removing the perpetrator’s specific culpability, still complicates our response, both to her individually and to the situation as a whole. It is easy enough, in the story Vermette has constructed, to lay the blame for the specific attack that sets the novel’s parts in motion. It is much harder, by the end of the book, to imagine that locking up one lost soul will actually do much to create a safer, happier, more just world for any of the people whose stories we’ve been following. So much is wrong: there is so much tragedy, some of it at the same level of explicit violence, but a lot of it more subtle, pervasive, and elusive. The Break is the only fiction listed as a resource on the website for the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls: as that suggests, it is about historic and systemic problems. But as it effectively dramatizes, these are always intractably personal problems as well.
Formally, The Break is well structured to show that reciprocity between systemic problems and individual lives. Its interlocking voices carry our attention outwards from the precipitating incident, but also always keep us connected to it, so that we don’t think about it by itself but as part of a web of relationships and circumstances. The only one of these voices that I found a bit strained was the one that actually opens the book, which recurs as a framing device: by the end of the novel I could appreciate better that it reflects a belief in continued presence where my own beliefs would allow only absence. This kind of spiritual continuity is one source of strength for the characters in The Break. Another is their strong family ties, and particularly, conspicuously, the ties between them as women: it is striking how peripheral the male characters seem, even when they are loved and cherished by the novel’s women–“all these women,” as one of the police officers observes, “holding each other up.”
The Break is both polished and gripping, and it avoids seeming like fiction written solely “with a purpose,” though at the same time it clearly has one and, I think, fulfills it: to put it in clichéd but apt terms, Vermette <
Update: Kerry Clare pointed me to this really interesting and useful review by Carleigh Baker. I didn’t realize (because I hadn’t previously read any other reviews of The Break) that the genre question has come up a lot already — though it obviously makes perfect sense to me that it has. I was surprised by this objection to considering the novel as crime fiction:
This brings up another issue with the critical treatment of The Break. It has already been considered by reviewers as a whodunit mystery and a police procedural, which unfortunately takes the work completely out of context. It is, in fact, a powerful indictment of the real-life police investigation of crimes involving indigenous victims in Winnipeg, both female and male.
This seems to presuppose that mysteries routinely take the side of the police, or at any rate that within the genre you won’t find a critique or even an “indictment” of official law enforcement. I would say that even within the subgenre of police procedurals you can find plenty of skepticism about how just and accountable the police are (think of The Terrorists, for instance, which pretty directly proposes that the police themselves deserve that label), but also many series feature amateur sleuths or private investigators working outside the state system precisely because they want to raise doubts about the capacity of of that system to address the real problems the books explore.
I wonder if the anxiety about (mis)labeling The Break as crime fiction is a self-perpetuating assumption that crime fiction isn’t taken seriously so the issues the novel focuses on won’t get the serious consideration they deserve if that’s what people think it is. A possible counter-argument is that (as mystery writers concerned with social justice issues are well aware) you can often reach a wider audience with your political concerns if you package them as genre fiction.
Posted in Canada, Katherena Vermette
Review: The Break by Katherena Vermette
Unphilosophize By Unphilosophize Published on May 4, 2017
Wit
I still have a lot of feelings about this book. I finished it slightly before the start of the Canada Reads competitions this year and Candy Palmater, who was defending the book, signed my copy at a Canada Reads event. This was before all hell broke lose on the first day and it got voted off. This is by far the worst thing that has happened in my reading world this year.
The Break is a weird sort of mystery. It opens with an assault and the rest of the book goes through different points of views and the events of the night of the assault are slowly revealed.
The story is told by a family of women whose relationship, some of them distant, other fraught, and some who were very close; and both revealed and mended throughout the novel.
During Canada Reads two of the panellists said that they did not like the book or feel that it was the novel that Canada needs to read, this year's theme, because of the under-representation of "good men". I yelled about this for about a week. Perhaps longer. (for full details see me twitter) Why they felt that a book about women, told by women, need to have men in it I'm not entirely sure. Secondly, there were several good men in the book, one of them was even a narrator. These comments were so infuriating, especially given that a lot of the books that I have read have male main characters and the only female characters are often poorly written and secondary.
I'm still upset.
<
Reviewed: The Break by Katherena Vermette
Updated / Wednesday, 14 Feb 2018 10:24 0
Katherena Vermette: Men don't come well out of her story, says Eileen Dunne
Katherena Vermette: Men don't come well out of her story, says Eileen Dunne
By Eileen Dunne
RTÉ newscaster and radio presenter
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Audience score
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Publisher Atlantic, hardback
Eileen Dunne welcomes The Break, set in Canada in the wake of a savage sexual assault on 13-year-old Emily on a snowy winter's night.
I love a book that takes me to a new place, a world I know nothing about - and so it is with The Break by the Canadian writer Katherena Vermette (not to be confused with The Break by Marian Keyes). The Break of the title is an isolated strip of land at the edge of a town in Winnipeg, Manitoba, home to the Métis and First Nations people. In Canada, a Métis is a person of `mixed race, especially one having white and American Indian parentage'. This is a tough, dark world, and The Break of the title may also refer to the broken homes, broken lives and broken relationships within the story.
13-year-old Emily is the victim of a savage sexual assault on The Break one snowy winter's night. Stella, a young mother, witnesses the attack, but unsure what she is seeing and afraid to leave her young children, she dials 911. By the time the police get there, everyone has disappeared and she feels they doubt her story.
The fall-out from this attack and its investigation form the narrative of the story. The assault is all the more savage when we realise who the perpetrator is. Yet, having said that, it is not unusual in this community - most of these characters have known violence and tragedy in their lives, and we are left with the feeling that it will continue into the next generation.
It's a dark book, hard to read at times, but ultimately rewarding as the characters come to terms with what has happened (and there are a lot of characters pitching in.) Vermette provides a family tree at the beginning of the book, and I found myself referring back to it several times to establish the relationship between the different players. The use of pet names and nicknames was a bit confusing, until you got to know them all.
Men don't come well out of this story; it's the women who are strong, from the much-revered great-grandmother (Kookom) down, they have been here before and they know they will survive. There's one notable exception: young police officer Tommy Scott, a Métis himself who is ultimately caught between two worlds.
This is Katherena Vermette's first novel, and she is already an award-winning poet. At times when I was reading, I thought of the Gloria Gaynor song I will Survive - at others, the line from Josephine Hart's Damage came to mind: "Damaged people are dangerous - they know they can survive". That book stayed with me for a long time, this one will too.
“Spiked”: A Review Of ‘The Break’, By Katherena Vermette
Posted on September 11, 2016 by bjosefg
9781487001117_1024x1024
First, here’s the review (wholly unchanged from the last time I submitted it).
After its 1200 or so words, I’ve included some paragraphs of backstory.
Bleak Houses
A Winnipeg poet paints a downbeat portrait of life among vulnerable Métis women
The Break
Katherena Vermette
Anansi 368pp $22.95
by Brett Josef Grubisic
Within the sweeping generalization that opens Survival (1972), that influential study of Canada’s literature, Margaret Atwood writes: “The survivor has no triumph or victory but the fact of his survival; he has little after his ordeal that he did not have before, except gratitude for having escaped with his life.” She was introducing her notorious “Victim Positions,” which she regarded as hallmarks of the national literary imagination.
Atwood’s assertion surfaced over and again as I read The Break, the ordeal-intense debut novel by Katherena Vermette. Despite The Break’s jacket description—a “powerful intergenerational family saga” by an “exciting new voice in Canadian literature”—with its hints of downs but also ups (and maybe a moment or two of unequivocal triumph), this profoundly dispiriting novel appears to hold scant hope for its characters except scraping by. A Métis Winnipeg resident whose poetry volume North End Love Songs won a Governor General Literary Award in 2013, Vermette’s cooly documentary outlook impresses with its precise craft. More than the saga’s power, though, the novel’s deep-set forlornness sticks with the reader. She’s undoubtedly a new voice in Canadian literature, but “sepulchral” and “dolorous” offer greater accuracy than “exciting.”
Set in winter and wintry in tone (bleak, discouraging, unforgiving, perilous), Vermette’s story begins in the wee hours with a tense police interview following a scuffle on the “empty expanse of land” in Winnipeg’s North End locals call the Break. Stella is overburdened with kids, anxiety, and a crushing history (her mother froze to death in an alley after she was beaten and raped and later ignored as a ‘drunken Native’ at a hospital). Now Stella has witnessed what she believes is a sexual assault outside her house at midnight. Initially patronizing and dismissive, the police—who have taken four hours to answer the 911 call—regard Stella as unreliable, a hysterical overtired mom with a feverish imagination. Though seething with a “familiar rage,” Stella quietly swallows their judgement.
That pair of officers discover a mass of bloody snow and regard it as evidence of yet another territorial gang dispute. They’re not exactly indifferent but close. As the weary and snide veteran Caucasian cop mentions to his earnest young Métis partner (whom he callously nicknames “May-tee”), “Nates” in vicious combat isn’t exactly headline news. “Why fret,” his manner conveys.
With first- and third-person narration in chapters named mainly after women in Stella’s extended family, Vermette expands her view to include a larger community of downtrodden North Enders. For example, the following chapter, “Emily,” traces the dangerous path of Stella’s young cousin, a sweet if self-loathing thirteen-year old. Emily, who “feels ugly and fat most of the time and is positive that no one has ever, ever liked her,” decides to accept an invitation to an illicit house party. The impulsive decision—to meet a cute boy—leads to a frenzied attack in a snow drift. Its resultant trauma ties Emily’s experience to those of her female relatives across the generations. The next chapter, “Phoenix,” depicts the erratic trail of another teenager, a lost but broke and furious escapee from juvenile custody with a dismal family history who hides out in her drug-dealer uncle’s hovel. Phoenix is glad to return “home” despite the fact that the house is a “total dump” filled with garbage, stolen goods, the odour of “smokes, dope, and old food,” and passed-out young women with limbs blemished with “track bruises.”
Across 29 chapters Vermette gives voice as well to Emily’s mother Paul (Pauline), aunt Lou (Louise), grandmother Cheryl, and great grandmother Kookom (Flora). Subdued, these voices do express love, hope, and contentment. But that’s sporadic. Far more commonly, they speak of <
Generation upon generation this family’s women have endured violence and heartache. Victims or witnesses of rape, murder, abandonment, and hardship, they also have more than passing familiarity with addictive substances as a coping mechanism; shame, defeat, longing, grief, and sadness are their ordinary emotional states.
In The Break, personal and familial crisis points surface with disarming regularity. During a pivotal one, Lou and Paul, who’ve seen too much misery and faced decades of letdowns, losses, and pain, spit out frustrated words and experience-based philosophies:
“We live in a crazy world, Lou. It’s a fucked up, crazy fucking place and I don’t put anything past
anyone anymore. We’re so fucked. We’re fucked, we’re all fucked.”
“We’re fucked up, yeah, but not completely fucked.”
“What the fuck is that supposed to mean?”
“It means everything’s going to be okay.”
Four chapters later, on the novel’s penultimate page, the women briefly return to that debate: “We’re fucked up but not fucked.” As far as statements of optimism go, that’s it. As a realization, as a baseline measurement for existence, that gallows humour is breathtakingly close to nihilism.
Ultimately, Vermette’s vision is disturbing because it’s so oriented toward a future of loss or defeat. She cannot or does not opt to give any of these women the gift of a better life or a feasible escape. Nor does she envision any means to heal individuals or communities. In the end, instead, Paul vows: “I’m going to give up feeling so hopeless. Or at least I’m going to try to feel hopeful as much as I can.” But Vermette—a novelist, not a documentarian; writing fiction, she could pack their bags and move them to the sunny Okanagan if she chose to—offers her characters nothing better than trying not to feel hopeless. The seeming implication? Deadbeat men will continue to let women down, hurt them, or rape them; gangs, violence, and drugs will flourish; direct or implicit racism will remain oppressive norms. And there’s no changing it. The best these Native and mixed-race figures can do is remain alive, and hope that no one will assault them or their kin again. As a portrait of existence, it’s stunningly bleak. And as a portrait, it’s an instructive lesson about just how crushing one author views daily existence in one region of a supposedly progressive, affluent, multicultural, and “highly livable” nation.
At one point Cheryl asks, “They’re already so broken, could they break any more?” Vermette’s despairing view suggests that the adult women will continue to struggle with addictions, serial heartbreaks, and calamity; already in the system, assaulted, or tempted by the fatal promise of gangs, their teenage offspring have just begun to comprehend life’s stacked deck. Like winter storms, further breakage will come. Vermette presents a far-reaching indictment that touches on race, gender, history, and governance. Her perspective is finally so dismaying because it perceives the damaging and corrosive dysfunction of the system as perhaps unfixable and, certainly, a fait accompli.
• • • • • • • • • • • • • • •
The book review would be “spiked,” the email informed me. I hadn’t run across that term and assumed it was journalistic slang for cancelled.
The review in question had been written by me about The Break, a debut work of fiction by Winnipeg poet Katherena Vermette. Well before this announcement the review had already been revised once (per the fiction editor’s comments). When the now-satisfied fiction editor passed that version of the review to the editor-in-chief, it was bounced back to me with further directives regarding a “responsible” next revision. The most recent revision, I was told, had made things even worse. (For those interested in the economics of freelance book reviewing: had the review been published by the journal that assigned it, for the hours spent reading the novel, writing the review, revising it, and revising it again, I’d be paid $110.)
By “things” and “worse,” I understood that the review came across as potentially racist to the editorial readers. True, “racist” was never spoken; I inferred that. The word I read and heard over and again was “insensitive.” As with “responsible” (another word I read and heard repeatedly), what I took away in a reading-between-the-lines kind of way was that the review registered negatively with the Toronto-area editorial staff. Evidently, it appeared insensitive about a subject that required kid gloves, irresponsible—or perhaps not responsible enough—about a subject that needed placement in a highly particular context. To my ears, the subtext of the emails (and, later, a conversation) related to the social politics of unequal power and privilege. Still, as a gay Caucasian male taking up media space to opine about heterosexual Métis and Aboriginal characters in a novel written by a Métis woman, I believed I’d understood the dimensions of the situation. The charge of insensitivity, then, baffled me. (Also, it embarrassed me: the implicit accusation of embodying or reflecting white masculine privilege didn’t jibe well with my own self-perception. The history of my people [ie, sodomites], after all, was nothing but marginalization and Othering for millennia.)
Eventually, thirty minutes of actual telephone conversation with the editor-in-chief culminated with mutual non-understanding, tense words (“censorship” and “Well, that’s not how I see it),” and abrupt call termination (that latter was me, hotheadedly).
The editor-in-chief and (I was reminded several times) additional readers at the office of this literary review journal had perceived the review as dwelling on Vermette’s negative depiction of the lives of her characters in Winnipeg’s troubled North End as indicating my 1) blaming the characters for their plights, and 2) faulting the novelist for not writing a story with a happy ending. To me, neither of these accusations made any sense; they struck me in fact as perverse misreadings of the review.
My own perception is that the review does not disparage the novel at all; there is no fault-finding per se. Instead, the review identifies the overall wintry tone of The Break and speculates on the author’s reasoning for highlighting such a menacing, despairing, and hopeless atmosphere. Further, the sole “responsibility of the review,” I was instructed, was to situate the novel in context to a national dialogue about violence and missing First Nations women that had been going on for the past few years. By that logic any other way of regarding the novel was irresponsible; there was only one correct way to view it and talk about it. About this matter of any review’s primary ethical obligation, the editor-in-chief and I retreated to diplomacy: “I guess we’ll have to agree to disagree.”
Rather than print the review, which would—I assume—somehow sully the quality and reputation of the literary journal, its editor would simply make the review disappear from sight. Evidently, in its pages no public discussion or assessing of Vermette’s novel was gauged preferable to an “insensitive” one. Instead of agreeing to the disappearing of the review, I withdrew it from consideration (with a tearful sayonara to $110) and gave it pride of place here instead.
→ Btw, Wikipedia’s entry on “spiking” places the term in the following ethical frameworks:
“In journalistic parlance, spiking refers to withholding a story from publication for reasons pertaining to its veracity (whether or not it conforms to the facts). Spiking is relatively rare and usually happens late in the editing process (after the assigning editor has signed off on it). It is only required when a simple edit or questioning the reporter or assigning editor cannot fix the problem. Reasons for spiking include a clear bias (someone on an opposing side of an issue did not respond, despite the fact that said response is central to the story), a major hole (many, if not most, readers will have a question after reading the story), a sudden change in events (three more people have died, but getting details from officials is impossible on deadline), or suspicions of plagiarism or other ethical violations on the part of the author.”
Looking now at the usual rationales for spiking—from “clear bias” to “ethical violations on the part of the author”—I’m once again surprised at the differences between my perceptions and those somewhere else who read the review and decided that spiking it was a best plan of action. The whole episode feels like an instructive moment, yes, but I’m still pretty unclear about the nature of the lesson.