bioflash: "The Search"

Under the microscope, Sofi examines the Paramecium: life inside a matter of microns. The single cell zigzags across the slide, breaths, ingests, metabolizes and eventually births a twin. A tiny, motile miracle.

Through the telescope, Sofi studies galaxies that spiral, and nebulae named after spiders. The stars are grains of sand on a cosmic beach: too many to imagine, too immense to fathom.

Curiosity carries her forward, an exploration of existence both grand and small. Like a child’s first foray into the forest, Sofi’s experiment is without boundary, her wonder without limit.

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Come and get it!

bioflash: "Late for Work"

Bill’s clock beeped. 6:45. Whap! Snooze.

6:55. Whap! “I don’t wanna work, I just want to bang on my drum...” Oops, wrong button. Whap!

7:05. Yawn. Snooze.

7:15. Ughhh.

7:25. Uh-oh. Thirty-five minutes to get dressed and beat two bridges.

Bill rushed out the door half-dressed. He weaved through traffic like taxis in Rome. Speed limit signs went by in a blurry dream.

A green light? Go faster.

Yellow? Faster still.

Red? Proceed with caution.

Then sirens.

“Damn!”

$196.

And so, like every other day, Bill was late for work.

That night he took a hammer to his snooze alarm.

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Don't hit that snooze alarm! Read more bioflash!

bioflash: "Rainchild"

She is both mothercloud and rainchild. Each rainchild is part of a god, a god whose body is a part of creation. The vast ocean holds her heart, the sky her spirit. Her cycle of reincarnation shifts one form to the next, moving her shape from snow-white infancy into springtime childhood, to finally rest in the eternal ocean. Always, she longs for the freedom of those forgotten waves. Yet the sungod banishes her, upward, to perch on her mountain prison. There she waits, locked in ice, for the summer fairies to dance her frozen crystal legs back into the stream.

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Come and get it! (more bioflash, that is...)

bioflash: "Meditation"

Jakob sat still for an hour. He didn't feel any different.

He tried two hours, then three. Life became a calm, clear river, yet
he wasn't satisfied. To be a perfect being--that's what Jakob wanted.

So he sat, in stubborn rigidness, for ten straight hours. Exhausted,
his eyes opened to a table of Englishmen drinking tea.

“Welcome to our perfect place.”

“What,” Jakob ventured, “do you all do?”

“We sit. We drink. We speak kindly about our Queen.”

“Why?”

With that word he fell back into his basement suite, feeling less
than perfect, and happily so.

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Come and get your bioflash fix!

bioflash: "Cookie Monster"

When the cookie with a chocolate chip happy face spoke to Trevor, he wasn't fazed.

“Don't eat me!”

Chomp.

“Ouch! I bring a message.”

“I'm listening.” Chomp.

“Om-eht-mey-moth.”

“Oh--sorry.”

Trevor rearranged the chocolate chips, using the nose to rebuild its half-eaten mouth. “Better?”

“Hardly. If you eat me, the Cosmic Cookie People will destroy Earth. The choice is yours!”

The words gripped Trevor's soul. Great power carried great responsibility. And yet, never had he tasted anything so delicious. In surreal slow-motion, he helplessly ate the rest.

The first colossal chocolate chip to fall from the sky flattened his house.

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Visit the bioflash breeding grounds right here!

bioflash: "Rain"

Colours of rainbow beckon the sun.

Pearls on grass: soft food for green blades.

Foil to famine, fear to fire.

Sun shield, mountain mane, river rapture.

Quenching the parched, broth of every cell.

The lost child of a nebulous womb whose mourning breaks the sky.

The flood in the plains that overflows leaf and bough.

Lucid fluid on the freeway that twists tires into tragedy.

---

Bioflash galore!

bioflash: "Closed"

“Spineless jellyfish!” Sheryl snapped. “That’s what you are, Ben.”

That night, she acted like nothing had happened.

Ben relished the fresh wound. He held it close, the way a child both resents and covets a hidden hurt. In the dark, nourished by sullen spite, his black seed sprouted.

And so, with time, he learned to revile everything about Sheryl.

She hugged him. What a dreadful choke hold.

She cleared behind the couch. Always judging him for being messy.

She said “I love you.” He heard “You should be grateful.”

In studious silence, Ben seethed, waiting a lifetime for a forgotten apology.

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Bioflash by the handfuls found here!

bioflash: "Last Stop"

The bus driver looked back at Tim.

“Bad dreams?”

Crushed robin’s eggs and smeared embryonic yolk. That’s all Tim saw. He frowned.

“It’s rush-hour. Where is everyone?”

The driver grinned a baleful grin. “Got off at the good stops. But we’re going to the end. Didn’t you know? You’re dead. Had a heart attack six stops back.”

“Heart attack?”

“Quite painless. Not fair, really. You should have left that bird’s nest alone.”

“Bird’s nest?” At a friend’s dare, Tim had flattened the tiny blue eggs beneath his shoe. “I was ten!”

“Old enough.”

Flame licked at the windows.

---

More bioflash than you can shake a stick at found here!

Bioflash: "Family Reunion"

Dave didn’t recognize the young woman walking up his sister’s driveway. By the hook of her nose and square jaw, definitely a Ryerson.

He shook her hand. “I’m Dave.”

She acted aloof, eying him warily. “Jasmine.”

“How are you connected?”

“Gloria is my aunt. I found out about the reunion from her, just a few days ago.”

“My sis? Strange. Oh—here’s my better half. Vanessa, this is Jasmine.”

Jasmine smiled sweetly. “A pleasure, I’m sure. But we’re not related.”

Dave scratched his hooked nose. “I’m confused. What does that make me?”

“My father. Nice to meet you.”

---

Lots more bioflash here!

Bioflash finally returns! -- "Shooting Star"

After a long hiatus, the bioflash have returned! I hope to put up one 100-word story every week.

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“Shooting Star”

Juno burst into Earth’s atmosphere, a stone bullet igniting the night sky. She travelled halfway across the universe to burn up in a brief white flash.

A shooting star, they called her. A nice way to speak of the dying.

But she was no star. A shell of iron, and heart of nickel. Still, 187 wishes were called her way. Juno granted none.

Perhaps, if someone called her by her true name, she would reconsider. But they were too late. Her flaming body, reduced to a bitter kernel, fell forgotten onto Earth, that most disciplined child of the sun.

---

Many more bioflash can be found here!

Death, the Final Emotion

I read this last night at the Kwantlen Writers' Guild annual reading.

You can also read the full version here.

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Dying. Death. Deceased.

These words hold a dark, indefinable weight. What will that last heartbeat feel like? My final gasp of air? These thoughts lurk like a wolf spider in my subconscious, a furry shadow I can’t quite see. Organ failure terrifies me, but not as much as the subsequent loss of conscious thought. One day, knowledge and memory will disappear like city lights winking out one by one. Some might remain on file or paper. Others to be recalled by family or friend. But all of my emotional vitality and fastidious reflections will be buried with me.

And I don’t want to lose that. I have spent far too long in rumination, ponderance and soul spelunking. Like a cow with its cud, I have chewed over every aspect of life—ethics, spirit, philosophy, creativity, relationship and happiness to list some of the highlights—until there is nothing left to digest. Then I take a bite of something new. I want to keep the essence of me alive. Sure, we’re all connected and one day everything will pass. Yet as much as I appreciate community, ecology and the universal thread that holds it all together, I still very much like the notion of I.

I am Lee Michael Beavington. I was born into Arkell, Ontario on May 18th in the year 1977. I like to eat chocolate and watch National Geographic specials on cheetahs. And I will someday die.

There, I said it. I will one day cease to exist. There will be no thought process, no brain activity, no ability to analyse situations to determine the pros and cons. After I die, I won’t be able to look back and think: Hey, this isn’t so bad. I can jump from Earth to Mars to Jupiter! My body only got in the way before...

I wonder, is it my brain that I fret over? My soul is reasonably safe. I’m vegetarian. I never kill spiders in the bathtub. I’m an all-around nice guy. When I die my soul—in whatever shape it so decides—will live on. But my mind, the 100 billion neurons that have wired themselves based on the specific choices I have made these past 32 years, will not make that final transition. Think of all the books I have read! What about my biology degree, all those facts and figures? Cheetahs can run 110 kilometers per hour! One blood cell carries a billion oxygen atoms! Sclerenchyma cell walls possess lignin! If I could only be a head in a jar. I wouldn’t take up much space. Just give me a shelf somewhere in a university library. I could read a new book or journal every day, and help direct students to the New Scientist.

I have trouble, in particular, with the notion that death is forever. The fact that life is finite would not be so hard to swallow if everything that came after wasn’t so long. That isn’t fair. In fact, it violates the code of my moral handbook. If life is short, death should be too. The universe is 12 billion years old. If I’m lucky, I’ll be a centenarian. So that means every second I breathe, comparatively speaking, is nearly four years for the universe. What kind of Divine Being determined that to be okay?

The answer to that question I will likely never know. At least not until I die. And I’m a curious person. I’m a scientist. I like to know how things work. Perhaps God will oblige me in testing some hypotheses. Yet my logical, rational intellect will literally die with me. What if I forget to include a control in my divine experiments? I imagine God is a busy person, and won’t be my personal guinea pig for long, if She agrees to that in the first place. (I use the word She here because, let’s face it, birth is a woman’s domain, and creating the universe would have been one helluva labour, and credit is due where credit is due.)

Of course, death can be devastating. Sudden, violent, and unforgiving in its cold and rigid grip. Lives end—permanently—while others are forever changed. You often can’t predict death. (Though sometimes you can, the great curse of self-awareness.)

But I’m stuck in my head again. Is that the problem? When you get down to it, death is an emotion. That’s right. A feeling. Humans are emotional beings. We feel, we laugh, we hate, we grieve. As much as scientists—men in particular—want to believe otherwise, it is our emotions that define us. Our bursting passions, our darkest fears, our greatest joys. The events, jobs, people, creations and adventures in our lives—the experiences we recall most vividly—are built on feeling. In Star Trek, Spock’s most pivotal moments are when he loses control, when emotion enters the picture.

So death is our final emotion. And that is a scary thought.

My own experience with death is limited to a trip to Disneyland when I was six years old. At the hotel pool, playing tag with my cousins in the deep end—they could swim, I could not—I lost my grip on the concrete lip and fell under. I fought to find air. But no matter how hard I screamed on the inside and flailed on the outside, I could not escape. My cousin Sam pulled me out. I still remember the dark spectre trying to drag me down. Is that what death feels like? Submersed in fluid, caged in the amnion, powerless to escape from the reaper’s womb? Dylan Thomas would have us pledge: “Do not go gentle into that good night.” Yet when my time comes, is it not an exercise in futility to rage against the dying of the light?

Then again, maybe it’s best not to dwell on one’s own mortality. Which means I have stewed long enough over this murky pot. At the very least, when I’m dead I won’t have to think about being dead. And if I can, what a pleasant surprise that will be.

First draft of The Tainted River is complete!

Yesterday, by Lynn Creek in North Vancouver, I finished the first draft of my novel, The Tainted River.



I actually wrote chapter one while on the backwaters of Kerala, India. Once again, at the end, I find myself by the river.



More to come...

Who knew poetry could be lucrative?

My ode to the bigleaf maple, entitled "Family Tree", placed second in the Earth Vision nature writing contest.

Follow the link to read!

This poem has now earned me a whopping $200.

Transcribing Truth

Please note: the full version, with photos, can be found here.

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In my hands I hold a treasure chest of words: my great-grandfather’s notebook. “Pow-wow,” reads the cover. Stoic Indians sit around a campfire next to a teepee, above the words subject and name. On the back, a multiplication table. This child’s notebook, fished from my mom’s filing cabinet last month, once felt my great-grandfather’s adult pencil. What golden prize waits within? I will transcribe every word.

I suppose it comes down to DNA. In the nucleus of each cell, coded in those entangled strands, lie threads of my ancestors—living and dead. My Norwegian great-great grandmother, who never accepted her son, Thomas, leaving the priesthood. After he married, she hounded Thomas and his wife, forcing them to immigrate to Canada. My kind and gentle grandma Bessie, who faced tragedy with great courage. And finally my mom, Dorothy: writer, social worker, feminist.

This thread of DNA has led to me.

Words shaped my mind earlier than most. The first book read to me—Richard Adam’s Watership Down—flowed from Dad’s tongue while Mom’s every heartbeat still gently jostled me within the amniotic fluid. Later, Mom cooed stories about animals and fairy tales with feminist maidens, while my dad told tales through flute and guitar. In kindergarten, too shy to fight for the train set, I abandoned toys for books.

What compels me to write? To lose myself in legend and share personal wisdom? Though I work in science—teaching students about microscopic cells and the vast biosphere—writing inspires me beyond any discipline. Yet my obsessive drive to create characters, narratives, even entire worlds is not enough. To archive and preserve ancestral stories is a commitment that springs from a well of curious habit. I have transcribed writings from three relatives—mother, aunt and great-grandfather.

As the third born of four sons, I feel the closest feminine ties with my mom, Dorothy, and her sisters—Betty and Chrissie. Only through transcribing their writings have I come to understand the three bookish goddesses nicknamed “sisti-uglers” by one of Chrissie’s boyfriends.

Mom raised me to love art. She put books—everything from The Iliad to Harriet the Spy to Aesop’s fables—on my shelves. She introduced me to foreign film—Fellini’s La Strada and Bergman’s Wild Strawberries. She nurtured every creative project I undertook: wall-to-wall mazes drawn across pin-feed computer paper, a filmed fantasy adventure in the backyard, and entering my first writing contest at age thirteen. While Dad held the role of ruthless editor (invaluable to me, if hard to bear), Mom was always the encourager. The one who says, “This is great! Send it out!”

I transcribed her manuscript first. Touching: A Family Love Story is filled with sex, cancer, death, tainted love, women-scorned—the six hundred yellowed pages contain everything my parents censored. In 2002 I found the manuscript languishing in the garage. Packing tape peeled from the flaccid box marked “Mom’s book.” As I picked up the hefty stack of papers, the clack of the typewriter instantly sounded from memory.

As a kid, that noise meant one thing: Do not disturb! My mom took refuge in the study—a room built by Dad, and later my bedroom—where she pounded at the keys. I remember the rhythm of the type bars hitting the paper, the grinding carriage return. Another finished line. She spat out dozens of pages each session, yet the silences meant even more. My budding eight-year-old intellect knew something about the artist’s mind. That sacred creative space. When I drew four-meter mazes, I tolerated no interruption. I can still hear Mom’s tone of voice, still see her piercing stare when I dared trespass. I possess the same fiery conviction. The only time I ever snapped at my girlfriend is when she peered over my shoulder while I wrote. To come between artist and art is to step between mother bear and cub.

Children do not witness their parents’ adolescence; they see them as mentors, life teachers that seem to shrink with time. Little did I know, as I set Touching on the desk next to my computer, the visceral journey that awaited. I discovered parts of my mother I had never met, parts almost too painful to bear.

On page one, Mom quotes Virginia Woolf: “The beauty of the world…has two edges, one of laughter, one of anguish cutting the heart asunder.”

Next page Mom holds her sister Betty in her arms as she dies, and then sings to her mother in a Pincher Creek hospital. “For almost seven hours I sang her favourite songs and hymns and slowly willed her to die. It was a labour of love. I gave my mother death as she had given me birth.”

I soon realized that in digitizing her book, I would be swimming in the depths of my mother’s anguish and grief.

As I transcribed aged typeface to bits and bytes, I moved vicariously through 1983, a year where I played with Star Wars action figures. A woman I thought I knew—mother, protector, housewife—became daughter, sister, writer, pissed off feminist, frustrated wife. I was six when her world collapsed, her older sister and mother having died a week apart. One morning, ready for school, I remember Mom breaking into tears, clutching the walls for support. My maternal pillar crumbled before my eyes. Dad said we could stay home. But my brothers and I ran for the bus, eager to escape. Our home could no longer shelter us from the storms of reality.

One hundred-and-fifty-thousand words later, I gained a fuller understanding of Dorothy Anne Lee, all the layers of onion peeled back to reveal the hidden, fragile flower. Behind Mom was a woman with admissible faults and extraordinary resilience. A woman who kept breastfeeding even when her doctor said: ‘Beyond three months it’s pathological.’ A woman who faced her own breast cancer scare—then watched two of the closest women in her life succumb to cancer. Despite her heart being cut asunder, she found strength to carry on, to write her story and live her life.

At Aunt Betty’s 50th birthday party, my mom wrote a series of clues for the family treasure hunt. As she says in Touching:

Betty started this ritual over forty years ago. The rules had always been simple. The clues must be clever, brilliant and challenging. They must be difficult to decipher but not impossible. Betty had always been the most clever clue maker. Hers were rhyming couplets often with literary references.

Nelson [author’s note: Nelson is my dad] had the distinction after he joined the family of producing absolutely brilliant clues that defied all the previous rules as to rhyme and reason…once he just gave Betty a blank piece of paper. It took her an hour to figure out that it meant “empty space”, which referred to the empty space in the crawl space above her ceiling.

Twenty years later, for Mother’s Day, I wrote clues for Mom. I organized a treasure hunt, just as she had done for Betty on her last birthday. Mine were not as clever or erudite. “Frozen chest” led her to the freezer, “hot cube” to the dryer, and eventually “music-maker’s seat” to the piano bench. Inside lay the crisp white pages of Touching.

The journey through Mom’s book led fittingly to my indomitable aunt, Betty Lambert, English professor and author of seventy plays. “Brilliant, wise, larger-than life,” my dad, her ex-student, succinctly wrote of her. While on holiday in San Francisco, she fell in love with an African American law student. Within the month she realized she was pregnant, but he did not want to be a father. Betty decided to keep the baby and raise the child on her own.

When I was young and shy, her flamboyance intimidated me. During family visits to Aunt Betty’s house, I ran in the backyard and played with Golda, her golden lab. Only scattered images remain. Russian matryoshka nesting dolls. Black-and-white family photos on the mantelpiece. A huge painting of a potted cactus. How does one build a relationship from a six-year-old memory?

Years later, my mom introduced me to Betty’s plays. Jennie’s Story, inspired by true events, examines the ramifications of Alberta’s Sexual Sterilization Act enacted in 1928. This permitted sterilization without consent on those deemed unfit or mentally challenged. The young Jennie worked as a housekeeper for a Catholic priest. He seduced her. To ensure she would not become pregnant, he convinced authorities she was mentally challenged and took her to Ponoka to be sterilized. He told Jennie she was having an appendectomy.

I saw Under the Skin next. Based on a real kidnapping in Port Moody, the focus is Renee’s marriage to the cruel, ruthless John, and his terrible secret. John has confined the neighbour’s twelve-year-old to the bomb shelter beneath his workshop, where he sexually molests her. Renee’s subtle reaction to what her heart gradually knows to be true underlies the play’s stark theme.

These productions were my first exposure to Betty’s vision. Her humour, honesty, and moral fury surfaced from the intensely drawn characters. As a teenager I read her sole novel, Crossings, moulding my nascent life philosophy further. Largely autobiographical, it depicts her physical and sexually abusive relationship with Mik. I began to understand woman as victims of patriarchal society, but persevering nonetheless. I witnessed violence and oppression endured with tender strength and determination.

On my personal journey to discover Betty, this treasure hunt led me to the veritable dragon’s den: Simon Fraser University’s special collections library. In that temperature and humidity-controlled room lay forty boxes filled with Elizabeth Minnie Lambert. SFU had bought her literary estate. Scripts, drafts, journals, letters, lectures…I tore into the manuscripts voraciously, feeding off her words like a coyote in a chicken coop.

For months I returned, every week devouring another few boxes. I read her notes on making love, script drafts covered in red edits, stories of teenage heartbreak, letters to an on-again off-again ex-lover, and personal diaries that shied away from nothing. Betty was always a seeker of truth. And she shared her truth, no matter how shocking. In one entry, I found a reference to me as a baby—my colicky scream filled her with an overwhelming desire to strangle me with her bare hands.

The dialogue in Betty’s plays made evident her wit. The mountain of manuscripts and drafts revealed her unwavering drive. Her entertaining letters, lovelorn confusion, and desperation for truth all danced behind the words. The aunt who died while I learned to print and spell now became a fellow writer and teacher.

In tribute to her words, I designed an elaborate website referencing every single work she wrote, published or not. But my goal was accomplished. My Aunt Betty was no longer a stranger.

Betty was a writer to the bitter end. Even when blinded by brain tumours, struck mute by pneumonia, she printed letter by painstaking letter on her yellow pad: I want to write. Her last words were on that same yellow pad.

What is the final demand in life? she wrote to my mom.

“I don’t know, Betty. But I’m sure you do.”

She nodded and wrote, every letter a tremendous effort, More and more and more nostalgia. So my mom talked about their father and mother, their childhood struggles, their bonding as sisters, how much they had always loved each other. She talked until Betty took her last breath in my mother’s arms.

Only two of the sisti-uglers remain, and my path now leads me to the youngest. Like her mother and older sister, cancer would later claim Chrissie’s body. Letters offer her only literary legacy, but she was full of story. In early 2007, given months to live, she clung to photos and family stories. During my final visits, we dug through boxes of familial treasures. As she moved excitedly from one subject to the next, I scrawled names and dates on unlabelled pictures, often including a question mark. Like a sponge, I sucked in her wit-filled anecdotes told with her wicked sense of humour.

Chrissie knew life’s importance. Hardship, injustice, ailment, and grief all tried to sour her spirit. Yet at her core, Chrissie lived for and shared story. Like Betty, she craved nostalgia.

And now, in my hands, the notebook of my great-grandfather, Thomas Craven, filled with fictional stories. This past week I transcribed the first, untitled tale about a bully named Piggoh.

Why am I driven this way, to set in stone words of the dead? Respect for ghosts of generations past? Morbid curiosity? Or perhaps, by following those who came before, I hope to find my own path.

In the lumberjack camps, Piggoh preys on Jules, a French immigrant. Thomas himself fled England for Canada in 1896 aboard the SS Mongolian, to escape his domineering mother. She demanded he stay in the priesthood. Instead, he married Bridget McGrane, a sweet Irish colleen—poor, illiterate, half his age, and soon pregnant. Thomas’s mother got him fired from a university job and threatened to disinherit him. He would have come into Westwood, a stately mansion complete with tea house, vineyard, horse stables and dog kennels. But he cut the phantom umbilical by crossing the Atlantic and taking the surname Cooper.

Thomas bought land near Cowley, a remote town 150 miles south of Calgary. He thought the scrubland would be valuable when the railway went through. But the tracks were diverted. With a third child on the way, and their barren land worthless, he became desperate for work. This man, fluent in five languages and with degrees from Oxford and Cambridge, accepted the job of logging camp cook. Thomas delighted in working outdoors, concocting new recipes, soups, and—as it turns out—fiction.

The story of Piggoh and Jules is obviously inspired by his days in the logging camps. Thomas’s penciled, cursive writing makes every third or fourth word difficult to decipher. With patient diligence, I transcribed the thirteen-page story; Jules stands up to the bully with one resounding punch.

[Piggoh] lay silent and peaceful amid the wild flowers and fern like a fallen angel. Jules, uncertain as to what would now happen, stood ready. Would Piggoh rise and beat him up? If so, he would take it willingly for the pleasure of seeing his tormenter ‘hors de combat’. The fallen bully lay without movement, looking up into the face of the French youth with surprise and with fear plainly written on his face.

Then Jules returned to his work and his axe, feeling and looking like a conqueror! Piggoh’s companions left him to recover as he was able, for it is against the etiquette of the woods to interfere in a fight.

“What happened?” was a question put by the bully.

“You were knocked out in one blow,” he was informed. “Served you damn well right!”

The last story in the notebook is called “The Timekeeper.” Thomas played that role at the ill-fated Frank Mine, a job he took some years later. At 4:10 in the morning, April 29th, 1903, 90 million tons of rock fell from the summit of Turtle Mountain. The town of Frank was swept away in a thunderous wave. By chance, Thomas was absent from work that morning.

Christened Turtle Mountain by rancher Louis Garnett, the oral traditions of the Blackfoot and Kutenai aptly referred to the peak as “the mountain that moves.” Thomas wrote about the day stone fell like rain in his article “The Terror that Came in the Night.”

The mass of falling rocks poured down on the town below with unceasing and irresistible force from the summit of the mountain literally burying the dwellings beneath and their unfortunate inmates, who waking in terror were buried in their rocky tombs beneath the crushing weight of countless tons…we know nothing of the [cause]—all is conjecture. Only one thing we know for certain is that we were and are alive and thankful to be so.

My three ancestral writers possess such diverse telling of tales. I search for the common thread, the fitting motif. My great grandfather dealt with mines and lumberjack camps. Mom and Aunt Betty wrote feminist-driven memoirs. I write about rivers, Iceland, and life on other planets. Is there a link?

We all seek truth. The truth of the Frank Slide, the truth of my Aunt Betty’s abusive relationship, the truth of cancer’s devastating effects. My own personal seeds of truth germinate into reflections on Mother Nature’s spirituality, world travelogues, and insights from exploring an entirely alien perspective.

On a cellular level, my ancestors and I share the same threads of life. Yet Watson, Crick and Franklin determined DNA to be a double helix—I have only elucidated stories from my maternal strand. On Dad’s side, stories are hard to come by. One week ago, wishing to explore my other helical half, I visited my dad’s mother. My hidden agenda? Hearing tales from her eighty years of life. Her first response came as a joyful sound, “For Christmas of next year, I’m going to write out my life story.” I felt a warm shiver of anticipation. I coaxed her for a preview; she was eager to oblige. Pieces of my past fell into place.

“My father—your great grandfather—had golden locks.” Hence my bright blonde curls up to age five.

“In cross-country, my brother and I finished third in all the Saskatchewan schools.” Hence my love of long-distance running.

“I wanted so badly to be a teacher, but my parents could only send one of us to university. My brother got to go. I thought to myself, I’ll get married and start a family.” My grandmother married and a year later Dad was born. The other half of the puzzle began to fill in.

I was curious. “Grandma, are you going to use your old script typewriter?”

She shook her head. “I’ll do it longhand.”

I offered to transcribe her words. Said it would be my honour—and it grants me first reading rights.

With this future project of preservation on my mind, I left feeling more familiar with my paternal strand. DNA fulfills its vital functions—protein production, replication, growth—only after being copied and transcribed. Then its purpose is translated into physical meaning. At some point, I will stop transcribing to focus on my tale. Yet the remaining pockets of truth compel me to further unravel those familial strands. This cause is ultimately selfish. When my time comes, I will be well prepared. In those last few hours and days, when death’s shadow robs my senses one by one, I will have no shortage of precious family nostalgia to bring me comfort.

Lee Beavington
August 20, 2009

References

Beavington, Dorothy. Touching: A Family Love Story. (Unpublished manuscript).

Cooper, Thomas. “The Terror That Came in the Night.” Pincher Creek Echo, April 26, 1962 (reprinted).

Lambert, Betty. Jennie’s Story.

Lambert, Betty. Under the Skin.

www.bettylambert.com

www.leebeavington.com

One more pat on the back...

Wow!

Wednesday night, the Kwantlen Writers' Guild held their annual reading event, and also announced the winners of the creative writing contest. I entered two poems, and one piece for nonfiction and fiction, in hopes of placing in one of the three categories.

Beforehand, I was a little nervous about getting up to read in front of the 40 or 50 people present. So when my friend Tanya arrived, she promptly suggested that we dance in the corner where the music was coming from. Not a bad way to shake the nerves (despite being stared at by everyone in the room!)

My parents were also there. Reading three of my bioflash went fine, and after several other readings Sheila Hancock, the outgoing chair of the Creative Writing department, announced the winners of the contest.

"The judging was blind," she assured everyone. "For poetry, first place goes to Lee Beavington."

Needless to say, I was quite surprised. Poetry isn't my strongest suit, and I had just heard some very strong poets, such as Karen Ezra, give stellar readings of their work. Up I went to shake Sheila's hand and get a copy of the Kwantlen Writers' Guild journal, in which my poem appears.

Second and third place for poetry were announced, and then on to nonfiction. "In second place we have...Lee Beavington!"

Up I went again. Then fiction came, in which I held little hope, as I had submitted a fantasy-flavoured piece, and I assumed the journal catered to what some consider to be "literary". Sheila called out the winners.

"First place goes to Lee Beavington!"

Flabbergasted by this point, I went up and proceeded to apologize to the crowd. My current creative writing instructor (Aislinn Hunter--big thanks to her for organizing the event) called out: "Lee slept with all the judges!"

The annual creative writing scholarship went to my talented classmate Angela Kenyon (who also placed second in the poetry category). Congrats to her! Before they announced the winner of the scholarship, a short piece was read about each applicant, including me. My teacher, Zoe Landale, wrote the following, which was read by the incoming chair (and inspirational teacher galore) Ross Laird:

Lee Beavington is a writer with courage. Getting to the places which resonate with readers requires going deep into the places where we ourselves are uncertain, and shadows leap high on the cave walls. Lee is a person who cares about stories. He also has a great work ethic and goes back over and over his writing until it fairly gleams.

I've been beaming since last night.

Bioflash: "Destiny's Fate"

“Don’t worry, be happy,” said Fate. “What will be will be.”

Destiny shook his head. “How can you say that? Luck is something you make.”

“Excuse me,” said Luck. “I was made by the divine.”

“I guess that makes me a heathen,” said Chance.

“Fortune favours the bold,” said Fortune boldly.

“You would say that,” Freewill said to Fortune. “It is the choices in life that are important.”

“Only the ones I make,” said Fate.

Destiny smiled. “And you make those choices because of me.”

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