by Rosemary Brown
While the books read for June touched on some of the same themes, they could not have been more different in approach and sensibility. However, I thoroughly enjoyed both books.
In the Indigenous Book Club, we read Two-Spirit Stories, Sex and the Ceremony Behind it All. This slim volume of sometimes achingly beautiful poetry was written by Alycia Two Bears, who describes herself as mixed blood, and is a member of the Mistawasis Nehiya First Nation in Saskatchewan.
Two Bears lives in Calgary where she earned B.A.s in General Studies and Education at the University of Calgary and where she now practices as a full spectrum birth worker. The mother of five children, she advocates for midwifery and home births. She is also a board member of the Moss Bag Project which assembles and distributes menstrual supplies to women who are unhoused.
Two Bear’s commitment to and love for women shines through her poetry. Organized into rounds, these short poems, some only one sentence long, are elegant and evocative. The gentleness and grace with which she treats a range of themes is reminiscent of her late mentor Sharron Proulx Turner, who is lovingly remembered in a few of the poems.
Some of my favourite lines were: “As a child I believed I could control the wind”; “Mountains are women lying naked on their back, sides lush green bushes, wet blue lakes, white nipple peaks, dark caves, sacred exploration”; and “Spirits looking for their lost child, bright lights in the night sky.”
Venco, the Settlers Book club selection, is not gentle nor graceful but is an equally compelling, women-centred read. Penned by award-winning and best-selling author Cherie Dimaline, from the Historic Georgian Bay Metis Community in Ontario, Venco traverses the centuries from the vantage point of the present and takes us into multiple geographic locations in North America.
I loosely categorize this work as an urban fantasy. It revolves around six women from diverse stages of life, racial, cultural, and sexual identities, who all have one thing in common. They are witches and they are searching for a seventh witch to complete their coven. They are aided by the Oracle (embodied in the Crone, the Mother, and the Maiden) as they seek to destroy the last of the Good Walkers, Jay Christos.
Since the time of the Inquisition, the Good Walkers have been claimed to use magical powers to seek out and kill “witches”: the healers, wise women, and mid-wives of old. For the Oracle and the witches, Jay personifies all that is wrong with the contemporary world, from the ravages of capitalism to the abuse of women and the natural world.
Jay Christos is a beautiful, seductive, narcissistic, abusive immortal who is determined to prevent the formation of the North American coven based in Salem. To do so he stalks Lucky, the sixth witch, as she searches for the seventh needed to complete the coven, a necessary step before the Oracle can act.
While the book start slowly as the author introduces us to her characters, it quickly picks up the pace and the reader will not want to put it down until they reach the dramatic and somewhat shocking conclusion.
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