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What I Want to Tell Goes Like This
What I Want to Tell Goes Like This is an intensely original first short story collection from acclaimed poet Matt Rader. The last story, "All This Was a Long Time Ago," is the 2014 winner of the Jack Hodgins Founders' Award for fiction from The Malahat Review , and other offerings from the collection have appeared in Event, The New Quarterly, Grain, Joyland, Forget Magazine and the Rusty Toque.
Rader's command of tension is masterful in these dark, off-kilter stories that are largely set in the context of the working/labour class in and around the Comox Valley on Vancouver Island, BC. They alternate between exploring the history of severe labour struggles in the area over a century ago, and the present-day experiences of people sliding through transitional, ambiguous moments in their relationships and sexuality. The juxtaposition of the two time periods seems to hint at the echoes of the harsh, violent legacy of the earlier age and its power struggles that continue to resonate in contemporary life.
In What I Want to Tell Goes Like This, we are witness to the controversial shooting death of infamous union activist Albert "Ginger" Goodwin by a police constable in 1918; to the squalor of tent cities erected on the Royston Bay mudflats during the Great Vancouver Coal Strike of 1912-14; to two boys' experimentation with sexual violence at the end of a secluded logging road; and to clarity and companionship found in a small cabin by the sea as a son cares for his dying father--a rough man who abandoned him when he was eight. In Rader's artful tales of grit and mystery, danger never feels far away.
Rader's command of tension is masterful in these dark, off-kilter stories that are largely set in the context of the working/labour class in and around the Comox Valley on Vancouver Island, BC. They alternate between exploring the history of severe labour struggles in the area over a century ago, and the present-day experiences of people sliding through transitional, ambiguous moments in their relationships and sexuality. The juxtaposition of the two time periods seems to hint at the echoes of the harsh, violent legacy of the earlier age and its power struggles that continue to resonate in contemporary life.
In What I Want to Tell Goes Like This, we are witness to the controversial shooting death of infamous union activist Albert "Ginger" Goodwin by a police constable in 1918; to the squalor of tent cities erected on the Royston Bay mudflats during the Great Vancouver Coal Strike of 1912-14; to two boys' experimentation with sexual violence at the end of a secluded logging road; and to clarity and companionship found in a small cabin by the sea as a son cares for his dying father--a rough man who abandoned him when he was eight. In Rader's artful tales of grit and mystery, danger never feels far away.
- GenresFiction
256 pages, Paperback
First published September 14, 2014
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
June 18, 2022
Oh, Matt. You got yer words. You got yer sentences. And now you got the history too. Where will it all end?
Rader is a writer who is not afraid of simple sentences or using common words to carry a great weight. Of course he also has the big gun vocabulary and poetic structures to back it all up. The total result is impressive. I had read the final story previously, when it was first published in the journal Malahat. It was a pleasure to read it again.
The volume, however, could have done with a bit more copy-editing. The perennial peak/peek problem, and a few apparently missing little words.
The title of the collection is not one of the story titles, but is taken from a line in the first piece.
Rader is a writer who is not afraid of simple sentences or using common words to carry a great weight. Of course he also has the big gun vocabulary and poetic structures to back it all up. The total result is impressive. I had read the final story previously, when it was first published in the journal Malahat. It was a pleasure to read it again.
The volume, however, could have done with a bit more copy-editing. The perennial peak/peek problem, and a few apparently missing little words.
The title of the collection is not one of the story titles, but is taken from a line in the first piece.
August 5, 2015
After the Sun newspaper released the film footage of then-Princess Elizabeth being taught by her uncle Edward to give a Nazi salute, Kathryn Hughes wrote in the Guardian on July 19 2015 "There is nothing more thrilling than when the past springs back to life and taps us on the shoulder." That resonated for me as I read this book. Matt is my cousin by marriage and I'm predisposed to like his work, but based on the reviews of "What I Want to Tell Goes Like This" and on his published poems I've read I was expecting to be more drawn in by the contemporary stories in this collection than by the historical ones. Instead, the stories set (sort of, because most of these stories don't move linearly through time) between 1904 and 1918 were my favourites.
I enjoyed the dark wit, clear and often lyrical prose, and echoes of themes and ideas and landscape and doom and gloom between the stories, past and present. Despite/because of the meticulous documenting of sources that Rader weaves through “The Children of the Great Strike, Vancouver Island, 1912–1914” and that at least one review I read complained about, that grounding in what is actually known about what happened made that story's tap of the past especially sharp on my shoulder. "Grand Forks, 1917" vividly imagines the meeting of miner and labour activist Albert "Ginger" Goodwin with religious leader and pacifist activist Peter Vasilevich Verigin without that same level of documentation. "All This Was A Long Time Ago" centres around James Joyce and Nora Barnacle near the start of their decades-long relationship and how Joyce's story "The Dead" started but has a present-day narrator who shares a lot of biographical details with Matt Rader possibly leaving his marriage of 15 years, separated from Joyce by 107 years but meeting him in the window of a ferry at night.
I enjoyed "First Women's Battalion of Death", mostly set in a contemporary salon but with the thoughts of the perspective character Catherine bringing in World War I:
"She listened to the sound of the broom against the floor and she imagined in that instant that is was the sound of the hairs moving against each other. Our hair going on even after death, "like grass in good soil." That's what Remarque's beleaguered German in _All Quiet on the Western Front_ imagines: the hair growing on his dead comrades' corpses in the mud of Western Europe, their nails twisting into corkscrews. Catherine knew it was a myth that these cells went on without us, without our beating hearts, but it compelled her imagination as it had Remarque's and now here was all that hair that her mind could not quite make dead being drawn across the floor."
and then later in that story:
“History was like this for Catherine: full of doublings, repetitions, echoes, rhymes, recurring shapes in time that lit up when viewed through the agency of perception. Often her life seemed to be lit with recognition, as if history were looking her in the eyes, as if she were being seen by Time. That was how she felt at that moment in the office.
That was how she felt in the salon.”
The story I liked least was the shortest one, "At The Lake", in which Rader writes of the sexual assault of a woman from the perspective of one of her two male rapists. As I read it I assumed the lake where this happens is near the Great Strike, near where the police shot Ginger Goodwin and captured in the story that follows it, "Alone Mountain," and the structure of the collection implies the Comox Valley's dark past informs its present, and again there were thematic echoes of other stories in this one. But I'm not re-reading it to confirm my recollection that the "doublings, repetitions, echoes, rhymes, recurring shapes in time" in this case were murky and just too dark for my taste.
"Alone Mountain" was also dark, starting from the perspective of Goodwin's killer, but apparently I'm less troubled by reading of a death from the perspective of the killer than of a rape from the perspective of the rapist. Maybe because it ends with Goodwin's perspective, and weaves in indigenous origin stories. And maybe the documenting of Goodwin's death, which had been mentioned in both “The Children of the Great Strike, Vancouver Island, 1912–1914” and "Grand Forks, 1917", felt more like a story that needed to be told.
I'm left by the book with a desire to finally read James Joyce and maybe Remarque, to learn more about Ginger Goodwin and the Comox Valley and Russian immigrant pacifists and labour unrest in early 20th Century BC. If I'd read that in someone else's review it would not have been a selling point. For me that's a testament to the power of the writing and stories in "What I Want to Tell Goes Like This", how they compelled my imagination even as they exposed the dark side of humanity.
I enjoyed the dark wit, clear and often lyrical prose, and echoes of themes and ideas and landscape and doom and gloom between the stories, past and present. Despite/because of the meticulous documenting of sources that Rader weaves through “The Children of the Great Strike, Vancouver Island, 1912–1914” and that at least one review I read complained about, that grounding in what is actually known about what happened made that story's tap of the past especially sharp on my shoulder. "Grand Forks, 1917" vividly imagines the meeting of miner and labour activist Albert "Ginger" Goodwin with religious leader and pacifist activist Peter Vasilevich Verigin without that same level of documentation. "All This Was A Long Time Ago" centres around James Joyce and Nora Barnacle near the start of their decades-long relationship and how Joyce's story "The Dead" started but has a present-day narrator who shares a lot of biographical details with Matt Rader possibly leaving his marriage of 15 years, separated from Joyce by 107 years but meeting him in the window of a ferry at night.
I enjoyed "First Women's Battalion of Death", mostly set in a contemporary salon but with the thoughts of the perspective character Catherine bringing in World War I:
"She listened to the sound of the broom against the floor and she imagined in that instant that is was the sound of the hairs moving against each other. Our hair going on even after death, "like grass in good soil." That's what Remarque's beleaguered German in _All Quiet on the Western Front_ imagines: the hair growing on his dead comrades' corpses in the mud of Western Europe, their nails twisting into corkscrews. Catherine knew it was a myth that these cells went on without us, without our beating hearts, but it compelled her imagination as it had Remarque's and now here was all that hair that her mind could not quite make dead being drawn across the floor."
and then later in that story:
“History was like this for Catherine: full of doublings, repetitions, echoes, rhymes, recurring shapes in time that lit up when viewed through the agency of perception. Often her life seemed to be lit with recognition, as if history were looking her in the eyes, as if she were being seen by Time. That was how she felt at that moment in the office.
That was how she felt in the salon.”
The story I liked least was the shortest one, "At The Lake", in which Rader writes of the sexual assault of a woman from the perspective of one of her two male rapists. As I read it I assumed the lake where this happens is near the Great Strike, near where the police shot Ginger Goodwin and captured in the story that follows it, "Alone Mountain," and the structure of the collection implies the Comox Valley's dark past informs its present, and again there were thematic echoes of other stories in this one. But I'm not re-reading it to confirm my recollection that the "doublings, repetitions, echoes, rhymes, recurring shapes in time" in this case were murky and just too dark for my taste.
"Alone Mountain" was also dark, starting from the perspective of Goodwin's killer, but apparently I'm less troubled by reading of a death from the perspective of the killer than of a rape from the perspective of the rapist. Maybe because it ends with Goodwin's perspective, and weaves in indigenous origin stories. And maybe the documenting of Goodwin's death, which had been mentioned in both “The Children of the Great Strike, Vancouver Island, 1912–1914” and "Grand Forks, 1917", felt more like a story that needed to be told.
I'm left by the book with a desire to finally read James Joyce and maybe Remarque, to learn more about Ginger Goodwin and the Comox Valley and Russian immigrant pacifists and labour unrest in early 20th Century BC. If I'd read that in someone else's review it would not have been a selling point. For me that's a testament to the power of the writing and stories in "What I Want to Tell Goes Like This", how they compelled my imagination even as they exposed the dark side of humanity.
February 10, 2019
Poetic Prose
Love how he crafts his words and how he weaves history into his storytelling. He creates an intimacy with his readers that delivers a satisfying emotional engagement.
Love how he crafts his words and how he weaves history into his storytelling. He creates an intimacy with his readers that delivers a satisfying emotional engagement.
March 12, 2015
This short story collection surprised me. I didn't expect to enjoy it as much as I did. The stories are generally set in Vancouver Island mining communities in the early part of the twentieth century and are quite a diverse group.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews