Today I am so proud of my friend Darrel McLeod! He just received this tremendous review from a prestigious source of his new novel, A Season in Chezgh’un.

Read the review and beg, borrow or steal the book. You will love it!

By the way, it is also for sale at bookstores across Canada and the US and at Page in the Sun Puerto Vallarta. Amazon anyone?

BEST BOOKS
A Season in Chezgh’un
Darrel J. McLeod. Douglas & McIntyre, $19.95 trade paper (320p) ISBN 978-1-77162-362-9Memoirist McLeod (Mamaskatch) makes his fiction debut with a sublime foray into the complexities of Indigenous life in northern Canada. James, a gay Cree man from northern Alberta, has assimilated in Vancouver and works as a schoolteacher. He lives with a loving partner, with whom he has an open relationship, and has found cultured friends. Still, he still feels out of place after his traditional Cree childhood, even though he lived then in poverty and was beaten and sexually abused by his brother-in-law. When he’s offered the job of principal at an underfunded school on a Dakelh reservation in northern British Columbia, he takes up the challenge to reacclimate yet again (thinking of the salmon who run through rivers into the Pacific and back, he reasons, “If they could migrate and transform themselves like that, with such purpose, why couldn’t he?”). On the reservation, he blends Indigenous skills and language with the standard curriculum. James loves his work, and lives in fear that his anonymous sexual encounters in public places will result in him getting arrested, beaten, or fired. The novel is full of unsparing accounts of the generational trauma inflicted on the Dakelh by Canada’s Catholic-run residential schools, which created a legacy of victims becoming abusers. Despite the adversity faced by James and the Dakelh, however, McLeod writes with great love for the natural world and the strength of its Indigenous people. This is transcendent. (Apr.)

I always knew I had no chance of seeing Django Reinhardt in person because he actually died when I was only 9 years old so that was impossible. However I did dream of seeing the incredible jazz manouche guitarist Birelli La Grene and still do. Covid prevented me from seeing him in a concert I bought tickets for but I keep trying.

I had hoped I could see the extremely talented Sylvain Luc as he was still young but, sadly, he passed away yesterday at only 58 years old as a result of a heart attack. A great friend of Birelli who he often joined in magnificent performances, he will certainly be missed.

​Didier Lockwood, a celebrated violinist of jazz manouche and disciple of Stephane Grappelli also passed away young in 2018, at only 60. Also an unexpected heart attack. I had, again, had hopes of seeing him perform live some day.

​Well, chances Christie, are narrowing…so you better get yourself over to France and see these people you really admire while there is time. And, by the way, do that for all the things that you want to do because you never know. They were only in their 50s and 60s!

So my mind is made up. By hook or by crook, come Hell or high water, I will be in Lisbon this summer to give my best to my poet hero Fernando Pessoa. Perhaps my final farewell, who knows. The moral of the story is never put off what you can do today because tomorrow is just not certain.

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