When six-foot Curva Peligrosa rides her horse into Weed, Alberta, after a twenty-year trek up the Old North Trail from southern Mexico, she stops its residents in their tracks. A parrot perched on each shoulder, wearing a serape and flat-brimmed black hat, and smiling and flashing her glittering gold tooth, she is unlike anything they have ever seen before. Curva is ready to settle down, but are the inhabitants of Weed ready for her? With an insatiable appetite for life and love, Curva’s infectious energy galvanizes the townspeople. With the greenest of thumbs, she creates a tropical habitat in an arctic clime, and she possesses a wicked trigger finger, her rifle and six-guns never far away.
Then a tornado tears though Weed, leaving all the inhabitants’ lives in disarray and revealing dark remains that cause the Weedites to question their very foundations. And that’s how the novel starts, with the twister hurtling Curva’s purple outhouse into the center of town, Curva inside, “peering through a slit in the door at the village dismantling around her.”
From then on, we follow Curva and the Weedites as they recover from the chaos that follows. As the above synopsis shows, a good portion of Curva Peligrosa’s narrative takes place in the fictional small town of Weed, Alberta, about twenty-five miles from what is now a major city, Calgary. When I, Lily MacKenzie, left the city in 1963, the population was two hundred fifty thousand. Today, Calgary, and its environs, has well over a million people.
While Curva Peligrosa doesn’t have autobiographical roots (I’m not Mexican American or six feet tall. Nor do I have a gold tooth!), it does have some parallels to historical moments in the province. When I was growing up in that area, agriculture was the main source of income. But in 1947, significant oil reserves were discovered at Leduc, Alberta, ushering in the oil boom that continues today. The excitement over extracting black gold from the earth brought job seekers and others to the area, eager to exploit the province’s riches.
I must have registered these developments subliminally, even though it wasn’t something I was particularly conscious of at the time. And as a young woman, I did secretarial work for Sinclair Canada Oil and other American petroleum companies. Impressionable, I thought the Texas accents signified power and prosperity and wanted to emulate them, faking a drawl whenever I could. It took me a while to realize that, in fact, many Americans were taking over our land and much of its oil.
My association with these (mainly) southerners fueled my interest in moving to America in my early twenties. Eventually I became an American citizen so that, as a single parent, I could take advantage of California’s university system and earn degrees (a B.A. and two Masters degrees) from San Francisco State. So while my early contact with these oilmen may not have been personally promising at the time, the experience propelled me into seeking higher education that wasn’t then available to me in Canada. However, the earlier image of American oilmen making off with our prairie identity had been planted. It stayed with me, surfacing in Curva Peligrosa and in Curva’s concerns over what she was witnessing in Weed, a town she had recently made her home. But none of this was intentional when I began the narrative. I had no idea then where it would take me.
In the novel, Shirley, an americano who is buying up nearby land so he can own all of the oil rights, represents the kind of southerner from my earlier experience. In Curva Peligrosa, he ends up being a villain in the old sense of the word where many readers will end up booing him. In turn, Shirley seems to embrace that identity and to enjoy the turmoil he is creating, not only in Curva, but also in the Weedites themselves. I had created a kind of Trumpian character long before Trump had brought chaos to America.
Like Curva, I’m not averse to some kinds of development, but I do recognize that the word can be misleading. In certain cases, it might represent growth and advancement for the people involved. For example, the Blackfoot tribe in Curva Peligrosa benefit from the oil wealth. It allows them to build a museum that highlights Native life and also to open their own university. Under the leadership of their chief Billie One Eye, the wealth gives them an identity they otherwise had lacked, even though they sold out to the americano in order to enrich their tribe.
But in many other instances, such development can deplete the land of valuable resources and drastically disturb the environment, improving a few lives but enslaving many, not unlike what we are witnessing today in America. The continued practice of mining and burning coal doesn’t make sense given its harmful effects on the environment. This imbalance becomes one of Curva’s concerns. She also hates how life’s pace has speeded up, not leaving time for the basics, such as enjoying leisurely meals with friends and loved ones, fiestas, and sex.I hadn’t set out to write a novel that harbored a political slant, but once I became involved in Curva’s quest, I didn’t have any choice but to follow along and express her concerns. In the process, I learned how seeds planted in our unconscious early on do sprout and bloom in our writing.
Lily Iona MacKenzie is the author of two novels, Fling and Curva Peligrosa, and a poetry collection All This. Her upcoming novel, Freefall: A Divine Comedy will be released in 2018. Lily’s poetry was also featured in the Pact Press anthology, Speak and Speak Again. When she’s not writing, she paints and travels widely with her husband. Lily also blogs.
I arrived last night, and even though the show was just starting to get set up, I saw some lovely people and got a peek at some tantalizing journals, papers, and pens. Cary Yeager from Fountain Pen Day gave me an official FPD pin and bookmark (I’m already collecting swag!) and we had a nice chat about the generosity of the fountain pen community. And it’s true: I have never met a group so welcoming and willing to share knowledge (and ink and pens) with even the newest of newbies.
The store-front windows of Broadway Books make the shop light and airy, and its well-organized shelves draw customers on to explore the next book, the next topic, the next table. Over the shelves hang poster-sized covers of other volumes for which readers might want to search.
The birthday party on Saturday made it obvious what a community asset the store is. I met a trio of women who had been friends for forty years. Regular customers milled about, chatting, talking books with the owners and staff, having their photos taken at the picture booth set up for the day, and eating cake and drinking champagne. Despite the bustle of the celebration, I saw the staff continuously assisting customers by making recommendations and finding books. One of the owners (alas! I did not discover which one) asked everyone there to please go out and tell the story of their book store, and I am happy to comply with that request here.
I began my bookstore safari in Seattle, Washington, where I was visiting my particular friend Maren Donley. Before I arrived, I explained my quest to her, and she immediately recommended a visit to the Third Place Books. While there are three Third Places (I’m not sure how the math works on that, whether it requires simple addition or some kind of quantum exponential multiplication), Maren suggested we drop by the Lake Forest store. “I drive by it twice a week. I had never been in until I met my priest there for a meeting. Then I said, ‘Oh! I have really been missing out!'” she told me.
The selection of books, Mr. Sindelar told me, has a curatorial aspect. The staff have a lot of say in the choices, which are also guided by the interests of customers and the diverse ideas and opinions that represent the neighborhood. It seems that every aspect of Third Place is indeed geared toward fostering community and neighborhood. The Commons area not only has ample seating and a play area for small children, it has three restaurants as well: sustenance for both mind and body.
As we wended our way toward the registers at the front of the store, Maren pointed out the cards that annotated the books on the tables and shelves. The cards offered reviews by the staff, noted awards won by the book and author, and even let browsers know that a less expensive edition of the book in question was available on a different shelf in the store. I had seen cards similarly deployed in other stores, but never to such good effect. Walking through the store while looking at the books and reading the cards was like enjoying a stimulating conversation with friends or taking part in a silent book club discussion.
Bookstores, for me, have always been imbued with magic: their exterior signage, the glimpse of books and bindings through gleaming glass windows sound a magnet call that I am utterly helpless to resist. It little matters whether the bookshop is a dusty repository of the previously loved or a modern facility that houses the recently released, but it must be independent—chains necessarily lack the vibrant individuality that differentiates one store from the other.
When one first walks through the doors at Quail Ridge Books, however—child and adult alike—the immediate impression is one of space, modern and convivial. It can be challenging indeed to marry the two: large can be lacking intimacy, modernity can be at the expense of warmth. And, for bookstores, the challenge doesn’t end there: one must, after all, pack in the shelving that allows for ready browsing, with aisle space for fellow booklovers to exchange a smile or two, so that one can peruse the spines from a little distance without feeling confined and hemmed in. Quail Ridge Books navigates these potential pitfalls masterfully. The walls are a warmly inviting shade of maroon, chandeliers add a decadent luxury to the browsing space, and the chairs—Oh, an entire blog post could be written on the chairs alone! They are upholstered in bright fabrics, with cushions deep and snug. And you realize, as you sink into one with books on your lap, that you are indeed welcome to stay and leaf through some favorite selections. For Quail Ridge Books is not about lining customers up, extracting from them their book-purchasing funds, and getting them out the door to make room for the new and next buyer. Quail Ridge Books, the store and the staff, are imbued with a passionate love of books and of sharing that passion with the Raleigh world. This dedication meant that the chair choice was no small matter. As Lisa, the owner of Quail Ridge Books, noted: “I have three daughters and when they were growing up, they always wanted to go to bookstores and sit in comfy seats. Not all bookstores have comfy seats, or any seats at all, so that was important: lots of comfy seats.” And so it occurs to me that Quail Ridge Books is like the Victorian library that we all wish we had at home with the winged back chair in front of the fireplace, innumerable books all around. Quail Ridge Books has one such library—and they are inviting us all in!
