As well as Luanne Armstrong writes, it’s a wonder she isn’t nationally and even internationally recognized, with a slew of awards lining her mantel.
Is it her versatility that’s kept her largely relegated to the ranks of the regional writer? Or, also with poetry, and fiction aimed at young readers, perhaps she just isn’t seen as fitting into a single genre. Or maybe her determination to juggle academia — she’s an adjunct professor, working primarily from home for the University of BC — and writing and farming is seen as a drawback. More likely, though, it’s her single-minded obsession with returning whenever possible to her Kootenay Lake farm, far from the coffee houses, social gatherings and hobnobbing opportunities that many of her counterparts are more comfortable with.
With her newest publication, and the third in a couple of years, Armstrong has returned to non-fiction in what at times feels like a sequel to Blue Valley, her ecological memoir from 2007.
The Light Through the Trees: Reflections on Land and Farming is a thoughtful look at life on a farm, not just any farm but a tract of land that is trapped between Kootenay Lake and Highway 3A, a land pressured on all sides by summer visitors who flock to the lake to escape their city lives. She and her brother continue to work the land with an Iowa-stubborn insistence at keeping alive at least a part of what they grew up with.
At her best — and she’s rarely at anything less these days — Armstrong’s non-fiction can be read in pieces, sounding very much like the poetry she continues to write. For evidence, consider some individual paragraphs lifted for the first chapter of The Light Through the Trees:
“I wonder if this is even a relationship, my feelings about this place and its inhabitants. Or is it all a one-way emotion from me, the human stalker, wandering around wanting to be loved? And just what am I doing here, living in this particular place? How do I understand it?”
Or, “Walking here is also walking in time, over layers of parents and grandparents. Understanding how to be fully in a place and taking care of it means also seeing how it is taking care of me.”
Or, “Once I was talking to a dear friend about my childhood and the farm, and he said, ‘The land was your mother and father.’ I think he was right, but as well as mother and father, I think the land is also my teacher and my home, the place I go to learn, the place that mystifies me with its depth and beauty, and never lets me go.”
Wordsworth, meet Wallace Stegner.
As the book progresses, Arm-strong is alternatively reminiscent, realistic and raging, grumpily describing encounters with the small engine crowd who find their leisure in chainsawing brush and building endlessly on cabins they visit only a few (thankfully) short weeks each year. Turn the page and she’s as likely to be going all Thoreau on the reader, paying minute attention to the detail of the verdant life that teems around and on the barely tamed farm, meditating on of the most peculiar of man’s constructs, property ownership.
Never taking the easy way with her writing, Armstrong uses words like colours in a painter’s palette, with the sparing and demanding eye of the water colourist. The editor in her doesn’t allow for a single unnecessary word. Like Mozart and his musical notes, she uses exactly the right number of words to say what she wants. In the Kootenays, we are fortunate indeed to call this maestro one of our own.
The Light Through the Trees will soon be available in Creston at Black Bear Books on Canyon Street.