Okay, here’s a coincidence that bears telling you all about. Long years ago when I still reviewed books (lots of books), I worked freelance for Larry Kart, then books editor at the Chicago Tribune. In 1995, Larry asked me to be one of the judges for the annual Nelson Algren Short Story Award, which was a very prestigious prize in those days. The other judges were Nicholas Delbanco and Sandra Scofield. The writer we picked for first prize was a 22-year-old Vietnamese immigrant named Dao Strom, who was a student at the Iowa Writers Workshop.
As I say, I had forgotten when I was a judge for the prize and I had forgotten who won (lost in memory — look, a lot happens in life, right?). I do remember the awards ceremony at a very large hotel banquet room in Chicago (I was thinking: What the fuck am I doing here?). I do remember meeting Nicholas because we became friendly acquaintances after that. And at the reception I met Wayne Booth, the eminent author of that great book The Rhetoric of Fiction.
In any case, our new contributing editor Fernando Sdrigotti (in London) put me in touch with Dao Strom (in Portland) a couple of months ago and I invited some work from her. The result is the lovely hybrid memoir we just published today. But it wasn’t till I was noodling around, looking for more biographical details that I noticed she had won the Nelson Algren Award. And then I did remember that the person we gave the prize to was Vietnamese. And then the tumblers began to click, and finally I found an old piece in the Tribune about that particular award, which confirmed what my brain couldn’t.
So after almost 20 years Dao Strom and I meet again through the angelic intervention of Fernando.
dg
Dao Strom managed not only to make the finals the first year she entered the competition, but also to finish in first place. Of three stories she submitted, “Up Over Boulder Hill” was singled out by the judges, Sandra Scofield, Nicholas Delbanco and Douglas Glover, themselves novelists and short-story writers.
David Harvey via Wikipedia
Pinckney Benedict via 
Paul Klee, Angelus Novus
Lynne Tillman by David Shankbone.
Yves Klein via Wikipedia
Sam Shelstad and dg at the Open Space Gallery, Victoria. Photos by Miles Giesbrecht.
Back Cover
At the end of the Victoria trip, dg spent an afternoon with the Coast Salish master carver Charles W. Elliott in his studio at the Tsarlip First Nation Reserve on the Saanich Peninsula north of the city. Above is a thunderbird atop of a Charles Elliott totem pole in front of the ȽÁU, WELṈEW̱ Tribal High School just down the road from the studio.
Charles W. Elliott holding a print he designed as a symbol for the 
Here’s the school front. Note the repetition of the structure: thunderbird on top of the pole, thunderbird on the from wall of the building, and the structure of the building as a whole is a thunderbird with wings. What you can’t see from the angle is that before the front door is an entryway in the shape of a bird again. To get into the school, students pass beneath the thunderbird’s wings. Also not the bracket shapes along the roof line. And then think what a lively public art form this is.
This is Elliott’s studio with a huge ocean-going dugout canoe made of old growth cedar, a work in progress. On the left is the base of a new totem pole.
Studio again. Note the Che Guevara image, one of several, in the studio, also mentioned by Elliott. You can’t forget that the natives are a colonized and dispossessed people who wake up every morning and look around and see commuters racing up the highway to a city that covers the land that was once theirs spiritually and economically, land they never gave away in any sense proper to their own culture and way of thinking. Put yourself in their shoes. As Elliott said, it’s as if there is a constant cloud or blanket of colonization over the natives. How they could they forget and be pleased? 
Little things all over the studio. Here’s a spinning fish lure in the shape of an octopus, the legs scalloped with those bracket patterns. Everything comes to life in this art world, inanimate objects, utilitarian objects.
So here’s a bronze spindle whorl (traditionally they were made of wood) made by Elliott’s 19-year-old son, Chas Elliott, who is learning the art from his father and brought this over to show us. If I remember correctly this is a seal (but I heard so much I might be misremembering). Mouth in the spindle opening. Flippers or paws to the side. Flippers accented with eye and bracket and lanceolate shapes. 
DG with a “talking stick” (you would hand this to someone who would then hold the floor whole others listened). By now you should be able to distinguish some of the motifs and design elements.
Outside the studio looking at a totem pole in for repair after about 20 years in the field. Totem poles don’t last forever, obviously. This one needs to be shaved down to fresh wood and repainted. And there is some rot at the top that needs digging out and a plug put in. A sad thing is that native carvers like Elliott can only work with old growth timber. For some reason, the old growth trees grew slower, their tree rings are much closer together, and the wood is harder and more durable. Newer trees seem to grow faster (perhaps because they get more light), the rings are farther apart and the wood between is “punky.” There is hardly any old growth timber left. I won’t go on. This is just a taste of the visit with Elliott, an immense privilege, not to mention fascinating; I could go on and on.
Surprisingly, there are great swathes of clear cut forest all along the coastal road in the west. Sometimes the lumber companies leave a thin screen of trees along the road and sometimes not. Depressing to see. Most of the logs go straight to China these days.
Sombrio Beach (photo by MF). Behind us, makeshift tents and campsites occupied by surfers trying to dry out in the dense mist.
The Juan de Fuca Trail near Sombrio Beach.
DG at the University of Victoria First Peoples House as a guest of 
Harbor seal off the marina wharf in Mill Bay. They were playing all along the coast, some far out and diving with dramatic tail slaps. At Mill Bay we heard the tail slaps, saw loons and a kingfisher and then a bald eagle zoomed close overhead, all in about five minutes. DG stopped mentioning the seals to the locals because it marked him as a greenhorn.
Cow Bay, a touristified, single-street, old village on the coast, organic foods, organic baked goods, and one store that sold liquor and tools.
This is the so-called butter church on Comiaken Hill in the Cowichan Reserve, Cowichan Bay in the background to the right. Abandoned, it was the first church in the area, an ancient-looking chapel, on a hill that feels lonely, mysterious and sacred, empty grass field to the left where people were once buried, though most of the markers are down, one lone oak tree, low mountains all around except in the direction of the bay. Also a place of ill-memory because of treaties signed nearby in the 1850s. The church was built in 1870 with the help of natives who were paid with money earned from the sale of butter. Apparently.
St. Anne’s Church, just down the road from the butter church. Back in Victoria we had run into an ancient beekeeper who said his great- or great-great-grandfather was Chief George Tzouhalem of the Cowichan band. An Irishman who fought with Pickett at Gettysburg apparently came up the coast and married the chief’s 15-year-old daughter — this was the beekeeper’s line. He said to drive up to this place because old chief Tzouhalem is buried here and his grand-daughter bought a pink granite plinth and had it raised over the grave. We walked all through this sombre place and finally, yes, did discover the plinth, raised by the grand-daughter Ettie George, just as the beekeeper had said. He had known Ettie and had stories.
Christianity is dissipating perhaps. The crosses all over the graveyard were mostly temporary markers. Occasionally, there was something more indicative of a different way of being. Later, I got to talk to a man who makes the grave markers, a social role passed down through his family, and he said the crosses are just places to put names now, not signs of belief. Alarming number of fresh graves in every native graveyard, signs of hard lives, poverty and the depression that goes with being a dispossessed and colonized people.