Red Berry Review, Volume 1 Issue 1  
– Reviewed by Angie Abdou for The Fernie Fix’s September 2009 Issue

The Red Berry Press of Fernie, BC has launched a new biannual literary journal.  The Red Berry Review is the brain child of Randal Macnair, Nicolas Milligan, and Keith Liggett and is dedicated to publishing writing that celebrates the people, communities, and landscapes of this geographic region. I commend these three men on the success of their first issue.  The cover art is beautiful, the book design laudable, and the range of the pieces impressive. From the clever humour of Kirsten Nash’s philosophical poem about a squirrel turned art critic to Gordon Sombrowski’s complex and multifaceted portrayal of the deepest, most unspeakable sorrow (tempered with equally profound resilience), this collection will lead readers through the full spectrum of emotions.

This first issue features eleven authors, and mixes completely new, unpublished writers with well-established veterans, such as Sid Marty and Jon Turk. Like journals published across the continent, then, The Red Berry Review does the important work of giving beginning writers a respectable home for their early work. As a fiction writer, I was a bit disappointed to find no short stories included in this inaugural issue.  Instead, the book contains eighteen poems and three pieces of creative nonfiction. I know, however, that the submissions were many and the competition for the book’s fifty pages stiff. I will look forward to finding short fiction in the pages of the next issue.

Christin Geall’s essay “Homing Instinct” opens the collection and sets the tone thematically.  Geall paints a picture of her younger self, a traveling undergraduate “who wanted to be stripped of place entirely in order to construct an identity without the encumbrances of context.” Through the personal growth experienced in the essay, readers begin to wonder if such freedom from context is possible.  Can we have identity completely uninfluenced by place or is our identity shaped by the very landscape in which it exists?

This relationship between humans and their land is explored from a variety of angles in the pieces that follow. Nobody who lives here will be surprised to find that wilderness features large in this exploration – from the awe-inspiring river of Maureen Stephenson’s poem “Sleep” to the mysterious and ultimately unknowable sea of Frances Hern’s poem “Northwest Passage Secrets” to the cradling mountains of Gordon Sombrowski’s “The Baker’s Wife,” each piece works to negotiate a relationship between man and environment, between home and wild, between art and nature.  In such considerations, it’s too easy to succumb to the clichéd, the sentimental, and the predictable. These talented and original writers, however, deftly avoid such pitfalls. 

The biggest challenge of the journal comes, perhaps, in Nicholas Bradley’s poem “Pacific Coast Highway, March” where readers are reminded that a place is not the same as the idea of that place.  When we remember a place (or write a poem about a place), we automatically transform it, creating something new. This consideration of art-as-mimicry is profound and thought-provoking, lending a richness to the Red Berry Review as a whole. Bradley’s interest in what literature can do (and how it does it) is echoed throughout the collection (particularly in Kirsten Nash’s “Farm Rules” and Sid Marty’s “One Road” and “For the Old Maestro: Irving Layton”), and this meta-fictional element adds a complexity that will bring me back to these poems, taking time to linger over them and reconsider their offerings. For me, that need to return is what separates “just books” from “real literature,” and I’m proud to say that Fernie now has a journal which contributes to the latter.

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