cathleenwith.com

www.cathleenwith.com

Cathleen With

in Gyeongju, Korea

Having Faith in the Polar Girls' Prison by Cathleen With

Foreign rights: Canada Fiction

Canadian rights to Cathleen With's first novel, HAVING FAITH IN THE POLAR GIRLS' PRISON, about a teenager imprisoned in the far North who gives birth to her daughter Faith, to Barbara Berson at Penguin Canada, at auction, for publication in January 2009, by Denise Bukowski of The Bukowski Agency.

Skids: Relit Shortlist

http://therelitawards.blogspot.com/

Skids review from Whistler mag

http://www.piquenewsmagazine.com/pique/index.php?cat=C_Columns&content=Bookmarks+1413

Skids review on rabble.ca

Brave new voice
Cathleen With’s debut story collection SKIDS excavates layers of pain and courage in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside


SKIDS, by Cathleen With (Arsenal Pulp, 2006; $19.95)
CATHLEEN WITH's debut story collection — SKIDS — has garnered excellent reviews from across the country, bringing her tales of youth in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside, many of them runaways or addicts, to all Canadians. I first heard With read from SKIDS, before it was published, and during our stint in the Banff Centre for the Arts Writing Studio. I knew instantly that her voice was raw, alive and necessary. With is a graduate of the University of British Columbia MFA program in Creative Writing. She has travelled extensively throughout Asia, and has lived in Siem Reap and Seoul. She currently lives in Vancouver. Below is a conversation we had about SKIDS, about the writing process and much more, followed by an excerpt from this excellent collection.—Elizabeth Ruth

Elizabeth Ruth: In recent years several Canadian books have set out to specifically discuss gender — Code White, a first novel by Debra Anderson, and the Brazen Femme anthology put together by Anna Camilleri and Chloe Brushwood Rose, to name but two. In SKIDS I found the representation of gender interesting and subversive because in any given story the issues seemed to be naturally integrated into the wider context of the piece. I'm thinking, for example, of the butchy Phoebe Elliot in Detox, a cursory mention of femme businessmen in Angel's House of Ice, and of course, Sanny Tranny is Alive and Well and Living on Davie. Do you see gender as inherent subject matter for you, or as incidental?


Cathleen With


Cathleen With: I see gender as both inherent and incidental. Inherent because I am absolutely aware that I want to portray spectrums of gender that are present in my world, and incidental because that's the way it is, all these types of people: gay, straight, lesbian, bi, trans, et cetera, they are all just there and living breathing in the city, in the detox, wherever. I don't really think much about “highlighting” a topic — sexuality or gender — because for me, that doesn't normalize it. Like Celie said in The Colour Purple, “It just be's that way,” and that's how I feel about gender as subject matter, not something put into my writing on purpose because of who I am or who I stand for, just is, because that's the way the world is if you look closely enough.

ER: Speaking of looking closely… One of the devices you consistently present for your characters in SKIDS, in moments of duress or anxiety, is to show them distancing, perhaps dissociating, but certainly escaping duress through drifting into alternative realities, dreaming, using elaborate fantasies to imagine their lives differently — or as you call it in one instance, taking a “brain voyage.” In Pyjamas, the protagonist says, “I am not in a psych ward bathtub, but at the Grand Wailea in Maui” where the rooms cost two-thousand dollars. Can you speak about the liberatory possibilities of the imagination?

CW:I think distraction in the sense of brain voyages, in the sense of “Okay, today I am going to wake up, and it is going to be different,” is what saved me, and many of the characters in the book. A counsellor once told me that distraction was the best aide to recovery, and boy did I use distraction: falling in and out of love with other residents/counsellors/people at meetings and imagining different lives for us all. Whether you're stuck in a detox freaking for a drink or drug, stuck in some room sweating over a university test, going through a job interview or crisis in the family, the imagination saves it all — better than any Prozac around and ten times better than any other drug. I think the power of the imagination — or the stuff of our more airy-fairy recovery shit, like Shakti Gawain's "Creative Visualization"-- has the power to transport and create anyone into a different person, a different life. If you are able to wish long enough.

ER:You have travelled widely. How do you understand the role of “place” in SKIDS? Particularly the role Vancouver plays?

CW:Place is important, especially in today's Vancouver. Today's Vancouver is not the Vancouver I was around in, or the friends in SKIDS. It is worse. Yes, there are places like Covenant House that have great programs for youth to get off the street and find their lives. But our homeless problem, drug problems are growing. There are more drugs like heroin coming into our ports, places where meth is being cooked up and an incredible number of grow-ops for our BC Bud. Vancouver is a difficult place to get cleaned up in, and while there are some excellent treatment centres and recovery houses — there are not enough beds to give people the chance to truly create a new life. Place is also about community, and Vancouver has some strong communities: Davie Street Village, Commercial Drive area and, yes, even the Downtown Eastside that many people want to plow under. Many people in these places are trying desperately to get their lives together, while living and loving. While I have lived overseas and have lived out many of my own “brain voyages,” these stories couldn't have taken place anywhere but Vancouver.

ER:The themes of “home” and “homelessness” — significantly linked to mother loss — sits at the heart of this collection about street kids where mothers turn tricks to get a hit, where children are apprehended by child protective services and where, as you write, "getting cleaned up is about trying to find that perfect home" and "you are all your own mothers." Why was it important to you, in writing these stories, to focus on "mother" in the ways you have?

CW:In many ways I was really lucky to have a good mom when I was growing up, and I still got lost along the way when I was a teenager. Many of the kids in the stories did not have moms who were there for them, and I think it's an important connection. Somewhere along the way, the mother-love gets lost, and when you are doing drugs, you're not quite capable of taking care of yourself, it's like you regress so that when you come off of drugs, you need to discover the basics re: how to re-parent yourself — or parent yourself for the first time.

ER:In the story entitled, The Arbutus Tree, a young protagonist finds it titillating to have stumbled upon two gay men having public sex. The scene is described erotically. Voyeurism, here, offers a glimpse into something foreign but fascinating. Because you have written a book about youth whose experiences of street life are not your own, I wonder if you can talk about the role of writer as witness and voyeur?

CW:I think that the part of voyeur was something that helped me recover, and something we talked about in recovery. One of our counsellors once said — “Listen to all these stories that aren't your own, and tell your own, because you all share common experiences. And you don't want to go back out there.” For me it boils down to sitting on the couch in the recovery house and listening to all these women and their stories, their hardships, many of them knowing that I was a writer already — I used to pull out my journal after Group and write furiously, trying to remember everything, trying to get better. It's more than being a voyeur though, it's about common experience. Sure, I might've got drunk and popped some pills every other night in a gay bar on Davie, and you might've shot heroin on East Hastings, but what was our common experience? Hating ourselves, wanting to transport ourselves out of our bodies to forget. I dedicated this book to the so-called “skids” that I knew because many of them wanted me to write their stories, so people could know how much they struggled, how they weren't just lazy-ass druggie street slime people saw on the news — but strong courageous people who'd had so much shit go down for them that it was difficult to get back up outta the hole. In that sense it was more “bearing witness” than voyeur.

ER:Related to the idea of author as witness, in Recover the protagonist says, “I didn't know how to get away from it, that I was supposed to hear all the shit, over and over again, by all kinds of women, so I'd remember, so I'd record it, to save myself, and speak for the ones who didn't make it.” Is there a way in which these lines could have also applied to you, as writer? Have you saved yourself in some way by writing SKIDS? If so, how? And, do you feel there is an obligation on the part of the author/witness to give voice to those without a voice?

CW:Yes to all, living parts of this book saved me and writing it certainly did as well. Recover is a very personal story, one I relate to very much, as I believe that hearing, speaking, owning, living is a huge part of recovery from drugs and alcohol. I don't think it's as much an obligation as a way to pay homage to some of my friends who didn't make it--their voices were silenced too soon. But I also wanted to show the absolute FIGHT in the characters, and in the people I knew: the will and drive to live and love, despite all the shit.

ER:How has is been for you to move from aspiring writer to published author? How has the book been received so far? What's next for you?

CW:I think it's neat to be able to imagine a life, and then find that some of it comes true. It was great to hold the book in my hands, send it to the recovery house or to the counsellors that helped me, and maybe to some kids who are having trouble with drugs and are trying to get into recovery. The whole "reviews" process has been a little scary, as the book is pretty personal, but I guess all writers feel that way about their first book, their baby! The Globe and Mail did a nice review — it seemed that Jim Bartley really "got" the characters, and i am grateful for his review. You want to think The Globe and Mail isn't important (especially when you live in Vancouver), but it was an important review for me, made me cry when I read it. Arsenal Pulp has been awesome, and I really didn't want it to go anywhere else — I am so happy the book came out with them — a great alternative press. For now I am working on a novel about a girl in the Arctic. I worked up there for a while and am fascinated by the North.

ER:Is there anything that I haven’t asked you about that you’d like to mention for rabble.ca readers?

CW:Yes, just this: There are great resources for people to access for help with alcohol, drug addiction, homelessness, physical or sexual assault, and HIV/AIDS. The United Way, YouthCo, Covenant House Vancouver. There are shelters for youth and for adults who are homeless in every major Canadian city. There are 24-hour resources like the Assaulted Women’s Helpline in Toronto, Toronto Rape Crisis Centre and The Gerstein Centre. Many of these resources can be found in the front of your local phone book or online. There is also aa.org, Kidshelp phone, or you can call any hospital in your city and they will have the numbers for you or someone you love.
**************************

Elizabeth Ruth has written two critically acclaimed novels, but before all that worked for 11 years in front line social services, including at a shelter in Vancouver’s Eastside.

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Create a Real Available Beach, an excerpt from SKIDS:

I’m walking out of the Balmoral Hotel, it’s sunny, it’s fi- nally sunny and I got hold of the social worker, not my social worker, but Jayme’s, and her social worker says that I can have her, I can have Jayme today just for today, as a trial but only for a couple of hours and there has to be a supervisor and they’re even gonna provide her with a supervisor and you think maybe I am pissed about that, you think maybe I am thinking, What the fuck do I need a supervisor for, me with my own kid, I never hurt Jayme, it was me that put her into care in the first place back when it wasn’t manageable, when I was still using and not on maintenance, cuz now I am on maintenance with the methadone program, and I’m at the safe injection site now cuz I’m here, it’s eight a.m. and they’re open for business. That’s what the nurse jokes as she opens the door and some of the people, they’re coming from the Balmoral too, or the Patricia, well, those places, they’re getting upscale now and some of the people that are jonesing for their fix, they’re coming from some of the welfare hotels past Main Street, still on Hastings, but way past Main now that they’ve got the construction happening at Woodwards, no more tent squats there, I didn’t need to go there anyways cuz, okay I believe in the protests and we got to stick together on the Downtown Eastside, we fucking have rights too. But it’s okay now, it’s okay cuz I’m not on the junk anymore, I got a job, I’m singing again, nights at the Balmoral and they give me some paycheques, okay they’re not that good but then I get a room and it’s kind of higher than the rooms right above the band that plays after us, cuz I need my sleep, and the boss says I look like I could be nineteen, he says I got this old look about me, but I have fake ID anyways, the cops never come bother us too much, and I’m here now at the clinic cuz I need my methadone and I’m one week into it, I’m doing good, I’m doing good, I get to see my girl today, I can’t fucking wait.

So I do my shot of methadone with the orange juice and say goodbye to that funny nurse, and then I grab my purse off the counter and I got my bankcard in there cuz I have a bankcard now, it’s a kind of power, well, you know they take all that shit away when you go to juvie and then in the detox, they just lock your stuff up for you, cuz I was only in juvie for a couple of weeks for doing some B and E’s down by Fraser Street, well, you know I’m not too into stealing, I never gone with a ring before that.

Well, but Jayme’s grandma, not my mom, but Jayme’s dad’s mom, Jayme’s dad been gone a long time, but me and Tracey, Jayme’s grandma, we got along great, and she had an old house on Fraser and she was nice to us and helped me, cuz she looked after Jayme and you know I didn’t really want to turn tricks, but why give up a good thing? Better than working at that Burger King, well, I didn’t think Grandma knew, and then that one girl on the street, Carly, well, she was turning tricks too, I kind of always came home early, didn’t I, but still she started talking, that Carly, about how we could get together with her boyfriend and do some home invasion kind of deal, like they’ve been making lots of money doing this home invasion ring and wouldn’t you know what with my luck that one fucking time I get caught doing it.

And then Jayme’s grandma says, I ain’t staying here anymore with your shit, I’m moving to Jenny’s in Winnipeg – that’s her daughter, her real one – so I know she’s gone for good, and then I’m sitting on the porch and even the new people are moving in and I just started walking, well, you know it was then I had to go to the clinic and ask them could they take Jayme. I just wanted it to be for a little while, honest, cuz then the court case came and my juvie time, actually they were pretty decent to me, only possession and solicitation offences before on my record, no priors for B and Es, so then I was sitting in juvie and a nice social worker told me more about detox, sure I’d heard about it from the street and she was saying how Jayme’ll be looked after, and fuck it’s taken so long, two months since I seen her, but guess what, today’s the day, I’m seeing my little girl.

She’s only three. When I had her it was a cold, cold November and I was in the hospital and she was so quick, I only really had about four hours of hard labour and it killed, but the doctors said that wasn’t much cuz usually girls who are fourteen take a long time to have babies, like some girls are still too small inside to have babies, but not me, so then I remember her eyes, so brown, was kind of funny cuz the nurses were all like, Oooh look how alert she is, and by then I already had all them drug talks about how taking junk while I was pregnant wasn’t good for the baby, but I stayed clean for her, those last few months I did, I did, and now she’s three.

And her social worker said, We can’t meet you at the Balmoral, it’s not an appropriate location, so I said, Where? and she called me back, I was at the pay phone just waiting for her to call and telling the old guy to just fuck off cuz I had a call coming in, I think he was waiting for a crack deal, but he coulda just gone out on the street, don’t know why he was bothering me, and she called back and said, Meet us out at Portside Park, down on East Waterfront Road, and I said Okay, then thought Where the fuck is that and asked the old guy and he said, That’s what they named it before they called it Crab Park.

Weird how they wanted a beach down here, Downtown Eastside Vancouver, they were probably thinking ahead to all this primo land, you can see all the buildings are already changing and sometimes there’s these rich west side kids out in the audience when I’m singing at the Balmoral and they’re slumming it, cuz yeah the crack whores and the meth freaks and the nod-offs on junk and the alleyways are filled with druggies that would just as soon knife you for a three dollar rock of crack than care, but every day I walk out the door, it’s changing down here, it’s changing, but they’ll forget about us.

But I don’t care, cuz I know what park the old guy is talking about, I know which park my little girl’s going to be at today, it’s the create-a-real-available-beach park, it’s Crab Park, and I don’t care who wants their hands on it, richies and west siders and people who drive Beemers and fancy fancy cars and who eat out of those hotel restaurants you see uptown, who the hell cares, cuz my little girl is at Crab Park and I get the day with her today and I can almost see her, her hair is shining in the sun and there’s the Lions, and they’ve got snow on them, and there’s the city and it’s got so much going for it, cuz today I’m gonna play on the beach with my little girl and we have the whole fucking day.

Excerpt from SKIDS, an Arsenal Pulp Press book.

Skids review on rabble.ca

thanks elizabeth ruth!

The Globe and Mail Review for Skids

"Street illegal"
JIM BARTLEY, The Globe and Mail
Skids
By Cathleen With
Arsenal Pulp

When we think of detox, we think of celebs breaking a pill or coke habit, or of an ordinary drunk desperate to not lose wife and kids. In the first story of this impressive debut collection, Cathleen With introduces a keener sense of waste. Jesse is 16 and a street kid, or "skid" in the unofficial parlance of social work. After a bona fide suicide attempt, she's being weaned off not only drugs, but the selling of her body to pay for them.

In the dry-out, she takes a shine to a new resident, Phoebe, and soon her regular "brain voyages" -- escapist fantasies to a tropical paradise -- are filled with romance, culminating in an idyllic birth scene on a balmy beach, with Phoebe as tender midwife.

In Angel's House of Ice, crystal meth is the fuel that keeps Kevin perilously aloft as he turns queer tricks in Vancouver. He does mostly high-end tourist trade. Kevin's other sustaining drug is Daniel, his native boyfriend. Heading for druggy burnout, the boys have no incentive to slow down. "The cash flow is too good." Every bad patch has a crystal promise around the corner.

In The Arbutus Tree, Jesse and her best friend in foster care, Ali, obliquely acknowledge an erotic attraction to each other even as they exhibit both fascination and disgust over gay men having sex in a beach-front park. They're in that teen middle-land of burgeoning hormones and minds addled by the body's surging needs.
Later, on the beach, they flirt with some callous older boys who mercilessly take what's been offered. It's rape, but the girls know it must never be spoken of. They huddle in bed later, holding each other, fearing that their cop foster dad will force a confession. But Jesse is secretly musing on the gay encounter they witnessed. We're left with a sadness tempered by budding love.

Drive Uncle Randy is a road story ripe for a film deal (think Gus van Sant or David Lynch). The hands-down standout of the book, it splays wide the secrets of a family plagued by desperate addictions ranging from beer to heroin to ranting religious fervour. Pubescent Anja has been kidnapped from her Vancouver trailer home by her mom's lover, who's also her uncle. Randy is a sexual predator on a lunatic mission to bring his lost brother (Anja's dad) back into the fold of Yahweh. His tool of spiritual coercion is the shotgun in the back seat.

Anja is our tale-teller, her numbed, dully incredulous voice perfectly matched to the nightmare of her days on the road (she's obliged to cook hits of smack in the car and shoot up gibbering Randy while he drives.) and her nights in shared motel beds. This tale is horrifying and mesmerizing. It surges ahead on the surreal leaps and illogic of dreams, all carried within a larger, neatly crafted narrative arc.
The stories are loosely linked by setting and some characters, which helps to underscore the anarchic drift of lives in this community of the dispossessed. We lose characters, then find them again, usually no better off -- but more familiar, and more worth knowing.

SKIDS, by Cathleen With: Arsenal Pulp Press Book Launch, December 5th, 2006

Our Town Cafe
Broadway and Kingsway,
Dec 5, 2006, 7pm
Host: Michael V. Smith
Featuring: Amber Dawn and Cathleen With
Bring your friends and support your local writers!

SKIDS on The Storytelling Show

Listen in: Nov. 12, 2006....Vancouver COOP Radio: CFRO 102.7
hosted by Jeannie Marks

SKIDS Quill and Quire review

"Skids" is the slang term for street kids or runaways living in Vancouver's Downtown Eastside. Many of them are native Canadians, many are HIV postive, and many are addicted to heroin, crystal meth or alcohol. They are unwed teenage mothers or victims of sexual abuse at the hands of family members or surrogate fammily members. They turn tricks for drug money; they float in and out of detox and rehab clinics.

The dozen stories in Cathleen With's new collection focus squarely on the lives of these marginalized urban denizens, sketching their existence in language that is a raw and immediate, yet also infused with compassion and understanding. There is a marked lack of sentimentality to these stories. The characters do not retreat into maudlin self-pity, but instead cling desperately almost defiantly - to whatever rays of hope manage to snine into their dark lives.

With locates a certain nobility in the lives of her dispossessed and forgotten characters. The narrator of "Create a Real Available Beach," a drug-addicted skid who has done a stint in juvenile detention for breaking and entering, gets a chance to visit with the daughter she gave up to social services ("because keeping her wasn't manageable"). The HIV-positive male prostitute in "Angel's House of Ice" refused to perform certain sex acts with clients becasuse, as he says, "I am no kind of HIV murderer." And Charlie, the protagonist of "Sanny Tranny is Alive and Well and Living on Davie," finds redemption in helping his transvestite father, who is suffering from kidney failure.

The stories occassionally feel too brief and underdeveloped, more like sketched than fully realized pieces. A reader is sometimes left wishing that the author had chosen to include fewer stories, and to flesh them out in a more deliberate and detailed manner. But the stories largely succeed, thanks to the author's voice, which is original, fresh and authentic. With inhabits her characters from the inside out, and presents them to us with a clear, unblinking gaze. These stories feel lived rather than imagined.

Oct 19th "Buns and Roses" VIWF

BUNS ’N’ ROSES
ANAR ALI, ELIZABETH BACHINSKY,
RYAN KNIGHTON, SHANE KOYZCAN,
ALAYNA MUNCE, NATHAN SELLYN,
MICHAEL V. SMITH, CATHLEEN WITH
HOST: BILLEH NICKERSON
FEATURING: THE WRITERS FESTIVAL
GO-GO DANCERS
8:00 PM
PERFORMANCE WORKS
$15 + $.50 FACILITY SURCHARGE
Join Billeh Nickerson, eight talented
writers and the festival's infamous go-go
dancers as they shake things up—literally
and literarily—for an evening of fun and
irreverence. Warning: may contain poetic
lap dances.
This event is sponsored by Raincoast Books.