September 8, 2016

Your three bodies form a curving shoreline,

pink and brown sweaters, bare legs.

The beach glows grainy under the sun's copper pressure,

air the colour of tangerines.

One of you is sleeping, the wind's finger

on your cheek like a tendril of hair.

--Anne Michaels, Women on a Beach

Xxx

Today, I’m having a go at finding the central piece of literature on which to base my project. Starting with a google search, of course. As I owe both the public and school library too much money to take out a book, the best I can hope for is to find a collection of pertinent poetry online, or else to find a book at a second-hand store.

I started with the Willow’s Beach wiki page, that deep-despised source, but it says that the beach was an ancient seaport called Sitchanalth, home to generations of Coast Salish people. Following a link to burntembers.com, I read that indigenous people used to have longhouses bordering this entire coastline. The site does not say when or where the longhouses and their people went (1).

Googling Coast Salish literature brings up a Stanley Evans, a writer living in Victoria right now. He wrote a series of detective mysteries featuring Coast Salish investigator Silas Seaweed. Reviews of the book say “combination of Coast Salish lore and solid plotting is a winner” (2). So that seems promising. The only thing is that Evans is from the UK… does he count as a Canadian author?

xxx

I called Russel Books.

They have a couple titles in stock, so I’m going to have a look. The premise of the book sounds interesting, but I don’t know how helpful it’s going to be in informing my Willow Beach project. Maybe I’ll have to change topics…