Relief publishing

The Campbell River Museum is one of my favourite museums, I have only visited about 3 museums in BC so it could yet be usurped! Plus it has some competition from The Museum of Country Life in Mayo (some of the exhibit contents are found without leaving my ma’s house) and the pinball machine museum in San Fran.

On the trail of Relief Camps during the 1930’s I harked on this on Campbell River Museum blog:

the “dirty thirties” resulted in vast numbers of homeless and unemployed and the FDP camps included accommodation and meals as well as work. One such camp (FDP Camp 5) was located at Elk Falls Park.

 

Elk Falls is a favoured spot by firstly my males who make annual pilgrimages there and latterly me who jumped on the bandwagon once and had a mighty time.

I’m particularly intrigued by the publishing of newsletters associated with the Forestry/Relief Camps during this time.  Even today there continue to be newsletters published by various history societies such as Forestry and so on. They might be one of the few print venues that enthusiastically solicit anecdotes and stories from their readers. There’s a great appetite in them for Got a story — We want to hear it. A contrast to these official writerly outlets where we seem to spend far too much time being told why we don’t have a story. Or rather why the person reading it has decided it isn’t a story within their limited framework.

***

On an interrelated note (a minum over a quaver) why hasn’t the fragment taken off in non fiction the way we have embraced it in blogging. I grow somewhat weary of the essay form at times. Especially when conceiving of generating it. It can become intoxicated by itself, we know where the walls are when we’re reading it and the writing often assures us, as we read, that this is how things should be written. A kind of “There will be a front door and a back door and four walls in this house so help me God.”  I don’t find it ungratifying, I just fancy an element of surprise. Some indication of the “paragraphic” (yep made that up) nature of thinking. And the way the mind likes to dart and associate. Rather than competently sprawl because, because we (holy grail of writing) said it must.