"No escaping their roots"

Jun 11, 2008 – Renfrew Collingwood Community News

By Julie Cheng

In this debut collection of short stories, local writer Don McLellan returns to his roots in a corner of Renfrew-Collingwood. He grew up in Renfrew Heights, a neighbourhood bordered by East 22nd Avenue, Rupert Street, Grandview Highway and Boundary Road.

But back in the late 1940s, a forested hillside was cleared off and bungalows built in what was called the Renfrew Heights Housing Project for War Veterans. "The Project was a sanctuary" for veterans returning from the Second World War, writes McLellan in his prologue, "a place to reassemble war-weary lives in the quiet years after slaughter."

Humorous and observant, the 17 stories here are told in a sparse language and impartial voice reflective of McLellan's background as a journalist. While works of fiction, these vivid stories give us an important perspective on the people who live in Renfrew Heights from the '40s to the present – who they are, where they came from, what they did from day to day. Here, too, are the winding streets of Dieppe, Normandy and Anzio and places like Falaise Park and nearby Still Creek. The characters could easily be our own neighbours, living on our own block, going to the parks we play in.

The stories of one young narrator and his family – a fashion-conscious mother, a delinquent older brother and a hard-drinking, carousing father, a veteran – appear throughout the book. The parents fight themselves and each other, the brothers find adventure in an interior B.C. town, the narrator follows his tormented friend on a flight through Still Creek.

There are gritty stories of the people who live or have escaped from the Project; a young outcast turned fugitive hero; a baseball player throwing in the Mexican League; a singer working the cruise ships; a group of hippies meeting at Falaise Park; a young hitchhiker attempting to live out Jack Kerouac's book On the Road; an old friend with a grow-op in his basement; a family of hard-working immigrants dealing with a mixed marriage.

But, like the narrator who is called back to the Project by a series of mysterious letters, these characters do not necessarily find peace in their "sanctuary." All learn that there is no escaping their roots.

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