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"Start at page one of this book, don't skip a damned word, and you'll find it a rich and heady flavourful brew with enough chokerknobs rockcod salal bush steampots and old smells of the coast in it to keep you coming back, like Oliver, asking 'Can I have some more, sir?'"
-Barry Broadfoot, from Foreword
"This book displays White's voice; his lucid, populist prose style, his humour, curiousity and knowledge - his importance beyond BC."
-Books in Canada
". . . the stuff of which folklore is woven. . ."
-The Vancouver Sun
"There are stories of the characters that peopled the float camps, one-man machinery shops, and fledgling island communities that are so vivid they seem like part of your own childhood memories."
-Westcoast Mariner
"For those with a sense of adventure and love for the BC Coast, here is storytelling at its best. . ."
-Coast Mountain Courier
". . . brilliantly and entertainingly illuminates the lives and attitudes of that majority of Canadians previously barely visible in our literature."
-Tom Wayman
Reading the fish tales in Goa
In southern India it doesn't rain between October and June. But it makes up for it in the monsoon season, June to September.
In the lovely hill station of Malabaleshwar they got 600 inches in three months last year. Think of it 50 feet. Thus I found it quite a fitting place to be reading Howard White's Writing In The Rain, which is what he used to do during holdups while catskinning.
Rain on the Sunshine Coast? Come on Howard, that's really stretching it. But, of course, that's what all writers do. The good ones only let it show for a reason. And Howard White is a good one.
While basking on the white sands of Goa, I read his graphic stretcher about getting rid of a dumptruck load of rotten fish, some of it on the main drag of Sechelt.
I could literally smell the fish. What helped was that the beaches of Goa are used by the locals to park their immense black fish boats as well as their fish. The bigger fish are lugged off in baskets but most of the sardines and prawns are spread on the sand to dry before being racked up into heaps and then transported on the ladies' heads to the rice fields for fertilizer.
Unfortunately, these ladies and their baskets weren't available to Howard when he decorated the peninsular highway. I think fishermen are a breed apart no matter where they are in the world. Howard White captured the essence of the old west coast highliner,in a free verse description of an injury on the fishing ground and the response, or lack of it, while the fish are running.
I can see that ancient mariner on the beaches of Goa. All he would have to do is swap his wool pants and sea boots for a G-string and join the nearest crew.
The Goa beach is also a good place to read about Howard White's early years in an isolated logging camp.While reading about a childhood without schools or teachers we are constantly visited by kids who have no schools or teachers.
While reading about Howard and his sister making their own isolation entertainment, we got to know a family of five small kids 12, 10 and 9 who hawk different things dawn to dusk, while the youngest, age 6, looks after the baby.
The kids speak good English and are polite and full of fun.
In October each year the kids come to Goa with their parents from Karala in the south and hawk their goods until the monsoon in May. In their own funny coastal way I think the lives of these kids are not totally unlike that of Howard White's early life in various isolation camps.
These wonderful warm little kids are spiritual kin to the little Indian boy who the Howard's picked up hitchhiking to Prince Rupert. That story alone is worth the price of the book. It catches the intangible that tells more about our native Canadians than any other story I have read.
It is Howard White's happy miracle to see. The ordinary is just a slightly different perspective to most of us. The other part is the strange task of capturing it in the fascinating little turkey tracks of which there are only 26 in the English language.
Whether in verse, anecdote, profile or short story, Howard White both captures and portrays the essence of ordinary, and many most extraordinary, people on the B.C. coast.
For young or old, male or female, if you want to give a cheap, but exceptionally rich, birthday or Christmas present, Writing In The Rain fills the bill.
On the other hand if you are curious about who you are and where you live treat yourself to Writing In The Rain.
-Ben Maartman, The Arrowsmith Star, Friday, April 5,1991