a postcard from Doriston

For some months I’d put my novel-in-progress aside. Too many things were on my mind and settling (imaginatively) back into a small coastal village just wasn’t possible. Throughout September, I worked a little on it, in it, each day. But I wasn’t sure how and why I might proceed. But yesterday afternoon the power went out unexpectedly and when it still hadn’t come back on in time for dinner, we went out for Mexican food. Maybe it was the bright lights, maybe it was the delicious Ixtapa ceviche, but somehow I was leaning across the table and telling John that I’d found a way to organize what was beginning to feel like too much material without a clear direction. Earlier in the day, in search of information about Doriston, a tiny hamlet that is, in a way, the presiding muse of this novel, I’d found an article online, part of my friend Andrew Scott’s BC Postal History Newsletter. This article repeated some of the information from Andrew’s 2005 Doriston article in the Georgia Straight but it also included more stuff about the short-lived Doriston Post Office. And in the way that an unexpected thing lights the flame that is inspiration, I spent the rest of the afternoon, or at least until the power went out, sketching a scene that allowed me to see my novel in a new and different way.

Somehow I was leaning across the table and telling John that I was going to organize the sections of the novel–the Easthope one and the Lviv one–as a series of postcards. In a way this is what I’ve already been doing but I’ve been nervous about also finding a more conventional way to connect the scenes, the moments, the sketches. Maybe I don’t need to though. Maybe the postcards themselves will make a coherence that is accumulative rather than simply narrative. I’m going to try anyway. The clues have been there all along. The cabin that my characters live in is on the Doriston Highway–if you’ve walked the Skookumchuck trail, you’ve been on the Doriston Highway–and some historical events concerning Doriston have inspired a series of paintings one of the characters is working on. So Postcards from Doriston, Postcards from Lviv. Today I feel the old excitement.

Note: the image at the top is from British Columbia Postal History Newsletter, Volume 28 Number 3, edited by Andrew Scott. Andrew isn’t well so I haven’t asked him for permission to use the image but I feel sure he wouldn’t mind. We have shared our fascination with Doriston many times.