Prairie West School Division: A Rural Legacy

“Prairie West School Division: A Rural Legacy”
by Jeanne Caswell
Published by Your Nickel’s Worth Publishing
Review by Elizabeth McGill
ISBN 10 1-894431-07-3

History buffs will be delighted. Young people, accustomed to Ipods and cell phones as their constant companions, will be incredulous. Everyone in between will be entertained by Jeanne Caswell’s book “Prairie West School Division: A Rural Legacy.” Her book chronicles the early days of the education system in the Swift Current area through to the contemporary schools of today. In 1905 when Saskatchewan became a province, there were no rural schools around Swift Current. By 1925, more than 100 schools had been opened.

Seven chapters and five appendices give the reader an insider’s perspective. The “Teaching Experience” chapter outlines the responsibilities of a teacher in a one-room school. The work load was tremendous. Aside from providing direct instruction for Grade 1-8 students, the teacher marked assignments for Grade 9 and 10 students taking correspondence courses. Ratepayers in Beaver Flat School District #4021 complained that teachers expected far too much money for teaching. In the depression years of the 1930’s, ratepayers could not afford salaries of $10 per month.

Computer technology was not invented. Most schools did not even have a telephone. Looking after the children’s physical welfare was part of the job description. In a blizzard, students spent the night at the school rather than relying on their horses to get them home safely. Teachers hauled coal and got the stove going before classes. One teacher, standing too close to the Quebec heater, burnt a hole in the back of her skirt.

In spite of no technology or teaching aids other than a blackboard (chalk allotment was one piece per day), students and staff have fond recollections. The school became the hub of the farming community. Dances, church services, recruiting meetings during World War 1, fowl suppers, Christmas concerts, and summer picnics took place at the school. Many teachers were young women teaching on permit. Some left after a short time, being unable to manage the responsibility and isolation of their teaching positions. Neighbourhood bachelors, eager to change their marital status, anticipated the arrival of the new teacher. Blumenhof School #4089 added a second classroom in the 1940’s. As the new foundation was being poured, the students threw the school strap into the cement. At King’s County School #4428, students used thistles to build forts. Part of the entertainment was setting fire to your rivals’ fort! Caswell’s book, full of humorous anecdotes, celebrates the past paying homage to visionaries who believed that education is the passport to the future.

Published in:  on 29 October 2008 at 1:38 pm Leave a Comment
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Journey Without a Map

Journey Without A Map Growing up Italian: A Memoir
by Donna Caruso
Published by Thistledown Press
Review by Elizabeth McGill
$19.95 ISBN 978-1-897235-36-2

If you believe the love of a family is life’s greatest blessing, you’ll love Donna Caruso’s book “Journey Without A Map Growing Up Italian: A Memoir.” This book wraps us in a warmth as cozy as grandma’s quilt with liberal doses of love in every stitch.

Opening Caruso’s book is like opening your family photo albums. You’ll delight in remembering special events like graduations, reunions, and weddings. Equally special are the every day but never mundane events like children running through the sprinkler in the backyard or standing on a stool stirring cookie batter. Cooking is an important part of Italian culture. Caruso walks us through the art of salad making, cooking perfect pasta, and making miraculously healing chicken soup. This book is a legacy to her family with her pride shining through in every page. Caruso poignantly shares details of her life. Her book is sometimes humourous like Uncle Nick dancing at a wedding, sometimes sad like when grandma died when Caruso was thirteen years old, but always entertaining.

Caruso uses exquisite imagery throughout. In describing her grandfather’s prolific garden, she says it is as if he had enlisted all the angels in Heaven to assist him. Can’t you just picture hoe wielding angels? If her name sounds familiar, perhaps it’s because CBC radio has broadcast many of her stories and plays over the past twenty years. This Fort Qu’Appelle resident has had her work “Under Her Skin” short listed for a Saskatchewan Book Award. “Journey Without A Map Growing Up Italian: A Memoir” is short listed for 2008. It is already a winner.

THIS BOOK IS AVAILABLE AT YOUR LOCAL BOOKSTORE OR VISIT WWW.SKBOOKS.COM

Published in:  on 22 October 2008 at 11:08 am Leave a Comment
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New World Dawning: The Sixties at Regina Campus

New World Dawning: The Sixties At Regina Campus
By James M. Pitsula
Published by Canadian Plains Research Centre
Review by Marie Powell Mendenhall
$29.95 ISBN: 978-0-88977-210-6

New World Dawning paints the decade of the 1960s with a broad brush, and examines the finer detail of how students adapted it to the particular circumstances at Regina Campus.

Author James M. Pitsula writes, “The goal is to reproduce the sixties experience of Regina students, to capture how they interpreted the times in which they were living.”

Through articles and photographs from the student newspaper, the Carillon, he shows how Regina students responded to major 1960s movements such as the peace movement, liberation, and the counterculture.

As the 1960s progressed, Regina students became concerned about women’s liberation, racial discrimination against First Nations peoples, birth control, and similar issues of the day.

The student movement heated up across Canada in the late 1960s. In Regina, 1968 became the peak year. One demonstration brought 1,200 students from across the province to the provincial legislature.

Student activism changed these students from preoccupations with dances, sports, and beer to “marching to the legislature on a regular basis to protest one alleged injustice or another.” Yet as Pitsula points out, “The sixties too often forgot that freedom is not the answer; it is the beginning of the question.”

Pitsula, a history professor, discusses the legacy of the 1960s in reforms and awareness, and the rising unemployment and faltering economy that led into the following decade.

New World Dawning has been nominated for a 2008 Saskatchewan Book Award. Pitsula is also the author of As One Who Serves: The Making of the University of Regina.

Published in:  on 8 October 2008 at 11:15 am Leave a Comment
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Mongrel Love

Mongrel Love
By Judith Krause
Published by Hagios Press
Review by Marie Powell Mendenhall
$17.95 ISBN: 978-0-9783440-1-6

Judith Krause’s fourth collection of poetry takes the reader on a journey through local and exotic worlds.

The journey may also be a metaphor for life. The poems are divided into three sections: “A Discovery of Strangers,” “Cargo,” and “Plots.” All three can be understood in different ways. “Plots,” for example, fit a story, a cemetery, or a piece of land. The poems explore all of these meanings.

Krause experiments with poetic forms, line endings, and imagery. The words and images in Mongrel Love are chosen to take the reader along on the journey. “We are all wounded/& beautiful” says the title poem, as we travel “the fruitless/ quest for the familiar.”

In “Arrivals” the narrator goes to Paris and meets “the man who saved my father’s life by sleeping in.” In “This is How,” travelers remember “floating down the river,/ all wine and white lights…”

The poem “Thirteen Ways of Viewing a Public Park” tells of “people paddling canoes up and down Regina Avenue.” And later, “How a sudden blooming of dragonflies becomes an iridescent veil,/ a living scarf, floating through the evening air.”

“The Museum of Sounds” tells a life story through what seem like random sound effects. The poem “Remains” is dedicated to Tamra Keepness, a child who disappeared in Regina in 2004. In “The Search,” we find “every twitch in our dreams is a sighting of the lost.”

Krause is a Regina writer, editor, and teacher. She won the Ralph Gustafson Poetry Prize in 2006. She has published three other books of poetry: What We Bring Home (1986), Half the Sky (1986), and Silk Routes of the Body (1981).

THIS BOOK IS AVAILABLE AT YOUR LOCAL BOOKSTORE OR VISIT WWW.SKBOOKS.COM

Published in:  on 1 October 2008 at 11:29 am Leave a Comment
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