The best short story writers curve their art around suggestion. The plume of smoke runs in two directions, too-back down the chimney into the troubled house, and drifting up into the blue erasure of the sky. Length can vex the balance: longer tales gravitate to the moral density of the novel, whose scale demands more than than wispy suggestion; shorter stories shrink into anecdote or haiku, only rarely finding the controlled angina of a Beatles song. (I'm thinking of "Eleanor Rigby".) The great writers of the short story, from Poe to Chekhov to Joyce and Borges, thread character, scene, scenario and desire onto a few social facts and fabricate work with the lustre of a blueprint: imaginative fruition that still points to a world elsewhere. Joyce's stories of decision and delusion in Dublin imagine an Ireland with a dire, dying glow. Edgar Allen Poe's tales of the uncanny and of furious detection show us how the Old World's ghosts are re-purposed in the gloaming forests of the New.
Writers who don't account for this thistledown tend to tell stories without much valence, as people in English departments used to say in the '80s. Jonathan Bennet's and Joanne Soper-Cook's new collections of stories, different as they are from one another, share this echo problem. Both are able writers, but neither gathers together a narrative with any of the ambition of, say, Chekhov's "The Lady with the Dog", which begins as a story of self-absorbed travellers having an affair and only gradually takes on nuance and movement, to the point that the fear that Chekhov captures on the last page is exquisite. A few scattered sentences about the sea, about steam blowing out of a Moscow dining club, convey the wrenching feeling of ice and despair inside a life-changing decision. These moments, and a certain drifting movement, are the story's genius.
In Joanne Soper-Cook's new collection of stories we see a fair number of virtuoso turns, the main one being her use of old snapshots to set each story on its trajectory. In an author's note in the back she thanks friends in Boston and family members in Canada for sending snapshots her way. We know, then, if we doubted our eyes, that the photos at the top of each story are found artifacts, some the strange existential glimmer-images you come across in flea markets or under the lids of piano benches in your own house-the frozen gaze of dolls in the images, the natural effluvia of the 20th century's predilection for making objects of everything, including experience. A few minutes' stop on the highway, an hour on the beach shuttles over the years into pictures that seem marbled, picked.
I like that each story evolves in some organic way from the photographs that have been reproduced, jauntily askew, near the titles. Each narrator in turn thinks through the pictures, imagining conflicts and conversations just outside the frame. Then following one or two slower, essay-like paragraphs about the faces and bodies we are suddenly greeted with lives twitching, abloom, moving backwards in time from the picture.
Much of the work feels both impressive and thin. The stories have a parlor trick quality about them because of the pictures, which I think generate a writerly problem: they say both much more, and much less, than words do. Beyond that, they are solid souvenirs in a way that words aren't, and indeed the two media push and pull on each other far more than Soper-Cook's village-historian narrators allow. Glance at the photographs as you read and you might wonder, as I did, why the narrators chose to talk about characters when the photographs so often also took in the crackling, random world: a strange floating past of unmown grass, overcast sky, a queer slant of sun. Halfway through the collection, when the narrative routine was established and promised not to break, I found myself longing for something less attached than these stories-less bounded to the people who are, after all, despite being forgotten or discarded, part of some historical record still. There are other Wittgensteinian/ontological questions the narrators leave out, but which form our ultimate fascination with old photographs: who are these people, beyond the things that happened to them in their lives? What happened to them in their random, stray thoughts? Where are their thoughts now? Photographs are about the fact that is not there and the fact that is, to steal a line from Wallace Stevens, and the mystery is rarely solvable or narratable.
The stories that stand out-"The San", the end of "Definitely Somewhere", "Bessie"-work because they don't smother their characters in detail but instead let weather, mood, the strange music of hot days set the tone. At the end of "Bessie", which begins with the photo of a child from the 1940s and follows her as she copes with her mother's polio and some intrusive images of dirty water, decomposing leaves, septic tanks, the narrator lingers on her own snapshot of the child, who has been wishing for a clean world: Her mother is pinning laundry on the line, a clean swath of white against the warm September sky. Her father is in his weekend clothes, on his hands and knees on the ground with a shovel, joking and laughing with Bessie's mother. A small part of Bessie wonders what they have to smile about, but this part of her is forced away by the rest, which insists upon this scene of normalcy. And indeed, when her parents move to greet her it really is the same as always. She has succeeded in mastering an elusive magic. She knows how to elude the probing of her conscience. She has learned how to fool herself.
The abject images of the story up to now crowd these sentences, but the sheer skill of the concluding lines-holding this vision in, keeping the dirty world out-can leave you smiling at the art.

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Old photographs, sepia in tone or faded black and white, are often silent on their subjects. Who hasn't found an old trunk or a shoebox stuffed with snapshots from another era? Rarely are secrets revealed. Often old photographs go the way of the garbage, particularly if no one is left to identify the subjects, share their stories.

In the hands of Newfoundland author Joanne Soper-Cook however, old photographs tell a myriad of tales, most of them hauntingly morbid or with that delicious twist that keeps us turning the pages of her strange and mildly disturbing new book The Opium Lady.

Each of the 31 short chapters is illustrated with a black and white photograph, taken anywhere from 1910 until 1955. One can judge this by background only; a late-model Chevrolet, an army uniform or a bonnet offers vague decades and dates for each snapshot. In the foreground of all the photos is a person or a group of people, and each chapter starts with words like: "Here is a picture of Ruth..." or "Bertha is a housewife..." Soper-Cook proceeds to tell us the stories of the people in the photographs in astounding detail and to great emotional effect.

Not only are the stories interesting, in and of themselves, but there is something in the voice of the narrator that compels the reader to carry on. The voice is strangely cool, almost distant, even though she unabashedly reveals intimate details of each person's life. In this second-hand telling, this once removed voice-over, we are offered snapshots of betrayal, scandal, heartbreak and tragedy, all tempered by an unreliable narrator. Can we believe these tales? Who is the teller, and how does he or she know the horrors and joys of these people's collective pasts?

This is Soper-Cook's ace in the hole, her clever literary device, and this mystery drives the book through to its tell-all conclusion. When the narrator is at last revealed, the photographs seem to come into clearer focus. The stories mirror the biases of the narrator's life. In turn, she (yes, I will reveal gender, but nothing else) becomes implicated.

Not all the pieces of this photographic picture puzzle fit together perfectly, however. Some stories seem to hover, without a place, over the framework of the whole. How, for example, does the man who amputates his own fingers out of love for his sister fit into the book? Some of the characters in this absurd album are obviously connected. Some aren't, but that makes their stories only slightly less appealing.

There is a strong sense of relief at the end of The Opium Lady. Not only is the life of the narrator revealed more completely and, with it her motives, but at its conclusion the photographs stop, the stories halt, the gruesome histories end and we are left grounded in the present.

However, like that final twist of the knife, Soper-Cook leaves us no assurance that this motley assortment of friends and relations dredged from the past aren't some version of our own kin, or worse yet, the very folks with whom we dangle our feet under the dining room table. Subtly, stealthily, in a collection of old photographs and some nimble and razor-sharp prose, we are reminded the past is never far removed.

Margaret Macpherson is a freelance reviewer and the author of a recent biography of Nellie McClung.

Review from December 2003 issue of Quill & Quire

Imagine moving into a house and finding an old family photo album tucked deep in the corner of a dusty bedroom closet, flipping through the photos, and inventing intricate storeis for the strangers in the pictures. Reading Newfoundland author Joanne Soper-Cook's THE OPIUM LADY offers such a pleasure. The book is a collection of 30-plus stories, each introduced by a black-and-white snapshot taken between 1910 and 1955. In each of these very-short stories, Soper-Cook describes the characters in the images, elaborating on their past and their future.

The snapshots are of women in cotton print house-dresses with a line full of laundry in the background, soldiers in crumpled woollen Canadian armed forces uniforms, a woman with bobbed hair sitting in the back of a 1930s pickup truck, little girls holding hands with huge bows pinned on top of their hair. Whether these photos are part of Soper-Cook's family or if she found the pictures in a thrift store is left ambiguous. The final story, which begins with a photo taken in the 1980s or '90s, is written in the first person and is about a woman embittered by her husband's desertion for another woman.

Soper-Cook has a wonderful eye for the folly of human nature. Her characters are eccentric, foolish, smart, corrupt, happy, miserable, rich, poor, lonely, damaged, content, repressed, vivacious, and everything in between. The stories left me wanting to know more about these people, which is both a blessing and a curse. ALthough it would have been more interesting to read half as many stories for twice as long, the people who inhabit THE OPIUM LADY stay in the memory.

Reviewed by Karen X. Tulchinsky, author of THE FIVE BOOKS OF MOSES LAPINSKY, published by Raincoast.

NEW! The first review for my newest book, THE OPIUM LADY.

By MAGGIE MORTIMER

Saturday, November 1, 2003 - Page D11

The Opium Lady

By Joanne Soper-Cook

Goose Lane, 215 pages, $19.95

An even divide of snapshot and portraiture; the family photos reside in boxes. While I'm currently between places, these images will remain in transition. Never fully documented. The stark landscape of a farmer's field, a spotted dog in mid-air, those soldiers next to those azaleas. Then there's the scribbled-on back of a snapshot: "Maddie in sunshine -- age 7." Who the hell's Maddie? Which field? The soldiers, did they, um, die? What's the dog's name? This, coupled with a writer's mind, and there is heady temptation to fill in the blanks. Newfoundland author Joanne Soper-Cook does much more than this.

Twenty-eight still photos pose as backdrops to 28 meandering tales. Snapshot one: It's the forties and it's Ruth. Her "avant-garde" swimsuit is as bold as the writing to follow. The details: Ruth smokes "purloined Chesterfields," bops "blasphemously to Benny Goodman" and, on a serious note, contributes to the war effort. "In a factory that makes helmets, army helmets that come rolling down the assembly line like great gleaming eggs, their green paint not yet hosed onto their shiny-smooth exteriors. They look like naked skulls, a multitude of empty craniums, waiting for the soul to get sprayed on." Five pages in, mid-way through this incredible passage, and Soper-Cook has sold me. Ruth of the saucy bathing attire now stands assembly line. Text and image are one.

The Opium Lady, the collection's title story, takes a far different course than snapshot #7 -- a calling card -- suggests. Here Jessie, "an actress in Vaudeville -- exquisitely pretty and poised" -- finds more than she bargained for in a free night on the town, where she is led from taxi to darkness to a small shack where demons await. Soper-Cook, however, does not need an actress to spin a theatrical yarn. Her past efforts include Waterdowne,[sic] featuring a cross-dressing bulimic, and a re-imagining of Napoleon's life in the novel, The Wide World Dreaming.

Melodrama ensues in The Goose Girls. In snapshot #8 they look like they're game for just about anything. Tales about their dead mother are always a draw. Oh, there was that drowning (the president gave her a medal), and then the war overseas, in France, where she "saved untold hundreds of soldiers." But then: "This is how the Goose Girls grow, lying in the dark and listening to fantastic stories, while Daddy sits out on the porch, smoking in the cricket song and breathing out the stars." How lovely is that?

And it's all there, pretty much, right next to each other. And this is why it works, because this writer can not only handle going over the top, she knows when and how to pull back. A stellar example is found in My Pretty Peggy, snapshot #16. "Sitting on a toy horse holding a toy bow," Peggy is three sincere pages of melancholy. The bride and groom in snapshot #23 serve as document to a troubled and darkly comedic courtship in How Phyllis Got Married. In a exposé that crosses generations, geography (Maryland, Newfoundland) and social boundaries, it addresses, in Soper-Cook's unique way, such egghead topics as gender, sexual preference and racism. The "androgynous sea creature" caught on camera in snapshot #12 "knows she'll never be like other girls." Confrontational and creepy Desperado Deane exhibits the same sort of tension and outsider status as A Suitable Woman. In snapshot #19 it is hard to tell it's mother and daughter, cold and awkwardly staged. In the sepia tones of a less tolerant time, the younger woman's manly apparel seems questionable. In this quiet allegory (really the inner dialogue of daughter Elizabeth), revelation happens and is as quickly silenced. It is in the silence and the ledgers of a dead husband that Mrs. Millicent's [sic] life in Neither Do They Spin takes such a turn. In her WASP, sorted-out existence (the one that made her strike that pose in snapshot #10), she hauntingly confronts a lifetime of bigotry.

Bertha and Her Daughters (see snapshot #3) is a highly charged chronicle of a woman (wife and mother) who says no to abuse in a unique way. (This is no Chicken Soup for the Soul.) Suspenseful, poetic and violent, the overall structure is flawless.

Less successful scenarios are to be found in the yeah and then what Vera Willoughby, the half-baked The Scold's Bridle and the who cares? Harridan Shoes.

Though Soper-Cook sometimes buckles under her sensationalized devices and twist endings, for the most part, she is dead on.

So there you have it. Over two dozen oddities strung together for your delight and horror. A strange microcosm of not just anyone's family album. Told with (among others) a soldier's dreams of the desert, a water witch's trade, a mother's polio, a schoolteacher's routine. Stunning. Maggie Mortimer is a freelance writer and photographer living in Toronto.

OUT OF THE OUTPORTS AND INTO REAL LIFE

The Globe and Mail, July 13, 2002

Reviewed by Danette Dooley

WATERBORNE, JoAnne Soper-Cook's third novel, tells the story of Stella Maris Goulding, a successful author who lives a reclusive life, dresses as a man when she ventures out, and resorts to bulimia in order to cope with the problems in her life. Stella's mother makes no bones about the fact that the child is nothing more than a burden. Such negative reinforcement causes Stella to blame herself for her mother's lack of affection. Self-hatred becomes the core of Stella's life.

While her father is a kinder soul, much of his time is spent away from their home in Elsinore, a Newfoundland fishing community. As a child, Stella finds comfort in her grandmother's home. Not until her mother becomes terminally ill does she learn the truth about her parentage.

In shaping the mother's character as a harsh woman who can't stand the sight of her own child, Soper-Cook's prose can sometimes be repetitive, yet it is so gripping this can be overlooked. While the mother's outport Newfoundland dialect rings true in much of the novel, it is not always consistent. Changing from "me" to "my" becomes jarring: "I looks like my mother did when she was my age. I can put on all the makeup I likes, dye me hair. I knows I'm not young. Lord Jesus, I knows it. I'm lucky Joss don't care about all that. He's not fussy like Jack was."

In some ways, Soper-Cook's writing resembles that of Newfoundland author Kenneth Harvey. Both impressive writers tend to use shock treatment when writing stories about the darker side of life. When Stella learns a friend has died, she copes through her bulimia. Whether it's an honest look at just how devastating the disorder can be, or an exaggeration of the illness, will be decided by the reader.

"I am looking for something cold, sweet and soft, something pliable that will yield to the trespass of my teeth. I find a pound of ground beef, as petrified as diamond, and thaw it in the microwave until it's soft enough for me. And then I eat it raw, like steak tartare, standing over the sink and cramming it into my mouth, the blood streaming down my chin. I am savage now, demented, I have bitten my own lip and the blood is coming down. I vomit all the meat moments after I have eaten it: great bloody clumps of ruptured flesh."

WATERBORNE is an intense and intriguing read that ought to establish this Newfoundland author as an important new voice in fiction.

(Astrid Brunner is a former professor of literature @ the St. John’s campus of Memorial University of Newfoundland; she now lives, writes and publishes by French Lake near Fredericton. For discussions of this article you may reach her @darklady@nbnet.nb.ca)

Why do Newfoundland writers produce so many dysfunctional families? Told in two main voices, Waterborne is the tale of Stella Maris Goulding, a cross-dressing, bulemic (sic) reclusive writer and her mother Mim, a beautiful woman with eyes as blue and cold as "the naked side of an iceberg." Stella is a being "out of joint" who must listen to CNN to know she is alive, afraid she'll miss the end of the world, afraid she'll become someone else if she indulges in life. Looking back at her childhood, Stella says, "Some mothers eat their young. Mine did..." Her fisherman father, on the other hand, sand and played with her during his infrequent times at home in the improbably named outport of Elsinore. And as a plant wilts and fades without light, so Stella becomes self-abusive and afraid of human relationships when her love is not returned.

Returning to Elsinore for her father's funeral, she is again faced with her mother's indifference and the memories of Nanny Bristow, her maternal grandmother. A Scotswoman who "knew things other grandmothers didn't know," Nanny gave Stella the love she craved along with teas served from thin china cups. An encounter with an unearthly young man, possessed of one blue eye and one brown, gives Stella the grounding she needs to face some ugly family secrets, as she comes to terms with her mother's mortality and her Gaelic heritage.

This is a compelling, disturbing book that, like the scene of an accident, left me unable to turn away.

Joanne Soper-Cook's Waterborne is narrated alternately by a mother-daughter pair who seem at first utterly unsympathetic. Even as an adult, Stella Maris Goulding sees her mother as a being who "must be appeased, [who] is capable of doing monstrous harm, of wreaking mad and horrible destruction." Stella despises herself because her mother despises her; as a result she is bulimic and afraid to leave the house unless dressed, protectively, as a man. Mim, from Stella's perspective a monstrous mother, is revealed in her own narrative as another victim: she complains endlessly about her own mother, Nancy, who was mostly absent - at work in St. John's or in a TB sanitarium - during her childhood, and about the daughter, Stella, who stole Mim's freedom by pushing her into a loveless marriage.

Such characters, particularly Stella, with her trendy disorders, risk being stale types (I found myself anticipating the revelation of Stella's childhood sexual abuse long before it came). Stella admits that "I am a sitcom staple: the victim of life who loses no opportunity to relate her injuries..." But in the end Stella and Mim transcend sitcom limitations, thanks to Soper-Cook's psychological insights and the rich, allusive language in which they are rendered. Stella's attempt to anesthetize herself against painful memories with food may be textbook, but the novel's unsparing, matter-of-fact descriptions of her cramming ice cream or raw hamburger down her throat breathe life into the formula, making her a sympathetic individual clinging to the strategies that allow her to cope with life even though she knows they are trapping her. Though Mim, like Stella, is frustratingly passive and self-pitying, her narratives, rendered in a note-perfect Newfoundland dialect, are full of an aggrieved life: "I shouldn't be touching the fags...but there's something to it. While I'm having a fag I can relax for a minute. I haven't got to go thinking about old foolishness."

Near the end of the novel, pushed by Mim's impending death from breast cancer, Nancy, Mim and Stella confront a legacy more positive than that of bad mothering: their link to a mysterious young man, perhaps a selkie, who comes for the women of their family when they die. It isn't clear, though, that her relationship with him will free Stella to become waterborne, to escape the past that binds her as tightly as she binds her breasts when cross-dressing. I wanted her to triumph, but the ending of the novel is tentative: she recognises that "nothing can be undone...all of it is transitory, ephemeral, and brief...This is the quietus that we make." Soper-Cook's allusions to Hamlet suggest, perhaps, that quietus is a more hopeful end to this dark family story than tragic action would be. Still, I would like to see her use the abundant talents in evidence here to create female characters who aren't victims.

WATERBORNE, a quirky, mystical novel from Maritimer Joanne Soper-Cook, draws selkies; a cross-dressing, reclusive female writer; a couple of stunningly beautiful English actors; bulimia; incest; beached whales; Hamlet; an ill-tempered mother; and breast cancer into an amazingly coherent whole. Stella Maris Goulding, Waterborne's heroine, is a successful writer who lives in self-imposed isolation near St. John's, Newfoundland. She maintains uncomfortable ties with her mother--a woman who never wanted a daughter and who treated her bookish child with stern, anti-intellectual contempt. Through a series of self-examinations and family revelations brought about by the death of her father, Stella works through her family history, her own inner life, and her slightly supernatural relationship to her Newfoundland home. Soper-Cook packs an enormous quantity of disparate thematic material into this book and is to be praised for shoehorning so much into a fairly concise novel. Many of its thematic tangents are never adequately resolved, but Waterborne has an eccentric charm that will keep readers sifting among its scattered flotsam and jetsam. --Jack Illingworth

Waterborne is a[n]...accomplished novel...Soper-Cook, a Newfoundlander, has written two previous novels. Waterborne takes the old myth of the seal-folk or selkies, who sometimes come on land and mate with humans, and shows how it might work out in modern times.

The main characters are three generations of women, the first from Scotland, the second from a Newfoundland outport and the third a transvestite writer in St. John's. Their past and present relationships form the substance of the novel, and far overshadow the other characters - even the strange young man with one blue eye and one brown, who's rescued from the sea.

You could read Waterborne as a feminist book, but you'd miss the most important dimension if you did. Waterborne's like the sea. Sometimes one person or thing washes up, sometimes another. You have to stay alert in order to tell who's speaking now and what's happened.