The Rain shines on Vancouver

A new magazine brings to light local publishing, and does so in admirable fashion

by Reed Eurchuk <reurchuk@republic-news.org>

Vancouver's newest journal, The Rain: The Vancouver Book Review, promotes critical discussion of locally published books and books about the region. Now in its third issue, The Rain has grown quickly, attracting reviews written by well known local writers (Michael Turner, Karen X Tulchinsky), and performers (Mecca Normal singer Jean Smith) as well as a number of teachers and editors.

In a telephone interview with The Republic, The Rain's publisher, editor and regular contributor, Michael Barnholden, said he hopes the Review is "a medium to pick up from the books" themselves and "contributes to intellectual discourse on locally published books." The magazine is notable for the quality of its writing as well as the way it engages the books reviewed. Not content to simply congratulate or resume a plot or argument, The Rain's writers speak to a text's strengths and contradictions.

Examples of The Rain's critical approach abound in its current issue. Writing a comparative review of two books on education, Crawford Killian opens with a paradox: the two books, "appear diametrically opposed; yet they both seek the same social goal."

Killian Sketches the two writers' differing approaches to the politics of education, their personal involvement in the educational system, and their writing styles. Refusing to "vote" for one book over the other, Killian manages to treat each fairly while at the same time pointing out problems in each.

Another review, by writer Michael Turner, of local Punk rocker Joe Keithley's recent autobiographical book, I, Shithead, opens with an amusing personal anecdote of a hockey scrum involving the two. Turner goes on to humorously engage some of Keithley's earlier punk rhetoric with the rhetoric in the book, and he finds the book lacking. Local writer, teacher and critic, Clint Burnham reviews Donna Vogel's book on the local municipal political party COPE. In the generally positive review, Burnham untangles an underestimation of class politics and the "mediatized nature of politics" from an overestimation of a "new social movement" perspective which emphasizes a "dream of multicultural harmony, environmental happiness and benevolent 'counter-hegemonic vision'" in Vogel's book. He points out the "fortuitous historical context" into which the book was born-the election of COPE-which, from his point of view, makes an ironic comment on some of Vogel's arguments.

Barnholden has spent much of his 30-odd years in Vancouver's literary community among writers and readers. After graduating from SFU, where he studied with and under a number of well known local writers, he worked for five years with local publisher Talon Books, and has also worked with the Kootenay School of Writing, a local writer-run centre.

The title, The Rain, originates in a joke at the expense of the Vancouver Sun. Barnholden says that journalists joke that they'll start a new paper which gets it right and call it The Rain. Barnholden told The Republic that one disappointment for him so far is the difficulty he has in getting people to review poetry, which he called one of his main interests. Currently the paper is available at branches of the Vancouver Public Library, the Book Warehouse, as well as independent magazine and book stores like Magpie and Peoples Co-op books on Commercial Drive.

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