The Dancehall Years Read online

  Many friends and associates have given me support and respite over the years. Thanks to King Anderson, bill bissett, Heather Marren-Reitsma, Paul Batley, Carole Itter, Anne and Jack Silberman, Tony and Janet Harris, Nik and Lise Karelis, Helen Truran and Elmar Plate, Linda and Gary Hanson, Richard and Shawna Audet, Nicole and Jim Tessier, Lee MacKay and Susan Douglas, Dennis and Dylan Conlon, Nancy Rothstein, Murray Hawse, Davey Gibbons, Wayne Tofsrud, Randy Buth, Claudia MacDonald, Paulie Haines, Sharron McCrimmon, Susan Foran, Teresa Plowright and Kris Glen. Thanks also to everyone at the Buchan Hotel in Vancouver and to my valiant publisher, Mona Fertig.

  Several locations have inspired the creation of The Dancehall Years. The Bowen Inn and The Pavilion at Bowen Island, B.C. provided the initial set, backed as they were by the Salish Sea. The mountains and lakes of the Bulkley Valley, particularly the peaks of Dzilh Yez and Stegyawden, as well as the reaches of Silverthorne Lake, Round Lake, McDowell Lake and Tyhee Lake, helped expand the novel’s horizons.

  Many books provided key historical facts. I am indebted to Irene Howard’s Bowen Island 1872–1972; Gerald Rushton’s Whistle Up the Inlet: The Union Steamship Story; Barry Broadfoot’s books, Ten Lost Years, Six War Years and Years of Sorrow, Years of Shame. Justice in our Time by Roy Miki and Cassandra Kobayashi helped me understand the aftermath of the internment years, as did Redress: Inside the Japanese Canadian Call for Justice by Roy Miki. The narrative was informed by The Nature of Sea Otters by Stephanie Paine and Our Coast Salish Way of Life: The Squamish by Daniel Conner and Doreen Bethune-Johnson. Along the Number Twenty Line by Rolf Knight revealed much about Vancouver in the 1940s. Man Along the Shore: The Story of the Vancouver Waterfront was written by the longshoremen who worked there. Many thanks to Betty Jane Wagner for her excellent study of a master teacher: Dorothy Heathcote: Drama as a Learning Medium; to John Wyndham for his novel, The Chrysalids, and to Jean-Paul Sartre for his play, The Flies. The story of The Dancehall Years is imaginary, and any errors or minor shifts in time sequences are mine.

  Sections of this novel have appeared in slightly different form in the following magazines: The Capilano Review, Herizons, The B.C. Monthly and Western Living.

  Many thanks to all.

  Joan Haggerty

  Telkwa, B.C., 2016.

  Joan Haggerty was born in 1940 and raised in Vancouver, B.C. From 1962 to 1972 she lived and wrote in London, England; Formentera, Spain; and New York City. Returning to the B.C. coast, she made her home in Roberts Creek and Vancouver where she taught in the Creative Writing Dept. at the University of British Columbia. She began a second career as a high school teacher in the Bulkley Valley in 1990. Her previous books are Please, Miss, Can I Play God? (Methuen, UK. & Bobbs-Merrill, U.S.A.), Daughters of the Moon (Bobbs-Merrill, U.S.A.), and The Invitation (Douglas & McIntyre & Les Editions JCL, Canada) which was nominated for the Governor General’s Award in 1994. She has spent summers on Bowen Island since childhood.