In Visible Ink: Crypto-Frictions

Kelly L. Green is a freelance writer living in Ajax, Ontario.

Writers are readers are critics are writers are readers. Noted Alberta
writer Aritha van Herk eloquently explores the positions/jumping-off
places/territorial overlap of writers and their audiences in this
collection of short works. Stories, essays, works of criticism, and
works that refuse to be categorized take the reader on a delightful
journey through the intellectual, emotional, and geographical terrain of
van Herk’s mind.

This is an author who does not let her readers float passively. She
plays with her words, plays on and around them. Jumping from genre to
genre, her works challenge the reader, requiring interest, intelligence,
and involvement. She uses her experience with a veritable cornucopia of
literature, Canadian and otherwise, to provide her readers with a
feverish feast of thought.

One hilarious early piece describes how van Herk took on an alter ego,
the Germanic genre-buster and critical critic Hannike Buch. Hannike the
critical “buchaneer” does not cut van Herk the fictioneer any slack,
and constantly insists that van Herk eschew the stifling traps of genre
and convention. Van Herk the writer ultimately gives Hannike her point,
but with one proviso: “Literature that refuses to be categorized will
continue to appear, but when it is badly read, unlovingly welcomed, you
are in danger of un/reading what might be the best of our writing. This
touching, critical attachment for the coffin of convention is
emphatically a tool of the dominant patriarchal and pedantic literary
tradition, the same one that insists, over and over again, that the
canon consists primarily of poetry by white European males.”

So it is up to us, dear readers, to take advantage of van Herk’s
invitation and join the conversation. It is indeed more fun to read when
an intellect as formidable as van Herk’s demands our equal
partnership.