Lift Up Your Hearts: Story Telling, Heart of Community.

Lori A. Dunn is a ESL teacher, instructional designer, and freelance
writer in New Westminster, B.C.

Lift Up Your Hearts is Laurel Buck’s fourth memoir. In this collection of personal tales, Buck takes on the role of Everywoman, recounting the unremarkable events of her life in a lovely readable prose, giving the reader permission to celebrate the beauty in the mundane. In this volume, Buck shares tales of how storytelling can help to build community and neighbourliness.

Buck’s husband is an Anglican minister, and as a couple they have experienced many opportunities to build communities. As an older, retired couple, they have the time to “bide awhile” when they travel, able to stay in and explore the communities in the countries they visit. And it is from these opportunities that Buck draws her experiences for the tales in this volume. She recounts evenings of urban storytelling, where strangers attempt to build the personal networks they so sorely need. The reader is embraced along with Buck and her husband into the small Cornish town, where they are welcomed into the VE day celebrations with open arms. They visit an old Irish friend who through age and illness can no longer provide them with the community of her B&B. They meet and bond with a travelling group of international motorcyclists, touring the British Isles in their own community-building experience. This personable, approachable couple seem able to engage wherever they go, and Buck shares these moments with her readers.

Lift Up Your Hearts is not a monumental book, but it is a delightful one. The stories are gentle reminders of the importance of our everyday lives, and celebrate the joy in finding communities wherever we might be. Buck’s prose is clear, with moments of rambling interest, when, for example, the story about staying in Cornwall is derailed by a discussion of the names of towns derived from those of saints in both Quebec and Cornwall. Even though Buck may not be a worldly traveller in the modern sense (she has to ask if tipping is the custom in Ireland), she comes across as one of us, and invites us to share her journey and her communities.