Furry Creek

M. Wayne Cunningham is a past executive director of the Saskatchewan
Arts Board and the former director of Academic and Career Programs at
East Kootenay Community College.

In September 1975, the B.C. poet Pat Lowther was brutally murdered by
her second husband, Roy Lowther, who was later convicted and sentenced
to prison where he died. Furry Creek, a “non-fiction novel” of
“documentary imaginings,” is Harrison’s attempt “to imagine a
fictive shape for Pat Lowther’s actual life.” The book incorporates
factual information from various sources (e.g., newspaper clippings,
trial transcripts, Lowther’s journal and love letters) and refilters
it through the point of view of various fictional characters, such as
the crime-scene investigators, the detectives, the court recorder, and
juror number seven.

The book is an odd construction of 23 entries, 14 of which could be
identified as chapters. Another eight are inserts consisting of three
letters to Harrison from Lowther’s daughters, Christine and Beth; a
Christmas note to him from Christine; Beth’s draft of an introduction
to a collection of her mother’s unpublished poetry entitled Time
Capsule; Christine’s final version of her essay for the collection; a
one-page announcement of the publication’s launch; and an afterword by
the author. The last entry is a poem by Lowther entitled “Doing It
Over.”

The final result is a scrapbook-like collection that mixes fiction and
nonfiction but does not manage to fuse the two into a unified whole.
Subtitled “Writing the Unwritable,” the afterword provides insights
into the author’s attempts to creatively marry fact with fiction; it
could prove useful as a discussion piece in creative-writing classes.

In Lowther’s “Doing It Over,” the speaker cautions that “some
things / no dream can recreate”; perhaps Lowther’s “fictive
shape” is one of those things.