Netherwords: Fictions, Poems, Rants from British Columbia

Tami Oliphant is a Ph.D. candidate in Library and Information Studies at the University of Western Ontario.

Netherwords is the published result of a contest held by the
one-year-old, independent, and entertainingly named Ripple Effect Press.
Entries were solicited from artists and writers from across British
Columbia. The judges were looking for “writing that takes risks, tells
difficult stories and incites the imagination with both humour and
outrage.” They went on to ask, “Where are the bad girls and boys of
B.C. literature, we wonder? Where are the writers who aren’t afraid to
usurp the tired, old conventions of CanLit decorum?”

With this rallying cry in mind, I prepared myself for sexual deviance,
Oedipal impulses, expletives, gore, and drugs—all the old literary
“alternative” standbys that are the culinary equivalent of baked
beans. In fact, the anthology does include sexual deviance and the rest,
but these conventions are not employed in a gratuitous fashion. Pieces
run the gamut from the entertaining “Seven Daily Sins,” to a
27-year-old woman who wants to be a teenage boy, to a story about a
prison guard turned executioner for a day, to a poem about a poetry
reading in which the author offers the stiletto-sharp observation “The
room is full of writers … You can smell the vanity and self-loathing
in the air.”

Overall, Netherwords produces a strange cacophony, more like a punk
band than a symphony. But as the judges would probably tell you, that is
exactly the point.