Born in Nelson, B.C., novelist Bill Stenson attended a one room schoolhouse on Thetis Island and grew up on a small farm in Duncan. He taught English and Creative Writing at various high schools, the Victoria School of Writing and the University of Victoria, and with Terence Young he co-founded and co-edited the Claremont Review, an international literary magazine for young adult writers.

Bill Stenson's first short story collection, Translating Women, and two novels, Svoboda and Hanne and Her Brother, were published by Thistledown Press. Also a finalist for the Prism International Fiction Contest and the Prairie Fire Short Fiction Contest, Stenson has published stories in Grain, The Malahat Review, The Antigonish Review, filling Station, Blood and Aphorisms, Wascana Review, Prairie Fire, Toronto Star, The New Quarterly, Prism International and the Nashwaak Review.

In 2013, Bill Stenson was a finalist for the 2nd Great BC Novel Contest. In 2017, Mother Tongue Publishing of Salt Spring Island B.C., announced Stenson had won its 4th Great BC Novel Contest, as judged by Audrey Thomas, for Ordinary Strangers, his novel about a daughter who wonders why there are no baby pictures of her in the family album. It is a sophisticated novel about unsophisticated people.

It opens with a couple driving to Fernie in the early 1960s, stopping at Hope where they lose their dog -- and discover instead a crying toddler in the woods. Unable to have children of their own, they proceed raise the girl they name Stacey, giving her a birth date and remaining secretive about her lost-'n'-found origins. Audrey Thomas describes this story about the road to forgiveness as funny, horrific and sad. "The story," she says, "will make you think hard about what it means to be a family."

His first fiction collection of 18 stories, Translating Women (Thistledown, $18.95 2004), contained fifteen of the stories previously published in various periodicals. "Not every man would find Muriel a real looker," he writes in his title story. "That's where the power of translation comes in. Muriel's not the kind of woman you approach aesthetically straight on. It's the way she flips her hair, the turn of her cheek, the pause she's perfected before important sentences."

It was followed by a novel, Svoboda (Thistledown, 2007), about the complexities of living within the Doukhobor culture of British Columbia during its turbulence of the 1950s, '60s and '70s when some factions of the sect gained notoriety in the headlines for civil disobedience, and the majority of Doukhobors were widely and unfairly mistaken as radicals as a result.

Hanne and Her Brother (Thistledown 2016) is Bill Stenson's novel about Hanne Lemmon who, at age sixteen, moves beyond her isolated, home-schooled life in the Cowichan Valley with a protective father to seek independence and love within the very different landscape of Eastend, Saskatchewan.

Bill Stenson lives with his wife, poet Susan Stenson, in the Cowichan Valley and writes every day. "Bill drinks coffee, smokes his pipe and does something to do with writing every single day. Some habits are better than others."

DATE OF BIRTH: February 28, 1949

PLACE OF BIRTH: Nelson, B.C.

EMPLOYMENT OTHER THAN WRITING: Teacher

Review of the author's work by BC Studies:
Svoboda

BOOKS:

Translating Women (Thistledown Press, 2004). 1-894345-77-0
Svoboda (Thistledown, 2007)
Hanne and Her Brother (Thistledown 2016) $19.95 978-1-77187-114-3
Ordinary Strangers (Mother Tongue 2018) $23.95 978-1-896949-70-3

Author photo by John Hemmings

[BCBW 2021] "Fiction" "Doukhobors"

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Half Brothers and Other Stories: a novella and four short fictions by Bill Stenson; illustrations by David Lester
(Mother Tongue $19.95)

Review by by Caroline Woodward

In his fifth book of fiction, Half Brothers and Other Stories, Bill Stenson warns from the outset to expect at least one story that grapples with sibling rivalry. Furthermore, Stenson chooses a Jane Austen epigraph: The younger brother must help to pay for the pleasures of the elder.

The novella asks hard questions of the parents, one essentially passive, the other chronically belligerent. Parenting remains the universal preserve of blundering amateurs. When the plot takes a serious twist, Dora, the mother of both boys, finally speaks some home truths to her husband, a former amateur boxer with drinking and gambling issues: “‘You can see now where all this fighting has got this family. Don’t you? It’s the grand solution for everything around here. You don’t like the way life is treating you then you fight. Fight, fight, fight…Our kids deserved better than this, and they’re damn well going to get it.’

‘You’re right,’ Ennis said. ‘You’re right.’ His contribution to a decidedly one-sided discussion lacked conviction, but she could tell he was trying.”

Dora tends to give everyone the benefit of the doubt and Ennis is the main beneficiary of her wishful thinking. The not-so-subtle matter of transferring his own pugilist ambitions to his brawny son and the countless cruelties his boy inflicts on his younger half-brother seems to have escaped his fatherly notice.

The plot twists and takes a mighty turn, and the two half-brothers become young men and change, or don’t change much, and life goes on. It’s a gritty, acutely observed character study and account of the consequences of their actions.

Ball and Chain begins with what I’d like to nominate as a sub-category of North American fiction concerned with raccoons and the often-hapless human response to them. Originally published in the Nashwaak Review, this story is leavened with dry humour: “He couldn’t remember his stomach getting bigger, but it had—from size thirty-four to forty, and a tight forty at that. That was the way a lot of things happened in life. Some days he would drive the eight miles into town, pull in front of the hardware store and not be able to remember driving there. Suddenly your life was altered, they built a new subdivision, and no one asked your opinion.”

The story follows two sets of characters, first a man, a young thief and a racoon. The second set is a real eastate agent, who is also a prospective home buyer considering a return to Vancouver Island from Toronto and her thirteen-year-old son’s concerns about adjusting to island life. These parallel lives converge in a most satisfying way, the kind of fictional sleight of hand which will make readers and other (generous) writers applaud with hoots and cheers!

Bon is the story of three thirteen-year-old boys in Duncan who form a gang one summer. Bon, short for Bonnie, is a Grade 8 grifter and femme fatale who soon has the boys doing her bidding after she joins the gang.

“It was the middle of a useless summer and the world was hot. The three of them sprawled out on the bank of the Cowichan River, their bikes in the gravel behind them like dead horses on the battlefield. They were drinking bottled root beer they’d stolen from the back of a delivery truck that followed the same route through town on Mondays.”

Their young lives are about to change during this memorable summer in another nuanced revelation of character in a story, like all in this collection, in which nothing is predictable.

Dick and Jane, first published by EVENT magazine, considers a brother and sister in their early teens. Jane is a very bright girl, destined to be an actuary for an insurance agency at the highest level of management. Her older brother, less gifted but a generous soul, is the first to give her full credit for her brains. Their father has gone missing after a messy extra-marital affair (not his) and after seven years, he is legally declared dead. What could possibly go wrong with this picture? Hang on for the ride!

The perfectly placed finale, Super Reader, is Bill Stenson at his playful peak. “My mother smokes cigarettes and my dad drinks whisky and I read books. We all have our burdens.” Chief among them are the boys who call him worm and whom he calls “the beat-you-to-a-pulp kids.” This portrait of a young ‘Super Reader’ is by turns funny, infuriating and profound because here we are, all ‘Children of the Book,’ reading this story at the end of this excellent collection, smiling and grimacing, in recognition of ourselves.
978-1-896949-85-7

Caroline Woodward is the author of nine books in five genres for adults and children. She lives and writes from somewhere on the road in a mighty BigFoot motorhome.
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