John Gallant

If the style of the drawing on the cover of this book looks familiar, you are not just seeing things. John Gallant may not be a name anyone had heard of but his son's name is well known, especially if you like graphic novels and comics. That also explains why a graphic publisher such as Drawn and Quarterly had published a non-graphic memoir.

Seth grew up hearing the stories which his father shared every time he had a chance. To the growing child, they sounded like adventures and every retelling added more details - as often happens with stories like that. As he was growing older, he started realizing that they are anything but - and that the humor in them is covering for desperation and hopelessness. So he decided to ask his father to start recording the stories and sending them over. Seeing them on paper, arriving sporadically, showed an even starker side of them - the humor which his father injected in the telling was all but gone - the only thing remaining was the reality of growing in poverty in a very rural part of the Prince Edward Island province - the village of New Acadia (later known as St. Charles) in the neighborhood of Rollo Bay in the 1920s and 1930s (but not on the coast itself).

John Gallant was born in 1917 in a family which would have been better off without children - the father was uneducated and frequently without a job, the mother was a housewife who seemed to care about her children but had way too many of them. There were some grandparents in the picture but they were not well-off either and the winters can be brutal in that part of the world. A lot of the early stories in this collection of autobiographical stories contain barely suppressed (and not always suppressed) loathing towards a father who had no job, no prospects, no dreams and yet wanted and had a big family.

I am not sure how much editing Seth did for this book - the stories do not sound like his usual style so I suspect we are actually hearing John's voice in a lot of it. The language and the stories are simple - the way a man who struggled to survive and never had a chance for real education talks and tells stories. But they also show where Seth got storytelling abilities (unless he helped more than it looks like he did).

Each of the stories in the book is very short, usually just a few pages but I dare you to try to read just a story at a time. There is some repetition and the story does not move entirely linearly (and some of the repetition comes from that) but reading it, it feels like the kind of stories family tell around the table or when the children come home. It was not an easy read in places, especially knowing that it happened (let's just say that the exploited children of the Dickens novels had it easy compared to some of what happened here). But it also showed me a part of Canada I am not very familiar with at a time when I am much more familiar with European and US history than Canadian (although admittedly, that may be true for most periods in history).

The short book (120 small pages with a lot of blank space) is the kind of memoirs I like reading - not those of the makers and the shakers of the world but the people who just lived in that area, in that time. These are also the kind of memoirs that rarely get published - this one would have never been published if Seth was not the artist that he is.

In addition to the cover and the editing, Seth also provided an introduction (in the form of a comic) and illustrations throughout the book (and I suspect he worked on the selection of the font and other visual elements).

Strongly recommended if you are interested in how some poor rural people lived during the Great Depression in Canada or if you like personal stories.… (meer)

Found this book in my local library and picked it up ahead of my upcoming trip to Prince Edward Island just to "get the feel" for the place. It turned out to be a really quick and enjoyable read, filled with gentle humour and some eye-opening super-short stories and illustrations. Even though there is a lot of poverty and struggle to survive throughout this book, there are also a lot of moments that will make you smile or even laugh out loud. And it is quite obvious that this was the author's intention: to give people a giggle and to remind everyone we need to appreciate what we have, even if we don't have a lot. Lovely read, important message behind it, too; highly recommended to all ages.… (meer)

I took this book out of the library because I wanted to read something set in PEI that wasn't written by L. M. Montgomery. Don't get me wrong; I am a fan of Montgomery's but I've read everything she has written. I didn't know until I got it home that one of Canada's best known illustrators of graphic novels was involved with this book. The author, John Gallant, is Seth's father and it was at Seth's urging that his father wrote down some of the stories he used to tell his children. When Seth was young he thought the stories were great fun but as he got older he realized that they were "tales of desperation".

The family circumstances of dire poverty probably had a great deal to do with the economic conditions but John Gallant also blames his father who did nothing to try to support his wife and children. And being good Catholics a new baby came along regularly. The Catholic church also come in for its fair share of criticism because the local priest lived in luxury and would not help out his parishioners. John Gallant was only able to go to Grade II in school but he lifted himself out of poverty and obtained an education. And, unlike his father, he was obviously a great parent.… (meer)

The author's son Seth, who has ingeniously written the foreword in comic-book style, remembers when he was a child and his Dad told stories of his childhood in the Depression they were made to sound like adventures. Only when Seth became adult he realized they were not adventures, but desperation and wretched poverty.

John Gallant has put the same stories in writing, which makes it obvious that this was no life of adventure, but of survival. This beautiful little book has hand-drawn illustrations by the author and a font that appears to have been printed by a youthful hand. I commend Gallant for being able to share his stories, and reminding those of us who did not experience the Great Depression, just how fortunate we are. Unforgettable.… (meer)