Brian Brett, former Chair of The Writers’ Union of Canada (2005-06), died on Wednesday, January 17, 2024 in Vancouver. Here, he is remembered by his many friends in the Union. The Union asked author William Deverell to write a lead In Memoriam for his close friend, and several others to add their memories.
By William Deverell
In the acknowledgments page of my last novel, Stung, I wrote: “I shared several creative highs with my pal of forty years, Brian Brett — poet, activist, raconteur, best-selling author of Tuco and Trauma Farm. He was the fomenter of several comedic riffs and twists, and helped sculpt a couple of oddball characters.”
Our friendship began in the early 1980s and continued until a sad, wintery January 17, of 2024, when this amazing literary colossus lost a year-long battle against the ravages of a severe stroke. He was 73.
Over those years, Brian and I often critiqued each others’ fictional works-in-progress, invariably while sharing a bottle of Glenlivet and a joint or two. Or three. And we would roar with laughter at the improbable scenarios we invented, and the crazy characters.
But though our creative brains somehow harmonized, I remained merely a one-trick pony novelist, while Brian was a masterful poet, multi-award-winning memoirist, essayist, lecturer, teacher, workshop guru, columnist, with an expansive list of literary prizes and short-listings, not to mention his talents in the arts of ceramics, bonsai, cuisine, and, jointly with his partner Sharon Doobenen, gardening and the raising of chickens, sheep, and peacocks. Sharon, a nurse, and he were together for nearly 40 years.
Brian and I were in tune politically, shared concerns about the future of this fragile planet, and, locally, campaigned to protect our islands in BC’s Salish Sea — his Salt Spring, mine Pender — from the threats of overgrowth. As to the politics of literature, I know no author as ferociously supportive of this Union as Brian Brett. (Though he enjoyed making a great ruckus at AGMs, but all for the good.) He was on Council for several years and was Chair in 2005.
It's hard to choose, but I think our most hilarious venture was our joint reading tour of interior BC libraries. We were joined by Sharon and my late wife Tekla Deverell, dogged back-seat drivers whose warnings to avoid the back roads were scoffed at. We knew where we were going, Brian and I: the Ainsworth Hot Springs. We ended up lost in the West Kootenay hills for untold hours as the road dwindled into a trackless dead end.
I can’t imagine that any TWUC member reading these remembrances is not familiar with the history of Brian’s difficult early years. The taunting and bullying he endured as he struggled with Kallmann Syndrome. He powerfully tells of his adolescent history in Uproar’s Your Only Music, a mix of poetry and memoir that awed many with its frankness, its openness. Those elements are also to be found in these brief, reflective lines from his last poetry collection, To Your Scattered Bodies Go:
Look into the image of you, boy-child,
the endless eyelashes, the floating wild hair
draped down to your ass.
The long bones of hormones
that didn’t stop growing
until the doctors whacked you with chemicals.
Uproar’s Your Only Music was followed by a second memoir, Trauma Farm, his most famous work, a meditation on farm life spiced with a rousing polemic against agribusiness, and rich with humour and rural anecdotes. It won the 2009 Writers’ Trust Nonfiction Prize among a batch of other awards. My favourite among his blurbs is this lyrical compliment by Wade Davis: “Trauma Farm is a touching and tender memoir, at once humorous and profound, filled with wonderful insights about life as a poet and accidental farmer in what will always be, for Brian Brett especially, the gentle rain forests of home.”
Tuco and the Scattershot World: A Life with Birds (2015) completes Brian’s trilogy of memoirs. The African Grey parrot, Tuco, served as Brian’s sidekick for 30 years before its sudden death, and this book not only commemorates Tuco but morphs into an exploration of “otherness,” how humans relate to other life forms. But there is hilarity here too. “Party time!” Tuco would announce when guests arrive. Or the trickster bird would do a pitch-perfect ringing of a phone, causing Sharon from outside to rush to answer it.
In 2016, the Writers’ Trust crowned Brian with the Matt Cohen Award: In Celebration of a Writing Life, celebrating his body of literary achievement.
Sadly, in 2017, Brian and Sharon broke apart. I made several trips to Salt Spring, joining with their family members in desperate but failed efforts at mediation. Literally, uproar was their only music, and Brian, whose health was failing, was determined to sell the farm and return to Vancouver.
It must be said that Brian handled matters poorly. It was he who initiated the breakup. Close friends, including me, were shocked to read in The Tyee and the Globe and Mail obituary that he cast the blame on Sharon. Her recent note to me: “I miss him.”
I recommend To Your Scattered Bodies Go, in which he plays with love, and aging — and death, remarkably prophesied. “Ah, well,” he wrote, “the end is never what you want; it’s what happens.”
By Margaret Atwood
Brian Brett was a dear friend of ours for many years. He was instrumental in the formation and shaping of The Writers’ Union in the seventies, working primarily with Graeme Gibson at that time; he continued to be a large and endearing, if sometimes rowdy, presence in our lives. He was a great oral storyteller — who can forget his parrot, Tuco? — and a retailer of hot West Coast gossip. As a survivor of childhood abuse due to his genetic abnormality, he was devoted to the principle of fair treatment, a devotion that got him summarily booted out of the UBC Creative Writing department during the Great Purge in the early days of the badly handled Galloway scandal. Knowing his life might be short, Brian lived it as fully and whole-heartedly as he could. His friends will miss his unique presence dearly.
By Jenny Erpenbeck
Brian, my dear, this was how I addressed you so many times. All those years you were so far away, I was used to missing you, but now the missing feels different. Just to let you know, I bought the Villon, I saved it. A well-worn volume, with a makeshift repair on its back, since broken apart on the inside. I could see, you tried your best to keep the thing together. Where it is broken it opens up first and reads:
Princes are fated to die
And everyone else who’s alive,
If they be angered by this or vexed
This too the wind beareth away.
I found the Villon in one of those cardboard boxes filled with what once was your library, already having been moved to the underworld of literature, the basement of a secondhand bookstore, even before you yourself were gone. That afternoon I visited you for the last time.
By Heidi Greco
When I met Brian, he was 21, fair-haired and still looked more like an angel than the giant of a man he became. And when I say giant, I’m meaning in several ways — his physical size, his passion for causes, his volume control.
Words I heard recently to describe poet Emile Nelligan are ones some might apply to Brian: volatile, unpredictable, freakish. Although Nelligan was from another era, he was an artist just as committed to the essence of poetry as was Brian Thomas Brett.
Today I think of Brian in a place I imagine as a kind of heaven: hanging out with Fawcett, Rosenblatt, and Lane. Whether they’re talking about literature or gardening or cats, I figure their discussion is loud and getting louder, but is all the while filled with laughter as they argue their way into the next matter of business, whatever it may be — frivolous or dark.
By Dorris Heffron
Brian Brett was our raging bull. He didn’t just care, moan, or rant about TWUC matters, he got into a rage about them. And sometimes got things improved. That’s not easy to do in the TWUC arena. His interests were wide, but he was most of all a dedicated, incorrigible writer.
What I loved about Brett was his kindness and generosity, how he could laugh at himself, and be broken hearted at the death of his human or animal and bird friends.
By David Homel
“There’ll be nothing left of Death when I get through with it.” Brian made that boast, and I took him at his word, even as I was helping him wrap his feet to staunch the bleeding when he was living at the Al Purdy A-frame residency outside of Ameliasburgh, Ontario. You had to get close to Brian to understand him. Otherwise, like some people, you were just a spectator to his noisy rattling chaos. I was lucky to be close to him at the times I could. The closeness was a family affair. My youngest son, after finishing UBC, went and lived a spell on Trauma Farm. We were all the richer for being near him. His expletive “Freakin’ armpit universe” lives on in my family. But more than that, his words that reminded us of the struggles of his life. “I’ll match you rape for rape,” he said to a TWUC member who was playing the victim at an AGM. I don’t think I would have had his strength.
By Chris Humphreys
Brian changed my life. (I will not be the only one who writes that.) Invited us to farm-sit Trauma Farm, twice. After the second time we moved to Salt Spring. I read, Uproar's Your Only Music, stunned by it. Not only that he'd survived such a tortured youth but that he overcame all obstacles to become so brilliant a wordsmith, so keen an observer of the world's joys and follies. He tackled it relentlessly, distilling experience into dazzling combinations of words and rhythms. His mind was quicksilver, all-embracing, leaping from summations of Donne's genius to Zeppelin to 60's Westerns in a blink. How that man loved a tangent! "There goes the neighbourhood," he'd cry whenever he saw me, even towards the very end. I shall miss hearing that, miss that smile, miss all the examples of a life fully lived. Exasperating, transcendent, rough, tender… Mr. Brett has left the building.
By Alma Lee
I first met Brian in the very early days of TWUC when he was one of the rabble rousers from the West Coast. We became friends then and after I moved to Vancouver he and Sharon hosted me frequently at Trauma Farm. Wonderful memories (and excellent food!). It was a sad thing to see him so diminished, and I was happy to be his "semi-official" Vancouver visitor when he was in Long Term Care at UBC hospital. May he be out there partying away with some of his old pals — other crazy poets and writers.
By Marion Quednau
Brian fled his constraints on a day dazzled with the whirling grey-golden light of snowfall:
when I hide in the snow
I dream a hurricane of suns, ...
soaking the pain from my body.
His words linger like slow melts on the tongue, each one as bright a surprise as the snowflakes we tasted as children. Brian wrote to resist the sham truths that daily bruise our knowing, believing in the stubborn beauty that persists. Another of our departed poets, Steve Heighton, once wrote,
We own so little
of ourselves, how
did we think to own
anything of the world?
He thanked Brian for "influence and support" in finding right words for the difficult things that press down on us, leave us marked by time, bereft. May both still be bound in the mischief and mystery of creating something out of nothing, lending us lift and purpose.
(BB, "The Winter," Poems New & Selected, Sono Nis, 1993. SH, "World Enough," Selected Poems: 1983-2020, Anansi, 2021.)
By Susan Swan
The first time I met Brian I told him to meet me in the back alley because I was going to beat him up. I was The Writers’ Union Chair in 2008 and he was the most irascible spokesperson in the Union’s BC chapter which was so often dissatisfied with the Union that a part-time staff member had to be hired to help out at their meetings. No other Canadian chapter was allowed that arrangement.
At an AGM, Brian relentlessly hectored me about broadening union membership to all Canadians, including Indigenous members who didn’t want to be identified as Canadians. He didn’t listen when I explained that doing this meant changing the Union bylaw first.
Half joking, I threatened to thrash him. To my surprise, his eyes lit up. He was thrilled, and I realized here was someone who enjoyed arguing as much as me. For us, a disagreement meant you respected the other person enough to tell them what you thought.
He and I became friends, and I had a memorable visit with Brian and his wife Sharon at their Salt Spring Island farm. The motion he so passionately wanted was passed at the next year’s AGM.
By Sean Virgo
1982. Two friends with dueling histories and aesthetics. I’d go over to White Rock at the weekend and after a long family evening Sharon would leave us to our nefarious devices and we’d repair to the spare bedroom and write. It was to be a mythic reinvention of erotica.
"Manzanita" was a chthonic spirit of possession, his hillside manifestation a shadowhawk with its whipoorwill call, moogaloo. We spent hours with him, sometimes till dawn, often helpless with laughter at ourselves and what language could do. We had no intention of publishing it, it was beyond Laurentian, completely “overcooked” in Brett’s words, but he always claimed that those sessions taught him how to write. No doubt "Manzanita" is lurking somewhere among his papers.
We had huge fallings-out and fallings-in over the years, but when we wrote to each other it was always with the same hail or farewell.
Moogaloo.
By Hal Wake
Brian was a master at producing literary tribute events for the Vancouver Writers Fest, and I relied on him greatly (his first such event with Patrick Lane is legendary).
We’ve heard about Brian’s eclectic interests, his capacious mind, his limitless imagination, and his myriad contributions to Canadian literature. But he was also just a whole lot of fun.
Some years back, Brian and I attended a festival in Sydney BC. After the last event we headed for Lorna Crozier and Patrick Lane’s where Brian had been invited to stay. I asked if he was sure it would be okay. "Oh yeah, no problem." Patrick met us at the door and asked us to be quiet. Lorna’s cat was very ill, so neither of us could stay there. "No problem," said Brian, "We’ll crash with Susan Musgrave," who graciously removed her sleepy daughters from their beds and installed us in their place. Unfortunately Susan’s cat was more comfortable sitting on Brian’s face. And my snoring din was apparently intolerable. He described the hell he had endured and laughed.
He often mentioned boxes he had at the archives which were not to be opened until after his death. Can you imagine the stories they contain?
