Oursonette

There was a close up of her heart-shaped face, her roguish, long-
lashed wink. Then she’d changed back into her bear form and headed
into the woods with her two bear allies.
When he’d first pitched Oursonette to Gloria, she’d been insure. “A
bear?” she’d said. “I dunno, Al. Could it maybe be a tiger? Or a lynx?”
“What’s wrong with a bear?”
“It’s not... face it, Al, a bear’s not sexy. Bears are more cuddly, like
teddy bears. Or else they’re ferocious.”
Al had been hurt. “You don’t get it,” he’d said. “The bear’s a tribute
to Uncle Joe. Russia – the U.S.S.R – they’re helping us win the war,
right?”
“So?”
“It’s a symbol. Like, a mascot. The Russian Bear. Except I made it
white, so it’s more, I dunno. More pure.”
“You’re very sweet, Al,” Gloria had said. “You need a girl friend.”
She’d paused, blown out more smoke, stared up at the ceiling, as she
did when pondering. “Okay, give it a whirl. If it works I’ll take you off
Bessie the Bullet Gal. But do it fast, we need to keep pushing if we want
to gain on Bell.”
But that had been a long time ago: three years at least. Now, in the
Pickering dining lounge, Gloria was frowning while she lit another
cigarette. She offered him the pack even though she knew he was quit-
ting on account of his lungs. “I’m thinking like you,” she said. “A year
ago I thought I’d be offering you a full-time slot. Get you out of the
mail room at C.P. But now...”
“What’re you both talking about?” said Mike. “Want some pie? I’m
having some. Lemon chiffon!”
“It’s not real lemons,” said Al.
“War’s over, honey,” Gloria said. “That embargo on American
comics is gonna come off. I give it six months, a year maximum.
All-colour Americans – they’ll be back. Captain Marvel, Batman,
Wonder Woman, the whole shooting match. Mickey Mouse, you name
it. Then this place will be flooded. Black and whites like ours will be
finished. Oh, Al, and that Russian bear – I don’t see that being so popu-
lar, coming up. How’re they going to divide things? The Yanks, the
Russies. It’s not gonna be so lovey-dovey soon, trust me.”
Mike said, “Cripes. I need another beer.”
“It’s okay, sweetie, we’ve got a fallback, “Gloria said to him. “We’ll
slide back into the posters and ads. The factories are gonna be making
all kinds of new things. Vacuum cleaners, toasters, cars – trust me,
they’re gonna be big! You heard of televisions? In a few years, just
watch! Then they’ll need to sell it, all of it, and that means ads. You’ll
have lots to draw!”
Fine for Mike, but what about me? Al thought. He didn’t want to
draw cars. They lacked purpose. He’d been just a kid when the war
started, so it was all he could really remember. The waste paper col-
lections, the balls of tinfoil they’d been urged to save, the ration books,
the radio broadcasts from the front, the newsreels, the airplane cards;
the smells, the sounds, the textures: would it all simply vanish, as if
those efforts counted for nothing? He had a vision of people, intent
on a single goal, marching forward together, but suddenly faltering,
coming to a standstill, then wandering away in different directions as
if they had amnesia. What would everyone do? He could not imagine.
And his Oursonette. She wasn’t a real woman, a real bear-woman,
true, but he would miss her a lot. They’d been through so much togeth-
er. The U-boat attack, the tank battle, the advance through Holland
when she’d brought food to the starving, the time when she’d rescued
those French resistance fighters; the Maquis, up in the mountains. The
people she’d guided through the Alps, into the safety of Switzerland.
That had been a suitable job for a bear. He’d learned so much geog-
raphy from her, he’d been with her every step of the way. Together
they’d renounced their so-called normal life to dedicate themselves
to the cause.
Au revoir, he whispered to her silently; but she was already fading.
Lost, lost. He felt like crying. Would he find someone else to draw?
Maybe not. Maybe his life was already over.
“Buck p, Al,” Mike said to him. “You’re young and reckless! You’ve
got a whole new future ahead of you! Have a beer!”
“Can you draw washing?” Gloria said. “Bowes of soap flakes? Cute
housewives in aprons hanging out the sheets, pitching woo to their
laundry? Sexy little kiss mouths?”
“Yeah,” said Gloria. “Cause trust me: it’s gonna be big!”

Author’s Note: I remember the VE Day celebrations, just barely, though
we were in Sault Ste Marie, not Toronto. I read a lot of comics on the
late 1940s, during their postwar surge. And my old friend Alan Walker
wrote the introduction to The Great Canadian comic Book, about the
early ‘40s black-and-whites.

Biographies

Irving Layton (born as Israel Lazarevich), poet, short-story writer,
essayist, professor, born 1912 in Romania, died 2006 in Canada.
Layton emigrated with his family from Romania to Montreal before
age one. He completed an MA in economics and political science at
McGill University and lectured at Concordia University. From 1970 he
became active in Toronto literary life and lectured at York University.
Irving Layton has published over 40 books. He is recognized in
Canada and abroad as a prolific, versatile, revolutionary and contro-
versial poet. He was the most outspoken and flamboyant among poets.
His satire was generally directed against bourgeois dullness, and his
famous love poems were erotically explicit. Layton theorized that
poetry should be “vital, intense, subtle and dramatic” and his work is
ample proof of his description. Famously generous with his time for
younger poets, Layton was a major influence on Leonard Cohen, Eli
Mandel and Al Purdy.

Frank Davey (Frank Wilmot Davey), critic, essayist, poet is a lead-
ing authority on contemporary Canadian literature and culture. He is
born in Vancouver 1940, earned his PhD at the University of Southern
California. From 1990 Frank Davey is living in Ontario. He was Pro-
fessor of Canadian Literature at York University.
Through his books of poetry, his literary and cultural criticism
and his rich range of essays on diverse topics, Frank Davey has been
a major figure involved in introducing the idea and practice of post-
modernism to writers in Canada.
Frank Davey’s landmark 1976 essay “Surviving the Paraphrase”
introduced a new era in Canadian literary criticism by critiquing the
then-dominant school of “Thematic Critics,” in particular the critical
work of Margaret Atwood, John Moss, D.G. Jones and Northrop Frye.

Fraser Sutherland, born and raised in Pictou County, Nova Scotia,
first attended the University of King’s College in Halifax, before
moving on to receive a Bachelor of Journalism from Carlton Univer-
sity in Ottawa in 1969. The following year he began freelance writing
and editing for several major newspapers and magazines, among them
the Toronto Star, the Globe and Mail, and the Wall Street Journal.
He has had fiction, nonfiction, criticism, and poetry published
in more than 100 periodicals and anthologies in Canada, the United
States, Great Britain, France, Serbia, Iran, Albania, and Bangladesh,
some of them translated into French, Serbian, Farsi, and Albanian.
Having written and edited for many dictionaries in three countries,
Sutherland may be the only Canadian poet who is also a lexicog-
rapher.
Fraser Sutherland now lives in Toronto.

Margaret Atwood (Margaret Eleanor Atwood), poet, novelist, critic,
is born 1939 in Ottawa. A varied and prolific writer, Margaret Atwood
is one of Canada’s major contemporary authors. Atwood’s writing is
noted for its careful craftsmanship and precision of language, which
give a sense of inevitability and a resonances to her words. In her fic-
tion Atwood has explored the issues of our time, capturing them in the
satirical, self-reflexive mode of the contemporary novel.
She has written to date a staggering 14 novels, nine short-story col-
lections, 16 books of poetry, and ten volumes of non-fiction that have
collectively garnered two Governor General’s Awards, a Giller Prize, a
Man Booker Prize and numerous other awards and accolades.
A Companion of the Order of Canada, Margaret Atwood is among
the most prolific and celebrated writers in Canadian history.

George Edward Hart was born in Prince Edward Island in 1914 and
lived in Charlottetown, Wolfville, Montreal, Rumsey-Millwood, Hali-
fax, Leaside, Toronto. He participated in the World War II as a naval
officer. He graduated and mastered the English language at Acadia
University in Nova Scotia. He has been a teacher, radio broadcaster,
actor, naval officer, social service executive and author. George Edward
Hart is the oldest living poet in the world: 104 years.
He has published 7 books of poetry under the joint title Wordscapes
(I-VII). His work, Transcontinental Pedestrians (Fitzhenry & White-
side, 2006), “is not only a well-reconstructed story, but a reminder that
the magnificent beauty of this country is best experienced at the pace
of self-locomotion” (Bruck Kidd).

Stojanka Radenovic Petkovic, born in Nis, Serbia where she com-
pleted her high school; she graduated from the Faculty of Philology in
Belgrade – English Language and Literature, and from the Faculty of
Political Sciences in Belgrade she was awarded Master’s Degree in Pol-
itical Sciences – Sociology of Work. She immigrated to Canada with
her family in 1994 and she was working as a LINC coordinator and a
community worker till retirement. She is a member of Writers’ Asso-
ciation of Serbia.
She has published many poems in Serbian magazines, twelve books
of poetry, a book of stories and one novel. Also she published a book
of “Selected poems” with extracts from the books reviews. Three of her
books are written in English and Serbian language. Her book “War
Geography” (1998) was declared the best book of poetry written in
Serbian language abroad, and the book “Virtual Reality” has got the
“Ivo Andric Academy” (2007).