Fiction Nature & The Environment
Chemical Valley
- Publisher
- Biblioasis
- Initial publish date
- Oct 2021
- Category
- Nature & the Environment, Literary, Short Stories (single author)
-
Paperback / softback
- ISBN
- 9781771964470
- Publish Date
- Oct 2021
- List Price
- $22.95
Classroom Resources
Where to buy it
Description
Winner of the Alistair MacLeod Prize for Short Fiction • A Thomas Raddall Atlantic Fiction Award Finalist • A 2022 ReLit Award Finalist • A Siskiyou Prize Semi-Finalist • A Miramichi Reader Best Fiction Title of 2021
Oil-soaked and swamp-born, the bruised optimism of Huebert’s stories offer sincere appreciation of the beauty of our wilted, wheezing world.
From refinery operators to long term care nurses, dishwashers to preppers to hockey enforcers, Chemical Valley’s compassionate and carefully wrought stories cultivate rich emotional worlds in and through the dankness of our bio-chemical animacy. Full-hearted, laced throughout with bruised optimism and sincere appreciation of the profound beauty of our wilted, wheezing world, Chemical Valley doesn’t shy away from urgent modern questions—the distribution of toxicity, environmental racism, the place of technoculture in this ecological spasm—but grounds these anxieties in the vivid and often humorous intricacies of its characters’ lives. Swamp-wrought and heartfelt, these stories run wild with vital energy, tilt and teeter into crazed and delirious loves.
About the author
Originally from Halifax, David Huebert has lived in Revelstoke, Fernie, Victoria, and Toronto. Currently a PhD student at Western University, his poetry has appeared in journals such as Event, Vallum, The Antigonish Review, and The Literary Review of Canada. His fiction has appeared in Grain, Existere, and The Dalhousie Review. we are no longer the smart kids in class is his first poetry collection.
Excerpt: Chemical Valley (by (author) David Huebert)
Chemical Valley I kneel down and reach for the nearest bird, hydraulics buzzing in my teeth and knees. The pigeon doesn’t flinch or blink. No blood. No burn-smell. Sal’s there in seconds, his face a blear of night-shift grog. He rubs his bigger eye, squats by the carcasses. Behind him the river wends and glimmers, slicks through refinery glare. “Poison you figure?” Sal thumbs his coverall pockets. “Leak maybe.” Suzy appears next to Sal, seeping chew-spit into her Coke can. She leans over and takes a pigeon in her Kevlared paw. Brings it to her face. “Freaky,” she says, bottom lip bulging. “Eyes still open.” She wiggles her rat-face into a grin, a frond of tobacco wagging in her bottom teeth. I can’t afford to say it: “Saving that for later?” Suzy flares: “What?” “The chew.” Suzy puts a hand over her mouth, speaks with taut lips: “Enough of your guff.” I snort. “Guff?” She sets the bird down, hitches her coveralls. Lips closed, she tongues the tobacco loose and swallows. “Clean ’em up,” she says, nodding at the pigeons. She spins and walks away, trailing chew-spit across the unit. *** What you might find, if you were handling a dead pigeon, is something unexpected in the glassy cosmos of its eye: a dark beauty, a molten alchemy. You might find a pigeon’s iris looks how you imagine the Earth’s core—pebble-glass waves of crimson, a perfect still shudder of rose and lilac. What you might do, if you were placing a dead pigeon into the incinerator, is take off your Kevlar glove and touch your bare index finger to its cornea. What you might do before dropping the bird into a white-hot Mordor of carbon and coke is touch your fingertip to that unblinking membrane and hold it there, feeling a mangle of tenderness and violation, thinking this may be the loveliest secret you have ever touched. *** I’m telling Eileen how I want to be buried, namely inside a tree. We’re sitting in bed eating Thai from the mall and listening to the 6 p.m. construction outside our window—the city tearing up the whole street along with tree roots and a rusted tangle of lead pipes—and I’m telling Eileen it’s called a biodegradable burial pod. Mouth full of cashew curry and I’m saying what they do is put your remains in this egg-looking thing like the xenomorph’s cocoon from Alien: Resurrection but it’s made of biodegradable plastic. I’m telling Eileen it’s called “capsula mundi” and what they do is hitch the remains to a semi-mature tree and plant the whole package. Stuff you down in fetal position and let you gradually decay until you become nitrogen, seep into soil. Contemplating panang, Eileen asks where I got the idea about the burial pod and I tell her Facebook or maybe an email newsletter. “You click on that shit? Why are you even thinking about this now? You just turned thirty-four.” I don’t tell her about the basement, about Mum. I don’t tell her about the pigeons strewn out on the concrete and then going supernova in the incinerator, don’t mention how it gets me thinking about flesh, about bodies, about waste. I don’t tell her about Blane, the twenty-nine-year-old long-distance runner who got a heart attack sitting at the panel in the Alkylation unit. Blane didn’t die but he did have to get surgery and a pacemaker and that sort of thing gets you thinking. Which is how you end up lying in bed at night checking your pulse and feeling like your chest is shrinking and thinking about the margin of irregular and erratic. Picking a bamboo shoot from her molars: “Since when are you into trees?” She says it smug. She says it like Ms. University Sciences and nobody else is allowed to like trees. I don’t tell her how we’re all compost and yes I read that on a Facebook link. I also do not tell her about the article’s tagline: “Your carbon footprint doesn’t end in the grave.” Reaching for the pad thai, I tell her about the balance, how it’s only natural. How the human body’s rich in nitrogen, how when you use a coffin there’s a lot of waste because the body just rots on its own when it could be giving nutrients to the system. Not to mention all the metals and treated woods in coffins. I tell her how the idea is to phase out traditional graveyards entirely, replace them with grave-forests. “Hmm,” Eileen says, gazing out the window—the sky a caramelized rose. “Is this a guilt thing, from working at the plants?” I tell her no, maybe, I don’t know. An excavator hisses its load into the earth. “Is this why you were so weird about your mother’s funeral?” I ask what she means and she says never mind, sorry. “Do you ever imagine they’re ducks?” Eileen asks what and I tell her the loaders and the bulldozers and the cranes. Sometimes I imagine they’re wildlife, ducks or geese. And maybe why they’re crying like that is because they’re in distress. Like maybe they’ve lost their eggs and all they want is to get them back and when you think about it like that it’s still bad but at least it’s not just machines screaming and blaring because they’re tearing up old sidewalks to put new ones down. “Ducks,” Eileen says. “Probably still be one working for every three scratching their guts for overtime pay.” She stacks the containers and reaches for the vaporizer on the nightstand, asking if I love trees so much why didn’t I become a landscaper or a botanist or an arborist. I shrug, not mentioning the debt or the mortgage or the pharmaceutical bills. Not mentioning that if I wanted to do something it would be the comic store but there’s no market in Sarnia anyway. I tell her it’s probably too late for a career change.
Editorial Reviews
Praise for Chemical Valley
"In this courageous collection, David Huebert holds little back as he weaves superbly crafted stories of the dark, difficult, and gritty reality of being human. Whether it be the destructive impact we have on our environment, each other, or ourselves, Huebert tackles this challenge with intelligence and compassion, both in his language and style, and in the empathy with which he portrays the human experience. The intertwining of ugliness, beauty, metallic cold and human warmth, and destruction and hope, creates a visceral, hopeful, and rewarding experience for the reader."—Alistair MacLeod Prize Jury Statement
"Huebert’s uncanny facility for spinning densely poetic fiction out of the tawdry horror of twenty-first-century life has made him one of the most captivating authors of the past decade."—Literary Review of Canada
"Huebert has a razor-sharp wit and an exacting eye for human foibles ... A masterful assemblage of environmentally minded tales."—Kirkus
"Huebert’s prose shines, frequently catching the reader off guard with startling but memorable turns of phrase and delirious imaginative leaps. And while the manic energy, eccentric humour and wry observations on life and love keep us entertained, the book’s rich emotional core draws us in, touching us at the most profound level."—Miramichi Reader
"Huebert is a gifted short story writer. His characters do contain multitudes, each story a set of worlds. Collectively, they reflect our times, and help us contemplate the most dire of threats to our singular habitable planet."—Atlantic Books Today
"Every story in Chemical Valley is uncanny, with a surprising dose of optimism nurtured by the bonds we share with each other as well as with the non-human world of which we are a part. What I have not discussed is the humour and heart throughout Huebert’s collection—it is an astounding feat to grapple with the reality we live in while also choosing to affirm the beauty around us. One can only hope that Huebert is working on a novel."—University of Toronto Quarterly
"[A] masterful exploration of dirty nature writing ... Chemical Valley’s stories, for all their dystopian demons, are balanced by Huebert’s insistence on penning his characters with an empathetic hand. His gaze may be harsh, like the reality we inhabit, but his love for his fellow man, and our desperate desire for connection, is unwavering."—Hamilton Arts & Letters
"Huebert's stories feel polished, elevated and expansive. Their intensity invites readers to reread, whether out of necessity or enduring curiosity ... Huebert digs deep, things get messy, and there's often a glitter of unanticipated discovery in the recesses of his stories—but only for the potential to illuminate another layer of darkness."—Marcie McCauley, Event
"Thought-provoking, smart, and frighteningly surreal, David Huebert’s Chemical Valley is a brilliantly crafted collection of short stories that confront the violence of human nature in the natural world."—The Farside Review
"Huebert works to create a world that seems almost futuristic then slowly reveals that he speaks of now and how our choices are destroying our health and our planet. He makes us feel the emotional side of well-developed characters as they face the world in fear and wonder."—bUneke Magazine
“David Huebert’s short stories explore environmental dread and creeping climate chaos, but also the power of love and community in a damaged world.”—Laura Lynch, CBC What on Earth
"The characters in ... Chemical Valley live in a world that has been molded and shaped by neoliberalism and the oil industry ... It’s a situation that could easily elicit nihilism, doom, and mourning—a kind of eco-grief—and yet, the various stories in this collection strive and yearn towards a sublime toxicity that finds beauty amidst the debris, and accordingly, in the lives of its inhabitants."—PRISM International
"The stories are varied, featuring oil refinery workers, teenage climate activists, long-term care nurses, and more, showing the issues and intricacies of their lives in lush detail. The grim explorations of wealth inequality, illness, and bereavement are counterbalanced by the rich and lyrical prose, providing heartfelt insights into today’s damaged world and the individuals who inhabit it."—ZYZZYVA
"Chemical Valley is full of stories that are beautiful, gross, depressing and uplifting all at once. Through the use of dazzling language and complex characters, this deeply thoughtful collection will truly get you thinking."—Dalhousie Gazette
"[D]ark, disturbing, excellent ... As a result of [Huebert's] poetic literary powers, I found myself mesmerized by the words and stories in this book, despite the grim contents. Or, even, because of them."—Consumed By Ink
"Chemical Valley—both in terms of its storytelling and presentation—shines on just about every meaningful level."—Always A Critic
"By delving into the lives of a range of characters, feral hockey players, grieving shift-workers, and love-sick teenagers, Huebert asks an urgent question—how to survive in a world that values chemicals and capitalism over human life? Lively, affecting, tragic, careful, and shot-through with humor, the stories seeped under my skin. I won't forget them any time soon."—Claire Cameron, author of The Last Neanderthal
“These stories are a making and unmaking, a feeling into the world and then a kind of visceral wrenching so that all that is or was once living unwinds and flashes of story break free—binding the reader into the flesh of a burdened earth, still breathing. An ecstatic surrender of beloved flesh, and dream, and carbon beings through geological and human (altered) time. Huebert tinkers human time across industrial effigies that make and break and will one day also be broken—a dream not yet quite dreamt, but this work is part of the dreaming. This collection is, in Huebert’s own exquisite play of words, ‘beautiful and polluted, toxic and sublime.’”—Angélique Lalonde, author of Glorious Frazzled Beings
“Visceral, intelligent, and original, David Huebert’s Chemical Valley displays a deep empathy and understanding of human relationships and a profound concern for our world. I was struck by how Huebert can take the grittiest of subject matter and turn it beautiful with his lyrical, alchemical prose. The stories in this collection are saturated with imagery and full of exquisite, textured language: this is the kind of writing that deserves to be read closely.”—Shashi Bhat, author of The Most Precious Substance on Earth
Praise for David Huebert
"In David Huebert’s 'Chemical Valley,' the narrator’s remarkable voice is laced with dark humour while displaying a tremendous depth of feeling as he cares for his dying partner and navigates a dangerous workplace replete with unpleasant coworkers. This is a complex story about love, death, and grief set in a contemporary Canadian community plagued by petrochemical-induced diseases and environmental ruin. The attention to language is so meticulous that tragedy is imbued with an aura of beauty. Each exquisite sentence in 'Chemical Valley' produces a sense of wonderment as the narrative crescendos to its harrowing conclusion."— 2020 Journey Prize Jury statement
"A paean to intimacy and to things rarely seen, 'Enigma' is an eloquent meditation on the mystery of life and death, love and grief, both human and animal. This is a vivid personal narrative of remarkable spiritual and emotional grace." —2016 CBC Prize jury statement (
"David Huebert’s short story collection, Peninsula Sinking brings all of the beauty, grace and heartbreak that the form excels at and then rattles you with its imagery."—The East Magazine
"A sense of wonderment penetrates the everyday lives of characters from the Maritimes in this well-crafted, compelling collection that displays a mastery of classical short-story structure and technique. Huebert’s vibrant language juxtaposes tough characters with tender preoccupations, creating narratives that are unsettling and mesmerizing, making ordinary moments in relationships thrilling and dangerous."—2017 Danuta Gleed Jury
