Stacey Power is 26, a graduate of Grenfell’s theatre arts program in Corner Brook, back in St. John’s and living in a row house off Military Road. She used to live with her best friend, Viv, and work with her, too, at a harbourfront restaurant, but was fired for a general lack of service industry capabilities and attitude.
Now she bartends at a downtown theatre, fluctuating shifts linked with its seasons of puppet shows and Christmas musicals, cross-country theatrical launches and stand-up comedy, cutting and serving sheets of birthday cakes at the Tiny Dancers after-party, or pouring glasses of white wine in exchange for drink tickets on opening nights. She has semi-regular gigs in radio advertising and Standardized Patient enactments, and auditions for bigger projects, but no luck so far.
Without much money, or any real job security, she still has a thriving, vital, social scene of “Drag Race” screenings, films at artist-run galleries featuring make-your-own-sundae bars, house parties culminating on often poorly thought out hook-ups, and lots of bands at Peter Easton or the Rose. She’s close to her parents, both retired teachers who still work as tutors, and to her religious (Catholic) grandmother.
Her life is fluid and exciting, and uncentred and demoralizing. It’s her late twenties, shouldn’t she have a few solid plans, or even a clue, by now? Is she an actor? Is she a good person?
Questions rocketed to the fore by the opening incident. Stacey is awoken by a knock on her front door. It’s the RNC, four officers on her doorstep, telling her they have a warrant and they want her phone and her laptop. Three more come in the back door. There’s some suspicion of some cybercrime. They can’t say what exactly. They can’t confirm whether or not she’s a suspect. That the situation is so nebulous only drenches it in anxiety.
“All I Ask” has a lot to say about boundaries, legal, sexual, and artistic, and the defence and negotiation of.
The confusing, intimidating “visit” from the police – Stacey’s friends urge her to make a formal complaint, which also pushes into her discomfort zone. Maybe even more concerning is Stacey’s relationship history, events that even with her explicit consent blare alarms of exploitation.
As for any ongoing creative processes everyone of course has an opinion. The bare-bones vibrancy of the city’s multi-media cross-disciplinary projects and venues is exhilarating to read about.
It’s all exhilarating to read about, tactile and sensual.
It all unfolds over a few days before Christmas, but the writing arcs and enfolds back to Stacey’s childhood, through her long friendship with Viv, to her more prickly potholed connection with Holly, now her roommate, taking in performances and lovers and commemorative pope spoons along the way. Stacey’s sphere of sharing underheated row houses, taking the long way to Sobey’s grocery store by walking through Bannerman Park, doing inventory in a theatre bar, attending in an all-ages show that spirals out of mosh pit control — it’s detailed, vivid, inhabited. The characters are also astutely specific, down to the frayed versus hemmed cuffs of their wide- versus skinny-legged jeans.
References to current affairs — the fallout from RNC officer Doug Snelgrove’s sexual assault trail, Muskrat Falls — add to the verisimilitude.
One afternoon, for example, Stacey and Viv drop by the Wesley United Church sale, which “happens once a week for two hours in the basement of the church. An older lady in a wheelchair sits at a table by the door with an open cash box. A piece of loose-leaf with 25 Cents Admission written in ballpoint pen is laid in front of the cash box. The same wrinkled piece of paper gets reused each week.” They are “looking for kitchen stuff, cake pans or salad bowls or funny mugs. Most of the clothes had been donated by old people, or more likely by their families after they’d passed away. It was all either really big or really small because of how people tend to shrink or expand at the end of their life.” They run into Holly, who’ve they’ve briefly chatted with before. Holly has moved there from Toronto, and is stranded in a one-bedroom apartment by the mall. Viv types her number into Holly’s phone and they all meet up for a band gig downtown. It’s the beginning of a significant reconfiguration of Stacey’s social network.
This is Eva Crocker’s first novel, following her wonderful short story collection “Barrelling Forward.”
By definition then an emerging talent. But it’s safe to say this talent has emerged.
Joan Sullivan is editor of Newfoundland Quarterly magazine. She reviews both fiction and non-fiction for The Telegram.
