Fugue in Green, the second book of multimedia artist Brenda Clews, is a haunting narrative, which takes the reader on a journey into the life of a family driven by perpetual conflict. It is a gripping drama about a dysfunctional family where the two children, Steig and Curtis, are controlled by a mother who is cruel and insensitive to their desires. The narrative is propelled forward by the opposing forces of the need to belong to a family and the desire for freedom. Steig is a teenaged girl who seeks liberation from an oppressive household in nature by dissolving in the landscapes around her. Her entry into the woods at a climactic point in the novella is an attempt to escape the anxieties and complexities of family life and to become one with a natural world offering a welcoming space for her imaginative mind: “She began hugging trees as tears streamed down her face. She was glad to be among huge ancient trees. There were many beech trees, and alder, elm, sweet chestnut, evergreen and oak trees along the way. Many were flaming with autumn colours. They seemed to open their branches to her, welcoming.”

The largely absent father Reb is a filmmaker whose art is underscored by a highly intuitive, poetic process of making movies. This act of creation transcends reality in order “to flow with a surreality, as if by a dream logic, a nearly impenetrable pattern of images forming a labyrinth.” Fugue in Green is largely about the creative process itself, which is skilfully woven into the narrative, blurring the boundaries between the creative imagination and the reality of everyday life. Both Reb and Steig are largely immersed in a visionary realm of their own and it is the haunting quality of those passages that make the reader surrender to “the mad sensibilities of the storyteller.” Brenda Clews has created a narrative, which is highly poetic, gliding effortlessly from one scene to the next, driven by the relentless power of the creative mind.

In Fugue in Green reality is largely filtered through the eye of the beholder and through the eye of the camera. Reb sees the world through the camera lens where he glides from dream to dream and where dreams “play on multiple screens that appeared on cards being shuffled in slow motion.” But it is this artistic sensibility, which largely defines the lives of both Reb and Steig that also creates a dissociation from the world inhabited by the mother Leica. Her hallucinations turn the interior of the family home into a Cubist horror. When the colors and shapes start resembling the paintings of Picasso, the reader is drawn into an angst ridden world of a character trapped in her own anxiety. “Colours were dingy, dark greys, blues and greens, like an early Picasso. She walked into the wall that dissolved into geometries of mirrors, turned and walked into another wall.”

When the mother Leica reaches a crisis point, the family is summoned back to reality….The end of the novella leaves us pondering the complexities of mental illness. Maybe the only saving grace in this haunting gothic tale is art itself.

Irena Nikolova on Facebook

Like a bullet in slow motion, she floated over treetops for as long as it took to blink.

A gothic fairy tale of spiritual connections, mystical protectors and escaping the clutches of a monster, this is the opening line of Brenda Clews’ mesmerizing, magical novella Fugue in Green, published by Quattro Books.

Teen siblings Steig and Curtis struggle to survive live with their cruel, controlling and abusive mother Leica while their filmmaker father Reb is away working in England. Their monster mother is a catalyst for Steig’s escapes into the woods that surround their Vermont home, where Steig finds solace in nature. It is in these moments that we learn that Steig is a magical, elemental young woman who becomes the landscape she loves and shelters in. She also sees ghosts: her grandparents and a former teacher. And the ghosts tell her things. And she has a spritely sentinel: a bird man called forth from her connection to the woods to be her guardian.

Reb lives and works with his dreams—and dreams while awake—the everyday becoming surreal, expressionist visions that surround him; a visual poet, he creates poetry with images instead of words. And what of the mysterious and angelic Clare, a magician with a camera who arrives in his life at the precise moment he needs her—both personally and professionally?

Steig’s younger brother Curtis busies himself with more traditional, earth-bound teen pursuits. While not fully immune to their mother’s unreasonable expectations, unpredictable behaviour and wrath, he bears the least of it. And when their mother goes too far with Steig one day, Curtis launches a plan to flee their mother, contact their father and join him in England. Their journey to safety is fraught with terrifying memories and shared visions, but is also protected by forest spirits.

Secrets are revealed—with devastating results. Reb had no idea about the child abuse going on in his own home; forced to move beyond his own sense of guilt of being so distant from his children, who he realizes he barely knows, he’s determined to make a safe, supportive home for them. He’s been away too much and for too long. Meanwhile, back at the family’s home in Vermont, and realizing that her children are gone, Leica flies into a spiralling, destructive rage that echoes across an ocean.

Supernatural, spiritual connections emerge and reveal themselves; the battle between order and wilderness embodied in the relationship between Steig’s mother and Steig—and even Reb. Love, family, myth and metaphysics intertwine, winding around these relationships as the two children escape the witch at home and into the arms of those who truly love them.

Magical, sensuous and seductive, Clews’ words swirl around you and draw you in; mesmerizing with evocative colours and haunting, ethereal—and sometimes disturbing—images. A short, gripping modern fairy tale, it’s perfect for curling up for an afternoon or evening read, easily finished in one sitting.

Cate McKim website

This review reprinted with permission from Cate McKim's blog on the Toronto arts scene, Life with More Cowbell.

Fugue in Green is a marvellous, magical treat! Exquisite writing takes you by the hand and leads you into this secret, surreal garden of wonder and delight.

"Let the imagination go - see what is crawling, blooming, bursting out of the edges of the world. Take seeing back to before you knew a tree was a tree, or that the chair was from the tree that was. Let the world be lights and colours, undefined, without perspective or time; a marvellous vista, explore."

But there is darkness, hardship, cruelty and abuse: "Reality was unrelentingly hard." Two children live at the mercy of a controlling, vicious matriarch, with an absent father. The whirling crisis of anger and hatred reaches a powerful crescendo and climaxes.

Fugue in Green would be a perfect work for a Guillermo del Toro-style director, as the work is filled with symbolism, nature and metaphor. Much like Ofelia in Pan's Labyrinth, Steig, the teenage girl, bonds with nature and is protected and guided by the animals and inhabitants of that fantastical world.

There is fantastic Dali-esquse imagery: "The greening infiltrated her. Separations between person and field disappeared, so there was only one field with an indistinct human shape of the same substance. When the sun shone, she turned to the power and energy of the light suffusing her cells. She was a leaf, a twig, a whirl of wind, the pink petal of a bee-pollinated flower. She was of the arborescent greening of the world, it shaped her."

A strong story arc creates mounting tension, observed in the narrative by Stieg's father Reb, with his desire to turn painful life into a meaningful work of art via film: "… they could compose the story as a gothic fairy tale. A gothic fairy tale that was replete with a cruel witch and a maiden in distress."

Stieg's observation echoes her father's: "The process of making their film was helping her to integrate what was fragmented within, to keep the warring voices, memories, desires and humiliations in her from splitting her apart. It gave her a story, a narrative, to organize the chaos within."

And, isn't that the point of most art?

Erotic and sensual, extraordinarily vivid and imaginative, Fugue in Green is a magical treat indeed.

Lisa de Nikolits website

Fugue in Green, Brenda Clews' novella now available from Quattro Books, is a tale of monsters, imperfect sunsets and waifs who were born of cats and “speak the language of birds”. Its haunting prose, as sharp and perfect as a diamond and as delicate as a spider’s web, is a prayer cried out loud: a prayer for freedom. Freedom is movement as we see from the book’s opening line:

“Like a bullet in slow motion, she floated over treetops for as long as it took to blink.” (p.7)

Few crave freedom – and are as deprived of it – as an abused child.

Steig is a sixteen year old girl who feels she belongs “in the woods with the green fire” (p.52). It is here where she becomes one with her imagination: “The tree pillars became Rapunzel towers with golden, whirling woody hair flowing down around her ankles.” (p. 58)

Sensitive, imaginative, and able to see things that others cannot, Steig brings to mind another auburn haired heroine of Canadian literature: the beloved Anne Shirley of Green Gables. However Steig does not have the loving comfort of a Matthew or a Marilla – instead our girl is terrorized by a mother as harsh and unfeeling as the whipping cane that she gleefully uses on her children; “a woman wired with landmines.” (p.24)

Steig can see the ghosts of wise old relatives; spirits who have nude tea parties (“The ways of the dead are strange.” p.10) and who tell dark secrets which eventually lead to flight and freedom. “The grandmothers said that travelling was still good, though, and better than just lying in your grave day after night after day.” (p.11) Steig is watched over by The Birdman, a spirit who emerges from her looking glass in the form of a man with “stick legs and a shell beak”. “His head was shaped out of a greenish, bluish white eggshell, perhaps a sparrow’s. But it was broken, like Humpty Dumpty’s.” (p.13)

An act of bravery by Steig and her brother proves to be the catalyst for the freedom that they seek.

“I am becoming something else,” she thought. The sound of wings flapped dimly in her room.” (p.37)

Birds in flight. Fish in motion (koi “with the orange silk wings of angels” (p.40). Earth, air, fire, water: all of these elements flow, breathe, burn and settle throughout Clews’ novella. “Let the imagination go – see what is crawling, blooming, bursting out of the edges of the world,” Steig’s father tells both his daughter and the reader (p.53).

Fugue in Green tells of the stories that are carried down through generations without a word ever having been spoken; the stories of our parents, their parents and our ancestors, stories which are on our tongues; their baggage on our backs – every loss, love, and experiences both joyful and tragic flowing through our veins as the river flows through the woods. Clews’ novella is a modern day fairy tale that is at once both beautiful and terrifying. At its heart however is a message of forgiveness and by the story’s end both the characters and the reader have found peace.

Heather Babcock's website

This review reprinted with permission from
Heather Babcock's Babcock's blog, Writing to Exhale

First of all, a conflict of interest statement:  Brenda Clews is a good friend of mine, and I have collaborated on performances and dinners with her.

So, about her novell(a), depending on where you draw the dividing line… It has the complexity of a full-length work of fiction, and at 208 pages, the length, although Brenda described it to me as a novella. It is, like the author herself, impossible to pigeonhole.  Brenda, depending on the context in which you meet her or her work, is a poet, fiction writer, videographer, painter, photographer, dancer, and presiding spirit over poetry and music salons. Fugue in Green is equally mutable — a “gothic fairy tale,” as the back-cover blurb states, but also a story of intuition,  of a sadly dysfunctional family and a mentally ill, abusive mother, an evocation of the power of creative thought, a ghost story and a voyage of recovery. It’s worth recalling the double meaning of “fugue”  as a style of imaginative musical composition, and a psychiatric term denoting a state that is a “flight” from reality.

The protagonist is Steig, a teenaged girl whose identity is formed by her intense bond with nature, especially trees; her younger brother Curtis; their experimental film-maker father Reb; his muse-like camera operator Clare; and his estranged wife Leica (perhaps not accidentally the name of a highly-regarded line of cameras). As for the plot, expect a journey,  suspense and surprise.  But it’s probably better to let the the reader follow the threads than to draw them out here.  The real energy of the book is its rich language, its portrayal of of a highly-intuitive creative process, and the permeable boundaries which Clews skilfully manipulates between characters, and between them and their environment. Long-dead family members sometimes reappear, in disconcerting form, to give Steig advice, or get her into trouble.  Steig inhabits her mother’s world through dreams and visions, and, like a dryad, needs a forest to sustain her. The film-making team shares the inner life of aquarium inhabitants, and records leaves swirling into the image of a woman’s face.  Colour permeates everything, especially the title’s green,

The overall effect is a hallucinatory, highly poetic kind of fiction that, without imitation, recalls some interesting literary ancestors to me — Celine’s Journey to the End of the Night, Virginia Woolf’s experimental work The Waves, Kenneth Patchen’s The Journal of Albion Moonlight.  I recommend you read it, because I’m sure, while you will recognize some of the strengths I have identified, your experience will be unique.  It’s that kind of book.

John Oughton website

This review reprinted with permission from John Oughton's Reviewing Blog

Anyone who has witnessed a Brenda Clews performance, embracing poetry, costumery, mask and dance, anybody who has seen her paintings, viewed her innovative videos or sat in one of those increasingly rare moments of calm, to read a section of her vibrant neo-mythical tract of poems, Tidal Fury, will know her to be an artist with boundless imagination and a knack for gravitating toward the right medium for each creative expression. Nobody familiar with her scope will be surprised that she has penned a brilliant novel.

High as our expectations might be, Fugue in Green exceeds them, with its edge-of-your-seat narrative style that strikes an ideal balance between invention and convention, verbal art and vernacular. Aptly named, Fugue in Green develops half a dozen major themes in its 200 pages which, being divided into more than 20 chapters makes it the kind of book one dips into on the subway, pulls from a backpack in a line-up and resumes while waiting for a movie to begin.

Speaking of film, it is refreshing that Brenda's novel reaches us in an era when the majority of established novelists are consciously writing for the screen: this trend toward script writing and away from the patently literary, though not without its strengths, is rather formulaic and stylistically restrictive. But Fugue in Green reminds us that the contemporary novel can still be a work of art in all the ways the term once applied.

Certain themes developed in Clews' book couldn't be pursued compellingly nor even convincingly were it not for the subtle poetic craft she deploys in the intricate weave of her narrative. No ham-fisted approach can suffice and no writing manual template exists for the successful depiction of a deranged abusive parent and the effects, through time, on the abused.

You may recall some past cinematic treatments of mental and physical abuse, as a Gothic horror sub-genre. These were, in the end, rather pointless. Even if the point were merely to reinforce stock notions about the psycho-emotionally disturbed, their violence and it's aftermath, most dramatic productions fail to show us anything we haven't already seen multiple times. The short cuts and the shorthand that would seem adequate for the conveyance of most content can't do justice to this delicate subject matter.

And then there is the "production code" for which, despite periodic campaigns, there is no equivalent in literary art. There are a number of praise-worthy "scenic" dimensions of Fugue in Green; one that resonates after the book has been shelved is that of "nature", in particular, the woods, the treed sanctum into which one character retreats for aesthetic, emotional and spiritual restoration. The language is sensual and immediate. Other scenes, especially of sexual activity, are beautifully narrated and superbly paced, with enough detail for a vivid image but not so much as to hijack the story or derail the plot.

Fugue in Green reaches emotional shades and intensities, within the intellectual and artistic freedom that only the novel (as bona fide literary art) affords: effects that could not have been achieved in any other mediated form. Today's news is full of perpetrators and victims, whose stories, when they cease to be broadcast fodder, cease to be told. The growth we need in understanding real social circumstances is perhaps tied to the sort of post-traumatic growth that the author has chronicled. Such expose calls for a deft hand at storytelling; it also requires a thoroughgoing life-history mode of narration. Fugue in Green meets both criteria.

There is a necessary honesty, but there is another level of truth-telling here. An adage spoken amongst fiction writers highlights the difference between truth and accuracy, one that hinges on the distinction between that which is meaningful and that which is merely apparent. Unlike a court of law, where we are permitted no interpretations but those established through disclosure of factual evidence, the novel, at its best, uses any means within verbal domains to convey its truth to the reader.

When it comes to certain human experiences, the only truth we, as readers may be able to grasp has come to us through fiction. This is all to say that whatever ratio of invention to biography Bren Clews was compelled to use in the recipe for Fugue in Green, it makes for a nourishing read, one that helps us grow in our own capacities for thought and feeling.

Dr Tom Gannon Hamilton’s website

Brenda Clews' recent literary effort, “Fugue in Green”, published by Quattro Press, is her first novella. Although known more for her poetry, and dynamic live poetic performances, “Fugue in Green”, demonstrates her skill at writing prose. The story’s protagonist, Steig, is a teenaged girl living in an abusive household dominated by a cruel mother. To circumvent her situation, she takes to hiding in the woods and communes with nature as a natural form of therapy. As well, her misery has summoned a mysterious creature, called Bird Man, who protects her.

We are drawn into Steig’s world by the colourful, eloquent writing that dazzles with flashes of poetic brilliance:

“While the grass was still green, everything else was browning. Turning crisp, dying. Flaming

As she looked over the dried pods, yellowed, shriveled leaves, brown stalks bending and breaking, she saw thousands of nature spirits, devas, preparing to rest, to sleep. The symphony of summer was slowing to a few instruments playing notes that were becoming intermittent.”

“Fugue in Green” is one of those mythic books that one feels compelled to read in one sitting. And if you buy only one book this year, make sure it is this one.

Charles Taylor website

I immensely enjoyed reading your book, Fugue in Green. I seldom read books anymore, just the odd magazine article or Google Search page or two. I just don’t have the mental stamina for it like I once used to. I read your book in two sittings one day after the next. That’s very unusual for me. I found that I kept turning the pages to find out what was going to happen next. Isn’t that what a good read is supposed to do to a reader?

Whenever I do decide to put the mental effort into diving into a story, I always like it when I learn something new. For example, I was familiar with the word “Fugue”, but because I haven’t used it in a sentence in eons, I had to look it up in the dictionary. I am glad that I did, because I have now reinforced the meaning of that word in my mind forever. Score 1 for you getting me to engage in your story.

The other things that I learned were that there are no wolves in England (except for the odd werewolf at Talbot Hall), and that a “pollarded” tree is one with its lower branches pruned so that the tree will grow upwards. It’s little things like that which are sprinkled throughout your book that enriched my own vocabulary and knowledge base in a non-intrusive way. I appreciate that in a book that I read.

Having known you casually for about 5 years now, I had a pretty good sense of your poetry work and your performance art. I was never one to really appreciate theatrical poetry and art especially at the highly esoteric levels that you reached.

I just didn’t think you had it in you to write a gripping story with elements of grittiness that hard-core fans of Elmore Leonard and Mickey Spillane could appreciate. I especially liked your description of the main character’s Russian uncle Zez, who when alive, would guzzle copious amounts of vodka and stand on his verandah in his underwear cursing the regime.

With my own episodic memories, I have experienced pattern completion from time to time. Your story invoked that sense in me when you cued me with pieces of mental imagery through your introduction and description of the “birdman”.

That brought back memories of when I first read Jorge Luis Borges’s “Book of Imaginary Beings” back in 1974 when I was in my second year at U of T. Then that triggered my memories of the haute imagery fabricated by Guillermo del Toro’s “Pan’s Labyrinth”. In neither of those two works was there the birdman of your creation, but your “broken-egg-shell-for-a-head” mirage got my imagination rolling. Score 2 for you.

I was also very impressed with your ability to forge a very readable “down-to-earth” mix of prose and narrative, a hybrid of brilliantly flighty dreamscape imagery and gosh-darned-gut-gripping suspense.

Brenda, as I read your book, I was thinking all the while that this definitely was your doorstep to a new life as a best-selling novelist. You might not quite be there yet, but like any athlete with gold medal Olympic potential, I think that you have shown that with a little more tweaking and honing of your writing style, you can surly transition from the world of ethereal poetry to writing a story that arcs with passion, betrayal, murderous jealousy and the whole spectrum of human feelings that will take the reader on an emotional, pop-corn-munching roller coaster ride.

And make many millions of dollars in the process! Remember, in a few years from now, I was one guy that you heard it from first!

Keep writing great stories!

Roman Romaniuk, co-inventor of DNA Games