It might be impossible to know if it is the pen or the camera that is Liz Bryan’s compass.
She follows both those creative forces in directions that have nothing to do with north or west, up or down, in or out. She explores inspiration and surprise, wonder and curiosity, the chase and the root. You can’t get to any of those places without crossing mountains and valleys, urbanity and emptiness. The ends and the means are so enmeshed, it’s impossible to differentiate them.
Being the follower of the pen and the camera, the carefully chosen word and the fastidiously framed photograph, has made a life and a living for Bryan. It has fulfilled her inner magnetisms as much as her vocational desires.
It has also made her an award winner. Her latest book – Adventure Roads of B.C.’s Northwest Heartland – was just named this year’s winner of the Jeanne Clarke Local History Award bestowed annually by the Prince George Public Library.
It was the first major literary award she’s ever won in her long and colourful author’s career, and qualified by virtue of its focus on this region of the province. The book includes a wide range of locations of northern B.C., the presence of the Cariboo being plain and prominent, and not just the obvious attractions. True to the title, Bryan takes even local readers to places they may never have been before in our own back yard.
The images and passages are woven together with the love of travel’s heightened senses. Even before her husband Jack passed away, she made these road trips on her own, so she had only her own instincts to follow.
“I am a visual person. It has to interest me,” she said, about how she chooses the roads to drive, the shutters to click, the ink to scratch onto pages. “If the landscape doesn’t affect me in some way, I become less interested. It has to be fantastic landscape, but that doesn’t have to be something immense or shocking, it can be the quiet satisfaction of loneliness. You have to have that to appreciate what’s going on around you.”
She admits she may have had too much loneliness, during the book’s production phase.
It wasn’t just one book, but two, that filled her isolated hours during the COVID closures. It was a productive, practical time for her, in her quiet home down its own adventure road in the community of Rock Creek south of Kelowna near the border with America. The other book, Pioneer Churches Along The Gold Rush Trail, was simultaneously researched, edited, laid out, published and released to the world at the same time as Adventure Roads. It, too, is a revelation of the Cariboo.
Now for the first time perhaps in her life, her creative well is dry, “and I feel very down because of it. I did two books simultaneously over two years, during COVID and during the fires, and the floods, and the smoke, and also a little bit of ailment on a personal point of view, and when I was finished, I felt drained. For the past year I have done nothing, and I don’t feel good about it.”
But she has constant interests, so she feels confident new invigoration will direct her pen and camera again. It has been that way since girlhood in London. She was the daughter of a Fleet Street journalist and overcame a verbal stammer as well as other 1960s impediments facing a young woman with intellectual ambition. She followed her father, John Rodgers (he later moved to B.C. to be nearer his daughter and became a columnist for the Vancouver Sun and wrote multiple bird books), into the London newspaper industry, and then carried that over an ocean and continent to Vancouver after committing to the adventures of life offered by a swarthy, interesting Canadian she met on a rock climbing excursion in Wales.
It was he, Jack, who turned the page, as well, on her youthful confusion over what to be in this new country she had adopted.
“He was the one. He said ‘why don’t we start a magazine?’ and I said you must be crazy. You need thousands of dollars to start a magazine.” He suggested giving one edition a pilot attempt. They just needed enough ad sales to cover the initial costs. The Vancouver Home Show became their first major sponsor and allowed them to publish that first issue, and in 1971 they were off. The Kerrisdale Courier stepped in as a monthly distributor. The ads rolled in. The articles by Liz and photos by Jack “eventually took over our lives” all based out of their home. The magazine was called Western Living and soon became staple reading material in B.C. homes.
Magazine production was so consuming, they couldn’t take regular family vacations, so they went on backroad excursions not far from home to give the kids and themselves some stimulation. Not able to waste anything of time or experience, they used the backroads as fodder for the magazine, and before long readers began asking for a compendium of these backroads adventure stories.
“So we said ok, and we put out our first book called Backroads of B.C., and it was a success,” Bryan said. “We sold out a hardcover edition in a matter of a couple of months, and then went into a softcover edition. We made enough money to put in a deposit on this land that I’m now sitting on. It all grew, and it came from my love of the country and wanting to get it all on paper and let people know about it.”
She now has many titles to her name, these latest two under the publishing banner of Heritage House.
Whether you read her books to vicariously go on fascinating journeys off the highways where there is the time and space to stop at will and enjoy the scenery, she conveying it to the printed page, or whether you read her books as a form of travel guide to formulate your own road trips into the human and geological features of our shared landscape, Liz Bryan always maps us out an Adventure Road to drive this province home.
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