An Alberta storyteller whose roots will always be firmly planted in Jasper is coming back to her hometown to relay Some of the Facts.
Author and creative writing instructor Beth Everest, the daughter of Jasper business patriarch Roy Everest, will read from her latest book at the Jasper Municipal Library. The event takes place Thursday, February 6, as part of the library’s From the Stacks series.
Everest’s collection of short stories was written in the tradition of her favourite novelists—also know as the world’s best liars, as she likes to joke.
“Fiction gives you license to play,” she says.
The stories she heard as a girl, and the characters with whom her parents shared their lives in the 1950s, provide the fertile soil from which Everest has cultivated her lively prose.
And although the nostalgic, magical light of those golden years is cast over the reimagined trails, back alleys and pool halls of Jasper, there is a grittier element which permeates Everest’s collection of stories. Like the painful insomnia of a hard-boozing cowboy, there is unspoken grief hidden within the crevasses of many of her characters, until—with the bang of a swinging screen door—it practically jumps off the page.
Everest knows about grief. She lost a sibling to cancer in 2011, and in 2013 she wrote about her own battle with the deadly disease in her book, Silent Sister: The Mastectomy Poems. Since the 2024 Jasper wildfire, she’s helped her sister Clare support her 90-year-old dad, whose home was one of the hundreds destroyed in that disaster.
“He still has lots of stories, and the more they’re told, the better they get,” Everest says. “This book is one way to hang onto Jasper’s oral history.”
That preservation may not have come to bear were it not for the July wildfire. Shortly after Jasper was evacuated, as Everest was rushing to meet her father and sister who had fled to British Columbia, her publicist got in touch.
“She wanted to do the book as a fundraiser,” Everest recalled. “She wanted to help.”
So did Everest. And so did the political and business fraternity that her father had developed in his venerable career. Phone calls were made, emails were sent and before she knew it, and event was being organized at Ottawa’s Perfect Books to promote the fast-tracked publication. Among the special guests who attended were Alberta senators, Green Party leader Elizabeth May, and former Prime Minister of Canada—her dad’s old buddy—Joe Clark.
“That was amazing,” Everest recalled. “I did not expect that big of a response.”
Having grown up in 1960s Jasper, such modesty should perhaps not come as a surprise. Like “Blondie” in Some of the Facts’ penultimate short story, Everest is still, at heart, just a small town girl.
Everest will read from Some of the Facts (published by Frontenac House) on Thursday, February 6 at 1:30 p.m. at the Jasper Municipal Library.
All proceeds from the book will be donated to the Jasper Community Team Society.
Bob Covey // bob@thejasperlocal.com
