The Coincidence Problem: Social Dispatches 1999-2022 by Stephen Osborne

Stephen Osborne is a long-time British Columbia-based literary raconteur and starter of bookish projects. In 1971, he co-founded Arsenal Pulp Press. In 1990, he and Mary Schendlinger co-founded Geist magazine, which is where the pieces collected in The Coincidence Program first appeared. Osborne is also the author of Ice & Fire: Dispatches from the New World, 1988-1998, also a collection of essays.

You might wonder, what is the coincidence problem? I’ll get to that in a moment. First, let’s consider it as a title. It provokes curiosity, sure. As with “dispatches,” it suggests intellectualism, a dispassionate consideration of what has the potential to be shocking, humorous, even profound. In this regard, it evokes Osborne’s approach. Where there is humour, it is dry. Where the content shocks, it is at a distance. Profundity is laced throughout.

Coincidence is not, in fact, a problem, nor is it a linking metaphor for this collection, which might have instead been titled Travels in Hyperreality, if Umberto Eco hadn’t taken that one first. The title essay concludes: “Thirty years later, I read in a layman’s book on quantum mechanics that what we experience of the world is not external reality at all, but our interaction with reality.” This interaction is what Osborne’s dispatches track.

Osborne was born in 1947 in Pangnirtung on Baffin Island, Northwest Territories (now Nunavut), the son of white southerners. His father was a doctor, who had taken the northern assignment. From this hyperreal beginning, his perspective is perhaps shaped. He records the world at a remove that allows him to catalogue both astonishing details rooted in specificity and remain detached. He is both in a place and not of it. The result is sometimes disorienting, but it is always interesting.

The essays must require hours of research. Though there are sometimes notes on his sources, often one is left to wonder, how does he know so much?

To cite a single example, here’s how Osborne begins an essay about the origins of the Remembrance Day poppy:

“On a Saturday afternoon early in the twentieth century in New York City, a young woman named Moina Michael, having been moved by a poem she had read that morning in the Ladies’ Home Journal, finds a supply of red silk poppies for sale in Wanamaker’s department store at the corner of 8th Street and Broadway; she has been searching for them all day through the shops and department stores along the stretch of Broadway known as the Ladies Mile. This event will determine the course of her life.”

One must ask, did Michael experience a coincidence problem? If so, it’s not recorded. What Osborne does record is the sequence of events that led Canadian Lieutenant-Colonel John McCrae, poet and physician, in 1915 to write “In Flanders Field,” and Michael to later discover it and begin the reimaging of the meaning of poppies. Among other details, Osborne tells us McCrae met Rudyard Kipling in 1900 and was a member of the McGill Pen and Paper Club.

One always turns the page during the reading of an Osborne essay wiser. His mind — and research skills — are encyclopedic. This book is a treasure of dispatches from our recent past.

Stephen Osborne is the founder of Arsenal Pulp Press and the co-founder of Geist magazine. His written work has received multiple awards, including the National Magazine Foundation Special Achievement Award, a CBC Creative Non-Fiction Award, the first Event magazine creative non-fiction award, and the inaugural Vancouver Arts Award for Writing and Publishing. He is the author of The Coincidence Problem: Selected Dispatches 1999-2022 and Ice and Fire: Dispatches from the New World, 1988-1998. He lives in Vancouver, BC.

Publisher: Arsenal Pulp Press (October 29, 2024)
Paperback 9″ x 6″ | 320 pages
ISBN: 9781551529653

Michael Bryson

Michael Bryson has been reviewing books since the 1990s in publications such as The Kitchener-Waterloo Record, Paragraph Magazine, Id Magazine, and Quill & Quire. His short story collections include Thirteen Shades of Black and White (1999) and The Lizard and Other Stories (2009). His fiction has appeared in Best Canadian Stories and other anthologies. His story Survival is available as a Kindle single. From 1999-2018, he oversaw 78 issues of fiction, poetry, reviews, author interviews, essays, and other features at The Danforth Review. He lives in Scarborough, Ontario, and blogs at Art/Life: Scribblings.