Imagine writing a book about taking out the garbage, weeding the garden, changing your summer tires to winter ones. Now imagine it shoots to the top of the B.C. bestseller list because it captures a charming facet of your culture. This is the position author Willie Sellers finds himself in, alongside his close friend and painter Kevin Easthope.
Sellers crafted a little story about a part of his upbringing so routine and mundane it hardly caught any threads in his mind. He wasn't even straining his brain to come up with a book idea. But when he saw curiosity in the eyes of his curious children, the path was laid, and the path went down the most familiar dirt track of his youth, to the shores of the river where he and his family plucked salmon from the swift water every summer, and processed them for winter eating. Nothing could be more commonplace in his Williams Lake Indian Band upbringing, and for everyone of his generation in the T'exelc community.
But he was being looked up to by the next generation - Cash and Milah - and he knew he owed them more than Winnie The Pooh and Little Golden Books stories. He owed them their own stories, dating back through the eons that T'exelc people and most of their 13 other neighbouring First Nations had been going to the river.
He put pen to paper and wrote them Dipnetting With Dad, then Easthope put paintbrush to canvas and together they soared up the book charts. This week, theirs was the third most popular book in the province.
"It's a little bit surreal how successful the book has been so far," Sellars said. "It's been on the B.C. bestseller list for five weeks now, up against novels and biographies and cookbooks, so that's a feat of its own. It's amazing to us that a little story about a northern B.C. everyday thing, an aboriginal thing, has caught on like it has."
There was a bit of hope in his heart, though, when he first started to arrange his memories and thoughts about heading down to the shoreline with his family, tying onto the safety line attached to the rocks along the fast river, then reaching the net into the wild current to scoop their winter groceries out, one by one, into a rock pit nearby. Then came the filleting, the hanging, the drying, the storing and all the other parts of the annual industry. It was a common scene along the Fraser and its tributaries, for virtually all the First Nations of the Cariboo-Chilcotin. Sellars was on the frontlines starting as young as about seven doing entry-level jobs, and by the time he was a teenager he was dipping his own net in.
"In the last few summers I've put on 10 pounds of muscle mass, just fishing for the community," said Sellars, a two-term councillor with the Williams Lake Indian Band.
He has also been a forest firefighter, hockey player, cowboy and studied at Thompson Rivers University and is involved in economic development projects for his nation. He has been getting so much demand for book presentations, though, that he is contemplating taking time off work.
Schools in particular have been lining up for some dipnetting dialogue.
"This whole process started so I could have something on the mantle I could read to my kids, talk to them about traditions and pass on my culture for my own kids, but it spiraled," Sellars said. "Because I have a couple of young kids at home, I'm always on the lookout for aboriginal stories for kids, and there aren't many, and the kids often lost interest in the ones we did find. We wanted to do something that I knew would push my own kids' buttons and hopefully push the buttons for non aboriginal kids too."
Entertainment was a big priority for Sellars as he wrote, but he kept in close sight the goal of instructing the reader in the ways of the T'exelc people.
"We have always made passing on our stories and our traditions a big part of our culture. I hope it opens eyes for other First Nations that this is a great tool to use. And the sky is the limit," Sellars said. "We wanted to make it cool again to go down to the river. When I was a kid we weren't allowed to go down until we were older. Then it wasn't cool, when you could play video games at home or go to a party on Friday night. It's a different mindset, and it is a lot of fun to go slam some fish into the rock pit."
When he was a youth himself, Sellars dreamed of playing pro hockey. He was a goalie, and had some success on the ice, then duty to family and community took hold and he put his energies into that. Adding the word "author" to his list of life's accomplishments is still hard for him to keep a straight face about.
"I never thought, coming out of high school, that a book was in my future, that I would be called a bestselling author," he said. "So that's another message to kids, to keep your options open in life, to expect big things of themselves, to take part in creative projects. You can't predict how things are going to go for you, in life, so set yourself up in the best conditions possible to take advantage of the way life goes. Get a good education, get involved in your community, and never think exciting things aren't going to happen."
Sellars and Easthope will be at Books and Company on Sunday at 2 p.m. to meet the public at a free reading and discussion about the book.
