"ONCE there was an ogre who was like all other ogres except in one respect: he was reasonable. He could see more than one point of view, and he liked to argue and discuss. People seldom realized this, however, since he looked like any other ogre, huge and frightening, and he spent his time doing what every other ogre does: grabbing passersby and stuffing them in his mouth."
So begins the latest collection by Danuta Gleed-winning short story writer Mike Barnes. As you know, Biblioasis is launching The Reasonable Ogre tomorrow, April 24th, at Phog Lounge, and on Thursday--yes, Thursday, I said Thursday, I swear I meant Thursday all along--Mike and Segbingway have their Toronto launch at Type Books. We'd be delighted if you joined us.
(Once there was an Ogre-Publicist who lived at the crossroads just three brooks down and a valley west of the Bibliomanse. He wasn't very reasonable but he was full of ideas. He said when we have events we should just carry people in off the street: in fact, he offered to do it himself for a modest fee. But since Ogre Publicity has gone up in price--the industry standard's now fifty gold dubloons with unlimited snacking--we decided to go with Glinda instead, whose rates for enchanted emails are really quite affordable, and who has a strict policy against eating patrons on-site. She even throws in a free babysitting service for kids 12 and under.)
If you're in Windsor or Toronto this week, do come. Tuesday's billet includes Amanda Jernigan, Pat Lowther-shortlisted poet, and Claire Tacon, winner of the 2011 Metcalf-Rooke Award for fiction. Thursday's event includes an exhibit of Segbingway's original brush paintings, which are, as you can imagine, absolutely fascinating up close. Fairy Tale Review founder Kate Bernheimer has called The Reasonable Ogre "a tribute to the power of story," and remarked that "the illustrations and language are so entwined as to be inseparable." Altogether? We're in for a couple of magical nights.
(Pudgy children especially welcome.)
Yours with a wiggle of the nose, T. Murgatroyd, Chief Witch & Master of Digital Wizarding, The Bibliomanse.
I didn’t start writing fiction until my mid-twenties. Before
then, I was more interested in poetry and drama—completing an undergrad in
theatre studies and working for a few years at CanStage. I’d swallowed the
theatre Koolaid by the pitcher and kept a copy of Peter Brook’s The Empty Space on my nightstand. When I
wrote a script and showed it to my mentor, however, she said she liked the
writing but didn’t think it was a play. Why
didn’t I rework it as a story?
At the time, the comment was devastating. It felt like my
characters were being sentenced to a lesser existence—they’d never live in
print as fully as they would on stage. They’d be robbed of the tension that
theatre creates between the performer and the audience, the marriage of textual
and visual elements. I went out with friends that night and got wasted. After
sobering up over noodles at Swatow, I went home, opened a new Word doc and
tried to rewrite the play as prose.
What’s stayed with me as I’ve focused on writing fiction is
an appreciation for seeing the written word performed. In those five, ten
minutes at the mic, non-playwrights get to snatch some of the magic of theatre.
Some readers are able to push the spectacle—Allen Ginsberg reciting Blake, or
Daniel Tysdal leading the crowd in a collective reading of a Cohen poem.
Others, like Jessica Westhead or Suzanne Buffam succeed with understatement,
letting their writing do the heavy lifting. No matter how subtle or bombastic
the reader, listening to text filtered through the human voice rarely fails to
yield new insights.
For writers, readings give us the rare opportunity to see
people react to the work as it’s being read. (Unfortunately, most readers
bristle when the author hovers over them, assessing their every twitch.)
It also brings unpredictability to a fixed form. Alongside
the potential to connect with an audience lurks the possibility of
disaster—what if no one laughs? What if there are fewer people every time I
look up? What if I’m struck with the runs mid-sentence? After one reading,
which I thought had gone well, a sweet, older gentleman informed me that he was
familiar with the road I’d mentioned in the passage. His aunt and uncle had
died in a horrific car accident on it. There wasn’t much to say after that.
This spring, I’ll be touring In the Field with Jamella Hagen, whose blisteringly good poetry
collection Kerosene came out last
year with Nightwood. Honestly, I’m looking forward to every minute of it. Three
people more interested in the free cookies? Great! Forty people being polite?
Sure! For better or worse, there’s a feeling of being present that comes from
standing in front of a group and putting one’s writing on display. In theatre
school, I was always a terrible actress. Somehow now that I’m reading my own
words, it feels more comfortable. Even when the vibe is less than electric,
there’s still a thrum, an intensity of feeling alive that’s rare and precious.
The Tacon/Hagen Tour, Spring 2012
April 24: Windsor (w/ Mike Barnes)
April 29: Ottawa, Ottawa Writer's Festival/ Plan 99
May 1st: Art Bar, Toronto
May 2nd: Pivot, Toronto
May 6th: LitLive, Hamilton
May 7th: Virus Series, Niagara Falls,
May 8th: Cobour Poetry Workshop, Cobourg
May 14th: Regina
May 15th: Pages on Kensington, Calgary (w/ John Lent)
May 16th: Kelowna, BC
May 24th: Robson Square Reading Series, Vancouver
May 28th: Bolen's Books, Victoria
Other events in London, Guelph, Waterloo, and elsewhere forthcoming ...
Attention all Toronto-area Biblioasis-o-philes: we'll be in Toronto tomorrow evening to launch Claire Tacon's Metcalf-Rooke winning In the Field at the Dora Keogh (141 Danforth Ave). Start time: 7 pm. Attendance mandatory, without a note from the doctor. And no, attending Dani Couture's launch of Algoma at the Gladstone tonight is not a valid excuse: if we were in Toronto, we'd be going to both as well. (We'll catch her here in Windsor in the next few weeks.) It's book launch season, folks: suck it up.
Looking forward to seeing (most of) you there,
Dan & Tara
PS: Please pass along to all non-Biblioasis connected folk: they are welcome as well.
Yesterday Team Biblioasis showed up in force on the streets (and, yes, in the fields) of Eden Mills, Ontario. With record turnouts, surprise performances, and patented Leon Rooke perorations, this year's celebration was positively, well, splendiferous.
The poets flocked to Dionne Brand and Lorna Crozier--we broke ground with Amanda Jernigan, who was called up by Leon Rooke to read from her newly-minted collection--and of course we celebrated the publication of Claire Tacon's In the Field, winner of the Metcalf-Rooke award. The lunchtime reading culminated with an impromptu chorus, led by Mr. Rooke himself, of Claire, Amanda, and Alison Pick each reading simultaneously from their own books ... while the festival founder accompanied them with rowdy song.
Photo Credit Tony Saxon of the Guelph Mercury. (Also, there may be a video.)
In anticipation of the official launch of Claire Tacon's Metcalf-Rooke Award winning In the Field this Sunday at the Eden Mills Writers' Festival, we thought we'd run this interview with Claire. If you're at Eden Mills please drop by the booth (we'll all be there) where you'll be able to pick up freshly printed copies (off of the truck today!) of Claire's novel (& six other fall '11 releases besides).
Here's the interview:
1. In the Field touches on a lot of what you might call ‘timely’ issues. Our population
is aging and one of your themes is geriatric care; interculturalism has been a
vital part of social policy over the past ten years, and your novel addresses mixed
marriage straight-on. You also explore the values differences that some say divide
urban from rural communities across North America. Did you have a sense for the
social relevance of your book as you were writing it? What drew you to these issues
in particular?
With the novel, I really wanted to ask what divides us and what connects us. I wasn’t so much consciously striving for social relevance as I was trying to explore which divisions are possible for us to bridge.
The urban/rural split is central to that question. Having grown up on a farm but gone to school in the city, it was a disconnect that I was aware of early on. My family didn’t work the land, but we regularly raised animals for our own consumption. Shoveling out the chicken coop or helping my brother skin rabbits were normal parts of my life, but they weren’t something I could bring up with my urban friends. Wolfville felt like a natural setting to highlight that divide because it’s a university town surrounded by a large agricultural industry. There’s a real gulf between town and gown.
Race or ethnicity isn’t set up in the novel as quite so clear a divide. Before writing the novel, I had a conversation with a friend about how interracial or interethnic families are rarely presented without that becoming the central issue of the book. There are a lot of great books in this genre, such as Gish Jen’s The Love Wife, but I think it’s problematic if we only see diverse families presented as an “issue.” While race complicates the Bascom family’s experience, it’s not the focus of the book or the main source of their discord.
That being said, I did want to explore how Ellie, a white woman married to a black man, has a different reaction to the same situation than her husband or sons. She assumes that because they are family, they will perceive and be perceived the same way, but the reality often differs.
Finally, in terms of aging and geriatric care, a number of my friends are starting to enter the so-called “sandwich generation.” By the end of the novel, Ellie is forced to ask herself whether it’s better to be a good mother or a good daughter. It’s a hard decision—we owe allegiances to both sides, but don’t always have the resources to fulfill both obligations.
2. In a recent interview you said that your first glimpse of a character is like ”hitting
it off with a friend of a friend at a cocktail party. On the one hand, it feels as if you’ve
known them all your life, but then you hit a point where you really need to sit them
down and ask them some questions.”
What were the questions you had to ask of your protagonist, Ellie Lucan?
One of my professors at UBC, Keith Maillard, spends a lot of time writing biographies for each character before starting any project. That was something I found really useful going into the second draft; I took about a month and wrote out Ellie and Richard’s lives from grade school to the present. Most of it got trashed, but it helped clarify their motivation and past experience going into the re-write. Since they’re fighting for most of the novel, asking each of them how they met and why they fell for each other was one of the central questions in that exercise.
3. Later in the same interview you said that by the time you’ve finished your first
draft, “the characters seem like family—I don’t always like them, but I always love
them.” It’s true that many characters in In the Field go on to make less-than-likeable
decisions. Which of your characters do you struggle to “like” the most?
Mordecai Richler is one of my favourite authors, partly because he manages to create deeply flawed characters that you still care about. I doubt many people would say they want Duddy Kravitz or Barney Panofsky as friends, but the books succeed because readers still understand them and care about them.
My protagonist Ellie and her husband Richard are certainly not at their best in the novel. At any other time in their life, they’d probably be as likable as anyone else, but we see them, particularly Ellie, at a time of crisis. I think that’s pretty human, to be self-centred or wrong-headed or even a bit of an asshole during a difficult time. The tension lies in how far you can go and still expect your loved ones to stand by you. While writing the book, I asked myself the same question—how far can I push these characters while keeping the audience on board?
4. First novels are always a rite of passage, and you’ve done significant rewrites of
In the Field since it was first conceived. Do you have plans for a second? What, if
anything, will you do differently?
Right now I’m working on a second novel. Like In the Field, it tackles family dynamics, but this time with parents of a special needs adult. The main difference is that I have a stronger idea of the narrative arc going into this writing process than I did the last one. In the Field started as an image—a woman driving down the road in the rain, her wipers not really working. As I wrote, I realized I knew that road and the plot spun off from there—where was she going? who was she meeting?, etc. It was a bit like being dropped off in an unknown location, mapping the terrain and then plotting the best route through. This time I’m at least packing a map and have a general idea of how to get from A to B.
5. What (other) work of fiction has meant the most to you as you were writing In the
Field?
I started writing the novel while I was doing my MFA at the University of British Columbia. During that time, I was turned on to so many different books and authors that it’s hard to pick just one. Books I prized most, but which I don’t presume to have emulated, are ones that maintain a sense of humour through the bleak moments. For that reason, Lorrie Moore’s short story People Like That Are the Only People Here… and Martin McDonagh’s play The Beauty Queen of Leenane have stuck with me for years.
6. Who is your ideal reader? Who would you like to reach the most with this story?
Honestly? Anyone who wants to start on page one and finish on page 278 and have an opinion about it.
One of the most moving book reviews I’ve ever heard was by a young woman in inner-city New York discussing Anne Frank’s diary. Her connection to the material went against a lot of current thinking about pairing books with readers who share a similar experience. I think that unpredictability of reader response is part of the beauty of literature.
Calling it a "violent, funny, thought-provoking novel," and comparing it with the work of Ernest Hemingway, Jules Lewis reviews A.J. Somerset's Combat Camera in today's Globe & Mail.
From the review:
Combat Camera opens with Zane on the ropes: 46 years old, drunk, friendless and possessing “no detectable ambition at all.” To pay the bills, he works as a photographer at Diamond Blue Productions, a small Internet pornography company on the outskirts of Toronto. Zane is perfect for the job: As in war, he can detach himself from the subject and let the camera do the work. When one young woman gets her face punched in by her brutish co-star, Bill, for an unsatisfactory performance, Zane feels nothing. He simply continues taking photos, mentally congratulating himself “on his excellent shutter timing.”
Somerset – a one-time soldier and a freelance photographer – paints a convincing picture of Zane’s messed-up head: The reader follows as his mechanical eye scans a bleak, desolate Toronto, paying more attention to the lighting on people’s faces, their potential to become still images, than anything else. All that can puncture this barrier – his iron lens, as it were – are Zane’s horrifying war flashbacks.
Yet he maintains a consistent sense of humour – self-deprecating, gruff, curmudgeonly. Somerset’s prose illuminates this. In one scene, Zane looks at his cellphone with “loathing, as one might regard a coiled and dangerous snake.”
Girl Crazy and Combat Camera are first-rate novels that come, I think, to the same grim conclusion about how to cope with our own personal hearts of darkness. Though the "incidents of the surface" involve sleazy, underworld happenings, both books are finally concerned with a more insidious form of corruption: the seductive power of illusions.
In an age when prize-winners -- and Jonathan Franzen -- seem to have sucked up all of the literary glory, a talented new author and his somewhat distracted small press publisher attempt to spread the word about Combat Camera (...one of the finest Canadian novels I have ever read. - John Metcalf) only to be defeated by Jonathan Friggin' Franzen.
The next leg of the triumphant Biblioasis fall tour begins with a whimper emitted by a writer forced to rise before the sun to make his train. There is a certain amount of groggy stumbling about, and the packing of last minute supplies: two bottles of whisky, a large bottle of Tylenol, a number four Phillips screwdriver, a small flashlight, and a large Band-Aid. Not all of these things will prove necessary, but it is best to be prepared. You never know.
The countryside is sodden. Somewhere beyond Kingston, a driver decides to race a westbound train, and loses. All trains sit stopped until the investigation is complete, although there seems to be little left of the car to investigate. The train arrives in Montreal an hour late.
The hotel is perhaps insalubrious. The room features a non-functional Jacuzzi and, surprisingly, mirrors on the ceiling. All attempts to relax are futile; staring up at your reflection in the mirror induces immediate and uncontrolled giggle fits. You examine this throwback to a forgotten era of tastelessness while sipping The Famous Grouse from a plastic cup. Whether the mirror or the whisky is more alarming is an open question. It is just possible that this is rock bottom.`
You are not the kind of guy who would be at a place like this at this time of the evening, but here you are, and you can`t say the terrain is entirely unfamiliar. Drawn & Quarterly is packed, and discreet inquiries confirm that the crowd is here for the reading, not merely for the chance to get in out of the rain. People shake your hand and congratulate you. You thank them. Gnawing at the back of your mind is the question of what you`re going to read.
Harold Hoefle reads first, having lost the coin toss. Alexander MacLeod introduces you with the weight and gravitas proper to a Giller finalist: "This book is about war. It's about pornography. And it doesn't suck!"
You read. People question, You answer. There is a certain amount of signing things, chiefly books.
It is now necessary to brace yourself against the considerable strain of the reading experience. You stumble out into the street and into the nearest bar. You haven't eaten since lunch, and lunch itself is debatable, provided as it was by Via Rail. The word at the bar is to avoid the quiche. Also, the hot wings, french fries, onion rings and nachos. Rumour has it that the pizza is safe. It is difficult to identify the toppings in the poor light. You engage in a preventive disingection of the alimentary canal using alcohol, a highly effective disinfectant.
Someone begins dancing on a table. You could swear it. The rest is a blur. You recall laughing at your reflection on the ceiling just before losing consciousness.
The next leg of the triumphant Biblioasis fall tour begins with a whimper emitted by a writer forced to rise before the sun to make his train....
Though it does not seem to be up yet at the Toronto Star's website, there is an excellent review of A.J. Somerset's Combat Camera in today's paper. Finding the Toronto Star anywhere around Emeryville Ontario is next to an impossible task, but due to my carefully cultivated network of informers -- including the author of Combat Camera himself -- I've managed to get my hands on the review, and will give you a quick tase of it here. Should the Star eventually post the whole thing online I'll make sure I post a link to that as well.
Ryan Bigge, the author of the review, writes:
Throughout the novel, Somerset alternates between the immediate and blunt trauma inflicted upon civilians in war zones and the slower-acting but no less injurious actions of a culture lacking in modesty. ... Somerset is a confident, gifted writer .... able to seamlessly switch between dialogue and Zane's internal monologue as he darts between grim horror and grim comedy. He also avoids the arid claustrophobia endemic to novels where much of the action takes place within the main character's mind. But the most satisfying aspects of this novel involve Somerset's refusal to make obvious the numerous parallels between photography and fiction ... Such observations offer an ongoing argument between the camera lens and keyboard, with the novel eventually revealing the strengths and limitations of both.
Largely a weekend off around the Bibliomanse, the first since Labour Day, so a quick list of odds and ends about our books, brought to you by the wide and wonderful internet.
Over at Pickle Me This, Kerry Clare calls Alexander MacLeod's Light Lifting one of the two best books she has read all year:
Alexander MacLeod’s short story collection Light Lifting never wavers, one solid story after another, and the effect is devastating, gripping, overwhelming. I could hardly believe that the book was this good, and so when I discovered that a friend was reading it at the same time that I was, I got in touch right right away for confirmation. Her take: “This guy is the real thing.”
Short stories whose absolutely evoked universes reminded me of Alice Munro in their expansiveness, whose subtly horrifying endings were a bit Flannery O’Connor. Stories so engaged with the stuff of this world, the living and the doing– laying brick driveways, changing an explosive diaper in a disgusting truck stop bathroom, learning to swim, cycling in the snow, crossing the finish line in a track competition, searching for lice, outrunning a train. So vivid that it’s hard to believe it’s fiction, which is why I had trouble remaining composed at the end of the story “Light Lifting”.
Kevin from Canada, a blogger who is part of the Giller shadow jury blog project, includes his choices for the Giller shortlist, including Alexander MacLeod's Light Lifting. He also hands off a copy of Light Lifting to Alison Gzowski, who is "very impressed."
I finished Light Lifting last night. I was very impressed. This is a debut collection of short stories (some have been published earlier in literary journals) and it’s everything you don’t expect from debut collections: assured, traditional, consistently well-written and varied.
For the rest of her write-up, and a further plug from "Kevin from Canada," please go here.
Mary Jo Anderson, who reviewed Light Lifting last weekend in the Chronicle Herald, has published her full review of the book -- The Herald cut her review in its pages considerably -- over at Thresholds, the Home of the International Post-Graduate Short Story Forum. It can be found here.
A.J. Somerset continued with his Guest Blogging at the National Post's Afterword, which I linked to here a couple of times last week, with a couple of additional posts and a week-ending interview with Mark Medley. You can find two other posts, Tourist Trap and Only Fiction Can Save Us by clicking on their respective links.
Here's an excerpt from the interview:
Q: Can you tell us what the novel is about, in exactly six words?
Well, that’s a relief. If I could do it in six, I wouldn’t have needed 80,000.
Lucas Zane, formerly a celebrated combat photographer, burnt out and washed up, has come to rest in Toronto where he pays the bills by shooting low-rent pornography. He hatches a plan to salvage his career by shooting a documentary project on a porn performer named Melissa, who hopes to make a fresh start. They each struggle towards a redemption that seems continually out of reach.
The youth audience will be pleased to learn that there are several references to vampires, although I hasten to add that none is sparkly.
