Bookmarked: Rogues' Wedding

On September 2nd, Terry Griggs's Rogues' Wedding was honoured in Owen Sound with a plaque as part of Project Bookmark, the second title in the series so-honoured, following only Michael Ondaatje's In The Skin of a Lion. The series "highlights and celebrates the stories that are embedded in our everyday geography."

For those of you who have not read Rogues' Wedding, this should serve as notice that you should do so. It tells the story of Griffth Smolders, who bolts on his wedding night after interpreting a rather odd natural occurence as an evil omen, not even waiting to consummate his marriage. When his wife Avice discovers this, she decides to pursue him to the ends of the earth, if she needs to, to have her revenge. Both embark on a flight of accidental discovery and cataclysmic misadventure -- including making what may be one of the first pornographic films.

Griggs weaves the folk stories and tales and landscapes of northern Ontario into a hilariously ribald tale, and it may be at least partly for this reason that Project Bookmark has honoured her creation. It's well deserved. We've made it clear here our admiration for Terry's writing over the years, and we're thrilled that she's getting a bit more wider recognition. Here's to hoping this leads more people to discover not only Wedding, but her other work for both adults and young adults alike. Like, perhaps, this and this and this.

Pickle Me This interviews Terry Griggs

There's an excellent interview with Terry Griggs over at Kerry Clare's Pickle Me This. I really want to thank Kerry for this, and her support of terry's books this Spring. She also reviewed both Dead and Quickening here.

The whole interview is fab, so check out the whole thing (just follow the Pickle Me This link above.)

And I'd like to take a second to wish Kerry the best in the coming weeks, as she's about to become a new mom. And to Stuart as well, of course. Best to you both.

Here's a taste of the interview:

I: What has been your experience of crime fiction? Prior to Thought You Were Dead, were you an avid reader of it? What writers and books are you most familiar with? What are your thoughts on the genre?

TG: Very little experience, really. Before starting research for Thought You Were Dead, I’d read maybe two or three mysteries. But at some point I became interested in the form and intrigued with its popularity, especially among readers who would not otherwise read genre fiction. I’m an Eng Lit grad, so for the longest time the only kind of work I read was literary. Not a lit-snob, just didn’t know any better, thought that’s where the good stuff was. And it is, of course, but certainly not all. I still think of literature as being in two categories, although for me it’s no longer the literary/ popular fiction divide, but basically what appeals and what doesn’t. Some books fulfill my reading needs and desires and others don’t—it’s as simple as that. I find this a satisfying re-arrangement of priorities and one that opens up the field.

As for books: I discovered Ian Rankin’s Rebus series early on and followed along —to think that his publishers had wanted to dump him at one point before he hit the big time! I’ve read all of P.D. James and Martha Grimes, most of Elizabeth George, and sampled many others.
Kate Atkinson I’ve always liked, and she’s written some mysteries of late (although I believe she doesn’t call them that). Haven’t delved much into the oldie-goldies yet, I confess, although Dan Wells, my publisher has just sent me a copy of Chandler’s The Little Sister.

I: What did you learn about crime fiction while writing this novel? Though you've constructed a send-up of the genre, you're still working within the formula. How was this experience different from your previous writing?

TG: I feel that I’ve always written mysteries, just not the kind that come with the sort of conventions that need to receive at least a nod as one is passing through. And literary does have its own formulas, perhaps less obvious ones. I found the genre to be a fair bit of fun, the form flexible enough to sustain a bit of larky handling. Although this book comes out as a send-up, it’s really just creative play and me inhabiting the genre in my particular, albeit subversive, way, making it my own, leaving my thumb print (evidence!). Plot is perhaps more easily traceable in Thought You Were Dead than in some of my other works, although I’ve never considered it a lesser element. I want to be a good storyteller.

Pickle Me This on Thought You Were Dead

Over at PMT, Kerry Clare writes about discovering Terry Griggs, and her thoughts on both Thought You Were Dead and Quickening. Read the whole thing here. Here, though, is a taste:

Griggs' fiction is as demanding as it is rewarding, pulling no punches at all. The reader is plunged rather than eased into the story, whose language must be untangled, unraveled in order to work out the plot. Chellis Beith may be a slacker, but Terry Griggs is no such thing, her tangling and raveling deliberate and intricate, sending up crime fiction, small-town culture, and the literary life. And so much more, this becoming clear with every rereading, with every sentence picked apart, with every one closely read. What a richly textured lark is this, how substantial is Terry Grigg's concept of whimsy.

In other Griggs related news, The Globe Paperback reviewer reviews in Twitter-like fashion Quickening:

QUICKENING

By Terry Griggs, Biblioasis, 156 pages, $19.95

Griggs's collection of short stories was nominated for a Governor-General's Award when it was published nearly 20 years ago, and they still display her talent and quirky sense of humour.

(Griggs writes the Tuesday Essay this week at globeandmail.com/books.)

Quickening

The last couple of days I've been re-reading, before sending them off to Terry, the proofs to Quickening(1990), Griggs's first collection of short fiction. Nominated for a GG award, but long, long, long out of print. Already there seems to be a bit of buzz about it, mainly tied, it seems, to the Salon controversy last summer (yes, Sina: seems at least a few people did discover the Salon writers for the first time through that endeavour). Terry has penned a short Foreword to the collection I thought I'd post here, as I think it captures so many of the joys that reading Griggs offers, along with the first page from Suddenly, the first story in the collection, to whet your appetite. Revisiting these stories has been one of the highlights so far of 2009, and I envy those of you out there who will be discovering them for the first time.

FOREWORD

Having been afforded this indulgence, this luxury, of republication, I thought I might as well add an extra two cents worth of explanation as to why. Quickening was first published in 1990 and contains a gathering of stories that I’d been working on for some time, which I suppose makes this introduction more a backward than a forward, although I’ll try for enough headlong encouragement to propel you into the text.

So, what are these stories; what do they have to offer; are they worth the trouble? Times have changed since they first sidled into the world. Spare, no-nonsense prose, continues to be much lauded, while what falls into the “poetic” category is much less so. Too much work, too flowery–artiness cluttering up the story or disguising its deficiencies. Nothing herein will make your teeth ache, I don’t think, but I do like language. Adverbs, adjectives, syllable-encrusted gems plucked from the word-hoard, tricky turns of phrase–all good stuff. A writer needn’t turn purple in the effort, but frankly, works of miserly, verbal monogamy have never brought me much pleasure. One can be spendthrift and still be precise–a more all-embracing precision. If, as the masterful William Trevor says, “stories, far more than novels, cast spells,” then surely one’s requirements would include a range of wordly wizardry. And true enough, making an entrancing word-woven thing is of great interest to me. Style, life in the line, entertainment of a kind that strikes more than just a glancing blow to the head or heart.

Okay then, suffice to say that the stories in this collection were not written by the Elements of Style rule book. I see them as being fairly straightforward, although the writing can be somewhat textured or layered, what a friend once described as a “thicket.” If the gist of any particular effort here seems overly elusive, a reader might need to venture in like a beater and drive out the game.

Another friend has described these stories as “wide tales” as opposed to tall ones, and that nicely covers the stretch in them. I’ve always been a bit of a fantasist, wanting to let in what lurks on the edges of vision, just beyond view. The droning realism of the everyday? Meh.

Let’s let language be an instrument of expansion, of seeing farther and more and deeper.

I’d write some of these stories differently now (or not at all), but I’ve left them unmolested, and laziness not the only reason. They are what they are; they deal with matters that absorbed me at the time, including some exploratory ways of approaching narrative. Some zig and zag, others host other stories in their innards, and a few are packed like a bulging suitcase, ready to pop open into a longer form. What scant autobiographical detail there is generally morphs into metaphor; here and there germinal fact sprouts into fiction. The imagination has done its work. If nothing else, Quickening represents the start of a writing life that does seem to determinedly persist. As a bonus–or booby prize, depending on one’s view–I’ve also added a story called “Tag” that was written shortly after the collection came out and was first published in What! magazine.

The dog out front with the nick in her ear and the patiently enquiring expression is called Fable.

William Trevor again: “The modern short story may be defined as the distillation of an essence.”

Ah yes, so welcome to my distillery, feel free to sample the brew. Old stuff, well aged, but not, I trust, gone skunky quite yet.

And, from SUDDENLY:

AWAY WE GO.

Went, I mean.

Snowflakes streaking past our eyes, stars jiggling up there in the sky.

Foop, into the snowbank.

Buck was laughing to split a gut, and he said, ‘Marsha, you're a kook,’ and I suppose he was right, considering. ‘Exhilarator! Haw, haw.’ He was smacking his hand on the dashboard. Did I say that? I expect I did. You know, words zip out of my mouth assbackwards half the time. Like then, when I hit the, excuse me, accelerator instead of the brakes and couldn't even get the swear­ing right. Probably because I was trying to pray at the same time, ‘Holy Shitface Mother of Bob, not the fender, please not the headlights.’ What we're talking about here is Daddy's brand new Comet GT with the Luxury Decor Option – cut-pile carpeting, colour-keyed vinyl roof and wheel covers, reclining contoured bucket seats – all the spiffy features Daddy couldn't stop jawing about that I'd just parked in a huge fucking snowbank.

‘Shut up, Buck!’ Though I shouldn't have said that, either. Way to impress a guy, eh?

I'd been working on it, too. ‘It’ being Buck and me, some­where alone. Not in a snowbank, I'll admit. That wasn't exactly what I was after. Getting my mitts on Daddy's car hadn't been easy. Getting Buck in it hadn't been easy. He's had his mind, such as it is, on other things lately. Two things, Trudy's, and they keep changing sizes, that's the joke. I nearly had to run him over. ‘Hey, Buckaroo, wanna go for a ride?’

What I wanted from Buck was simple. I wanted his undying love, his thrashing gushing heart in my hand (no matter it was likely cold and blue as a ball of ice), and I wanted to sing in his band, the Tomcats, New Year's Eve at the Lantern. I wanted this pretty bad. Feature me down on my knees every night: Listen up, Bob, you gotta do this for me. I'll wear my black dress, the one I bought in Reitman's in Sudbury with the ruffles around the hem tickling my kneecaps. Hot stuff, or what? I promise I'll be buried in it. You set me up and I'll do the rest.

Though You Were Dead: Craine Sketches

Above, some rough endpaper sketches for our upcoming Terry Griggs's novel Thought You Were Dead. Dead is a bit of a departure for Terry, a comic-noir biblio-mystery, the first in a projected series of mysteries about literary researcher/reluctant detective/slacker Chellis Beith. The novel turns the mystery form on its head, bludgeoning flat language and puritanical sensibilities with evident glee. It's one of the silliest, funniest, word-drunk books I've read in quite a while, a linguistic joyride, a Griggsian romp. The Globe once reviewed an earlier book of Griggs's, saying it was like reading Robertson Davies on speed: if that's the case Thought You Were Dead would be Christie on crack.

This will also be our first illustrated novel. In addition to the endpapers, there will be another half dozen or so full page illustrations by Nick Craine, giving the book an appropriate pulp feel. Should have some of the final drawings to show you in the next week or so.

We'll be republishing Terry's first collection of short stories, Quickening, alongside Dead, complete with a previously unpublished -- unless you were one of the 26 people who bought the story from Metcalf's Magnum Reading series 17 years ago -- story, Tag.