In an August far, far away ...

Morning, folks. A long-overdue shoutout this morning to the blog of rob mclennan, who, in his perennially noble endeavour to interview Anyone and Everyone who's Awesome, took the time last month to speak with our own Claire Tacon. To read Claire on how she came to fiction, on her favourite funky smells, and on that jerk with the grocery store flyer, click here.

The Festival Series with Claire Tacon

In homage--oh God, is it already here?--to festival season, our indefatigable friends at Open Book Ontario have commenced a series of interviews on what these events mean to the people who attend them. They've just posted a Q&A with our very own Claire Tacon, who was recently at the Ottawa Writers' Festival. If you get a second, take a look! (And then, erm, try to take your naps now, because fall is just around the corner. Yipes.)

The Reasonable Ogre Hits Windsor, Toronto

"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.

Get On Up: A Claire Tacon Guest Post

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 ...

#faster #shinier #prettier @authors: A Claire Tacon Guest Post

The CBC has announced that next year’s Canada Reads authors will be sent on a mall tour, part of a strategy to reach a younger demographic. Sporting bikinis and Lucite heels (regardless of gender), the writers will walk a food court catwalk and then stand next to voting boxes where mall patrons can pick their favourites. Shoppers not wanting to take a break between Dynamite and H&M, can text in their preferences. The writer with the most number of votes and facebook friends wins.

In her excoriating article in The Globe and Mail, Kathryn Kuitenbrouwer discussed much of what made this year’s Canada Reads so abysmal. The competition, however, is only a symptom of the fact that cultural criticism is no longer considered sexy enough in its own right. Instead it needs to be tarted up with reality-TV-style competitions and propped up by social media campaigns. Beyond the tackiness, it’s dangerous. By conflating the ideas of criticism and celebrity, we’re recasting what it means to be a writer.

Back in 2010, Russell Smith exhorted authors to unplug and get writing. He claimed that books succeed on their own merits. Keep your head down, keep writing and let the accolades take care of themselves. We’re two years on and there’s a spot on the Giller long-list for the title that got the most online votes.

***

Do you have a book coming out? Do you want to? The first piece of advice you’ll be given is to develop a web presence. With reviews and criticism disappearing in traditional venues, publishers need their authors to flog books by whatever means available. Social media is cheap, requires no supervision and when someone does it well, it can sell books. But those successes are as few and far between as Mary Kay ladies driving pink Cadillacs.

Social media was not designed for considered commentary. It succeeds by disseminating the business of ordinary lives in ways previously reserved for celebrities. Our names show up in “newsfeeds”; we get tagged in photos; our friends are tallied. We toss out the crumbs of our daily lives, convinced there is a waiting crowd ready to receive them as pearls.

It’s also a fast medium—Twitter, Facebook and blogs are built for snappy, superficial updates. There’s no time for the contemplation that went into a Richler column, and certainly none of the pay.

What happens to the craft when writers need to be more concerned with selling themselves than with honing their art? Few writers can survive without day jobs; many also have families. There are only so many hours in a day and the hours spent feeding blogs, Twitter and Facebook often come at the expense of writing, reading, and observing.

Before In the Field came out, I took the advice; got a webpage up, started a blog. I’ve written one post. Partly it’s because any free time goes to writing, but partly it’s because I’m more comfortable nosing into other people’s business than displaying my own. It’s why I write fiction. After logging more than a quarter million hours with myself, I’m quite happy to step into someone else’s shoes. 

There’s also the issue of experience. At 32, with only one book out, I’m reminded of my grandmother’s reaction to the couple that sold the rights to a livestream of their mutual deflowering. “What’s exciting about two virgins having sex?”

I worry that with increased reliance on social media, and more call for sensation to sell books, we’re cutting out a key writing demographic—introverts. If you’re not a great publicist, if you don’t like the spotlight, does that mean you don’t get to be a writer?

***

So where does that leave us? In fact, I take my answer from social media’s literary success. Sites like Canadian Bookshelf (or the now defunct Book Ninja), online writing hubs like Joyland, the multitude of author-driven review sites, Sarah Selecky’s Twitter feed writing prompts, or placesforwriters’ aggregation of calls for submission are all examples of ways technology can serve the arts community. I wish I’d spent less time over the past six months worrying about establishing an online reputation and more time contributing to my in-the-flesh community.

We need to accept that, infuriating as it is, we’re never going to get those spaces for criticism back in traditional media. And if we’re going to infect non-readers with a love of literature, it’s not going to be from masquerading as pseudo-celebrities or voting other writers off the island. It’s going to be from being community-builders. From hosting and attending live readings. From smart, hip initiatives like the Poetry Vending machines and Project Bookmark. It’s going to be from talking to people (yes, even the ones who liked Twilight) about books. Every day. 

February Book of the Month: Claire Tacon's In the Field

Claire Tacon's In the Field was the winner of the most recent Metcalf-Rooke Award (&, yes, for those of you who submitted to the current one, we're still wading through manuscripts: expect an announcement in the next  two weeks) and takes as one of its themes the idea that you can't go home again.  Ellie Lucan tries to do so, imagining she's escaping from career disappointment and a troublesome time in her marriage, but discovers when she returns home that many more problems and complications await, which challenge and change her views about many things, the most important one being herself.

As the inaugural Biblioasis Book of the Month pick, orders of In the Field through the Biblioasis website will receive a 30% discount from the $19.95 list price (that's $13.97).  You can find In the Field's page on the website here.  (Out of solidarity for the other Metcalf-Rooke books, we have also applied the same discount to previous winners.  These include Patricia Young's Airstream; Kathleen Winter's boYs; Rebecca Rosenblum's Once; Amy Jones's What Boys Like; and A. J. Somerset's Combat Camera. )

In an excellent interview in the latest issue of The New Quarterly new TNQ editor Pamela Mulloy speaks with Claire about her novel.  Here's a little taste:

CT: The Swiss Air plane crash comes up twice in the book: I think that's a good metaphor for Ellie's unravelling.  Planes don't usually go down unless there's a whole series of problems.  Pilots are trained to deal with almost anything -- engine failures, pressure drops, broken landing equipment, and combinations of problems.  Crashing a plane takes either a catastrophic event or a long chain of smaller problems.  

It's the same in life; we're able to deal with crises as long as they're staggered and not too severe.  It's when we get two or three things thrown our way in quick succession that we get overwhelmed.  No matter how happy you are in a given moment, with the right set of circumstances, you could be at a breaking point.  That's what happens for Ellie.  

In the end, she has to decide whether it's better to be a good daughter or a good mother.  For most of the novel, she's either avoided decisions or let others make them for her.  The book's ending is quiet, but it leaves her forced to choose for herself, to be an active participant in her own life.  

In addition to being a novelist, Claire is an accomplished short story writer, and three of her stories have also just appeared in the Oberon's Coming Attractions volume, selected by Mark Anthony Jarman.

Claire Tacon will be embarking over April-May on a near two dozen city tour which will take her through much of Ontario, to select cities on the prairies, and through to British Columbia.  Stay tuned for more details.  And stay tuned for more about Claire and her book over the course of February on Thirsty: perhaps we'll even convince her to take the reins for a post or two....

Claire Tacon Launch at the Dora Keogh Tomorrow (Thursday, October 13th) Eve

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.

In the Field: An Interview with Claire Tacon

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.