A 45-minute talk with Will Ferguson

On Wednesday Torontoist books editor James Grainger sat down with novelist, travel writer and humourist Will Ferguson at the Irish Embassy pub to discuss all thing literary and his new travel memoir Beyond Belfast: A 560-Mile Walk Across Northern Ireland on Sore Feet. Ferguson is the author of the novels Generica (later changed to Happiness) and Spanish Fly and the travel memoirs Beauty Tips from Moose Jaw, Hitching Rides with Buddha, as well as How to Be a Canadian (Even if You Already Are One), co-written with his brother Ian. For his latest book Ferguson walked the Belfast Way through the six counties of Northern Ireland. The Belfast Way is billed as “the longest waymarked trail in the British Isles” and follows some very rugged terrain along the Irish coast.

TO: Canadians are considered a pretty witty people. Why is so much of our fiction so humourless?

WF: I don’t know really. We have a strange relationship to humour and identity in general in Canada. Take Stephen Leacock. The Americans loved him for his British wit and the British loved him for his Yankee humour. He got that his whole life, being mistaken for a Brit or an American. That strikes me as a typically Canadian thing. We have a British literary tradition and American pop culture roots. We’re inundated with American pop culture, but it’s not our culture. Whenever you get a culture that’s swarmed with another culture, the people from the first culture tend to become observers. We’re outsiders to American pop culture, so we can look at it in a way they can’t, yet it’s not our culture. That outsiderness naturally leads us toward satire but even more toward spoof and parody. Satire is humour with an agenda, with a reason. Spoof is affectionate, it’s humour that plays on the form not the content. Canadians are great at spoof, it’s what we specialize in, doing an affectionate, fake version of something familiar, like the Scary Movie franchise. Those movies aren’t making a comment about the content of horror movies, they’re just playing with the form. I honestly don’t know why that hasn’t made its way into much of our fiction.

TO: Did you find that your first novel, Generica, which is satirical in nature, did not get the attention it deserved because it was funny?

WF: Every author thinks that their book didn’t get the attention it deserved. Everyone likes to think they’re a maverick who’s pushing the boundaries and that they are being marginalized. The novel certainly didn’t come roaring out of the gate but it sold steadily. There seemed to be confusion, among the reviewing class, who really should know better, a confusion between satire and spoof. I wrote a satire, but because satire is considered to be more of a British form and Canadians are more used to spoof comedy, reviewers here tended to judge Generica as a spoof or parody. It’s not a parody, it’s a satire, a satire of the self-help industry.

TO: And that was less of a problem in Britain?

WF: I think so. Generica didn’t really do much in Canada until the British picked up on it. They changed the title to Happiness, which seemed to help. Originally I’d wanted to call it “Apocalypse Nice.” I wanted to have the image of a horseman wearing a smiley button.

TO: Did you find that British readers had less trouble with the idea that humour can be used to express the kinds of “deep ideas” normally associated with more somber literary forms?

WF: Yes. I toured a few countries in Europe and each readership had their own reaction. The Spanish saw Happiness as a very serious but funny critique of American capitalism. The Brits thought I was “taking a piss” with the Yanks. They saw it as me mocking the Yanks.

TO: So what made you return to the travel memoir genre with your latest book, Beyond Belfast?

WF: My goal was always to alternate between writing novels and travel memoirs. After Happiness I published Hitchhiking with the Buddha, then the novel Spanish Fly, and now I’ve got Beyond Belfast. It’s been harder than I thought. I had planned on being a straight travel writer but that’s not what happened.

TO: Which form do you prefer?

WF: Well, travel writing is harder, it’s more work. It’s more physically demanding and it’s not cheap! Writing a novel is more…daunting. It’s pure imagination. Travel writing gives you the plot and the protagonist. You’ve got almost everything laid out for you. You have to journey from A to B, you’ve got characters you meet along the way, you’ve got dialogue, you’ve got obstacles. It’s like a novel, except in novels the characters are paramount and in a travel memoir it’s the place that dominates. In a novel, for instance, set in Cape Breton, the writing would focus on the seven generations of hardscrabble women characters, with the rugged landscape forming a background. In a travel memoir, the landscape would function as the main character.

TO: How much do you need to know about a place before you feel that you can “get a book out of it.”

WF: Quite a lot, actually. When I visit a place I usually get a sense of whether I want to write a travel article about my trip or try to turn it into a book. Usually a shorter journey leads to a travel article. I had a sense early on that Northern Ireland could carry a book. I first traveled there just before my son was born in 1996. It was then that I heard about the Ulster Way that goes all through Northern Ireland. I like to write about a place that allows you to go deep into the land and the culture, a place that is full of contradictions and human drama. In Japan, for instance, the people can seem very cold on the surface but when you go a little deeper you find that they are quite warm, then you go a little deeper and you come up against a reserve. Northern Ireland was like that, with more of the warmth on top.

TO: What surprised you most about the country?

WF: How peaceful it is, on a day-to-day basis. Outside of Belfast it’s like one big farm, very rural. The kindness of the people was wonderful, but there’s also a tremendous sadness because of what they’ve gone through.

TO: Do you have any advice for people visiting Northern Ireland?

WF: Avoid giving uniformed opinions about politics and religion. It’s not that you have to hide who you are, but you don’t want to go in and start telling people there your opinions on everything. The other thing they don’t want to hear is you telling them that your grandmother was Irish and that makes you Irish too. If you don’t have an Irish accent, then to them you’re not Irish.