Coming Soon: Iain Reid’s One Bird’s Choice
We’ve all been there, or know someone who has: overeducated and underemployed, a grown-up child is forced to return to his or her parents’ home until something better comes along. In One Bird’s Choice, memoirist Iain Reid returns to live with his eccentric parents, where he scores a part-time job at a radio station in his home town. To make matters worse, his parents own a hobby farm and Iain is expected to help out. The result is an entertaining and heartwarming exploration of family, growing up, and learning that you really can go home again.
One Bird’s Choice is Iain Reid’s first book and he chatted with Books@Torontoist about taking it from concept to creation for our latest Coming Soon interview.
Torontoist: Give us your one-sentence pitch for the new book, One Bird’s Choice.
Iain Reid: I’m terrible at pitches but here goes: it’s a funny (true) story about family and food and animals and life. You see, I told you.
Torontoist: How long did it take to write it?
IR: I’ve been working on this book in one form or another for about three years or so.
Torontoist: This is your first book. What surprised you about the process from taking book from concept to reality?
IR: Throughout the process I’ve been surprised at times how long it takes for a book to get in the stores. It’s a marathon. Although in reality I think that’s just an illusion for a first time writer who wants to be running a sprint. It doesn’t really take that long. But after every draft I always felt like, okay, great, the book’s done, but my editor would just laugh and say, no, not yet, settle down. That’s something else I was surprised at (but pleasantly so): my editor. I never knew the importance of a good editor. My editor at Anansi, Janie Yoon, is brilliant. We didn’t argue once. I didn’t appreciate the sheer skill that editing requires until I worked with her. It’s a knack I’ll never have.
Torontoist: Did you let your family and friends look at the book while you were writing it?
IR: Indeed I did. My parents would ask me to read them chapters as they were being finished. So they, along with their cats, were my first audience. Their reaction was always the same. They would laugh. They’ve been supportive throughout. My parents understand it was a funny situation and they have the ability to laugh at themselves (and me, of course). If they ever felt uncomfortable about anything I wouldn’t have written it. But we’re not talking big family secrets here or anything. It’s not a reality show about some pseudo-celebrity family.
The Summer of Oprah: Parrot and Olivier in America
This summer, Erin Balser is reading all 20 titles on Oprah’s Summer Reading List. The Summer of Oprah will be chronicled on Books@Torontoist every Monday and Thursday throughout July and August.
It took 17 books, but I’m finally struggling to find something to say about an Oprah title. It’s not that Peter Carey’s novel isn’t good (it is). It’s simply that Parrot and Olivier in America is so far outside my realm of experience that I have nothing to hook it into, nothing to ponder, nothing that inspires me to ramble about my own life.
If you’ve been following along, you’ll know these reviews are a little bit self-centred.
Carey tells the story of Olivier de Garmont, a French nobleman (a character clearly inspired by another French nobleman, Alexis de Tocqueville, author of Democracy in America) and a working-class Englishman, John Lisset, aka Parrot. Through a series of unusual events, Parrot comes to work for Olivier’s family at a young age, and when Olivier is encouraged to travel to America to explore the country’s new democratic system, Parrot begrudgingly accompanies him as a secretary/parental spy. Together, the twosome explore America in all it’s fascinating uncultured (their words, not mine, but I’m inclined to agree) glory, following many of the same routes as de Tocqueville’s journey.
It’s obvious how much historical research Carey did for the novel. Nineteenth-century England, France, and America all come to life in deep unfiltered portraits. Many characters are inspired by actual historical figures or archetypes and Alexis de Tocqueville’s own book figures heavily as many of his phrases and opinions find their way into Olivier’s prose. Parrot is a new invention but is an obvious spin on Dickens’ characters. In a lesser author’s hands, this homage would be eye-rolling, but Carey’s makes Parrot a fun and lively throwback that strengthens the setting and surrounding characters.
There are many winks and nudges to history throughout this tale. To be frank, reading this book made me feel dumb. Being Canadian and armed with a science degree, my knowledge of American (and French and British) history is High School level at best, so it was obvious just how many references were whipping by me and less obvious how many more I simply missed. Andrew Jackson is sure to get a lot of laughs as his caricature wonderfully embodies Carey’s rough and tumble America. But all I know about the guy was that he was the seventh president of the United States. I am embarrassed by this fact.
If you’re a fan of Peter Carey, Parrot and Olivier in America has all the author’s usual tricks and twists. It’s laugh out loud funny and dazzling in detail. However, the pace is slower going than it needed to be, and I really didn’t get into the story until Parrot and Olivier crossed the pond to America—nearly 200 pages in. The noble and his servant take turns narrating the tale and while Olivier is supposed to be insufferable (at least, I hope he is), his recollection of his French childhood is nearly unbearable to. I wanted to shake the whiny bastard.
Not only am I ignorant to the intricacies of American history, I’m also unbelievably quick to give up on books. If Oprah wasn’t forcing me, I never would have finished this one. I’m glad I did, but it shouldn’t take nearly half the book before I start to change my mind.
The middle of the novel is a roaring good time as the two enemies are forced to travel together because of Olivier’s parents wishes. The men openly hate each other and slyly one-up each other, such as when Olivier allows Parrot to transcribe how he bedded Parrot’s girlfriend in a letter to his mother. Eventually this twosome begins to respect and—god forbid—like each other, and that’s where the narrative again loses steam. It’s a chaotic book, often told out of order connections between characters left unexplained. Carey does not feel guilty taking the reader on 20-page tangents and drifting back to Parrot or Olivier’s childhood on a whim.
However, despite it’s uneven pace, Parrot and Olivier in America is Carey through and through. At times it’s a rip-roaring ride that crosses an ocean and cleverly dissects American history and culture. While smart and sly, it’s not Carey at is best. For fans, it’s an enjoyable and sometimes thrilling read (if you get through the first half), but if you haven’t picked up Carey yet, try one of his 10 other books first.
However, it’s possible I just don’t get it.
Illustration by Brian McLachlan/Torontoist
Putting the Story in History: On Writing Historical Fiction for the Young
Believe it or not, young people are actually interested in learning about the pre-iPod past. The problem is, they often don’t know it. That’s where the historical fiction author comes in. Transforming masses of archived and other written materials into an exciting, true-to-period story, these half-historian/half-storytellers deliver page-turning narratives that educate young readers (without said readers realizing they are learning something)
Torontoist recently corresponded with Young Adult historical authors Paul Yee and Hugh Brewster about the challenges of writing for their target readership. Yee and Brewster have recently contributed titles to Scholastic Canada’s I Am Canada series, a new line of historical novels aimed at young male readers. Yee and Brewster are also two of the authors taking part in the Toronto Public Library’s first annual Book Bash (the Canadian Children’s Literature Festival) at the North York Central Library (5120 Yonge Street) in Mel Lastman’s Square. The free event kicks off on Saturday morning at 11 a.m. and features a packed roster of authors for young readers reading from their works, signing books, and giving workshops.
Torontoist: What are some of the challenges of making history come alive for a younger readership?
Hugh Brewster: “Finding the story in history” is my motto. If I can find a story that intrigues me I can usually find a way to convey it to readers. One of the challenges is not losing the momentum of the story when you have to explain things, such as who Stalin was, for example. I like having a glossary and a historical note in the aftermatter so you don’t have to get bogged down with too many explanations in the text.
Paul Yee: To make history come alive, you’ve got to get the historical details right. How many days did it take to cross the Pacific Ocean in 1882? Did pencils exist then? How much could a dollar buy? Being specific on background details is important because youngsters are quick to seize on nuance, for example, you’ll hear them argue, “You said ‘Go to bed’ but you didn’t say ‘Don’t read there!’”
Torontoist: What strategies have you developed to engage that readership?
PY: Writing historical fiction is similar to writing other kinds of fiction because you need all the elements of story: compelling characters, serious conflict, and high stakes. One aspect of the past that helps in writing historical fiction is this: childhood was shorter then. Children were less overprotected and more engaged in family survival. Boys in particular entered the adult world at an earlier age. And today’s young readers accept that difference and are keen to see their fictional counterparts thrive in the adult world.
HB: I’ve written quite a few historical non-fiction titles for children and two of the pleasures of creating historical fiction that I discovered in writing Prisoner of Dieppe are creating characters and putting words in their mouths. (I’ve written plays so dialogue comes fairly easily.) If the characters you create and the words they say seem authentic, then the readers will be engaged. Luckily the way people spoke in 1942 is not greatly different from modern speech. I think I’d find the “Forsooth, ye varlet” style of dialogue to be a bit of a struggle.
Torontoist: What drew you to the historical events/eras evoked in your novel?
PY: Helping to build the Canadian Pacific Railway was the single most heroic event in Chinese-Canadian history. The dangerous work, the number of lives lost, the terrible working conditions—all these factors made the Chinese crews into fearless and determined workers. Yet we know next to nothing about them because the historical record is lacking. Writing this book was a way of remembering and honouring thousands of forgotten workers in Canadian history.
HB: Scholastic asked me if I’d write a war novel for their new series and I instantly said I wanted to write about Dieppe. This was partly because I’d just done a non-fiction book called Dieppe: Canada’s Darkest Day of World War II and figured I’d have a leg-up on the research. But it wasn’t just about double dipping, Dieppe is one of the most haunting stories in our war history. We still wonder how it happened. And I’d met many Dieppe veterans and heard many of their recollections about not just the raid but the prison camp years and the death march at the end of the war. From giving talks in schools I knew that kids were particularly interested in the POW stories––the tunneling, escapes, false identities, and so on.
The Summer of Oprah: What Is Left the Daughter
This summer, Erin Balser is reading all 20 titles on Oprah’s Summer Reading List. The Summer of Oprah will be chronicled on Books@Torontoist every Monday and Thursday throughout July and August.
When Wyatt Hillyer’s parents commit a double suicide by jumping off the twin Halifax bridges in 1941 (mother and father both fell in love with the same woman), the orphaned boy is shipped of to little Middle Economy (a real village in Nova Scotia) to start a new life with his aunt and uncle. Over the next few years, as the makeshift family becomes increasingly unstable, Wyatt falls in love with his adopted cousin, his uncle becomes obsessed with German U-boats, his cousin marries a German student, and the province becomes increasingly antsy as the war starts to hit closer to home.
Novelist Howard Norman elegantly weaves actual historical events, such as the sinking of a Nova Scotian ferry ship by a German U-Boat, into the narrative of What Is Left the Daughter, resulting in a haunting, vivid portrait of Canada’s ocean playground during the Second World War. Norman’s eye for detail is astounding and I found myself revisiting places like residential Bliss Street, the bustling campus of Dalhousie, the hills of Barrington Street, and Advocate Harbor, the smallest, saddest fishing village I’ve ever been to.
It’s always jarring to read books set in places you lived. Mentions of those places evoke memories of your time there and when the book and your memories conflict, the narrative begins to feel hollow and inauthentic. But when the author gets the details bang-on, the experience is less like getting lost in someone else’s made-up world and more walking a walk down memory lane–even though the book is set in the 1940s and you lived there in the early 2000s. It’s like writer and reader share a delicious secret.
However, Norman’s biggest success lies is not in his historical and geographical accuracies but in his ability to make even the worst sins—greed, pride, lust, envy, and the rest of them—understandable, as if they’re merely part of everyday small town life (they’re not), often overlooked and meant to be forgiven.
I try to avoid books set in Nova Scotia. I grew up there, so when when authors distort and compromise their portraits of the province for the sake of narrative, I get edgy, antsy, and I want to yell at everyone whose ever told me that my childhood fishing village is “quaint” or “adorable” and that I “should feel so lucky to have grown up there.” I’m the person who yells at the television when there’s a continuity error (Dear Degrassi, football players would never wear their uniforms on the bus to the game.) I just can’t handle it when people get details wrong. It certainly doesn’t help most of these stories as epic historical family sagas, overloaded with death, suffering, and intra-family sexy time, a genre I like to generally avoid.
Oprah, however, eats these kinds of books up.
And while And What Is Left the Daughter is no different in many ways, Norman captures the East Coast’s quaint quirkiness with affection and good humour. The end result? A family seaside saga that may have all the same ingredients, but the final product is much, much different.
Illustration by Brian McLachlan/Torontoist
Summer Roundup: Richard Langlois, Comics Criticism and Funny Forest
(Image courtesy of Alan Bunce.)
Today we take a bit of a break from our regular comics-artist interview format to catch up on some Canadian comics news. Over at Sequential Ink (Canadian comics news and culture blog), Bryan Munn draws our attention to the passing of Richard Langlois, a trailblazer in French comics criticism:
Richard Langlois, a pioneering historian and scholar of French-language comics, died July 19 in Sherbrooke, Quebec, after suffering from cancer. Langlois introduced the teaching of comics at the college and university levels in Quebec and was responsible for several historical comics-themed exhibits and publications over the last 40 years, as well as working as a comics journalist and critic.
Langlois’ work has helped to shape and define not just what comics are (and were in his own day) but how they could be re-imagined and more deeply appreciated. In my opinion, we owe a great deal of the current appreciation of comics today to tireless writers like Langlois, who began his work 40 years ago.
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We would be at a great loss without Canadian scholar and journalist Jeet Heer, who (among everything else that he does) writes regularly for the wonderful comics blog Comics Comics. Two recent posts caught my attention. In the first, Heer points to the great critical body of work that cartoonists and others have undertaken in the form of the interview (there’s also some wonderful background on the subject via David Hains). In a second piece, Heer examines the nationalism in the works of many Canadian cartoonists, speculating on the reasons for this trend and comparing it to the rest of our national literature:
What is noteworthy is that comics don’t fall into the periodization seen in literature. The sort of nationalist themes that [Russell] Smith’s characters were dismissing as dated in 1998 – small towns, historical figures such as Riel – are in fact a major concern to the best Canadian cartoonists: Seth’s whole body of work, indeed, revolves around such topics, as do the most popular works of Chester Brown and David Collier (who did a fine biographical portrayal of Grey Owl, another Canadian icon).
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Webcomics may come and go, but a webcomic is not created every day by Alan Bunce—or, no, wait, yes it is. Back in 2000, Bunce, formerly a senior storyboard artist at Nelvana and director of Babar: The Movie, decided to self publish his vision of what a children’s comic should be. Shortly after he won that year’s Russ Manning Most Promising Newcomer Award.
This year Bunce is trying his hand at a webcomic version of Funny Forest, at funnyforest.ca. I can’t seem to get enough of it— the work is irreverent, self-referential, meta-comics. It also works as silly slapstick and mad-cap humour. Funny Forest captures so perfectly the joyousness and exuberance of spontaneous comic creation.
Coming Soon: Gary Barwin’s The Porcupinity of the Stars
Ah, summer. The time of year when many authors simply sit around and wait for their book to hit store shelves. The time when authors wait for the inevitable publicity and media frenzy.
In reality, the time between when the book goes off to press and when it gets into the hands of readers everywhere can be a difficult one. What if there’s a mistake? What if something goes wrong? What if the cover is really, really ugly? In Books@Torontoist’s Coming Soon series, we ask authors exactly what this process is like and what they do to cope.
Our latest victim interviewee is poet and musician Gary Barwin. His most recent collection, The Porcupinity of the Stars, will be published by Coach House Books in October. In the collection, Barwin explores family and loss in his usual biting, vivid, contemporary style.
Torontoist: How long have you been working on this book? Has the process differed from previous projects?
Gary Barwin: Most of the poems in The Porcupinity of the Stars were written over the past several years, though I did disinter one poem from a writing workshop that I did with bp Nichol 25 years ago. It was quite a delight to discover that, all those years ago, I actually did have a clue, at least intermittently. It gave me a kind of retroactive confidence in myself as a young writer.
The book was accepted by Coach House three years ago and so, against my natural impatience and impetuousness, I had lots of time to reflect, to hone, to write, rewrite, and substitute poems. Together with my editor, Kevin Connolly, I developed a really clear vision of what this book would be—and what it wouldn’t be. I had the time, and the encouragement from Kevin, to really push some of these poems beyond my initial conception of them. I greatly respect Kevin’s writing and his editing—he’s really insightful and sensitive to patterns and possibilities in both the individual text and in the manuscript as a whole. I asked him to be brutally honest with me. He wrote “Not on my watch” on a couple of the poems, a comment which I found funny in its honesty while being grateful that he was willing to be tough and to help me bring pressure to bear on the manuscript in order to improve it and give it more focus.
Torontoist: You’ve written both poetry collections and fiction. Is your creative process different for these projects?
GB: I think about my short fiction and my poetry in much the same way. Writing in these different forms is like playing different styles of music on the same instrument. Longer fiction, like novels, is something else. Not that I’ve run one, but I imagine a novel like a marathon. There is time to reflect, to have doubts, to strategize, to think ahead to different stages in the race. To secretly sneak on a bus. Poetry and short fiction are more like 100 metre dashes. Before the race, you work repeatedly to hone beginnings and endings, to improve your ability with style and form, and to think about what kind of race you would like to run. But, once the starter’s pistol goes off, you’re in the middle of it and what you do relies on the experience of all your previous races and training. Unlike a race, though, you can go back and fix that slow beginning, you can add some extra oomph to the ending, or white out that competitor biting at your heels.
The Summer of Oprah: Father of the Rain
This summer, Erin Balser is reading all 20 titles on Oprah’s Summer Reading List. The Summer of Oprah will be chronicled on Books@Torontoist every Monday and Thursday throughout July and August.
Daley Amory’s father is a difficult man. She adores him until one day, when she’s 11, her mother leaves him, taking Daley with her and shattering her world. The next 30 years are a series of ups and downs as Daley spends her teens balancing precariously between her parents’ two worlds, her twenties rejecting her father, and her thirties trying to accept him and the limitations of their relationship.
Daley, the protagonist of Lily King’s Father of the Rain, seems to spend her life either trying to save her father and running away from him. When she dives into the world of academia, she rejects his conservative WASP viewpoints, his heavy drinking, and his bigoted ways, yet just when she thinks she’s rid of him forever, she still does her best to pick him up and fix him up, to restore him to the father of her youth.
When I was 11, my father ran for political office. He won. I remember the election party: the Styrofoam plastic flat-topped hats, the streamers, the red and white checkered floors, “Simply the Best” blaring in the background. My dad, sheepish and surprised, but also pleased, shaking everyone’s hand. For the next 10 years, he was never home. We saw him on Sundays, if we went to a pancake breakfast, a funeral, or a lobster supper with him. My mother carefully cut out every newspaper article that mentioned his name. There’s now an entire closet at home devoted to these clippings. I was proud of his hard work and accomplishments, pleased to see him on television wearing smart suits and saying smart things, but I yearned for him to be home.
I, like Daley, yearned for the father-daughter relationship of my youth.
Daley is so desperate to fix her father that she destroys other her other relationships. She sacrifices her relationship with her mother to have one with her father. She gives up a job and a boyfriend to help her dad. Whenever Daley puts her father’s life ahead of her own, they both end up disappointed.
King creates two complicated characters, both as charming as they are frustrating. These characters are far more sophisticated than King’s prose, and she occasionally loses her way when she tries to flesh out her characters with back story. Everything, from the presence of Daley’s college roommate to the reappearance of her childhood crush, is written as if it has heart-wrenching meaning. Sometimes the style works (as it does when said college roommate and her father come for dinner) and sometimes it doesn’t (as it doesn’t when Daley drunkenly hooks up with a childhood friend).
The scenes featuring Daley and her dad, whether they are playing tennis or traveling from AA meetings, are the rich threads that tie the book together. When King lets go, stops trying to make everything so damn profound, and lets her characters do their thing (as when Daley and her dad picnic on a nearby island) she’s at her best, capturing two broken people trying to make sense of how they became so shattered.
When I was 21, my dad lost an election. Suddenly, he was home. All the time. The three little girls who cheered his victory were now college women, confused by his presence. We didn’t need daddy anymore and we didn’t know how to connect with the father that stood before us. Four years later, we still don’t really know. My father’s presence can be as suffocating as it is necessary and learning to balance this has been a long, difficult process.
But, really, all families are difficult, in their own special way.
King passes no judgment on those who separate themselves from their parents or on those who become intricately and infinitely bound to theirs. She simply lets Daley and her father be, in all their twisted glory. The daughter is never successful at sweeping up the fractured pieces of her father’s life, or her own, but, somehow, King makes the fact that father and daughter simply were, flaws and all, a victory.
Father of the Rain is an intense, complex portrait of a father and a daughter and the indivisible bonds they share, arguing that family, no matter how fucked up, is what matters. It’s uneven and occasionally frustrating, but emotionally riveting and never boring.
Just like Daley and her dad.
Just like me and mine.
Illustration by Brian McLachlan/Torontoist
The Summer of Oprah: Someone Will Be with You Shortly
This summer, Erin Balser is reading all 20 titles on Oprah’s Summer Reading List. The Summer of Oprah will be chronicled on Books@Torontoist every Monday and Thursday throughout July and August.
Today’s book is yet another officially Oprah-affiliated title. Lisa Kogan, a columnist for O, the Oprah magazine, delivers humourous tales about family life and balancing work and family, motherhood, politics, and more in her essay collection Someone Will Be with You Shortly. She delivers a great mix of been-there-done-that humour with jaw-droppingly personal revelations.
Kogan mixes the silly with the serious and effortlessly changes lanes without coming across as whiny or self-righteous. She weaves between discussing the difficulties of being a single mom, living with diabetes, and dealing with a child who is rapidly becoming a teenager. It’s easy to see why Oprah hired her to write a column. It’s easy to see why she has so many fans. She’s fresh, funny, irreverent, and breathtakingly honest about her (difficult but privileged) life and shows that being an easy, breezy, modern every woman is really fucking hard.
People like me are not who Kogan writes for.
My biggest problem right now is that the chair I bought for my modern-minimalist-meets-shabby-chic living room is not modern-minimalist or shabby-chic. My biggest responsibility to remembering to feed my cats on a regular basis. Sure, relatives have died. My dad was hit by a boat one terrible summer and teetered between life and death for a good six months. I worry about making money and having a fulfilling career and satisfying relationships. But day-to-day, I live relatively responsibility- and problem-free. This is probably a good thing, because I’m the type of person who forgets to eat and goes days without showering and the lack of such personal-care skills would not bode well for someone with dependents or even a real job.
Kogan’s success with the Oprah-loving set stems from her familiarity. She’s the witty best friend. She’s the former cool college roommate. She’s who you call when you need advice and when you need a pick-me-up. She knows when you need your mother and when you need a martini. She’s a character on Sex and the City and Everybody Loves Raymond at the same time. She’s infinitely relatable while being eons cooler than most women her age. She’s the Oprah (or Ellen DeGeneres, Julia Roberts, or Michelle Obama) of humour writing.
So, for now, Someone Will Be With You Shortly will be the book I recommend to the boyfriend’s mom, to my single female boss, and to the mother-of-three neighbour who is fascinated by my writerly ways. It’s going on my shelf for now, behind Dave Eggers, Neil Gaiman, and Zoe Whittall. In 15 years, when I’m living in North Toronto, covered in baby vomit with an 11-year-old screaming at me because I’m refusing to buy her skin-tight sparkly pants and dealing with in-laws who just won’t go away, a leaky roof, and a myriad of financial and health problems that come with home-ownership, producing dependants, and simply growing older, I’ll pick it up, read it, and realize just how bang-on Kogan captured the plight of the upper-middle class North American white woman.
In the meantime, does anyone have any good know where I can buy a modern-minimalist-meets-shabby-chic chair?
Illustration by Brian McLachlan/Torontoist
LitBlog Spotlight: [tk]
Let’s face it, most book blogs gravitate in tone toward the positive, the enthusiastic, the boosterish. What better place to share your love of the printed word and the flowing narrative than through the global free space that is the internet? And what better way to proclaim that love than through the unfettered praise of the book you just put down or the author whose work swept you up and away for a season?
Some bibliophile bloggers, however, infuse a little tough love and even vitriol into their commentary. One such writer: Nathan Whitlock, creator and maintainer of the [tk] blog, Books for Young People editor at Quill & Quire magazine, and the author of A Week of This (a novel in seven days). Books@Torontoist editor James Grainger recently lobbed a few questions Whitlock’s way. His responses are below.
Torontoist: How did [tk] come to be and how has it evolved?
Nathan Whitlock: Almost exactly four years ago, when I was between major drafts on my first novel, I found I had a not entirely coincidental itch to write short, funny things instead of long, sad things. Blogs were still the thing, as far as web commentary went. Now, of course, blogs sometimes seem like the Commodore 64 of the web world, and my own has gone through some very quiet spells, but it’s still a convenient place to throw up the odd cranky opinion or Andy Rooney-esque observation that no one would actually pay me to write.
In the beginning, I had no real plan for the thing, though I knew that books would be a constant focus, just by default, and though I’ve gotten better at getting to the point with it, the blog is still pretty much a grab-bag with a focus on books—aside from the year or so when it got pressed into service as part of the awesome promotional machine for my novel.
Torontoist: Where did the name come from?
NW: Well, [tk] means “to come”—it’s a placeholder in editing-speak. The sad truth is that I came up with the name while trying to come up with a name, if you know what I mean. I stuck “[tk]” in there, and decided it looked good, so it stayed.
Torontoist: You already do a fair amount of reviewing and freelancing for various outlets. What can you do on the blog that you can’t do for love or money somewhere else?
NW: That’s the, well, not million-dollar question, but certainly the couple-of-hundred dollars question. Since freelance writing helps pay my rent, I need to keep most of my guns aimed at paying gigs, but [tk] allows me to A) keep it short, and B) say whatever it is exactly as I want, without worrying about whether or not it fits a magazine’s mandate. It’s also good for things I simply want to rant about right away and that would not make any sense or age well in print, with the inevitable time-lag.
The odd thing is that there have been a few paying assignments that have come about because of things I wrote about for nothing on the blog. It’s not exactly a big revenue generator, and I’m sure the thing has lost me more paying work than it has brought in, but it does happen.
Globs of Memoir: An Interview with Peter Norman
“Morning. The plane dispenses you.
We enfold each other,”
From “Recursion”
Scroll down for the rest of the poem
Peter Norman’s debut collection, At the Gates of the Theme Park is the newest book forming the parade of class-A Canadian poetic debuts this year. The book was published by the very surprising little Toronto house (literally, it’s just a house), Mansfield Press. The book is a variegated and exceptionally dexterous first collection, using landscapes real and imagined to stage dramas that concern romance, history, work, identity, and more.
Peter Norman exchanged emails with Torontoist’s poetry columnist, Jacob McArthur Mooney, on either side of a move from Halifax to Toronto.
Jacob McArthur Mooney: Thanks for doing this Peter. At the Gates of the Theme Park is a book with a rather complicated, often shifting sense of time. Some of the poems seem comfortable working with memory as a reliable source, others (I’m thinking of “Unwelcome” as a prime example) seem quite suspicious of memory, or maybe they’re suspicious of retelling, and so they shirk and shift through a battery of times and locations. I wonder how you feel about the anecdote, in the end. Do you consider yourself a reliable source of your own material?
Peter Norman: Memory is deceptive; I imagine we all rearrange our histories to fit some sort of narrative. Retelling distorts things further. I have a few stock anecdotes—the time I inadvertently sat on a piece of art in a gallery; the time the cops mistook me for an armed robber—and these have probably mutated to become sleeker or funnier, while memory scrambles along behind, modifying itself to match the tale. So yeah, I distrust the precision of memory and anecdote, and very few of my poems are pure autobiography.
On the other hand, I have tried over and over again to write serviceably about certain events in my life, one in particular, and have failed every time. That’s made me wary when I find myself hell-bent on relating some part of my experience. A poem that serves itself, not me, is probably a better poem.
As for “Unwelcome,” it began as a simple expression of my unease in the wild. Somewhere along the way, “my” became “our” and “the wild” became something like “existence.” “My” faulty memory (not sure why I came here; can’t remember where I was before) corresponds to the apparently entrenched desire humans have to understand and return to some kind of shrouded origin predating our biological beginnings. That’s my conscious take on the poem, anyway. My distrust of memory probably wormed its way in, subliminally.
JMM: That idea of writing “serviceably” about one’s life is an interesting one, and likely worthy of some unpacking. By serviceably, do you mean accurately, or do you mean it in the broader sense of “with utility?”
It’s true that very few of your poems are pure autobiography, but it seems a solid percent of them are, for lack of a better expression, impure autobiographies, or “laced with” autobiography. “Unwelcome” is certainly an example, but not a lonely one. I wonder where the tool of memoir sits in your toolbox. You seem wary of it, both in conversation and in the poems, and it’s that wariness, I think, that makes your dealing with it interesting to follow. What is a serviceable use of the personal, for you? What are the dangers it presents?
PN: I was using “serviceable” as a stand-in for “good” (or at least “half-decent”). And by “good” I mean “doing the work it has to do.” Sometimes a poem seems to have a mind of its own, and I can get in the way with my blundering efforts to impose an agenda. Obviously a poem comes from the poet’s mind, nothing more mystical than that. But the sub- or unconscious plays a part, and perhaps it’s there that this “mind of its own” is housed.
I guess “serviceable” turns out to be a pretty appropriate word, then, even if I didn’t think too hard before using it. A serviceable poem serves its own purpose rather than mine; it is a poem in which my role is that of servant rather than master.
You’re right that I’m wary of autobiography. I’m quite private. I feel glutted by the spectacle of people turning themselves inside out for public consumption, and my reaction is to go the other way. Plus I’m leery of the urge to nail a particular experience, to encapsulate and convey it. That urge is often what drives me to “get in the way.”
For example, let’s go back to this life event I referred to earlier, the one I’ve repeatedly tried and failed to write about. It was a robbery at gunpoint, and it was the only time I’ve felt myself to be in danger of being killed. The trauma turned out to be pretty negligible—no one was shot—but it made an impact. So why have I failed to address it poetically? Maybe because I’m trying to serve me, my own agenda, the agenda of enshrining this experience. Maybe the material will sneak into some other project and serve it well.
Then again, maybe the robbery experience is a Rosetta stone: if I pull off a decent poem about it, I’ll have cracked the code and will transform into a confessional poet. Who knows!
As you’ve spotted, though, autobiography (pure and impure) does appear in Theme Park. In some poems, globs of memoir are flung at other characters—for example, the retired judge who narrates “Sentences” has had my childhood memories thrust upon him. Other poems faithfully report events I’ve merely witnessed (“A Man on the Bus,” for example). And my own experiences show up, distorted or intact (“Plucked” and “The Slough” come to mind).