Lachlan Murray's blog

Stephen Osborne, Anakana Schofield, Daniel Francis, and Jean Barman

In my previous post I considered the role writing can play in self-definition, and in the often fraught question of identity. One way of framing the event I attended on the final day of the Writers Festival is that it extended these same concerns to the city of Vancouver and its citizens.

Vancouver 125 Legacy Books gathered the members of an advisory committee responsible for deciding, earlier this year, which out-of-print Vancouver books — local classics — should be republished in a project jointly undertaking by The Association of Book Publishers of BC and the Office of Vancouver’s Poet Laureate Brad Cran, and partially funded by the City of Vancouver. The committee members were historians Jean Barman and Daniel Francis, writer, editor and publisher Stephen Osborne, and writers Anakana Schofield and Michael Turner. Turner acted as moderator for the event because, as he told the audience, none of his suggested books made the final cut, although he was “pretty happy with the process” and the final results. (Maxine Gadd’s Lost Language: Selected Poems was one of Turner’s suggestions.) Cran, who just completed his tenure as city poet laureate, was in the audience and added some comments during the Q&A.

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Kathryn Gretsinger, Jen Sookfong Lee, Ling Zhang, and Kevin Chong

I felt an interesting if subtle shift take place toward the end of the ironically titled Bamboo Lettering, a Saturday afternoon panel discussion involving Kevin Chong, Jen Sookfong Lee, and Ling Zhang, moderated by CBC radio journalist Kathryn Gretsinger. Two or three questions from the audience were of the writerly type: How do you come up with your story ideas? What do e-books mean for writers? What sort of research did you do? The intention of the event was to explore how Canadian writers of Chinese descent navigate the issues of identity, race, culture, family, or as the Festival program described it, “the tension between avoiding your heritage and embracing your heritage.” And those questions were certainly well aired and discussed. However, as the event progressed, and the personalities of the three writers emerged through what they read from their work, and through their responses to Gretsinger’s politely astute questions, the whole issue of “Chinese-ness” or Otherness seemed to drop away. As if the audience and the panel at a certain point had had enough of the topic and it was time to move on. And we were left with three writers discussing their work and the business of writing with an audience interested in hearing the details. Much as it should be, and as it would be with a panel of white Canadian writers.

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During the Q&A at the end of Vancouver Seen, a Tuesday evening panel of Vancouver writers Dennis E. Bolen, Kevin Chong, Zsuzsi Gartner, and Jen Sookfong Lee, an audience member reiterated a couple of the questions from the description of the event in the Festival program. “What kind of literary community exists in Vancouver? What is the nature of relationships between writers?” He was probably hoping for a more substantive answer than what had emerged to that point. I’m interested in Vancouver writing, but I’d also been attracted to the event, in part, by the series of questions in the program. They’re interesting questions, not throwaways used to fill out a few lines of copy. Here are the questions, which I’ll attempt to answer — or at least mull over — based on what the authors read from their work, and on the ensuing discussion, moderated by Vancouver Magazine executive editor John Burns.

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I started collecting books about my hometown a few years ago. Initially, I thought there hadn’t been much published, and if you were to take away the titles of the last ten or fifteen years, perhaps there’s an argument to be made. I wondered about a lack of self-reflection among Vancouverites, a gaze focused south to the United States, or in earlier decades, across an ocean, to Britain. As I continued to dig, I came to realize that a number of interesting books, and interesting writers, did exist.

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Eight events in seven days, thirty-four writers, and judging by the way I felt the next morning, one overly late and overly liquid night spent yakking with writers and other people associated with the Festival. All of it squeezed around a full-time job. It wasn’t supposed to be this way. I told my wife months ago that this year I would pace myself. I just didn’t realize the pace would be one suited to the Indy 500. Anyway . . .

I thought I’d use my last post of this year’s Festival blog for some brief accounts of the writers, readings, or comments I found particularly memorable or resonant, while recognizing that someone else could come up with a completely different list.

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Poet Don McKay told the audience at Raw Material that when he was a young man he would “blast through the bush . . . inattentive to anything smaller than a moose.” Now he’s more likely to “pick up a pebble” and say, “tell me about yourself.” The other three writers on the panel, Jack Hodgins, Terence Young, and Charlotte Gray, suggested a similar smallness to some of what constitutes the raw material for their writing. The germinal seed for Hodgins’ latest novel, The Master of Happy Endings, was “a tiny item in an international paper,” in which a retired professor was looking to be adopted as someone’s tutor. The “little detail” that provided a spark for Young’s short story “Dream Vacation” was hearing about a student who’d had “a fortunate accident,” something not serious enough to incapacitate, but serious enough to warrant a substantial insurance settlement. Although popular historian Gray “works from the historical record,” and is thus forced to deal with a much larger pot of raw material than might be typical for the poet, novelist, or short story writer, “history is vast,” necessitating some careful selection on her part. In Gold Diggers: Striking It Rich in the Klondike, she plucks six individuals from the “long line of black ants,” the stampeders and others who made and remade the brutal journey through the Chilkoot Pass on their way to the supposed promised land where gold lay in river banks like “cheese in a sandwich.” In Gray’s view, a new and resonant telling of the story of the Klondike gold rush could emerge by imaginatively inhabiting a tiny fraction of the participants, rather than by employing the traditional sweeping or panoramic approach.

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    Andrea Levy (Photo: Chris Cameron)

I wasn’t sure whether The Big Idea was going to emerge from the Wednesday night Festival event at Performance Works — not that I was concerned. The readings from the four writers on the panel, Andrea Levy, Yann Martel, Claudio Magris, and Andrew O’Hagan, and their subsequent conversation, deftly guided and moderated by Merilyn Simonds, another of this year’s Festival authors, was stimulating and engaging enough in itself without requiring some overarching grand theme or unity of purpose. But toward the end of the evening the big idea did finally coalesce, and then it got briefly derailed, probably by accident, before being dusted off and put back on its feet.

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A biographical coincidence led to my initial interest in Victoria writer Terence Young. Young teaches English and creative writing at the private school in Victoria I attended for five years in the 1970s. My internment was well before Young’s tenure, and the place I attended — essentially an unreconstructed English boys’ school — was much different from the current version of the school, from what I can gather. Although Young himself attended one of Victoria’s public high schools, I’ve been curious whether any of the weirdness of that 1970s private school, or the fossilized, roadside attraction Englishness of 1960s and 70s Victoria, permeate his work. To find out, I’ll probably have to read his 2004 novel, After Goodlake’s, set in 1960s and contemporary Victoria. However, Young’s latest book, the short story collection The End of the Ice Age, does evoke the hermetic quality I remember so well from my teen years in Victoria — at the time, a city with a significant number of inhabitants who felt a connection to an England that had ceased to exist.

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What a pleasure to sit in the presence of Brian Brett Sunday morning as he mixed short readings from Trauma Farm, his memoir of life on his Salt Spring Island farm, with additional stories and details of farm life and tough-minded criticism of agribusiness and factory farming. And Brett is a presence. A large, craggy-faced man, his powerful body wrapped in leather vest and unpretentious work clothes, he reminded me of a Yorkshire farmer, or following that genetic line farther back, a Viking. Brett's appearance is largely the result of testosterone treatment for Kallmann's Syndrome, as he tells us in his memoir Uproar's Your Only Music: "Over the years I have metamorphosed into a creature resembling my childhood biker pals." But Viking or biker, he is a gentle, voluble one, bubbling with mirth and enthusiasm as he shared vignettes of farmyard slapstick with the audience, before reading a final passage that was eloquent and moving in its affirmation of the connectedness of all living things.

Brian Brett 

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In the passage Robert Arthur Alexie read from his novel, Porcupines and China Dolls, he puts us into a missionary ship in the far north. The ship is carrying away young Aboriginal children to residential school. Looking back to shore, a child sees the tiny black outlines of his parents, standing motionless, like statues. When the children arrive at the school, priests and nuns brusquely strip, wash, and shear them, as well as cover them with white delousing powder. The children's clothing and personal effects, the one comforting link with home, they burn. "Porcupines" are the spiky-headed boys after their hair has been shorn. "China dolls" are the girls, their hair left only slightly longer, faces dusted with the white powder. With these stark and evocative details, the haunting image of the parents on the shore, Alexie, in a short space, conveys more about the residential school experience than any number of more generic accounts in the mainstream media. As one member of the audience commented toward the end of the event, "White Canadians know with a small ‘k' about the residential school system, but they don't Know about it with a capital ‘K'." The key to Knowing is when we feel something in the guts. The specificity and intimacy of Alexie's written words, and the forthrightness and openness of his spoken ones, achieved that feeling for me, and probably for many in the audience.

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