Vancouver atypical–brilliant sun alternating with dense dank fog. near the water, walked a couple miles. misplaced my mind. the day passes.
In the Defense of My Novel
The things that alert you to another book you’re about to write are not necessarily the things that end up in that book. Why 1964? That’s when I heard Miles Davis for the first time—on someone else’s stereo. Playing Ascenseur pour l’échafaud (Lift to the Gallows) opened a sneaky door at the back of my … Read more
The Only Good Song on the Radio
The only time I listen to pop music on the radio these days is when I’m driving. I don’t expect much, just something pleasant enough to keep me going with the traffic over the Burrard Street Bridge—something with a good beat, lyrics that are not too idiotic, and a catchy melody. Usually that’s what I get, but a few weeks ago I realized that radio music had gone dead for me. The only thing that kept me from switching over to a CD was one song. They didn’t play it often enough, and I kept waiting for it—the only good song on the radio.
Private Thoughts — after Yen Shu
In happier times the setting sun lacquered the waves in the harbor now below the Lions the rain has swelled the creeks into torrents so many days of loneliness and now desolation and no stove fire I’d send a letter in a fish if I could but everywhere rivers and mountains are endless ___ … Read more
AN OPEN LETTER TO THE CBC
Dear Canadian Broadcasting Corporation,
Since I emigrated to Canada in 1970, I have been listening to CBC Radio. I listen to it in much of my down-time—while I’m cooking, doing the dishes, putting away my socks, or driving my car. I regard CBC Radio as an old reliable friend, and I am writing to you in the spirit of friendship. In recent years Q was one of my favourite shows. The host is gone, but the show continues, and that’s what I want to talk about.
Farewell, Rohan O’Grady
Canadian novelist, Rohan O’Grady, dies at 91 is a headline you will not read in any Canadian newspaper. June Skinner, who wrote under that pen name, has never received the recognition her work deserves. She never thought of herself as either a pioneering Canadian novelist or as a unique woman of letters, but she was both. She began publishing when Canadian novels were thin on the ground, and the publishers who picked her up were not in Toronto but in London and New York. From 1961 to 1981 she wrote in complete isolation, living a quiet life as a wife and mother in West Vancouver.
STEVE IN TORONTO—AUDIO DRAMA
Warning–this is a dark scene from Motet, the darkest of my novels. Some listeners might find it disturbing.
“Steve in Toronto” opens in a loft on Queen Street in Toronto in 1977. I am playing Steven Beuhl. The amazing young Vancouver actress, Ranae Miller, is playing the punk rocker, Annie Epoxy.
If you want to know what happens next, listen to Episode 10 of The Canadian Fiction Podcast in which I read the rest of the story and talk about it afterward with podcaster Erika Thorkelson.
If I were writing Motet now, Annie Epoxy would have a far bigger role in it. Reading the book again for the first time after twenty years, I found her a fascinating, complex character who deserves far more stage time than I originally gave her.
Podcast: Play in new window | Download
ON THE DEATH OF DORIS LESSING
“Literature is analysis after the event.” Doris Lessing from The Golden Notebook.
To say that Doris Lessing had a huge impact on me is a monumental understatement.
I first read Lessing in 1970.
For two years I had been pouring all of my energy into the American antiwar movement, but now the New Left was exploding into fiery fragments — bombs going off on campuses, the Weatherman faction of SDS at the height of its insanity, paranoia, bone-grinding fear, bleak nihilism. During those two years of activism I had not read fiction. I remembered the writers I used to love, felt a nostalgia for a lost time when an innocent sweetness had been possible, but in 1970 it was not possible to admire John Updike for his elegant prose. Then I read The Golden Notebook and suddenly there was Lessing in all of her fury and intensity — WAKE UP, this is serious, this is BLOODY serious, this MEANS SOMETHING.
THE POWER OF GIRLS: PART TWO
STORIES TO TELL
The Knife’s music video for “A Tooth For An Eye” has some interesting similarities to Grimes’ “Oblivion.” I don’t mean to imply any direct influence. The same social conditions often produce similar lines of thought, and it doesn’t really matter whether Olof Dreijer and Karin Dreijer Andersson, the Swedish siblings who make up The Knife, have seen Grimes’ work or not.
As the video opens, we are in a locker room. The men walking in know each other and exchange greetings as they strip down to their workout gear. This is an athletic group of guys with well-toned bodies; they range in age from their twenties up to one venerable gent who’s fairly long in the tooth. They enter the gym through a door clearly labeled “Herrar”—Men—and we find, to our surprise if not to theirs, that a young girl is in charge of their class. Her striped sweatsuit makes it impossible to pinpoint her age, but she could be as young as twelve. She immediately begins directing them in a series of supple movements that would be more appropriate for girls her age than for this collection of mature males. They do their best. Karin Dreijer Andersson’s voice, grotesquely distorted, comes blasting out of the girl’s mouth: “I’m telling you stories. Trust me.” What stories is the girl telling us?