David Bergen: A Fan's Appreciation

by Tannis Sprott

I haven't lived in Manitoba for 29 years, and my feelings about my childhood, and memories of living there, tend to be greatly influenced by what's going on in my life at any given moment. When I'm stuck on the 401 heading into Toronto in rush hour, I desperately miss being able to walk from one side of town to the other in 15 minutes (20 if you dawdled, and really, why wouldn't you?). Then there are the times when I want to try cooking something exotic for dinner , much easier to do in the city.

In general, my memories are centred around nostalgic visions of glorious sunsets, starry skies on crystal clear nights, the sound of snow crunching under foot instead of shplopping, the (incessant) wind in my hair, etc., etc. 

Imagine my surprise, then, when I had what can only be described as a visceral experience when reading David Bergen's "The Age of Hope", a story which follows the life of Hope, who grows up in Eden, Manitoba, gives up nursing school to marry Roy Koop, bears four children, and spends a lifetime struggling with who she is, where she is, and how she seems to dance on the periphery of the life she imagines she wants.

Bergen so profoundly caught the essence of small town life - Hope's sense of being constrained by the smallness of her world; her desire to broaden her experiences, but never quite sure how to go about it; her sense of isolation that continues, even though her life is actually a tremendously full one. I learned to love her through the course of the book, living her life right along side her for five decades.

And I have David Bergen to thank for cleaning the dust off my rear view mirror, allowing a whole cascade of memories to come flooding back. It's interesting how belonging to a small community, where everyone knows everyone else, can be both incredibly supportive, and tremendously isolating. I'm looking forward to Tuesday night with great anticipation, as literary stars David Bergen (with "The Age of Hope") and Richard Ford (with "Canada") compare fictional notes on all things prairie. With any luck, it will be a clear Manitoba night, and I can get reacquainted with those other stars after the show. What a wondrous homecoming that would be!

Tannis Sprott currently lives in Guelph, Ontario but will soon be "home" temporarily.

Look for more posts by Tannis throughout THIN AIR 2012.

In defense of the short story

By Carrie Snyder

I’ve been thinking quite a lot about the short story form. The jacket copy on my book, The Juliet Stories, categorizes it as a “novel-in-stories.” That seems as accurate to me; but the funny thing is that not everyone agrees. 

Photo by Nancy Forde

“These are not stories, this is a novel,” I’ve been told by more than one reader.

Fair enough. Reading is an individual experience. And I suppose I could see it as a bit of a compliment: everyone wants to write a novel, right? Maybe I’m just being touchy on the subject.

Truth is, when I started writing The Juliet Stories, it was a novel. And it didn’t work. I wrote and re-wrote the damn thing, but nothing about it wanted to be a novel. Eventually I gave up, but the material wouldn’t quit my consciousness, so I wrote a story. And another. And a few more, until—to skip over a whole lot of angst and gritty, dull work—I had a book. A “novel-in-stories.”

Is this a confession of failure? That the material I tried to shape into a novel refused my entreaties to fit to form? I’m not sure. It could be that I’m not a novelist. Or it could be that a tale knows how it wants to be told. 

A short story is, by definition, shorter than a novel. It might be longer than a poem, but then again, it might not be. A short story is, often, just about exactly the length of a chapter. 

So why not call them chapters, when strung together to make a coherent whole?

Each chapter in The Juliet Stories was written as a short story; if removed from context, it’s meant to stand on its own. I never thought of any as being a chapter leading to another chapter. That said, these stories belong together. They serve a larger whole. They are placed chronologically, and the characters remain themselves throughout the book, changing as characters do, and don’t, according to their development. The book has an overarching plot, unifying themes. 

I know all of that. But I think these remain stories, at heart.

Each curves back on itself at the end, so you see its beginning in a new way. Much happens, but plot is not the focal point. Mood is, and sensation, and attention to detail. There is something fragile about stories, something open-ended, something that points to mystery.

It isn’t that I don’t want you to read The Juliet Stories as a novel. Of course you may. But don’t make it be a novel. Don’t make it end, like novels end, at The End. Let it be, maybe, a meditation on the things we can’t say, we only understand, or believe, or feel; or, let it be like a memory, something you’ll think about and wonder about, but never pin down in absolute terms.

Because I’m pretty sure that’s what a short story is. And that’s why I write them. 

Carrie Snyder joins Meira Cook, Stella Leventoyannis Harvey, Cordelia Strube, Richard Van Camp, and Jess Walter on Mainstage, "Life Lessons" on Monday, September 24th, 8pm, at MTYP The Forks.

The next day, Tuesday, September, 25th, she joins Cordeila Strube for Afternoon Book Chat, with Festival Director Charlene Director, at McNally Robinson, 2:30-3:30pm.

Visit Carrie Snyder at carrieannesnyder.blogspot.com/

Thin Air in Two Cities

Méira Cook on the inspiration for her new novel...

and why THIN AIR always surprises her

I was born in Johannesburg, South Africa, where I lived for twenty-five years before immigrating to Canada. When I was growing up in the seventies it was customary for white middle class families to employ a nanny to look after their children. The nanny was, of course, black although she could have been of Zulu or Xhosa or Sotho or Tswana descent but these important distinctions were not considered by the affluent and largely oblivious white society of the time. Since the nanny had to live with the white family — invariably in the servant’s quarters behind the kitchen — she was separated from her own family because in those days of Apartheid black folks couldn’t live in “white neighbourhoods.” Her own children were sent to live with relatives in the townships if they were lucky, in the homelands if they were not.

I’ve always found the relationship between what South Africans once called “maids and madams” to be a source of great curiosity, vast exasperation, some shame, and in the end — because all that turmoil of emotion has to find its outlet — creativity. My novel, The House on Sugarbush Road, tells the story of two families, two “houses.” Beauty Mapule has worked for a prominent Afrikaner family for more than thirty years, her reign has spanned successive du Plessis generations. What I loved exploring was the idea that the relationship between domestic servant and employer is not necessarily submissive, or even particularly domesticated. There is enormous potential for subversion and unruliness, for surprise and even for tenderness between people who are not family, not friends, not compatriots, and yet who’ve lived together for many years.

That’s sort of how I feel about reading at Thin Air too. I mean the part about unruliness and surprise. Charlene and her crew run a splendid event but the part I love best is the element of quirkiness and, yes, subversion that always creeps into the proceedings. Think, for example, of the festival’s name which is a masterful stroke of creative misdirection. Thin Air always seems to me to evoke a rarified atmosphere of highbrow, pointy-headed Bookistes who ply their craft in a menacing, slightly precarious city largely populated by consumptives. Au very contraire!

The Winnipeg Writers’ Festival is famous for its rollicking good humour, its throngs of word-greedy readers, its crowds of page-turning omnivores hungry for the gloriously eclectic selections that are offered up. You have to love the eccentricity of it, the exuberance and joy, and the way a kind of prestidigitation seems to be at work. A wave of the hand and it could all vanish into . . . 

Méira Cook joins Stella Leventoyannis Harvey and Festival Director Charlene Diehl for Afternoon Book Chat, Monday, September 24th, 2:30-3:30pm at McNally Robinson. Admission is free.

That evening, at 8:00pm, Cook and Leventoyannis Harvey, along with Carrie Snyder, Cordelia Strube, Richard Van Camp, and Jess Walter, feature on the Mainstage for "Life Lessons" at MTYP at the Forks. $12/$10 students and seniors.

JonArno Lawson on Coming Back to Winnipeg

When I came to read at Thin Air in Winnipeg the first time, in 2008, it was already a city where I felt at home. My brother had lived in Winnipeg for ten years as part of the Primus theatre company, and I'd made several trips out during the 1990s to see his shows. Back then, it had never occurred to me that I might be on a stage in Winnipeg myself someday. . . 

The warm, down-to-earth reception of my work (and of myself!) are dearly treasured memories. I still use my souvenir Thin Air coffee cup for my morning tea because it's a reminder of the happy days I spent at the festival, and it reminds me that there might actually be people out there who are interested in what I'm doing.

I'd always hoped to be invited back (what a complicated task for Charlene! Canada is overflowing with talented, prolific writers, and everyone deserves a hearing, don't you think?), but never expected it - so when the summons came I was overjoyed.

I'm very much looking forward to meeting the students at Oak Bluff Community School, and at the Collegiate of the University of Winnipeg. Also to sharing the stage with Jonathan Ball, Lorna Crozier, Sue Goyette, and Patrick Lane - what a line-up - I hope I'm not last up. . .!

JonArno Lawson joins Jonathan Ball, Lorna Crozier, Sue Goyette, and Patrick Lane for  the Poetry Bash on the Mainstage at MTYP, The Forks, on Friday, September 28th at 8:00pm. He'll also be put and about as part of the THIN AIR 2012 School Program.

Pasha Malla: The Man Who Knew Too Little

by John Barber

When young literary lion Pasha Malla won Ontario’s $20,000 Trillium Book Award for his debut collection of short stories, he devoted his entire acceptance speech to a gushing, fan-boy endorsement of the whimsical Disney-Pixar film Up – thus thoroughly confusing an audience expecting a bracing whiff of the avant-garde.

The newcomer’s stories were knowing and strange in ways typical of the most advanced and currently stylish postmodern literature. His exotic ethnicity (Kashmiri-English) and intellectual verve had already typecast him as Voice of the New Canada, meta-fictional division. But Malla in person turned out to be a charmingly naive outsider from London, Ont., a happy suburban popcorn-cruncher making a middlebrow spectacle of himself amid the nonplussed elite.

Three years later, Malla’s first novel, People Park, squares the circle. Built frankly atop an edifice previously constructed by a who’s who of prestigiously obscure masters – Robert Coover, Cesar Aires, Ferenc Karinthy, Mikhail Bulgakov – People Park is despite that a loose and friendly shaggy dog of a novel, often challenging but ever ingratiating. Much like the author, a serious-minded young man who learned early not to take himself too seriously.


Pausing in the shade to discuss his novel in the midst of a household move – down one floor in the Riverdale semi where he and his partner rent a flat – Malla actively resists the role of cultural sage, constantly censoring any incipient punditry. “What do I know?” he asks, genuinely bewildered – and also, he adds, “embarrassed” when fellow young lions pretend they do know.

“One of the reasons I write fiction is that fiction is a great space for equivocation,” he says. Questions breed questions; answers are elusive.

“Have you ever heard an author on stage at a festival say, ‘I don’t know?’ ” Malla asks. “Wouldn’t that be nice? I can’t wait till somebody asks me a question I don’t know the answer to, so I can admit I don’t know.”

Such questions might well include the most obvious: What is your book about?

The easy answer is that People Park is about the crisis experienced in an imaginary city over the course of a four-day visit by a sinister magician. It is about an enormously various number of things that happen to an exhaustingly large cast of characters. But the real answer to the basic question, Malla insists, is up to the reader.

“I’m a controlling person by nature, so I made a kind of challenge to myself to let go a little bit, to force myself to allow room for different interpretations,” he explains. Already readers are peppering the author with novel readings he never explicitly intended, entering the sprawling space of People Park by means of gates deliberately left open and threads hanging.

“To me those are the spaces in the book I love that really excite me the most,” he says, “when it’s up to the reader on their own to figure out what might have happened.

“And that’s when books continue to live with you – when you’ve felt some kind of agency through reading it.”

In People Park, “agency” moves in channels of play and magic. “There’s this real joy in giving yourself over to that kind of entertainment,” Malla says. “It’s a leap of faith that you take with the author, one of the few things adults do that still feels like playing. There’s something innocent in it, something liberating.”

But by no means all sweet and sunlit. Malla’s imaginary city grows from “a palpable sense that things are headed in a wrong direction” in the real world, he says. Although careful not to contradict readers who might think otherwise, he adds that he included “a number of very quiet clues in the book that it’s set in 1984.”

Malla personally felt the anxiety that underlies the friendly exterior of People Park when he was overwhelmed by the intensely diverse yet ultimately dissatisfying experience of Toronto’s Nuit Blanche cultural festival. “It felt like being inside the Internet,” he says. The whole city rushing from one amusement to another, its interest exhausted a moment after being aroused, worried there is always somewhere better to be.

Such is the atmosphere of People Park. “I wanted to capture, in a kind of sideways fashion, the way that living makes me feel,” Malla says. And to explore how “a mass cultural hysterical Internet culture” undermines the life of the individual.

Once again, punditry raises its ugly head. And once again, personable Pasha beats it down – volunteering that among the classics he plundered for the themes and settings of People Park were the works of Stephen King. The stuff he read as a thoughtless teenager embedded in the ordered reality of his home and native Middlemarch.

King left him cold the second time around, Malla admits. His tastes have evolved to embrace the most challenging forms of contemporary fiction. But there is nothing deceptive about the modest goals of his ambitious and sprawling first effort at the long-form game.

“Novels certainly can’t save us,” he says, characteristically lowering expectations. “But they can provide spaces where true introspection happens.” And People Park is nothing if not ample in such spaces.

(The Globe and Mail, Tuesday, July 10 2012)

Pasha Malla joins Mike Barnes in conversation with Festival Director Charlene Diehl at the Afternoon Book Chat, Wednesday, September 26th, 2:30-3:30pm at McNally Robinson.

That evening, Malla and Barnes, along with Rawi Hage, Esme Claire Keith, and Sean Virgo, appear on Mainstage: Fables For Our Times, 8:00pm, MTYP at The Forks.

Corey Redekop: On the Subject of Zombies

I’m not sure where the fully-formed idea for Husk came from. I have always loved zombies and knew that I wanted to somehow incorporate my favourite monster into a story. Ever since I caught the original  Night of the Living Dead on late-night television (eyes clenched shut, bowels constricted in terror), I don’t think there’s been a monster that has affected me on such a primal level.( I don’t include the shark from Jaws here, as that beast is more or less real, and in a league all its own.)

(Not, however, the sharks of the sequels, though; as the series ambled on, they lost any semblance of reality and became pretty much just painted logs with fins menacing less and less talented actors. Oh, Sir Michael Caine, I dearly hope you enjoy that house Jaws: The Revenge helped paid for; it’s not every day an actor of your undeniable stature is upstaged by asoggy  papier-mâché fish and the little-remembered teen hero of The Last Starfighter.)

Back to zombies: this was a monster I had never encountered before. Humans beyond death, but as far from vampires as you could get. Creatures devoid of motive, unable to be reasoned with. Just appetite. As the grainy black and white members of the undead lumbered incessantly forward, overwhelming the humans through sheer numbers, I found myself unprepared for my visceral reaction. Part of this was from setting; alone, after midnight, watching a scratchy copy on a flickering television in the dark. There is something lost, I believe, in the rush to ‘clean’ up films for DVDs and BluRays. I appreciate a clean image, but movies such as these cry out for dirt and smudged cells and poor transfers. Something this terrifying should never be clean.

From that point on, I was hooked. I forced myself to peek through my fingers at the remarkable terror that is Dawn of the Dead, and sat through the disappointing social commentary of  Day of the Dead. I forced myself to watch the unnerving and nauseating works of  Lucio Fulci. I goggled in disbelief as the undead actually sprinted in the"Dawn remake, and threw up my arms as they bounced on trampolines in Steve Miner’s misbegotten rethinking of Day. I discovered the immense low-fi pleasures of  The Evil Dead (and Bruce Campbell, of course). I laughed myself silly as a girl I knew in high school did her best to survive being trapped in  Uwe Boll’s House of the Dead, one of my top contenders for funniest unintentional comedy ever made, even funnier than Shaun of the Dead or  Fido (as well as being a remarkably awful film). I even paid good money to witness the witless Joe Piscopo battle zombie criminals in Dead Heat.

There’s something pure and unspoiled in the classic Hollywood zombie. They’re horrifying and yet they subtly gain our sympathy because, on some level, they are still us. You battle a zombie, you battle yourself; just look at NOTLD, the humans battling each other with as much ferocity as the zombies outside. They’re the perfect villain on both a physical gut-wrenching horror level and a sub-textual level. Zombies are such empty vessels that they can be made avatars for literally anything. They can represent consumerism, or mob mentality, or political ideology, or sexual repression. A good zombie film will scare and disgust you; a great one will make you think afterward. Sadly, there aren’t many great ones about, with even Romero himself visiting the well a few times too often — Land of the Dead has some great moments, but  Diary of and Survival of are pretty poor (Diary especially).

Yet the inherent problem with the zombie from a character standpoint is that they’re ultimately, well, rather boring. There’s no development possible in a brain-dead skin sack that eats anything in its path. They’re great as mass unthinking evil, not so great as riveting character studies. At best, they are shadows of their former selves, locked in routine. There is a marked lack of personality, something that can only be achieved through maintaining some form of inner monologue.

Now, in regards to your less well-known ‘thinking zombie,’ your cinematic pickings are slim at best: there was Bub in Day of the Dead, he has glimmerings of intelligence, and could manipulate a walkman; Big Daddy in Land of the Dead gradually led an undead revolution; and Fido in Fido becomes a beloved family pet. But even in those instances, it’s still all groans and moans and shuffling and appetite. There is some actual discussion on the morality of the undead in Return of the Living Dead, where two men become infected, die, and still walk about conversing and wondering what the hell is happening to them. But even with this new step in undead evolution (SPOILERS), the full zombie effect soon hits one (resulting in drooling attacks of the cannibalistic nature), and the other cremates himself before he can lose all control.

So if you want to make a zombie your protagonist, particularly in book form, you’re by necessity going to have to make a few concessions to classic monster theory and actually bequeath unto your ghoul a marked increase in personality. You’ll need to tweak the myth at points, bend it at others, and break it completely apart when need be. Otherwise, the book will be nothing but groaning and lurching and eating and more groaning and more lurching. Horrifying for ten minutes. Deadly dull for the rest.

No, if you desire a zombie as a main character, with motivations and personal issues and qualms and questions of morality versus the need for living brunch, you’re going to have to: write a book, because you need the expansiveness of paper to fully delve into psychological ramblings, and do some serious rejiggering on the mythology.

Or at least I did, and I’m hardly the first; check out the spectacular anthology The Living Dead for a cornucopia of talented authors pushing the limits of what zombie literature can be. David Wellington threw some curveballs in his Monster trilogy, Robin Becker kept an innate intelligence functioning behind the decaying brain of her hero in Brains: A Zombie Memoir, and although I haven’t gotten to read it yet, I’ve heard very interesting things about S.G. Browne’s Breathers.

For my own take on it, I wanted to make sure that Sheldon Funk (my zombitagonist, if you will) retained the basic elements of the classic undead; he had to eat people. He could feel conflicted, he could debate the morality, but in the end he needed to feast on the sweet sweet tang of human flesh, or rot away to nothing. A little wish-wash namby-pambiness was fine, but I needed Sheldon to be a monster, albeit a monster you can relate to. Darn it, I wanted the guy to be nice. Without that, there would be no reason to follow his adventures.

So I kept far more aspects of humanity intact after Sheldon’s resurrection, and made him out to be my ‘patient zero,’ my Typhoid Mary of the boneyard. He would wield those certain character traits that any objective observer might classify as ‘ghoulish’ (the biting, the rotting, the possibility of infection, the pesky lack of a heartbeat), but he would still retain the capacity for rational thought and intelligent speech (although the second is far harder than you’d think when your lungs don’t function). People can then react to him either as a man or a demon, as he contains aspects of both.

This is what I call ‘tweaking,’ and what others may call ‘distortion’ or ‘outright wrong.’ But I feel that if a certain bestselling author (fine, Stephanie Meyer) can create a cult around vampires who twinkle in the daytime and werewolves with allergies to shirts, I should be allowed a great deal of latitude with how a reanimated corpse might behave. Personally, rather than admit any ancestry to Twilight’s horribly bland shampires, I feel Sheldon is far more a cousin to Steven Sherril’s sad and lonely Greek monster in the wonderful The Minotaur Takes a Cigarette Break, slaving away through eternity as a short-order cook.

If you do have a problem with my taking of zombie liberties, I can only suggest that, rather than complain, you write your own book on the subject.

That’ll show me.

Richard Van Camp talks about his latest collection of stories...

I was asked recently what my new collection, Godless but Loyal to Heaven, is about. I thought about it for a few seconds and my reply was, “Faith.”

This is my third collection of short stories, and I’m so proud of it because these stories braid so many of my essential characters together--like Torchy, Sfen, Snowbird and Stephanie from “Mermaids”,  Grant, Clarence and Brutus  from “Let’s Beat the Shit out of Herman Rosko” and “Dogrib Midnight Runners”, Kevin and Dean Meddows from The Lesser Blessed and  “The Last Snow of the Virgin Mary”.  It also introduces a new character, Bear, who is on a path of revenge.

I think it’s safe to say that most of my characters have faith in humanity, a respect for the Creator and a wish for a “master plan” that finds them all at peace: you see how in “Mermaids” from Angel Wing Splash Pattern, Torchy asks the blind medicine man Snowbird to bless his hands to win a bingo game, but we see a larger picture in play in their novella “Godless but Loyal to Heaven.” My characters are always welcomed into more than they ever dreamed: sometimes for good (“Mermaids”); sometimes for the horrible (“Snow White Nothing for Miles) ; and sometimes for the mysterious (“I Count Myself Among Them”).

In Godless but Loyal to Heaven, we have stories that take place in Vancouver, Fort Smith, the fictional town of Fort Simmer, Behchoko, Nunavut and the future. 

All of these characters in Godless but Loyal to Heaven are at the crossroads: a young Clarence is torn between his childhood friend, Brutus, but wants to hang with the cool kids in “Children of the Sundance”; “On the Wings of this Prayer” is the ultimate warning of what may happen to all of us if the Tar Sands of Alberta are allowed to burn wider and deeper into the earth; “The Fleshing” is about Bear having to choose to stand his ground with a Wheetago in order to save lives; “Tony Toenails” is about how nicknames are sometimes given and earned at the same time; “Love Song” is about Grant wanting the best for a friend in order to take from a sworn enemy; “Devotion” is about a wish for a deal with the mysterious white caribou people; “Lizard People” is about an infiltrating race who may be leading us. “Godless but Loyal to Heaven” is about Torchy in the fight of his life and his inheritance as a brother and adopted grandson to Snowbird; “The Contract” is about Bear on a path of vengeance and “Feeding the Fire” is about two warriors who want to punish the Fort Simmer principal for doing the unthinkable. 

Yes, there’s intended violence here, but there’s also hilarity and where there was pain you’ll find the Great Mystery at play for all of these characters.

My greatest joy in writing this collection was realizing how deeply I adore these characters: Snowbird, Torchy and Stephanie already have a new story I’m working on right now titled “Furnace”, in which you learn more about Torchy and Sfen’s Uncle Frank. Bear is already submerged in a new story called “Blood Rides the Wind” and Kevin Garner has a story called “Born a girl”, which you’ll be able to read very soon in the NorthWords anthology titled Coming Home: Stories from the NorthWest Territories, also published by Enfield & Wizenty. 

Godless but Loyal to Heaven confirms what I’ve been suspecting for some time: while I may be the author of the these books, it’s always the characters who lead me, and I can’t wait to see where they are taking me next. They have faith in me and their stories confirm my faith in humanity and the Creator and a spiritual path that we set in motion with our actions, thoughts and intentions. 

I was asked in an interview yesterday what I wanted for book and my answer came to me in an instant: “I want readers to wonder about these characters and these stories years after they’ve read them.”

Our first print run of Godless but Loyal to Heaven is a collector’s edition of 750 hardcovers. I’m grabbing as many as I can for myself because they go fast. After that, we switch to soft cover and I’m proud to say we will be an E Book very soon.

I am grateful to Enfield & Wizenty for publishing me, and I’m grateful to Maurice Mierau and Catharina de Bakker for all of their editorial help. Great editors make superb writers. Mahsi cho to you both for pushing me so hard to make this a collection we can all be proud of. 

Mahsi cho, everyone. I can’t wait to hold this collection in my hands. 

I hope these stories blow you away!

With respect,

Richard Van Camp

Richard Van Camp joins Meira Cook, Stella Leventoyannis Harvey, Carrie Snyder, Cordelia Strube, and Jess Walter on the Mainstage, "Life Lessons," on Monday, September 24, 8:00-10:00pm at MTYP at the Forks. He's also part of THIN AIR's School Program, visiting High Schools throughout the city during Festival Week.