The Luminaries: The Fortunes Are Told In The Stars

By Jason C S Cheung

To be very honest, I hadn’t done my due diligence and read The Luminaries before I entered the centre culturel franco-manitobain. After some reasearch, I was fascinated to learn that the novel is set in 19^th century New Zealand. It's a mystery and a historical period piece: one of my favourite types! Eleanor Catton was a true inspiration this evening as she read, then shared her insights and reflections on her book. She illuminated us on an epic journey across the ocean to 1860s New Zealand (the setting of the novel is the gold rush on the west coast of New Zealand, a wild frontier).

She has won the Man Booker Prize and the Governor General Award for her bestselling novel.

An Ambience Set By Giving

The evening began with greetings from many honoured guests. The most memorable moment was from elders Clarence and Barbara Nepinak’s blessing of the event, which reminded us that we were on treaty land, and welcomed us to a sacred place of respect and sharing. They offered our guest a gift that carried significant meaning, as it was prepared by members of the Nepinak's community. Giving, Catton later told us, is an act bigger than ourselves, and one that defies the laws of nature. Much like reading a novel and experiencing the gift bestowed by the writer upon us, we are welcomed and enriched by the characters’ experiences as if they were that of our own. This theme inevitably ties in with the economy of worth versus value, which was central to some of the ideologies in her characters’ development.

Graceful Style, Grateful Audience

In her dialogue with festival director Charlene Diehl, the discussions of plot structure and archetypes really intrigued me. I was impressed with her analysis of archetypes versus stereotypes. From what I learned, an archetype is a mould: “a basis for the infinite to be filled,” whereas a stereotype is a reduction of a person to a series of traits. This is where it gets very interesting: by incorporating the elements of the twelve zodiacs, each character is generated through a set of pre-existing characteristics. Catton went on to describe the Freudian relationship between some of the planets, which was very complicated (beyond my meager understanding), but nevertheless breathtaking.

As the Planets and Signs Dictate

The way Catton described the interconnectedness and the interdependence of the stars and planets in motion truly mesmerized the audience. Personification of archetypes in celestial objects is nothing new, but to learn that she used them to shape her characters was definitely a breath of fresh air. The meticulous inner workings of miracles weaved into the magical network of her characters was truly astounding. I felt transformed by the intricacies of her storytelling, and her elegant presence.

Fortune telling as a Career?

I would like to ask Eleanor a personal question:

I am one of your archetypes of the constellation characters in the novel: Chinese, male, and a Virgo. Would you be kind enough to give a personal chart reading? In sharing your story and personal journey in the development of this astounding work (which I will surely read), it is rare to find a great novelist, but it is rarer still to find an author with such eloquence in language and a graceful presence that is still a bit mysterious to me.

Thank you for travelling to the other side of the ocean to visit us.

Well, better get started on the long journey of 832 pages. Good for reading on the plane!

Please join us for more wonderful events at the 18^th Winnipeg International Writers’ Festival, and happy reading!

Jason C.S. Cheung

Detachment: An Adoption Memoir

Remarks made at the launch of Detachment: An Adoption Memoir
at McNally Robinson, Winnipeg, Sept 5, 2014


Many of you will wonder why I wrote this book. Perhaps your wondering will include some questioning of my sanity or parenting credentials. Believe me, that’s appropriate.

I wrote Detachment with as much grit and honesty as possible because the story matters. It’s a story of being a father, a son, and a husband. It’s a story about me screwing up over and over, and refusing to give up. That probably doesn’t sound very entertaining. Let me start over.


Detachment is a quest for connection, really for spiritual and emotional empathy with the suffering, the humour, and the humanity of other people. Detachment tries to be realistic about the challenges of family life post-adoption, and about the specific struggles I've had understanding my kids and their damaged history, as well as my dad with his scarred past, and with my wife over my own failures to attach. But even with the necessary darkness, I wanted to take the reader along an arc where the future became brighter for me and my family.


A lot of things were tough about this book. One of the toughest things was I had to decide what could be public and what had to remain private. For the book to be compelling, it needed to be intimate, but I didn't want to hurt my kids or other family members either. God knows if I got that balance right.

I structured Detachment like a novel because most of the memoirs I admire borrow storytelling techniques from fiction: Dave Eggers' A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, Mary Karr's The Liars' Club, Warren Cariou’s Lake of the Prairies are such books, all of which have inspired me.


I struggled with how to tell the story in Detachment for five years; meanwhile the story kept changing while I lived it. The breakthrough came for me in Banff three years ago, when Michael Crummey, one of the faculty members, pointed out that I could start the book with my sessions seeing a psychologist, in crisis. Michael observed that shrinks are like priests: they can't ever reveal what you might fictionalize; he also has the best bullshit detector of anyone I've ever met, aside from my wife Betsy. That first chapter now forms the prologue, which I called "Shrinking." From there the book moves back to 2005, when we adopted our sons, and the adoption story is told chronologically. But the story of my father's childhood is interwoven in flashbacks.


The book is dedicated to my sons: the younger two Peter and Bohdan, and my oldest, Jeremy, who was born here in Canada and was also affected by my past, including the fact that I'd had 34 addresses by the age of 17, and for whom I was an often absent and detached father. All of us need to make sense of history on our own, but I hope that this book will help my three sons figure out their own roots. As one of Patrick Friesen’s characters in his long poem The Shunning puts it:

Do you understand this? where we came from?
it all adds up
figure it out for yourself


I have many people to thank, starting with Betsy. As the Beach Boys say, “God only knows what I’d be without you.” The short answer might be homeless. But really on top of eating much worse and going to the gym less, without you what I was trained in childhood to call my spiritual life, something I still believe in, would be irretrievably damaged. I can only be a whole person with you.

Then I must thank my aunt Lil, who told me the story of my grandfather’s disappearance, my grandmother’s rape and early death, and explained so much to me about my her and father’s struggles to overcome the horrors of their childhoods. Someday maybe I’ll be as good a storyteller as she is.

As you know, Mennonites are not Italians; we have trouble expressing ourselves emotionally sometimes. My father, an orphan at the age of ten whose earliest memory is a Holocaust atrocity, would now be described as having PTSD, and possibly a form of attachment disorder. By telling his story in this book, I gained empathy for him, a father who was at times detached himself, and being a more empathetic son helped me understand and empathize with my own sons.


I hope that this book speaks to the experience of children who have suffered neglect and abandonment, and also to the experience of children who are war refugees like my father was.

Like Dorothy Parker, I take more pleasure in having written than in actually doing the work. Parker also said brevity is the soul of lingerie, but that’s another topic.

Maurice Mierau

On Yearning

So after I launching two kids and a book in two years back in the early 2000s, I went through a bit of publishing dry spell.  Then this year, with two books coming out within six months of each other, those in-the-know told me I should start developing my “online presence.”

Unfortunately, turns out coming up with a “presence” really sucks. My fiction is never remotely autobiographical. I have no marketable “persona” other than ones that have been blogged to death ― working mom, harried volunteer, opinionated artist. Other than the stories I tell, there is nothing particularly remarkable about me or my life.

I ended up calling my blog “Write in the Middle,” with the tag line: I’ve lived in Winnipeg my whole life. It’s an unassuming, middle-of-the-continent kind of place that sometimes yearns for greatness — which is why it suits me, I guess.

It kind of made sense given that I’m a mid-career, mid-life writer who lives in a place that as far as many are concerned, is neither here nor there. But probably the key word is yearning.

Pretty much all my stories involve a pervasive, sometimes senseless yearning.

In Your Constant Star, my YA novel that came out this past spring, the three young protagonists collide like electrons, attracting and repelling each other as each seeks something they can’t really name.

Faye, adopted from China by a couple from Winnipeg, wants to understand what may never be understood ― why is she so pissed at her doting parents? What makes her long lost friend, Bev, tick? How can her birth country be so brutal and so beautiful at the same time? Bev, unexpectedly pregnant and determined to give her offspring what she doesn’t have, just wants to feel something ― to give a shit for once in her life. As for Mannie, Bev’s self-sabotaging baby-daddy and hero is in own mind, he just wants to come to the rescue for once in his life.

The interconnected Winnipeg stories in my other new book — Boy Lost in Wild, launched this fall — similarly explores our common ability to yearn. No matter what their age or circumstances ― from a sixteen-year old Iranian “sandwich artist” who defies her secular parents by wearing a head scarf, to a Ukrainian octogenarian who remembers the 1919 General Strike ― these Winnipeggers are united by their search to figure out who they are, and where they belong. 

No matter who we are, to feel alive, is to yearn. So I write about yearning, in all its forms.

And hopefully, my stories are also about mercy. For yearning means we all walk around with a nagging sense of the unattainable and unrealized, of who we want to be and who we really are.

For most us, if we’re lucky, we come to understand that being neither here nor there is a pretty good place to be.

Brenda Hasiuk

"Engaged Audiences, Engaged Readers"

Last year at this time, I was at home in The Pas, anticipating a birth.
In early September, fifteen copies of my first novel, Swarm, arrived in the mail in a cardboard box. My puppy insisted on chewing the corner flaps as I pulled the parcel open.

The thing took nearly five years from creative spark to the final push of page-proofs and there it was, with its beautiful turquoise cover, full of words, in my hands.

How strange.

Earlier that summer, I’d had the good fortune to hear from festival organizer Charlene Diehl. She loved the advance copy of the book, she told me, and offered an invitation to read at Thin Air.

I was over the moon. Not only would it be the book’s first outing, but it would also give me a chance to hang out with other writers, an opportunity I don’t get very often, living up here in The Pas.

It would also be only my second appearance at a major literary festival. The first had happened two months prior at the Leacock Festival in my former home town of Orillia, before the book was even available.

There is a key event that stands out for me at the festival (apart, of course, from the dramatic explosion of a glass of red wine in the writers’ lounge at the end of a very trying day, so I was told, for the tireless, dedicated festival organizers – cue shout-out here for all their hard work).

It’s an event that I remember mentally marking because of its resonant significance, the sensation that it gave me that I was indeed making a mark, getting somewhere with this craft I’ve been practicing and living my life for going on twenty-five years.

It was the moment when I walked out on the main stage, reading that night with Andrew Pyper, Lucie Wilks, Daniel Canty, and Dennis Cooley, all great writers, and I, there, with them.
Exhilaration.
Charlie Wilkins was in the audience, whose book Little Ship of Fools I’d read that summer and loved, and later I would discover that he was also a fan of mine.

A high school friend I hadn’t seen since I was a teenager was there, as well as a Winnipeg writer I’d connected with online and hadn’t yet met in person.

Writing is a lonely act, but then there are these amazing opportunities: to share the story you’ve spent many years living with, pouring yourself into, labouring over, all alone.

Engaged audiences, engaged readers, mean everything, or nearly that, because they give us community and a pretty huge reason to work.

Last year, I gobbled up Thin Air – not only my own events but those I experienced as audience, as reader, as kin to all of you who love books – because words are not just my vocation and my calling: they are my passion.

And it’s clear that in this, I am far from alone.

Lauren Carter,
September, 2014

Feeling blocked?

At the post-reading question-and-answer at last year’s Pint of Bitter Murder at the Park Theatre, Gail Bowen and I were asked if we ever experienced writer’s block. Or perhaps it was “suffered from” the aforementioned condition. The questioner had a plaintive tone in her voice––or at least I think she did, since her question, one of many good ones that afternoon, lived a kind of half-life with me. I can remember the question. I just can’t quite remember my answer. It may have had something to do with not experiencing writer’s block, which was unhelpful of me. But then I’m never sure what others mean by “writer’s block.” I’ve always assumed it to be the almost pathological inability to produce a word, sentence or paragraph for days, weeks, months or years––by which time the writer, so-called, should seek another vocation or avocation. Moments of dullness in front of the computer, the inability to come up with a fresh thought or the perfectly appropriate word or phrase, the feeling of gawwwwd, do I really have to do this this morning is not writer’s block any more than moments of inattention and general funk driving a taxi is taxi driver’s block. Writer’s block, if that’s what this is, is perfectly normal––probably little more than the eager brain, wanting to wander, rebelling at the need to concentrate, or the vital body, wanting to roam, rebelling at the need to sit still. All the usual nostrums apply: get up, walk around, take a shower, or just fuhgeddaboudit for the day. Are you on a deadline? Probably not. If you are, then writer’s block has an astonishing way of vanishing. And here’s proof: Thin Air publicist Bruce Symaka asked if I would contribute to this year’s Thin Air blog. Yes, I said, though I didn’t have a blessed idea what I would write about. But I had a deadline––Labour Day. And though it is now, as I write, Labour Day Eve, and still don’t have a single bloody idea what the hell I’m going to write about (writer’s block!), I have a deadline. And that concentrates the mind wonderfully.


C.C. Benison’s latest novel, Ten Lords A-Leaping, arrives in paperback November 4.

Sent Traveling

Plagued by doubt, I pick at my prose, searching for answers. If I keep scratching, the text will bleed. I stop writing. Though the novel is nearly done, a crucial element is missing and I am uncertain how to proceed.

In the story, a young German named Heinrich arrives in the village of Pangnirtung, on Baffin Island. The year is 1980. He sets off on a two-week hike but when he returns to Pangnirtung time has raced forward. 2010 the calendar insists. For reasons unknown to him, he has been yanked from the twentieth century and deposited in the twenty-first.

To prevent myself from physically or otherwise destroying the manuscript, I decide to send Heinrich traveling in fragments, away from me. The novel tells Heinrich’s life through pieced-together scraps of narrative evidence: journal entries and extracts from books on animals; it includes Inuit tales, in which a person’s soul may pass through many lives, inhabiting first a raven then a seal; it depicts how a young man is torn from the era of handwritten letters and thrust into an image-saturated age of pixels. Given all this, why not toss the manuscript of Heinrich, atomized and joined to an array of photos and paintings, on a voyage across actual continents, through “real” time, at the mercy of snail-mail? I experience an intense desire to copy the novel onto the backs of postcards, then drop it, bit by bit, into the machinery of the Canada Post. Today, so many narratives bypass the bound pages of books, migrating rather through fiber-optic cables from creator to consumer, what better way, in such a shape-shifting era, for a novel to travel from author to reader than by postcard? For the duration of my experiment, Heinrich will escape my destructive grasp; a number of my friends will receive something besides a bill in the mail; they will be reacquainted with the frustration of deciphering sloppy handwriting; and I may discover the novel’s missing element.

I gather postcards into a small mound, select one, and begin transcribing. A single, double-spaced, printed page of the manuscript becomes four handwritten postcards. I press on. Each picture adds a layer of meaning. Not just any postcard will do. Every picture must comment on the text. Oblique or overt, a connection has to nestle within each pairing of image and prose.

Postcard # 20. I’ve completed a sufficient number to start mailing them. Excited by the prospect of their imminent journey, yet regretful at having to part with them, I hesitate. The act of mailing them feels final; I sense that I have no right to ask that the postcards be returned to me. I may never see them again. I am giving them away. Why not scan them first and create a digital archive? I don’t own a scanner and lack the skill to create such an archive, but I do have a friend who is both computer savvy and generous.

Postcard #51. Over fifty postcards have been scanned and archived by my dear friend, who is either crazy or has not yet realized the proportions this project may take on--that we are creating a creature with tentacles. I am seated across from a friend in a bar, holding up a postcard, excitedly reading aloud. My listener remarks that hearing the words while looking at the front of the postcard allows his mind to move more fluidly between picture and text. Aha. What if postcard recipients were willing to record themselves reading, and these audio files were added to the archive? The result would be a handwritten-illustrated-e-audio-book that could be navigated by a variety of routes. Rather than read from beginning to end, visitors could enter the novel through any picture that intrigues them, advance through a story being read aloud by an eclectic vocal collective of fellow readers. How differently a text inhabits each reader would become audio-palpable. If a visitor chose not to enter through a picture, not to advance card by card, but rather to search the archive by recipient’s name, such a visitor could experience an auditory “core sample” of the novel – a layered reading in one voice of passages taken from many separates points in the narrative, a delicate drilling through the story.

Postcard # 64. My supply of postcards is diminishing. From the AGO I’ve bought crisp new ones, and in a used-books store, where the vintage postcards are arranged by theme and fill several shoe boxes perched on a shelf at the back, I’ve spent more money than I intended. I put out a call for donations and soon am inundated: souvenir images of the Freud Museum in London, England; Star Trek; Ikea; Disney Land; a New Brunswick amateur taxidermist who stuffs squirrels and dresses them in costumes. The possibilities multiply. Will such random cards successfully illuminate the novel? I go on-line, searching for specific images: snapshots taken of Tettnang, Heinrich Schlögel’s hometown near Lake Constance. Vacationers have posted holiday photos. I contact several to ask permission to reproduce their shots of the town square, of the hops fields and orchards surrounding the town. A number of my own quick shots, taken on a two-week hike in Auyuittuq Park on Baffin Island become postcards. I e-mail the National Archive of Canada, which grants me permission to reproduce, for use in an art project, a selection of photos taken on Baffin Island in the twenties and fifties; most of these are portraits of unidentified, de-named, Inuit men, women, and children.

In a shoe box containing photos and letters that once belonged to my father, I come across postcards of the Rhine, purchased by him at the age of twenty-two—a Canadian cycling through Germany in 1937, his adventure the reverse of Heinrich’s. I ask my friend and collaborator to make a copy of one of my father’s postcards, and on the back of this I transcribe a passage, describing Heinrich’s hike along Baffin Island’s Weasel River. When he bought the Rhine postcards, my father did not know that in two years’ time he’d be abandoning graduate school to fight in a war against Germany. While Canadians, oversees, fought fascism, back in Canada aboriginal children were being forcibly taken from their parents and placed in residential schools. How many stories can one archive tell? How many can it hide?

I have handed over postcard #259 to the Canada Post, in whom I must place my trust. I have abandoned the notion I had at the start of asking for the cards to be returned, of rearranging the order of the novel according to the dates that postcards were received. To listen to so many voices of postcard recipients reading will make sufficiently clear that the text has traveled, that the novel has left its author and now lives elsewhere. I cycle around the city, making recording “house calls” with my laptop, while more tech-confident postcard receivers read into their iPhones and send me their files. Clusters of recordings land in my inbox. Sometimes, the passage being brought to life by an expressive voice is one I’ve deleted from the novel. I listen carefully, wondering if I ought to reinstate the words. A guitarist rents studio time, and records himself reading while playing. His generosity amazes me. A poem is written in response to a postcard, then another poem. Photos are sent to me of dresser drawers, shelves, china bowls, desktops, and cabinets where passages from my novel are being kept safe. Safe from me?

I have now woven an archivist’s voice into the novel. I have done so while the manuscript wandered in bits and pieces across Canada and Europe. Is her voice, the archivist’s, perhaps the missing element?

A composer is translating the novel into ten minutes of music. He has selected piano (for Germany), also cello, clarinet, and percussion. He has divided the novel into five sections. “The first expresses yearning, a young man ready to leave Tettnang,” he tells me. “Toronto will be a grid, played to the rhythm of pursuit, someone escaping on foot, walking not running.” My novel and Nic Gotham’s music will soon become inseparable for me.

Passages of the novel now “belong” to the voices of readers. The text hovers, mobile, yet archived; it resides in a noncommercial space, collectively cradled, while I continue to search for answers. The number of receivers now surpasses seventy. Possibly the novel needn’t ever be published as a book, and I’ll be spared the trauma of completion, of fixity? Ours is an era of chaotic possibility. Yet we crave cohesion. Isn’t the role of fiction to provide structure? The duty of the storyteller to lure unsettled experience into a polished form, to hold the pieces steady until they break free once more? The bound and silent book waits to be read. The archive of passages uttered from mouths ignorant of context, deprived of what precedes and follows, is a place of friction, alive to myriad interpretation. Between these two locations Heinrich travels back and forth.

The Schlögel Archive is open to the public. It is located at www.schlogel.ca. The Search for Heinrich Schlögel, is being published in September 2014 by Pedlar Press in Canada and by Tin House Books in the United States.

Martha Baillie
August, 2014

Martha Baillie joins THIN AIR 2014 for Afternoon Book Chat, Wednesday, September 24th at 2:30 pm at McNally Robinson Booksellers, and at the Mainstage. Wednesday, September 24th at 7:30 pm, at MTYP.

"It’s daunting for a writer to take on her own town."

When Carol Shields released Larry’s Party, we were all fascinated by her fictional take on Winnipeg. Keen-eyed readers came up to her to point out tiny inaccuracies (“You know, you can’t turn left off Osborne onto Rosalyn.”) It’s daunting for a writer to take on her own town.

The Opening Sky takes place mostly in Wolseley, a neighbourhood I’ve lived in and love. No trips to the British Museum for this one-- my research involved asking people questions like, “What beer would a work crew of 25 year-olds be drinking?” (Moosehead, apparently).

If I worked hard to get Winnipeg right, it wasn’t to satisfy readers that know the city like the backs of their hands. I was the servant of a fictional Winnipeg, which meant creating the illusion for readers that they’re entering the real one. This illusion depends on a lot of specific detail – but sometimes it’s the need for specificity that drives you to invent. For example, I wanted to give my fictional family a house number, so I ended up creating a street in Wolseley, Augusta Street.

But who am I kidding?—when I invented (and I didn’t do it a lot), it was mainly for my convenience as a storyteller. One of my characters is a microbiologist and I wanted him to work at Lake Winnipeg. I asked Karen Scott at the Lake Winnipeg Research Consortium if there was a research facility at the lake, beyond the MV Namao. “No,” she said. “But it would be great. Feel free to give us with one.” So I built a lab at a fictional site called Presley Point. Then, power-mad, I named a co-ed dorm at the University of Winnipeg after Margaret Laurence.

As a reader, invented details in a real setting sometimes bug me. As a novelist, I don’t question them: the demands of the story are always going to trump small matters of factual accuracy, and I don’t think they’re terribly crucial to the larger goal of getting the city right—but maybe I’m about to find out.

* Joan Thomas

August 21, 2014

Joan Thomas' latest book is the novel, The Opening Sky

See Joan at THIN AIR 2014 at the Nooner, Tuesday, September 23rd at 12:15 pm, at Carol Shields Auditorium, Millennium Library, and at the Mainstage. Tuesday, September 23rd at 7:30 pm, at MTYP.