Speaking of the Calgarian Hotel...

... FFWD ran an excerpt this week from Sam Sutherland's forthcoming book on Canadian punk. The excerpt focuses on the late, great Calgarian Hotel, home for some time of Calgary's punk scene. Sam talked to old school punks across Canada, including me, and I'm really looking forward to his book, Perfect Youth, which is coming out from ECW next year.

Cool!

New! Chunk of w-i-p

Here's something new. A piece of work-in-progress. Haven't posted a w-i-p before, and this is brief, but I haven't Written anything in a while so I thought I'd throw it out there. Hope it intrigues:

If I knew anything about ballet I’d be able to tell you the name of the position she was in in her profile picture on NetWork.com. She was on one foot and had her other leg pretty close to straight up in the air, flashing a big grin for the camera. Only she’s not a ballerina, she’s a stockbroker, and she wasn’t wearing tights or a tutu, she was wearing a t-shirt and Daisy Duke shorts, and the picture was taken in a bar. So it’s none of my business, right? I’m not her employer, God knows. I don’t even know her, really, though I feel like I do because I’ve heard so much about her. And like I say, I don’t know anything about ballet. Or stockbroking. Or Brazilian waxes. But I know if I was her employer I’d be having a little chat with her about professionalism, about ethics.

            Just like the one I figure her husband’s about to have with his employer.

Freshwater Pearls; The Writing Life; MRU

There's the cover of Freshwater Pearls, the anthology being put together by the Alexandra Writers Centre Society in celebration of their 30th anniversary and being published this September by Recliner Books. It looks like a great selection of work is going to be included. And if all goes well, I'll be at the launch which takes place Wed. September 21, 7 PM at the Alexandra Centre, 922 - 9 Ave. SE. 

 I'm hoping that we'll be successful in moving the engagement I already had for that night to the previous week, Wed. Sept. 14th. Which is a talk I'm giving for the Writers Guild of Alberta on The Writing Life at Shelf Life Books, 1302 - 4 St. SW. Once the dates are confirmed I'll post more details.

And continuing to prepare the Mount Royal courses so I can take some time off later in the summer. Looking forward to the fall! It looks like it'll be a busy one.

Robert Kroetsch events next week

Canada lost a literary giant on June 21 when Robert Kroetsch was killed in a car accident. I never met the man myself, but I clearly recall reading The Studhorse Man in university and being amazed -- this is what a Canadian novel can be. He was a friend and mentor to many writers I know and I'm sorry I never had the chance to meet him.

So I am going to a couple of Robert Kroetsch celebrations next week. First up is Tuesday, July 12th, 7 PM, at Shelf Life Books, where there'll be readings and refreshments. And at 7 PM on Thursday, July 14th, Pages on Kensington is hosting a special July edition of their Flywheel reading series, dedicated to Kroetsch. He was a huge figure in the Alberta literary landscape and I'm looking forward to these tributes. Hope to see you all there.

Betty's Run

Tomorrow, Sunday, June 12th is the date of Betty's Walk and Run for ALS here in Calgary, and I'm all registered for it. Should have gone to pick up my shirt and all that stuff today. And I meant to solicit donations and promote the event. But I haven't done any of that because my mom, Marilyn, passed away last Tuesday at age 68, after living with this damned disease the last 18 months. And let me say right now that the recent passing of Dr. Kervorkian didn't go unnoticed in my household. I read Licia Corbella's ridiculous editorial about him in The Calgary Herald today and it made my blood boil.

Ms. Corbella, you should thank the God you seem to be so fervent about that neither you or nor any of your loved ones have ALS (Lou Gehrig's disease).  Because if you did, you would pray for the same mercy that decent people extend toward their pets. Would you watch your dog or cat slowly become paralyzed and finally die of CO2 poisoning because they were not able, in the end, to exhale? No, I didn't think so. But because euthanasia is illegal in Canada, that's exactly what my mother had to go through. You call Dr. Kervorkian a murderer because he spared people from this kind of suffering?  Um. So who pronounced you Judge of All Things because you write editorials?

I just can't face participating in Betty's Walk and Run for ALS tomorrow, although I did last year and I intend to do it  next. But I would encourage anyone who's interested to donate to the fight against ALS here:

http://www.alsab.ca/contactus.aspx

My mom and I thank you from the bottom of our hearts.

Writing in the Works 4

Here's the whole Writing in the Works gang after our fourth fabulous annual show. From left to right, this year's readers Susan Calder, Inge Trueman, Naomi K. Lewis, myself and Leslie Gavel; our MC and chief helmsperson Rona Altrows; and, down in front, this year's provider of refreshments and general support, Elaine Morin. We had an excellent afternoon of readings, book sales and hanging out, and had more fun later at the Rose and Crown. Many thanks to Leanna McLennan and Elaine's hubby Scott for their help with the refreshments, to Shelf Life Books for book sales and to Calgary Public Library for once again providing us with a home. Thanks to Jan Markley for again acting as official event photographer. And thanks to everyone who came out to hear us!

We're already talking about Writing in the Works 5...

Guest Post: Betty Jane Hegerat on The Boy

It's my great pleasure to announce a guest posting here at TFBCH by my friend and colleague, Betty Jane Hegerat. I asked her a couple of questions about her amazing new book, The Boy (Oolichan Books), which she has graciously responded to below. Enjoy!

BJH:  Lori, thanks for inviting me to your blog. I know you’ve been hard at work on a novel for many years, so I’ve been looking forward to talking with you about that experience of living with a book-in-progress.  I believe your novel has involved research as well, but I suspect that you enjoy that part of the process more than I did in exploring this murder story.

LH:  It seems to me that this would be a difficult book to write. What was most difficult about writing it?

BJH: The real story is a horrible one, and finding the shape of the book was more of a challenge than I was looking for, but I think the most difficult part was the wrestling with my right to tell the story.  Yes, I am a writer, a storyteller, and this is what we do, but I have never drawn so obviously from the lives of real people. When I write fiction, I borrow and steal, disclose secrets and tell lies—all without apology. If I do the job well, the art that comes out of the chicanery is unrecognizable as real life.  But I knew as soon as I began to sift through the information about the Cook family that I would never be comfortable playing fast and loose with the details of their story. And yet, I was drawn to the family and their fate more than I was to the legal details and Robert Cook’s fate. I wanted to make sense of how something so dreadful could befall an ordinary working class family in small town Alberta.  And of course, to suggest that there was even a fragment of sense to the events in that small white house on June 25, 1959, seemed an affront to the memory of these seven people.  If I’d been able to walk away from the story I would have done so, but whatever it was that alternately compelled me and repulsed me, was the strongest obsession I’ve ever experienced in my writing life.

LH: How did writing The Boy differ from writing a novel?

BJH: In some ways writing The Boy was quite similar to writing my previous two novels. I have a tendency to call every new idea a “story” and pray that it will be short, because short fiction really is my first love.  Even before I was blindsided by the Cook story, I had begun to fear that Louise’s problem was not going to be resolved in anything close to 3000 words.  Then the fiction began to get entangled with the 50 year old murder story and I had a mess on my hands that was unlike anything I’d dealt with before. I’m used to having messy first drafts, and doing major revision through many more drafts, but normally there is some cohesion, and some order to the experimenting.  Whose story is it?  Who’s narrating?  From what vantage point?  Is the voice consistent? Where is the energy coming from to drive the story?  I didn’t even attempt to ask those questions of the reams of material I ended up gathering around the Cook story.  When I finally accepted that the work was going to have to include both the fiction and the non-fiction, the challenge was to find a way to fit it together.  I was definitely not a quick study on this project, and it took me a couple of years to realize that I had the structure all along. Louise’s story had turned into a novella, and if I could stitch the non-fiction to it like Peter Pan’s shadow, I might just be able to pull it off.  The Boy is being marketed as fiction for a number of reasons, even though it doesn’t fit any definition of the novel that I’ve ever seen.  But neither does it fit into non-fiction because of the embedded fiction. It’s a strange book, but it is what it is.

LH: Thank you, Betty, for the insights into the writing of this interesting, amazing, and yes, kind of strange book. I'm almost done reading it, and my sense is more that The Boy is unique than strange. I have never read a book quite like this. The approach reminds me a little of Truman Capote's In Cold Blood. I think you may have written the first book in a new genre! Whatever pigeonhole it does or doesn't fit into, though, I can say that it is mesmerizing. Congratulations again on its publication! And thanks for dropping by and talking about it.

And another special treat, folks: an audio clip of Betty reading from The Boy over at her blog. Click on "other people's lives" And enjoy!