Playlist for My Ongoing Job Search
November 12, 2009 · Leave a Comment
While much (well, most) of my time has been spent working at my internship with jobpostings magazine or lighting cheese on fire, I recently noticed that I also spend a considerable amount of time looking for a full-time job in the publishing sector. How much time? Well, today I worked from home, stopping (roughly) every hour to see if anything new had been posted.
Other things I’ve noticed in relation to my job search:
- Panic attacks. Yup. But I think this has more to do with paying bills.
- More jogging pant action.
- I spend long hours pondering my life in relation to my chosen career path, which has me over-analyzing everything from the first article I ever had published to the last article I had published, as well as other weird childhood memories like that two-day old, soggy sandwich I was forced to eat when I was nine (not worth going into here).
- The fact that I write for a magazine that gives job hunting advice to new grads and I can barely land an interview. Only realized that about a week ago.
- I feel like it would be okay to drink irish whiskey with everything.
- My self-confidence is up — wait no, down, wait no, up, wait no down, wait no…
So I decided to make a playlist that would help alleviate these no-job-blues. Here it is:
- Early in the Morning — Charles Brown
- Mature Fantasy — Drummer
- There’s No Here — Dinosaur Jr.
- Easy Money — Constantines (Fantastic b-side from the last album)
- Hard Breaks — Alberta Cross
- She Said She Said — The Beatles
- Shout Me Out — TV On The Radio
- Yeah Sapphire — The Hold Steady
- Keep Me — The Black Keys
- Calliope! — The Veils
- Dirty Business — Constantines
- Farther Up The Road — Bobby Blue Bland
- Sixes and Sevens — Lucero (this new album deserves its own post)
- Simple Man — Lynyrd Skynyrd
- Every Everything — Husker Du
- Youthless — Beck
- Let the Drummer Kick — Citizen Cope
- The Happening — Pixies
- You Got Me Rockin’ — The Rolling Stones
- Killing Floor — Howlin’ Wolf
→ Leave a CommentCategories: Mixed Bag
Tagged: blues, hold steady, job search, jogging pants, music
Trans-Canada Feature
June 11, 2009 · Leave a Comment
(This appeared in the June issue of the Today’s Trucking. I also wrote a feature for Logisitics Magazine on Canadian ports, and a feature on bio-methane for Plumbing & HVAC. All three magazines are published by Newcom Media. If you would like the pdf. versions, please send me an email.)
THE TRANS CANADA: From Sea to C-minus
JUNE 2009 27
If Canada is to emerge as a strong G8 contestant—and make no mistake, it is a contest—we not only have to cultivate innovation, leadership, and ideas, we must also come together. And to come together, we have to go back to one of the basic building blocks of any nation: a national highway.
With strong ports in Vancouver, Prince Rupert and Halifax, and a viable inland freight portal in development in Manitoba, what is needed is a Trans-Canada Highway (TCH) that is safe, efficient, and consistent in design and vision. We need a twinned or at least a double-divided highway that doesn’t leave parts of the country in economic purgatory, one that reflects where Canadians are today and where we want to go.
If the current state of the Trans-Canada is any reflection of where we are as a country, it’s safe to say that we are a broken, scattered mess with each province only concerned with its own needs. We can’t even number the Trans-Canada highway consistently, let alone pave it.
Appropriately numbered 1 from Victoria to Manitoba, it changes as soon as the TCH hits Ontario. What’s more annoying is that if you follow the TCH on Google maps, paying attention to the little green-and-white rectangular markers that designate the Trans-Canada, they stop at Ontario only to pick upagain in Quebec. Apparently, Google doesn’t think that the Trans-Canada runs through Ontario.
And you can’t blame them. Highways 17 and 11 of the Trans-Canada Highway are no shining beacons of a proud country’s national highway system. Predominately two-laned, the northern sections of 11 and 17 are examples of antiquated road construction from the 50’s, when the initial construction of the TCH was nearing completion. It took roughly 20 years if you don’t include 30 years of local communities and business lobbying, and $1 billion, simply to have the TCH paved. “May it serve to bring Canadians closer together,” Prime Minister John Diefenbaker said at the Trans-Canada’s opening ceremony at Rogers Pass in 1962. “May it bring to all Canadians a renewed determination.”
After doing a bit of research into the state of our main artery, I’d say it’s high time we listened again to Dief. The highway needs extensive work at various points, but the longest, saddest section can be found in northern and northwestern Ontario.
“The level of support for the Trans-Canada has deteriorated,” says David Orazietti, the MPP for Sault Ste. Marie, “and Ontario has the longest section of un-four-laned Trans-Canada link in the country.” Back in 2006, Orazietti brought forth a bill that would see sections of highway 17 twinned, arguing that it would improve safety and northern Ontario’s economy. (It would also lubricate the trucking business immensely. As it is, along many sections of the TCH, a single small accident can tie up traffic for miles.)
Orazietti garnered support for Bill 149 from the Ontario Trucking Association (OTA), the Ontario Provincial Police (OPP), the CAA, and a multitude of other lobbyists, but the bill didn’t get much further than its third reading in the legislature before being pushed aside—which isn’t surprising. It’s always been a long quest to have the Trans-Canada twinned where needed. Just ask New Brunswick or Saskatchewan, provinces that lobbied for years before having their shares of the TCH twinned.
Orazietti points out that in 1949, when they signed the Trans-Canada Highway Act between the federal government and the provinces, in participation with the federal government, laid out a route that would be branded as the Trans-
Canada route and those links through each province were going to be funded 50 percent by the federal government.
To twin or not to twin? It’s not even a question anymore.
Twinned or divided highways provide, first and foremost, immense improvements in road safety. “If there’s no opportunity for the oncoming car to move to the side without going onto the gravel and into the ditch,” Orazietti says “the risk of an accident, the likelihood of it going up, are greater.”
Bob Dolyniuk of the Manitoba Trucking Association (MTA) agrees. “When I was in the industry,” he says, “particularly
in the wintertime in northern Ontario—double dividing would have made it a hell of a lot better.” As it is, there are stretches of 17 and 11 with “miles and miles with no place to pull off if you want to check your load or have a problem,” says David Berry, a retired owner-operator out of Iron Bridge, Ont. “If the shoulder is there,” he continues, “you can’t really trust them because they’re soft.” Plus the lack of rest stops makes it difficult for drivers to fulfill
service requirements. Today’sTrucking.com reported in May that a husband/wife driving team for Manitoulin Transport who run a lane from Calgary to Toronto were distributing petitions in order to get a few more rest areas. It’s a lot of country to travel and the wife side of the team, Susan Barlow, says the number of washroom facilities along the way—particularly in Ontario—is inadequate and only getting worse.
The other obvious benefit to twinned highways is the substantial increase in efficiency. “You wouldn’t have some of the traffic jams you have now,” Dolyniuk says of the Kenora/Dryden area. “And one only has to travel through northern Ontario and northwestern Ontario during vacation season when there’s a significant mix of personal and commercial vehicles.”
Tim Heney, CEO of the Thunder Bay Port Authority, emphasizes dimensional cargo. “When you have a two-lane road,
you have a lot more restrictions on the amount of movements you can make, basically dictated by the road itself. Fourlanes are much more adaptable to slowmoving pieces.”
And then, of course, there are the environmental benefits. “There would be less stopping and going, slowing down, speeding up,” Dolyniuk says. “Obviously it would create some fuel efficiency for the industry and also reduce our greenhouse-gas emissions.” Modern-day design plans take into account wildlife by specifically building either tunnels under the highway or overpasses covered in earth at popular creature crossings. The highway through Banff National Park is a prime example of this.
HIGHWAY 17 vs HIGHWAY 11
While highway 11 is predominantly flatter than 17, making it cheaper to twin or double-divide, it is populated with much smaller communities than 17, which may be the better choice given its proximity to large urban centers, Lakes Superior and Huron, and eventually down to prime economic corridors in the U.S.
But let’s face it: twinning the entire length of both highways isn’t going to happen—even with the federal government’s
recently renewed love for infrastructure spending.
The cost to four-lane Highway 69 in Ontario, according to TSH, the company that is assessing the next stage of that
particular twinning project, was roughly $10 million per kilometer, not including design and property buying. If that price tag is any indication of how much it would cost to four-lane both 17 and 11,we’re talking billions and a not-in-our lifetime project. Probably not even in our great-grandchildren’s lifetime. So choices have to be made as to which sections take precedence.
As it stands, Heney, Dolyniuk and Orazietti agree that Winnipeg to Thunder Bay is the critical corridor. “You look at
the growth in western Canada,” Heney argues. “That’s where the growth in the Canadian economy is going to come
from. It’s coming east.” Retired OPP officer William Manktelow spent years working up along that stretch of dilapidated highway. “When you drive out of Manitoba and into Ontario,” he says, “the roads deteriorate probably a 100 percent. Uneven patches, potholes. I found it very disgusting to know that Ontario would maintain a highway to that condition knowing that it is the Trans-Canada.”
While passing lanes have been put in, it’s still a bad stretch of the TCH, so much so that “before the tightening up of the
border,” Dolyniuk says, “a significant portion of Canadian domestic east-west traffic moved in-transit through the States to avoid northern Ontario. “All that did for us as a country is it gave us less in fuel tax and excise tax revenue to the provincial and federal governments and it gave more to the U.S. governments for their infrastructure. I would hate to see that happen again once we resolve the issue with in-transit moves with the States.”
Realistically, it comes down to where the money is best spent. “Any transportation link in our country is going to have a positive economic impact in the long run,” Heney says. “To justify it in immediate payback is more difficult, of course.” Dolyniuk adds that highway 16 through Manitoba and Saskatchewan would be ideal for twinning, and Ozarietti maintains that there is no reason Sault Ste. Marie to Ottawa cannot be twinned. “It would obviously create greater support for the trucking industry and more economic opportunities,” Ozarietti says of the possibility of an improved infrastructure along 17.
While we may not be on the heels of a World War pushing us to improve our national infrastructure as we were during
the initial construction of the Trans-Canada, we certainly could use some of that Diefenbaker “renewed determination” in the race to stay relevant on the global playing field. If there ever was a time again when we had to drop our petty regional differences—Western Canada vs. Central Canada; Eastern Canada vs. Western Canada (and everyone against Toronto)—it’s now.
“I think that’s something we’re starting to lose sight of with all this north-south talk,” Heney says when I ask him about the symbolic possibilities of a truly connected Trans-Canada. “It really just fragments the country more. I think it would help unify the country like back in the old days when they first built it.”▲
WASHOUT (sidebar)
It’s a significant section of the
Trans-Canada highway (TCH) that has
its problems, but not the kind that can
be solved by twinning.
Last October, The Fraser Institute
released a study that reported that the
Marine Atlantic ferry system that links
Nova Scotia to The Rock is extremely
expensive, costing federal and provincial
governments $60 per person, per trip.
Still, somebody’s trying to remedy
the situation.
“The Atlantic Vision came on stream
on April first,” said Marine Atlantic’s Tara
Laing. “With the addition of that [new]
vessel, we’ll actually increase the
capacity of our overall fleet. What that
does for the commercial-trucking
industry is ensure that there is more
capacity to transport.”
Laing said that they’ve made a few
changes to the schedule in an effort to
have more “customer-friendly sailing
times and as well building some
additional port times.”
On the same note, they’ve also built in
“some additional maintenance time in
our schedule so that we’re better able
overall to meet our published schedule”.
The inaugural voyage of the new ship
was delayed five hours when the support
legs of a tractor-trailer jammed on the
ramp and equipment had to be brought
in to dislodge it. Let’s hope that didn’t set
the tone for the service.— Jason Rhyno
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New Words
April 27, 2009 · 1 Comment
I’ve been aiming to finish filling in the holes in this blog, but have been busy with the internship and a few freelance gigs.
This is some of the online stuff I’ve done at the internship: here, here, and here.
Working on three features for three different magazines for May/June.
Which I should be working on. Now.
→ 1 CommentCategories: 1
This would be fun.
March 26, 2009 · 2 Comments
I would like to do this.
→ 2 CommentsCategories: Print Magazines
Wiggin Kinda Awesome (Reason 214 why it’s good to meet people in pubs)
March 23, 2009 · Leave a Comment
With the latest issue of Stop Smiling rolled up in my hand, I went to my local pub the other night for last call, hoping to get a quick read in before lights out. Instead, I ended up talking with one of the server’s boyfriend, and we started talking magazines(probably because I had the Stop Smiling next to my beer (and yes, I’m aware that this blog is starting to turn into promotional material for Stop Smiling.). Turns out he interned with Sheppard Fairey during the early days of Swindle. Anyway, skipping over his drunken, broken story (but really good story), he ended up writing down some links for me to check out as we mostly discussed online mags.
One of them was Wiggin.biz . Go check it out before you read further.
Done?
I’m not sure if they are still making issues as the back issues only go up to 2006, but nonetheless. A free online magazine with no ads, barely any links, and no money thrown into marketing. Apparently, they rely on word of mouth (which works, apparently). I haven’t finished checking out every issue, but I’ve seen enough to think that the more mainstream mags should be taking notes for their online versions. I like this one. And this one. I’d like to see more use of music when I click on my favourite mag’s site; slicker designs, a surpirise here and there. I don’t know what to think of all the crazy use of flash, but I like the playfulness of it. But it might be too playful, too different, in terms of design, from issue to issue. I’m thinking here of the necessity of consistency in print magazines, and how that applies to online mags.
What do you guys think? This thing too much, or what?
→ Leave a CommentCategories: Mixed Bag
The Anti-Matter Anthology + Thoughts on Interviewing Pt. 1
March 20, 2009 · 1 Comment
A few things have happened this past month that have brought me back to thinking about interview questions.
In no particular order, they are:
A good friend recently gave me The Anti-Matter Anthology: A 1990’s Post-Punk & Hardcore Reader by Norman Brannon. To make a long story short, Brannon published a fanzine in the 90’s that had interviews with various hardcore and post-punk bands. This anthology is a collection of those interviews and it is an absolutely fascinating read, not because I am a particular fan of 90’s hardcore(don’t hate it either. Just prefer it in small doses.), but because Brannon asks questions that capture the zeitgeist of the time. It’s all existential despair, and insights into family, religion, media, politics, and therapy sessions. It is the 1990’s. These interviews are not only about the music, but, as Aaron Burgess writes in the foreward:
“[...] questions [that] get beyond the music’s surface to examine the real human issues lying underneath. Not the well-worn issues of personality and decadence, either, but The Big Issue of what it means to be a frightened human being truly living on this big, lonely planet.”
Burgess points out that Brannon is a “seeker”, and this is the key point. Any good interview I’ve read are the ones where the questions go way beyond the obvious, where an actual conversation develops. And any good interview that I have done are the ones where my curiousity — my need to know — has had its breakline cut, and the car is about to flip and roll a few times before exploding into flames.
My Jon Dore Interview
I recently interviewed comedian Jon Dore for the summer issue of On The Danforth (I’ll post it here later this year after the issue comes out in June), and it turned out to be, I’m sorry to say, not what I had wanted. My research had been the laying-on-the-couch-watching-comedy type of research, and then reading other articles on Jon. They had all missed the point of Jon Dore’s comedy style, paid no attention to the new brand of comedy emerging (a generation raised on The Kids in the Hall, South Park, Mr. Show? Awesome.) and highlighted the low-brow bit of his work. Nothing about his use of misdirection, combination of different styles (sketch, music, stand-up, improv, and probably more), and I found myself rather pissed off at the fact that nobody saw this. I wanted to know about Comedy, about getting good at it, about combining those different styles, about the writing process, about the state of Canadian comedy. I was, and still am, curious about it all because the interview happened over the phone(he was in L.A.), 15 minutes before I had to go sling souvlaki dinners. I think we spoke for a total of 10 minutes. Plus, the magazine was due to the printers in four days, every other article had already been layed-out, and I had one (one!) page for the interview. What I wanted was a pub-conversation: in-depth, meanandering, punctuated with personal stories and humour. I, like the young Brannon, wanted (and still need) to understand.
(and just a quick side-note here: Jon Dore’s character on The Jon Dore Television Show is also someone who needs to know. But in a different way. Watch the video.)
The Flying Walrus Chronicles
During my time at The Flying Walrus (and by the way, can someone fix that site please?), I made a point of having a student artist’s work on the cover, and then an interview with them on the inside. I became fascinated with these young artists, and realized that I wanted to know about them rather than their work. I know nothing of colours and techniques, but was consumed by the more cerebral aspect of it, where they got their ideas, how their life affected their work. After a few of these conversations, I realized that they all kind of had the same thoughts/worries/concerns about art and life. This stuff was serious to them, and it became serious to me, and I wanted to know more. My preliminary research consisted of me looking at their work, and basically asking other people who knew of them if they were cool. One of the last interviews I did started with the interviewee saying “I don’t want to talk about my family, or my personal life.” She was worried because so many before her had shared, obviously what she considered, way too much information. Fine. No daddy questions.
The Flying Walrus was also a great place to learn writing/editing lessons the hard way. One student writer pitched me an idea of interviewing a professor for every issue. I thought this was great. Yes. Lets do it. Now, I had no idea how to properly edit at that point, so when I got this massive interview with the chair of the English Dept., Julia Creet, one day before we had to go to print, I kind of let it go in as it was written( I know, I know). Now, the writer had a penchant for experimental writing, so when I read this interview that had all these ellipsis and “uhs” and “uhms”, I thought, Oh. Neat. Okay. It’s like a real conversation. When the issue came out, I was receiving text messages from a friend of mine who happened to be in Julia’s class:
“holy sh*t. what did you guys publish? Julia is going off the wall.”
“seriously, jay, this is bad.”
“she’s really ripping into the writer.”
“he’s blaming you.”
So, like any good editor, I took the blame. I walked into The Chair of the English Dept.’s office armed with a well-thought out explanation(“I’m an idiot.”) ready for some sort of expulsion, but instead what I got was well-needed guidance on how to edit an interview properly. Apparently, leaving the “uhs” and “uhms” in makes your subject look like a jerk. I was handed a stack of articles on how to edit an interview properly, and after that incident, I was a regular in Julia’s office, asking for advice on various things.
Other Things Learned at The Flying Walrus:
Don’t make interviews up. People will think they are real, and leave death threats on your office door.
The breadth of Stop Smiling’s interviews are inspiring. They manage to capture the subject, pose challenging questions, and create a dialogue. And the website is an extension of that, with photo essays and videos to go along with the interviews. Brilliant.
Anyway. I’ve got a renewed energy for interviewing.
I’m going to start a list of interview techniques/advice. Feel free to submit some.
→ 1 CommentCategories: Mixed Bag · Pub Conversations
Tagged: interview techniques, Jon Dore, Norman Brannon, Stop Smiling magazine, The Anti-Matter Anthology
Beer, Bourbon, and Stories: In Conversation with Andrew Pyper
March 13, 2009 · Leave a Comment
Author Andrew Pyper
My interview with Andrew Pyper was, and still is, one of best conversations I’ve ever had, not only because it took place at The Paddock over many beers and many bourbons (as all interviews should), but because much of the conversation deals with the importance of writing/reading a good story.
“At the end of the day, if the story is well-written and credible, and people are moved by it, the question of genre falls away.”
I: Happy Accidents and the Hierarchy of Rejection Letters.
You started off writing short stories when you were still an undergrad; did you always take writing seriously when you were younger?
Andrew Pyper: I always took writing seriously in the sense that it was always at the front of my mind, the front of my consciousness. From the time that I literally learned how to hand-write, I would go around hand-writing stories in the air and built a world for myself that was independent of both reality as well as other people, or scrutiny or evaluation. So for me, writing was initially a psychological escape and a way buffering yourself from the world — some people, from an early age in childhood, may have been involved in sports or clubs or that kind of thing and for me, growing up as a more or less only child, it was a world of books, of reading and writing. So, right from the get-go, I was always writing but I never really conceived of it as even a potential way of making a living until deep into my twenties. Throughout my twenties I was sending out short stories to journals and magazines and was getting published in them. It was always a passion but not a potential way to pay the rent. I thought that no one got to do that as a living — and that’s mostly true. There may be fifty to a hundred professional fiction writers in Canada — that is people who do it full time and that’s all they do and they pay their mortgage that way — and that might be a liberal estimate. So it was something that I needed and that I loved, that I would still be doing today even if I weren’t writing professionally. But there’s been a happy accident in the last decade or so of being able to do it for a living as well.
Where was the first place you got published?
The first place that I got published, aside from school papers, would’ve been The New Quarterly, a journal that is published out of the University of Waterloo. It was a short story, I forget the year, but I was 21 and I published four, five, six pieces with that journal since. I have a kinship with it, and it really is, I would say, one of the top ten literary journals in Canada.
Was it one of the stories in Kiss Me?
Yeah, that first one ended up being in Kiss Me, called “Call Roxanne”, which I think is the third or fourth story in that collection. That quarterly ended up publishing two or three other stories that ended up in that collection.
That’s a pretty young age to start getting published in decent literary journals.
Yeah, I mean it was, but even with that surprising success there was a whole lot of rejections. I was foolishly sending out stories to The New Yorker and Atlantic and Harper’s at the same time. Encouragingly, at those big magazines which everyone tends to send their work to, there’s a hierarchy of rejection letters that I learned about through receiving them. It runs about from the fortune cookie size, that’s basically ‘thanks but no thanks, to the bar coaster size that are a little more detailed — so ‘thank you, although your story had merit, we have no space for it at this time’. The best rejection letter I got from those big American magazines was from The Atlantic which was an actual type written signed letter saying that he analyzed the story, he really liked it, but at the end of the day it didn’t quite cut the mustard. I still have that rejection letter somewhere. Sometimes rejection letters can be quite encouraging (laughing).
II: How to Write a Novel and Where to Stick Your Thumb.
After having read your novels — I read them backwards, so Wildfire Season, Trade Mission, Lost Girls — how did you approach your first novel? Did you know how to attack your first novel?
Lost Girls.
That’s a good question; it’s a messy question with a messy answer. Writing short stories, as you know, is hard enough. They are often underestimated as kind of a lower rung on the ladder toward the ascent of the novel. That hierarchy is largely false because a short story, a good short story, almost needs to be flawless. You notice the mistakes or the misspeaks, the tonal problems in a short story more markedly than you do in a novel. A novel is foremost forgiving because it is bigger and shaggier and there’s more room to have a bad day, or a bad page. But having said that, the novel, at least the novels that I aspire to write, are more plot driven so it requires a different kind of architecture. How do you build a story? A story in the sense of a true beginning, middle and end? The stories in Kiss Me are stories, but they are pieces, they are fragments, where the story I wanted to write in law school was definitely about a structured, plot driven big machine, and I had no experience with that. So I started by really just mapping it out, feeling it out on the page, not by writing it, but by mapping it out. It’s something I still do to this day. I’m a real advocate for outlines. I build toward the outline by taking notes, by speaking to a Dictaphone, by jotting down thoughts, by calling myself on my cell and leaving messages for myself — any means necessary to collect all of your thoughts; that might take a year. Then assemble those thoughts, and then pick out major five points where the story needs to hit, and you drop them on a line: I know this has to happen here at the beginning, this is probably going to happen at around the middle, I know it has to end here because we’re going to reveal this big secret at the end. Once you have those sign posts, it’s a matter of fleshing in, letting the moss grow on the line. That’s where, what we generally regard as the literary aspect, comes in — the thematic connections, or characterizations, and stuff like that. It’s a matter of sticking four or five sticks into the sand and calling that your story when it comes to novel writing, which is a process you don’t have to do in writing short stories. Short stories, I think, are much more intuitive, more instinctual, and almost spontaneous. Having said all that, it was still a messy process and when I finished my first draft after law school I gave it to a few trusted friends and I had an agent at that time…
When did you get your agent?
I got my agent through a very happy coincidence. Ann McDermid is my agent and she returned from London, where she was an agent for many years, around 1995 or so, to begin a new life here around the time just before that latest explosion of CanLit being sold abroad. People were saying to her that they need more agents, so she reluctantly took on some clients, and then realized “wow, there’s something going on here”. She approached me shortly after the publication of Kiss Me, and said “I’d like to take you on as a client” and I thought “sure, but I have nothing that you can sell. I’m glad that you asked me but I don’t want to let you down”. She said “well, I’m sure that over the next decade you’ll do alright”. So I gave her this kind of messy first draft at law school and she didn’t really know what it was but I think she liked it. That started the long process of both her job of acquiring editors and selling the book, but also the writerly process of responding to the different editors who gave me notes on the book. All in all, one imagines writing novel as kind of going away and writing and it’s done, but my experience is that a third of it is just thinking about it, doodling away and appearing like your doing nothing. Then there’s a year of actual writing, and then a year of fiddling with what you’ve got on the page, seeing if you can clean this thing up, or jolt it to life, or fix it. There’s actually less quote unquote writing than the stereotype would entail of feverish-guy-in-room-smashing-away-at-typewriting. There’s more sort of thumb up your ass than that.
Do you find it hard working with editors, and accepting their comments?
My reaction to other people’s comments changes over time, and essentially it’s getting to know your self. It’s a process of divorcing your own tastes from some kind of knowledge of yourself as a writer, knowing your strengths, knowing your weaknesses. I think, initially, when Lost Girls was being edited, I listened to everyone equally and took everything equally seriously and felt that everything that everyone had to say had equal merit. Which isn’t the case. Today, it’s not that I’ve become harder or more opinionated, but rather that I know what I am trying to do more clearly than I think I did then. Now, when editors give me comments or notes, I know the notes that are like “yes, you’re absolutely right” because I know in advance that there is a vulnerability in the text. They’re merely pointing out something I was hoping to cheat, something I was hoping to slide by, and they got me. It’s like telling a lie when someone calls you on it versus having someone convince you what you’ve done is wrong. I don’t think that type of editing ever works and it feels like someone, in a fundamental way, is trying to make you not be you, or make the book not be what the book wants to be. It just feels wrong. As I said, it’s learning both the limitations and strengths of your own vision and voice that allows you to be more amendable to the editorial process.
III: The Best Kind of Research and The Importance of Not Being an Asshole.
You said that writing a novel is a lot of sitting around thinking, and then you write it and go through the editing process. Where does the research come into play? I know that for The Wildfire Season you got one of those tasty little writer retreats and spent some time in the Yukon. Did the research, lets say for The Wildfire Season, involve just going to local bars, speaking with firefighters, sitting down, having a few beers with them? Did you read books on the subject?
The Wildfire Season.
There are really two general stripes of research: one is the library research, the books that you read. In the case of The Wildfire Season, how they [fires] behave, incidents in wildfire history for example. Some of the dynamics that the characters in the novel have to face and the way the fire behaves is based on existing lore and anecdotes in wildfire history. So there’s that. There’s diving into the books and gaining a quick and dirty expertise from an academic point of view. And then there’s the research that I think is more valuable in fiction; the barroom friend making, anecdote learning and trust gaining research that you get from people, that you get from listening, that you get from finding the right people and getting them to entrust their stories to you. It might be different if you are writing a historical novel where you have to more or less just be books and then cook everything up from imagination. My books are decidedly contemporary so, yeah, you can get a certain amount from books, but I have found it really beneficial to pay for rounds of drinks and in the right place at the right time you learn things. Often it can just be a phrase, a word of slang and other times it can be far juicier. For example in The Wildfire Season, I knew there was going to be a fire, I knew who the characters were, but I didn’t really care how the fire got started. I was just going to have lightning strike, which is how most fires start and just get on with it. Towards the end of research, I was hanging out with a few young firefighters and they entrusted me with the information that sometimes firefighters start their own fires in order to justify the next year’s contract. The more fires you fight, the more money you have to spend, the more money they send you next year. Which is a very embedded trade secret that I turned around and used. I’m sure that ninety-nine percent of the time that those self-started fires are started that they are little, almost like fires in a garbage can, and they don’t get out of control. In the novel, for my purposes, I did have it go out of control, but there’s a perfect example of something that I never would have imagined, wouldn’t have used in the novel had it not been for just hanging out, shutting up and listening to what people have to say.
Did they know that you were writer when you are hanging out with them?
Yeah. If you announce to people that you are a writer there’s typically two reactions. One is “well yeah, but are you a real writer?” And once you prove that, you know, “here’s some books, I’m one of those published writers”, then the attitude typically shifts to storytelling. What do you do with a chronicler? You tell them your stories. Again, in my experience, if you’re not an asshole, and you do listen to what people have to say, they want to tell you their stories. There’s often very fictionally useful material in that.
When you were up in the Yukon, were you writing then, or were you just hanging out?
I went back over the course of a few summers to the Yukon. The first time I went was sort of exploratory and I thought “I think I want to set a novel here, I know it’s going to involve fire around a little town” and that’s all I had. That particular trip I knew I had to find my setting, I’m seeing, at least conceptually, that it has to be the end of the road, it has to be the most isolated place on the continent. Some place that is forgotten; there’s only one road in and one road out. So I asked around and people recommended Ross River and when I did go there, I was like “yes, this is the end of the road”. Then in subsequent trips it was a combination of refining some of the research I wanted to do on both bears and fires. The research process and the writing process overlap. There are paragraphs, there are character sketches that you feel so hot about that you can’t stop yourself from writing. But that sit down, here we go, beginning, middle and end— a hundred and ten thousand words coming at you — can only really happen when all of the questions have been answered that you have about the story.
Have you been anywhere else? Like for The Trade Mission? How’d you go about that? That’s a really interesting book. In terms of your other work, it sort of stands out a little differently.
Yeah, if I read from it or revisit it now, which I typically don’t with my books, it’s definitely the oddest of the three novels, and the hardest, the darkest by a long shot. I was less interested in the place than I was in the concept of taking a represented heir of virtual age guys and putting them in the most radically differentiated context I could imagine. In early thoughts about it, I imagined them in North Korea or somewhere in Asia. So long as they couldn’t get in or out and totally unlike urban North America. When I started to write the book I realized that I was playing on jungle clichés, the sense of place was not coming through. I think I had the characters more or less right, I think I had the ideas I wanted more or less right, but the jungle felt like bad TV jungle. I realized that I couldn’t bluff this; I’m had to go there. So I did go to the rainforest for six weeks and did a bunch of different trips, more or less the same area that the characters did. I think the book, for what it was, hugely benefited from that.
IV: Morality as a Parlour Game.
When I was reading The Wildfire Season, I had a dream where there was a fire and all my ex-girlfriends were coming after me, which was obviously inspired by the book, but it got me thinking, especially after reading The Trade Mission, about your characters. Why are you so mean to your characters? You put them through a lot of work, and I was wondering if there is a reason behind that?
I think you touched on a fundamental shared theme, or argument of the novels, and I think it is because I don’t conceive it as larger ideas in advance. I write the novels from a looking at a painting up close and slowly sliding back process as opposed to looking at the canvas and this is how it’s going to look whole, it’s going to convey these ideas, or more intellectualized themes, and then slowly go forward and say okay, how do I paint this? For me, the process, on a practical level, is the opposite. I start with, “okay, guys, guys in jungle, and he’s like this, and these two guys have this relationship like this”. So it almost comes as a surprise when you are finished the book and you read it, or more to the point, have other people read it and provide comment as you just provided that there’s clarity there, or some coherent point shared between the books and think “Oh! Okay so this is something I didn’t really grapple with at the conceptual level at each of the books”. Having said all that, I think it has something to do with a concern I have about the post-modern — that’s such a shaggy term, I don’t even know if it means anything — about the contemporary relationship of the Western world to quote unquote reality. As our lives become increasingly mediated by media that is virtualized — by television, by the internet, by gadgetry, by things that you click and have earphones for — I think it has had an impact on the way we live and also the way we view the world and ourselves. Not necessarily in the sense that that technology is bad — this isn’t some kind of blooded argument of burn all the Ipods — but rather I’m interested in having characters who are living in their heads in one way or another and bringing them out of their heads, confronting them with some version of reality. And for the sake of drama and making this point as strongly as possible, those confrontations are typically not subtle. I think that is the psychological experiment that is being repeated in those books.
What’s interesting about your characters and those harsh physical and mental situations is that it brings out who they really are, in terms of how you don’t really know someone until you see them react under pressure, until you see them, say, go to war. They could wet their pants or stand up and fight. And when the situations in your novels press the characters hard, it makes them more believable, and feels like you are pulling out as much as you can from your characters.
A couple of things I would say in response to that; another of the concerns that the novels seem to have is morality, what shape does morality take in the contemporary context — again, where contemporary means urbanized, and technologically infused. To a large extent, in practice, morality has become a kind of parlour game. Like “what would you do if?” Or you watch Doctor Phil and you judge, thinking “oh, I think it was wrong that that guy was fucking his nanny and neglected his wife”. In other words, venues or situations in which it is easy to judge, where we could all agree that this guy is wrong and she’s the victim.
What interests me more are truer tests, or spontaneous tests, and as you said, tests that you couldn’t possibly imagine yourself in this situation or how you’ll react. And here’s the truth, what is your worth in the face of this particular challenge, that isn’t sort of fancy talk, or bluster in a barroom or living room sofa. The proof is in your actions, and actions, do, I think, speak louder than words. So they are action novels, and do involve that physical stress — not just for thrillerish fun. For me, that’s the only way I know how you can stick a moral thermometer in these people and see how they react.
The Trade Mission
The protagonists in your novels, so far, have all had to go through some type of redemption — like Crane from Lost Girls, who isn’t a nice guy, Crossman from The Trade Mission does something rather horrible. That theme isn’t taking over the whole novels, but it’s there…
Well, yeah. The Trade Mission has a less possibility for redemption than there is a small hole for survival, but it’s certainly true about the other book ended novels, Lost Girls and Wildfire Season. They are about men, of a similar age, who have done something unquestionably wrong to begin with, and are given an opportunity for a second go round. I think I’m interested in that because I’m interested in those characters, or to put it another way, I’m not interested in those protagonists that are typical soft award winning literary novels where they are role models. I don’t want to read about role models, or people who are mearly enduring something nobly with poetic language. I’m always more interested, in literature as well as plays and movies — I love the badguys, the human villain. When I think of characters in Shakespeare, it’s not the heroes of the play, it’s like who’s the most interesting character in Othello? Well for me it’s Iago. I’ve never been tempted to have a do-gooder on the front of my stage, or even a sympathetic sufferer. I just find that those figures are static and have no where to go but lecture, or stand as some sort of moral example. I prefer the more radilly movement of, not just someone who is flawed, but is on a track of being outright bad, and opening the door a crack for them to look at their choice, to look at the fork in the road, which for me is a metaphor for each of us everyday. This is going to sound new age-y, and therapeutic, and I regret if it does, but there is always a two-prong choice of the “this” or the “that”, do I take the high or low road, do I cheat or do I do the hard work, do I let this one slip or not. In a larger scale, the novels explore that daily kitchen sink dilemma that each of us face.
V: The Primary Delight of Reading.
It was the Independent on Sunday which said something to the effect that The Trade Mission was Stephen King meets Joseph Conrad. Do you think that’s fair? Are you trying to balance a “good read” with something more cultural and literary?
When I read that line, “Stephen King meets Joseph Conrad”, I can very happily live with that. Do I set out to write some amalgam between these two sides? No. I believe that there shouldn’t be such a fence between what usually goes as quote unquote literary fiction and quote unquote commercial fiction. The writers that I really admire are the ones that probably sat uncomfortably on that same fence, and Conrad obviously is a good example, or Jon Fowles, or Jon Le Carre — or Stephen King himself for that matter — are all writers that I admire, and that employ, what I regard, as good story telling; that’s compulsive, compelling, that are page turners, but in the highest sense of that term. You are interested in it, you’re engaged, you’re perspiring, you’re exicted, you’re worrying, you’re frightened, and when someone says “It’s time for dinner”, you say “Just a couple of more minutes”. I think those responses to a text have been, at some point in the last fifty or a hundred years, downgraded to some kind of cheap thrill, and in it’s place has risen this reading as thesis dissertation, reading as repetition of obvious socially agreed upon moral points, and just sort of story-less meandering, typically, and when you read those quotes — this is unfair to the people who write those books because they don’t write the cover copy — if I see the word meditative on a book cover, I know I’m in trouble. There’s all this meditating going on, and I can mediate on my own successfully. I see where people are coming from when they raise the question of “where do you put these books?” and “where do you put yourself in these books?” But for me, and I’m not saying that I’m of the level of Conrad or Fowles, but I feel a kinship with those writers, so I sort of say “what would Jon Fowles say or Jon Le Carrre say?” At the end of the day, if the story is well-written and credible and people are moved by it, the question of genre falls away. The question of genre is such a static academic debate and it’s that kind of categorical thinking that robs the practice of reading of it’s primary delight, and leads to prejudice; this is worthy of serious attention and this isn’t.
Well, it seems that with your novels, you can go back, unlike a P.D. James novel where you finish reading and say “well, that’s that”. With your novels, you can go back and discuss certain aspects of the text, see things that you didn’t see on first read.
Literary plus page-turner equals “surely that’s better”, or that more people can come to the party. It’s interesting with publishers: how they publish the book, what kind of jacket they put on the book, what kind of bookstores they’re sold in, and the readers who read it. People come to a book with certain expectations, and as much as I might argue against having expectations, people do it anyway. Often times the mystery reader will come to a book like Lost Girls and will say “well I liked it, but it’s not really a mystery”, and so they’re disappointed. Conversely, a literary reader will say “it kinda reminded me of P.D. James”, that this is kind of a cheap read, that it’s pulpy. In some respects, it potentially widens the interest and impact of the books, and in another sense, it limits it because if someone has a tendency towards categorical thinking, then they’re going to have expectations, and if those expectations aren’t confirmed, there’s a sense of vague disappointment. As opposed to what I hope the effect would be, which is something that gets you worked up about the characters, or an idea that gnawed at your head, or a dream that you had about it — you don’t have to like it, so long as it left a mark, I’m satisfied.
It comes down to the story.
Absolutely. The comments that I am most gratified to hear from my readers are the “fuck you, I had an exam the next day but I stayed up till four a.m. reading your book”. It’s that kind of you-messed-my-life-up comments that are the best.
VI: Keeping Your Eyes on the Post-It Note
Who are you reading right now?
I’m trying to work my way through Larry McMurtry’s Lonesome Dove — and there’s another great example; it’s a Western, but it won the Pulitzer Prize. I’m in the middle of that, and my wife and I have had our first child who just turned four months old, so reading has been on the back-burner more or less for the last few months. So if it’s not a book I have to review, I’m not reading much. There hasn’t been a lot of pleasure reading in the last four months. But yeah, I’m gnawing my way through Lonesome Dove. The Toronto Public Library is setting up a website for men to read because sadly, and worryingly, something like ninety percent of the people who read serious fiction are women, which is, on the one hand, great, but on the other hand is literariness a pink ghetto? Which troubles me as a man. They’re setting up this website called “Book Man” and they’re going to get in lay people, as well as male practitioners of fiction, to recommend a dozen books that they like, and so I’m thinking about that and re-tasting some of the books I know I’m going to recommend. Again, since we’ve had our baby, and the moments of the day get shorter and smaller that aren’t writing related, I find myself going to the bookshelf and just tasting instead of embarking on a big, new book. I know that after Lonesome Dove, I want to read Cormac Mccarthy’s The Road, his new book, which is about the end of the world. The last book that I read, just before Christmas, was Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go, which I just loved.
He’s amazing.
He is amazing. If I’m interested in the virtual confrontation with the real, he’s the master of almost the inverse of that, he’s the master of people who don’t even know how repressed they are (Laughs). Even when they’re confronted with something awful, they still don’t get it. And for those books, there’s a process of the reader recognizing “Don’t you see? These people are Nazi’s!” or “Don’t you see? You’re a clone and they’re going to kill you!” and you’re screaming at the page for the character to wake up.
Maybe it’s just me, but I saw a lot of Raymond Carver in your short stories. Is he an influence for you?
Yeah, definitely. Not in as marked a way as some other pointedly minimalist writers are. My lines tend to be longer and his world is the recovering alcoholic living above a laundry mat, and my stories are, well, the same versions of those people, except younger. The stories in Kiss Me share a generational interest, and those people tend to be under thirty, as I was at the time. I think Carver was an influence, and certainly Alice Munro was an influence, but citing her as an influence as a Canadian short story writer is like citing Shakespeare as an influence as a British novelist or playwright. I still don’t really have any go-to influences, at least that I’m aware of. It remains for others to point that out.
I think I was, in many ways, to the extent that I was constructing the stories consciously, trying to achieve an effect as opposed to style. The difference between those two things, in my mind, is that an effect is the way you feel when you close a book, or walk out of the cinema, and style is the way you feel in the story, or in the cinema. For me, the ideal way you’ll feel, not think, but feel upon a conclusion of a story is what interested me, and still interests me. This is sort of extraneous, but in addition to an outline that I’m a big believer in, there’s also a small post-it note that I’ll stick on the wall next to the computer when I’m writing a novel that will typically say something very, very fundamental about, not the story, or the theme, but how you feel when you will read this book goal. And for me, it’s a kind of talismanic telos of when it’s a groggy Monday and you’re like “where the fuck am I in this thing” — the post-it note can be like “Oh, yes. Right.” For The Wildfire Season, it was “It’s a love story” — and yes, it’s a novel about a fire and this guy and wilderness survival, and it’s an action novel and a thriller — but to me, I couldn’t let my eyes off the prize that it was a love story between this man and his daughter who he’s never met. If I lost that, I felt that the story would crumble and I wouldn’t achieve what I wanted to achieve. So, as a writerly piece of advice, a novel is a big thing and you can think about big themes, about the outlines and how you structure the story, which you should, but there should also be that post-it note either on the wall or in your mind of “how do you want me to feel about this novel?” It sounds so obvious, but it’s so obvious that it’s overlooked. A lot of the first draft novels that I’ve been asked to read, I’ve said, “yes, it’s well-written, the story is good, it’s a little all over the place” — all of which is fixable — but what is not fixable is what are you trying to do. How would you like me to put the last page down and feel? Do you want me to cry, do you want me to be choking with laughter? If you don’t know that intent, I think it would be hard to write more than a page.
VII: Beginnings, Endings, and Sticking to the Goal of Blood.
I wanted to ask you about beginnings and endings, and the one ending that I really enjoyed was in the short story “If You Lived Here, You’d Be Home By Now”, or even the ending for “Call Roxanne”. How do you know when to end and when to begin? Is that something you think about?
In my case, the endings come through the process of writing it, and is the great divide between writing a short story and a novel. Even though a short story, is, well, shorter, I don’t know how the endings are going to come, whereas I do know how a novel is going to end when I start it. The short stories that I write are started at the point of which could be considered the middle — you sort of jump in — and the story congeals around you. I like those endings too because I think they are true, but they are not endings I had in mind, or thought that they would end there. They are endings that come as a surprise, almost as much as a surprise to me, as hopefully they are to the reader. The last four-hundred words of “If You Lived Here, You’d Be Home By Now”, I did not know that there would be this tallying of what this kid has, how little he seems to have, how fucked he seems to be, and yet how happy he is. But that last paragraph was probably written in a hundred and eighty six seconds. After the fact, it makes you reflect on how a lot of things in life, not just writing, but any practice or activity of life, is how you realize that it turned out really well. How they aren’t considered, how they weren’t planned. As in, I always knew the story was going to turn out this way, or that I always knew I was going to marry Carol, who turned out to be the greatest love of my life, or I always knew I was going to be a great father, or I always knew that buying that house was going to be the best investment of my life, or whatever. That, typically, only after the fact, can go “that turned out quite well, didn’t it?” You have no idea how you got there.
How important is your prose? The Trade Mission seemed very hard to write.
It concerns me a lot. I like to think that on the occasions where the question of genre fiction and literary fiction comes up, I feel like “well, have you read even a page of my books?” It should be clear, or I hope, that any page of The Trade Mission is different from any page of Dean Koontz. I know I’m falling into two traps, one is self-aggrandizing arrogance, and the other is “oh, there is a difference between genre fiction and literary [fiction]”. I don’t mention this to recreate a hierarchy, I mention this only insofar as I spent a lot of time on that, which is why the books take three years versus Dean Koontz eight months. Sometimes I think, “geez, maybe I should crank this stuff out quicker” so people notice the trouble you have gone to. But that is the primary pleasure of the work — is crafting a good sentence, or nailing a good image, or taking a risk, leaning back in the chair and pondering some simile you come up with and thinking “shit, this is risky”. That, for me, on a minute by minute work routine level, that’s the work. It’s concocting and then self-judging, and then grinning madly, saying “fuck it, let’s do it” and forging ahead, and sticking a knife in, pulling it out and seeing how much blood comes out — all that fun of making someone who is not yourself, see and hear and smell what you see and hear and smell. And catching yourself always on “oh that’s cheesy, that’s quick, that’s a bad day, Andrew”. That self-regulating; you’re better than this, and your reader is better than this. So it means a lot to me, and I spend a lot of time on it. I like to think that it makes a difference to the integrity of the book. It’s something that is, in contemporary reviewing, for whatever reason, rare to find mentioned. It’s so rare that reviews reflect on, or even mention, how line by line responds to the text. It’s always about themes of the text, or whether or not it’s correct according to some ideology, and it leads to books being recommended, and when I pick up a book, I love that line by line excitement. I’d rather read a page of Martin Amis, than the Giller winner three years ago — I don’t even know who the Giller winner was three years ago. Again, for me, there should be something amusing, or exciting, or risky, or provocative on every page. If it’s simply a matter of pulp, simply a floor buffering, I kind of quickly close those books.
How do you think your prose has changed since Lost Girls?
I think it’s gotten quite a bit less shaggy. I would love to revise everything I’ve written. I don’t have that sense of “no, it is done, it is perfect”. No, everything I’ve written is flawed, and even though I’m really proud of Lost Girls, I really think that the central story — and a lot of the beats in that story — are unique and remarkable. It’s a novel I’d love to have another go at because the lines are often too shaggy, some of the metaphors don’t work. But then, I might take something out of it if I revisit it that way. I think the writing has gotten a little more concentrated, less interested in the knock-out punch, and more interested in little jabs leading to the round house. Just to belabour this boxing metaphor, I think I’ve become more of what I really am, which is a bespectacled white guy boxer. So you play your strengths, and wait for your moments, as opposed to Lost Girls which strode into the ring as a Tyson, and I’m no Tyson. So a little more small “c” conservative in some respects, but still sticking to the goal of blood.
VIII: “I thought up until you, Jane Urquhart was the shit.”
I find myself, when reading a person’s novels, seeing how they’ll tighten up from the first book to their latest. I catch myself enjoying the prose more in their first novels, which I have equated to my age — wanting that “knock-out punch”. Have you found that your audience has changed as you’ve grown? How much does the audience filter in, in terms of your prose, what you are writing about, who you are writing about? Do you think about that at all?
I used to think that there was an imaginary room of people that if I walked in, and they had all read my work, they’d say “we’re so glad you’re here, the life of the party has arrived, you’re our hero”. Now, I have discovered that that room doesn’t exist, but also that fraction of ideal reader has fallen away to be replaced by maybe only my own mad convictions. I know that writers speak about their relationship to their audience, and often times they speak about it in very practical real terms and they can know “when I go to Cape Breton, I get a hall full of these kinds of people, and they love the thing, and they understand this, and it’s set in Newfoundland, and they love the fish, and I speak their language, they speak mine”. I don’t have that. I don’t have a constituency. There’s no venue or room that I could ideally summon and be surrounded by a hundred people who totally loved and got what I was doing. Having said that, I think it’s a good thing. There is an audience, in terms of that the books sell x number of copies, not Stephen King numbers, sadly, but nor is it the “oh my god, no one cares” numbers. There’s a weird rag-tag coalition out there of people who don’t know each other, who are clearly like “I like that guy, I like this one better than this one, but I’m kind of following him and I’m interested”. I don’t know who they are, but on the occasions that I’ve done readings, I’ve met those sort of people who are “I’ve read everything you’ve done, I will buy the next thing you do, I’m a fan”. Honest to God, they could be young men, they could be soccer moms, and they can be, literally, eighty year old widows who are “I thought up until you, Jane Urquhart was the shit”. So I‘ve happily abandoned the idea of an ideal readership, and more now go on blind faith that whatever is occupying my interest at the moment, surely it’s going to connect with someone out there. You obviously hope that it connects with a million people, but I do really strongly believe that if you conceive of an audience first, I think that almost always that process fails. It has to be a “if you build it they will come process”, as opposed to “what do they want, give them what they want” process.
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Tagged: Andrew Pyper, Lost Girls, The Trade Mission
