Gibson - Across Canada By Story: a Coast-To-Coast Literary Adventure

ACROSS CANADA

BY STORY

A Coast-to-Coast Literary Adventure

by Douglas Gibson

with illustrations by Anthony Jenkins

ECW Press

for Alice Munro

and every Canadian author.

It all began in Thunder Bay. That was where the strange idea of doing a stage show based on my book, Stories About Storytellers, first came to me. Now, after a tour involving all ten provinces and more than separate shows, seen by thousands of polite people (no jeers, no tossed tomatoes!), it seems like an obvious idea. It wasnt obvious at the time.

Heres how it happened. The volunteers who ran the Sleeping Giant Literary Festival in Thunder Bay invited me to come there in the summer of 2010 , more than a year before Stories About Storytellers was published. They asked me, as a former editor, to teach a couple of classes: one about writing, and one about working with an editor. At first, I was mildly interested, but as soon as I learned that the classes would be given in Old Fort William, a historic fur-trade site, I was desperately keen to go.

A confession about one of my wild enthusiasms: Im fascinated by the history of Canadas fur trade, and by people like William McGillivray ( 1764 1825 ), the fierce Scot who gave his name to Fort William. His fort, I knew, was literally at the heart of the North West Companys fur trade empire, which flowed right across the country. This was the central point where the Grand Rendezvous took place each summer, where the Montreal voyageurs who had paddled west from cold dawn to dusk in canoes full of trade goods like blankets, kettles, and guns met their fur-trading comrades from the North and the West, who had raced to get their smaller canoes (the fifteen-foot canots du nord), jammed with bales of fur, east in time to make the great exchange. More than , of these tough characters would converge on the fort for a few short, hectic days to, in Charles Gordons words, trade and plot, and perhaps have a drink or two. Then they dunked their heads, loaded their canoes up to the tumblehome, and headed back. Whether they were paddling east or west, every man in every canoe was in a deadly race against the early freeze-up that could kill him.

I had heard that Old Fort William was a marvellous reconstruction of those days, specifically of around 1816 , and that it was complete with surprising details like the six acres of potato fields that were needed to keep the year-round fort staff alive through the winter. In fact, I had heard it described as one of Canadas greatest tourist sites, underappreciated because so few people went to Thunder Bay. Now Iwas going to Thunder Bay!

So I was happily agreeing to give the two lectures when the festival organizer Dorothy Colby said from the Thunder Bay end of the line, Oh, one other thing: besides your two classes, youll be one of the authors reading from their books on Friday night.

I was taken aback. But Im not an author yet, and I dont have a book, I stammered.

Ah, she said kindly, but we hear that youre writing a book. So you can read from it as a work-in-progress and were sure youll enjoy reading in a lineup with people like Miriam Toews and Richard Scrimger and David Carpenter and Terry Fallis.

This just made things worse. No, no, I really didnt belong with authors like that, this wasnt right. But she was adamant, and I, very reluctantly, agreed to be part of the authors reading.

The Friday evening reading was held at the grand old Prince Arthur Hotel in Thunder Bay. Its one of the traditional railway hotels, very near the old station on the Lake Superior waterfront. (Jane Urquhart, a Northern Ontario girl from Little Longlac, mentions the hotel in her 1997 novel, The Underpainter. In a dramatic late chapter, the central character looks from the hotel window at the dazzling snow-covered lake and he dreams hell see his lover walking to him against a backdrop of the Sleeping Giant: the huge man made of rock slumbered now on a smooth white sheet, not on the textured dark bed of glimmering water I remembered from my summer arrivals.) In real life, the hotel played a major part in Canadian history. Before the days of airports, national groups liked meeting in central railway towns like Thunder Bay or Winnipeg. So it was here, in 1921 , that a group drawn from across Canada formally adopted the wild idea that the red poppy seriously, a red poppy! should become the nation-wide symbol of Remembrance Day. For more than ninety years that idea has held up pretty well.

Our own Prince Arthur Hotel event was a revelation. It changed my life.

The reading setup was in accordance with the usual tradition: one author after another trudges onstage to stand behind a podium, modestly introduces the reading, then reads from his or her book for twenty minutes, takes a bow, and shuffles off to make way for the next reader.

Youve probably seen readings like this, and you probably know that some authors read aloud better than others. But the static format and the unchanging setting is terrible, and might as well have been designed to bore the audience, giving them nothing much to look at, no spectacle, and no drama just a series of readers barricaded behind a lectern.

I was so nervous about my undeserved role among these experienced and well-known authors real authors that I prepared my twenty-minute reading with great care. I chose to read from my chapter about W.O. Mitchell. I knew that the early material there was very funny, and the later stuff very sad.

It worked wonders with the Thunder Bay crowd. They laughed till they cried at the early W.O. stories, then they mopped away real tears, with some sobs audible, when I told of W.O.s joking bravely on his deathbed. (In the audience, my wife Janes cousin Paul Inksetter whispered that he felt sorry for whoever had to follow that particular powerful ending.)

It was very gratifying. But it was something more. It made me think, in a quieter moment: Wow, they seem to really like these behind-the-scenes stories about working with famous authors! That seemed to bode well for my book.

But I also thought, My goodness, there I was, stuck behind a podium, remote from the audience, who were given nothing apart from me to look at during my static reading yet they seemed to like it. Now, if I could change things around, find a way to get out from behind the podium and roam around the whole stage, to break down the barrier between me and the audience, and turn it into a real stage show by giving them something interesting to look at well, we might have something unique: a new kind of author event that brings it all back to its origins, storytelling.

To cut (ahem) a long story short, I came home from Thunder Bay and, drawing on the skills I had developed writing sketches for the theatre back in my student days, wrote a one-man play based on my book.

I was encouraged from the start by my lovely and talented assistant (i.e., my wife, Jane) and by my friend Terry Fallis, who had been there in Thunder Bay cheering me on, and who was able to help me with the electronic side. Because I knew this was not going to be in any way a reading. I was going to wander around the stage telling stories. And I would make it visually exciting by basing the stories on the authors who appeared onscreen behind me, in the form of the brilliant caricatures by Anthony Jenkins that punctuate the book. To add even more variety I would build in unexpected bursts of music, and an intriguing new kind of show began to take shape as I inserted scenes that were slightly more dramatic than a man sitting at a desk, editing. Boxing against Ernest Hemingway or imitating a polar bear gutting a sled dog was a little more exciting, everyone agreed.