Bookmark Interview: Christopher Walsh: Under the Electric Sky

Calgary freelance journalist Christopher Walsh took a page out of the Tom Wolfe’s bible on New Journalism a couple of years back, quitting his job as a reporter at an Alberta newspaper to run off and join the travelling carnival. The result is a fascinating and lively account of one of the biggest and longest running carnivals in Canada, the Bill Lynch Shows.

Walsh’s book is entitled Under the Electric Sky: The History of the Bill Lynch Shows, published by Nimbus Press.  The 31 year old Walsh joined the Bill Lynch carnival for a summer to study carnies and the lifestyle first hand, taking the writer back to his hometown of Halifax. Walsh appeared on Bookmark in May, 2011, talking about his adventures and the dying form of entertainment known as the carnival. You can hear that interview with clicking on the Title of this Blog Entry.

After Bill Lynch passed away in 1972, the Bill Lynch Shows were taken over by Soggy Reid. He maintained the Lynch tradition of showing charity to the less fortunate throughout the Maritimes. Several years after buying the carnival, Reid was devastated when an accident on one of the carnival’s rides killed a patron. The carnival almost folded as a result. However, the carnies all rallied around Reid and the carnival persevered, still doing its rounds to this day. 

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Bookmark Interview: Timothy Taylor: The Blue Light Project

Vancouver’s Timothy Taylor is an award-winning and best-selling novelist who likely has struck literary gold with his new novel The Blue Light Project, published by Knopf Canada. On the one hand, this book is a serious novel with big ideas woven through it, such as our fascination with fame and anti-fame and society’s repeated sacrificing of celebrities as a sort of cultural ritual, the meaning of art as a political force, of underground street culture and modern-day terrorism.Seo bookmarking This also is an edgy suspense story, centred around a man who takes hostage an auditorium full of children attending a television talent contest. En route to the story’s amazing conclusion, we meet a beautiful woman and former star athlete still celebrated only for a moment of glory many years before, a broken down journalist whose stellar career crashed and burned when he got caught inventing a source for one of his stories, and the strange street artist known as Rabbit with his almost super-hero abilities in racing across the city’s rooftops in true Parkour fashion.

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 Timothy Taylor, a one-time banker and self-taught writer, visited Edmonton recently on a Seo  book .tour, returning to the city where he received his degree in economics from the University of Alberta. Taylor talked to Bookmark about the characters that populate The Blue Light Project and the big ideas that run through this engaging story. You can listen to that interview by clicking on the Title of this Blog Entry.

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Bookmark Interview: Wendy McGrath: Santa Rosa

Edmonton writer Wendy McGrath was first published as a poet but her past two publications have in fact been novels, including her latest offering Santa Rosa, published in spring 2011 by NeWest Press.

The poet is still very much at work in McGrath’s novels; in fact they seem to exist  somewhere along the border of the narrative poem and the novel. Santa Rosa doesn’t so much tell a story as it evokes a private experience, that of a young girl growing up in a north-east Edmonton neighbourhood in the 1960s, curious about the things that a child would be curious about, vaguely aware if uncomprehending of the growing dissolution of her parents’ marriage. I sat down with Wendy McGrath and we talked about the poetic language of her prose and why her novels don’t necessarily concern themselves much with plot and character development. You can listen to that interview by clicking on the Title of this Blog Entry.

Bookmark Interview: Wayne Arthurson: Fall from Grace..

Edmonton writer Wayne Arthurson has managed a somewhat rare feat for a largely untried new author–he went to New York and landed a two-book deal with MacMillan Publishing subsidiary Forge. The first book was published in April this year–a murder mystery set in Edmonton and notable for its unusual protagonist, a recently rehabilitated journalist named Leo Desroches, a man almost destroyed by his gambling addiction and who now robs banks in his spare time in order to control his urges.

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The novel, called Fall from Grace, opens with reporter Desroches being invited by a police officer to view the body of a young native woman found murdered in a farmer’s field. Covering the story of the woman’s death leads Desroches down a dangerous path as he begins to unravel the secrets of a serial killer whose identity is truly shocking. Wayne Arthurson sat down with Bookmark in May, 2011, to talk about his story. I opened by asking Arthurson if Desroches was based on anyone he knew. You can listen to that interview by clicking on the Title of this Blog Entry.

A second Leo Desroches novel will be released next year by Forge, this book entitled A Killing Winter. 

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Bookmark Interview: E.D. Blodgett: Praha

E.D. “Ted” Blodgett is a former poet-laureate of Edmonton and spent 34 years at the University of Alberta as a professor of Comparative Literature. A widely recognized Canadian poet, literary critic and translator,  Blodgett won a Governor-General’s Award for Literature in 1996 for his volume Apostrophes: Woman At A Piano. He has published 2-dozen books of poetry, including two new volumes this year. Blodgett, who now lives in coastal British Columbia, has just published Apostrophes Seven with the University of Alberta Press and Praha with Athabasca University Press.


Praha is an homage to Blodgett’s beloved city of 
Prague, capital of the Czech Republic, original home of Blodgett’s wife and the city to which he has returned time and time again. Praha consists of 65 poems featured in English on one page and in Czech on the next.
Prague is an eleven-hundred year old city, a sharp contrast to the relatively young city of Edmonton where Blodgett spent so much of his life. Prague was the centre of the Bohemian Empire and at one time was the seat of the Holy Roman Empire. Today a popular destination for tourists, Prague is renowned for its architecture, including its ancient castles and cathedrals.  Blodgett seeks to capture the gentle melancholy that hangs over Prague and which he says is embedded in the souls of its citizens; a city that has seen perhaps too much over too long a time so that even a visitor feels its retiring ancient spirit. 
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I reached Ted Blodgett in May 2011 at his home in B.C.’s lower mainland to talk about the writing of Praha. You can hear that interview by clicking on the Title of this Blog Entry. The week after the interview, Blodgett flew to Prague where a book launch was held for Praha.
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Bookmark Interview: Gail Sidonie Sobat: Chance to Dance For You

Edmonton writer and educator Gail Sidonie Sobat has a new book for young adult readers hot off the presses. Once again Sobat tackles an important and controversial aspect of teenaged life as she did in her book on anorexic young women called Gravity
 Journal. This time Sobat looks at the challenges facing gay young men and women trying to survive the close, peer-dominated environment of high school. Her new novel is called Chance to Dance for You and is published by Great Plains Teen Fiction. Gail and I recently sat down to talk about the new book and also about her other great passion, YouthWrite, a writing camp for young people that she founded 15 years ago. We started by talking about the lead character of Sobat’s novel, gay high school student and dancer Ian Trudeau. You can hear that interview by clicking on the Title of this Blog Entry.

Bookmark Interview: David Adams Richards: Incidents in the Life of Markus Paul..

 David Adams Richards is among the truly great writers of Canadian literature. His novels have largely centred around the land he knows so well, the Miramichi Valley of New Brunswick. Richards’ body of work has earned him Governor General’s Awards for both fiction and non-fiction, a Giller Prize, a Commonwealth Writers Prize, a Trillium Award and two Gemini Awards.

 The latest offering of this soft-spoken son of the Atlantic is again set in the Miramichi Valley, in a small New Brunswick community that abuts a Mikmak village and reservation. Incidents in the Life of Markus Paul, like previous Richards’ novels, is unafraid of the dark and broken corners of human existence, his language blunt and spare with each word powerfully weighted and wielded, his descriptions harsh when necessary and unyielding, while revealing emotions and motivations complex and nuanced.

The book tells the story of Hector Penniac, a 17 year old Micmac boy with dreams of being a doctor, killed in the first few hours of his first real job, that of stacking timber in the hold of a freighter. While the death easily could be an accident, racial divides, old hurts, modern politics and callous conniving soon lead to talk of murder with suspicion falling on a local white man known to be a loner, Roger Savage. What follows is an escalating cycle of prejudice, manipulation and presumption that culminates in violence and more deaths. The story jumps back and forth in time to a future many years later when Markus Paul, a grandson of the Mikmak chief  Amos Paul and now an RCMP officer, ends up re-opening the investigation into what really happened to young Penniac and brings to light a number of dark secrets.
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David Adams Richards stopped in Edmonton in May 2011 as part of a national tour in support of Incidents in the Life of Markus Paul and was interviewed on Bookmark. You can hear that interview by clicking on the Title of this Blog Entry.  In opening, Richards says the story was triggered by an actual accident.

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Bookmark Interview: Helen Waldstein Wilkes: Letters from the Lost: A Memoir of Discovery

The 2nd Annual Alberta Readers’ Choice Award was given out June 11, 2011, at the Alberta Book Awards in Calgary. The winner of the $10,000 prize was 74-year-old Helen Waldstein Wilkes, author of a moving memoir of tragedy, discovery and resilient new life. The book is called Letters from the Lost: A Memoir of Discovery, published by Athabasca University Press.







Helen Waldstein was 2 years old when she fled with her parents from Nazi-occupied Prague to Canada. The letters to which the title refers are those of aunts, uncles, grandparents and cousins; letters sent to Helen’s family in their new Canadian home from relatives who did not survive the Holocaust. The letters were handed down to

Helen Wilkes by her father but Helen did not open the box of letters until she was 60 years old. When she finally read them, Helen began a journey of discovery to find her lost family in the Old Country and to also discover her own lost heritage as a Jew.
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Helen Waldstein Wilkes sat down with me the morning after the Awards in the lobby of Calgary’s grand old Palliser Hotel and talked about her book Letters from the Lost. I opened by asking why she waited so long to study the letters. You can hear that interview by clicking on the Title of this Blog Entry.

 

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Bookmark Interview: Lynn Coady: The Antagonist

Lynn Coady’s new novel The Antagonist won’t be released by House of Anansi Press until September but already the book has been marked by the National Post as one of the most anticipated books of 2011. That’s in part because of the remarkable body of work this young Cape Breton writer, now living in Edmonton, already has given the world: such novels as Mean Boy, The Saints of Big Harbour, and her first novel Strange Heaven, nominated for a Governor General’s Award.

In The Antagonist, Coady creates the lead character Gordon Rankin, commonly called “Rank,” an oversized muscular young man who, against his will and his nature, is cast in the role of an enforcer, a goon – pressed by his hockey coach, his classmates and especially his diminutive but loud-mouthed and highly opinionated father Gordon Senior. Much of the book features a series of monologues by “Rank”. They come in the form of a series of e-mails sent to a former friend who has outraged Rank by using him as a character in a book, and not in a flattering manner. Rank is gradually revealed to us as a sensitive and intelligent soul trapped within a body that betrays the inner self. Throughout Coady uses lively, dancing language and a devilish sense of humour to carry the tale to its final revelations.
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I met with Lynn Coady recently to talk about The Antagonist and asked her to discuss the seminal influences in creating Gordon Rankin Junior. You can hear that interview by clicking on the Title of this Blog Entry. 

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