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.
And Video Look me...

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.