299_Luke_Hilles_Ziegler_Patterson_George-Sipos_Real-and-Imagined-Lives.mp3

otter.ai

7.02.2024

no

Unknown Speaker 0:01
So welcome

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from me and Derrick, especially to this real and imagined lives, which is, I guess you'd call it kind of themed reading, we want to look at how the raw material of life gets turned into this thing called narrative. And all the degrees and shades of

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true or authentic skews. I'm not working at this mic.

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So what I'm going to do at the beginning here is to, first of all introduce the people who are going to be reading and talking tonight. And secondly, to thank the people who have made it possible and then I'm going to be rescued out on the way.

Unknown Speaker 0:43
So we're going to begin tonight, first of all, with polar Luke, who's this story, the second person along for me,

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probably is one of the first writers I met when I moved to into Salt Spring Island. She's the author of the acclaimed novel magazine as well as Burning Ground, which was a winner in the Commonwealth writers prize.

Unknown Speaker 1:05
Pearl is going to be followed by Robert hills, government general award winning poet two sources, also an author of two novels, including one that makes use of events from his own life raising voices and the memoir, kissing.

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Our next reader is Maddie Ziegler. Maggie is fourth person

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knows many people on Saltspring as activist and psychotherapists.

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As a writer, she's just begun to publish her writing, and is almost finished with the manuscript excuse me, that she's reading from tonight.

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Then, we will hear from Kevin Patterson,

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who is the third

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award winning short story writer, or theoretical water in between, which is a memoir and consumption, much of a novel.

Unknown Speaker 2:01
And then we will hear from George George supercheap was his first collection of poetry anything but the moon was shortlisted for a DC Book Award, and has another book coming out London landmarks which is coming out later in the year. And this is a memoir, but he describes it as having been set in a semi fictional Ontario of the 1950s and 1960s.

Unknown Speaker 2:25
So real and imagined lies, we will take a break of the Roberts reading, and just see

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what's ahead.

Unknown Speaker 2:35
Let's give everyone some applause. And let's also thank the Canada Council and the writers union for funding this event and aspirin to Fred's contribution in terms of the space.

Unknown Speaker 3:07
Thanks to Derek and Kathy for hosting us.

Unknown Speaker 3:12
It's a great pleasure for me to introduce Pearl my wife for years and I don't think I've actually ever introduced just before the reading of speakers short, Pearl uses language in a magical way for me each time she reads, sequences and events, and interesting and powerful ways to use words. I think she's a truly gifted master of the novel is written two novels, Burning Ground and Manimals. The

Unknown Speaker 3:43
Burning Ground won the Commonwealth prize for best novel in the Canadian Caribbean region was a major accomplishment. And it was also shortlisted for the Robertson Davies chapters First Book Award. Her second end was a notable global male notable book of the year. A second novel, Madame Z, was long listed for the impact of Milan prize and international largest international prize besides the

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Nobel Prize for Literature.

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It's my great pleasure to introduce

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that'll cost me

Unknown Speaker 4:31
Thank you, Robert. That was nice. And thank you all. Thanks to all of you for coming. Wonderful to see so many people and practice did such a great job. I know. Probably we're all going to say that but such a great job of pulling us together very quickly.

Unknown Speaker 4:48
Because we're talking on a

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on a theme. I just put together some notes and I was going to do this extemporaneously. But I decided to just read it and

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cuz I'm feeling nervous. So what I'm going to do is start with this little essay that I wrote an essay without a thesis, I noticed that the last minute, but basically my thesis is really everything is fiction.

Unknown Speaker 5:15
So I'm going to start with that. And then I'll read, Kathy asked me to fill in a half hour here. So I'll do that. And then I'll read and discuss a little bit what I was doing with this passage that I read.

Unknown Speaker 5:29
So

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writing what you know, real and imaginary lives, fiction is an extension of what we all do naturally, as we experienced the real world, but also imagined beyond reality to recall events. Maybe we change them, or rationalize or fantasize something better for ourselves. But we definitely go beyond reality. And if we add enough imagining, to our experience in fiction and reality become difficult to separate, we act out what we've read, and characters tend to have as much influence on us as people. So stories end up being powerful tools, whether we read them in the New Yorker, or watch them out on television, they shaped us most, I think, as a writer, when they surprise us, or get to the truth of something that we know intuitively. As writers, we're then taking part in the shaping of stories, and consequently of thought, whenever we publish anything,

Unknown Speaker 6:29
writing fiction feels sometimes like playing dolls, or toy soldiers. We give our characters characteristics that we borrowed from everywhere we've been, including not only the real world, but our minds. And then readers tend to imagine these fictional lives and make them part of bear reality. And I saw this enacted with Madden z, which is a story based on the life of a real woman who was the mistress of brother 12. He was the founder of the Aquarian Foundation, cult in the 1920s. Over at Cedar by the sea.

Unknown Speaker 7:09
And more than one person told me that my fictional Z had altered their vision of the historical woman.

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But I didn't happen to cleave that both my story and any historical version that's out there, I think they're both equally fictional.

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And I especially came to that conclusion, as I was doing the research.

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I noted too, that in trying to stick to the facts, we often misunderstand them and misrepresent them, so that they're no longer what we would call facts anyway, we distort them with faulty memory, or with our faulty perceptions. But on the other hand, the the opposite is also true. In trying to create a fiction, we actually sometimes arrive at authenticity. So sometimes fiction can actually redeem a person. And that was something that I hoped to do a little bit with the story because she was

Unknown Speaker 8:11
maligned every a lot of people belong here, and probably with good reason. But the story was just so

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one sided, that that's what got me interested in.

Unknown Speaker 8:26
In writing about her again, my goal was not really to make readers feel that they knew, Madam see, but more to have them doubt what they thought they already knew about her. I believe that we should doubt most of what we know, and that nothing is as we think it is. And I enjoy exploring that in my fiction, probably, mostly because it's very difficult to do in real life.

Unknown Speaker 8:51
writing the novel Madame Z was a paradoxical experience for me, because the most enjoyable parts of the writing process were the hours I spent going through archival collections. And yet working that information into the narrative actually made me very unhappy. Because the more closely I stuck to the facts, the flatter Madame Z seemed to me and the more one dimensional she became. So it was as if the facts dehumanized her, while the fictions made her more real, to me, at least. We've all heard the expression, right, what you know, and I think that most writers in the beginning at least, translate that to mean that writing about what we know, a career as a nurse or a pilot or brain cancer or HIV or Saltspring Island or the Yukon, whatever, allows us to provide realistic details that make our stories interesting and original. I tried to do this in Burning Ground my first book when I created a character who worked at a fire tower, because I had also worked at a fire tower for several summers. So when it rains

Unknown Speaker 10:00
Adding what we know, in this way is undeniably a good strategy. However, we can expand the notion of writing what we know to also include research. And if we have no personal experience with a subject, then we can research it so thoroughly that we have the capacity to impart the same level of detail as if we had actually lived it. This is also a good strategy, but it's more difficult to use. And nothing is worse than a passage of fiction that reads like notes from a research session. And I hope that that's I'm actually reading a passage that I have already researched. So I hope that's not the case here.

Unknown Speaker 10:38
After writing that MC, I now view the concept of writing what I know differently again, and sometimes what we know, is not so much about their physicality or the facts, but about an emotional state. And we can write about that as authentic ly as about any concrete physical details, we can show emotions through those physical details, and images far more. And they're far more powerful

Unknown Speaker 11:08
than when they're unattached to an emotion. For example, the description of a ship can be interesting. But when that description is used to show loneliness, or the raw, or raw power, for example, then readers are not only intellectually interested, but they're emotionally affected by those images.

Unknown Speaker 11:27
When I first read about Z, as I mentioned, her story attracted me because of her impetuousness. Her poor choices, her apparent alienation, and her talent for unhappiness. I felt that I knew a lot about those, even though I knew very little about some of the other events.

Unknown Speaker 11:49
For example, I knew I didn't know much about theosophy, and whenever I tried to read about it, it just made me want to sleep. And the whole colony was built on its logical principles. So that wasn't particularly good.

Unknown Speaker 12:09
No, I lost my place. There we go. So in writing about those emotional states, then I found a way into the story. And I found the authenticity that had been missing in all of the pages of facts and physical details. So for me, memorable writing explores what makes us human, not as vague or lofty ideas. But images, stories are, for me, images linked together, in such a way that the ideas and emotions behind them become clearer, we tend to tell about ideas too, and all writers know the, you know, we need to show not tell. And so when we're thinking in terms of ideas we're telling, but we tend to show images. So if we start with an image,

Unknown Speaker 12:57
an image is the right vehicle, really for vivid fiction that allows readers to experience the event as if they were actually there. The psychology and emotion behind the images, and cause and effect. The motivation then for all the actions has always interested me, both in life and in fiction. And I asked myself, How do people and characters act? What breaks them especially? And how do they put themselves back together again, after they're broken. So I like to start with images that evoke a feeling that transcends time, and then create more images, and more until they tell the story that I'm trying to tell whether that's historical or contemporary. So what I'm going to read now is a passage.

Unknown Speaker 13:49
The The story is about mistress of brother 12. As I said, she was much maligned. And she at one point, met this fellow named Roger, who was called the King, the poultry king of Florida, the poultry king of Florida. So that's what I started with. And then I knew that I wanted, I knew that he had badly beaten Madame z at one point and really hurt her. He had just beaten to a pulp in attempt. And that was all I knew about that was that he had done that and so I wanted to create a scene that made him a little bit dark. And this is I combined them that desire to show his dark side with what I knew about him as the poultry king of Florida. And

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this is what I ended up with.

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So he's asked her now to come out to his processing plant his chicken processing plant. They arrive around noon when the heat is at its most unbearable. Three buildings sit long and low.

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centered in a square parched land surrounded by wire fence, and everywhere she looks she sees chickens. She has never heard such a clatter as 1000s of them squawk at once. Roger shows her the hatchery first where its employees can step 20,000 eggs a week, several 100 baby chicks will be sold right here he tells her to local farmers. Some families buy only three or four newborn chicks while others want up to 100 at a time, he says, But these sales make up only a small part of his business. The majority of the chicks are kept and grown in the second building to an average weight of four five pounds. These are broilers for sale at auction, and it is the broilers that have brought him more wealth than he could have imagined. But that's only the beginning. Processing is the future. Fresh packaged chickens he tells her have much more potential for profit than live ones. And this new plant has begun as a small experiment for the city wholesale market, which pays highest of all people in the city don't want to choose a chicken and wait to have addressed they want to be in and out of the market as fast as possible. That's the future and almost no one knows it yet.

Unknown Speaker 16:14
Inside the last building, the air is fettered, and almost as hot is outside. All the workers look forward and unhappy and like they wish they were not standing on a concrete pad in a sweltering processing plant. But when Roger hands her a cotton overcoat and rubber boots, and Don's has set himself she does the same. Then she balls a handkerchief under her nose and follows his lead. Noting that as they approach each station, his employees grow busier at their tasks. They walk to the far end of the building where live chickens enters, still flapping and protesting their feet round together and click to a heavy cable strung the length of the factory. The clips move easily along the cable so that workers can slide birds backward or forward as necessary. She has imagined the factory differently, quieter cleaner, with only a few employees and each of those busy over one bird at a time. In fact, the birds moves swiftly from person to person along the overhead cable. We call this December this assembly line. It's tripled our output, Roger says he looks pleased with themselves and we still can't keep up the orders. Everywhere she looks she sees a massive feathers, blood and other glutinous looking bits in piles to carefully avoid. See here Roger nods to an employee working over a trough where the water runs great read. The fellow acknowledges Roger, but he keeps on with his job and as she watches he takes the chicken by the beak with one hand and stretches its neck because other hand wields a large knife and he decapitates the unfortunate creature with one quick slice tosses the severed head into a barrel behind him and unhooks the chicken from the table. It continues to flop even as he dunked the neck in the trough of water. The chicken's bowels released when he cut off his head. So when the flopping lessons he scrapes that evacuation into the water as well. Roger raises his voice over the racket come closer emotions are over where she can see into the trough. I've devised a system where the water fills and drains continuously, so the level remains constant but fresh. If you kill chickens at home a bucket of water will do but we're processing so many here. He'd soon have more blood than water. She went says that that the thought of a tub full of warm blood combined with very real odor around her causes her to press more firmly at the handkerchief she holds to her nose. When the chicken stops flopping altogether. The man reattaches it to the cable and pushes it along. Even as he reaches for another live one. They move on then to watch as a different employee grabs that drained chicken and dumps it in water. That's hot water. Roger explains. He holds the chicken under for a few seconds to loosen the feathers for plucking. They'll go in the barrel. He points we'll sell them for pillows and feather beds. She watches as the older man pulls feathers at a remarkable speed and tosses them aside. The world record for plucking is 10 seconds. Raju gestures toward the line. He's been with us since the beginning so he's almost as fast. A beginner like you might need 15 minutes. Would you like to give it a try?

Unknown Speaker 19:28
Why not she thinks how difficult can it be? Roger Motion's the man aside and he smiles encouragement as T Z tentatively pulls a few feathers. They come out more easily than she had expected. But when she finishes the patch the skin isn't as bearish. She had hoped. She tries picking out a few of the smaller feathers and tears that remain. But that only tears skin so she stops. They cinch those Robert says Roger says he takes her elbow and guides her farther down the line where the chickens move faster from person to person.

Unknown Speaker 20:00
One man cuts the legs and feet off another slicked back and removes the windpipe and the neck. A third removes an oil gland and cuts around the anus. She hasn't realized that chicken passes through so many hands before it touches your plate. And she's about to save. So when they reach the eviscerating station, the stench here is strongest of all. Wait, Roger motions and employee to stop just as she moves to put her hand inside a chicken? And he nods toward Z. She'd like to do it? No, I don't think so. Z is contempt to watch or to move past without watching it all. She has had enough with the chickens there noise and odor. She doesn't know how anyone can work in such disagreeable conditions day after day. And she doesn't want to consider the sorts of lives that forced these people to do so. For her own part. She's began to feel so dirty she goes she will ever feel fresh again. She could be reduced to this if she's not careful. No, Roger. No, that's fine. She places her hand on his arm to stop them. Let's not interrupt her work. Oh, she doesn't mind she'll catch up. It's the last step before we rent some package. Then. The woman on the line waits. Another chicken joins the first so now she is to behind. Put on the spot Z reluctantly pushes her sleeves up past your elbows. grips the chicken with one hand and clutch plunges the other inside up to her wrist. She doesn't know what she expected, but suddenly she understands as if she hasn't until that very second, that she has reached into the cavity of a creature that until only a few moments before lift. Her core couldn't be more real if she had forced her hand down someone's throat and into his chest cavity.

Unknown Speaker 21:45
She makes herself clutch a handful of warm, slippery and trails, wincing as chords and soft lumps squished between her fingers. When she withdraws her hands and trails plop out like placenta after birth, and slime and blood cover her fingers up to the wrist. She clenched her John swallows urgently wheeling the contents of her stomach to stay put. She's certainly nothing has masked her revulsion. And yet Roger urges her on. That's the way scrape with your fingers until you get it all. He focuses intently on the activity of her hands. Once again, she violates the chicken. She thinks she is indeed doing something immoral as if she performed some sixth sideshow. And the intensity of Rogers observation causes her to wonder how frequently he stands at this particular table. Just as quickly as she has the thought she tries unsuccessfully to block the resulting image from her mind. Feel around in there, get it all. She hears an extra note in his voice that wasn't there earlier, not excitement perhaps, but some inappropriate cousin to excitement that she can't quite name. Once again, Roger has pushed her beyond what she knows of herself into a dark arena of discomfort. She looks down on the chicken and on her hand fumbling and twisting inside it already.

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Already high on her narrow wrist, thin red strands have begun to dry. Now that's it, she drops the chicken on the work table and sinks her arm in a bucket of clear water. She is spotted next to the station, unfinished. She snatches the stain towel Roger offers and turns away from him.

Unknown Speaker 23:28
So I began with

Unknown Speaker 23:31
Rogers and as the culture king of Florida. And so I felt like something, I had to do something about chickens. And that's where the scene originated.

Unknown Speaker 23:44
But I also needed to somehow work my way up to him beating the crap out of her and have it believable at the time. So this comes

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aways before that, to foreshadow bad events.

Unknown Speaker 24:01
And then I had to find out about chicken processing. And it was actually quite interesting. And it just happened that at that particular time processing was really taking off. And he was in at the beginning of that and that's how he apparently made his millions. So that that was all I knew about him and all that I knew about chicken processing, then I had to find out but I, you know, you can't just

Unknown Speaker 24:34
give a bunch of crap about chicken process in a novel. So I tried to create the scene in a plausible way. And it's made sense to me that he would want to, you know, he's, he's seducing her and he wants to show off his business and also, you know, this would be a good opportunity to show the darker side of him. So, all of that pertains to the research

Unknown Speaker 25:00
But

Unknown Speaker 25:01
there was a large element of this that was also fantasy. And as I, I had always imagined chickens the way I have had to pluck them, you know, with just the bucket of water and chicken, me and the chicken by itself. And so when I was imagining what it would actually be like in a processing plant, it's amazing what our

Unknown Speaker 25:28
unconscious maybe comes up with, because I've never read anything about chicken processing. But we, we sort of tend to, I think some I don't know what happens, but, but we tend to imagine,

Unknown Speaker 25:40
in a way, that's very true to life sometimes. And so when I started, I mean, maybe that's not unusual, maybe just imagining a chicken assembly line, you know, maybe no one would do that. But it tends to surprise me when that happens when

Unknown Speaker 25:56
the imagining turns out to actually be true. And, you know, when I don't know anything about it. So that was really interesting, and learning about how the assembly line was just new at that time, too, and was so held out was used and,

Unknown Speaker 26:13
and I guess what I was talking about earlier, but those those emotions and the gut feelings, and I wanted to kind of get that sense of revulsion across without ever saying, you know, that Roger had these kind of revolting tendencies and this

Unknown Speaker 26:34
anger and brutality in him. And then I also brought in the, my own experience, cleaning a chicken. And I remembered that when I cleaned, I didn't clean very many of them. And when I did, that, I was pregnant with my daughter. And it was the most revolting experience and reaching in and feeling all that, that warmth and, and, you know, those cords and gobs of more slippery slime in there. And I don't think I ever meant to retain it or thought about it at any other time in my life. After it was over, it was just something that had happened, you know, I did it, I didn't like it, I made sure I didn't have to do it again. And then I made up that in the story. And so that's sort of how fiction and real life come together, we, we have all of these experiences that we've imagined and, and acted out and, and then somehow, we managed to pull them in when we need them. And we don't use them exactly as they are we stretch them and elaborate on them and do whatever we need to do to make them work for the story. Because that's ultimately what's most important, it's just that the story works that the image works in this particular story. So you know, I do whatever I have to do with whatever pieces of information I have to make them work like that.

Unknown Speaker 28:14
If you want any questions, or

Unknown Speaker 28:20
pretty much

Unknown Speaker 28:30
okay, well then I'll pass it up to Robert.

Unknown Speaker 28:48
I should have said,

Unknown Speaker 28:51
Girl is going to talk a little longer than the others because of funding and sometimes I didn't want you to think she was really

Unknown Speaker 29:01
I approached this because I write fiction, poetry and nonfiction are often one time that I just always only wrote poetry but I did put different names on the books but hasn't matured beyond that. Now,

Unknown Speaker 29:18
I have a theory though. I noticed produce back a lot and the discussion was about real versus imaginary, I think but I liked the word back. In the other way Pearl talks about how she used facts in fiction. And for me, I see back in this way, in poetry.

Unknown Speaker 29:44
Poetry blurs intentionally blurs facts and fiction into a metaphor. And so fashion and fiction are almost irrelevant in a way. Fiction. As girl has so eloquently out

Unknown Speaker 30:00
wouldn't really accelerate, takes back as a way of embellishing fiction to make it seem real sort of, so that the person feels that they're part of the story is taking place. First of all grounded I suppose in a real place in a real time by she's talking about the 1920s in that scene in Florida in the 1920s. And so the details and one of the challenges I found in writing fiction is that

Unknown Speaker 30:31
poetry can just make up everything I can see like the fight over there as well. So on the moments where, but in fiction is, you have to be more accurate in the sense of

Unknown Speaker 30:42
the reader expects to believe something so something stands out. So in a novel, for example, it takes place in my opinion, 10 official up and 72 Chrysler car seems like people are going to react against that.

Unknown Speaker 30:59
In terms of nonfiction, I always have trouble with nonfiction, because sometimes I don't think it exists. My apologies, because there's some great nonfiction writers here.

Unknown Speaker 31:10
I believe that.

Unknown Speaker 31:14
Nonfiction, in a sense, I do believe it exists. But my sense of it is that nonfiction is where we have facts. And we use fiction to sort of embellish the facts. So for example, in nonfiction, what fiction does is fill in the missing pieces. So

Unknown Speaker 31:35
in the passage, I'm going to read, for example, I could remember going somewhere with my father and a truck, but I don't remember what he said, conversations, one of the things in memoir, for example. And I know that people have religiously made notes and tape. And so there are legitimate conversations and memoirs, I don't think that they don't exist. But

Unknown Speaker 31:57
I do think that in nonfiction, it's okay to invent things and embellish the nonfiction and embellish the facts that make people feel better, as long as you don't cross the line, for example, and a million little pieces.

Unknown Speaker 32:13
PRI got into trouble because he basically wrote a novel and then the publishers worked it out as a nonfiction book. And then everybody got upset because it was too much fiction in the nonfiction. So you can't have too much fiction in the nonfiction. So for example, I couldn't write a memoir that I was assigned to in the 1930s most people wouldn't buy it. So there has to be some kind of accuracy there. So I'm going to show you just a little briefly from my work the three aspects and then I'll leave the poetry for last. So for me poetry lands, it's a melting pot between fiction and nonfiction, it's kind of irrelevant and a poem to be really actually go there. Like there's a great poem which is read the other day by Horace Thomas a while support when it comes to door as a very moving call now that the sample they come to the door, maybe did maybe doesn't matter. In the poem in the context of poem doesn't matter.

Unknown Speaker 33:12
I'm gonna start with

Unknown Speaker 33:15
my novel graduate.

Unknown Speaker 33:19
I'm just gonna read the opening sentence.

Unknown Speaker 33:23
The only doctor in town was tailgate Smith, he rode his horse for miles to keep snow delivered. Surely it was a blue baby, despite his efforts,

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a gradual ruin most people don't know. Well.

Unknown Speaker 33:38
It's a novel about

Unknown Speaker 33:41
two stories one takes place in northern Ontario. And this is Northern Ontario part of the story. And the second story takes place in Germany and Russia, during that the end of the war. And really, when I think about it now, the Kenora Northern Ontario story is a story. My mother's story and the story in Germany was my father's story and even the main character in that part of the novels Tom and my father's name was Mickey. So there was a similarity there. In this my uncle told me that there was a doctor in town named Dr. Pick up where my mother was, and her sister, her older sister, was a blue baby. So that kind of started I wrote that sentence. And that was the first sentence and always was the first sentence of the novel. But his doctor Doctor pickup sounded weird in our context. Sounds like he was a pickup artists, right? So I like tailgate Smith instead. Sounds better. So I use stories from my own childhood and mouth as a medium to so and then in a way that's how I use partly how I use fact and fiction.

Unknown Speaker 34:50
Now, this novel, as I said, takes place partly it's about a Canadian soldier, when he's actually a paratrooper who lands behind enemy lines

Unknown Speaker 35:00
entered Germany at the end of the war, and it's taken prisoner by the Russians and sent to a gulag. And that happened to like about a million Allied soldiers that disappeared in Russian gulags. And that was the impetus for me to write the story. So I picked a point where he landed. And then, when the book came out, a reviewer said, oh, yeah, he was in this company. And he landed in this location because he was in this group. And I didn't know any of that. And I would thank the person because he basically made the character more real for me. Although I just basically took a guess that where he might have been what he might have been doing. So in fiction infection, you have that luxury of sort of taking what works for the story of girls.

Unknown Speaker 35:47
And meld amazing into a story really what's important in a novel is the acts the rising action. So everything sort of serves the rising action serves the characters and the development of the characters etc.

Unknown Speaker 36:04
Now for me, okay, as I said, nonfiction, is

Unknown Speaker 36:10
an example of I have a lot of trouble with nonfiction because mostly I make up everything. I think writers I believe writers are liars, and the better writers are better liars. So even the nonfiction ones again, apology, there's some really great ones here.

Unknown Speaker 36:28
It's ultimately about ideas and metaphor. And metaphor is a very fearful thing for people because you can hold it up and you can see it as an invisible thing.

Unknown Speaker 36:38
And in my

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enclosed memoirs, like this one a call and while I wouldn't even want to risk the balance between truth and facts, fiction, facts, and that's an interesting

Unknown Speaker 36:54
that's an amalgamation of fiction and action.

Unknown Speaker 36:57
But here's those seem like my dad, there was always bears coming around. I grew up in northern Ontario, similar George and

Unknown Speaker 37:06
there was always bears coming around where I grew up. We're always having to shoot bears and then what do you do with the bear we drive it to the dump? Right? Okay, so this is a memory

Unknown Speaker 37:17
of that.

Unknown Speaker 37:19
When we we got so my my dad shot a bear, he shot numerous bad but isn't an example where he shot a bear and then my brother and I, and my father took the bear to sit down to dispose of it. When we got to sit down. A dozen or so other vehicles were parked there. Several people stood with rifles aimed down into the pit. As we drill near, I saw three dead there's mine gravel, at one a large man for for cause the bears head close to his. And then as he smiled, a woman snapped pictures. A similar scene was going on at another carves a few feet away. Bear hunters, my father sneered, and then had it. Come on, boys, give me a hand.

Unknown Speaker 38:07
I waited in the front of the truck, looking out the back window as my father and brothers, of course over the tailgate and let us draw on the ground. One picture, one of the men in the crowd asked my daughter, nope, he said, he and my brother drag the dead bear the edge of the large city with the help of a couple of bystanders costume to the mask below. My father wiped his hands in his pants and walk back to the chuck and my brother close behind.

Unknown Speaker 38:38
He didn't say a word on the whole chip home, already divided another cigarette just whistled a couple of tunes. I didn't recognize that he must have learned earlier in his life. As he drove up the road, he said, animals remember how you treat them. Even a dead animal remembers. Just because they're dead doesn't mean they've gone. There's a right way to kill and a wrong way.

Unknown Speaker 39:05
My dad isn't an evil story.

Unknown Speaker 39:09
I made up all the conversation because I didn't know I remember going to the dump. I remember the people I remember the pictures, all of that, but I don't remember what anybody said. I don't remember conversation, unfortunately.

Unknown Speaker 39:21
So you're, you're stuck. You're either. You either think, as Pearl said, You've tried to figure out a way to make it believable that fits the story.

Unknown Speaker 39:33
And if it works, works, I mean, that's I

Unknown Speaker 39:37
don't want to go too long.

Unknown Speaker 39:41
Poetry, which is what I

Unknown Speaker 39:45
started writing and I had to learn all about writing fiction, and nonfiction, a lot of learned a lot of it.

Unknown Speaker 39:52
She's a very kind teacher.

Unknown Speaker 39:57
But for me, poetry has always been as I said,

Unknown Speaker 40:00
Melting Pot and I wrote this poem in Chiang Mai. I spent the winter there and I was asked to write a poem for an anthology called Victoria and I said, Well, I'm in Chiang Mai. I said, Well, can you write about Chiang Mai and Victoria and I said, Okay, I'll try.

Unknown Speaker 40:14
And I wrote a poem called distorted fast, which just talk.

Unknown Speaker 40:20
I didn't know I was going to do this when I wrote the poem, came out that way.

Unknown Speaker 40:26
And it's a poem about my brother who died of esophageal cancer in August. He's my younger brother. He's the same brother in that story. And this is kind of what came from. Remember, it's a melting pot. And I'm with that.

Unknown Speaker 40:42
The last days of my brother's life, where a jumble of Rush starts to die and are always out of place. When the days take away and nothing. There's little the rest of us can do with greed. I escaped to Chiang Mai, where orchids grow wired to the size of palm trees that lie in a 700 year old Christian mold. I remember I'm reminded of Victoria wearing a miniature walls of wet rock are broken only by a few Southern Red Sea drums. Bunch with colorful Adonia like 15 foot rhododendrons crowd the side of buildings and persist in their green despite inches of snow. All winter, the cloud is turquoise over dois deck, bending snow rain, parse trees shed their leaves and grass Browns to straw.

Unknown Speaker 41:36
Like the boulevards of Victoria in August. Today is a waste of human human and road jam with tough dumps and song towels. I remember my brothers were at cruisers parked in front of the Empress Hotel after dinner at the Santa Monica fender to tell me a joke about an elephant. The summer Egon both of us times there's one more ingredient to mix with rain sunshine and a car burning oil.

Unknown Speaker 42:05
Now in the heat or sang my I'm amazed how cities crawl inside is to come with our blood carries between Oregon memories the work of a lot of tissue, but nothing liquid is permanent. With each heartbeat my brother drains from me and I struggled with find the faint pulse of this sort of that memory like saying goodbye to Amanda.

Unknown Speaker 42:29
How I watched the species cruiser abruptly change lanes as he joined the ferry faster. His brake lights not coming on.

Unknown Speaker 42:38
Most of life is water the rest sunshine bits of gravel. It is six months since his death. And I still can't speak of that instead I speak of running water and two cities in blue in the distance mountains promised to keep us safe. But Can anything

Unknown Speaker 43:02
we'll take a

Unknown Speaker 43:17
short break now

Unknown Speaker 43:19
back and then we'll come back and begin again

Unknown Speaker 43:25
until it will be done.

Unknown Speaker 43:43
Thank you.

Unknown Speaker 43:45
I've known Maggie for many years since coming to Salt Spring and I only just found out some things about her. I didn't realize that she was writing a

Unknown Speaker 43:56
story about her mother's life. That's something that is very powerful for me. I feel that that's a really important kind of story. She's

Unknown Speaker 44:08
an activist, psychotherapist, and has had journalism published in many national magazines and she's household publish her creative writing and Prairie Fire room and other voices.

Unknown Speaker 44:24
And she's currently I heard that she has a manuscript out right now. So I'll cross my fingers on that. So he is writing a memoir in two voices, which is more of a challenge. I'm sure hopefully we can talk about that as well. So he's amazing

Unknown Speaker 44:49
I feel like I've been pushed out here with the big boys and girls so I'm a little bit nervous.

Unknown Speaker 44:58
I mean, it started by

Unknown Speaker 45:00
I just said, okay, okay, I'm gonna start by just reading a short piece about how this manuscript came to be and then talk about it a little bit and then read a little bit more in the two voices.

Unknown Speaker 45:16
I'm gonna speak with you, my mother said, we were lying at opposite ends of her long white couch, our legs and tangled, mine and blue jeans and hers and red polyester slabs. About what I said. I want to say goodbye. The light has gone out. She stared at me through her thick black frame glasses. When I'm wrong, I'd like you to write everything down very quickly before you forget. I close my eyes and asked her to massage my feet. Her delicate hands on my bare skin since tingling sensations throughout my body. It's like the rock they said. When I opened my eyes. I saw tears rolling down her cheeks.

Unknown Speaker 45:59
Get some papers. She ordered me. You have to write everything down. I got up and found the red spiral notebook on the bookcase. How shall I begin? We have to take notes on the last year. Okay, I said curling up as my end of the couch.

Unknown Speaker 46:16
It began with a lot of heavy weather. She said there was a move. We can embellish it later. Sometimes I wrote. I wrote this down. I can't remember the right order. She hesitated started picking lint off a folded blanket. While mom just say it in whatever way it comes off sorted out later.

Unknown Speaker 46:36
You have a lot of script to work from if you ever feel like doing it. she gestured towards open shelving covered with clips, loose leaf papers, black binders and pockets of envelopes found with rubber bands. This is all yours now she said and fell silent for a while. Put a line underneath to indicate it's not finished. You might find it awful. She looked at me looking at her write down what I'm saying? She said impatiently, I wrote.

Unknown Speaker 47:07
So I had thought that this commitment to my mother, my mother was a writer. And she had a very well documented life that as you can see, in that passage, she she left me. But I thought that I was just promising her that I would kind of record this straightforward tale of old age dementia in nursing homes and dying simple, really.

Unknown Speaker 47:31
But it really became clear to me as I engaged in this project that I couldn't write about her last years without writing about her life, which meant going into all those papers and finding out the parts of her story that I had avoided knowing all my life. And now I couldn't ask her about it because she didn't have the she was losing her mind. So I didn't really know what I was getting into. And I often wondered what was I thinking it was almost as if there was someone other than myself who had made that promise to her and someone other than myself who had saved all those boxes of paper. But despite myself, I became very seduced by the story. It's a really grand story of

Unknown Speaker 48:12
immigration and refugees and living in three continents, Africa, Canada, England, and I became very consumed by the story. And I became very

Unknown Speaker 48:23
felonious carrying my mother's voice in a way I had never heard it partly through the words that she left and partly through a beginning of an imaginative process that was beginning to take place inside of me. And I was seeing my mother more and more as a woman who had a passion for writing, who wrote all her life, and yet had a silence voice in a certain kind of way. So this woman who was more than my mother began to really

Unknown Speaker 48:51
seed inside of me and I became determined that she had to tell her story, and she had to tell it in her own way. And that I wanted her to tell her truth. And I very stubborn about this, despite all kinds of various advice on how to put a book together, that she had to tell this story. But I created, of course, you know, a whole host of problems for myself. One was structural, trying to kind of move back and forth. And a story that was told in two first persons was a little bit of a challenge. And also moving through the kind of the Nursing Home Story at one level, and then this recreation of my mother's life.

Unknown Speaker 49:33
And then the question, of course, you know, building on what Robert was saying around when he's writing this piece about his father, what is the truth? I mean, my mother, as Divini diarist are correspond and recorded selectively, and I have selected from her selections. So I've chosen fragments of letters from hundreds and hundreds of letters and some of the letters that haven't even read and I chose certain

Unknown Speaker 50:00
details there are passages and events from her diaries that caught my attention that seem to speak to something important. But I often asked myself in that process was truth narrowing or widening, I couldn't tell. And this tangled me up sometimes are almost hopelessly and at times I had to just put this whole manuscript,

Unknown Speaker 50:22
put this whole manuscript aside for months at a time, I couldn't figure out how I can recreate recreate her truth in a way that was true for her and sit down beside my own memory of her. How could I reconcile some of the pieces of her story that seemed not to fit together? She had one version and letters and another in her diaries?

Unknown Speaker 50:45
How could my mother and I come to a shared story? Did we need to Howard my mother's story, real or imagined, helped me understand my own life, my own place?

Unknown Speaker 50:57
Without a relevant question. And what about my own story? What was I going to live in? What was I going to leave out, I made my own choices just as she did. And then with the choices that I made, about her story and about my story, I embellished them.

Unknown Speaker 51:16
But I can say this is a struggle to, to thread together my story, her story, and my reflections on her story, I came to know something about where I come from, that I didn't know before, as an immigrant child didn't have a history except in little bits and pieces.

Unknown Speaker 51:35
I became part of a long history that stretched me, not stretched me thin, but stretched me into a bigger, a big fat muscle place that belonging. And that's real. And that's true.

Unknown Speaker 51:50
So I'm going to read this short piece in my mother's voice. And the setup to this piece is that my parents are in England. My father was a refugee, a Jewish refugee from the Nazis who had gone to Kenya. And my mother had gone to Kenya with the British Army, and they began this

Unknown Speaker 52:10
romance there. They were both interested, idealistic, socialistic, internationalist types. And in this sort of, they had left Kenya and come to England, and they've been in England, two years, my mother's homeland, and my father, things aren't going all that well. And my father has just told my mother that he's quitting his job, and that

Unknown Speaker 52:33
they're going to be moving to Canada.

Unknown Speaker 52:39
My whisper No, surprise me. The words had hopped in and I could not put it back with not what will you do? He asked scathingly. You don't have a job or any money? What would I do there? I said bitterly. Here I can move back in with mom paw ma will help with the children and I'll get a job or complete or when you're settled. He walked out, slam the door. I sat and mobile at the table. The raucous sounds coming from the rookery in the nearby cluster of trees reminded me of my grandfather's cottage, where my sister and I would spend part of our summer holidays, and where we would look through old lattice windows seven to the two foot thick stone walls, and see rocks flying over the ruins of Hardwick Hall, which saw the story when had been smashed by a cannonball from Cromwell's army.

Unknown Speaker 53:33
I sat until magics little hand came to rest online. And then I got up and began to prepare the suffer

Unknown Speaker 53:42
Wolfgang acquiesce because he had no choice. And because he didn't want to lose me. And because he admitted that arriving in a foreign country as an unemployed family of four would be impossible. So I was with my parents again. And because they took care of the children, I could work.

Unknown Speaker 54:01
To my surprise, I enjoyed working on the buses. She had taken the job as a conductor some

Unknown Speaker 54:08
open back as the buses in England, the conductor or the conductor's would people get on the back of the bus and they would pay.

Unknown Speaker 54:18
As faltering to winter my hands and feet were constantly cold, my breath, a freezing missed the job and anonymous in the course sexual jokes in the lunchroom, aggravating beyond belief. And yet I found a strange companionship. I saw people I had known all my life. I enjoy talking with strangers. When I wanted to work in the early morning, I felt a glow of belonging, a kinship with the miners waiting for their buses, the night shifts turning out of the factories, the milk lorry drivers and the news agent on the corner who was just turning on his wife as I walked past. I studied the past

Unknown Speaker 55:00
passengers created stories out of the cut of a child's hair, how a color rode high on a neck, and unguarded profile, this way of the hips of a young man in his working clothes, and the hands that revealed so much as they handed over their money.

Unknown Speaker 55:18
I remembered walking to work at cheap Regeneron and coal with its flaring chimneys, and they felt the love that accompanies the knowledge of impending loss.

Unknown Speaker 55:30
So when that piece I put together, you know, this is the creation process, I put together.

Unknown Speaker 55:38
Some descriptions borrowed from what my mother had wrote in her diary about working on the process, and incorporated a childhood memory. And I created a scene out of her description of this conflict with my father. So it's an act of imagination, but it also has

Unknown Speaker 55:59
the pieces of it are all true.

Unknown Speaker 56:03
As far as I know. So I would just want to read one more short piece which is in my voice, just to give you kind of a sense of how I'm trying to move back and forward

Unknown Speaker 56:14
in the story.

Unknown Speaker 56:17
My mother rarely heard the telephone ringing. As she slipped further towards silence, it seemed that sometimes she had lost interest in speech. While I was speaking story and wanting connection. Mandy helped her to the telephone, but I felt only emptiness coming through the webinar. Do you want me to do the talking my master? Yes, there, she mumbled. At least she knew it was me. Ma'am. I've been doing what you asked me to. I've been writing down your story. I hope you don't mind. I'm telling it in my own way. She wasn't listening.

Unknown Speaker 56:51
Where are you? Here she is. I deflated at home. She said, I wonder what to do about that great, big, awesome, sad that she lives in the library? Are these random words? Is she thinking of her patriarchal grandfather give his library of Victorian novels? Or is this the rather assertive commentary on my father or some deep colonial notion of Africa? Can I just let go of having to figure everything out to find meaning and every confused word? She started Oh, he's in the basement now. Well, I don't like him. There's no basement, Mom, I said, but she had gone to some other place and she didn't return. And I turned my eyes to the photograph of my mother and myself. pinned to the bed to the bulletin board. Perhaps four years old, sitting on a park bench, looking over grassy fields forwarded with trees. Her arm is loose around me and I am nestled at her side, short, chubby legs dangling. This black and white photograph had led us into vivid life. Today, I found it. And I have started in the green breathing world around us and the itchiness of the red threads and the brown sweater and a happiness in my heart. This memory lifted my body which knew without any doubt that she loved me.

Unknown Speaker 58:13
That day, I had turned the photograph upside down, because it challenged my beliefs that my mother was a woman who didn't know how to love and my belief that I did not love her. But then I turned the photograph case up again and placed it on my bulletin board. Now I knew that I loved her and now I was losing her.

Unknown Speaker 59:00
Thank you

Unknown Speaker 59:04
our next reader is Kevin Patterson was a man that never ceases to amaze me. First of all, he's a full time doctor and he's been. He's gone up to a sense in the Arctic and also gone to Afghanistan, which is to me quite shattering. And also he has managed to sail by himself solo from Hawaii to Victoria was also shuttering to me.

Unknown Speaker 59:32
And on top of that, he is an amazing writer. He's written what I think is one of the best nonfiction books with

Unknown Speaker 59:40
which is the water in between. I found it riveting gripping.

Unknown Speaker 59:45
book of short stories the country cold and amazing novel based on experience in north of consumption and he's working on always working on future books. He's very prolific and energetic.

Unknown Speaker 59:59
Give

Unknown Speaker 1:00:00 Yeah

Unknown Speaker 1:00:12 God bless to have EP

Unknown Speaker 1:00:16 this should mean that cool

Unknown Speaker 1:00:21 gives the island an indoor pool and then launches a writing program on Saltspring. Island.

Unknown Speaker 1:00:28 Unbelievable.

Unknown Speaker 1:00:29 So this is

Unknown Speaker 1:00:32 the sequel to the water in between. And I guess it's done, I think it's done, it might have done

Unknown Speaker 1:00:40 it right now to go in with a title of a mercurial see. And that will change half a dozen times between now and its appearance. So we'll just call it the sequel for now. And it's about another trip I made across the ocean a couple of years ago down to French Polynesia, to the mark Hayes's

Unknown Speaker 1:01:03 and then back up to Hawaii and home again, and it's about my twin brother, who died of AIDS a couple of years ago. And it's about the ocean, about weather and

Unknown Speaker 1:01:16 where weather comes from, what makes it what it means. So I'm going to read from the first couple of chapters

Unknown Speaker 1:01:28 in men's nautical tables, JD Potter, London 1942 sanction for use in the Royal Navy price, 27 shillings and six pence states in its table distance of the sea horizon, page 12. In my coffee, it smells like clothes and wet wool, that at a height of I have one foot, the sea horizon is 1.15 miles away. That is, treading water and flat sees your eyes one foot above the water, you can see 1.15 miles of water, all other things being perfect. This surprises me. When I have swam in the sea 1000s of miles from shore and flat columns that appear unlikely ever to end. It hasn't seemed to me that the horizon was as far away as that. Admittedly, there's no such thing as perfect visibility out there, even when the air is motionless and necessary condition for me to slip nervously into the water under evaporation makes the hair shimmer and they eat more substantially. Even after days and days of calm. There is always the swell, shuttering its way south from the winter storms and the Gulf of Alaska. This persists even into midsummer and begins again at the first sign of its waning when the swell sags and drops a swimmer into its trough. The Horizon approaches to within only a few 100 feet. The crests of those great ocean swells penning the swimmer in as he drops. The sensation provides an estimation of what krill must feel the last moments of their briny lives as a baleen whale sucks them in. The troughs move on of course, those troughs have all sorts due and soon as well as picking you up faster and higher than seems at all reasonable. If the crest is 12 feet above sea level and your head manages to protrude above is another foot than the distance of the horizon has now become 4.14 miles. Three more miles of sight just by writing as well. If you're sitting in the cockpit of a 30 year old concrete sailboat named seamos another six feet higher than our water treading and swell lifted example the horizon becomes five miles climb 50 feet to the masthead of that boat in the water stretches 8.67 miles before it disappears against the shimmering sky

Unknown Speaker 1:04:00 under your gauge shimmers.

Unknown Speaker 1:04:13 Listen

Unknown Speaker 1:04:17 I guess it's not that

Unknown Speaker 1:04:22 my publisher

Unknown Speaker 1:04:25 glistens 200 square miles of ocean. Immediately below you the sailboat pitches and Yas slaley. In the undulating sea, it isn't necessary to hold on. But if you become frightened and hold on too tightly, your arms will tire and if you fall to the deck from this height you will climb no more mass.

Unknown Speaker 1:04:48 The interaction between the waves from the polar storms to both the north and the south setup complex and irregular interference patterns and as well. The boat moves smoothly

Unknown Speaker 1:05:00 is like a nervous horse. Like a horse. When it moves faster, it moves more smoothly, but it cannot be moving less fast or less smoothly than it is in this motionless air and the mass head spools and spins and pitches like a cartoon prizefighter moments before hitting the canvas.

Unknown Speaker 1:05:21 Below the crew of the little sailboat lies in a tangle of awkwardly angled limbs. We hold our elbows over our eyes to shield ourselves from the glare and shift often to scratch our bellies.

Unknown Speaker 1:05:35 When the pitch when the boat pitches Oddly, the two of us grab to the cockpit combing to stop from slipping from our purchase. When this happens, we exchange a forceful word of commiseration and protest. We are deeply Brown and skinny. We've been eating noodles and rice for a month now. There have been no showers in this time. And in that male way things are beginning to degenerate a little.

Unknown Speaker 1:06:03 When we speak, which is not often every third word is one of commiseration or protests.

Unknown Speaker 1:06:11 Let go the trousers and masthead and rise high into the sky to 10 30,000 feet above the water. The horizon is now 22 miles away. The boat below has become difficult to discern and the metallically shining ocean all around it. This is the altitude of aircraft enroute to Hawaii 1000 miles off to the races to the west. It is disappointing that from his height, the horizon is not farther away. When one rises the first 12 feet one sees eight times as far another 30,000 feet higher. And once he's only 22 Miles three times farther, from whatever height it is observed. The horizon is exactly it's defined in distance away. This is not a matter of acuity envision, it would not matter how powerful the telescope was used to study it. Eight miles from the cockpit observer, the water disappears and pass that is gone. If the ocean was flat as the polished aluminum making sheet it looks like under there, out there under the sun. And if you look harder, you would see farther in demonstrating that you don't. The first Galilean telescopes reconfirmed the Greek idea of the world as spherical ships appear on the horizon first as disembodied topsails. And then as they make their way to shore, the working canvas and finally the halls become visible. It is as true at 50 times magnification as it is at one, the world is round and Columbus and any other sailor with enough enough geometry to work in Astro.

Unknown Speaker 1:07:45 Picture, a cone standing on the water, it's tick is at the height of your eyes, the sides set obliquely to the horizon. When a cone is very low, when you're treading water, its base is almost flat. But the larger the cone grows, the less flat the base is, the more important becomes the fact that the cone sits not on a plane, but a sphere and the consequent wave curves out and away from the sides of the cone and the sidelines of the observer. This is why the initial satisfyingly large increases in range of sight are not sustained with further increases in height of art.

Unknown Speaker 1:08:22 The more the observer rises, the faster the Earth turns away. The formula for calculating the distance from the eye to the horizon would be obvious to the 10th grade version of ourselves on and protesting the irrelevance of staggering in geometry. And the habit tangents have of being at right angles to radiuses. Once the right angle runs once the right sided triangle is identified, with the distance between the observer and the sea horizon, forming one side, the radius of the Earth another and the radius of the Earth plus the height of the observer the other, the calculation of the sea horizon is easy. We know what the radius of the Earth is 6371 kilometers, and we know what that added to the height of the observer is so we have two of the three sides of the right triangle. Subtracting the largest box from the next largest box gives the other small box and the distance of the seat horizon.

Unknown Speaker 1:09:17 Continuing your sense it's a spy plane altitude 140,000 feet, Hawaii becomes visible. Now the globe is opening before you quickly. The sailboat is long ago loss of eyesight though as telescope was a sort carried on spy planes can take it out again, on a sailboat where my friend and I are growing frustrated with the motionless air and there are scant progress. There is some discussion about Hawaii. It is closer to us than French Polynesia, where we had said we were going and it would be an easy downwind run to get there. But the conversation does not proceed much further. Nothing important is broken and no one is sick. On the contrary, apart from a mountain

Unknown Speaker 1:10:00 restlessness that began as a Winslow, we are almost untroubled. We arrived with a cool Dawn as the horizon brightens. And before we are even done scratching, the sky is as bright as admits the intensity of the blues, the enormous sky the big blue black waves rising in the distance the to colored water closer at hand drifting past is like paint from A to

Unknown Speaker 1:10:25 all this light everywhere, even within the boat under the deck, we squint

Unknown Speaker 1:10:32 one bit that's lovely. Those mornings after our heads clear, we plot our coordinates on the chart of the North Pacific we've been maintaining, and we study the line we're making on it meandering south, the daily increments of 100 and a few miles seem paltry, alongside the 2000. We've come along the 2000 Miles yet to go but that wandering pencil lead line leading from Vancouver Island, is all water We've sailed upon daydreaming and cussing. We want to get into Ebola, but it hasn't been like the last few 1000 Miles has been so bad. The sauce marched through our heads quickly. Now as much a part of the morning ritual was scratching. We've even stopped saying words aloud. Coffee has prepared the sense of the beans as their ground and sharply pointed in the absence of a den of competing sense, diesel exhausts wood, smoke and hairspray and lawn clippings. There's only the sea air clean and salted at an unexpectedly dry tasting and our own not inconsiderable selves. We haven't enough fresh water to afford showers and so by this point, we scan the skies for the prospect of squalls. When the sky darkens, we leap onto the deck with bodies of head and shoulders and old space body bars. Otherwise, we do our best with seawater bucket showers and a careful eye to wind direction essential on a sailboat in any event, more essential yeah three weeks into a long ocean passage in the tropical heat on a small boat like crewed by two men with robust adequate function.

Unknown Speaker 1:12:22 My brother Tom went to junior high school in the late 1970s At the height of a Welcome Back Kotter era, even within the limited aesthetic aspirations of that pursuit and anatomically obvious time, the decisions he made about eyewear and synthetic fabric sweaters remain alarming.

Unknown Speaker 1:12:42 In photographs it looks like a straw stuff and elongated sock puppet Prosser brown ale barber hair silky teenaged whiskers unraveling knitted acrylic shut out from each of the prominent extremities. He was my twin and in this respect and in some others who were the same stick insect limbs, eyelashes that hung up after noses and knees and shoulders and elbows like Calabash have stuck together with Fiddlesticks dowels. We were parodies of the idea of youthful beauty.

Unknown Speaker 1:13:12 paging through our yearbooks from that time The striking thing was how hotly contended the not a good look prize was face after face grimaces out from under feathered hair and sideburns like many beards tend to do monogrammed eyeglasses with lens lenses. The size of ashtrays held together with both plastic frames hanging heavily on those simple faces would look good then it could not have been any other era.

Unknown Speaker 1:13:40 In our rural Manitoba hometown right within curious certainty, he was considered smart. I tripped and daydreamed my way through most of junior and senior high school. In contrast, while he drew the admiration of provincial science, fair judges exasperation and fashion matters, perhaps, with poor French teachers and educational psychologists. He was brilliant, and in the manner of brilliant boys in such towns terrified, though he had other more compelling reasons to be terrified to junior in high school was the first time in our lives that we spent our days more than 15 feet apart from one another, in different classrooms and among different friends, and inevitable stead of individuation between us it was more painful than our vocabularies could provide for. Until then, we had done the same homework together at night. He showing me the way, explaining the subtleties of long division and trigonometry and continuing on far as the homework assignments into the centricity is of LaMarcus evolutionary theory as a Stalinist Susie as the theory underlying the differences between heavy water and light water reactors, and the stages of stellar nuclear fusion that lead to a supernova. It seems to me implausible now that a 13 year old could discuss

Unknown Speaker 1:15:00 to these topics in depth, nevertheless, late into the night, from the bottom bunk bed up into my mattress as I listened to him mostly wordlessly, when I became confused, he knew it without me saying anything. And three feet below me, he backed up, and more slowly explained how the fusion processes that create iron consumes rather than produces energy, unlike every other preceding step, a fusion and a star's life.

Unknown Speaker 1:15:28 I'm not sure what's different about iron, I think it's just like combustion here on Earth. There are things that are more flammable and things that are less gasoline burns easily, but wet paper consumes more heat than it produces when he tried to burn it like that. So how come the whole universe hasn't burned or fuse?

Unknown Speaker 1:15:48 Eventually, maybe it will, iron and red and gold and all the other heavy but not radioactive elements. But it's not old enough yet. It's still almost all hydrogen and a wee bit of helium. Everything else is just a trace. funny to think, though, that everything that isn't hydrogen or helium comes from a supernova, like you and me, and everything around us, started for us. Exactly. How old is our Sun? Maybe 6 billion years? And how old is the universe? 13 billion years. But that's time for lots and lots of supernovas, the stars that are big enough to end up that way burn up in 100 million years or less. I don't get what it means that a supernova exploded. It's like this big star uses evidence useful fuel. How does?

Unknown Speaker 1:16:34 How it how can it go just run out of gas and cool down. While it does, it's just that it does that so fast, it collapses in on itself hard enough to make both to make more heavy elements and to send them out as clouds of carbon, and iron and everything into space. Like when they blow up those buildings so that they collapse in on themselves, they send out big clouds of dust in imploded. Where does all the light come from the heat of the collapse. Think of it like stored energy like water pumped up a water tower, so long as the pump is plugged in and holds the start out the water up. But when it shuts off all at once everything comes falling down at once. And if it could gush of energy,

Unknown Speaker 1:17:17 which is what makes all the heavy elements like gold and stuff.

Unknown Speaker 1:17:21 It seems strange because it is the energy masters involved are on a completely different scale than anything we know about living on Earth. Even these wet paper analogies aren't really that useful.

Unknown Speaker 1:17:33 It was like having a tutor who knew even thoughts in your head, which probably stops thanks.

Unknown Speaker 1:18:00 Our last reader is Kevin. George, suppose

Unknown Speaker 1:18:06 he's involved with Saltspring.

Unknown Speaker 1:18:10 His first book of poetry called anything of the moon, which I think is a lovely title was shortlisted for a DC Book Award. And he's now work published his second book in the fall called London landmarks. And it's about a memoir about

Unknown Speaker 1:18:31 phone Ontario in the 1950s and 60s, which I have a real connection with since I was born in the same province. So I'll be really interested to see what he does with that.

Unknown Speaker 1:18:51 Thank you, thank you all for coming. And my apologies to the people over in the annex for not being able to see quite as well.

Unknown Speaker 1:19:00 I came to Canada with my family in 1957 at the age of seven and a bit, and we went through to London, Ontario, where we lived for 10 years

Unknown Speaker 1:19:12 until I was 17 and a bit and then we moved to Vancouver.

Unknown Speaker 1:19:17 If you have never been there or don't know, London

Unknown Speaker 1:19:21 is a medium sized city halfway between Toronto and Windsor. At that time, it was about 200,000 people and by now I assume it's bigger than I don't know how big it is.

Unknown Speaker 1:19:33 As Robert said, The this book that's coming out in the fall is called London landmarks.

Unknown Speaker 1:19:39 It consists of about two dozen fairly short pieces, three, four or five pages long most of them

Unknown Speaker 1:19:47 each section

Unknown Speaker 1:19:48 starts with identifying and a little bit describing something in London or building a street or neighborhood or bridge. So in that

Unknown Speaker 1:20:00 That sounds it's a sort of a kind of a fake guidebook.

Unknown Speaker 1:20:05 Though if anybody actually used it that it would be very disconcerting because most of the landmarks that are mentioned in it no longer exist. Some of them may never have existed.

Unknown Speaker 1:20:16 And from these from the starting points each of the sections then wanders off on its own course into memory and speculation and fiction and so on.

Unknown Speaker 1:20:28 So Kathy said I had 10 minutes was selected only one of the sections in the book to read to because I think it may be a little bit germane to the to the theme of this evening.

Unknown Speaker 1:20:39 So this is landmark number 20 Cutty Sark.

Unknown Speaker 1:20:45 To northeast of Richmond, there was a White House on Oxford Street, onto the front of which a little shop that was built, where model airplane kits were sold.

Unknown Speaker 1:20:56 I came across the store and became an obituary sometime after my first introduction to the strange world of model building.

Unknown Speaker 1:21:04 A family friend has given me a box with a picture of a B 52 Bomber on it. On the left from my first birthday in Canada.

Unknown Speaker 1:21:12 That's in the tube of glue

Unknown Speaker 1:21:15 inside with three little trees major brown plastic, each with around narrow trunk, similar branches, and parts of an airplane attached like fruit to the branch tips.

Unknown Speaker 1:21:28 And with a folded sheet of paper showing a long list of sequential diagrams of how the parts were to be put together to make an eight inch long model of the bomber in flight.

Unknown Speaker 1:21:41 There were also two clear plastic bits that could be snapped together to make a display stand with a pivot. That allowed with finished airplane to climb for dive, or bank.

Unknown Speaker 1:21:54 I glued it together in one afternoon, a sheet of newspaper on the dining room table and the instructions unfolded in front of me.

Unknown Speaker 1:22:02 I loved every minute of it.

Unknown Speaker 1:22:05 Here was a picture of an aileron that showed where on the when it's two tabs were to fit into two slots. And here was the piece with the tabs exactly as illustrated.

Unknown Speaker 1:22:17 Snap it off it's plastic branch, squeeze on glue inserted where it along, hold it for a bit of a glue partial reset, and then go on to the next step.

Unknown Speaker 1:22:30 Now though, the fumes from the glue contributed something to the euphoria of creation.

Unknown Speaker 1:22:36 But I remember loving the sheer progressive logic of at all

Unknown Speaker 1:22:40 the infallibility of construction. The reliable face that for every tab a there was a slot be.

Unknown Speaker 1:22:50 Nevermind that the end result of that first model was quite dreadful. A few pieces had broken when I snapped them off their retaining tree so that the jet engines on the left wing were distinctly crooked, and one of the gutter of canopies was missing altogether. I also didn't know about wiping off excess glue for drying, and the plane ended up with gobs and smears of hardened glue all over the wings, and fuselage and Windows.

Unknown Speaker 1:23:18 All in all, perched on a little stand. It looked as if it were coming in for a crash landing after flying through the eye of a nuclear explosion.

Unknown Speaker 1:23:29 But none of that mattered. The building of it has been the point.

Unknown Speaker 1:23:35 And so I discovered the hobby store on Oxford Street and went back for more over the years that followed.

Unknown Speaker 1:23:41 I eventually learned how to cut the pieces off the retaining framework with a knife and sand down the residual plastic, how to apply glue properly, and how to paint the pieces. I acquired little glass jars and colored paints learn how to shake them so the solvent and pigments mixed properly, and everything else it took to get the right results.

Unknown Speaker 1:24:06 I don't have a lot of fighter planes and bombers and tanks. We were in the middle of the Cold War and World War Two but still a recent memory. So there was probably a reason for all the military models. But I don't if that was the only factor.

Unknown Speaker 1:24:21 These things were intricate, with lots of complicated parts.

Unknown Speaker 1:24:26 I never thought of them actually dropping bombs or scraping columns of refugees, how to glue the bombs on so they wouldn't fall off, and how to position the tanks cannon at a rakish angle. These were the technical and aesthetic issues.

Unknown Speaker 1:24:43 Even later, when my interests switch to making models of cars. The point was not just that the wheels should turn or the doors open, but that the assembly should be satisfying that the paintwork should cover the scenes and that the chrome should clean

Unknown Speaker 1:25:02 Did I see a connection between my mobile hot rods and the real cars I saw the car show with the Western fare? Well, yes, of course. But that wasn't the point. Where it was, it was so only to the extent that the car is under the lights with the girls in bathing suits beside them. Silt sashes with manufacturer's name stretching from shoulder to opposite hip, were also on display. They weren't useful. The cars weren't anything anyone would actually drive to Loblaws for a jug of milk. They were an idea of something made plastic so to speak.

Unknown Speaker 1:25:42 Most of us gave up making models at a certain age. Probably the same age, we discovered we lived in a real world in which B 50 twos flew unseen overhead with real bombs ready to drop,

Unknown Speaker 1:25:56 and in which we could actually drive real cars, or at least be driven by older brothers who had a license.

Unknown Speaker 1:26:03 Also, no doubt the same age we discovered real girls, and the infinitely more complex concepts of assembly, for which there were no folded sheets of explanation.

Unknown Speaker 1:26:15 Nevermind all the smirks that accompany the new meanings of tab a and slug B.

Unknown Speaker 1:26:24 But strangely, I went the other way.

Unknown Speaker 1:26:27 At 17 I bought a huge model of the concert.

Unknown Speaker 1:26:32 It took three months to build and when it was finished, it was three feet long and over two feet high, complete with rigging and little sailors on deck hauling on ropes.

Unknown Speaker 1:26:44 Rather than abandoned the idea of of models depicting an unreal world. I wanted to build a huge one that was as realistic as possible.

Unknown Speaker 1:26:54 I studied what I could about this last grade clipper ship, already an anachronism in the emergency age of steam, and read books about its final great race with the rival Thermopylae to set a record for the fastest London to Bombay run.

Unknown Speaker 1:27:12 I think it's the hole with a fine copper wash tinge here and there with green to capture the effects of the sea.

Unknown Speaker 1:27:20 Ice from the rigging with the crew thread defences taplow blocks into mahogany paint and gave the sailors jolly red headscarves.

Unknown Speaker 1:27:30 When the ship was finished, it sat on the desk in my room. Bob pointed East a papers minion jacket stern

Unknown Speaker 1:27:40 I wish I could say I started that desk in my final year of high school reading Conrad, but in fast

Unknown Speaker 1:27:51 school fond memory because the printer, but in fact, it was great well, physics and algebra that occupied my time.

Unknown Speaker 1:28:00 When we left for Vancouver, the movers placed the ship in a large cardboard box and fastened it to the bottom with nylon straps so it wouldn't come to harm on the leg.

Unknown Speaker 1:28:11 I don't know why we took it with us. It seemed inconceivable to me that we should not do I'm sure it added to the cost of the move.

Unknown Speaker 1:28:20 So while we rode the train, the cod historic majors journey across Canada in a truck.

Unknown Speaker 1:28:27 I imagine that now traveling westward across the prairies in a box once again. It's true of sailors turning their hands to the ropes with bedsteads and chests of drawers peeking around them like ships timbers on the high seas

Unknown Speaker 1:29:01 the idea now was to have some questions and some discussion but I was wondering if we could move the mic so we could pass it

Unknown Speaker 1:29:09 on time.

Unknown Speaker 1:29:32 comes into play

Unknown Speaker 1:29:44 Does anybody want a question they want to start with?

Unknown Speaker 1:29:53 Start with as Kevin question.

Unknown Speaker 1:29:59 Kevin on

Unknown Speaker 1:30:00 When I said before me about compensation

Unknown Speaker 1:30:05 when you were doing what I need to do

Unknown Speaker 1:30:09 for the approach that's what when you were at when you actually wrote it, and I kept I kept a journal

Unknown Speaker 1:30:19 and see there's a ton of time you know, I

Unknown Speaker 1:30:22 would get up at six in the morning and

Unknown Speaker 1:30:25 do my navigation and make up 650

Unknown Speaker 1:30:33 All the time in the world

Unknown Speaker 1:30:36 and so I would read and write all that time and and

Unknown Speaker 1:30:41 as far as travel writing project goes, a sailing trip

Unknown Speaker 1:30:47 needs just one imaginable and I've traveled my brain has kept shifting over and took a lot of luggage and all that other

Unknown Speaker 1:30:55 stuff nonsense of making your way through places you don't know where else but as he is, it's different. You know, there's a very easy rhythm that gets set up pretty quickly. And

Unknown Speaker 1:31:09 then and, and I rely on that tremendously the same thing

Unknown Speaker 1:31:19 Chris

Unknown Speaker 1:31:22 storm factor fixes

Unknown Speaker 1:31:28 everything

Unknown Speaker 1:31:33 was back. Absolutely. But, and the journal has all kinds of water spots all through.

Unknown Speaker 1:31:40 I mean, it was horrendous dark. I mean, you're alive.

Unknown Speaker 1:31:46 You have to feel free that is true and neopoints sailor, right, like my first trip. I mean, the first trip I've ever been on the ocean on any boat except the BC ferry route.

Unknown Speaker 1:31:59 So my ideas of what I wanted to do that is crazy storms probably be interpreted in that like, the spirit of stripe, was genuinely sincere. And you know, I think those seeds really probably were, you know, 20 feet or something. And I think the winds were 45 knots or something like that. But somebody stare at one of these accomplishments for instance, with a shrug that off as a passing

Unknown Speaker 1:32:28 summer.

Unknown Speaker 1:32:56 I think that it's dangerous and dull to, to take a lot of literal extracts from a journal and put that in a travel book, you're only kind of doing half of the job that you're obliged to, as a writer there I think, in as much as I don't know what your journal looks like, but mine is just full of banalities and self pity and nonsense and stubbed my toe when I was taking on the mainsail it really hurts and I took some Advil but it's still hurting a lot. And, and so I wouldn't, I would be too ashamed to show anyone else, the vast majority of my journal entries and beyond that, you know, I don't for both these sailing books, I I didn't start writing them until a couple of years after they were completed. And and that was good, I think because they don't they don't really settle out in your head. You know, you don't really have a sense of the over arching narrative structure at the time and so there's not many journal entries in either of the books

Unknown Speaker 1:34:04 for that reason, which isn't to say that the journal entries aren't super important they are but they have to be processed to make any sense I think

Unknown Speaker 1:34:16 mostly impressed

Unknown Speaker 1:34:20 went into the minut detail about

Unknown Speaker 1:34:24 sky

Unknown Speaker 1:34:28 pictures

Unknown Speaker 1:34:30 Grace

Unknown Speaker 1:34:38 thanks. Yeah, no, I was I was reading that out, especially as I was going through the formula for calculating the distance to the sea horizon. I was seized by a sudden anxiety because

Unknown Speaker 1:34:49 nobody's read these words before you guys are the first and and and I think that they may not appeal to people that aren't, you know, seized by

Unknown Speaker 1:35:00 I

Unknown Speaker 1:35:02 minutiae and intricacy and all that sort of thing. So I think I'm gonna have to dial back that a little bit and maybe leave the price egory In theory away.

Unknown Speaker 1:35:14 But that's what,

Unknown Speaker 1:35:16 that's what it's like B and C, you know, I mean, your mind's tools and coils and kind of wraps his way around little tiny things. And so, and that was a device in the book, you know, I'm trying to get across to the reader, how it is, you think when you're out there was not a lot to do. And looking at the ocean day after day after day after day, you find yourself, you know, obsessed, or I find myself obsessing over these crazy little things. And so, you know, the, in capturing narrative nonfiction, you know, there's what you say. And then there's, there's other things like that, you know, sort of the, the obsessive quality of the head gets reflected in a sort of an obsessive quality in their writing. And you can kind of get at truce in a backhanded way more completely than then by simply saying them explicitly. That's what I was trying to get done better

Unknown Speaker 1:36:13 than other people.

Unknown Speaker 1:36:15 Yeah,

Unknown Speaker 1:36:17 go ahead.

Unknown Speaker 1:36:19 I was gonna say something about about that conic section, Pythagorean Theorem stuff, which to me worked extremely well. And I think it's not Well, partly because

Unknown Speaker 1:36:33 the way of describing it, as you say, reflects the state of mind of the person on the boat. But more to the point, I think

Unknown Speaker 1:36:42 it it places the reader in that on that boat on that ocean, I mean, starting with the eye being one foot above the water, and then gradually expanding the perspective from that till you're looking at it from a satellites perspective. I think as a narrative device, I think it's perfect for Crete for placing the reader literally on the ocean. So all of that learned stuff

Unknown Speaker 1:37:08 is fine. It doesn't to me, it doesn't alienate me at all. I mean, I can follow exactly the working through the mathematics.

Unknown Speaker 1:37:15 By contrast, little, I felt very uncomfortable. In the second section with the cosmological stuff about supernovas and so on. There I, I felt, as Paul was saying, at the very beginning, there was a danger that the research and the scientific knowledge

Unknown Speaker 1:37:34 overtakes the actual narrative. I mean, I mean, it was fine. By and large, I mean, I never lost sense of the two brothers at night discussing this, but there was a danger that you would lose it, it was unlike the first part, which which function for the for the reader, as a as a, as a kind of point of view, the second part didn't work out well, for me, that's kind of

Unknown Speaker 1:38:01 time

Unknown Speaker 1:38:05 knock on the door.

Unknown Speaker 1:38:17 Again

Unknown Speaker 1:38:23 thought that was a danger that I might

Unknown Speaker 1:38:35 have to work

Unknown Speaker 1:38:37 through, worried

Unknown Speaker 1:38:42 about ourselves making that post your voice to speak differently, because they sounded like a scene by Michael, my brother and I did sentence sound like the same guy. In real life. That's, that's the point.

Unknown Speaker 1:38:56 gonna change for the sake of the book. Okay, with that, you bring up the point, which I like, for all I talk a lot about this idea. And I'd like to get everybody involved. So I'd like to ask, but the whole idea is when does when do you tweak it to fit the story? And when do you respect it? Like?

Unknown Speaker 1:39:17 I was talking before about, I've invented the dialogue of my father, but it has to be what he would have said. Like, that's the whole thing. So you know, I think you'd have to be careful. Like, if you're a twin, your brother's a twin. It's expected that you would sound the same.

Unknown Speaker 1:39:34 Can I just ask a question? I'll ask her a question about because you have one novel, that's historical, basically, research magazine and you have another novel Burning Ground, which you use a lot of your own experience wasn't any different writing more of a story that came out of what you had experienced or one that wasn't harder to write that and then want to write a story that wasn't the

Unknown Speaker 1:40:00 traps and have a different time period.

Unknown Speaker 1:40:05 Well, I think they were both difficult in their own way. Because, like Kevin said, when you're writing about the personnel, you have to get rid of all of the garbage in the banalities that nobody's really going to be interested in. So you have to just use some germ of something in your life to write about, although, because I set it at the fire tower that was interesting that that made it easier because I could use the details from the fire tower that I knew. So that made it easier and with the historical fiction.

Unknown Speaker 1:40:45 There was just so much that I was trying to work in that actually, as I said earlier, just deadened the story. And so I I needed to let go of that after a while and not worry so much about the about the historical aspect of it. I still had to keep every I wanted the the historical facts there. But I couldn't make everything fit the story. It's like Kevin just said about his brother, the narrative has to come first. And if if