Malarky tour 2012 and major weather events

I have been on the road with Malarky on and off since Sept. 23 when I began at the Brooklyn Book Festival followed by Ontario (Trent, Peterborough), THIN AIR Winnipeg International Writers Festival, Victoria Writers Festival, Wordstock Portland Writers Festival, Vancouver Writers Fest and I am just returned from the marvellous experience that is IFOA in Toronto.

Thank you to all those festivals who invited me, to the audiences and many readers I met, writers I read with and the staff and volunteers who work so hard at these festivals and my publisher Biblioasis for their stellar efforts on behalf of Malarky. I also thank the Canada Council for the Arts, the Writers Union and the BC Arts Council for support.

Obviously I have been greviously remiss with my weather reports and must take a big inhale and apologize for this. It is not that I haven’t been observing for I have, just have not quite managed to nail it onto the screen.

Yesterday’s weather events in New Jersey and New York give great pause. The ferocity. The build and how the weather pattern increased its speed on approach, thus making the predication even more challenging. One of the descriptions that has stayed with me from relatives in the middle of it was of the windows bending. The windows being bent (inwards I assume) from the power of the wind. And how fire and water co-existed throughout. Houses on fire in the Rockaways that were surrounded by water on all sides was another description I caught.

I send good thoughts and courage to those involved in recovery efforts and getting the lights turned back on. I am always impressed by the spirit of New Yorkers and was doubly impressed by noting friends who woke this morning there and immediately turned their thoughts and attention to how they might join volunteer efforts today in that city.

Over the next weeks I will catch up on some postings and thoughts about my experience on the road.

Stay warm and safe and thank you again.

Joe Biden endorses Malarky!

Tonight in the Vice Presidential debate we heard Joe Biden indicate the influence of my novel Malarky on him.
Behind every Vice-President is an episodic novel.

Buy the novel that inspired American politics ….

Toronto Review of Books interview

Kelli Deeth interviewed me for the Toronto Review of Books and I can say it’s one of my favourite interviews. Her questions on Malarky were carefully thought out and it’s clear arose from a very close reading of the novel. I was also grateful for her examination of who is absent from the novel … i.e. the daughters it’s the first time perhaps I’ve been asked about this. It reminds me again and again of how powerful a careful reading and excavation on any book can be and why, in my opinion, there’s often more power in being a reader than a writer.  I wish there was as much competition and desire to be a reader as there is to be a writer these days. Imagine if all job interviews commenced with the inquiry: so tell me what you are reading or what you have read?

I digress. Here’s a clip from Kelli Deeth’s interview and a link to the whole text.

9. I read that you spent ten years writing this book. What kept you going?

…Reading kept me going. It is what matters most. A single moment in publishing does not galvanize me as much as considering the interrelationship between many moments and how they speak to each other.

Finally I have an insatiable appetite for completely redundant information, so that keeps me very occupied and sustained – kinda like constant mental porridge.

Read Kelli Deeth’s Interview with Anakana Schofield here

Newsday note Malarky reading event in NY as a “must see”

Thanks to Wendy Smith and Newsday who cited my event with Amy Sohn and Joshua Henkin at the Brooklyn Book Festival in their list of 5 Must Sees at the 7th Annual Event in this recent article

That made for a lovely, warm welcome to Brooklyn last weekend. Photos and full report of extraordinary festival to follow shortly. Certainly a highlight of my year! Such admiration for Johnny Temple and the team of staff and volunteers who pull off this amazing festival. I wish every city could enjoy such a celebration of literature.

The book that ruined my life: Anakana Schofield

The Georgia Straight recently asked me the following question in relation to my appearence on Sunday Sept 29th at The Word on the Street 2012 : Which book changed your life?

Below was my response, published on their website and now here.

Since March 15, when I published a novel, I have been asked multiple times in interviews: which book changed your life?

If honest, I have not had a Pentecostal-change-of-my-life moment as a result of reading any book.

Ever.

The things that changed my life were my father dying one night in 1977, my son being born in 1999, getting a council flat or its equivalent in Vancouver, and a diagnosis of reflux in my left kidney.

It occurs to me that I have not considered the original question in broad enough terms. Which book has ruined my life?

BBC Radio 4 provides the answer. Last Thursday, not long after the above inquiry yet again ding-donged into my email (“Tell us about the book or author that changed your life”), I came upon a serialization of Geoffrey Household’s Rogue Male, Episode 5 of which was streaming live.

Rogue Male was a novel I studied and the only novel I have any memory of studying (do I need to check into a clinic?) for O-level English 25 years ago. It was a profound experience. We had to read it aloud. I was never ever asked to read aloud because I desperately wanted to read aloud. I had to suffer the most awful rendition of this novel aloud, which I duly tackled by reading the entire novel ahead silently. Chapters ahead, I’d read the whole book at my desk, while everyone else was still plodding through early chapters aloud. It was a racehorse reading of Rogue Male.

Mr. Household’s novel was a visceral experience. I read a novel about a man who lived under the ground like a mole. Just because. It didn’t matter why he lived under there. I was only captivated by the idea that people could live underground and therefore, obviously, did live underground. Right now. All around me. And because there was an authoritative male voice telling me. I too could go there.

With hindsight, perhaps the central heating wasn’t very good in our house because I can’t understand why I wanted, in the words of the Jam, to be Going Underground. I was an overly imaginative adolescent likely damaged by enforced listening to BBC Radio 2.

In anticipation of going back underground with Radio 4 last week, I searched up the novel online and felt a retroactive kick to the kidney to learn the book was a spy thriller! A classic spy thriller! Episode 5 delivered itself along with a sentence describing a man holding sight of another man in a crossfire.

There was no man killing any other man in the novel I read at that school desk. There was no spy on the run. There was just a man who wanted to live underground for a reason that made no impression on me, because I was too impressed by the concept you could live down there. Beneath Clarks Shoes. I was impaled on that image. Household could say whatever he wanted after that. I was gone. Underground.

Twenty-five years after the fact I learn that my most visceral literary influence may explain why I have never been able to imagine owning a home and flunked science.