Category Archives: Dispatches from the Road

AN ASTONISHING STORY ABOUT HUGH MACLENNAN

by Douglas Gibson

As you know from Stories About Storytellers I’ve long had a huge admiration for Hugh MacLennan. There’s a whole chapter in that book about him, full of admiring stories, showing how this man bestrode Canadian culture, carving a trail for other writers. You’ll recall that he won three Governor-General’s Awards for Fiction, but — just as important — also two for Non-Fiction, thanks to his wide-ranging essays.

My new book will have a chapter on him.  While most of the chapters are centred on a Province (“Saskatchewan!” or “The Coasts of B.C.”) his is simply “Hugh MacLennan’s Canada”. As you’d expect, it deals with Halifax, and Montreal, and Quebec City, and Sherbrooke and his beloved Eastern Townships, including North Hatley, where he died in 1990.

But since Hugh was also the author of The Colour of Canada, and The Rivers of Canada (where as a young editor I played a role as a minor tributary) for this book of Literary Tourism  I have him take us right across the country, to the roaring Fraser in the West, and the mighty Mackenzie in the north. His love of the country comes through in every line he wrote.

He was such a major Canadian figure that he was often called up for national assignments. In 1958 the country was facing a General Election, with two leaders who  were not well known, Lester Pearson and John Diefenbaker (who had just won an unexpected minority). To allow people to get to know them better Maclean’s magazine selected Hugh to be one of a panel of three interviewers, with Pierre Berton as the Chair.

The interview with Diefenbaker did not go well . Here is how Pierre Berton described it in his memoir, My Times :  “When the interview ended and the prime minister left, I looked at Hugh MacLennan, who was clearly badly shaken by the encounter.   “The thought of that man being prime minister…” he kept saying. Suddenly he hurried to the washroom and threw up.”

There are other, much more surprising revelations about Hugh in the book.

“WHAT’S IT LIKE, BEING MARRIED TO MARGARET ATWOOD?”

by Douglas Gibson

Every so often, as I roam around book Festivals, or other literary events, a conversation with a nice stranger will take an odd turn. They ( and they’re usually women, but not always) will start to ask what it’s like  “having two writers in the family”. I’m able to laugh this off, explaining that Jane is much too sensible to get into writing, ha, ha. But sometimes they are more direct, asking about what  “Margaret” or even “Peggy” is up to these days.

And it becomes clear that they think that I’m Graeme Gibson.

Now Graeme is a very fine fellow, and I’m pleased to call him a friend, even if we’re not related. But we both suffer ( at least I hope he suffers from people telling him how much they enjoyed his publishing memoirs) from having a very common Canadian surname, in the narrow confines of the world of books, which leads to our being mistaken for one another.

We are both keen birders, and have worked for Adventure Canada, and are members of The Writers’ Union of Canada(which he helped to found) and I have published him with pride in the past, so life often throws us pleasantly together.

Never more pleasantly, however, than in August at Port Medway in Nova Scotia. After I had performed my stage show, I signed books at the local Fire Hall. The excited volunteers told me at the end that I had sold 29 copies of my book, the most ever in the 12 years of the Readers’ Festival…matched only by Graeme Gibson.

BONNIE CLYDE ROSE ON BONNE BAY

by Douglas Gibson

One high point of the Woody Point adventure was when my old publishing friend, Clyde Rose, emerged from the gloom of the darkened theatre at The Merchant House to greet me before my show. Clyde was the publisher of Breakwater Books in St. John’s for what seemed like many generations, and his daughter Rebecca carries it on today.

Clyde now lives in Woody Point, and he kindly took me and Jane out for a mid-day cruise around Bonne Bay on his small boat, which he handled with easy skill –- even if he failed to find the bald-headed eagle near Norris Point for us!

We recalled grand old publishing times, including two stories involving the great Newfoundland humorist, Ray Guy, who died just a few months ago.

Clyde once proudly published a Ray Guy book with a title that was designed to mystify anyone outside Newfoundland. The title was You May Know Them as Sea Urchins, Ma’am.

Every Newfoundlander, however, was delighted by this internal joke. They all knew that the local term for “sea urchins” was “whore’s eggs.”

I remember vividly the time that Ray pulled off a great practical joke in, I think, The Canadian magazine. It involved the cleverest case of bilingual swearing I ever saw. In a solemn look at Newfoundland heraldry, Ray pointed out that the seal in the central position of the official coat of arms was lying horizontally, in what is known in heraldry as a “volant” or “flying” position. Since a seal is known in French as “un phoque” alert readers (but, perhaps, not the editors) sensed that mischief was afoot.

Ray went on to note that this “volant” position gave rise to the official French-language motto of Newfoundland, “Je ne donne pas un phoque volant.”

THE POINT OF WOODY POINT

by Douglas Gibson

For a Canadian author, being invited to attend the Writers at Woody Point event in August is the equivalent of winning the Nobel Prize. It has been running for 10 years now, and has attracted a galaxy of literary stars “from away,” like Michael Ondaatje, Richard Ford, Alexander McCall Smith, Linda Spalding, Elizabeth Hay and Will Ferguson, bolstered by major talents from Newfoundland such as Lisa Moore, Wayne Johnson, Michael Crummey, Michael Winter and many more.

It all started when Stephen Brunt, the well-known Toronto-based sportswriter, had the idea that outsiders would love to discover Woody Point, his idyllic summer home. The tiny community of about 700 lies half-way up the long west coast of Newfoundland, surrounded by Gros Morne National Park — a little like an east-coast Banff, without the fudge shops. The sort of sweeping views of fiords and mountains that you get in those clever ads from the Newfoundland Tourism folks lie all around the little town, and the open waters of the Gulf are just around the corner, as Jane and I found when we borrowed kayaks from our friends Peter and Robert early one morning.

Gros Morne, of course, is a World Heritage site. Its high, orange Tablelands (amazingly, derived from the ocean floor thrust upward) were what proved the revolutionary Continental Drift theories of Toronto’s Tuzo Wilson and Newfoundland’s own “Hank” Williams.

Two minor notes: Tuzo Wilson and I were once guests at a small dinner party given by Brenda and Robertson Davies; like most great scientists he had wide-ranging interests. Second, in the course of my five days at Woody Point I went on a guided hike at The Tablelands. Part of the attraction was a reading by the poet Don MacKay, a keen geologist, and also an outdoor performance by the energetic fiddler Kelly Russell; he amazed me by revealing that Hank Williams was a fine fiddler too.

A key moment in the history of the writers’ festival was when Stephen Brunt’s local crew (including his wife of undetermined ethnic heritage, Jeanie MacFarlane) persuaded the marvellous Shelagh Rogers to get involved. Now she is the voice of the Festival, introducing all of the main events at the grand old Heritage Theatre. She even conducts live, on-stage interviews for her CBC show, The Next Chapter. Her talk with Greg Malone, author of Don’t Tell The Newfoundlanders will make astonishing listening for anyone who, like me, believed that Newfoundland joined Canada gratefully, after an honest vote.

The writers’ events run morning, noon and night. My own show began at 11 at night, followed by some more music, by Pamela Morgan and Sandy Johnston. (Later, Shelagh announced Pamela as “Pamela Anderson,” which led to many jokes.) Often the first readings were at 9:30 in the morning, and the nature walks and other events through the day kept us hopping, and sometimes missing readings that clashed with our chosen event. Saturday morning started with a Church Hall fund-raising breakfast for the local firemen, and the Saturday and Sunday evenings ended with a big dance at the local Legion.

We were staying within earshot of all this, at a central B and B named “Aunt Jane’s”. How could we resist? Will Ferguson was there, too, and others came and went.

A key part of understanding the lure of Woody Point is realising that you are part of the community. People who elsewhere might be strangers come up to you on the street and chat. Fishermen and carpenters (I’ll try not to be too Biblical) reveal that they were at your show, and enjoyed it, but have a question about Brian Mulroney.  Going for dinner produces comments and questions from the staff, and paying your bill involves a long conversation. Village life! That’s what I grew up with in Scotland. I loved every minute of it. And the organizers like Gary Noel made everything easy for us.

At the start of my show I told the audience that my book contains the line “I never met a Newfoundlander I didn’t like.” I hoped that none of them would take that as a challenge, and none did. So the record is still unblemished.

The usual unbelievable coincidences occurred. After my show a woman from the Cypress Hills district in Saskatchewan came up to tell me that when she was growing up she knew my cowboy author, R.D. Symons. She was even able to tell me what happened to his son, Gerry, ranching on another frontier in Colombia.

And when we had dinner with the multi-talented Des Walsh and his lady, Ruth, he told me that he had known Harold Horwood well, even attending the rebel school called Animal Farm that Harold established, in the teeth of fierce St. John’s police pressure. He could even do a fine imitation (like all schoolboys) of his teacher, Harold, throwing back his long-haired head.

A final Newfoundland story. At the Legion bar I met a fine man who had enjoyed my show. When he told me his name was Young, I got excited, telling him about my father’s mother in Scotland, Jessie Young. He cut short my speculation about our being related by telling me that family research had showed that his family were pirates … and had stolen the law-abiding name of Young!

I never met a Newfoundlander I didn’t like.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

BAYFIELD DAYS AND NIGHTS

by Douglas Gibson

Late in July we drove down to Bayfield, in Alice Munro’s Huron County.  

   After Stratford the car knows the way… through Sebringville (Ontario’s longest hamlet, I’m told) then Mitchell (former home of Orlo Miller, who wrote Death To the Donnellys for me) then Dublin (home of “The Liffey Drain”) then Seaforth. Here we took a turn south, wrenching the car wheel away from the traditional route on to Clinton and then Goderich,  to go straight to Bayfield. Along the way we saw the Bannockburn Bridge (worth a photo shoot, since I’m organising a Bannockburn reunion next June, the 700th anniversary of the 1314 battle, where Robert The Bruce defeated Edward The Second-Rate) with the next village, appropriately, named Brucefield.

Bayfield is a place well known to Alice. She once did a “Long Pen ” signing event there , as a favour to her friend the bookseller and her friend Margaret Atwood, the Long Pen’s inventor. We know it, too. In fact my wife Jane is a former resident. When she was based in London, working as a Speech Therapist at the old Victoria Hospital, she and her first husband had a summer place in Bayfield, so we’re always glad to have an excuse to head for “Ontario’s West Coast”.

After wandering around the busy Main Street (on a summer Sunday it’s as crowded with strollers as Yonge Street) we settled in at The Little Inn. In the evening we met Mary Brown, the brave bookseller who organised the event, at the Town Hall, an old church built in 1882. There were the usual technical difficulties before the show, but it all worked out well, with me performing my act at floor level, in front of the stage, and introducing my “lovely and talented assistant”, Jane, who would be changing the slides for me. We even had a Q. and A. session , which was fun, including a woman with memories of being hailed as a  fellow “stubblejumper” by W.O. Mitchell.

Among the audience were old friends of mine , lost for 30 years, and a number of Alice’s friends, from Goderich, Clinton, and even Blyth including one lady who once shared waitressing duties with her. There was a flash of Huron County understatement when one woman told me she was at the show because a friend had seen my show in Stratford and had reported that it was ( I swelled, expecting superlatives, although she was really  too old for “awesome”) it was … um …  “quite interesting.”

When we visited Alice at home in Clinton the next day, she liked that story, and matched it with a story from some years ago when she was visiting a bookstore and offered to sign the pile of copies of her latest book. The bookseller refused the offer…  “because then I couldn’t return them if they didn’t sell.”

GOOD CHEER AT BONNECHERE

by Douglas Gibson

 For 11 years the little Ottawa Valley town of Eganville has played host to the Bonnechere Literary Festival. The moving spirit (there is always a moving spirit for these things) is a Force of Nature called Doyne Ahearn. She contacts you, tells you just how remote her Festival is (about 5 hours from Toronto) and how they can’t really afford to pay anything, but you can stay with her and Frank in their big log house and get to know the Ottawa Valley, including nearby Foymount,  the highest inhabited town in Ontario.

 How can you say no?

  Well, I tried, just as others such as Nino Ricci before me had tried, but Doyne wore me down. Not the summer of 2012? OK, we’ll put you down for 2013.

   So Jane and I planned an anti-clockwise sweep, first up to Peterborough, then to Marmora and the gold-rush country near Madoc, then via Bannockburn (!) up to Bancroft , then sidling north and east to Cormac, near Eganville.

  Our arrival at the famous log cabin coincided with the descent of amazingly thick clouds of flies, but Doyne and Frank soon introduced us to the joys of “bug suits”, and we were able to go swimming off a raft moored in the bug-free middle of a lake, Lake Doyne. The raft, by the way, was reached by means of a circulating rope ferry system, the rope pulled by Jane or me as keen, bug-suited Charons.

   A fine dinner was followed by a tour of the Valley, far from the county seat of Renfrew, the boyhood home of Robertson Davies. In Eaganville we learned about “the Catholic side “ of town, as it was in the old days (and as late as the 1920s Orange-Catholic hostilities were so fierce that the military came in “with cannon”, we were told, to keep the opponents to their own side of the Bonnechere River that divides the town). In these saner times we saw the fine old Museum, and the Library, which the Literary Festival helps to maintain.

  Late in the day “extreme weather” took over. Rain fell in sheets, thunder rolled and lightning flashed. The pre-show dinner at the best restaurant in town was shaping up well, with our mouth-watering orders taken by the friendly waitress when everything went black . The power was off.

It stayed off, and dinner was cancelled. Show time approached. Since my show was due to take place in a windowless church basement, the lack of power was fatal.  For safety reasons we would not be allowed in the dark basement.

   With 30 minutes to the show, it was time for plan B. I suggested that with the thunderstorm rain now gone we could bring chairs out to the parking lot and I could do the show there, in the open air. We had started to bring the chairs out when the lights went on…and, after some heart-stopping flickers, they stayed on.
And the show went on!

  We all had fun, and a few books were sold. Doyne told me that we attracted the very first standing ovation the Festival had seen in its eleven years; I could get to like the experience, especially when Jane joins in. And I was very pleased to receive a fine original painting, entitled “The Storyteller”! Local delicacies made up a very welcome “gift pack”.

   When we got back to Doyne and Frank’s place, the power was off there, so we went quietly to bed. And the next day, after a lavish breakfast, we set off for the long ride through Algonquin Park, armed with Frank’s fascinating book on the subject. As my father’s son, who grew up around saw-mills, I found the Logging Museum a constant delight. And then, after Algonquin Park, via Huntsville, Rosseau and Foot’s Bay, we were back at beloved Loon Island, the cottage on Lake Joseph owned by our good friends, Hope and Phil, who live next door. After four days of swimming (why do they put the navigation buoy we swim around further out in the lake each year?), canoeing, rowing the skiff, cruising the lake admiring the moon and stars, and gathering buckets (oh, all right, cups) of the world’s best blueberries, it was time to head south to Barrie and Toronto, after almost 900 Ontario kilometres.

Not a bad way to spend a summer.

WORKING HARD AT LAKEFIELD

by Douglas Gibson

  Three years ago I was the Lakefield Festival’s host/interviewer at an evening celebrating Michael Crummey’s Galore and Linden MacIntyre’s The Bishop’s Man. With those two fine writers and performers crooning their readings at the entranced audience, how could it go any way other than very well indeed?

  But the Lakefield Festival organisers (this means you, Stephanie) remembered me with affection, and this year presented me with an offer I could not refuse. I would give my solo Stories About Storytellers Show at 2.30 on Saturday afternoon, then act as host/interviewer for the evening session at 8.00, with three authors — count them, three. Then, presumably, I would collapse off-stage, but the show would be over by then.

   Ruthless people, those Lakefield folks.

   On the Friday evening we had dinner with Orme Mitchell (W.O.’s son) , his wife Barb, and  Norman Jewison and his wife, our dinner enlivened by Norman’s tales of his Caledon neighbour , Robertson Davies, and his Hollywood friend Sean Connery, whom I can imitate shupremely well.

  Saturday was spent roaming around Lakefield, before we went to the superb theatre at Lakefield School. After many careful sound checks the lapel mike was working really well… until, after a kind introduction by Lewis MacLeod (son of you know who), I went on stage, to find that squeaking feedback was now, mysteriously, a constant enemy.

   In the end Jane (urged by the sound man) strode on to the stage, demanding the slide-changing “clicker”, which she handled off-stage, and we soldiered on, to good effect. There was even a standing ovation, which is a surprisingly humbling experience (“You really liked it that much?”). Then Lewis conducted a kindly Question and Answer session, and I went off to sign books.

  So many books were sold, and signed, that the local bookseller ran out, and we were able to replenish her supplies with extra copies from the car. Ah, the glamorous life of a touring author.

  The evening session featured three very fine novelists, reading from their recent books, then chatting about them with me. The final part of the evening allowed the audience to throw questions at any of the authors.

  The books in question were very different: Annabel  by Katherine Winter tells the story of a hermaphrodite baby raised as a boy in Labrador in the 1970s:  The Empty Room by Lauren B. Davis tells the modern story of a day in a middle-aged Toronto woman’s life when her alcoholism catches up with her: The Purchase by Linda Spalding is set on the violent Virgina frontier around 1800 when an abolitionist Quaker finds himself the owner of a slave.

  All very different, all very good. I recommend each one of them whole-heartedly, and am proud that our discussion centred exclusively on the books, as opposed to the prizes won, or the brothers or husbands (including Ron Davis, an excellent photographer) who might have earned a mention. Our main problem was that we ran out of time before all the audience’s questions could be answered. But the books are there to be read.

And I did not collapse, on-stage or off, and even attended a post-show party, before sleeping very soundly that night.

A Montreal Coincidence

by Douglas Gibson

In July I gave my show at a Westmount residence for seniors named Place Kensington. It’s a fine, lively place (or Place) and the residents include two authors of mine, the charming Ted Phillips and my friend William Weintraub, the author of City Unique. Bill Weintraub is also famous for the  classic novel Why Rock The Boat?  and I proudly edited his last novel , Crazy about Lili,  providing  it with a very funny cover illustration by the wonderful Anthony Jenkins, whose path was later to cross mine, as my readers know.

In the course of my show, when I was talking  about James Houston going into the North, an older man in the audience asked me, “When was this?”

“In 1948,” I replied.

“Yes, that sounds about right.”

He went on to explain that he was setting up his medical practice around then, and had wandered into the Canadian Handicrafts Guild shop, and had come across a very fine portrait of a young woman (in those days a young “Eskimo” woman) in full sealskin traditional outfit. He stood there admiring this piece of finely drawn art that revealed another world, far from Montreal. Then another customer, a young dark-haired man, came and stood beside him, looking over his shoulder at the drawing.

“Do you like it?” the stranger asked.

“Yes, I do,” said the young doctor, “but I’m just setting up my medical practice, and I’m sure I can’t afford it.”

“Can you afford $50?” asked the man.

“Yes,” said the surprised doctor, and James Houston made the deal with him right there and then, remarking that this was the first of his Northern drawings that he had ever sold.

The doctor told us that he still had James Houston’s drawing, after all these years. And I told the audience that we had all been part of the sort of coincidence that weaves its web around us every day, in unexpected ways.

Later that evening Jane and I had dinner in Old Montreal, celebrating the coincidence that had brought us together at The Couchiching Conference, so that exactly 11 years earlier we had got married.

ALICE MUNRO SAYS GOODBYE TO THE WRITING LIFE.

by Douglas Gibson

 In 2006, Alice Munro said that she was not going to write any more. Many journalists seized on this terrible news and reported it as fact, and it flashed around the Canadian literary world like summer lightning

 Wiser heads, however, checked with me, her long-time editor, and found me dismissing the idea, with the words that “Alice is a born writer, and she’s not going to stop writing.”

   Fortunately for the world, I was right, and she has produced two collections of stories since then.

  Sadly, I’m not saying that this time.

   In fact, when she came to Toronto in June, to accept the Trillium Prize for Dear Life, I was with her in a private room at the Toronto Reference Library when the enterprising Mark Medley interviewed her and asked her about her future writing plans. When she told him that she had no such plans, and had stopped writing, (“I’m probably not going to write anymore”), I stayed silent.

  Recently Charles McGrath, of the New York Times, visited her in Clinton and returned with the same story. His fine July 1 article, “Alice Munro Puts Down Her Pen To Let The World In” reflects the fact that he is an old friend and editor of Alice’s work, and a great admirer. It’s a superb account of Alice’s life and work, and I recommend it highly.

  So what has changed? For a start, Alice is now 82. In April she lost her beloved husband, Gerry Fremlin, and life is harder now. On the subject of growing old, which Charles McGrath rightly notes is “a subject that preoccupies some of her best stories”, she says “I worry less than I did. There’s nothing you can do about it, and it’s better than being dead. I feel that I’ve done what I wanted to do, and that makes me fairly content.”

   “Fairly content”…now there’s an Alice Munro expression, (just like “better than being dead”). I suppose I can say that the millions of readers around the world who know her work can be “fairly content” that she wrote a lifetime’s worth of wonderful short stories that can be read and re-read for ever. My own recommendation, by the way, is The Progress Of Love, which I discuss on my Book Club website, complete with 20 Discussion Points.

   I accompanied Alice to two award sessions in Toronto in June, in both cases whisked by limo to the event, then escorted (with me hovering at Alice’s elbow, the escort escorted) to the reception and the dinner. At both the Libris Awards session, where I spoke to introduce Alice to the nation’s booksellers, who were giving her a Lifetime Achievement Award, and at the later Trillium Prize event, there was a strong sense that people in the audience knew that this was a special moment towards the end of a long , unmatched career. The affection and respect in the sustained, standing ovations were very obvious, almost tangible. And the people who took the opportunity to come to our table to greet Alice (“Yes, I once met Alice Munro!”), sometimes were literally kneeling to greet her , and were always visibly affected when they staggered away, dazed by the experience of meeting her, although she was always friendly and unaffected (“Who do you think you are?”)
It was wonderful to be so close to such powerful experiences, although my role was to watch for signs of strain, then to swoop Alice back to her limo, and back to the family waiting for her at the hotel.

The Canada Trip

by Douglas Gibson

This summer, Jane (my “techie”– though no tattoos so far) and I are going to be travelling widely to give my show in various parts of Canada. As usual, I’m preparing by consulting the 1997 classic, The Canada Trip, by Charles Gordon.  

  You may know him as a former writer for The Ottawa Citizen, or a witty columnist for Maclean’s. Even better, you may know him as the author of the classic At The Cottage and the follow-up Still At The Cottage. His other books include an affectionate satire on life in Ottawa (The Governor General’s Bunny Hop), The Grim Pig, a novel based on the newspaper world , and Canada’s answer to the wave of hyperbolic self-improvement books from the U.S.A., brilliantly entitled  How To Be Not Too Bad. All of them reveal Charles as a man with a finely understated style that is a delight to read, and a dry sense of humour so Canadian that  it deserves to occupy our seat at the United Nations.

   In the summer of 1996 he and his wife Nancy (known in the book, to her slight irritation, as “The Business Manager”) set out from Ottawa in the family car to drive across Canada and back. The result is a wonderful book that shows what typical travellers will find as they enjoy the trip. It is not an earnest “Whither Canada?” book, as much as a “Whither the moose?” or even a “Whither the washroom?” book, and we are all grateful for it. Check it out.

  I am especially grateful for what my old friend Charles wrote about me in his Acknowledgements:  “My publisher, editor, and fellow Scot, Doug Gibson, was as encouraging as always on this, our fourth project together. In his editing,  Doug consistently amazed me with his knowledge of what is where in Canada. Many times he was able to tell me that I could not have been looking at what I thought I was looking at from a given spot – a sunset, a mountain, an ocean – because I was facing the wrong way. This invariably sent me back to my map collection and invariably forced me to conclude he was right – except maybe for once in Saskatoon.” (Ah, Saskatoon, where the reliable old north-south Idylwyld Freeway treacherously turns east, south of the river.)

   Jane and I will have a chance to expand our knowledge of the country as we roam around with my show, this summer. Maybe we’ll meet you along the way. It should be fun.