Category Archives: The Show

DISASTER IN LONDON’S WEST END

by Douglas Gibson

Since I started performing on-stage versions of my books, I’ve been to many surprising places. With STORIES ABOUT STORYTELLERS I went from coast (Queen Charlotte City, Haida Gwaii) to coast (Woody Point, Newfoundland) to coast (Ungava Bay, on an Adventure Canada cruise ship, in July 2015). Over 100 Canadian performances, so far!

Outside Canada, I took the show to Mexico, and to China, with performances in Beijing and Shanghai.

Now, with the new show based on the fall 2015 book. ACROSS CANADA BY STORY: A Coast-to-Coast Literary Adventure, I’ve started to roam around Canada. So far, I’ve given about 20 shows, in every province west of New Brunswick. Many, many more to come. Watch this space….or invite me to your theatre, library, bookstore, or club!

But in April I opened up new territory, by giving the show in Scotland and in England. The Scottish show was in St. Andrews, my alma mater. I was there to celebrate my 50th anniversary of graduation. I gave the show in the Byre Theatre, to a small but appreciative audience that seemed interested to learn about our major Canadian authors.

A side note: the Byre Theatre played a role in my life, perhaps preparing me for the performing life. In 1964, I and five friends under Alan Strachan took over The Byre for a week, to put on an original satirical review, a little like “Beyond The Fringe”. A high point occurred in the middle of the show when I stepped out beyond the closed stage curtains. In an annoyingly mincing voice I posed as a theatre authority, saying:  “Trends in humour are ever-changing. Satire has come and gone. Now many experts in the field are predicting that the new popular trend could well be….Slapstick!” Whereupon a bare arm flew out between the stage curtains and smashed a large custard pie into my face.

Blackout.

And the bare-armed Stage Manager then led me, blinded and gasping, back to my dressing room, where towels awaited me. As I finished mopping my face, more than thirty seconds later, they were still laughing. Give the audience what they want… And seeing me getting a creamy pie smashed into my face certainly seemed to hit a new theatrical record for total audience delight, every night of the week. It was good training for a Publisher.

There were no custard pies in evidence when I gave the show on April 19 in Canada House, in Trafalgar Square. The High Commission people treated me very well, and Scott Proudfoot introduced me graciously to the 70 people assembled in the grand MacKenzie King room. The stage, about two feet high, was bare, to allow me to roam around, retreating where necessary to the screen at the back, to point out details of Anthony Jenkins’ caricatures, or of the maps as we moved across the country. It was all very fine, and Nelson was standing unconcerned on his column outside the window when BANG, I fell off the stage.

It wasn’t just a little trip off the back. It was a full swan-dive, so that I landed on my shoulder and head, legs in the air. The screen went blank, people screamed, and Jane and Scott stormed across the stage to pick me up, and dust me off, and restore the shattered slide-changer that had suffered in the fall.

Miraculously, I was not hurt, and was able to carry on, and even to enjoy the excellent dinner that the High Commission staged in my honour in the MacDonald room. But since Trafalgar Square is definitely in London’s West End, a theatrical Mecca, I hope that someone can come up with a selling line about this incident that I can use to promote my show.

Any ideas?

For an objective account of my fall please read the blog of Debra Martens, spouse of Scott Proudfoot.

https://canadianwritersabroad.com/2016/04/27/falling-for-love-of-books/

FROM BLOOMSBURY TO THE YUKON

by Douglas Gibson

Roger Fry was a senior member of the Bloomsbury Group, a respected art critic who mingled with Leonard and Virginia Woolf, Lytton Strachey, Vanessa Bell, Duncan Grant and the gang. He championed  modern artists such as Cezanne and Matisse,  and was such a prominent figure in Britain that his son, Julian, saw that he was likely to spend his life in his father’s shadow, as “Roger Fry’s son”.

So Julian came to Canada, and became a hard-riding rancher in B.C.’s Cariboo, where art critics were not an important part of life.

There he raised his son, Alan Fry.   Born in Lac La Hache in 1931, young Alan was a real Cariboo boy, raised around horses and cattle, and skilled with a rope and an axe. In 1962, he revealed an extra dimension when he published his book about growing up, Ranch On the Cariboo.

He came into my life when in 1969 he brought me an extraordinary manuscript, a novel based on his experience as an Indian agent working in rural B.C. for the Dept. of Indian Affairs. For a civil servant to produce such a hard-hitting book about how bad things were on a “fictional” reserve was amazingly brave. When How A People Die was published in 1970 it was a sensation. “The New York Times” ran a review by the Native American novelist N. Scott Momaday that said :“This small book is one of the most sensitive and incisive statements on the subject of human alienation that I have seen…”

Reviews in Canada were equally admiring, but the harsh portrait of a dysfunctional reserve, written by a civil servant, led to an angry chorus of voices wanting him fired. Alan went to his local band, and left his fate in their hands. After a meeting they reported that they wanted him to stay, and told the rest of the world that Alan was their guy, and everyone else should back off. A respected native leader visited the reserve in question, and wearily reported to Alan that things were, in reality, even worse than in the book.

Alan kept on writing, from his base on Quadra Island, near Campbell River, where I visited him twice. In 1971 he brought out Come A Long Journey, about a canoe trip down the Yukon river with the narrator and his Native friend Dave. The Revenge Of Annie Charlie (1973) dealt with Native conflicts with the RCMP in a humorous way. In 1974 he reverted to his old Cariboo ranching background with The Burden of Adrian Knowle .

Then he got tired of the bureaucracy in Indian Affairs, and quit. What should he do now? Well, he had loved the time he had spent in the Yukon, and decided to move there. But how? How could he get a grubstake when his only asset was his house on Quadra, surrounded by Douglas Fir trees? His Lac La Hache skills provided the answer.

With his axe he felled enough trees to make a two-storey log cabin, built the old way, with interlocking timbers and not a single nail. I visited the house, which was a thing of beauty. And now Alan had two houses to sell, to keep him going in the Yukon.

Just north of Whitehorse, beside Lake Laberge, he erected a tepee, and lived in it year-round, even during the months when he was surviving under 40 below ( where Celsius and Fahrenheit meet) temperatures in a tent. I was back in my warm office in Toronto, fascinated by all this, and in due course a book came out of it, a non-fiction guide called Survival In The Wilderness. Read it…..it may save your life one day.

Then a woman came on the scene, and the tepee life became less attractive than life in a house in Whitehorse….

I visited that house in January, to catch up with my old friend Alan. We’ve stayed in touch over the years, always with great pleasure. My pride in working with Alan over all this time was revived a few years ago when my friend Howie White, of Harbour, realising that How A People Die was still – tragically – relevant today, reissued a new edition of the great classic.

At 84, Alan is now not as young as he once was, and is fighting a number of health challenges. But as you can see from the attached photo, he and his editor and friend for so many years are damned glad to see one another. And I’m glad to pay tribute to an important Canadian author.

Alan Fry

 

ON THE ROAD AGAIN

by Douglas Gibson

One of the joys of touring around, giving one of my shows, is that I get to meet and mingle with people who love books……..sometimes even my books!

Sometimes the conversations are very surprising, coming straight out of history. For instance, a couple of weeks ago I was at Leaside Library, and I was talking about Grey Owl, and the success of his shows that the Noble Red Man gave on-stage in Europe and North America. A man in the front row burst out, “I SAW HIM! In Sudbury, eighty years ago! I was a kid, and I was taken to see the famous Grey Owl. It was amazing”

Amazing, indeed, since Grey Owl died in 1938. But when I spoke to him later, Doug Gardner told me he was about 8 years old, around 1936, when he went to St. Anne’s Hall in Sudbury, the big local auditorium for major events. He remembers being astounded, and very impressed, by the man in buckskins on stage.

More recently, at the Shaw-College Library, I was talking about my Windsor visit to grab the manuscript from Alistair MacLeod when a fan in the front row couldn’t contain herself. “A HOME INVASION!” she shouted out, excitedly.

I was in Whitby this week and met a woman when I signed her book. She was more restrained at my event, but later wrote in an email that she knew all about Michael Ondaatje’s romantic adventures at Bishop’s. “My sister-in-law told me the campus fairly hummed with the scandal!”

FUTURE SHOWS YOU MIGHT WANT TO SEE

Toronto: Wednesday, March 30, 2016   Writers’ Trust Lunch…….Women’s Art Association, 23 Prince Arthur 1.30—3:00pm

Nanaimo: Thursday April 7, 2016 U.V.I. Gustafson Lecture, 7:00pm

Quebec City:  Sunday, April 10, 2016 Festival, Morrin Centre, Brunch

Scotland:  St. Andrews, Sunday, April 1, 2016, ACROSS CANADA BY STORY. The Byre Theatre, 7:00 pm

England:  London, Tuesday April 19, 2016. Canada House, Trafalgar Square, ACROSS CANADA BY STORY 6:00pm Show, 7:00 pm Reception. Please tell all your friends to register with the Canadian High Commission!

Many more shows to come, in Toronto, and beyond.

“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.

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.

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.

 

STRATFORD, CLINTON, AND ALICE MUNRO

by JK
ALICE MUNRO 1931– Not Bad Short Story Writer

ALICE MUNRO 1931– Not Bad Short Story Writer

My two Stratford shows – in the grand old City Hall building, right downtown, near the Avon theatre – were inspiring for me. The school show on Friday afternoon drew a crowd of adult friends, including Geoff Hancock , the former editor of Canadian Fiction (and photographer of Mavis Gallant), who now runs a B&B in Stratford, and the Stratford Festival’s David Prosser. But the main audience was a large group of high-school kids brought in by bus.

I was able to speak briefly about their home town to the kids from Exeter – home of the unique breed of all-white squirrels, and of the famous family of my Toronto  friend John MacNaughton, who died a few months ago.

I was, however, able to speak at much greater length to the Grade 12 kids from Clinton. This, of course, is the town where Alice Munro lives, and I was able to suggest to them how amazingly lucky they were to live in the same place as a world-famous writer who was putting their town on the literary map of the world, an internationally famous figure they might meet on the way to the Post Office. I talked about how her stories were set among people like their neighbours, and explained how famous Alice (“the living writer most likely to be read in 100 years time”, according to The Atlantic magazine) really was.

The next day word filtered back from a teacher that conversation among the kids on the bus home included the comment that this was the first time they had “ever felt proud about coming from Clinton”.

The next night’s show (part of Stratford’s Springworks Festival ) was for adults, and went fine. The sound man, who had worked at The Banff Centre and fallen under W.O. Mitchell’s spell, was hit hard by my final story about the unforgettable W.O.. After the show, our hosts, Lucille Roch and Warren Holmes, held a reception for us, and as we entered they kindly led a round of applause. It was a pleasant surreal moment (“I’m being applauded as I walk into a friend’s house!”), but it was nothing compared to the news of the impact on the kids from Clinton.