Category Archives: Reading

Everyday living for most people can be compared all-too-easily to what drought means for farmers, what the dry seasons meant to American Indians. It’s a barren time full of silence and waiting and subtle, fatalistic dread that nothing is going to happen, that life will wither and perhaps even die. And it’s that need for green, for life and living, which brings comfort and joy and the heights of emotional salvation when the rains finally come. One could make the argument that we read drama and fantasy and horror because we have an inherent, hard-wired need for emotional input—a need for rain.

That’s a writer’s job, at least some of the time. We must don the doe’s skull and bright feathers. We must clothe ourselves in tanned hides and wrap bone rattles about our wrists and ankles. We must dance, sprouting clouds of dust as we stomp our feet and we sweat upon the hard-baked clay of everyday life.

It’s our job.

One of the hardest things writers have to live with is the uncertainty that their dancing has brought rain, sprinkled or poured a little bit of life into a reader’s existence. The truth is that most writers, especially at the beginning of their careers, never find out if their dancing has borne precipitation. There is this gulf—a fundamental disconnect—between writer and reader, one that leaves writers with cracked lips and dusty throats.

I recently had two experiences—more milestones in my career—which gave me tangible evidence that my own dancing was not in vain. Last fall I submitted a short story called Family Heirloom to the magazine Steampunk Trials. It’s a steampunk take on the Underground Railroad where a white widow and a freed slave build an Underwater Railroad in Missouri.

Included in the acceptance email was a very simple accolade, and one I’ll never forget. The story had brought tears the editor to eyes. When I wrote that story, it was with the absolute intention of touching, playing upon the heartstrings of the reader. I intended to bring forth the emotions of suffering and sacrifice, highlight the resolve of an individual to carry on and enrich the lives of the next generation in spite of tragedy.

Because of that first editor’s response, I chose Family Heirloom as the lead in a short story collection of mine that came out this summer. It’s not a best-seller in no small part because it contains cross-genre short stories, which is really a double-whammy against people even looking at it, let alone buying it. And yet, in spite of its uphill battle to gain recognition, I recently received another bit of rain. One of the reviewers up on Amazon said the same thing as the editor: that the story had brought tears to his or her eyes, and that other stories in that volume also had profound emotional effects. A reader took the time to let me—and the world—know that there was rain to be found between those pages.

For a writer, there’s nothing better than that.

So, to all the writers who read this, I can say but one thing: keep dancing. And to every reader, for all the rain you have been given by authors, give them some back. Give them the rain they need in the form of emails and reviews and word-of-mouth praise for the rain that has sustained you.

Drought is a fact of life, but we all possess the means by which we can bring rain to those who need it.

They Do Things Differently There

May 22, 2014

fictorians

Guest Posts Reading Reflection Reviews 4 Comments

A guest post by Amy Groening.

My family unearthed They Do Things Differently There (Jan Mark, 1994) at a library book sale when I was twelve years old. We had been consuming Jan Mark books for years and were very excited to discover a relatively new book of his shoved in amongst the clutter of salable discards. Every Jan Mark book I have read has endowed me with some new discovery of how to both play with the English language and appreciate life in general, but They Do Things Differently There was a crown jewel when I was young, and now, thirteen years later, I appreciate it all the more.

The account of a beautiful yet fleeting friendship between two dizzyingly creative teenaged girls, They Do Things Differently There offers clever descriptions of the realities of growing up in small-town Britain, a sardonic criticism of insincere aestheticism, and, most importantly, periodic vignettes of the deeper and much more bizarre episodes of an alternate reality, showing through in patches where the veneer of clean living has worn through.

I’m not talking about Blue Velvet, severed-ears-in-the-backwoods-type double lives; I’m quite sure Elaine and Charlotte would have balked at a crime so underwhelmingly average. Beneath the flowery, scrubbed-clean town of Compton Rosehay lurks Stalemate, a half-forgotten city that boasts a mermaid factory, a corpse-collecting manor lord and the respectable bunch of blackmailers keeping him in check, missionaries from Mars, and the Nobel Prize-winning creation of the Auger Scale of Tedium.

As ridiculous as the world of Stalemate sounds, Jan Mark uses these elements to create an effortlessly bizarre, unapologetically irreverent, and thoroughly enjoyable reading experience. It wasn’t until this year that I noticed the underlying references to pop culture and highbrow art that riddled the work. When I was twelve, mentions of Daleks flew right over my head, and I was under the impression that Mark’s cheeky rewriting of Wordsworth’s verse—Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive/But to be a fish was very heaven—was, in fact, just a clever bit of writing she had come up with herself. Even the book’s title is pulled straight from The Go-Between by L.P. Hartley. When Charlotte breaks the fourth wall and admits they’ve missed half a story because two pages of the book got stuck together, I was practically in convulsions of wonder. While I have now become accustomed to viewing this as a favourite trick of postmodern writing, back then it was the most mind-bogglingly clever writing twist I had come across.

This is one of the many things I love about Jan Mark: she created stories that I could enjoy as an uncultured preteen, and yet she didn’t seem to concern herself with the idea that a twelve-year-old might not catch references to high-brow literature (or British sci-fi shows from the 1960s). She didn’t pander to the lowest common denominator of undereducated schoolchildren, and yet she wrote books that said schoolchildren could still enjoy. I truly believe she wrote for a juvenile audience not because it was easier, as many people seem to think, but because it allowed her to freely exercise her complex, zany, and joyful yet melancholy writing style.

That being said, her novels do address serious matters—They Do Things Differently There is chock-full of loneliness, desperation, and the pain of being a social outcast. The stress of growing up, the terrifying powerlessness of childhood, the cruelty of adolescent alliances, and the dangers of depression come up in many of her stories.

Jan Mark was a prolific and well-respected British writer. When she passed away in 2006, she had published over fifty novels, plays, and short story anthologies, and had won the Carnegie medal twice, and yet the majority of her books are tragically difficult to come by.

When my family discovered They Do Things Differently There, it was out of print, as were Nothing to Be Afraid Of, a book of short stories we seemed to check out of the library several times a year, and Hairs in the Palm of the Hand, a book we finally procured a battered old copy of, which my sister still does dramatic readings of every Christmas. I have often wondered how a collection of books could be so principle in shaping my adolescence and my own writing aspirations, and yet so underappreciated, at least by a North American public.

For the longest time, I was under the impression we were the only Canadians who knew about these books. I was almost disappointed when They Do Things Differently There went back into print, assuming it meant Jan Mark was going to sweep North America and become a household name instead of a much-loved secret.

However, I still haven’t met any Mark fans who were not blood relations of mine; a quick visit to Amazon reveals not a single comment has been left on the They Do Things Differently There page, few ratings have been given, and while she does have a loyal fan base and blog articles devoted to singing the praises of her writing, her books are clearly still not being given the attention they so richly deserve.

Guest Writer Bio:

Amy Groening is a publishing assistant at Word Alive Press. She is a passionate storyteller with experience in blogging, newspaper reportage, and creative writing. She holds an Honours degree in English Literature and is happy to be working in an industry where she can see other writers’ dreams come to life. She enjoys many creative pursuits, including sewing, sculpture, and painting, and spends an embarrassingly large amount of time at home taking photos of her cats committing random acts of feline crime.

Four Lords of the Diamond

May 20, 2014

Colette Black

Colette Black Genres Reading Science Fiction The Writing Life 6 Comments

Jack L. C Four Lords of the Diamond halker was a pretty well-known author, so I’ve found it surprising that very few of the writers I’ve interacted with are familiar with his Four Lords of the Diamond series. In all honesty, when I picked up the first book I wasn’t much of a science fiction fan. I gravitated more to fantasy and didn’t usually have much to do with stories involving science and technology. What truly intrigued me in Chalker’s work was the psychology aspect. There aren’t many books I remember from over twenty years ago, but these have stuck with me. Here’s why:

The premise of the story centers around a government agent, an assassin, who has his mind replicated. Four convicts destined for four separate prison planets are mind-wiped to be replaced with the agent’s replications. Each of them has an assignment to assassinate some prominent public figure for the cause of the intergalactic government. As they carry out their assignments, their minds are connected to the original agent. He watches as their new genetic make-up, along with their various environments, changes them. In the process, it changes him. This study of genetics and environment’s influence on behavior, as portrayed through this one man, fascinated me.

After all these years, I can’t tell you what they did on each planet, only that each story caused me to look deep within myself. I analyzed the influences in my life and carefully considered my goals. I identified some of the hurdles in my way, both genetic and environmental, and I decided how to overcome them. I don’t think I did this consciously, but I thought so much about what I had read that at some unconscious level I formed a resolve.

Some books have a lasting effect in our lives. It doesn’t happen with everything we read, and sometimes we find our own meanings within a story, but oftentimes the storyline is lost in memory because the deeper meaning is so profound. That’s how it was for me with Four Lords of the Diamond. Maybe it was my age. Maybe it was my mindset while reading a particular volume. Maybe it was just random happenstance. Whatever the reason, whenever you ask me about science fiction to make you think, this will top my list. If this is a series you’ve read, I’d love to hear your impressions. Let me know if it affected you as much as it affected me.

Welcome to Macdonald Hall

May 19, 2014

Evan Braun

Character Evan Braun Reading Reflection Reviews 4 Comments

East of Toronto, just off Highway 48, you will find a beautiful tree-lined campus right across the road from the famous Miss Scrimmage’s Finishing School for Young Ladies. It is Macdonald Hall, where generations of boys have been educated and prepared for manhood. Named for Sir John A. Macdonald, the Hall, with its ivy-covered stone buildings and beautiful rolling lawns, is the most respected boarding school for boys in all of Canada.

Okay, so here’s how the story goes. While in the seventh grade, Gordon Korman’s English teacher (“Mr. Hamilton,” according to Wikipedia, and the first book’s dedication) assigned his students to write a short novel. Putting aside how ambitious and insane such an assignment would be, the result was Korman’s very first attempt at a novel—This Can’t Be Happening at Macdonald Hall—which was subsequently published in 1978 by Scholastic Books. Korman was only twelve years old when he wrote it, and fourteen when it got published.

Hold the phone. Did you catch that? He was twelve and got published on his first attempt. Is anybody else feeling inadequate? I sure am. By the time of his graduation from high school, Korman had written another five books. Holy crow. Eighty-five books later, here we are, in 2014, and I’m going all the way back to the beginning of Korman’s career to tell you about a series of young adult novels that absolutely changed my life—the Macdonald Hall series, alternatively known as “Bruno and Boots,” for the two protagonists.

These books flood me with overwhelming nostalgia. When Greg Little announced that this month would be dedicated to unknown books, I knew immediately that I had to write about Macdonald Hall. I subsequently jumped onto my Kindle, eager to buy ebook editions of all seven books in the series. Well, guess what? They’re not there. I couldn’t believe it.

Fortunately, I had five of the seven books (along with a bunch of other favourite Korman reads) in an old box in my storage room that I hadn’t opened in a few years. I began to devour them.

I realize I’ve now written some three hundred words and haven’t managed to say anything about the books except “They’re awesome; no, seriously, they’re really that awesome.” Which makes for a pretty lousy endorsement, so here are some details.

I began this post with the first paragraph from Korman’s premiere novel, and it sets the stage for all the hijinks that follow. The setting is Macdonald Hall, a boarding school on the outskirts of Toronto, and just across the street is an accompanying boarding school for girls, Miss Scrimmage’s Finishing School for Young Ladies, an ironic and misleadingly quaint name. Indeed, these unruly girls figure prominently into each story, and they are beyond delightful—and nowhere near “finished.”

The titular characters, Bruno and Boots, are roommates in Dormitory 3, Room 306—a.k.a. central headquarters for a lot of shenanigans. Bruno Walton is a passionate troublemaker with a penchant for letting (nay, encouraging) his many elaborate schemes get out of control. Boots O’Neal is the classic straight man, a sidekick who frequently gets drawn into his best friend’s intrigues. In the course of these books, they plot the downfall of a hated new school administrator (The War with Mr. Wizzle, my personal favourite of the novels), the stratospheric rise and inevitable collapse of the Hall’s football team (The Zucchini Warriors, which presents some surprisingly interesting commentary on gender politics), the fundraising effort for a new swimming pool to avoid Boots being transferred to a new school (Go Jump in the Pool), the undermining of a Justin Bieber-like celebrity on campus to shoot a major motion picture (Macdonald Hall Goes Hollywood), among other memorable outings.

The friendships and recurring characters are beautifully developed over the progression of the series, and the prose is sophisticated enough to make me stare at the page in disbelief that a twelve-year-old could have had a hand in crafting it. As an eight-year-old reader, I fell in love with Bruno and Boots and their many cohorts. Yes, they were constantly in trouble, but they were almost always driven by noble goals. They were good kids. Flawed? Of course, but never beyond redemption.

And that leads me to the thing I appreciate most about the series. I’ve reread the series twice in my twenties, and I’m in the middle of a third reread now. No surprisingly, I appreciate different things as a thirty-one-year-old than I did when I was eight. Back then, it was clear that the overarching antagonist of the series was Macdonald Hall’s stern but fair headmaster, Theodore Sturgeon (a.k.a. “The Fish”). In the character of Sturgeon, we are confronted with the heart of the series. He’s depicted as a middle-aged man with zero humor and a serious disposition—that is, as far as the boys know. In private, Korman shows us a kind and warm-hearted molder of men, not unlike the beloved Coach Taylor from Friday Night Lights. Sturgeon isn’t the antagonist all the kids at the school think he is. The reality is that he loves and cares for his students, and he has a secret affection particularly for Bruno and Boots—not despite their troublemaking ways, but because of them.

I don’t have kids, and I probably never will, barring unforeseen developments in my life. I’m okay with this reality, and it normally doesn’t bother me. The only time it does bother me is when I think of these Macdonald Hall books, and I’m filled with sadness that I don’t have anyone to pass them on to. Fortunately, my niece and nephew are about to come into reading age. Hopefully my sister won’t mind if I drop by the house each evening before bedtime to read a few chapters.