WordFest Blog 5 by Noah Richler

Because they’re both fun and they write brilliantly for young adults and adults alike, Sheree Fitch and Chris Humphreys, in an authorly squeeze.

You can talk about ‘CanLit’ and ‘AusLit’ but what can you say about ‘NZLit’, it doesn’t work,” said Elizabeth Knox, the New Zealand author of the bestselling The Vintner’s Luck—now being made into a movie by Niki Caro, director of The Whale Rider, with the Oscar-nominated child star of that film, Keisha Castle-Hughes. (Whose favorite moment of the Academy Awards, a few years back, was not gentleman Johnny Depp standing and greeting the pint-sized New Zealand star with such grace and courtesy?)

We’d been participating in the discussion, “Crossing the Equator,” at the Rozsa Centre at the University of Calgary again, only now the view through the building’s marvelous wall of windows was of spanking new cement trucks (all the old ones are in Ontario) and not trees but, no matter, the discourse was lively.

Knox, of course, is from New Zealand, a couple of islands to which Newfoundlanders, in particular, can relate. They can, because the great cartographer Christopher Cook rushed off to map New Zealand’s North and South islands having already practiced many of the names he used there on Newfoundland. He two-timed Newfoundland, basically, for warmer climes but was subsequently eaten for supper and de mortuis nil nisi bonum, which is what people say when they really mean ‘serves him right.

En tout cas. (That’s French for, “I digress.”)

Knox was on a panel representing the Antipodes—that is antipodean, I should point out, to us and not to anybody who actually lives ‘down there’. Canadians, and mostly our Inuit are used to this sort of prejudicial geographical description—that we live ‘nowhere’ (“a place is only nowhere to the people who don’t live there,” said Margaret Atwood to me once), or that Inuit live “up” North. Even North is relative, of course; “you can put North anywhere you want,” said a Baffin Island bush pilot to me years ago, fiddling with his first-generation GPS as an ice-encrusted snowmobile shifted from its moorings in the back of the small plane—

En tout cas.

(That’s French for) as I was saying: Knox was on a panel representing the Antipodes with the wonderful Australian novelist Gail Jones, who was nominated in 2006 for the Orange Prize and is on her way to a week’s residency at the University of Manitoba in Brandon, where students are studying her novel of aboriginal colonial abuse, Sorry, and Myles Merrill, the American performance artist who moved to Australia from Chicago when he was twenty-five.

This was another compelling congregation—“session” always sounds so formal—in which some light was shed upon illuminating similarities and differences between these three countries at opposite ends of what was once Empire.

Australia, Canada and New Zealand are places that have a great deal in common, and other aspects of national experience that are not. All of our countries are defined by aboriginal contribution and relations between natives and settlers that are largely unsettled. The idea of aboriginals as the original custodians of the land, of the problems of colonial territorial acquisition and also of the necessity of some sort of apology—made, in a qualified manner, in Canada this last June to those who had suffered through the residential schools a few months after Australia apologized to the country’s “stolen generations” (not just political speeches do the Conservatives appropriate from down under)—exist in Gail Jones’ work, as they do in that of novelists and poets of this country. No surprise there, as novelists, poets, storytellers and artists by the very nature of what they do tend to be at the forefront of issues dogging a populace and so lead efforts to recognize, if not resolve, outstanding social problems.

Issues concerning aboriginal relations and the colonial legacy are at the root of Miles Merrill’s work, too, though he deals with these ideas in fierce and trenchant monologues—one of which, “Monotype,” took the caustic imagined dialogue of an aboriginal and a couple of racists in an Australian bar to say something quite distressing about human relations.

Not Gail Jones, Elizabeth Knox or even Miles Merrill (sorry, don’t know how to interview and shoot a camera at the same time), but Alberta’s Marina Endicott, because I’m crazy about her writing, tip her to win the Giller, and hear Western and West Coast writers complain that the Giller pays no attention to the West—huh? She’s a brilliant reader too.

Merrill is an easy, natural performer and an interesting figure. The words that come out of his mouth can be rough but the comportment, and the sentiments are gentle. “Do you write out of bitterness?” one young woman in the audience asked. “No” was Merrill’s answer, and then he went on to relate a story about troubled kids he’d asked to write a story about what they’d done on a Friday night, and who’d parroted received hip-hop ghetto American experience. “Now tell me what you really did,” he’d said, the soliciting amazing and only-Australian tales of traditional aboriginal experience. We talked a little about the Canadian novelist Lawrence Hill, who holds a lot in common with Merrill: both are the children of American civil rights activists—Merrill of Black Panther parents and Hill of a couple that chose to travel the overground railroad to Don Mills. There young Lawrence experienced the frustration of his mixed-race skin not being interesting, or recognized for what it was, and in his novel Any Known Blood, his protagonist is mistaken for a native, an Algerian, etc, and makes a play of it—which was exactly Merrill’s experience in Australia. Fascinating. Merill’s works are on CD, and he has a website—www.wordtravels.net—and both are well worth checking out.

In Australia, as in Canada—more so than in New Zealand (“we have no interior,” Knox complained)— Northrop Frye’s idea of cities as “garrisons in the wilderness” applies. It is outdated in both countries, of course, though it probably still resonates, as in each country a constellation of cities clings to the shore—there with the Pacific, and with the United States, here. Each country has vast and less populated places at their back door: here the North; in Australia, that interior. Gail Jones was receptive to the question of these national similarities and differences, and spoke eloquently about the writer’s advantage of being at the margins.

It was interesting to me, too, that the phenomenon of the photograph was at the heart of one of the novels she read from, Sixty Lights. Our own Katherine Govier, Michael Ondaatje and notable others have used the idea of the photograph to make their writers’ enquiries into the nature of human experience.

Speaking of photographs, here’s Bookshorts’ Judith Keenan with Canada Reads and Giller-longlisted novelist Paul Quarrington, the other night. His film, “Pavane,” was one of the soirées best. He’s looking good, eh? (“What’s the matter with him,” one writer asked me worriedly, “has he given up drinking?”)

Canada has more than its fair share of actual photographers, too, such as Jeff Wall and Edward Burtynsky, who illustrate the popular idea that being at the margins—observing the rest of the world from a distance—makes us comfortable contemplating the world through a lens. Of course it’s not just the experience of the Canadian to write that way—it was W.G. Sebald who was most adept at the abstract inclusion of photographs in his brilliant work (the photograph’s incomplete nature, the fact that it has edges and a world implied beyond its frame is an invitation to writers to make it up, to start to imagine everything that surrounds the photograph)—but it does strike me that there may be particular reasons that we understand the separation of experience and our representation of it that the actual physical object of a photograph, or a camera, makes explicit. In Canada, as possibly in Australia, some part of the colonial legacy—of having been at the very edge of Empire and political experience—persists in this sense we have that we live at the margins. Only now it’s been turned into a virtue. We are observers and good at it.

So “Crossing the Equator” turned into a conversation of discovery, as much as the revelation of lives differently lived. It would have been great fun to continue on—is, for instance, the fantasy that Gail Knox also writes, and read from, derived from the experience of being at the margins of the self-proclaimed centres of the world (the UK, the United States) and therefore more free to re-imagine place? How is it that both Australia and Canada revere a criminal renegade—Louis Riel, here, Ned Kelley in Australia—and so on.

En tout cas

This, of course, is why we attend festivals—to sit and listen, as I also did to Patrick Lane the other night—and either be stimulated by the sheer force of language, or simply to want to know more. I’d listened to a couple of minutes of Patrick Lane reading from Red Dog, Red Dog, and thought, “I know this story”—of a drinking, carousing young cowboy, but soon after that he’d drawn me in and won me over with his poetic, evocative prose.

Novels can be “novel”—i.e. new—by virtue of style, as Patrick Lane’s was, or through their information, leaving us wanting to learn more about some time or place of which we’d previously had no idea and that is made accessible to us through the bridge of our common humanity, upon which novelists, poets, storytellers and their readers rely. Today I bought Gail Jones’ novel, Sorry, and I ran into Miles Merrill intent on buying the book I wrote. “I haven’t paid enough attention to Canada,” he said, perhaps not knowing yet, how much his own experience of being the outsider in America and Australia is a quasi-Canadian one. He’ll find out, or disagree 9and we’ll talk about it later.) Either way, ours were just two journeys of discovery that started after “Crossing the Equator.”

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