U of Alberta writers-in-residence interviews: Thomas Wharton (2002-3)

For the sake of the fortieth anniversary of the writer-in-residence program (the longest lasting of its kind in Canada) at the University of Alberta, I have taken it upon myself to interview as many former University of Alberta writers-in-residence as possible [see the ongoing list of writers here]. See the link to the entireseries of interviews (updating weekly) here.

Thomas Wharton was born in Grande Prairie, Alberta. His first novel, Icefields (1995), won the Commonwealth Writer’s Prize for Best First Book, Canada/Caribbean division. His second novel, Salamander (2001), was short-listed for the Governor-General’s Literary Award and the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize. A collection of short fiction, The Logogryph, published in 2004 by Gaspereau Press, won the Howard O’Hagan Prize at the Alberta Book Awards, and was shortlisted for the IMPAC Dublin Prize.

Wharton has written a YA fantasy trilogy, The Perilous Realm (2008-2013). His most recent book is the eco-fiction Every Blade of Grass, self-published in 2014. Currently he is working on a new collection of fantastical tales. His work has been published in the US, UK, France, Germany, Italy, Japan and other countries.

Thomas Wharton is an associate professor in the department of English and Film Studies at the University of Alberta, where he teaches creative writing. He lives in the countryside near Edmonton with his wife and three children.

He was writer-in-residence at the University of Alberta during the 2002-3 academic year.

Q: When you began your residency, you’d published two novels over the previous eight years. Where did you feel you were in your writing? What did the opportunity mean to you?

A: At the time I started my residency I’d written a third novel that both my agent and my publisher had a lot of doubts about. I shelved it in frustration and began another project I’d had on the go for a long time: a collection of stories about mysterious, magical books. The residency gave me the security and the renewed confidence to let go of the one project for the time being and start this new book about books.

Q: Was this your first residency?

A: No, my first residency was at Grant MacEwan University in 1999. That was a four-month residency, I believe.

Q: The bulk of writers-in-residence at the University of Alberta have been writers from outside the province. As an Edmonton-based writer, how did it feel to be acknowledged locally through the position?

A: I don’t know if I saw it as an opportunity for me as an Edmonton writer, per se – it’s actually taken a long time for me to think of myself as an Edmonton writer – I’ve lived in other places for much of my life, and now I live outside the city, so I don’t know what to call myself anymore. I just felt honoured that the committee thought my work made me worthy of the job!

Q: How did you engage with students and the community during your residency?

A: Interestingly I didn’t meet with many students during my residency. Most of the people who came to see me were people from Edmonton and surrounding communities. I had the feeling most of them were more aware of the residency and what it could do for them than most students were. I also felt that students saw the writer-in-residence as another authority, like one of their professors, and this may have been why some were reluctant to have their work read and critiqued. Although I did have one student drop by one afternoon and ask me if I would read his essay and give him some feedback because he had to hand it in ... in half an hour!

Q: What do you see as your biggest accomplishment while there? What had you been hoping to achieve?

A: I met with people who were having difficulty with their writing in one way or another – either because they were struggling to get started as writers or had stalled on a project. It was a good feeling to work through some of the issues with them and to bring in my own experience in order to help them get some perspective on their own. There were also a few challenges in working with people who simply wanted confirmation from me that their work was wonderful, and when I couldn’t affirm that, they weren’t always pleasant about it.

Q: Looking back on the experience now, how do you think it impacted upon your work?

A: It was my first major writer-in-res gig, and at that point I hadn’t done much creative writing teaching. So helping other writers really gave me an opportunity to articulate (to myself as much as to the writers who came to see me) what I have learned about good writing. I think the experience made me work harder and think more deeply about what I was doing as a writer.

University of Alberta writers-in-residence event(s): Edmonton report,

Recently, Christine and I were in Edmonton as part of my participation in the fortieth anniversary of the writer-in-residence program at the University of Alberta (I was writer-in-residence during the 2007-2008 academic year), with numerous readings, panels and gatherings both formal and informal, organized by a small group led by U of A prof Thomas Wharton (who did a stellar job).

Thanks to father-in-law, we were gifted passes to the Air Canada Lounge, which we enjoyed in Toronto in both directions. Oh my.

[to the left: on the right of the photo is Sheila Watson's desk, held in the FM Salter Room in U of Alberta's English and Film Studies Department] The list of attendees was impressive: Gary Geddes, Tom Wayman, Daphne Marlatt, Leona Gom, Fred Wah, Kristjana Gunnars, Di Brandt, Marilyn Dumont, Caterina Edwards, Curtis Gillespie, Merna Summers, Trevor Ferguson, Thomas Wharton, Catherine Bush, Tim Bowling, Tim Lilburn, myself, Richard van Camp, Marina Endicott, Don McKay and Erín Moure (and you are reading, of course, my ongoing series of interviews with as many of this list as have agreed?). Originally Fred Stenson was scheduled to participate as well, but, unfortunately, illness managed to knock him out for the exact few days of the event.

Awaiting our second flight to Edmonton during an hour or so in Toronto, we even managed to share the flight with Catherine Bush and Don McKay (who had already been travelling for many hours, given he came in from Newfoundland), able to have some lovely conversation at our shared gate.

Once we arrived, the events were incredible: spread out over a few days, which allowed for breathing space between, without having to pack every author into a marathon event, which apparently they did at the prior gathering of such, a decade earlier (can you imagine they do this every decade? I am totally going back to Alberta every decade from now on...). Opening night, for example, there was a group reading by more than half a dozen of the list, including Kristjana Gunnars, launching her brand-new above/ground press chapbook (I also produced a new item co-translated by Moure, as well as a chapbook of my short fiction); she was easily the best reader in the set. I'd only heard her read once before, during the year she was writer-in-residence at the University of Ottawa, somewhere around 1992 (back then, I was immersed in her novels; had I understood then what a writer-in-residence did, I really should have attempted to send her some of my writing...).

My participation included a panel conversation, the second of a two-panel conversation on what it means to be "engaged." Our panel (moderated by Erín Moure, with myself, Di Brandt, Marilyn Dumont and Fred Wah) responded, in part, to the first panel (moderated by Gary Geddes, with Richard van Camp, Daphne Marlatt and Kristjana Gunnars). What does it mean to be engaged?

Further highlights included: being able to spend time with Marilyn Dumont (brilliant and quite funny), finally meet Richard van Camp (a whirlwind of energy), and generous conversations with Catherine Bush, Tim Lilburn, Don McKay, Di Brandt, Gary Geddes and Tim Bowling; again see Edmonton poets Christine Stewart and Douglas Barbour, and Cathie Crooks and Peter Midgley from the University of Alberta Press, among so many others in and around Edmonton that I haven't seen in moons and moons and moons.

Of course I had envelopes of chapbooks etcetera for every participant, and was pleasantly surprised when a couple of the writers kindly gifted me their books in return: new titles by Di Brandt and Gary Geddes, and Leona Gom's The Collected Poems (Sono Nis Press, 1991).

And of course, while there, I took full advantage of the University of Alberta print-shop, with a far larger array of colour options than my local Staples; I produced the covers for the next three issues of Touch the Donkey (but really need to figure out some further options locally).

You don't even want to think about how much I spent, or how much more it cost to mail it all home...

Given the rarity of childcare in our household (mother-in-law was generous enough to watch our wee Rose while we were away), we snuck off to the West Edmonton Mall during our one and only window with which to catch the new Deadpool movie, 11am on Saturday morning (IT WAS COMPLETELY AWESOME!). It also meant that this was our first (apart from a Toronto funeral in January) solo trip since Rose was born, as well as our final trip before the new one appears in a few weeks time. We enjoyed the breath (although, at this point, Christine isn't really sleeping well either way). We wandered the Mall for a bit, a venue Christine hadn't actually experienced prior to this; and an expensive day: twenty-five dollar cab each way. Ugh. But oh so worth it.

I don't even want to talk about how my laptop disappeared from the airplane upon landing (mistakenly picked up by another; it was delivered safe to the hotel by the time we returned from the first evening's events). And it was, somehow, warmer in Edmonton during our time there than it was back in Ottawa (minus sixteen at home, and barely zero in Edmonton; it was like a little spring).

It was very strange to be back in Edmonton after a decade. So much has changed since then, and the whole experience seems so very, very long ago, and yet, I was entirely reshaped by the experience. My time in Edmonton was incredibly productive [see my piece on Sheila Watson's White Pelican, for example], and changed the direction of my thoughts on a multitude of things, from writing to living to simply being in the world. It changed just about everything, and I am enormously grateful.

And oh, our view from the hotel breakfast nook, where we had all but one breakfast (we went next door for our final morning, to see what the Fairmont Macdonald had to offer...). The University of Alberta would be across the river valley, but to the far right, just out of the frame...

It was a whirlwind: I wasn't able to show Christine where I'd lived during my year, or introduce her to the HUB Mall or the incredible view from the seventh-floor Grad Lounge in the Student Union Building. I wasn't able to show her The Garneau Pub, where I spent nearly every evening with a mound of books and paper, furiously working. Or even where my office was located. There was always another event we had to get to, or a brief window in which to gather food before the next event. Perhaps in ten years time.

And and: on our Toronto-Ottawa flight, seeing Stephen Brockwell and Gwendolyn Guth, returning from a week-plus of rest in some sunny, southern clime...

Our Hallowe'en costumes: Doctor Who and Idris

Strange, isn't it? This is possibly only the second year I've dressed up in nearly thirty years, when I used to take my younger sister around Maxville to trick-or-treat, our mother waiting for us in the car. We walked the village with pillowcases, most often to houses our mother knew, my sister dressed as whatever she was that year, and myself, borrowing one of my father's caps, achieving perhaps the laziest costume-making possible. I'm a feed salesman, I'd tell them. And then I'd empty my pillowcase in the car after every third or fourth house, so people might think we had only begun, and perhaps offer more. Terrible.

I don't even want to get into my ill-fated Morpheus (a la Neil Gaiman's The Sandman) costume from the mid-1990s.

This year, Christine and I went to a house-party as Matt Smith's Doctor Who and the TARDIS-in-human-form, Idris (from that episode written by Gaiman; are we noticing a theme, anyone?). Here's a picture of the two of us [by Cathy McDonald-Zytveld] in costume in front of our new residence, the third floor of a century-old house on McLeod Street. And yes, we actually live in the turret. During our outside photo shoot, we even managed to finally meet our downstairs neighbours, as they came outside to admire Christine's costume, and show off their own (“Bride-zilla” and “Rogue,” from X-Men)

Christine spent three days putting the costume together from an array of material, and I'm impressed at just how much she looked like Idris herself; damned sexy.

Still, one of the few people at the party who understood our costume was a young twentysomething, Anna, dressed in Ukrainian garb. She even had, in her purse, sonic screwdrivers for both Doctors ten and eleven, as well as a Doctor Who sound effects hand-held device. All of these carried completely unrelated to Hallowe'en and the party (apparently she doesn't often tell folk she carries these things around with her). Hilarious!

Part of what I always find entertaining about making public declarations of any of my particular interests—my collection of some 6,000 comic books (almost exclusively Marvel, with some Vertigo thrown in as well), or my adoration of the Doctor Who reboot six seasons ago—is in seeing just who ends up responding, whether Rusty Priske mentioning his appreciation of the work of Brian Michael Bendis, or this Doctor Who/Silence fan video that Adeena Karasick sent, made by her daughter, Safia. My favourite, still, a comic book conversation with Thomas Wharton while over for dinner; we knew it was bad when we realized even his then-five and ten year old sons looked bored by it. And any conversation I've had with Toronto YA author Leslie Livingston is enough to drive anyone away with a roll of their eyes.

Still, questions remain: will we ever figure out, who was piloting the TARDIS at the end of Matt Smith's first season? That whole damned season was set up as a trap for the Doctor, far more complex than the other, smaller trap of the Pandoricum; the things in Amy's room set the trap for the Pandoricum by the Daleks, Cybermen, etc., but the crack in the wall was the result of the explosion, which was done by someone else. Who was it pulling the strings to make the TARDIS explode in the first place? The whole plotline feels as though it's been set aside. Yes, the “Let's Kill Hitler” episode wrapped up a few too many other threads up too quickly, but the season's final episode was quite magnificent.

Will the next season finally bring Doctor number eleven back to the mystery of who took control of the TARDIS? I suspect the only one who might hate the Doctor that much could only be himself (was the dream episode a clue?); is it a fragment of the Doctor himself, whether internal or external, working some large multiple-season plot? Why all these loose ends? Why does every new Doctor since the reboot then become my new favourite?

Bowties are cool.

Today my lovely daughter turns seventeen years old; where does the time go?

She doesn't like me posting pictures of her, so nothing to post; picked up a copy of Nicole Brossard's Mauve Desert for her recently (and the new issue of Buffy Season Eight, things I have yet to drop into the mail), and hoping to get a copy of Thomas Wharton's Salamander [see my review of such here] for her as well.

Not sure when I'm home next; when will I see her again?

related notes: what I wrote last year; the year before;

readings in Edmonton; the past few days (again);

Wednesday, November 28; New Faculty Colloquium, with Liz Czach, Don Perkins + Christine Stewart

I think everyone should have to go through this, every year. Until I showed up and saw what this was, I had no idea what I’d be in for. Basically, three new faculty of the English and Film Studies Department talked about what they’re currently working on now that they’re here at the University of Alberta; it was extremely interesting! Liz Czach talked about arriving here in the faculty after working for years at the Toronto International Film Festival, which was pretty interesting, and Don Perkins (I call him “new guy” now) talking about where he considers himself after finally getting full-time work, after twenty years of working sessionally!

Listening to Christine Stewart talk about working deliberately on Canadian avant-garde women poets, focusing on the works of Catriona Strang, Dorothy Trujillo Lusk, Lissa Wolsak, Lisa Robertson and a couple of others, was utterly magnificent; she talked about working her own poetic project of the detritus of Mill Creek Ravine, as she commutes under the bridge twice daily on her bike, and seeing what gets lost, thrown out or simply left behind. The two ideas were bridged through deliberate forgetting, how people and items are under the bridge, and how more progressive works in Canadian writing somehow get forgotten, even as the same writers get larger amounts of ongoing attention in the United States and England. What is it about Canadian literature that wants to forget that these writers existed or exist?

Christine Stewart is my new favourite super-hero.

I won’t tell you about going up to RATT (the grad lounge) afterwards, where the bartender wouldn’t let me pay for drinks, or that he and his pals invited me to join their band; I won’t tell you about the karaoke that followed, or what muscles I pulled during the process. It just isn’t worth it…

Thursday, November 29; Catherine Owen’s 44th Ave Troubadour Series


(rob, Paul + Catherine)

It took a while to find the place, but it was a nice, intimate venue, being Edmonton poet Catherine Owen’s living room. Musician (and new mom) Michelle Boudreau has the most lovely and compelling singing voice, and a real skill on guitar; she talked a bit about sustaining the long note, and even how, during childbirth (her Aria is 3 months old) she sustained a single note for five full minutes, making all of the nurses suddenly pay much more attention to her. I got a copy of her this room cd (2005), by her “michell boudreau band.” Photographer Paul Saturley had some very interesting work, including not just photography but digital imagery that he’s been playing with since the technology first came out around 1990, making him one of the first in the field; even cooler that of his two “slide show” presentations, both had music by his son, with one by Paul’s son’s metal band.

Friday, November 30; Thomas Wharton in Canada Reads!

Friday afternoon, a reception hosted by NeWest Press and the Canadian Literature Centre at the University of Alberta at Leva Cappuccino Bar to celebrate Thomas Wharton’s first novel, Icefields (NeWest Press, 1995), being selected for the CBC Canada Reads 2008 line-up! Wharton’s novel was selected by Steve MacLean, Chief Astronaut for the Canadian Space Agency (I was trying to convince NeWest to put on “as read by astronauts” on the cover of the book), and was the first book by Alberta to be picked for the entire series. NeWest Press board member Douglas Barbour said a few words, and so did Rudy Wiebe, who was Wharton’s creative writing prof during the beginnings of the novel, as well as later editor of the book, and new(ish) NeWest Press general manager Lou Morin presented Wharton with a small bag of gifts, including dehydrated foods (perfect for space travel!). The event itself had a good group of friends, supporters, writers and other well-wishers, including Greg Hollingshead, Christine Stewart, Don Perkins, Jonathan Meakin, Peter Midgley (from UAP) and a whole slew of others. There was no way he wouldn’t have felt the love.
photos courtesy Lainna El Jabi

coming up: my novel launch on Tuesday; Christine Stewart reading on December 11 at Hulbert’s as the next edition of the Olive Reading Series; the Ottawa launch of my novel on December 13 at the Ottawa Art Gallery; the Ottawa launch of The Peter F. Yacht Club at the Carleton Tavern on December 22!

Thomas Wharton in Canada Reads; a note from NeWest Press:

Astronaut picks Icefields by Thomas Wharton (NeWest Press, 1995) for 7th annual Canada Reads competition!

Steve MacLean, Chief Astronaut for the Canadian Space Agency, will boldly champion Thomas Wharton’s [see his 12 or 20 questions interview here] first novel, Icefields, for the CBC’s Canada Reads 2008 literary showdown. This is the first time a book by an Alberta author will compete in Canada Reads!

Book lovers across the country are invited to read this novel and participate in scheduled events. The Canada Reads debates will air daily on CBC’s Radio One from February 25 to 29, 2008, each episode ending with the elimination of a title.

Join the nation and cheer for Icefields as it battles against four other books chosen by celebrity panelists. Visit the NeWest Press website for related news and event listings: http://www.newestpress.com/.

Written by acclaimed author and Edmonton resident Thomas Wharton, this remarkable book has been published in 6 countries, won numerous awards, and developed a following of rapt and loyal readers. Icefields has been cited by the Times Literary Supplement for its “crystalline beauty.” People magazine calls it “a finely etched tale of love in a cold climate.”

www.cbc.ca/canadareads

Thomas Wharton's Salamander

The book tells its own story.

Examine it closely and you will see the ragged edges of the type, its cracks and bumps and gaps, the letters that lie crookedly or ride higher or lower than the others, the ink's variations in depth, consistency, and hue, the motes of dust and droplets of sweat sealed within the warp and woof of the paper, the tiny insect bodies caught as the platen came down and now immortalized as unnecessary commas and full stops.

In these imperfections lies a human tale of typecutters, squinting compositors, proofreaders and black-faced printer's devils, labouring against time and heartache and disorder, against life, to create that thing not found in nature, yet still subject to its changes.

The pages stain, fox, dry out. Paper flakes like rusty metal. Threads work loose, headbands and tailbands fray. Front and back boards sag from spines, flyleaves and buckram corner-pieces peel away. Dust mites, cockroaches, and termites dine on paper and binding paste. Rats and mice make snug nests in the middle of thick chapters. And unseen, through the chemical action of time, the words themselves are drained of their living sap. In every library, readers sit in placid quiet while all around them a forest decays.

After all this time, I finally read Thomas Wharton's [see his "12 or 20" interview here; or his current Edmonton Journal thriller project here] second novel, Salamander (Toronto ON: McClelland & Stewart, 2001), yesterday, on the airplane back to Ottawa; the book he was touring when I met him, some six years ago, at the ottawa international writers festival. Just what had been preventing me all this time? Salamander is a magnificent story within a story within a story, much like The Canterbury Tales or Neil Gaiman's epic eleven-volume graphic novel The Sandman. Written as a tale told by a young girl to a colonel in a bombed-out bookshop in 1759 Montreal, beginning with the story of a Count who loses his son and wife, even as he gains a daughter. Through grief and the luxuries that giving up on the world affords, the Count withdraws to a castle (and his own obsessions with puzzles and labyrinths) that eventually ceases to officially exist, living on the boundaries of two countries, and yet existing properly within neither. The Count eventually fashions a castle that exists with moving floors, walls and rooms in an incredible display of mechanics that would make this novel wonderful to appear on film (reminding me of Richard Brautigan's shifting scenes in his novel The Hawkline Monster; wanting to see a film version simply to see how such scenes can even be displayed). Become obsessed with his books, the Count invites the legendary English printer, Nicholas Flood, to come to their castle that does not exist, and create an infinite book, without beginning or end. It is once there that we see the absurdity and the brilliance of Count Ostrov's creations (deliberately working a castle that could be self-sustaining, without need for human interaction), and where Flood meets the Count's beautiful daughter, Irena.

He held the paper to the dying spark of a candle and it crackled into sullen flame. She quickly relit the other candles and smiled over the bouquet of light she was handing him. As the paper burned up she saw through the green flames the image stamped upon it, melting and writhing. She asked him if he had chosen the phoenix as his symbol for just such moments.

— Salamander, Flood said.

— What?

— The creature is supposed to be a salamander.

The little dragon that dwells in fire, he explained, without being consumed, was a reassuring thought for people who work with paper. Originally he wanted a chimera, but the engraver he hired had gotten his mythological beasts confused.

— We have them in the castle, she said. The real sort of salamander, I mean. In the underground crypts, among the gears, where it's dark and damp.

— It sounds a lot like London. The sort of climate where printers thrive.

— If that's so, she asked, why did you leave?

He felt his face burn.

— I can't resist a challenge.

Wharton's story weaves through the fantastic (and even the impossible), and certainly invites comparisons with Alice in Wonderland and The Lord of the Rings (as well as Borges and Calvino) in some of the reviews quoted in the paperback version. The comparisons are apt, but I would compare it more to the best of British author Neil Gaiman, certainly through his series The Sandman, whether in the structure of story within story within story, or in Flood's commission, to create an impossible book (Gaiman's tale includes an endless library of books only dreamed, and never written). As one character tells Nicholas Flood, after hearing of his project, "In imagining your alam, Mr. Flood, you became a member of the world's oldest reading society, one that has existed for centuries, under countless names, in every part of the world. A society dedicated to the dreaming of fabulous, impossible, imaginary books." Like Gaiman, through his fantastic and dreamlike fantasy tales (it's interesting how Wharton places his science in a period where the supernatural and the sciences were still spoken of in the same hushed tones, seen with an equal sense of wonder), but darker and somehow with more depth, writing a tale of the search for knowledge and the perseverance of the heart (it helps, too, that Wharton is a better writer than Gaiman, who is still a master storyteller, but somehow stronger in the form of the graphic novel). How does a boy from Grand Prairie manage to create such a tale, a story within so many seemingly-endless stories? As one of his characters speaks, "A book is a confession, after all."

He told her that if she wanted to know what London was like, the castle would give her a good idea.

— People are always in motion there. No one stays in one place for long.

— Here the walls and ceilings and floors move, she said, and the people stand still.

He looked into her eyes and at that moment a truth that he should have seen right from the beginning became clear to him. The castle, the automatons, the clockworks, all of this was her father's system and functioned by his rules, but Irena had her
own system, quietly running on it's own inside the Count's. He was not sure why
she had disabled the great clock, but felt a rush of hope that she had done it to bring about this encounter with him. Feeling the colour rising to his face, he turned to his press and saw that Ludwig had wound down at the bar.

— And you, Mr. Flood, she said. How do you feel about the clocks?

He hesitated, and was aware again of what seemed an unearthly stillness.

— I like them at the moment, he said.

The book follows Flood as he collects knowledge, stories and supplies for his impossible book, watching what he loses, even as he gains. Watching everything slip away and away from Flood and the Count and Irena, Wharton's novel can be read as a book about story, and the impermanence of the world, writing his way out of the prairie "tall tale" of Robert Kroetsch into his own magical blend of history, fantasy and myth (they are not so different, after all). Watching everything slip away and listening to the tales the characters tell within tales, Wharton's magnificent novel can be read about the world, and about how stories, through their repeated tellings, remain their own sense of permanence. Empires might wither, and crumble and fall, but if even a single person exists to tell the story of that empire, then it was worth it, after all.