Alix Hawley's Blog, page 14

Amazonians

Feeling dumbfounded, lucky, and grateful that All True won the Amazon.ca / Walrus First Novel Award last night here in Toronto. Shelagh Rogers was a relaxed and engaging host who revealed everyone's dark secrets. It was good to hear from judges Nick Mount and Helen Humphreys, who emphasized how great all the finalists' books are this year (we all wished judge Richard Wagamese had been able to make it too). Alphabetical order had me reading first, so I got the jitters out of the way and was able to enjoy everyone else's excerpts (two minutes is a tough gig as far as readings go!).  All great readers, and interesting that so many of the finalists are musicians. Emma Hooper read a fluid and darting section about memory from Etta and Otto and Russell and James. Sean Michaels gave us a short (too short!) and beautiful love-letter clip from the Moscow section of his Us Conductors. Guillaume Morrisette, who "enjoy[s] self-loathing," had everybody laughing at his characters' half-hearted plans to run a car into Concordia, or maybe go out tonight, in New Tab. And Chelsea Rooney finished with a slam-dunk piece on anger and violence from Pedal.

Emma and I had planned to burst into song (something from The Lion King) at the end, and I'm still sorry Toronto missed out on that. I'm also sorry that in my daze, I didn't thank everyone properly--my agent, Denise Bukowski (who made me get my hair done), my sharp editors, Anne Collins and Amanda Lewis at Knopf / Random House, the judges, the Walrus Foundation, the Amazon folks, and my family and friends at home. I was not expecting to win. At least I managed to mostly contain my tears!

Beautiful Day in Dan's Neighbourhood

It's sunny and breezy in Toronto, and I'm enjoying my perch at the Four Seasons a little too much. Macarons, silence, a monstrous bubble bath. The life. What would Dan have made of it? Not his thing, I imagine, although I've dragged him along anyway, in the form of my sequel notes and draft--and, as you can see, Lyman Draper's enormous 19th-century compendium of material about our man (that's why I needed the bigger suitcase). Draper's notes don't go too far beyond the timing of the end of All True, so I'm also enjoying conjuring up what comes next. And I have the feeling Draper, a small, unassuming, dogged collector, who almost lost everything when his boxes of notes fell off a coach, is going to turn up one of my stories one of these days. 

I know I'm lucky not just to be living it up in the hotel, but to have such a deep tunnel of material to add to, thanks to storytellers and writers over the years. And Toronto is a little closer to Dan's territory than I usually am, which feels lucky, too.

Toronto 2.0

I'm at the Kelowna airport, having just stripped off my shoes and jacket in front of dozens of strangers at security. Ritual humiliation complete, I'm about to board the plane for Toronto and the Amazon First Novel Award festivities. Looking forward to seeing the other finalists and exchanging books. I'm planning to have all my copies signed, too--I love the scribble and cryptic messages . . . 

Italian Dan

Well, All True has received a little write-up in Italy's Internazionale magazine for April. How, I don't know, especially as the book isn't out in translation yet. Must be the eternal appeal of the frontier! 

Haunts

Yesterday I was guest speaker at the Vancouver One-to-One Literacy Society's annual party. Hycroft Manor, where we were, is some amazing house. It recently suffered a flood, so we had to move from the downstairs ballroom to a smaller but very lovely space, full of gorgeous plasterwork and adjacent to a green-tiled solarium, on the main floor. According to the Ghosts of Vancouver website, Hycroft is haunted by at least seven spirits and a black football-shaped orb. I saw none of these.

I did see about 150 Society members, who are some deeply amazing people. The volunteers work on reading with struggling individual kids in elementary schools for several hours a week, and many of them have been at it for years. 

As part of the talk, I read from a part of my novel when Daniel is learning to read and write with his own tutor, his sister-in-law (I had to alter the history a bit--it wasn't actually Israel's wife, but another brother's wife who helped him). Yesterday made me realize what a key scene it is, though it's a quiet and relatively uneventful one. Reading is his first escape from the confined life he dislikes. The tutors I talked mentioned that the escape goes both ways--they feel it too when one of their students breaks through with a book.

I'm still in Vancouver today, which feels like a little holiday also. Flowers all over the place. This morning I recorded a radio interview for CBC. This afternoon I went back to bed for a while. This time, the hotel room seems to be haunted only by a vacuum cleaner revving every so often next door.

Easter Dinner

Easter weekend is through. The chocolate ain't. Tell me I'm not the only mother who samples her kids' takings. 

No chocolate in the backwoods. If you've read All True, you'll know there was a lot of meat involved year-round. Those hunting, skinning, and dining scenes were tough for this vegetarian to write, at least at first. I love research, though. I loved reading about how all butter smelled slightly sour in those days, and what parts of which animals were considered the best eating (beaver tail, buffalo hump and tongue, etc.). I was also happy, if a little repulsed, to recognize some of the pork-preserving techniques I remembered from reading the Little House on the Prairie series as a child. 

First Novel Award

Well, I'm thrilled that All True has been nominated for the Amazon.ca First Novel Award, and especially to be in such great company: Emma Hooper, Sean Michaels, Guillaume Morissette, and Chelsea Rooney. I'm in the middle of Chelsea's fierce and intelligent Pedal right now, and the others' novels are in the reading line-up beside the bed.

Nick Mount, the head judge, says my version of Dan is "intimate." Well, I've had a few requests for more smut in the sequel, so I'll continue to work on the smuttiness. For now, I'm feeling pretty happy at the prospect of returning to Toronto in May for the awards evening, and more drinking, huzzah.

Victorian Times

Doing my best Madwoman in the Attic impression at the Empress. Note the window seat, upon which I plan to swoon. I'm in Victoria, listening to seagulls and sirens wailing alternately. It's a rainy spring equinox. The clouds are spread high above the soaked pavements.

Last night, I read at Russell Books on Fort Street. I walked there through puddles and headlights, and went down a set of stairs to find found book heaven. Complete collections of original Nancy Drew and Hardy Boys hardbacks, signed first editions, leather-bound compilations of Edwardian children's magazines, gorgeous glossy cookbooks, the deep smell of old paper. And us, four contemporary writers, reading for the damp crowd among the stacks. Lucky to go first, I then got to sit back and listen to Matt Rader read from his quietly menacing island story "The Laurel Whalen," from his collection What I Want To Tell Goes Like This. Chelsea Rooney followed with a searing excerpt from her novel Pedal, describing a woman at Vancouver's Wreck Beach observing a pedophile trying to control himself, and Lee Henderson finished with a piece of The Road Narrows as You Go, about a young 1980s cartoonist desperate to know whether she's Ronald Reagan's illegitimate child. All gripping.

So: very different subjects. But we all seemed to be talking about the past and its influence on the present. The way people from our pasts control us still. I thought about how Dan's older brother Israel, who dies young, affects him throughout my book--that idea was a huge part of my understanding of Dan's character.

I also thought about ghosts quite a lot last night here at the Empress Hotel. Lovely, old, slightly creepy, with miles of corridors, arched and barrel-vaulted ceilings, and imposing carved cabinets at random intervals. Tonight I'm leaving the bedside light on.

Straight Out of Charleston

I'm pretty excited about All True being mentioned in the venerable Garden and Gun magazine of South Carolina. Wasn't expecting that, I must say!

Frontier People

A friend asked me what it was like to write about Daniel's interactions with the Native American and black characters in my book. It was, in a word, hard. The difficulty came in the book's perspective, which is Daniel's--the son of British Quaker settlers. Everything comes through his eyes, and has to be painted as would have seemed natural to him, which is not always natural to a contemporary audience. So there are certainly racist moments in the story (I'm thinking of an incident when Dan and his brother laugh about the white names some of the Cherokees call themselves, for instance).

However, the historical Boone seems to have been more sympathetic than many whites were towards the native woodland people. He grew up with Delaware and Catawba people nearby, and was very familiar with their way of life. As an adult, he was sometimes called a "white Indian" for his loose hunting clothing and moccasins, and his enjoyment of nomadic long hunts. There are quite a few accounts, such as those of Simon Girty, another "white Indian," of Europeans abandoning their lives and  joining  tribes. Girty and Dan crossed paths, and I was sorry to have to leave him on the cutting-room floor in the end.

Daniel was captured and adopted by Shawnee people, and seems to have found much to prefer about life in their winter town, as my story depicts. His relationship with Black Fish, his adoptive father, became for me a symbol of the power struggles, tensions, and attempts at connection between the two civilizations.

My book also includes several black characters who are slaves (yes, some Quakers owned them). The party that sets out to settle Kentucky includes quite a few of them. Pompey, an escaped Virginia man who is also adopted by the Shawnee, drew me the most sharply. He was an actual interpreter and apparently a powerful, disturbing personality, sometimes referred to as "the black Shawnee." For my book, he serves as a shock wave, always reminding Dan that life will never be neat and easy for everyone.  I'm looking forward to having him back for the sequel.