Richard Harris's Blog, page 59

Bending Adversity

So, while away in Chicago stuffing my face on pizza and red meat, I took some time to read a book which is hot off the press here in Canada, David Pilling’s Bending Adversity: Japan and the Art of Survival. To say the book is simply a well-written account of the days and months after the 2011 Tohoku earthquake and subsequent nuclear meltdown at Fukushima (though authorities at the governing Tepco organization were loathe to use the word “meltdown,” perhaps because they were suffering meltdowns themselves), is a grave understatement. The Financial Times’ former Tokyo correspondent has accomplished so much more in this look at Japan and its ability to bounce back from horror while remaining resilient in the face of indescribable hardship.

The title of the book is a reference to a phrase he heard someone use once in reference to the nuclear disaster at Fukushima – wazawai wo tenjite fuku to nasu - which the author translates as “bend adversity and turn it into happiness.”

Pilling has written both an investigative journal on Japan and its uncanny ability to rebound from unspeakable tragedy as well as a personal account of certain Japanese people who are shaping their country’s future path as we speak.  Murakami Haruki (of wild sheep chasing bird chronicle fame) and Natsuo Kirino (whose novel Out is incredible) are among the numerous rock stars Pilling got together with and interviewed for the book.

For many reasons, I’ve long enjoyed reading fiction and non-fiction on and about Japan. For me, Pilling’s offering now joins the ranks of Herbert Bix’s Pulitzer Prize-winning book Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan and Haruko Taya Cook & Theodore F. Cook’s Japan at War: An Oral History as seminal non-fiction works on the country.

ABNA Quarter-Finalists Announced

K, not my strongest picture for a post. Keep in mind, however, they pay me the big bucks (i.e. less than minimum wage) to be a soldier on the pen, not a design guy who wears tight slacks and monogrammed eyewear.

Today, Quarter-Finalists were announced for the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award and A Father’s Son made the cut. Nice! Or as they say in Korean, 나이스! Obviously a big difference linguistically.

Amazon sends you this PDF file and as you scroll down to see if your name and title are there, it’s a little like being back in school and wondering what you got on that final exam you totally know you aced…but could very well have bombed. Exhilarating! Frustrating. Inspiring! Heartbreaking. Yes! Yes! Yes! Oh, my god, no. NO!!!!

But it’s all good. Onwards and upwards we roll from here.

 

TIF Receives CCA Grant

Today, Wednesday, March 26, 2014, The Immortal Flower received a literary grant from The Canada Council for the Arts. This is, without a doubt, the highest honour bestowed upon any of my writing in the last 14 years. I have been working on this novel for 13 years in one form or another, and to see the five-century epic receive a nod from the country’s highest literary body is, well, humbling. As in, deeply, deeply humbling. I’m speechless.

If you’d like to read a sample from some of the completed parts of the story, click here.

My sincere and profound thanks to the CCA and to everyone who supports government funding for the arts, individual artists and artistic organizations. Good on ya, eh!

 

 

AFS Longlisted for ABNA

A Father’s Son has been longlisted for the 2014 Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award (ABNA). The award, which is kind of a big deal for the obvious reasons, also comes with a $50,000 grand prize purse and four second-prize purses worth $15,000 each. Cha-ching.

A short list will be announced next month, with all of these stories getting space in an upcoming edition of Publishers Weekly to publish the novel’s 300-word blurb. That’s also kind of a hot issue.

Final winners are expected to be announced in July.

I have also submitted A Father’s Son for The Toronto Book Award and the Trillium Book Award, but they don’t announce their respective winners until the autumn.

You might be wondering why I included a picture of the NHL’s Calder Trophy with this post, but I think of the ABNA as the NHL Rookie of the Year Award (I might sort of like hockey.) If that’s the case, I’ll nominate the following award correlations for all future fiction writers/hockey lovers:

Stanley Cup & Conn Smythe Award: Booker Prize

Hart Trophy: Giller Prize, Pulitzer Prize

Art Ross Trophy: Governor General’s Award, Pen/Faulkner Award

Norris Trophy: Commonwealth Book Prize

Vezina Trophy: Orange Award

NHL Foundation Player Award: Nobel Prize in Literature

Lady Byng Trophy: all other fiction awards (this makes more sense if you know what this trophy symbolizes)

The BBC Believes You’ve Only Read 6 of These Books

When it comes to naming classics, there are a few no-brainers, at least in the Western canon of literature. Names like Shakespeare, Tolstoy, Dickens, Dumas, Bronte and Austen would seem to be shoo-ins for a place on the list.

But would you believe (or agree with) the fact that Cervantes, Hemingway, Faulkner, Patchett, Morrison, Ondaatje, Munro, Richler, Murakami, Bulgakov, Chekhov, Pushkin, and Greene did not make the BBC’s most recent list of 100 books we should read before we die? Perhaps more WTF is that The Da Vinci Code, Memoirs of a Geisha, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, Harry Potter, The Time Traveler’s Wife and The Kite Runner made this list. As if that weren’t enough of a brain orgy, someone at the BBC was clearly drinking moonshine late into the night when they added The Five People You Meet in Heaven to this list.

Who the where the…why?

On the flip side, kudos to them for including Cloud Atlas, A Confederacy of Dunces, Watership Down and A Suitable Boy.

You can look over the books which did make the BBC’s list yourself and keep score. While they say you’ve likely read only 6 of these “classics,” the average Goodreads member has read 23 of them.

Click here to see the BBC list in its entirety.

 

Get Confident, Stupid!

I don’t have a lot of skills, but I’ve become pretty damn good at accepting rejection letters from publishers, magazines and agents. Back in 2000, when I finished a draft of my first book, Tears of Mokpo (thank all mountain gods it never saw the light of day), I read everything I could get my hands on about the querying process. This included the Holy Grail of the business, Writer’s Market. I hit up people in Toronto, Vancouver, New York, Los Angeles, London and a hundred other places in between. The result? Complete and utter failure.

The first rejection letter sucked. (Yes, that’s how long ago it was. I actually received a piece of paper in the mail.) The second one wasn’t much better. By about Rejection No. 30 I stopped counting. I also stopped collecting the letters/emails. Instead, I began outfitting myself with rejection-proof armour. It’s an invisible suit and costs nothing. Unfortunately, many are too intimidated to try one on for size.

As many have learned over the centuries – often painfully – art is not an exact science. Nor is life. No matter how great we think we are, there will always be someone to tell us how so not great we are. If you imagine a world where people quit at the first (or hundredth) sign of failure/rejection, it would indeed be a sad, vapid place we live in.

Stories abound of inspirational men and women overcoming adversity, taking rejection by the horns, and saying, “I STILL BELIEVE IN MYSELF!” Click here to see some examples of real rejection letters to/from famous writers, musicians and filmmakers, and just try to imagine their industry without them.

Trainwrecks

This short story is dedicated to everyone and anyone who has taught English in East Asia at one time or another, especially if that nation happened to be Korea. Click here to read the story on Wattpad.

Oy! Bungy Jumping!

What would we do without the Internet? I almost forget about this experience until I was surfing through YouTube on my virtual surfboard and remembered that I posted my death-defying jump while in Cairns, Australia in 2008. After spending a day in Port Douglas, petting a koala and feeding kangaroos by hand (checking out crocs from behind steel barriers, admiring black cockatoos, and listening to the most hilarious bird in the world, the Kookaburra, do its thing), I was driving back to my hotel when I thought, Hey! Today’s as good a day as ever to jump 164 feet into a shallow body of water.

After signing over my life to AJ Hackett, donating all my useable organs for research (i.e. none) and climbing the tower one frightening step at a time, which in itself is a full workout, I reached the top of the wooden structure, the Great Barrier Reef stretched out before me, lush jungle flanking me on both sides, the temperature a balmy 31 degrees C and HUMID. They tied a “harness” to me. They told me not to “worry.” They said it was “fun.”

I said, “How many people back out at the last minute?”

“Ahhhhh, right about, oh, I don’t know, maybe…one in ten?”

“Is that a question?”

“Huh?”

“Nothing. Guys or girls mostly?”

“Always the guys. Unless they’re Asian. Then it’s the girls and the guys.”

Anyway, I made the jump (to AC/DC, no less!) and survived the experience. If you haven’t tried it, I’d highly recommend doing it. Unlike other popular vacation sports like parasailing, rock climbing, and scuba diving, you’ll probably never feel your heart come through your chest like you do when edging towards the  jump point – and that’s worth something at the end of the day!

Watch the video here, though be forewarned those of you who are faint of heart….

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SEfbN481XTA

Bel Canto

I don’t usually write about books or post book reviews on my site, but I have just finished what is arguably one of the best novels I’ve ever read and had to let people know. The plot is intriguing and based loosely on the Lima Crisis. A world-famous opera singer is invited to perform at a private party being hosted by the vice president of a South American country (which one is never stated) and paid for by one of the soprano’s biggest fans, an extremely wealthy Japanese businessman who is in town to consider opening up a factory there. However, things go awry when terrorists break into the vice president’s mansion. They were originally looking to kidnap the president, who was supposed to be in attendance but never showed up, so instead the terrorists take the roughly 100 guests hostage.

Yet this is not a shoot-’em-up, fast-paced thriller. This is the most unlikely love story I’ve come across, a unique mix of Lord of the Flies and The Map of Love.  Beautifully wrought, intricately described and unbelievably realistic, Ann Patchett puts on a clinic for writers. The storytelling is so tight you keep forgetting you’re reading fiction. The prose is lyrical, and while cleverly subdued, it remains poignant throughout the book. The two love stories she creates out of this most unlikely scenario are also nothing short of heartbreakingly mesmerizing.

Along the way, you’ll learn a ton about opera, but not in some pedantic, academic way that will have you yawning and looking to throw the book down. An immensely talented writer, Patchett allows her heroine, Roxane Coss, to deliver the story on opera through a spellbinding series of events that will have people actually wanting to go and download an opera and listen to it while reading.

Many of us are often wondering what to read next. Well, here’s your answer. Go and pick this up and do yourself a favour, especially if you’re a writer/aspiring writer and want to see genius at work.

 

Happy 2014!

2013. The year that was. My sincere thanks to everyone who helped make A Father’s Son a success. Truly and for trues. Thank you. There are no words in my sparse lexicon to express the gratitude I feel to everybody who has helped put this novel on the map.

That being said, I’m pleased to announce that I have finished a final draft of The Immortal Flower, the five-century epic I hope will be my real coming out party.

All the best in 2014. Happy reading, as always, and happy New Year!