Over the next couple of days, I shall unpack the Canada Day quiz I posted on July 1. The quotes and authors are some of my favourites. I shouldn’t keep them to myself.

“Looking back on it now, I can see there were signs. In the week before it happened, there was a string of unusual events that I noticed but did not recognize. Seemingly trivial, apparently unconnected, they were not even events really, so much as odd occurrences, whimsical coincidences, amusing quirks of nature or fate.” Diane Schoemperlen, Our Lady of the Lost and Found

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On an apparently typical Monday morning, a middle-aged writer goes into her living room to water the plants. A woman is standing there. She is the Virgin Mary. Invited to stay for lunch, Mary explains that after 2,000 years of petition, adoration and travelling, she is tired and needs some rest. She stays for a week.

In 2002, I completed my MA thesis. I wrote a creative nonfiction piece about a man I met who was a commando during the Second World War. Now, the university I attended did not have a MFA (Master of Fine Arts) program like the one at UBC. This meant my work had to stand on its own as a creative piece, but I had to defend it academically. Double work. I was a bit of a savage.

The academic focus of my thesis was that the boundary between fiction and nonfiction is an artificial one that the reader creates to make sense of the world. Note that I called my thesis “creative nonfiction,” it’s a label that immediately informs you about the type of writing, and suggests the extent of the nonfiction or factual events described in the book. I argued that as a reader we should consider what is being said, who is saying it, what authority the author has assigned that character, why we believe something to be “the truth” and something else to be a lie. We shouldn’t be misled by the label.

If I was a more accomplished writer, with a great concept, Our Lady of the Lost and Found is the book I would want to write. Instead, it is the book that I had the most pleasure reading in 2001.

Here are first lines of novels by my favourite Canadian authors. These aren’t necessarily the best first lines, but they are all by great authors. Can you match the author to the first line?

All night long, Hooker Winslow’s eyes were open.

Marie Ursule woke up this morning knowing what morning it was and that it might be her last.

She stands up in the garden where she has been working and looks into the distance.

Lydia leans back to laugh at something Wilf Jardine says.

The pizza man.

“We’ll just have to sell him,” I remember my mother saying with finality.

My lifelong involvement with Mrs Dempster began at 5:58 o’clock p.m. on 27 December 1908, at which time I was ten years and seven months old.

Northwest of Montreal, through a valley always in sight of the low mountains of the Laurentian Shield, the Ottawa River flows out of Protestant Ontario into Catholic Quebec.

Hank Peterson went into the bedroom of his house one Friday morning about 6:30, carrying a shotgun, and when he came out the lives of everyone in Red Rock had changed forever.

Looking back on it now, I can see there were signs.

Jerry was fifty years old when his daughters denounced him, as he had always known they would.

He was going into the house through the woodshed when he heard his name mentioned.

Authors listed alphabetically, need hints, look at the book title:
David Arnason, King Jerry
Dionne Brand, at the full and change of the moon
Robertson Davies, Fifth Business
Timothy Findley, The Last of the Crazy People
Robert Kroetsch, The Puppeteer
Hugh MacLennan, Two Solitudes
Alistair MacLeod, The Lost Salt Gift of Blood, “In the Fall”
Michael Ondaatje, The English Patient
Al Purdy, A Splinter in the Heart
Diane Schoemperlen, Our Lady of the Lost and Found
Wayne Tefs, Red Rock
Michael Winter, This All Happened

If you were going to write a novel, what would the first line be?

I saw a copy of Haunted at the Beaches Book City in Toronto. Like any curious reader, I flipped to the short story “Guts.” I had a morbid fascination with what words could have caused crowds to faint, in particular the men.

“Guts” I discovered is about the foibles of masturbation, in particular the kind in which the male species engages. Halfway through the story it became clear to me why the men in the audience were affected. “Guts” unpacks all sorts of unwanted, nasty, mental images. It is the short of story urban legends are made of, a story where things get inappropriately stuck or sucked in graphic detail.

I stood while reading and when I felt a peculiar wobble in my knees and glanced ahead and saw the ominous words “corn and peanuts,” I shut the book. I prefer to be momentarily mortified rather than permanently haunted, thank you very much.

For background:
Here’s my first post on Haunted.

There is something about a list that I am attracted to. I make a lot of lists, grocery lists, to do lists, books I want to read lists, movies I want to watch lists. Those are the banal lists that keep me going through the day, but the truly beautiful lists are the ones that draw me in, make me want to copy them down, make me laugh. Dave Letterman’s lists are an example but any top 10 list would do.

I’m not alone. There are all sorts of books of lists published: lists of quotations, trivia lists. Dictionaries are the ultimate lists.

Here’s the list I was drawn to yesterday:

Code blue: cardiac arrest
Code white: aggressive violent act
Code red: fire/smoke
Code yellow: missing patient
Code brown: hazardous spill
Code black: bomb threat
Code green: evacuation
Code orange: disaster/mass casuality
… code “can you guess where I was yesterday?”

Any other great lists out there?

Here are the fun things that happened at the show:

I met with GooglePrint. And I read today that Google has surpassed Time Warner Inc. as the media industry’s most valuable company. The market value of Google is $83.4-billion vs. Time Warner’s paltry $79.4-billion.

Michael Winter signed a copy of his novel The Big Why for me. There’s a paperback coming out soon and the cover looks awesome. I’m not a fan of the cloth cover. I really enjoyed Winter’s first book All This Happened, and The Big Why sounds promising. The first sentence is “I have been loved. I can say this. But back then, before it all went wrong, I did not know enough to consider the question.”

Do you have first sentences that draw you in, are your favourites? Covers and first sentence. That’s my hook.

I saw Joseph Boyden, who I played pool with last year but didn’t get a chance to speak to this year.

I got a copy of On Bullshit, which I love. It is oatmeal coloured with black type. Apparently there are 4 different colours. I’ve only ever seen the white and green one.

I saw Hayley Wickenheiser signing autographs at the show.

I went to dinner with friends and had an amazing pork tenderloin crusted with pine nuts and surrounded by apples. It was delicious, and James will tell you that I don’t like pork. It’s a thin slice between the pork I like and the pork I don’t.

I got to see the new logo for McClelland and Stewart. It is a chariot rider with a bow and arrow. The photo is of the M&S tattoo I have on my arm. Temporary tattoo, it wasn’t that kind of weekend. I’ll tell you the background story of the tattoo and logo later.

Aside from that I steered clear of the bargain-basement style hoarding of free books. Most people at the show are carting enormous book bags packed with titles they’ll never read and will likely abandon in their hotel. But there are also those who I admire, those who will be totally enthralled with your description of a book and will kindly tell you that they don’t want to take it now, but will watch for it. I prefer that approach, which leads me back to a previous post where I questioned why we do this show. According to everyone I asked, albeit it was a small but high-quality sampling, we do it because of the people. Buyers say they can’t do their job without the show. They need to make the personal, face-to-face contacts, and more important, they need to see what books we’re making a fuss about. Sometimes it isn’t clear that a title is huge until a book buyer is at the show, sees the blow-ups of the cover, the light boxes, everyone carrying around the advance copies. But mostly people just want to be around other book people, talking shop, networking and smoozing.

BookExpo Canada is finally over and I am now back at home. Fully reachable, back on the grid. There was no ring toss at our booth, but I did suggest a bean bag toss and feats of strength for next year.

Yesterday was a record clobbering day and this morning when I left my hotel at 7:30 it was already 33 C. The electricity strike didn’t seem to affect me, Hydro One does have people on strike, but the actual use of electricity, or lack of, did affected me. Yesterday the show closed and the exhibitors stayed to tear down the booths and pack up books. As soon as the fair was officially closed, the convention centre turned off the lights and the air conditioning. What you need to picture here is a bunch of publishing folks in their trade show outfits doing manual labour–actual lifting of boxes, not just the cushy standing around stuff–without air conditioning. When I returned to my hotel, I could barely strip my clothes off. My pants stuck to me in ways that are truly unmentionable.

I suppose for the sake of the environment I should feel proud of my non-air-conditioning moments. Monday Ontario folks set a record for air conditioner use, driving electricity demand to 26,157 megawatts per hour at the peak, according to the Globe and Mail. Apparently if the use isn’t curbed, Hydro One may be forced to reduce demand by causing short blackouts. The greater concern is likely that the increased demand forces them to import expensive hydro from neighbouring provinces and sates.

So it was a triple threat kind of day Saturday: heat alert, smog alert, thunderstorm alert. The rest of the time it was just the smog and heat. Did you know that smog is SMoke and OxyGen? I did not know this.

I think my cheeks are frozen. And my feet are on fire.

Yesterday was the first day of BookExpo Canada. Today is the second day. Today it is 23 C and it is only 8:30. I think it is also 23 C in the Conference Hall. I walked here because I missed the shuttle. My stupid fault. I wanted breakfast from the grocery store instead of cold eggs from the hotel. So I walked. My grown-up clothes are black. All black. Did I mention it is 23 C. I think my core temperature is well above 23 C.

So what did I do yesterday? Mostly I smiled. That’s why my cheeks are frozen. I also wandered around to see what other publishers are doing for Fall. I talked to the fine folks at Princeton University Press, and I’m now wearing my “I’m full of bullshit” button. I also have an 8th edition printing of the book ON BULLSHIT. I love it and have given it out as birthday presents. It’s a little academic essay on bullshit and the difference between bullshit and lies. Liars apparently believe in some sort of truth whereas bullshitters believe they are telling a form of the truth. I’m also reading Seth Godin’s All Marketers Are Liars. I’d rather think of myself as a bullshitter rather than a liar. But I’ll have to finish the book.

It’s 9 bells now, another day begins, another smile, another case of frozen cheeks. Wish me well.

I’m off the grid. No laptop, no cellphone, at large and unreachable. It is kind of fun, yet forces me to mooch laptop time and find quarters for the telephone. Totally old school.

This is the second time I’ve typed this post. I’m using a laptop that randomly hits the enter key, which means it randomly lost my first attempt at this post. Like the iPod Shuffle, life is random.

So the first time I typed this I wrote about Hanif, the friendly neighbourhood convenience store owner who is an endless source of information about the transit system. I also wrote about how every time I’m in Toronto someone is on strike. It’s the taxis this time. And it is rumoured the electric company might strike. All entertaining in an inconvenient way.

That’s all you get, I’m less enthusiastic the second time around, but damn it was a good original post.

I’m preparing to go to Toronto next week for BookExpo Canada (BEC). What is BEC? Well, it’s the Canadian version of BEA, BookExpo America. I know, clever name. Anyway, BEC is a book convention. Canadian publishers gather in the convention centre, they have booths, and booth parties, and in the booths are typically sales and marketing folks who talk to booksellers and media about the upcoming season and the fantastic books on the list.

Why do we do this? Some publishers offer discounts on book orders at the show, but in recent years the number of book orders taken at the show has dropped off. It’s not really the purpose of the show. Ok, so what is the purpose? Authors often attend and sign books for booksellers, who already love or know about the author. Signings for unheard of authors don’t draw a crowd so publishers have stopped inviting unknown authors. Unpublished authors sometimes come and try to meet the editors and pass off a manuscript, but generally the editors don’t come or don’t want to carry around manuscripts, which eventually get lost in the booth anyway. So why, why do we spend the money every year to participate in this event? I’m not sure, but I’m going to start asking people who might know.

I was having a poke and stroll through the Google listings for my name the other day. I’m trying to figure out what keywords I want to use to optimize my site. And yes, that turned into a bit of vanity searching. What I discovered was a story I’d written for the Manitoban, the University of Manitoba Student Newspaper. Published in the literary supplement, January 21, 1998 was the following story:

“These perogies. These are the best perogies. Not like those store bought perogies. Those perogies look like they’ve been chewed on. Chewed on by rats. Look at how nice the corners of my perogies look. Smooth, fold edges – no rat edges here.”

I had mentioned that I had perogies for dinner last night. “My perogies,” she’d said. “Boughten,” I’d replied. Now her huge flower-printed frame was lumbering around the kitchen gathering and mashing, blending and mixing the perfect ingredients for her perogies. In Ukrainian, she reminded me that, “these perogies, these are the best perogies.”

Her glasses kept slipping off her nose from the sweat caused by sudden activity. Imagine, my grandmother, who sits for hours engulfed by the lazy boy, enraptured in her soap operas, had abandoned Young and the Restless, which she calls Young and the Rest of Us, not at a commercial break, but in the middle of an affair, where at any moment a secret could be told. All of this, just to make me perogies. To remind me that, these perogies, these are the best perogies. Not store bought, not my mother’s, who had to learn from her, and not mine who weren’t learned from anyone but made in a machine, sealed in plastic and microwaved for convenience sake – not to mention chewed on by rats.