I was very excited to have the opportunity to interview Canadian-made author, Lynn Coady, for the Buy Canadian First Book Club! You can read my review of her book "The Antagonist", in last Monday's Good Shopper Blog.
I also have a book winner to announce at the end of this post!
GSB: I loved the Canadian references in "The Antagonist", as Rank is at a Canadian University on a hockey scholarship. Was Java Joe's another Canadian kick back? I know there really is a Java Joe and that they are a Canadian owned and operated company. I took the Icy Dream and Java Joe references to really be Dairy Queen and Canadian icon, Tim Horton's.
LC: Hmm...I thought I made Java Joe's up!
I didn't realize there was actually a coffee franchise called that.
Yes, your instincts were correct, I imagined Icy Dream and Java Joe's as through-the-looking-glass versions of DQ and Tim Horton's.
GSB: How important is it to you to have Canadian connections in your book?
LC: I write stories that are set in contemporary Canada and my characters are Canadian. What's important to me is being straightforward about that, not pretending otherwise or feeling hamstrung by silly fears that there's something provincial or problematic about setting a work of fiction in the Canadian here and now.
What's provincial is that fear itself. No one complains about Roddy Doyle setting his novels in Ireland, or JM Coetzee setting his latest books in Australia. This is the only country I know where the question even comes up.
GSB: You have so much insight into a tough Canadian "thug" like Rank, getting into university on a hockey scholarship, sitting outside on a couch in the snow BBQing (love it!) - how did you research your novel?
LC: The only stuff I really had to research was hockey and the juvenile court system.
It's not hard to do research on hockey in this country, fortunately.
What I did in this case was, I wrote the hockey-related scenes as best as I could and then gave a draft of the book to two gentlemen friends of mine who played hockey in high school and university--they were my technical advisers.
They pointed out anything I got wrong and reassured me about the things I got right.
The university scenes didn't require much research outside of a university education and having male friends. Sitting outside on a couch in the snow--hasn't everyone done that at some point in their twenties?
GSB: I love that our world has evolved so that in our books characters are using email and Facebook.
Do you find our new ways of communication easier to include in your books or do you think it's hard to keep track of what a character might email, text, tweet or post on Facebook?
LC: Facebook was used pretty deliberately in "The Antagonist"--I didn't really mean for it to seem like just a regular part of Rank's life, I wanted to show him discovering it as a tool, as a means of reconnecting with his past.
The novel couldn't have happened without Facebook, and in fact it was my own experience with Facebook that inspired a crucial element of the novel--Rank's past coming back to haunt him in a very immediate way, yet a way that feels both real and unreal at once.
When I started writing "The Antagonist", Facebook was still pretty new, so I had an awareness of incorporating this new technology into the story, but with something like email--email has become so ubiquitous these days that I now write about characters emailing each other without giving it a second thought, the same way I'd write about them watching TV or using a coffee machine.
Recently, I wrote my first short story that involves people texting one another.
I think all the new communications technology amounts to something writers can't help but embrace--this is how people speak to one another now and that makes it central to the stories we tell about contemporary life.
GSB: What Canadians do you look towards for inspiration in the world of authors and journalism?
LC: With authors, I admire my fellow East Coasters Lisa Moore and Michael Winter and David Adams Richards and my fellow Edmontonians Greg Hollingshead and Marina Endicott.
To give Toronto its due, I've been really enjoying How Should a Person Be? by Sheila Heti. And there are so many great journalists and non-fiction writers in Canada, one of them being my friend here in Edmonton, Curtis Gillespie, with whom I work on the magazine Eighteen Bridges.
There are a lot of great journalists who I follow on Twitter, like Chris Turner, Judith Timson, Stephanie Nolan, Kady O'Malley, Doug Saunders and Carl Wilson.
GSB: What is one piece of advice you can pass on to a Canadian teenager dreaming about becoming an author?
LC: Read everything until you figure out what you like. Then figure out why you like it.
Then write like that.
GSB: Thank you so much for chatting with me, Lynn!!
I look forward to catching up with your other books "Strange Heaven", "Play the Monster Blind", "Saints of Big Harbour", and "Mean Boy".
Now is the time to get ready for our next book. We'll be reading "Light Lifting", by Canadian author, Alexander MacLeod.
"Light Lifting" is said to be one of those rare debuts: a breathtakingly good collection of short fiction that heralds the arrival of a significant new talent.
Congratulation to our winner, Peggy O'Reilley, who has won a copy of Lynn Coady's novel, "The Antagonist"!
I look forward to chatting about the book with you in our Buy Canadian First Book Club on Facebook and I will be in touch as to how you can claim your prize!
To win a copy of "Light Lifting", please answer the question at the end of our review, which will be published on Monday, December 19, 2011. The winner will be announced the following week. Good luck and thanks so much for participating!
:: images courtesy of Chapters-Indigo.
