Made in Banff

What does it mean to really experience Banff? Everyone has a different story or feeling about how the beauty of this location affects their work and spirit. Part of being an artist here at the Centre is having the opportunity to get out and really be in nature. The Banff Centre’s Community Services office organizes excursions for artists to do just that: from bus trips, to canoeing, to bird-watching. Australian writer Gayelene Carbis shares a moment from her outdoor experience.

The bird-watching trip to Vermilion Lakes was one of the highlights of “The Banff Experience” for me. Before I get to the bear (yes, there was a BEAR!), the day was simply a wonderful, relaxing, lovely sunny day with stunningly beautiful views (my very best/favourite photos!). And then there were the birds. I’ve never been a big animal-lover, but Mojo’s (our leader’s) enthusiasm and passion for sighting the birds was contagious and soon I was excited at sighting and really seeing these beautiful creatures. We heard a sora (which is RARE), saw a Canada goose on its nest, red-winged blackbirds, warblers down by a beaver pond, the yellow-throat warbler, mallards, the red-breasted nuthatch, a female bufflehead, and a shoveller (duck!). And then, as we drove towards town, one of us yelled out: “A bear!!! There’s a bear!” We all looked over to the forest and the river desperately trying to see the bear, but the bear was nowhere to be seen. The park ranger wouldn’t let us stop and park (and rightly so!) and was moving us on. Mojo turned the car around and we drove slowly past. Nothing.

And then suddenly, I saw it. A grizzly bear there amongst the trees where the forest began. It was beautiful. It was this wild, huge, beautiful creature in its natural habitat about 20 metres away from us – in other words, CLOSE! I wasn’t prepared for what it would feel like to see that bear. It was incredibly moving. My eyes filled with tears. I couldn’t believe I’d seen a bear! “You are so lucky,” said Mojo to all of us. We all sat there stunned, knowing how lucky we were to see the bear. It was a grizzly with her three cubs, but I saw only the bear. Later a woman told me she’s lived here 25 years and had never seen one.

I found myself wanting to go back there, looking for a sight of the bear and her three cubs, which I didn’t see. Wanting a photo or not even that, just to SEE the bear again. I didn’t go back though.

I felt I’d been given a gift and you don’t go looking for another one when you’ve been given the perfect gift, do you? Besides, I felt I should leave the bear, and her three cubs, alone. They were perfectly happy out there.

The birds were beautiful, the day was wonderful, the views were spectacular and it was wonderful to go with a group of artists from all over the world (a Canadian poet, a Dutch sculptor, a New York illustrator, a Mexican filmmaker, an Austrian visual artist, Mojo and me) – but it’s the sudden sight of the grizzly bear that will stay forever in my memory and for me it sums up “The Banff Experience:” AMAZING!

Thank you so much to Mojo and Community Services for organizing trips like this one. And thanks to Mojo for taking us out there and infecting us with her love and joy in birds. And bears!

Gayelene Carbis is playwright, poet, fiction, film and libretto writer and dramaturg from Melbourne, Australia. She was at The Banff Centre recently for the Writing Studio.

Justin Ridgeway is a writer working on his first novel in the Writing Studio program this year. We asked him to tell us about preparing to read his work for a live audience…

For at least a week I had been thinking about what I would read. Would it be a passage that I felt was beautiful? Would it be a passage intended to demonstrate literary prowess? Or one intended to convey a poignant emotional tack?

Ultimately, the passage I chose to read was the one that I had heard most clearly in my head, spoken by a focal female character named Emily from the manuscript I was working on. As I revised my work, I realized that it wasn’t a matter of finding her voice, but listening quietly so I could hear it. Emily’s voice was soft with a calm longing, as I paced my room and read her words in 14-pt. Helvetica.

I like to think that my words are an extension of myself, an insight into my own inner world. I sit in my room, typing away on a laptop thinking that almost simultaneously these words are passing over the lips of a distant reader. It’s like the charmed beginning of a relationship, with its initial subtle flirtation and no prophecy of where it’s going, just clinging to that hope for connection with someone outside ourselves and that room with the laptop sitting on a desk.

Of course, relationships change us. Similar to the way my words shift through states of being, from the laptop’s RGB to the printed page’s CMYK. When I stood up to read my work I was not only taking the words outside my room, off my laptop and printed page, but giving them yet another body. Another life, really.

I don’t know if the passage I read will remain in the final manuscript. In writing, there’s this common commandment, in varying iterations, advising you to kill your darlings (I first heard “babies” – not “darlings” – and I think the morbidity of that was part of the advice’s intention). So here I am, I’ve read the passage aloud before witnesses, read it in Emily’s voice, breathed her into existence. And yet I am unsure of their fate. It’s difficult to kill something once you’ve brought it to life.

 

Interview by Steven Ross Smith

With this fall’s publication of A Good Man, Saskatoon writer Guy Vanderhaeghe completes a literary hat trick – three sweeping historical novels set in the late 19thcentury Canadian/American Wild West. The Englishman’s Boy, the first book in the thematicallyconnected trilogy, won the 1996 Governor General’s award. The second, The Last Crossing, topped the 2004 CBC Canada Reads competition. A Good Man was long-listed for this year’s Scotiabank Giller prize.

No stranger to The Banff Centre, Guy Vanderheaeghe was this year’s Wordfest Banff Distinguished Author. Following the festival, he sat down with the Centre’s Literary Arts director Steven Ross Smith to talk about the challenges of writing historical fiction, and how to craft a perfect sentence.

Steven Ross Smith: One of the things I’ve noticed about your writing is that you really seem to love the sentence.

Guy Vanderhaeghe: Well, I’m not a natural writer, so I think that I have to pay more attention. I’m a big reviser, so I tinker with sentences endlessly. It just doesn’t come immediately. When I begin my morning’s writing I always go back and revise what I have written the day before and sometimes revise it twice. There’s something that’s always stuck in my mind, something that the great Irish short story/writer/novelist John McGahern said. Someone asked him, “How do you write a novel/short story?” He said, “First you write one good sentence, then you write a second good sentence, and then you write your third good sentence.” And that’s been banging around in the back of my mind almost from the time that I began trying to learn how to write.

SRS: You said you’re not a natural writer, what do you mean by that?

GV: I don’t form things as words initially. I form pictures in my mind and then I try to translate those pictures to words. I mean, that obviously sounds very strange, but writing for me is a kind of translation. Ever since I was a child the things that I imagined, I imagined as pictures. Maybe if I had been born slightly later, I might have been more interested in being a film director, for instance. Now that said, I love great writing and one of the reasons I love great writing is that in my mind it does two things; it puts pictures in your mind, and it puts sounds in your head. I do love the sound of words and I like the inflections, particularly of the vernacular, just the way I like the more formal writing of the 19th century. So for me, when I attack the page, I try to attack it with pictures and with sounds in my head.

SRS: What makes a good sentence?

GV: Oh boy, that’s really difficult. Cyril Connolly talked about two different kinds of English – one he called ‘the mandarin’, which is what we might call now poetic prose, and the other one he called the plain – George Orwell, Ernest Hemingway, Christopher Isherwood, people like that. I don’t think of myself as a plain writer in that style, nor do I think of myself as a poetic writer. I stand in the middle. So there are moments when I will indulge myself, but I also sometimes draw back into the plain style. And the reason for that is that style in a novel has to be married to subject. Whatever you’re writing about in that moment might demand either an alteration of style, or perhaps even a new style, at that moment on the page. 

SRS: A Good Man is the third book in your trilogy of novels set in the West in the late 1800s. You obviously have a deep fascination with this era. Where does that come from?

GV: It actually goes back to a book I read when I was perhaps ten years old by American historian Paul Sharpe. He wrote a book called Whoop-Up Country about a region in Northern Montana, Fort Benton, that extended into southeastern and southwestern Saskatchewan. And that book always stuck in my mind. I did a Master’s Degree in History. I actually thought I might become an academic historian until I discovered I didn’t have the chops for that. But it took me a long time to actually move towards the historical novel, because I was always afraid that my training as a historian would put too many censors in my head.

SRS: These three novels provide a very in-depth insight into that era, even though they are fiction. You’ve really fulfilled a historian’s role as well as a novelist’s role.

GV: I would qualify that. I actually have a disclaimer in this book, even though I do a lot of research and tend to come pretty close to the record. I write what I call ‘intimate history’, which is reimagining history in the way that the people who experienced it dealt with it. All historical writing, even the standard historical writing, comes down to interpretation. There are certain facts that exist, but any writer, whether he or she is a historian or a novelist, brings their own preoccupations, their own perceptions, even what I would call their own world view to the writing of that history.

SRS: Where do you get your insights into character?

GV: When I write a character, I try to comprehend the situation through the character’s point of view and personality. I sometimes tell creative writing students: “don’t put yourself in the position of judging a character when you write”, because I think that if the reader doesn’t make a decision about a character– if the reader feels led by a ring in the nose towards a certain viewpoint of a character – that does nothing but create resistance. So my attitude is I know that I am creating these characters, and I know that I have a certain viewpoint about these characters, but at the same time these characters have to have the freedom to live in a book the way I would imagine them living in, for lack of a better phrase, the real world. So in my case it’s a funny kind of juggling act in which I try and turn my perception of the action, and run it through the character’s eyes whenever I can.

SRS: You’ve said that A Good Man completes the trilogy and that you are ready to move on. Are the characters in A Good Man still with you?

GV: I feel that I want to break from this and turn to something else. I have no idea what that is right now. But I have a feeling that it is time to refresh myself with some other kind of writing. When I look back, I’ve been preoccupied with this for 15 or more years. Which is a long time to give yourself up to anything. It’s an odd thing, only in a few instances have I carried on with characters and I’m pretty sure that these are finished. Once I finish a book, I try to wipe the slate clean. So I would say yes, they’ve left me. The ghosts have left me.

A Good Man is published by McClelland & Stewart. Guy Vanderhaeghe has served as faculty for The Banff Centre’s Writing Studio Program. This interview has been condensed and edited. For a more complete audio version, check the spring issue (#6) of BOULDERPAVEMENT, the Centre’s online magazine of art and ideas, to be published in April 2012. BOULDERPAVEMENT was a finalist at the 2011 Canadian Online Publishing Awards and received an Honourable Mention for Best Digital Design, in the 2011 National Magazine Awards. boulderpavement.ca