P.K. Page, an extraordinary poet, prose writer, and painter, one of our most individual talents, died yesterday at home in Victoria, B.C. It is a loss not only for the world of Canadian poetry, over which she loomed large in her unusual way, but for Canada itself.

While I had read poems of hers before, I first encountered the enormity of her contribution in Ottawa in 2003, when Prof. Zailig Pollock, now named Page’s literary executor, spoke to a conference I attended. Pollock’s presentation was about the possibilities of hypertext poetry, and he used his ongoing work on Page as an example. After that day, I began to seek her poems out, and my reading of her has been a universally satisfying experience. (For an artist with such a wide range, she was unbelievably consistent.) The Walrus was fortunate to publish her work a few times over the years, most recently in June 2008, when we featured her poem “Each Mortal Thing,” illustrated by a pair of P.K.’s wonderful drawings.

While her passing is a considerable loss, especially given how productive she was in old age, there is some good news. As Quill & Quire reported yesterday, Pollock will be working with Tim Inkster and his excellent Porcupine’s Quill Press to publish a ten-volume edition of Page’s complete works. Additionally, Pollock and Dalhousie professor Dean Irvine will be preparing a hypermedia archive of her work. Thanks to these efforts, she will live on.

Last June, P.K. published a poem called “Cullen in the Afterlife” in Poetry. On this day after her passing, quoting its closing lines seems to me a very good way of saying goodbye:

So he must start once more. He had begun
how many times? Faint glimmerings and dim
memories of pasts behind the past
recently lived — the animal pasts and vague
vegetable pasts — those climbing vines and fruits;
and mineral pasts (a slower pulse) the shine
of gold and silver and the gray of iron.
The “upward anguish.”
What a rush of wings
above him as he thought the phrase and knew
angels were overhead, and over them
a million suns and moons.

(Drawing by P.K. Page. Click here to read more of her poetry in The Walrus.)

Reif Larsen’s The Selected Works of T.S. Spivet is a novel that’s easy to talk about but difficult to write about. It’s a natural distinction for a book that’s so beautifully designed and obsessively layed out—what can one say with mere words, after all, when the subject of one’s words is a text that incorporates as marginalia scientific diagrams, heartbreaking sketches, sweeping illustration, and nuanced cartography. I’ll just say that Larsen’s debut is everything one could hope for from such an expansively composed volume: it is by turns beautiful, moving, witty, informative, mysterious, and devastating. I spoke with Reif Larsen a few weeks ago, just before he launched the book in Toronto.

When T.S. lists the clubs he’s joined, he includes the Official Dolly Party Fan Club. It occurred to me that though we know a whole lot about what T.S. reads, sees, thinks, and feels, we don’t really get any information on what he’d listen to. What would be on T.S. Spivet’s playlist?

It’s funny that you ask this, because there’s this blog called Largehearted Boy, and they asked me to do a playlist, though it wasn’t necessarily what T.S. would listen to. Because I thought about this and realized that the Coppertop Ranch is kind a music-less place, aside from kind of the crackle of the Westerns on television. (more…)

Last week, I posted the first half of my conversation with New Yorker staff writer David Grann, whose new book The Lost City of Z, about the explorer Percy Fawcett and his mysterious disappearance in the Amazon in 1925, is currently sitting comfortably at number thirteen on the New York Times non-fiction bestseller list. Some brief thoughts on the book were offered before the transcript began; many others have offered more in-depth praise. Part two of our long conversation follows below, with topics including Sherlock Holmes, Theosophy, and some of Fawcett’s more extreme beliefs.

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It’s also a book, of course, about your own obsession. I wonder what you think you have in common with someone else you’ve written about, another historian who was particularly interested in a cache of secret papers, the Sherlock Holmes expert Richard Lancelyn Green?

Oh, probably a lot. I mean, a lot. The thing I remember most about the Lancelyn Green piece, who was this great Conan Doyle and Sherlock Holmes scholar, was his room towards the end of his life, which was so filled with pictures of Conan Doyle and papers and artifacts that everywhere you kind of turned he was haunted by this subject matter he was investigating. And in the course of writing this book, which took me several years of research—I have a little room, a little office, it’s extremely small, and I had, you know, maps up on the wall where Fawcett went and pictures and pop culture imagery and thousands and thousands of pages of copies of Victorian letters and diaries. I mean, you could barely get into my office. And I often felt extremely overwhelmed in the pursuit of this subject. It’s interesting—I wrote the Lancelyn Green piece before the book, and it actually led to the book when I discovered while researching that Fawcett had helped inspire Conan Doyle’s novel The Lost World. Green was driven…mad may be too strong a word, but nearly insane by his obsession with Conan Doyle and his desire to write the definitive biography, he’d spent his whole life on it. And I wanted very much to write the definitive biography on Fawcett—there’d never really been one—but it was utterly elusive. Even if you try to fill in every little bit, there will always be other little bits you don’t know. So of all the people you asked me, in terms of my own life and quest, I feel the most similarity with him. (more…)

There’s a moment relatively early on in David Grann’s spectacular new book, The Lost City of Z, where the author is imagining his subject, Percy Fawcett, during Fawcett’s early years in Ceylon. Fawcett, who would go on to become the world’s most famous explorer and the inspiration for countless fanatical quests to resolve the mystery of his fate, was at the time encamped in a military fort. Grann, recounting a strained moment between Fawcett and his eventual wife Nina, tells us that “For years, they had no more contact. Fawcett remained at the fort, where, high on the cliffs, he could see a pillar dedicated to a Dutch maiden who, in 1687, had leaped to her death after her fiancé deserted her. Nina, meanwhile, returned to Great Britain.”

I offer this as a simple example of what makes this book so exceptional. In Grann’s meticulous endnotes there is no account of his having recovered this information from Fawcett’s papers, which means that instead it was gleaned by his doing what truly great biographers do: imagine their subjects fully, so fully as to meaningfully reconstruct their behaviour within a verifiable environment. Grann the researcher uncovered this pillar, and he can be certain that Fawcett would have seen it; knowing Fawcett’s obsessive streak, he can be relatively certain that his explorer would be aware of the local history. Even if Fawcett didn’t know the pillar’s history, Grann does, and the latter’s research, in this moment and countless others throughout the book, opens history to these small moments of insight, of knowing, and—as in his subtle juxtaposition here of the very practical Nina with her more melodramatic husband—quiet, wise wit.

David Grann is a staff writer at the New Yorker, where he contributes some of the most intriguing, bizarre, and gripping stories the magazine runs—investigating the mysterious death of the world’s leading Sherlock Holmes expert; reporting on Frédéric Bourdin, a French con-artist whose impersonations of children were so successful, he was taken in by a Texas family as their long-missing teenage son; considering Mark Halperin, one of the most influential—and sometimes controversial—players in American political media. We met a few weeks ago, on a cold Toronto Monday morning. (more…)

(Detail of photograph by Larry Towell, appearing in our April issue.)

When we asked Mark Kingwell to write an essay about leadership related to Obama, we weren’t entirely sure what we’d get, but none of us expected the brave, challenging, and completely original piece of writing that resulted. It’s not that we didn’t expect Mark’s writing to be those things—it characteristically is—but that we didn’t expect it to be so in the form in which it exists, an unusual, second-person monologue that allows him, as he tells me below, to be both about Obama not about Obama. I asked Mark a few questions about the new essay, the new president, and the idea of self-awareness.

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I imagine that in writing the piece, you had to do a lot of anticipating, imagining how Obama would conceive of certain things, react to certain phenomena. Now that we’ve been able to observe him in action for a few months, have you rethought your understanding of him?

I wanted the essay to be both about Obama and not about him—readers may notice that his name appears nowhere in the piece, even its headline. In that sense, the cover sell is a bit misleading, though I’m always happy to be on a magazine cover! My idea was to use the change of administration, and the election-victory and inauguration speeches as opportunities for reflection about the very idea of democratic politics. The second-person conceit is a way of doing this, imagining an interior dialogue that might be the counterpoint to all the official rhetoric being uttered by the official man in his official voice. So: back and forth thoughts, doubts, little surges of optimism, and so on. I did of course draw on some real Obama material, his stated views on taxation for example, even while putting other material—stuff from Ian McEwan, David Foster Wallace—into this ‘you’ person’s head. (more…)

An interview with Maclean’s editor-in-chief Ken Whyte about his new book on William Hearst

Of all the non-fiction titles I’ve read this year, few have surprised and delighted me more than Maclean’s editor-in-chief and publisher Ken Whyte’s new account of the rise of William Randolph Hearst, The Uncrowned King. While the book focuses on the struggle for marketplace dominance between Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer, it is, at heart, a history of America at the dawn of the twentieth century, densely packed with research, anecdote, and analysis. (It also offers a fantastic epigraph, worth repeating, from the inimitable Randall Jarrell: “The people who live in a golden age usually go around complaining how yellow everything looks.”)

I spoke with Whyte last week, amidst a grim season for the print media in general, but before this week’s even grimmer news of the bankruptcy of the Tribune group and the New York Times’ new mortgage. As Whyte explains below, his critical reconsideration of Hearst’s early New York success has convinced him that a serious reimagining of what newspapers do is necessary should they hope to survive in the twenty-first century.

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You note that you first read about Hearst while preparing for the launch of the National Post, but that you didn’t see enough there to convince you that the stereotypes about him were inaccurate. What about your experience in newspapers made want to return to study him five years later?

When I returned to it, I still hadn’t changed my mind about Hearst. I’d always had suspicions that something wasn’t right in the way the story was told, because I didn’t believe that Hearst could go from such a low circulation to a high circulation in such a competitive market unless there was something interesting, compelling about his newspaper. So I suspected that people who had written about this episode were missing some of the qualities or appeal of it, otherwise he couldn’t have had that kind of success. (more…)

Taras Grescoe’s excellent book Bottomfeeder is now out in paperback, and recently won the prestigious Writers Trust Award for best non-fiction book of the year…

Taras Grescoe’s excellent book Bottomfeeder is now out in paperback, and recently won the prestigious Writers Trust Award for best non-fiction book of the year. I reviewed Taras’s book in our June issue. He was kind enough to answer my questions about fish, food writing, and fans.

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The book’s main argument—that we should stop eating large, predatory fish and instead consume the more sustainable bottomfeeders—requires an adjustment in our attitudes toward dinner. In researching and adopting the ideas in the book, what has been the single biggest adjustment you’ve made?

I’ve completely adjusted my eating habits when it comes to seafood.

Before I started researching and writing Bottomfeeder, I figured that getting my protein in the form of seafood, from the oceans, was smarter than getting it in the form of chicken, poultry, or beef, from industrial abbatoirs and factory farms. It was a fairly straightforward decision, one I made in the early 90s: fish was clearly more sustainable, and healthier, than meat. At the time, it seemed to me the oceans were inexhaustible as a food source. (more…)

As yesterday’s informal National Post poll showed, Joseph Boyden is the smart-money choice to win this year’s Giller Prize tonight. (Update: Huzzah! I was right.) And for good reason — his new novel, Through Black Spruce, is a methodical study of our relation to the land and each other, marked by Boyden’s characteristically beautiful prose and true, vivid characters. I spoke with Joseph a few weeks ago in Toronto.

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I read in the interview you did with your wife, Amanda, for the CBC, that you handed her a hundred pages of an early version of the novel that just wasn’t working. How did this story originally come to you? And what did you change from those early attempts to make it successful?

The story originally—I knew before I finished Three Day Road that I wanted to write at least one other book, and very possibly two, try and create a trilogy of the family. Each novel could be read on its own, but they don’t have to be read in any particular order, although reading them from first to third might make the most sense. I wanted to stretch myself as a writer and go back to the contemporary—my first story collection was contemporary short stories—and I wanted to explore that world again because I think there’s so much going on, it’s really kind of exciting. And then this whole idea, kind of from a Leonard Cohen song, “Suzanne takes you down” was fascinating to me, and the original title was She Takes You Down, referring to Suzanne, traveling down South and that. But the original title had too many negative connotations that I didn’t want to imply. (more…)