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.

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Most textiles and clothes are made in Asia, sold to the West, discarded in the West, and donated to charities who have too many dresses to know what to do with them. Then the charities send them to Africa. For example:

Fictitious Original Owner: Cindy Showalker’s 8th birthday party in Miami, 1993. Cindy and her mom went shopping at the local strip mall and found this doozy on sale. Cindy really loves the color pink, especially when there’s an iridescent sheen involved. Mrs. Showalker thought it was expensive, even on sale, but she swiped the plastic anyway since Cindy only turns eight once. Cindy only wore the dress once, and then Mrs. Showkalker gave it to their Hispanic maid, who already had so many party dresses that she passed it on to Goodwill.

Actual Current Owner: Lucy Mugisha, Gayaza District, one hour east of Kampala, Uganda, 2008. Lucy loves this dress when she rides bicycles with her friends. She wears it everyday since it’s her only dress besides her school uniform. Lucy just turned seven, and was getting a bit old to be running around the village without any pants on. Her tata (dad) bought it at a used clothing market in Kampala when he went to find the family a new frying pan. Incidentally, he is color blind. (more…)

“We love our King,” proclaims Kingal, a Bhutanese man I am chatting with.  I have heard this sentiment throughout Bhutan.  The people here keep pictures of him in their homes, in their businesses; they say prayers for him.  It is as if he is a part of their lives, and “love” is not a casual, metaphorical term. It seems to accurately describe the emotion they have for him.

This year is momentous for this tiny Himalayan kingdom: they are celebrating 100 years of the Wangchuck dynasty, and the fifth King, Druk Gyalpo Jingme Khesar Namgyel Wangchuck,  was just coronated on November 6th — the date deemed auspicious by “three enlightened astrologers.”  Thursday was the eighth day of the ninth month of the earth male rat year.  But just as notably, Bhutan had its first election in March 2008.  The Kings deemed it important that Bhutan transition to a parlimentary democracy, with the king in a background role, much like the royal family of England.   (more…)

Desperate for exercise, I spent half an hour yesterday jogging around Liberty City. My cousin wanted me to steal a police Hummer and shoot innocent bystanders. Instead, I ended my relaxing run in an Emergency Room with grenades that put all us invalids out of our collective miseries.

Usually after a run I just do pigeon pose.

With my foot damaged and my mind speeding the internets have provided me with other less violent places to go.

I’ve proposed to a wide variety of rural Christian girls. I’ve been sending tinkly poetry composed of lines culled from my favourite horror novels/movies and songs. For example: Your new society sounds charming, Mine Mine Mind, My heart burns there, too.* No responses yet.

Yesterday I dropped a community move for a family whose patriarch is working in Egypt. It was amazing. So many people came to help, the trucks were unloaded and unpacked in less than an hour. (more…)

From the window of our 171-year-old hotel, the St James, I looked out onto the familiar sight of the Edmund Pettus Bridge gently bending over the Alabama River, covered in a layer of morning dew, and lit up by a brilliant sunny sky. The previous night’s celebrations left me feeling less than sparkling, but Birmingham was beckoning.

Since the beginning of our trip we had planned to visit the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church, which was bombed by members of the Ku Klux Klan in 1963, killing four girls and giving Birmingham the nickname “Bombingham.” When we arrived, the church’s stone steps were warm from the noon sun. The doors were closed, but a sign directed visitors to go through the office entrance. I was expecting a livelier gathering, but the quiet mood was a sign that people were taking a breather, retreating to the smaller communities of their families, and getting ready for the next chapter. (more…)

Well, I held off my formal endorsement because I didn’t want to be accused of attempting to influence a foreign election, but you might as well know I was pulling for Obama.

And you also might as well know that the reason I’ve been gone for a week (and the reason you’ll be waiting a few more days to read my promised chapter III of the whole annoying-to-childless-people mediation on kids and happiness) is because my daughter Irene was born last Friday morning. Halloween baby! Instant goth cred, no?

In any event, those two dominating events are the subject of an essay I wrote on election day for Eye Weekly. In the nature of these things, we had to cut it by more than half its length to fit it in the paper. So for anyone interested in the director’s cut — or uncut — here’s the whole thing as I wrote it. (The short version: I’m really happy this week.) (more…)

So I broke my foot. I’m on a roll here: Heartbreak last week and foot-snafu this week
 
So I broke my foot.

I’m on a roll here: Heartbreak last week and foot-snafu this week. 

What ever could be next?

My Rev A Macbook Pro will arrive soon and so I expect I will have a broken churned-out-of-Shanghai-too-soon computer.

I’m as bad off as Yahoo, mewling and crawling back to Microsoft. Yahoo now needs to be bought by them after failing to close on any other offers. And me? I’ve taken for granted how well my heart and feet have served me thus far. Now I long for immediate rejuvenation.

What a pathetic pair we make.

Socialnets to the rescue! (more…)

I am always suspicious of megaprojects, which tend to be mostly about national pride, political legacies, and trickle-down corruption. (This is true back home, too: witness Montreal’s crumbling Big Owe stadium, and the useless white mastodon that is Mirabel airport.) Well, projects don’t get much more mega than the Panama Canal. My favourite statistic from the Canal’s museum is that its excavation required 60 million pounds of dynamite. Whole wars have been fought with less.

I admit it’s hard to argue with the general usefulness of halving the seafaring distance between New York and San Francisco, but this Eighth Wonder of the World is not without its controversies. Its history provides useful illustrations for a checklist of megaproject dos and don’ts:

Don’t: Kill tens of thousands of people and then fail through stubborn incompetence. Really, this should be Rule One for any project, but nobody told the French, who in 1880 decided they would dig a sea-level canal across the isthmus, rather than building one with locks. 22,000 workers died, mostly from malaria and dengue fever. No canal was dug. The French tend not to talk about this episode much when itemizing the triumphs of their glorious history. (more…)

A photo gallery from Selma, Alabama on the night of Barack Obama’s election victory

SELMA, ALABAMA — “Yes we can. Yes we can. Yes, we did!” The crowd erupted with hugs and high fives last night at The Gathering, a local Selma café, when Barack Obama became the 44th American president.

It had been an emotional day for the city. As if to signal the mood, the usually clear skies were overcast all morning, blending in with the grey Spanish moss hanging limply off oak branches. That evening, some seventy residents, along with reporters from the New York Times and Chicago Tribune, crossed the Edmund Pettus Bridge in silence, retracing the steps of those who fought for voting rights and changed the political landscape of America.

Holding candles to light the way, the group assembled on the other side of the Alabama River, where Civil Rights marchers had once encountered violence and hatred. Waiting for them was ninety-seven-year-old Amelia Boynton Robinson, who had been tear-gassed and beaten on March 7, 1965, better known as “Bloody Sunday.” The officer who had repeatedly hit her on that fateful day died recently, she told the crowd, and she attended his funeral as a gesture of forgiveness.

Her message resonated with the residents of Selma, who nodded their heads in approval at her story. However much the city has to contend with its past, residents are hopeful for its future. “Martin Luther King believed that Selma could be a modern Mesopotamia, a melting pot,” said Mae, who has lived here all her life. “Now all eyes are on us. If we can do it…” she trails off, lost in the possibilities, before adding, “It’s not so much about change as hope.”

Taking a smoke break outside The Gathering after McCain’s concession speech, a young, off-duty police officer tells me that this moment marks a new American nationality. His father was one of the organizers for Bloody Sunday, and was in Memphis when Martin Luther King was killed. I ask him how it feels to inherit a narrative he didn’t experience first-hand. “We’re making our own history. There’s so much possibility here, we just have to be creative.”

Obama mentioned Selma last night during his victory speech as being a symbol of his campaign’s maxim, Yes, we can. A few weeks after announcing his run for office, he had visited the city to commemorate the Civil Rights marches, saying, “Don’t tell me I don’t have a claim on Selma, Alabama. Don’t tell me I won’t come home to Selma, Alabama. I’m here because somebody marched. I’m here because you all sacrificed for me.”

Photos by Michael Lasry. Click to see a larger image, or read Alex Redgrave’s first postcard from Alabama.

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On a road truo to Alabama to watch today’s election, stopping by the town of Selma

“Why Alabama?” asked the border agent on Saturday afternoon. Ah, the trick question. We thought heading for the big ‘A’ might look suspicious because, seriously, why Alabama? When we—that being myself, and my friends Michael and Kristen—set off from Montreal to the Heart of Dixie, it was on a whim with little time to prepare for the question beyond “Why not?”

From its bustling blue collar cities, to the eerily silent cotton fields, Alabama is haunted by history. It was here that Rosa Parks defied racial segregation laws, inciting the Montgomery Bus Boycott that went all the way to the Supreme Court. And it was here that Martin Luther King led marches for the Civil Rights Movement from Selma to Montgomery, where he gave the “How Long, Not Long” speech and later wrote his “Letter From Birmingham Jail.” Through the lens of this turbulent past is a presidency that means much for the future of the Deep South—a region defined by loss and resurrection. We wanted to witness this historic election for ourselves. (more…)

For expats, the razing of South Bar Street for a residential development was the end of Old Beijing

A few blocks from Workers’ Stadium, which was commissioned by Mao Zedong in 1959 to mark the tenth anniversary of the People’s Republic of China, is a neighbourhood called Sanlitun, the city’s centre of hedonism. Sanlitun is a place of expat lore. In the late 1990s, Sanlitun South Bar Street was, other than hotel bars, the only place to go for late-night revelry. The Sanlitun establishments were intimate and dirty, and partiers spilled into the narrow streets until it was a big outdoor beer garden. A friend of mine who teaches math at an international school and who is in his sixth year in the city told me that South Bar Street was a place where people drank lukewarm bottles of Tsingtao beer by the dozen and “just got drunk.” The Facebook group Sanlitun Bar Street Alumni now has some 1,500 members. (more…)

At the Dublin Marathon, I stuck to my plan of drafting off the Kenyans for the first 24 miles

DUBLIN—I’m sorry, Trotteriacs. I feel like I’ve failed you. I gave it all that I could, but in the end, I didn’t win the 29th running of the Dublin Marathon. Good thing I didn’t make any money-back guarantees.

In the end, it was Ukrainian runner Andriy Naumov who was first across the line in Merrion Square, managing to hold off my valiant challenge by a barely perceptible gap of one hour, 43 minutes and one second. I appealed the result immediately, petitioning the race jury to review the photo finish, but it turns out the exposure time of the finish-line cameras is significantly less than one hour. Amazing what they can do with technology these days… (more…)