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From Up River and For One Night Only
From Up River and For One Night Only by Brett Josef Grubisic (Now or Never $21.95)
Brett Josef Grubisic's third novel, From Up River and For One Night Only, was partially inspired by his hometown of Mission in the Fraser Valley. As in his first novel, Mission is fictionalized as River Bend City.
"I have ambivalence about Mission,"; he says, "but I realize that I routinely return to it to gripe about it, and I thought that would be an interesting space to explore.";
As a professor of English literature at UBC, Grubisic regularly teaches Alice Munro's Lives of Girls and Women. "That book ends with a kind of manifesto about how one should represent one's hometown,"; he says, "and she uses a lot of words like accuracy and so forth.
"The character who's the writer [in Lives of Girls and Women] rejects an early version of her novel which is filled with exaggeration and caricature. I realized the idea of how one represents one's past through fiction was something I wanted to explore.";
Grubisic's first novel, The Age of Cities (Arsenal Pulp 2006), was partially set in River Bend City in the early 1960s, before he lived there. It tells the story of a closeted gay teacher who lives with his mother and first visits Vancouver in 1959. During his brief forays into the big city, he accidentally discovers a gay subculture. This experimental novel involves the discovery of a manuscript inside a hollowed-out home economics textbook.
Set two decades later, From Up River is about four teens with a dream to make it big as musicians. We follow the main character Gordyn-with his name self-respelled-as he serendipitously wanders into the Granville Street record wonderland of Phantasmorgia and looks for '45 records from early punk bands like Siouxsie and the Banshees. The record employees are black-lipped and spike-haired.
That territory is familiar to Grubisic from his own teens. Typical trips to the big city were going to Eaton's and window shopping, until he discovered the music store, as Gordyn does in the novel.
"It was a whole world we never knew existed,"; says Grubisic. "The people in it are far more adventurous then you'd ever dream of being, but you recognize something in them. A desire to be out of the ordinary.";
These days Grubisic still seeks out music from new bands such as The Knife, St. Vincent and Ladytron. "My taste in electronic has remained constant-basically sythn pop, but more edgy,"; he says. "Discovering something you didn't know existed, like new music, it changes you.";
From up river has four main characters-siblings Gordyn and Dee, and their two friends, also siblings, Jay and Em-who all must solve numerous problems to form the band of their imagination. The intrepid but not exactly talented teens must come up with songs, lyrics, musical ability, access to instruments, places to play and a name.
"There's a lot of autobiography and a lot of fiction,"; says Grubisic. "For example, I never played in any band, New Wave or otherwise, but there were two sets of brothers and sisters in my real life.
"The characters are several steps removed from reality. There was no drug running, no prostitution,"; he says, alluding to some of the novel's more lurid and unexpectedly hilarious episodes.
Grubisic's sister, Meesha Grubisic, died unexpectedly in 2014. In the novel, Jay's sister Em also dies as an adult, leading to Jay and Dee reconnecting.
"My novel was close to being finished when my sister was hit by a car,"; he says. "The writing after that changed the novel into something more serious. At the time of my sister's death, I was drawn to the idea of finding a source to blame [for the tragedy]. The more I thought about Mission and my father, the more I thought that if they hadn't existed, she wouldn't have died. The rewriting started dealing with that. The novel became darker. The portrayal of Em's father became less generous.";
The book's cover shows three teens of the 1980s, including a boy sporting eyeliner, shoulder pads and big hair. Originally the novel would have ended in 1981, but rewriting the story after his sister's fatal accident took the novel beyond nostalgia for an era. Grubisic's experience of cleaning out his sister's house with her friends after her death gave rise to a similar scene in the novel.
Whereas From Up River has reflections of the B.C. music scene, Grubisic's second novel, This Location of Unknown Possibilities (Now or Never, 2014) highlights the general absurdity of the movie-making process. It follows a bemused professor to the Okanagan where she has been hired to serve as a history consultant for a period film. The somewhat prim professor thinks she will be getting an important role on the set as well as an interesting story to tell about how she spent her summer. Alas, the projected film is almost immediately discarded, morphing instead into a steam-punk mash-up of the Victorian era, complete with the discovery of a crashed alien spacecraft in the desert and evil aliens for the movie's busty lady explorer and her wimpy doctor sidekick to battle.
All three novels share a satirical streak. "I can't do sustained sadness,"; Grubisic says. "I just don't have that quality in my own experience of life."; To a suggestion that he's somewhat dour, Grubisic replies, "I'm as pessimistic as any writer, but I also have a large amount of optimism. And I think that optimism comes out in comedy.";
Grubisic is now planning one more novel to be set in River Bend City, which will complete a loosely-based Mission trilogy, marking another return to a place he wanted to get away from.
978-1-988098-07-4
Carellin Brooks is a Freudian scholar, a Wreck Beach historian and a Vancouver Public Library trustee.
Brett Josef Grubisic's third novel, From Up River and For One Night Only, was partially inspired by his hometown of Mission in the Fraser Valley. As in his first novel, Mission is fictionalized as River Bend City.
"I have ambivalence about Mission,"; he says, "but I realize that I routinely return to it to gripe about it, and I thought that would be an interesting space to explore.";
As a professor of English literature at UBC, Grubisic regularly teaches Alice Munro's Lives of Girls and Women. "That book ends with a kind of manifesto about how one should represent one's hometown,"; he says, "and she uses a lot of words like accuracy and so forth.
"The character who's the writer [in Lives of Girls and Women] rejects an early version of her novel which is filled with exaggeration and caricature. I realized the idea of how one represents one's past through fiction was something I wanted to explore.";
Grubisic's first novel, The Age of Cities (Arsenal Pulp 2006), was partially set in River Bend City in the early 1960s, before he lived there. It tells the story of a closeted gay teacher who lives with his mother and first visits Vancouver in 1959. During his brief forays into the big city, he accidentally discovers a gay subculture. This experimental novel involves the discovery of a manuscript inside a hollowed-out home economics textbook.
Set two decades later, From Up River is about four teens with a dream to make it big as musicians. We follow the main character Gordyn-with his name self-respelled-as he serendipitously wanders into the Granville Street record wonderland of Phantasmorgia and looks for '45 records from early punk bands like Siouxsie and the Banshees. The record employees are black-lipped and spike-haired.
That territory is familiar to Grubisic from his own teens. Typical trips to the big city were going to Eaton's and window shopping, until he discovered the music store, as Gordyn does in the novel.
"It was a whole world we never knew existed,"; says Grubisic. "The people in it are far more adventurous then you'd ever dream of being, but you recognize something in them. A desire to be out of the ordinary.";
These days Grubisic still seeks out music from new bands such as The Knife, St. Vincent and Ladytron. "My taste in electronic has remained constant-basically sythn pop, but more edgy,"; he says. "Discovering something you didn't know existed, like new music, it changes you.";
From up river has four main characters-siblings Gordyn and Dee, and their two friends, also siblings, Jay and Em-who all must solve numerous problems to form the band of their imagination. The intrepid but not exactly talented teens must come up with songs, lyrics, musical ability, access to instruments, places to play and a name.
"There's a lot of autobiography and a lot of fiction,"; says Grubisic. "For example, I never played in any band, New Wave or otherwise, but there were two sets of brothers and sisters in my real life.
"The characters are several steps removed from reality. There was no drug running, no prostitution,"; he says, alluding to some of the novel's more lurid and unexpectedly hilarious episodes.
Grubisic's sister, Meesha Grubisic, died unexpectedly in 2014. In the novel, Jay's sister Em also dies as an adult, leading to Jay and Dee reconnecting.
"My novel was close to being finished when my sister was hit by a car,"; he says. "The writing after that changed the novel into something more serious. At the time of my sister's death, I was drawn to the idea of finding a source to blame [for the tragedy]. The more I thought about Mission and my father, the more I thought that if they hadn't existed, she wouldn't have died. The rewriting started dealing with that. The novel became darker. The portrayal of Em's father became less generous.";
The book's cover shows three teens of the 1980s, including a boy sporting eyeliner, shoulder pads and big hair. Originally the novel would have ended in 1981, but rewriting the story after his sister's fatal accident took the novel beyond nostalgia for an era. Grubisic's experience of cleaning out his sister's house with her friends after her death gave rise to a similar scene in the novel.
Whereas From Up River has reflections of the B.C. music scene, Grubisic's second novel, This Location of Unknown Possibilities (Now or Never, 2014) highlights the general absurdity of the movie-making process. It follows a bemused professor to the Okanagan where she has been hired to serve as a history consultant for a period film. The somewhat prim professor thinks she will be getting an important role on the set as well as an interesting story to tell about how she spent her summer. Alas, the projected film is almost immediately discarded, morphing instead into a steam-punk mash-up of the Victorian era, complete with the discovery of a crashed alien spacecraft in the desert and evil aliens for the movie's busty lady explorer and her wimpy doctor sidekick to battle.
All three novels share a satirical streak. "I can't do sustained sadness,"; Grubisic says. "I just don't have that quality in my own experience of life."; To a suggestion that he's somewhat dour, Grubisic replies, "I'm as pessimistic as any writer, but I also have a large amount of optimism. And I think that optimism comes out in comedy.";
Grubisic is now planning one more novel to be set in River Bend City, which will complete a loosely-based Mission trilogy, marking another return to a place he wanted to get away from.
978-1-988098-07-4
Carellin Brooks is a Freudian scholar, a Wreck Beach historian and a Vancouver Public Library trustee.
Submitted on March 1, 2016 in By David.
