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Terasen Lifetime Achievement Award
The last time I spoke to a library audience I swore I would never do it again. This was while giving a reading in a small library where a man in the back row kept sighing loudly every few minutes throughout, as though he were bored, and impatient, and physically uncomfortable. Groaning, really. Poor fellow, I thought. I'll call a break so he can escape this hell with some dignity. I did, but he got up and loaded a plate with cakes and sandwiches, got himself a glass of wine, and returned to his seat where he continued to sigh and moan loudly throughout the rest of the reading. Never again, I vowed!
You can see what it takes to make me change my mind.
For me, there is something special about the fact that this is happening in Vancouver. One of my first memories is of standing on the deck of a CPR steamship - I was a small child at the time - and looking up as we sailed under the Lions Gate Bridge and entered Vancouver's harbour. If anyone had told me then that my name would one day be embedded in a Vancouver sidewalk I would have been terrified this meant I was destined to be either a traffic fatality or a real estate developer.
That was my first journey out into the world and I remember it vividly because in those pre-BC Ferry days it meant getting out of bed in the middle of the night, sleeping in the back seat of the car as we travelled down the winding old island highway south to Nanaimo, driving onto a large elevator that lowered us and our car down into the hold of the ship, crossing the strait, and then seeing for the first time that magical bridge and the towering buildings of the mysterious city - including that amazing "skyscraper," the Marine Building!
Later, Vancouver became important for another reason. Of my father's many brothers one had not gone into the logging camps or the pulp mills but lived and worked in this city, and I was aware that he composed original songs on the piano and wrote anecdotes he sent to the family still living back on the Island, as well as undertaking the massive task of assembling and writing a family history that included the entire world. He became, at a time when I needed it, a symbol of a different sort of life, a life that made my private ambition to write stories seem a little less ridiculous and slightly less impossible than it seemed while I was feeding chickens and milking the cow before school.
If he and Vancouver encouraged my dreams, nothing I'd read at school or home told me that writing about BC was a reasonable prospect. I'd heard that there was a juvenile magistrate and fisherman in Campbell River who wrote books, and I even saw one of them once - a paperback titled "Timber" with a half-naked woman on the cover. My parents had brought it into the house but I was never able to find it after that first glance, though I turned the place upside down looking for it. It they had hidden it somewhere, I thought, this was probably because it was, like Peyton Place, not fit for young minds. To me, the curious thing was - the miraculous thing of it was that, whatever was on the cover, it had been written by someone who lived on the same piece of the world as I did! And it had been published -- just like the "real' writers from other countries, the writers we learned about in school.
Years later, at university, it was Earle Birney who suggested I read the novels of Vancouver's Ethel Wilson to learn the importance of style. He also assigned Sheila Watson's strange and wonderful new novel hot off the press, set in a fictitious community somewhere in the Interior of British Columbia. It seemed that I had not inherited a literary wasteland after all, I'd just been unaware of what had been going on. There were hugely talented writers already making superb fiction out of the world that they lived in, not all that far away from mine.
Of course there's a risk in being amongst the first to write about a region. I have met people who tell me they emigrated to Vancouver Island from their European countries because they liked what they saw in my books. This is a scary thing to hear - especially while you're waiting for them to tell you if they found what they'd expected. I have also met people who tell me they love the books but would never want to live in a place where nature is so wild and the people so eccentric. And at every book signing or reading Back East someone has told me they grew up on Vancouver Island and that I've ruined their lives - that my books make them so homesick they feel like giving up their jobs and moving back. One woman said, "I only have to see the word 'salal' and I'm a basket case!"
One evening, at a party on the 17th floor of a hotel on Denman Street here in Vancouver, that temporary west-coaster Margaret Laurence, after I'd thanked her for her early encouragement, told me how Ethel Wilson had given her encouragement in the beginning, and how she was happy to pass it on. "That's what you do, kiddo" she said. "You pass it on."
My turn to "pass it on" came after I'd been teaching in Ottawa for two years, when the University of Victoria called me up and suggested it was high time I got myself back to BC where I belonged, to teach in their writing department. This resulted in an opportunity to work for 19 years with an astonishing number of talented beginners, some of whom will stand here one day to accept a Lifetime Achievement Award of their own.
For them, in my turn, I intend to be an example - by demonstrating that a Lifetime Achievement Award is not a signal that it's time to quit, but is, rather, a pat on the back encouraging you to start working on a second lifetime achievement! Because, despite all the me me me in my comments just now, I continue to find other people more interesting than myself - and still feel compelled to explore them! Fiction is not only about place, after all, or its unique culture, or even about the pursuit of the perfect sentence. It is, finally, an attempt to understand and celebrate the human soul.
In addition to my gratitude to Dianne (Vancouver's greatest gift to me) and to family members for their unflagging support, and to the University of Victoria for bringing me home to work "on location," so to speak, and to Douglas Gibson who has been my editor from the beginning. I wish to express thanks to Alan Twigg and B.C. Bookworld, to His Worship Mayor Sullivan, to Paul Whitney and staff of the Vancouver Library, to Amy Hennessy and Terasen Gas, and to all other supporters of BC writers and writing - including the booksellers and readers -- for this award and for all that it represents.
It's probably a good thing I don't live in Vancouver. Otherwise I might eventually become an embarrassment, hanging around the library just to see if people stop to look at this plaque, and to check once a week for signs of rude graffiti.
[Vancouver Public Library, June 10, 2006]
You can see what it takes to make me change my mind.
For me, there is something special about the fact that this is happening in Vancouver. One of my first memories is of standing on the deck of a CPR steamship - I was a small child at the time - and looking up as we sailed under the Lions Gate Bridge and entered Vancouver's harbour. If anyone had told me then that my name would one day be embedded in a Vancouver sidewalk I would have been terrified this meant I was destined to be either a traffic fatality or a real estate developer.
That was my first journey out into the world and I remember it vividly because in those pre-BC Ferry days it meant getting out of bed in the middle of the night, sleeping in the back seat of the car as we travelled down the winding old island highway south to Nanaimo, driving onto a large elevator that lowered us and our car down into the hold of the ship, crossing the strait, and then seeing for the first time that magical bridge and the towering buildings of the mysterious city - including that amazing "skyscraper," the Marine Building!
Later, Vancouver became important for another reason. Of my father's many brothers one had not gone into the logging camps or the pulp mills but lived and worked in this city, and I was aware that he composed original songs on the piano and wrote anecdotes he sent to the family still living back on the Island, as well as undertaking the massive task of assembling and writing a family history that included the entire world. He became, at a time when I needed it, a symbol of a different sort of life, a life that made my private ambition to write stories seem a little less ridiculous and slightly less impossible than it seemed while I was feeding chickens and milking the cow before school.
If he and Vancouver encouraged my dreams, nothing I'd read at school or home told me that writing about BC was a reasonable prospect. I'd heard that there was a juvenile magistrate and fisherman in Campbell River who wrote books, and I even saw one of them once - a paperback titled "Timber" with a half-naked woman on the cover. My parents had brought it into the house but I was never able to find it after that first glance, though I turned the place upside down looking for it. It they had hidden it somewhere, I thought, this was probably because it was, like Peyton Place, not fit for young minds. To me, the curious thing was - the miraculous thing of it was that, whatever was on the cover, it had been written by someone who lived on the same piece of the world as I did! And it had been published -- just like the "real' writers from other countries, the writers we learned about in school.
Years later, at university, it was Earle Birney who suggested I read the novels of Vancouver's Ethel Wilson to learn the importance of style. He also assigned Sheila Watson's strange and wonderful new novel hot off the press, set in a fictitious community somewhere in the Interior of British Columbia. It seemed that I had not inherited a literary wasteland after all, I'd just been unaware of what had been going on. There were hugely talented writers already making superb fiction out of the world that they lived in, not all that far away from mine.
Of course there's a risk in being amongst the first to write about a region. I have met people who tell me they emigrated to Vancouver Island from their European countries because they liked what they saw in my books. This is a scary thing to hear - especially while you're waiting for them to tell you if they found what they'd expected. I have also met people who tell me they love the books but would never want to live in a place where nature is so wild and the people so eccentric. And at every book signing or reading Back East someone has told me they grew up on Vancouver Island and that I've ruined their lives - that my books make them so homesick they feel like giving up their jobs and moving back. One woman said, "I only have to see the word 'salal' and I'm a basket case!"
One evening, at a party on the 17th floor of a hotel on Denman Street here in Vancouver, that temporary west-coaster Margaret Laurence, after I'd thanked her for her early encouragement, told me how Ethel Wilson had given her encouragement in the beginning, and how she was happy to pass it on. "That's what you do, kiddo" she said. "You pass it on."
My turn to "pass it on" came after I'd been teaching in Ottawa for two years, when the University of Victoria called me up and suggested it was high time I got myself back to BC where I belonged, to teach in their writing department. This resulted in an opportunity to work for 19 years with an astonishing number of talented beginners, some of whom will stand here one day to accept a Lifetime Achievement Award of their own.
For them, in my turn, I intend to be an example - by demonstrating that a Lifetime Achievement Award is not a signal that it's time to quit, but is, rather, a pat on the back encouraging you to start working on a second lifetime achievement! Because, despite all the me me me in my comments just now, I continue to find other people more interesting than myself - and still feel compelled to explore them! Fiction is not only about place, after all, or its unique culture, or even about the pursuit of the perfect sentence. It is, finally, an attempt to understand and celebrate the human soul.
In addition to my gratitude to Dianne (Vancouver's greatest gift to me) and to family members for their unflagging support, and to the University of Victoria for bringing me home to work "on location," so to speak, and to Douglas Gibson who has been my editor from the beginning. I wish to express thanks to Alan Twigg and B.C. Bookworld, to His Worship Mayor Sullivan, to Paul Whitney and staff of the Vancouver Library, to Amy Hennessy and Terasen Gas, and to all other supporters of BC writers and writing - including the booksellers and readers -- for this award and for all that it represents.
It's probably a good thing I don't live in Vancouver. Otherwise I might eventually become an embarrassment, hanging around the library just to see if people stop to look at this plaque, and to check once a week for signs of rude graffiti.
[Vancouver Public Library, June 10, 2006]
Submitted on June 15, 2006 in By David.
