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The Path to Ardroe by John Lent (Thistledown $19.95)
Don't quit your day job. That's what artists often hear. One alternative is to retire from it, as John Lent has done.
No longer regional dean of Okanagan College's Kalmalka campus in Vernon, the former English professor now concentrates on being a vocalist for the Lent/Fraser/Wall trio, a long-established jazz group that features guitarists Neil Fraser and Shelby Wall.
Having started singing professionally, in Edmonton, at 18, and writing seriously at 25, Lent now has ten books and a CD called Shadow Moon behind him.
"Music and writing have always seemed inseparable to me,"; he says, "but it's funny how I don't usually think about it much. Now that you asked me, it's obvious writing and singing are connected.
"What joins writing and music is the phrasing and its array of rhythms. The whole issue of 'phrasing' is as crucial in poetry and fiction. Even non-fiction, too. Strong lyrical rhythms have always dominated my poetry and my fiction. But first you must learn the fundamentals.
"When you have covered tunes so much, you acquire the confidence to improvise in music. When that happens, you really do move into an intuitive space of almost unself-conciousness during which you do not know what you're doing, but you're doing it.
"The great enemy of improvisation is the rational mind coming in to interfere and try to control things. You have to make sure it doesn't. That's when you lose the 'feel,' and everything begins to acquire a calculated contrivance. It might be technically good, but it has no heart or soul because it's lost the feel.
"Exactly the same thing applies in my writing. Now, forty years into it, I write to surprise myself, to scare myself even, just as I do when I sing.
I want to write in a state of improvisation. Like the melody in jazz or folk or blues, you have to have the basic frame to hold you, but you are also improvising within that frame.
"That's what happened in the novel. In The Path to Ardroe, I set up four characters in four very different settings. That was the frame. Then I began to improvise. When I sat down to write, I really did not know what was going to happen except I was going to write and generally stay within the frame. The details would come the way the notes do when you're singing. You have to feel them.
"I see my songs as stories and poems. And I see my fiction and poetry like compositions: symphonies, sonatas, suites. I would see The Path to Ardroe in much the same way I might see the structure of Miles Davis' Sketches of Spain or Coltrane's Blue Train.
"But there are crucial differences in the kinds of thrills and rushes and satisfactions both forms offer. The painful thing about writing compared to music is that writing is slow and eventually completed in one form whereas music is immediate, very physical, and never the same twice. That needs to be said, too.";
John Lent first wrote about the Connelly family 16 years ago in Monet's Garden, when he introduced the siblings Neil, Jane and Rick. A follow-up Connelly novel nine years later, So It Won't Go Away, was shortlisted for the Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize in 2006.
This time, the only Connelly in The Path to Ardroe (Thistledown $19.95) is Rick, one of four protagonists that include Rick's long-time friends Peter Chisholm and Tania Semenchuk, as well as Melissa Picard, twenty-two-year-old daughter of another couple who are close friends to the older trio.
The four characters share the pages almost equally from four different places-Glendarroch, Strasbourg, Edmonton and Vernon-all on the same day in 1994.
In Scotland, Peter takes a little-used footpath to Ardroe, from Glendarroch, hoping for excellent coastal views and a glimpse of the hamlet of Ardroe. But he leaves too late, enjoys one smoke too many, lingers too long, caught up in memories of the woman he had come to Scotland to find.
Brave and open to mysticism, Peter is struggling with a painful family history, having lost his father and sister at an early age. His creativity is reflected in his dreams.
The book's other three narrators are also on personal quests, but their explorations are interior. Rick is also a heavy drinker and smoker, and a writer. Twenty-two-year-old Melissa has spread her wings and flown to France, to write. She has left behind a nagging mother, a boyfriend called Brian, a divorced alcoholic father who has fathered an extramarital child, and several creative writing instructors who possibly did her more harm than good.
Tania is older, a teacher and a successful public figure who has an interesting story to tell us about her trip west with Rick when she was Melissa's age. She's a woman who has tragically lost her lover and who has chosen to raise a child on her own, a child who was deliberately and secretly fathered by Melissa's father.
In metafiction, a novel usually imitates a novel, rather than the real world, so readers don't have the luxury of losing themselves in a fictional story. The Path of Ardroe qualifies as metafiction. [William Gass came up with the term metafiction in 1970. Irony and introspection are two of its trademarks, and Lent uses both heavily.]
Another metafiction trademark is the superimposition of the author's life on his characters. Sonia and Rick love jazz; Rick's brother Neil is a musician. Lent and Rick also seem to have the same musical brother called Neil. All four characters grew up in Edmonton, as did the author. The first draft of The Path to Ardroe was largely written while Lent was on sabbatical in 1994, in Scotland.
978-1-927068-01-4
www.lentfraserwall.com
Cherie Thiessen reviews fiction from Pender Island.
[BCBW 2012]
No longer regional dean of Okanagan College's Kalmalka campus in Vernon, the former English professor now concentrates on being a vocalist for the Lent/Fraser/Wall trio, a long-established jazz group that features guitarists Neil Fraser and Shelby Wall.
Having started singing professionally, in Edmonton, at 18, and writing seriously at 25, Lent now has ten books and a CD called Shadow Moon behind him.
"Music and writing have always seemed inseparable to me,"; he says, "but it's funny how I don't usually think about it much. Now that you asked me, it's obvious writing and singing are connected.
"What joins writing and music is the phrasing and its array of rhythms. The whole issue of 'phrasing' is as crucial in poetry and fiction. Even non-fiction, too. Strong lyrical rhythms have always dominated my poetry and my fiction. But first you must learn the fundamentals.
"When you have covered tunes so much, you acquire the confidence to improvise in music. When that happens, you really do move into an intuitive space of almost unself-conciousness during which you do not know what you're doing, but you're doing it.
"The great enemy of improvisation is the rational mind coming in to interfere and try to control things. You have to make sure it doesn't. That's when you lose the 'feel,' and everything begins to acquire a calculated contrivance. It might be technically good, but it has no heart or soul because it's lost the feel.
"Exactly the same thing applies in my writing. Now, forty years into it, I write to surprise myself, to scare myself even, just as I do when I sing.
I want to write in a state of improvisation. Like the melody in jazz or folk or blues, you have to have the basic frame to hold you, but you are also improvising within that frame.
"That's what happened in the novel. In The Path to Ardroe, I set up four characters in four very different settings. That was the frame. Then I began to improvise. When I sat down to write, I really did not know what was going to happen except I was going to write and generally stay within the frame. The details would come the way the notes do when you're singing. You have to feel them.
"I see my songs as stories and poems. And I see my fiction and poetry like compositions: symphonies, sonatas, suites. I would see The Path to Ardroe in much the same way I might see the structure of Miles Davis' Sketches of Spain or Coltrane's Blue Train.
"But there are crucial differences in the kinds of thrills and rushes and satisfactions both forms offer. The painful thing about writing compared to music is that writing is slow and eventually completed in one form whereas music is immediate, very physical, and never the same twice. That needs to be said, too.";
John Lent first wrote about the Connelly family 16 years ago in Monet's Garden, when he introduced the siblings Neil, Jane and Rick. A follow-up Connelly novel nine years later, So It Won't Go Away, was shortlisted for the Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize in 2006.
This time, the only Connelly in The Path to Ardroe (Thistledown $19.95) is Rick, one of four protagonists that include Rick's long-time friends Peter Chisholm and Tania Semenchuk, as well as Melissa Picard, twenty-two-year-old daughter of another couple who are close friends to the older trio.
The four characters share the pages almost equally from four different places-Glendarroch, Strasbourg, Edmonton and Vernon-all on the same day in 1994.
In Scotland, Peter takes a little-used footpath to Ardroe, from Glendarroch, hoping for excellent coastal views and a glimpse of the hamlet of Ardroe. But he leaves too late, enjoys one smoke too many, lingers too long, caught up in memories of the woman he had come to Scotland to find.
Brave and open to mysticism, Peter is struggling with a painful family history, having lost his father and sister at an early age. His creativity is reflected in his dreams.
The book's other three narrators are also on personal quests, but their explorations are interior. Rick is also a heavy drinker and smoker, and a writer. Twenty-two-year-old Melissa has spread her wings and flown to France, to write. She has left behind a nagging mother, a boyfriend called Brian, a divorced alcoholic father who has fathered an extramarital child, and several creative writing instructors who possibly did her more harm than good.
Tania is older, a teacher and a successful public figure who has an interesting story to tell us about her trip west with Rick when she was Melissa's age. She's a woman who has tragically lost her lover and who has chosen to raise a child on her own, a child who was deliberately and secretly fathered by Melissa's father.
In metafiction, a novel usually imitates a novel, rather than the real world, so readers don't have the luxury of losing themselves in a fictional story. The Path of Ardroe qualifies as metafiction. [William Gass came up with the term metafiction in 1970. Irony and introspection are two of its trademarks, and Lent uses both heavily.]
Another metafiction trademark is the superimposition of the author's life on his characters. Sonia and Rick love jazz; Rick's brother Neil is a musician. Lent and Rick also seem to have the same musical brother called Neil. All four characters grew up in Edmonton, as did the author. The first draft of The Path to Ardroe was largely written while Lent was on sabbatical in 1994, in Scotland.
978-1-927068-01-4
www.lentfraserwall.com
Cherie Thiessen reviews fiction from Pender Island.
[BCBW 2012]
Submitted on September 4, 2012 in By David.
