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A romance novelist who threw it all away: Winnifred Eaton Reeve

Brian Brennan - September 13, 2021 - No Comments
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She was a Canadian-born novelist with no family connections to Japan who succeeded in convincing thousands of readers, and a few gullible newspaper writers, that she actually came from Japan. How did she get away with it?

Talking to CBC Radio about Rogues and Rebels

Brian Brennan - September 6, 2021 - No Comments
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Chris dela Torre, host of CBC Radio One’s Daybreak Alberta, gave me the opportunity this morning to tell listeners across the province about my new book, Rogues and Rebels: Unforgettable Characters from Canada’s West.

Rogues and Rebels now published

Brian Brennan - September 5, 2021 - No Comments
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Rogues and Rebels: Unforgettable Characters from Canada’s West is my latest title. It introduces us to 32 larger-than-life Westerners who refused to play by the rules.

Recent Posts
    • Defending the energy industry against its attackers
      The Kenney government has now loaded the barrels in the $30 million war room it established to defend the energy industry against attackers. Will it hit its intended targets? Calgary Herald columnist Chris Varcoe doesn’t seem to think so. He notes that the Stelmach government tried something similar in 2008 and that it didn’t last long – barely more than two years. “Nor was it particularly effective.” Varcoe writes that if it was hard in 2008 for the government to correct perceived media errors about the industry, “imagine how difficult it will be to do that in 2019, with the proliferation of social media and polarized audiences.” Varcoe is right. I also don’t think this new war room – now called the Canadian Energy Centre – is going to work. It won’t have the power to require the media to run whatever press releases, tweets or other propaganda devices it employs in response to negative publicity about the industry. So, it is doomed to soon become as irrelevant as the ill-fated “For the Record” website launched by the Stelmach government in 2008. Back in the day, in 1937, the first Social Credit government also tried something similar. It even went so far as to introduce legislation forcing newspapers to print government-supplied articles equal in length to those critical of the government. It didn’t work. The Supreme Court of Canada ruled that the proposed press legislation was beyond the province’s legal power to enact. Alberta’s newspapers received special Pulitzer Prize citations for their leadership in resisting the bill. The Kenney war room does have two functions that might be potentially useful, aside from its more immediate role of rapidly defending the industry against the shots fired by its critics. But these functions would only be of interest to scholars and researchers, not to the media. One is the data and research unit that will analyze information about the industry. The other is the energy literacy unit that will generate content for the stories the province wants to be told. The media likely wouldn’t use either of these government-sponsored units to obtain up-to-date information about the industry, because of possible bias. It already has plenty of neutral sources it can tap, including Statistics Canada’s new Canadian Energy Information Portal. As for the government’s rapid response unit, all it will do is add more decibels to the existing volume of noise about the industry. It would be more effective if it could find a way of cutting through that noise.... Read more...
    • Media coverage for The Love of One’s Country
      I published my novel independently, and that can sometimes deter a mainstream media organization from publicly acknowledging the existence of a book. But not the Calgary Herald, thank goodness. Nor has it been a deterrent for CBC Radio in Alberta. Today was a good day for letting readers and listeners know about The Love of One’s Country. Catherine Ford wrote in the Herald this morning that I must have been frustrated when I found it difficult to write the story of my own family after telling the stories of hundreds of other families in feature obituaries for the Herald during the 1990s. Catherine is absolutely right. I had no letters, diaries or other documents to guide my storytelling in this project, aside from transcriptions of poems composed in Gaelic by my grandmother’s great-grandmother, a survivor of the devastating Irish potato famines of the 1840s. Her poems gave me a sense of the things my ancestor cared about, particularly her desire for Ireland to separate from the United Kingdom. But they told me nothing about the woman herself. That I had to make up. On the radio, meanwhile, Daybreak Alberta host Russell Bowers gave me a generous amount of time – close to 15 minutes – to tell the listeners how I dealt with the challenge of writing about life in rural, famine-stricken Ireland a century before I was born. I also talked to Russell about the challenge of telling readers what it was like to travel across the ocean in a ship never meant for the transportation of human cargo. This is a journey, of course, that I never took myself. Catherine’s article and Russell’s radio interview have been important in getting the word out about The Love Of One’s Country. So, too, have the reviews appearing in blogs and newsletters, and on the Barnes & Noble website. No writer is ever content to write just for the closet. We all want our work to be read.... Read more...
    • Make us better, said the immigration officer
      Should Canada exclude certain immigrants? “Absolutely,” declared a Mount Royal University sessional instructor in a controversial opinion piece deleted from the Vancouver Sun’s website after being widely condemned on social media. “If you do let people into your country,” wrote Mark Hecht in his now discredited op-ed, “then make sure they hold similar values.” The op-ed, which remained in the Sun’s print edition while an apologetic editor-in-chief excised the offending piece from the paper’s website, said Canada should abandon cultural and ethnic diversity, tolerance and inclusion, and start accepting a new norm for immigration policy: compatibility, cohesion and social trust. The article even went so far as to say that a “sprinkle of Protestantism” would put the country back on the right track. Hecht defended his piece as an attempt to break new ground in terms of what he could say in a mainstream newspaper. But nobody, aside from a handful of commenters on his blog, stepped forward to publicly support him. “An inexcusable failure of journalism,” said one critic. “Jingoistic, xenophobic,” said another. “White supremacist screed” with “neo-Nazi talking points,” said a third. Hecht rejected the suggestion his views were racist because “I’m talking about culture, not skin colour.” But to no avail. Even his employer refused to publicly side with him: “The ideas expressed do not represent the position of Mount Royal University.” This all happened on a weekend when the daughter of Romanian immigrants who came to Canada in the mid-1990s did our country proud by becoming the first Canadian-born tennis player to win a Grand Slam singles title. I can envisage the immigration officer saying the same thing to Bianca Andreescu’s parents that one of his predecessors said to me on Remembrance Day 1966: “Welcome to Canada. Make us better.”... Read more...
    • Why did I write my novel, The Love of One’s Country?
      Because I felt I had told only part of the story when I published Songs of an Irish Poet: The Mary O’Leary Story, a nonfiction biography of my ancestor, a renowned Irish folk poet of the 19th century. Yes, I had written about the financial difficulties my ancestor faced during the years leading up to the potato famines of the 1840s, when the cattle and dairy farming business she ran with husband James went into a steady decline.  But no, I hadn’t written much about the devastating impact of the famines themselves, aside from a few paragraphs about evictions by greedy landlords.  I had written nothing about the workhouses, those Dickensian institutions built to house the most destitute of the rural inhabitants. And I hadn’t written anything about the inadequate famine relief efforts, or the fake incentives the landlords offered their “surplus” tenants to get them off their lands and onto coffin ships bound for North America.  One reason for this omission was that the main source of information for my biography – a priest who interviewed Mary O’Leary’s grandchildren and published an Irish-language book of her songs in 1931 – had offered only sketchy details of her life in his book. His main goal, it seems, was to preserve her poems. They had never been written down during her lifetime, but passed orally from generation to generation, and had only survived as artefacts of an ancient Irish literary tradition because the priest and two fellow folklore collectors asked the grandchildren to sing them for transcription purposes.  After publishing my Mary O’Leary biography, which was little more than an expanded version of the priest’s book but now translated into English and rewritten extensively with added historical context, I felt the need revisit her story and fill in the gaps. My ancestor, after all, was a famine survivor. She had avoided the workhouse and didn’t die of starvation. She lived to be 75, which back then would have been considered a ripe old age. And she left a legacy of songs still performed today at major traditional music festivals throughout Ireland.  How did the survivors get through those dreadful times when successive years of blights destroyed their potato crops? How did they deal with the abuses they suffered aboard ship, aside from the unsanitary conditions and the rampant cases of typhus and dysentery? These are what I wanted to write about, and fiction gave me the best vehicle for telling that story after I had completed the necessary research. I also wanted to give the narrative a contemporary dimension by blending the famine history with the story of a more recent immigrant, like myself, who found Canada to be as welcoming in the 1960s as it continues to be today for immigrants seeking refuge. My autobiography, Leaving Dublin: Writing My Way from Ireland to Canada, became the point of departure for that part of the fictional story in my novel.  I’m thrilled now to share my novel with the world. I gave it the title The Love of One’s Country because it deals with the way immigrants can become conflicted when they trade one country for another. For further details and purchase information, consult my books page.... Read more...
    • Extortion closes SMA bars
      After blogging recently about rising crime in San Miguel de Allende (SMA), it saddens me to report that extortion has now shut down five bars in the city’s historic centre, causing 80 people to lose their jobs. At the same time, in neighbouring Celaya – 50 kilometres to the south – crime gangs have shot and killed four people after local business owners staged a demonstration to protest extortion. SMA bar owners who spoke to El Universal, a Mexico City newspaper, said suitcases filled with marijuana and cocaine were left in their premises along with notes from the cartels saying they had to sell the drugs by a specified date. If they failed to meet the deadline, a “corrective” would be given. Five owners opted to discard the drugs and close their bars rather than comply with the order. The bars are all located in a popular tourist section of the city. SMA municipal authorities continue to downplay the rise of crime in their city. The business owners are adamant, however, that extortion exists and say they fear retaliation if they go public like their neighbours in Celaya. The Mexican news agency Notimex confirms that it saw one of the extortion notes containing the threat of corrective action.... Read more...
    • Crime spike in San Miguel de Allende
      For the fourth year in a row, the readers of New York’s Travel + Leisure magazine have chosen San Miguel de Allende as the best city in Mexico and the second-best in the world. At the same time, they have ranked San Miguel’s Hotel Matilda as one of the world’s best urban hotels. That’s the good news. The bad news is that gunmen shot and killed two police officers in San Miguel this past week, making for a total of 65 homicides in the municipality so far this year. Last year, three murders occurred during the same period. The reason for the increase in crime, according to local business owners, is that when President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador vowed in December to end Mexico’s rampant fuel theft, the organized crime gangs responded by diversifying their activities. Two rival drug cartels established operations in San Miguel, where they recruited young people to sell street drugs, and they extorted up to the equivalent of $650 CAD monthly from nightclub owners and artisan market stallholders. If the business owners didn’t pay, they risked being put on a hit list. My interest in this developing news stems from the fact that Zelda and I have been regular winter visitors to San Miguel since 2014, when we spent two enjoyable weeks at the Hotel Matilda. We fell in love with this colonial gem of cobbled streets and revolutionary charm, where some of our Canadian friends now live for up to six months of the year. The much-photographed Parroquia de San Miguel Arcángel Zelda and I go there for one month, February, when the weather in Calgary is at its most unforgiving and the weather in San Miguel is as temperate as the May weather on Salt Spring Island. We also go because the best restaurants there are less expensive than in Calgary, but still of consistently high quality, and because the city generally is culturally rich and diverse. As I wrote in an article for Facts and Opinions.com, you can attend an afternoon reading by a Spanish poet and then listen to a Calgary jazz singer-pianist and a Brazilian electric guitarist performing Great American Songbook staples while you dine in a pizza restaurant owned by a former Mexico City addictions counsellor. Plus, we go there because, in February, San Miguel hosts what my writing comrade Merilyn Simonds has called “the NAFTA of literary festivals,” a gathering of Canadian, American and Mexican authors that attracts the likes of Margaret Atwood, Calvin Trillin and Barbara Kingsolver as keynote speakers. Given the lure of the writers’ festival and the tourist appeal of San Miguel’s restaurants, art galleries, cultural heritage and colonial architecture, it’s perhaps understandable that a city councillor would ask residents not to circulate news stories about the recent violence. “Just share positive news,” wrote Humberto Campos on Facebook. “I’m not trying to cover anything up, I just want to avoid damage to our economy.” He wrote this a couple of days after a Saturday night street shooting left three people dead, including a 14-year-old girl who had been eating at a taco stand. Campos’s posting drew a predictable response from other Facebook users. “You cannot cover the sun with your finger,” wrote one. “People should be advised about what is happening around them,” wrote another. Campos replied: “Keep on sharing the bad and not the good, then. But don’t complain when there’s no money or tourism.” San Miguel’s municipal president, Luis Alberto Villarreal García, took a similar stand this past weekend when he reamed out a couple of reporters live-streaming a police protest held following the shooting deaths of the two officers. “It’s time for you to decide which side you’re on,” said the mayor, grabbing one reporter’s cellphone. “The side of crime or security.” The reporter responded by filing an assault complaint against Villarreal. One recent street shooting that didn’t make the news, probably because nobody was killed or wounded, happened in a central area popular with tourists and wedding parties. It occurred on a Friday afternoon half a block from the Hotel Matilda, where Zelda and I have frequently walked. According to neighbours, the police arrived, arrested a woman who had been firing a gun and threatening passers-by, and resolved the situation without further incident. That one unnerved me. We used to walk that street in the evenings, after dinner and a show or an author reading, and never had to worry about our safety. From now on, we’ll be taking cabs.... Read more...
    • Moving in the mountains of immortality
      Romancing the Rockies: Mountaineers, Missionaries, Marilyn & More was my fifth book. Fifth House published it in 2005, and it sold 4,004 copies. Not my biggest seller, but a worthy contender all the same. It won the first Dave Greber Freelance Writers Award and landed on the shortlist for another prize. In 2017, Fitzhenry & Whiteside, the parent of Fifth House, declared Romancing the Rockies out of print. A year later, I put it back in print as an independently published title. I hate to see my books die. Thanks to print on demand, I no longer have to. I promoted the new edition on my home page and on social media, and it began to sell again. An Edmonton service club bought a dozen copies of the new edition to give to its guest speakers. The book also caught the eye of a television documentary film-maker in Paris. He was doing a program on the movies of the Austrian-born film director Otto Preminger and decided to interview me because I had included a chapter about a Preminger film in Romancing the Rockies. With cameraman Cyrille on the banks of the Bow The Preminger film was called River of No Return. Shot mostly around Jasper and Banff during the summer of 1953, it was a western starring Robert Mitchum and Marilyn Monroe. I had written about trouble on and off the set during the filming – Monroe fracturing her ankle, Mitchum getting drunk in the Banff Springs Hotel bar – and film-maker Thomas Cazals wanted me to talk about some of that. But mostly he wanted me to comment on Preminger’s use of the new CinemaScope wide-screen technology to make the scenery a co-star in his film. Monroe and Preminger on the set He interviewed me on Wednesday at Bow Falls, where one of the movie’s key scenes takes place. Thomas’s cameraman, Cyrille, shot me from different angles and had me moving around the site like a film actor, strolling along the banks of the Bow, looking off to my left, admiring the scenery. I can’t wait to see how this will show on the screen. The documentary will appear in France in Germany on the European culture channel, ARTE, which offers programs in several languages, including English, Spanish and Italian. Voiceovers will turn my spoken words into French and German. I’ll let you know when the show is available for viewing. Who knew that a piece I wrote fifteen years ago would now reach a new audience through European television?... Read more...
    • Remembering Kelly Jay, 1941–2019
      I first met him thirty years ago when, at age forty-seven, he had stepped away temporarily from the music business to run a café in Canmore. “As you can see,” said Kelly, “I finally took a day job.” He noted that Little Richard had gone from washing dishes in a Georgia restaurant to fame and glory as a rock ‘n’ roller. “I went from fame and glory to washing dishes in a Canmore hotel. The difference is, I own the dishes.” Kelly Jay (second from left at the back) with King Biscuit Boy (Richard Newell, front left) He needed the restaurant gig, he said, to put money in his bank account after twenty years of rock ‘n’ roll living defined more by spending than by saving. “We weren’t as interested in security as we were in maintaining the vibe,” he said about his high-flying years as the lead singer and piano player for Crowbar, a blues-based rockabilly band that had started out in 1968 as anonymous backup for Rompin’ Ronnie Hawkins, the Arkansas-born godfather of Canadian rock. “We lived in expensive hotels and drove in limos. You only come this way once; you might as well do it in a Cadillac.” Kelly and his five bandmates had spent a year with Hawkins before striking out on their own. “They’re a nice bunch of guys,” said Hawkins, “but so dumb they could fuck up a crowbar in ten seconds. So dumb they couldn’t solve a two-piece puzzle.” As a joke, they first named themselves Two-Piece Puzzle but, after a few weeks, decided they liked Crowbar better. Hawkins had what today you would call a Trumpian penchant for bad-mouthing former bandmates after they left the fold. He had voiced similarly disparaging words for Crowbar’s predecessors, the Hawks, when they moved on, first to provide plugged-in accompaniment for Bob Dylan, and later to establish themselves independently as The Band. “I taught these guys how to play,” said Rompin’ Ronnie about The Band. “But I taught them the blues. I’m surprised how many country elements they’ve now added to their music.” If Kelly Jay and Crowbar were dumb – as Hawkins alleged – they were dumb like a fox. Within a year, they were on their way to becoming the hottest, fastest, wickedest, wildest, tightest, baddest rockers around. Every rock critic who mattered said so. “Mama, get your dancing shoes on,” wrote Dave Marsh in Creem magazine. “Then steady yourself for the jivingest rock ‘n’ boogie band in the land.” Earl McRae, writing in the Star Weekly magazine, hailed Crowbar as “Canada’s best bet for international stardom of a lasting nature since the Guess Who.” Australia’s Ritchie Yorke, writing for Rolling Stone, echoed that sentiment: “Canada has finally found another act able to compete in the top ten of the world charts.” Their 1969 song “Oh What a Feeling, Oh What a Rush” was the hit single that launched Crowbar as a major force in Canadian rock. Even Hawkins was impressed. “These guys are now as tight as a frog’s ass stretched over a boxcar,” he said. “And that’s watertight.” Kelly and Crowbar bassist Roly Greenway had written “Oh What a Feeling” to celebrate the birth of Kelly’s daughter, Tiffany Rain. However, the Nixon administration saw something more ominous in the song. The White House asserted that “Oh What a Feeling” promoted drug use (“oh what a rush”) and banned it from the U.S. airwaves. “That stung us,” said Kelly. “It hurt like crazy not to have ‘Oh What a Feeling’ a success in the States.” There were, however, tours to the States. Concert appearances with Van Morrison, Johnny Winters, Alice Cooper, Bob Dylan, and other pop luminaries. Friendships established with the likes of Paul McCartney and John Lennon. When they clapped hands in 4/4 time on Lennon’s recordings of “Meat City” and “Institution,” made at The Record Plant in New York City, Crowbar became known, said Kelly, as “the noisy rock ‘n’ roll band from Canada that keeps bringing hookers in from 42nd Street.” They embraced a partying lifestyle that could have killed them. “We went to Hollywood and ended up drunk in James Mason’s swimming pool. We got drunk with the Rolling Stones at Sunset Recorders. We could have done a John Belushi real quick if left to our own devices.” Instead, they opted for Canada, where mostly they could stay out of trouble, and be big fish in a little pond. They kept the vibe going through the 1970s and well into the 1980s before they started to slow down. That’s when Kelly decided to move out west (“way out the 401,” he told his bandmates) and try something different. He never intended the Canmore restaurant stint to last forever. After a couple of years at it, Kelly returned to his first love, singing and playing keyboards. Whenever the right gig came along, he would make a few phone calls and Crowbar would be ready to rock again. “As long as King Biscuit Boy and I are drawing breath, there will be a Crowbar,” he said. He settled in Calgary and played regularly at the King Eddie, the Shamrock Hotel, and other blues venues in the city. He had no desire to go back to his native Hamilton, he said. “I was dying out there. The pollution was affecting my breathing. I had to get out of Hamilton if I was going to survive.” Kelly did that interview with me, for the Calgary Herald’s old Sunday magazine, in October 1989. Two years later, he and Crowbar starred in a ten-hour classic-rock extravaganza at Vancouver’s Plaza of Nations. Four years after that, in 1995, Kelly returned to Hamilton to host the Juno Awards banquet. “We’re back in the Hammer, baby,” he said to whoops of delight from the audience. In 1999, as reported by Globe and Mail TV critic John Doyle, Kelly “wowed a stunned nation” with his rendition of “Oh What a Feeling” at CBC’s annual Canada Day party. Kelly remained active in the music business through the first decade of the 21st century. In 2002, at age sixty, he performed at a musical fund-raiser for his old boss, Rompin’ Ronnie Hawkins, then being treated for pancreatic cancer. In 2005, Kelly and dozens of other Canadian musicians helped raise more than $3.2 million for the Red Cross to aid tsunami relief efforts. In 2009, he granted permission for “Oh What a Feeling” to be used as the official theme song for the Calgary Grey Cup celebrations. In 2011, Kelly and former Crowbar bandmate Roly Greenway entered the Canadian Songwriters Hall of Fame. By that time, Kelly was dealing with numerous health issues. When he sang the national anthem at the 2013 Alberta Flood Aid pre-concert show in the McMahon Stadium parking lot, you could tell that Kelly’s mobility was impaired. Last time I saw him was a year ago, in Calgary at Bill Dowey’s regular Sunday afternoon jam in the Blues Can. Kelly was then in a wheelchair. He told me that a mysterious throat condition had stopped him from singing and that a stroke had stolen his ability to play keyboards. Yet there he was, still grooving to the blues, pleased to see that the younger generation was keeping the vibe going. He died early this morning at age 77 after suffering another stroke. Rock on, Kelly Jay. Your music gave us more than a feeling, more than a rush.... Read more...
    • The 30-year journey of a novel
      It began in 1988. I was reviewing books for the Calgary Herald. One was a two-volume anthology of Irish writings, The Untold Story: The Irish in Canada. It included a journal kept by an immigrant who came to Canada in 1847, the most devastating year of the Irish potato famines. Titled “Black ’47: A Summer of Sorrow,” the journal offered a harrowing account of life in rural County Sligo, where poverty and hunger drove many inhabitants into inefficiently managed workhouses and forced others to leave the country with the hope of finding a better life across the ocean. Their incentives for leaving included offers of paid trans-Atlantic passage from the British landlords and the promise of 100 acres and ten shillings upon landing in Canada. The credited writer of the journal, Gerald Keegan, was a schoolteacher and tenant farmer who could see no future for himself in Ireland. He embarked for Canada without knowing beforehand that the sailing ships used for transporting immigrants were repurposed commercial vessels poorly equipped for the transportation of human cargo. But he soon learned why in later years they would come to be known as coffin ships. His detailed account of the six weeks he spent aboard this overcrowded vessel was the most heartbreaking section of the journal.  I can’t remember now what I wrote in my Herald review but I do remember that the journal, which later turned out to be a fake, had a profound impact on me. My Cork ancestors were famine survivors. Many lost their farms and homes, but escaped the hunger and avoided the workhouses. Some emigrated to the United States and prospered. Among those who stayed at home was my maternal grandmother’s great-grandmother, Máire Bhuí Ní Laoire (Yellow Mary O’Leary), who left a legacy of folk poetry that inspired me to write her biography. After reading my Herald review, a Calgary theatre director suggested I use the Keegan journal as the basis for a play about immigration. I worked on the play for two years. When finished, I sent it to another director who said it might have some production potential if rewritten. But even then it would be a tough sell because it would require a large cast and that would restrict its viability as a professional stage project. At that point, I rewrote it as a radio play where the famine immigrant was reading passages from his journal. That concept didn’t work because the journal entries sat flat on the page like piss on a plate. Turning the journal entries into an exchange of letters between the famine immigrant and his mother didn’t make things any better. I put the radio play away in a drawer and didn’t think about it for a couple of years. In 1992, I came across an article in the Montreal Gazette that drew me back to the play. Headlined “Fact and Fiction Blur in Tale of Irish Famine,” it said the authenticity of the Keegan journal was being called into question. Some scholars believed the journal was the fictional work of two or more authors, including the Quebec newspaper editor who first published the journal in 1895. Despite this, an Edmonton film company, Great North Productions, had secured the screen rights and was all set to chronicle the immigrant’s voyage in a documentary. At that point, I decided the best way to deal with the source material was to turn it into a novel. After more than two decades of writing nonfiction articles for newspapers and magazines, this would be my first stab at writing long-form fiction. I showed my play to a writer friend who specializes in fiction. She agreed that a novel would be the best vehicle for the subject. She also suggested that when I turned it into a novel, I should add a contemporary dimension so it would be something more than a 19th century period piece. I did this by introducing a new character, also an immigrant and a descendant of the famine immigrant. I had him coming to Canada in 1966, partly to escape from a soul-destroying job in the Irish civil service and partly to find out what happened to his immigrant ancestor after he arrived in Canada in 1847. If some of this sounds familiar, it could be because I immigrated to Canada in 1966 and wrote about it in my autobiography, Leaving Dublin: Writing My Way from Ireland to Canada.  I had never written fiction so I had to learn some new tricks. In my naïveté, I had always thought that writing fiction was much the same as writing nonfiction except that you made things up. Not so, I discovered. After taking a series of masterclasses and workshops on fiction writing I became familiar for the first time with such terms as three-part dialogue, leitmotif and archetypal patterns. These were strategies and artistic choices that I might have been aware of subliminally but had never identified them as such because I had never studied fiction as a craft.  I worked on the novel intermittently over a 25-year period. The famine immigrant evolved into an agrarian insurgent inspired by the ethno-nationalistic ideals of his mother, a celebrated folk poet. The contemporary immigrant also harboured republican sympathies. While writing the book, I earned a living with my pen, until 1999 as a staff columnist with the Calgary Herald and after that as a freelance journalist and author of books of biography and social history. At the beginning of 2018, I finally felt ready to share my novel with the world. I gave it the title The Love of One’s Country because it deals with the way immigrants can become conflicted when they leave one country for another. I felt the book should be published simultaneously in Ireland and Canada because the Irish would get the Irish bits and the Canadians would get the Canadian bits, and the novelistic fusing of the two cultures would resonate with both. So I began by trying to find a literary agency in Canada that would represent the book domestically and internationally. No luck there. One agent told me she has great difficulty placing literary fiction with major publishers because they are interested primarily in diverse voices and commercial sales hooks. The Love of One’s Country clearly doesn’t have either. The next step, therefore, was to find a literary press that would be willing to take it on. There were a few mild expressions of interest there but eventually, I opted for independent publication because this way I would have more control over the editing, design, distribution and marketing of the book. It also meant that the book would never go out of print. As long as there’s an internet, The Love of One’s Country will always be available.... Read more...
    • Romancing the Rockies back in print
      I am thrilled to announce that my 2005 book of nonfiction mountain stories, Romancing the Rockies: Mountaineers, Missionaries, Marilyn & More, out of print for a year, is now back on sale again with a spiffy new cover. It is available both as a paperback and – for the first time – as an e-book. When it was first published, a reviewer for Avenue magazine said it should be read for “information and inspiration.” This book was bit of a departure for me because I don’t climb, scramble, ski, canoe or spend any more time in the outdoors than it takes for me to carry home a chai tea latte from Vintage Caffeine. But I do have a passion for storytelling, and the mountains are full of stories. Some are found in the poems of Jon Whyte, some in the ballads of Wilf Carter, and some in the wildlife paintings of Carl Rungius. All demand to be told. The hot chocolate may run out and the sleeping bags may beckon but we must remain by the fire till the tale is told. My journey to the Rockies was more spiritual than physical, so I was grateful for all the explorers, adventurers, artists and climbers who blazed the trails to make my storytelling possible. And how, you may ask, does Marilyn fit into all this? Well, as I quickly discovered when I started researching the book, the story of Monroe’s 1953 trip to Jasper and Banff to make a movie called River of No Return was still being retold fifty years later. Did her dependency on the barbiturates and painkillers that led to her 1962 death from a drug overdose begin on the River of No Return set when she suffered from exposure and exhaustion during filming? So wrote two of her biographers in 1992. When Monroe died, there was no mention in the Alberta newspapers of the summer she had spent filming in the Rockies. But half a century later I was able to find people in Jasper and Banff who still had lots to say about the movie and its doomed star. I was pleased to record what they remembered. Buy the paperback version of Romancing the Rockies by clicking HERE Buy the e-book edition (free if you’re a Kindle Unlimited subscriber!) by clicking HERE... Read more...

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© 2019 Brian Brennan