I mean, look at it objectively, side by side.
First: Agassiz is a small town in southwestern British Columbia, a farm-town nestled in a crook of the Fraser River about an hour and a half outside of Vancouver. A couple of days each year the air is so heavy with the smell of fertilizer from the fields that you almost taste the cow shit. Coming into town, you cross a bridge over the Fraser (which terrified me as a child, and terrifies me more now), you drive down either the front street or the back street. There’s one high school, and in the mid-’80s a close group of friends won the Provincial basketball championships against all odds. There’s a library, and a couple of coffeeshops, and down the road a piece is another little town, Harrison Hot Springs, on the shores of Harrison Lake. Every year in Agassiz, there’s the Fall Fair and Corn Festival (third weekend in September), and the Corn King is crowned. The town is ringed with farms, and forests, and lazy back roads.
Okay, now Henderson.
Henderson is a small town in southwestern British Columbia, a farm-town nestled in a crook of a river about an hour and a half outside of Vancouver. A couple of days each year the air is so heavy with the smell of fertilizer from the fields that you almost taste the cow shit. Coming into town, you cross a bridge over the river, and you drive down either the front street or the back street. There’s one high school, and in the mid-’80s a close group of friends won the Provincial basketball championships against all odds. There’s a library, and a couple of coffee-shops, and down the road a piece is another little town, on the shores of a large, mysterious lake. Every year in Henderson, there’s the Harvest Festival (third weekend in September), and the Harvest King is crowned. The town is ringed with farms, and forests, and lazy back roads. Oh, and it has a movie theatre.
See? Completely and utterly different. (Note the movie theatre.)
I’m not being facetious. Or coy. Agassiz is not Henderson.
The trick, even to my mind, is to balance the “is not” with the fact that, at some levels, it “is.”
With so many of my formative years spent in that small spot on the map, Agassiz is a wealth of memories and experiences. It’s a veritable mine-field of resonance. Walking down the highway from the house where I grew up to my grandmother’s house alone layers memory upon memory, some pleasant, some not so much. The smell of the dust on that road in high summer is almost crippling in the sheer amount of resonance it carries. That half mile stretch alone has enough in it for a book. Or two. The dusty air is thick with ghosts. And everywhere I turn in Agassiz, there’s more, and more, and more. The past (Pang’s restaurant, for example, where I lived every weekend for several years, drinking coffee and eating wonton soup and writing, always writing, while my girlfriend waited tables) jockeys for position with the present reality (that building burned down, for example, about a year ago). It’s an absolute wealth of raw material, of emotion and memory and questions. . . .
To the point where I can’t write about Agassiz. I simply can’t.
And yet, I do. But I don’t. (Are you starting to see how this works, in my head? Welcome to my head, by the way — it’s a bit of a scary place.)
Writers have their places, locales and sites that inspire them, that give them homes and give them stories. James Joyce had Dublin, and he was unrepentant about it. On Bloomsday every year (which is, as I’m writing this, today, as a matter of fact), devotees gather to follow the steps of Leopold Bloom through Dublin and through Ulysses. An entire industry has grown up around a single book and its fidelity to its sense of place (which is even more impressive, considering the novel was written in Switzerland, not Ireland, but I digress . . .). To a much lesser degree (because hey, we are talking Joyce here), I have Victoria. Walking tours could, conceivably, be led from location to location: Hillside Mall, Royal Jubilee, John’s Place, the cliffs off Dallas Road, Pagliacci’s. Okay, it’s a much less interesting tour that Joyce’s Dublin, but it could be done (and I suspect that, hard though it may be to believe, there may actually be more drinking involved in my tour than any Bloomsday ramble).
But I also have Agassiz. There are stories to tell, not of the town itself, but of some of the ideas around the town, some of the resonances. For better or worse, it inspires me, in ways that are at once inextricably linked to the physical place and simultaneously completely unrelated.
I’m not alone in this. Look at William Faulkner. He referred to Yoknapatawpha County as his “apocryphal county,” based loosely on Lafayette County where he lived. Similarly, Manawaka, Manitoba was based loosely on Neepawa, Margaret Laurence’s hometown. And look at Stephen King, whose Derry and Castle Rock are clearly more than inspired by the small Maine towns he knows so well.
The question then, I suppose, is why? To get all rhetorical and third-person-y about it: if you’re going to write about a place, and you’ve gone on at great length to clarify just how important the place is to you and your writing, why not just write about the place? For the love of God, man, why tie yourself up in knots over it?
And the only way I can answer is to repeat myself: because Henderson is not Agassiz. Except inasmuch as it is.
An anecdote might help.
Henderson was born in the early 1990s, on the main floor of the Book Warehouse store on Broadway in Vancouver. It was the third week of September. I was managing the Book Warehouse location in Victoria at that point, and I was working for a week at the flagship store, connecting with the head office, getting to know how things were done in the big city. It was a Friday afternoon. I had come back from lunch at a little Chinese restaurant a couple of doors down (wonton soup, naturally), and I was feeling the first buzzes of an MSG reaction when one of the people working there asked me what I was doing for the weekend.
So I explained that my wife was coming over from Victoria and we were headed out to Agassiz for the Fall Fair that afternoon.
The Agassiz Fall Fair is a big deal in the way that only smalltown fall fairs can be a big deal. It’s the equivalent of homecoming weekend at your better universities: everybody who can come back, comes back. It’s a celebration of friends and family, an annual opportunity to re-connect with one’s roots. This person I was talking to didn’t know that, however, so I had to explain the Fall Fair in detail. And after I described the rides and the judging of preserves and baking and crafts and the beer garden and how much I missed the old days of the demolition derby, I explained about the crowning of the Corn King.
“It’s pretty prestigious,” I explained. “All the local farmers who are growing corn that year are entered, and their fields and their crops are evaluated by a panel of experts, people from the Experimental Farm, that sort of thing. And the one with the finest crop is crowned the Corn King. There’s a robe and a crown and everything.”
And that’s the whole story. That’s what the Corn King is, more or less (if I were inclined to research further, I would know exactly who to call — one of the benefits of smalltown life). Except I didn’t stop there. And to this day, I don’t know where the next comment came from, or how it came to me. But came it did.
“And then,” I continued, completely deadpan, “at midnight he’s sacrificed to the Old Gods to ensure a plentiful harvest for the next year.“
She laughed (of course it was a she); it wasn’t bad as far as punchlines go.
I didn’t laugh. And in that moment, my life changed, and Henderson was born.
Because all that stuff about the Fall Fair, the homecoming, the crowning of the Corn King? That’s all Agassiz.
The mythic, ritual, pagan sacrifice of the Corn King for the benefit of the community, though? That’s Henderson. There are any number of perfectly valid reasons to create a mirror-image of an existing community to use as a location for one’s writing. Hell, I subscribe to any number of perfectly straightforward reasons to justify my having done it.
Chief among these is likely practicality. Simply put, it’s easier to write about a place that you’re making up because you can include what you need. When
you’re writing based in and on a real place, you’re pretty much limited to the existing reality. Yeah, I said pretty much; I haven’t always followed that rule, as my mentions of Sherry being treated at Royal Jubilee in Before I Wake and the continued existence of an antiquarian bookstore in the new novel where now there is only a financial planning company should attest. As a general rule, though, inventing a place gives you more freedom. I couldn’t, for example, write about characters in Agassiz going to a movie, because Agassiz, during the time of my existence hasn’t had a movie theatre. Henderson does, though. (Can you tell I’m still a little ticked at the lack of a movie theatre in Agassiz when I was growing up?) It allows you a larger freedom as well, the freedom to create histories and identities and backstories. Again, if you need it, you can create it. It’s not like writing about Victoria and needing, for some reason, to have the city destroyed in a historic fire at the turn of the century. That kind of thing just doesn’t fly.
And then there’s the issue of . . . well, let’s call it civility. But fear might be another way of looking at it. And deniability. Let’s face it, if you’re writing in the “real” world, somebody, somewhere, sometime is going to get pissed and assume that the very worst of the characters in your book is, in fact, a barely concealed version of his- or herself. Nobody wants a story filled with saints and piety (God, where would be the fun in that?), but people don’t want to think that they’re the basis for the very nadir of your creations. And in the event that you’re confronted by a 6’ 2” refrigerator of a man with a badge, who’s drunkenly complaining that the pants-wetting, alcoholic, child-molesting deputy in your book must be him, being able to say, “No, no, it’s just a story! See! It’s in a completely different town! Completely imaginary!” might, just might, help you avoid the shit-kicking, which, let’s face it, you probably deserve.
I’m sure the residents of Lafayette County and Neepawa weren’t always that keen on how “they” were depicted in Faulkner and Laurence’s writing, but what can you do?
And speaking of shit-kicking, there’s also the issue of cruelty. And this is, for me, a pretty pertinent reason to distance a real town by creating a simulacrum.
Let’s look at Castle Rock and Derry, two of Stephen King’s “wholesome” little towns. Jesus, what that man puts those people through is nothing short of malicious. I mean, killer clowns, fer the love of Pete! Does it get any worse than that? And I bet he does it with a smile on his face. No, I’m sure he does it with a smile on his face, because I’ve been there. I’ve done that. The things that happen in the Henderson stories . . . the mind reels.
And while the thought of burning the town of Agassiz to the ground is reprehensible (and, yes, I realize, likely psychotic), with Henderson, it’s all right. No, it’s better than all right: it’s the right thing to do. Well, given the context and the events surrounding it.
Which is probably the key thing, now that I think about it. The main reason for the creation of Henderson was that it allowed me access to those stories I wanted to tell, and a context in which to tell them.
Let’s face it — I’m odd. I know that. Anyone who’s spent any time at all talking with me knows it; it’s an undeniable fact.
And I have odd ideas for stories. How else would I be able to go from a perfectly innocent, nay, almost heart-warming story about a smalltown agricultural fair to a story that has its roots in ideas of pagan sacrifice, the Eleusinian Mysteries and a willing death for the good of a community? That’s not a logical leap.
And so long as I was thinking about Agassiz, it was an impossible leap even for me to make.
Agassiz is so rich in my mind, its people so familiar to me, its landscape so real, so drenched in memory and experience, that it’s literally impossible for me to write about it. And certainly impossible for me to turn the full, and more than occasionally destructive, force of my imagination on it.
Turn it one degree toward the weird, though, and not only can I turn my imagination on it, but I do. With relish.
Or, to put it another way (and to deliver the pay-off for the analogy I established earlier):
Imagine a stack of transparency sheets overlaying a strict, cartographical rendering of the town of Agassiz, and its surrounding forests and hills and cemeteries and lakeshore. Look at the whole stack: the cartographical base; the knowledge transparency, with my deep, intimate awareness of the town; the experience transparency, with seventeen years worth of memories (and, let’s face it, baggage); and finally, the resonance level, with the darkness of my imagination and the brightness of my ghosts.
That, right there, is my Agassiz you’re holding in your hands. My personal geography, in one possibly overdeveloped metaphor.
Now, grab the top transparency, the resonance sheet, and fold it carefully back while you tear out the other two transparencies — knowledge and experience — and toss them in the nearest trash can (or, if you’re feeling symbolic, set them aflame with a Zippo lighter). Now, take out a Sharpie, scribble over the name “Agassiz” on the base sheet and scrawl in the name “Henderson.” And finally, let the only remaining transparency sheet fall back into place: resonance on top of cartography, divorced from knowledge and experience.
That’s Henderson, right there. One degree of weird — and an entire universe — away from Agassiz.
Or, as I’ve always maintained (and if you want to go all quantum for your metaphors), two very real towns, occupying the same very real space, but in parallel universes.
The creation of Henderson (or discovery, really, because I suppose it was always there somewhere, in the depths of my subconscious) allowed me to create, not quite out of whole cloth, a history for the town. A population. A dynamic and a psyche.
It allowed me to create a world.
And over the last decade and a half, through a dozen or so short stories, a novella or two, and a shortish, abandoned novel, I’ve developed that world with a level of detail and immersion the extent of which I don’t think I’m even aware of yet. I know where everything is in Henderson, how settings relate to settings not in the abstract but at a level of roads and paths through fields and forests. I know the history of Henderson. I know its people, and who they relate to, and how.
You’ve met a few of them now. Some of them you’ll see again, in the way that you’ll always run into people you know in a small town. Especially when they’re as significant to the town and its history as John Joseph and his wife Claire. You’ll hear about the flood of ’49. And the year the town burned to the ground, following an endless summer of madness and violence and no rain. You’ll hear stories of birth, and of death, and of myths alive and walking the backroads and paths.
And forests. Can’t forget the forests.
Did I say “flood” up there? Ah, yes, so I did. Yes, Henderson has a flood. Much like Agassiz did, sixty plus years ago. Things happen like that in the weird relationship between the two places. Events and locations shift amorphously from one reality to the next. Take the woods in The World More Full of Weeping: I know those woods. I’ve walked those woods. When I was Brian’s age, I thought about disappearing into them.
And last June, during a long-weekend family reunion, I walked into them again. Not far, because they scare me as much as they attract me. But far enough to really feel them again, to be reminded that they were as I had both imagined and remembered.
Because the woods in The World More Full of Weeping are the ones at the back of my grandmother’s house, the house where, in the novella, Brian and his father live.
It’s funny, though: walking through Agassiz, spending the weekend in the house where I grew up (which is the house in “The Small Rain Down,” for the record), I didn’t feel any of the surreality that accompanies me so often in Victoria. In my grandmother’s house, I was surrounded by my family — there wasn’t the slightest sense of being in two places at once, or having my real life and the life I had created for Brian and Jeff awkwardly juxtaposed.
That’s the main thing
about Henderson: it’s utterly fictional, even though it might seem otherwise. And therefore I can breathe easy.
Stepping into the woods, though . . .
Stepping into the woods was like crossing a threshold, from the heat of the day to the cool of the shadows. From the noise of the fifty or sixty family members in the backyard preparing for a group photograph to the not-quite-stillness, the slow, steady hum of mystery and life unfolding unseen all around me.
It was as if, in one step, I went from Agassiz to Henderson. By entering the woods, I had moved between worlds.
Which I suppose is the last word. Because that’s what happens when you walk into the woods.
Acknowledgements
To get it out of the way at the start: any credit goes to others. Blame, however, comes straight to me.
As always, a writer is grateful to his readers, and I’m no exception. I’m most grateful to those readers who get the story first, hot and pulpy and fresh, whose eyes help shape it into even a modicum of respectability. For these stories, my deepest gratitude to James Grainger and to Colin Holt, fine readers and fine friends both (even when I don’t pull my own weight). And Colin deserves extra thanks, for all his help — above and beyond the call of duty, my friend.
I would also like to thank the readers on the RWF Yahoo board. It’s a strange world where a group of Springsteen fans can come together as first readers and fiction enablers, but it’s a world I’m delighted to live in. Thanks, then, to Ruth, Adam, Fredo, Michael, Kathryn, Ray and Karen. And to Laurie and Matthias, who also weighed in. Strange how easily strangers can become friends without even meeting.
Random House Canada was very gracious in allowing this slim volume to sneak out — my thanks to my publisher, Anne Collins, for her understanding, and to my agent, Anne McDermid, for facilitating the whole process.
Most times you can’t judge a book by its cover. In this case, however, I just hope the book even approaches the sheer brilliance of the cover that Erik Mohr created for it. I stand in awe.
The World More Full of Weeping Page 7
