Waterloo Region Record

Writing Ontario with this year’s Trillium Book Award nominees

The local spot most important to their writing, and who they can’t wait for you to read next

DEBORAH DUNDAS BOOKS EDITOR Twitter: @debdundas

Local authors and local books always hold a special spot in readers hearts as we see our own stories being told, set in places familiar to us. Each year, the Trillium Awards, presented by Ontario Creates, awards books written by Ontario writers, in English and French: for book and for poetry or children’s book. This year we’ve asked the five finalists — the winners are announced June 15 — in the English book category about the influence of Ontario on their writing — and the Ontario writer they think we absolutely have to read. Here’s what they said.

Emma Donoghue, “The Pull of the Stars” (HarperCollins) 1. What Ontario place/space is most important to your writing/writing life? Why?

One Ontario location that stands out for its importance to my writing life is Toronto’s Parkdale neighbourhood. I set the two books of my young readers’ series there, “The Lotterys Plus One” and “The Lotterys More or Less,” because it seemed the perfect setting for a tale of a two-same-sex-couples-and-their-seven-kids multicultural family. Parkdale offers that flavoursome mixture of shabby and glossy, gentrified and ungentrifiable … but I must admit I fictionalized it by adding a ravine.

2. What emerging Ontario writer do we all need to read? Why?

As for a new writer, I’d recommend Karen McBride (an Algonquin Anishinaabe writer based in Ottawa) whose debut novel “Crow Winter” is a moving and humorous story of bereavement with lots of appeal to young adults as well as adult readers — and illustrated by the author, for good measure.

Craig Davidson, “Cascade” (Knopf Canada)

1. Niagara Falls would be, as the majority of my books are set there. It’s basically as I came of age there. St. Catharines specifically, but the whole Golden Horseshoe as it’s called would be the terrain I’ve walked with my very earliest books right until the most recent.

2. I’m afraid with the pandemic and so on I don’t really have my ear to the ground on what great writing talent is emerging in the literary journals or writing programs here in Ontario. If I were a journal editor or creative writing prof, I’d likely have a few emerging talents to keep an eye on. So the writer I’d recommend people read isn’t emerging — he’s been writing as long as I have — but I really enjoyed Pasha Malla’s “Kill the Mall.”

A.F. Moritz, “As Far As You Know” (House of Anansi)

1. May I say “my room?” Wherever it’s been in Toronto, it’s been the centre of knowing Ontario for me. On Hillsdale Avenue East, I looked out into a shady sequence of backyards, almost like a woods, dominated by a great basswood tree. From there I walked through the park system, sometimes up to Sunnybrook, sometimes up to Muir Park, watching, meeting owls, writing. Bringing the writing back to my desk to digest. From there, too, I drove all around the province, to research and take photographs … On Lauder Avenue, I looked out from a high third storey at a sunny residential street, and I walked the streets north, and Corso Italia, and east and south, down past Marshall McLuhan’s former house, to the Annex. This is to mention only a very few of the places that my room has been, for me, the centre of, the place of places. It’s always been right where it is but what’s around it keeps moving. But it’s all Ontario.

2. I ought to mention many but with great pain and strain I’ll limit myself to two. Antonia Facciponte, Kevin Hardcastle: poetry and prose.

Hardcastle’s far from unknown, but far from known enough. His debut, “Debris” (2015), won the Trillium Book Award among others. His 2017 novel, “In the Cage,” didn’t get as much attention, but is even better. John Irving said it is “faultlessly conceived” and shows Hardcastle’s “abiding sympathy for the neglected rural poor.” Hardcastle’s language is spare, hard, exciting to read. Suspense and literature, realism and meaning, perfectly blended.

Facciponte has just published her first book, “To Make a Bridge.” She has a profound and creative — I’d say crackling, effervescent-grasp of English poetry and at the same time an equally profound thrust to remake it by bringing in her own place and people, all their flavours, customs, sufferings, knowledge … including their own way with words.

Farzana Doctor, “Seven” (Dundurn Press)

1. My family moved to Whitby, Ontario, when I was five years old, and I have vivid memories of spending hours at the Whitby Public Library, exploring bookshelves, sitting in huge (to me) bean bag chairs and taking home armfuls of books. That library made me a reader, the foundation of any writer’s training. I still love libraries — their calm, their possibilities and their big writing tables.

2. I want everyone to read Shaukat Ajmeri’s “Keepers of the Faith” (Mawenzi, 2020), a powerful story about the tyranny of religion and the bonds of love that endure despite oppression. Ajmeri writes about the community that I was born into and I wish I could have read this book when I was a teenager.

Souvankham Thammavongsa, “How to Pronounce Knife” (McClelland & Stewart)

1. The corner of Keele Street and Eglinton Avenue West. I grew up there and went to school there. My characters are not humiliated or ashamed or embarrassed when they don’t know the English language because that is my experience and the area I grew up in. I wasn’t interested in fitting in. I am proud of who I am and where I come from because everyone around me is, too.

2. I have come across some short stories by Deepa Rajagopalan. There’s a difference between writing a good story and having a good anecdote. She knows what a good story is and she knows how to make one. I don’t think of her as emerging though because what she achieves in her stories is a lifetime of feeling and living. You can’t be emerging when you know how to do that. She doesn’t have a book, that’s all, and something can be done about that.

The Trillium Book Awards will be presented Tuesday and you can watch online at 8 p.m. at facebook.com/OMDCOnline/live. Winners of the book award receive $20,000 while winners of the poetry or children’s awards receive $10,000.

BOOKS

en-ca

2021-06-12T07:00:00.0000000Z

2021-06-12T07:00:00.0000000Z

https://waterloorecord.pressreader.com/article/282071984846091

Toronto Star Newspapers Limited