Someone asked me recently if my books were linked by a common trait and for a moment I found the question daunting. Then I leapt at the one attribute that they all possess, from my long poem to academic work to novel and short story: self-reliance. When I began to examine the notion more closely, however, I saw that they do not merely celebrate isolated figures crowing about their accomplishments in the wilderness, but are also works about the construction of community.
This will not surprise those who know me, for I am perhaps overly interested in notions of intellectual, social, and technological survival and how they might be applied. My long poem, Multiple Personality Disorder, is premised on a set of characters trying to solve their own mental illness, and my academic work, the text on reader response and reception theory—itself a self-driven form of textual interpretation—is about Rudy Wiebe’s The Mad Trapper, another story of madness and survival in Canada’s north. Another full length academic work, Historiographic Metafiction tells of those writers who decide to take on their project by retelling versions of history, texts which go against the mainstream in order revitalize a forgotten or deliberately excised story. Likewise, my book on the media, The Appearance of Solidity, is interested in the effect of the media upon the individual and how society shifts in response to technological changes.
Not surprisingly my first novel, Naked in the Road, follows this same trend. In it I imagine a man who takes off his clothes to begin again at zero, although he discovers that he must unload the heaviest of baggage of all, the ego, before he can progress intellectually and morally and rejoin the world. The nameless narrator of In Light of Ray, also sheds the dross of social advancement in order to more firmly find his place in the world, and although his search continues into the second book in the series, Working for Ray, by this time he has found someone to share in the adventure.
I wrote a series of non-fiction travel narratives or journals, in which I tell of wandering around Thailand and South East Asia (How to Get to Bangkok and Going Back to Bangkok), and the story of building my own boat and other adventures on water—Life on the Water. The same thread of relying on yourself, solving your own problems and answering your own concerns runs through all three of those books, as well as a deep interest in the new worlds I was exploring. In The Wish to Live Deliberately, my most recent adventure of building a cabin in the woods is quintessentially a Walden-esque story of tools and steadiness of mind, as well as a formula for simplification and what David Folster once called being self-contained.
The tales which come to closest to explaining the potential of the human species, especially that of a dedicated few, are my science fiction project novels. They are concerned with current technology and our ability, and need, to settle the solar system. The first in that group, A Million Castaways is a radical vision of that type, as one man sent to die, frantically, and accurately as it turns out, uses the tools at hand to build a habitat from a nickel iron asteroid. In Vested Interest another small group sets out to prove the governments wrong in their defunding of the space programs, as they cobble together their own equipment and bring Vesta, the second most massive asteroid in the belt, back to Earth as a proof of concept for the starving masses who need the resources. In Flat Earth, a Renaissance genius working alone sets out on a similar adventure, although the novel is more concerned with his many descendants as they try to discover the origin of their world, an obviously made object that cries out for explanation.
My short stories similarly tell of people struggling, and often winning against great odds. In Working After the Collapse I collect the stories of people who have discovered innovative ways to survive the oil crash of post-industrial society, and Surviving the Apocalypse I skip forward in time to find those characters who have somehow endured the collapse of their society. Code World is a collection of tales from the far side of the technological future, and tells of the apocalypse from the point of view of those on the ground and who are either fighting against the changes to their society, or merely trying to survive them.
Both A Storied Winnipeg and Living in Ashton tell the same story of survival set against the backdrop of the Manitoba experience, and the title of the book, Isolates and Survivors: Stories of Resilience speaks for itself. Writing This Ability is my attempt to give voice to those amongst us who struggle daily with living with disabilities, although these stories are more concerned with the reach of the human intellect, the intransigence of human dignity, and how the circumstances with which people are confronted are no match for the fortitude and insight of the survivor.
Both the short story collection Glooscap’s Plan and the novel Coming Home to Newfoundland take on a different project, although they are written with the same notions of independence of thought and action. Essentially talking animal stories, they relate a plan to reinforce environmental regulation from the ground up, and how resource misuse is a worldwide problem that is best handled by dedicated individuals. Similar concerns inform my retelling of the bible, as in The Bloody History of the Fertile Crescent, I strive to clear away the dross in order to show the stories of those who struggle on the tilted ground of the original story. Christmas Stories, or What Christmas Means to Me may seem like an outlier in this grouping at first glance, but even this book of Christmas stories is concerned with those who fight past the elbows at the banquet, of those not invited to the feast, and who find their own way to survive the season.
Although such an overview of a collection of work that is so focused on self-reliance might seem to indicate an almost pathological concern with solitude and misanthropy, many of these texts are also at their foundation deeply concerned with community. The science fiction project novels are about joining community or encouraging exploration so that all may share resources, and the many collections of stories tell of people set in their cultural milieu like raisins in a pudding, both essential and contributing to the overall social design. In a more personal way, much of my later work has come to tell this story more overtly. The Blind Fish series isolates a miscellaneous collection of people underground and tells their generational story of nation building, and Malu tried to find a place for an australopithecine girl who has come late to the human party.
The Ray novels, aspects of Blind Fish, and Malu expose what has come to be a preoccupation in my writing. I have always been interested in stories that are more than one hand clapping, as the Hindi expression would have it. Instead, I examine the logical conclusion of self-reliance, which is helping others. This is perhaps best seen through Not Quite Dark, my post-apocalyptic adoption story. Merely surviving is not enough, my characters discover. Their narrative comes to have meaning only when they reach out to help others who cannot make it on their own. My adoption narratives are about social responsibility, as their iconoclastic misanthropes set aside their own concerns to rescue the timid and afraid, the abandoned child, and to bring them into a story where they can blossom. This narrative thread runs through many of my novels and short stories, and even in my latest novel, Going to Ground, or the one currently under revision, Shipton, in Sight of Memory, lone individuals at the beginning of the story are happily burdened by their adopted families by the end.
Self-reliance, my work argues, is not sufficient on its own. If the goal is merely self-survival, then the contribution to the world is scarcely worth the resources used to accomplish it. Only when the novel turns, when the lone figure on the raft reaches into the water of circumstance or destruction and lifts another does the story begin. Otherwise the tale is merely a manual, which teaches survival techniques but never explains what the survivor should do with living.
