Lawrence Hill
Home Again
I'm back home again after what turned out to be an
excellent conference in Halifax. A lot of good people
from across the country and some excellent
presentations.
I didn't get any writing done, however. Too much to do at the conference, too much to do in Halifax.
So I've come home exhausted and looking forward to a quiet (apparently rainy) weekend to recover in time to get back to the office on Monday.
I am still trying to think of ideas for an Abigail Massey novel. My visit to Halifax prompted me to wonder if perhaps that's the direction I should go: have Abigail and her pals go to 1943 Halifax for some reason, perhaps to greet a war brides ship or a hospital ship. I'd like to get them into Pier 21 since my mother's family arrived there about 10 years later and I find it an interesting and quite dramatic place.
As usual, I'm worried about the research but there does seem to be a massive amount of information on Halifax available so I hope it would not be too hard.
While in Halifax, I had the chance to see and hear both Lawrence Hill, highly respected author whose most recent novel, The Book of Negroes, was recently named winner of the Canada Reads competition for 2009, and Halifax poet and singer Shauntay Grant, a performance artist whose poem "Up Home" is now a highly successful children's book by the same title.
As any of you who have read this blog in the past will know, I was not overly impressed with one of Hill's earlier efforts — Some Great Thing. My review of that book appears in an earlier post. Hill in person, however, is exceptional. A warm and welcoming man, his presentation proved a wonderful kick off to the conference. And he read an abbreviated version of the first chapter of The Book of Negroes during that presentation, prompting me to go out and buy the novel. I've just started reading it and am very impressed.
Grant, on the other hand, closed the conference
with an energetic, passionate performance of several
of her poems, including "Up Home", a memoir of her
childhood in North Preston, one of several Black
communities in and around Halifax. Grant's
performance was entrancing and her poetry has a
lovely quality to it that I find hard to put into
words. I don't know if the book, Up Home, is
available widely across the country but it is worth
looking for. It's published by Nimbus Publishing in
Halifax and includes some truly spectacular artwork
by Halifax artist Susan Tooke, much of which was on
exhibition at the Nova Scotia Art Gallery when we
were there.
Meanwhile, my garden is showing very healthy rows of green now, all of which popped up while I was away. Exciting times!
I didn't get any writing done, however. Too much to do at the conference, too much to do in Halifax.
So I've come home exhausted and looking forward to a quiet (apparently rainy) weekend to recover in time to get back to the office on Monday.
I am still trying to think of ideas for an Abigail Massey novel. My visit to Halifax prompted me to wonder if perhaps that's the direction I should go: have Abigail and her pals go to 1943 Halifax for some reason, perhaps to greet a war brides ship or a hospital ship. I'd like to get them into Pier 21 since my mother's family arrived there about 10 years later and I find it an interesting and quite dramatic place.
As usual, I'm worried about the research but there does seem to be a massive amount of information on Halifax available so I hope it would not be too hard.
While in Halifax, I had the chance to see and hear both Lawrence Hill, highly respected author whose most recent novel, The Book of Negroes, was recently named winner of the Canada Reads competition for 2009, and Halifax poet and singer Shauntay Grant, a performance artist whose poem "Up Home" is now a highly successful children's book by the same title.
As any of you who have read this blog in the past will know, I was not overly impressed with one of Hill's earlier efforts — Some Great Thing. My review of that book appears in an earlier post. Hill in person, however, is exceptional. A warm and welcoming man, his presentation proved a wonderful kick off to the conference. And he read an abbreviated version of the first chapter of The Book of Negroes during that presentation, prompting me to go out and buy the novel. I've just started reading it and am very impressed.
Meanwhile, my garden is showing very healthy rows of green now, all of which popped up while I was away. Exciting times!
Some Great Thing? Not So Much
29/03/09 08:10 Filed in: Reading
I'm back. A very difficult week away leaves me tired
and emotionally drained. Not the best circumstances
under which to try to do any writing but at least
I've been reading. I've just started Ross Pennie's
new medical mystery Tainted, which is great
so far, much better than my previous reading
expedition: Lawrence Hill's Some Great
Thing.
I have read and admired Hill's writing for some time, especially his non-fiction work on race relations (for want of a better term this early on a Sunday morning) in Canada. I have used an essay he wrote for Maclean's Magazine in training programs at work and am very much looking forward to obtaining a copy of his recent work, The Book of Negroes.
Published in 1992, Some Great Thing was probably Hill's first or second novel. I received it as a gift recently and, frankly, had never heard of it. Having read it now, I can see why.
This is no great book. In fact, the writing in it is surprisingly poor, in my opinion. The story of a young journalist of south asian background who returns to his hometown, Winnipeg, to take a job with the local daily newspaper and get reacquainted with his race-proud dad, Some Great Thing flounders around for a coherent story line from start to finish and, after failing to find one for 240 pages, simply stops. The characters are stereotypes of the worst kind and Hill literally tells us what to think rather than allowing us to develop our own understanding of the people and events of the book.
It's an early effort, no doubt, but Some Great Thing provides for me more evidence to prove my theory that often the writing itself does not matter in the decision of what gets published. If the subject matter is something the publishers feel will sell, they figure the reader won't know how bad the book is until after he has paid his money and taken the book home to read.
I have read and admired Hill's writing for some time, especially his non-fiction work on race relations (for want of a better term this early on a Sunday morning) in Canada. I have used an essay he wrote for Maclean's Magazine in training programs at work and am very much looking forward to obtaining a copy of his recent work, The Book of Negroes.
Published in 1992, Some Great Thing was probably Hill's first or second novel. I received it as a gift recently and, frankly, had never heard of it. Having read it now, I can see why.
This is no great book. In fact, the writing in it is surprisingly poor, in my opinion. The story of a young journalist of south asian background who returns to his hometown, Winnipeg, to take a job with the local daily newspaper and get reacquainted with his race-proud dad, Some Great Thing flounders around for a coherent story line from start to finish and, after failing to find one for 240 pages, simply stops. The characters are stereotypes of the worst kind and Hill literally tells us what to think rather than allowing us to develop our own understanding of the people and events of the book.
It's an early effort, no doubt, but Some Great Thing provides for me more evidence to prove my theory that often the writing itself does not matter in the decision of what gets published. If the subject matter is something the publishers feel will sell, they figure the reader won't know how bad the book is until after he has paid his money and taken the book home to read.