Happy New Year from all of us at Biblioasis! It’s been a whirlwind couple of months, beginning with Kathy Page’s Rogers Writer’s Trust Fiction Prize win for Dear Evelyn and continuing up to this very second as we prepare for the publication of our 2019 titles. We’re also doing some organizing around the Bibliomanse and steadfastly refusing to discard any books, whether they spark joy or not.

And speaking of organizing: we’re eagerly awaiting February 5 and the Canadian publication of our first 2019 title: Cecil Foster’s They Call Me George: The Untold Story of Black Train Porters and the Birth of Modern Canada. Foster’s history documents the struggles, both individual and collective, of Black Canadians against the racist policies of their employers and their country. It was their actions, Foster argues, that laid the groundwork for the multicultural nation we know today. Incorporating the author’s own interviews with former porters and outlining the rarely-discussed institutional racism of early Canadian immigration and employment policies, They Call Me George is an indispensable read for the 21st century.

We sat down at our keyboards last month to ask Cecil a few questions about his new book.

A Biblioasis Interview with Cecil Foster, author of They Call Me George

For those who are coming to your work for the first time, can you tell us a little about yourself and your writing?

Born in Barbados, I came to Canada in 1979, eventually became a leading business reporter especially on transportation, where I became fascinated by the narrative of how Canada was built by the railways, how confederation was a promise to link Canada sea-to-sea by railway, how Canada was held together by a thin ribbon of steel. But who manned those railways? Little was ever written about them, except maybe by Stephen Leacock about the smiling darkies, as he called them. As a Black man it was with pride that I dug deeper to discover the role of Black men—including West Indians—in the making of Canada, as well as the great odds they had to overcome to make Canada the much admired multicultural country it is today.

What drove you to write a book about the porters?

I was always trying to work the porters into my writing on the Black experience in Canada, in both fiction and non-fiction. Then came the opportunity to write a book on the untold stories of Canada as part as the federal government’s initiative to mark Canada’s 150^th anniversary and I jumped at the chance when Biblioasis came calling.

You did an incredible amount of research for this book. Is there any one particular porter or story that has stuck with you?

At the back of my mind, and always present in my research, was my friend Billy Downey of Halifax. He was a genuinely pioneering Canadian, who worked on the railway and eventually ended up as a supervisor. When I spent a year in Halifax, every Saturday I would have lunch with Billy and two other friends, and I would hear all those wonderful stories of being Black and working on the ‘roads. I dedicate the book to Billy’s memory. Other than that, undoubtedly the other standout was Stanley Grizzle. Not only was he a leading activist but he had the good foresight to be a hoarder—whereby he kept everything, every piece of paper or clippings, which are now the rich treasure trove I found in the Canadian Archives.

Why is it that we haven’t heard much previously about the porters’ activism and what they did for this country?

We haven’t heard much because this story undermines the popular impressions of a) Canada and Black people, and b) how Canada became multicultural.

Many Canadians conveniently want to forget that Canada was a White Man’s country and helped pioneered worldwide apartheid and integration. Or they recall the stories of the Underground Railroad and African slaves escaping from the U.S. to freedom in Canada—but they do not linger on how Canada tried to repel Black immigration and often forced Black people to leave. When they look at Canada today, they cannot believe that this country once limited immigration from India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka (then Ceylon) to 350 annually and often did not even meet this quota.

The story of how Canada became multicultural is often told as a fight between English and French Canadians for domination. This book argues differently: it states that multiculturalism resulted from pressures by people of colour to make Canada non-white, to dismantle Canada as a White Man’s country, and to make it a place in which all types of people can find social justice.

These are not positions that are popular in the Canadian mainstream, let alone taught as official Canadian history and as part of the development of ideas and policies in Canada.

Did anything particularly surprise you in your research?

I was surprised by how easily racist discourse was accepted as part of the national debate even into the 1960s, as can be found in Hansard, the official reports of Parliament, and in national newspapers and journals. And many of those who today talk about Canadian prime minister Laurier’s sunny ways and Laurier’s belief that the 20^th century would belong to Canada might do a double-take when considering the racist and white supremacist context in which Laurier—and so many other prime ministers—were talking. On the other hand two prime ministers—John Diefenbaker and Pierre Elliott Trudeau—stand out as the makers of the new Canada, having refuted much that they inherited from prior Canadian leaders.

What are you reading right now?

I have Esi Edugyan’s Washington Black on my bookstand and hope I can get to it before my summer break.

 

 

 

 

We’re delighted by this week’s arrival of beloved local author Patrick Brode’s Dying for a Drink: How a Prohibition Preacher Got Away with Murder. Brode’s latest tells a story that’s familiar to many Windsorites and guaranteed to captivate anyone who’s interested in the history of the Prohibition era. We sat down with Pat to find out more about the true story behind this local lore.

For those who might not be familiar with your work, can you tell us a little bit about yourself as a writer and a historian?

I have been writing legal history since the 1970s. My publications so far consist of biographies and studies of unique issues such as sexual “seduction” and its consequences in Canada. Many of my writings have been case studies, which have focused on specific cases. For example, I have written on the 1860 extradition trial of the escaped slave John Anderson, the 1895 murder trial of a black woman, Clara Ford in Toronto, and the prosecution of a serial killer of homosexuals in Windsor Ontario in 1947.

Babe Trumble’s murder is a well-known story in the Windsor region. What drew you to write about this particular case for a national—and international—audience?

What makes the murder of the saloonkeeper Babe Trumble by a Methodist clergyman so compelling was the way in which it so captured the opposing forces of the Prohibition era. That a religious figure would shoot down and kill a man who had the nerve to sell alcohol became the high water mark of religious zealotry in Canada. It became a turning point in which the public began to question the validity of morality by government force.

I was struck by the extent of Toronto media coverage of this case, and the ways in which Toronto was so at odds with the Border Cities region over the alcohol issue. Can you talk a little bit about that dynamic? 

All major Toronto newspapers sent reporters to Windsor to cover the early rum running events. Their coverage was inevitably sensational with accounts of running gun battles, and bloody confrontations between police and bootleggers along the shore of the Detroit River. It made for exciting copy, and the Toronto public loved it. Part of it was vicarious thrills. The Windsor area was often referred to as the “Essex Frontier” as if it was the Wild West. It was portrayed as a dangerous place where everyone carried a gun and was ready to use it.  The Toronto reading public was entertained by but safely removed from this mini-war going on 300 kilometers away.

The Windsor region has always been intertwined with that of our American neighbours across the river in Detroit. How was the Detroit region affected by the hullabaloo recounted in Dying For a Drink?

 Throughout this incident, the role of Detroit as the great magnet for Canadian booze is central. Both cities had nothing but disdain for the prevailing liquor laws and intended to defy those laws for their mutual benefit. The almost overnight growth of the cross-border smuggling trade was a business phenomenon that made millionaires out of cab drivers. But to prohibition true believers, such as the Reverend Spracklin, this was a defiance of morality which had the force of law. It had to be stopped.

Today, Windsor seems fondly proud of its rum-running past, almost part of our civic heritage. Has it always been that way?

 There was almost a romantic “Robin Hood” feel to the period. Ordinary people were rising up to resist a law that had little popular support. It is one of the few instances where so many people in a Canadian city openly broke the law. For that reason, the “Rumrunner era” continues to resonate. The descendants of bootleggers proudly display relicts of their family’s past and tours celebrate the persons and sites of the era.

The Prohibition era has an extensive mythology—you’re very careful to ground your work in facts and not legends. Are there any persistent myths you come across while working in that era’s history?

 That one of the many who broke the law was shot down and killed for his defiance shocked Windsor. It was a further measure of the times that in most of the rest of the Ontario the respectable classes thought he got what he deserved.

In many ways the incident has been embellished since 1920. It has been romanticized to suggest that the killing was the result of an ongoing feud. It has also been suggested that the Reverend Spracklin was a Canadian “Eliot Ness.” Neither view has any substance and detracts from the real facts that brought them together in a tragic, spontaneous clash.

What are you working on next?

 I’m working on a further legal history on the war crimes committed against Canadian servicemen at the end of World War II and the resulting courts martial.

 

 

K.D. Miller’s Late Breaking, a collection of stories inspired by the work of Alex Colville, hit shelves last week, and early reports demonstrate that readers are as captivated as your humble Biblioblogger by this brilliant new book from the author of Rogers Writers’ Trust finalist All Saints. We sat down with K.D. to learn more about its inspiration, as well as its relationship to her other work.

In Ottawa? K.D. is the featured reader at The Short Reading Series on Sunday, October 14. Join us downtown at The Gallery Bar at The Lieutenant’s Pump on Elgin Street at 4 pm!

Biblioasis: For those not already familiar with your work, can you tell us a little bit about yourself and your writing?

K.D. Miller: I have published seven books (including Late Breaking) –five collections of short stories, a novel and a collection of personal essays. My short story collections are linked – whether by theme or through recurring characters and situations. I like this form very much, as it gives me the freedom to revisit a personality or circumstance and see it from a very different angle. My novel, Brown Dwarf, had a similarly loose structure – the narrative point of view shifted back and forth from first to third, and the time frame from present to past. My collection of essays, Holy Writ, explored a favourite theme of mine – the link between creativity and spirituality. Right now I’m at work on a new book of essays that goes further in that direction. Recently I’ve started to publish single poems in literary journals, and my essay “The Death of Me” has been accepted for the summer issue of The New Quarterly as part of their Falling in Love With Poetry series. It describes how I came to poetry late in life and rather reluctantly, and includes four of my poems.

Though retired, I still write in the early morning, as I did for decades before leaving for work. I’m at my desk by 6 am at the very latest, and those couple of hours with my coffee and the view out my window are the best of the day.

B: Each story in Late Breaking is based on a painting of Alex Colville’s. Can you tell us a bit about what drew you to his work, and what inspired the idea of a book collection like this?

KDM: I had always liked the work of Alex Colville – his precise delineation, his almost-invisible brushwork, and above all the eerie, chill-down-the-spine effect of many of his paintings. (That black horse galloping toward the oncoming train captures perfectly what I’m talking about.) His paintings are extremely evocative. Many of his subjects either have their heads turned sharply away from the viewer or are looking the viewer disconcertingly straight in the eye. And you can take that kind of thing any way you like – as a challenge, as a cry for help, whatever. Even in his less disturbing paintings, nothing is entirely peaceful or at rest. You get the feeling that something memorable has just happened, or is just about to happen.

In 2014, the AGO mounted a major exhibit of Colville’s work, finding in it fascinating parallels with the Coen brothers’ films and the writing of Alice Munro. As I roamed from painting to painting, the phrase “the Colville stories” kept repeating in my mind like a mantra. I felt inspired – almost driven – to use those paintings as visual writing prompts. Their layers of possibility, their disturbing ambiguity left me convinced that I could pull stories out of them for the rest of my life. I actually felt blessed.

B: How does the collection relate (or not relate) to your last book All Saints?

KDM: All Saints is linked together by recurring characters who in one way or another find themselves inside a small, struggling urban church – the titular All Saints. When I started writing Late Breaking, I did not intend to have recurring characters. I had thought that the linkage would be one more of atmosphere, theme, imagery, etc. But then it occurred to me that the protagonist of one story simply must have been the long-time friend of the protagonist of another. And a minor character here was the neighbour or colleague of another minor character over there … And so on. The characters, in their way, let me in on a community that gradually formed under my hand.

There are other similarities too. Given my own interest in spirituality, it is not too surprising that one character in Late Breaking is an Anglican priest, and another the son of a United Church minister. Both books also deal with death as a significant theme – its mystery, and the way we do everything in our power to pretend it isn’t there waiting for us.

I think All Saints is a more closely-packed collection than Late Breaking. While I was writing the latter, I went further afield – both in terms of technique and setting. Fewer of the Late Breaking characters are dug out of myself, and more of them are people who, you might say, came to visit and let me get to know them.

In both cases, however, I became extremely fond of the community I greeted at my desk each morning, and missed them terribly once the books were finished.

B: The eponymous story “Late Breaking” juxtaposes both very funny CanLit satire with a heartbreaking story of loss, centered around a fiction writer named Jill Macklin. I’m wondering if you can tell us more about that character?

KDM: Well, I won’t pretend that there isn’t a big dollop of Jill in me and me in her. We’re about the same age, we both had day-jobs for many years that supported our fiction-writing on the side, and we both had the experience of being up for an award and nursing a broken heart at the same time.

That said, I want to emphasize that my own award-nomination experience was very different from Jill’s. The one she is up for – the Olympia Featherstone Award For Fiction – is purely a creature of the imagination, as is its rather crass competitor – the Biggar Prize. I wanted to put Jill smack in between two unrealities – a pedestal and a ditch, you might say – and give her a chance to find her way back to her true self.

One other thing that I hope the title story does is remind the reader that the elder heart can still break. It is as tender, brave and vulnerable as it ever was. Falling in love is as exhilarating for someone in their sixties as it is for someone in their twenties; and the failure of that love hurts them just as much, too.

In fact, if there is one thing I hope the collection Late Breaking can achieve, it is this understanding that our hearts stay young and open, right up until the end.

B: What are you reading right now?

KDM: Well, I just finished Philip Kerr’s Prussian Blue (I love murder mysteries!) and have just started May Sarton’s The House by the Sea – the journal she kept in the 1970s while living in a big old farm house on the coast of Maine. She is a marvelous diarist, and is just about my age at time of writing. Many years ago, I wrote two sentences which I have not been able to do anything with: “Old women belong by the sea. They have earned their place with the rocks and the foam.” May Sarton’s book is bringing those sentences back to me, like a mantra. Maybe it’s time to put them into an essay. Or a story. Or a poem.

 

We’re on the road again this week! Our Fall 401 Tour kicks off tonight at Drawn & Quarterly with readings by CP Boyko, Catherine Leroux, KD Miller, Alex Pheby, and special guests Randy Boyagoda and Lazer Lederhendler.

There will surely be magic in the night when Thursday’s event brings Boyko, Leroux, Miller, and Pheby to Toronto’s Monarch Tavern, where they’ll be joined by Daniel Wells himself.

But heaven’s waiting down the tracks, where Windsor and Biblioasis Bookshop will welcome our four intrepid travellers and their brilliant new books home at the end of the ride.

Although we’ve (mercifully) come to the end of this blog post, it’s alright, baby, it’s alright.