The CanLit Tool Kit
October 2, 2009 by Steven W. Beattie · 7 Comments
The CanLit Tool Kit:
Pick one from each heading. Combine for an award-worthy Canadian novel.
This
- lyrical
- haunting
- sensitive
- heartbreaking
- touching
- burnished
- windswept
- multigenerational
novel, set on
- a farm in southern Ontario
- a Prairie homestead
- a northern outpost
- a bucolic lakeshore
- a lighthouse
during
- the First World War
- the Second World War
- the Boer War
- the 1835 Northwest Rebellions
- the Battle of the Plains of Abraham
- the War of 1812
and focusing on
- the flooding of a southern Ontario town
- a drought on the Prairies
- the destruction of a Maritime oil rig
- a barn fire
- locusts decimating the fall harvest
- a cattle cull
combines
- an alcoholic/drug addicted/sexually abusive father
- a steadfast wife
- a rebellious adolescent
- a child dying of grippe
- a loyal dog
- an aged, wisdom-filled elder
with the harrowing story of
- a canoe trip in the Northwest Territories
- an ice-fishing expedition in northern Ontario
- a cross-country caravan
- a winter in the Rockies
- a tortured love triangle
- memory and loss
- the unyielding weight of the past
Mix well, and voilà.
This multigenerational novel, set on a northern outpost during the Boer War and focusing on locusts decimating the fall harvest combines a loyal dog with the harrowing story of an ice-fishing expedition in northern Ontario.
I’d read that!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
If I ever manage to get my novel finished (and published!) I think I’m going to swing for the fences and see if I can get a critic to call it ‘burnished’.
Nothing screams literary quality like pottery polished with a bone spatula. (Except that one time I saw a critic call a novel ‘verdant’, though I fail to see what makes a green book any better than a book of some other colour.)
Ha! Funniest thing I’ve read all day!
I am posting this on my office door. You must submit this as a poem to a literary journal.
And not a mention of The Rebellions of 1837-38, or Lower Canada or Quebec at all. Shows just what parts of the country count.
Careful Steven, you might get Noah Richler on your case.
I wonder how Robertson Davies, who is one of my favorite authors (and probably my favorite Canadian author) would fare on the joke list: not well, it seems, and maybe that’s why he transcends whatever prizes he received; I don’t know much about his capital-L Literary career. But I do know he spent a fair amount of time discussing what it means to be Canadian in Conversations With Robertson Davies, an interview collection that I wrote about at the link, and, obviously, in his novels.