A Writer’s Tension:
Reflections on Genre, Place, and Time (Part 1)

Interview by Dave Brundage

Tim Bowling was born and raised on the west coast of Canada where he grew up in a salmon fishing family. These early experiences of working in the wild greatly inform much of the writing he has published since 1995. Over the past eighteen years, he has put eleven poetry collections, four novels, and two books of creative non-fiction into the world, and has received numerous accolades: two Governor General's Award nominations, two Writers Trust of Canada nominations, a fellowship from the Guggenheim Foundation, five Alberta Book Awards (ten nominations), two Alberta Readers Choice Awards nominations, and a Canadian Authors Association Award. His work with other writers at various stages of their careers has also been considerable. In addition to teaching at the Banff Centre for the Arts in both poetry and fiction, Tim has served as a writer-in-residence at several institutions and recently completed a term as the online WIR for ARC, Canada's national poetry magazine. Widely respected in both the local and national literary communities (he has lived happily in Edmonton since 1995), Tim continues to work in a variety of writing forms, including fiction, non-fiction, the essay, and poetry.

Aurora: Since your first book of poetry, Low Water Slack in 1995, you've published eleven more poetry collections, edited a poetry collection, published four novels and published two books of non-fiction. That's pretty well a book a year. It has all received high critical acclaim. And it all appears to rest on a poetic foundation. Is it fair to understand that you would consider yourself first and foremost a poet?

Tim Bowling: Oh, well, that's a question that I kind of wrestle with, because there are practical reasons why it's best for me not to say that. But I think in fairness the genres over time have kind of blended and married together. So even as a poet if I were to say, yes, I think of myself as a poet, well, the foundation of my poetry has often been very narrative. I hold with Robert Frost that all poems are storytelling, so there's always been an element of storytelling in my poetry, no matter how lyric I try to make it.

So do I think of myself primarily as a poet?  I think maybe if you publish more books of poetry than you do other books and you get noticed for those books of poetry before you get noticed for the other books, then the culture thinks of you more as a poet. But to be honest, it's something I have to fight against as a prose writer, because I think sometimes my prose is unfairly in competition with my poetry, which I don't want it to be. I see them as all part of one process if quite different activities. From my early twenties I wanted to be a short story writer and a novelist; that ambition was there as early as thinking about being a poet. But I'm happy to be considered a poet, for sure.

Aurora: At an AU presentation you answered a question on writing fiction by saying that you start it off with a poem or at least with the spirit of poetry. But I'm now wondering if it's almost like different sides of the coin. Like you were saying, poetry is storytelling and in a sense there's perhaps poetry to storytelling?

Tim Bowling:  Oh, I would say for sure. As someone who's looking at writing and the whole process of writing, one of the things I've had to do to be an effective fiction writer or a non-fiction writer - and it's a constant struggle for me in the draft stage - is to try to eliminate, for want of a better word, poeticisms. Well, that's even harsh. I'm always thinking Ezra Pound in my head saying that poetry and prose have to be as good as each other. So there's not this idea of what is poetic language. I like to think my poetry is pretty rigorous and not ephemeral and unspecific and all those things that poetic prose is often described as – it's purple, it goes on too long.

Aurora: Excessive description?

Tim Bowling: In some ways, but it’s also culturally relative.  I've found that when it comes to fiction our culture currently has a hard time with description. I've always loved it, though, because I read so much Victorian fiction when I was younger - physical description of character, of place. It's a little bit out of fashion, and I think in poetry you're encouraged to go, well… in a different direction as well. As you can tell, I am continually wrestling with these things. There's no finality to them.

Aurora: Block descriptions of characters and setting certainly do feature in the novel, The Paperboy's Winter. I get the sense that there's such an affinity for them in your way of writing, that what's old-fashioned - what's the saying of Faulkner about the past?

Tim Bowling: It isn't dead. The past isn't dead. It isn't even past.

Aurora: If you're doing it, it's not past.

Tim Bowling: And the whole idea of time. All poetry, so it's said, is really about time fundamentally. You can hear time behind every line of poetry, that's sort of the way I approach it. I guess I try to carry that over into the prose as much as possible. With my most recent novel, The Tinsmith, I thought I had really cut to the narrative line a lot more, stayed to the story as much as possible and eliminated a lot of extraneous physical description. Yet if I jump on Goodreads and have a look at different responses to the book, there are still people thinking the prose has too much description.

A certain amount of it is current taste. I've read studies that have suggested, for example, that the sentence is getting shorter and shorter, that people don't write in long sentences, because it's just not done. Technology is affecting that to some extent. We all work in little quick bursts, and I think for someone who really loves Thomas Hardy, Herman Melville, or Henry James, as I do, these big long beautiful rambling sentences are very comfortable. But I think they're certainly not the fashion today.

Aurora: I recall a workshop saying the average sentence length has gone from sixty-four or sixty-five words in the late Middle Ages of Chaucer's period to around fourteen in the 1980s. Of course it depends on what kind of writing we're talking about, too. But I imagine the latest information might suggest today’s average sentence length - at least, outside of academe, perhaps to be shorter yet again.

Tim Bowling: You mentioned Faulkner. I think some of his sentences, and I don't know if some of them are even technically sentences just all run together, but for pages and pages. That kind of style is of the past, which isn't past.

Aurora: Clark Blaise once said that a long, long sentence in the right hands is like a rush - he said this in a creative writing seminar at Concordia University in the 1970s by -- Bobby Orr.

Tim Bowling: Okay, that still holds up.

Aurora: I personally would say I find that quality in your sentences. They're still precise and accurate and specific, but there's a rhetorical drive when they get longer. I wanted to mention another author concerning description in fiction. I agree the general advice these days is to integrate it briskly and discreetly as the plot goes forward, drop in just a nugget here and there. The author I’m thinking of, who is specifically noted for defying the minimal-description taste, is Saul Bellow. He has been praised specifically for his remarkable physical descriptions of characters. I wonder if you sense a connection in that respect. Of course, some people also consider him old-fashioned.

Tim Bowling: Well, the term old-fashioned I mean, Saul Bellow, the kind of writer Saul Bellow is; today he seems somehow out of place. And he probably did fifty years ago, too in a way, not only for physical description but also the absolute unapologetic intelligence of his work, saying to us, “I'm going to deal with this particular area of life unapologetically and really go into it.”

But “old fashioned.” It took me many years to realize: “fashioned from the old.” They turned the word around. Old-fashioned/fashioned from the old - well, who isn’t? Where should we be fashioned from?

Aurora: In other words, isn't it a good thing, to be?

Tim Bowling: Well, I would think. But obviously when people use that term what they mean is that you're not current with whatever the development is. But then again, Margaret Atwood amongst many others has said there's no progress in art; it's not like technology, where there's always the new, better thing, the improvement. So when it comes to art, when it comes to fiction writing, I hate to think of throwing the baby out with the bathwater, to use an old cliché. You can only go with what you as a reader will take. I will hate three pages of description if it's bad, but I'll hate three pages of dialogue if they're bad. So if it's three pages of wonderful description, that doesn’t bother me in the least.

Aurora: That was my feeling with Paperboy's Winter, and clearly it's other readers' feelings. But this reference to where we are fashioned from leads me to another of your works I’d like you to discuss, The Lost Coast, published in 2007. I believe it was about the twelfth of your nineteen published books. So it's kind of further along. But I thought it might be an interesting departure for exploring your life and writing in that it's so much based in where you're from. To start off, could you describe that book?

Tim Bowling: Well, The Lost Coast was a very simple - it came out of a rather simple frustration on my part, to be honest. Again this relates to the blurring of the genres, and what I recognize can be done in one can't be done in others as successfully. I basically realized that the culture I grew up in, the salmon fishing culture on the Fraser River, had disappeared. All of the commentary around it apart from finger pointing had to do with the disappearance of the actual species. Of course, destruction of the salmon was a terribly sad thing. But what no one was talking much about was the destruction of the culture that went with it. In Newfoundland, for example, with the cod fishery, those two things were always married. You had the resource and then you had the effect of the lost resource on Newfoundland. But in British Columbia the discussion was almost purely salmon as an economic resource and how does it affect the economy – that's all you were hearing. You were hearing fishermen were to blame for over-fishing; the Department of Fisheries was to blame for this, that and the other.

I realized I had lost something personally. It was a sense of place and a sense of working in a place. The physical experience of working in a landscape, a powerful landscape, is something that's irreplaceable. You can go as a tourist and get in a kayak and paddle around the Fraser River, but it's not the same experience as living in it and working in it. You don't feel it the same way, I don't think. Not that it's a bad experience, it's a different experience. So when you have an entire culture all up and down the coast of people whose lives are in those rhythms of the salmon's return, you've lost something much greater than just an economic resource. You've lost a whole way of life.

I realized I wanted to reach more people, for one thing. You'd have to be a pretty deluded poet to think your poetry is going to reach a lot of readers if you want to make a statement about something. It just doesn't happen in this culture or many cultures anymore. Non-fiction remains the most popular form. If you want to reach readers and you're not going to make a movie, prose non-fiction is probably the number one choice.

I wanted to explore the history of British Columbia salmon fishing industry and my personal place in it, and I also wanted to make a few, for want of a better word, political and moral statements about my truth. I'm not saying it's the only truth, but as a writer you have to make your stand. I said, well this is the way I feel about it. Then I put it out there simply because I didn't think anybody else was doing that.

Aurora: I guess a term for those elements or threads in the book is manifesto, and it's a powerful manifesto. That can easily come across as putting people off; as I'm sure you would agree.

Tim Bowling: And it did. It did put some people off.

Aurora: The strong critical statement.

Tim Bowling: I think I was sensitive to that, though. I wanted to make clear in the book my own complicity in an industry that was destroying the resource. I didn't want to make it seem entirely as if there were all sorts of outside evil forces that had caused this downfall.

Aurora: It struck me you weave back to that point frequently in different ways.

Tim Bowling: Well, the nineteenth century wasn't a golden age; it was a destructive and brutal age, and we're not necessarily any worse than they were, maybe in some ways better. I guess at the end, how do I feel about it now? The first talk I gave for the AU writer-in-residency this (2013-14) term was all about our relationship to the natural world and what we're doing. This is the burning topic of the day. It's the big topic. I'd like to believe The Lost Coast will remain. Apparently it shows up on courses and people use it who are teaching ecological writing. I hope it will hold up that way, because really it's basically mourning the loss, it's mourning the way we treat and interact with the natural world. But how are we going resolve that? I don't think I'm arrogant enough to posit any answers.

Aurora: Jane Jacobs was taken to task by some reviewers for her last book, Dark Age Ahead.¹. It was called gloomy. It basically analyzes different reasons she thought things were not in good shape. But she said she wanted to push the discussion; it was up to everyone to work on the answer.

Tim Bowling: What is a writer's responsibility or what is a writer's purpose? I think it's different for different writers. I was too much a fan of Camus and Orwell and others who really believed that you had to be a bit of a disturbance at times. I think I do, probably do that in all the forms I work in.

I worked really hard to get a lot of history into The Lost Coast. But I do that what they call creative non-fiction thing where I kind of blend the fictional techniques with the history. As a result, some have unfairly tagged the book a memoir. But it isn't specifically. When I was trying to sell the book, one particular agent said to me, “Well you know, no offense, but who are you to write a memoir?” But it's not specifically a memoir in the sense of Gordon Lightfoot writing his memoir or Bobby Orr writing his. I’m not saying, “This is my story in the salmon fishing industry.” People who write memoir about themselves better have some kind of fame. My purpose was more to put myself simply as an entrée to a memoir of the culture.

Some of the reviews of the book really pleased me. One in particular recognized my purpose, which is all any writer can ask for. I forget the specific writer, but the review said that in the debate which is obviously ongoing with the talk of pipelines going out to the coast and running through First Nations territory and that's all going to affect the ecology of the coast, these things are not going away – that my personal background gave me a position on the discussion that not everyone has. Thinking about that review, I realized the gift I had in having grown up where I did and having been involved in what I was involved in, and then being a writer, that gave me an opportunity to write a manifesto that might carry some weight. Books speak to some and not to others, but I think that one certainly has been one of my more popular books.

Aurora: Is there a degree to which the acknowledged persona viewpoint is essential for accountability? You're positioning who you are and sort of putting the cards on the table. It's clearly honest from that perspective.

Tim Bowling: I guess the danger in that, though going back to hockey; it can be like the argument that you can't criticize fighting in hockey if you're not a hockey player, if you’ve never played it, because how do you know, you don't understand the code. I wouldn't want to trump everybody else's position by saying, well, I grew up in a salmon fishing family, and how can you possibly …

I'm not saying that's what you're saying, but that was the balance I had to find. Yes, I do have a specific position that tells me certain things. I certainly would have, from being a child on the river, a certain appreciation for that culture that someone who's coming to it from books wouldn't have. That was an advantage. On the other hand, you can be somewhat blinded, too, to certain obvious things by being within a culture.

Aurora: Your insider position informs people who don't have that background, in an important way. But also you're alerting us to the politics, to the bias, to other things in the culture. To me, though, the personal memoir strand of Lost Coast is most vividly and vibrantly a description of family. That's so important, I thought of the loving relationships.

Tim Bowling: I'm glad you described it that way because I think I'm overstating the manifesto part.

Aurora: It's only there sometimes?

Tim Bowling: It only comes in a few points where I really let it out.

Aurora: Ten percent or something?

Tim Bowling: Yeah. I think that's probably the only way it could work. Fifty percent manifesto and fifty percent family lyricism, probably your better balance would be lower end manifesto. How many words does it take to get a message across if what you're saying is we're doing things wrong? You don't need to spend pages and pages blaming governments and blaming corporations. Everybody knows.

Aurora: I find the overtly critical part is quite brisk and controlled as well as poetically cadenced. It’s more an honest description of conditions than finger-pointing. As well as these critical elements, there's this quality and level of almost a textbook on fish, telling us all kinds of interesting stuff. That part reminds me of Melville, except again it's not going on for pages, it's interwoven. It's very educational, and the process descriptions of the industry of a fishing village – the cannery, the boats, and the whole process.

Tim Bowling: The thing about the species, I'm glad you mentioned that, too, because that's where Alberta comes into play frankly, my shift from living on the coast to living in Edmonton. When I first came to Edmonton, people would ask me about myself and I'd talk about salmon fishing in the background and talk about salmon. I was amazed at how many people don't know the most basic things about what I just took for granted as being this amazing natural spectacle, not knowing how many different species of salmon there were, not knowing that the salmon spawn and die, the whole process. The whole cycle, which was like mother's milk to me, wasn't common knowledge to people even just one province over. Then I reflected that Vancouver is filled with people who have no relationship to this incredible history and resource. That also factored into the book, my frustration with the west coast literary culture itself. I'm still fighting that battle, I'm afraid. Or I'm not afraid, but it's one that I've set myself out to do, and that's where my recent The Tinsmith comes in. I've always had this desire to sort of, again it sounds aggressive, but just to say to people, look at this place where you're living and look at its history.

Aurora: The Tinsmith, which is about the cannery history?

Tim Bowling: Yeah, it's set in the nineteenth century. It's really about how the American Civil War affected the development of British Columbia in the 1860s and 1870s. It deals with slavery and it deals with one of the early salmon canners on the Fraser River, who was mixed blood, white and black. This is historical but very little is known about him. So that had always haunted me from a very young age. Sarah Orne Jewett, an American writer, has said what haunts the imagination for years and years and finally gets put down on paper has the possibility of being literature. That's something I think is true.

So anyway, as a kid I'd be taken to the local museum, which was very close to my home, and there'd be these references to this character, John Sullivan Deas, but very little was known about him, a very shadowy figure, very mysterious, like much of western history. You have these fascinating individuals but very little record of them or very little known about them. So that was the basis of that book. It wasn't actually in the historical record about this particular person, who came and went very quickly in BC history. He was there for a decade and then gone back to the States.

Aurora: But he left a legacy.

Tim Bowling: A definite legacy, which is his name. His name is on Deas Island, the Deas Island Tunnel - the tunnel that links Vancouver to my part of the coast. His place name is still there but very little is known about him, so in that novel I wanted to take that history and flesh it out.

Western Canadian history has so much richness to it. This is probably the greatest tension in my creative life: my fascination and interest in the local and the sense I have that our cultures are moving away from it. I don't just mean literary culture, I mean economic culture; that tension exists everywhere. Whether you're buying your groceries, you're buying your lettuce that's been sent to you from China, or whether you're going to the farmer's market and trying to buy it local, everybody's making these choices. I think those choices are also happening in literature. Writers make choices about whether they're going to write about the place they're from, if it matters to them. Maybe it doesn't matter to everyone. Or you're going to write a different kind of book. Obviously not everybody's going to be the same kind of writer.

Aurora: You’ve suggested that reader responses to books like The Tinsmith or The Lost Coast give an impression that people don’t know, or don’t know enough about the history of the local. Without your book, how many of us would have heard about what you call “British Columbia’s most dramatic environmental crime - when the Canadian Northern, racing against a deadline to build an unnecessary third rail route to the coast, illegally blasted tons of rock into the Fraser River at Hell’s Gate.” Several dozen workers fell to their deaths.

Tim Bowling: Hell's Gate. That was 1912, just before the First World War.

Aurora: You report that 1913 was “the big year of the four-year salmon cycle” (122). Everyone “got together to figure out ways to keep the price of fish low, to keep fishermen divided on racial lines, and to block any possible labour organizing. Meanwhile, at Hell’s Gate, an already narrow passage upriver through the canyon had been narrowed to just a few yards by the blasted rock.” What happened to the salmon, and not just the salmon was devastating. You say, “The situation that awaited the salmon and the interior aboriginal groups whose lives depended on them was as tragic as the situation that awaited western civilization. And the blithe unconcern in the face of it was equally monumental” (123).

Tim Bowling: But there were other slaughters, there were terrible slaughters all along.

Aurora: As a working writer, how do you negotiate between really important topics you know personally and believe should come forward and the conditions of what we might call the industry, the market-place?

Tim Bowling: It's hard to know. What you write and how does come down partly to practical things. There's what readers, that mass of people out there might be reading or potentially interested in reading. Then there's what the publishing industry thinks readers are interested in. You have to negotiate that path.

I've often said to people that if you want to publish with Random House or Doubleday or Knopf or these big multi-national publishers, you're probably going to really, really minimize your chances if you're going to write the great novel about William Lyon Mackenzie King.

Aurora: Nightwood Editions, publisher of The Lost Coast, is a BC publisher descended from the early 1960s Vancouver blewointment press founded by the remarkably creative concrete and sound poet, bill bissett. It grew and reached into creative non-fiction and seeks new writers across Canada. But it’s not claiming to be a Random House.

Tim Bowling: Yeah. That's just the way it is. It's like you're not going to sell certain subjects to big multi-nationals. This gets to nationalism, to independence, this gets to all these things again which are not just about literature, they're about the way we live today, and larger issues. Sometimes I think, wow, I'd love to write or wouldn't that be fascinating to read a really good novel about a Canadian political figure. It's not that there aren't presses or publishers out there who would do that, but if you're trying to make a living, all these things come into play for writers, how you go about things.

I think to some extent with some of the books I've written, I've been trying to act like a George Orwell in an age that doesn’t necessarily listen to writers the same way. I've had it said to me many times - and we hear this all the time as writers; if you're trying to make an impact, if you want to make your voice heard, then writing books is not the way to do it now. But if you're a writer, then you just have to continually believe that's not true - it’s not only other forms of expression, of art, that reach people.

Aurora: And getting back to poetry?

Tim Bowling: I've always felt that poetry doesn't have that problem. Maybe that’s a reason I go on writing it among all other genres. For so many people writing poetry is kind of liberating and freeing because they understand very early on that poetry is not a commercial activity. Therefore any choices you make about projects you're going to do have a different kind of consideration. I don't think I've ever written a book, and I don't know too many writers who do, actually, when it comes right down to it, sit down and write a book thinking that it's going to be publishable or saleable. There has to be some sort of interior drive. It's too hard to write books.

Aurora: I wonder if a common interior drive is notable across some of your genres, in dominant details and interests, suggesting perhaps some common source material and inspiration. It's noteworthy to me, having recently read the Paperboy's Winter and The Lost Coast, that there are connections between certain characters and settings. I wouldn't assume that the places and characters in the non-fiction are one hundred percent the model for the novel. They have their differences and yet they share this kind of nexus of material that you worked with. What might you feel you're going for with the novel that's different from creative non-fiction?

Tim Bowling: I think there are parts of The Lost Coast that come pretty close to fiction in terms of how the narrative unfolds. But also big differences, and you've already touched on a couple of the big differences, and that's the amount of information about species. In a novel you're not going to suddenly stop, well unless you're Herman Melville, and Herman Melville was really writing a novel that no one else has ever written.

Aurora: No one liked it at the time, either.

Tim Bowling: A lot of people hate it now. Actually to be honest, I use Herman Melville [as a role model] and to a lesser extent Scott Fitzgerald, because writing books is hard. I remind myself a human being wrote Moby Dick, one person wrote that book. That should've put him on easy street, in my mind, for the rest of his life. He should've just been, whether you like it or you don't like it, just give the guy a soft job in whatever department of the government or something. So if I'm having a bad day as a writer I think, oh God, look at what Herman Melville did and what happened to him or Scott Fitzgerald. Basically The Great Gatsby at the time it was published was considered a failure.

But anyway, yes, I think the information about species and about the history and then the manifesto part - those are harder to get across in fiction successfully, though it depends on the kind of fiction. There obviously have not been many novels written that have had real strong manifesto elements to them where you can have a character stand up and make a speech. My first novel does, actually, Downriver Drift, published in 2000, again, similar setting, and similar dealing with the fishing industry. One character is a labor organizer; some of his dialogue is meant to be manifesto-like. But I do think with The Lost Coast, and we haven't mentioned  In the Suicide's Library yet - there's a certain kind of license and freedom to blending non-fiction and fiction.

Aurora: Speaking of In the Suicide’s Library, here’s another question on the nature of creative non-fiction, is every event and moment in that book exactly what happened?

Tim Bowling: No, but it's definitely non-fiction. It's non-fiction in the sense that all the important things are true. The core of the book, what the book is about - again almost always at the center of my prose there is some sort of moral conundrum. The core of that book is really about whether I should steal a book or not. And that's true. Exactly as it's described is true. It was in the University of Alberta Rutherford Library, it was that book, that signature was in it – everything is true. What happens after that, and all the things about my life that are in that book are… I don't know… I haven't looked at it for a while, but I think are almost entirely true. But some things have been altered.

Aurora: For dramatic impact?

Tim Bowling: Yeah, made bigger. Was I necessarily as tortured as I sound in the narrative? Probably not, I got through it.

Aurora: Being familiar with the Rutherford, I couldn't imagine it being the setting for a gripping story; that apologetic Canadian dismissal of the local, perhaps.

Tim Bowling: Well, in Edmonton these days there's this sense of literary happening, because the city's getting bigger and bigger all the time, and when you get bigger and bigger there are more and more writers and there’s more sense of a place with energy. People here have been talking a lot lately about how many books get set in Edmonton. My wife Theresa, her novel The Unfinished Child, Brindle & Glass, 2013 is entirely set in Edmonton. There are more and more of them, and a lot of genre writers, though I think they hate that term. In any case, a lot of detective-story writers are starting to set novels here. The funny thing about a place like Edmonton, and this is also true of Vancouver - I know I'm getting a little off topic, jumping ahead but also coming back to the idea of the local and who's interesting what readers and what readers are interested in is “exotic appeal.”

When I won that Guggenheim fellowship in the States, one of the reasons I'm sure is that for people in New York and, say, the east coast United States, Alberta and British Columbia are interesting because they're still rather exotic. What are these places and what do we know about them, they think? Very little, so they're sort of curious. Whereas from the point of view of people in the West – Edmonton, Vancouver, and Calgary – there's always been this sense (I think it's disappearing but there's long been a sense) that we're not taken seriously because who cares about what happens here. That's not without foundation; there certainly is some truth to that. But again if the population of Edmonton is going to double in the next twenty years, as they say it is, then sometimes sheer volume just changes the way writers feel about their place.

Aurora: As you report, your home community, Ladner (fictionalized in The Paper Boy’s Winter as Chilukthan) was founded by British and Americans. You mention the strong influence of reading and enjoying Victorian literature. But it also seems clear that you are very close to American literature as well. Could you comment on this?

Tim Bowling: I think it's just a matter of the sheer power and quality of American literature. I really think it's that. I grew up in a strong Canadian nationalist home, very much the idea of Canada at the time I was a kid in the seventies.

Aurora: My childhood was before that, a time when we still saluted the Union Jack. We didn't have a Canadian flag at all. I just want to offer that sense, for younger readers in particular, of how rapidly this changed, with a plunge, some would say awkward, into nationalism. You seem to capture that new outlook very well in the figure of the school principal in The Paper Boy’s Winter.

Tim Bowling: He was actually modeled very loosely on a principal I had who was all into the United Nations and Lester B. Pearson, that whole notion, and boy how old fashioned that looks now, this sense of Canada as a tolerant force, a peacemaker, but also this idea of nation building, Canada on the rise, Canada as an entity.

Early in my writing career I tried writing poems about Canada. I very quickly realized that I couldn't have picked something that was more doomed to obsolescence, which is really sad. It's a sad acknowledgement for a poet to understand. Manijeh² and I were recently talking about poetry and how different it is for an Iranian and other cultures, with relationship to an actual nation. But partly that's because Canada has no simple answer to the question what is a Canadian? If you don’t have one sort of ethnic bloodline, it's harder to have a sense of speaking for all people. I can't stand up and speak for the whole. I mean, I can try, but it doesn't carry the same validity.

Take the World Cup of soccer; my kids were asking me who we'd be pulling for. They keep showing people all across Canada pulling for basically their ethnic bond, like if they're Greek Canadians, they're pulling for Greece, and if they're German they're pulling for Germany. My heritage is English and Irish but back so long - like mid-nineteenth century -- that I don't have any particular affinity for that. Canada didn't have a team so I said, “well, pick whatever you want.” I think probably there are real pros and cons to that from the point of view of writers who are fascinated and interested in their own place.

I had an interesting conversation on email with a Newfoundland writer named Paul Bowdring. He's a novelist. He just published a novel The Stranger’s Gallery last year that won the big Newfoundland award for 2013, the Winterset Prize. I've always really liked his work. He publishes about one novel a decade, so it had been a long time between books. Anyway, this novel is entirely about Newfoundland and Newfoundland's history and the way things have changed over time. The main character is an archivist. I said to Paul, “it must be so nice to write in a definite culture because Newfoundland is different from the rest of Canada that way – that if you're a Newfoundland writer and you write about Newfoundland, you might actually have a strong local audience.” He said, “Well, we’re losing that.” I was saying to him I didn't think I ever had that. Growing up on the Fraser River when I was living in B.C., I never felt there was any kind of appetite, strong appetite for writing about B.C. Having said that, one of my main publishers, Harbor Publishing, has almost by themselves managed to give local writing about place a presence there.

Aurora: So failing a single nation to write about, it seems your response is wonderfully summed up in The Suicide’s Library with the little formula for writers “reality plus imagination”: work with the reality you know best in the local. In other words, home. But you also show, in works like The Lost Coast, the old local reality slipping away. Does that get us into, if you're not using the local, then what?

Tim Bowling: Yeah, it becomes more and more complicated. But I’m sure outside of Canada it's just as complicated. In the Western world, we're becoming more and more urbanized. People are urbanized. The statistics are there, anyway. The countryside is emptying out and people are moving to the cities.

Aurora: For the first time the Native population is over fifty percent urban now.

Tim Bowling: I think that's reflecting the general trend everywhere, not just in Canada. So when you don't have the bond with the actual land, and this is what I come back to with The Lost Coast. I mean, why do I have such a strong sense of place and maybe some other writers don't have it? Well, it's not a mystery. I have it because I was given it. It was given to me because I was fortunate my parents worked in a land-based industry that put me right there at the center. This is the foundation for all of my poetry. It put me at the center of mystery and awe in a way that I wouldn't have been otherwise.

As a parent I struggle with this. All parents who had any kind of a natural relationship to nature growing up look at the way kids live today and think, God, get outside, climb a tree, do something where you're actively involved in the physical reality of where you live. Well, with the times we live in, you realize you're really fighting the current there.

Aurora: You're swimming upstream more than the salmon.

Tim Bowling: You certainly are. And how is that going to change writing, how is it going to change literature? A person who sees the glass as half full would say, well that's storytelling, and the power of storytelling can come from other sources and other places.

Aurora: Sure. Some say, can’t a writer always tell a meaningful story? Regardless of change, urbanization, globalization and so on, there’s always something lyrical and dramatic, the telling detail that captures the moment. But, if one’s not that kind of writer, what do you do?

Tim Bowling: This is so hard for me to address, because I've spent most of the past twenty years of my life as a city dweller. I'm not on the Fraser River pulling salmon. So where do my experiences come from, where do the poems come from now? Well, for certain kinds of writers, and I'm one of them, a lot of times it's memory, it's other things, the past. This is why the past isn't dead because it's so rich, there's so much in it. Your failure to access that is the question. You go and talk to somebody you grew up with and they'll tell you all sorts of things you've forgotten and can't access anymore. Then once you’re told, you think.

It just happens that while working on my current book in progress, I met a girl that I grew up with in my home town. She lived next door to me, actually. She was reminiscing about the old days. She said, “Remember when I kept pigeons?” I said, “No, I don't.” But when she said it, then I remembered. So now I've incorporated that detail into the story I'm working on because there's something haunting about it, because who keeps pigeons? But I guess people do, or did. It's what struck me when my family and I moved back to the west coast. This was back to “the lost coast” and specifically why the book of that title happened.

Aurora: The point of view from Gibsons, with which you open The Lost Coast, right?

Tim Bowling: From Gibsons, yeah. We moved to the Sunshine Coast and when we were there it looked a lot like my hometown in the seventies. But there was no fishing industry going on, so the boats were idle in the harbor. That was more or less over and I felt that, so the book came partly out of that experience but also the recognition we moved there specifically for the ocean and the mountains and to get our kids living right in that environment to see what it would be like. My wife thought it might be permanent, but I figured we'd come back to Edmonton, because I like Edmonton so much. But anyway, while we were there we noticed that most people (and this would be 2004 or 2005) living there were living just the same as people in the city. Kids had no greater access; kids weren't roaming around anymore than they do anywhere else. Everybody's life was very scheduled. Everybody was busy, overwhelmed, the pace was fast even though everyone said it was slow. The only people who were going slow were those who were retired. Everybody else trying to live there was living just as if they were in downtown Edmonton.

This is probably everywhere. It’s the zeitgeist.

Aurora: So how does that affect your writing?

Tim Bowling: Well, I guess at a certain point it's no different than if you're not a writer. Some people are always embracing the new and moving rapidly towards it while others feel we're losing something valuable behind us, too.

I think that tension is the tension that creates my art. I don't want to live in the past because it wasn't perfect, but there are also things about it that I think I would like my children still to be able to experience.

Aurora: Yet I think it’s fair to say that not everything you write now comes out of memory, settings from the past?

Tim Bowling: Many of the poems that I write now in fact come out of urban experience, a lot of them, because of where I am. This city isn't like others and not all cities are like each other yet.

Aurora: Returning as we have to this city and Alberta, Tim, we seem to have reached a natural point to conclude this first part of our discussion. I just want to say that we were very grateful to have you as the writer in residence this past year with Athabasca University. Thank you for these wide-ranging reflections on your life and art, and on writing in general. I look forward to resuming the thread in Part 2.

¹ On the decay of five essential pillars of North American society, published in 2004.

² Dr. ManijehMannani, Chair, Centre for the Humanities, AU.

Note: Part 2 of the interview with Tim Bowling, which includes discussion of his latest novel, The Tinsmith and latest poetry, Circa Nineteen Hundred and Grief, is archived at the Athabasca University Writer in Residence website http://writer-in-residence.athabascau.ca/.

Publications by Tim Bowling

Poetry

The Duende of Tetherball, Nightwood Editions, 2016

Circa Nineteen Hundred and Grief. Gaspereau Press, 2014.

Selected Poems. Nightwood Editions, 2013

Tenderman. Nightwood Editions, 2012

The Annotated Bee & Me. Gaspereau Press, 2010

The Book Collector. Nightwood Editions, 2008

Fathom. Gaspereau Press, 2006

The Memory Orchard Brick Books, 2004

The Witness Ghost. Nightwood, 2003

Darkness and Silence. Nightwood, 2001

The Thin Smoke of the Heart. McGill-Queen's University Press, 2000

Dying Scarlet. Nightwood, 1997

Low Water Slack. Nightwood, 1995

Novels

The Tinsmith Brindle & Glass, 2012

The Bone Sharps. Gaspereau Press, 2007

The Paperboy's Winter. Penguin Books, 2003

Downriver Drift. Harbour Publishing, 2000

Non-fiction

In The Suicide's Library: A Book Lover's Journey. Gaspereau Press, 2010

The Lost Coast: Salmon, Memory, and the Death of Wild Culture. Nightwood, 2007

Related Links

BC Salmon Facts provided by Vancouver Aquarium
https://www.vanaqua.org/education/aquafacts/salmon

Fraser Canyon
http://travelthecanyon.com/

Fraser River
http://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/fraser-river/

Hell’s Gate History
http://www.hellsgateairtram.com/history/hells-gate/

Interview July 2014 - Adapted from AU’s Writer in Residence Archives, Bowling, Tim (http://writer-in-residence.athabascau.ca/archive/TimBowling/

Dave Brundage is former Creative Writing Co-ordinator, Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences at Athabasca University, now retired.

Updated March 2020

Aurora Online
Citation Format
Dave Brundage (2014) A Writer’s Tension: Reflections on Genre, Place, and Time (Part 1): An Interview with Tim Bowling Aurora Online