A Writer’s Tension:
Reflections on Genre, Place, and Time (Part 2)

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: In Part 1 of our discussion, you touched on genre, writing local, remembering the past, and reflecting on loss. You also touched on a strong element in your work of social criticism and even protest. To resume these themes, I wondered if you could say something more about social activism in your personal life.

Tim Bowling: Just as an example of how a writer's life sometimes reflects the work, some of our kids have been home schooled. Recalling my own school years, I have such vivid memories of—frankly—boredom. When I look at it now, it was boredom. Relief was just go out and do something, wander around with a stick, look at things and just have nothing else to do.

Aurora: You have a memorable passage in The Lost Coast: “How can I put this plainly? School cost me my heritage. Kept out of it, I’d have experienced so much more of the rich world into which I’d been born. Put into it, I learned how to raise my hand and how to sit still….” What follows is most striking: “learning the cruelty and injustice of authority, losing the streets, field and river and hours of daydreams and solitude” (224). It’s one of many remarkable passages. It put me in mind of William Blake saying something to the effect of thank God, I was never sent to school and made to play the part of a fool.

Tim Bowling:  Yeah, well, but I went to school from the age of six, so…

Aurora: You say that you were farmed and before that you were wild.

Tim Bowling:  There's always places where writers, I think, make choices. That might be, and it is, an exaggeration.

Aurora: A persona?

Tim Bowling:  It's a persona, yes, a created thing for the sake of that narrative.

Aurora: It makes a point, though.

Tim Bowling: Well, and it's not entirely untrue, because I think if I had not gone to school, I certainly—these experiences I write about—I would've had more of them. I would've been with my dad fishing more of the time. But school obviously gave me things, too, that my own family would not have given me. Sometimes when you're remembering the past, you like to remember things a certain way—you're not exactly an honest chronicler always, that's for sure.

Aurora: You're translating, in a sense?

Tim Bowling:  Yeah, you are. And you're probably translating poorly at times. But what's any writer's obligation? This comes down to the forms somewhat, but I think it's the same, and I tell apprentice writers this all the time. I say, you only really have one obligation, and that's to be entertaining. There are different ways to be entertaining, but that's your primary one. Even if you're going to write a manifesto, it has to be entertaining.

Aurora: Is it perhaps a matter of if you have the truth and a great deal to say and compassion and wonderful intentions but you don't know how to make it entertaining, then the rest doesn't matter? Is that partly what it is? Because you certainly have those other things in there, too. I wouldn't say that the ultimate value for me is the entertainment, but it's what kept me going and turning the page.

Tim Bowling: Entertainment is a hard, dangerous word to use in our culture because it sounds frivolous. But I don't mean it like “entertainment.” I think Moby Dick is vastly entertaining, but it's entertaining on levels that we don't necessarily all agree are.

Aurora: Magic charm?

Tim Bowling: Well, it's the power of the language, it's the power of the sentence, it's the power of an image. It's the sheer idea. When I teach John Cheevers' short story “The Swimmer,” I always begin with, what an idea, to write a story about a guy who's going to swim his way home across backyard swimming pools. He must've just been giggling and delighted and couldn't wait to write it. Apparently, he was going to write a novel based on it. I'm not surprised, because it's such a good idea. But he wrote one hundred and fifty pages of notes and then condensed it down to that short story.

Aurora: You say in The Lost Coast, “… poets live over dark rushing water and build our flumes of words to carry something on beyond ourselves…. And the fuel for that motion is a continual sensitivity to association, otherwise known as a metaphor-making spirit” (232). That idea of Cheevers’ was a happy day for a metaphor, I would think.

Tim Bowling:  A hugely happy day. I was thinking about that and then the whole idea of Moby Dick, too. Things get watered down so much over time. I know Moby Dick is such a cultural icon now: you see it used for restaurants and T-shirts and all sorts of things. But the idea of coming up with this guy in mad pursuit of a white whale is just hugely powerful. How do people get through all those pages and pages and pages of whaling description? Most people aren't that interested in the details of whaling. But what's going to happen with this guy and this whale? It's just a basic narrative hook. Melville does so much else, but this, I think, is what holds us… Having a good hook comes right down to everything I write; it comes right down to an individual poem. The poem is like a pop song in that sense. Right from the start, if there isn't some metaphor-making or some kind of memorable language, memorable image, something to reward the reader for making the effort, then I don't think it's going to succeed.

Aurora: Well, to me in your work there's always a question, or something, that leaps out and is very interesting, whether it's is this guy going to steal this book…

Tim Bowling: That's why Melville is a genius and I'm maybe a good writer but I'm not a genius. Partly, in fairness this is also a difference in time period. I had this conversation with my son the other day. I was explaining Shakespeare because he asked me out of the blue, “So was Shakespeare the greatest writer ever?” It's like, well, okay let's see now…”

Aurora: You didn't point out to him who you are?

Tim Bowling:  He didn't ask, “Dad, are you greater than Shakespeare?” But the funny thing about that to me was that I'm so aware always of mythologies and conventions. I think certain kinds of writers, and I'm one of them, I'm always questioning accepted wisdom. I think, well, okay, why would my eleven-year-old who's not in school even, like why would he think Shakespeare is the greatest writer ever? He's come across this idea somewhere – television. I haven't said to him that Shakespeare is the greatest writer.

Aurora: I think I had that idea by about the age of four. Where does it come from?

Tim Bowling: Where does it come from? Well, it's certainly the notion. I wanted to answer it honestly. I had energy that day. I wasn't just going to say yes, move on. My knowledge of Shakespeare is such that, okay obviously powerful, yes, no doubt about it, and probably maybe if you have to rank, up there if not number one. But what were the circumstances outside of that writer's control that collided with the language and everything else to allow that to happen? So, I used the comparison between Shakespeare and Melville. I said, well whoever William Shakespeare was, is he a greater writer than Herman Melville given what they each had to work with and given the times and places they lived in? I would say, you know what, I think maybe Melville was greater, but I don't know. It's not just a question of the work you left, although some people would like to think you just look at the work, but greater in terms of what you've had to overcome.

Aurora: You're handed a certain path by destiny in a sense, aren't you?

Tim Bowling:  In a sense, I think – where you are, what you experience… With Shakespeare, the coming together of all those forces that made English so rich at that time. But then again, where were all the other Shakespeares at that time? That's a very difficult thing to answer.

Aurora: But coming back to narrative hook?

Tim Bowling:  Coming back to narrative hook, it might be a condition of the way our lives have changed. Melville’s story in Moby Dick is so based on the elements, the hook is such an elemental force, closer to what Shakespeare had, it seems, than what we have today. So, my narrative hook involves an urban guy having to decide whether he should steal a book or not. Partly that's all created out of this tension that I feel as a writer in an industry where books are changing so much, where the way things have always been done in publishing is rapidly changing and being digitized. Again, is it bold new territory that we should all be rushing and racing into? I think there are probably great opportunities and advantages for writers in the way things are now. But also, who doesn't love books if you're a writer?

Aurora: For me The Suicide’s Library evokes much of the despair and darkness of so much twentieth century Western literature. In Part 1 of our discussion you mentioned zeitgeist- - the zeitgeist of so many things stacked toward nightmare and against fulfillment TB: I think that book begins with the narrator saying he's having a mild midlife crisis and it's not the kind that involves sports cars and young women and that sort of thing. Then it goes on from there to look at Weldon Kees, an American writer of the twentieth Century who probably committed suicide. He's perceived as a "minor" arts figure in history.

Tim Bowling: Yes, known as a poet but very marginal. Yet actually what's happened since the writing of that book is, like so many people, by the time I got to my late forties I was starting to come closer—and I don't think the writing of the book led me to it, I think it's just life—but by the time I was in my late forties shortly after the book was published in 2010, so this would've been around 2011 or so—I started to experience some of that feeling of depression that was new to me. I hadn't had it. Who knows, maybe the writing of that book helped me cope with it better than I would've otherwise. Art often does that, helps keep you away.

Aurora: Some struggle was and perhaps is going on?

Tim Bowling: I seem to be battling with the culture I want to live in, because a lot of the poems I want to write these days are poems of midlife. But our culture, our poetry culture is very young, and it has to be. I think the people to whom the poems that I'm currently writing speak the most are the people who have the least amount of time to read poetry. It's the students, the twenty-year olds who are excited about poetry, twenty to thirty-five.

Aurora: Fitzgerald talks about writing to the younger generation.

Tim Bowling:  Well, but I think he's talking about writing to that younger generation while you're in it. You write for your generation and then the critics of the next generation and the schoolmasters of all time. But what do you do if you're middle aged? I think you write poetry specifically. Well, all forms, but if you want to write a non-fiction book you can choose to write about anything at all. Whatever the current fashion is, I could write about it as a seventy-year-old or an eighty-year-old. It doesn't matter. You can write about it. You have to do all the things that anybody has to do when they write a good non-fiction book – you have to research and you have to have some affinity for what you're writing about. But when it comes to poetry, lyric poetry anyway, and it's coming out of your life, well, you write naturally out of the experiences you're having. I wouldn't expect someone who's twenty-five years old to necessarily have an understanding of some of the pieces in my latest book of poems Circa Nineteen Hundred and Grief. I don't know…. As a teacher of writing, what practical advice can you give them about what they should write or how they should go about being writers?

Aurora: That's a very good question. Most people I think would say, find your own story. Fitzgerald suggested you only have one, maybe two or three, but you tell it different ways throughout your life perhaps. Is that true? In some ways, it makes sense to me that that might be true.

Tim Bowling:  Circa has a poem in it that's called “Childhood.” The opening line is, "I want it back, it is unseemly to admit so." It's right there, because childhood is not something we respect in our culture very much. It's also something that's not appreciated for what it really is, as it should be, this wonderful opportunity for freedom and imagination and things of which ideally, we keep a strong element through our lives. But we're biological, we're made up of forces we can't control to some extent, so as we get older our relationship to everything alters. I think obviously when it comes to somebody like Weldon Kees, why does he kill himself? When he killed himself he was forty-one. Why didn't he do it when he was twenty-one? Well, probably because he had changed and what he was coping with he could no longer cope with. I think when it comes to any kind of writing, you have your story and you tell it. I think what I like to tell young writers, and I excite myself when I say this because it's the truth, is that, look, no one can stop you, that's the beautiful thing. No one else can stop you from writing a book.

Aurora: I think you said writing is one of the few things where you can be somewhat free of authority.

Tim Bowling:  Writing it and publishing it are two different things. But the writing of it, you can do whatever you want. In how many areas of life is that true? That's wonderfully freeing, I think. But then the negotiation you have to make as a working writer, as a writer in the world, who wants to reach readers and whatever else, well that's different. But if you look at the history of literature I suppose you find that most writers who eventually mean something to people have come fairly close to doing both things at the same time. It's ongoing. I set out as a writer early on. When I was a young guy going to university at UBC, there just simply were not any novels or there wasn't any literature, very little, about the place I grew up in. So as a kid I couldn't read a book that was sort of dramatizing my place and mythologizing it and making it alive to me in a way that some kid growing up in Mississippi would. Fitzgerald said that we end up writing the books we can't find to read.

Aurora: Yes, that we want to read.

Tim Bowling:  I felt that regardless of whatever fortunes happen to books, the wonderful thing about them is that they do take on a life of their own. When I'm gone, somebody growing up there now can still read The Paperboy’s Winter. I know they've taught it in my old high school on a few occasions. One of the neatest things about it is somebody told me they had the book, they brought it home, because kids bring their schoolwork home. They had the book around and some of the parents would be the age I am or younger, and in that novel there's a tree, there's a tall Douglas fir that's in the neighborhood I grew up in. It's gone now, but it was a memorable tree I guess for more people even than just in my neighborhood. Some of these parents, they were asking the kids about the book and they'd say, my dad said, “Oh, I remember that tree. I used to bike over there,” and that kind of thing.

Aurora: The scenes with that tree are especially vivid and evocative for me. You return to it in The Lost Coast: “A Douglas fir, a hundred and twenty feet high, hundreds of years old….” You describe your persona self as a child climbing, looking out over the town, and history. You even weave in uses of the wood: “to make spear handles, harpoon shafts, spoons, dipnet poles, harpoon barbs, salmon weirs, and halibut and cod hooks. Its pitch was used for sealing the joints of harpoon heads, gaffs and fishhooks, also for caulking canoes….” Readers should check out that remarkable sequence from pages 102 to 107 of The Lost Coast. You spoke earlier of poetry in prose: this passage surely has that in spades. Poetry.

Tim Bowling:  A wonderful thing about publishing books is poetry. When I published my first book of poetry, which has to do a lot with the fishing industry and the Fraser River, a whole bunch of people came to the poetry reading in my home town for the launch of the book because they knew my parents. They weren't interested in poetry in particular but this was Hec and Jean's son, who's published a book, so let's go, including the barber that cut my hair when I was a little boy. He figures in some things. He had said to me—and this may be the greatest compliment I've ever had—he said, “that book of yours,” he said, “It made me look at everything with new appreciation.” That's all that I really could ask for, regardless of what the subject is. It makes someone look at it.

Aurora: For young aspiring poets wanting to express themselves, hoping to help readers to look at things with new appreciation, what advice do you give?

Tim Bowling:  I always tell people, if you want to write, poetry especially, you've got to read a lot, read poetry—and you should walk a lot. The combination of the rhythm that you get from walking and thinking about poems as you're writing—and I think that's true for everybody—it's just physical, it's breathing and pausing. And this doesn't mean having a device in your hand so that you can immediately record what you're thinking, because I've often found as much as technologies can help in some ways, when it comes to writing poems I think one of the great things is just relying on your memory. If you get the rhythm in your head, if you get a line in your head and you're walking and by the time you get back to your house it's still there, then its chances of being memorable are much better.

Aurora: You have to work at keeping it sometimes, and that sort of strengthens it?

Tim Bowling:  As much as people hate it in elementary school, I do think that learning poetry by memory, by rote, repetition, is a great help. As much as it might turn some people off poetry—and it probably does—for those who are not turned off by it, it's a wonderful thing for your own process, for remembering your own poems.

Aurora: Is it somewhat similar to the aspiring new masters of art who used to literally copy the recognized masters? They knew they were copying, but, wow, what a learning experience.

Tim Bowling:  Was it Hemmingway or one of the great twentieth century writers who would handwrite prose that he admired just to get the rhythm of it?

Aurora: I don’t know if Hemingway did that, but I read recently about a writer who said she wrote out one of Hemmingway's stories by hand, from start to finish. She said she did that just to completely grasp and appreciate the work. That’s mentioned in Robert Lamb’s book on the modern short story and Hemingway, Art Matters. Hemingway also once commented that the secret of his style was writing prose as poetry. But I believe you were just back very recently (June 2014) to Ladner and the coast for readings?

Tim Bowling:  It was good. And in October I'm going out to the coast again for a number of readings from my new book (The Tinsmith).

Aurora: What can you tell us about this latest one?

Tim Bowling:  It's two different points of view told in the third person. One's an American surgeon who'd been a surgeon in the Civil War battlefields and met this character, this mixed blood character, there. The first third of The Tinsmith takes place on the battlefield of Antietam in Maryland in 1862. Then the narrative switches to the Fraser River a decade later and it takes off from there. Then it goes back and forth. And going back to the question of writing about the local, when my agent tried to place the book with American publishers they routinely said the Civil War stuff was interesting but the Fraser River stuff, the B.C. stuff, the stuff that really motivated the book, wasn't.

Aurora:  Not an “American” story. No doubt this befalls other home-grown Canadian material, even as perceived exotic settings may be advantages in other cases.

Tim Bowling: If I'd been, some people would say smarter, but in my case a different kind of writer, then I would’ve simply written a Civil War novel and set the entire thing in the United States. That would've been a very different kind of book. It wouldn't have been as honest a book to me but it might've sold well… So, there's always that negotiation.

Aurora: Did you feel particularly challenged taking on the mixed blood American character, who would have been considered black?

Tim Bowling:  I felt I could write about him because we had a shared experience and a very powerful one about being on that river and the importance of that river. This happens to me all the time. I don't think I set myself up to be a spokesperson for anybody except myself. Circa Nineteen Hundred and Grief, for example, is a fairly dark, heavy book. Midlife seems quite a weight to bear, though there's elements of joy in it, too, I hope. I encountered a neighbour in the river valley the other day, a man who's suffered some real health trauma recently. He was a neighbor of mine. Some years ago, we lived side by side. Anyway, he and his wife had come to the launch of the book. They read the book and he said, “We really enjoyed it.” Then he kind of laughed and said, “Well, I don't know if we could enjoy it.” I thought at the time—because we all have our struggles in life of different kinds—I thought, well how do you read someone else's work who's saying a certain thing, and we all as readers place ourselves in relation to the work we read based on our own experiences. So sometimes I feel a little bit like I don't necessarily say what I say with the expectation that everyone else feels that way. But when it comes to the relationship between people, I'm an old-fashioned humanist. I believe that the things that matter are birth and death and love, and all these things are the same. I know there have been all kinds of statements over the past thirty or forty years to say that's not true, there's no such thing as a general universal humanism. But as a writer and particularly maybe as a poet and fiction writer, I have to believe in a shared humanity. I have to believe that a woman who loses a baby feels bad about it everywhere or a man who goes to war and sees his compatriots killed carries that weight. 3 The Tinsmith came out with Canadian publisher Brindle & Glass.  I can read Yehuda Amichai's poetry and feel that it's true, though my experience isn't his experience. I think that's the power of literature.

Aurora: You’re taking a humanistic look at—and inviting a humanistic response to—the west coast.

Tim Bowling:  In the sense of the west coast, at that level I think Canada is a remarkable success story that isn't really celebrated that much, how so many people of different ethnic backgrounds really do live, if you look at the world, really do live in remarkable peace. Obviously, there are problems, but if you look at history, if you look at the world, I feel very fortunate that way. Part of me feels my books do often seem heavy, there seems a real weight sometimes to them and a real darkness. It's like the past is this horrible force that's bearing down on us. At the same time, I'm leading a fairly privileged life. But I think partly it's the guilt of that which informs a lot of what I do. I'm so aware as a writer that history can just descend on us at any given time.

Aurora: Is this tension at work in anything in progress?

Tim Bowling:  My current project is dealing with Nazi war criminals in Canada because I'm haunted by justice and injustice. So, the same with the west coast and the salmon industry. I hate the fact that the wrong people get blamed for the problems. You have fishermen on the west coast who still blame the Natives, for instance, for all the problems in the fishery. So, a lot of what I do, it sounds arrogant to say correcting wrongs, but I think the archiving thing is I'm motivated with this new project because I see the rise of neofascism in Europe. I particularly see it as very strong in Greece. I grew up amongst a large Greek community on the Fraser River and hung out with a lot of Greek kids, played sports with Greek kids, went to their houses. With this project, I started looking into the history of Greece in this century and finding out things. It's not different than the salmon. People don't know about the salmon, well how many people know what happened to Greeks, Jews in the Second World War? I certainly didn't know until I started searching.  Historical novels often get written out of the current moment. I started to recognize what was going on in Greece with the rise of the Golden Dawn far right party, and I looked at the history and I saw shocking things about the Holocaust in Greece. Most people don't think about a Holocaust when they think about Greece. But ninety percent—again, there's that ninety percent—of Salonica's Jewish population was wiped out. I think about it and I think, that's a fact, that happened, and here's this party now coming to prominence there. It's the old, if we don't learn the lessons of history we're doomed to repeat them. So, I think as a writer I feel like we're all living not so much, well maybe on borrowed time, but I feel like we're not as grateful for what we have as we ought to be. I think that informs much of what I do. I can't believe that I can get up every day and have a fairly comfortable and calm life. I'm too aware of the fact that other people in other time periods and in other places even today wake up with that same feeling and then it all changes.

Aurora: It sounds like this international interest is further informing perhaps but not displacing your fundamental sense of being a local writer.

Tim Bowling:  I think I've always wanted more than anything to be thought of as a local writer. When it comes to Alberta, well, in The Bone Sharps, for instance, I really got fascinated with that paleontological history down in dinosaur park. That novel is entirely about it. In the Suicide's Library is entirely set here.

Aurora: We’re back to Alberta again, Tim, the place where we started this interview, and again I appreciate all you have shared in this discussion as well as your wonderfully productive year as writer in residence with Athabasca University. All our best wishes to you with the current project and those that follow.

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

Awards

2002: Canadian Authors Association, winner of poetry award, Darkness and Silence

2003: Finalist for Governor General's Award for poetry, The Witness Ghost

2004: 2Finalist for Governor General's Award for poetry, The Memory Orchard

2004: Alberta Literary Awards, winner of the Georges Bugnet Award for Novel, The Paperboy's Winter

2008: Guggenheim Fellowship

2012: Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize finalist for The Tinsmith.

Original 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.

Aurora Online
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Dave Brundage (2020) A Writer’s Tension: Reflections on Genre, Place, and Time (Part 2): An Interview with Tim Bowling Aurora Online