Alice Hearts Welsh Zombies on tour!

It has been quite a while since I posted on a Monday, but when Todd from The Workhorsery e-mailed me about a Halloween blog tour he was planning, I couldn't say no. Alice Hearts Welsh Zombies by Victoria Dunn is The Workhorsery's third book and, while this is unrelated to the blog tour, given the recent craziness in publishing it is really awesome to see an independent continuing to publishing interesting and fun Canadian work. The Workhorsery released a book trailer for Alice four months ago. It was the first book trailer I ever watched right the way through and then rewatched immediately. If you haven't seen it, it's posted below. 

So, with all of that in the background, when Todd asked me what I was interested in doing for my stop of the tour (today is Day 1) I knew I wanted to talk about the trailer. The impetus for promotion is increasingly placed on authors as publishing houses lose those resources (both staff and money) and I wanted to explore that a little. I was initially just going to post the e-mail Q&A I did with Victoria Higgins and Meghan Dunn (collectively known as Victoria Dunn), but they got into it even before my questions started, so I've included that part of the e-mail too.

Finally, before the questions start and the book trailer rolls (you really should watch it – the song will be stuck in your head all day), one last bit of business. The Workhorsery is holding a blog tour contest. Whoever comes up with the best answer to the question the best answer to the question "should zombies have human rights?" will receive a special Workhorsery prize pack, which will include:

• autographed copies of all three of our novels (Victoria Dunn's Alice Hearts Welsh Zombies; Derek Winkler's Pitouie; and Jocelyne Allen's You and the Pirates)!
• a genuine zombie crotchet doll, possibly from the book trailer itself, definitely specially-crafted by the author(s) herself/themselves! 
• some other secret stuff related to the novel that we're keeping top secret!
• a hand-made, super-limited addition Alice Hearts Welsh Zombies Workhorsery tote bag to carry it all in!

To win, e-mail your answer to read@theworkhorsery.ca or tweet them @theworkhorsery before Nov. 7.

Alright, let the blog tour begin!

(E-mail correspondence below. I'm in black, Victoria Dunn is in purple.)

First, I’m not sure if you would rather answer as Victoria Dunn or as Victoria and Meghan, so I’ll let you choose.

We answered as Victoria Dunn, our evil hive mind, using the royal we. But we’re not stuck up, honest.

But, can you let me know? If you choose to answer as yourselves (or, individually, as the case may be) can you indicate who is saying what? That way, if you squabble about an answer, we can all be in on it.

Victoria Dunn frequently argues with herself. Although rarely about anything pertaining to writing. The most recent argument was whether the cups suit in our zombie tarot deck represents sex, or if zombies and sex are two great tastes that do not taste great together. However, we do agree that tasting zombies is not generally a good idea.
Some background for your readers: Alice Hearts Welsh Zombies began life as an entry in the 2009 International 3-Day Novel Contest, a Vancouver based contest held every Labour Day weekend. We won 3rd place in that competition, and we’ve been doing all of our first drafts this way ever since. We’re both big fans of the creative rush of writing tens of thousands of words all at once, and the inevitable sleep-deprivation leads to some inspired – and occasionally insane – plot twists. 

1. When you were writing/had just finished Alice Hearts Welsh Zombies, did you give any thought to how you might promote it? Did you know that might be part of your job, as authors?

We were working on the promotion before the book was even done. Victoria works at a bookstore, so we understand how important it is to make sure the book gets into people’s hot little hands. We were stalking Trevor Strong of the Arrogant Worms before we even had a publishing contract, having discovered that he writes songs to order (after all, every novel needs its own theme song…). So, at our first meeting with our publisher, the Workhorsery, we were able to propose some ideas for promoting the novel including the book trailer and zombie beauty contests etc. 

2. Whose idea was the book trailer? Had you seen any previously?

The problem with having an evil hive mind is that it’s impossible to figure out which ideas belong to which person. Or even who wrote what originally! Certainly the book trailer was something we agreed on from very early on, sometime between the midnight deadline of the 3-Day Novel contest and beginning the second draft a few months later. Which was, incidentally, when we noticed that in the first draft our airplane had crashed upside down, but had magically righted itself by the end of the chapter. It was several more months before we noticed that we’d accidentally handed a suicidal character a fully loaded gun. You’d almost think it had only been written in three days…

3. As compound authors, you’re obviously okay with collaboration, but were you ever worried about letting someone else handle to creative process when it came to the video?

We trusted Trevor completely, especially as neither of us has any musical ability at all. We still suffer flashbacks to traumatic middle school music classes. One of our music teachers was a Hungarian who’d fled the Soviets and liked to make students cry– this is when young Victoria became a Communist sympathizer.
The rest of the video was entirely our creation. In fact, it was the first video we’d ever made! Can you tell? (The constantly shifting light levels might be a clue.) 

4. Where was it filmed?

On the floor in the room at the front of Meghan’s house that really doesn’t have a name. She has fantasies that someday it will be a library with built in shelves and a sexy rolling ladder. Meghan believes in dreaming big!

5. The very, very catchy song was written and sung by Trevor Strong – did you consult? Were you ever worried he wouldn’t “get” your book?

It’s quite the earworm, isn’t it?
When we hired Trevor, he gave us the option of telling him as much or as little about the book as we wanted. Some people who have hired him have apparently only shared the title of the book, but that seemed counterproductive to us. We wanted more than “Alice Hearts Welsh Zombies is a book! Please buy it!” on an endless loop. So we gave him characters and the basic plot, and confessed our ambitions for becoming fabulously successful authors and selling the movie rights. He ran with it, and we were delighted with the result. 

6. Whose idea was it to crochet the characters?

Meghan was already making little TV characters out of crochet, such as tiny crocheted Starsky and Hutch facing off against little crocheted Satanists. Since we couldn’t afford to pay actors, it wasn’t a stretch to think that we might as well make them.

7. I see you’ve made the zombie pattern available on your website – are you hoping to inspire some Call Me Maybe­-esque spin-offs?

That’d be wonderful! We’re also completely cool with fan fiction, even the really smutty kind (especially the really smutty kind). We promise never to stalk our fans and issue cease-and-desist orders, unless they’re making money off of our book and won’t give us a cut!
We’re also encouraging our friends to come up with creative book covers, like the literary one on our website. One of our friends is currently working on a pulp 1950s magazine style cover. Can’t wait to see it! 

8. With a story this fun, I feel like the sky is the limit when it comes to promotion. Besides the trailer and the blog tour, what do you have planned?

We’ve got more ideas than we have time or energy to execute. But on Halloween night we’ll be doing zombie tarot card reading at Collected Works bookstore. We’ll also be attending the Small Press Book Fair, Fall Edition in November, and in December we’ll be teaching teenagers how to crochet their very own zombie Christmas ornaments at a local high school.
We really enjoy events like the Ottawa Geek Market and Toronto Word on the Street. We also visit bookstores, and have been known to pounce on complete strangers in the street and terrorize them into buying our book. 

9. Both the book and the book trailer have been really well received. What do you think makes the zombie so appealing?

Zombies are adorably tenacious. It doesn’t matter if they lose an arm, a leg or half their body, they never give up on their goals. They don’t get stressed out about failure, either. Despite the whole hunger for human flesh, zombies are never malicious. They don’t hate you. They’ll never judge you. They just want to get up close and personal, because they think you’re a tasty treat. And that’s really a compliment when you think about it.

10. Will you be dressing up for Halloween?

Thanks to the zombie novel, we’ve been hanging out at the local Punk Flea Markets and buying pretty dresses with skull and zombie prints. Also, we have a growing collection of zombie t-shirts. It’s amazing how often zombies are exactly the right fashion statement to make.
Zombie wear also works as a marketing tool, too! If someone asks about the t-shirt or the dress, it’s an opening to hand-sell the novel, or at least give them a bookmark.
Meghan’s considering handing bookmarks out with the Halloween candy this year. If she does, she’ll definitely give them with candy, not instead of candy, because she doesn’t want her house egged.

Alice Hearts Welsh Zombies is available from your local independent bookstore. PLUS, the tour continues tomorrow and Wednesday! Check out The Eyrea on Tuesday and Open Book Toronto on Wednesday for more about Victoria Dunn, Alice Hearts Welsh Zombies an, well, zombies in general.

S.T.E.L.L.A.A. & Child Literacy

Not that long ago, I listened to a Radiolab podcast about colour and it blew my mind. Now, I'll be the first to admit that their brand of science-y storytelling can often do that, but this was different. In the show (which I highly recommend you listen to), they talked not only about how colour works and where it comes from and that sort of thing – they also talked about the language of colour. Specifically, they spoke to a linguist Guy Deutscher about William Gladstone's reading of The Odyssey and how, even though that book takes place mostly in locations surrounded by water, the word "blue" is never used. Not once. The conclusion? That blue didn't exist for Homer. He didn't have a word for it, so he couldn't express it (he instead describes the sea as "wine-dark"). Colour words, it seems, develop in stages that are consistent across cultures, with blue being the last major one to come into play. Crazy, right?

I have been thinking about this a lot since I listened to that podcast, so when Carrie MacMillan contacted me about being part of the S.T.E.L.L.A.A. blog tour, the two ideas meshed. S.T.E.L.L.A.A. works to eradicate poverty in Africa by providing literacy and educational tools to communities. It's a small thing, but it can have a huge impact. One of the ways S.T.E.L.L.A.A. provides these tools is through books donated in Canada and delivered to various African communities (part of their philosophy is to promote environmental responsibility, and reusing books is a great way to do that).

When I was a kid, I was lucky enough to grow up in a house filled with books. My parents were (and remain) readers, so from the word go I was surrounded by books. I was read to, I was encouraged to pick up books and flip through them (and later, of course, to read them myself). For me, books were a way to go somewhere else. I was never going to experience 19th century Prince Edward Island or the pioneer days in the U.S. for myself, but Lucy Maud Montgomery and Laura Ingalls Wilder could take me there. I was never going to take a boat past Patagonia, but thanks to Sue Scullard's Miss Fanshawe and the Great Dragon Adventure I not only got to see the mountains of Patagonia, but also to follow along as the heroine discovered dragons at the centre of the Earth. I still have never been to the Netherlands, but because I was read (many, many times) The Cow Who Fell Into the Canal by Phyllis Krazilovsky, I was given a way to imagine it anyway.

That's the point, really. Reading, and being read to, as a child feeds your imagination with a world of images and and situations and places that you might never experience first-hand, but can dream about nonetheless. As kids, my sisters and I weren't allowed to watch much TV, so our free time was spent reading and playing, and the vast majority of our games were fuelled by our incredibly active imaginations. Even though there were certainly times when, like Homer I suppose, we lacked the word for whatever it was we wanted to describe, we had the imaginations to come up with something else.

In Orwell's 1984 there is the suggestion that if we lack the word for something, we can't think it; fostering active imaginations in children defeats that, because if you have an imagination, there is always a way to express yourself. (No word for blue? Fine then, I'll say it's "wine-dark.")

As my contribution to the S.T.E.L.L.A.A. blog tour, I'd like to encourage you to donate your (gently) used books to their cause. Local libraries are certainly deserving as well, but even if you put every second or third book aside, it makes a difference. In addition to picture books and fiction, S.T.E.L.L.A.A. needs text books. Subjects such as math and basic science – in which not a lot really changes between editions – are greatly appreciated, and put to excellent use. Education and imagination are extraordinarily empowering, although it's easy to forget that living as we do in a society where both those things are so normalized.

Now, it's tempting to say that every book will be appreciated, but it's important to remember the context in which these books will be read. Cookbooks, books about home decor, etc. are of little use to communities looking to improve education. Yes, they can be tools for imagination, but they depict a reality so incredibly different that at best they are useless and at worst, insulting. S.T.E.L.L.A.A. also stays away from evangelical and political work, so please consider that when planning books to donate (an illustrated book of parables may have been a family favourite in your house, but may not jive with a community it's sent to, and respecting that is important). The full list of guidelines for donation are here – for the most part, your books are welcomed with open arms.

All the drop-off points are in Toronto; however, I asked about sending books by mail, and was given this address:

STELLAA 

9200 Weston Road

PO Box 92092

Vaughan, ON L4H 3J3

If it's a big donation, though, they ask that you get in touch with them about sending it.

Although I often have the opportunity (both through this blog in in my day to day life) to champion books and literature, it's rare that I get the chance to do more than simply recommend a book or encourage someone to shop at local independent bookstore. If you feel similarly, consider donating books S.T.E.L.L.A.A. – Allegra Young is planning to run a book drive in the New Year, so perhaps I'll talk to her about co-hosting. Either way, stay tuned!

Also, this is the second-last day of the blog tour, but if you'd like to read more about S.T.E.L.L.A.A., and learn more about the organization, please take a tour through all the stops:
Sept. 8: Tour launches with Terry Fallis
Sept. 9: Vanessa Grillone
Sept. 10: Amy McKie
Sept. 11: Jenn Lawrence
Sept 12: Allegra Young
Sept. 13: Here!
Sept. 14: Mara Shapiro

Q&A: Peter Behrens

Peter Behrens' new novel – a follow-up to his Governor General Award-winning The Law of Dreams – came out this week and he's working the blog circuit. House of Anansi got in touch with me last month about participating; yesterday I reviewed his book, and today I have a Q&A I did with him via e-mail.

Peter Behrens

Q: Did you envision yourself returning to this family when you wrote The Law of Dreams?
A: I began this novel before Law of Dreams. While I was writing it I realized that the Famine was one of the key to understanding Joe's character. So I stopped, went back, researched, and wrote the famine novel. Then I could write The O’Briens.

Q: After your first novel did so well did you feel pressure when you sat down to write The O'Briens
A: No pressure. But setting out to write a novel is always a bit frightening. Intimidating. There are moments when it seems impossible that will ever be finished. That I will know enough to be able to write it and finish it. Each book is a separate thing, a separate experience. The stories in my 2 novels are linked – but the books are totally different animals. They breathe differently, smell different, speak in quite different voices.

Q: It's unusual to read a novel that sees a character do from his teens to his 70s, was it challenging to spend that much time with Joe?
A: No. He is closely based on my grandfather. I was curious, very curious about him. I wanted to try to understand him a little better. I should say, I don't believe it's possible to “know” in the sense of “understanding” other people thoroughly, completely. Even "understanding" ourselves is a mystery quite beyond our grasp. Yet “realist” novels often pretend that characters can be "explained" wholly. But ...we are all secret beings wrapped up inside ourselves. I can offer glimpses of Joe.
But I wanted to spend all this time in Joe's company. He is very interesting to me. He is an intelligent man, yet a mystery to himself, as well as to his wife and children. Introspection not his forte. Forward motion all the time. He knows/feels LOVE but in such a blunt instinctive way; he's almost like a patriarchal animal watching over his brood/children. His instinct is to protect them, protect them, protect them....from what? The world? Someone in the book says that being loved by Joe felt a lot like being hated.

Q: You write from several points of view in this novel, did you have a favourite (or a voice you connected with best)?
A: No, I feel very attached to them all. But I guess I had most fun with Frankie. She's sharp, questioning, subversive.

Q: It seems like the family is touched by every major event of the era, how much time did you spend researching this novel?
A: Not quite true, for example they had no experience direct or indirect with The Holocaust...but they were certainly touched and shaped by the wars of the century, by its economic booms and busts...I've always been deeply intrigued by history, have read history and thought about it all my life. I only undertstand the present by seeing historical dimension. I can’t begin to understand anything or anyone until I have some grip on their history. That's how it works for me. Other people don’t need the historical dimension in the same way. It's in my hardwiring though.
The story of the O'Briens is based on my family's story. I always knew it, it seemed powerful to me, a set of myths I had to reexamine and query and explore.

Q: This novel is ripe for summer reading – big books are great for vacations – what are you hoping to read this summer?
A: Well I'm on a book tour now and have a with me a big fat paperback edition of Hilary Mantel's novel, Wolf Hall. And I've just finished Hampton Sides' Hellhound on His Trail a nonfiction account of the summer of 1968, the assassination of ML King JR in Memphis, and the effort to find and capture his assassin.

The O'Briens

Peter Behrens' new novel – a follow-up to his Governor General Award-winning The Law of Dreams – came out this week and he's working the blog circuit. House of Anansi got in touch with me last month about participating, so I'm reviewing the book today, and tomorrow I'll post a Q&A I did with him. 

As anyone who reads this blog knows, I am a fan of layered perspectives in a novel. When it's done well, it's one of my favourite devices because it allows you so much insight into what's happening. Rather than having to infer what other characters feel and think you get the chance to understand their perspective, which generally enriches the story. Peter Behrens' The O'Briens is a novel about that titular family, starting when Joe O'Brien (our main man) was a teenager in the forest of the Ottawa Valley during the 1890s and leading us through his life until the 1960s. 

The novel starts out from Joe's perspective. His father died in the Boer War and it's just his mother, himself,  his brothers, Grattan and Tom, and their two sisters left in the wilderness. Then Joe's mother remarries a drunken fiddler, who beats her and molests the two sisters. Joe, only 16, has already started a relatively profitable lumber business when he decides to deal with his stepfather. Joe takes the man to the barn and beats him (with his brothers' help) to within an inch of his life. Shortly thereafter Joe's mother dies and he packs up his brothers and sisters and moves them out of the wilderness, which is the only thing they've ever known. Joe is driven. From the get-go he knows he wants success in business and to marry a woman who is better than he is, with whom he'll have children. After seeing his brothers and sisters safely entered into various religious schools – his sisters go on to be nuns and his brother Tom becomes a priest – Joe heads west to seek his fortune with a railway contract. 

In the following section, which is also quite long, we're introduced to Iseult – Joe's future wife. She grew up on the East Coast of the U.S., but after her father's suicide she and her mother moved to Pasadena. When Iseult is in her early 20s, her mother dies, so she decides to move to California and leaves for Venice. She has money from her inheritance and her plan is to buy a little house where she can be alone and feel the air and the sun and just breathe. Iseult has a kind of crippling asthma, so light and airy spaces are what she dreams of. In the first real estate office she enters, who should be behind the desk but Grattan, Joe's brother. Grattan sells Iseult a little cottage and through him she meets Joe who's in town for the winter because the railway is too frozen to continue working on. They have a very brief courtship and then they get married. 

The rest of the novel's sections are somewhat shorter than the first two, and they follow Joe and Iseult up into the Rockies where Joe is working on his railroad contract and where Iseult loses their first child. The marriage never really recovers from that, but they do eventually have three more children – Mike, Margo, and Frankie (short for Frances). Although Mike is born out west, by the time the girls have come along Iseult and Joe have moved east to Montreal, where Joe sets up a construction company and starts building houses and bridges and roads. The family seems to travel constantly, and very little of this half of the book is told from Joe's perspective; rather, Behrens focuses on Iseult and the kids, especially Mike, to tell us what Joe is like.

This is a family story, both about the family Joe built around him and his brothers and sisters, but it is not an entirely happy one. Joe's sisters die during the Spanish Influenza epidemic, Iseult takes the kids and leaves for a while, and Grattan is a pilot in WWI and comes home a completely different person, among other things. There are several different plots going in the second half of the novel (which happens when you have several narrators) and the sections start to feel a little choppy as they jump through years without really explaining what happened in between. Nonetheless, at this point I was pretty involved with the novel, so I forgave the missing pieces in favour of what was there, which is a lot. 

It's ambitious to take on this kind of multi-generational family saga, especially during an era when so many things of historic significance happened. The family touched by almost every major event of the early 20th century, which makes this novel a kind of alternative way to learn history, especially where war is concerned. Usually a big novel like The O'Briens would be released in the winter, but a thick and interesting book is perfect for taking on vacation, and although this isn't always a cheerful story, it won't entirely take the wind out of your sails either. It's a summer novel that asks you to think and engage, and in return gives you something to sink into.

The O'Briens
by Peter Behrens
First published 2011 (cover image shown from House of Anansi Press edition)

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Writing by Derek Winkler

Hi there. My name's Derek and I've just published a novel called Pitouie. You can read all about it over at The Workhorsery. I'm getting the plug out of the way first because the rest of this post will have absolutely nothing to do with Pitouie. The rest of this post will be about motorcycles.

"It's a picture of my grandfather on his bike," Derek Winkler wrote when he e-mailed
the photo. "These machines, they get in the blood."

I got my motorcycle license when I was 17. When I was 19 I became an English major. It seemed obvious that I should write a book about about motorcycles. The resulting work was a magic realist road trip novel so irredeemably awful that innocent persons might be driven to madness by just by reading it. I keep the single extant copy on an Amiga floppy disk under lock and key.

Pitouie is landing

Two months ago, The Workhorsery's Todd Ferguson inexplicably recognized me at Word on the Street and asked me to be part of the blog tour for the press's forthcoming novel Pitouie, by Derek Winkler. Of course, I said yes. So far, Winkler has been to The Afterword and The Book Mine Set, and today he's coming to Books Under Skin.

In the author notes at the end of the novel – which has such a twist in the middle I'm reluctant to describe it to you, suffice to say, I look for these things when I read and did not see it coming; also, the narrative is layered, and I love that – Derek Winkler is described thusly:

Derek Winkler is the editor of an obscure trade publication that you have almost certainly never heard of. He also performs any number of dark and arcane tasks for Broken Pencil magazine. He has done just enough freelance journalism to be able to make that claim with a straight face.

His two most prized possessions are a broken motorcycle and his grandfather's 1926 edition of The Complete Works of Shakespeare.

Well, the first paragraph ties back to the novel, which features a sort-of journalist (that is, he works at a trade magazine, Waste Insight, essentially rewriting press releases for publication). I'm in no way saying that Winkler himself is a "sort-of journalist," but that section of his bio is relevant to the novel. The second half, however, is related to his contribution to Books Under Skin: all about motorcycle memoirs. It's funny, it's interesting, and it might just make you want to read some more of Winkler's writing.

Here's Winkler's full blog-touring schedule:
Nov. 15-19: The Afterword
Nov. 20: The Book Mine Set
Nov. 21: Books Under Skin
Nov. 22: Hoodie Ripper
Nov. 23: rob mclennan’s blog
Nov. 24: Books on the Radio
Nov. 25: Maisonneuve Magazine
Nov. 26: Open Book Toronto