Authors look back at life-changing books

agination of the reader to go visit such places. There’s an epilogue to it all. Sixty-five years after my father handed the book to that young friend and then lost touch with him, the man tracked my father down. They’d last seen each other when they were boys, and they met again as old, old men to find out where their lives had taken them, and, surprisingly, he returned the copy of Lasseter’s Last Ride to him. The book now sits on my bookshelf as not only a family heirloom, but also a sort of amulet about the power a good story can have. That Lasseter gold mine has still never been found. Maybe I should take a run at it myself one day—but I’m still busy finding buried treasure in Vancouver history.”

KATHERINE COLLINS ( Neil the Horse) “Carl Barks did not merely change my life. He had a large hand in creating it. He was the cartoonist who elevated Donald Duck to a classic Everyman, in stories of timeless buffoonery. I was a Barks fan before I could even read, in the early 1950s. My mom had discovered him, and read every new issue to us kids, as we all collapsed in laughter. His Donald was filled with vainglorious ambitions, and his inevitable failures were spectacular slapstick calamities. Our hearts wept for hapless Donald, even as we guffawed. He would rise again, but never succeed. Barks’s humour used wild exaggeration and gobsmacking absurdity. And he also spun longer tales, of travel and adventure, which opened my eyes to the world’s marvels. By absorbing his work I learned that comics can be great comedy, and literature, and art. He is now said to be the most widely published author on the planet, in almost every country and language. He has never been out of print since 1942. I’m fond of Shakespeare, Austen, Twain, Munro, and their peers. But Barks looms larger than anyone for me, even taller than the gigantic statue of Cornelius Coot that looms over Duckburg.”

RODNEY DECROO ( Next Door to the Butcher Shop) “I was 11 years old when I found a mouldy paperback copy of Dee Brown’s Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee in a box of discarded books at my school. I asked my teacher if I could read it. He said I could but that I was probably too young to understand it. The book was like a hand grenade tossed into my preadolescent mind. Brown’s account of America’s genocidal campaign

against American Indians blew apart the trailer-park, militaristic American patriotism I’d been force-fed. That patriotism was a weird and contradictory cocktail of romantic stories about George Custer’s Last Stand versus the evil Indians, Lincoln’s heroic efforts to free the slaves, and the legend of America as the champion of freedom and democracy throughout the world. I was a fervent little patriot and rabidly consumed books like Grosset & Dunlap’s We Were There patriotic historical novels for children. My father had returned from the Vietnam War with severe PTSD and both my parents struggled with alcohol and other drugs. So there was lots of chaos and violence in our home and I clung to these myths because they made me part of something allegedly great and good. When I asked adults about Brown’s book they either dismissed it as bullshit or anti-american propaganda. A few years later I’d skipped school so I could go to a Pittsburgh Pirates home opener at Three Rivers Stadium. I was sitting next to a man who told me he was a Pirates fan because they’d fielded the first all-black starting lineup in Major League Baseball. He also told me that he was part black and part American Indian. Suddenly, I was telling him about Brown’s book and how horribly we’d treated Indians and that it was bad to be an American. He listened quietly, then asked if I was an American. I said yes, of course. Then he said—and I’ll never forget it—‘then you can be any kind of American you want, so be the kind you want to believe in.’ ”

LEANNE DUNIC ( To Love the Coming End) “The author that comes to mind is Anaïs Nin, whose work shaped me as a person and as a writer. I loved her fearlessness in who she was, what she did, who she did. She challenged and changed my perspective on life and love and inspired courage in my artistic practice. She and I also had bizarre similarities—for instance, we both wrote stories in which a character puts a finger inside of a chicken, and not through its beak.”

ROBYN HARDING ( The Party) “When I was eight years old, I was a flower girl in my aunt’s wedding. As a thank-you gift, she gave me a copy of James and the Giant Peach by Roald Dahl. It was so fantastical, but somehow so real. I vividly recall the scene where James crawls into the peach for the first time. I could feel the peach flesh on my knees, I could taste the juice as he licked the walls of his fruity tunnel. Even though the characters were a grasshopper, a centipede, and an earthworm, they came to life. There were a few pencil illustrations that were just enough to set my imagination running wild. I still have that copy of the book. And while I’ve never written anything in that fantasy vein, Roald Dahl inspired me with the magic of his words.”

SHEENA KAMAL ( The Lost Ones) “I have many favourites, but one book that particularly resonates with me is The Golden Compass by Philip Pullman. It’s a brilliant book by any measure, but what stays with me is the main character’s ability to operate a truth-telling compass. She holds a question in her mind without thinking directly about it, and the compass provides the answer. In many ways, this reflects how I write. I hold something in my mind, some idea or the other, and my intuition guides me. So when I’m under deadline, trying too hard to make the words flow, I think of this compass trick. In this way, The Golden Compass has had a profound impact on my life because it informs how I approach my work. Plus, it has armoured bears. Who can resist that?”

JEN SOOKFONG LEE ( The Conjoined) “I’ve wanted to be a writer for as long as I can remember, and many books have changed my life. (It could be argued that it’s mostly books that change my life and people rarely do.) The book that totally changed how I saw voice and language was Stilt Jack by John Thompson, which my favourite teacher at UBC, Keith Maillard, told me to read. Thompson’s poems are characterized by emotional disconnect, hard winters, and the edges of loneliness. His voice was uniquely his. No one else has ever written like John Thompson and no one else ever will. We can try to accomplish all sorts of social or literary goals with our writing, but really, if you don’t know and inhabit your own voice, then it doesn’t even matter. Stilt Jack forced me to confront who I am in words and that has been the most valuable lesson of my writing life.”

( Life on Mars) “A friend gave me The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy just as I was beginning my studies at Mcgill University. It languished, unread, amid a growing collection of breathtaking books: A Fine Balance, Things Fall Apart, Midnight’s Children. Then one morning I cracked the cover. Set in Kerala, India, during the late 1960s, the book explores the devastating results of a love affair between Ammu, from an upper-class, Syrian Christian family, and Velutha, an Untouchable carpenter and communist. There was the heartbreaking daring of Roy’s language. ‘And the air was full of Thoughts and Things to Say. But at times like these, only the Small Things are ever said. Big Things lurk unsaid inside.’ There was the haunting undercurrent of postcolonial history. Roy’s indictment of India’s caste system, of oppressive rule and religion, is set against small, exquisitely

LORI MCNULTY

drawn moments of love, indignity, and suffering. ‘Little events, ordinary things, smashed and reconstituted. Suddenly, they become the bleached bones of a story.’ I knew then that literature was capable of shape-shifting, that it could grow fangs and feet. Since reading the book, I have twice visited India. And when I look into the eyes of the locals—a Garhwali girl climbing a hill path, a vegetable vender selling eggplants and potatoes in Ahmedabad—i think of all that is forbidden and beautiful in the world. Great books make you want to write. And so I began to.”

AHMAD DANNY RAMADAN ( The Clothesline Swing) “Growing up in Damascus, Syria, I had very limited access to any books written outside of the country. Many books were censored or banned by the Syrian regime, especially books that brought understanding and connections to other cultures. I had to wait until I lived in Egypt in the early 2000s to get to read the book that would teach me how to be a better author. In Cairo in my early 20s, I stumbled upon a novel called One Hundred Years of Solitude by an author I didn’t even recognize at the time called Gabriel García Márquez. My friends there, a group of geeks and nerds who also enjoyed reading, found the matter laughable, as Márquez was quite the phenomenon by then. I ignored their laughs, and bought the book. Slipping into the magical world of Márquez truly consumed me. I was taken by the storytelling, the magical realism and his ability to connect lives and ancestors with stories that echo through time and place. By the time I finished the book, I felt like there was a light that was lit within me, enhancing my own writing, and teaching me how to produce a glimpse of that magic myself. Now, whenever I feel a writer’s block coming upon me, I find myself pulling any of Márquez’s novels and reading for a bit; I either overcome my writer’s block, or at least I feel the warmth of my favourite author again.”

Thegoldencompass