A brush with fame
Ottawa author channels seminal Canadian painter in new book
Tom Thomson: Journal of My Last Spring
Tim Bouma
Burnstown Publishing House
The first time Tim Bouma tried the authorial voice of Tom Thomson on for size, his efforts fell well within his chosen medium’s then- 140- character limit.
On Nov. 28, 2011, Bouma, a federal public servant in Ottawa, posted his first tweet on his fledgling Twitter account, TTLastSpring: “Getting quite a lot done, but unsure what I will submit to the OSA spring exhibition,” he wrote.
Based on his research and imagination, Bouma began bringing to life, in the first person, the final months of Thomson, who died under mysterious circumstances on Canoe Lake in Algonquin Park, Ont., in July 1917. Within half a year, Bouma generated about 1,000 more tweets.
In the years since, Bouma himself has got quite a lot more done. He perennially repeats his cycle of tweets thanks to a scheduling program that automates the process. He created a blog as an offshoot of the Twitter account and now he’s releasing a book. Tom Thomson: Journal of My Last Spring imagines the nightly journal entries Thomson himself would have written in the months before his death.
Like Thomson, Bouma, 52, grew up in the village of Leith, Ont., on the south shore of Georgian Bay. “He’s always been a part of my life. ... I could relate to him,” says Bouma of the artist, known as one of Canada’s most influential painters of the 20th century.
But Thomson is someone all Canadians can relate to, Bouma says. “He is a lost son. He defined the most iconic images of Canada.
“The fact that he died in his prime, at 39, just on the cusp of his evolution as an artist ... What he gave us is not just his art. He also gave us that feeling of what could have been possible. It’s that bittersweet kind of loss.”
Before he began tweeting, Bouma had been a more passive fan of Thomson’s work, compiling copies of sketches and reading biographies. He was always interested in Thomson’s mysterious death, he says.
After Thomson’s disappearance on a canoe trip on July 8, 1917, his body was recovered and his death was ruled an accidental drowning. But doubts about his death persisted and theories emerged that Thomson was murdered, or committed suicide, or that the body that was recovered wasn’t even his.
“The mystery gave the story its fuel,” Bouma says. “But that isn’t what people were looking for.”
Instead, he found once he’d created Thomson’s online persona, his followers, of which there are now almost 8,000 on Twitter, were more interested in connecting with Thomson than in intrigue or conspiracy theories.
“What people want is they want to have a relationship with Tom. They want to know him beyond what he painted,” Bouma says.
Followers on Twitter would respond to his tweets, prompting Bouma to tweet back in character. “I had all these people involved in this fiction. It was really amazing,” he says.
Bouma’s interest in Thomson became even more intense in 2013 when the cybersecurity specialist by day decided to become a historical fiction writer by night.
Inspired by Thomson’s daily regimen of painting a sketch, Bouma resolved to try writing a journal entry each day, fictionalizing in a format longer than a tweet what Thomson might have done. Bouma did that for 100 days straight, from March to July that year.
Each night, once his sons were in bed, Bouma would look back at the tweets, perhaps do some additional historical research online and then indulge in what he calls “method writing.”
“I just channelled Tom,” Bouma says. “Sometimes the stories would jump to life when I was writing them.”
Later in 2013, Bouma began attending writing workshops to sharpen his skills. Ultimately, his writings as Thomson earned the praise of Canadian author Roy MacGregor, who had written his own non- fiction book on Thomson, Canoe Lake and Northern Light: The Enduring Mystery of Tom Thomson and the Woman Who Loved Him.
“There is no recording of Tom’s voice, yet I have come over the years to feel that Tim Bouma has captured that ‘ voice’ and given us new insights into the person he was and the times in which he lived,” MacGregor has written.
Bouma’s book totals 222 pages and consists of more than 120 journal entries, plus several letters written by Thomson and the July 20, 1917, Owen Sound Sun article written after Thomson’s body was recovered from the lake.
For the book, Bouma says he refined his writing, adjusted the timeline of the entries and corrected some factual information.
Also included in the book are several “alternative sketches” — strikingly Thomsonesque works of art created by a computer program that imposed Thomson’s painting style onto photographs Bouma took depicting what the artist might have seen during his final days.
Bouma had hoped to release his book last year, in sync with the centenary of Thomson’s death, but that didn’t happen. “I have something more timeless now, as opposed to a rushed product,” he says.
Bouma says he has a followup book in mind — an “alternative history” based on Thomson surviving the canoeing mishap that apparently took his life.
Bouma says he envisions Thomson shipping off to Europe and becoming a First World War Canadian war artist.
“He’s painting in the trenches,” Bouma says.