HAPPY TO BE HOME
Author King lets his characters do the travelling
When writer Thomas King was younger he was always up for a trip.
Much to his mother's concern, the 20ish King left California to hitchhike for weeks through Mexico.
Then there was a trip on a transocean steamer ship to New Zealand where he spent a year before moving on to Australia.
“She said: `Are you nuts?'” said King who is also a respected photographer and member of the Order of Canada.
But now, even before COVID-19 grounded everyone, the winner of the Governor General's Literary Award for Fiction for The Back of the Turtle and the RBC Taylor Prize for The Inconvenient Indian says at 77, he's OK with staying close to the Guelph, Ont., home he shares with Helen, his partner of 40 years.
“What happened for travel for me was the more places I saw the more places I went, the more they all seemed to be pretty much similar to where I had come from,” said King.
“Customs were different. The languages were different. The food was different, but by and large people are people. After a while it seemed like it was a lot of work to get from where I was to this new and exciting place and it isn't all that new and all that exciting. It's OK.
“It's interesting, but you know I could be just as happy back where I came from,” added King.
“So slowly but surely the allure of travel has slipped away from me.”
Yes, gone are the days King said he would “go anywhere at the drop of a hat.”
His current reticence to road trips seems a bit funny when you consider his new book is called Indians on Vacation and it is about a couple and their travels.
The novel was just announced as one of five books nominated for the $50,000 Writers' Trust Fiction Prize. The award will be presented Nov. 19.
“Yes, I know,” said King when asked about that irony and the reality of COVID-19.
“I picked the right time to publish that didn't I?”
In Indians on Vacation, the vacationers are Blackbird, Bird for short, and his partner Mimi. He is half Cherokee and half Greek and she is Blackfoot.
The pair is on a quest of sorts. They have been attempting to retrace the steps of a long lost great uncle of Mimi's who gathered up the family medicine bundle and left Alberta in the early 1900s to join a travelling Wild West show as it traversed Europe. Uncle Leroy's postcards home are what have been guiding Bird's and Mimi's travels.
The reader catches up with the couple just as they land in Prague, another capital that offers up plenty of sightseeing and soul searching.
While this is a work of fiction, King admits that Bird shares some quirks and qualities with his creator.
They both like to take pictures (King was a photojournalist during his time in Australia). They are of Cherokee and Greek lineage and while Mimi hits the ground running with a guidebook in hand, both Bird and King would rather watch the world go by while sipping a strong espresso on a café patio.
Customs were different. The languages were different. The food was different, but by and large people are people.
“I think my favourite line in the book is when Mimi says: `I love you Bird, but sometimes you wear me out.' I think in those kinds of relationships there is that possibility. You just wear a person down,” said King reflecting on Bird's tendency to whinge and let his “demons,” get the better of him.
Indians on Vacation is a witty, funny, striking story that ponders the importance of history from the smallest personal connections to big-picture politics.
The book will be at the forefront of a discussion that King will be having via Zoom with fellow writer and journalist Waubgeshig Rice when the pair takes part in a Vancouver Writers Festival ( VWF) virtual event on Oct. 24 (6 p.m.). The festival runs online Oct. 19-25.
In the novel, Bird the narrator tells us: “Travel does allow us to collect new adventures, gather up new stories we can share with family and friends. The problem is that travel stories are only interesting if something untoward happens, if trouble makes an appearance, if a disaster is survived.”
Bird adds: “The first expectation of a good travel story is that something went wrong. No one wants to hear about the perfectly uneventful time you spent in Istanbul. Not even you. Next time, try harder.”
King laughs a little when he is reminded of his words.
“It's true, good travel stories are boring because nothing happens,” he says.
“The great travel stories are when you're beset by minor disasters.”
King says he is always on the lookout for those types of stories: the kind of stories that float around and if you are paying attention you are able to make note of them and save them for later. Save them for a new work.
King is currently at home working on his sixth Dreadfulwater mystery series novel.
“The plot is killing me on this,” said King, who admits creating characters is his favourite part of the process.
“I started writing mysteries because I needed some way to clear my mind between the literary novels. I like mysteries. If I'm going to read I generally read mysteries because they are easy to get in and out of.”
He also has another novel set to come out in the spring of 2021.
Called Sufferance, the new literary work is one that King really likes and one he has had hanging around for a while.
“I keep putting it to one side because I didn't get it right. Then I pick it up and try again and of my novels it probably has the longest tenure and the most missteps,” said King.
Recently King's work made it to the big screen, as his non-fiction book The Inconvenient Indian was inspiration for filmmaker Michelle Latimer's documentary — which King narrates — of the same name.
The film won numerous awards at the recent Toronto International Film Festival.
Despite King's current view on travel, he has had many excellent excursions, including one trip he made four decades ago; a trip he says, when you consider the America we are watching today, makes him look prescient and pretty darn smart.
King, who grew up near Sacramento, Calif., moved to Lethbridge in 1980 because as he says there was good health care and the people seemed sane.
It's there that his friend Leroy Little Bear offered him a job teaching in the Native Studies department at Lethbridge University.
“Believe me, now that looks like such a good decision,” said King who met Helen in Lethbridge.
“I look like a genius now.”