THE COMFORTS OF HOME
AUTHOR HAS SEEN THE WORLD AND IS NOW HAPPY TO STAY PUT
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 trans-ocean 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 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,” King added. “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 reticence to road trips seems a bit funny when you consider his new book is
called Indians on Vacation and 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 two are 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 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.
“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 King will be having via Zoom with fellow writer and journalist Waubgeshig Rice when the two take part in a Vancouver Writers Festival virtual event on Oct. 24 at 6 p.m. The festival runs online Oct. 19-25.
King is 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 work is one King really likes and one he has had hanging around for awhile.
“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.
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.”