Talking with Michael Van Rooy

Award winning Winnipeg author, Michael Van Rooy was signing books at McNally Robinson on Saturday when I spoke with him.  An Ordinary Decent Criminal, the first book in his Monty Haaviko crime series, won the Eileen McTavish Sykes Award for Best First Book by a Manitoba Author in 2006.  Van Rooy was also awarded the John Hirsh Award for Most Promising Manitoba Writer in 2009.

Van Rooy was very friendly and helpful. He is the Literary Arts Ambassador for the Winnipeg Cultural Capital of Canada 2010.  He offered to send me a copy of An Imagined City: A Literary History of Winnipeg, as part of the Arts For All project: It’s About The Stories…It’s Always About the Stories!  

After he signed my fresh-off-the-shelf copy of An Ordinary Decent Criminal we chatted for a while. Some background info and some of the topics we discussed are below: 

His education: Van Rooy was born in B.C. but raised in Winnipeg.  He graduated from Sisler High School, studied history at the U of M, and more recently English at U of W.  Van Rooy received his criminal education during a stint in Stony Mountain Penitentiary and Rockwood Institution for armed robbery in his early twenties.  In a Winnipeg Free Press interview Van Rooy said, "I didn't do it.  I was in the wrong place at the wrong time."

CreComm: When I told him that I am a CreComm student he explained that his mother was a CreComm instructor for twenty years. As a teenager he helped her mark papers.

A recommendation for aspiring writers: Get business cards printed calling yourself a Writer, “They are really useful.”  Van Rooy said, whether you are published or not “you are a writer."

On making time for writing: "You need to develop a pattern, a rhythm.  Whatever works for you.” Van Rooy said David Bergen used to go to work an hour early every morning and would “write in his car in the parking lot of Tech Voc." He suggested getting up an hour early each day and trying to write a page. Just 330 words. "By the end of the year you will have a novel."

.

Recommended reading for writers: A book on screen writing by Robert McKee called Story, and Aristotle's Poetics.

Thanks Michael.

Soupy Out

New Yorker Story Review: The Tree Line, Kansas, 1934

TheTree Line, Kansas, 1934 could be the location heading in a report.  And in fact the story is narrated by Lee, a retired FBI agent who has probably written hundreds of reports for the Bureau over his long career.   Lee is sitting around at his house on a lake “tweezing apart past scenarios that had ended up with (him) alive and others dead.” He is specifically looking back on a 5 day stake out in Kansas.  It was during the time when the FBI was making a name for itself catching criminals like Pretty Boy Floyd and Dillinger.  Even in 1934, Lee is a “hard-bitten” veteran of the FBI.  He and his inexperienced, know-it-all partner, Barnes, are waiting in the tree line on a farm.  The farm is the known hideout for Carson, a dangerous bank robber.  Barnes thinks they are wasting their time hanging out at place that Carson knows they know about.  And he tells Lee at every opportunity.  Lee, a man of few words does not scold him or tell him to shut up, although in hindsight he wishes he had.  He may have saved his life. 

The main body of the essay is structured like a report.  Lee numbers off the reasons why he should have known that day was going to go horribly wrong.  How his gut was trying to warn him.  Some of the reasons include everything from the movement of the sun, the look of the road, his partners impatient outbursts, and the wind: “Any experienced lawman knew that the wind rising like that had to mean something.”  And sure enough his gut is right.

But this story is not about the arrival of Carson at the farm, in fact, disappointingly, the shoot out with Carson and his thugs is only mentioned in the last line of the story.   This story is about perception.  Lee reflects on the perception of time after a long stake out: “surveillance compressed time, tightening it in—days of inaction punctuated only by occasional shit breaks, piss breaks, smoke breaks and drink breaks, food breaks and stretch breaks interrupted only by small, inconsequential peripheral actions observed.”  This “compressed” perception of time during long periods of doing nothing, can affect you.  Your body and mind can fail you when they are suddenly called into action.

 This story is also about our perception of events that occurred long ago and how time can skew those events.  Did Lee really have a gut feeling that told him there was going to be trouble that day?  Or, looking back, has he just imagined this gut feeling where there was actually nothing but boredom?  Was this imagined gut feeling a product of his guilt for inaction in a time of crisis?  For an experienced law man like himself that sort of failure must be hard to live with.  So he takes the tiniest of details from his five days at the farm and compiles them into a “gut feeling” that he failed to act on.  Perhaps, in a law man’s mind, having a gut feeling that you were slow to act on is better than having no inkling of trouble at all.

The best part of this story was how well the author, David Means, got inside the head of a retired FBI agent.  The kinds of experiences and details that the author put into the story made me believe that Means had been a law enforcement officer.  At the very least he has done significant research into the history of law enforcement in the US.

I also appreciated how Means crafted his story about the details of a stake out that don’t make it into the genre novels or Hollywood movies about this time in American history.  A normal story about this event would include some details about the stake out, but just as a way to build anticipation for the climax: the violent shoot out.  Means does the opposite.  He builds the entire story around the monotonous details of a five day stake out, and excludes the action at the end.  It is a unique yet somewhat anticlimactic take on the 1930’s crime story.

Below is a shootout from a movie about Dillinger and Pretty Boy Floyd from the 70's, in case you, like me, were craving some pure old fashioned unadulterated action after reading David Means short story.

Soupy out. 

Two To Remember

Well I met Peter and Marie Sawatzky yesterday at the St. James Legion Branch #4. Marie, 85, is a war bride. She met Peter,89, in her home country of Holland, at the end of the Second World War. He was waiting to be shipped home after two years of fighting in Italy and Holland. They met and fell in love, "like in a movie" she says, in her adorable Dutch accent. They will celebrate their 65th wedding anniversary in January. And every year they carry flags in Remembrance Day parades and visit schools to tell the children about war; so that new generations of Canadians don't forget. I won't forget them.  And Remembrance Day will always be a little more special for me because of them.

Thank you Peter and Marie Sawatzky.

My City's Still Laughing

My City's Still Breathing, a symposium exploring the arts, artists and the city kicked off on Thursday and runs until Sunday afternoon.   This symposium is part of the celebration of Winnipeg as the Cultural Capital of Canada 2010.  The goal of the four day event is to "gather international experts to deliberate and debate the current and future relationships of art and design to city-making."  Yesterdays events included three keynote speakers: author Jon Hawkes, one of Australia's leading commentators on cultural policy; creative economy expert Simon Evans; and writer and hollywood director John Waters.
 
I did not see Hawkes lecture although I would have liked to.  Evans lecture on creative economy was depressing and encouraging at the same time.  And John Waters basically did an hour of stand-up.  I am not sure what Waters' hour or so on stage did to discuss "relationships of art and design to city-making” but his anecdotes about growing up gay in Baltimore, making movies like Pink Flamingoes and Hair Spray, and teaching at federal prisons, had the audience howling and cringing, sometimes in the same breath.

My City’s Still Breathing runs all weekend and has more interesting speakers including internationally acclaimed painter and sculptor Eric Fischl.  Check out times and locations at their website.  I expect speakers like Fischl will actually discuss some of the topics of the symposium.  And he may have fewer dirty jokes than Waters.  None the less, it’s good to see our city can still laugh.

Soupy out