Influences

The coulees on my parents' farm feed down into greater coulees and valleys, eventually joining the Kneehill Creek somewhere downstream from the town of Carbon and upstream from Horseshoe Canyon; from there, the stream flows downward into the middle Red Deer River, just upstream from the town of Drumheller and downstream from the Blariot Ferry, a site that plays an important role in Robert Kroetsch's Badlands novel. Despite my proximity to the valley and my childhood interest in paleontology, I never read or even heard of Badlands when I was young; but I would now list it, along with Kroetsch's other novels, particularly Studhorse Man and Words of My Roaring, as one of my strongest influences.Particularly appealing to me is the way that his books, though set on the prairie, tell stories that are not only very different from most prairie novels, but also use post-modern and occasionally magic-realist devices to achieve their effect; Louise Erdrich similarly combines the two traditions. In some ways, his work has common ground some of Howard O'Hagan's work, particularly Tay John (though Kroetsch's work is more refined and poetic), which I studied in English classes and wrote a paper on, looking at the similarities between Tay John and Heart of Darkness. All of these works are quest stories. I could probably make the argument that Correction Road is, on some level, a quest story, but it wouldn't be an obvious fit. I think that I tend to borrow a lot of elements from that form in my own work though; and certainly, other writers who use that sort of form are also extremely influential on me: Jose Saramago and Charles Portis, for example. Certainly the quest story is a natural fit with magic realism: the strange appearance of the horse in Studhorse Man, or the unusual circumstances throughout Saramago's Stone Raft, which tells the story of the Iberian Penninsula breaking off from Europe and drifting off into the Atlantic. With my previously-professed interest in the theme of continental drift, it's probably no wonder that I love the ideas in Stone Raft. Most interesting to me is that, unlike many magic-realist writers, Saramago does not keep his magic-realism separate from science; whenever the unexplained appears in Saramago's writing, government scientists appear, trying to understand it.

I'm wandering from the things that I intended to write about, specifically to show some of my influences and how they may have manifested themselves in my work. One of my most difficult decisions was how I'd deal with one inexplicable, magic-realist event that shapes the entire narration of the story. (It's a difficult thing to describe because I don't want to give away certain surprises.) In the end, the approach I went with was a bit like Saramago's. Science exists, and is, in fact, a major element of the book; there are things that are beyond what even the most scientific and knowledgeable characters can explain. Physics and metaphysics exist in the same space and do not contradict one another.