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Leaving Dublin FAQ

Q: You’re not particularly well known, yet you’ve published a book of memoirs. Why would people be interested in the memoirs of someone they never heard of?

A: It’s all in the storytelling, don’t you know? Nobody had ever heard of Frank McCourt before he published Angela’s Ashes, yet his book became an instant bestseller.

Q: Do you think your book is going to become an instant bestseller?

A: One lives in hope.

Q: What would it take to become a bestseller?

A: A review in The New York Times would help. So would a review in The Globe and Mail. Or the National Post.

Q: How about a review in the Irish Times?

A: That would help too.

Q: But what if the reviews were negative? Wouldn’t that adversely affect sales?

A: Not necessarily. Yann Martel received some stinging reviews for Beatrice & Virgil, yet that didn’t stop him from ascending to the top of the national bestseller lists in Canada. Pierre Berton used to tell young writers, “Don’t read your reviews. Measure them.” The longer the review, said Berton, the better the chance that readers will want to buy the book.

Q: Have you received negative reviews for any of your previous books?

A: Yes, a couple.

Q: And?

A: The best revenge, as one of my publishers once told me, is to forgive your antagonists, live well, and wait for the sales figures to come in.

Q: You’ve changed the working title of your autobiography a few times. Initially it was called Reinventing Myself: Memoirs of a Dublin Rogue. Now it’s called Leaving Dublin: Writing my Way from Ireland to Canada. Why the changes?

A: An editor pointed out that I had not, in fact, reinvented myself after I moved to Canada at age 23. I had simply adapted to new opportunities. My publisher suggested I put the word “writing” in the title to indicate that this is what I do.

Q: But you’ve done other things. You’ve been a professional musician. You’ve been a radio announcer.

A: Yes, I was a writer who played music for a living, and a writer who worked in commercial broadcasting. I’ve been a writer since I was a child, when I made up bedtime stories for my younger brother.

Q: Your publisher, RMB ❘ Rocky Mountain Books, puts out books about outdoor adventure, mountain culture, hiking guides, and so on. Where do you fit into that mix? Are you a climber or a hiker?

A: No, not at all. My publisher, Don Gorman, has broadened the scope of his catalogue considerably in recent years. He also publishes books of travel, biography, history and social justice. A very popular recent title, for example, is John Reilly’s Bad Medicine, about crime and punishment on a First Nations reserve where the author served as a provincial court judge.

Q: What prompted you to write this autobiography, and why did you decide to do it now?

A: Because I can still remember. I hoped that in the process of remembering things and writing them down, I might be able to make sense of my life and give it context.

Q: That sounds like a self-serving rationale for writing book of memoirs.

A: Indeed. A book about oneself is – by definition – an exercise in self-absorption. But an autobiography is also about being rooted in a particular time and place. That makes it an exercise in social history, a subject dear to my heart.

Q: You write about growing up in Ireland during the 1940s and 1950s. Why would readers in Canada, the U.S. and other countries be interested in that?

A: They have read about the Celtic Tiger and how it stopped roaring in recent years. I expect they would also be interested in what things were like in suburban Ireland before the cub was born.

Q: Then you write about coming to Canada at age 23. What makes your immigration story different from any other?

A: The fact that I came here not to find employment or escape from a repressive regime, but to get away from an Irish civil service job that was driving me crazy.

Q: Why couldn’t you have looked for another job in Ireland?

A: Because Ireland was driving me crazy too.

Q: You worked as a singer of Irish folk songs after you got to Canada. Couldn’t you have done that in Ireland?

A: As a matter of fact, I did. But there wasn’t enough money in it to justify giving up my day job. Canada gave me the chance to do it full-time.

Q: Then you worked in radio. What was that all about?

A: I wanted to try something different. I knew the manager of the radio station in Prince George and he opened the door.

Q: During your 30 years in the newspaper business you worked at a number of different jobs: police reporter, theatre critic, staff writer for the Calgary Herald’s Sunday magazine, obituary columnist. Why so many changes?

A: They were all great gigs. I enjoyed the challenges and the rewards of every one.

Q: One of the longest chapters in Leaving Dublin is about an eight-month lockout and strike at the Calgary Herald in 1999-2000. Why did you devote so much space to this topic?

A: Because nobody had told the insider story before. This was an unusual dispute in Canadian labour history in the sense that it wasn’t about wages or vacation allowances. It was about a group of journalists who wanted to be treated with dignity and respect.

Q: Do you think people will take issue with your interpretations of certain events, for example your description of what was happening at the Calgary Herald before the journalists started walking a picket line?

A: Undoubtedly. Everyone has his or her version of a story. This is my version.

Q: What other stories are you writing these days?

A: I’m working on the centennial history of the Calgary Public Library, for publication in the spring of 2012.

Vanity fare

Edmonton novelist Thomas Trofimuk heaps abuse on the self-publishing industry in an article written for a recent edition of WestWord, the Writers Guild of Alberta’s magazine. He does not mince words. “Any idiot can self-publish a book,” he writes. “Most self-published books I’ve read needed editing, revising or at some point needed to be profoundly rejected.”

A self-published Calgary writer, Eleanor King Byers, takes exception to Trofimuk’s remarks, characterizing them as “offensive.” In a letter to the WestWord editor, she suggests that Trofimuk should research the “art” of self-publishing before “throwing out careless comments.” She goes on to talk about the success of her own books, and says that independent Calgary booksellers have “indicated a readiness to carry any future work sight unseen.”

Trofimuk is not moved to issue a retraction. “In my experience, most self-published books are horrifyingly bad,” he repeats. “Self-published books are not subjected to an independent critic that will judge their worth on literary grounds. In short, they do not have to be good. They just have to be funded.”

Which argument is the valid one? Is self-publishing largely the domain of inept hacks with money to spend, or a legitimate literary enterprise that can sometimes produce nuggets?

In fact, there is truth in both arguments. Self-publishing does generate a lot of dross but then so does mainstream publishing. I was a judge for a national literary awards program last year and – of the more than 200 commercially published books I scrutinized – only a handful of titles were worth publishing. Some were superb. Most were, as the English literary critic Victoria Glendinning boldly said about the 2009 Giller Prize entries, “unbelievably dreadful.”

I have also been a judge for competitions in which self-published books were allowed entry, and occasionally have been pleasantly surprised. I have yet to find anything to measure up to the standards of such famous self-published works as The Celestine Prophecy or Mrs. Dalloway, but I have come across the odd self-published author (Terry Fallis is a well-known recent example) who would not look out of place in the catalogue of a major publishing house.

I have not read the work of Eleanor King Byers but I do know that her book Guardians of the Lamp – about the old Calgary General Hospital and its nursing school – sat atop the local bestsellers’ list of the Calgary Herald for many months. That suggests to me it wasn’t just her friends and family and former nursing colleagues who bought this book. Clearly, there are many Calgarians who wanted to read about those dedicated women who ministered to the sick at what was once the largest hospital in the province.

Self-publishing was once considered the basest form of literary endeavour, indulged in by mediocre scribblers who could not get their work commercially published. So desperate were they to see their books in print, they paid vanity presses to publish them. When I worked as a newspaper books editor, I could always tell from a quick glance at the covers which ones were the vanity publications. They were crudely designed with ugly artwork, deeply strange titles (Reusing Old Graves, Bombproof Your Horse) and fonts that looked as if they came out of a children’s printing set.

Nowadays, with the aid of sophisticated cover design software and inexpensive print-on-demand technology, it is possible for self-published authors to put out books that look professionally produced. It’s not just wannabe authors who are availing of this technology. Traditionally published authors like myself are also using it, to bring back old titles when mainstream publishers declare them out of print. These books have already been professionally vetted and edited so they usually are a cut above those manuscripts that have not gone through this gatekeeping process.

I sympathize with Trofimuk when he says he doesn’t want to wade through thousands of “iffy” self-published books when there are “just too many great books out there that I don’t have time to read.” I also sympathize with Byers when she says that self-publishing “does not necessarily indicate rejection by publishing houses.” It can also indicate an author’s desire for more editorial control or a greater share of the royalties. A writer I know who has published several best-selling mountaineering books with commercial trade houses did his latest book as a self-publishing venture because he wanted it out by a certain date and wanted a bigger slice of the profits. He already had an established track record so he had high hopes that his book would do well. I expect it probably will.

There is a legitimate place in the literary world for self-published books. There always has been. Mark Twain, James Joyce, Anais Nin, Beatrix Potter and a host of other well-known writers all had to self-publish at different points in their careers because they could not find publishers to take on their work. But for every self-published author who turned out to be a literary genius, there were thousands who fell by the wayside. Today, there are millions falling by the wayside, because all it takes to get published now is access to a computer and an account with Blogger. Good luck finding golden needles in that particular haystack.

Where the heart is

"She wheeled her wheelbarrow ..."

“Would you ever consider moving home again?” asked the cab driver as we made our way out to the Dublin airport after a short holiday in Ireland.

Home? I’ve lived in Canada for almost 45 years. I spent just 23 in Dublin. Much as I still love it, I haven’t thought of it as home in a very long time.

It is quite a different Dublin now from the city I left behind in 1966. The restaurants are more appealing, the public transit system more efficient, and the place is crawling with tourists, even in rainy June. They crowd into Bewley’s Oriental Café and convince themselves the coffee served there is better than the caffè misto brewed at Starbucks. They have their pictures taken with the statue of “Molly Malone” at the bottom of Grafton Street just like they have their photos taken on the Spanish Steps in Rome or with Eros at Piccadilly Circus. The Irish go to Bavaria for their vacations while the Germans come to Dublin. Go figure.

Molly Malone is the tragic heroine of a popular Dublin anthem called “Cockles and Mussels.” It’s not known if a real person by that name ever existed. Doesn’t really matter. She lives on in song and story like the heroes of renown. The locals, in typically irreverent style, refer to her statue variously as “The Tart with the Cart” and “The Dish with the Fish.” Dubliners love to give catchy names to public monuments. When a bronze statue of Anna Livia (representing the River Liffey) was unveiled in O’Connell Street in 1988, they dubbed it “The Floozy in the Jacuzzi.” Even the sculptor got a kick out of the name. The “Floozy” has since been relocated to make room for a singularly unprepossessing monument called “The Spire of Dublin,” which stands on the site formerly occupied by Nelson’s Pillar. Nelson was blown to kingdom come in 1966. The IRA claimed responsibility but charges were never laid. Nobody expected they ever would be. There was cheering in the pubs the night after the old admiral was finally toppled from his perch.

I climbed the Pillar once. Dubliners used to let the visitors indulge in that sort of activity, like kissing the Blarney Stone or riding in a horse and trap around the Lakes of Killarney. But I wanted to see the view from the top. Joyce used to say that if the British ever bombed Dublin, it could be reconstructed brick by brick from the descriptions in his books. I wonder if Joyce ever climbed the Pillar.

The Pillar and the Theatre Royal are gone, as are the Metropole Cinema and the venerable “Bono Vox” advertising sign on O’Connell Street from which the lead singer of U2 famously derived his stage name. But some things remain the same. The eyeless Bank of Ireland still has bricked-in windows all around, the locals still feed the ducks in Stephen’s Green with stale bread crumbs, and the traditional musicians still jam nightly at O’Donoghue’s Bar in Merrion Row hoping to follow in the footsteps of Christy Moore and Ronnie Drew.

Drew was an unlikely pop star, a basso profundo ballad singer who performed as front man for The Dubliners and knocked the Beatles off the Irish charts with his gravelly renditions of “Nelson’s Farewell” (celebrating the demise of the iconic Pillar) and “Seven Drunken Nights.” The Clancy Brothers did the same, topping the charts with such rebel songs as “The Rising of the Moon” and “The Foggy Dew.” Both the Dubliners and the Clancys wrote the soundtrack of my life during the 1960s and gave me a greater sense of my Irish identity than any of the historical propaganda drummed into me by the Christian Brothers through 12 years of schooling.

Dublin in the 1960s was a sleepy provincial backwater on the western outskirts of Europe. Dublin today is connected, cosmopolitan, and aware of what’s going on in the rest of the world. I like it better now than I did when growing up.

Would I ever consider moving “home” again? In a way I have, by writing about it. My memoirs will be published this fall by RMB. But my true home remains in Canada, in Calgary, where I have lived most of my adult life. Dublin bore me but Canada made me. It calms my nights and invigorates my days.

Like me and follow me

That’s what the social network gurus (and my publisher) say we should do. Have people like us on Facebook and follow us on Twitter. So here goes. Click here to like me on Facebook and here to follow me on Twitter. I promise to do the same for you. Really!

Reading library books on the iPad

Took me all day to figure this one out. I borrowed my first e-book from the public library today and opened it, a pdf document, on my iMac with a program called Adobe Digital Editions. (The library website told me I would need to download this version of the Adobe software to do this.) I pinpointed the e-book file in my Downloads folder, and Adobe Digital Editions did the rest, seamlessly and efficiently.

I then looked for a way to transfer the e-book file to my iPad, but the instructions on the library website seemed to be directed at PC, not Mac, users. They told me I should download a program called Overdrive Media Console to my computer and use that to move the e-book file from my computer to a reading device. I did download Overdrive, as recommended, but then hit an obstacle: iTunes on the Mac does not recognize Overdrive as a file sharing app that can be used for transferring documents from a desktop computer to an iPad or vice versa. Other e-reader apps, such as Goodreader and Kobo, can be used for such transfers, but they don’t support the Adobe e-book DRM control technology that has become an industry standard for public libraries.

So now I’m stuck. I have the e-book on my iMac, looks great, but I don’t really want to read it on the computer. I want to read it on my iPad. What to do? I Google for quite a while and eventually find the solution: Bluefire Reader, a free app that iTunes DOES recognize as one that can transfer documents between reading devices and personal computers. I install Bluefire on the iPad, connect the iPad to the computer, open the iPad in iTunes, click on the option box that says, “manually manage music and videos,” select Bluefire from the list of recognized file-sharing apps, click the “add” button and add the e-book file to my list of documents. I sync the two devices, click the Bluefire app on my iPad and voilá: the e-book file is on the iPad, where it looks even better than on the computer.

One thing I discover while doing all this: Only the alias of the e-book file appears in my Downloads folder on the iMac. The actual file is in the Documents folder, in a folder called “Digital Editions.” That’s the file that I have to add to the list of documents in the “apps – file sharing” section of iTunes. And there it will stay, on both my iMac and my iPad, until the lending period expires on March 12. At that point, I’m told, the e-book file will evaporate into thin air. Isn’t technology marvellous!

Gordon Cope’s A Thames Moment

With the help of Apple’s great software program, iMovie, I have created a video trailer for Gordon Cope’s travel memoir, A Thames Moment. View the video on YouTube and let me know what you think. This is my first attempt at video production. 

Silence is golden

Television reporter Tom Clark parts company with CTV News, and the network issues a public statement to that effect. Kevin Newman steps down as Global anchor, and his network does the same. But what happens when dozens, perhaps hundreds of print reporters in this country leave their jobs, either voluntarily or otherwise? Silence.

Postmedia Network, successor to CanWest, has started cutting jobs at its newspapers. No surprise there. It paid $1.1 billion for the papers, and has to cover its costs somehow. This has been standard policy in the newspaper business for more than 30 years. Whenever publishers run into money problems, they devalue the product by getting rid of staff and then filling up the white space between the ads with more and more wire copy. Mind you, they rarely get rid of senior managers when they do this purging. These are the ones handing out the pink slips, after all. The managers get to stay so they can continue to manage … what, exactly? With fewer and fewer staffers to supervise, they busy themselves with other jobs. I knew a senior editorial manager at one paper whose job it was to check all the signed cab slips that came back to the newsroom after the reporters used taxis to carry out their assignments. The job of checking the slips could have been done by a part-time office assistant, yet it was given to this senior manager who remained at the paper from cradle to grave. How well did he handle his awesome responsibility? Let me put it this way: Every time I used a cab, I signed my name, “Donald Duck.”

You didn’t read about the Postmedia job cuts in any of the Postmedia newspapers. That’s standard newspaper policy, too. Whenever the National Post lays off staff, it leaves it up The Globe and Mail and Toronto Star to cover the story. The Post will write about job cuts in other industries, but it won’t cover any stories that happen under its own roof. The original source for the Postmedia story was an internal memo sent by a company vice-president to staff at the Victoria Times-Colonist. “We must continue to find ways to serve our readers and advertisers in more cost-effective ways,” wrote the VP, Kevin Bent. The memo was leaked to the Communications, Energy and Paperworkers Union, and that’s how you got to read about it in the Globe.

Postmedia has confirmed there are layoffs, but won’t give the numbers. Nor will it give any names. The Globe, citing sources, says about 20 jobs were cut at the Edmonton Journal and 30 at the Calgary Herald. An unspecified number will be leaving such other papers as the Vancouver Sun and Province, the Montreal Gazette and the Ottawa Citizen. Are any of our favourite columnists affected? If they were working for one of the television networks, we’d know the answer.

This posting also appears on backoftheboook.ca , Canada’s online magazine

Occasional blogging

As you can tell from the dates on my postings, I’m not the most active blogger in the universe. I have a life, OK? I don’t have time to spend my days opining about anything and everything under the sun. But get a load of this. Here’s a blog posting from books editor Martin Levin that has been parked on The Globe and Mail’s website for more than seven months. As you can tell from the comments, the Globe’s readers are wondering about this too. Does Levin have nothing else to say about “books, publishing and the world of literature”? Has he taken a leave of absence? Did he accept a package and leave the paper?

The Globe makes a point of saying that comments on its website are not the opinions of the paper; only the opinions of the commenters. But doesn’t anyone at the Globe realize that a blog posting that has been gathering dust since February should probably be moved off the front page of the paper’s online books section? When the Globe’s webmeisters are updating the page with the latest book reviews do they look at the Levin column and say, “Yep, this is one for the ages. This is a keeper”? Levin calls his blog, “Shelf Life.” There’s a certain irony there when you come to think about it.

If Levin’s column had appeared in the print edition of the Globe, it would long ago have been consigned to the recycling bins of the nation. But because it was posted online, it has been allowed to float around the blogosphere forever, like space junk. Is there a limit to the amount of stuff that can be dumped on the Internet before someone has to raise the red flag and say, “No more”? This should be an engaging topic of debate for the environmentalists of tomorrow.

In praise of Cowtown

A Los Angeles firm hired to replace “Heart of the New West” as Calgary’s slogan has produced what it calls a “brand positioning statement” identifying Calgary as “Canada’s most dynamic city.” How boring.  How generic. If tedious is what they wanted, why didn’t these American branding experts go with “Canada’s most entrepreneurial city” or “Canada’s most can-do city” or one of those other clichéd rah-rah phrases that  local mayoralty candidates include in their campaign platforms as if they actually believe them? How do you quantify such generalized claims? They are nothing more than examples of marketing-speak at its most banal.

I will admit I’ve never been a big fan of the “Heart of the New West” slogan.  It does have a nice hip, modern ring to it, but it’s fundamentally meaningless. What exactly is the New West? How does it differ from the Old West? Where are the boundaries? Is British Columbia included? Do you have to wear cowboy boots to qualify for admission? Does anyone, aside from the people at Tourism Calgary and Calgary Economic Development, actually put the phrase on letterheads. The Telus Convention Centre people flatly refuse to use it in their marketing materials, preferring to go with “Yes, it’s Calgary!” This unintelligible “Heart of the New West” slogan definitely had to go. We needed something better.

The American firm, Gensler, was paid something like US$200,000 to come up with a new slogan. For that kind of  money, surely it could have produced something more imaginative than “Canada’s most dynamic city.”

Let me offer, at absolutely no charge, the following as an alternative:

“Canada’s original Cowtown”

Yes, I know it’s a throwback to the 1950s. Our look-to-the-future civic dignitaries will undoubtedly cringe and reject this cowboy-hatted stereotype as corny and dated. They seem to be faintly embarrassed by the fact that we actually have a western heritage in this town. Yet they still hand out white cowboy hats to every visiting potentate and former American president. Because, let’s face it, this is what defines us and separates us from all the other major cities in Canada. This is what establishes our cultural identity. Ask anyone in Toronto or Montreal or Vancouver where Cowtown is, and they know immediately what city you’re talking about. Ask them where the “Heart of the New West” is and they scratch their heads.

We have tried the ‘Heart of the New West” slogan for nine years. It was the chosen replacement for “Home of the 1988 Winter Olympics” and it simply hasn’t worked. The stylized cowboy-hat logo does offer a clue to what Calgary is all about, so it could be retained. But let’s replace “Heart of the New West” with a slogan that actually means something; one that salutes our frontier past. Yes, we could also recognize the fact that Calgary is the capital of the oil industry in Canada, or perhaps the head-office capital of Canada. But first and foremost we are the once and future Cowtown. Every Canadian knows that. Everyone who comes to the Stampede knows that. Everyone who writes headlines for The Globe and Mail knows that. Let’s celebrate that fact, embrace our western roots, crack open another can of Grasshopper, and throw another steak on the backyard barbecue.