The Notebooks: Interviews and New Fiction from Contemporary Writers

M. Wayne Cunningham is a past executive director of the Saskatchewan
Arts Board and the former director of Academic and Career Programs at
East Kootenay Community College.

This hefty collection of arresting stories by, and telling interviews
with, 17 on-the-rise Canadian fiction writers is a keeper. The stories
include Yann Martel’s “notes for a next novel,” tentatively titled
“The High Mountains of Portugal”; an excerpt from Derek
McCormack’s “The Haunted Hillbilly,” about “an evil gay
couturier named Nudie”; Steven Heighton’s imaginative story of J.
Gordon Whitehead, “the McGill University dropout whose famous assault
led to Houdini’s death.” Andrew Pyper’s spellbinding account of a
trick played on a voyeuristic night watchman is no less gripping than
R.M. Vaughan’s “Pumpkin,” the story of a disturbed young mother
and her missing child. Michael Redhill’s “Cold” explains why you
can’t go home again, while Lynn Coady contributes the lighthearted
“The Les Bird Era.” Other contributors include Esta Spalding,
Michael Winter, Lynn Crosbie, and Eden Robinson.

The interviews are a marvelous record of what Redhill refers to as
“the flex and flux of writers around each other.” Here we learn
about the writers’ working habits, their mentors and influences, their
anxieties and jealousies, their fear of failure and rejection.
Commenting on the support (or otherwise) of the media and reviewers,
Crosbie says, “I am fairly indifferent now, though I remember my
enemies.” McCormack laments the treatment accorded writers from small
presses, while Vaughan decries the presentation of Atlantic Canadians as
“the colourful peasantry of the nation.”

Editors Berry and Caple are to be commended for their research and
reading before the interviews, the excellent selection and balance of
the writers’ work, the incisiveness of their interviewing, and the
overall editing of the book.