Open Book: Ontario is celebrating the 24th Annual Trillium Book Award with The Trillium Ten/Trillium Dix interview series. Find out what this year's Trillium Book Award finalists were doing when they heard the news about their nomination, where in the province they most love to write, who their favourite Ontario authors are and more by following our series. Winners of the Trillium Awards will be announced on Friday, June 17th.
Ken Sparling of Richmond Hill is nominated for the English-Language Trillium Book Award for Book (Pedlar Press), which is an anti-narrative, a fiction, an attempt at different ways of saying — depending on who you ask.
Find out what Pedlar Press publisher Beth Follett has to say about Ken Sparling's Book and Dani Couture's Sweet, also nominated for a Trillium Award, in this installment of the Trillium Edition.
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Open Book:
Tell us about your Trillium-Award nominated book.
Ken Sparling:
Book is the story of a guy who one day finds himself in the middle of a whole mess of words and then spends the rest of his life trying to figure out what the hell to do with them.
Book is a question.
Book is about being at the edge of nothing.
Book is about what happens when you start out believing that words are little packages of meaning that can be connected to each other to help you arrive at a place you were meant to arrive at based on how a writer placed one word next to another, only to discover that words are more like tiny aliterate traps that snap at meaning as though it were some little parasite that’s been stuck inside you all along.
One paragraph, partway into Book, starts with a small orange cat lying in the grass in a front yard. It’s the first time the orange cat appears in Book (or, if the orange cat has appeared before, I’ve forgotten that it appeared before). A girl looks out at the cat. Another cat, a black one, sits in a tree. That’s it for the cats. The orange cat doesn’t reappear in the book, nor does the black cat, nor the girl looking out at the orange cat. In fact, by the time the paragraph ends, it is about a woman in a black t-shirt standing on a townhouse balcony — and she never shows up again in the book (at least, as far as I can recall).
I can’t remember what Book is about.
I don’t want to remember what Book is about. Book is about not trying to remember what a book is about as you go about reading a book. It’s about continually rediscovering what a book is about as it goes about being a book that you go about being a reader.
Book is about making it up as you go along. It’s about responding to the moment. It’s about changing your mind. It’s about the powerful creative force for good that resides in the space you inhabit in that moment when you change your mind — when your mind changes.
Book is about riding a bunch of wild, untameable words as far as you can ride them without falling away into the void, and then reigning those words in long enough to get them to turn around and carry you along in your hunt for words that might save you from falling, words that will allow you to ride along the edge of the void, and look into the void, without falling. And maybe sometimes, as you read Book, you will fall. And if this happens, I don’t think I can help you.
Book is me, the author, saying to you, the reader, that if you fall in, I can’t help you. It’s me telling you that you are on your own, that if you’ve come here to my book, if you’ve come here to this day, to this week, to this year, to your life, looking for a guided tour, then you’ve come to the wrong place.
Book is about not being about. It’s about simply being.
OB:
What gave you the idea for the book that received this nomination?
KS:
The germ of the idea for Book came when I was asked to be part of an afternoon reading at the Stephen Leacock Festival in Orillia a couple of years ago. I hadn’t been asked to read for a while. I pulled out a file of words I’d written over the years and tried to figure out how I could position these words relative to one another in a way that might seem compelling to me as I read them to a bunch of people I’d never met who came to hear me read in Orillia.
That was the origin of the idea for Book, but I didn’t know it at the time.
The idea secretly grew inside me a little bit when a new magazine called New York Tyrant asked me to submit some of my writing. I got out more files of words I’d written and I went about trying to figure out how to juxtapose these words, one among the others, in a way that seemed compelling enough to me to share with the editors and readers of New York Tyrant magazine.
After New York Tyrant accepted some of my words, I started to get excited, because some people were paying attention to what I was writing, and I pulled out file after file of words trying to figure out what to do with all these words, till at some point I realized that soon I would have enough words to fill a book. So I went about trying to juxtapose the words in a way that seemed to me to be compelling, a way that would make people feel compelled as they went about reading a book about a guy who had spent almost his entire life trying to figure out what the hell to do with the mess of words he had, one day when he was ten years old, found himself in the middle of, a mess of words he had since felt constantly compelled to do something with.
OB:
What were you doing when you received the news about your Trillium nomination?
KS:
I was sitting at my desk at work, in the basement of Toronto Reference Library. It was Tuesday morning and I’d just gotten into work after the May long weekend. It was about eight in the morning, and, like on any other morning at work, I opened my email. There was one email from my publisher, Beth, and I figured it was about a bunch of copies of Book that we’d been emailing back and forth about that she was selling back to me because they were just sitting in the warehouse collecting dust. But it turned out that this was the email telling me I was nominated as a finalist for the Trillium.
The first thing I was supposed to do at work that morning, after I checked my email, was scan media and online blogs to find any references to Toronto Public Library that had been made over the weekend... this is a job that normally takes me about an hour, and it took all morning. In fact, ever since I found out about the nomination, that’s been par for the course, everything is taking me way longer because I can’t focus on anything except the fact that I got nominated for this award. If any library programs crash and burn in the next few weeks, it might be the fault of the Trillium Award — friend to the library though they may be!
OB:
What book would you give to a visitor to give them a sense of Ontario?
KS:
I think, rather than recommend a particular book, I’d recommend a bookstore. I’d tell the visitor to Ontario that if they were planning to spend any time in Toronto they should take a half a day (or a whole day!) and spend it at Type Books on Queen Street West. Besides being the prettiest little bookstore I’ve ever been in, full of the best, most interesting books you could hope to find anywhere, it is staffed by people who all love books... they love talking about books, they love recommending books and they seem, from what I’ve seen, to love every single person who comes into the store. And you could find out a lot more about Ontario in an afternoon at Type browsing books by Ontario authors than you could in a month of travelling around the province on a tour bus.
OB:
What spot in Ontario most inspires you to write?
KS:
Bruce Beach, on Lake Huron, south of Kincardine. I finished my last two books up there. I like being there in the fall, by myself, with just my bicycle for getting into town for groceries and stuff. It’s windy and cool, there’s leaves blowing around, the sand is cold under your bare feet. I like going into the lake when almost no one else will go in because they think it’s too cold. I eat Zehrs donuts, read science fiction, play some banjo... but mostly, when I’m at the beach in the fall, I revise and rewrite and rescue words from my seemingly limitless and, to me, almost irresistible inclinations to be mundane, or prosaic, or melodramatic, or sappy.
OB:
Who is your favourite Ontario-based author?
KS:
Derek McCormack.
OB:
Do you have a favourite quote about writing?
KS:
“Writing is a cop-out. An excuse to live perpetually in fantasy land, where you can create, direct and watch the products of your own head. Very selfish." (Monica Dickens)
OB:
What distracts you from writing?
KS:
Nothing, really. At this point in my life, I don’t consider writing as something I have to do... I mean, yes, I have to do it... but I don’t have to do it at any particular time of the day, and I don’t have to get so much writing done this week, and I don’t owe anyone chapter one of my next novel, and I don’t have an agent trying to make a living off me, and I don’t have to have a 40 page sample of my latest novel ready tomorrow for a grant I’m applying for... so if my kid wants me to drive him to Future Shop to buy something, or my wife wants me to go to Home Depot with her to buy a nail gun, or we run out of milk and I need to nip over to No Frills, or I get sucked in by some inane headline on the MSN webiste after I sign out of my hotmail, it never feels like a distraction.
Most of the time, it just feels like I am where I am, and wherever I am generally feels like a pretty good place to be. I work on my writing projects when I have time, and if I don’t have time, I’m generally pretty patient. I’m not making a living from this and I don’t expect I ever will. I’m fortunate to have a great day job that I love, at an institution I have enormous respect for, the library; and I feel positively blessed to have a publisher, Beth Follett at Pedlar Press, who has believed in and supported me for many years because she loves what I write, regardless of how well my books might ever sell (but feel free to buy any of Pedlar’s titles, you won’t be disappointed!).
OB:
What are you reading right now?
KS:
Before the Trillium nominations were announced, I was reading:
Monkey by Michael Boyce (Pedlar Press!!) – if you decide to read this book, try reading it very slowly, without agitation.
My Name Is Memory by Ann Brashares, which you can read as fast as you want. I can’t stop reading it, it’s keeping me up nights.
And, finally, The Art of Recklessness by Dean Young, which is about what it means to write poetry. This one was recommended to me by my friend, the librarian and poet Susan Kernohan, who is really good at recommending to me books that I will like.
But I put all three of those books on hold till after June 17, when the Trillium winners will be announced, because I want to try to read as many of the books as I can by the other Trillium-nominated authors in my category (all of which I went down and bought at Type, so follow my lead!). So far, I’ve dipped into all of them and read a fair chunk of a couple, and I’m honestly blown away. If nothing comes out of this nomination but that I got to spend a few weeks exploring some wonderful books by some amazing writers, that will be more than enough for me.
OB:
What can you tell us about your next project?
KS:
It’s a novel, tentatively titled It's Raining Whispered Words, set in a bed at night in a room with blackout curtains and no light. You can’t even see the eyes of the couple in the bed. They can’t see each other. They sit up, they roll over, they pull the covers up to their chins, they push the covers down around their ankles, they scratch themselves, they touch themselves intimately, but neither one can see what the other is doing, they can only hear each other’s whispered words.
The biggest limitation I’m having with this premise is that, because the story is set entirely in a bed in a dark, sealed room, there’s no wind to blow the characters’ hair around, and if you’ve read any of my books, you’ll know I love to move the hair of my characters around by having wind blow on their heads. I’m thinking I can overcome this obstacle by having a ceiling fan going in the room. Then their hair might be moving, but no one would be able to see it was moving, and that would be intriguing, don’t you think?
I should warn anyone who is now looking forward to reading my next novel based on this interview that if you were to ask me this question again tomorrow, “What can you tell us about your next project,” I would give you an entirely different answer.
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Besides Book, Ken Sparling has authored three other Pedlar Press titles: Intention Implication Wind, For Those Whom God Has Blessed with Fingers and an untitled novel. His handmade book Hush Up and Listen Stinky Poo Butt was released last year in a tenth anniversary paperback edition by Artistically Declined Press, with a forward by Derek McCormack. His first novel, Dad Says He Saw You at the Mall, which was originally published by Knopf in 1996, will be reissued in 2012 by Mud Luscious Press. Sparling has recently had stories in New York Tyrant and Gigantic magazines, and online at JMWW and CORIUM. Ken lives in Richmond Hill with his wife and two sons, and works in communications at Toronto Public Library.
For more information about Book please visit the Pedlar Press website.
Buy this book at your local independent bookstore or online at Chapters/Indigo or Amazon.
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