If you look at footage of the Newfoundland Regiment, you see they are at rest and giddy and being silly with one another. Silliness is the antidote to trench warfare.
Through an arbitrary problem, I had arrived at a tenet of good writing: brevity wins.
Beaumont-Hamel sits within a thousand acres of French agriculture. The trenches are under this blanket of grass. In the 1920s, a park was established here and trees from Newfoundland imported to encircle the battlefield so you get the feeling of being within a copse of woods.
I approached writing a story for the CBC Literary Awards as a mercenary venture - $5,000 for one story, not bad. Now, how do you win it? Jurors are wading through skyscrapers of paper, looking for one story that stands out.
How does the past ambush us? How can we be accurate about what happened, how can we be true to it? And can war be declared over? And can we ever evolve from the notion of war, of nations, of us versus them?
When you join the army, you are asked to lay down your life for your country. That is a tremendous oath to take. In return, a good country should offer that soldier every possible means it can to allow that soldier to stay alive and, upon return, healthy - both mentally and physically.
A few years ago, I was trying to buy a piece of land next to a house I had in Newfoundland. I discovered that the plot had been owned by a family, and the son had gone off to World War I and been killed. It began to interest me: What would have happened on that land if the son had lived, had brought up his own family there?
If you are having trouble with a story, it may not be an issue with the quality of the writing - there may just be too much of it.
I plan to live to be 98, so I'll be the guy at Dundas and Yonge flogging a box of mouldy novels.
Linda Svendsen's 'Marine Life' was important. I was nearly 22. Larry Mathews discussed the book in a creative writing class. We examined her stories, figured out how they worked.
I didn't like filtering the story through me, saying, 'Reader, you'll be safe with me. While it gets a little dangerous, it'll be okay because, after all, you're with me, because I'm a warm convivial voice. But let's be entertained by this horrible stuff.' I didn't like that.
There are scenes from books I'm happy with. I tend to think my books are all broken. But then my favourite reads are almost always books that don't, in the end, pull off what they set out to do.
We found letters at the house we bought from a sailor to his wife who lived in the house. He went down to the Caribbean on this trader vessel, bringing down salted fish. There would be handwritten letters, but also telegrams, saying which ports he was in. And he'd be gone for three months. That was just the way it is.
The truth is, everybody falls into an incinerator of some measure or other. Not literally one. The question is what are you going to do with those bad times? Are you just going to let them gnaw at you?
Wild and urban at the same time - that's the type of woman I'm with.
You can't go wrong with major life and death stories when it comes to a competition, so I thought I'd have a go at writing one.
The greatness of being an artist is the kind of ridiculous guffaw you can have at one's own misery. 'That was miserable! Now how can I write about it?'
I've grown up, luckily, with only a distant relationship to war and soldiering.
The fantastic thing about the memorial to the Newfoundland Regiment at Beaumont-Hamel is that it's one of the rare examples where they've preserved a battlefield more or less as it was. You can see all the trenches, where the British were, where the Germans lined up.
I've never in my life categorized a year of my life as good or bad. I just think I'm living a good life, warts and all.
