FFWD Weekly
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Books by Hamish MacAulay Evan Solomon comes with accomplishments. He may be touring the country promoting his first book (photographing his interviewers is part of the experience), but at 30 this is a man with a past. A founding editor of the successful Shift magazine, Solomon has also hosted two television shows. Juggling his mini-media empire was getting in the way of his childhood dream to be a novelist, so he left the day-to-day grind of editing Shift and cancelled his e-mail for six months to concentrate on writing Crossing The Distance. He has not cut himself off entirely. He still talks to co-founder Andy Heintzman about Shift's upcoming entrance into the U.S. market and hosts CBC Newsworld's weekly book show, Hot Type. Writing has always been Solomon's goal, and he admits to starting Shift for that reason. "For me the ultimate form of adulthood is to read and write and deal in narrative," he says. "So it seemed as if being a storyteller was the ultimate job." Solomon has won what he calls the novel writing lottery – his prize is a published manuscript. It tells the story of two brothers with a deep bond that persists despite their juxtaposed personalities, a story he has been thinking about for four years. "The two ideas of being passive and watching or active and engaging, which are Jake and Theo respectively, came to me while I was in India. A country that poses the question of engagement and disengagement all the time," he says. Solomon is fascinated with the concept of the storyteller. He sees the transition from magazine editor and television host to novelist as simply a change of medium. "When I grew up, being a novelist was the only game in town. From a narrative point of view the big stories were told in novels," he says. Crossing The Distance is a story of betrayal. Fascinated by betrayal and with finding the point at which unconditional love becomes conditional, he chose sibling love – "the hardest love, the closest love" – to push the point as far as possible. Solomon uses the betrayal theme to ask a secondary question of the media (which he is still a part of) that make up the backdrop of the novel– viewers' interest versus exploitation. "At what point are we telling people’s stories and at what point are we actually betraying them and using them?" Solomon is an author pedaling his first book, but he loves to talk about the media. In discussing split-run magazines and Canadian culture, he states the Canadian government should support culture because that is why at least some of us pay our taxes. After all, most successful Canadian artists started with the help of government supported media, and Shift magazine was once one of those being subsidized. "The bottom line is not how you make culture," Solomon states. Despite his concern for our culture and the Canadian sense of place he creates in the book, he says Crossing The Distance is about placelessness, the subjective reality each person has that the media attempts to override with a single truth. "We inhabit stories, not places. Your Calgary is different from your neighbour's Calgary – it is an imagined space consisting of how you think and dream about Calgary."

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