| Last year, when I temporarily took over this column for Harry Vandervlist, I began an occasional series of profiles of prominent book people in the Calgary community. Now it’s time to pick it up again, and the subject of my fourth profile is author W. Mark Giles.
Born in Saskatchewan and raised in Edmonton, Giles has made Calgary his home since 1989. Beginning in the early 1990s, his fiction and other writings have been published in magazines and newspapers across Canada. His stories probe the complexities of identity and imagination that lurk beneath the surfaces of everyday experience. He is currently pursuing a master’s degree in Canadian literature at the University of Calgary. His first book, Knucklehead & Other Stories, won the City of Calgary W.O. Mitchell Book Prize on May 26.
Fast Forward: Why do you write?
Giles: Sometimes I think I write because my two older brothers did and I wanted to be like them. My mother was a kitchen-table writer, until she became a kitchen-table painter later in life, and developed into quite a fine watercolourist. She knew W.O. Mitchell at the University of Alberta, tried to get into F.M. Salter’s writing seminar. I grew up with the idea that writing was a worthy endeavour. For a very long time I loved the idea of writing but did very little – I published a few stories, and workshopped myself into submission. Then I didn’t write a word for many years. In 1998, I returned to it – I think I was old enough then (turning 40) to realize that to succeed takes work, and that it’s not unhealthy to want to succeed.
What book(s) are you currently reading?
Apocrypha: Further Journeys by Stan Dragland. I had the great pleasure of meeting Stan recently – he is a terrific conversationalist, storyteller, poet, critic and troubadour. His book is part memoir, part meditation on the processes of reading and writing, and is thoroughly engaging. I think the CBC should do a reality TV series called Where’s Stan Now? Once a week, we can drop in on him wherever he may be – discussing Icelandic literature in his St. John’s kitchen with the Newfoundland poet Agnes Walsh, playing his smokin’ version of Fred Eaglesmith’s "I Like Trains" with Michael Crummy at a party, or visiting family or friends all across the country.
What is your favourite book of all time?
As a pimply-faced, 19-year-old pothead pulling graveyard shifts in a chemical factory, I read pulp science fiction exclusively. I picked up Samuel R. Delany’s Dhalgren almost by accident. Holy cow! I thought, so this is what a book can do. Most recently, I had the same response to Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita (translated by Burgin and Tiernan O’Connor – it’s superior to the 1967 translation). A knockout.
What was your favourite book as a child?
The first book I remember reading was (Dr. Seuss’s) Hop on Pop. We had dozens of volumes of a series called Best in Children’s Books and I loved them all. There was a weird miscellany called Bennett Cerf’s Houseful of Laughter that had tons of stories and poems I liked to read and re-read. But the book that probably fascinated me the most was a two-volume medical text, The Art and Principles of Plastic Surgery. It had scores of documentary photographs of case studies and procedures, and was not nearly as macabre as it may sound.
Do you have a favourite Canadian author or book?
At various times I’ve read my way through big chunks of different Canadian writers – Mavis Gallant, Thomas King, Robert Kroetsch, Alice Munro, Mordecai Richler, Sheila Watson – but I do have a soft spot for David Adams Richards. His first three novels are wonderfully dense works of anger, experimentation and dread. As he’s matured, his craft has become more transparent, but his books never fail to move me. |
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