DETAILS

Tom Wayman with Woodstock Rising
Pages on Kensington
Friday, November 27 - Friday, November 27

More in: Literary

Two months into a month-long home renovation and I find the topic slipping into the least appropriate conversations. Instead of questioning Tom Wayman about his debut novel Woodstock Rising, we start discussing the finer points of home repair. I’m prattling on about the sense of accomplishment I get if everything comes together on a project, when it occurs to me how foolish this must sound to a man who’s just published his 26th book. I can’t imagine that the trials and tribulations of putting together an Ikea kitchen really compare to completing a novel.

“I think home repair is more of a challenge,” he says. “There are more constituent parts of a house, more things that can go wrong. Materials get outdated, you go to find a part and they don’t make it anymore, all that stuff. Whereas by and large… English grammar doesn’t change as fast as hardware and plumbing parts.”

Perhaps this generosity towards handymen is to be expected from a writer who has consistently argued for a literature that recognizes the centrality of labour to our lives.

In Woodstock Rising, Wayman writes about the working life of a Canadian graduate student struggling to get his thesis written at the University of California, Irvine, while caught up in the social, political and cultural whirlwind of America in the 1960s. All the while a subplot unfolds that finds Wayman (the eponymous protagonist) embroiled in a scheme to launch a satellite in the name of the Woodstock Nation.

When not tapping away at his thesis, Wayman spends his days hanging out in a beach house with far-out characters like burnout veterans Pump and Jay, self-styled man of mystery Edward, and surfers Phil and Willow while crossing paths with real-life characters like former U.S. president Richard Nixon and the radicals of the Students for a Democratic Society. These well-drawn characters, along with richly detailed descriptions of time and place, combine to transport readers to Southern California circa 1969. You can almost smell the pot smoke mingling with the ocean mist.

While the narrator shares Wayman’s name and some of his biographical information, the author stresses that Wayman the narrator is a fictional construct.

“I know that with novels, especially first novels, people tend to think of them as autobiographical,” he says. “So I thought, to heck with it, I’ll just call that character by my own name. We’ll cut to the chase. But it’s not really me. It’s a kind of a composite character. I wanted an outsider to the experiences, because I think the ’60s took everyone by surprise. I never felt anyone was totally at home in the ’60s, just because so much was changing so fast. So I thought the idea of a Canadian — someone who’s like an American but not quite — sort of captured what it was like for young people to be suddenly in the midst of a whole new world.”

Having an outsider tell the story also allows for much of the book’s humour. Despite the dead serious belief the youngsters had in their ability to transform society, Wayman treats them lightly.

“A lot of sad and bad and awful things happened in the ’60s, but by and large, it was a lot of fun,” he says. “I wanted to keep the book lighthearted as well as serious. We live in a society where to get through the day we crack jokes, whether it’s at work or in bad situations. People use humour to give themselves perspective…. Not all the sections of the book are funny, but I wanted enough in there that it gave perspective in the way that humour does in everyday life."

Wayman will be reading from Woodstock Rising at the book launch at Pages on Kensginton on Friday, November 27 at 7:30 p.m.