Paul Quarrington’s latest novel, The Ravine, takes us into, well, a ravine. Not only as the physical location of a childhood trauma, but also as a metaphor for the psychological hole the narrator main character and his brother must climb out of. It is a rambling, funny, intentionally distracted tale that follows a perpetual screw-up, Phil McQuigge, as he staggers through his emotional shortcomings, writing a novel and making more than a few drunken phone calls.

Quarrington describes The Ravine, as well as some of his past work, as semi-autobiographical, with the caveat that he’s not really that bad. He puts his own tendencies into his characters and amplifies them. “So I think that’s what I did with Phil, too. I certainly have a tendency to drink and dial, but I made him have the problem in spades to kind of work myself through it,” he says soberly on the phone from Toronto.

The novel delves into memory and its shortcomings, distinguishing between what happens, what we think happened and the way it all shapes us. “I think in that particular case, in The Ravine, I was dealing with memory, and how these memories sort of come back to inform your adulthood. It’s not even your past that informs it, it’s the memories,” he says. “You can’t really remember your past.”

This, too, is borne by real life experience. Quarrington says he had his own childhood experience in a ravine, but can’t recall precisely what transpired — something a psychologist rather obviously suggested may have something to do with his selective memory.

However, there must be something of a memory in this man. How else could he possibly manage to stay so busy? Depending on whether you count singer-songwriter as two jobs, Quarrington has no less than six or seven professions. He’s also a teacher, novelist, screenwriter, filmmaker and television writer. He does cop to finding it all a little taxing sometimes. “I have to admit, sometimes I don’t manage to do it all in a day,” he says laughing. “I used to be better at it, my mind used to be more elastic, and now there’s usually something I have neglected.”

Just to drive the point home that he can do everything, Quarrington is premiering a short film, Pavane, based on The Ravine at WordFest. Perhaps reflecting the schizophrenic writing style of the book, Quarrington worked on both projects at the same time. “In writing The Ravine, I wrote about half the book and then left off to write a screenplay, or a different take. It’s not actually a version of the novel, it’s kind of another approach. So I guess I wanted to explore other storylines and slightly different characters. And then went back to the novel,” he says.

The short film mixes animation and live action, separating the lives of the adult characters from the animated youth and the terrors of the ravine. It is set largely in Birds of a Feather, a piano bar that makes appearances in the novel as the place where Phil’s younger brother Jay tickles the ivories. “In going back and forth, I thought, well, it might be effective to tell the children’s story in animation, because it sort of, I don’t know, lends a patina of innocence that either makes the creepy stuff all the more creepier or maybe makes the creepy stuff a little easier to take,” explains Quarrington. He also did it to spare audiences the suspension of disbelief that is often required to match a child actor with his adult counterpart.

It’s a long way from his initial foray into filmmaking. “When I was in Grade 13… I got accepted to this film sort of camp in the summer, where they gave us all sorts of equipment and encouraged us to make films. But my friend and I took the camera to a party and filmed ourselves drinking beer, and then goodly sent in the stuff to get developed. So I got thrown out of that and my career as a filmmaker was in jeopardy for many years.”

If a novel and a movie isn’t enough to impress, Quarrington will also be playing with his band, Porkbelly Futures, at The Banff Centre. Show off.