Victoria journalist Tom Hawthorn regularly faces an unusual writing challenge: to create a brief profile that not only reports the fact of a deceased person’s life but tells an engaging and memorable story. It is a challenge that many writers could use to hone their skills. Hawthorn’s new book, Deadlines: Obits of Memorable British Columbians (Harbour Publishing, 288 pages, $26.95) tells 50 fascinating stories within the constraints of a newspaper obituary. It’s a lively read. Lorne Daniel asked Tom Hawthorn five questions about his challenges and his craft.

What are your criteria for selecting deceased people to profile for an obituary? How did you decide which profiles to include in Deadlines?

I write obituaries mostly for the Globe and Mail, so the person’s life needs to be of interest to a national audience. I also have to get the editors at the Globe interested in the person. Canada’s a big country, so competition for the obit page is fierce.

Did the person lead an interesting life? Did they have a public persona of note? Were they unique in some way? Does their life tell us something about life as it is lived in British Columbia, or Canada?

From nearly 500 obits written over the past decade, I’ve culled Deadlines to 50. We were looking for a cross section of people from a variety of backgrounds. Otherwise, we could have published a book of 50 hockey obits. Hmmm. Maybe next year.

What are the factors that result in there being relatively few women in Deadlines?

Let’s see, we’ve got an obit of a pioneering aviatrix (Margaret Fane Rutledge), a pioneering doctor (Dr. Josephine Mallek), a pioneering aboriginal leader (Gertrude Guerin), a pioneering rock journalist Jeani Read). I’m seeing a trend. Roles for women were limited until recent years. People who died in the previous decade mostly made their mark in the 1930s, ’40s, ’50s and ’60s, when opportunities for women were restricted. The obit pages of the future will have more women subjects than they’ve had in the past.

In Deadlines, you’ll also read about the Cougar Lady of Sechelt, about Pearl (the Elephant Girl) Edwards, about Norma Macmillan (the voice of Casper the Friendly Ghost), about Leila Vennewitz, a translator of global renown, and about Jean Crowley of Avalon Dairy.

An obituary is a relatively constrained piece of writing in that the writer is expected to cover certain bases. When you are drafting and revising your work, what do you do to keep each article fresh and engaging?

An obit in the Globe does carry a responsibility to touch on the person’s public life. Honours have to be noted. Like any piece of good writing, an obit can be fresh and engaging if a story is told. I seek out anecdotes that capture personality, details that offer insight on the person.

In your Acknowledgements, you quip that “the subjects are in no condition to complain,” but no doubt many other readers scrutinize each obituary quite closely. What is your approach to fact-checking your work — and do you have any tips for other non-fiction writers?

Whenever I write for the Globe, I am all too aware that among the reading audience will be at least one expert in the area about which I am writing. It is a sobering realization.

I am an obsessive researcher. I feel like I can never have enough newspaper clippings, or book citations, or interviews completed. Still, errors do happen and one can only try to be diligent to avoid the most common and to correct mistakes when they are spotted.
I do make that quip, but in doing so I ask readers to inform me of errors. I’m keen to get the story right. Even after it is written and published. Even after the subject is no longer with us.

Tips for non-fiction writers: When in doubt, leave it out. Keep asking questions until you’re sure about the answer. Never guess.

The British Columbians in Deadlines may not have been ordinary or typical citizens but do you see their lives and experiences as saying something about the nature of British Columbia in general? Are certain story lines more pronounced in BC than we would find elsewhere?

British Columbia attracts (and encourages) dreamers and schemers and Utopians, as well as scammers and scoundrels and con artists. It’s at the end of the road, so it is where people go to re-invent themselves. The province is also a place without the chains of church and class and tradition you’d find in more established societies, so it is not surprising that you find so many pioneers and trailblazers here, from Douglas Jung as the first member of Parliament of Chinese-Canadian ancestry to avant-garde theatre provocateur John Juliani. Life is different out here. Describing how so keeps it interesting.

Lorne Daniel’s selected poems, Drawing Back to Take a Running Jump, was published in 2012. He is working on a book of creative non-fiction about Alberta’s fur trade and oil frontiers.

Author Thomas King drew a huge crowd to First Peoples House November 16, 2012, when he visited Victoria to promote his new book, The Inconvenient Indian: A Curious Account of Native People in North America (Doubleday, 270 pages, $34.95). “When we look at Native-non-native relations, there is no great difference between the past and the present,” King observes in his witty but serious way. Taiaiake Alfred, professor of Indigenous governance and political science at UVic, interviewed King about his new book, which is essential reading for Canadians of all colours and stripes.

The Inconvenient Indian delivers some hard truths and has a real edge to it. It seems, to me anyway, like a shift from the approach you’re known for, softening the blow using irony and humour. Are you getting bolder as you go along, or maybe angrier?

I’m too old for that now. I was a pretty noisy activist in the 60s and the 70s. I’d yell and scream and jump up and down. But I discovered that doing that, I was entertainment. I wasn’t having much of an impact . . . White organizations would invite me in and I would give them hell. They would all clap at the end. They enjoyed it, and I would go away. Besides, it just scared the shit out of me when someone did point a gun in my face. There were other guys who were a lot braver than I was. I just decided at some point that I had writing skills that I could use, and that’s what I was going to do. I’m not going to try and be something I am not. I just said. “This is who I am,” and if somebody doesn’t like it, well, I can’t do much about it. I discovered that humour and satire were much better weapons. As I’ve gotten older, I’m still using those narrative tools because I think they are very effective. But it hasn’t taken the edge off of my anger because I’ve lived long enough to see the same kind of shit just come around again and again and again. And people keep saying that things are getting better. If they are getting better, why are Native people still defending their land base? If things are getting better, why do we still have to justify our existence? Why do we have to keep telling non-native North America that treaty rights were not given to us like loot bags at a movie gala? So yeah, I still get pretty hot. But this book was my only kick at the can of non-fiction. I’ve gotten older so I can’t move quite as fast as I used to and I can’t write another one.

Is there a moment in your life you can point to that made you most angry in understanding our collective oppression as Indigenous people?

It was a whole bunch of little cuts and a couple of big whacks. I’ll tell you one thing that got me. There was a photographer out of Utah who had done a book on Native sacred places. He went around and photographed sacred places and what they look like now. One sacred place now has a Wal-Mart on it. Another sacred place is all paved over for basketball courts, stuff like that. I’m a photographer too, and I’d been going around taking portraits of Native artists in North America and so I saw his book and liked it. I wrote him and said, “Do you want to trade a couple of photographs?” He said, “Yeah, yeah, I’ll do that” because he’d seen my work. And so I got one photo from him of tombstones at the Carlisle Indian School, gravestones of kids who died there. I remember getting it in the mail, opening it up and framing it. It’s on the wall at my house right now. Just looking at that, you know, I’m reminded of all the kids who died in residential schools. I say in the book that [Whites] knew at the time there were problems with the residential schools, but they were betting that something good would come out of it. The only thing was, they could make that bet easily enough, because they weren’t betting with their money, they weren’t betting with their community, they weren’t betting with their kids. I think that really sort of summed it up for me, the residential school experience: “If we’re wrong, so what? It’s just, you know, it’s just Indians.”

Dead Dog Café, the iconic CBC radio show you wrote and performed in, was beloved by millions of people and influential in shaping the way people thought of Indigenous people. But things have changed since that show was on the air. Indigenous people are doing social commentary and comedy, not only on the radio but using social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook and podcasting. What do you make of this change in the media landscape and the opportunities or challenges it presents for writers?

I’m so technologically ignorant; I don’t know where YouTube or tweeter … twitter … twitter. I couldn’t find my butt with a board along the Internet . . . So I don’t know who’s doing what. It’s not me . . . . I could have written this book and just put it on line. But I’m an old fart and I like looking at a book. When Dead Dog was on, CBC wasn’t looking at any of the other shows. They had their “Indian” show. That’s unfortunate. I’d like them to have said, “Dead Dog Café was a success. Let’s do some other shows with Indians at the same time.” But they didn’t do it because of course you got your Big Indian on Campus and once you have one, you don’t need any others . . . . my sense of humour when I was 25, 35, 40 years old was pretty stupid. It wasn’t Dead Dog humour. But when I got up into my 50s and my 60s, I think I started to refine that. Sometimes I think you just need some age behind you to do certain things. And it may be that Dead Dog was successful because I was old enough to pay attention to what I was doing, rather than just go for the funny laugh. I mean the one segment I always liked was, 10 Reasons Why It’s Good to Have Indians in Canada, and the first reason was because they gave the RCMP live targets to practice on. I thought for sure the lawyers would shut that down and they didn’t. So it told me right there that I could come really close to the edge. I could really push this thing on CBC as far as I wanted to. So we did.

What’s it like being a perpetual exmatriate living away from your homeland? How do you maintain your connection to your Cherokee heritage and nationality?

That’s a tough one for me because I was born and raised on the West Coast. My father is Cherokee. He came out to the West Coast during [the Second World War] and met my mother. My mother is Greek. My father took off when I was about three years old, just after my younger brother was born. We never saw him again. So that part of the family, we know part of the history on it and other parts of the history we don’t know . . . . it really is almost impossible. For one thing, I don’t have the “Cherokee by blood” card, and there is little chance that I will ever be able to get it. I have been back to Oklahoma a number of times, checking in with relatives. But being raised on the West Coast and not being raised within the Nation, it’s tough. So what I’ve decided is that I’m a sort of nomadic Cherokee, if you will. Like a turtle. I just carry myself and the culture and everything else that I have been able to pull together around with me like a turtle does. As a matter of fact, on my jacket lapel, I always wear this turtle pin just to remind myself that it’s okay.

I think that your book Truth and Bright Water truly captures what it is like to live on an Indian reserve, and to be a First Nations person confronting the realities of our colonized existence. Soldier, the rez dog, as a character, the lost White girl looking for her duck, the pathetically beautiful imagery of Tecumseh and Swimmer bringing the buffalo back to the prairie, I loved it. That book was published in 2000. What book is yet to be written about Native American life and who do you think is going to write it? Better yet, who should write it?

Oh boy! I should of course. Well, oddly enough I’m working on a book right now called The Back of the Turtle. And what I’ve decided to do is take the stories that have literally fallen from the sky, the Creation story. I’m trying to craft a story that talks about the contemporary world in which we live, Native and non-natives, but using a Native narrative strategy, not something like Green Grass, Running Water. I mean, Green Grass was serious but this is a more serious piece, a more satiric piece. I love satire; I think it moves people a lot more than anything else does. It’s a great weapon. I don’t know if that’s the kind of book that still needs to be written. It’s the kind of book that I need to write. And I think that’s what you’re going to find. You’re going to find Native writers who, as they move along, say Sherman Alexie, as he moves along, and Louise Erdrich, as she moves along, maybe deciding that as they get older there’s one book that they have to write. I think you’ll find it coming from one of the older writers, only because we can’t fool around with just knocking out books. There are some writers who just pump them out as fast as they can because they’ve got to pay the rent. At this point, I don’t have to pay the rent like that. I could take my time. Louise could take her time. Sherman could probably afford to take his time. I don’t know where it’s going to come from. I don’t even know what it’s going to look like. I do know that Truth and Bright Water is my favourite novel that I have written. Oddly enough, it got the least amount of play. I think it’s because people have decided that Green Grass, Running Water was my masterwork, so now they can leave me alone and find somebody else. Writing’s a funny business. The Inconvenient Indian was six years in coming. And in the meantime, I sort of lost my place in the great mandala. So now I’m happy it’s out there. But all that means is now the clock is ticking on the next one.

Taiaiake Alfred is working on a memoir about his father and Mohawk ironworkers.

Over the past year, local filmmakers and writers David Springbett and Brian Paisley have been obsessed with the “what if” while preparing their new documentary Apocalypse . . . When, which debuts Nov. 19 on Vision TV. The five-part series explores the origins, implications, repercussions and psychology behind “doomsday” thinking. Lynne Van Luven talked on email with the pair, to find out what they discovered.

1. David, as far as I know, you’re not an “apocalypticism” proponent, what was the precipitating event or idea that got this series started?

I’d just finished a book called Future Babble – about why we continue to trust experts, even though they’re wrong more often than not. Add to that a conversation (OKAY, it was in a pub) about 2012, and Doomsday Scenarios in general, and it all just came together.

2. Brian, what drew you into the project?

The opportunity to dig around a popular myth and expose and explore its foundations. The fact that Doomsday predictions continue to enthrall us despite every previous one being an utter and undeniable failure suggests deeper human concerns and motivations…

3. What was the most interesting thing each of you learned in the making of the series?

BP: That our fascination with apocalyptic thinking extends far beyond simple End Days’ predictions and actually influences how we look at our world and deal with it on a day-to-day basis.

DS: Beyond the big picture of Apocalyptic ideas influencing our culture, a number of our interviews led us in directions we hadn’t previously considered. The siege at Waco, TX, for example, could have been avoided had the ATF and FBI understood the apocalyptic mindset of Koresh and his followers. One of the most interesting interviews was with Marcelo Gleiser, an astronomer and physicist, who connected early culture’s relationship with the heavens to such recent events as the Heaven’s Gate cult in the 1980s.

4. Do you have any fears that just by showing Apocalypse . . . When? Vison — and thus you two — might be setting off a whole aftershock of new Doomsday thinking?

BP: Positive aftershocks – yes!. If you watch the show from start to finish, you’ll be thinking and talking about the way we look at our world, and perhaps what we should be doing to ensure we never usher in a human-made Doomsday.

DS: If we can stimulate new Doomsday thinking that includes our potential for a self-created Apocalypse — we’ve done our job !

5. Your key question, “What happens when nothing happens?” is intriguing. What answer have you come to in the “aftermath” of all your research, writing and filming?

BP: What happens is, people keep believing. Despite all the historical evidence, every experience telling us the human race is still alive and kicking, and the blatant fact the sun just rose on another day, true believers will find a way to rationalize their beliefs and continue to follow their prophetic fixations – “It might not have happened this time, but wait, it will – and very soon!”. There’s even a name for that kind of antithetical persistence: cognitive dissonance – our ability to hold two obviously contradictory points-of-view at the same time. Fascinating!

www.apoclaypsewhentvseries.com

“Apocalypse. . . When?” coming soon to VisionTV, 8 p.m. Nov. 19 to 23

The Devil’s Curve: A Journey into Power and Profit at the Amazon’s Edge
By Arno Kopecky
Douglas & McIntyre, 306 pp., $29.95

Arno Kopecky, 35, has been working as a freelancer for the past decade since graduating from the University of Victoria. He recently participated in an alumni reading sponsored by the Department of Writing as part of UVic’s 50th anniversary celebrations. In The Devil’s Curve, Kopecky has written an intelligent, witty and informative book about his year of independent research in both Peru and Colombia. In his travels, he met Indigenous leaders, visited their villages, and surveyed the rivers and forests put at risk by North America’s lust for gold. Kopecky trusted to the hospitality and decency of the local Awajun people he met, and his book illustrates both their struggle and Canada’s complicity through its free trade agreements. The Devil’s Curve is a must-read for all Canadians; throughout the book, Kopecky asks the questions we all should be considering; he presents an international problem in compelling human terms. Lynne Van Luven met Kopecky on his recent visit to Victoria and conducted this interview with him later. Sanguine in the face of his publisher’s fiscal troubles, he is now working on a new book about the Northern Gateway project and its proposed tanker routes in West Coast waters.

Can you talk a bit about what event (s)was/were the catalyst for the research that lead to Devil’s Curve?

On June 5, 2009, the Peruvian army opened fire on a crowd of 3000 Awajun Indians who had been camping on a stretch of highway known as the Devil’s Curve for 57 days; it was a scene straight out of Francisco Pizarro’s conquest of the Incas, and it made international headlines by noon of that same day because a few journalists were on hand to record the attack (not me – I got there four months later).

The tragedy grabbed my attention because I was planning a trip to that part of the world at the time, to look into the free trade agreements Canada was then signing with Peru and Colombia. Thinking about free trade can quickly become an exercise in abstraction, but suddenly here was this very concrete example of the human consequences these deals can have. The reason those Awajun had been blockading the highway was to protest the free trade agreements that were locking in the rights of foreign companies operating on their territory…and so the traveling research began.

From reading your book, I learned a huge amount, both about Canada’s part in mining the Amazon and about the feisty Awajun people; in fact, I realized how seldom national media covers these issues. Was educating the public part of your goal in writing the book?

Interesting to hear you say that, since the one review that has come out about this book so far criticizes me for not being informative enough – I’m too gonzo, spend too much time drinking with natives and slum dwellers, not enough time interviewing corporate CEOs…
At any rate, I did want to educate the public, but I didn’t want to bore the hell out of them, so I ended up writing something that kind of slips between (occasionally inebriated) travel narrative and (sober, I promise) investigative journalism. South America may not be in the news much lately – a good sign that much has improved in the last fifteen years – but I do think everyone’s heard the story about the bad corporation despoiling the good Indian’s land. It’s not a subject that tends to captivate readers who aren’t already interested in these things, and the people I most want to reach are precisely those who aren’t normally interested in these things. For that you need a lure, and mine was story.

Whether my story’s any good or not, I dunno, but at least bad writing was not among my aforementioned reviewer’s complaints.

Well, I think the writing is terrific. You traipse across a lot of territory in Peru and Colombia in your narrative, yet you manage not to overwhelm the reader with unwieldy amounts of data. Was there a key organizing principle behind that achievement?

I wish I had an organizing principle, and not just for writing. But when I look back on it, I realize that I stuck pretty close to the notes I took during my year of travels. These were basically journal entries of compelling scenes, impressions, interesting conversations…
One big structural question was how to juggle the two stories at the heart of this book, one taking place in the Peruvian Amazon and another taking place in the city of Medellín, Colombia. In the end, I decided to keep the two countries out of one another’s chapters, which made my life (and hopefully the reader’s) a lot easier.

The Awajun’s struggle against North American mining firms, including Canadian Dorato Resources, seems to me to be incredibly brave, but the book left me wondering how optimistic you are about their chance of success. Can you comment?

Dorato is a gold exploration company with some prime real estate in Awajun territory, but their stock hasn’t budged above nine cents despite several years of enthusiastic reports. They’ve had a couple devastating exposés in the media – David Suzuki executed them in a documentary called The Real Avatar – so for a number of reasons I actually am quite optimistic that the Awajun’s water source will not be drenched in mercury or arsenic any time soon.

As for the bigger question about how to reign in the resource extraction firms now having a field day in Peru and Colombia, and basically everywhere on earth – for me, this is one of the stories of our times, and no it isn’t looking good at the moment. We’re eating up our world at a terrifying rate. But Obama’s just been re-elected as I write this, and I find hope creeping unreasonably into all current outlooks.

There is so much about The Devil’s Curve that presages the current resistance on the West Coast, especially amongst First Nations leaders, to Northern Gateway and Kinder Morgan. You planned that, right?

Obviously. It took all my powers of persuasion to convince Stephen Harper and Natural Resources Minister Joe Oliver to wait until I’d finished writing The Devil’s Curve before they started elaborating their theory of foreign-funded radicals and obstreperous Indians blocking Canada’s foreign-funded path to prosperity. Thankfully, both gentlemen co-operated, and then repeated almost verbatim the same arguments I first heard emanating from the presidents of Peru and Colombia.

That gave me just enough time to spend the summer and fall exploring the Northern Gateway’s proposed tanker routes, on a sailboat between Kitimat and Bella Bella. I’ve just returned home from that misadventure and am writing it up now – a Canadian sequel to The Devil’s Curve, assuming I can find someone to publish it!