Original subtitles

"I went that night and sat by our river."

"The water of our great river makes us disappear.

We become at twilight in the battle of water,

a symphony of ghosts.

We remember the ghosts of children."

"Father Billy has told us this.

Each man must attempt to come to some truce

with his own heart."

"Gerry had never known truth.

But he had conceived it himself,

like some great men conceive of truth,

and chisel it into the world."

"...but he had conceived it himself, like some great men

conceive of truth and chisel it--"

"...like some great men

conceive of truth and chisel it into the world."

"Always, he'd come back to his part of the river."

"He had a peculiar way of expression.

Almost everything seemed to be said slowly, and in duplicate."

"That's no good, no good."

"Or if asked how he was, he would reply,

"Not too bad, too bad."

"He had a bad head on him.

He sometimes couldn't help what he did."

"Sir, you said you would take me fishing."

"Turn her slowly, Cathy."

"Those words still seemed to sing

in the trees above them."

"She'll walk with you if you turn her slowly."

"To lilt and measure out of some deep

reservoir of love and humility."

"'Can you tell me what I should do?'

Arnold asked--" "She'll walk with you

if you turn her slowly."

"'Can you tell me what I should do?'

Arnold asked, after he explained that he was unhappy."

"I'm not having this place smell of piss

at Little Simon's funeral. You hear me?"

"The fights became more frequent and quarrels,

and snitching each other's food."

"'Fuck ya, fuck ya'

for 'I love you. I love you'

or 'Help me. Help me.'"

"So Packet followed his mother about the Maritimes."

"Always, he'd come back to his part of the river."

"Always, he'd come back to his part of the river."

"...to his part of the river."

"In the spring,

there was the pleasant smell of soil and earth."

"And she hoarded things like a chipmunk might.

Her trailer was filled--"

"He lay flat on his back with the tarp

over him, smelling his own fear..."

"When he was bullied on the street, he said yes.

That's just what it's like."

"They turned to the left and began to walk,

just as slowly, ever so slowly."

"'Are we lost, Papa? Are we?'

'Don't be frightened Georgie. No. We can never get lost.'"

People sometimes mistake the idea

that I'm writing about poverty and desperation.

I'm not going to shun the fact that I do write about it.

Of course I do. But I'm writing about

the absolute greatness of the human soul.

And we all have the same greatness.

And it is our obligation to use that.

That's a real art, eh?

When you get a fly, you can tell who tied it, eh?

Yeah.

- You can tell who tied the fly. - Oh, yes. Yeah.

I'm going to put a little head cement on it.

You know the definition of a fisherman, eh?

- What is it, sir? - Well, it's a jerk

on one end of the line waiting for a jerk on the other.

That's pretty well it.

- So that's it. - Yeah.

- And there you go. - Thank you, sir.

- There's your bug bow. - Thank you.

That's a beautiful bug.

"My first fishing foray was along the bank

of a small brook to the northwest of Newcastle,

on the Miramichi. A sparkling old brook

that Lord Beaverbrook took his name from.

It was Saturday in May of 1955

and I was not yet five years of age.

I had four worms in my pocket. They smelled of the dark earth

near my grandmother's back garden

where they had come from.

And all worms smell of earth,

and therefore all earth smells of trout.

That was long ago, when fishing was innocent and benevolent.

Fishing even then could take me out of myself,

far away from the worry of my life, such as it was,

and into another life, better and more complete.

I have learned since that I would have to argue

my way through life, that I was going to become

a person who could never leave to rest the idea of why

things were the way they were."

: "It was once said on CBC radio

by a professor from Ottawa that Mary Cyr had met the poor,

but she had never really known them.

But that was not true about her.

In fact, she had met the poor everywhere

and was more knowledgeable about them

than were a host of devoted middle-class activists."

"In this world, there were things

one was required to like, or at least to accept.

Mary Cyr did not seem able to do that as well as most.

Nor did she seem to care."

My mother was hanging out the clothes.

And it was a windy day.

And some of the sheets got caught up in the line.

You know, she says, "Well I'm going to go out

and fix that." And so she threw on her sneakers

and she didn't tie the laces. She just ran out

and she tripped over the lace and fell from the porch,

onto her stomach, which was, unfortunately,

my head.

And, uh...

And within the next hour,

she realized she had to go to the hospital,

because she was going to give birth.

And so I was born two months premature.

I weighed three pounds.

By the time I was four, I was walking around

and you know,

I used my right side far more than my left.

I still do.

"I was looked at a lot when I was young.

Poked and prodded. People wondered about me.

Wondered if I would live, or how I would if I did,

would I be the same as they were.

That was the big crisis in their life,

unknown by me for quite some time.

How would I ever be like other people?

Because for a long time, at least until I was about five,

I simply assumed I was.

My parents especially wanted me to be as others were.

My mother was desperate to include me in everything.

But there is a wonderful indication that the oddballs

in the end..."

"My parents especially wanted me to be as others were.

My mother was desperate to include me in everything.

But there is a wonderful indication that the oddballs

in the end are the ones that sooner or later

make all the difference.

It always did puzzle me

how those who commend Saint Francis

or Saint Joan of Arc still cringe at the fact

that their own child might have a vision

to do something out of the ordinary.

I did try everything. And it never bothered me

very much at all.

But my left side bothered certain other people,

who then told others it bothered me.

That is, they took their fear of my being different

and placed it at my door.

And I saw the fear of my being different

in others quite early, because some people had it

when dealing with me.

Why did they fear me?

Well, concerning my mother

this came out of guilt for having fallen

on the day I was born,

and causing my calamity.

It remained a block between us.

My mother's guilt is understandable

but not warranted, and I should have told her

so many years ago that there was absolutely

nothing for me to forgive.

What my mother did give me was a love of the written word,

and I suppose that was worth at least

one fall down the stairs."

It also worried her

that I wouldn't be able to make out in life.

When I decided to be a writer, this was a horrendous thing,

because she-she probably felt that I was going to...

She probably thought

that I was going to starve to death anyway.

And then to become a writer?

Well, that just added to it all.

So I was certainly going to starve to death.

So I think she was extremely worried,

because I knew from the time I was 14,

what I was going to be. And she always thought,

"Well, you'll be that, but you'll be a teacher first."

Well, there was no way.

"I often wanted to enter the world

of the stained glass

to find myself walking along the purple road,

with the Mount of Olives behind me.

I suppose because I wanted to be good,

and my mother wanted goodness for me.

I wanted too to escape the obligation

I had toward my own destiny,

my family, my sister and brother

who were more real to me than a herd of saints."

"It was now July.

The screen door let in a breeze that was almost forlorn.

The street was hot, though,

and the great shrubs had turned brown at their tips.

Andrew was at the age where he was beginning

to discover that intellectual beliefs

did not always match action

and that sins were sometimes overcome

by personal attributes."

When I was 16, I was trying to write,

so school was not important to me.

I didn't agree with the English teacher I had.

And I didn't think that...

he was saying the right things about the books.

And I was reading different books.

I made 28 on my English exam.

Or something.

It wasn't very high.

And uh...

And then I was caught reading--

Writing poems in class.

The teacher read one of these poems to the class.

So I threw a chemistry book. I didn't throw it at him.

But he said I threw it at him. I threw it at the wall.

But anyway, it doesn't matter. He...

So he took my poems to the principal.

Or he... whatever.

And these poems were pretty bad.

But I thought they were pretty great at that time.

I thought, like Shakespeare.

But they weren't great.

So the school board were there.

And they were reading my poems,

and what I said about the English teacher,

all that, and stuff.

And they said, "Well, you know, he has a real problem."

My parents were sitting there with the school board.

And they said, "Well, he's got to go see a psychiatrist."

I had just started going out with Peg.

So I phoned Peg, and said, "Do you want to go to Moncton?"

She said, "Sure! Why do you have to go to Moncton?"

I said, "Oh, they think I'm crazy."

"So do you want to come? We'll get a hamburger."

"Sure! I'll come."

Maybe she was crazy, right?

And I was in the psychiatrist's office for about

a half hour or so and they called my parents in.

The psychiatrist said, "Uh...

your son is brilliant."

I'm not saying that about myself.

It's what he said to my parents, which...

which made them a little happier, I think,

than they were on the way down.

But then I had to go back and get the strap

and be expelled for the rest of the year.

So I was forced to see a psychiatrist, and given...

And beaten, to be allowed access to a place I never wanted to be.

I loved the movies.

I went every chance I got to the theatre,

because first of all, I could get in free.

Because of my limited mobility on my left side,

I could never skate. So I'd go to the movies,

and that's where I found solace.

"Her features had changed

since her husband's death.

She seemed closed off,

more solitary than ever.

In her mid-twenties and a young mother,

she was beautiful,

though somewhat tougher since her husband's death.

Her money held no pleasure.

She was very stern with herself,

yet was kind to almost everyone else and to Walter."

My grandmother was a very...

forceful presence in my life for a long time.

She had a great deal of strength and integrity.

And I admired her very much.

My grandmother had to come up

against a lot in her life

when she was running the theatre.

First off, she lost her husband.

They... They met in 1911.

He was a travelling musician.

He had his degree from the Royal Conservatory.

He needed someone to accompany him on the violin in Newcastle.

And he called for players to come out and audition.

And one was Janie McGowan with her fiddle.

And he said, "Can you read music?"

And she said, "No, but I can play anything you can."

And she was an 18-year-old girl.

So they got married. They ran the theatre.

They ran, you know...

They started the theatre.

Yeah, they started the theatre;

one of the first in the Maritimes,

if not the first.

"Walter had done nothing in the last

few weeks but find things out about her enemies.

He walked back and forth,

banking to the left

and blowing smoke from his oversized cigar.

He told her that it was a consortium of friends

that showed a complete and unswerving contempt for her.

How this contempt was manufactured?

Easily, indeed.

A widow like Janie McLeary

would know nothing about the movies

fine and decent people wanted.

And why? Because her father was old Jimmy McLeary the drunk.

She knew nothing about business,

and would be better taking care of her children,

the way a woman should."

She was an amazing woman.

And so was my other grandmother.

My other grandmother on the Adams side,

they tried to foreclose on her house

and take over her house too.

And she kept them at bay with a double-barrel shotgun.

So she was no slouch either,

when it came to protecting her own property

and her own people.

So I grew up in the midst of very strong women.

The porch is gone, but the fireplace,

the fireplace is probably all redone and everything.

No, it's the same.

- Come and look through here. - Is it?

Hi!

You can see the fireplace.

Oh, yeah. God Almighty.

"'So now I will mention that boy

from the Miramichi' John said,

'The one with his pockets stuffed with poems

as he hitchhiked through the dark.

The one who was the uncle of those children,

and who became their stepdad after Ida died.

He was writing a novel about downriver people.

A novel about the world he had grown up in.

He was writing a novel about you, your family,

Gaby May and her family.'

She was what beauty was about.

'Sir, you said you would take me fishing.'

Those words still seemed to sing in the trees above them,

to lilt and measure out of some deep reservoir

of humility and love."

I started out writing poetry.

And I never thought I'd be a novelist.

I didn't think I was interested in being a novelist,

which is the strangest thing in the world,

because the first thing I ever read

that really interested me as a writer

was Oliver Twist, which was a novel.

But I thought I'd be a poet.

I used to hitchhike to Fredericton

with poems in my pockets, and stuff.

And uh, I'd come to the McCord Hall group.

So when I went to McCord Hall, they were all professors.

I mean, I liked every one of them.

You know, in some ways, I thought they were great.

In other ways, I've got to tell you,

that I was very different from them.

Um, first of all, um...

I was going to be a writer.

And they were professors,

and the younger kids there

were going to be professors.

For a while, you know, I wasn't taken serious at all.

And I wrote these awful poems,

and then short stories, and awful short stories.

And then I was going to write this short story

about this boy who shoots a cow.

And it ended up being The Coming of Winter.

So that was the novel. And then I realized that,

well, that was my calling,

such as it was, was to be a novelist.

And when I was at St. Thomas, one of the professors

told everyone that, you know, that he was my teacher.

He was my mentor, uh, that he taught me how to write,

and that I wouldn't have been able to write

The Coming of Winter were it not for him.

So I saw how writing attracted people to you

in a way to gain some attention to themselves.

And so when you see professors do that and you're 21, 22,

you realize that human nature is human nature.

And it doesn't matter how many doctorate degrees you have.

But I was the only one who was a writer first,

last, and forever.

It's a deep commitment. It was also...

Um...

It was also very hard on myself

and-and...

and-and she who must be obeyed.

Peg.

Because you know, when I said, I said as a joke,

but it wasn't really a joke, that first night I met her,

um, you know, the very first night I met her.

And uh, and I drove her home.

And I said, "What are you going to do?"

And she said, "Well I'm going to graduate and go to, um...

go to Toronto and get a job."

I said, "Well you know, you don't have to go to Toronto

to get a job. Get a job here."

And I mean, you know, Peg came from, you know,

a family with a widowed mother and nine children.

Of course she wanted to get a job.

She was at work when she was 17, really.

And I said, "I'm going to be a writer."

And she said, "You are?" I said, "Yes, I'm going to be a writer."

And...

that kind of damned us both, didn't it?

I mean, we were both damned by that.

The world she entered with me was not guaranteed.

There was no paycheque at the end of the week.

There were years and years of struggle,

which I didn't know.

But I was prepared to do.

I had finished The Coming of Winter,

and I was starting Blood Ties and I said, "This is crazy."

And I quit university. And then she was out of work.

And we bummed around, and we went out west.

I wasn't happy out West.

I wasn't happy at all out West.

And we moved to Newcastle,

and that was no good.

That was not a good place for me

when I was writing Lives of Short Duration.

I drank an awful lot for a long time.

But I mean, most of the people I knew back then

were heavy drinkers.

I started drinking very young.

I started drinking when I was 14,

and I quit at 32.

By the time I was 18, I was smoking two packs a day.

And then I went up to three packs for the last ten years

of my smoking.

But then I started chewing tobacco,

which was even worse. So...

So, there was no getting around

that I had an addictive personality.

I mean, if I went to pick flowers,

I'd probably be picking 4,000. You know what I mean?

I just had this addictive personality.

I couldn't stop doing what I was doing.

Uh, so, that was me.

Drinking was uh, was reward.

I could write for a week, and then I could drink

on the weekend.

And I wouldn't have to think of all these thoughts

in my head, and the characters

and where they wanted to go and I could just black them out.

"He would sit in his tavern,

chairs with transparent ashtrays,

like ghosts that have spoken."

"...like ghosts that have spoken."

"The discarded materials of a generation

...stunk in his mouth..."

"...and there was a smell of rubble and dust

from the liquor store they were expanding."

"...from the liquor store they were expanding."

And Lives of Short Duration

was an extremely hard book to write.

I mean, it was because I knew what I was writing.

I was damning the coming society, in a way,

which I didn't want to do. But I...

But I saw the old world being chopped to pieces

for no reason. And I...

And you know, maybe I was wrong, but I had to write that book.

"'Rance' he said, 'You awake?

How can you get any sleep in this fucking place?'"

"I'm looking for a man tonight."

"And there was talk of a McDonald's

fast food hamburger restaurant."

"Little Simon was sent by the social workers

to a brick house in town."

"God helps the Social Services."

"And if any of you fuckers happen to see

a man, let me know, will you?"

I was afraid of the book.

I was afraid of what I was writing.

"He lay flat on his back

with a tarp over him."

"He dressed and left the hospital, walked out,

once the nurses left the desk,

down the exit steps, and into the grey night."

It was a long struggle to get it done.

And I did not know how to end that book.

"On the radio came talk of unemployment.

And in the paper, an article by a social worker..."

"...smelling his own fear,

like the smell of his own blood."

"...on the disturbing plight of youth."

"Bradley, you little jeeser, where are you?"

And all these characters kept coming and coming.

And a lot of it, I threw in the dump.

It didn't work.

"It isn't as if a man was born with a chunk of fathers."

There were things coming because of mass media

and because of the influx of the new popular code,

the new popular ideas of the world,

and how people were reaching for things,

and leaving what was essentially important to their...

to their own nature behind,

because they were reaching for a brass ring

that didn't really exist.

And there, that became the dismantling of family life

in Lives of Short Duration.

"And it always came over the fields,

the trees being broken down by graders, the dust,

the new homes on shale beds

with cement foundations.

One after the other."

"When his father hit him,

he hit him across the face and sent him sprawling

under the kitchen table.

And when he stood up, his father hit him again,

hard on the other side of the face,

and again sent him sprawling.

Wasn't there compassion in that, in compulsive violence?

And couldn't he still smell his father's hand?"

"Haven't I been a good father?

Haven't I been a Jesus good father?"

"Georgie, you just shut your god-damnable mouth.

We're having a party."

"Lois had always been nice to him..."

"Don't be frightened. Georgie..."

"She brought him fruit and striped pajamas."

"...we can never get lost."

"Little Simon, standing in his underwear...

...in the white room, with his two pairs of socks."

"On and on. Children in cars.

Lois, going to the discotheque to drink zombies in a glass..."

"You promised me a good time!

You promised me a good time!"

"...and toking with the boys in the back corner,

as they eyed her uplifted breasts..."

"You could see

the rose tattoo above her left breast."

"...and the beautiful slant of her belly.

It was all the same."

"She'd had three children by three different men."

"...get a wet cloth

- and clean that up." - "She lived in a trailer

with a woodshed on the back."

"Now, go on, now." "And you could hear

her yelling at her kids all the time."

"Little Simon shook his head.

His face, hands coarsened by various addictions.

His breath smelling of unpleasing amphetamine."

"So Packet lived in the night.

And he lived constantly

like all men of the river, with memories."

"And the smell of food rose over

the ditches..." "...a steel rod..."

"...and over the wild flowers and onto the road..."

"Emma Jane, what was she doing?"

"...mingling with the smell of gas

and the empty barns and buildings..."

"Oh, papa..." "...with their dark

virginal quality." "...papa."

"And the houses with their lights on

for the evening."

"He went into the woods in the early morning.

It was warm, so the snow would melt.

And he found a nice quiet place,

and sitting on a cedar fell, rolled a cigarette."

"The north of this province..."

"Houses like ideas." "...having to bring

people in to set up businesses

and having to pay them to make them stay..."

" Straggly corpses from one end to the other."

"...until the trees are gone..."

- "Oh, papa, papa...." - "Thousands of acres downed

and nothing planted,

and the men looking around in absolute bafflement."

"Great Expectations Hair Salon.

For the man with the means to move in the groove."

"We're part of the stew now.

And it's their recipe, gentlemen."

"And it is what we wanted,

what we bragged about having, until we succeeded..."

"He put Little Simon's and Packet's head

into the toilet bowl, one at a time,

and flushed the toilet, when they were youngsters."

"He could see Packet's hair swirling in the whirlpool."

"And Packet took the beer and drank it.

And it ran down both sides of his mouth."

"He slapped Little Simon's hands.

The God-awful screams."

"Oh, I've had the odd bad dream,

but nothing like Pack."

"The day Packet left for out west

was the day Old Simon left the hospital."

"Death came from massive loss of blood

and shock, almost instantaneously..."

"'You leave my brother alone,'

she'd yell on the telephone."

"...The bullet cutting, scalding through the aorta."

"Then he took her back to the car

and laid her in the back seat..."

"Why wouldn't he stop?"

"She saw the ceiling light,

and a bug caught in it..."

"Because if you're hurting someone then you stop..."

"...a small bug, like a black fly.

'Help me go home,' she said. 'Help me go home.'

'Where's the purse? Where's Mom's purse?'"

You were going completely

against current there.

Yes, I was. Yeah. I was going against current.

Yeah, there's no question. There's no question.

And I-I mean, there was other books coming out

that were funny. And they were,

they were hopeful. Um...

And they were considered hopeful and funny,

and uh, and life-affirming.

And I was writing this book that was considered hopeless

and non-life-affirming.

But I think it was just the opposite.

When I have something to write,

it's beyond being driven or determined.

It's something far deeper than that.

And have I taken on society over this? Yeah, I think I have.

I think I have taken on...

probably more than I could chew.

But uh, but anyway,

I-I've...

I've written what I felt I had to write.

My idea of rural life was entirely condescended to

by uh, by certain critics.

And part of it was because they didn't know that

sense of place was more than a location

because they would say, "He has a real sense of place,"

in his regional backwater. You know?

In his regional, tepid backwater

filled with wild game and...

and electric eels.

You know? He knows his stuff.

But when he gets into the real world, you know,

the world of uh, urban Canada, he doesn't know anything.

This is, I mean, this is essentially

what they were saying, okay?

I'm fooling around. But essentially,

they were saying if you lived in the city,

you would have more experience,

but you and I know, that that was never true,

never true at all.

It's because of this early frivolousness,

when describing my work,

that made me, uh, more determined

to do my work the way I saw it should be done.

But there is a trick to the word, "depressing".

And there is a trick to the word, "regionalism."

What it says is this work

really has nothing to do with real people.

It doesn't have to do with real people.

Because what we're afraid to do is say,

"Richards is writing about the spirit of man...

He's writing about the soul of man."

Because we don't want to deal with that.

Every book I've done,

it refutes the idea

of the hopelessness of humanity

by the greatness of the characters.

"Dad left before Percy was three.

I carry a picture of Percy on his third birthday;

Dad's chair is empty.

So he must have been gone.

I tried for a time to be Percy's father.

I took him for walks, in his wagon,

and we would stop along our lane to collect his bugs.

Percy had four jars filled with grasshoppers and crickets,

caterpillars and snails.

He'd wait for me to come home from fishing, jar in hand.

He'd open the front door and run to give me a hug."

We're all born with that greatness.

And it's how we exercise that that makes humanity worthwhile.

How are you, John?

: So are you still writing, Dave?

Oh yeah, I'm still working away.

I've been getting by, Johnny.

John bought a new house on...

Trapper Newman or Robert Newman

was a great friend of mine. Um...

Some people thought of him as a hard luck case.

I uh, I loved the guy.

He's called Trapper because he had big hands.

And he was a brawler. I mean, he'd knock you out

with one punch.

One day, he phoned me.

He says, "You're the only one I can talk to about this."

He said, "I just read The Life of Balzac."

He said, "Do you know anything about Balzac?"

I said, "Yeah, La Comédie humaine" I said, "I read it."

He said, "It's wonderful."

So we met at the tavern and we talked about it,

and he became a fast friend.

He used to visit me and we drank an awful lot together.

And then he went away.

And he came back to me.

And uh...

he helped me stop drinking.

And if it wasn't for him,

I probably would have still drank.

And I probably wouldn't have lived. And he told me.

He said, "You've got one or two more years left."

He said, "You're going to die in some way,

if you don't quit drinking."

And he was very humble about it.

And very truthful.

And so he helped me stop drinking.

Years later, a professor told me that I should quit writing.

That I, you know, that I did the work I could do.

And I should quit writing.

In essence, if I had to quit writing,

because this very well-educated professor at a university

who knows all about literature told me,

then 50 or 60 characters that I gave

to Canadian literature would never have been...

never have been written, never have been created.

Trapper Newman,

in helping me to get off the bottle,

kept me alive,

and allowed me to create 60 characters.

So he's certainly more important in my life than that professor.

And I think, with all due respect,

he's more important to Canadian literature

than that professor.

The characters that stand against the odds

for personal integrity will always win the day.

People will always come back and want to read about them.

And the best ones will teach the world something.

"Jerry had never known truth,

but he had conceived it himself

like some great men conceive of truth

and chisel it into the world.

And it was his and no one else's.

He was like some great soul

cast out and trying to find shelter in the storm.

His father had a plate in his head

and would want to fight.

His father would stand with his shirt out,

weaving back and forth,

his right fist cocked a little,

back against the wall,

and the dry earth,

the smell of hay,

tumbling with the crickets

and smell of summer

and all the world jostling in trumpets of song.

A mentally unfit melancholy man

along a road with a little boy by the hand.

Then you know truth.

You don't know it before then."

My main thing is the characters.

It's the wonder and the graciousness

and the greatness and the silliness and the...

and the self-centeredness,

and all of that in my characters

that I'm concerned about.

"Now I wish to tell you

that the decrees against my father

were not constant or even at that time inevitable.

Many months could go by without one.

I am telling you of the occasions that I remember.

I also remember walks in the woods,

and picnics and fishing trips up Aaron Brook in the spring

where Dad would speak about poetry

and Walt Whitman and Thoreau;

yet what I say here is something to measure my father by.

He did not know that he, and not Thoreau,

was the real article,

or that his civil disobedience

went to the very soul of man."

"In August that same year,

on a particular windy warm night, just after dark,

she was seen carrying a huge bear trap

toward her enemies' house.

They came to her cottage, the RCMP.

She was planning to set this bear trap

and leave it on the steps two cottages away,

in order to get the rich girls who'd made fun of her friend

Debby Dormey's stutter,

a little girl who lived on the upper road,

near the highway;

lived her life in three rooms

with a small bathroom in the hall;

a girl Mary Cyr had suddenly befriended, and treasured.

It was the first time she was in the RCMP register,

as she would describe it,

and it would be the first of 27 times.

It was the beginning of her war against conformity,

but of a very specialized sort of war,

a kind of clandestine one.

One where she was the silent observer

of the disastrous world."

If you don't know your characters on the inside,

you don't know them very well.

I know why Lois was left alone.

I know why she was sexually assaulted

in Lives of Short Duration.

I know why she loves her kids.

I know why she loves her kids,

although she can't handle them.

I knew Adeles all my life. I grew up with Adeles.

"When the Canadians lost a game,

she would go about the house like a ghost refusing to eat,

and prayed, her lips moving slowly:

'Oh God, let Pete Mahovlich get a goal.'"

"For Adele who had always loved hockey,

and especially the Montreal Canadiens,

this 1972 series between the Canadians and the Russians,

was the one spiritual happening she could think of."

"We were all going to make the NHL

when I was ten or eleven.

In those years, long ago,

the weather was always more than it is now.

There was more of it.

More snow, more ice, more sky.

More wind. More hockey.

We were all friends of the Foley boys,

there were seven of them.

One of our goalies was a girl.

Another was a huge boy with fresh-pressed pants

and the smell of holy water,

who believed in Santa Claus until he was 13."

And that's when I, as a kid,

would begin to give up my idea that I would ever make the NHL.

I used to think, "Well, they might be still

looking for me," when I was 12.

But by the time I got to be about 13,

I realized they weren't really looking for me.

They were looking for guys like Bobby Orr.

I don't know why.

But it seems that's the way...

And that's when I became a writer.

And I wrote about hockey

and find it passionately and intrinsically

involved in Canadian life.

"Another boy, Michael, had all the talent in the world

but did not own a pair of skates until he was 12.

And then only a broken-up, second-hand pair

with the blades chipped that he got from a pile

in the Foleys' basement.

Michael rarely played organized hockey, organized anything.

They didn't have the money.

He grew up in the truest sense alone.

He would appear out of the shadows

at the end of the lane after supper,

with his jacket undone,

and buttons missing off of his shirt,

his overboots unzipped and flapping and torn.

In his house, rats ran along the walls

and there was a cot behind the stove where he slept.

There probably were feelings in him even at that time

that there was no way out.

Poverty has a smell that has nothing to do with dirt.

It has the smell of darkness, of evening,

of leaves in the earth."

There's a very poignant thing that happened in Michael's life

in the book and in real life,

is he won 200 dollars on Bingo before Christmas one time.

And I simply assumed,

and so did others, that he would get his hockey skates.

Well, he wasn't going to get his hockey skates.

He was going to buy his grandmother a dress,

and his, you know, brother a coat.

I never understood why a person

would look down upon a person who didn't have money.

I could not understand that.

It is why I have my problem with the modern world,

that belief that change can come from physical things,

that it can come from material and physical things,

and that if we all have the right job

or the right plot of land,

that's not where equality comes from.

It's not where human dignity comes from.

It only comes from the soul of the individual.

They, he, and her, have to chart their own course.

"He had no idea where to go.

He went outside and followed the gravel drive

down to the road, bent over and kissed it.

He went to see Billy the priest.

'Can you tell me what I should do?' Arnold asked,

after he explained that he was unhappy.

The priest told him that he knew many people who were.

Arnold said that this might be true.

'Yes, many people feel this way.

But one must be true to oneself,

and in this way, find God.'

Arnold felt ashamed at the word 'God.'"

When I began to see

how people could destroy their own humanity

and the humanity of others,

I began to believe that faith was essential to humanity.

The idea of the regenerative force of faith;

man and women's implicit search for faith,

even if they decried it at the same time,

becomes more and more standard

in the orthodoxy of my work.

"John Delano went and sat in the back

of the church, and stared at the Blessed Virgin

and the cross on the altar.

There was the faint smell of ancient obligation,

the memory of 10,000 souls,

these devotions that did not matter to many anymore.

But that John in madness went back to,

prayed and fasted and thought about more than most,

although he was a person

who had been a bad candidate for any of it.

He knew, after solving cases for almost 35 years,

he'd not been able to prevent one murder.

And over those years,

he had dealt with 77 of them.

Still, he felt that sitting here,

at the back of Saint Rose of Lima,

was every bit as logical

as sitting anywhere else in the universe.

It was every bit as logical as spinning above the earth

in a space station,

floating without gravity

in a cylinder above the Pacific Islands.

He had blood on his hands from solving murders,

and he felt unblessed because of the work he did.

There was in the human dimension the damned truth:

that a man too eager to accuse someone

commits the same crime he accuses others of.

Self-righteous exposés

of man's inequities

show the inequity

of the self-righteous."

With the character John Delano,

and I've dealt with him in ten novels,

there was always this idea

that there was much more to him,

um, much more to him,

emotionally and with integrity

than people gave him credit for.

"The person writing was religious,

or at least believed in the import

of more cosmic forces in our lives.

And the incident had plagued him enough to write to Delano.

And John knew why:

He was a very well-known RCMP officer, that was true,

but he had also lost a boy years ago, his own son.

He had never solved his own son's case.

It had driven him to despair."

I had no idea that John Delano would be a police officer.

I had no idea that he would appear again

after my first few books.

But, that he forcefully comes back,

I think is essential to the canon of my work.

I empathize with him completely,

especially in the later books,

uh, because he goes from being somewhat of a town punk

to becoming a great man.

And he becomes a great man because of the force of love.

So it is a journey for him.

And it's a journey for me too.

"On Thanksgiving Saturday there was a dance,

and I came home drunk.

Elly said that Dad had phoned.

She told me he would be home for Christmas.

She never told him she was sick.

Never that I was drunk.

She had never been drunk.

I, on the other hand, had taken to being

what my neighbours thought I was.

For, once I became what they had delighted in saying I was,

they feared me.

Still, our house belied my monstership.

I wasn't even a thief in my heart.

I sought not darkness but light."

It's a very difficult thing to write about faith,

intentionally and seriously, when you live in a world

that has, in so many ways, just simply given it up,

and think it's not important.

There is a desire to belong to things

that at times you can't belong to.

And so you have to step away.

You have to be your own man or woman. You have to be.

And we don't always succeed.

But we hope that we succeed at the best point in our lives.

"In so many books published

it is all a package of social concern

and neighbourly wisdom now,

like crystals of instant soup.

The trick is to pretend it's your wisdom

as you step up to the podium to read.

Carry this handbook guide written out for you,

and don't misplace it with all the others in the crowded room:

A single mother suffers.

Men do not understand women.

A drunken father is brutal.

Fights in police cars are bad.

Ignorance and violence are always male.

Racists are always white.

The age of intellectual comfort has come.

Like instant coffee in a Styrofoam cup,

it's always all there, ready to mix up.

It takes a lot of encouragement to swallow.

But the payoff means you belong to the inner circle,

the compassionate ones of gentle Autumn book launchings

who are bound to agree with you on what true suffering means."

The Turtle, The Handbook and The Dark Night Air

came out of isolation;

not only physical isolation,

but a spiritual isolation from the other writers that I knew.

It seemed that so many of them were going on in a direction

that, which I thought would be not lasting,

that there were deeper, more treasured truths

that were important,

that they either did not comprehend

or did not want to comprehend.

Whether I could comprehend them in my work or not,

at least I knew there was a problem

that I had to try to address.

Still, I realize now that literature through the ages

does not very often favour those who have the handbook,

though they hold on to it like a treasure.

But literature favours in the end Emily Bronteë's torch.

The torch illuminates the ones who remain steadfast

in searching the foul night,

either in laughter or in tears,

searching, and knowing what it is

they are searching for. That's the key.

All around, everywhere...

there will be cold and darkness.

I'll say this:

There is no shame to recognize it as such.

The world is and must be and always has been

a brutal, mad and godless place

filled with priceless moments of hilarity,

sacrifice and love.

That is what the torch is for.

That's the reason for it.

To search this out."

I would like for you to talk to me about

how suffering finds its place in your work

and the necessity of suffering.

I wish I could explain suffering, in a way.

Um...

Without suffering, there is no spiritual evolution.

It allows empathy, and it allows contrition,

and it allows spiritual growth.

But today's mantra is to eradicate suffering,

without realizing who it is who suffers.

And that's a big deal, because the idea

that we know the sufferers and who suffer,

and therefore we can eradicate it for them,

is sometimes based on a very narrow falsehood.

"In the left-hand corner of his room,

beyond the window that stared out at the road,

Arnold managed to poke at the hornets with a broom.

Another fight.

That's all life was about. If one thought of it enough.

After supper this evening,

his girlfriend had left him again.

He saw her walk across the road.

What was he to do? He kept his courage.

Courage that the social workers told him he must have to live."

"Randy had become a little bully,

and though he was smaller than most of the other cubs,

would pick up anything to hit them.

Craig came to see them about it and seemed upset over it.

'Well,' Arnold said,

'did you know that in the foster home he was beaten

by the bigger boys and ordered about?'

Mabel said, 'He's just getting even now!'

'Yes,' Arnold said,

'He's just getting even, that'll teach them.'

But that night, they changed their minds.

'What did you hit that other cub with?' Mabel yelled.

'A stick!' So Mabel didn't know what to do about it,

so she slapped him with a belt until her stomach hurt.

So that took some of the pain away."

"Juliet has driven here to see how Randy is;

Juliet, the social worker.

I sit on the cot-spring praying to my mother,

praying to her dirty white arse,

and the washbasin that has loosened its atoms in the heat,

so I can smell it along with the spit from weeds.

I listen like a criminal to the guilt

seeping through the house boards, and crawling

belly down across the hot porch.

Guilt at the edge of our trees."

"I caught my mother crying.

Her hands busily tried to fix the clock radio,

and her tears came down her face.

It made me nervous.

This road is in trouble.

No one treats the other with respect.

My mother sniffs and her hands tremble

as she twists the dial.

There are many ways of crying, I know them all."

"One day, he took Randy's clothes to the dump

and burnt them.

The clothes Randy had had on

when he went to the hospital covered by spots of blood,

and cut open by a nurse, were the last to be burnt.

Then he went home,

and after listening to the hornets for ten minutes,

he got an idea of how to be rid of them.

He burnt the house to the ground."

Our duty to the poor will never end.

No matter what social program you have,

our duty to the poor, and to the oppressed,

will never end.

That's the duty of humanity.

That's the duty of men and women.

Without Peg, I probably wouldn't have gotten my work done.

I probably wouldn't have written my books.

Without her, I probably wouldn't have made it.

I can't see my having a literary career without her.

How are you doing?

There you are, you old son of a bitch.

- How you been? - Good.

How you been, buddy?

- Good. Good. - You're looking good.

Hi, Peter. Hi, Robert.

- How you doing? - Hey, Peter. How you doing?

I consider the friends I grew up with

my real friends. And I consider them

my real friends because they don't give a damn

who I am. They're my friends.

You know, they're proud of me if I write books.

But they don't care for, you know,

whether I've become a senator. I don't even think of myself

as a senator and neither do they, I don't think.

He was there, and this girl, about 14 or so.

He kept grabbing hold of her, up swinging her around.

He was going, "Come on! Dance with me!"

And then she'd get away from him.

And he did it twice, eh?

Second time he did it, Trapper looks at him,

and he says, "I'll dance with you."

Happy Birthday to you!

Happy Birthday, dear David!

Happy Birthday to you!

Yeah.

Well, thank you very much.

Long, long, long, long, long, long!

I know, I know.

Why are there so many trees?

Why so many trees?

Well, it's nice to have trees isn't it?

- Yeah. - Yeah, well these trees...

Why is there so many plants?

Well, it's nice to have plants too.

You know, if you lived in the city

where your daddy grew up,

there was hardly any trees

and there was hardly any plants.

Yeah, my son, taking over my life.

Want to try that?

Yeah, fish right along that bar, John.

- Okay. - See that bar?

"I can't think of one moment

where we look at someone in love and awe,

where they aren't in some great respect childlike.

Those who are at their best,

when they are, are most often like children.

When we see our loved ones acting not childishly,

but childlike, we realize why we love.

But it is more than just realizing why we love.

In fact, these qualities allow us to love

both that person and ourselves.

And the truth about love, as Saint Faustina said,

is that 'Love has only one measure, to be measureless.'"

"She did not know when she discovered

that it was time to go.

Debby Dormey's mother had taught her the secret

without ever meeting her once.

For when you do go, you do not have to say goodbye.

If you are brave enough,

you just have to someday walk away.

Years ago, the Miramichi writer who she liked

but who she could never read,

told her that they both were the kind of people

who did not belong.

He said you couldn't fight that, ever,

for they will not allow us safe passage

to the end of the night.

Which meant, and he smiled:

'That you and I will leave them,

so suddenly that it will take a while

for them to catch their breath

and realize we are no longer here.'"

I don't know what'll happen to my work in the future.

I think it might last. I think some of it'll last.

Um, but I did it because I love the Miramichi.

I did it because I love the people.

I wouldn't have written a word if I didn't love the people.

I wouldn't have written a word if I didn't find them...

I didn't find in them something sanctified

and something of beauty.

And uh, and I hope I wrote about them

with compassion and love, because that's how I feel.

Subtitling: difuze