Nightmares, Dreams and Deliberate Ideas, For Real and On Purpose

In 2021, during the weird silence of the Covid lockdown, I woke up one morning electrified with the memory of a dream I'd had. I'd dreamt I was walking through an orchard, much like the fruit farm I grew up on in Niagara-on-the-Lake. There may or may not have been blossoms in the trees. You know how ephemeral dreams are. And in this dream, the peace is broken by the sudden intrusion of a large bull moose huffing and grunting angrily, intent on doing harm. It knocks me down with its huge 12 point antlers, stomping on my chest with all the weight on its hooves, breaking bones and skin, puncturing my lungs, stopping my screams short. I woke up with this vivid though horrible image, so affected that I wrote it down immediately. I really needed to make a story out of this. Ideas arrived from all directions.

With the freedom of working from home, I was able to research topics like moose hunting, bow archery, the conditions of wartime Rotterdam and the viability of apple husbandry in Northern Ontario. Put all together, it would make a short story, combining many elements, such as loss, generational trauma, racism, identity and heritage. The story would be 'Berend', and it stands as one of the most comprehensive and emotionally charged stories I'd ever written.

The problem with 'Berend' however, would be its length. At 20 pages, it was a bit long for publication in a literary journal and I knew I would have trouble finding placement for it, as confident as I was. That seems to be a common problem for me, story lengths. I was also haunted by the fringe characters in the story, feeling that their own stories would need fleshing out. I sat with the story for a couple more years, until last summer, when I made the decision to create a full novel out of it.

I knew I wanted to create something with the background of my Dutch heritage. At the same time as the impetus of this story, details of the horrific treatment of indigenous children in Canadian residential schools were coming out, casting a pall over every nationalist sentiment that I'd ever had about being Canadian. What right did I have, as the son of an immigrant, to be in a nation founded on deception, genocide and oppression? My presence on these stolen lands began to feel illegitimate. It made me feel ill to consider it. I began to think more about the soil on which I am indigenous, where I might truly belong; the Rhine Delta with all its tributaries, the lowlands of Western Europe. At the same time, I couldn't deny the fact that I'd been born here in Canada, and that I truly loved the land and the cultures of all the people living on it. I started to consider a wider story that would span the full reach of my identity as a Canadian born in the Dutch diaspora. I wanted to acknowledge it all, the history, the social background, the heritage and the situation as it stands today.

What followed was more intensive research. I wanted to know all about the Dutch resistance during the Nazi Occupation of the Netherlands during the Second World War. I wanted to know about those who had immigrated to Canada in the aftermath of the war. I wanted to know about the mining industry in mid-20th century Northern Ontario. I wanted to know the streets of Rotterdam, Cochrane, Montreal and Toronto in the Fifties, Nineties and present time. I delved into my family history, read book after book on the topics I would include in the novel, taking notes the whole time in one of the many notebooks that had been gifted to me. In these notes, I could envision scenes I would want to include in the narrative, considering how different characters would react to them, how and where they could fit in the plot. So much ink, so many pages. As I progressed, I knew how I wanted the plot to go, but I still had no idea how the timelines would weave into each other.

I knew I wanted a non-linear narrative, to tell stories in different time frames, connecting them all with a fine thread. I created character sketches of all my main characters and took the scenes from the notes I had written to give them personalities, with arcs and motivations. Still with all this, everything was sitting in pieces without an instruction manual to guide its assembly. 

So, just yesterday morning, at my dining room table, I sat and drew a chart of the events in the different timelines and started zipper-merging potential segues that made sense. This was what I needed.

When I was done, I had a view of the whole story, spanning 85 years and 4 generations. I knew my novel's beginning, middle and end. It was like learning I was going to be a father again, I was so excited. Every so often, I will open the chart on Google Docs, just to look at it and feel that dopamine wash once again.

So now I set out to add structure to the frame, to create this story stemming from the tumult of the German Occupation of the Netherlands, the immigrant experience of the early Fifties, the identity conflicts of growing up in the Dutch diaspora during the Canadian centennial decade, and finally to the current unexpected resurgence of regressive right wing politics and its fearsome impact on the vulnerable members of our society. The scope is wide, but I have a vision and that vision has perspective. I know what I'm doing now. 

I have a lot of things going on. I am still working as an educational assistant full time. I have a collection of short stories and a complete novel looking for a publisher. There are submissions to be made. In September, I will be starting an editing course with Concordia University to boost my writing skills and possibly open a channel of income for the future when I retire. But all the while, I will be spending this summer writing this novel. A lot of it hits home for me, drawing from personal experiences and the experiences of my family members. It brings into focus my political convictions and it will give me a voice against the rise of fascism and social regression going on today. This could be life-affirming, if not life-changing. I’m onto something good here. It feels good.

Notes from the American Highway: The Road to Individe

 There was a time, before today’s cross-border troubles, when a trip to the United States was a common thing for me. Enhanced driver’s license in hand, I would timidly cross over to New York, the Carolinas and Florida two or three times a year. During this time in the aughts of the first decade of the millennium, I was also growing into a new phase of my writing. After noticing a great many of my stories had been written with little to no commitment to the setting the stories were inhabiting, I wanted to challenge myself to aim my writerly camera at the new locales I’d been visiting. Those trips south of the border soon had me writing reams of notes about the differences in culture and attitude between Canada and the U.S., with an eye out for the eccentricities they would present. It turned out to be a deep trove from which I would choose numerous scenarios.

First off, it gave me the flash fiction ‘Geosmin’, an attempt at automatic writing, a genre that worked well the idiosyncrasies of American culture. In that open train of thought, I came about depicting a weary traveller from Newfoundland on a layover in Orlando en route to the Galapagos Encantados. My own experiences with Orlando with its hyperbolic news media and the multi-layered environment of a Disneyfied International Drive, I was able to give an absurdist take on a quintessential American city. The story found a place in Blank Spaces magazine months later, as well as a part in the Just Words anthology in 2020.

That accomplished, my remaining notes still had more to say. Somewhere in those pages, a road trip story was demanding to be made. “Never compose anything unless the not composing of it becomes a positive nuisance to you,” Gustav Holst once said, so from this came the story of ‘Individe’.

At the time, I was in the middle of extricating myself from a failed marriage and my headspace was looking to do some healing. I began to craft a cathartic component to the story to help me along my own journey towards finding myself again. Starting with the concept of individuality, meaning the indivisiveness of the singular self, I drew up themes of personal autonomy, identity and the preservation of the self. ‘Individe’. The unbreakable self, the sum of its parts. Along the same lines of ‘indivisiveness’, I looked at the unbreakable ties of fraternal unity, speaking also of the geographical divide of the continental east and west, north and south. 

Furthermore, I’d always loved the dynamics of brotherhood. I relished forming the construct of  two siblings who are close, but have grown apart due to circumstances in their lives. I love the banter between male friends, how it can oscillate from lighthearted chirping to heated arguments and then resolve itself with harmless juvenile ridiculousness. I started to work on characters loosely fashioned after the dynamics between my own brother and myself, giving them both proportionate baggage to carry and let their banter dictate how the journey would unfold. With all this, I started to piece together a narrative of two fraternal twin brothers, estranged through the trajectory of their own separate lives who arrange an escape  from the Canadian winter to watch the Toronto Blue Jays spring training in Florida. On the way, illness and emotional freight complicates the trek as they consider their own familial divide, trying to reconcile them.

As the story approached fruition, I was seeing that it was going to have a word count in the nine thousands, which pushed it into the category of novella- something I didn’t expect. Considering this, I turned inward to see if there were any elements I could expand upon to truly flesh it out in the novella context. This brought me more developed characters with stronger motivations and a story that could breathe and resonate more.

So with this rather long story, too long for the submission guidelines of most magazines, too short to be viewed as marketable by the traditional publishing industry, I began to look at opportunities to publish it myself. In the end, I turned to Kindle Publishing and found it an easy platform to develop an e-book and later a printed piece. I now have twenty little book-babies in a neat cardboard box in my office, ready to go out, looking nifty with their glossy, professional-looking (but self-designed) covers. There’s a certain dopamine rush involved when you finally hold a printed copy of something you’ve made yourself. It's a reward in itself. It’s partly why I create art. Each creation feels like a gift to myself, each finished product always filling me with pride.

So I send my little book-babies out into the world, hoping readers catch my drift and enjoy my twists of phrase and relate to the characters I’ve devised. Yes, there’s a little bit of brave narcissism involved in promoting it, but each step of the way I’m humbled in its creation and the craft of ensuring its artistic and technical strength. It’s a balanced thing, full of checks and balances to maintain but when it’s done, it brings the greatest affirmation. You release your little baby into the wild, and you hope for the best, giving it the greatest send-off you can. 

So, reader. It’s up to you now…