Archive
“The Boy” makes the Globe
My thanks to Neil Reynolds of The Globe and Mail for a warm and friendly column on my book, “The Boy in the Picture.”
Neil’s piece takes up almost half of today’s Opp Ed page with a reprint of the famous Last Spike photo and a favorable review.
I especially liked this part:
” …inspiring tale … Argyle tells this Boy’s Own tale superbly…”
(See, that’s how publishers pick out cover blurbs.)
You can read it here.
Diary of a Book Launch
Wed., Aug. 11 - We fly from Toronto to Kelowna to begin a British Columbia book tour for my Young Adult bio of “Last Spiker” Edward Mallandaine – The Boy in the Picture.
Aug. 12 - An enjoyable stay at the English Rose Garden B&B where host Mina Muench greets us with a glass of homemade wine (good, too!). The car Budget rents us is such a lemon we take it back and opt for a Ford Mustang convertible. A week of glorious B.C. sunshine ahead of us!
Aug. 13-14. We drive to Revelstoke via the pretty lake town of Salmon Arm, stopping first to visit Barb Britton of the Monahan agency in Vernon, who run the big Bookland store there. In Sicamous, on the shore of Shuswap Lake, we look for the site where the steamer Rainbow would have brought Edward ashore. At the Chamber of Commerce we’re told that’s in Old Town but we can’t go there — it’s now a gated condo community. So much for history!
Aug. 15 – After attending the Last Spike dinner of the Railway Days festival, an enthusiastic crowd gathers at the Museum for the book launch. Lots of questions and keen interest. Guide George Hopkins tells us every tour he conducts produces questions about “the boy in the picture.” Curator Jennifer Dickerson leads a q&a and lots of books are sold.
Aug. 16 - We get our first daily newspaper review, in the Victoria Times-Colonist, and it’s a good one: Dave Obee writes:
“It’s aimed at younger readers, but don’t let that sway you. It is highly readable, and it will help to shed new light on the construction of the railway 125 years ago.”
Aug. 17 - We head for Creston, my home town and the town that Edward Mallandaine helped found. Tammy Hardwick is waiting for us at the Creston Museum where we’re given a beautiful setting in the garden for a signing session. This is one of the finest small town museums in Canada. Two of my classmates from Grade 1, Phyllis Vigne and Russell Tompkins, put in a surprise appearance. How wonderful to see them! The museum sells out!
Aug. 18 – On to Nelson, buddy Chris Moore’s home town. He blogs:
“I know a writer named Ray Argyle. When Ray Argyle was a kid in Creston, BC, he knew an old gent named Edward Mallendaine. When Edward Mallendaine was a kid, he squeezed himself in behind an old gent named Donald Smith for what has been called the most famous photo in Canadian history…”
Aug. 20 - We arrive in Vancouver and are put up by Genni Guinn and Frank Hooke at their wonderful South Granville St. home. Her new novel, Solitaria will be out next month. There’s an evening boccie party with lots of interesting guests, including Vancouver Writers’ Festival artistic director Hal Wake.
Aug. 21 - It’s a bonus when I drive out to Abbotsford to meet April Bell, who I’ve been emailing for the past year. April is a fount of knowledge on a major miscarriage of justice when the wrong man was hanged for the murder of her great great aunt back in Ontario. It’s the topic of an article I have coming up in the December issue of Canada’s History.
Aug. 22-24. We get two days off from interviews and signings for a weekend in Whistler where partner Deborah Windsor’s son Damien is with Fairmont Whistler Resort. They go skydiving – jumping out of a plane at 10,000 feet! I’m grounded, mercifully.
Aug. 26 - Back home, ready for the Toronto launch of The Boy in the Picture at Roundhouse Park Sunday at 4 p.m. Details on the web site of the Railway Historical Association, here. Hope to see you!
The “Canadian Railroad Trilogy” and the Last Spike
I’m getting ready for the launch of my book “The Boy in the Picture” on Sunday (August 15) at the Railway Days Festival in Revelstoke, B.C.
Book launches are always high on authors’ agendas. I’m indebted to the Revelstoke Railway Museum for working me into their observations of the 125th anniversary of the driving of the Last Spike.
Museum director Jennifer Dunkerson will interview me and I’ll be signing copies of the book.
It’s the story of boyish Edward Mallandaine who set out to “fight the Indians” in the Riel Rebellion, missed the uprising, but had hair-raising adventures in the B.C. mountains during the final days of the building of the Canadian Pacific Railway in 1885.
It’s a Young Adult title
– the best-selling sector in the book business these days — but Margaret Bryant from my publisher Dundurn Press reports that her grandfather enjoyed it!
I’m blown away by the early response. As I write, I’m No. 1 on the children’s non-fiction best seller list on Amazon. Had a great interview with the Revelstoke Times-Review which will run a feature in their anniversary edition coming out on Thursday.
After Revelstoke, I’ll have a book signing at the Creston Museum in Creston, B.C., on Tuesday afternoon, August 17. My Toronto launch is set for Roundhouse Park in Toronto — where a railway museum is being assembled — for Sunday, August 29 at 4 p.m. (Sorry for all these shameless self-promotions.) It’s on Bremner Blvd., opposite the CN Tower.
All this has gotten me to thinking about how celebrated railways are in our history, in songs as well as in books.
Among many great railway songs, there’s Paul Quarrington’s “Gotta Love a Train” which I heard him perform at Hugh’s Room not long before his untimely death.
But nothing, I’m sure Paul would have agreed, matches Gordon’s Lightfoot’s unforgettable “Canadian Railroad Trilogy.”
The CBC web site has an interesting piece on how this matchless classic was commissioned by the CBC and first played on air on January 1, 1967 – the year of Canada’s Centennial.
The article by Jennifer Higgs about “Railroad Trilogy,” Canadian nationalism and 1960s folk music, critiques Lightfoot’s song as an exclusively white, European interpretation of Canadian history.
Well, that’s what Canadian history looked like at that time. She criticizes the absence of aboriginal references in the song. But it was written before “les sauvages” of New France had completed their long migration into the “First Nations” of modern Canada.
The “Canadian Railroad Trilogy” accurately represents attitudes of the era of which it speaks, and the time in which it was written.
Nonetheless, it remains a stirring, epic poem that has rightfully contributed to Lightfoot’s iconic status as Canada’s folk singer laureate.
Listen to it now, and see if you don’t agree. (Note that the visuals include pictures of Chinese railway laborers, to whom I devote a chapter in “The Boy in the Picture.”)
The boy, the man and the Last Spike
The novelist and creative writing teacher Barbara Kyle has reminded me of the theory of six degrees of separation. It holds that everyone on earth is linked to each of us by no more than six steps, through people we know, who know someone else, and so on. This is perhaps the basis for the old saying, “It’s a small world.”
The subject came up when I passed along the news that my new book The Boy in the Picture will come out in August 2010 from the Natural Heritage imprint of the leading Canadian book publisher, Dundurn Press.
It tells the story of young Edward Mallandaine, the “boy in the picture” of the driving of the Last Spike that marked completion of the Canadian Pacific Railway on November 7, 1885.
In this case, I’m only one degree of separation from that great historic event. When Edward was a very old man and I was a young boy, I knew him. He was the Reeve (Mayor) of my hometown of Creston, B.C.
It’s a little humbling when I think that the entire history of Canada since Confederation is wrapped up in the lives of just the two of us!
Edward was a lad in Victoria when the Northwest Rebellion broke out and he decided he wanted to “fight the Indians.” He headed to the prairies but the rebellion was put down before he got there.
Fate had a different destiny for him. He was hired to ride dispatches by horseback over the incomplete section of the railway in the Monashee mountain range. That put him in Craigellachie for the Last Spike ceremony. You can see him peering out from this picture.
I’ve written The Boy in the Picture as a Young Adult book. It includes about fifty historic pictures.
I see Edward as a great role model for today’s young people who live in a vastly different Canada, where we’re joined by the web and other technologies, instead of the railway. But Edward’s lust for adventure and his unflinching courage in tackling unknown dangers fit well with the challenges young people face today.
The Boy is based on historic records and stories I remember from Edward. It’s told through creative non-fiction and combines plot, setting and dialogue in a story-telling narrative of historic adventure. Maybe it’ll help to make Canadian history a little more exciting!
Edward went on to become a pioneer of British Columbia. He helped found the town of Creston where he was “the man” for many, many years.
I’ve been researching Edward’s life for the past three years, first for an article in The Beaver magazine, and now for this book. I’ve dug through files on Edward’s family in the B.C. Archives in Victoria, the Glenbow Museum in Calgary, and Library and Archives Canada in Ottawa.
I’ve also had great help from two museums in Revelstoke, B.C., the Revelstoke Railway Museum and the Revelstoke Museum. I’m excited that the book launch will be at the Railway Museum on August 17 as part of their annual Railway Days Festival.
2010 will be a big year for the Railway Museum because it marks the 125th anniversary of the driving of the Last Spike. Maybe we’ll see you there!
At CBC, all that’s old is new again
It is truly the “dog days” of Summer when your TV screen is filled with endless repeats. Repeats that no one really wants to watch anyway, compared to the better uses we can make of our time.
But this Summer, the re-runs are more prolific than ever on CBC-TV. What really hurts is that they come at us during a lousy — cold, wet and rainy – time when our options for diversions are fewer than usual.
The weather’s better around our place this week. But when even The National starts running old news items — as it did this week with a piece on Canadian asbestos exports — I say it’s time to ask what’s going on?
The repeats are even more obvious on CBC Radio. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard endless repeats of Dispatches items, replays of The Debaters, or the endless repetition of features from The Current.
The CBC warned us, back in May, that the network’s $171 million shortfall this year means more repeat programming. As one example, they’ve cut in half the old two-hour noontime call-in shows (surely one of the most economical types of broadcasting) in favor of jamming in more re-runs.
Come August 31, the CBC will expand its supper-time local TV newscasts from 60 to 90 minutes. But listen to this: CBC spokesman Chris Ball cites the increase not as a means of delivering a fuller range of local news, but as “as a way to do things smarter and do things on a cost-effective basis.” Cheaper, in other words.
At the bottom of the CBC’s soul-searching is the conflict between buying high-priced American shows that will draw ad-rich audiences, and of fulfilling what should be its primary role of giving Canadians information and cultural content that supports our uniqueness in the world.
You can see an attempt to do this in the two-part mini series, Iron Road, that began last Sunday night and winds up next Sunday. It’s the melodramatic and not entirely historically accurate story of a Chinese girl who comes to Canada (Gold Mountain) in search of her father, lost during the building of the railway in B.C.
I watched with a critical eye because I’m just finishing up work on my Young Adult title, The Boy in the Picture. It’s the story of young Edward Mallandaine, the boy whose shining face peers out from the famous picture of the driving of the Last Spike of the CPR.
Part sex drama, part kung fu movie, The Iron Road has some beautiful scenes and well played out vignettes. It’s the first joint Chinese-Canadian film production in 22 years and it’s based on what was originally an opera.
The Iron Road, however, is more fiction than fact. The Canadian Pacific Railway is replaced by the Nickel Railroad, and none of the characters even suggest the real people who recruited six thousand Chinese workers to drive the railway up the Fraser River canyon and across the mountains into Alberta.
Whether a production like this creates an appreciation and understanding for Canada’s heritage is highly arguable. It brings the fact of the railway building to a broad Canadian audience. But it tells us nothing of the struggle than brought it into existence, beyond providing a worthwhile recognition of the ordeal of its Chinese laborers. That’s entertainment!
