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KEN MCGOOGAN
Canada, Scotland, Arctic 2016

King of the Beats died 50 years ago

King of the Beats died 50 years ago

October 13, 2019

The 50th anniversary of the death of Jack Kerouac, on October 21, is certain to inspire an outpouring of remembrance and might also spark controversy. Certainly the “King of the Beats,” with his Quebecois roots, had a powerful effect on me. In the Sixties, after reading just about everything Kerouac had written, I went on the road, hitchhiking and riding freight trains from Montreal to San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury.
In the Seventies, I earned an MFA degree with the first draft of a novel in which Kerouac figures. Next decade, while working as a literary journalist, I attended the Quebec City rencontre at which Beat luminaries (Allen Ginsberg, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Carolyn Cassady) encountered such Quebecois interpreters of Kerouac as Victor Levy-Beaulieu. I wrote about that conference in the Calgary Herald and The Kerouac Connection, arguing that “Kerouac is BIGGER than Beat.”
I rewrote my MFA novel and, with Pottersfield Press, published it in 1993 as Visions of Kerouac. The book later appeared in French translation as Le Fantome de Kerouac. It proved to be the only work of fiction that I wished to keep alive. Three times I revised and republished it, until in 2016, I brought out a fourth and final, final, final revision as Kerouac’s Ghost.
Looking back, I see Kerouac as influencing all my books, most of which take a creative nonfiction approach to biography and/or history. I regard Joan Rawshanks in the Fog, from Visions of Cody, as seminal. It preceded Tom Wolfe and qualifies Kerouac as the godfather of New Journalism, one of two major streams of creative nonfiction. No matter what I write about – from Arctic exploration to the Highland Clearances -- I burn to get out of the archives and go to where whatever happened. That’s the Kerouac in me.
Did I mention controversy? I draw your attention to Kerouac: The Last Quarter Century by Gerald Nicosia. He is the author of Memory Babe: A Critical Biography of Jack Kerouac. In 1983, when it appeared, I reviewed it: “Comparing Kerouac biographies, I quickly discovered that Memory Babe had far more authority than any other. I consider Gerald Nicosia to be the world’s foremost authority on Jack Kerouac.”
I see no reason to revise that assessment -- even though, for the past couple of decades, Nicosia has been embroiled in a battle against those who gained control of the Kerouac estate and then sold it piecemeal to the highest bidder. The Last Quarter Century, which tells a terrible true story of high-stakes forgery, bullying, and unmitigated greed, is a must-read for Kerouac aficionados. It’s available through Noodlebrain Press at Box 130, Corte Madera, California (email: ellenrecycles@yahoo.com). A revised edition of Memory Babe will be published in 2020 by Cool Grove Press.


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Ken McGoogan
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First Highlander Awards celebrate excellence

First Highlander Awards celebrate excellence

October 12, 2019
The first-ever Highlander Awards were conferred yesterday  evening at a quiet ceremony involving drams of Lagavulin. Created to mark the launch of Flight of the Highlanders, and consisting of shout-outs, kudos, and widespread recognition, they celebrate excellence in five categories.
The Best Bookstore Display Award went to Biblioasis in Windsor, where Theo Hummer went the extra mile . . . as you can see in the magnificent presentation above.
Kew-Balmy Beach in the Toronto Beaches took The Best Landing Site Award. At this location,  Highlanders thundered ashore in their hundreds.
The Best Book Review honors  went to Dean Jobb, whose stellar review appeared in The Scotsman. Jobb, whose latest book is The Murderous Doctor Cream, concludes that "in a time of rising intolerance toward minorities and immigrants, Flight of the Highlanders is a much-needed reality check.
McGoogan’s chronicle of how impoverished but tenacious Scots built new lives in Canada – and transformed their new country – is a reminder that all of us, regardless of origin or race, want the same things: a better life and a brighter future."
The Best Collage Celebration Award proved to be no contest. The folks at Neilson Park Creative Centre, led by Alison Lam, launched a new authors' series with Flight of the Highlanders and swept the category. 
Last but not least, after a hard-fought battle, The Best Excerpt Award went to Canadian Geographic for its gorgeous presentation (see below). Hats off to all the winners. Oh, and slangevar!

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Ken McGoogan
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New book revels in firsts: talk, series, review

New book revels in firsts: talk, series, review

October 06, 2019

Mine was the first presentation in a first-ever series of author readings that launched today at the Neilson Park Creative Centre in Etobicoke. I called my talk When the Highlanders Came to Canada: Dragging History into the 21st Century. From Type Books, manager Beck Andoff turned up with maybe 30 copies of Flight of the Highlanders . . . and sold all but three of them. Alison Lam organized and launched the series . . . and after I spoke lined up to buy five copies of the book. That's what I call leading by example.
Meanwhile, the first review of the book turned up in The Scotsman on October 3. You can access the original by clicking here. Written by Dean Jobb, whose latest book is The Murderous Doctor Cream, the review notes  that Scots played a key role in the creation of Canada, but "it took more than a couple of visionary politicians to build a new nation. Scottish farmers and their families – driven from their lands by the hundreds of thousands and “packed off to the colonies like so many bales of manufactured goods,” as one contemporary noted – did the heavy lifting. These “persecuted” and “dispossessed emigrants,” author Ken McGoogan reminds us, battled “hardship, hunger and adamant rejection in a New World wilderness” as they “went to work laying the foundations of a modern nation”.
The review continues:
"In Flight of the Highlanders, the bestselling Canadian author argues that the Highland Scots – victims of the Clearances and the oppression that followed the Battle of Culloden – were “Canada’s first refugees.” And that makes their story a timely reminder of the contribution refugees and other newcomers have made, and continue to make, to their new homelands. Today, almost five million Canadians claim Scottish heritage. . . .
McGoogan, who has chronicled Arctic exploration and Canada’s Scottish heritage in previous books, draws on extensive travels and research in Scotland to trace the origins of these refugees and the injustices that drove them overseas. While this will be familiar territory for Scottish readers, he soon moves to the North American phase of the story. Large-scale resettlement began in 1773, when the Hector – a tiny “coffin ship” crammed with almost 200 people – survived a hurricane and landed at Pictou, Nova Scotia. Waves of “brave-hearted Highlanders” followed, among them some unfortunates who settled in the United States, remained “loyal” during the American Revolution and were then driven northward in a second exodus.
Canadians of English, Irish and French descent, whose ancestors also helped to build their country, may bristle at the focus on Scottish immigrants. And the subtitle is a little jarring, as Canadians own up to an ugly legacy of mistreatment and assimilation of indigenous peoples; the arrival of the Scots and other European settlers, as the author acknowledges, was the unmaking of their Canada.
But in a time of rising intolerance toward minorities and immigrants, Flight of the Highlanders is a much-needed reality check. McGoogan’s chronicle of how impoverished but tenacious Scots built new lives in Canada – and transformed their new country – is a reminder that all of us, regardless of origin or race, want the same things: a better life and a brighter future.
(Photos by Sheena Fraser McGoogan.)
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Ken McGoogan
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Shouting out to the creators of bestsellerdom

Shouting out to the creators of bestsellerdom

September 24, 2019
I feel driven to offer up a few shout-outs, starting with the Royal Canadian Geographical Society. The folks there are not only putting me on stage in Ottawa on Dec. 3 but look right: they're telling the world about that event in stylish fashion. And also inviting people to register (see below).
Last year, the RCGS sent me on a whirlwind speaking tour of Scotland. That was in conjunction with the Royal Scottish Geographical Society. Galashiels, Ayr, Helensborough, Perth, whoosh, all inside a week. Then there was the book excerpt that turned up in Canadian Geographic magazine:  https://kenmcgoogan.blogspot.com/2019/04/cangeo-goes-gorgeous-with-highlanders.html
Obviously, all this takes a team. But the man who is leading the charge at the RCGS is CEO John Geiger, so to him especially I want to say hey! Thanks!
Meanwhile, if you check out the bestsellers list at the foot of this post, and you have some idea of how the book trade works, you'll understand why I want to thank first my tireless agent Bev Slopen and then the folks at HarperCollins Canada, where editor Patrick Crean is obviously my main man. And Noelle Zitzer and Alan Jones have been instrumental in making the book look gorgeous.  But the reason  Flight of the Highlanders turned up on that bestseller list immediately after release is because the sales and marketing team got the book into bookstores across the country. They like to keep a low-profile. But led by vice-president Leo MacDonald, that team includes Michael Guy-Haddock and Cory Beatty at head office, and in the field, such expert salespeople as Mike Mason and Terry Toews. So: hats off to all of you. Your skill and hard work are much appreciated.
To register for that Ottawa event -- and get a better look at that poster -- go here:
https://events.myconferencesuite.com/Can_Geo_Talks_Presents_Ken_McGoogan/reg/landing
Original list: https://vancouversun.com/entertainment/books/international-30-bestselling-books-for-the-week-of-september-21
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Ken McGoogan
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Graeme Gibson speaks of Gentleman Death

Graeme Gibson speaks of Gentleman Death

September 18, 2019

In autumn 1999,  when we journalists went on strike at the Calgary Herald, fighting to install a union, two visiting Toronto-based writers joined us on the picket line: Graeme Gibson and Margaret Atwood. That meant a lot to us and spoke volumes about the two of them.  Six years before that, as the newspaper's Books Editor, I interviewed Gibson about GENTLEMAN DEATH, his recently published fourth novel. This seems a good time to hear his voice. 

"At heart fundamentalism is not a religious notion," says a character in Gentleman Death. "It`s political, right-wing political of the most perfidious kind." She then describes the leaders of "America`s fundamentalist Right as demagogues and crank ayatollahs every one."
Novelist Graeme Gibson says he wasn`t thinking of the Reform Party when he wrote those words. But in his view religious fundamentalism, be it Christian or Islamic, translates as social engineering, social control.
"We`re not talking religion," Gibson said in Calgary, "we`re talking politics. How to stabilize a certain political view. If I were a Jew or a Muslim, I`d be very worried."
The Toronto novelist, whose books include Five Legs, Communion and Perpetual Motion, has been a driving force in cultural politics since the early 1970s. He helped form both The Writers` Union of Canada and the Writers` Development Trust and has served as president of the Canadian Centre of International Pen. In 1992 he received the Order of Canada, and earlier this month (October 1993), the Harbourfront Festival Prize, worth $11,000.
Politics is subtly present throughout Gibson`s latest novel, as when his narrator, Robert Fraser, rants about prime ministers who sell Canada to pay for their own incompetence and lack of vision.
By including this political subtext, Gibson risks dating the novel and making it less accessible to other cultures (previous works have been translated into French, German, Polish and Spanish). "I thought about that," he said. "But I was trying to make Fraser real. That`s the kind of man he is. If I`d backed off because the politics wouldn`t sell in France, I`d betray my man. As a writer, my major responsibility is to my book and the people in it. Not to the future, and not to other cultures."
The politics is intelligent. But Gentleman Death is primarily a literary treat. It`s sophisticated fiction that finds Gibson using sparkling language to explore profoundly adult themes. And to come to terms with death.
Structurally, the book reminds me of that contemporary classic Flaubert`s Parrot by Julian Barnes. There, the hero hid from painful experience by obsessing about a dead writer. Here, Robert Fraser begins novel after novel to avoid dealing with the deaths of his father and brother.
Gibson wanted to avoid writing about a writer, he said, and considered making Fraser a lawyer. "But this is a book about Fraser`s passage from denial to acceptance," he said. "And only with a writer can you demonstrate the evasions. The reader can see the nature of Fraser`s evasions for himself."
I`ve mentioned language. Here`s Fraser: "Preparing to shave one morning several weeks after Father`s funeral I discovered Death himself had entered my body. Not the cruel fellow of scarlet corners, not Death who comes as a stranger, but that lean inevitable harbinger of mortality, of succession, the Gentleman whose guise is time."
That`s chosen almost at random. "I`m fairly language-driven as a writer," Gibson said. "On some levels that`s the chief glory of the novel. I find flat prose an enormous turn-off."
Because of the way Gibson uses language, Gentleman Death is a richly entertaining novel. Then there`s the engaging wit. At one point, Fraser makes fun of his own nationalism as "fashionable nostalgia, the result of not watching enough American television."
Or consider the flirtatious exchange that arises when he tells a lady-friend that a female ghost visited, and she vows to find out who it was: "Which wanton did you imagine creeping into your bed?"
"Beth, Beth," I protested. "You know it`s always you. It`s only you."
"You`re either a liar, Robbie, or a disappointment."
"Isn`t it possible to belong to both groups?"
"That would be unpardonable."
For the rest, Gibson still raves about Margaret Atwood, his partner of more than two decades: "What astonishes me most is how little fame has changed her. She`s extraordinarily resolute about being herself. Peggy has remained the writer I knew from the beginning."
He`s working on another novel, which he declines to discuss for the record. But don`t be surprised if it includes a political subtext: "As a nationalist," Gibson said, "I have to be optimistic, and as a humanist I have to have faith. But it`s not always easy."
(In 2009, Graeme Gibson and I participated in a Robbie Burns Polar Dip organized by Adventure Canada. Kindred spirits, we did so by serving whisky to those who actually took the plunge.) 


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Ken McGoogan
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Highlanders invade Toronto Beaches

Highlanders invade Toronto Beaches

September 15, 2019

They said it couldn't be done. But Highlanders came ashore Sunday morning. It happened in the Toronto Beaches. The invaders move now to Ben McNally Books, the most beautiful (and best-stocked) bookstore in Canada.  Kilts, bagpipes, selfies . . . a full-blown signing! Maybe we'll hear a passage or two. Tuesday 6 p.m.  366 Bay Street, immediately south of City Hall. You know you want to be there. Come on down!
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Ken McGoogan
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Scottish Studies Society goes the extra mile

Scottish Studies Society goes the extra mile

September 11, 2019

OK, so I feel moved to give a shout-out to the Scottish Studies Society, and especially to president and newsletter editor David M. Hunter. The latest Society newsletter, The Scots Canadian, was at the printer when Hunter got wind of Flight of the Highlanders. Nothing daunted, he put together a flyer – noting the book launch on Sept. 17 (see below) – and turned it into a newsletter insert. In my opinion, that’s going the extra mile. David, huge thanks!
The finished flyer reads as follows: In September 2019, Canadian author Ken McGoogan will publish Flight of the Highlanders: The Making of Canada. The book tells the story of those courageous Scots who, ruthlessly evicted from their ancestral homelands, sailed in “coffin ships” to Canada, where they battled hardship, hunger, and even murderous persecution. While in How the Scots Invented Canada, Ken celebrated outstanding individuals, this time around he focuses on the common people. During the infamous Highland Clearances, tens of thousands of dispossessed and destitute Scots crossed the Atlantic — unfortunate prototypes for the refugees we see arriving today from around the world. If contemporary Canada is more welcoming to newcomers than most countries, Flight of the Highlanders shows that it is at least partly because of the lingering influence of those persecuted Highlanders. Together with their better-off brethren—the lawyers, educators, politicians, and businessmen—those unbreakable Scots proved the making of Canada. The book can be pre-ordered online or through any bookstore.
Toronto launch: Ben McNally Books, 366 Bay St., Sept. 17, 2019 from 6 to 8 p.m. All welcome.

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Ken McGoogan
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Before turning mainly to books about arctic exploration and Canadian history, Ken McGoogan worked for two decades as a journalist at major dailies in Toronto, Calgary, and Montreal. He teaches creative nonfiction writing through the University of Toronto and in the MFA program at King’s College in Halifax. Ken served as chair of the Public Lending Right Commission, has written recently for Canada’s History, Canadian Geographic, and Maclean’s, and sails with Adventure Canada as a resource historian. Based in Toronto, he has given talks and presentations across Canada, from Dawson City to Dartmouth, and in places as different as Edinburgh, Melbourne, and Hobart.