Five Roses in Ontario / no appropriation of cuisine

We had fun, Five Roses and I in Ontario. First, gourmet nibbles and wine with enthusiastic book clubbers in Stratford at the Chefs' School

then a pastry chef showing us how to make cream puffs and inviting us to try our hand at piping whipped cream, followed by me talking about the role of food in characterization and fiction. This, too, was with the Stratford Writers' Festival under the auspices of the Chefs' School. Imaginative programming, right? Not your everyday writer's gig!

As a footnote--something to consider?--there were more male participants at this pastry/writers' event than I usually see when I speak about a novel. 

then a most interesting interview at the Westdale Library in Hamilton with Jennifer Gillies, artistic director of gritLit. Perceptive questions and comments from the audience.

and THEN, in honour of the working-class setting of my novel, an upscale Québécois-themed supper hosted by the Appetite for Words Festival in Stratford. I've been to many réveillons and cabanes à sucre, and wow! Stratford's chef Randi Rudner topped any version of the old-timey pea soup and tourtière I've ever eaten. Luscious salmon, julienned celeriac, fresh puréed peas, chunks of smoked ham, poached egg, tourtière, spicy baked beans, sauteed brussel sprouts, red cabbage chutney... There was more! As well as wine pairings--some of which I had to refuse, poor me! because I don't drink red wine. (That's a joke, right? I was so happy that evening I could have drunk tap water.) Randi, I should note, although she has now lives in Ontario, is from Quebec so there is no appropriation of cuisine. 

The back wall of the dining room of the Chefs' School is in glass, so diners can see the chef and cooks concocting the meal. I walked by the school earlier in the afternoon, and prep was already well underway. I was familiar with the scene since I worked in restaurant kitchens in another lifetime, when I was a grad student in Toronto. 

Between tourtière and dessert, Theresa Albert and I had a lively interview about Five Roses.

The food was so fine! But of course the best part of all these events was meeting readers and would-be readers. Hearing the comments, observations, and questions readers have. Even hearing what people didn't like because that's worth talking about too.

Several wanted to know the practicalities of how a wannabe writer goes from scribbling on pages to getting them published. You keep at it. Beginnings can be humble. The other day I walked past the decrepit brick building behind a garage where, up on the second floor, I saw the dirty windows of the editorial office/kitchen of the magazine that first published me. I don't think the magazine went past two issues. I've just googled the name of the itchy young man who was the editor and can find no internet trace of him. Mind you, that was years ago. Years for him, years for me too. With years between publications. That's how you get published. You keep doing it despite the years.

This morning, in my reading, I came across this: "...the most worn-out clichés traverse time for generations, all the while the most beautiful poems fade to oblivion." (from La petite et le vieux by Marie-Renee Lavoie) Maybe that's what it means to be a writer: you persist in trying to beat the cliches and the silence, even when you know they're destined for oblivion.

Thank you to the wonderful people in Stratford who invited me; Jennifer Gillies at gritLit; Dundurn Press; the Quebec Writers' Federation for their unflagging support of getting Quebec writers out into the world; and R who ferried me about in a rented car so that I could bring as many pairs of shoes as I wanted.

Five Roses Book Club Resource

For those of you who belong to book clubs and are considering discussing Five Roses, the lovely team at Dundurn Press have made a resource package, including a map (!) highlighting where events in the novel take place.  Here's the link:

https://www.dundurn.com/sites/default/files/supplementary/9781459734241-BookClubResource.pdf

And also, for the fun of it, here are a few pictures and sketches of the neighbourhoods described in the novel. I took the photos. Sketches courtesy of Robert Aubé. I see the photos as factual documentation but the sketches strike me as being more quintessentially true. Whatever truth is.

fun things happening for Five Roses

It's only early July and already fun things are happening for Five Roses.

My press, Dundurn, made this lovely map to locate events in the novel.

As a point of reference, here's the one I sent them:

Not ready for a career as a cartographer, am I?

Though this reminds me of the time an eminent person asked where I lived. I drew a map of the island of Montreal. (That's right. Montreal is on an island in the St. Lawrence River.) Then I located the point of land known as Pointe St-Charles.

She gasped and said, "You live in the nipple!"

So the map above is an expanded nipple.

First the snazzy map, and then a soft package arrived which didn't seem at all paper or book-related. But look! A cloth panel of my book cover which I've tacked it to my study door.

That, above the panel, is a Little Nell knocker a friend brought from Edinburgh. We both compare notes as to what does and doesn't convince housemates that we're working.

R found this card of a Five Roses flour beach mat. And she's reading a book! (Though how she manages to be comfortable with a book in that pose, I don't know.)

And here's me holding Five Roses wearing a Five Roses T-shirt, standing in front of the FARINE FIVE ROSES sign on the Lachine Canal.

Where can you buy the book? In Montreal at the Paragraphe Bookstore, Drawn & Quarterly, and the downtown Indigo. In Toronto at the Indigo in the Eaton Centre. In Whitby at Chapters. If you know of other bookstores, please drop me a line.
You can order it directly from the publisher at https://www.dundurn.com/books/Five-Roses
It's available on ibooks and will be available at Amazon on July 23rd. If you buy it on Amazon, do please rate the book or write a review. That really helps. A Goodreads or Library Thing rating is also grand.

All right, that's enough about the book. Next post I'm going to write about my garden.  

writing research / Five Roses, a novel

Increasingly, I do things because I need to know how something works or how it’s done, because I want to write about it. Writing makes me go out and explore the world. 

A few weeks ago I spent an afternoon with a tailor in her atelier. She was tracing a pattern she'd made on fine grey wool that she'd imported from England. We talked fabric, design, making patterns, cutting them, and more. Listening to her talk about her work and how she’d trained for it was fascinating. You can find her on Twitter and Instagram: Susana Vera. 

On a personal level I'm interested in how one acquires skills, but I would never have contacted a tailor and asked if I could spend an afternoon with her if I weren’t writing about costumes.

Talking with people is one way of doing research. Trawling the internet is another. (How did we ever manage without the internet????) Youtube, books, a camera. maps, looking over people's shoulders. Taking a trip and taking notes. And baking cream puffs, why not? 

I have a new novel, Five Roses, coming out this summer. The novel isn’t about food, but two of the characters work in a patisserie. I thought it would be fun to include a recipe with the book--and wanted an easy one that didn't require fancy equipment. I used to make cream puffs when I was kid. You don’t even need a mixer. They are that easy. But I haven’t made them for years and felt I should test the recipe before sending it to my publisher. I took a picture in sunlight so you can see how light and airy they are. I poked them with the knife to release steam and keep them dry before they’re filled with... whipped cream, custard, ice cream, jam, sliced fruit?

I also wanted something made with flour since the novel is called Five Roses--for the FARINE FIVE ROSES sign on the south-west horizon of Montreal. The sign was erected in 1948. Each letter is 15 feet or 5 metres high.

I live west of the sign in Pointe St-Charles, the post-industrial neighbourhood where the novel is set, and on days when the wind comes from that direction, you can smell flour being milled. It gets up your nose.

I didn't write about the milling of flour in Five Roses, but I'm thinking that's something else I want to know about. More research.  

Five Roses / Dundurn Press 2016

In 2016 I will be publishing a new novel, Five Roses, with Dundurn Press in Toronto.

The novel is not about flowers, though one of the characters is called Rose.

The title has to do with the FARINE FIVE ROSES sign which is a landmark on the south-west horizon of Montreal. From 1954 to 1977 the sign included the word FLOUR which was removed in 1977 in accordance with Quebec language laws.

I'm not writing about flour mills either, though the fact that industry once thrived in south-west Montreal is a significant factor. I am a little fascinated with abandoned industrial complexes.

Here's the sign as seen from Pointe St-Charles where the novel is set. It's an inner-city neighbourhood being gentrified as I write. The neighbour a few doors down just had her brick redone. From another direction I can hear floors being sanded. Another neighbour is gutting the ground floor of his duplex. My novel takes place in the early 2000s when the process of gentrification in The Pointe was gearing up. For better or worse.

The setting of abandonment and appropriation reflects the loss and recovery the characters in the novel experience. A sister kills herself, a baby is lost, a mother dies. I'm giving nothing away here. These events have already happened. I want to know how the characters move on after a suicide, a lost baby, a death. There's no such thing as ghosts and yet. A house stands empty for a year. Two boys eat from a can of ravioli. One woman shows another how to fashion a rose out of marzipan. A loom is rescued. A baby howls with hunger. A chickadee pecks bagel crumbs from a young woman's hand. A man spies through gaps in a wooden fence. Rooms in an old house get a fresh coat of paint. There's cycling by the St. Lawrence River, a game of strip poker in a basement, a man practising fishing in the grass, a large orange cat. A woman climbs a rope ladder up the tower of a derelict factory.

I've tried not to overdo the number of times that characters notice the FARINE FIVE ROSES sign in the sky, but I've been interested in the sign since before I moved to the Pointe. I have a FIVE ROSES T-shirt. If I had a cellphone, I would get a FIVE ROSES cellphone cover. Are there FIVE ROSES lighters? FIVE ROSES jeans? Does someone have an old FIVE ROSES burlap flour sack?

That's a photocopy of an illustration in a 1940s cookbook my mother-in-law had. When I first saw it, I knew I wanted a copy. It was long enough ago that I had a hard time finding a place that made colour photocopies. At the time I didn't know what I meant to write about it, but I knew I would.

Not so long ago a friend sent me this in the mail.

It's the back of a Five Roses cookbook that she found at a farmer's market in Victoria, BC. The cookbook dates from 1962.

There are recipes for Whipped Cream Topping for Pies. (Silly me, I never knew I needed a recipe for that.)
Croquettes with this enticing description: "Five Roses Croquettes, with their crisp brown deliciousness, are a delightful food."
Witches Bonnets. This is a dessert and that's how it's written. No apostrophe.
Supper Snack--to be made with "White Sauce No. 2".