Writing what you know
Kudos to the Georgia Straight, the Vancouver weekly that, under the stewardship of John Burns, regularly provides excellent book coverage, for publishing the entire acceptance speech that Jack Hodgins gave last weekend at the BC Book Prizes. The Comox-born writer was picking up the Lieutenant Governor’s Award for Literary Excellence and spoke about how he came to write about his neck of the woods after trying to ape the style and locations of writers like Faulkner and Steinbeck.
“It occurred to me that perhaps I’d found a gold mine in my own back yard,” he said. “I began to fashion stories out of bits and pieces of the life around me, the life I remembered from my childhood, and the life that was reported to me by the tale-carriers. Of course I had to tone things down a bit so people elsewhere would believe me. Even so, those far to the east thought I was making it all up out of an imagination given to gross exaggeration, while people on Vancouver Island were not shy about saying ‘That was a pretty good story there, Hodgins, but I could’ve told you a better one. Why don’t you tell them what it’s really like?’”
Related links:
Click here for the Georgia Straight article
