Q&A: Maya Gallus, director of literary doc The Mystery of Mazo de la Roche

Severn Thompson stars as Mazo de la Roche (Photo: NFB)

Mazo de la Roche was one of Canada’s most famous and prolific authors, penning 23 novels, 13 plays, and more than 50 short stories. Her 1927 novel, Jalna, about a wealthy Ontario family named Whiteoak, sold over 11 million copies in 93 languages. After its international success, de la Roche spun her Whiteoaks stories into a 16-book series, which has been adapted for film, theatre, and the CBC Television production The Whiteoaks of Jalna.

Quillblog spoke with Maya Gallus – director of the docudrama The Mystery of Mazo de la Roche, which has its English-language premiere this weekend at the Hot Docs film festival in Toronto – about why this enigmatic author has become one of Canada’s forgotten literary success stories.

How did you discover Mazo de la Roche?
I had heard of Mazo de la Roche growing up, but in the context of the CBC miniseries. Like most Canadians, I didn’t know anything about her – I thought she was an old Victorian spinster.

In the early 1990s, I read a biography of her by Joan Givner called Mazo de la Roche: The Hidden Life (Oxford University Press), and was intrigued. I discovered she had lived with her lifelong companion, Caroline Clement, and they were kind of like Canada’s Gertrude Stein and Alice Toklas in terms of their partnership. Caroline was involved in every aspect of Mazo’s creative life – as companion, muse, and even as a transcriber and secretary.

I was also intrigued by how much of a pioneer de la Roche was in terms of women’s writing. She took her place at the table with the men, and surpassed them in success and wealth, which was extraordinary at that time. The only other woman who had that kind of success in the 1920s and ’30s was Lucy Maud Montgomery.

If she was so successful, why isn’t de la Roche well known today?
It was a combination of things. Because she wrote a series, some people dismissed her work as populist. She wasn’t writing the grim realistic style that was popular when CanLit was starting to be studied in school. She was much more about fantasy, and there was a Harlequin romance aspect to her in some ways, although her writing was deeper than that.

There was some jealousy, too, as she was internationally famous and wealthy. One theory is that some people resented her success because she was writing lighter fare. Others felt that she wasn’t really reflecting what Canada was really about. But if you go back and read her books now, they are interesting portraits of that time in Canada.

She was known as a notoriously private person. That must have made writing the documentary difficult.
Even though she was very famous and she knew how to manipulate media, de la Roche had a conflicted relationship with fame. She really understood the construction of a persona, the way that someone today like Madonna or Angelina Jolie or Lady Gaga knows how to manipulate their public persona to make people feel like they know the person when really they don’t.

It was a difficult project for me to tackle because her story was so densely layered and contradictory. There were numerous biographies written about her, and her own autobiography is so elliptical, she doesn’t mention dates. It’s hard to tell if some of what she is telling us is even the truth.

Is that why you chose to present her story as a docudrama?
I went to de la Roche’s fiction and looked at her primary alter ego Finch Whiteoak. I began to understand more of who she was, and I felt that I had permission to explore the nature of biography and the elusive line between fact and fiction because she herself was doing that with her own life.

The film is as much a portrait of an artist as it is about the nature of biography.

Do you know of any contemporary authors who have been influenced by de la Roche’s work?
I don’t see a direct influence on any writers, but I do see that Canadian writers, especially women, owe a debt to her, as she really opened the door for them. In school, we learn about Susanna Moodie and Catherine Parr Traill, and then there is this giant leap to Margaret Atwood and Margaret Laurence, but in between was Mazo de la Roche. She is the whole parentheses that is missing from Canadian literary history.

Canadian literary event roundup: April 27-May 3

• Canadian Literature Symposium – The Worlds of Carol Shields, University of Ottawa (April 27–29, $100, details available on the website)
• Manitoba Book Awards, Centre culturel franco-manitobain, Winnipeg (April 28, 7 p.m., free)
• Barbara Reid reads from her children’s book Picture a Tree, Evergreen Brick Works, Toronto (April 29, 2 p.m., free)
• Alison DeLory launches her children’s book Lunar Lifter, Keshen Goodman Library, Halifax (April 29, 3 p.m., free)
• Tightrope Books hosts “literary zoo” fundraiser for the High Park Zoo, Café Novo, Toronto (April 29, 1 p.m., PWYC donation)
• Vincent Lam launches The Headmaster’s Wager, Calgary Public Library Central Branch (May 1, 7 p.m., $30, includes copy of book)
• Monica Graham launches Historic New Glasgow, Stellarton, Westville and Trenton, New Glasgow Public Library, Nova Scotia (May 2, 7 p.m., free)
• Trillium 25th Anniversary Reading Series with Mark Frutkin, Thomas King, Alistair MacLeod, Rabindranath Maharaj, Pasha Malla, and Camilla Gibb, Gladstone Hotel, Toronto (May 2, 6:30 p.m., free)
• Anne Fleming launches her short story collection Gay Dwarves of America, Full of Beans, Toronto (May 2, 7 p.m., free)
• Canadian Children’s Book Week kicks off with readings across the country (May 5–12, full schedule available on the website)

Quillblog is looking for photos from literary events across Canada. Send your photos to scflinn@quillandquire.com.

Patrick deWitt wins Leacock

Patrick deWitt is the recipient of some new bling, in the form of the Stephen Leacock Memorial Medal for Humour.

This is the third Canadian award win for deWitt’s novel The Sisters Brothers (House of Anansi Press). The dark Western has already received the Governor General’s Literary Award for Fiction and the Rogers Writers’ Trust Literary Award.

The other shortlisted titles were:

• Rupinder Gill, On the Outside, Looking Indian: How My Second Childhood Changed My Life (McClelland & Stewart)
• Susan Juby, The Woefield Poultry Collective (HarperCollins Canada)
• Shari Lapeña, Happiness Economics (Brindle & Glass)
• Robyn Michele Levy, Most of Me: Surviving My Medical Meltdown (Greystone Books)

The $15,000 prize will be awarded to deWitt at a gala dinner on June 12 in Orillia, Ontario.

Event photos: Heather A. Clark, Yasuko Thanh, and Cheryl Rainfield

Spring book launch season is well underway. Click on the thumbnails to view photos from three recent events.

Quillblog is looking for photos from literary events across Canada. Send your photos to scflinn@quillandquire.com

Canadian Science Writers’ Association reveals 2011′s best Canadian science books

The Canadian Science Writers’ Association have announced their picks for the best Canadian science books published in 2011.

Judges selected Jerry Thompson’s Cascadia’s Fault: The Deadly Earthquake that Will Devastate North America (HarperCollins Canada) as the best general audience book and Tanya Lloyd Kyi’s 50 Poisonous Questions: A Book with Bite (Annick Press) as the best youth title.

Entries were judged on the “basis of initiative, originality, scientific accuracy, clarity of interpretation and value in promoting a better understanding of science by the public.”

The awards will be presented at the CSWA’s annual meeting, which is being held at the University of Windsor, June 2–5.

Three Canadian novels among Commonwealth Book Prize nominees

Three Canadian novels, all from independent publishers, have been shortlisted for the 2012 Commonwealth Book Prize.

Riel Nason’s The Town that Drowned (Goose Lane Editions), Olive Senior’s Dancing Lessons (Cormorant Books), and Johanna Skibsrud’s The Sentimentalists (Gaspereau Press/D&M Publishers) will face 16 other titles for the £10,000 prize.

This is Nason’s first major nomination. Senior is shortlisted for the Amazon.ca First Novel Award, which will be presented on April 26, and Skibsrud won the 2010 Scotiabank Giller Prize for The Sentimentalists.

In previous years, regional prizes were awarded for Best Book and Best First Book, with the winners of those contests competing for the top prizes. In 2011, the Commonwealth Foundation revised the rules: only first books are eligible for the Commonwealth Book Prize. Canadians are competing against European authors at the regional level (instead of Caribbean authors as in previous years), with the winner of that contest moving on to compete against writers from Africa, Asia, the Caribbean, and the Pacific.

Five regional winners will be named May 22, and the overall winners will be announced June 8. For a list of all nominees, visit the Commonwealth Book Prize website.

Book links roundup: Amazon vs. the Big Six, turning awful fan fic into a bestseller, and more

• Book publishers prove they can fight against Amazon
• Author Barry Eisler argues that Amazon should take on the publishing industry
• How to turn awful fan fiction into a best-selling novel
• Ebook and e-reading apps will dominate tablet downloads by 2016
• Jonathan Lethem dissects Talking Heads’ Fear of Music for Continuum’s 33 1/3 book series
• Rare Q&A with underground comics artist Lynda Barry
• Lena Dunham, creator of the HBO comedy series Girls, discusses her reading habits (with a CanLit mention)

Slideshow: A Weekend with Jane Austen

Toronto’s Pride and Prejudice fans will don their finest gloves and gowns for A Weekend with Jane Austen (April 20–22), a three-day event that celebrates the 1812 Regency era with workshops, lectures, tours, and period costumes.

The event is organized by Karen Millyard, a dance teacher and academic who discovered a love of English Country Dancing – popular during Austen’s time – while recovering from a bone marrow transplant. Millyard, who runs dance events throughout the year and is an enthusiastic advocate of the activity, says it’s not just romantics and English-lit majors who show up at her costumed events. “We get a lot of computer programmers – my theory is that they’re attracted to the dance patterns. They’re very mathematical and balanced,” she says.

Millyard admits that there are people who are drawn to the events because of BBC’s 1995 Pride and Prejudice mini-series starring Colin Firth. “It’s possible that there’s a certain false gloss over it – we tend to romanticize the past,” she says.

Click on the thumbnails to see photos from Millyard’s Midwinter Masquerade Ball, which took place on Feb. 18, 2012.

Kobo to open 100 boutiques within WHSmith stores

Tech website AppNewser is reporting that Kobo will open branded shops inside 100 locations of the U.K. retailer, WHSmith.

According to the blog, the e-reading company has been testing booths in select WHSmith locations. The Kobo shops will be rolled out this year and be staffed by tech experts.

Earlier this week, Kobo CEO Michael Serbinis confirmed in an interview with The Bookseller that the company’s expanded publishing service will be launched the end of the current quarter.

Quillcast episode seven: celebrating the 10th anniversary of Hana’s Suitcase

Quillcast is a podcast series from Quill & Quire featuring behind-the-scenes conversations with authors and publishing insiders.

In this episode, we celebrate the 10th anniversary of Hana’s Suitcase (Second Story Press), the story of a Japanese teacher and her quest to discover the history behind a child’s suitcase found at the Auschwitz death camp. To mark the milestone, Q&Q Web editor Sue Carter Flinn sat down with author Karen Levine and Margie Wolfe, founder of Second Story.

Hana’s Suitcase began its life as a radio documentary for the CBC before being published as a children’s book. Since it was released in 2002, the book has been published in 40 countries and 29 languages, and inspired the 2009 documentary, Inside Hana’s Suitcase.

Click on the thumbnails to view images from Hana’s Suitcase Anniversary Album, which features over 60 pages of letters, photos, essays, and children’s art that reflect on the importance of Hana’s story.

Quillcast is produced with media partners The Walrus, Open Book: Ontario, and Open Book: Toronto, with support from Toronto Life. This project has been generously supported by the Ontario Media Development Corporation’s Entertainment and Creative Cluster Partnerships Fund.

Subscribe to the podcast in iTunes.

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