Remember how Vancouver always used to rank top-5 in those most liveable cities lists? Yeah, I know. Most liveable if you have a few million for a house. But still. There we are in 2017. Number 3 according to MSNBC.

What doesn’t get mentioned as often is our senior ranking on another set of lists. Those are the ones that rank cities according to their complete infatuation with the roasted seeds of an epigynous berry found on Asian and African shrubs known as coffea Arabica.

Yeah, we love our joe in this town. Boffo for coffee. Two Starbucks per intersection never struck us as ridiculous, as we once used to have. A friend from Montreal, visiting for the first time in the early 90’s, described his first experience of Robson and Thurlow (where there were two Starbucks until one was recently closed). “There were a bunch of bikers at this one Starbucks when I entered. I saw them finish their coffees, get on their motorcycles, and then CROSS THE STREET and go into the other one.”

That’s Vancouver in a nutshell or, in this case, a roasted endosperm.

Of course, most residents also realize that our relationship with the brown bean hasn’t been static. We weren’t born this way. Don’t anybody try to claim that Jack Khatsahlano greeted our city forefathers with high-altitude, shade-grown juice served out of a Belgian gold plated vacuum coffee siphon. My point being that fine coffee isn’t in our blood. It’s is a choice we’ve made, socially and economically. And as such, it offers a portrait of, if not quite who we are, then at least who we think we are.

I found myself considering all this over the past month as I sampled my way through a list of cafes and fine bean roasters in Vancouver recommended to me by my most ardent coffee-loving friends. But I found it brought into absolutely crystal focus while sitting in boardroom of the Doi Chaang Coffee Company on West Hastings Street downtown. John Darch, the company’s founder and 50% owner (the other 50% is owned, notably, by the Akhi hill tribe in Thailand who farm the beans) had just served me up a cup of their single-estate espresso which proved to be best cup of coffee I drank during this whole experiment, and our conversation had turned to civet coffee.

You may have heard about this stuff already. The civet, a svelte mammal whose musky body scent is used in perfumery, also happens to be a bit of a coffee fiend. Only, they eat the fruit. The cherry, as it’s known. What emerges from the other end of the civet then, in due course, is the seed of this fruit – the coffee “bean” – neatly de-fruited by that point and (connoisseurs maintain) enhanced in flavor as only possible by exposure to the enzymes in a civet’s digestive tract. It’s coffee scat, essentially. But what Darch wanted me to understand that Doi Chaang’s particular brand of civet coffee scat was special. Sold at $55 for 50 grams, which works out to $1,100 a kilogram, and carried by both Harrod’s and Dean & DeLucca, Doi Chaang’s civet coffee isn’t made using farmed civets who are inhumanely force-fed coffee cherries and whose poop is then combed for seeds. It’s made by wild Thai civets who rove the coffee plantation nocturnally and voluntarily, eating in the manner and pace of their choosing.

“Garbage in, garbage out,” Darch says of other brands. “Our civets are choosing their own cherries. And of course that means they choose only the best!”

It’s a great story. (I’ve been telling it ever since.) And perhaps that is the key point here. Coffee these days is very much about having a great (and ideally heartwarming) story. Google up any of the major players in Canadian independent beans these days, in fact – Ethical Bean, Kicking Horse, Salt Spring Coffee, Doi Chaang – and you’ll find such consistency in the stories it’s hard to believe they weren’t centrally coordinated. No, nobody else boasts of having wild Thai civets custom processing beans for them. And I’m not talking about the product being “organic” or “fair trade”, either, which should be considered the bare minimum entry requirements in this field.

I’m talking instead about other initiatives intended to humanize these companies to the point that they don’t sound like corporations at all and more like non-profits. These are companies touting projects to build schools in Central America (Ethical Bean), or to recycle coffee grounds and bags (Salt Spring), or to funnel financial support to the Canadian Nature Conservancy and local food banks (Kicking Horse). Doi Chaang, whose founder gave half the company to the Thai tribe where he sources his beans is perhaps only pushing farther down the same virtuous avenue. Did he have to? Not legally. But to make a mark in coffee, it was a very savvy move.

“Of course people won’t buy crappy coffee,” he says. “But nobody has a story like ours.”

And as if to underscore that point, he describes how sales of Doi Chaang’s coffee “struggled” for the first two years. Not because of quality. Critic Ken Davis, whose ratings in Coffee Review have become the Parker Points for the beverage, tells me that Doi Chaang coffee is in the top 10% of coffees he has “cupped”, rating around 89-91, where your typical cup of Starbucks is 83-84, and Folgers instant crystals comes in around 60. No, the struggling was story-related, in the sense that not enough people knew about what Doi Chaang was doing. Sales only exploded following the airing of a Global TV documentary on the company’s “Beyond Fair Trade” partnership with Akhi peoples. In one year sales tripled and haven’t looked back.

Which is a curious market feature, when you think about it. We don’t refuse to use Hootsuite unless Ryan Holmes builds a school in Honduras. We don’t boycott Burrowing Owl if they neglect to build their brand around high profile environmental donations. Why then do coffee consumers demand that people in the coffee space go beyond making good juice – and here I mean both wholesalers and retail cafes – and also somehow commit to making the world a happier and more egalitarian place? What the hell is in this stuff other than caffeine, some kind of ethical, high-minded pixie-dust?

Doubtful. I think the answer is, in fact, a lot more scientific and less flattering to us individually. It’s Batesian Mimicry at work, folks. Species copy each other, mimicking high value features, like stripes and spots that signal venom and discourage predators. Perhaps the most famous example is the entirely harmless Scarlet King Snake who copies (not perfectly, but pretty well) the markings of the very-poisonous Eastern Coral Snake, securing for itself a protection that it didn’t actually earn.

Consumers do the same thing, in waves, mimicking high value ideas to secure the returns that they have observed other consumers earlier receive. So the first generation of Starbucks users were able to signal to the world a powerful knowledge, positioning them advantageously relative to coffee drinkers who’d come before. Starbucks consumption indicated that you didn’t drink the watery, flavorless, institutional coffee that had prevailed prior in North America. You’d travelled to Europe. You knew the truth about craft and quality and the way coffee really should be done.

As status accrued to those early adopters, a billion mimics followed, displaying the logo in obedience to the evolutionary code written within: signal what the successful species signals. The cups proliferated. Competitors to Starbucks responded by darkening their own roasts. Starbucks responded by growing, growing, growing. They became a mega-corporation. They started selling breakfast sandwiches and their “cafes” started smelling like cheese. The line-ups grew. And at some fateful tipping point, the exclusivity of the brand collapsed.

Which is exactly what happens to Coral Snake populations when too many Scarlet Kings mimic their markings and dilute the results.

Starbucks may still be profitable. (John Darch observes: “Starbucks changed people from being willing to spend 10 cents on coffee to being willing to spend $2 or $3.”) But they’ll never regain what was lost: exclusivity, the trust of consumers that a status message could be reliably communicated by the simple act of holding one of their cups. That business has now passed on to another wave of merchants and consumers who now position themselves advantageously relative to the Starbucks drinkers who’d come before, signalling that they know the truth about craft and quality and the way coffee really should be done. Only in this iteration of the story, importantly distinguished from the Starbucks version that preceded: humanized, small-scale, socially conscious, non-corporate.

And still expensive. $3 plus still prevails for an Americano, of which Lloyd Bernhardt of Ethical Bean assures me only $.25 or so is actually the cost of coffee. But for that $2.75, we’re getting back the story that we originally craved, the one that distinguishes people on both sides of the Clover.

Has Batesian Mimicry followed? Go read the websites of the major coffee wholesalers and most popular cafés decide for yourself. They all look like Coral Snakes and Scarlet Kings to me. Will there be another bursting of bubbles? A migration of opinion, perhaps very suddenly, away from that which grants status to geeky mustachioed guys in undershirts hunched over pour-over gear and the earnest customers who watch their every move?

Count on it.

In the meantime, sample yourself from what is on offer, and ask yourself how much of the brand promise is in the story told versus the coffee delivered.

This year he tackled a hot-button topic. He decided to test whether social media dependency could be predicted by knowing a person’s Myers-Briggs personality type.

I say “hot-button” because when I posted to Facebook soliciting friends to complete the survey, responses way exceeded expectations. And a lot of people expressed interest in seeing the results.

My son presented his own results at his school. But here is a summary for all those of you who participated or are just curious.

First off, the survey itself was designed to elicit base information (age, gender, personality type), as well as assess social media use against a metric used in clinical practice to diagnose Social Media Disorder (SMD). That clinical metric tests for the following:

• frequency of social media usage
• symptoms of withdrawal after cessation of use
• tolerance changes over time
• evidence of preoccupation with one or more social media
• life problems arising from social media usage
• personal conflict stemming from social media interactions
• the level of social media’s “persistence”, which refers to the level of difficulty a user experiences in trying to limit use

The full SMD checklist measures for variables beyond these seven. But Survey Monkey limits you to 10 questions before they charge you a big fee. So we had imposed restrictions as do most scientific research projects

The survey in the end looked like this:

Questions 1, 2 and 10 measure the base information. Questions 3 to 9 represented our proxy measure of SMD. A yes scored one. And depending on usage levels cited in response to Question 3, 0-2 points might be indicated. That resulted in possible SMD scores from zero to eight.

Once the word was out there, we had a tremendous response. Over 100 people took the survey, though again Survey Monkey free use restrictions kicked in. They only let you compile the results of 100 before you have to pay. So we chose 100 randomly, of which 2 were incomplete, giving us a final data set of 98, which allowed something like 95% confidence in the results. (Hey, I dropped out of stats, ask my kid any of the technical questions.)

I know that anybody reading this really only wants to know one thing, which is: does my personality type mean I’m a Facebook junkie or not!!??

So this is me, cutting to the chase.

Here are the results by personality type, noting the number of respondents who identified by the different Myers-Briggs archetypes.

So what do you know, our lone INTP, referred to in the typology as “The Thinker” returned the highest SMD score. So they either show the highest signs of dependence, or perhaps they were merely the most honest respondent.

And then of course, next one down is another small grouping, only .5 lower on the SMD scale who appear to be an almost completely opposite personality type. So what does that mean?

Notably, there was a clustering of 27 respondents who shared continuum positions oriented to Intuition (N), Feelings (F) and Perceiving (P).

Here’s another look at the way the continuum stacked up against one another:

My relative ineptitude with Excel graphing means those numbers at the bottom are listed kinda wonky. Just match up the colours: numbers to descriptors to bars and everything makes sense.

In words:

Introvert SMD scores were on average higher than extroverts. This result ran counter to hypothesis. We thought those highly social E types would be the more susceptible to social obsession. But those inward looking I’s proved just slightly more vulnerable.

On the continuum from Sensing to iNtuition meanwhile – used as an indicator of the way one focusses one’s attention – check out those scores. Apparently if you like to learn by association and brilliant flourishes of insight founded on pattern recognition, well then you also are glued to Twitter just a degree more than those who respond to their senses and to the neatly sequential.

The last two are clearly where the difference stand out though. The Thinking-Feeling continuum is associated with the way people make decisions. Objectivity versus subjectivity, roughly. And here perhaps the data is least surprising. Because despite our highest SMD score going to a T, the F’s had it by a long shot in the end. So note, if you make your decisions through personalization and with reference to experience and people don’t like your cat video, you hurt more deeply than all the thinkers on earth.

Last one: Judging versus Perceiving, a continuum measuring a person’s response to complexity, which is (best I can make out) a matter of preferring organized, structured data with a bid to closure (J), and those more prone to the stimulating, new and potentially random idea (P). And again with emphasis, we had a winner. SMD scores were significantly higher for our perceivers, indicating perhaps that the new idea of a that new cat video is more intoxicating to them.

Those results considered, the INFP personality type that the data indicated was most susceptible to SMD. Quiet, reflective folks interested in serving humanity, say the experts. Extremely loyal with well developed value systems in which they strive to live.

Princess Diana, Audrey Hepburn, Fred Rogers, John Lennon, Kurt Cobain, Tori Amos, Morrissey, Chloe Sevigny, A.A. Milne, Helen Keller, Carl Rogers, and Isabel Briggs Myers herself who created this whole metric in the first place.

The creator of Myers Briggs would have been your friend on Facebook. And yours. And yours. And yours.

Some final numbers and thanks to all who participated:

Should writers of fiction review the work of colleagues? I avoid it personally, and my rational for doing is the basis for my side of a debate that was part of the CBC Literary Smackdown series a couple of years back. The other side of the issue was taken by esteemed Victoria-based novelist and nonfiction writer Robert Weirsma, who also writes a lot of fine reviews.

I enjoyed the discussion because I enjoy talking to Robert. But I knew going in that arguing my side of the resolved was a thankless proposition. That’s because I was arguing that the prevalence of competitiveness and envy in our culture and economy – magnified incredibly, in my view, by the migration of that culture and economy from offline to online – makes the review that one writer writes of another writer highly suspect. Consciously or unconsciously, in other words, insider reviews (positive or negative) end up being strategic, designed in their subtle and not-so-subtle ways to serve the purposes of the reviewer. Better that the writer withdraw from this toxic maeltsrom of mutual appraisal and measurement (as exemplified in our hysterical interest in our own online profiles) and leave reviewing to “professionals”, people who write from within literature but not within the writing community.

Robert’s argument for reviewing was from the standpoint of empathy. As a novelist, he could empathize more with the writer being reviewed than could a non-writer. Empathy, in this analysis, provides the novelist/reviewer with insights into the writing process and the significance of the literary accomplishment as it’s ultimately delivered (or not) on the page.

That point is interesting because it shows that Robert and I come to our respective conclusions in response to our observation of what are closely related human capacities. Empathy, after all, is the mother of envy.

Here’s Martin Amis putting his finger directly on the button in The Pregnant Widow:

“It was only Nicholas, his male flesh and blood, that Karl really envied. And envy, the dictionary suggests, takes us by a knight’s move to empathy. From L. invidere “regard maliciously,” from in- into + videre “to see.” Envy is negative empathy. Envy is empathy in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

That’s a very powerful idea: that “to see into” someone (their work, their tastes and tendencies, their condition) might “by a knight’s move” lead us to “regard maliciously”, wanting what the other has and quite possibly wishing them ill.

The French existentialists were good at this same bit of reasoning. They used the term resentiment to characterize a variety of hostility that is targeted on the person considered the source of one’s frustration.

Frustration. Being frustrated. Being prevented from getting where you’re going. If we understood that we were prone to resentiment, that would be a powerful understanding.

Powerful, but as I said, thankless. Who wants to hear that the French existentialists think they’re prone to some toxic mix of envy and resentment? That would be self-recrimination of the worst kind, flagging a provisional quality in us. And since we prize independence of mind and the idea of personal autonomy perhaps above all other things in our culture, that very idea that we are vainly comparing ourselves to others and finding ourselves wanting is bitterly distasteful.

Of course, my whole argument was also an abstraction. I wasn’t saying Robert specifically was envious and therefore a strategic reviewer. I was making a point that is as inwardly directed as it is outwardly.

In an interesting Facebook disscussion that sparked to life after Canada Writes posted the essays, the downsides of taking my position were immediately plain, as I was asked to produce my evidence and provide an example from Robert’s reviewing of the envy that I felt prohibited the novelist/reviewer from effectively reviewing a colleagues work.

Fair play. I was in the realm of abstraction. And while I won’t take on Robert’s work, I’ll happily take on my own. Consider this review I wrote of Jason Anderson’s 2006 novel Showbiz, published by ECW. It ran in the Literary Review of Canada, and I now regret writing it. Not because I don’t stand by the points I made, but because I can hear my own strategic positioning in it. I was writing about celebrity myself quite a lot at that time. (The Blue LIght Project was in the works.) So I had criticisms of Anderson’s approach. Far more important is the fact that Anderson and I were doing the same thing at the time. Literarily speaking, we were after the same prize. We were undifferentiated competitors.

Call me a wimp, then, but I still feel icky about that review. Maybe I even withdrew from reviewing books by colleagues because of it. But the story ends well, because in a turn worthy of, I don’t know, Flaubert, my own 2006 novel, Story House, was then bitterly trashed and stomped only six months later *in the same publication* by a reviewer named Adele Freedman.

Story House is about architecture. Freedman is an architecture critic. And she tore me a new egress, to put it politely.

Let’s agree to call that karma.

The Incredible Story of a Marine and his Opera

I received one of the assignments of my career in 2012. 20 years in freelancing. Hundreds and hundreds of published pieces in great magazines. And I finally got my first commission from Harpers.

That was a big deal to me. And the story was big too. It was about a Marine vet named Christian Ellis. This guy had fought both battles of Fallujah and come home with PTSD. But through crazy good fortune, he’d been paired up with a composer and a librettist and had written an opera about his experience.

I pitched Harpers. They took it. And off I went on the most curious, captivating, challenging and ultimately frustrating assignments of my career to that point.

I left it all on the field writing that one, let me tell you. Hours and hours spent with Ellis on the phone, as well as visiting with him in Los Angeles and DC. A couple dozen other interviews with VA doctors, veterans activists and opera people. I read up on PTSD and asymmetrical combat zones, looked at battle diagrams from Fallujah. And by the end of all that, I’d learned two enormous truths.

First, writing your very best stuff as a freelancer doesn’t all pan out to publication. Harpers spiked the piece after editing my second draft. Reason: a regular Harpers contributor had a PTSD piece spiked at at a different magazine. And they were stepping in to cover for him and letting my piece go.

That hurt after a year’s work. But it didn’t hurt like what followed. I shopped the story everywhere after that: the New York Times, The Nation, The New Republic. No dice. And a similar thing was said by most of the editors to whom I spoke about it. Great writing, they said. But there’s just too much PTSD coverage out there. The story is played.

What killed me about that particular response has nothing to do with writing pride. It has everything to do with the second truth I’d uncovered: that PTSD was in fact the wrong diagnosis in a vast number of cases. There was very different problems at play with these many wounded warriors. And that very different problem stemmed both from what had happen to veterans in combat and what happened to them when they got home.

If you’re saying PTSD is a played story, in other words, you’re part of Ellis’s problem, part of the burning dark heart of the opera that his life had inspired.

Here’s that whole story, as it was told to me by a man I was honored to meet. Thank you sincerely, Christian. And thank you for your service.

FALLUJAH

By Timothy Taylor

For only a single, very brief moment in the new opera Fallujah, two characters hold precisely the same note while singing subtly different words. It wouldn’t be much of an innovation, musically speaking—unity and difference at play—were it not for the characters and the story involved. That two-bar high-G in Fallujah is held between two mothers whose sons met during the bloody fighting that took place in that city during the Iraq War. Colleen is American and Shatha is Iraqi. And in their fleeting moment of unison, the women shape a telling juxtaposition. Colleen sits in agony outside a VA hospital room, where her son Philip, a PTSD-diagnosed Marine veteran convalescing after a suicide attempt, refuses to see her. Shatha, still in Iraq and still in the terrible moment that brought about Philip’s psychiatric injury, grieves her own son Wissam who died at the marine’s own hand.

“It hurt him to be mine,” Shatha sings. “It hurts him to be mine,” Colleen sings.

Here the opera – an unusual item itself for being the first about the Iraq War – captures in a single note the deeply troubling legacy of contemporary wars in which technology and improvisational combat theaters combine in an ever more volatile ways to provide for the death of innocents, and which seem as a result ever more likely to psychiatrically injure combatants such that they may wish they had not survived. Half a million psychiatric injuries are estimated to exist now among the 2.4 million who’ve served since 9/11. There’s the frightening number you’ll hear from veterans’ advocacy groups. But Fallujah would have us realize that these injuries are not just a concern to service people, nor are they understood well enough to be treated reliably at all. In the ringing aftermath of war, Fallujah illustrates that we all wait anxiously outside the door of the treatment room, affected and infected, grieving and confused.

The drama in Fallujah lives, then, at the fraught intersection of a veteran’s horrifying experience and the perplexed culture to which he returns. And it was no surprise when I met the man who inspired the opera, and crucially the character Philip, to learn that he knew this territory excruciatingly well. Christian Ellis, now 29 years old, was a Marine machine gunner, a sergeant who fought in both 2004 battles in Fallujah and came home tormented by what he’d seen and done. Before the opera took shape, he’d fallen far. He’d been diagnosed with PTSD. He’d attempted suicide and been estranged from his parents. He’d had a run-in with the law after breaking the arm of a grocery store clerk who approached him from behind with his change. At a critical low point, he’d lost his most important relationship after almost strangling his boyfriend to death in a nightmare-fueled sleep-walking rage. Ellis was down to last chances when he signed up for a fly-fishing retreat in Idaho sponsored by Explore.org, the charitable foundation of billionaire philanthropist Charles Annenberg Weingarten. There, sitting on the bank of a stream on the last day of the retreat talking about what they’d all dreamed of doing as kids, Weingarten turned to Ellis for an answer. The young veteran said without hesitation that he’d always wanted to sing opera.

Billionaires have billionaire ways. Weingarten didn’t know anything about opera. But he liked the young man sitting next to him there. And the idea flowered in the moment.

“They all called me the Dude, like Lebowski,” Weingarten says, remembering the moment and sounding quite a lot like the Coen brothers character as he speaks from his office off the Santa Monica boardwalk. “And I’m like: Dude has an idea. This is going to sound crazy but… let’s do an opera on the war in Iraq! Modern day war, foreign soil, machine gunners, everyone dying. My god it was Opera 101!”

Weingarten would go on to fund the making of Fallujah to the tune of around $350K, drawing in composer Tobin Stokes, Iraqi/American playwright Heather Raffo, and City Opera Vancouver to carry the commission. In Los Angeles, where we meet for the first time, Ellis impresses me as the kind of person who could inspire in this way.  But our conversation also convinces me that what unfolds onstage during the opera – that turbulent 90 minute storm of orchestra and voice that evokes an opening vortex around the perilous rim of which the audience understands itself to be spinning – originated in some intrinsic way in the experience of a single man, the steps he took, the days he lived, the deepening and darkening events of which he was both author and subject.

***

“Christian?” I lean into the window of the black model Grand Am, scuffed and worn, conspicuous in valet parking at the glam Beverly Hilton where it’s Jag after Bentley after Porsche.

“Yeah man,” he says. “Get in.”

We’ve spoken on the phone several times at this point, I know the voice: musical, yes. Sensitive, delicate even. They called him “pretty boy” in the Corps not because he was gay, but knowing he was gay and not caring, protecting their own. Plus, “pretty boy” contrasted well with the professional Ellis: machine gunner in a Combined Anti-Armor (CAAT) platoon on react duty in the most dangerous city in Iraq, the job code and coordinates of an undisputed badass.

Welterweight, I think. Good looking, ripped. Torn jeans and a sleeveless black t-shirt with flames and illegible script, some font where the letters look like blades. He has tribal tattoos from his shoulders to his forearms and a ball cap with a frayed brim pulled low. He looks at me a certain way I’ll get to know, smiling but so wary his eyes are almost closed. I climb in and shake the hand of the man who served three tours, then came home wracked by grief and guilt, sitting with his back to walls in restaurants when he had the energy to go out at all, scanning for hostiles and avenues of egress, objects that might be used as weapons.

We drive to Tavern restaurant on San Vincente Boulevard, across the freeway in toney Brentwood. The menu sports artisanal cheese and halibut with white-corn succotash. Ellis orders a burger, Jack and Coke. We talk about the 50 cal, how to traverse and sight one off the back of a moving Humvee, the most important qualities a machine gunner can have: knowing the terrain, dialing the area topo-map into your head so you can site any spot on it from a thousand yards and unload in a hurry.

“I look around me,” he says, when we get to veteran life. “I see how they look at me. The tattoos, the jeans… And nobody here would imagine that I could sing opera.”

From an early age, too. He sang beautifully in the shower, his adoptive mother remembers though the demons were dark and plentiful. Born to a drug-addicted prostitute in Philadelphia, Ellis spent time in thirteen different foster homes during his early childhood, over the long course of which he says he was “raped, molested, homeless, starved…” Michelle Ellis rescued him out of an orphanage and adopted him when he was eight. A Christian, morally rigorous family, the Ellises cared for their adopted son until he left home at nineteen, messed up in complex and individual ways: a meth-dabbling rebel with a secret taste for men, enrolled at Liberty University where no number of Friday addresses by Jerry Falwell were going to change what was going on inside.

“Why don’t you enlist?”

Sometimes a question posed by your mother comes preloaded with an answer. Ellis had graduated with a degree in forensic psychology and voice performance, but no job prospects. He was living with his grandparents in a Phoenix seniors community. He considered his mother’s question and decided if you’re going to serve, then do the hardest service imaginable.

Of course he made mistakes and got screamed at like any other boot. But he was just like any boot in other ways too, disappearing out of himself and into that bigger collective thing: The Corps. “When we suffered together, we got tighter.” And nobody cared if you were black or white or blue or gay, Republican or Democrat. “None of us cared. Nobody gave a shit, pardon my language, but we didn’t. We experienced joy together and we suffered together, and we also knew we had to work together.”

Which is an inner truth of service, right there: all in-unit belonging was motivated by that holy work, which lived beyond any individual pride or ambition and which was girded with an iron sense of righteousness too. Good guys and bad guys. That was the language used. Ellis responded to the hardened sense of common calling. Discipline is the instant willing obedience to all orders, respect for authority and teamwork. You don’t join the Marine Corps, you convert. And Ellis was inwardly and outwardly transformed, something he illustrates by saying: “We were trained to enjoy going into danger. We were trained that if there was an explosion, you didn’t run away, you went directly towards it. That’s what marines do.”

And when his religious adoptive father saw Ellis parading behind the Brigadier General on graduation, the color bearer for his training regiment, all disagreement was suspended and the father smiled on the son. Six months later, Ellis senior, suffering from a rare brain cancer, would tell Ellis on his deployment to Iraq: “Don’t come home if I die. Your mother will be taken care of and your comrades need you.” And the young Ellis felt a connection with this man that he’d never felt prior, a handshake sealing a shared ethos between them, the possibility of higher purpose.

Our Tavern lunch arrives, burgers, another Jack and Coke. The waiter hovers, tending to Ellis who smiles and says thanks and betrays a gentleness of which he may be unaware. “He can be very charming,” Heather Raffo, Fallujah’s librettist has told me, not intending this as a caution, but betraying that the charm lies over deeper chasms, hidden agonies. Ellis eats and sighs appreciatively. “This is great.”

He became a “Professional” just after Labour Day 2003. Second battalion, First Marines, Pendleton, California. Part of “The Old Breed”: Guadalcanal, Peleliu, Okinawa, Inchon, Choisin Reservoir, Vietnam, OEF, OIF. The 2/1 Professionals have been active in sixty-four of the past ninety years, including almost twenty continuous years since September 1994. Ellis, who had proven his marksmanship with the M16 and his moxie by correcting a weaponry instructor on the correct range of the 50-calibre machine gun, was assigned to Weapons Company, CAAT platoon. Six months later he was standing on the choking white desert of Kuwait, staggered by the heat, by the engine of military industry churning around him. They were outside of the city of Fallujah in a week.

2/1’s CAAT platoon was tasked with running recon missions to find the hotspots. Ellis recalls the moment it got real, the thin whine of a bullet passing his ear as he sat in the 50 cal turret. “I remember thinking: someone just tried to kill me.” From that moment onward, between recon mission and react calls to support infantry units, mortar attacks and the ongoing danger of IEDs and suicide bombers, Ellis says his head was constantly “on the swivel”, his vigilance level permanently raised. Fear taught the body, and it was a good thing too if you planned on living.

Recon. React. Mount up became the dreaded words. “We’d be in our hooches after a fifteen-hour patrol, just thrown off our sweaty clothes and heavy gear. We’re in our skivvies and laying down… The two most horrible words any CAAT marine can hear.” Mount up! On your feet. Get dressed. Clean and load the weapons, gas the vehicles, gear check. Then go out and have someone fire RPGs at you, a hissing sound Ellis winces remembering.

And then, on March 31, 2004 four contractors working for Blackwater took a shortcut through the Fallujah. They were ambushed, killed, burned and dismembered, the four bodies hung from “Brooklyn Bridge” just south of 2/1’s position off the Jolan District of Fallujah. The Jolan Graveyard, as it was sometimes known. Mount up! Ellis and the CAAT platoon responded to the call, but by the time they were rolling the four men were dead and on television already.

In the opera the soldiers sing: Burnt, like charcoal! Dragged through the street! And the one named Rocks adds in a deathly undertone: This place makes me hate more every day.

Ellis sits silently remembering the blackened bodies of dead Americans, the jeering crowds. “Rage,” he says. “I remember thinking: there’s the enemy. And man, woman and child, they will die.”

Of course, revenge is never as cathartic as rage allows us to anticipate. Just before the first invasion of Fallujah in April 2004, Ellis was brought to the first of his own war’s deadly pivot points. Checkpoint 77, north of the city. A country road with livestock and greenery and eerily no one around. They hit the ambush without ever seeing the shooters. They took casualties and called in the F-18s. Trapped, they set up a perimeter and road blocks. It didn’t take 30 minutes for a car to appear, an ordinary sedan coming on through the chicanes and razor wire, ignoring the hand gestures, the orders to stop shouted in Arabic. Into the kill zone and Sgt. Ellis did as the health of the unit demanded. He emptied an M16 clip through the windshield.

Remembering doesn’t get easier despite remembering every day, every morning, every night, every hour. “We did the dead check,” he says, voice faint. “And what I saw when I looked into the car destroyed my life, literally on a daily basis it’s fucked up my world.”

A father and a mother. Two little boys, five or six years old.

We don’t talk for a while. Ellis needs air. We take a break and drive back to the hotel. Ellis sits in the lobby, looking away from me. But I can see he wants to finish for me to appreciate the arc of the story downwards toward despair. After the first aborted invasion, Ellis recalls a tense intermission in Fallujah during which 2/1 did recon and patrolled the perimeter of the city. At camp he befriended a local boy named Wissam, fourteen years old, who sold the marines DVDs. He introduced himself to Ellis one day by writing his name on Ellis’s palm. In the opera, after doing the same, Wissam inquires of the character Philip what his name might mean, saying: Your mother named you to mean something.

“A good kid. The kind of kid who would have been popular in high school.” Ellis recalls this now but not with a smile because only a few weeks later the boy was killed, his throat slit by the Mujahadeen for fraternizing with Marines.

Spiralling, descending. Ellis and his friends listened to Drowning Pool’s album Let the Bodies Hit the Floor. They listened to themselves laughing hysterically in a PsyOps recording intended to be played at eardrum-cracking volumes through speakers aimed at the enemy. His best friend stepped on a mine outside an Iraqi Coalition Defense Force station as Ellis looked on. “Nothing but pink mist and a memory,” Ellis says, who registered in the ringing aftermath that pieces of his friend’s brain were in his own mouth. And no respite or catharsis following the event, either. Hardly time for a deep breath. Days later, twenty marines from Fox Company died when a vehicle borne IED was detonated next to their seven ton. Ellis breaks down remembering after hours of stoic retelling. “I remember seeing torsos, dismembered heads, arms, legs…. images I never thought I’d have to see. The smell was horrendous, burning bomb chemicals, gasoline, human flesh.” Ellis remembers picking up the half-torso of a dead Marine. “Unimaginable,” he whispers, but we both know he can only wish that were so.

And with these events, Ellis says, the hate was resealed in them. He re-upped to 3/1 (the “Thundering Third”) for the second invasion in November 2004 because he already knew the Jolan territory they’d been tasked with. He had a fractured vertebrae but refused to stay in the hospital. The marines punched into the city from the north, combat bulldozers levelling houses as they went. 1,200 to 1,500 insurgents were killed according to official estimates. Rules of engagement? Ellis says dryly: “unload and show clear”, short hand for empty every clip until there are no more. But if Ellis’s Iraq proved anything it’s that we never reach this point in war anymore. There are always more clips, always three more bullets to fire as you’ve been relentlessly trained: two to the body, one to the head.

Ellis put his final trio of bullets—not his last certainly, but the last he seems to remember—into the body of a nine-year-old boy who walked toward their checkpoint in Jolan with his hands held in front of him and his eyes serenely closed.

Philip sings: He’s got something. He’s cupping his hands. What’s he got in his hands? His hands!!

“Could you kill a child?” Ellis asks me.

We stare at one another awhile here, but we both know the complicated truth. He was over there while I was at home. And yet people like me make up the home to which everyone in Ellis’s position is asked to return. “Could you kill a child,” he says again, less a question than a statement addressed to the Beverly Hilton lobby: plush cream carpets, hanging lights, the glint of chrome and steel, gold and marble.

The boy crossed into the kill zone, ignoring calls to stop. Ellis could see that he appeared to be holding something. “I had the best line of sight so I took the shot. I didn’t hesitate.” Two to the body, one to the head. Probably the Muj making videos to feed Al Jazeera and prove Marines were baby killers. But did their reasons matter now?

The dead check revealed the boy had nothing on him.

***

After you learn all Ellis has been through, it’s tempting to see his encounter with Weingarten as something in the order of miraculous. And that moment on the bank of the stream in Idaho certainly turned things radically around for Ellis. One day he’s a PTSD-diagnosed veteran whose life is crumbling around him and the next, almost literally, he’s signed up for singing lessons with award-winning counter-tenor Brian Asawa and an opera is being written and composed based on his life. And for the world of opera, Fallujah moved incredibly fast, something for which Weingarten’s financing provided. Ellis travelled to New York to spend time with Raffo as she prepared the libretto. He consulted with Stokes as he prepared the score, sharing his Iraq playlists (yes, including Drowning Pool). Annenberg’s budget even included financing for the making of a documentary about the process for screening online by Vancouver filmmaker John Bolton.

“It was beyond anything I’ve seen in my professional life,” Charles Barber, director of City Opera Vancouver tells me, who’s been making operas for 25 years.

And yet by the time I meet Ellis in Los Angeles, he still has no meaningful work. He’s isolated, living alone in Van Nuys. No friends, he says, a situation hard to rectify since he rarely goes out. “You wouldn’t believe the energy it took me just to come down here to talk to you,” he tells me, eyes narrowed almost to the point of closing, hat brim pulled down low. He’s depressed, he says. He’s taking mirtazapine which exhausts him but which he needs to get out of the house.

Part of this behaviour is the PTSD, but talking to Ellis you quickly sense that there’s more. Clinically defined, PTSD is the produce of danger-driven trauma. Combat puts your head “on the swivel”, as Ellis has put it, and your agitated neurons eventually rewire to speed up fight-or-flight responses. Dr. Jonathan Shay, a retired VA psychiatrist who worked for 20 years with veterans suffering from a range of stress related injuries, describes PTSD as a “battlefield adaptation” that creates problems when they can’t be turned off. But when total numbers are discussed – over half a million people suffering from stress injuries among the 2.4 million who’ve served since 9/11 – a crucial take-away is that clinical PTSD cannot explain all these cases or symptoms because so many veterans cannot trace the onset of their problems—with jobs and relationships, with depression—to traumatic experiences that stemmed from danger. Ellis himself, in the harrowing experiences he describes to me and in those attributed to the character in Fallujah that he inspired, seems hardly to rate danger even though it’s an obvious part of the job sitting in a machine gun turret in a live-fire zone. What Ellis returns to again and again instead are situations of when combat pushes combatants into betraying their values.

“I personally believe that it’s against human nature to kill,” Ellis told me in our very first conversation. But when you’re trained to react immediately and protect your buddies in volatile situations, you do what you need to survive. “Unfortunately, when you’re taken out of that environment, it’s hard to come to terms with.”

Dr. Shay is so convinced of the capacity for injury beyond PTSD that he coined the term “moral injury” to describe what Ellis and so many others seem to be suffering. It’s a term now used by a growing body of researchers and one that resonates with veterans I interview as well. Zachary Iscol was Ellis’s Executive Officer in 3/1 Weapons Company during the second invasion of Fallujah, a time during which an elderly man who merely had “bad eyes and bad brakes” drove at their barricade and was shot dead.

“Nobody signs up to be the person who takes the life of someone’s father at a checkpoint,” Iscol tells me. But it happened. And the result wasn’t hyper-vigilance. “Shame and guilt about the decisions made,” he says instead. “And grief. Traumatic amounts of grief.”

Dr. William Nash, who served as a psychiatrist with the Marines in Fallujah at the same time as Iscol and Ellis, tells me that marine after marine told him similar stories during his tour. Whether they’d done something or failed to do something, “the common theme was the feeling that they failed to live up to their own ethos.”

If this is hell for soldiers and Marines – like Ellis, who twists in his chair recounting these events – it’s starting to suggest another kind of impending hell for treatment professionals, who understand that moral injury is a much thornier and longer term problem than PTSD, which at least has established therapies to desensitize the impact of particular triggers: loud noises, open spaces, people approaching them from behind. The person who has breached their own moral code—as Ellis feels he has done in those checkpoint killings as well as in failing to save his buddy who stepped on the mine – experiences what Shay describes as “betrayal” which contributes to a destruction of the capacity for trust.

“And that is a catastrophe,” Shay says. “The destruction of trust is like cancer of the soul because what replaces trust is not a vacuum but the expectation of harm, exploitation and humiliation from other people and institutions.” People in this position are isolated, which adds to despair. And here we drive through to the darker side of the discussion, where the life of so many veterans are actually lived in the balance. Ellis had survived four suicide attempts before finding himself sitting on the bank of a stream chatting with Weingarten about opera. But a staggering number of service members and veterans do not survive their suicide attempts. The VA estimates that since 9/11 approximately 22 veterans a day have killed themselves. Among active service members, Philip Carter at the Centre for a New American Security (CNAS) tells me that 3,600 troops have suicide over the same period, roughly the same number as have been lost to IEDs. Concern at senior levels of the military is unprecedented, Carter says, both due to worries about military readiness and the ethos that no service member be left behind. “Generals I know take this very seriously,” Carter tells me. “A military suicide is a personal loss, a defeat.”

The possibility that this problem might be structural, then, is deeply troubling. But both Ellis’s experience and mounting research make it hard not to reach that conclusion. In a policy brief called Losing the Battle: The Challenge of Military Suicide, CNAS researchers explain how three protective factors typically prevent people from suiciding in moments of despair: belonging, usefulness, and the fear of death. But as Ellis’s own experience chillingly illustrates, military service amplifies the first two while silencing the third. Trained to run towards explosions, to defend buddies as if their injuries would be his own, Ellis felt intense belonging and usefulness while in uniform. He re-upped to 3/1 because he knew the Jolan terrain and, despite having a broken back, knew that his contribution would be invaluable to the new unit.

Civilian life in the consumerist west is famously less affirming and Ellis is living this drama too. His collaboration with Raffo and Stokes gave him purpose and a profound sense of usefulness. He was flying to New York. He was being interviewed by the press and filmed for the documentary. The process was extraordinary by any standards.

“Nobody makes a film about a workshop, I can tell you that,” Heather Raffo says. “And nobody films a workshop and then puts the film on the internet and then has their press guys out there to get massive amounts of press.”

Fallujah and Ellis got massive press. And by the time the workshop had its filmed performance in Vancouver in May 2012, the house jammed with invited guests and military friends and visitors, it was to Ellis like a dream come true. He wept. And then it was over and the longer and slower part of the process began, contacting prospective opera houses, further fine-tuning and workshopping, a process that in opera can take literally years. Ellis no longer had a role.

“For a while this opera was the most amazing thing in my life,” Ellis tells me. “And then the contract for my employment ended and… I’ve been the worst in my life that I’ve ever been in terms of depression.”

300 resumes. That’s what the job application count is at. One call back. No job offer. Ellis hit a low point when he didn’t get a call back on a job posting for a janitor. He hit an even lower point when a prospective room-mate cheated him out of his half of a damage deposit which left him broke and living in his car, something he did for a month.

Belonging? Usefulness? Ellis found these operatically compromised, you could say. And with his fear of death long trained out of him, he was completely exposed, stripped free of protective layering just as despair came calling in the form of dreams and day-mares about a family of four, the body of an unarmed nine year old in the street of Jolan.

This understanding of Ellis situation is crucial in that it situates his struggle at the intersection of service and society. Moral injury isn’t a military problem but a cultural one. The affected service member or veteran is suspended in the chasm between military and civilian values, and there’s strong evidence to suggest that chasm is widening as both combat and western cultures evolve.

Combat, simply put, is getting harder on people. Of course no veteran will ever describe their own combat experience as more difficult than anybody else’s in history. But Marine Lt Colonel Dave Grossman, in his book On Combat, argues that the constancy, ubiquity and intensity of combat violence has radically increased over history. “Fighting all day and all night for months on end is a twentieth century phenomenon,” he notes, going on to estimate that if combat in a contemporary theater were to be continuous for sixty days, 98 percent of service members involved will become psychiatric casualties of one kind or another.

Worsening the situation is a factor Nash refers to as the “dimensionality” of contemporary combat, stemming from the reality of counter-insurgency, where the hand of friendship must be extended despite the enemy being indistinguishable from friends and civilians (and all three categories in Iraq proving fluid). Ellis himself remembers General James Mattis instructing them before the first invasion of Fallujah: “Suspect everyone is a terrorist but don’t treat them like one.” This is humane guidance, assuredly, measured against Abbot Amalric’s pep-talk to his retinue before 1209 Sack of Bezier at the beginning of the Albigensian Crusade: “Kill them all, God will know his own.” But the more victim-sensitive approach of our era is being applied on a confused and uncertain battlefield where in virtually any moment of engagement there is an elevated likelihood that a soldier or marine will kill a civilian, breaching the quasi-religious sanction that military culture holds against this practice and exposing the service member to potentially life-changing after-effects.

Problematically, it isn’t necessarily possible to mitigate the rising potential for moral injury with training or leadership. In fact, the reverse may be paradoxically true. The more effectively a unit is fused, the more embedded the individual identities are in the collective meaning and purpose, the more grievous will be the trauma experienced at the loss of one of its members. Fallujah’s preoccupation with mothers is telling here as it reflects Raffo’s dawning awareness in her own research of the true bond between combat comrades.

“They don’t brother each other,” she says to me. “They mother each other.”

And the grief they feel on the loss of comrades, Nash says, is commensurate. “It’s something I’d really only previously seen in parents who’d lost children. It’s an impossible grief.”

As for the risk of killing a civilian, effective leadership can lend its expertise to avoiding this outcome. But it can’t help contributing to it simultaneously. Grossman’s analysis of effective leadership and training characterizes them as “psychological weapons”, used to elicit combat behaviours that contribute to victory. In a famous example, “fire rates”—the percentage of shooting opportunities resulting in a shot being taken—are reported by some studies to have risen due to leadership and training techniques from as low as 20 percent during World War Two to over 90 percent today. What is mission critical to combat, however, doesn’t necessarily cater to mental health post-combat. Ellis now lives with the after-effects of having had these psychological weapons applied in his own training. He was a better marine for their application. He was better able to do what society demands a marine to do. But on his return to that same civilian society, Ellis found himself in possession of a self-knowledge that is a significant part of his torment.

“Whether you’re family or friend,” he tells me on the topic of following orders, pulling the trigger, and defending his unit even at the risk of mistakes and moral injury, “I’ll take you out. In the moment, I would do what I had to do. And knowing that has become more of a curse than a blessing.”

The blessing is the degree to which that mental conditioning allowed him to serve the unit’s common good. The curse is that civilian society is less able than ever to synchronize with those values and less able to reabsorb veterans as a result. Society is the context in which service is undertaken. And if combat has more likely to psychiatrically injure, society has changed too in ways that make it an ever more difficult site of recovery and healing. The Abbot Almaric’s directions now seem perverse, but nobody under his command would have been able to express misgivings in terms of the potential for moral injury because the loosening of social hierarchies and power structures in the West such that individual dignity and enfranchisement would have real meaning was hundreds of years in the future. And it would only be in recent times that social conditions would provide for ongoing, widespread and public disagreement about the prosecution of the nation’s wars, a situation now so established in the United States—no war of the past half century having been truly “popular”—that it should be considered healthy and normal.

To be curious, to question, and to disagree are modern civilian capacities. Immediate and willing obedience remains the requirement of military service. Between them grows a gap and its relative recency is a defining feature of it.

“The social context has evolved greatly,” Philip Carter tells me, speaking of what he refers to as the civil-military divide. Part of that is the result of participation rates, which have fallen to less than one percent of the population. The bigger part is mindset, to the point that Carter will tell me: “There’s now little connective tissue remaining between those who serve and the society they serve.”

The ultimate evidence of that loss of connective tissue, Carter says, is a dichotomy that has emerged in the national conversation about military service. “That dichotomy paints all troops as victims or all troops as heroes,” he says. “Neither is true and both are harmful in different ways.”

Carter’s framing of the divide is powerful, and should be troubling for those concerned with veterans’ health and the efficacy of the service-society partnership, because it cuts to the fundamental discontinuity of values that has grown over time between those two broad entities. Troops dislike the word hero and they hate the word victim. These are quintessentially modern civilian concepts, dependent on a politics of individual recognition and individual rights, and therefore hostile respectively to the indispensable military values of duty and sacrifice. To be a good service member means embracing a self-conception that the society you serve has steadily eradicated in its laudable pursuit of rights and freedoms, while at the same time being tasked with protecting a civilian self-conception that your own service will demand you to put aside. That is the wide and disorienting space in which the potential for moral injury becomes radically magnified. It’s also the paradox to which every stress-injured veteran returns.

The remedy isn’t obvious to anyone I speak to about it. But healing is almost always characterized as a process that must involve both service members and civilians. That one percent who serve do so on behalf of the ninety-nine who don’t, however insulated, estranged and distracted the ninety-nine may have become. “The miasma, the moral stain of war used to be something that the whole population felt the responsibility for cleansing,” Nash says. “It isn’t like that here, nor anywhere else in the West as far as I know.”

“Every society known to anthropology and history had rituals for returning soldiers,” Shay says, noting these always involved civilians. “In my view we all need to clean ourselves up after war.”

Perhaps Fallujah can contribute to such a process. For Ellis, it did at least provide for a temporary atonement. He wept at the staged workshop in Vancouver “not only because of how it sounded, but because these were characters I knew, singing back to me.”

Characters restored to life, in other words: Wissam, a best friend, a boy at a checkpoint and a family of four. Christian Ellis too, alive again and redeemed. And for as long as it took the stunned applause in the theater to fade and for the cameras to stop rolling, Ellis might have claimed a kind of healing. But the applause did fade and the cameras did stop rolling. And service and society continued their silent drift ever further out of mutual reach, Ellis in the chasm between and falling fast.

“I’m an actress,” says Raffo, who has watched Ellis buffeted by the ebb and flow of attention swirling around Fallujah. “And for a really grounded person who’s used to dealing with it every day… it’s still hard. You put someone in the middle of the fire for whom am-I-worthy is their crux issue…”

Her voice trails off but we both know where the sentence is going. We’ve both heard Ellis at highs and lows: one month talking about producing Fallujah for LA Opera with the help of a friend, the next month withdrawing from the opera entirely. At one point I get an email from him indicating that the opera has ruined his life. He loses his car eventually. He loses his apartment. He announces plans to re-recruit with the Marines but his cause for release prevents it despite his stellar ratings. Our last conversation in Los Angeles is in a Mexican restaurant in the Sherman Oaks gallery, we eat carne asada. Ellis sips a Jack and Coke. The afternoon shadows lengthen and Ellis tells me something I’ve sensed lingering in the unsaid.

“I created it, but it’s not my project,” he says. “I’m trying. I’m not giving up. I don’t give up. But there are days I feel like I want to and that’s when I’ve tried suicide.”

So we arrive at the point where Ellis’s bid for recovery has brought him, despite his progress all the way from the horror of Fallujah to the wavering beauty and truth of Fallujah. He remembers swallowing a handful of pills and laying on the bed. He remembers drowsiness, things shutting down. He remembers his dog jumping up next to him, putting a paw on his chest and starting to whimper. Just enough to pull him back. Ellis phoned for an ambulance and had himself committed. He stayed in hospital for two weeks.

He sits back in the chair at the restaurant telling me this. The galleria is swarming with shoppers behind him. He’s looking at me from under the brim of that hat with the frayed brim. His eyes are open wider than before, but only very slightly.

***

In Fallujah, The Mothers’ Duet poignantly captures the interwoven tragedies of traumatic loss and moral injury and shows them to bridge the difference between friend and enemy. But after that moment, unison does not return. There is instead, in the narrative and musical unfolding of the opera, a darkening, a sense of ongoing crisis. Philip sings to the transformations of war, the remaking of the civilian as a marine, and then the terrible moral remaking of combat. I thought I would make something of myself, but this war made something out of me.

Ellis too had no control over what war would do to him. He had no way to predict it. “An emotionally devoid shell,” he says. “Happiness destroyed. Sadness, depression, heartache, rage.”

We meet a final time in Washington, DC. Bolton’s film The Making of Fallujah is being screened at the GI Film Festival. On “International Warrior Night” we watch movies about PTSD at the Canadian Embassy, including one by Danish rapper Martin Milo who deployed to Afghanistan in 2010. Say what you want, just don’t call me a hero. Milo who sings from out of the chasm, intensely proud of his service, missing his comrades both because of and despite the hell they endured. Ready to die, with my brothers by my side. Then the chorus: Promise me, we won’t return to war. A few minutes later Ellis has to leave the theater when one film depicts a little girl brutally murdered in Baghdad by the Mujahadeen for socializing with English soldiers. What Ellis has been through, he has not been through alone.

The Making of Fallujah screens the last day of the festival in Arlington. Ellis is nervous and begs off talking to sit alone in the back row. Then, just before it starts, he comes down the theater and slips into a seat beside me. Up there on screen he’s affable, easy going. He interviews well and does not seem tormented. But I feel him twisting in the chair next to me.

Philip, nearing the very end of the opera sings: It’s not what I did, it’s what’s possible. What I could do. What I can do.

Philip’s mother Colleen sings a final time in the opera, after the mother’s duet. She’s been waiting outside the VA hospital room throughout the story. Her son’s back is still turned to her. But she’s had time to reflect on her prior ignorance, and to realize what understanding will bring. It comes minutes before the end. But in that moment Colleen suddenly see herself accurately in place.

How can I sleep seeing what you see? This war has made a monster of me.

Here we understand Colleen to have seen herself emblematic: the culpable civilian, the context of her son’s service, the necessary partner to any possible absolution, forgiveness and healing. She could have said “any war now and going forward”. She could have said “made a monster out of us”. But it’s Colleen’s moment of epiphany. And the rest of us—waiting as we are outside Christian Ellis’s recovery room and that of all other injured veterans whether we realize it or not—now need urgently to reach that moment of epiphany in our own ways.

It was all very fascinating and then one day a well-known architecture critic said to: well if you want to get to the bottom of this, you’re just going to have to sit down read the foundational architecture school textbook called Structures: or Why Things Don’t Fall Down, by JE Gordon.

So I ordered a copy. And I loved it from the opening paragraph a lot, which I’ve entered below in slightly abbreviated form:

“A structure is defined as ‘any assemblage of materials which is intended to sustain loads… If an engineering structure breaks people are likely to get killed, so engineers do well to investigate the behavior of structures with circumspection.

But, unfortunately, when they come to tell other people about their subject, something goes badly wrong, for they talk in a strange language, and some of us are left with the conviction that the study of structures… is incomprehensible, irrelevant and very boring indeed.”

That can on occasion seem true of story telling also. You have to build stories the right way, even if when they fall down they rarely kill people.

And here’s another thing I noticed. Check out the cover of my copy of Gordon’s book, purchased for $5 on AbeBooks.

What’s with the skeleton?

And that’s where things get interesting. Because here is something that architecture can teach us about story telling. There is a sense of the structures in play being organically linked to human physiology. And that’s what this blog post is about.

How is that true of architecture?

Well we have to go back to another foundational text to see that. That would be the 14^th century Italian edition of  De Architectura, a seminal architectural book written by Roman engineer and artillery designer Vitruvius. Indeed, the famous Vitruvian Man from the Da Vinci drawing. But Da Vinci wasn’t drawing a portrait, he was illustrating the way that the writing of Vitruvius connected principle building principles and the human body.

The Canon of Proportions, this drawing and its text are sometimes also known. And what a crucial idea it captures: that the human form somehow indicates the principles that should guide the construction of those structures we wish to safely inhabit.

That skeleton on the cover of Structures: or Why Things Don’t Fall Down suddenly makes more sense.

Of course, we don’t build buildings just to stand up. A water tower stands up and is good for what it does. But it’s not a great building in any holistic sense. And here again, with respect to JE Gordon, who himself acknowledges the architect communications do occasionally go badly wrong, Vitruvius is again our source who summed up that holistic expression of what makes good architect in one memorable phrase.

Interviewer: Tell me in your words, Mr. Vitruvius, what makes a good building?

Vitruvius: The end is to build well. And well building hath three conditions: firmness, commodity and delight.

I’m cheating a bit there, because Vitruvius never said exactly that. But that’s how his big idea was translated by Sir Henry Wotton in his book The Elements of Architecture (1624). Firmness, commodity, and delight.

Firmness: Does the building stand up? Does it keep out the wind and rain?

Commodity: An old-fashioned word for “usefulness”. Will people want to occupy the building? Will they find ways to use it for their purposes over time?

Delight: Does the building engage and hold the eye and senses? Is it beautiful?

In short, this:

How is this applied to story telling?

Stories are built things. Stories have architects. Stories have users who occupy them. Stories are sometimes beautiful and sometimes merely riveting and engaging all the while they trouble us. Stories are in every sense a structure. And writers are in every sense the people who wish to do the building.

But more important than any metaphorical talk: stories share with architecture a sense that they are linked to the organic evolution of the human species. For one reason or another, we’ve tended to shape and tell our stories in similar ways over time.

Aristotle famously put that together in a paradigm that is attributed to him and his book De Poetica. That one looks something like this:

From Star Wars to the Lord of the Rings, you can easily discern this shape in storytelling. And I’ll unpack this paradigm in greater length in a future blog post. My point really is that such a paradigm is possible. And it’s not the only one. Other researchers have done similar work, summarizing a historical body of stories to show how they seem to adhere to pattern, as if in response to some organic need or impulse on the part of the humans telling the stories.

Joseph Campbell is another famous example. He catalogued myths told in cultures all over the world. And his schematic summary (which I’ll also blog about it more detail in a future post that looks at the corporate story of Johnny Walker Black) is different in shape than Aristotle, but gestures towards some of the same basic narrative movements.

Here’s how Campbell is typically summarized:

If human organics suggest best practices in building buildings, then these paradigms show us that stories have historically emerged in similar fashion. And if that is an article of faith on my part, accept at least that it has been a useful for me in framing an approach to the craft of fiction.

Returning to that summation of Vitruvius, now bent to our purposes:

Firmness:                          Does the story stand up? Does it have all of the necessary parts to make it weather the elements?

Here’s where I think the “Elements of Fiction” come into play, those essential building blocks in our fiction: characters types, setting, prose components, style & tone, theme, symbolism & imagery

Commodity:                     Will readers want to occupy the story and inhabit it over time, putting it to “use” in their own individual ways?

Here we look to the ways that stories have been found “useful” through history, unpacking the paradigms and conventions, not to create rules that mustn’t be broken, but to create an understanding of how narrative spaces have been successfully constructed for reader occupation in the past.

Delight:                             Does the story engage and hold the senses? Is it beautiful? Or if not, is it yet captivating such that it might achieve the author’s intended effects?

Here in the discussion is where we look to more subjective approaches and techniques, ways to create active and engaged beginnings, accessing characters in ways that make them live, writing dialogue that evokes the real, and the careful building of climaxes, capsize moments and resonant resolutions.

These are all areas which I’ve worked on with students, and which I’ll return to in later weeks and months in my blog.

I hope you’ll join me and share your own experiences with story in the comments sections.

I get asked about unreliable characters a lot, a device that’s been used extensively in storytelling through the ages. Twentieth-century novels like Lolita, Fight Club and Life of Pi come to mind.

Maybe my students are extra interested in unreliability these days because of what’s happening in politics. I can’t say for sure.

But the area has been studied. You can find a section on unreliable narrators in that copy of Booth’s 1961 book The Rhetoric of Fiction which is probably sitting on the shelf right over your left shoulder.

Another good book on the topic was written by William Riggan in 1982 called Picaros, Madmen, Naifs and Clowns: The Unreliable First Person Narrator. Picaros boast. Madmen are deluded. Clowns don’t take anything seriously. And Naifs just don’t get what’s going on.

Riggan also wrote about Liars, who of course do what liars do. Which raises the topic of politicians again. But let’s just not go there…

Let’s just talk instead about how we can approach unreliability in our thinking as writers. And with that in mind, I’ve attached my own taxonomy of these character types (simpler than Riggan’s) based on two variables:

• The degree to which the character knows the reality of the story, which is to say the spectrum at the opposite ends of which live the naif and the liar;
• The degree to which the readers is aware of that same reality, which is the difference between a story that surprises you at some point with the unreliability of the narrator, and those stories which you read seeing that unreliability all along.

Those two variables give rise to four archetypic reading experiences which I’ve sketched into the following table with some examples in each case.

I hope this is helpful.

—

Thanks everyone for being here. And thank you Shelly Rosenblum and the Belkin Gallery for inviting me.

I’ve only been full-time faculty here for 18 months or so. And one thing I didn’t know to anticipate were these cross-disciplinary conversations that were possible on-campus. Last week I enjoyed listening to novelist Camilla Gibb talk at the Peter Wall Institute about empathy and anthropology. Today I get to talk with UBC History professor Carla Nappi about Ai Weiwei. This is a great pleasure.

I’m going to avoid saying anything that might be mistaken for art criticism today. It’s not my field. What I’m going to do instead is draw on my own practice area – both in journalism and writing novels – and talk about the narrative that these images suggest to me.

I feel encouraged to do this by Ai Weiwei himself, who didn’t really consider this collection of photos to be a work of art in themselves. This will seem counterintuitive, I realize. Ai WeiWei is one of the most recognized contemporary artists in the world today. He curated this selection from 10,000 original pictures and took the time to put them in a particular order. And of course it’s hanging in an art gallery, so it must be art.

But what he actually said about this collection is: “I would not consciously have called it art. It’s just the activities in my life. Becoming more conscious of my life activities, that attitude was more important than producing work.”

The attitude Ai Weiwei was speaking about was the conviction that he was indeed an artist, a belief that everyone who wants to practice in the arts must somehow attain. Not trying to be an artist. Not planning. But being. With these photographs, Ai Weiwei seems to be telling us, he wasn’t making art, he was making himself as an artist, which is never easy.

As a storyteller, I find that very interesting. Narrative comes to life when three elements first combine: (1) character, (2) desire (for concrete or abstract outcomes), and (3) obstacles that prevent the character from merely claiming what is desired. That’s the juice of narrative right there.

And as I look at these photographs, that’s what I find myself seeing. The beginning of a narrative about Ai Weiwei’s movement towards an objective. He may be a superstar now. But these pictures offer a glimpse of Weiwei at his crucial moment of becoming. 25 years old, out of China for the first time, and for the first time also engaged in a fully autonomous way with his own dreams and desires.

So who was this young man, before becoming the famous man?

History is relevant here. Born in 1957 in Beijing, Ai Weiwei arrived just a few months after his father, the well-known poet Ai Quing, had been denounced by authorities, banned from writing or publishing. And the family had been sent to a work camp in Northeast China. The cultural revolution in 1966 arguably made things worse for them. And without dwelling overly on this history, just consider that Ai Weiwei as a nine year old boy saw his father publically and ritually and repeatedly humiliated. He saw posters with his father’s image and defamatory statements. He saw his father force-marched through the streets, chanting confessions to crimes he hadn’t committed, while children threw stones. In a particularly vivid memory, the artist remembers when his father was denounced as a “reactionary novelist” by people who knew nothing about his father’s writing – he was a poet, and had never written a novel – and these people then doused his father’s face in black ink. Since the couldn’t afford soap, his father’s face remained black for many days.

The end of the Cultural Revolution didn’t heal everything either. “After 20 years of injustice,” he said. “We were given only these words: it was a mistake.”

They were back in Beijing however, and more free than ever before. Ai Weiwei joined the Beijing Film Academy in the Set Design department, where he was going to learn how to paint. But almost immediately he began producing work so outrageous to his instructors that they declined even to consider it for grades. Ai Weiwei eventually quit and applied to study abroad in the US.

So that is the young man who arrived in the East Village in 1981, working part time jobs and by his own description, not really having any solid idea what he was doing there. He speaks of just leaving his apartment in the morning and wandering, without direction or agenda.

But he did have a vision of himself as an artist. And so a crucial triangle takes shape: a character, desire, and all the many obstacles that you might imagine for a broke, new immigrant, shortly to be an illegal immigrant, who has this most impossible of dreams.

Luckily for us, he also had a camera with which that narrative beginning might be captured.

Not immediately, however. But it seems that around 1985, or 1986, the photos really started to accumulate. This documenting of himself doing the thing he’d dreamed of doing.

Here’s the son of a poet who was forbidden to write for twenty years. Here’s an artist declaring himself to be subject to no such powers.

“I started my own life, in which I was very clear about my own decisions. Before that, I was a student and all the decisions were made by common requirements – you study at school, finish your studies, and then try to become an artist. Then I realized that I am an artist and that it’s my life and that’s the way I choose to live. So I started to take some photos… excited about this new life and this kind of attitude.”

No surprise then that Ai Weiwei developed what you might think of as the proto-selfie. Here he is at the MOMA

Here he is on West Fourth Street, where Ai Weiwei and other Chinese artists would paint the portraits of passersby.

The artist here is in the process not so much of examining himself as gathering the supporting evidence to prove himself, something this shot into the mirror really captures.

That’s Ai Weiwei recording Ai Weiwei in the process of becoming Ai Weiwei.

In the Facebook era, there is a tendency to dismiss this as self-promotion: fatuous and transparent. But here is a man raised on the edge of a northern Chinese desert, exposed for the first time to the possibilities of the individual. I find this mirror shot makes a lot of sense in that context.

Of course, it’s important to understand that he wasn’t an isolated loner as these images might suggest. Selfies run the risk of suggesting total self-absorption. But this doesn’t appear to ahve been the case. In fact, Ai Weiwei seems to have been a social magnet during this time, constantly in touch with people, exploring, listening, exchanging ideas. One imagines the conversations to have been very lively.

Artist and intellectuals:

A film student from Taiwan.

Here’s the well-known Chinese poet Bei Dao visiting with Ai Weiwei in 1988.

Bei Dao is the most notable representative of the Misty Poets, a group of Chinese poets who reacted against the restrictions of the Cultural Revolution. Dao would go on later to write a book of essays about his time in New York called Midnight’s Gate which includes a cloaked reference to Ai Weiwei.

In a piece in Artforum, Philip Tinari writes: “Everyone in Bejing knew that his basement apartment on East 7th Street had become an unofficial embassy for the avant-garde in exile.”

As you might expect, in that case, he was friendly with Allen Ginsberg and Harry Smith

Smith was one of the Godfathers of the beat movement, an artist and experimental filmmaker and bohemian mystic. He was also a fanatical collector of paper airplanes, Seminole textiles and Ukrainian Easter eggs. He would have been living with Ginsberg at this time, having run out of money, an arrangement Ginsberg’s doctor eventually put an end to, the story goes, because Smith was giving Ginsberg high blood pressure.

Ai Weiwei met Ginsburg at a poetry reading at St. Marks In-the-Bowery. Ginsberg knew Weiwei’s father and had met him in Beijing. In the New Yorker, Weiwei describes Ginsberg reading his poetry aloud including White Shroud, which Ginsberg wrote for his mother. “I didn’t quite understand it. But he loved reading it.

If there was a kind of narrative bump, or turning point in this material, this collection of photographs, to me it seems to be the Tompkins Square Riot photos of 1988.

As some will remember, New York had a series of riots in 1988 relating to housing and public parks access. Tompkins Park had itself become a squatters camp which then Mayor Koch famously criticized for being filthy before acknowledging he’d never been there. A curfew was imposed. And on August 6 and 7, police tried to clear people out of the park in what was later referred to as a “police riot”.

This is the front of Christodora House, which is on Avenue B on the east side of Tompkins Park. This is kind of ground zero for the whole dispute. Originally part of the American Settlement House Movement, Christodora House was built in 1928 to provide “low-income and immigrant residents food, shelter, education and health services.” It had a pool and a gym, and was sort of like a private rec centre with social housing. It was in financial difficulties by the 40’s and was sold to the city, who seem to have more or less left it for a couple of decades. During the 60’s it was full of squatters and was reportedly the National HQ of Black Panthers as well as serving as a set for porn films. Wiki tells me that both Iggy Pop and Vincent D’Onofrio at one point lived here.

In 1975, the city sold the property for $62,500 and within a decade the developer began to convert the building to condos, which cause further friction in the area. During the Tompkins square riots crowds broke in and trashed the lobby yelling “Die Yuppie Scum”.

Imagine how angry people would have been if they’d known that in another 20 years, 25 years, a 1400 square foot one bedroom in Christodora would run around $2 million.

Later there would be other protests in Washington Square Park Protest 1988, and Ai Weiwei would be there too.

And the following year would be the year of ACT UP AIDS protests.

I think what we’re seeing here is the shaping of a world view, shaping of a sense of skepticism about power. Here’s a young man marked by the cultural revolution, adrift in America, in the process of proving himself to be what his imagination told him he could be… It is probably critical to note that these protests here would have been followed in months by events in Tianamen Square.

Here’s an artist intensely, ferociously engaged I think. Taking stock.

“We were young at the time and soon identified with the values of the free world because of our recent history. We hated totalitarian society very much and longed for the so-called free world. Later, we  became more critical of the US when we found out the country didn’t have as much freedom as it claimed.”

Did Ai Weiwei feel hopeless though? One suspects not. Because woven through the difficult images are always people acting, people (like Weiwei, but in their own ways) claiming themselves.

For every act of suppression, and act of expression.

After 1989, although I haven’t counted them, it seems to me the selfies begin to get less frequent. Ai Weiwei is still present in all of these, but we sense the process of self-discovery is now past its beginnings, that something like conclusions or at least convictions are shaping themselves in this young man.

The future beckons.

The Godfather of Beat Generation, Harry Smith dies

Smith had a heart attack in Room 328 of the Hotel Chelsea. He died in the hospital later in the arms of a poet friend who reported that he was “singing as he drifted away”.

I find myself thinking that Ai Weiwei had an ironic glint in his eye as he selected this as the last of the series.

End credits. Cue the violin. The artist has left the building.

“My experience in the US was the most important experience of my life. There I learned about personal freedom, independence, and the relationship between the individual and the state, as well as the power structure of that society – and art, of course, I learned a lot.”

I want to return to the poet Bei Dao for a moment to close.

This is a short excerpt from Bei Dao’ book Midnight’s Gate about his time in New York. Note that he does not name the artist friend that he meets, but you be the judge who he’s talking about…

“The first time I visited New York was in the summer of 1988. We went to the East Village to look for W…

He’d been living illegally in New York for eight years. People have different reactions to living illegally. Some people live as if they’re walking on thin ice, while others take to it like a fish to water. New York remakes people like no other place.

This man who was a good student – a sophomore in film school – had completely transformed himself. His eyes were gloomy, his face fatter, and his ears bigger.

He was now full of New York slang. As he walked down the street all sorts of people walked over to greet him, their faces full of respect. At that time, the East Village was a land of the homeless, drunks, drug dealers and those suffering from AIDS. He would always grunt a response, but would not say much, just pat them on the shoulder, or stroke their bald heads, and miraculously, their enraged, crazy spirits would calm instantly.

I asked him how he made a living, and he said he painted people’s portraits on the street. He then got out his painting tools, hailed a taxi, and dragged us to a section of West Fourth Street, where a number of other Chinese painters were already trying to drum up business. Unfortunately, luck was not with him that evening as he waited two hours with no one even inquiring about prices. When someone suggested he go to Atlantic City for a little gambling, he immediately closed up shop and sailed off.

I’ll let Ai Weiwei have the last word, a quote which I find resonating in each of these photos. It seems to me that if these photos do one thing, taken all together, it is to show Ai Weiwei reaching this conclusion:

“Creativity,” Ai Weiwei wrote in 2008, twenty years after that visit with Bei Dao… “is the power to reject the past, to change the status quo, and to seek new potential. Simply put, aside from using one’s imagination—perhaps more importantly—creativity is the power to act.”

It looked like a billboard.

But it wasn’t advertising anything.

Instead, it depicted the space right in front of the board, but completely empty of people.

That space, the University has decided, will be called Achievement Square. And it’s intended to be a high traffic zone where people can congregate and express themselves.

The billboard wasn’t advertising Achievement Square, however. It was asking passersby to envision the space as they might like to see it in the future.

Fridge Magnet Game. Wha…?

But on the other side, it became pretty clear. Dozens of little people, fridge magnet style, campus citizens in minature, available for you to arrnage in patterns of your choosing, doing whatever you think they would be doing, in combinations or by themselves.

People didn’t need instructions. Fridge Magnets is like a universal language.

A day or so after install, the new square had been envisioned over and over again, hundreds of times.

Some visions were just what you’d expect:

Romantic congress. Observation. Critical distance. That’s pretty much campus life right there.

Go visit The Achievement Square Fridge Magnet Game out front of the UBC Bookstore, a collaboration between UBC Creative Writing, the artist Byron “Cameraman” Dauncey, and the UBC SEEDS Program (social economic ecological development studies), which is itself part of UBC Campus and Community Planning.

Come down and play the Fridge Magnet Game. There are no rules. There are no age restrictions.

Not a lot of RIP Paul Walker posts in my various feeds this morning, despite the Fast and the Furious lead having died a grisly death on Saturday. I guess Walker doesn’t have a big profile in the literary scene. His films were middle brow. His acting wasn’t overly nuanced. So he died in the burning wreck of a Porsche, I can hear the collective consciousness murmuring. Wasn’t that kind of in the script?

Maybe. I don’t know. Who knows anything about death but the dead? But I did meet Walker once. So I can talk about the guy I met, who surprised me.

I was working for Toro Magazine at the time, Canada’s upstart Esquire clone that burned through a few million of a prominent Toronto real estate developer dollars before everybody came to their senses. They sent me to LA to interview him in early 2006, just pre-Flags of Our Fathers. Some PR genius set up the meet at the Peterson Automotive Museum (cars, get it? Fast and the Furious? Like a theme interview.) We walked around looking at old cars owned by other actors for awhile, Paul Newman, Steve McQueen. Walker was unimpressed because he raced cars himself. He’d piled a GT3 into the wall at Willow Springs the week prior. No big deal because he’d use it as a parts car. (Chilling a bit to note that he was a passenger in a GT when he died, but I digress.)

I gave him a break from cars and we found a booth in the deserted museum cafeteria. We got talking and were there for a couple of hours. And a very interesting person emerged: a guy who hated Hollywood, disliked being a public person, and spent half his time plotting an escape from both that he never ultimately made.

You can read the article here and decide for yourself what you think about him. But one part of the interview that didn’t make the article sticks with me most. It was the moment Walker realized that I didn’t cover Hollywood for a living, that I wasn’t part of the machine, and that was the moment he suddenly got very candid.

We were talking about the film he’d just produced called The Death and Life of Bobby Z, starring Walker and Laurence Fishbourne (who Walker hugely admired)…

Walker: Everyone was rock solid. And I just hope to God it comes out all right. Because it was just good people all around. Olivia Wilde is just awesome. She was on OC, she played what’s that Misha Barton… Is that her name?

TT: I don’t know.

PW: You’re worse than me. Even I know her name. But I don’t watch any of her shows. You watch TV at all?

TT: Nah.

PW: (Long pause.) Me either. Do you have a TV set up?

TT: Yeah, it’s set up…

PW: But you don’t watch it.

TT: No.

PW: You watch movies?

TT: I do watch movies.

PW: (laughs, shakes his head) You’re like me. I don’t know who anybody is. You don’t know who anybody is down here. (laughing)

TT: No I don’t know Hollywood at all. I didn’t know who you were. I had to look you up.

PW: (really laughing now, long pause) That is awesome!

[At which point Walker started to open up and eventually we get talking about life in Hollywood.]

PW: Honestly? I like my job, but I can’t stand the people. I hate LA. It’s misplaced priorities. Everyone’s got their head up their ass. No one gives a shit about anybody. Relationships are disposable. They play like they want to be your friend, but only because you’re the hot piece of ass.

TT: I suppose it’s because there’s a ton of money involved.

PW: Sure. Yeah. Wherever there’s money involved it’s gonna be like that. In big corporate America it’s probably the same thing. You know they want to be buds with you and shake your hand, but there’s no real loyalty. It’s pro sports. It’s anywhere. And I don’t want to live that life.

TT: But let’s be honest, you’re involved.

PW: Yeah but who wants to live that life? You can’t go anywhere without people going hey, hey, this or that. You lose your anonymity.

TT: So what’s it like for you walking down Wilshire.

PW: It drives me crazy! It’s bad. I mean you hear these stories about how certain people are such assholes. And there such pricks when it comes to it. And I find myself doing it sometimes. I’m doing the same thing. Earlier today, when somebody came up to me. I’m just eating my damn burger and it’s like I don’t want to be bothered, I’m sorry. I gotta run. I gotta go meet this guy. Dude, I had 25 minutes. I was just down the street. I thought, surely I can just get this and get out. But you want to know why I was late. Because the entire staff of the [burger joint name] had to come out. And I just wanted to go [throws up his hands]. But the only reason I didn’t is because I don’t want to be known as the Dick. That’s the only reason I stayed. But what I wanted to do is go: leave me alone I gotta go! I’m running late, you understand?It’s such a weird deal. It’s not grounded in anything.

TT: Does this underscore your desire to get the fuck out of Dodge?

PW: Yeah. But then no. It’s like: can you have a normal life and still do it? Can you eliminate all the pricks. Can you surround yourself with people you know are good people. Every one of those guys I worked with on Bobby Z? What comes first and foremost? Their families. They’re out there the whole shoot, and they’re not banging the hair stylist and then fucking an extra the next day. There are morals. There’s a morality. You know? But there are still certain days when I really feel, I can’t do it. I can’t do it.

***

RIP Paul Walker. You got away, only not in the way you wanted and no in the way I had hoped you would since our now-long-ago conversation. Peace to the Walker family.

My writing career started an unbelievable 25 years ago in an unbelievable place: banking. I can’t say it was by accident either. I started university as cluelessly as many (most?) students, thinking only that I was suited for the corporate life and with hardly a thought for what the content of a satisfying work day might be. During my undergraduate days, at the University of Alberta, I ended up focussing on economics, which genuinely engaged me. But I wasn’t mathematically inclined enough to really advance far past intuitive concepts.

At the end of three years, I knew my undergrad (without econometrics) wasn’t going to mean much. Looking to decorate my intensely modest CV with some more letters, I applied to MBA schools. I was accepted at Queens and decided to go there.

I remember my time at Queens with mixed feelings, honestly. I loved the place, and enjoyed much of the program. But something was seeping from my subconscious to the more interruptive frontal parts of my brain. My desk in my apartment (North of Princess, the down-market significance of which won’t be lost on Queens students or alum) was stacked with non-business reading. Some reading choices I’m proud of, some make me cringe. I remember reading the Richler canon, which really shaped what I thought was a worthwhile endeavour in literary writing. But then, I also slogged through piles of Auden, which seems a bit histrionic in hindsight.

By graduation from B-school, I had myself a fairly entrenched set of career conflicts going on. I wanted to write, but I’d been shaped enough by a practical upbringing and (let’s be honest) by the mimetic inspiration of six years of econ/MBA studies, to think that making money was also a solid idea. I went into banking and tried to do that. I’m not going to say I loved my time at the Toronto Dominion, but it’d be disingenuous to I didn’t benefit from that experience either. Years later, interviewing famed Canadian literary ex-pat Mavis Gallant, she’d tell me that her early job as a reporter still fueled her writing by throwing off memories of character types, snips of dialogue, physical mannerism and narrative ideas. I feel that way now about my banking days, which involved me in the lives of dozens (if not hundreds) of small to medium sized business people. These were folks running hard to make things work, giving themselves to a whole range of worthy (and sometimes less worthy) projects. People in that position, people with real skin in the game, tend to show you themselves, tend to show you character, one way or the other. No surprise the first short stories I started to write during this period involved people at their places of work. Work shaped people, I understood. And even as I failed to do the work I wanted to do in any consistent way – write, publish etc. – I could see that my own work was shaping me. I’m grateful to this day to some inspiring bosses from that period, hard-asses all of them: Arnold Fenrick, Mike Lefevre, Breen Egan.

All that said, me and the TD wasn’t a relationship with legs. Year four, just as I was being offered a promotion that would have meant a move and more responsibility, I quit. I recall being summoned to the SVP Pacific’s office and asked politely what the hell I was up to. I didn’t even really have an answer. I was quitting to do something creative. I actually said that, which was a bit naive because it was so nebulous but because it probably also diminished the creativity in business work, of which there is plenty. In any case, the veep was a gentleman about it, the head of HR a bit less so. “Is your wife quitting her job too?” he asked, clearly thinking I was off to join a cult.

I won’t go through the gory details of starting a writing career, only distill it to the following. I wrote constantly and submitted stories everywhere. I pinned rejection slips to my cork board. I celebrated when a rejection slip had a hand written comment on it. I did all the typical stuff, in other words. And I benefited greatly from what had come before. I used my experiences prior to inform my fiction (see above, characters, situations, personalities). I also used the ethic of the business world to inspire my overall approach. That doesn’t mean I made much money. I didn’t! But I kept writing (production) and read a lot (product development) and talked endlessly to people (marketing and pre-social media social media).

As for the holy grail – publication – it started slowly and picked up only slightly after five years (five years! I kept the rent paid with consulting work.) I placed two short stories in the first 3 years (thank you endlessly Grain and Canadian Fiction). I published a few more over the next couple years, then as these things go, a single editor (Allen Hepburn then at Descant) took an interest. The first phone call I ever received from anybody in publishing was from Allen in 1998, I think. He put me on to my agent and from there, a new kind of energy was in the works.

Still, it took 10 full years from quitting my job, and 14 years leaving university with the vague itch to write, to see my first book in print: Stanley Park. But that’s also where the second big break point comes in this crazy career. With Stanley Park, I could call on magazine editors and actually pitch them with credibility. I’m not saying this credibility was earned, only they gave it because *I had a book*. So I started getting gigs. In 2000, enRoute Magazine send me to Korea on the first assignment of what would be a long and continuing relationship (I think the enRoute article count is now at something like 26 pieces?). But there were other great client relationships formed during this period. I loved working with Toro and Saturday Night and Vancouver Review. And I’m proud to continue work with the best magazine editors out there, those at Harpers, Walrus, Eighteen Bridges, Cooking Light, Vancouver Magazine and a whole range of others.

After 13 years of that model – writing book-length fiction and hundreds of magazine-length nonfiction pieces – I took up teaching. I got into it by plugging into an SFU workshop on behalf of my friend, the writer Shaena Lambert. In those workshops, part of the SFU Writer’s Studio program, I discovered something I couldn’t have known about myself: I enjoyed that time with aspiring writings. I enjoyed the give and take of ideas (freelancing is like soloing a sailboat around the world at times, rewarding but… well, solo). I also benefited greatly I think from the critical process, listening to others critique work, and improving my own critical skills such that they might be applied to my own work. When a full-time position was advertised at the UBC Creative Writing Program in early 2013, I found myself considering a position for which even three years prior I’d have thought myself completely unsuited.

I’m thrilled to have been accepted by the team of writers at the UBC Creative Writing Program, along with fellow new hire Nancy Lee. But I also feel a very distinct feeling, unlike anything I’ve felt other than that moment quitting my banking job and that later moment when Stanley Park helped me turn another corner. The career has changed it’s course, however slightly. It’s shifted on its track and taken more wind. I’m looking forward to the Fall with real anticipation: to enagaging with students at various stages of their own writing projects, to working with the others here in the program, to bringing what I’ve done to this point to bear on the future, which is what I’ve somehow been lucky enough to do all along.

Here’s my UBC contact page. Thanks everyone at Creative Writing for the chance and here’s to the future.