The last two weeks have been hectic. I was on a tour for the BC and Yukon book prizes, speaking to high school students around the province. Sixteen talks and readings over six days.
On our drive home, the organizer put on Introducing…The Walkers, a podcast about a best-selling UK memoirist whose book The Salt Path is at best a distortion of the truth, at worst a tissue of lies. Embezzlement, miracle cures, ripping off family and friends. An excellent grifter tale, told by the journalist who broke the story.
While on tour I also read Edward Lee’s Buttermilk Graffiti, a food travelogue and cookbook by a Korean American chef raised in Brooklyn and residing in Kentucky. Lee’s book and recipes challenge ideas of authenticity while upholding traditions.
Lee’s recipes have no photo accompaniment, because he feels a photo creates a ‘correct’ way for a dish to turn out. Instead, Lee wants you to experiment. If your version of cornbread comes out tasting good but looking ‘wrong,’ then it’s right.
I love his explanation, and how Buttermilk seems designed to fit Lee’s theme and subject. That’s what I want for Shot in Vancouver.
My tour coincided with the two weeks I have for dealing with my manuscript’s edits: double-checking facts, approving or rejecting corrections, and adding last-minute additions like The Social Reckoning and Castration Movie Anthology. Instead of two weeks to do this, I’ve had eight days.
Buttermilk and the Salt Path scandal gave me a new perspective on my project. “Nonfiction” covers so much ground—personal memoir, criticism, academic textbook. Shot in Vancouver is none of these. I’ve joked that it’s a PhD’s amount of research that reads like an Uncle John’s Bathroom Reader.
What I’ve written is a collection of interesting stories about films and series that, taken together, tell the story of a region’s industry and art form.
A book has a relationship to its subject that should be expressed by the book’s appearance and design. The cover, the font, the way footnotes are used or not—all of that has to be determined by that relationship. A crime novel should look like a crime novel—it’s why I hate those awful new Black Lizards, which seem embarrassed by the genre itself. A fun book about films and TV shows should look like that.
Easier said than done, though.
Pre-order Shot in Vancouver now
And pick up the latest Wakeland novel, Guns Across the River.
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