I’ve been called a very visual writer. I welcome the description. It might come from my background as a visual artist, or my natural, almost obsessive, tendency toward detail, or because film has had such a profound impact on me that it has permeated my writing. All three, I suppose. I have a great admiration for writers who can paint detailed landscapes with words; Tolkien was the master. Of course, the art of it really comes when the writer can paint an evocative and compelling picture using as few words as possible. I’m still working on that and will be for a long time, but I was proud when a reviewer wrote this about The Perpetual Now:
“the prose is touched with unfussy observational poetry. ‘Ferguston sometimes felt like a war-torn city where all the buildings were left standing,’ Bourgault writes, capturing a rich sense of place in a line.”
Sometimes, a place can be so vivid as to take on a personality of its own. I like to think of Ferguston in that way, that the town had become in fact a very real character in the book, though not necessarily a pleasant one. (That some readers have agreed with that assessment is one of the best compliments I’ve received to date.) As for Ferguston’s counterpart in Day of Epiphany, the town of Saint-Jolain, Québec, I’m not sure it would qualify. Saint-Jolain never evolved that way, simply because most of the action takes place in the Sainte-Madeleine orphanage a few kilometres away, while the town itself has been largely relegated to the background.
Some geography
For those who are interested, I imagine Saint-Jolain to be located somewhere in the general vicinity of Mont-Laurier, Québec, which is about a two-hour drive almost due north of Ottawa, or 45 minutes northeast of Maniwaki. Had I done the same kind of exploratory mission that I did when I was creating Ferguston, I might have located it elsewhere. Who knows. I certainly like the idea of putting in the midst of a huge diocese: the diocese of Amos (where Mont Laurier is located) covers some 127,000 square kilometres. Getting around the diocese in such a remote area back in the 1950s would have been a challenge, and the realities of such an expansive geography work well for the story. As for its appearance, think of a slightly more modern version of a Clarence Gagnon painting, with cars from the ‘40s and ‘50s replacing the horse-drawn sleighs and buggies. (Check out the McMichael Canadian Art Collection which has some excellent examples of Gagnon’s work.)
The Sainte-Madeleine orphanage comes close to being a character: I do talk about its history and it does go through something of an evolution, but I stopped short of giving it a real personality. Some readers may disagree, and I’d love to hear from you when the book comes out (soon, I promise!). I also toyed with the idea of providing a layout of the building to give it a more detailed identity, but seeing as it’s conceived as a complex four-storey structure, that would have been complicated. Plus the book already has a forward, a preface, an epilogue, an afterword, and acknowledgements: that’s a lot of extras.
Speaking of characters, just as I did for The Perpetual Now, my next entry will be a full and annotated listing of the people (21 at last count) who inhabit the landscape I’ve created for Day of Epiphany. Stay tuned!
So I wrote this novel... 