- 20.09.2024
CTV News – Award-winning northern author launches latest book
NORTHERN BOOK CLUB: Award-winning author Rod Carley talks to Tony Ryma about his fourth novel, Ruff, and current northern Ontario book tour.
NORTHERN BOOK CLUB: Award-winning author Rod Carley talks to Tony Ryma about his fourth novel, Ruff, and current northern Ontario book tour.
Rod Carley’s “RUFF” tackles a fictional telling of William Shakespeare tackling issues of equality, gender, justice and censorship. If this sounds like a lot to take in, Nav Nanwa had the pleasure of talking to the author about the whole idea for the book and why it’s a book you need to read.
RUFF is available to order from your favourite independent bookseller, Latitude 46 Publishing, Indigo/Chapters/Coles, and Amazon.
Article by: GALEN SIMMONS
Award-winning author and former Stratford Festival associate director Rod Carley may not be able to launch his new book, RUFF – a fictional tale about William Shakespeare’s efforts to remain relevant in a changing world – in Stratford Upon Avon, but Stratford, Ont., will do just fine.
From noon to 4 p.m. Aug. 24, Carley will return to the Festival City to launch his North American book tour at Fanfare Books.
“Since the novel concerns itself with a bad year in the life of Will Shakespeare, what better place to hold the launch than in Stratford?” Carley said.
RUFF, Carley’s fourth novel, is described as a theatrical odyssey packed with an unforgettable cast of Elizabethan eccentrics. Suffering from a mid-life crisis, a plague outbreak and the death of the ancient queen, Shakespeare’s mettle is put to the test when the new king puts his witch-burning hobby aside to announce a national play competition that will determine which theatre company will secure his favour and remain in business. As he struggles to write a Scottish supernatural thriller, Shakespeare faces one obstacle after another including a young, rival, punk poet and his activist wife fighting for equality and a woman’s right to tread the boards.
Shakespeare and his band of misfits must ensure not only their own survival, but that of England as well. The stage is set for an outrageous and compelling tale of ghosts, ghostwriting, writer’s block and the chopping block.
“It goes back, originally, to my second book, KINMOUNT, where the central character, Dave Middleton, who was a down-and-out Shakespearean director; I wrote him as a descendant of an Elizabethan playwright named Thomas Middleton,” Carley said. “We have evidence that Thomas Middleton possibly wrote some of the supernatural scenes with the witches in Macbeth and possibly added scenes
during Shakespeare’s lifetime or after his death. That’s kind of fuzzy, but we know there was some kind of collaboration.
“So, I thought that was kind of the magic what-if. What would happen if I put these two characters together in a book. And if you look at it, there’s an age difference of 17 years. Shakespeare’s turning 40, so I imagined, like many writers, he’s middle-aged, he’s having a mid-life depression, he’s got domestic troubles back in Stratford, he’s never home – his daughters think he’s an uncle they see only at Christmas – and he’s grieving the death of his son, and his father’s just died. There’s a plague outbreak, the queen died, so everything is topsy turvy and he’s facing a
lot of financial stressors. Then you add to it the new rival writers – the punk writers – are coming up and they view him as yesterday’s news.”
Carley, who has directed Shakespeare’s plays and written about people directing Shakespeare and, now, about the man himself, said he wanted to humanize the larger-than-life playwright by portraying
him as a man struggling with the same personal insecurities and fears of what the future will bring that many of us struggle with today. And while Shakespeare, as Carley writes him, is terrified of the supernatural, he teams up with Thomas Middleton – a man obsessed with ghosts and witches – to help him write a play that appeals to the new King and the monarch’s own fascination with the occult. Carley purposely set his story at a time in history not unlike today.
“The same way there’s no point in doing a Shakespeare play unless it’s accessible to audiences today … there’s no reason to write a novel about William Shakespeare unless it’s fresh and it’s got something new to say. … One of my quests in writing this was to also write a book that’s more modern than tomorrow. The book is set in 1604 … but it’s amazing the similarities between what was happening then and what was happening now.
“ … For example, Shakespeare was dealing with the plague; we are dealing with the pandemic. He was dealing with the hyper-conservative puritans who now had a majority in Parliament; we’re
dealing with the crazy, right-wing evangelists in the States. We’re fighting global warming; during his era, they were fighting what’s called ‘the little ice age’ where the climate changes and everything got unseasonably cold. … Fake news then; fake news now. … The homeless situation was terrible in Elizabethan society. They would go down to the ports and steal all the sails form the boats and they made makeshift camps in London. That’s not too far from what’s happening right now.”
While his novel is fiction, Carley did extensive research to ensure it was grounded in real history, and he used whatever details we know about Shakespeare today – though there are few – as inspiration to create a character and a story that seems possible, if not plausible.
With this year’s Stratford Festival production of Something Rotten – another story featuring a fictionalized version of Shakespeare – in full swing, Carley said Stratford is the perfect place to launch his book tour.
“I had an absolute blast writing this story and I think it will be great fun for readers whether you like Shakespeare or you don’t like Shakespeare,” Carley said. “You don’t need to have any kind of Shakespearean knowledge to pick up this book and read it.”
For more information about Carley, RUFF, or any of his previous books, visit rodcarley.ca.
The Stephen Leacock Associates are pleased to announce the 2023 long list for the annual Stephen Leacock Memorial Medal for Humour. Celebrating 76 years since its inception, this annual award recognizes excellence in Canadian literary humour. Past winners have included Terry Fallis, Will Ferguson, W.O.Mitchell, Stuart McLean and Mordecai Richler and many others. Board President Michael Hill thanks the national panel of judges for their thoughtful recommendations with this “long list”. He also thanks the authors for their submissions, and commends them on the quality of their writing. The three finalists for the award will be named on Tuesday, August 1, 2023, with the medal winner being announced on Saturday, September 16, 2023 at the Leacock Medal Award Gala Dinner.
The long list for the 2023 Leacock Medal is: (in alphabetical order by author surname)
| Caetano, Cody | Half-Bads in White Regalia | Hamish Hamilton Canada |
| Carley, Rod | Grin Reaping | Latitude 46 Publishing |
| DeForge, Michael | Birds of Maine | Drawn and Quarterly |
| French, Bobbi | The Good Women of Safe Harbour | HarperCollins Publishers Ltd. |
| Healey, Emma | Best Young Woman Job Book | Random House Canada |
| Johnston, Wayne | Jennie’s Boy | Alfred A. Knopf Canada |
| Juby, Susan | Mindful of Murder | HarperCollins Publishers Ltd. |
| King, Thomas | Deep House: A DreadfulWater Mystery | HarperCollins Publishers Ltd. |
| Nawaz, Zarqa | Jameela Green Ruins Everything | Simon and Schuster Canada |
| Syjuco, Miguel | I Was the President’s Mistress!! | Hamish Hamilton Canada |
The Leacock Medal awards are generously sponsored by the Dunkley Charitable Foundation.
For more information about the Leacock Medal and Stephen Leacock Associates, please visit the website at https://leacock.ca. Tickets for the Gala Dinner are available at www.leacock.ca/gala.php.
The Stephen Leacock Associates are pleased to announce the 2023 long list for the annual Stephen Leacock Memorial Medal for Humour.
Celebrating 76 years since its inception, this annual award recognizes excellence in Canadian literary humour. Past winners have included Terry Fallis, Will Ferguson, W.O.Mitchell, Stuart McLean and Mordecai Richler.
Board President Michael Hill thanks the national panel of judges for their thoughtful recommendations with this “long list.” He also thanks the authors for their submissions, and commends them on the quality of their writing.
The three finalists for the award will be named on Tuesday, Aug. 1, 2023, with the medal winner being announced on Saturday, Sept. 16, 2023 at the Leacock Medal Award Gala Dinner.
The long list for the 2023 Leacock Medal is: (in alphabetical order by author surname)
The Leacock Medal for Humour awards are generously sponsored by the Dunkley Charitable Foundation. For more information about the Leacock Medal and Stephen Leacock Associates, please visit www.leacock.ca.
An author and former Stratford Festival director is bringing his latest book, Grin Reaping, to Stratford’s Fanfare Books for a reading and book-signing event later this month.
Inspired by the works of famously reclusive author J.D. Salinger and his tales of the fictional Glass family, Rod Carley’s newest book is a collection of short stories about another fictional family, the Boyles.
“(Salinger) had one older sister and he filled that (familial) gap in by creating a fictional family. Likewise, I had one younger brother and I’d always wanted to have a larger family, and especially sisters,” Carley said. “So the stories (in Grin Reaping) came out of wanting to expand my own sense of family but also, in creating this character, Rudy Boyle, I wanted to find a figure through which I could inject my observational humour on the world as both a creature and a critic of the human predicament.”
In this series of 14 interconnected short stories and musings, Rudy Boyle, a northern Ontario English teacher stuck both in middle age and in the middle of his five siblings, transforms the strangeness of his everyday life into exaggerated home-movie prose. From the significance of tuna fish to the threat of aliens to big-ticket items like mortality, gender, climate change and Armageddon, Rudy tackles a range of topics with a wry, self-deprecating wit.
As he shares such snippets, Rudy exaggerates mundane situations into comic celebrations of the life of the mind, never letting the truth get in the way of a great story. His reminiscences deal not only with the absurdities of human nature but also encompass the grief of losing family.
“I write humour as a tonic, I think. People need a laugh and we inject humour into our daily lives all the time because it makes being on the planet easier and it prevents us from jumping off buildings,” Carley said. “The title, Grin Reaping, over the course of writing the book I lost my parents and a few friends, so then that sense of loss and the grieving we go through became the foundation of the book and how we laugh when there’s really nothing else we can do.”
Carley also said his time in theatre had a tremendous impact on his writing, helping flavour his subject matter while informing how he writes and develops his characters. He also reads his work out loud as he’s writing to hear how it sounds when spoken, adding to that sense of the theatrical.
“There’s a similarity between writing fiction and directing theatre or as an actor. You’ve got a central character who you throw every possible obstacle at them, and then they have to somehow overcome these obstacles to achieve an objective, and then over the course of a play or a book, you get to see if they’re successful or not. So those elements are similar. Also, I’m a very dialogue-based writer, and a lot of that came out of my work in the theatre,” Carley said.
Carley worked for the Stratford Festival as a resident assistant director in the early 1990s under then-artistic director David William. He became the first recipient of the Festival’s Jean Gascon Director’s Award and was awarded three Tyron Guthrie Awards during his tenure with the Stratford company. Carley went on to direct numerous Shakespearean productions across the province and, in 2009, was a winner of TVO’s Big Ideas/Best Lecturer competition for his lecture, Adapting Shakespeare Within a Modern Canadian Context.
Currently living in North Bay, Carley began writing humorous fiction about 10 years ago. His first book, A Matter of Will, was a finalist for the Northern Lit Award for Fiction while his second book, KINMOUNT, won the silver medal for Best Regional Fiction from the 2021 Independent Publisher’s Book Awards and was one of 10 books longlisted for the 2021 Leacock Medal for Humour.
“My second book, KINMOUNT, is all about a down-and-out classical stage director named Dave Middleton who reluctantly takes a job directing Romeo and Juliet in Kinmount, in this rural farm community, and everything that can go wrong does,” Carley said. “He finds himself this reluctant emissary of truth in a battle of artistic integrity and censorship. So that book came out a lot of my experiences directing Shakespeare over my career.
Carley will be reading from and signing copies of Grin Reaping from 1 p.m to 3 p.m. at Fanfare Books in Stratford on Saturday, Aug. 27. Along with his latest book, copies of KINMOUNT will also be available for purchase during the event.
The acclaimed writer, now 60, spent his childhood surrounded by books. His mother Belva would take him and his younger brother to the library every week for a new stack of stories and would read to the boys every night before bed.
“She instilled in me a great love of reading,” Carley said in a phone interview this week.
Carley grew up in Brockville with his parents Hewitt and Belva, and brother Greg, in a home that nurtured his innate love of books, he said. As he grew, he went from reading picture stories with his mom to reading authors like C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien on his own.
By the time he grew up and was ready to flee the nest at 19, his “thirst for knowledge” and “love of books consumed” him.
“J.D. Salinger’s fictional Glass family were heroes for me at this age — quirky role models living in their New York City apartment on the Upper East Side. I wanted to be an actor like Zooey, a writer like Buddy, and a guru like Seymour,” he said.
“These, of course, were not the career paths being pushed by my high school guidance counselor at Brockville Collegiate Institute.”
He wasn’t dissuaded from a life in the literary world, though, and left Brockville for Toronto, where he studied theatre and writing.
He eventually made his way to North Bay where he currently lives, and managed to propel his love of storytelling into a multi-faceted career.
He wears many hats in his professional life; he’s the artistic director of Canadore College’s Acting for Stage and Screen Program, and an English professor at Nipissing University. He’s also a freelance director and actor, and an author of three books, the latest of which – Grin Reaping – he is currently touring the province to promote.
The novel is a series of 14 interconnected short stories, based on a character called Rudy Boyle, a frustrated college English teacher stuck both in middle age and in the middle of his five siblings, Carley said.
“He translates the strangeness of his everyday life into an exaggerated home-movie prose,” Carley said of the character he created.
“He’s got a dry, self-deprecating wit. With his observational humour, he tackles a range of subject matter, from the big ticket items like Armageddon, climate change, diversity and mortality, to a lot more ridiculous, silly items, as well. But he never lets the truth get in the way of a good story.”
This genre of writing can be challenging since humour is subjective, he said, but putting a comic spin onto life’s heavier moments is how he and many others cope with life’s hardships – like the death of his own parents.
“I wrote the book, overall, as kind of a tonic for readers for the difficult times we’ve been going through. We all need a laugh in the face of all kinds of different adversities,” he said.
Hard as the task of writing humour might be, Carley has been recognized by his peers and critically acclaimed for his work in the field.
His first novel, A Matter of Will, was a finalist for the 2018 Northern Lit Award for Fiction. His second novel, Kinmount, won the Silver Medal for Best Regional Fiction from the 2021 Independent Publishers Book Awards and was one of 10 books longlisted for the 2021 Leacock Medal for Humour.
Of his third and most recent book, Terry Fallis, two-time winner of the Stephen Leacock Medal for Humour, gave a rave review.
“Many writers are serious. Fewer are funny. If you’re lucky, once in a while, you come across that rare writer who makes you laugh and think at the same time, even in the same sentence. Rod Carley pulls it off in Grin Reaping.”
When he’s not at his cottage in Seeley’s Bay for the summer, Carley has spent recent months on a book tour throughout the province, and has already been to Brockville once to a sold-out crowd.
This Saturday, Aug. 13, he’ll be back signing books at River West Co. at 80 King St. W. from 1 p.m. to 4 p.m.
All of his books will be available to purchase at the signing, he said, and they are also available locally at Beggars Banquet Books in Gananoque.
Grin Reaping catalogues the foibles of the fictional Boyle family. In a series of fourteen interconnected short stories and musings, Rudy Boyle, a Northern Ontario college English teacher stuck both in middle age and in the middle of his five siblings, transforms the strangeness of his everyday life into exaggerated home-movie prose. From the significance of tuna fish and Botox, the threat of coyotes and aliens, to the big-ticket items of mortality, gender, climate change, and Armageddon, Rudy tackles a range of topics with a wry, self-deprecating wit. As he variously shares such snippets, he exaggerates small and mundane situations into comic celebrations of the life of the mind, never letting the truth get in the way of a great story. His reminiscences deal not only with the absurdities of human nature, but also encompass the grief of losing family. Rudy is bedeviled by neurosis, and cowed before the insignificant things in his world. He talks largely about small matters and trivially about great affairs. It is the nature of his dilemma and the dilemma of his nature.
CanLit doesn’t have a reputation for hilarity, but the third book from North Bay based writer Rod Carley, Grin Reaping (Latitude 46 Publishing), is more evidence that our supposedly serious rep needs some updating.
The connected short stories of Grin Reaping follow the Boyle family through adventures both spectacular and quotidian, with Carley’s signature wit bubbling throughout. Unafraid to turn a comedic lens on death, mental health, conspiracies, and pain, Carley performs a high wire act with ease, revealing how our most serious life events can, from some angles, feel delightfully absurd, while our smallest moments can be quietly heart-rending.
Grin Reaping has been praised by Leacock Medal for Humour nominees and winners like Terry Fallis, Amy Jones, and Susan Juby for its laugh out loud funny writing, witty send up of “rural absurdities”, and wry, thoughtful examination of mortality. Carley earned a Leacock nomination for his second novel, Kinmount, and has clearly only grown his wit, sharp eye, and comedic timing in Grin Reaping.
We’re excited to speak with Rod today about the book as part of our Keep if Short series for short story writers. He tells us about the American literary icon whose work inspired him as a teen, explains how camels with Botox and our supposed lizard overlords became part of his inspiration for the stories, and shares the moving reasons for his choice of dedication.
Open Book:
How did you decide what stories to include in the collection? When were they written?
Rod Carley:
When I was nineteen, my thirst for knowledge and my love of books consumed me. J.D. Salinger’s fictional Glass family were heroes for me at this age – quirky role models living in their New York City apartment on the Upper East Side. I wanted to be an actor like Zooey, a writer like Buddy, and a guru like Seymour. These of course were not the career paths being pushed by my high school guidance counsellor. Unlike the Glass family with its brood of seven children, Salinger only had one elder sister. He wrote his Glass stories to fill that void. I have one younger brother. As both a critic and creature of the human predicament, I wrote this interconnected collection of short stories to expand my sense of family and examine the absurdities of LIFE. Over the five years it took me to write the stories, both my parents died and I lost a couple of good friends. Death, loss, and grief gradually became the bedrock for the collection – underlying my observational humour and becoming the source for the wordplay of the book’s title – that cowled figure with the scythe – Grin Reaping.
OB:
What do the stories have in common? Do you see a link between them, either structurally or thematically?
RC:
The stories are told from the point of view of Rudy Boyle, a frustrated college English teacher, stuck both in middle-age and in the middle of his five siblings – Larry (a retired Northern Ontario railroader), Evie (a Jungian analyst), Jonah (his fraternal twin), JoJo (a YA fiction writer), and Nicky (an accident-prone daredevil). Rudy translates the strangeness of his and his family’s everyday life into hilarious home-movie prose. He is the axis around which the fourteen stories revolve. Exaggerating small and mundane situations into comic celebrations of the life of the mind, Rudy never lets the truth get in the way of a great story. His reminiscences deal not only with the absurdities of human nature, but also encompass the grief of losing loved ones. Rudy is bedeviled by neurosis, and cowed before the insignificant things in his world. He talks largely about small matters and trivially about great affairs. It is the nature of his dilemma and the dilemma of his nature.
I deliberately wrote the stories as a book with the heft of a novel.
OB:
Did you do any specific research for any of your stories? Tell us a bit about that process.
RC:
I grind my teeth at night and, as a result, wear a mouth guard when sleeping, er, when attempting to sleep. One of the stories, Botox and the Brontosaurus, grew out of my late-night, molar-grinding insomnia. When I was preparing a Grade Six science fair project, I read about how the brontosaurus grinded its teeth. I also came across a news story in The Guardian about a small caravan of camels being disqualified from a beauty contest in Saudi Arabia because a vet injected their snouts with Botox to give them a more alluring pout. The brontosaurus and Botox triggered my over-active imagination. I researched the dental regimen of the brontosaurus as well as the effects of Botox injections on teeth grinding. I channeled my research through Rudy’s neurotic mind and it mashed together nicely to become another of his tall tales.
OB:
What was the strangest or most memorable moment or experience during the writing process for you?
RC:
I enjoyed poking fun at conspiracy theorists in The Land of the Lizard-People. Why do otherwise rational individuals make the leap to such illogical belief systems? 12 million Americans believe alien lizards rule us, as do millions of Canadians. I was shocked to discover that I knew someone within my social circle who actually believed that blood-drinking, shape-shifting interstellar lizards in human suits ruled our country. Truth will always be stranger than fiction.
OB:
Do you have a favourite short story collection that you’ve read? Tell us why it is special to you?
RC:
The only book I’ve read ten times (or more) is J.D. Salinger’s Nine Stories. It helped me understand what a story collection was, and should be. It reminds me of those pencil marks on the wall, recording childhood height: a way to measure how we become different people, over time. From the outside, the stories are often very funny; inside, they are about heartbreak and loss of innocence. The whole nine have a magical ease about them, a deceptively loose-appearing structure, and a mystical grace. There is not a trace of sentimentality.
OB:
Who did you dedicate your collection to, and why?
RC:
Grin Reaping is in part dedicated to my good friend John Batchelor who died tragically at the age of sixty due to the monster mesothelioma. John read the stories in their first incarnation and provided honest feedback. He was looking forward to the release of the collection. Sadly, he never lived to see it. So, these stories, are in some way for him.
The collection is also for my brother Greg. When we were kids, he cut my half of the lawn so I could read. My brother personifies generosity. He also manages to recreate our late mother’s apple pie recipe to such perfection that I swear our mother is sitting in the kitchen with us. She probably is.
OB:
What, if anything, did you learn from writing these short stories?
RC:
As Rudy says, we laugh because there’s nothing we can do about it. That and fitted sheets were invented by lizard-people to conquer the human race.
Article by: open-book.ca
BOOK CLUBS! Rod is available for readings and signings, both in person and on-line. Contact him here to arrange your reading.
Invite me to speak at your festival, conference or book club:
705 477 1525 rod@rodcarley.ca Rod Carley rdcarley @carley_rod
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