ed_rex

I've been remiss. Badly remiss.

I'm not only a new daddy, I am also an ostensible publisher. A publisher with a new book out, into which I have invested a couple of thousand dollars and uncounted (not uncountable, but uncounted) hours, and I don't think I've really even talked about it here. (Nor have I talked about it enough elsewhere; I have fallen down on the promotional side of the job pretty badly, and can only blame baby and Covid19 so far.)

What follows is, essentially, a draft of a promotional piece. It's in the form of a book review, while also explaining that this book is why I decided to put a few thousand dollars I could ill afford into a publishing venture.

I'm posting it here in part because I want to sit on it overnight and see how it looks onscreen in the morning, and also in hopes of getting some feedback — Does it make you interested in reading the book? If not, why not? How can I make it better?

I am very far being a natural when it comes to self-promotion, and am even less confident about my skills in that field. So any advice on how to improve it will be welcome. (As will any orders, of course!)

My daughter is an infant of excellent literary tastes!
"And my daddy is shameless about exploiting me!"

When civilizations collide on the open prairie

Black Grass, a novel by Carl Dow

If you suspect a familial relationship between author and publisher here, you're right. Carl Dow is my dad. And his novel Black Grass is why I became a publisher in the first place, even though it was not The BumblePuppy Press' first book So take this review with as much salt as you see fit.

Truth is, when he sent me an early draft of Black Grass, I didn't even want to read my father's novel. Some 25 or more years before that he had asked me to read a radio play he'd written, which I did and which I told him was, in a word, terrible.

I didn't see another piece of fiction from him for a very long time.

So it was with a lot of trepidation that I started to read the manuscript one night, but it was with tears in my eyes that I finished it as the sun was rising the next day.

Black Grass is a bit of a portmanteau of a novel: part adventure story, part war novel, part love story, with a dollop of history both (as J.R.R. Tolkien put it) true and feigned.

Set north and south of the border of what would become the states of Minnesota and North Dakota and the future province of Manitoba, our hero is none other than Gabriel Dumont, who would later become Louis Riel's military leader.

Carl Dow's Dumont is a heroic figure of the old school: multi-talented and illiterate in seven different languages, with a warm smile for children and the ability to kill in regretful cold blood when necessary; a sceptic among believers, and the prairie Métis' Chief of the Hunt, he is a man who loves peace and wants, most of all, to live a nomadic hunter's life, even as the weight of history threatens all that he loves.

His encounter with that future history starts in earnest in the form of a damsel in distress, Susannah Ross, and the bounty hunters she has led on a chase all the way from Halifax, Nova Scotia.

Run down at last, Susannah faces gang rape and then a life as a bond-slave until Dumont intervenes, taking the city woman into the heart of his nomad's world, even as an army of several thousand Fenian raiders masses south of the border, determined to conquer the land held by the Northwest Company, convinced the local Métis population will welcome them as liberators.

If the the opening scene is almost a cliche, Susannah will prove to be far more than the pulpish damsel in distress she at first seems. As a visitor from "civilized" Halifax she serves as a 21st century reader's eyes into the alien world of 19th century nomads, and also a formidable and complicated character in her own right.

The married Dumont and the widowed Susannah enjoy a pretty modern friendship with benefits; Carl Dow's sex scenes skirt the line between too coy and too explicit and also manage to to avoid competing for a Bad Sex in Fiction Award. In Black Grass sex is, above all else, fun.

Similarly, the novel is rich with organic, character-based humour, including some laugh out loud moments. For a short novel whose maguffin is the battle between a small band of Métis hunters and an even smaller, tensely allied force of Chief Sitting Bull's Dakotah Sioux against several thousand heavily-armed American invaders, Carl Dow manages to give the reader plenty of time to experience nomadic life without war or drama.

Black Grass is that rare and fabulous literary beast, a genre novel that successfully straddles several genres at once — action, romance, historical, all folded into a trip into a mostly pretty accurate depiction of a now-distant past. (And what isn't accurate is convincing. When I was done reading the novel in manuscript, I was hopping mad about what — I thought — my education had neglected to teach me about the history of Manitoba.

I'll leave to other readers the pleasure of figuring out what Carl Dow has taken from history and what he has invented as history.

Black Grass is a novel that will surprise and delight you — and maybe, occasionally, make you cringe or even offend you. But, as the late British writer L.P. Hartley famously put it, "The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there."

Black Grass is available in paper and ebook editions from the usual online vendors, or your local bookshop. For an autographed copy of the first edition, please visit the publisher's website (that's right here!).

A view from the self(ish) perspective

Young Edifice says goodbye to his baby as he prepares to venture out into the plague-emptied streets of Ottawa, afternoon of March 25, 2020.

I feel as if I'm tempting fate to type the following, but here goes ...

Presuming we don't get sick, the semi-lockdown we're experiencing in response to the Covid-19 pandemic has barely touched our lives except for one thing: I am out of work.

Out of work, but not disastrously so. Raven is still on maternity leave, at either 90% or 100% of her salary (I think the latter), and I have learned sufficient frugality from her that I actually have a couple of thousand dollars in the bank — something I was unable to accomplish back the days more than a decade ago when I earned twice what I do now. And it looks as I will be eligible for some sort of government package that will cover my lost income at least until August — which is when our plan had me leaving work to become a full-time dad anyway.

And in a worst-case scenario, if we both somehow lost our jobs, we live in an apartment owned by non-profit housing corporation and so, would be eligible for a rent subsidy until we were back on our feet.

Long story short, I don't think any of us are sick, I want to stay home with my daughter and I might get paid to do so for the next four months, and I now have more time to write and to work on being a publisher — yes, if you're looking for something good to read, click this long link!.

What's not to like?

Not quite eerie ... but close

Photo taken around 14:45 on March 25, 2020, outside a grocery store at the corner of Bank and Somerset Streets in downtown Ottawa

Oh yeah, there's plenty not to like.

On a personal level, we had intended to visit Raven's parents and family in Macau in April but that plan — obviously — is on an indefinite hold.

Much more seriously, people — quite a lot of people in some places — are dying. Many others are seriously ill and still more people are losing their jobs and anxious that they will lose a lot more than that.

And I believe, too, from information derived via The Other Place, that at least one of you has symptoms of Covid-19 and is feeling understandably anxious because of it, so the situation is hitting me on a personal level as well, if at some distance.

Here in Ottawa (see photo above), life goes on but in an eerie sort of half-normal fashion. A lot of stores are closed and the streets — even close to rush hour — have a Sunday feel to them, while queues to get into grocery stores are now the norm. (I also went to the Beer Store yesterday — yes, booze has been deemed an essential service; and rightly so, as the last thing an over-burdened medical system needs is to have its emergency rooms crowded with alcoholics suffering from delerium tremens — and found it nearly empty.)

People are mostly being very good about keeping their "social distance" from one another and seem to be dealing with the situation with consideration and good humour. That said, our just-in-time supply system is having serious problems keeping things like toilet paper in stock, as has been widely noted throughout much of the world. The toiletry section of my local supermarket reminds me of the empty shelves we so often found in Cuba.

And here we are ...

Photo of Young Edifice holding his daughter in what might have been the final snowfall of the season., Tuesday, March 24, 2020.

And so the entire world lives in times more uncertain than ever. A global economy based on suicidal fossil fuels and with a production capacity that far exceeds demand, while the rich hoard an ever-greater percentage of the whole is now being stressed by a deadly new virus that has spread across the world with shocking speed.

I think that most of us, myself definitely included, feel on a gut-level that things will soon (or soonish) go back to normal, and maybe they will.

But will they?

On the one hand, governments in a lot of places are instituting emergency measures that provide them with powers they may be loathe to relinquish, while on the other, many of capitalism's contradictions are ever-harder to paper over.

Can the climate movement become a fully-fledged anti-capitalist movement? I dunno, but I can dream ...

Me, I'm doing my best to hunker down and raise my daughter as if the world is a safe and wonderful place and will only get better. I will dream.

Meanwhile, how are you folks coping with the situation?