Lögberg-Heimskringla - 06.11.1992, Blaðsíða 5

Lögberg-Heimskringla • Föstudagur 6. nóvember 1992 • 5
A profile of Kristjana Gunnars
Kristjana Gunnars’ writing has
been compared to a frozen
lake surface through which
hidden depths are made visible.
Travel and text are inseparable for
Kristjana Gunnars. Now in
Edmonton, where she teaches
Creative Writing and Literature at the
University of Alberta, Kristjana
Gunnars has lived in countries on
two continents. Born in Reykjavík,
Iceland, she moved to Canada in
1969, where she’s lived in major
urban centers and many rural areas as
well.
“I’ve moved around,” she says.
And everywhere she’s moved seems
to eventually show up in her work.
. In her first novel, The Prowler,
landscapes as different as Iceland’s
rockbound coast and Disneyland
came to life. Zero Hour took readers
to a remarkably accurate Winnipeg.
The Substance of Forgetting adds the
British Columbia Okanagan Valley to
Gunnars’ literary map.
“I can’t write outside of the envi-
ronment,” she says. “I think that’s the
writer’s job - to
describe what
there is. You
want to specify
everything.
“I exagger-
ate the place of
setting some-
times. It takes
over, setting . .
. maybe I prefer
setting to char-
acter.”
Ask her,
“ W h e r e ’ s
home?” and
she answers
with wherever
she happens to
be living now.
But Iceland’s
literary tradi-
tion continues
to inform her
work.
There’s a
thread of the
bizarre and
grotesque,
more prevalent
in Gunnars’
early work
than in her lat-
est writing.
But the polished surface of her
prose - once compared to a frozen
lake surface through which hidden
depths are visible - reflects the influ-
ence of Icelandic writing.
“Icelandic literature is allusive,”
she says. “It has cool emotions.”
One particular school of Scandi-
navian writing is apparent in The
Substance of Forgetting. “Punkt-
roman” (point-fiction) emphasizes
moments of being instead of narra-
tive. Point-fiction is intense and poet-
ic, something that characterizes all
three of Gunnars’ books with Red
Deer College Press.
Though many books in her oeuvre
are poetry, she no longer writes
poems.
“These prose books have replaced
my poetry,” she says.
Hi! Goolies!
Re: Vince Leah’s musings on the
nickname ‘Goolie’ for Icelanders, in
L/H 23, Oct. 1992,1 can be of help.
This appellation interested me as
soon as I heard it. There were various
explanations, none of which provcd
satisfatory when the time-element was
checked. Gisli Jonsson, poet and print-
er extraordinaire at the Columbia Press,
however gave me the explanation with-
out any reservations. It was a transfer of
the Chinese contraction Goolie Hall for
Goodtemplar Hall. This transfer, as
Leah states, came to include the region,
‘Goolie Crescent’, its inhabitants, as
‘Goolies’, and by extension all
Winnipeg Icelanders and sometimes
others.
Originally used in good-natured fun
the byname developed a derogatory
meaning, as is explained in my book
It seems to work for her. Both of
her last books have eamed awards or
nominations for awards. The Prowler
was named McNalley-Robinson
Book of the Year and was nominated
for the Books in Canada First Novel
Award. Zero Hour was nominated
for the Governor General’s Award,
and both earned her a nomination for
the prestigious Canada-Australia
Literary Prize. The Substance of
Forgetting is sure to build on these
successes.
Meanwhile, Kristjana Gunnars
will move on, finding new territory in
both her adopted country and her
writing.
Kristjana Gunnars has two new
books coming out which will be
reviewed in L-H soon.
Purrt og blautt að vestan, p.92. In the
beginning Icelanders did not rise high
in the eyes of the English .majority, and
notes in windows on houses for rent
were known to carry the addition:
‘Icclanders need not apply.’ We were
considered ‘lousy’ in the real sense, and
defínitely were after the lengthy travel
in poor sanitary condition, as well as
this condition being a noteworthy
national endeavor in livestock raising.
As regards the Chinese trick of the
tongue, it is not unusual: a Chinese
restaurant keeper in Benito called Birch
River ‘buschalivah’. As for the ‘Goalies’,
a pet name for the famous hockey team
the Falcons, they came some 20 years
later. My friends in Winnipeg did not
like the name Goolie I teased them
without mercy, accordingly. It is a good
name though. Let us stick to it!
Bjöm Jónsson
Kristjana Gunnars
Letter to the Edltor
Valgardson takes
Cont'd from page 4
boasts such talents as Jack Hodgins
and on occasion W. P. Kinsella. The
Victoria approach to creative writing is
sweaty and practical: “I tell my stu-
dents I am a plumber and I teach
plumbing,” Valgardson says. “If you
want to leam about deconstruction, go
to the English department. I am not
the slightest bit interested.”
As a writer he finds teaching debili-
tating. After a day spent grading
papers, sitting on committees, keeping
office hours, preparing lessons, and
analyzing other people’s writing,
Valgardson says the last thing he wants
to do when he comes home at night is
to write. But write he does, in a house
which has a quiet, empty feel about it,
and which seems far too large for one
Person. Is it his own loneliness that
makes him write? “Possibly,” he
allows. “Writing a novel is very, very
lonely, but it is a way of meeting my
own emotional needs, and of speaking
tor people who might be inarticulate.”
He thinks loneliness is the illness of
the nineties, that there is a kind of dis-
'ocation that has come with urbaniza-
t'on and the exchanging of roles
between men and women. “We claim
we want freedom,” he says, but, “we
don’t understand that what we often
get along with that is aloneness.” After
more than 20 years of marriage he and
his wife — an antique dealer like Bob’s
disaffected wife — separated in the
early eighties in the interval between
Gentle Sinners and Botticelli. His son
and daughter-in-law lived with him for
a while, which Valgardson says was “a
joy,” but they have just moved to San
Diego. His married daughter lives in
Victoria and every Tuesday and
Thursdav afternoon Valgardson
babysits his year-old grandson while
his daughter plays soccer. There isn’t a
hint of self-sacrifice in this admission.
“I have always felt very strongly that if
it were possible I could guarantee my
children time,” he says. “My daughter
and her husband are at that age where
they are working like hell to pay the
mortgage and the car payments and
what happens is that you lose a life.”
What he wants is to reach out and
give them what he didn’t have at their
age: a little ease from the daily grind.
He says that in 30 years he has never
made enough in any one year to sur-
vive on his writing. “íf I had it to do
over again, I guess I should have mar-
new direction
ried somebody with a great deal of
money, but when you are 21 and full
of lust, money and being supported
doesn’t come into it. “
7 tell my students lama
plumber and I teach
plumbing’
In his middle years, after intensive
Jungian therapy and years of dream
analysis, Valgardson seems to have
discovercd a different kind of lust. The
meticulous, detached voice of his early
fiction has been blown away by an
overpowering urge to fling his words
and stories onto the page. It seems as
though the slow measured writing is a
thing of the past. He says he wrote the
first draft of Bofficelli in six weeks.
“The April before last, I woke up
one morning at 3 o’clock.” He
thrashed around and eventually went
back to sleep. The same thing hap-
pened three mornings in a row.
Finally, he said to himself: “This is
crazy.” He got up, went to his comput-
er, and started to write. “I wrote until
five in the morning without a break.”
The first thing that appeared was the
diabolical chapter about the marriage
counsellor. “When it came, I thought,
‘What in the hell is that?”’ — and
Valgardson shrieks his hooting laugh
in memory of his own astonishment.
This kind of automatic writing went on
for six weeks, at the end of which he
had 65,000 words and a completed
first draft. “Then I spent 11 months
rewriting,” he admits.
He thought about holding back
Botticelli for another year to polish
and tighten it, but he was afraid that
in the process he would smother its
surging emotion. In the end, he went
for broke. “There’s a big risk in writ-
ing what you really care about
because you have to expose yourself,”
he says. “Most people don’t do that.
They go for years never telling any-
body what they really think and care
about.” Not Valgardson, not ever, but
particularly not now. He’s leapt off
the deep end with The Girl with the
Botticellil Face. All he can do is wait
apprehensively to hear what kind of
splash it will make. That wait, as all
writers know, is one of the loneliest
vigils of them ail.
The Globc and Mail