Leroy by Karen Garry – a message for all

First impressions can be deceiving! This is not a children’s book

Leroy-Not a children’s book

I encountered Leroy and Karen Garry a couple weeks ago when I spoke at the Canadian Authors – Metro Vancouver meeting. My topic was the use of ‘voice’ in writing and I shared some of my experience with marketing. Karen had been asking me many questions, and at the end of the meeting, we exchanged books: her book Leroy for my Sun Dogs and Yellowcake. Two more opposite books you couldn’t imagine.

Leroy – the message

When Karen told me her book was an adult book, I thought I had misheard her. I was looking at a book that looked more like a children’s book. She was right of course.

Leroy is a commentary on our changing earth, changing because of our actions and inaction. Karen peppers the pages with colourful, detailed and whimsical drawings, felted creatures, block text that is as compelling as the drawings, and a heartfelt message that even a child could understand.

To buy your own copy of Leroy, visit www.heartshapedrawk.com
You can follow Karen on Instagram @heartshapedrawk and on Facebook

She had also been multi-tasking, as the following sketches of me show. Aren’t they fun?

I seem to have shed a few years. Very grateful.

Sandberg at Canadian Authors presentation

 

Karen Garry drawing

Gunnar ghost stories

I confess. This is not a ghost story, but another story from the ghost uranium mine – Gunnar Mines, Saskatchewan.

The residents left Gunnar over fifty years ago. The mine is long gone.
The buildings have disappeared – sold and shipped on the lake to Fort McMurray or Uranium City when the mine closed, or demolished as part of the cleanup in 2011. Even Uranium City people, itinerant fishermen, and hopeful geologists can no longer access the site.

Sunset before Gunnar’s sunset. Courtesy of the Cooke family.

But more than fifty years of stories still knock at my door. The latest is from Kelly Nelson who spent eleven weeks at the vacated town in the summer of 1978. He was a draftsman for a technology company.

Kelly Nelson’s first thoughts

  • My first thoughts of the site when I arrived was, what a dump; not that there was much trash lying around, but it wasn’t the well-kept small town I grew up in (Unity, SK).  By the time I left, I had completely flipped that around and was sad to leave as I found the place so interesting, between the mine-site and the geography with the huge rock outcroppings, trees growing out cracks in the rocks and so on.
  • The fishing was great. I think we pioneered barbless fishing as we knew what was going to happen, so we’d just catch and release. For three weeks in the middle of summer we stopped fishing because it was boring!  Also, the cook would do a fish dish for us only once every 10 days due to the natural mercury in the water. Eventually we ran out of hooks. I was the only one in the crew who didn’t catch an Arctic Grayling, as much as I tried.
  • I got lost while fishing. One evening I walked west of the west townsite on a trail that paralleled the lake shore. I fished for about three hours and when I started walking back I headed to the trail. After a really long time I came to the lake shore again and was completely dumbfounded. By then I could make out the mine site from the shore, so I just followed it back home. I realized I had walked in a large arc and learned how easy it was to get lost. I wrote my brother that night and asked him to send me a navigation compass.
  • Reading outside at midnight on June 21 – that seemed so bizarre to me, but so neat as well. I still remember the book – Helter Skelter by Truman Capote .
  • I agree with the people in the book who suggested Gunnar imparted a sort of mystical sense of peace. We had no TVs and no music radio, only five cassettes (the Grease soundtrack, an ABBA tape, Willie Nelson and Waylon Jennings, Linda Ronstad, and one other I no longer remember), so the forest provided most of the sound we heard. I must say to this day I feel completely at ease in any forest, and I think my time at Gunnar played a role in that.
  • Thank you for writing the book; even though my time in Gunnar came half a generation after it was abandoned as a mine and settlement, it remains a most memorable part of my life.

Kelly’s review of Sun Dogs & Yellowcake

I quite enjoyed the book; I think you did a very good job of writing it – explaining the background for how the company and townsite came to be, life there, and the follow-up. For a subject that could have been dry, to me it was very interesting. You appear to be an accomplished and experienced writer.

To learn more about /my book Sun Dogs & Yellowcake about the ghost uranium mine, Gunnar Mines, click here. To follow me on Facebook, click heree.

Voice: Who should tell your story?

A writer’s choice of voice for a story or novel is one of the most important decisions he or she will make. Voice can be equally important in nonfiction. I will be speaking about voice at the upcoming meeting of The Canadian Authors Association – Metro Vancouver (including Victoria) on January 9, 2018.

I saw the documentary film They Shall Not Grow Old just after Christmas. Director Peter Jackson produced this powerful film about the Great War based on 100 hours of historical film footage and 600 hours of audio recordings from the British War Museum.

His team enhanced hundreds of hours of film by sharpening images and adding colour. The motion is less jerky and more natural than in the original clips.

The original footage also predated movie sound but Jackson could see the soldiers’ lips moving, so he tasked expert lip readers with interpreting their words. The experts determined the correct dialogue – with appropriate accents – and this was incorporated into the film.

Jackson also wrestled with how to do justice to the men who had served and lost lives in the war. He decided the story could only be told by using the men’s own words from the audio tapes and then superimposing these over the footage. The result is an authentic and heart wrenching trip into the trenches and battle zones of WWI.

I reached a similar conclusion about voice four years prior when writing my nonfiction book Sun Dogs and Yellowcake. I determined that former residents of the uranium town where I grew up, must tell their stories in their own words. In this way, life in a mining town in the 1950s and ’60s and the personalities of its residents would be more authentically portrayed.

To hear more about voice and my choice in Sun Dogs, you are welcome to attend the upcoming meeting of Canadian Authors Association – Metro Vancouver (including Victoria) on January 9, 2018. For information about the presentation, please click here.


 I recommend that everyone see They Shall Not Grow Old.  To watch the trailer  click here. 

To see more information about Sun Dogs and Yellowcake, click here.