Loading summary
Transcript87 lines
- [00:01]
Movie Trailer Announcer
This Friday see what critics are calling a cold blooded masterpiece. Hello, Finny.
- [00:06]
Bruce Hunter
Your back.
- [00:07]
Movie Trailer Announcer
Dead is just a word. Did you think our story was over? Discover the secret.
- [00:14]
Holly Gattery
It's brought us here for a reason.
- [00:15]
Movie Trailer Announcer
Behind the mask. What do you think happens when you die? It's time to find out. You can honk. I'm not afraid of you. You should be. Black Phone 2 only in theaters Friday. Rated R under 17. Not admitted without parent.
- [00:31]
Marshalls Advertiser
This episode is brought to you by Marshalls where you never have to compromise between quality and price. The buyers of Marshalls hustle hard working to bring you great deals on brand name and designer pieces because Marshalls believes everyone deserves access to the good stuff. Visit a Marshalls store near you or shop online@marshalls.com so good, so good, so good.
- [00:55]
Nordstrom Rack Advertiser
Just in thousands of winter arrivals at your Nordstrom rack store, save up to 70% on coats, slippers and cashmere from Kate Spade New York, Vince Ugg, Levi's and more.
- [01:06]
Bruce Hunter
Check out these boots. They've got the best gifts.
- [01:08]
Nordstrom Rack Advertiser
My holiday shopping hack join the Nordiclub. Get an extra 5% off every rack purchase with your Nordstrom credit card. Plus buy it online and pick it up in store the same day for free. Big gifts, big perks. That's why you rack.
- [01:23]
Experian Advertiser
Welcome to the new books.
- [01:28]
Holly Gattery
Hello everyone and welcome to nbn. I am your host Holly Gattery and I am thrilled to be joined today by award winning author Bruce Hunter, whose novel of love, disability and wildness in the Bears House was re released this year by frontnet Press to wide acclaim and much love. Set in the 1960s Calgary in Alberta's backcountry, this reissue tells the story of a creative young mother, Claire Dunlop, raising her deaf son against the insurmountable odds of poverty, mental illness and hardship. In the Bear's House is ultimately about listening to the wild in the wilderness and what we lose when it's gone. Bruce Hunter's poems, stories and essays have appeared in over 80 publications in Canada, China, India, Italy, the UK and the US. He has authored 11 books. His novel in the Bear House was translated into Italian and he also has a really wonderful collection of short stories that I actually first read. Bruce, correct me if I'm wrong because it's escaped me. Is it country music? Songs?
- [02:40]
Bruce Hunter
Country music?
- [02:41]
Holly Gattery
Country country music? Country? I don't know. Well, songs would make sense, but that'd be redundant. Country music.
- [02:47]
Bruce Hunter
It's from a radio call sign. A fictional radio call in the book CWBY Voice the cowboy in Country Music Country.
- [02:57]
Co-host or Guest
Okay.
- [02:58]
Holly Gattery
Yes. Yeah, it was such a great collection, such a wonderful collection of short stories.
- [03:01]
Co-host or Guest
I absolutely loved it and I'm excited.
- [03:04]
Holly Gattery
To talk to you about in the Bears House, which I know we have a lot of listeners here who teach at the New Books Network, so please hear me out. This book needs to be taught in high school classrooms and universities across North America, and I'd argue also beyond so I'm really delighted to talk to you.
- [03:22]
Co-host or Guest
About this story, Bruce.
- [03:24]
Holly Gattery
So my first question for you is, I'd like you to speak to where the story came from, the nucleus of this story. Where did that sprout in your wonderful brain?
- [03:35]
Bruce Hunter
Boy, that came from I think probably a half dozen different places, spaces, geographically, historically and in my mind. But about 25 or so years ago I wrote a poem called Two O' Clock Creek. And Two O' Clock Creek is a real place named by a great uncle of mine. It's on Kootenay Plains, which is not in the Kootenay Mountains of B.C. but is in west central Alberta on the eastern slopes of the Rockies, about an hour west of Rocky Mountain House, just past Nordic and so on. But Two o' Clock Creek was named by my great uncle because what happened was the sun came around and shone on a glacier, and then around 2 o', clock, after the sun was at its peak, there was a creek. And I was mystified by that as a young boy. I was nine years old at the time I first went up to Gouny Plains and saw Two o' Clock Creek. My narrator in the book is quite a bit older. For fictional reasons and historical reasons, I had to move the story along quite a ways. But that was part of what happened. The other part was I was mystified by how I survived growing up in the late 50s and 60s with two very significant disabilities. One is loss of hearing as an infant and in low vision all my life and many, many eye procedures and so on. But that was part of it. I wanted to understand that time and I wanted to understand my parents. There was a lot of mystery around the time and also around my parents personal life. And there were a lot of things that were hidden and for understandable reasons given the time and in the story. So that's partly where it came from. And one is I wanted to understand deafness. Just because you are something doesn't mean you have insights into it, doesn't mean you have the medical and historical knowledge around those things. And so for me, it was an attempt to solve some problems and answer some questions and as a teacher to pass along the stories and the history that I'd learned.
- [06:00]
Holly Gattery
What a great answer. And there was a review recently in Friction Literature that I think really captured the spirit of one of the things I adored so, so much about your book. And that is. And the reviewer, whose name is totally escaping me now. But listeners, I will find it by the end of the episode. Oh, sorry, Ainsley. Louis. I'm hoping I'm pronouncing it right. Apologies if I'm not. Ainsley. A pull quote from it says this representation of disability is a wonderful breath of fresh air. Hunter, who is deaf himself, recognizes Trout's partial deafness as a fundamental part of who he is, but allows Trout to find competencies, ways of knowing and identity beyond that. I mean, I got chills reading that for our listeners. Trout is the name of Claire Dunlop's son. So we're getting both perspectives in the novel. And interestingly, and I would love you to speak to this. Trout's voice is. Is third person and Claire's is first person. Now the. This is speaking to something I. I think I heard somebody else who reviewed your book or heard read somebody else who reviewed your book comment on is that as someone who is deaf yourself, I found it interesting that the first person. What feels to me like such a close narration is from the point of the mother and Trout is third person when it still feels like a very close narrative. Don't get me wrong, but I was wondering about your choice and why you decided to do that.
- [07:44]
Bruce Hunter
That's interesting that you say that. What happened? I was about three years into the book and I was writing the whole book in third person omniscient from Trout's point of view. And just to give a couple of explanations, Trout got a nickname from his family who loved Wild and therefore gave him that name. And the title come from a backcountry. The title of the book comes from a backcountry analogy that basically translates as, you're in a bear's house now, mind your manners. The naming is important there, but the perspective. Third person omniscient was the wide camera angle. And I learned a lot from studying film and university. And one of the things you learn about, of course, is point of view and also where the microphone is. You know, if you're. If you're filming from the point of view of a dog or a cat or a mouse, even the microphone can be in a very different place and also different voices. The Clara's voice for me was a challenge to write because of the intimacy. Claire's happy to Tell you everything. You know, she has, in many ways, no boundaries, but she's also very lyrical and intelligent. And I was three years into the book before I realized if I don't tell this story, at least partly or significantly from a mother's point of view, I don't really have an honest or authentic book. And that came about as a result of it, first of all, talking to many mothers of deaf and deafened children. And one of the things I realized is this is so important, because in the 1950s, late 1950s, early 60s, a lot of the things that we have came from mothers who went forward and organized and instituted programs and courses in colleges and college programs and things like that. So there's an enormous amount of unsaid, unpaid legwork by the mothers. The second part, more closer to the story, is that the mother is often the first person to know that the child has a disability of some type. In my case and in the case of many others of my generation, and I'm 73. So what happened was the mothers would be dismissed. Pooh, poohed. My mother actually was patted on the head by a doctor. My mother was a tiny woman, and the doctor patted it on the head and said, he'll grow out of it. Okay, that never happened, but. So it shows you. Part of the ethos of the time gets in that.
- [10:34]
Holly Gattery
That's a great answer. I also love the. Okay. I love Claire's fire. I loved how hard she fought for her son. I love how helpless she was sometimes and how enraged she was at her helplessness. It felt so authentic, as a mother to four humans myself, to often feel that. Not that I can understand exactly what Claire went through, obviously. The other thing I want to talk to you about is the wildness that is running through this book. And I mean that in the sense that there is an inseparable distinctions between who we are as human beings and our natural surroundings. So when we say, like, oh, that's a wild animal, it's like we're distancing ourselves from the fact that that's exactly what we are. And we have certainly taken our wildness, perhaps in destructive and often dense, detrimental ways, but we are wildness. And one thing I love about Trout, from that perfect nickname that puts him.
- [11:37]
Co-host or Guest
In the wild and situates him as.
- [11:39]
Holly Gattery
A wild thing in the best possible sense of the word, and how in tune Trout is with his surroundings. So I would like for you to talk about. I don't think I'm giving anything away here. The pivot in the book where Trout leaves his home after some slightly charmingly deviant behavior.
- [12:00]
Co-host or Guest
I every now and then say, and I do read Charlie charmingly from one who knows. Yes, exactly. I often say to my kids, you know, I would love just to get a call from law enforcement about you one day, get off your phones and go out there and raise some hell. Child's doing it.
- [12:17]
Holly Gattery
I mean, like, and like I said charmingly deviant, in other words, like nobody is actually really getting hurt from this behavior. It, it's, I would say it's harmless, harmless deviance. So I, I, he gets sent away to live in the mountains of Alberta with his aunt and uncle and I'd love for you to talk. And then he's really placed in this wildness and I'd like you to talk about that pivot in the book and then I can come back to this question, because I'm asking you two questions at once, which is a fault of mine as an interviewer, but, but I get excited and then I start to ramble. To also talk about your incorporation of indigenous people in this story as you, a writer who is not indigenous, and how you did this with sympathy, with sensitivity, empathy, and also within the confines of ida, are you staying firmly in your lane.
- [13:21]
Bruce Hunter
To give an overview? First of all, I believe in cultural sensitivity and cultural literacy. And in other words, we may not be. I'm not Italian and I'm not fluent, but I did a four city tour of Italy with Nella Casa Delorso, which translates as in the House of de Bear, and a reception in Italy to the story set in the wilds of Canada. It was exceptional and very emotional and it's seen as a family story and not the larger context. It's a story of families, first of all, the Scottish Canadian immigrants and also first nations families. So eventually the story encompasses all of that. But getting back to the wild, I was very fortunate to be raised in a family, extended family, dozens of cousins, 11 great aunts and uncles off the boat from Scotland. And they were people themselves who were very close to the land and therefore wildness. We were surrounded by aunts and uncles and animals and music and all kinds of things. So there's a rich culture that I did and my character Trout comes out of the other was what happens when someone has a disability is they start to learn other powers. I used to say to my special needs students, I know you have a special need, so do I. But the question I really want to ask, because you got to this age and you got to college, what's your superpower because we have one, and we have one because we've developed it to survive. In my case, it was reading. And I'm going to bring it back to the wild, because on the one hand, it was a reading. There was a literate, civilized world, logic and all that, and narrative. But on the other side, there was a tactile relationship with nature. You were in it, you touched it, you breathed it. And as I did when I was nine years old by my character, Trout, age 13, my experience at the wild was tactile. I tried to touch a pack route once and got bitten by it. That was an important lesson. He has his little territory. He may not be big, and his territory may not be big, but that was an important lesson at a young age. And the other thing that happened. And I went back to Kootenay Plain many, many times to research the book. But I lived in proximity to Stony Dakota on the Bighorn Reserve and visited often and went out to the round dances and things like that. And I was always included as a child. And I mirror that in the novel because I want people to understand this particular group of people. This is how they were. They were hospitable, and they shared their culture and they shared their stories as well. And a lot of the stories I share were stories that were shared with me, either by the elders of my own Scottish clan or the elders of the Stony Nakota and other groups around Alberta, either in speaking, in telling, or in writing. I believe at an early age I had a conversion. I'm an atheist, but I have deep spiritual beliefs, partly Buddhist and partly coming from First Nations. And I do not, like, you see, a separation between being human and being wild. Being human. We are animals. We are part of the animal world. And one of the things that I've noticed over the years, I love bears. Fascinated by bears. I'm not naive. When I'm in the back country, I'm learning my manners. I keep my wits about me and I respect them. But I don't free code. I don't yell. I don't carry bear spray or a horn or anything like that. I do what I learned to do from my own relatives and from the First Nation people that I spent time with, had walked with and traveled with and talked with at great length, which is to observe the animal and observe all animals. And I think one of the superpowers that I have, if I can call it that, and certainly Trout has, is that the power of observation. And when you think about it, hearing and its subset listening is all about Observation, because listening is multisensory. It includes occlusion, which is another way of saying, we listen to the skin, we feel through our skin, to the hairs on the back of our neck, on our head. A cat had whiskers. We have body, hair and skin. And if you've ever listened to Adobe speaker in a wonderful theater or sound, the communications through vibration and sound is various levels of vibration. The other part of it is observation of the eyes and the face and 40% of what we hear at tone. So I didn't have very much hearing, but I had tone. And I'm not tone deaf. I'm actually fairly musical and I can hold a tune and I can keep pitch and all that. Well, that's tone. And so despite the idea of wildness, there's a great deal of information that is being received by animals, wild animals, by humans, who may not have some of the advantages other people have, which is access to language, either because they don't speak it, they can't hear it, or they can't read it. And education, for example, is based on the premise that people can hear and see. And of course, I couldn't. So in a regular school system, it was a fight to survive. And one of my survival skills, and I mirror this with trout, is the ability to read and read quickly and read comprehensively and widely. I am not a discriminating reader at all. I read everything I said. I wish I hadn't. And I also have a very heightened sense of smell to misfortune. Sometimes if I walk into someplace that has potpourri, I feel like I've walked into a nasal glitter bomb. I have to leave. There's too much information coming in. And I often can locate things through smell very simply. If I go to the mall and I can't find a coffee place, I follow my nose and I can do that kind of thing. Other people are far more gifted at this than I am. And what we're talking about is neuroscience. And there's a fellow in Los Angeles who is an advocate for echolocation for the blind. And there are pictures of him in the LA Times riding his mountain bike in rush hour traffic in Los Angeles by echolocation. That's incredible.
- [21:11]
Holly Gattery
Yeah, that gives me anxiety just thinking about it.
- [21:15]
Co-host or Guest
I'm like, sweetie, get off the road.
- [21:17]
Bruce Hunter
Right? But that's the other thing I want to get to. I often say this when I'm talking about disabilities and especially when I'm talking about bears, people's fear of others, that they don't know it could be racial, could be wild animals, could be, you know, a different adventure they haven't had yet. One of the greatest disabilities we all have is fear. And the fear is often much, much greater than in actuality. When you look at the fear of bears, for example, it's huge. It's great. And I watch a lot of videos on bears, and I saw one recently of a bear on ancient seaboard in the United States. And he was an old guy. You could tell by looking at him. And bears millions of years ago descended from dogs, so they have that sensitivity and they have similar features. But this was an old guy, and he's walking down the road minding his own business. He had a grizzled snout. And this family sees him coming up past the front of their acreage. They run like screaming fools down the street. I'm thinking, the bear is looking at them and going, what? It's your problem. I'm an old guy on my way to see a man about a dog or who knows what. And here you are, you're having this reaction. The reaction is not to that bear. The reaction is to some preconceived notion in their head said, the bear is going to eat them. Oh, whatever. Who knows? Bears don't. Other than maybe grizzly bears and polar bears don't eat people. Now, they'll certainly challenge you if you challenge them and all kinds of things. But I don't want to go too far off into that topic. But my point is, one of the things you learn, at least I learned as a person with disability, you can't afford to have the luxury of fear. And to give you an example, I went to Italy for the first time about 13 years ago. And the night before, of course, you had the panic attack that I pack enough of this or that, did I print my tickets and boarding passes and so on. But I had this panic attack around deafness and the other half of my brain, which is not terribly helpful. Sometimes the anxious side of the brain said, you don't know Italian. First of all, which I don't, and second of all, your death. And unfortunately, the sensible side of my brain said, you idiot, you've been deaf all your life. You know how to be deaf and function, and you're deaf in every language in the world. And the other side of my brain goes, good point. I need to get a laugh.
- [24:08]
Holly Gattery
You're what? What is it? You're, you know, multilingually deaf.
- [24:12]
Co-host or Guest
I don't know if that's.
- [24:14]
Holly Gattery
Yeah, exactly. I love that. And when you're talking about, we will come back. I'm going to circle us back being, you know, my, my, you know, Brain Clamp host, I am going to circle us back to the question of talking, you know, writing about indigenous people. And again, I want to be clear to our listeners. We are learning about them through the perspective of Trout, a boy who actually has quite an adorably embarrassing crush on one of them.
- [24:44]
Co-host or Guest
Which, which I loved.
- [24:45]
Holly Gattery
Rome, but I, I, yeah, it's absolutely true. I mean, I live out in a rural area and bears are frequently abounding. And we had one live in a tree right outside our house for a very long time. And I kind of wanted it out just because it was making my dogs crazy and loud, and I don't like loudness, but for the most part just left it. And I didn't want to say anything about it publicly around here because I was afraid I'd just get people with guns coming to my house. So I just kind of let it.
- [25:18]
Co-host or Guest
Hang out there until it was ready to leave because I was like, like I live in hunting country. I was like, I don't want these people around my house.
- [25:28]
Holly Gattery
And it did leave it realized there was nothing there for it except annoying dogs and children. So, and, and goats, which it had no interest in because goats, this is a black bear, so it's not going to take on a goat. That's not what they do. A little bear fact I learned at the Toronto Metro Toronto Zoo is that bears are mostly vegetarians. And, well, at least the bears that I'm talking about, not polar bears, but the bears in my neck of the woods are mostly vegetarians and they eat mostly.
- [26:00]
Bruce Hunter
That's exactly, you know, what I was thinking as I was talking. You'll see on the coast, of course, the bears come down to the spawning season and so on. So there is that the protein in their diet. But they go after ant hills and of course, berries. And I was on a boat trip going up to Cote, and it was a small craft and we got very close to the coast and there was a grizzly bear underneath a crab apple tree. And he was in the water and the crab apple tree was hanging over the water. He stripped the crab apples so they all landed on the water. And then he went along like a vacuum and vacuumed them up off the surface. And this is the most interesting thing to see. And of course, a camera wouldn't have recorded this if I'd had one to quickly access. But the part that I really liked was after he was finished, he flipped over on his back and floated away.
- [26:58]
Co-host or Guest
What an image.
- [27:01]
Bruce Hunter
It's getting back to observation. The more you learn, the more you observe. That mitigates the fear. It doesn't take fear away. It just puts it in a place that it's manageable. And the important thing is, it's like with anything in life. Get to know the people, get to know the place, get to know the animals. And the indigenous people that I know teach their children, there's a time to walk with the bear and there's a time to hunt the bear. They also give the bears names in their territory, so they know the bears. Each bear has a personality, and if there's something wrong with the bear, they know that. And also, females are very different in their territory. Their territory is very small, close to a food source, which makes sense. If you're going to have a baby, you want to go to 711 and get the milk. It's basically that the males cover quite a large territory and they may have side girls. So the more you learn, the more you realize, okay, there are things to watch out for and there are things that are really not important. But getting back to your question about the indigenous material that Trout is immersed in and comes out of the book, that came about partly as I had family diaries and journals of encounters with the people in the region I write about. So I was very blessed to have that, and the family wanted me to have that. My Scottish grandmother said to me one time, you are our scribe. And I went, oh, Lord, that's a weight I'm not quite sure I want. But it was true. It is true. And that was part of it. The other part of it is when I left the area, I went back and did a lot of reading. So when I was writing the novel, there were things that I, of course, couldn't know as a nine year old, but as a mature writer. And I taught sociology, which gives you different frames to look at different things. When I'm talking about cultural literacy, that's an example. So I wanted to be culturally literate insofar as I could be. And the challenge in telling the story was that the history is constantly being updated. Like the name of the band had changed three times over 50 or 60 years, because as the people themselves are learning more about their ancestors, there is a changing of the name to reflect the reality to the current reality and also the historical reality. And that was a lot of work to keep up with. But the other part of it is Trout has an explosive sensitivity. He is the canary in the coal mine. So he is picking up on things that other people don't pick up on. And I quite like the fact that Trout rather had this crush on the chief's granddaughter. And I was told by a friend of mine who is very familiar with. She's a non Indigenous woman who's written a wonderful book on Alberta film and the Indigenous people in the history of the film industry, going back to the 1920s and so on. And a lot of the people that I am writing about were in films, and I watched those films, Westerns and things like that. And so they passed on their culture through the songs and speech in the films. And so that was certainly an influence because when I realized all these movies I'd watched were the people I'd actually met, and they were very proud of that because their role in the films was a letter to future generations about their culture, about their language, and their pride in what they could do in terms of horsemanship.
- [31:17]
Holly Gattery
Yeah, I think I recall when I was talking to you a bit earlier about this book that you had Indigenous friends read the book. You had that level of sensitivity reading in the book. And I mean, I can't imagine you being anything but cautious about these things to begin with. In fact, I would argue if there's one thing that's going to keep this book from getting into school, it has.
- [31:46]
Co-host or Guest
Nothing to do with anything except one very scandalous scene between Trout and his friend, which I read that. I was like, somebody is finally talking about what little, little young boys get up to.
- [32:00]
Bruce Hunter
I. I can tell you some of the feedback I've had, which it's going to be interesting. I look forward to it because my belief is part of reconciliation. First of all, I think we need to hear each other's stories. And in order to do that, we have to share those stories. And some of the stories I read about, I have not read them anywhere. And yet when I talk to people who are not Indigenous, who are consultants with Indigenous people, they come, oh, yeah. And I said, well, why is this the first time I've heard anybody talking about this? I haven't read about it. The other thing is there's a great body of literature written about and by Indigenous people now. It's a huge body of literature. In fact, it's a genre. And what I'm troubled by is a lot of that has not made its way into the schools, and it's been around for a long time. And some of the stories, the one about Walking Buffalo, for example, George McLean, who started the Banff Indian Days, he was an incredibly accomplished man who traveled on behalf of the peace movement in the 1960s to speak to the queen. And he was such an eloquent speaker. And his own personal story, which is too long to tell right now, but it's a fascinating one in terms of survival, statesmanship, and all kinds of things. So there's stories like that. But anyway, getting back to the point about Trump's infatuation with this young indigenous woman, I was told by a friend who has written a film book that Olive Stoney would not be happy with that. And I thought, give me a break. I have Cree cousins, and one of my uncles married his Cree secretary when he worked for Alberta government telephones. There is no way in hell you can mandate who can fall in love with who. And that is both the beauty of the world and, I think, the mystery of the world. As if people come from entirely different background, fall in love, have kids and bring up the kids, and suddenly the kids present a conundrum to the world because they're neither this nor that. And I think the reason I relate to all this so passionately, I am a neither here nor there person. I am not completely deaf, completely blind, although I'm legally both. But people say, you don't have a white cane, and I'm not using an ear horn, and I don't use American Sign Language. I'm an in between. And when you're an in between, you're always looking for your own statehood, but then you discover most of the world is like you. The problem is we're trying to define each other in very narrow terms. So I'm happy to talk about all this, because these are things that not just my own family has faith, but other families I know who are indigenous. And one of the things that I found is an icebreaker. And I learned this from my own elders, and the elders of the various group that I was blessed with meeting at a young age is that one of the most fundamental things we can do as humans is to share our story. And we do this all the time. We have dinner with another couple, and you say, how did you meet? And that's a great opening for conversation and stories. And one of my early assignments as an English professor, I taught sociology as well as other kinds of courses, but I talked in from all over the world. Many of them were soldiers that came from Iran or Iraq or those kinds of places, or they were involved in the middle of a war skirmish. And I'd say, tell me your story. What's your story? And that was an Open question. But it allowed them to focus on what mattered to them. And if it mattered to them, it mattered to me. And the stories that I learned changed me.
- [36:27]
Holly Gattery
Yeah, that's such a great answer. And I really do thank you for Bruce, for bringing it to us with such perspective. My final question, well, penultimate, I should say, question for you, is about capturing.
- [36:44]
Co-host or Guest
Boyishness in this book.
- [36:47]
Holly Gattery
And what I mean by that is there is such lightness and play, and.
- [36:52]
Co-host or Guest
This is not an all light and playful.
- [36:55]
Holly Gattery
I mean, there's lots of playfulness in the book, but it deals with some really salient, even dark themes, like bullying and I would say, like abuse. Bullying to the point of abuse, which I guess all bullying is abuse, and it does deal with that. But Trout has a relationship with a friend, and there's. There's a lot of wonderful boyishness in there. And even when Trout goes out to live with his aunt and uncle, there's a lot of, you know, boyishness that reminds me of, like, you know, Tom Sawyer, Huck Finn vibes, where the Redfern Groves vibes, you know, all those great classic stories of becoming. And I really loved seeing that from Trout's perspective. Now, again, the whole time, you have Claire's story riding alongside this one, which is giving you a different story. Trout is not an only child.
- [37:51]
Co-host or Guest
There is other stuff going on in Claire's life.
- [37:55]
Holly Gattery
But with Trout, I was really taken in and enchanted by him, even by the parts of him that he or other people might have considered shameful. I reveled in being given the opportunity to see those parts of this boy's life. And I also want to add that I think my children may have really disliked me reading your book, because after I did, I was like, guys, you know, put your phones down and go take out the trash. Like, they just, like. Ever since I read your book, I'm.
- [38:26]
Co-host or Guest
So much more insistent that they help.
- [38:28]
Holly Gattery
Around the house because Trent is a kid who is just. Just does it, like, without being asked, is just a kid who, because of the morals and values in which he was raised, because of who he is for a variety of reasons. It's just actually a really nice, helpful kid. And. Which plays into my question of boyishness. And I know I just asked a really huge question, but I'd love for you to attempt to tackle it for me.
- [38:54]
Bruce Hunter
There are so many things in that question. One of the things I like going back to the book and I said, this speaks of me personally, coming from the family I did, the love of animals and all that kind of stuff and the wild and all of that. I planted my first tree when I was 8 years old, so something very deep that goes back in that. But the other part that I enjoy about Trout is his love of the dogs. He is just in love with those dogs. The horses he is a little terrified of, which is not a bad thing to be at that age when you're around huge pack horses and horses that are only ridden for work. So, in other words, they're not riding horses, they're not hobby horses or anything like, they're workhorses. And they can be dangerous, especially if you're a small person. But the other thing that came up after I won the award at Banff and I had an interview with the Calgary Herald, and this is boyishness. The interviewer for Takagi Herald zeroed in on. He said, trout loves to fart. And I started laughing, and I said, well, first of all, there's a reason for that, and that is that we talk about multisensory hearing or listening. Farting is multisensory for obvious reasons. But when I was interviewing the mothers of especially deaf and deaf and boys, I would always ask that question, does your son fart? And they would always go, oh, yeah. And when you think of what being deaf is, it's not so much not hearing, but it's not being heard. And the deaf and deafened people I talked to said, we want to be heard. And certainly the act of farting is a way of being heard because it's shock. It's all kinds of things. And you may not be able to be articulate in a lot of other ways, but you sure as hell get the attention of a teacher or a mother or a grandmother when you let one rip.
- [41:13]
Co-host or Guest
As a mother of four children, two.
- [41:16]
Holly Gattery
Of whom are boys, I. I agree.
- [41:20]
Bruce Hunter
Don't give them beans.
- [41:22]
Co-host or Guest
Yeah, just. I agree.
- [41:24]
Bruce Hunter
It is, I would argue, you know, superficial. But, you know, I. I think there. There's a lesson in all of this.
- [41:31]
Holly Gattery
I would argue that some of the.
- [41:32]
Co-host or Guest
Bigger kids I know in my life still find that farting as a way to get attention.
- [41:40]
Holly Gattery
So.
- [41:42]
Bruce Hunter
Well, it just, you know, while we're. While we're on this topic, I was very fortunate to have W. O Mitchell way back when as a mentor and teacher at the Banff School of Fine Arts. And I would work in laboring jobs, and I got a poetry scholarship to go and work with him and Irving Leighton. But one of the things I noticed, Mitchell was a great performer. He was actually trained as an actor. So he was a dramatic Persona. Had a little bit of a Mark Twain bearing about him with the fabulous white hair and the snuff blocks and the whole thing. But I got to the seminar room early in the morning in Banff and he was there. He walked in, there was only two of us in the room. And he did this little show where he tiptoed across the carpet to where he would sit, you know, sort of in the center of the circle oval in a well lighted room with the mountains in the backdrop. And he went a couple depths and he let one rip. And then he looked to see if anyone was watching. Then he walked two more steps and let another one rip. And I thought, God, this guy is childish. But God, I like that because he had never lost his boyishness and isn't a wonderful thing in the world, you know, so the best lessons are often out of class.
- [43:12]
Holly Gattery
Yeah, yeah, that's.
- [43:13]
Co-host or Guest
That's true.
- [43:14]
Holly Gattery
Because I grew up with a father who was very. Who, we'll just put it politely, he's never lost his inner boyishness either. And then a mother who is just mortified by it. And so being caught in between those two worlds of, you know, we don't do that, that is not polite. And then having one parent literally throw back his head and laugh in defiance.
- [43:40]
Co-host or Guest
Of propriety in class was quite an experience.
- [43:43]
Holly Gattery
I still find myself when somebody makes a joke, even with Trout, being like a little bit scandalized. Like, I wasn't scandalized about the part. Yeah, with him and his best friend when they were masturbating together, that I was like, yeah, cool, those are boys. But I like the farting.
- [44:00]
Co-host or Guest
Scandalized. I was like, oh, my, what does this say about who I am? That, you know, one thing is like, yeah, boys will be boys do this.
- [44:08]
Bruce Hunter
Well, you know, part of when I did the research for the book, I wanted to find out was I typical or atypical. And I think of the time I grew up in and with the disability plural that I had, I was pretty typical. And, well, because if you can't access the language and you're isolated for various reasons, either sent away to a school or you're isolated socially as I was, as Trout is, then you're faced with going into the world with a different set of values. I didn't meet anybody like me until I was well into my 30s. And the reason for that is not a lot of us got through school successfully and were often underemployed or, excuse me, unemployed. And then going on to post secondary education was A huge challenge because a lot of the assists that are now built into the system were not there. There was no help. And so I think that. And, you know, one of the things that really impacted in my telling of the story, you know, and the reason I'm bringing this up, is what you said about your father and what you said about your mother. Because I'm going, okay, what are the social or societal values and what are the personal values? Because everybody around Trout is creative. And I mean creative in the sense that these were people that came from poverty, they came from other places, or they lived in the backcountry. And if you didn't have something, you made it, and you made it from whatever you had around you, which is the ultimate form of creativity. And if you didn't have it, you learned to do without it. So you used what you did have. And that. I'm still like that, I think, in probably every aspect of life, you know, how can I make this happen? How can I make this work? Who can I work with? And I said this, and it sounds trite. Yesterday when you or somebody made a comment, oh, it was you. And I said, well, my mantra is, let's have fun. Let's not stress out. Let's have fun. You know, and if this is our last day on the planet, let's have fun.
- [46:38]
Co-host or Guest
Yeah.
- [46:39]
Holly Gattery
Yep. You know, I should. I should let my dad send me tiktoks of fart jokes and not, you.
- [46:44]
Co-host or Guest
Know, tell him to grow up. I should just let him do it, you know, like, fine, that's fine.
- [46:53]
Bruce Hunter
I can just. I can just see the Google coming up with Bruce, Hunter and Holly. Talk about farting.
- [47:01]
Co-host or Guest
I know this is definitely something. In the dozens and dozens and dozens of episodes of NBN I've done, I don't think I've ever talked.
- [47:13]
Holly Gattery
And it's still making me squirm.
- [47:16]
Co-host or Guest
Like, I still feel compression in my chest. Like, oh, my gosh, my mother will be so ashamed of me. My father will delight in it, but my mother is going to be so ashamed.
- [47:27]
Holly Gattery
That's okay. I'm going to unclench and loosen up to especially take a deep breath and ask you my final question, which is, Bruce, what are you working on now?
- [47:36]
Bruce Hunter
Right now, I'm working on trying to get through what has been a momentous year four city tour in Italy. Incredible response to the book. And the response has been so heartfelt from everywhere. I've tears my eyes. And this is on a regular basis. My next book, Fingers crossed. I've already started and I've been traveling in Vietnam and Cambodia, and I have a sensitivity to the culture and to social and other isolation through poverty and things like that. So I look at things differently. And to give you a little window into what I'm working on, I was in an incense. I don't want to call it a factory because it gives a North American perspective of a steel clad building that either are huts that are open to the wind and the rice patties are right beside and the bales of bamboo sticks to be milled into incense sticks. But I walked into one of the sheds where the incense heads are made, in other words, dipped into dye. And the dye they use is cinnamon. And it's bright, it's blood red in terms of the dye. And so I walked in and I did what I always do when I go into workplaces. I put my hand out to shake the hand of the man who was making the incense. And he held out this hand. Both hands were bright red and he had sandals on and his feet were bright red from the dye. And I said, no, no, I'll shake your hand anyway. I put my hand out and he shook my hand with his red hand, his working hand, and then invited me to sit down for tea. And I thought, thank God I'm a poet and thank God I was raised the way I was, which is to shake the hand of someone who is making the thing that you are going to use. And I'm eternally grateful for that. So that's where I'm going.
- [49:34]
Holly Gattery
Well, thank you for sharing that, Bruce. And thank you for talking to us about your marvelous novel, in the Bear's House, which was published with Frontenac House Press. It's a reissue. It's quite remarkable. It is not the same exactly as the first one. So just because you've read it once doesn't mean you shouldn't read it again. And is available wherever books are bought or borrowed. Bruce Hunter, I am so glad to have had the chance to talk with you and talk about things that made me uncomfortable.
- [50:05]
Bruce Hunter
I'm honored by this and I'm honored by your help.
- [50:08]
Co-host or Guest
Yeah, it was much fun.
- [50:10]
Bruce Hunter
I'll introduce it to the world again. Thank you.
- [50:13]
Holly Gattery
Oh, it's been an absolute pleasure, Bruce. I hope you have a wonderful day and everyone pick up Bruce's book. And when you love it, which I know you will, make sure to shout it out. Thank you, Bruce.
- [50:23]
Bruce Hunter
Thank you.
- [50:36]
Experian Advertiser
It's okay not to be perfect with finances. Experian is your big financial friend and here to help. Did you know you can get matched with credit cards on the app. Some cards are labeled no Ding Decline, which means if you're not approved, they won't hurt your credit scores. Download the Experian app for free today. Applying for no Ding Decline cards won't hurt your credit scores. If you aren't initially approved, initial approval will result in a hard inquiry, which may impact your credit scores.