Bob Armstrong

It was a year of new experiences and long-sought-for goals and also a year in which mortality sent me regular reminders.

This was the year when finally, after half a dozen nominations and shortlist appearances for earlier writings, I won a literary award (the Margaret Laurence Prize for Fiction, from the Manitoba Book Awards, for my novel Prodigies). Since I’ve just finished an edit of the first draft of a sequel to Prodigies, I’m hoping that that award opens the door for the book I’m currently calling Prodigies: The Ghost of Cheyenne. This was also the year when I finally had a short story published in my hometown literary journal, Prairie Fire (The Symbolic Cemetery, inspired by a backpacking trip in a haunted Central European mountain range, published in the magazine’s spring edition).

The new or long-sought-for experiences weren’t only literary. For decades, I had wanted to climb a high mountain, something in the Himalayas or Andes that’s high enough to make breathing difficult. A few years ago, my wife Rosemary and I made it to glacier level (5,000 metres) on Cotopaxi, in Ecuador. On that occasion we took a bus to the 4,700-metre level, so while the air was thin enough we didn’t struggle against it for long. In February of 2022, though, I climbed with my son to the summit of 5,636-metre Pico de Orizaba, the highest mountain in Mexico and third-highest in North America. While technically simple (just a long, steep slog up loose rock, followed by a longer steep slog on snow and ice), the climb would have been impossible for me without the encouragement of my son Sam, a skilled sport climber and professional rope technician.

There were plenty of other new experiences. In June, I officiated at a wedding, which is something I’d never imagined doing. After winning a stand-up paddle board in a fund-raising lottery, I added SUP to my list of outdoor sports that I enjoy without being especially adept at. On road trips with our lightweight solar-powered travel trailer, Rosemary and I hiked in Yellowstone, Grand Teton and White Sands National Parks and explored Dodge City, Palo Duro Canyon, Santa Fe, Taos and Lincoln County, New Mexico, potential locations for future books with wild west settings. These trips included our first-ever rattlesnake close encounter and a rite of passage for modern nomads: sleeping in a Wal-Mart parking lot. For our thirtieth anniversary, Rosemary and I went to New York and, among other things, took in a Billy Joel concert at Madison Square Garden and wandered around Brooklyn, both new settings for me. When a contract I was counting on this year was bumped to 2023, I applied for a part-time job as Christmas extra help at Manitoba Liquor Marts and until New Year’s Eve I’ll be working my first-ever job in retail.

And amid all this, I kept getting reminded that, though it’s not dark yet, as Bob Dylan sang, it’s getting there.

In March, I reached two years cancer-free following my surgery in 2020. But two months later, my doctor told me it was time to start taking daily medication to reduce my cholesterol. I’d always thought that you’re officially old when you have to start taking daily meds, so this was the year I passed that milestone. In May, after we returned from a trailer trip, I found myself hobbling about with sciatic nerve pain, a result of sitting too long on long driving days. Another marker of advanced age.

Physiotherapy and various stretching and strengthening exercises got the pain under control but once was I was able to run again my limit was seven or eight kilometres, instead of the earlier eight to ten. In September, ankle pain led to another set of physiotherapy visits and exercises. After that, I cut my running back to four or five kilometres at a time.

My body was feeling a little better, albeit heavier as a result of the reduced activity, when a routine eye appointment brought me more news of the passage of time: glaucoma. I’m now taking daily eyedrops to slow the expected gradual loss of vision and I’m hopeful that the condition was caught early enough that I have decades of vision still ahead. But again, if it’s not dark yet, it’s getting there.

I was still digesting this premonition of mortality when a social media exchange led to something that will be a Big New Thing for me in 2023. I’ve been doing comedy at open mic events since just before my surgery in February 2020 and several of my sets have focused on my experience with cancer and the long-term effects of my surgery.

In 2023, I’ll bring all that material together – some of which made its way into a personal essay published in 2022 in The Fiddlehead – at a health care conference in Winnipeg. It will be my first paid comedy gig. It’s another thing I’ve always dream of, and it would not have been possible without the hints of mortality I’ve been receiving in the last few years.

 

This year’s Manitoba Book Awards were scheduled to be announced online at 11 a.m. June 11 and I was on that day camping at a nearby provincial park. Fortunately, the park had cell service so I spent the morning looking at my phone and refreshing the browser just in case the organizers released it early. At exactly 11 a.m. my whoop startled the wildlife. After a string of runner-up finishes for my first novel and my plays, I finally won something!

(My publisher – Five Star/Gale — is based in Maine and doesn’t have a lot of distribution in Canada. If you can’t pick up a copy in Winnipeg at McNally Robinson Booksellers, you can get it at this little online site named after a big South American river.

I’ll be taking part in an event this fall at the WInnipeg International Writers’ Festival with fellow Manitoba Book Award winners. Before that happens, I’ll be reading from my short story The Symbolic Cemetery, published recently in Prairie Fire Magazine, at an event June 28 at Little Brown Jug brewery. It’s the first in-person event Prairie Fire has held since the pandemic began.

For non-Canadian readers, Margaret Laurence was one of the founding authors in the establishment of Canadian literature in the 1960s and ’70s as a viable national literature. Her novels The Stone Angel and The Diviners, both set in Manitoba, were staples of high school and college English reading lists for decades.

 

My novel Prodigies (Five Star/Cengage) has been shortlisted for two prizes in the 2022 Manitoba Book Awards.

The Winnipeg International Writers’ Festival, which co-ordinates the awards, announced May 6 that Prodigies was one of five books on the shortlist for the Margaret Laurence Award for Fiction. Prodigies is also on the shortlist for the Michael van Rooy Award for Genre Fiction, awarded every second year, which was created about a decade ago to recognize works in crime writing, speculative fiction and other genres that tend to be overlooked in favour of literary fiction. An interesting note is that two books from the genre fiction shortlist are also on the fiction shortlist: Prodigies and Catherine Macdonald’s crime novel So Many Windings.

I guess while I’m at it, I can take about one-tenth of a bow for the fact that the speculative fiction anthology Alternate Plains is also on the shortlist for the Michael van Rooy Award. The collection of horror, science fiction and fantasy from the prairie provinces features my alternate-realities literary-world comedy Frank 2.0.

The winning books will be announced June 9.

Writers tend to hesitate or become vaguely mystical when asked where they get their ideas. Maybe, like magicians, we fear we’ll lose our special status if we let too many people see behind the illusion.

In honour of the literary magazine Prairie Fire publishing one of my latest stories in its spring Uncharted Territory-themed issue, I’ll try to show you how my story of a couple of bickering hikers in a storm-struck Central European mountain range came to be. (If you click on the Prairie Fire link, you’ll see a few previews of work in the magazine, including my story.)

In 2018, my wife Rosemary and I went for a four-day hike on the Tatranska Magistrala, a hiking trail that traverses Slovakia’s Tatra Mountains. Our plan was to stay three nights in mountain huts, crossing two high passes along the way, and end with a scramble to the top of the highest peak in the area.

As we made our way to our first night’s destination, early October drizzle turned to snow, which became heavier as we reached our hut. The next day, with the high trail impassable, we hiked back down, caught the narrow-gauge railway at the base of the mountains to the next valley along, and hiked up to that night’s destination. The next day, the sun came out and started melting the snow and we continued toward our third mountain hut. The snow was still deep in places and, after we met up with an Australian woman, my wife decided to hike down with her to the railway and repeat the previous day’s hike-train-hike itinerary in order to skip the high pass up ahead.

I ended up walking alone on an increasingly snow-covered trail, then stepping gingerly down a long series of heavily drifted switchbacks to reach the hut where I would later that day reunite with Rosemary.

The next day, the trail to the high mountains was covered with melting slush, so we gave up on reaching the Slovakia-Poland border. Instead, we visited a nearby collection of memorials to Slovakian mountaineers and others who had died in the Tatra Mountains. The Symbolic Cemetery was the kind of haunting place that, if you’re a writer, you just know will generate a story somehow. Between this and the Holocaust memorial we saw at the railway station in Poprad, the nearby town that provides access to the mountains, just before we started the hike, this trip was book-ended with haunted feelings. For three years, these memories ripened in my mind while producing only a half-page of a dreary piece that might have been about mourning if I hadn’t abandoned it.

Then in September 2021, while hiking the James Duncan Trail, at Big Trout Bay, near Thunder Bay, Ontario, Rosemary and I again temporarily split up. On the James Duncan Trail, you can hike there-and-back to a high viewpoint 250 metres above Lake Superior, or you can do a 10-km point-to-point that bypasses the viewpoint in favour of a beautiful cobble beach, then finishes at a different trailhead. Since I wanted to reach the summit, we decided that I’d accompany Rosemary to the beach, then turn around, hit the heights, return to the car, and pick her up at the other end of the trail. As I walked alone along beautiful, but infamously moody, Lake Superior, I thought of the other time we’d parted ways on a hike and of the dangers attendant upon solo hiking in rapidly changeable autumn weather. In the space of the couple of hours it took to get back to the car, a story of a hiking couple in a haunted mountain range came to me, almost word for word. I wrote it up longhand that night and when our trip was over, expanded on my first scrawled draft to create the version I submitted a few weeks later to Prairie Fire.

They don’t all come to you in one piece like this, but sometimes it happens. Sometimes a specific action or image, a view from up high, feet stepping over rough rock, can  make the story spring to life. Sometimes a spark smoulders for years before bursting to life. Maybe it is a magic trick.

I was travelling last fall when the first review came in for Prodigies and somehow I never got around to posting it here. Bad author! Go back to Self Promotion 101.

Anyway, here it is, from the Winnipeg Free Press: Teenage Trio Terrific in Wild Western Yarn. It’s paywalled, but here are some highlights:

“In the late 1870s, three formidably talented kids converge on Deadwood, S.D. in this exciting, episodic tale from Winnipeg writer, actor and park naturalist (and Winnipeg Free Press reviewer) Bob Armstrong.

“The prodigies at the heart of this story make their circuitous ways to the law-challenged setting of the novel’s last half in a series of vignettes that also work as shorter narratives, engaging the reader with vivid description, historical detail and American culture and folklore.”

Most recently, Prodigies picked up another review, this one in a journal aimed at the school and library market, called CM: Canadian Review of Materials.

The reviewer particularly appreciated the two strong female characters and the way the novel blends themes from late 19th century history with the action, so that a reader doesn’t need to know the history coming in but learns a lot after reading it. Here are some highlights.

“Armstrong blends together the three adolescents’ stories expertly and seamlessly. The book features spunky, determined teenagers who stand up for what is right, and they share many laughs along the way. Armstrong has created several strong, independent young female characters, including Lily, and Vera, the daughter of the editor-in-chief of the Black Hills newspaper, who defies her father, and, despite the danger this may pose to her, she embarks on her own to research and write stories about Daniel, the legendary sharpshooter known as the Bulldog Kid, someone whom everyone has been talking about. As a female reviewer, these aspects stood out to me, and I believe other readers will certainly observe and appreciate the inclusion of these feminist aspects. This is an especially appreciated detail as women’s suffrage was just in its infancy in the 1870’s, with women’s right to vote, for example, being still nearly 50 years in the future in both the United States and Canada. It was refreshing to see women framed in such a positive and empowering light and to read about characters who are fighting for their independence despite the upward battle at the time.

Prodigies is a unique text that expertly blends humour with serious topics and historical and social themes. The fact that each of the teen protagonists has an exceptional gift or skill adds a supernatural element to the text that is bound to make the reader root for each of them as they use these skills to fight against the antagonists they encounter. One of the best parts of the novel is that one can enter the text with minimal background knowledge of the Gold Rush-era, the American settings, or the social and historical elements present at the time, and become thoroughly engaged in the storyline, exiting the text having learned historical details along the way. This book would certainly be a text that is like no other on any library or classroom bookshelf.”

 

 

The good people at Enfield & Wizenty and Great Plains Publications published my short story Frank 2.0 last fall in the anthology  Alternate Plains: Stories of Prairie Speculative Fiction. It’s the follow-up to their 2018 anthology Parallel Prairies. Frank 2.0 is an alternative worlds story that also serves as a kind of autobiography of my fantasy life.

Frank 2.0 was actually my second story with a science fiction or speculative fiction angle to it to be published in 2021. Earlier in the year FreeFall Magazine ran my short story The Going and the Gone, which I’ve described as a kind of magical realism take on the pandemic.

I stayed on a bit of fantasy/speculative run in the fall with a new short story, titled The Symbolic Cemetery, which will be published in the spring of 2022 in the “Uncharted Territory” themed issue of Prairie Fire Magazine. While many of my stories come together slowly from an initial idea, I thought through The Symbolic Cemetery in two or three hours while hiking alone through the North Shore Mountains overlooking Lake Superior near Thunder Bay, Ontario. That night I wrote out the story longhand in a travel journal and when I got home I finished the story, gave it an edit and submitted it. Shortest path ever from idea to acceptance.

All three stories feature in the manuscript I’m sending around to publishers at the moment, a short story collection I’m currently calling A Time and A Place.

“It’s a Western with a twist. Set in the 1870’s, and eventually in the legendary town of Deadwood, the plot gallops along like a runaway horse. Part Oliver Twist, part Sisters Brothers, this one’s a great summer read.”

Glenn Dixon (Bootleg Stardust, Juliet’s Answer)

Available from Amazon (hardcover, US$25,95 CAN$32.95), bookstores and, if you live in Winnipeg, personal delivery. Contact me at booknewsbob, followed by the “at” sign and gmail dot com.

“This novel and its trio of teenagers surprised me over and over again. Prodigies is a rip-roaring, unexpected, funny, and utterly original escape.”

• Angie Abdou (This One Wild Life, In Case I Go)

“Winnipeg based author Bob Armstrong has written an engaging Western novel with crossover appeal to young adult audiences. Set in 1870s New York and Midwest America, Prodigies grips readers tight and holds on right to the end. … The novel’s explosive conclusion could certainly launch a sequel as our prodigies (now friends) dust off and continue their journeys.”

• Anita Daher (You Don’t Have to Die in the End)

I began considering my forthcoming novel, Prodigies, after a trip to the old Arizona mining boomtown of Jerome in 2010. By 2015, I was well into a first draft of Prodigies, by this point set in Deadwood and various points east.

In the last decade, I’ve read plenty of fiction and non-fiction set along the North American frontier between the late 18th and early 20th centuries. Recently, I thought about some differences and similarities between Canadian and American literary treatments of frontier themes and settings. The result was this essay in the June 2021 issue of The Literary Review of Canada. https://reviewcanada.ca/magazine/2021/06/writing-into-the-sunset/

Like many of you, I’ve been helped through the pandemic by regular walking. Hikes, walk-and-talks, neighbourhood strolls: anything that gets me out in the world and moving around has been helpful.

Another thing that’s helped me get through a time of fear, uncertainty and enforced idleness, which preceded the pandemic, has been comedy. Just before Christmas 2019 I was diagnosed with prostate cancer and put on the list for surgery. Almost immediately, I began working on stand-up material, most of it mining my cancer experience. Before pandemic shutdowns began, I did one set in January 2020 before my surgery and another in early March once I’d recovered enough from surgery to go out in the evening.

Since December, I’ve been doing monthly comedy sets on Facebook Live, gradually moving beyond the cancer material. (Sure, I’ve played the cancer card. Look at me. It’s the only card I’ve got.)

This wasn’t a huge departure for me. All of my plays were comedies or hybrid comedies (thriller comedy, philosophical comedy, comedy drama). And in my upcoming novel, Prodigies, one of the characters is a wise-cracking gang member whose dream is to tell jokes for a living in saloons and dance halls. Coming up with intentionally anachronistic Borscht Belt-style jokes for this character was one of the most enjoyable parts of writing Prodigies.

I’ve recently had a creative non-fiction piece, entitled The Cancer Joke, about my cancer and comedy experience accepted for publication. I’ll follow with more details on this one shortly.

I’ve also pulled together my feelings about the pandemic year in a magical realist comedic short story called The Going and the Gone, which will be published shortly in FreeFall Magazine, an Alberta-based literary magazine. I’ll post the link as soon as it’s up.