New novel a long time in gestation
Roots of Winnipegger's fourth go back to her childhood
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Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 09/09/2009 (6193 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.
It takes a while for a story to bubble up through Margaret Sweatman’s subconscious.
The veteran Winnipeg writer can trace the roots of her new novel, her fourth, all the way back to Grade 6.
"I remember studying Restoration drama at the Winnipeg Theatre School," she says. "I didn’t fully understand it then, of course. I don’t even now. But I found it fascinating."
Newly published by Goose Lane Editions, The Players follows the adventures of Lilly Cole, a teenaged orphan who falls into the court of British monarch Charles II in the 1660s before heading off to the New World with French fur trader Pierre Radisson.
"I liked the idea of the collision between the purist Canadian myth of rock and tree and the decadent culture that existed in England at the same time."
In stores now, The Players has its official launch 8 p.m. Wednesday at McNally Robinson Grant Park.
Sweatman, also a playwright and song lyricist, started writing it a decade ago. But she put it aside to finish When Alice Lay Down With Peter, the 2001 novel that won her that year’s Rogers Writers’ Trust Award.
"(The Players) took a very long time," she admits. "I needed the distance to figure out the language and what was possible for the modern reader."
Her friend Charlene Diehl, artistic director of the Winnipeg’s Thin Air writers festival, think’s she’s done it again.
"She’s got an unfettered imagination, which is remarkably rare," says Diehl, who has booked Sweatman to appear at this year’s event, slated for Sept. 20-26.
"She’s also a gorgeous stylist. She’s got a voice that’s particular, flexible and full of character."
Sweatman offered an early draft of The Players to Knopf Canada, the Toronto-based imprint of the multinational Random House empire, which had successfully published Alice.
"They turned it down, the fools," jokes Sweatman, 56. "But it turned out for the better."
She hooked up with respected Toronto editor Bethany Gibson, who Sweatman says was instrumental in helping her find the structure of the story.
Gibson got the gig as the publisher of Goose Lane, a Fredericton-based regional house that has a long tradition in literary fiction.
She has since left, but not before releasing Winnipegger Joan Thomas’s Commonwealth Prize-winning debut, Reading by Lightning, last year, and now The Players.
"I felt we had something important," Sweatman says. "We really pushed against each other in a progressive way."
Sweatman is married to the composer and musician Glenn Buhr, with whom she performs as a vocalist. The pair spent part of the summer recording a new album of 12 jazz and art songs, which they co-wrote.
She is also a creative writing professor at the University of Winnipeg, where a few years ago she held the first Carol Shields writer-in-residence post.
"I love the students," she says. "I’ve taught at other universities, but they have nowhere near the level of interest and engagement."
morley.walker@freepress.mb.ca
BookLaunch
The Players
"ö By Margaret Sweatman
"ö McNally Robinson Grant Park
"ö Tonight at 8
