A world away

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 28/12/2003 (8159 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

IF you were always being beaten up by bullies in junior high, maybe you’d find respite in the world of fantasy fiction, too.

This may or may not have been a motivating factor for Winnipeg writer Duncan Thornton, who recently published his third children’s fantasy novel, The Star-Glass, which follows characters he first introduced in his Governor-General’s Award-nominated debut, Kalifax, in 1999.

“Not to sound immodest, but I don’t think anyone in Canada has done anything quite like this,” says Thornton, who has created a Canadian fantasy universe with echoes of the British Narnia series and the American Oz books.

“If I didn’t feel that way, I wouldn’t have written them.”

Todd Besant, Thornton’s friend and a local publishing expert, believes Thornton has been overlooked on the national scene.

“I think he’s easily one of the finest writers in this genre in the country,” says Besant, managing editor of Winnipeg’s Turnstone Press.

“He puts a lot of care and research into what he does.”

Now 41, Thornton has been fascinated by fantasy literature since he was a boy. He read The Lord of the Rings for the first time at age nine and has been re-reading the Tolkien classics more or less continuously since.

“You lose count after about 25 times,” he says. “The best books of that sort make a world of their own, and it feels like a place you want to be.”

For the record, he thinks Peter Jackson’s movie version is spectacular. “Someone who knows the books as well as I do can always find minor faults,” he says. “But he did a great job, considering he didn’t actually ask me for advice.”

In junior high, the middle son of a United Church minister, Thornton was the new kid on Goulding Street in the West End, attending Isaac Brock School.

“For a while, I was being beaten up almost every week,” recalls Thornton, who, with his diffident manner, long hair and beard, resembles a certain Christian archetype. “I had to engineer a way to get out there.”

He formally dropped out after Grade 8 at age 13. He took Grade 9 by correspondence before his family moved to Saskatoon. He never did go to high school.

He spent his teen years reading voraciously, playing Dungeons and Dragons and joining the Society for Creative Anachronism, an international organization dedicated to researching and re-creating pre-17th-century European history.

At age 20, self-taught in most academic disciplines, he entered the University of Saskatchewan as a mature student. After two years, fascinated by medieval history and children’s literature, he transferred to the University of Winnipeg.

He hung around with the computer-geek crowd (he learned Internet web-page design before most people knew what web pages were), not to mention incipient Crash Test Dummy Brad Roberts and aspiring writer Kevin Patterson.

“We were the cool kids,” Thornton notes dryly. “At least, we thought we were cool.”

During his time at the U of W, he also became ill — with Chronic Fatigue Syndrome. He kept it together long enough to graduate, winning the gold medal in honours history and eventually enrolling in a master of English program at Montreal’s Concordia University.

“In those years, their English program was a black den of post-modernism,” he says. “It wasn’t for me.”

One day, sick of reading Foucault and Derrida, he started writing something of his own. What came out were the first few pages of Kalifax, the story of a boy, Tom, who joins a Franklin-like expedition up North to the Eaves of the World. It would take him seven years to finish the book.

“I knew nothing about boats and I knew nothing about the Arctic,” he says. “I had to immerse myself in those subjects.”

It was slow going because of his CFS. He returned to Winnipeg to finish his course work at the University of Manitoba. It must have been fate. In his Milton class, he met his future wife, a St. James girl, Brenda Hasiuk, who was also an aspiring writer.

“I was going to write my thesis on sense of place in children’s literature,” Thornton recalls. “But I got much more interested in writing children’s literature.”

With his illness, both working and writing were like pushing boulders uphill. He spent the better part of a decade, from his middle 20s to his early 30s, on social assistance.

Eventually, his fortunes turned around. Using his computer knowledge, he landed a job managing the website for Canadian Materials for Schools and Libraries, a well-known education journal.

This eventually led to a job teaching new media at Red River College. He and Hasiuk married in 1995. They bought a great little house near Assiniboine Park which they’ve filled with art, books, funky furniture and knick-knacks of every imaginable sort.

“Brenda does the decorating,” says Thornton, surveying the organized clutter. “Sometimes I have to overrule her. People need space to move.”

Hasiuk works as communications director for the Manitoba Government Employees Union and writes in her spare time. She has published short stories in many top literary journals and recently sent out her first novel.

“We’re the first to read each other’s stuff,” says Hasiuk, 35, whose fiction is in the Prairie realist vein. “We help each other a lot.”

Thornton teaches one course at Red River College and does some business writing on the side. Most of his work life is spent in a 40-square-foot cubbyhole in his garage where he writes without distraction of any kind.

He sent his Kalifax manuscript to 10 publishers before it was accepted by Coteau Books in Regina. He had not thought of it as a continuing series until his editor, poet Geoffrey Ursell, told him he needed to write a book focusing on Tom’s friend Jenny, an obnoxious 12-year-old girl with an elevated vocabulary.

Captain Jenny & the Sea of Wonders appeared a year later. It took him two years to come up with a third book, The Star-Glass, in which for the first time he maps out an imaginary version of Canada, the Vastlands, where Tom and Jenny engage in a series of adventures. The books are pitched at kids aged 8-14.

“I have no age group in mind when I’m writing,” he says. “I write them for myself, so Brenda says they must be for aging computer geeks who’ve seen Lord of the Rings 35 times.”

He has no plans to begin a fourth book featuring Tom and Jenny. He is researching two non-fiction books, one on the Society for Creative Anachronism (which holds an annual “war” in Pennsylvania that he plans to attend) and another, a memoir, on his painful years on Goulding Street.

“I want to track down the kids who beat me up,” he says. “I’d like to know what they remember from those times.”

morley.walker@freepress.mb.ca