Fiction, reality, and hockey ideals

Although Seeking the Center is a novel, my motivation for writing the story was, initially, a desire to understand what hockey is. What the hockey life is. Although I made up most aspects of the story—the teams are fictional, the towns are fictional, and the characters, of course, are fictional—I tried to root every made-up detail in reality.

But writing a novel isn’t about reproducing reality, and I’ve come to realize that my need to understand, address, and critique reality sometimes means that my novel’s details aren’t entirely realistic. The character of Claude Doucette (“Deuce”), a Métis enforcer on a minor league hockey team, is a good example of this.

Claude’s family has suffered some recent misfortunes, and he feels obligated to provide them with financial and emotional support. To do so, he often leaves his fictional team in its fictional town in central Saskatchewan and drives north across the prairie to his hometown several hours away. He does this during hockey season, even when he has only one day off. It’s not at all realistic. The distances are huge, and one has to assume that the physical and mental demands placed on pro hockey players would make a trip like this—which Claude does on a fairly regular basis—nearly impossible. 

Although unrealistic, these frequent cross-province road trips address at least two topics that I encountered during my research. First, they highlight the fact that professional sport schedules are set up to maximize revenue, while de-prioritizing the personal lives and family relationships of players. Second, there’s the expectation that players should be willing to sacrifice themselves for their team.

In hockey the role of the enforcer represents the extreme of this notion. As an enforcer, Claude’s literal role is to defend his own teammates by fighting the enforcer on the opposing team. Luckily, the harm that this causes to the players involved has become more widely acknowledged in recent years, and actual “enforcers” are much fewer than they were in the ‘90s when Seeking takes place, but the glorification of “taking one for the team” and of fighting itself, persist.

“… I know how much you admire him—how much you admire that kind of player. You know, that big, strong warrior type.”
“I do,” she said.
“The way he’s always, like, camped out in front of the net, taking all that abuse. The way he never turns down a fight. He’s really tough.”
“He is… He’s awesome.”

In Claude’s case, this team/hockey role is echoed or amplified by the roles he plays within his family and community. 

“Claude,” asked Agnes, “what did you mean when you said that hockey’s a tough game, but also a tough life?”
“I meant it’s lonely. You’re on the road a lot. Away from the people who care about you.”
She didn’t say anything.
He continued. “You asked about Vin. He’s a good kid, but even if he could get his game back, if he has trouble when he’s living at home, with his family, it’s going to be real tough when he’s away, playing for some team in Alberta, or B.C. Real tough. Trust me.”
They were quiet for a while. Then Agnes said, “you don’t really want to play pro, do you?”
He shrugged. “It’s working out okay so far.”

At one point, Agnes compares him to a (First Nations) chief: 

…it didn’t seem like they’d only just met. And the light that washed across his upturned face seemed to shine both inside and out. She felt safe with him. He was just like those old chiefs.

In the character of Claude, the role of enforcer meets the trope of the nearly superhuman First Nations chief, a figure of tremendous character, of mental as well as physical strength, a leader who is there for his people, defending and providing for them no matter the cost to himself.  (I wrote about different contexts of “Chief” in an earlier post.)

Agnes thought of Vin, trapped somewhere in the cold maze of hallways, and the old stories flooded her mind, stories of Riel and Big Bear and Poundmaker, the leaders of her people, and how they’d been imprisoned, trapped outside the sun, the cycles, and the seasons —outside of life as they knew it— until they withered.

As a novelist, my goal is neither to hold up this notion of self-sacrifice as the ideal, nor to tear it down completely. I’m not a judge or a philosopher. I’m just trying to portray what I see, to put it out there for consideration, hopefully in an entertaining way. 

At five the next morning the sun rose over the horizon and Vin looked out his window to see Claude’s red pickup towing a wooden fishing skiff on an aluminum-frame trailer. Vin stepped out of the door with his hockey bag over his shoulder, his stick in his hand.
“We going fishing?” Vin asked.
“Nah. Already been out.”
“Jesus, Deuce. Do you ever sleep?”
“Sometimes.”

People rarely live up to an ideal. I think this is where my love for Claude, and all my characters, comes in. They are just people, barely bounded by reality, with idiosyncrasies that straddle a wavering line between character and caricature. 

I posted another excerpt! This one's in honor of the Stanley Cup Playoffs

The final round of the 2019 Stanley Cup Playoffs is set to begin on Monday, May 27, between the Boston Bruins and the St. Louis Blues. Eliminated in the previous three rounds were: the Washington Capitals, Pittsburgh Penguins, Tampa Bay Lightning, Toronto Maple Leafs, Calgary Flames, Las Vegas Golden Knights, Winnipeg Jets, Nashville Predators, New York Islanders, Columbus Blue Jackets, Dallas Stars, Colorado Avalanche, Carolina Hurricanes, and San Jose Sharks.

That’s a lot of sad hockey teams!

This excerpt is one of my favorite chapters in Seeking the Center. I’m posting it in honor of all the teams that have been eliminated from the Stanley Cup Playoffs—or from tournaments anywhere, of any kind. You can find it here, or go to the “excerpt” page of this website.

I hope you enjoy it! And I would love to hear about your experiences in elimination tournaments in the comments below, if it’s not too traumatic for you ;) … and no matter what your experience is, you know it’s more impressive than mine—I was eliminated before I even began!

Thanks for reading and responding!

P.S. I plan to post an audio version of this excerpt within the next week or so.

Agnes, Maria Campbell, and the light inside

Who is Agnes, protagonist of Seeking the Center? Where did she come from? The short answer is, I don't know. 

She's not autobiographical. I have never been as tough, as brave, or as smart-assed as she is. (I only wish I was!)

I've mentioned that she began, partly, as a question about being female in the overwhelmingly male world of ice hockey. And that's certainly true.

Ultimately, though, a lot of things entered into the mix that became Agnes's character. And while I will never uncover all of them, I can say that one major inspiration is the life of Maria Campbell, a Métis woman who persevered through extreme difficulties to become a writer, a teacher, a much-respected elder, and an advocate for Métis and women's rights.

I found Campbell's Halfbreed by chance, browsing the stacks at Powell's Books in Portland, Oregon, and I owe an eternal debt of gratitude to whomever it was that sold their used copy to Powell's! The autobiography is riveting and a must-read for everyone.

Campbell was born in 1940 in Park Valley, SK, a poor Road Allowance community. (Unlike other Aboriginal groups, the Métis were not granted rights to land under treaties with the Canadian government, so many were forced to squat on "road allowances" - Crown lands set aside for future roadways.) At age 33 she wrote Halfbreed, an autobiography documenting her life up until that time. In Halfbreed, Campbell never shies away from the poverty, alcoholism, violence, addiction, racism, and sexism that she faced, but she nevertheless manages to portray some of the beauty of her Métis culture and the love that existed within her family, troubled though it may have been.

While devastating at times, Halfbreed remains a testament to the dignity and spirit that people can possess, nurture, and share in defiance of even the direst circumstances and the most heartless enemies. Campbell has this light within herself, and she also has the ability to find it, and to inspire it, in others. In spite of people who fail her, and circumstances that drag her down, she retains the ability to love and to trust others, and to parlay that love into something that can sustain and nourish.

Agnes doesn't experience the hardship and desperation that Campbell did, but she has the same light inside her. And in Seeking the Center, she learns to find it and use it, for her own good and for the good of others.

Some notes on ‘Chief’ as a (hockey) nickname

In Seeking the Center, there’s a scene where Claude is referred to as “Chief” by an opponent:

Good thing you got ol' Chief there to look out for you, eh MacKenzie?

It's not meant as a compliment, either for MacKenzie, who, it is implied, is not man enough to stand up for himself, or for Claude, whom the opponent tries to belittle by referring to him by the racial stereotype “Chief.”

Hockey nicknames are known for their unimaginative-ness, and while researching Seeking, I quickly learned that “Chief” is, or was at one time, the go-to for First Nations/Native American/Métis players of hockey - and other sports as well. According to Don Marks, author of They Call Me Chief: Warriors on Ice, “almost every Indian who played in the NHL or anywhere else has been called ‘Chief' at one time or another.”

Jim Neilson, who played in the NHL in the 1960s and 1970s, told Marks,

I’ve been called Chief all my life, everywhere else I go. In hockey, you know that your teammates were calling you Chief in a friendly, natural sort of way. But then you would play guys from other teams and you knew it wasn’t so friendly. Most of it was just during the heat of the battle and they were trying to throw you off your game and you just ignore it.

Stan Jonathan, Mohawk/Tuscarora NHL forward from 1976-1983, said, also to Don Marks,

They called me Little Chief and I didn’t mind that. It was when they called me ‘wahoo’ or ‘F#$%’n little Indian’ that I didn’t like [it]...

Judging from Neilson’s and Jonathan’s comments, the context of the name-calling could influence players' feelings about it. But also, as Jonathan indicates, the term “Chief,” while intended to isolate, belittle, and ridicule a person on the basis of race, might have been different, in some sense, than other slurs.

Year in Nam is Leroy TeCube's memoir of the year he served as a G.I. in Vietnam. (I also wrote about it in an earlier post.) Like Jim Neilson and Stan Jonathan, TeCube, a Jicarilla Apache man, was given the nickname “Chief” by his "teammates," i.e. the soldiers in his platoon.

When I joined the platoon it consisted mostly of white GIs, followed by blacks and Hispanics. I was the only American Indian. Someone asked, ‘What race are you? You look like an Indian.'

TeCube describes how he discussed his tribal affiliation with the guys, until finally one of them says, “In that case we’ll call you ‘Chief.’” TeCube answers him, “In my traditional way the title of chief is earned and shown respect.” He then recalls: 

Most of the guys would call me Chief from then on, although a handful of individuals called me by my real name. Up until that moment throughout my training no one even suggested calling me Chief. I wondered why that was so. Perhaps because as trainees we were used to being treated as animals and were addressed by our last names. Now here in Vietnam everyone had an identity. 

Regardless of how the name was intended, TeCube chooses how he will take it - he re-appropriates it - and throughout his service in Vietnam he works hard to live up to the name “chief” and what it means to him and his traditional beliefs. He writes:

I also thought of my new responsibility from my Jicarilla Apache way...the short translation of Nahn Tahn is leader. A more indepth translation, however, describes it as someone who is also an orator. He tells his people what happened in battle or what is about to happen to them next...being Nahn Tahn was something to be feared. Only the very strong took on the responsibility. One had to set a good example and ensure that the needs of everyone in his group were met before he thought of himself. He must never be corrupted or gain wealth from his position. The main criteria were that he never retreat in battle and he show a lot of courage. He had to be the first one into a conflict, and if need be, he would fight single-handedly with an enemy leader…

Towards the end of his time in Vietnam, TeCube recalls “meeting a fellow soldier who was Navajo...as we talked I realized he was also a leader within his platoon and was also called Chief. This gave me a good feeling, knowing that another individual lived up to the name.”

Finally, TeCube is awarded sergeant’s stripes. He writes: 

That day I felt a great sense of pride and accomplishment. I never expected to be a sergeant when I entered the army. Now I had orders in my hand stating just that. I also knew that I had earned the rank….It took a little time before I got used to being called sergeant or sarge. Some called me Sergeant TeCube. Most of the time I still went by Chief or Sergeant Chief. This had more meaning. According to my traditional beliefs, I had now earned the right to be called Chief.

TeCube - along with all of his platoon-mates - quickly recognizes the futility of the Vietnam War, but, having no choice in the matter, he takes it as an obstacle to overcome, just as he takes the moniker given to him, "Chief," as a personal challenge. And while I didn't know about TeCube and hadn't read his story when I was writing Seeking, I like the way that, without knowing it, the player who calls Claude "Chief" unwittingly points to certain facets of Claude's character and aspirations, facets that don't come to light until later in the story. Claude feels that he has little choice but to play what he thinks of as "this white man's game," and while, like TeCube, he is certainly aware of racism and the obstacles it places in his path, he soldiers on, keeping his identity, self-respect, and dignity intact.

Update: I’ve written another post about Claude and the idea/ideal of the Chief.

Guys playing sports: an early passage from Seeking the Center

I wrote this little piece several years ago, when I was just starting to work on Seeking the Center. It's about young guys playing sports.

By the end of the lazy summer I'm glad to get back to town. To the cool of the rink, the smells of moldering, wet wool and sharp sweat, the sling-shot jocks, the jostling of us guys packed together in our stalls, buzzing and slamming like too many molecules, loud with joking and laughing and trash-talking. Where else would we go? What other place is left for us? The big, slick ice, the dark tunnel, the dank, crowded dressing room: they’ve made those places for us.

Outside, they’ve taken down the goals. Like a fish out of water, my form seems unsuited, my strength, outsize. It’s like when I was a kid and my mamma would say, what am I ever going to do with you? I was too fast, too heavy, too hard, too strong, too loud, too coarse, and too excitable to have in the house. It couldn’t hold me. I didn’t stop when she said stop. My words grated on the ears; my shirttail fluttered. Not fit for civilized society. That’s what she’d say. She was only joking, but I think it might be true.

I’ve heard that in the old days, they set the goals a town apart, fields apart, forests apart. That would’ve suited me great. Back then the earth was our playing field. One goal was just over the hill, far side of the schoolhouse; the other, across the stream and through the muskeg. We’d run through the brush, our feet on fire, our battles real.

But somehow it got too small for us out there, and so they’ve put us inside. Kind of funny, eh? Maybe it’s for the best; maybe it’s for our own good. Now we’re a show, a museum piece, and people pay to see us. They don’t have to have us in the house, or in town, or terrorizing the schoolmarms, or trampling the fields or trudging through the muskeg, getting mud on our shoes. Now we’re contained. It’s cleaner this way. 

How long does it take to write a novel?

So, how long did it take you to write Seeking the Center? I get that question regularly. I wish I had kept track of the hours, but of course I didn't. For the first two to four years I didn't even know that I was writing it! But, here's my best (although rather long and rambling) answer to the question:

The first glimmers started in 2008-2009. My notes - the ones I can find - date back to 2010. My characters started to come into existence during summer vacation 2010, and the earliest passages that I wrote date to 2010 or 2011. The year 2012 was kind of a lost year, for various reasons, but during the spring and summer of 2013 I did a ton of research, and I wrote the bulk of the story during the academic year 2013-2014. In the fall of 2014 I found an editor who wanted to work with me on it (sheer luck!) and we worked on and off (she had other projects going) from early 2015 until mid 2016 - outlining and re-outlining, adding and deleting sections, revising, editing, proofreading, etc. - until the book was ready for publication in the fall of 2016.

La belle Françoise: the evolution of a traditional song

"La belle Françoise" is a song that appears in Seeking the Center and on my Seeking the Center playlist. I think its background is interesting, and I want to share it with you. 

When I was writing Achille's main scene in Seeking, I looked for a song that could play a certain role in it. (I won't elaborate on that role, because I don't want to spoil the story.) I wanted a traditional voyageur song, because that is a major part of Achille's background and identity. (The voyageurs were the French Canadian paddlers of the birchbark canoes that carried trade goods north and west into the interior of North America, and brought back loads of furs to the companies in Montreal. They used traditional songs to synchronize their paddling. Most of these songs pre-dated France's first settlements in Quebec, so they date back to the 17th century or earlier.)

"La belle Françoise" appears in sources including Grace Lee Nute's The Voyageur and Thomas R. Draughon's Canot d'Écorce: Chansons de Voyageurs. Though it isn't the song most associated with the voyageurs, I chose it because of its minor key, which gives it a melancholy mood, and because of its lyrics, which dramatize the impending separation of two lovers.

In the song, Françoise weeps because her man must go to war, but he assures her that, if she waits for him, he will return and marry her. Their plight echoes the situations of some of my characters. Although it is not actual war that they are going to, they are facing unknown and sometimes hostile situations, away from their homeplaces.

You can listen to different versions of the song on YouTube. I chose Garolou's live version for my Seeking the Center playlist mainly because it makes an exciting finale. But it also represents a further evolution of the song that, although it doesn't pertain to Seeking, is interesting in its own right. 

Garolou was a French-Canadian group active in the 1970s that often took traditional French and French-Canadian chansons (songs) and gave them modern, rock settings. "La belle Françoise" was an early hit for them (mid 1970s). You can hear how they've contemporized it with a Vietnam-era anti-war message by inserting an intense version of "La Marseillaise." The Seeking the Center playlist version is from Garolou's 1997 live Réunion album.

Some sports writing by Jack Kerouac

I haven't had much time for blogging lately, but with the Super Bowl approaching, I thought I'd share a piece of my favorite writing about football - a passage from Jack Kerouac's 1950 novel The Town and the City. What I've quoted below is part of a much longer scene describing a high school game between fierce rivals on a blustery, autumn New England day. 

They saw the Lawton team across the field in a huddle of great captains, standing in the wind in their dark uniforms, helmeted fantastically, all grotesque, wild, and ominous; they saw the officials in white placing the new yellow football on the kickoff line; they saw the whole mob-swarmed terrific stadium in a gray windswept blaze of vision. Whistles were piping in the air, silence was falling over the multitudes, the game was ready to begin.

And then when Peter saw the ball up in the air, wobbling and windswept, and saw it bouncing down before him, he was mortified with fear. Then he lunged for it, picked it up, snarled and ran straight downfield with all his headlong might, crashing and stamping through a confusion of hard bodies and falling finally on the icy midfield beneath ten others, and the game was on....

Down on the field the teams lined up, the linemen digging in low and glaring at each other, the backs crouching, the quarterback calling out numbers with his whole body jerking behind each shout, the officials waiting expectantly nearby, and all of it windswept on the dark field to which all eyes were fastened excitedly. The lines collided, biffed, scattered, long rangy youths sprawled, someone ran and ducked into a pileup of bodies, and it was no gain...

The crowd suddenly roared as someone ran wide around end, around reaching hands, arching his back and waving one arm, cutting back suddenly on dancing feet, wavering, darting aside, plunging on a few yards and pulling along to a stop under a pile of bodies. The crowd's roar surged away into droning chattering sounds, cowbells and drums rang in the sharp air...

And now suddenly the crowd rose to its feet with one roaring cry of surprise, explosive and vast, as a Galloway player swept wide around the end, leaped into the air, twisted, and shot the ball several yards over dark helmeted heads, as another Galloway player paused, twisted, reached out for the ball, barely grasped it in his fingers, turned and went plummeting downfield along the sidelines. The roaring of the crowd surged and grew thunderous, the Martin mother jumped up on her seat to see, and she saw a figure racing down the sidelines, shaking off tacklers with a squirming motion, plunging through others with a striding determination, tripping, stumbling, staggering on half fallen and half running, straightening out once more, plodding, faking, yet suddenly approaching the goal line in a drunken weary run, staggered aside by another lunging figure, momentarily stopping, then carrying on again, striding to the line falling, with a dark figure smashing into it, now wavering on bent knees, now finally diving over and rolling in the end zone triumphantly.

Rink air vs. outside air: an early passage from Seeking the Center

I wrote this passage, I think, in 2010. Or maybe 2009. It was some of the first writing I did related to Seeking the Center (although it is not in the published book). At the time, I was thinking about the cyclical nature of a hockey life - a nomadic sort of existence where you move from place to place with the seasons. You earn money playing during the winter, and then return to farm or factory to earn your keep during the summer. I was thinking about these two modes of existence, equal parts of your livelihood - and your personhood. How are they different from one another? 

During practice the sounds pinball: the digging and scraping of steel blades into the ice, the rattling fright of the puck against the boards, the clattering of sticks, the whoops and calls of the boys. But as soon as we turn to go, and our skate blades sink mutely into the rubber-mat path that leads to the dressing room, the sounds cease their ricocheting and hang quiet like bats in a cave. Because the hard rink air is as empty as an icicle. There's nothing in it but itself.

    When the season is over I go home. There the air is full. It holds the scents of grasses and flowers and animals and dirt; it holds bird songs and wind rustlings and ghost rustlings. Yes, ghosts - in the air and even on the ground. Because there, every mark ever made, every footfall, every poop leaves its trace. Not like in the rink, where every hour or two a machine comes to clean up and scrape away. In there - it's like Coach says - let yesterday's game go, play today's game. But outside the rink there's no machine to scrape it all away. Outside, every trace remains.

    It’s slow-going at home. Instead of the slick, easy surface of the ice there are stones and tall tangled weeds and gopher holes. But there is solace in the slowness: there is space to slip away, time to remember. My legs swish through the hayfield and the grasshoppers make way. In the afternoon I retreat to the thick shade that lines the river and I cool off in the murky water, a big, naked muskrat with a trailing, sliver wake. I add my heavy step to the scurried histories of my brethren, impressed on the mudflat. From my fleshy prints they know me, and take me as their own.

Seeking the Center playlist

Some of the songs that were there for me as I was writing Seeking the Center:

1. Whatta Man - Salt-N-Pepa
2. Silver River - Shingoose (poetry by Duke Redbird)
3. You Really Got Me - The Kinks
4. When a Man Loves a Woman - Percy Sledge
5. Look How the Stars Shine for You - Randy Wood
6. Wild Horses - The Rolling Stones
7. How You Like Me Now - The Heavy
8. A Case of You - Joni Mitchell
9. Heart of Stone - The Rolling Stones
10. Road to Batoche - Jimmie LaRocque, Gerry McIvor, Kim Chartrand
11. I'll Be There - The Jackson 5
12. Never Never Blues - John Trudell
13. La belle Françoise - Garolou

Here's a link to the Spotify playlist.

UPDATE: I can't believe I forgot about "What's Love Got To Do With It?" (Tina Turner) - a song that actually appears in Seeking the Center. Just like "Heart of Stone," it should have made it onto the playlist for sure. Remember? Jamie sings it while dancing into in the dressing room just before he meets Deuce for the first time. Anyhow, I snuck it in between The Jackson 5 and John Trudell on the Spotify playlist. Sorry about that!

Who's my favorite character?

Someone just asked me to name my favorite character in Seeking the Center. This is tough. I love all my characters. But, while I reserve the right to change my mind without notice, at this moment I'd have to say that Claude (a.k.a Deuce) is my favorite. Why? Well, what's not to like?

As Achille says, "he's big, he's strong, he's--". And then the poor guy starts coughing and can't finish his sentence. But you can fill in the blank.

As Agnes notes, "Wow."

And as far as Owen is concerned, "even though he liked old Deuce, and respected him, it pained him to remember the Wolves' dressing room, and being up close and personal with the big guy and his goddamn perfect muscles and his huge, fighter's hands and his golden skin and all the rest of it."

But, beyond the admirable physical specimen that he is, what I love most about Claude is his courageous, straight-ahead nature. He doesn't let concerns about consequences stop him from doing what he needs to do. He's not afraid to drop the gloves, but he doesn't hesitate to offer his hand to a person in need, either. He's not too good to yank your chain when the occasion calls for it, but he's not above laughing at himself, either.

Above all, he doesn't blame other people for his problems. And while he's a player in what he thinks of as "this white man's game," he is his own person. In his own quiet but deliberate way, he makes things happen. (Except on the one occasion when he needs a little push. But you'll have to read about that for yourself.)

And that's why I love Claude.

Tuning in to my characters

I often feel that my characters are already there, even before I begin writing. My job is to tune in to them, as if I'm fiddling with a radio dial to get a clear signal. Like a radio,  I become a conduit through which my characters' voices travel from there to here.

Occasionally a scene seems to be just waiting for me to catch it. It coalesces when I first wake up in the morning, or maybe in the middle of the night, and I scramble to comprehend it and scribble it down before it vanishes. Then, as time goes on, I have to figure out where it belongs in the story. Sometimes that's a puzzle.

When I was writing Seeking the Center, one of the last scenes in the story came to me very early on, and I thought I had the ending all figured out. But as I continued writing, I began to realize that I was wrong, and things ended up very differently than I had initially thought they would.

The scene itself remained, though, as it still does in the final version - the core of it almost exactly as I first wrote it down. What no longer made sense for one character, made perfect sense for another. 

I have wondered what happened in the interim. Did my characters purposefully defy my expectations? Was I - perhaps subconsciously - trying to use them to further some hidden agenda of my own, and they rebelled? Or did I just not know them as well as I thought I did?

Maybe it was just a faulty radio.