Every aspiring writer should go to hear author Joan Haggerty when she speaks at the Sunshine Coast Arts Centre on April 22. Her latest novel, The Dancehall Years (Mother Tongue Publishing), has been nominated for the Ethel Wilson Fiction prize at the BC Book Awards. It’s a book that took her 20 years and 100 drafts to write, using an intricate and lengthy process that will resonate with many writers.
“The book exists somewhere,” Haggerty told Coast Reporter. “It’s your job [as a writer] to find it.”
Currently she lives in Telkwa, near Smithers, where she taught high school for years and is now retired. But she’s lived in many different places, from New York to Roberts Creek. In the 1970s she lived in a rented cabin in the Creek as a young working writer. She is looking forward to seeing old friends when she visits the Coast on April 22.
The novel is set on Bowen Island in the period before WWII until the 1980s. Haggerty’s family lived in Vancouver and had a cottage on Bowen during a formative time of her life. Many of the buildings have been torn down now, but they live again in the book. The iconic island dance pavilion – a famed moonlight cruise destination – becomes an emotional landmark and a focal point for the passage of time.
“I’m not writing about nostalgia,” she said. “I’m more concerned with the social issues of the time.”
It’s a multi-level novel with themes of families ripped apart by war, its characters deeply affected by the internment of the Japanese.
Haggerty’s style is prose poetry. Her dialogues have no punctuation and they don’t indicate who is speaking. She did that deliberately. “I don’t hear the world with punctuation,” she said. “I hear language blended into the narrative of the day.”
The event is co-sponsored by Sunshine Coast Arts Council and Canada Council for the Arts. Doors open at 7:30 p.m. with talk at 8 p.m. Admission is by donation. It should inspire at least a few writers to return to their languishing manuscripts.
