AMERICAN AUTHORS CHALLENGE--SEPTEMBER 2021---HOWARD NORMAN

I discovered Howard Norman in 2009, when he was one of the participants in a book festival in Scranton, PA. In preparation for attending that event and meeting the author, I read his novel, The Bird Artist. I immediately "stocked up" on his work, intending to read everything the man wrote. I have fallen behind in that intention, naturally, but have sampled enough of his output to know that I want to fulfill it if at all possible. The man himself was easy to talk to, and not at all offended that I took him for a Canadian, as apparently so many people, at least at that time, often did. On that note, I will segue into this profile of the author, by Don Lee and Marguerite Huppert, which appeared in the Winter 1997-98 issue of Ploughshares which was guest edited by Norman and his wife Joan Shore. I cannot do more justice to his bio and work than was done here, and it's worth reading every word, although I have edited it for length.

*****from Ploughshares:****
"More than a few people have assumed that Howard Norman is a Canadian writer. It's no wonder, considering that most of his work -- including his first two novels,
The Northern Lights and The Bird Artist, both of which were nominated for the National Book Award -- is set in Canada. In fact, Norman was born in Toledo, Ohio, in 1949 to Russian-Polish-Jewish parents, and he went to elementary school in Grand Rapids, Michigan.

What led him north to Canada? "As a kid," Norman says, "I spent a lot of time in bookmobiles and libraries. I went to four different elementary schools. Libraries were the one continuity. And from early on, through books, I projected a life -- I daydreamed north. This is makeshift psychologizing, but perhaps part of it was that such open, vast spaces, such a sense of mystery and severe, compelling landscapes, served to counteract the claustrophobia of an inwardly collapsing home life." His father was rarely home (when he died in 1996, Norman had not seen him in twenty years). His mother secretly cared for other children to make ends meet, which Norman did not discover until he spotted her in a photo, pushing a stroller, in a friend's family album. His three brothers provided no solace, and Norman has remained estranged from two of them. His one source of warmth and refuge was his best friend, Paul, and Paul's family. But then Paul got sick all of a sudden {and died} from a rare blood disease.

Eventually, Norman dropped out of high school and moved in with friends outside of Toronto. One summer, he went to Manitoba to work on a fire crew, which was mostly made up of Cree Indians, and he was fascinated by their culture, their stories and folktales in particular. Norman devised a plan for his life. He decided he would write about the wilds of Canada and its tribes. During the next sixteen years, true to his word, he would live and work for extended periods in Canada and beyond, in Hudson's Bay and Greenland and Newfoundland.

Toward that end, he received his high school equivalency and studied zoology and English at Western Michigan University...and worked at the Athena Book Store in Kalamazoo... {which became} the center of his life; it was there that he found a role model in the naturalist and bird artist Edward Lear...

Norman ... was offered a three-year fellowship at the University of Michigan, where he was able to focus on his translations...{of} Native American poems and folktales. He had a knack for picking up Algonquin and Eskimo dialects -- he's fluent in three and passable in two, a facility that curiously does not extend to any other languages, such as French or Spanish...

In 1978, Norman put together a collection, The Wishing Bone Cycle: Narrative Poems of the Swampy Cree Indians...(To this day, Norman shares his royalties and other honoraria with the Cree community.) ...he continued his itinerant life as a freelancer, taking on any writing assignment that came his way. He wrote field reports for journals and museums, radio plays, narratives for documentaries, ethnographic studies, children's books, and travel articles, and he worked as an interpreter and a translator for various institutions... "Deep down, I think I still harbored some hope of constructing a life somewhat like my hero at the time, Edward Lear. He was a rather eccentric traveler, and of course a wonderful artist. ... I had this notion of reporting back from remote places and including my sketches and drawings. ... The central failure in my thinking was that I simply could not draw."

All of Norman's far-flung work did, however, serve as a kind of literary apprenticeship. "This is difficult to articulate," he says, "since it didn't involve individual mentors as much as being steeped in -- and influenced by -- very different cultural traditions than my own and, of course, the centrality of oral literature to those cultures. I listened to, recorded, kept notebooks on hundreds of stories. Sometimes under formal circumstances, most often not. And even if you are slow to grasp the true emotional and historical dimensions and generosities of these myths and folktales, still, a lot of it sinks in. The structures, the rhythms, the wild episodes, the sheer inventiveness and unpredictability of incident. Of course, as a Westerner -- an outsider -- one can't ever think in those languages. But you can work at it. I was dogged, if nothing else. One project, transcription and translation of just ten shaman stories from around Hudson's Bay, is just now getting completed almost to my satisfaction, after twenty
or so years. That's pretty much how it has gone for me. Translation was a good education. Sitting at family tables in locales such as Churchill or Eskimo Point, filling notebooks, botching it, botching it, getting a little right. It wasn't romantic; it was just hands-on. And it made life worthwhile for me. I think about translation a lot. I like what Walter Benjamin said: 'A real translation is transparent, it does not cover the original, does not block its light, but allows the pure language, as though reinforced by its own medium, to shine upon the original all the more fully.' "

Yet the transient life began to wear on Norman. "I was somewhat lost, really. I knew ... I no longer wanted to...work exclusively in remote places...I started taking notes for a novel." Then, in 1981, the poet Philip Levine and his wife, Fran, invited him to Thanksgiving dinner and introduced him to another poet, Jane Shore. "... it was the most important day of my life, meeting Jane."

It was Shore who goaded Norman into working on his fiction. "I mean, she wanted me to be doing something. Jane had been writing seriously and with total commitment since college... Shortly after that, Gail Mazur asked for something for her issue of Ploughshares. I gave her some pages from The Northern Lights -- a beginning -- and, bless her heart, she took them."

Between the book's publication in 1987 and the release of his second novel, The Bird Artist, in 1994... Norman was able to publish a collection of stories, Kiss in the Hotel Joseph Conrad and Other Stories...{and} another book of translations,
Northern Tales: Traditional Stories of Eskimo and Indian Peoples...

Norman had actually started taking notes for The Bird Artist more than a decade before, in 1980. "I was researching a documentary film in a fishing village in Newfoundland," he says. "I was put up in a church annex, and in that rather spartan room was a lovely watercolor of an ibis wading in the shallows. It was really a very accomplished watercolor. It was unsigned... But ... I asked around, and found out that the artist was a young man who had been charged with murdering a lighthouse keeper. It was by and large a sordid tale, involving his mother, his half-sister, the lighthouse keeper. He was finally acquitted and went on living for years in his home village, sort of an outcast, but tolerated. He actually published three bird drawings in journals. I own one original. ...

For Norman, the process of developing fictional characters has always been "an intense act of vicariousness of unpredictable duration. I think it's accurate to say, that, yes, male or female, I'd like to be the characters I write. Maybe not permanently...but for the duration of the novel, yes, I would like to be those characters in those exact circumstances. To some extent, then, I invent characters out of the longing to be someone else."...

These days...his old journeys to the frozen climes, isolated as they were, still elicit an allegiance. "I once heard someone say, 'I'm going south to Canada.' I liked that sentence a lot."

**********end of Ploughshares profile******

In the nearly 25 years since the above profile was written, Norman has published at least 7 more novels; a collection of short fiction; several memoirs; collections of folk tales and Cree legends for young readers, and more. His most recent novel is The Ghost Claus, published in 2019.

I have The Museum Guard sitting unread on my shelf so I plan to read that. He's been on my radar since reading and very much enjoying My Famous Evening years ago.

Both The Bird Artist and Northern Lights are my September choices.

>2 cbl_tn: I think I will read The Museum Guard as well.

>3 m.belljackson: The Bird Artist was a terrific reading experience for me.

I have a copy of The Bird Artist that I got specifically for this month's challenge. I'm currently reading Ethan Canin for February, but when I finish that, I'll read Mr. Norman. And also try to write som'thin on the Connie Willis.

I loved both books mentioned here >4 laytonwoman3rd:.

I'm going to read The Ghost Clause, who knows, maybe even this weekend! I've been such bad AAC participant this year.

I started The Bird Artist yesterday. Close to half way at this moment, poised to step into chapter 6: "The Murder". It is holding my interest.

I started What is Left the Daughter yesterday, and had trouble putting it down. I will finish it today, and it bodes well to be my first 5 star read in a long while. >7 weird_O: It also has a chapter titled "Murder".

The Ghost Clause (Howard Norman) (13/09/21) ***



A young couple (Muriel and Zach) move into a house soon after their wedding, bought from a recently widowed woman (Lorca). The main narrator is the ghost of Lorca's husband Simon, who resides in his old house observing the lives of Muriel and Zachery, and reflecting back on his own marriage, and setting off the motion sensor in the library when he is in there.

The marriages being observed get muddled. Simon and Lorca's feels more real, so you could really do without the second IMO.

There is a missing child Zach is trying to find, as he is a private detective.

And there are of literary quotes (which normally I'd love, but ...).

Oh, and there is a cat, and a couple of academic friends.

I was so disappointed in this novel, as I've loved two of his earlier novels, but this one was trying too hard and didn't work except in odd areas. Twice it was almost a DNF.

>9 Caroline_McElwee: I'm sorry to hear that The Ghost Clause was a dud for you, Caroline. I finished What is Left the Daughter, and although I'm not quite ready to put my thoughts together, it was a wonderful read for me. On the other hand, I'm dipping into his collection of translated folk tales, Between Heaven and Earth, and I can't imagine any child I know being charmed by them so far.

I must compliment you Linda on the introduction you made up there at >1 laytonwoman3rd:. I doubt I would have ever picked up a book by Howard Norman. But that Ploughshares piece was intriguing, esp the mention at the end about the bird artist. Then when I saw Bill and Joe commenting on the Bird Artist I found a nice used but unread trade paperback on Saturday. I was going to read the next Ruth Galloway (your fault as well!) but I read the first couple pages of the Bird Artist and I was hooked. I'm about 2/3 through it. I wouldn't blame anyone for saying they didn't like it, but it is such a quirky, eccentric book with a dark humor laid on some fairly sad characters. I think this will be one of my favorite reads this year.

>11 RBeffa: Wonderful---I snared both you and Bill (I don't think I can take credit for Joe) with The Bird Artist. I may have to revisit that one myself.

I finished Norman's The Ghost Clause the other day. It didn't do a lot for me, but I *do* feel, after reading it, that I want to try more of his work. So that's good. Here's my review.

>13 lycomayflower: Do read more of him. And remember he's funny sometimes if you catch on to what he's doing.

I settled on I Hate to Leave This Beautiful Place for this month's challenge and did an audiobook. Howard Norman is a good writer and has captivated my attention as a reader right away. I added a few other Norma's books to my TBR list.

*bump* Just noting here that Howard Norman has a new novel, Come to the Window, published in July of 2024. Because I know you all want more of his marvelous strangeness. There's a review here, if you have WP access.

"any good novel with a whale in it is eager to say something about fate and obsession"

Thanks for the bump Linda. I do like his work mostly.