Thursday March 22, 2012

The Etobicoke Historical Society
is very proud to announce
the Speaker for the March 22, 2012 Monthly Meeting
will be Ann Birch as she presents
"Making a Case for Historical Fiction"

Ann Birch

 AN INTERVIEW WITH ANN BIRCH

A member of several historical societies, Ann Birch has worked for a decade in Toronto's finest old houses as an interpreter. These places have given her a wide knowledge of 19th century domestic, social and political life. She can tell you why table knives had rounded edges, why candles had to be stored in metal safes at night and why even the best people seldom bathed. She particularly enjoys researching the journals and letters of early immigrants to Upper Canada. She gives frequent lectures on historical people.

Ann is an award-winning educator. She was Head of English at several Toronto high schools and an associate professor in the teacher-training programs at York University and the University of Toronto. She holds a post-graduate degree in Canadian literature and writes essays and reviews for magazines and newspapers.
She also teaches writing and does freelance editing.

"Settlement" is your debut novel Ann,  tell us about your book, "Settlement"

It's a story of romance and adventure set in Upper Canada in 1836-37. Though it's fiction, it often draws on real figures and events. There's the love affair between an erudite English writer named Anna Jameson and a Canadian rebel named Sam Jarvis. There's the comfortable brick-house smugness of the Toronto upper classes set against the struggles of the First Nations in their wigwams. There's the contrast of Toronto locked in snow and ice, and Lake Huron, wild and expansive in summer sunshine.

OB:
What was your first publication?

AB:
I've been writing alt my life. I started with plays for my Girt Guide troupe. I wrote stories, poems and essays for school publications. I even entered a national short story contest when I was ten. But my first publication, in the sense of writing for well-known periodicals, was probably a review for Books in Canada or a travel piece for The Globe and Mail.

OB:
Tell us about your research process.

AB:
I've had ten years' experience working in two of Toronto's finest old homes: the Grange, built in 1818, and Campbell House, built in 1822. These places have given me first-hand insight into the lifestyle of Toronto's upper classes. I also delved into archival letters and newspapers from the 1830s. Then, of course, there was Anna Jameson's wonderful memoir of her brief time in Upper Canada. It's called Winter Studies and Summer Rambles and it's still in print after all these years. In it she tells us that "dear Mr. Jarvis" brought some hot Madeira to her tent on their canoe voyage down Lake Huron. Oh boy, what a novelist can do with hints like that! Sam Jarvis's life and times are well documented in books like Austin Seton Thompson's Jarvis Street and Chris Raible's Muddy York Mud: Scandal Et Scurrility in Upper Canada. And in the Canoe Museum in Peterborough I came across Grace Lee Nute's The Voyageur. That was a find! It gives a vivid account of the day-to-day life of voyageurs in their birch bark canoes. It even has the words and music for the songs they sang. 1 played these songs on the piano and my small granddaughters sang along.

OB:
What inspired you to write this story?

AB:
My husband was always telling me about Anna Jameson. Then one day I was dusting the books in my bookcases-a rare event, I assure you-and a copy of the Coles facsimile edition of Anna's memoir fell, just missing my toe. I opened it up to the narrative of her canoe trip down Lake Huron with twenty=6ne men, and I was immediately interested. And when I read her reference to "dear Mr. Jarvis"-well, I took it from there!

OB:
When did you first become interested in history?

AB:
As a child in a small Ontario town, it was the historical fiction in the local library that turned me on to history. No one could tear me away from books like The Scarlet Pimpernel, The Three Musketeers, and A Tale of Two Cities. These books introduced me to exotic worlds, to far-off times filled with glory and courage, bloodshed and horror. People sometimes dismiss historical fiction, but what is history really but someone's narrative of an important event? The facts are there, and when someone tells the story behind them, these events take on new life. For someone like me shut within the narrow boundaries of a quiet countryside, it was historical fiction that offered a look at the wonder of a larger world.

OB:
What Canadian historical figure most inspires you? Why?

AB:
I'm intrigued by Sam Jarvis. He's a man of contrasts. History books write him off as a scoundrel. He murdered John Ridout in a duet. He and a gang of thugs tore apart William Lyon Mackenzie's print shop. As Superintendent of Indian Affairs, he pocketed government money intended for the First Nations. Yet my research reveals admirable things about him. He fought bravely in the War of 1812; he undertook the repayment of his father's immense debts; he was a loving and generous father who saw the need to educate his daughters at a time when female education was considered a waste of time. It's his complexity that's intriguing.

But if we're talking inspiration, I'd have to say it's Northrop Frye I'm indebted to. His writing on archetypes has made me incapable of seeing any major event as just an event. In her memoir, Anna Jameson writes about a Toronto fire in midwinter, and I've made that event a separate chapter in my novel. As Anna lines up with the bucket brigade, or warms a freezing baby in her fur muff, or serves soup to a crowd of dispossessed poor, she throws off the strictures of Toronto's upper classes and like the phoenix rises from the ashes as a new woman. It's Northrop Frye's insights on archetypes that make me understand what really happened here with Anna.

PLOT SUMMARY:    English writer Anna Jameson arrives in the tiny settlement of Toronto in November 1836. She has come at the request of her estranged husband Robert. He is a closet homosexual who needs to fake a normal marriage in order to gain a prestigious appointment. In those days, sodomy as it was called was punishable by death. Anna has her own reasons for helping Robert. Her travels will give her material for a new book, which will eventually be published in England years later. As well, she hopes for a monetary settlement from Robert to help support her parents and sisters in England. At first, Anna finds herself in an alien world. She also meets manabout-town Sam Jarvis. As bleak winter changes into the glorious spring of 1837, Anna summons strength to cast off her unsatisfactory husband. At Manitoulin Island, she and Sam Jarvis meet again, wrestle with the conflicts in their relationship, and arrive at a settlement.

A REVIEW OF THE BOOK ON AMAZON WEBSITE:

Ann Birch is the perfect combination of historian and novelist. While reading Anna Jameson's classic memoirs of her visit to Canada in 1836, Winter Studies and Summer Rambles, Birch fixed on a small detail about "dear Mr. Jarvis" bringing the brave lady voyageur a mug of hot Madeira in her tent on a canoe trip down Lake Huron. Who was Sam Jarvis, his name given to one of Toronto's iconic streets? A very complex person, it appears. He killed a man in a duel, yet fought nobly in the War of 1812. In later years, he pocketed government money in his job as Superintendent of Indian Affairs. On the other hand, he educated his daughters over a century before the concept became accepted. An ideal flawed hero. Unbeknownst even to her, Birch had been preparing for years to bring to life this exciting period. Working for a decade in Toronto's famous old homes, The Grange (1818) and Campbell House (1822) as well as reading from original sources, she had borne witness to the morals and the mores of a time gone by. With studied precision, she can walk her readers through a mean rooming house or a luxurious mansion, with an eye to each piece of furniture and every dish brought to table. Yet she is as at home as she describes Jameson sleeping in a tent, fighting the dread mosquitoes, and enjoying a tasty fresh-caught fish. The even-handed treatment of the First Nations people in the book is faithful to Jameson's human compassion and ethics as well. Birch's storytelling ability springs from the typical "what if" idea inside every good writer. Anna Jameson could (or even should) have had an affair with the rebel Sam Jarvis. She arrives in Toronto in the dead of winter as part of her marital bargain to a cold and ambitious husband. On the other hand, Sam has a wife who doesn't want to add to their family numbers or jeopardize her health. With these passionate adventurers, the stage is clearly set for romance. As the tension builds, the streets of old York appear, with sounds from the wooden pattens used to avoid the mud, the itch of long underwear, or the reek of buffalo robes. And yet despite the dreaded fires which plague a warren of ramshackle frame houses, winter is a time of great release, freedom to skate on the ice or glide along in sleighs. In an age when few people save for English majors will pick up Jameson's still-in-print classic, Birch makes history more accessible through her marvellous prose. Sense and sensibility grace this creative labour of love.