AUTHOR INTERVIEW - BILL GASTON

Anansi: Tell us a bit about the origins of “The Order of Good Cheer” festival and how it came to feature in your most recent book of the same name?

Bill Gaston: The Order was an idea, or remedy, of Samuel de Champlain’s, born in the hard winter of 1607. He saw 50 men living in cramped and smoky conditions, harsh snow and wind, depression and hostility, bad and monotonous food, and the first signs of scurvy coming. 30 of 60 men had died the year previous on the Island of St-Croix. So Champlain proposed a series of nightly banquets, with alternating hosts, wherein the host would try to throw a better banquet than the one before it. There were songs, skits, much wine and, most importantly, new and exotic food, much of it provided by the local Mi’qmah people. Good Cheer better translates to “good food and drink.” It was a huge success: spirits rose, and somewhat by accident they ate enough fresh food to counter scurvy. Only three died that year. In any case, “The Order of Good Cheer” survives to this day, in various forms. There are supper clubs, and Nova Scotia awards people honorary membership in the Order.

A: Your novel, The Order of Good Cheer, alternates between two stories told in two times, 400 years apart. Can you talk about why you chose to tell two stories?

BG: The situation that gave rise to “The Order of Good Cheer”—isolation, depression, encroaching disease, boredom, bad food—exists today in other places. Now, I didn’t mean to “pick on” Prince Rupert in choosing it for the parallel story, but that small city, 400 years after Champlain’s Port Royal, is an economically depressed place where it rains all the time. Lying on the extreme west coast, it’s also the last place of European exploration west. It’s as far as they could go, so to speak. It’s also a settlement surrounded by First Nations people. It proved the perfect setting for the second story. For characters I chose a group of people suffering the same problems any group faces—marriages crumbling, kids and substance abuse, older relatives sliding into terminal illness, etc. Andy Winslow, my latter-day Champlain, finds reason in all of this to resurrect the Order. And in case I’m making this book sound awfully depressing, I’ll add that he is celebrating camaraderie, and the charged moment, and indeed life itself. And I should add that he’s also hopelessly in love and trying to lure his old girlfriend back to bed. So that’s why there are two stories. But actually there are three: the unspoken story of the 400-year gap. It’s odd perhaps, but I see this third story as containing much of the mystery and power in the book. It’s a very present ghost, one that’s 400 years old and 4,000 miles wide.

A: Did you experience any temptation to rewrite history while you were writing the character of Samuel de Champlain?

BG: I explain in the author’s note that I did indeed condense two years of history into one. But other than that I stayed fairly true to the facts as we know them. The Mi’qmah chief Membertou was reportedly over 100 years old. The lawyer/poet Lescarbot reportedly sucked up to Poutrincourt and belittled Champlain whenever he could. But Champlain proved to be the ideal figure to characterize, basically because so little is known about him. He wrote and published his journals, or course, but almost nothing of his personality emerges. We know that as a mapmaker he was often wrong, and rather ditzy. But, since no one knows what he was really like, I was very free to fill in the blanks.

A: You’ve recently started to tour with the novel, and will appear in October at the Calgary WordFest and the International Festival of Authors in Toronto. In July, you’ll appear in Saint John, New Brunswick. Do you expect the book to be received differently in each locale?

BG: I don’t know what the reactions might be—mostly, I hope there is one. I do know that everywhere there are people acutely knowledgeable about Canadian history, and I hope they both enjoy the historical side of this book, as well as appreciate the humour and oddness I sometimes infused the history with. And I hope they cut me some factual slack. I suspect in Saint John there will be more of those who might question certain facts, seeing as Saint John and environs are part of this books setting. As to the present-day sections, I’m hoping all Canadians, in fact all North Americans, can see Prince Rupert—where you can get good pho and crantinis—as a universal place.

A: Finally, what would be on the menu for your own Order of Good Cheer?

BG: The rules are that the food must be wild and local, or brought over in barrels from France, so that limits things a bit, and anyway I’m all for bending rules whenever I see them. So my grand feast would include wild and local fiddleheads, steamed and drizzled with balsamic, but topped with tobiko (preserved flying fish roe). Moose stewed till tender, with blackberry-Calvados sauce. Pickerel from Manitoba. Duck with something made from cranberries and honey. Some kind of warm, steaming, rustic bread that feels like heaven in your mouth. And over in a dark corner, past the table holding goblets of cognac, and the rack groaning with magnums of champagne, sits a barrel, big as an ox, full of ridiculously good 6-year-old vin ordinaire.

Author Events for Bill Gaston

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