An author's long journey
Jeremy Mesiano-Crookston
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Chase & Haven, by Michael Blouin (Coach House Press), 250 pp.
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Ottawa's Michael Blouin launches first novel
Ottawa author Mike Blouin's journey back to his art began in the form of a letter. "Back in 1996 I left home one weekend to pick up a writer's digest - a list of publishers. I had been receiving rejection letters one after another and standing in the bookstore I finally thought, Maybe I should just give this up. Then when I got home, a letter from Descant magazine was waiting. They had accepted seven of my poems."Blouin had been writing since he was a young man, but the responsibilities of a new and growing family settled him into a career as a high school teacher. "I really loved it," he admits. He worked hard, spent 10 years as a principal and finally returned to teaching a class three years ago.
But as with every choice in life, something needed to loosen its grip. "Marriage and children slowed down my writing. Then I simply lost my direction in writing for many years. I rediscovered it through poetry." The Descant success marked a change in him, and fired his renewed enthusiasm. In 2007 Blouin published a collection of poems, and this year releases his first novel, Chase & Haven, with renowned Toronto press Coach House Books.
Chase & Haven sounds like a harrowing and compelling kind of work. It tells a bleak story of two siblings whose lives twine around each other, and around the wreckage of their upbringing by an alcoholic and abusive father. It might seem like standard fare in Canadian literature themes, but it's Blouin's particular style and vision for the book that
touches my imagination and makes me interested in reading it. The book oscillates from character to character, building a world from their vantage points and modelling itself after real human recollection. "I've tried to eliminate strict linearity from this work. There's no downtime between events A and B, for example, no narrative in-between, but the story moves from one point to another just like human memory does."
Blouin's careful thought extends through other aspects of the book. The sequence of the book is "broken into thirds which mirror the passage of a day." Scenes in the first section take place in mornings, in the second in afternoons and the final third in evenings.
Most interesting to me is the particular combination of prose and poetic language Blouin strives for. He explained: "I tried to make each scene able to stand alone. Each one should be strong enough to not have to connect to the others."
In his hands the text of the book is meant to present a series of individual moments that arrive and pass in immediacy, like a Zen moment. But taken together these moments also describe the lives attached to them. It may sound contradictory at first, but Blouin obviously enjoys this kind of artistic tension. "You have to find a calm, relaxed place to write from. But it's necessary to write about urgent matters in life."
