I’m very excited about this forthcoming title, In the Flesh: Twenty Writers Explore the Body.  The idea for a book of writing about the body first came to me over ten years ago, and I worked for a while on it with my friend Sue Thomas. It went through various metamorphoses, lay dormant for a while and then, in collaboration with another friend, Lynne Van Luven, it was distilled into its current form and taken up by Brindle & Glass.

Each writer was invited to choose (or, in some cases, gently steered towards!)  a particular body part and asked to write a candid personal essay exploring that part and their relationship with it. The assumption was that writers  had to possess (or have possessed) a particular part in order to write about it. However, we abandoned this rule in the case of two very significant parts, as you will see below.

The twenty essays that resulted from our rather odd invitations are fascinating and utterly distinctive in content and tone.  Witty, sad, quirky, passionate: each one reads beautifully alone; put together, they create a fascinating, multi-dimensional portrait of the human body and our experience of living within it.

Here, to whet your appetite, is the contents page:

Introduction: Prison and Paradise by Kathy Page and Lynne Van Luven

 Face, Hair, Tongue . . .

            Reading Faces by Julian Gunn

            120,000 Strands by Caroline Adderson

            The Tongue, from Childhood to Dotage by Madeleine Thein

Skin, Eyes, Ears . . .

            What I Think of When I Think of Skin by Taiaike Alfred

            Eyes by Trevor Cole

            The Covert Ear by Margaret Thompson

Brain, Hands, Feet . . .

            The Human Brain by Lorna Crozier

            Hand Over Hand by Kathy Page

            Pas de Deux by Dede Crane

Vagina, Penis, Womb, Breasts, Ass . . .

My Vagina by André Alexis

Twenty Questions (Eight, really. It’s never as long as you think), by Merilyn Simmonds

My Womb Works, by Heather Kutai

Life With My Girls by Lynne Van Luven

My Flat Cree Ass by Candace Fertile

Bones, Blood, Heart, Back . . .

Cage of Bones by Brian Brett

Blood Typing by Susan Olding

A Serious Arteriopath by Kate Pullinger

BAD Back by Richard Steel

Kidney, Pancreas . . .

The Frankenstein Syndrome, or Giving Away the Body by Stephen Gauer

 And Inside, Silence by Sue Thomas

This new piece, published in Carte Blanche,  centres on a day out with two nonagenarians: one of the last excursions my parents and I took together.  http://carte-blanche.org/the-perfect-day/

This article about emigration, gardening and family, was first published in Aqua Magazine, p28 on.   Click to  read it in the turning pages magazine format  with original illustrations. The text is below.

What I am planting, how it grows

In one of those windy, sunny days when  the light and sound levels are in constant flux, as if an exuberant  toddler  were  in charge of the effects, I crouch over my rows of carrot seedlings, thinning them to  a centimetre apart and knowing full well that I will have to do the job twice more before things are right. Every year I try and fail to sow them thinly enough. The seedlings are tiny, the first ferny carrot-leaves just appearing, their white stems fragile as hairs. I keep the plucked ones in my free hand to dispose of safely, since crushed foliage of any kind can attract the carrot fly.  It’s tedious, finicky work.  And at this time of day I should actually be working on my new novel, and I want to, I really,  really do – yet here I am squatting in the vegetable patch, an inane smile  spreading across my face.

In the bed behind me are rows of  huge lettuces with crinkled deep red and green leaves protecting tender green hearts.  To my right, onions, to the left, two kinds of potatoes and three kinds of beans,  rhubarb, beets, peas; over by the house, flowerbeds: all of them thriving under current wet then sunny conditions.   There’s a greenhouse  full of tomato plants over by the rocky knoll, and of course,  in between all these areas of cultivation lie vast  tracts of weed and wildflower, and round about it, the encircling trees.  The whole place hums with growth. What is it with gardening? Why do I love my lettuces so much?   Because I do: I love the crinkled gleaming look of them when they are thriving (this variety, Yugoslav Butterhead is as gorgeous as any flower), and I love the almost–sweet, wild taste and the soft yet very definite texture  of a just-picked leaf. Naturally, it delights me to be able to  avoid the pesticides and the supermarket, to feed my family and friends with what I have grown.  And gardening is certainly easier, mentally speaking,  than writing books… There’s all that,  of course, and yet there is more, too.

To use a gardening metaphor, my family and I transplanted ourselves here from England about ten years ago. Language, climate,  and values were in may ways similar,  so we didn’t  go into transplant shock on arrival, but I have come to realise that while there may be romance and excitement  to a voluntary move such as ours, it is also a brutal thing. Even though emigration  is  softer, less absolute than it used to be before there were planes, phones, the internet and so on, leaving one’s country to make a home in another is  a rupture – one that deepens, rather than lessens over time. I miss not only my family –  especially, now, my father –  and not just certain loved or archetypical land and city-scapes,  but  also unexpected things such as newspapers and  radio programmes, accents, trains and train journeys, certain bushes and shrubs,  clothes that don’t shrink, and the relatively high quality of  supermarket-baked bread…  Emigration disconnects you from the physical  locations of your past, and also from the future that would have flowed from that past, had you not left, and so even though Canada, and in particular this convoluted, rocky island,  has been kind to me,  I  sometimes  yearn (impossibly) to return.

So, I  dispose of my carrot thinnings and  then return to the garden to  tug out the chickweed and dandelions that have started to grow  between the garlic plants. This forest soil, sandy and acidic is not what garlic wants.  It takes at least five years of adding compost and manure to  darken and develop real fertility. But the summer light and warmth are wonderful,  and if, as we do, you collect and store the winter’s abundant  rainwater,  it will take you right  through the dry  summer months.   The garlic is already tall and as  I reach between the stems, the sun warms my back and somewhere out of sight an eagle sings – a   strange fluting noise quite incongruous with the bird.

The eagle and its call are emblematic of   the West Coast, and I think one of the things I am doing here in the garden is joining myself, literally and symbolically, to a new  land. The hours I spend  out here working are also hours spent listening to the birds, the rustle of the deer  and the wind in the trees. I  observe the sky and the way the light shifts and changes, the weather, the quality of the air: I experience the same patch of land, many different ways.  I’m learning it and at the same time becoming part of it.

Yet the thing about gardening is that I have done it all my life, and so, despite this garden being so very definitely on the Pacific Rim, a new place for me, five thousand miles away from where I was born, tending  it reconnects me to my past.  When I am in the garden I am me, now,  working with raised beds and fish compost, dealing with tent caterpillars in my fruit trees,  sowing  peas called Cascadia and  beans called Gold Rush;  I am also a young woman with an allotment patch in London, the owner of a window box and then of thin, shade-free  hundred foot slice in Norwich,  of a shady square, of a rubble-ridden rectangle in Tooting Bec  -  I’m all of those, but most  of all, but I’m  a child,  being shown by my father how to weed properly and how far apart to plant  the  peas.

There was a magnolia tree in the front of the house I grew up in, and Dahlias, plagued by earwigs,   grew to one side of the path that led to the front door.  Most of the garden was at the back, and it included both a  tree-house built  in a pussy-willow tree, and a swing  set close by a laburnum, the flowers and pods of which I was frequently reminded not to eat.   There was a peach tree on the south facing wall of the house, a  hazelnut, and several apple varieties.   A bed of azaleas and rhododendrons (which grow wild here) was treated annually to maintain the correct PH. Behind that  was a mysterious, key-shaped area surrounded in an ancient yew hedge that  had been  part of the grounds of the manor house on which the subdivision was built.

The vegetable garden ran down the  left side, from the kitchen to the  swing, and was my father’s domain:  the plants in  workmanlike rows, the soil  turned each spring. Before meals, my sisters and I would be sent out to pick. We were taught how to do that properly: how to  find the runner beans amongst the foliage, and take them before they got tough;  how to feel the pea pods and judge what was inside,  to turn potatoes without spoiling to many with the fork,  to rub the soil away from the tops of the carrots so as to make sure they were worth pulling,  and judge the ripeness of fruit. One of the best things was picking a  peach,  cupping it in your hand and  turning gently until it  came free.

My mother was in charge of storage: we wrapped lettuce or chard (which had to be picked or it would bolt) in damp newspaper  before we put it in the  salad drawer, and kept roots cool  in a  mini-cellar by the back door.  Apples and pears were wrapped in newspaper and stored in boxes in the garage. Convenience food was  increasingly available, but we had none of it.

My father commuted daily to his office job. My parents came from the inner city and grew up with untended, postage-stamp sized gardens, and none of our neighbours grew food. But it was what we did, and it’s what I do now. There’s no peach tree here, but I’ve shown my children (and my husband) many of the things I was taught.

The  wind  picks up. The  broad beans, which here we call fava, need staking – that’s what I’ll do next, and before I go in  I’ll pick rhubarb and some salad greens: lettuce, spinach, rocket – which here is called arugula.

My parents tended that first garden for over fifty years, their second, for less than ten. My  mother’s gone, my father no longer digs and hoes. But I call and  tell him week by week, what I am planting, how it grows.

It’s because of you, I tell him, that I’m on my knees in the dirt.

I think that’s as it should be, he says.

“Canada’s ReLit Award–founded to acknowledge the best new work released by independent publishers–may not come with a purse, but it brings a welcome, back-to-the-books focus to the craft.”  Amazon.com

The Find is one of ten titles short-listed for the 2011 Relit Award (Novel):

http://therelitawards.blogspot.com/

Storylines: a Workshop with Kathy Page

How does an idea become a fully-fledged short story, novel or non-fiction narrative? We’ll experiment with new ways to find and develop story ideas, and then begin to create the story itself. This workshop is an opportunity to start fresh work,  to develop something you have had in mind for a while, or even  to sidestep a block.

The workshop will be held 8th & 9th October 2011,  from 10 – 4 each day  in the author’s home on Salt Spring Island, British Columbia, and is suitable for all levels of experience.

Max class size: 12

Cost: $190 includes tea and coffee; students  bring their own lunches.

For further information about Kathy Page’s books and courses, please explore www.kathypage.info

To register, or for further information about this workshop,  email: kathypage@shaw.ca

It’s with some trepidation that I stuff my suitcase with copies of my latest novel  and set out for Lost and Found: In Search of Extinct Species, an Explora International Conference at the Toulouse Natural History Museum.

The last time I  attended an academic conference was during my research for The Find. The 2005 Symposium on Dinosaur Park at the Royal Tyrell Museum turned out to be both useful fascinating, but since I was the only non-palaeontologist there (and almost the only person not wearing dusty boots and brown, technical clothes), the  initial experience was disorientating. It was as if I had been dropped into another culture – or even onto another planet – an impression  compounded by the arid, fantastically eroded landscape surrounding the museum, so very different to the lush temperate rainforest I  inhabit. Until I made a friend who could  help me translate the dense, polysyllabic language spoken, I understood only about one word in five, and  my  brain wound itself into knots as a result of the sheer effort expended in connecting those one-in-five words with assorted guesses at other words  and with the often baffling visual imagery presented,  in order to form some semblance of coherent thought. I was asleep by 8:30pm, utterly exhausted, and fully aware that I could blame no-one but myself. Now, that same self has gone and signed me up for Lost and Found…

However, a trip to France is  always a good thing and during the tedious, anxiety-inducing wait at the Heathrow I make sure to remind myself that the food is bound to be delicious and that  this time I’ll be part of the conference, rather than an outsider peering in, and a multi-disciplinary event looking at extinction in art and literature is a perfect context in which to present The Find.

As it turns out, the  entire event – skilfully orchestrated –  is an intense and very pleasurable experience, fertile and thought-provoking in the way that a metaphor or simile can be.  I give my presentation first, and so  am soon able to relax and enjoy the others. The speakers -  literary critics,  art  and cultural historians, a sociologist,  several palaeontologists, as well as another Canadian novelist -   are without exception articulate and passionate; presentations include a study of  extinct creatures in Edith Nesbitt’s fiction,   a heart-rending  examination of the extinction of the Eskimo Curlew, an account of an extraordinary nineteenth century children’s book in which fossils  were portrayed as  out to be the serial reincarnations of an Indian fakir,  an enquiry into various extinction scenarios  for the  American prairie,  and  an imaginative investigation of what it might be like to confront our very own, human extinction… At the end, Joan Thomas reads  from  her fine novel Curiosity, which centres on  the first woman fossil collector/palaeontologist, Mary Anning.

Seemingly disparate approaches and ideas turn out to relate to, or to provide  new perspectives on  each other.  Each presentation is bound up with its own particularities,  yet there are many connections between them –  and,  it seems to me, an underlying  ‘finding,’ ­too: how hard we struggle, when presented with  new evidence about the world or  with new situations or predicaments,  to apply our existing ideas  to  what confronts us –  and how poorly  doing so serves us.  God did not plant fossils in the cliffs just to test our faith, and it seems  unlikely that science alone will not find a way out of the problems our technologies  have created for us.  What we need is a special kind of  imagination, one that uses the whole of our humanity, rather than parts of it.  It’s good news, that  the kind of  exploratory,  inter-connective thinking  this conference engenders is not itself extinct – though, since it does not turn an obvious profit, it rarely finds favour with administrations or governments,  and might well be described as endangered.

Between  and after the presentations  we continue  the discussions arising from them, network,  and explore the world about us which in turn becomes part of the conversation.   We eat local food, tour the truly spectacular museum, watch peacocks display and mate,  and travel into the countryside  of Aude, lively with  spring growth and the scents of crushed juniper, thyme and sage.  We find fossilized fragments of dinosaur eggshell, narrowly avoid stepping on processional caterpillars, and taste the local sparkling wine.

Toulouse  ­– from the tall, thoughtful student who met me at the airport to the explosive espresso machine in the Hotel du Taur – is a delight. My thanks to  Laurence and Marie for inviting me, and to  the BC Arts Council, McArthur & Co and Vancouver Island University for making it possible to take The Find to Lost & Found.

It’s a kind of love affair. I found him in a footnote in Donna Dickenson’s Body Shopping, scoured  the province’s libraries and drew a blank, then ordered The Kingdom of Infinite Space and The Hand: A Philosophical Enquiry into Human Being, both by Raymond Tallis, from a well-known online bookstore. They did say they had the books, but it was silly of me to believe them: weeks passed.  One, then another email arrived announcing that there would be a delay in the fulfilment of my order, and then finally, came an admission of failure: both books were unobtainable.  Meantime, I’d almost completed the project for which I wanted to read them, but still, I don’t like unobtainable so  I asked our local librarian to put in an Out of Province Request, for which, she warned me, I might be charged an unspecified amount. Four days later, the books arrived courtesy of the University of Regina. And then it began.

There’s no point, my husband knows, in asking what I’m reading. The answer at the moment is always the same: Tallis. And no, he can’t have it afterwards, because it has to go back to Regina.

For some time I have been working with my friend Lynne on a book of literary essays about the human body — an anthology in which twenty writers each take on a part of the body about which they  have strong feelings of some kind. In the Flesh will be published in 2012 by Brindle & Glass.

Raymond Tallis, who until he retired, was a physician specializing in geriatric medicine, and a clinical scientist – as well as a novelist, poet, and a writer-philosopher – considered a similar idea some years back,  though he was not limited to twenty parts and would have written  all the essays himself  from a very definite philosophical perspective.

However, he decided  that it was impossible to cram so much into one volume, and went on instead  to write a volume about the human head, which, since it seems to present particularly acutely the “am I my body/where am I in my body/ how do I relate to my body” question, he uses as a portal into a detailed exploration of what he calls our “muddled, even tortured”  mind-body relationship.  Tallis is also the author of Handkind, a trilogy of books about a single body part – the human hand – which, he argues, is the origin of our sense of self, our feeling of agency, even of human consciousness.

These are huge topics, and vital ones too. Tallis approaches them with a blend of meticulousness and gusto that’s entirely appropriate to a subject in which he, just like the rest of us, has an intense personal interest.

“I want to think into the muddle of embodiment,” he explains in the introduction to The Kingdom of Infinite Space, “and I want to celebrate the mystery of the fact that we are embodied, rather than fall in with the tradition of being rather sniffy about it. Many writers, following the example of Plato, have seen the body as a kind of prison, a cognitive disaster, a humiliation, or some kind of moral disgrace. I, on the other hand, while I do not believe that we are immortal souls, unhappily lodgers accidentally trapped in 70 kilograms of protoplasm, equally reject the idea that we are entirely identified with our bodies….”

The word celebrate in the quote above  is very important. This writer knows the human body, inside and out, in all its glory and squalor.  Years of working with and for it have not jaded him; he remains excited by and curious about what people are and what  we do, and by our/his own capacity to think about it.  A sense of wonder animates every sentence.  He manages to be technical and lyrical by turns, and often simultaneously. If he cannot find the exact word for what he means, he creates it.  When writing about speech, he calls it “this exquisitely sculpted head-zephyr.”  Speech, he notes,  “is a compendious, elaborate, folded oceanic expression of what is there. Every speech act expresses or invokes both a possibility in the world and something about myself,” and he prefaces his remarks this way: “What follows is an attempt to capture the ocean in a child’s bucket itself made of a bit of the ocean…

“Our mouths shape sounds thousands of years older than they are; our lips pat plosives that married their meanings on lips that have long since liquefied. Speaking, we exhale a mixture of air and history, breath and memory, beyond our consciousness. We speak with tongues not our own. And yet we make the language we have on loan our own possession, the most immediate and intimate expression of ourselves…

“Boundless and fathomless, then, is this ocean of speech, the great sea of ‘may be’ constructed out of sculpted air, the ballooning apace of possibility inflated by our ever-active mouths, where storms of abstraction bring joy and sorrow, war and peace, enlightenment and superstition; where a multitude of speakers stitches universes…” Quotes extracted from p90-96 of The Kingdom of Infinite Space.

One problem I have here is that I can’t quote the whole book.  And another problem I have is that The Kingdom of Infinite Space and The Hand, volume one of the trilogy, Handkind, are not books you can (or would want to) rush though. Interlibrary loans are non-renewable, and the fines are 50c a day.

Tallis is equally vivid on seeing (how having our eyes  up top has shaped our thinking; how they, uniquely amongst our senses, give us a sense of distance, and tell us also what is not seen), on toothache (how pain obliterates our sense of self), on the incredible architecture of the ear, on the way we each evoke the other when we touch, on how death returns us to the purely organic.

Periodically, Tallis offers up wonderful, page-long lists –  for example, on P266 of The Kingdom of Infinite Space, a tiny selection of what he will have experienced before  he dies. He poses a steady stream of questions: Are my thoughts in my head? What happens when we think about thinking? How do all the things we are aware of at any one moment “converge in the same moment of consciousness without losing their separate identity?  How do they merge or become integrated into a whole without ending up as a mush?” Are we a part of nature? Not surprisingly, Tallis’s answers do not come in the form of yes or no; faced with impossible choices, he finds a new way to look at things, and  when meeting a mystery, he seems happy to acknowledge it as such.

Here, then, is someone who dismisses Descartes in a single line, is strongly opposed to the notion that we are basically the same as other animals, but does not believe that comparing ourselves to computer will takes us very far… I suspect that Raymond Tallis  might not get on with David Abram, whose book Becoming Animal I raved about not long ago,  even though they are both spellbinding writers, particularly gifted and rendering  the complexities of daily experience. But this, as I said, is a kind of love affair.  Thank goodness AbeBooks now say they can help me out.

http://www.raymondtallis.com/

Body Shopping by Donna Dickenson

A  day’s prospecting leads paleontologist Anna Silowski to make an extraordinary discovery in a remote part of British Columbia,  but at the same time, the tensions below the surface of her successful career are exposed. Pushed towards breakdown, she finds herself unexpectedly dependent on high-school drop out Scott Macleod, and recruits him to help on the excavation of her find. Scott is soon way out of his depth, and the excavation itself teeters on the edge of disaster. The Find is a compelling story about discovery, inheritance and fate, and a moving exploration of the possibilities that hide within a seemingly impossible relationship.

Purchase The Find from Munro’s Books

“Kathy Page is one of our most daring writers.  Once again she delivers a riveting, superbly paced novel of great complexity.  Like a paleontologist herself, she chisels away at the layers of a story that initially reads as a thriller, meticulously and precisely laying bare the tender love story underneath.  If you don’t know Page’s work yet, she’s a find.”  Caroline Adderson, winner of the 2006 Marion Engel Award, author of Pleased to Meet You, Sitting Practice and A History of Forgetting.

“Kathy Page reminds us what a novel can do that almost nothing else can: take elements as different as dinosaur hunting, landclaims,  inherited disease, and abuse of power, and link them with grace and  necessity. Above all, this is a love story of the rarest kind: one with something new to say.” Fred Stenson, Giller-nominated, award-winning author of eight novels, including The Trade & The Great Karoo.

Playing with genre is a feature of Page’s writing. Of Alphabet, she said: “Most crime stories are full of suspense, and end with the criminal being caught and incarcerated. Alphabet is about what happens after the sentence – no crimes, no chases – and I wanted it to be just as gripping.”   In The Find she has combined an adventure story  with a novel of ideas, and created something new:  ”What is the ‘real’ story here?” she asks. “Some readers may prefer one or the other aspect of the book, or think they do – and then be drawn into unexpected territory.  For me, it’s a story about discovery, and all that means.”

“The Find offers the best of all worlds: descriptions that draw you in without distracting from the story, realistic characters who face difficult choices, and a complex plot that keeps you turning the pages until the very end—with the added bonus that it’s published on one of the greenest types of text paper available…” Full review at:

http://shereadsandreads.blogspot.com/2010/11/green-books-campaign-review-find-by.html

“The clash of conflicting desires, subterfuge, uncomfortable triangling and a profound difference in values with regard to the past, all keep us turning the pages… And the abundance of information about pterosaurs, archeology, native political struggles, academic rivalry, alcoholism and Huntington’s disease is woven into the story seamlessly, only adding to the pleasure of its satisfying, unclichéd conclusion.” The Globe & Mail review of The Find

“Kathy Page crafts from unexpected resonances between a discovery of pre-historic remains and the unfolding of the life of the scientist, Anna, a compelling story of contemporary life and a quest to transmute our evolutionary inheritance of primitive emotions–ambition, lust, fear of death– into love and reason. The story—beautifully– inhabits the uncharted space between.”  Marilyn Bowering, award-winning playwright, poet and novelist, author of What it Takes to be Human

“The Find is an intricate and suspenseful narrative that soars several times past haunting catastrophe, and lands with the skeletal grace of the winged prehistoric creature at its core. This is a book that stirs admiration for both the characters and their author.” Pearl Luke, Commonwealth Prize winner, author of  Madame Zee and Burning Ground.

“Page delivers with The Find.“ Driftwood review of The Find

“The Find is a book that absorbs you. You read each carefully thought out  word. You read the descriptive passages with their clarity and intricate details. You become a part of the team and realise what a complex, yet  amazingly realistic story Kathy Page has written….” Lethbridge Herald

“A thoughtful book.  Much of the story turns on patterns of things not easily seen – the traces in the shale which may indicate the presence of the pterosaur, the patterns of deterioration and the gene markers which may demonstrate that Anna has the disease: patterns of small things which once discerned, point to a larger whole. There are, too, patterns of family history, and the patterns of conflict played out between First Nations and colonisers, and even, at a mundane level, between men and women…… G Cat’s Bookshelf review of The Find

“Mysteries bred in the bone…” Times Colonist review

Excerpt from The Find

Kathy Page introduces and reads from The Find:

Book club questions for The Find

Word Works interview with Kathy Page about the research and revision for The Find

Kathy Page talks about her work,  including Alphabet and The Find, at Tallinn Summer School, 2009

Purchase The Find from Amazon.ca

It’s unsettling when life imitates art,  and a story you have written starts to happen around you.   For example, shortly after I finished the Story of My Face, I met the teenage version of my character, Natalie, in a motel swimming pool near Vancouver airport.   She was called something else and she was in the wrong part of the world, but she was the right age looked exactly as I had imagined her:  wild auburn hair, a milky, freckled complexion. It was baking hot afternoon. She was on her own in the pool, trying to learn to swim. She waded over and started asking the kind of questions Natalie would ask -  about our family and what we were doing  there, and what it was like where we came from.   Her father was busy, she told us, waving at one of the poolside rooms, its door closed, its curtains closed against the sun… We went for dinner and came back, and Natalie was still there in the pool, in the dark,  half an hour before it closed.

Planes roared through the  indigo sky above our heads as my character’s doppelganger and I sank up to our necks in the water so to avoid the mosquitoes that had gathered above the pool.  How old was my daughter?  Natalie wanted to know. Where did she go to school? It was as if I’d stepped into my own book.  Just as the other (I nearly typed real) Natalie does in The Story of My Face, the pool Natalie seemed to desperately want to become part of someone else’s family, and I felt terrible, leaving her.

Recently, I contacted a local palaeontologist in the hopes of borrowing a photograph for a presentation about The Find that I’m giving later this year.  Did I realise, he asked, that here had been a recent discovery on Hornby Island, very like the one in the novel?  I did not,  so I looked it up. It was clear that although the news about the pterosaur discovered, Gwawinapterus beardi, had come out in January 2011, following the publication of the official description,  the discovery itself had taken place back in 2004, while I was writing  my book. Ironically, I was at the time trying very hard to avoid imitating life , and so not writing about the local discoveries, or the real palaeontologists,  about which I knew.  Despite these valiant efforts to keep fiction and fact apart, ‘my’ find had been taking place for real only  two hours drive from where I sat, typing away,  and  just few miles from the novel’s (fictional) setting. Naturally enough, both discoveries were made in the same geological formation.  As in The Find, the story of the real discovery involved a female palaeontologist and, I realised as I read further, there was controversy as to exactly who had found the specimen.

There (I hope) the similarities end, but even so, for an hour or two, the  world about me felt subtly different, somehow less certain.

It’s probably as simple as this: life is so prolific, that anything you can invent will happen, somewhere and probably more than once.  Another interpretation might be that all the stories ever written do exist, in a  multitude of almost parallel  but sometimes touching universes. In every story there are seams between  it the real  world. As I writer I work very hard on my seams,  but somehow they are  fraying, and coming undone…

Hornby Island’s Pterosaur

The Story of My Face McArthur & Co are re-issuing The Story of My Face in  April 2011

Thinking ahead to an illustrated talk I’ll give in March, I was leafing through a box of research materials for The Find, and came across this image, a detail From The Story of Life by Lorraine Malach. The post card was pinned to my office wall  for at least two years while I wrote the book; the original work is an enormous relief that runs along the entrance  wall in the Royal Tyrell Museum: ten adjacent clay panels, each one four feet wide by eight feet high.  Using human-like figures as actors/storytellers, it  tells the story of life from the Precambrian to the Cretaceous era.

I fell in love with The Story of Life at first sight. I was overwhelmed by sheer ambition of the idea, and the beauty of its execution: this is a sculpture that you walk alongside and take in  slowly, as a sequence, then step back from and try to  absorb as a whole. It’s impossible for an image of the entire work to do justice to its scale,  to the tenderness of the details, or to the tactile qualities of the clay, but it can  give you  a sense of the flow from one panel to the next: Story-of-life_mural.jpg.  You’ll see that it’s a pattern, but also a narrative. Certain shapes – arms, hands, heads – are repeated throughout, but in each panel they arrange themselves in different configurations  and become – or are in the process of becoming – something else. In this way the various body parts/visual elements seems to be working just as genetic materials do, combining and recombining,  repeating and varying. These panels ressemble fossils, and also something you might see under a microscope: cells  growing and dividing, specialising, massing together.  And at the same time, they look like a flattened-out cathedral,  and they look like  snapshots of a dance, like movement frozen in time. The Story of Life is modern and simple. The repeated figures are abstracted, but when you look closely, you see that they are also  subtly individualized. A hand touches a face or a head, one face tilts  towards another:  they’re part of a long, very slow process, but they also have an existence in the moment. Something is writing itself through them, and it also connects them, each to the other. You can see a mother and child in the third panel from the left, and you can call it a Madonna and  Child, if you so wish.

There’s little information readily available about the artist, who died shortly before the work was complete, but one thing that’s  clear is that Lorraine Malach was a deeply spiritual woman.  The Story of Life has a kinship with other great works of public art that are both secular and spiritual  –  Diego Riviera’s murals,  some Hindu temple sculptures,  some First Nations art.

When I saw Lorraine Malach’s mural for the first time, I was, to use that 70′s phrase, blown away.  I stood there,  my eyes moving from one part to another just as they do when I’m out  on the beach or in the woods –  noticing both similarities, and variation in the forms around me.I’d felt for years that art and science need to merge, rather than polarize, so it was thrilling to find a huge and brilliant work of art with  spiritual undertones  given pride of place in the entrance way of  a scientific institution - and it was  doubly thrilling  because  I  knew already that one the main characters in my as- yet-untitled novel would be a palaeontologist, that her mother was an artist,  and that the scientific discovery that began the story would soon broaden out into a far larger one…  For years, this picture reminded me of  something I was interested to explore in my writing. It kept me company, served as both inspiration and  talisman.