Yesterday I had two nice writer moments. The first came when a courier delivered a box containing my author copies of “Love You to Death”. There is something both satisfying and terrifying about looking at a finished book and knowing that, for good or ill, the book is now on its own. I have seen some very old manuscripts with the epigraph “Go litel boke…” as part of the frontespiece. I always remember that poignant farewell when I get my author copies.
The second nice writer moment came when I did a very long TV interview at our university bookstore. The interviewer was intelligent and thoughtful and we talked about both “Love You to Death” and “The Nesting Dolls”, the new Joanne Kilbourn that will be published in August. He asked, as many interviewers have, if Joanne is me. After we discussed that question, he asked where Charlie Dowhanuik, the first person narrator-protagonist of “Love You to Death” came from.
Charlie is an interesting guy. He’s a late night radio talk show host who’s smart, edgy, vulnerable and empathetic. It’s not often that I can identify the genesis of any of my characters with accuracy. Most often the people in my novels and plays start with a fusion of bits and pieces of people I’ve met, heard about or read about and then they become something new altogether.
But Charlie began with one specific man whom I met on a train 12 years ago. My husband and I were going to Vangroovy (as my kids call it)—Vancouver as the rest of us call it. Our train had stopped to take on new passengers and the first person in our car was an extraordinarily beautiful young woman. Behind her, was her boyfriend, a young man with a birthmark that covered half his face like a blood mask. He was wearing a t-shirt that said “Beauty is in the Eye of the Beholder”. When he saw me looking at it, he said “Do you want to see what’s written on the back?” I said ‘sure’. He turned, and I saw an ad from a beer company. When he faced me again, I realized that I had misread the message on his shirt. In fact, it read “Beauty is in the eye of the Beer-holder”. “Great shirt,” I said. “We both laughed, and that was it. A 30 second encounter. . .
But that young man with the horrific bloodmask stayed with me. He knew that everyone who met him would have to deal with his birthmark. The T-shirt was a strategy, a way of dealing with the elephant in the living room. He charmed me as he had obviously charmed the beautiful young woman who got on the train with him. There was something in this young man that I didn’t want to lose.
In “Burying Ariel,” the sixth of the Joanne Kilbourn novels, Charlie Dowhanuik made his first appearance. In this novel, we learn about his tragic relationship with the woman he loved. Charlie appears in the some of the other Kilbourn novels, but he has a large role in the 10th Joanne novel, “The Endless Knot”. I liked Charlie and I had plans for making him a continuing character in the Joanne series.
When CBC asked me to write Canada’s entry for the World Play Project – a project in which 8 public radio stations from 8 English speaking countries contribute a play—Charlie D, a radio host, seemed like a natural choice.
Two Charlie D plays were broadcast by CBC – both more than once. Last 24th of May weekend, the radio play that eventually became “Love You to Death” was broadcast. Later that week, I received a note from Bob Tyrrell telling me about the Raven series. I had always wanted to write something that would engage people like some of my students at First Nations University—adults who needed to master skills but who needed to be drawn in by someone like them – someone who dealt with prejudice every day of their lives and who understood anger.
Charlie D was a natural.