Better than a good book

The St. Albert Public Library will host two world-class novelists on Friday, as it rolls out its second After Hours event, an evening author meet and greet that began last year.

Library director Peter Bailey is excited to welcome two famous writers — Lynn Coady and Marina Endicott — who don't shy away from intimate conversations.

"It's so great to have such high profile authors so close by," Bailey said. "They're great down-to-earth people."

Coady and Endicott have each made their mark with local audiences. While they were born on opposite ends of the country, each now lives in Edmonton. They've both had experience in the national and international limelight with their novels over the last few years. Both Coady's The Antagonist and Endicott's The Little Shadows are on the Globe and Mail's 100 Best Books of 2011 list.

Separately, they've each made their own appearances in the program space at the local library over the last few years. Now it's time for these two literary stars, who are friends, to come together and share the limelight.

Marina Endicott – The Little Shadows

It was slightly less than three years ago that Marina Endicott first made an appearance at the St. Albert library, that time to discuss her novel, Good to a Fault. That book won the Commonwealth Writers' Prize for Canada and the Caribbean that year. It was also short-listed for the Giller Prize and made the long-list for the prestigious International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award.

Since then she has come out with her third novel, The Little Shadows, which was long-listed for the Giller and was a finalist for the Governor General's Award for Fiction last year.

The book tells the story of three vaudeville-performing sisters in the years surrounding the First World War as they tour around western Canada and the United States. Even though their mother can barely handle them after their father's unexpected passing, Aurora, Clover and Bella survive the tough times by working together and working hard. We see them develop simultaneously as people and artists as they navigate the pitfalls and hardships of their personal lives and professional careers.

Endicott — a former actor, director, dramaturge and journalist — revels in the opportunity to tell stories that take readers on journeys where they read about strange characters' lives while learning about their own at the same time. Along the way, she has garnered some fairly positive critical attention as well.

"I've been very lucky," she began, commenting on her entire oeuvre. "The Little Shadows is a totally different kind of book. Instead of an intimate domestic examination of charity and illness and looking after children [like Good to a Fault], it's a rags-to-riches story about the early days of vaudeville in Alberta and across the West."

The kernel for the story came about as a surprise while she was researching another project several years ago.

"I kept finding photos of early vaudeville in Canada. I was so surprised. I kept picking at it for a couple of years until I realized that I had something I wanted to write about," she said.

What she wrote ended up being very frank. Being a performer in any time period can easily leave you vulnerable to shady characters and unpleasant situations. The trio of protagonists handle their adventures as best they can — what Endicott calls the "vicissitudes of their life as they manage to grow a kind of family out of the vaudeville company that they made and how they became successful." They aim for and accomplish artistic success and adulthood by sticking together.

She hopes readers examine and appreciate their relationships with their own relatives, and with the worlds in which they live.

"I think that I'm always writing about creative families, how we become necessary to each other," she said. "I'm always thinking about poverty and class, and I'm always trying to make it slightly funny."

Lynn Coady – The Antagonist

This Edmonton-based author was last at the St. Albert Public Library in September 2010 when she did the Alberta Born/Alberta Bound author chat with Todd Babiak.

A former playwright and journalist like Endicott, this award-winning author first gained notoriety with books like Strange Heaven, Saints of Big Harbour and Mean Boy. She still writes a popular advice column called Group Therapy that runs weekly in the Globe and Mail but novels are her bread and butter.

Getting noticed as a strong writer meant that she had to spend a bit more time making sure her work keeps improving. That's why it took five years between Mean Boy and her latest and most powerful work to arrive.

The Antagonist is a very literary title for a book about a commonly tragic character. Gordon "Rank" Rankin, Jr. was an impressively large teenager so his father pushed and bullied him into a hockey goon, the kind of player whose sole purpose is to push and bully the other team's players around.

It's an examination of how physical attributes can so easily and so often give others entirely false impressions about who a person really is on the inside.

"It's been really great," Coady said, referring to the positive public reception the book has received. "It's been awhile since I published anything and the publishing industry has changed a lot, reading has changed, the buying public has changed. I didn't really know what to expect. Ever since 2008, the buzz has been to lower your expectations."

Even if she had high expectations, she probably would have been pleasantly surprised to find The Antagonist come out at exactly the right time in popular culture and in public consciousness. While a comedy film called Goon (to be released next month) seems like it will give a humourous spin on the same subject matter, there has been a lot of discussion and debate about the dangers of rough play in hockey. Even non-fans are probably aware of Sidney Crosby's battles with concussions and Don Cherry's comments that fighting is an inherent part of the game and shouldn't be reduced by league officials.

Being a part of a zeitgeist doesn't mean that she's going to change her writing style to the point of writing about teenaged vampires.

"I think every writer sits around and fantasizes about completely selling out, coming up with this one big idea and making a million dollars," Coady said. "I indulge those fantasies every once in a while but I just can't seem to go there."

A brief word from the moderator

Dr. Anne Bailey expects a lively and casual conversation between the two authors, especially since they are both good friends in real life who often conduct literary salon events at The Artery in Edmonton.

"I'm actually thinking that I might not even need to be there," she said, tongue in cheek.

The discussion will involve the two authors' biographies and life paths along with conversation about their books, of course. This format makes for a lively evening, especially with the wine being offered around.

"It's a really fun take on the usual author reading."