CBC host to regale with hockey tales

Most people would know Grant Lawrence as the affable host of CBC programs like Grant Lawrence Live, RadioSonic, RadioEscapade and The Wild Side. There's a lot about the man himself that would probably make for compelling storytelling too.

This is his first-ever book event in northern Alberta and he's thrilled to get the billing. The talkative West Coast native doesn't just have a lot to say. He has stories to tell, especially ones about his own frenetic life.

"Busy," he stated with a rare succinctness. "Always on the move. Always travelling. The baby comes along with us which is really fun."

Lawrence's wife, singer Jill Barber, gave birth to their son in August. Wife and child will not be in the audience for tomorrow's show, however.

In between Barber's tour and his tour, they have quite a full life together. It is indeed a busy life. The 42-year-old is currently on a cross-country tour to promote his second autobiographical book, The Lonely End of the Rink: Confessions of a Reluctant Goalie. After the success of Adventures in Solitude (What Not to Wear to a Nudist Potluck and Other Stories from Desolation Sound), he must have figured that having a somewhat solitary yet kooky title was one of the key ingredients.

Kooky non-fiction book titles usually come from kooky upbringings. The man behind the mellifluous voice has a somewhat up-and-down relationship with hockey. Born in Vancouver, he has enjoyed a lifelong love of the game, especially the Vancouver Canucks and especially the team's goalies. He even plays with The Flying Vees, described as an amateur team mostly comprised of musicians like himself. Lawrence used to play with indie rock group, The Smugglers, but they haven't been active for several years.

But go into his past and he'll tell you a different tale about hockey.

"We're born into a hockey country. In the winter, we play hockey. I was never comfortable with that because the meanest, biggest assholes in my class all wore hockey jackets and rained abuse down on me," he confessed. "The book is about me conquering those fears of intimidation and ridicule, to eventually in adulthood play the game on my own terms and enjoy it for it really is, which is a lot of fun if played the right way."

Nobody can deny that Lawrence has a way with words. Adventures in Solitude even gained him some recognition in the form of nominations for the 2011 Hilary Weston Writers' Trust Prize for Nonfiction and the 2011 Edna Staebler Award. He called it a surprise success but it has all the makings of a classic, especially with its "based on real life" accounting of his childhood.

"It's a real summer book, based at my family's summer cabin in a very wild area of B.C. called Desolation Sound. It's populated by a very scant scattering of end-of-the-road freedom seekers like hippies and oyster farmers and hermits and loggers and my middle class family," he said. "We were real 'fish out of water' there. It used to horrify me as a child to go there."

This new book, he continued, is the winter counterpart to the first.

"Same eras of my life… except the story occurs in the winter. It's my deeply conflicted relationship with our national sporting pastime of hockey, and how I never really felt like I had a place in our game."

It probably all started with his Winnipeg-bred parents forcing him to learn how to skate much to his "screaming protest." Knowing how to rock a set of blades didn't help him much when he was a nerdy outcast in a class full of hockey jocks.

The main event

Lawrence has a few things up his sleeve that he hopes will keep the audience's attention during tomorrow's event.

"When I'm doing these book events, the last thing I ever want to be is boring. I want to bring humour, I want to bring interactivity, and I want to bring music."

He promised a few short readings – "nothing sermon length" – along with a slide with some highly embarrassing slides as a youth and "über-nerd" plus a video presentation of The Flying Vees in action.

There will be a Q&A where he'll get to joke around with the audience. People might be interested in asking him about how he even finds the time to write, especially considering his busy life. He said it's gotten tougher to be a writer since his first book came out because he's now in a family way.

"Since the first book came out, I have gotten married, I have a child now. I had to figure out ways to carve out time to write. I would write after my wife went to bed. Instead of watching in-flight entertainment, I would force myself to write. You're literally strapped to a chair. I'd force myself to type. Once I get on a roll, I can't stop. The challenge for me is finding the time to start. It's that constant challenge we all face in our life: finding the time to get things done."

He might even have a remark or two about how this publishing season has been busy for book titles by some rather auspicious authors.

"I have not read Stephen Harper's book about hockey," he admitted. "My publisher warned me: 'You put out a hockey book in the fall, you're going up against the big guns.' Little did I know that I was going to release my book in the same season as Bobby Orr, next to Gretzky and Howe the most famous, celebrated hockey player of all time, and Stephen Harper, our prime minister releases a hockey book!"

Barber joked that audiences should form a team of books with Lawrence as the goalie, Orr on defence and Harper as the right-winger.

Apart from all of these other fascinating topics, Lawrence will have to step down at some point and take second stage to Mike McDonald. The musician with Edmonton's famed country-punk group Jr. Gone Wild will have a short acoustic set to keep everyone in good spirits.

Lawrence is excited to have the company.

"I always like to tap into the local scene wherever I go. I'm really honoured to have Mike McDonald of arguably one of Edmonton's legendary independent bands – Jr. Gone Wild – to lend a hand."

McDonald admits that he does not usually play gigs in libraries.

"Very few. This might be my second one," he said.

His knowledge about Lawrence as an author is slightly less than his knowledge about the rocker that Lawrence used to be.

"I know about him. The Smugglers did the right work and made their mark."

He admitted that's about the only thing that ties everything all together. It's not like he's going to be singing about libraries and books.

"I've never written songs about that."