DETAILS
Fire Song
By Adam Garnet Jones
232 pages
Softcover $12.95; Hardcover $18.95
Annick Press
Filmmakers usually stick to making films while authors usually stick to writing books. Usually, the author creates the book first and it becomes popular or worthy in some way to have its film rights sold so that the filmmaker can make a movie out of it.
That’s a lot of ‘usuallys' that don’t mean anything to filmmaker turned author Adam Garnet Jones. The descendant of the Michel First Nation wrote and directed the 2015 movie Fire Song and released it to critical acclaim. Fresh off the success of last year’s Great Great Great, his second full-length feature, he’s back now with the book version of Fire Song, just published by Annick Press.
“I knew that it was going to be hard to make my first feature. I wanted a story that was important to me but also felt like it was more important than me … something that I thought was really important to put into the world,” he said from his Toronto office.
The story of Fire Song follows Shane, a bisexual Aboriginal teenager on the verge of getting off his remote Northern Ontario reserve and going to university, leaving his girlfriend behind but hopefully taking his reluctant secret boyfriend with him. Just weeks before leaving, his sister dies by suicide, leaving him to choose between caring for his struggling family and his own future.
The film was very well received, premiering at the 2015 Toronto International Film Festival and going on to be the closing night selection at the imagineNATIVE Film + Media Arts Festival where it picked up one of its four festival Audience Choice Awards. It also took two jury prizes for best film.
The story obviously resonated with viewers as well. A lot of them wanted to know more about the characters and what happens with them.
“People came up to me after screenings … and said that they really felt like the film was about them and their lives, which is something as a filmmaker that you always want and hope to hear. It also was hard because there’s tough stuff in the film. It was really hard to hear from my communities that the story did feel so true to them. I love how much people really took the film and the story on as their own.”
Annick Press suggested that it would make for a good young adult novel. Leery to pass something that he was so connected with over to another author, Jones took up his own gauntlet and wrote the book himself.
“Because the story was – is – so personal and I spent so much time with it, I just felt like they wouldn’t actually be able to give me enough money for me to trust them enough with it.”
Since he had never written a book before, he had to audition for the part with some sample chapters. He passed and was challenged to complete the manuscript in three months, a daunting pace.
He ended up needing a full year but got it done, and now the fruits of his labours are coming full circle. The book is on CBC’s list of 10 Canadian young adult titles to watch for in the first half of 2018. At the same time, the film is getting translated into Anishinaabemowin, the Ojibwe language of the reserve.
Jones is obviously pleased with having gotten to this point, even if it means having to say good-bye to it as he sends it off into the world again.
“Writing a book is something I never thought I would be able to do. I’ve always held writers of fiction in such high esteem. The feeling of sitting there having completed the book and knowing that I had done it was a proud moment but also a little bit sad, too.”
