Hang onto this Vine

Post-apocalyptic Alberta? It’s a disturbing and hopefully distant image but one that has Edmonton author Sheree Zielke vying for James Cameron’s attention.

When the Canadian-born blockbuster director of Avatar and Titanic famously toured the Alberta tar sands two months ago, Zielke, a former radio personality with CKST and 1070 Gold in St. Albert, caught his attention just after he left his well-reported meeting with Premier Ed Stelmach. She handed him a copy of her new book, Martha’s Vine, and asked him when he would be making a big movie in this province.

Now that’s savvy marketing and just another chapter in this longer tale of how an idea can take 15 years to percolate before it’s ready to be served. This is one patient writer who still knows the value of having the clock finally tick down.

“I have always been a lover of post-apocalyptic and survivalist stories. Even as a little girl, the idea of survivalism was totally intoxicating to me. My favourite book was The Boxcar Children, which is a kind of survivalist story for children,” she said, referring to the long-running series of children’s stories by Gertrude Chandler Warner. It’s about four kids escaping an orphanage and the mistreatment of a mean stepmother by living in a train car. She said that it didn’t take much to spark her imagination about a real life opportunity for escape and the challenges people might have to face.

“When the year 2000 was coming on … I thought, ‘What if [the Y2K bug] was real and something did go wrong with the power grid?’ It just stepped off from there. When it didn’t happen, I just shelved the book and thought, ‘Ah well, it was fun.’ It kept nagging at me until last year, I pulled it back out and I said to a friend of mine, ‘I have to have a little pressure on me to write.’ We writers write best to a deadline. I’m an ex-reporter and I need deadlines. So I said, ‘Put pressure on me and make me write this book.’ He said, ‘Okay, you write it and I’ll read it but if you don’t keep it interesting, you’ve lost me.’ Every so often we’d hit a part and he’d say, ‘You know what? You’re losing me and you’ve gotta do something.’”

Apparently this kind of critical but friendly feedback provided her several moments to really take stock of her story and keep the action going for the audience. She came upon a literary device called underchapters to parallel the universes between Martha and a secondary character only known as The Man.

“That picked up the pace. It had something for the women and something for the men. Interestingly enough, right now, it’s very mainstream. I’ve got 20-year-old boys and 70-year-old women … and they’re all really liking the read.”

And a compelling read it is too, something that Cameron should keep on his night table. The underchapter device works pretty well for keeping the pages turning, much like the one-page chapters that became the hallmark for Dan Brown of The Da Vinci Code. It doesn’t always make for smart reading but here it holds up decently to sustain an astute reader, even if it is, at its heart, pulp fiction.

It’s about a world without power where all systems are thrown into chaos. A biker gang conglomerate fights against a survivalist named Matthew when Martha, a strong-willed free woman, comes into the picture to throw everybody a curveball. It’s got enough meat to always feed your appetite but be warned that there’s still a fair bit of grit to give you pause that this fantasy still has roots in reality.