Multi-award-winning author, actor and playwright Joel Thomas Hynes is launching a collection of poetic narratives tonight The Ship in St. John’s (7:30 on).
Straight Razor Days is essentially a collection of “intimate little narratives and observances” on father-son-grandson relations. Hynes told CBC that they were essentially a product of “acting upon the compulsion of writing, which I have to do. It’s become a habit of mine to write stuff down when I’m not able to tuck myself away and focus on one big project.” After a while, all of his “little narratives” revealed a thematic link and fit nicely together as a manuscript, so he pitched it to a few places as he carried on writing his latest novel (and a short film, always busy, this one). The admirable Beth Follett of Pedlar Press snatched it up.
Pedlar Press are calling the anomaly a collection of poetry for cataloging reasons, and it is being touted as exposing a much more emotional, sophisticated, tender side of Hynes than his other works have revealed. It’s certainly a more intimate book, featuring pieces like “Make Your Peace” about his grandfather’s passing.Here’s a background on that piece:
“I was in a bit of a messy place,” Hynes says, and that he hadn’t been to see his grandfather, a lively tough guy, in a while. “And there he was in the bed, skeletal, and I was shocked to see him. I loved him and I really felt he loved me too. I had the sense that he was waiting for things to align before he went off. He knew myself and father were in the room.” A priest read him his rights, and as soon as he left the room, Hynes’s grandfather died. “It was my first time actually watching somebody die. He had really really blue Hynes eyes. The light just leaves. It’s actually life you know? I remember looking up, and looking around and out through the window wondering where the hell my grandfather had gone because he wasn’t there in that body anymore. I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t know how to feel or how to react. It was a very strange life altering moment for me. It sort of haunted me, that moment, until I managed to set it somehow down on paper. I don’t think I did it all that much justice. I mean it’s a nice, quiet, intimate, telling piece to read, but I don’t think I quite got at what it did to me.”
Those are the kind of moments explored in the collection, which features pieces on his father and his own son, Percy. He’s always been quite frank about how parenting has changed his life for the better, helping to “heal me up and get all that old garbage out of my head.” “It’s a huge part of my identity you won’t often see in my other work,” he told CBC’s Weekend Arts Magazine, but you’ll see it in Straight Razor Days.
“I guess I
was in a place where I needed to communicate with people, who are both alive or dead. I just wanted to write little narratives, set the record straight in some ways, extend a hand in other ways. It’s not an angry book, but it runs the gamut of emotion.”
There are several pieces called “Apparently” that “challenge my family mythology.”
Never one to be idle long — it seems like every three months his name surfaces for some new project — Hynes is currently writing a new novel, and has his first short film premiering shortly at the Atlantic Film Festival, called Clipper Gold. It stars Des Walsh and Ruth Lawrence, Joel both wrote and directed it. He calls it a “quiet and unassuming film about domestic tension and a couple who are in a very emotionally stagnant place. All their dark secrets unfurl against the backdrop of a good feed of moose sausages and tea.”
Best known for the raw narrative hook in his novels Down to the Dirt and Right Away Monday, his lead roles in movies like Down to the Dirt and Crackie or CBC’s Hatching, Matching and Dispatching,and his award-winning plays like Say Nothing, Saw Wood, or lately, his manifesto, God Help Thee, he also has shorts and essays published in anthologies or by papers like the Globe and Mail. Point being, as if he wasn’t prolific enough to turn your head, in more fields than one, the release of Straight Razor Days, whatever you want to call it, might make him the busiest and most diverse writer on the Rock. He can even be found on stage from time to time as a musician, or making appearances on albums (See Blair Harvey’s “Dozen Beer” for a damn good song). In fact, a great Canadian songwriter, Justin Rutledge endorsed Straight Razor Days:
“A visceral and poignant portrayal of hungry times, Straight Razor Days confides in the reader in a ragged voice reminiscent more of Springsteen than Al Purdy. Relentlessly truthful and not without hope, Hynes’s Newfoundland is a place of violent beauty and stark wonder. A refreshing and inspiring work.” – Justin Rutledge
It’s in stores now … except for Chapters and Coles. Pedlar Press, who’ve published this, don’t do business with Indigo the Bully.
* I’ve quoted Joel quite heavily from his recent interview with CBC’s Weekend Arts Magazine. Enough to acknowledge that here. I’m on vacation, after all, and felt that that chat got at all the things I’d've asked him myself anyway …
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