Governor General's award-winning writer Thomas King speaks to us about the high wire act of mixing humor and tragedy and how an inherent respect for the material goes a long way in storytelling. Plus, how his experience filmmaking posed completely different creative challenges compared to writing.
Governor General's award-winning writer Thomas King speaks to us about the high wire act of mixing humor and tragedy and how an inherent respect for the material goes a long way in storytelling. Plus, how his experience filmmaking posed completely different creative challenges compared to writing.
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Heather Reisman:
Hi, I’m Heather Reisman, and this is Well Said, a podcast on the art and science of living well. This podcast is brought to you by Indigo.
Our guest today is one of the great storytellers of our time, Thomas King. Thomas is a writer, professor, broadcaster, and is widely regarded as one of the most influential Indigenous writers of his generation. He was the first Indigenous person to deliver the Massey Lectures. He has written a number of powerful works, including the Governor General Award-winning The Back of the Turtle, The Inconvenient Indian, and Indians on Vacation—that last one, a Heather’s Pick. And he recently won the Stephen Leacock Medal for Humour, for Indians on Vacation.
Thomas’s latest book is called Sufferance. This is a book about power, privilege, and inequality. It’s a rich story about Jeremiah Camp, a man with the power to see societal patterns and forecast the future, and maybe even to change it, set in a fictional, small reserve town. Sufferance is moving, it’s important, but it’s also laugh-out-loud funny.
Today’s episode is hosted by Amanda Gauthier, a fellow booklover and a senior member of Indigo’s book team. Amanda, over to you.
Amanda Gauthier:
Thomas King, thank you so much for joining us today.
Thomas King:
Oh, my pleasure. My pleasure.
Amanda Gauthier:
So, you were just awarded the Stephen Leacock Medal for Humour, for your book Indians on Vacation.
Thomas King:
Yeah.
Amanda Gauthier:
What does that mean to you?
Thomas King:
It’s a lovely award. I was surprised that I was up for it. I don’t see myself as a humorist, particularly. Although when I look at Leacock’s work, certainly there was the bit of the satirist in Leacock.
And I’ve always enjoyed him for that. He was really quite a lovely writer. I don’t think he gets as much attention as he should. So, in that sense, the Leacock was very nice to win for Indians on Vacation. And I suppose, of all my books, that would be the one that would qualify for something like the Leacock more than anything else.
Amanda Gauthier:
That book was so joyful.
Thomas King:
The plots that I deal with in my novels are not terribly important to me. What’s important are the characters and the interaction of the characters. If you come to my novels, you come for the characters; don’t come for the plot. If you come for the plot, stay home.
Amanda Gauthier:
(laughs)
Thomas King:
My plots are not terribly complex; they’re not terribly difficult. Even the mysteries that I write—the DreadfulWater mysteries that I write—are not terribly complex plots. But it’s the characters and the richness of those characters and their interaction that brings me back to writing, again and again and again. Because I really love those characters.
Amanda Gauthier:
You know, there’s been a lot of discussion recently, in recent years, about appropriation and who gets to tell what story.
And what is kind of interesting, to me personally—as I’ve been, you know, listening and trying to learn from these discussions—is underpinning all this idea, of who gets to tell what, is that the story itself is so valuable, otherwise we wouldn’t care who said what, who tells what story.
Thomas King:
Umm-hmm.
Amanda Gauthier:
That underneath that, the story itself has value, because we want to be sure the right person gets to tell it. And I would love to hear your point of view on that, on who gets to tell what story and the power of storytelling.
Thomas King:
Well, I mean, I’ve been fairly clear about this over the years. As far as I’m concerned, the person who gets to tell the story is the person who can tell it—and who can tell it well. And in many cases, if it’s Aboriginal stories, that’ll be Aboriginal writers; but not always. And sometimes people who tell non-Native stories—White stories, if you will—don’t have to be White writers, particularly.
But you have to be able to tell it well. You’ve got to be a good storyteller. You have to have respect for the material and for the story. And if you don’t, I don’t care who you are, it’s not going to turn out very well. I understand the issue of appropriation, especially with Native text, because that’s been going on for years—anthropologists, ethnographers, linguists, right up to the present day—where there are people who think they can tell a better story than Indigenous people can. For the most part, they can’t, because they don’t know the material and they really don’t have the kind of respect for the material that’s going to make a good story.
But there are some writers who do. There are some non-Native writers who have written stories about Native people that I quite liked. But you have to be careful. There’s so much bad stuff that gets on the market that it makes us cranky (laughs).
Amanda Gauthier:
I think storytelling is about getting close. Right? We want to be able to tell a version of something. And in this book, you have so many storytellers. I think of Florence and her recap and version of the news. She has stories that she tells there. With many different types of storytelling, including Lala, you know, who is her own storyteller, and who is a joyful storyteller.
Thomas King:
Oh, yes. Yes. Yes.
Amanda Gauthier:
And they’re quite funny as storytellers. But they all tell very different stories. So I’m curious about why there are so many storytellers in this book and the differences between the stories they tell.
Thomas King:
Well, I mean, within regular society there are hundreds of storytellers that you meet in your everyday life. And some are good, and some aren’t so good.
There’s that old joke about prisoners. This guy gets thrown into prison. And he’s there. The first night when the lights go off, somebody in the darkness…. Do you know this story?
Amanda Gauthier:
No, I do not.
Thomas King:
Somebody in the darkness yells, “43!” And everybody laughs. And then the person yells, “49!” Everybody just laughs. And the person yells, “24!” Everybody in the jail laughs and laughs. In the morning, the guy gets up and he gets in line for breakfast. He says, “Listen. Last night after the lights went out, somebody began calling out numbers in the dark, and you all laughed.” And he says, “Yes, yes.” He said, “We’ve been here for so long that we know the stories by heart, and we just give them numbers, and so, you know, we have a good time.”
And so that night the guy stands by the bars, and when the lights go out, he goes, “24!” There’s dead silence. You know, “43!” Nothing. “49!” Just a tomb.
He gets up the next day, gets back in the line. He says, “Listen. Last night after the lights went out, I called out all your favourite stories, and nobody laughed.” And the guy said, “Well, you know how it is, some people can tell a story, some people can’t.”
Amanda Gauthier:
(laughs) Oh, that’s really actually quite powerful. Isn’t it? (laughs)
Thomas King:
It is.
Amanda Gauthier:
That’s incredible.
Thomas King:
So what you have to have in those communities is—if you’re writing about that, you have to have everyone who is, in their own way, a good storyteller.
And so whether it’s Lala—who really is my four-year-old granddaughter, she’s lovely, I just, I have such a good time with her—or whether it’s Bob Loomis, Mayor Bob.
Amanda Gauthier:
Bob’s the one. (laughs)
Thomas King:
Or Bob’s the one. Yes. (laughs)
(laughter)
Accusation and endorsement in equal parts.
Amanda Gauthier:
Oh, so perfect. (laughs)
Thomas King:
And Florence, you know, who has a background in the Caribbean. Or Nutty, who is there on the reserve.
All of these people have a story to tell. And the trick is to let them tell their stories in a way that creates the community—creates a literary community, creates a social community.
And what I found out—by the way, this is an interesting thing—as a writer, I thought of writing as fairly complex and difficult, but I’m also a photographer—I’ve been doing photography for as long as I’ve been doing writing—and I just recently, in the last months, tried to switch over from still photography to filmmaking, and let me tell ya, a part of me wakes up every day and says, “I should have stayed in writing.”
If I thought writing was hard and getting a story together, making a film is infinitely more difficult, because there’s that entire technical part of it that will drive you up a wall. It’s so brutal. And it really makes me want to come back to writing full-time again. (laughs
Amanda Gauthier:
Well, I guess you can’t just like strike a line in film, can you? When you’re editing it must be a completely different animal
Thomas King:
No. And you know, it’s so easy to write, compared to the other.
So. And but storytelling, all the ways in which we can tell stories—dance, song, film, writing, art—they all have their easy parts and their hard parts. But I have to say that filmmaking is one of the harder ones that I’ve seen, so far
Amanda Gauthier:
Well then why do it? What…?
Thomas King:
Ahh!
Amanda Gauthier:
You’re a masterful driver, so why go into a new medium?
Thomas King:
Yeah. Well, you know, here’s what happens is—I’m 78 now, and I’ve been writing for a fairly long time. It’s easy to get bored. Once you think you’ve mastered something—and nobody masters writing, but I think you get to a point where you believe that you might have. And I’m easily bored. I’m that dog in the house that you leave alone and come back to find your couch destroyed and your door torn to pieces.
And so I’m always looking for new outlets for storytelling—always new ways to tell a story. And so I’ve done it in short stories; I’ve done it on radio; I’ve done it in novels; non-fiction. And so I’d gotten a little bit bored, I think. And I said, “You know what? I’ve got a little hiatus right now, Sufferance is out. This is the time for me to swing over and try my hand at filmmaking.” Well, just shoot me in the head. (laughs)
Amanda Gauthier:
One of the things that we talk about on this podcast is wellness—this idea of grappling with our own wellness, our health and wellness. And something that, you know, was underpinning all the really great characters and the laughs in this book was everybody is dealing with a little piece of trauma, and they’re metabolizing it with the tools they have at hand.
Thomas King:
Umm-hmm.
Amanda Gauthier:
And the humour is so connected to the capacity to, you know, deal with our trauma. I wondered what your point of view is on the connection between laughter being the best medicine.
Thomas King:
Well, my attitude really is that if I’m going to create a really awful situation then I better be able to mix some humour into it to—not just to leaven it. That’s not the purpose of humour. The humour is also to sharpen the pathos.
So in my books, if we’re dealing with a horrendous occurrence and you see some humour in there, normally it’s humour that is to bring that level of tragedy even higher than it is. It’s an odd thing that humour does in those situations, if it’s handled correctly. So it’s a highwire act; it’s like walking on the edge of a knife. One misstep and the whole thing falls apart. So if you’re a writer and you’re going to use that kind of a strategy, you really better know what you’re doing.
Because you can fall off either side. You can fall off and make the tragedy seem silly. Or you can go the other way and try to make it satiric, which you really can’t afford to do. I mean, sometimes you can. But many times…. If you’re dealing, say, with residential schools and the death in residential schools, you have to walk a very fine line if you’re going to mix humour in with that particular story. But I don’t think there’s any other way to tell that story, otherwise people turn away.
When I was younger and I was very active in—not the American Indian movement so much but in Native movements in the U.S., I made the mistake of being the sort of, you know, an in-your-face kind of guy. And what happened was that people just turned away. They’d stop listening to you. And so whatever message you had, it was lost in the anger. It’s not that the anger wasn’t justified. It was just, as a strategy, it was a lousy strategy. And it took me years to learn that. Years to learn that.
And my book deals with an established cemetery in a residential school. And there are hundreds of sort of hidden cemeteries around residential schools. And it’s not new. And while the non-Native population may find it shocking, Native people have been talking about these kinds of things for years. When I was first involved in Native activity, back in the early ’60s, people were talking about these kinds of occurrences at residential schools. We’ve been talking for years to say that, you know, people who ran those residential schools were sexually and physically abusing the students. Over and over again we said that, and no one listened to us. And so now, all of a sudden, when they do—when you have the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, where you have direct testimony to that, and people are going, “Oh, we didn’t know that was happening”—well, you didn’t know because you weren’t listening.
Amanda Gauthier:
It’s very beautiful, the small—it seems like a small act of replacing the wooden crosses with limestone that Jeremiah undertakes, you know, engraving in a more permanent and Earth-minded way, perhaps, the names of those children—it seems like a small act, but it does feel very healing. Was that your intention? What was the metaphor you were working there?
Thomas King:
The metaphor, basically, was pulling the stake out of the heart, out of the wound, if you will. That here is the symbol of a religion that killed the kids, basically. And to have those things still stuck in the ground like that was an offence. Jeremiah saw that as an offence. And so he begins replacing those with river stones. And he carves the name of the children into the stones and puts them there. Puts the crosses into a pile with the idea he’s going to burn those, which just drives a couple of characters up a wall that he’s going to do that.
That was—for me, that was kind of delightful. I went to a Catholic residential school for two years. Not the kind on the reserve. This was in a—this was in a city. And I remember the kind of strictures there. And I was overwhelmingly depressed being there. Because they really do—whether you’re Native, whether you’re non-Native—you go to some of those schools and they really do press the life right out of you. But I wouldn’t wish that on anybody. And you can see the damage to today.
Amanda Gauthier:
You know, this idea that Jeremiah says, “My efforts in the cemetery” are his efforts of the Reconciliation Project. You know, that he doesn’t believe in reconciliation. But that there’s small healings that can move a community forward.
And that leads me to Jeremiah and his role as the forecaster. What a great ominous name to give someone. We have Florence with her tarot cards trying to predict the future. But he has a very different version of forecasting. And it’s quite dark. Can you tell us a little bit—without giving away too much, can you tell us a little bit about that?
Thomas King:
Yeah. I mean, everybody has a skill. Most people, you know, some people don’t find their skill, but a lot of people do. For Jeremiah, he has the ability to look at human society—to look at history, to look at what’s happening in the world right now—and he can see patterns. That’s his skill. He can see patterns. And he was fortunate enough, or unfortunate enough, to be hired by a large multinational corporation to look for those patterns in the world. Because recognizing those patterns, knowing those patterns, being able to predict what’s going to happen is very important to a multinational business. And so that’s what Jeremiah did for a living.
The problem was, the more you look at the world, the more you look into the heart of that world, it’s like that old saw about looking in the abyss and the abyss looking back. That’s more or less what happens to Jeremiah. He’s looked once too often. And his answer to that, to that vision that he’s seeing, is to retreat to the old residential school on the reserve. And I don’t think he knows what he’s going to do. He certainly didn’t plan on doing what he does or, you know, what people will do to him. But there it is. That’s pretty much life, isn’t it?
Amanda Gauthier:
It is, yes. I think that contrast is so beautiful. You know, he’s made a fortune, you know, presumably being able to predict and tell people’s stories—tell the exact story of somebody else’s life—but he’s unable to control his own story.
Thomas King:
Yeah.
Amanda Gauthier:
You know, he becomes enmeshed in this community—for better or for worse—from his point of view, for worse. But for them it’s just such an embrace. And they’re so happy to have him home. I think there’s something really—again relating back to trauma—this idea that we can break cycles, that we can forecast a different future for ourselves.
Thomas King:
Yeah. Of course, who was it? Was it Mike Tyson who says, “Everybody has a plan until you get hit”? And Jeremiah has a plan, and then he, metaphorically, gets hit by the community. So.
[music]
[announcer voice]
We hope you’ve been enjoying Well Said and the meaningful conversations with experts, authors, and thought leaders to help you live life with purpose and intention. Visit indigo.ca to explore more books from your favourite podcast guests, including the Own Voices collection, featuring stories by diverse authors from their own perspectives.
Amanda Gauthier:
At the end of every one of our episodes, we like to ask our guests a few fun questions. What book has had a profound impact on your life?
Thomas King:
There aren’t any books that have a profound on my life. Pieces of books have spoken to me. There are parts of Moby Dick, there are parts of House Made of Dawn, there are parts of a Portrait of an Artist With 26 Horses that have stayed with me. But I don’t think of it in terms of books. I think of it in terms of emotions or moments that are created that I can take with me.
Amanda Gauthier:
Mmm, beautiful. What are you reading right now?
Thomas King:
The last book that I read was Jesse Wente’s book, which is coming out, called Unreconciled, which is a very good book.
Amanda Gauthier:
Oh, wonderful.
Thomas King:
Yeah, I was really impressed with that book. So I’m hoping that that does really well.
Amanda Gauthier:
What brings you joy?
Thomas King:
Oh. Well, I guess, I wake up in the morning, I have my breakfast. I have an espresso and a little piece of cake of some sort. And for that moment—for that moment, everything is more or less perfect.
And then it falls apart.
And my grandkids and my kids bring me a great deal of joy. My partner certainly brings me a great deal of joy. I’m a fairly simple guy in the end. And ah, so those things keep me going. And right now it’s my four-year-old granddaughter, who is a non-stop talker. I mean, this kid does not shut up. She’s found language. And she’s found the world. And she can’t wait to share those insights with you.
Amanda Gauthier:
Oh, wonderful.
One of the values that we have been trying to live here at Indigo is speaking to the idea of living with intention. What does that mean to you: living with intention?
Thomas King:
Well, living intention, for me just simply means doing my work. Doing what I think is valuable. I seldom do anything that I think is worthless. Although interviews…
Amanda Gauthier:
(laughs) Oh, no!
Thomas King:
… interviews tend to come close.
Amanda Gauthier:
(laughing)
Thomas King:
But I like to spend my time … For instance, this morning I was out with my movie camera doing some shots for a film that I’m working on. And so, it’s just—it’s small stuff. I just go out and I shoot, and I come home and I feel as though I’ve accomplished something because it’s what I wanted to do, what I think is going to be important in the end. And so I try to do that all the time. And then I have a nap. Or a couple of naps.
Amanda Gauthier:
(laughs) Thank you, so much, for your time today, Mr. King. I really enjoyed our conversation. I hope we get to do this again.
Thomas King:
Pleasure. Thank you. (singing) Oh, thanks for the memories, ya-do-do-do-do-do.
[music]
Heather Reisman:
Thank you for tuning in to our conversation with Thomas King. For more ideas to help you live well, including the book featured in this episode, Sufferance, visit indigo.ca/podcast. If you enjoyed this episode, please leave us a rating on Apple Podcasts, but you can follow us wherever you listen to your podcasts.
Well Said was produced for Indigo Inc. by Vocal Fry Studios and is hosted by me, Heather Reisman. A special thank you today to Amanda Gauthier for guest hosting today’s conversation.
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