The Thread is Victoria Hislop's third novel. Like her first novel, The Island, The Thread is set in Greece. Beginning with the great fire fo Thessaloniki, which burned 9,500 houses, The Thread tells the story of this city in northern Greece through the romance of Katerina and Dimitri. Anchoring the novel to the present is their grandson, who must decide if he will continue their legacy of keeping the histories of Thessaloniki or leave the island behind.

Victoria says she finds inspiration by "visiting unfamiliar foreign cities, sitting in cafés and wondering what goes on in the lives of the people there." We're very pleased to have this wonderufl guest blog about how her visit to a dress shop in Thessaloniki gave birth to the character of Katerina.

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Thessaloniki is more than a backdrop to The Thread.  For me it is one of the most important characters in the novel, one that plays a main role in the story, suffering and surviving the various events and catastrophes thrown at it, just as Katerina, Dimitri and many others.

I made my first trip there five years ago.  For several decades, I had been island hopping, stayed in Athens a dozen times, travelled round the Peloponnese, and been more times than I can count to Crete.  Until then, however, I had never been to the north of Greece.

As the plane made its final descent, I looked out of the window and saw acres of flat, agricultural land, organised, sub-divided and dark with ripening crops, very unlike the pale, often infertile landscape further south.  I realised straightaway that in this cool, damp climate I would need an umbrella as much as I needed sun protection.   It was only a 20 minute journey from the airport to the city centre but I could see that I had arrived in a very different part of the country from those I had visited before.

Like most cities, Thessaloniki has sprawled in recent years but, unlike many, it has a discernible boundaries: the sea on one side and a steep slope on another.  I knew I could wander without getting lost but at least if I did lose my way, there would always be a glimpse of a sparkling bay to orient me.

On that first visit, both monuments and architecture began to tell me a story and to raise many questions too.  Thessaloniki seemed to have a little of every period and every style.  There are some magnificent 3rd century Roman remains including a massive triumphal arch on which are carved the achievements of the Emperor Galerius.  There is also a perfect rotunda, reminiscent of the Pantheon in Rome, and I learned that it had had many different chapters in its history: originally it was a polytheistic temple, then a church, afterwards a mosque and was then reconsecrated as a church once again in 1912.  A minaret still stands next to it as if to remind the passer by of its 300 years of use by Muslims.

There are plenty of quickly erected 1970’s, five or six-storey concrete blocks which are ubiquitously erected throughout all Greek cities, but in addition there are magnificent neo-classical mansions, with pillars and double-stairways leading to a grand front door, and many art deco buildings as well.  By contrast there are narrow cobbled streets with gabled houses in a Turkish style.

As well as the richness of different building styles and its friendly atmosphere, two things made a particularly big impression on that first visit.  The first was the Holocaust monument that I came across in one of the main squares.  It is a striking piece of sculpture and from a distance looks like a small tree, but as I approached I made out a series of slim bodies interwoven with each other, many upside down.  They seem to be both struggling and dancing.  It recorded the fact that the entire Jewish population of the city (50,000 people) had been rounded up and taken to concentration camps in Poland in 1943.  It was shocking.  There is no other word.  I knew for a fact that the Jewish population of Greece was almost non-existent.  And now I knew why.

The second was equally unexpected.  Right in the middle of the city, on one of the main streets, there is a large house, heavily fortified and guarded, with a sign in Turkish and English on the gate.  On my first visit, parked right outside, there was a dark blue, armoured bus, the kind usually used for transporting riot police. I discovered that it was the birthplace of Mustafa Kemal, a.k.a. Kemal Ataturk, the founder of modern Turkey, and with my British passport (which I had to leave with an official at the door), I was frisked and then allowed in to look around.

I was alone in the four storey mansion apart from the house’s custodian who followed me around in silence from room to room.  I tried out my Greek on him to break the ice, but the response I got suggested either that my Greek was even worse than I thought, or, as it turned out, he only spoke Turkish.  On the walls were displayed black and white photographs of Mustafa Kemal at every stage of his life.  In all the images a pair of pale, almost translucent eyes gazed out from a strong chiseled face.  He was handsome, charismatic but chilling, just like the house itself.

I found myself asking what was behind these unexpected discoveries:  A house in which local people seemed not to be allowed, but where I, a stranger, was welcomed.  And a monument to tens of thousands of Jews in a what is a relatively small city.

When I returned to the UK, I read Mark Mazower’s “Salonica: City of Ghosts” which is agreed by everyone, including the Greeks themselves, to be the best book ever written on Thessaloniki.  He gives a detailed history of the city between 1430 and 1950,  and explains how and why there are remnants of Muslim and Jewish culture in the city, even when there appear to be no Muslims or Jews now living there.

Mazower explains why the city’s Muslim population was obliged to leave in the early 1920’s.  It was the end result of a long struggle between the Greeks and the Turks, and the man whose eyes had chilled me from the walls of the grand but gloomy house on Pavlou Street had belonged to the person who had been pivotal in the destruction of the Greek army in the early 1920’s.  His first home, right in the middle of Greece’s second city, is venerated by the Turks, but certainly not by the Greeks.

Mazower also describes the fate of the Jewish population who at one time formed the majority of the city’s population.  Thessaloniki had been the home to a sizable Sephardic (meaning Spanish in Hebrew) Jewish community since the 15th century, when they first arrived from Spain.  The Sephardic Jews’ ghettoisation and subsequent departure for Poland in 1943 left a huge physical and cultural space in Thessaloniki’s population.

Thessaloniki has seen many dramatic events and I wondered how people might have survived them.  Out of this speculation grew the idea for the The Thread.  I made more interesting “discoveries” in Thessaloniki by ambling without a map.   The topography of the city means that you will never get hopelessly lost (just a little disoriented, and only occasionally).  The gradient of the land which takes you away from the sea tells you which way you are going and the relatively small scale of the city means that you can always find your way back to the centre.  Most of the maps of the city seem only to have the large streets and it wasn’t really the main streets that interested me.  I wanted to stroll around the lanes and alleyways where my characters might have lived, and the residential areas with the big green bins overflowing with rubbish, and stray cats.  I found those more exciting than the roads well-marked by tourist maps and these were the places where the ideas for the characters were formulated.

One of the significant things I noticed was the plethora of dress shops.  Narrow streets full of them.  And to complement them, many places selling ribbons, buttons, lace and other haberdashery.

As most women would, I browsed in a few of these shops and fell in love.  It was a midnight blue satin dress, short, with beading on a black ribbon beneath the bust.  I tried it on but it was to big.  A lady appeared with pins and quickly fitted it.  Another woman stood back to give her view and I noticed there were several other women getting the same attention from the staff.  How quickly would they be able to finish it, I asked, knowing I was flying home first thing the following day?  “Today,” they said.  They were true to their word.  The dress was finished later that afternoon.  When I tried it on again, it had been moulded round my body like haute couture, a fully lined, satin, beaded cocktail dress.   And all this for 80 euros.  I had experienced first hand the talent for tailoring for which Thessaloniki, I was to discover, has a reputation.  These chatty ladies with their tape measures and shears were mistresses of a craft and I realised that I had found the idea for my main character.  She was to be a seamstress, a modistra, a woman with enormous talent, someone who could take hold of her own destiny in a world where the fate of so many people was determined by the decisions of politicians and the random outcome of war.

I wrote The Thread to explore for myself the strength and courage that the inhabitants of Thessaloniki must have had to survive the events of the 20th century.  I hope I have done them justice.

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Victoria Hislop is a writer and journalist. She writes travel features for theSunday Telegraph, the Mail on Sunday and Woman & Home. Victoria lives in Kent with her husband, Ian Hislop, and their two children.

Thanks to our friends at HBG Canada for facilitating this blog and to Victoria for providing it.

It's 1984 and in the town of South Wakefield, 14-year-old Chris Lane is sure that he can see the future, or at least guess what’s inside of Christie Brinkley's mind. Unfortunately, he can’t foresee the closing of Joyland, the town's only video arcade. As the arcade fades from his life, Chris is forced to find a new source of entertainment, and ends up getting more than he bargained for  A summer of teenage lust and violence.

Set to the digital pulse of video games and the echoes of hair metal, Joyland is about the impossibility of knowing the future, about bringing the Cold War home. Illustrations by Eisner Award winner Nate Powell head up each chapter, and this new paperback edition includes an alternate ending and an author interview that provides new insights into this powerful piece of fiction.

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Q: To start, why write about vintage video games? Were they a jumping-off point for your story or a layer you added later on?

Emily: Joyland the novel began when I was twenty-six or twenty-seven years old, more than a decade ago now. I believe it started with the title — Joyland was the name of an arcade in my hometown, long closed — and I felt it would make a good title for something. I began to wonder what a book titled Joyland would be, and somehow became determined to write that book. At the time, I had written a short story collection, and it was on its way to being published, but I’d never attempted any kind of long-form work, so it was largely about the challenge. I wanted the story to mimic the movement and imagery of those games, and I felt that any coming of age story I might write would have to feature them because, as someone born in the ’70s, they were such a vital part of my childhood. I felt they should be a part of my generation’s literature as well.

Q: Joyland is set in 1984, a time when video games, like Chris and Tammy, are on the cusp of big changes. Why did you choose that period? Do you think the same story could have taken place today, when technology can’t be contained in gaming consoles and boarded-up arcades?

Emily: There’s the obvious ominous feeling of the year thanks to Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. The video game boom was really earlier, 1980–1982; stocks fell rapidly in ’83. If we think of those early ’80s years as a kind of heyday, then the natural disillusionment should come around ’84. I wanted the book to be about loss of innocence, so this fit for me. The style, values, and focus of the ’80s changed around that time too. When you look at decades and eras, that turnover year, not everything stops being something and starts being something else. A lot of the early ’80s were still like the ’70s; by the time the middle of a decade comes, that’s when we tend to stop and notice that things have changed.

I see this period as the beginning of the technology we know today in terms of ordinary people beginning to focus on the home computer. Schools were buying computers and making it a special part of our education, and people began talking about when we would all learn on computers all day long and go to school remotely. This seemed insane at the time! But even between the writing of this book and its re-release, technology has leaped ahead again. The internet, and our use of it, has grown in ways I couldn’t predict. Now, if I wanted to, I could find almost any TV clip from the ’80s online at YouTube, whereas when I was writing Joyland, I had only my memory and the memories of those around me, and the resources of magazine archives, video stores, and libraries. There were fan sites and databases, but only a handful. Wikipedia was just being launched in 2001 — the year I wrote the first draft of Joyland.

I don’t know if I can say what a coming of age story melded with today’s technology should look like. That may have to come from someone younger than me, someone growing up now, for whom these things are natural and taken for granted, rather than someone who is absolutely agog at how we communicate and how quickly things change.

Q: You’ve written two other novels since finishing Joyland: how did it feel to return to the world you’d created? Has your work since then made you see this first novel differently?

Emily: I still have a depth of feeling for this novel, complex good and bad feelings, like a first love. I don’t want to say I worked harder on it than Heaven Is Small or my new novel, The Blondes (which is still forthcoming), but I worked at it the way you can only work at a first novel: obsessively, in such a way that you and the novel are one and the same, and if it doesn’t succeed (or you don’t see it as succeeding) it will literally kill you. Now, my work comes from me, but there is much more of a distinction between how I see myself and what I produce.

Q: You also published a Trillium Award–nominated collection of poetry, Songs for the Dancing Chicken, in 2007. Does your work as a poet inform your fiction writing, or do you try to keep the two separate?

Emily: In this case, I was still very much developing as a poet and considering myself one, so I do think that Joyland is informed by that love of poetry. The poetic influence is there in glimpses in my other work, but I read much less poetry and aspire to it less than I used to. There was a time where you couldn’t catch me without a volume of poetry in my purse. Lately, I’m more likely to be dipping into short fiction than poetry — still an abbreviated form relying on symbolism, but with stronger narrative.

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Emily Schultz is a writer living in Toronto and New York. She is also the author of the novels Heaven Is Small and The Blondes, the short story collection Black Coffee Night, and the Trillium award–nominated collection of poems Songs for the Dancing Chicken.

Thanks to our friends at ECW Press for facilitating this blog, and to Emily Schultz herself.

When Hurricane Hazel tore through Toronto on October 15, 1954, it left its mark on both the city and its inhabitants. In the aftermath, a young cop named Ray Townes emerges as a hero numerous accounts detail the way he battled the raging Humber River to save those trapped in their homes and his story is featured prominently in the newspapers, thrusting him into the spotlight as a local celebrity.

Meanwhile, his wife Mary is wrestling with doubts about her husband's heroism. While performing her own miracles the night of the storm as a nurse at a mud-filled, overcrowded emergency room, Mary met a woman disoriented and near death with a disturbingly peculiar recollection of events. While Mary tries to shake her suspicions about Ray as they rebuild their life in the shell-shocked city, she can’t help but wonder about her husband and that fateful night. When a reporter comes knocking 50 years later to revisit that horrendous night, the truth begins to surface and threatens to destroy them.

Cleverly constructed with meticulous research, this work of historical fiction includes a new section filled with author interviews, new insights in the work, and bonus work from the author.

The Indigo Fiction Blog is pleased to present this guest piece from Mark Sinnett, author of The Carnivore, winner of the 2010 Toronto Book Award.

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I don’t suppose I’m very different from most other writers in that, at idle moments, moments when I should really be writing, or plotting, or fixing something in the house, I’ll laze around trying to imagine what sort of film my books would make. And in the case of The Carnivore, the short answer, of course, is that it would make a damn good one, and so I move on quickly to casting decisions and budget considerations. And then, inevitably, I work on the soundtrack.

I long ago decided that I wasn’t going to use much period music, not even for the scenes set in 1954. Mostly that’s because I just don’t know what the music scene was like then. I mean, I can look up the charts of the period and then populate the film with that music, but I’m not sure I want my characters to be that easily swayed by current fad and fashion. My house sure doesn’t pulse with Bieber and Gaga, so why should Ray and Mary have moved to “Mr. Sandman”? And I just don’t know whether Ray’s a Sinatra guy, or a Miles Davis fan. Would he and Mary, or he and Alice, have sung along with Rosemary Clooney? I think that if I tried to make these decisions, with my limited knowledge, I’d have been unfair and untrue to the characters. I would have been guessing, and also would have saddled them with too much mid-century baggage.

And so I decided to use music that I love, timeless music that means the world to me, and music that, if I were in Ray’s shoes, or Mary’s, I’d want in the background, salting down from the leaden clouds.

I hear Gillian Welch singing “Time (The Revelator)” over the titles. “I’m not what I’m supposed to be / But who could know if I’m a traitor?” At least that’s what I hear. And that about sums it up.

Bonnie “Prince” Billy will sing “Cold & Wet,” and he could do it just about anywhere, but I hear it as Ray drags his sorry self home after that long night of the storm, like a rat through the bedraggled streets. A nearly comic effect would be achieved, I think. And I do think there is a dark dark humour at work for long moments in this book. I seem to be the only one to think that, mind you.

And when Alice slips into the water and is carried away, it’s “The Drowning Man” by The Cure. Google those lyrics and you’ll see why. But it’s also about the heavy dark drift of the music, which is so purely evocative of the river the way I imagined it while writing those chapters.

Damien Jurado has a hundred sad and haunted songs that I hear coming out of the wooden cabinets in Alice’s seedy digs above the furniture shop. But if I’m going to pick one for the scene in which she and Ray cast off their clothes it would be “What Were the Chances,” from his And Now That I’m in Your Shadow album.

The great Toronto singer/songwriter Hayden has a great song called “Starting Over,” which is hushed and melancholy, ill and wan somehow, and yet also quite fierce, and full of longing. I see Ray wrapped in his blankets, gnawing on his dinner, or sipping at his booze, lifting a knee softly to this.

Nouvelle Vague cover the old Visage new-wave thriller, “Fade to Grey” in a cool way. And I think of this song whenever I think of Mary, newly pregnant and walking Yonge Street, or on a streetcar along Queen. I don’t know why, really, and I’ve edited this paragraph out three times now, but it’s a persistent association so finally I’m going to leave it alone. Mark Kozelek has written some truly miserable songs, and I’m fond of them all. His “All Mixed Up” (with Red House Painters) is a must in the aftermath of the storm. And works for Ray and for Mary, I think.

Jessica Lea Mayfield is very young but sings as if she’s borne witness to every one of the awful moments in the fifty years Ray and Mary endure in this book. “I’ll Be the One You Want Someday” should play over the credits, in my humble opinion.

And that’s about it for now. By the time they make the film (got to think positively) I’ll have a whole new list. But let me quickly just add this. For all the incidental music, for the general atmospherics, I chose the work of two composers. First, there’s Max Richter, a German-born U.K. artist. He writes mostly for the piano, but he also incorporates found sound and prose fragments, burbling fluid electronica and hissing (and somehow consoling) drifts of static. His latest, Infra, is one of the two perfect albums for this story. The second is by an Icelandic woman, Hildur Guðnadóttir, who mines some of the same ground as Richter, but works with a cello (among many other instruments) and creates much bleaker music, but also very beautiful. And it’s these wild drones of hers that would fill the film if Edward Burtynsky filmed the book and took the river as its main character, rather than Ray and Mary. Without Sinking is the name of the album that tears me apart.

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Mark Sinnett is the author of The Landing (Carleton University Press, 1997), poetry, winner of the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award; Bull (Insomniac Press, 1998), short stories; Some Late Adventure of the Feelings (ECW Press, 2000), poetry; and The Border Guards (Harper Collins, 2004), a novel/thriller, shortlisted for the Arthur Ellis award. He lives in Kingston, Ontario.

Special thanks to ECW press for facilitating this guest blog, & to Mark Sinnett himself for composing it.  
 

The Leap:  How to Survive and Thrive in the Sustainable Economy

The revolutionary follow-up to Chris Turner’s Governor General’s Literary Award and National Business Book Award nominee, The Geography of Hope.

The most vital project of the twenty-first century is a shift from our unsustainable way of life to a sustainable one--a great lateral leap from a track headed for economic and ecological disaster to one bound for renewed prosperity. In The Leap, Chris Turner presents a field guide to making that jump, drawing on recent breakthroughs in state-of-the-art renewable energy, cleantech and urban design. From the solar towers of sunny Spain to the bike paths and pedestrianized avenues of the world’s most livable city--Copenhagen, Denmark--to the nascent "green-collar" economies rejuvenating the former East Germany and the American Rust Belt, he paints a vivid portrait of a new, sustainable world order already up and running.

In his 2007 book, The Geography of Hope, Chris Turner wrote about an emerging world of clean-tech possibility. This led to a two-year stint as sustainability columnist for the Globe and Mail, during which many of the fringe developments covered in his book became vital. By the time those two years were up his reporting tracks were being retraced by mainstream outlets like the New York Times. In The Leap, he once again charts the world’s near-future course.  

 Here's Chris Turner himself, on his career, his inspiration, and his new book:  

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The great sidelong leap from unsustainable to sustainable living that I describe in The Leap feels somewhat autobiographical, even though I don’t talk about my own life much at all in the book. I never set out deliberately to cover the sustainability beat as a journalist, and I certainly never intended to become a professional optimist; instead, I took a leap of faith of my own seven years ago and landed there by accident.

My first book was Planet Simpson, a cultural history of The Simpsons – a book about a cartoon that was actually more like a recounting of everything wrong with modern society, which in its hilariously satirical way is what The Simpsons is. In that book’s wake, I knew I wanted to write next about climate change, which I believed then (and still do now) is the defining challenge of the twenty-first century.

I decided, though, that I didn’t want to talk about the problem, didn’t want to spend the next few years of my life telling tales of doom and decline. Without the leavening satire of Homer and Bart and Mr. Burns, I knew that would be a hopeless story.

I had no idea how to solve the climate crisis, but I set out anyway on a sort of dare to find solutions. I was convinced there had to be some, even if I didn’t know what they were or where they were. The result of that journey of discovery was my 2007 book, The Geography of Hope: A Tour of the World We Need. In the hazily defined sustainability movement whose emergence the book documents, I felt like I’d uncovered the richest vein of innovation, ingenuity and inspiration on the planet, and I knew I’d found not just the subject of a book but the central focus of my life’s work.  

I now feel like it’s my job to fix a critical eye on the world’s brightest beacons of hope and be professionally amazed by what’s possible. During the field research for The Geography of Hope, I couldn’t believe what I was seeing, how close at hand were the solutions to climate change and so many other of the world’s most intractable problems; during the field research for The Leap, I couldn’t believe we weren’t all pursuing those solutions post-haste. I started out amazed at everything people were doing and now I’m most amazed by how reluctant we are to follow their lead. I’m astonished, still, that 50 families in southern Germany live in homes that make more energy than they use – that 50 families in southern Germany live in green power plants – and that every other family on earth isn’t building a house like that of its own.

As I write this, the news is just breaking – and sinking in – that one of the foremost change agents of our time, Apple founder Steve Jobs, has died. I pick up my iPhone and scroll through heartfelt eulogies on the internet and I’m reminded that I hold in my hands a flat-out eye-popping miracle of human invention, a thing that simply wouldn’t be if Steve Jobs hadn’t willed it into existence.

Here’s something Jobs told the 2005 graduating class at Stanford:

“You can’t connect the dots looking forward. You can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something – your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever – because believing that the dots will connect down the road will give you the confidence to follow your heart, even when it leads you off the well-worn path. And that will make all the difference.”

He is describing the force of will that propels The Leap.

My main purpose in writing The Leap was to create a language for describing the transition to sustainability equal to its extraordinary transformative power. For too long, the conversation about this change has been dominated by talk of costs, challenges and uncertainties; we need to speak with greater volume and clarity about benefits, successes and boundless opportunities. The reality on the ground on the far side of a Leap is that it is a place best understood through the lens of Jobs’ risktaking verve. It’s the new frontier, wild and exciting, dynamic and inventive and overflowing with promise.

The best places in the world are the sustainable places – Copenhagen’s bike lanes, Germany’s solar-powered suburbs, Spain’s fast trains, Iowa’s community-scale windfarms, the handful of basements in my hometown of Calgary where next-generation furnaces heat the air and produce electricity as a sort of waste product. Let’s celebrate these successes – and then set about replicating them everywhere.

Let’s take The Leap. The only thing we have to lose is our fear of falling.

 

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For further reading:  previously featured in the Indigo Nonfiction Blog:  Tzeporah Berman on her book, This Crazy Time.  

Thanks to our friends at Random House Canada, and special thanks to Chris himself, for sharing this exclusive guest blog.