Thursday 16 August 2012

Poetry, Prose, Song, and Censorship: An Awesome Evening at Words of the Season


Last night, I had the pleasure to read at the Writers’ Community of Durham Region’s “Words of the Season in Poetry, Prose, and Song,” at Trinity Irish Pub and Restaurant in Whitby, Ontario. Despite slow (and expensive) service, and a bit of censorship (according to our MC, the management are puritans), we had a great evening.



I read an excerpt from chapter two of Underground, “A Gentleman’s Education.”  I have to admit, I was a little worried about reading a dissection scene after the management’s request for “no more references to bodily functions.”  Despite the perhaps not-so-supper-friendly subject matter, the piece was very well received.  To read “A Gentleman’s Education,” and other chapters from Underground, visit www.cmgbooks.com/5.html.



Thanks to everyone who turned out to read and be read to, and thanks to the organizers of the event for putting together such an awesome night.


Thursday 9 August 2012

Public Reading

On Wednesday, August 15, I will be reading as part of the Writers’ Community of Durham Region’s “Words of the Season in Poetry, Prose, and Song.”  Beginning at 7 pm, at Trinity Irish Pub and Restaurant (75 Consumers Drive – the AMC centre) in Whitby, Ontario, the event will feature fifteen artists, each performing for five minutes.  

I’m still trying to decide what I’ll read, but I’m leaning toward an excerpt from chapter two of Underground, “A Gentleman’s Education.”  If anyone has any other suggestions or pieces they’d be interested in hearing, leave a comment or follow the links on my webpage, www.cmgbooks.com, to drop me a line.

Hope to see you there!

Monday 6 August 2012

Underground - Chapter Five Posted!

Chapter five of Underground, “Resurrectionists,” is now available at www.cmgbooks.com/5.html.  Have a read and pop back here to let me know what you think!

Acknowledgments

My gratitude to the staff of the Bracken Health Sciences Library of Queen’s University, for their help and patience in locating some interesting books.

Thanks to everyone who helped pick out a suitably seedy location for this chapter: Aaron, Erin, Jenn, Ron, and Steve.  In the end, it came down to two establishments: the Crown and Anchor and the Cushindall Inn.  I chose the Cushindall, since the Crown and Anchor sounded more like a soldiers’ haunt than a workman’s, and it was generally members of the working class who moonlighted as resurrectionists.

Finally, as always, my thanks to the folks at Effective Editing, for tidying up the final draft for me.

Some Notes on the Chapter

The Cushindall Inn was a tavern owned by Alexander McKillop, located on Johnson Street.  I found it in the Kingston directory of 1865; there was no directory for 1864.  I could find no photographs of the tavern, and the building in which it operated no longer stands, so the description of the inn is entirely fictional.

Resurrectionists or sack-‘em-up-men were workmen who, for a substantial fee, would rob fresh graves to provide bodies for medical students and physicians in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.  Although the Anatomy Act of 1841 was intended to curtail the need for grave robbing, reports of resurrectionists persisted in Canada as late as 1885, when an article in the Glob accused Queen’s medical students of making off with yet another body.

Resources

If you’re interested in the resurrectionists, or in nineteenth-century medical education, I highly recommend any or all of the following:

Ball, James Moores. The Sack-‘em-up-Men: An Account of the Rise and Fall of the Modern Resurrectionists. Edinburgh: Oliver and Boyd, 1928.

Bonner, Thomas Neville. Becoming a Physician. New York: Oxford University Press, 1995.

Frank, Julia Bess. “Body Snatching: A Grave Medical Problem.” Yale Journal of Biology and Medicine, 49:4, 1976, Available online at http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2595508/.


MacGillivray, Royce. “Body-Snatching in Ontario,” 1988, available online athttps://tspace.library.utoronto.ca/bitstream/1807/177619/2/body%20snatching%20Ontario%20CBMH.pdf.

Neatby, Hilda. The History of Queen’s University, Vol. 1. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1974.

Sappel, Michael. Traffic in Dead Bodies: Anatomy and Embodied Social Identity in Nineteenth-Century America. New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2002.
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Wednesday 1 August 2012

Underground On-Site Research: Problems, Solutions, and Thanks

One of the hardest parts of writing historical fiction is getting a sense of what things looked like.  Being blind, I either have to get permission to handle objects (which is sometimes possible), or I have to rely on others’ descriptions of them.  Not surprisingly, smaller objects in common use throughout history are relatively easy to describe or recreate from paper or modelling clay.  Historical architecture is harder to get right. 

Picture your favourite building.  Now imagine what you would think it looked like if you could only “see” as much of the structure as your hands could reach.  Try finding a detailed print description of the structure online—remember, photos aren’t accessible to people with vision impairments.  How would you describe the building to someone who couldn’t see? 

Jennifer, my good friend and fantastic research assistant, has gotten very good at helping me figure out what old buildings looked like, using everything from words to make-shift models constructed of paper napkins, cardboard boxes, and other random materials.

.  This weekend, Jenn and I visited Kingston, where Underground is set.  We explored the downtown area and the parts of Queen’s University that are relevant to Underground. 

It turns out that Sherwood’s mad dash to class in chapter two would have him entering through the front door—not the back door—of what was then the “New Medical Building” (constructed in 1858 to get the Faculty of Medicine and the “vapours” from their dissections out of Summer Hill, the main university building). This mistake has been fixed on the master copy of Underground and will appear in the final version on the website.  

For those who are interested, the New Medical Building was built behind Summer Hill so the university did not have to spend extra on ornamental architecture.  Now the “New Medical Building” forms part of the Medical Quadrangle.  Thanks to Jenn for helping me figure out what this area looked like in 1864!

The fruits of our downtown investigations will appear in chapter six, which is partially written, and which should be posted before I return to law school in September. 

Check back soon for the next instalment of Underground, or sign up for my free email notifications so you’ll know the very day the instalments are posted!