Jim McEwan comes from the Ottawa Valley. And frig it shows. In the best of ways. He’s worked with his hands, he loves watching and playing hockey, he knows his community and the hardships of farming. All of his life experiences spill out in his debut novel Fearnoch—a brilliant piece of Canadian fiction that is worth the read.
“My only natural ability is my memory and it can be a curse. It’s never for anything useful, it’’s all little tales and details. I didn’t want to lose them and I thought if I got them down in words, it would make me feel safer about all these little bits,” explained Jim.
His life does topple over onto the pages of Fearnoch, the story of a Valley farming town and the different lives of those who live there, or left there.
“It is my way of giving homage and respect to tiny little beautiful things. There are thousand of big and small things, could be interesting words or your dad telling you his stories. It’s stuff you don’t want to get lost. So I put them all in a box in my mind,” said the author. “It’s joyful when you can write out some text your friend sent you that you see as beautiful language and include it in a book that gets published.”
Jim wanted to try writing in the third person with many characters so the narrations could go in and out of many different viewpoints between people who disagree all the time.
“Someone you disagree with so much but if you could be in their head, or see them in real life at say a hockey game, you wouldn’t hate them or want them dead. We’re all human, we are all imperfect and we are all trapped together in this shitty space in the Ottawa Valley that is going to get hit by a tornado, it’s not special but you can still make something beautiful there.”
Jim took inspiration from Northrop Frye’s four main types of stories: romance, comedy, tragedy and irony; and used them to develop his four main characters.
“They soon became their own characters and I wanted to show them bickering on the outside, and how they are so different on the outside but on the inside they are more similar than you think,” said Jim. “While I also got to get romantic about hockey and farms. At the end something happens, that is bad and it’s life or death and they can’t focus on their little minutia of disagreements. They have to see if they will get along as human beings.”
Jim recognizes the hardships of writing, while it can be joyous and a blessing, the weeds you have to plow through to get the piece you want can be isolating.
“It’s lonely. You are like a stenographer for the fun things that other people get to do. Then you see someone who is ripping through life. Doing the coolest things, going to a Shania Twain concert or going dancing and you’re just alone, writing about someone doing that. It can be awful.”
When writing or approaching any form of art, Jim suggests not taking yourself too seriously. You can go crazy if you do, and it’s something that writers sometimes just need to do.
“You’re probably not going to make a lot of money and if you think about it too much you can get lost. It’s hard to explain it in plain terms.”
Jim recognizes that he needs to relive a piece of his life or other people’s stories that made him feel human or proper and rehash them on paper.
“Very rarely do I just invent things and then if I do, I think it doesn’t come off as authentic. A character is never based on anyone I exclusively know, it might switch and might be how I behaved in specific circumstances. But for example Ebenezer’s crimes in the book, is where I had to take a real flight of fancy imagining because I had no firsthand knowledge of what that feels like.”
Fearnoch does provide some classic Valley themes, but it never sounds forced or cliche, but rather just right. It digs into the human experience and community that develops under duress, and specific circumstance and the idea that you can’t survive as a solo entity, while also recognizing that no matter where you go, your home has made up pieces of you.
“There are a lot of people who know way more about this area than I do and I hope it rings true for them and I wasn’t lazy.”
No one would call Jim’s writing lazy by any means, it’s whimsical and powerful, it’s sweeping emotion lingered with hardship and the sparks that make life worth living, even when you’re working at the dump every single day.
The words he chooses are intentional and moving and that’s really why he wanted to write down all the pieces he felt through his experiences.
“None of us really know what we are talking about, but here are some good things that, on my good days, I think are beautiful, and I hope you like them too.”
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