Gail Anderson-Dargatz

Gail Anderson-Dargatz (* 1963 in Salmon Arm , British Columbia , Canada ) is a Canadian writer who writes novels and short stories and was awarded the Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize in 1997 .

Life

Gail Kathryn Anderson was born in Salmon, Arm, British Columbia in 1963, the youngest of five sisters, and studied creative writing at the University of Victoria . In her teens, she realized that her father, Eric Anderson, a sheep farmer, was not her biological father, which her mother confirmed. The parents divorced in 1981, though Eric Anderson never treated them differently from his other daughters. Her mother Irene Anderson was a writer and at the age of 18 Gail Anderson announced that she wanted to become the new Margaret Laurence , a writer who would above all describe rural life for women. In her early twenties, she worked as a reporter, photographer and cartoonist for the local newspaper, the Salmon Arm Observer , but continued to submit articles to writing competitions. One of her competition entries caught the attention of the judging writer Jack Hodgins , who encouraged her to attend the aforementioned course with him, where she subsequently took her Bachelor of Arts . At the university she met her future husband Floyd, who studied anthropology there . They got married in 1991, after which she started writing and he gave her financial support by working on a cattle ranch.

Her real literary career began when an early draft of the later novel The Cure for Death by Lightning won the CBC / Radio Canada competition. When literary agent Denise Bukowski from Toronto contacted her, she had a short story collection ready: The Miss Hereford Stories . The 1960s-set stories featuring eccentric characters set in the fictional town of Likely, Alberta , were nominated for the Stephen Leacock Medal for Humor. Publication guides saw their course towards first publication as a prime example of the traditional path.

Her first novel, The Cure for Death by Lightning (1996), was an experimental but accessible work that tied relatively loosely connected storylines with a collection of her own mother's recipes and household tips. It was one of the best-sellers in Canada that year that brought the author's name to life. The novel was shortlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize and was nominated as a debut for the Books in Canada First Novel Award . After all, it won the BC Book Prizes belonging Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize .

When the writer reflected the situation of her parents in her novel A Recipe for Bees and gave her parents the manuscripts to read before they were published, the two of them approached each other again in conversations and secretly remarried in 1998, merely informing their daughters by fax.

In A Rhinestone Button she processed the brain operation of her husband Floyd from 1994 as the starting point of her story about the Christian fundamentalist cattle farmer Job Sunstrum, who suffers from the rare neurological disease, synesthesia , which means that he perceives noises as colors. Since his teenage years, her husband had visions that eventually turned out to be a brain tumor after a grand mal , but at the age of 20 had moved him to go to Africa as a missionary for the Baptists . The tumor was successfully removed, but it took a long period of convalescence during which it was struggling with impaired consciousness.

Her penultimate novel, Turtle Valley (2007), is set by Salmon Arm during a forest fire and tells the story of Kat who has to take care of her elderly parents, her young child and a sick husband at the same time. The novel was inspired by the Salmon Arm Fire , in which the author had to evacuate her own parents . According to the author, the main focus of the novel is on the unadorned portrait of a caring personality and their family relationships, as well as those objects on which memories are manifested: “To give an unflinching portrait of the caregiver, how very hard it is on the caregiver and on all family relationships. "

In an interview, she was asked if she was afraid of writer's block . She replied that she could not believe it because there was another personal problem behind it, the solution of which had to be taken care of, or one should simply do better research. However, she thinks it is more difficult for Canadian authors to have commercially viable success, since one can only speculate on a potential market of 30 million inhabitants. An independent comparison by a literary scholar came to the conclusion that Anderson-Dargatz, along with Andrew Pyper , Kerri Sakamoto and Frances Itani, are among those modern Canadian authors who, in contrast to Michael Ondaatje , do not really unite , despite a favorable reception by the press corresponding sales success in the United States because the changes in the post-colonial Canadian literary scene were not really registered and accepted by the US literary scholars.

In addition to Margaret Laurence, she feels committed to Alice Munro , Margaret Atwood and Carol Shields as literary role models.

Gail Anderson-Dargatz lived with her husband Floyd and their son on a farm on Vancouver Island for a few years . She now teaches creative writing at the University of British Columbia and commutes between Manitoulin Island and the Shuswap region, where most of her novels are set.

Her works have been translated into German, Danish, French, Dutch, Spanish, Swedish, Bulgarian, Greek and Japanese to this day.

She is currently working with her mentor Jack Hodgins on a joint novel, The Edge , about an accident at a fictional Canadian university.

reception

Helmut Walther's opinion of Von Blitzen, Tod and Buttercookies is as follows: “Gail Anderson-Dargatz has presented a piece of original literature that immediately draws you into the lives of her characters. This is not a text with an attempt at philosophical depth, but after reading the volume, one gets the impression of having learned more about the nature of man than if one had received a profound treatise. In its narrative density and poetic narrative style, the novel is a remarkable debut ”.

In English-speaking Gail Anderson-Dargatz is as representative of the "magic (al) realism" ( magic realism ) because it will incorporate in Canada anticipated various cultural trends in their dream worlds. The author herself relativizes this in most interviews and attributes this to the interweaving of Anglo-American sagas and myths with those of the First Nations . In The Cure for Death by Lightning , the figure of the Coyote plays the role of the frightening, shapeshifting trickster as part of Canadian Gothic , which is typical in Indian sagas . The novel itself is referred to as a classic descendant of the educational novel genre in Canada .

In addition to Eden Robinson , Gail Anderson-Dargatz is most likely to follow Margaret Atwood's Canadian tradition in describing the myths of the wilderness. In addition, according to the view of English literary scholarship, it is in the line of the Canadian sub-genre that has been commonly referred to as a regional idyll since Lucy Maud Montgomery's Anne of Green Gables (1908) , which also includes early 20th century authors such as Nellie McClung and Ralph Connor as well as the later writers Ernest Buckler , Milton Acorn , Alice Munro , Anderson-Dargatz and Alistair McLeod , for whom all small towns and rural communities are in focus.

plant

Short stories

• The Miss Hereford Stories . Douglas & McIntyre, Vancouver 1994, ISBN 1-55054-160-9

Novels

• The Cure for Death by Lightning . Alfred A. Knopf Canada, Toronto 1996, ISBN 0-385-72047-5 .
  • Of lightning, death and butter cookies . Translated into German by Fred Schmitz. Ullstein, Berlin 1997, ISBN 3-550-08230-4 .
• A recipe for bees . Harmony Books, New York 1998, ISBN 0-385-72048-3 .
  • Augusta . Translated from the English by Sabine Schwenk, Claassen, Munich 2001, ISBN 3-546-00243-1 .
• A rhinestone button . Alfred A. Knopf Canada, Toronto 2002, ISBN 0-676-97550-X / ISBN 0-676-97549-6 .
• Turtle Valley . Alfred A. Knopf Canada, Toronto 2007, ISBN 0-676-97886-X .
  • In the valley of the butterflies . Translated by Beate Brammertz, btb, Munich 2010. ISBN 978-3-442-73994-3
• The stalker . Grass Roots Press, Edmonton 2010, ISBN 978-1-926-58329-7

Awards and nominations

• 1992/93: CBC Radio's Literary Competition for short stories: for The Girl with the Bell Necklace
• 1995: nominated for the Leacock Medal for Humor
• 1996: nominated for the Scotiabank Giller Prize
• 1996: Nominated for the Books in Canada First Novel Award for her debut novel The Cure for Death by Lightning
• 1997: Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize for The Cure for Death by Lightning
• 1998: nominated for the Scotiabank Giller Prize for A Recipe for Bees

literature

• Diana Chlebek: Canada . In: Journal of Commonwealth Literature, 43, no. 4 (2008), pp. 31-61.
• Tanya Lewis: Regions in time: Gail Anderson-Dargatz's The cure for death by lightning and Ann-Marie Macdonald's Fall on your knees . Thesis paper, 2009. * .PDF - other source
• Abra Lynn Whidden: Feminist fallen women: rewriting interwar patriarchy in Margaret Atwood's The blind assassin, Ann-Marie MacDonald's Fall on your knees and Gail Anderson-Dargatz's A recipe for bees . Arcadia University 2004.
• Johanna Erichsen: A Haunted Family: Gail Anderson Dagartz's "Turtle Valley" as a Supernatural Mystery Thriller. Bachelor thesis , Institute for English / American Studies at the University of Jena

Web links

• Literature by and about Gail Anderson-Dargatz in the catalog of the German National Library
• http://www.gailanderson-dargatz.ca/cms/index.php/about-gail/8-biography
• Entry on British Columbian Writers
• Katy Wimhurst: Interview with Gail Anderson-Dargatz . In: Serendipity - www.magicalrealism.co.uk, 2009.
• Flash-based audio interview on www.livewriters, 2007 6:44 min
• Directory of literary legacy on www.collectionscanada.gc.ca with biography

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Archive link ( Memento of the original from July 23, 2012 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.  
2. ↑ Susan Driscoll et al. a .: Get Published !: Professionally, Affordably, Fast . Iuniverse Inc, Bloomington 2010, p. 45.
3. ↑ author portrait on ABCbookworld.com ., 2005
4. ↑ Alissa Quart: Gail Anderson-Dargatz: Writing in Canadian . In: Publishers Weekly . January 17, 2001. Retrieved February 25, 2012.
5. ↑ The homepage of the British self-help and information group on this disease also mentions Anderson-Dargatz 'book in its literature list: http://www.uksynaesthesia.com/furtherreading.htm .
6. ↑ Interview with Gail-Anderson-Dargatz . Januarymagazine.com - February 2003. Retrieved February 25, 2012.
7. ↑ Canadian Living: Life: Community: Interview with author Gail Anderson-Dargatz ( Memento of the original from May 16, 2008 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link has been inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.  
8. ↑ Gail Anderson-Dargatz: Stranger than fiction  ( page no longer available , search in web archives )  Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. . In: The Globe and Mail . August 31, 2009. Retrieved February 25, 2012.  
9. ↑ Gail Anderson-Dargatz Interview. October 14, 2007 . www.cbc.ca. Retrieved February 25, 2012.
10. ^ Nicholas Birns: Theory after theory. An intellectual history of literary theory from 1950 to the early twenty-first century . Broadview Press, Peterborough, Ontario / Buffalo, New York 2010, p. 252.
11. ↑ See Abra Lynn Whidden: Feminist Fallen Women: Rewriting Interwar Patriarchy in Margaret Atwood's "The Blind Assasin", Ann-Marie MacDonald's "Fall on Your Knees", and Gail Anderson-Dargatz '"A Recipe for Bees" . MA thesis. Acadia University 2004.
12. ↑ http://www.jackhodgins.ca/jackhodgins-bio.htm
13. ↑ Archive link ( Memento of the original from March 2, 2012 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.  
14. ↑ Archive link ( Memento of the original dated November 4, 2011 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.  
15. ↑ Berlin Reading Signs, edition 05/97
16. ↑ On the figure of the coyote as the embodiment of the trickster in the tradition of the Anglo-American novel, cf. Mark Shackleton: Whose Myth is it Anyway? Coyote in the Poetry of Gary Snyder and Simon J. Ortiz . In: William Blazek, Michael K. Glenday: American mythologies: essays on contemporary literature . Liverpool University Press, Liverpool 2005, p. 230.
17. ↑ Maggie Ann Bowers: Magic (al) realism . Routledge, New York 2004, p. 52.
18. ↑ Heath Slettedahl Macperherson: Her-story and the Feminist Fantastic in Gail Andersond-Dargatz 'The Cure for Death by Lightning . In: Robert Alexander Wardhaugh, Alison Calder (Eds.): History, literature, and the writing of the Canadian Prairies . University of Manitoba Press, Winnipeg 2005, pp. 87-100.
19. ↑ Linda M. Morra, Deanna Reder (Ed.): Troubling tricksters: revisioning critical conversations . Wilfrid Laurier University Press, Waterloo, Ontario 2010, p. 86ff.
20. ^ Marlene Goldman: Coyote's Children and the Canadian Gothic: Sheila Watson's The Double Hook and Gail Anderson-Dargatz 'The Cure for Death by Lightning . In: Cynthia Conchita Sugars, Gerry Turcotte: Unsettled remains: Canadian literature & the postcolonial gothic . Wilfrid Laurier University Press, Waterloo, Ontario 2009, p. 51.
21. ↑ Heath Slettedahl Macperherson: Her-story and the Feminist Fantastic in Gail Andersond-Dargatz 'The Cure for Death by Lightning . Rodopi, Amsterdam a. a. 2000, p. 88.
22. ↑ Heidi Slettedahl Macpherson: Women's movement: escape as transgression in North American feminist fiction . Rodopi, Amsterdam a. a. 2000, p. 102.
23. ↑ Ellen McWilliams: Margaret Atwood and the Female Bildungsroman . Ashgate Publishing, Farnham 2009, p. 141.
24. ↑ Eva-Marie Kröller: The Cambridge companion to Canadian literature . Cambridge University Press, Cambridge / New York 2004, p. 202.
25. ↑ Faye Hammill: Canadian literature . Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh 2007, p. 72.
26. ^ Juliet Fleming: The Cure for Death by Lightning . In: TLS, the Times literary supplement. no. 4895, (1997), p. 21.
27. ^ Katie Owen: A Recipe for Bees . In: TLS, the Times literary supplement. no.5002, (1999), p. 21.
28. ↑ Catherine Radimer: Review on ffwdwekly. August 29, 1998 ( Memento of the original of February 28, 2007 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was automatically inserted and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. .  
29. ↑ Today the award is one of the Canadian Literary Awards . See: William H. New: Encyclopedia of literature in Canada . University of Toronto Press, Toronto 2002, p. 62.