Buying on Time
    by Antanas Sileika

Raised in Edmonton, Ian currently lives in Montreal. On a recent visit to Edmonton, Ian was able to spend an afternoon in the south side Sugar Bowl Café (where the book was actually written) sharing his thoughts on the book; it's creation, reactions, and future projects.

The idea of writing a book had always been in the back of his mind, but it was in the Sugar Bowl on October 27, 1996, the day after the end of the Yankee-Braves World Series, that the process actually began:

"Maybe it was having watched the baseball game the day before, but I thought of Roberto Clemente and how much it meant to me to get that card and especially with him dying a year after that (1972). I just thought I'd try to write in the voice of that kid who was trying to find that card. I decided to limit it to a day, and to limit it completely to that kid's voice."

Once he got started, Ian wrote the book straight through in a linear fashion without the agonizing rewrites that plague many an author's attempts.

"I tried to, as much as possible, recreate what that kid's thought process would have been in the course of a day. I didn't want to cheat on that by making some clever revision later on. It was almost like an experiment in linear prose. Although that sounds pretentious, I wanted to see how far I could take that single voice and concept."

Pretentious is the last thing you would call this book. Although it is obvious that the "kid", Neil, is based on the author and his life experiences, Ian is quick to point out that the book is a novel, not a memoir. Some characters are based on people from other periods in Ian's life. Daniela is based on a girl Ian knew in high school. The gym teacher, Mr. Newcombe, is based on an Australian teacher who taught some of Ian's older siblings. Every location mentioned in the book has an exact parallel in the real world.

"I wanted people, theoretically, to be able to walk around Glengarry with a copy of the book and say 'here's that corner', and they could. The neighborhood hasn't really changed at all. Some of the shops have different owners now, but most of the locations are exactly the same. There hasn't been any new construction or anything torn down in that neighborhood in the last 32 years."

For those unfamiliar, the Glengarry neighborhood is located in north central Edmonton, south of 137 Avenue and north of 132 Avenue, between 97 Street and 82 Street. Ian and his family moved there in 1962, from Hull, Quebec where Ian was born earlier that year.

"137th Avenue was basically where the city ended. There were farms on the other side of the street. As I was growing up they started building places like Dickensfield and Londonderry a bit further down. The makeup of the neighborhood was upper blue collar to lower-lower middle class. Most of the fathers were trades people with an occasional teacher or something. The mothers were mostly housewives, which I talk about in the book. It was the end of that era, where most mothers stayed at home. The few working mothers that I was aware of at that time were from some other different kind of family setup where either the father wasn't around for some mysterious reason or there was some kind of family turmoil going on, so the mother had to work."

"Edmonton was more isolated then, which is good and bad. Good in that people took more pride in their own little scene or culture and we didn't necessarily feel we had to ape the United States. This was pre-cable TV, so even though a lot of the programming on the channels we had was American, there was also a little hierarchy of local celebrities. The host of Popcorn Playhouse, at the time, was like a god to us."

"There was a sense of a city and a community being built by the people who lived in it. In the case of a place like Glengarry, the first residents literally built the neighborhood. A lot of it was co-op housing and the owners had built their homes. Everybody had moved in and got their start at the same time, so there was a real bond. It felt like you were almost settlers. You would look across the street and there would be farms. I don't know if you really get that anymore in these great big new subdivisions that go up."

With less outside media influences, the printed word played an important role in Ian's early years:

"There was a general feeling of a huge adventure to go to the library or when the bookmobile came to town. Getting our hands on some new books for my friends and I was the closest thing to traveling. We weren't of an income group that took off to some glamorous place every summer, so we got to know the world around us through books, National Geographics, that sort of thing. It was pre-multimedia age. Sure, we had TV and we all had a few records and the radio, but I think our number one entertainment source was still the printed word, including comic books."

Ian's favorite book that he associates with the library from this time period is "The Horse Who Played Center Field" by Hal Higdon. In Ian's book, Neil took it out of the school library, but in reality Ian borrowed it from the downtown library when he was eight.

"I remember thinking at the time it was the first sort of adult book, in that it was long, had no pictures, and the type was fairly small, that I read all the way through. It was about baseball, which I was fanatically into at that time, but it was also kind of a kid's book in that there was a horse on this baseball team, which is obviously not true. I think the book is long since out of print. One dream of mine is that the people who read my book might create a demand for that book to come back into print."

Ian has certainly found a demand for his own book. When he began the book it seemed only natural to set it in Edmonton. Some of the implications of this only became clear as he was finishing the book and getting it published.

"I literally couldn't think of another novel set in that period or level of society in Edmonton. I couldn't think of another single example. It's a great feeling of having filled that void. People have a basic need and desire to read stories set in places they at least recognize even if they can't literally, personally identify with them. We get conditioned to thinking that stories only happen in certain exciting places, or Cape Breton or something where everybody's poor and everything's picturesque. I just thought my upbringing is as full of enough interesting experiences as anybody else's. I'm just going to try and set it down the way it was, as close to it as I could recreate and have faith that people would be able to relate to it and it seems that they can. There's an overwhelming sense of gratitude from people who come up to me at signings, not only saying how much they liked the book, but really thanking me and getting very emotional in some cases that someone had put their experience down on paper."

Ian had basically completed the book while still living in Edmonton, just before moving to Montreal. The completed manuscript then sat in a drawer for a couple of years. Through a series of coincidences it ended up in the hands of a publisher (Porcupine's Quill) and they accepted it in the summer of 2000. The book wasn't actually published until the fall of 2002. In the meantime, during the winter of 2001, Ian showed the manuscript to another struggling (at the time) author who lived down the block, Yann Martel.

"I didn't really know him all that well, we had chatted a few times. I thought I had nothing to lose. I didn't think he'd even read it , let alone like it."

Yann obviously likes the book. On the back cover of Ian's book is a quote from the Booker prize winning author praising the book: "If J.D. Salinger or Mark Twain had lived in Edmonton, they might have written 'A Tourist's Guide To Glengarry'."

High praise indeed and there's a lesson for aspiring writers as Ian points out:

"Don't be shy. I've found writers to be a very supportive community. They're not bitchy or backbiting. They'll go out of their way to help, especially for aspiring writers."

Ian has already begun work on his next book. Without giving away too many details, as it's still very much a work in progress, the working title of the book is "The Anglophile".

"It's about a guy obsessed with British culture, more specifically British music. He lives vicariously through the records and the novels that he reads. It takes place over a thirty-year span, the sixties to the nineties. It takes place over three different continents and has different narrators. In terms of form it's as different from the first one as it could possibly be."

The book will continue to explore Ian's interest in pop music and the cultures around it. Ian was surprised that not many reviewers or interviewers mentioned the musical side of "Tourist's Guide."

"Music is so crucial to this book. To me, it's the single most important element. For every part of the book, there's a specific song that sets the tone."

Many people have commented on how easily the book could be made into a movie. There have been some 'tentative expressions of interest' from the movie industry but Ian can't go into any details at this point. When pressed as to who he could envision playing the role of the young Neil McDonald, Ian thought one of the younger members of the Culkin clan, Kieran Culkin, who recently appeared in " The Dangerous Lives of Altar Boys", definitely looked the part. A younger version of Jason Schwartzman, the lead role in "Rushmore", would be his ideal actor. That movie's director, Wes Anderson, would be Ian's choice for director.

"'Rushmore" and "The Royal Tenebaums" are masterpieces. The musical sensibility, the songs that he always chooses for his soundtracks are so perfectly in tune with what I do." (So Wes, if you're reading this, get in touch with Ian).

One final note, for the many fans of the first book, there could be a sequel down the road.

"Maybe for my third book, now that it seems there could be a demand. I feel like I created this kid and to never write about him again would be like abandoning him. I've had thoughts of maybe picking up his life at about age fourteen or fifteen, late junior high. It's not that much later in terms of actual time, but it's a really fundamental shift in the way you see the world. It would inevitably be a sadder and a less innocent kind of book. The kid has an innocent sensibility but he's going to be dealing with a lot more nasty stuff going on around him."

It may be awhile before this book appears, but if it's anything like "A Tourist's Guide To Glengarry", it will be well worth the wait.