Writers come in all forms-take Saskatchewan-farm-boy-turned-novelist Lee Gowan, for instance. Now teaching writing at the U of T’s School of Continuing Studies, Gowan laughs a bit when he talks about growing up on a farm in the Prairies. As the eldest son, Gowan might have been expected to take over the family business, but the lure of a different life found him leaving the Saskatchewan landscape behind him. Gowan soon found himself with an M.F.A. in Creative Writing from the University of British Columbia, and a collection of short stories called Going to Cuba (1990) that met with some critical acclaim. In 1993, his screenplay for Paris or Somewhere landed him a Gemini Award nomination.
Despite his time spent in larger cities, Gowan’s small-town upbringing is hardly a distant memory. His stories feature a host of little Prairie towns and the sometimes-bizarre cast of characters that inhabit them, his work always seemingly aimed at dispelling the stereotypes that city-folk maintain. His first novel, Make Believe Love (2001), tracked an obsessive one-way relationship between a man from Toronto and a librarian from Swift Current.
At the time, Gowan’s publishers were pushing him in their New Faces of Fiction campaign (other alumni of the campaign, such as Ann-Marie Macdonald and David Macfarlane, went on to major critical and commercial success). With Make Believe Love, Gowan might have been up to something “new”-not new as in a plotline you’ve never seen, or new as in stylistically experimental, but the novel was “new” in the Frankenstein-esque way that it cobbled together a bunch of old ways of thinking while shedding a bit of light on the West as it is now.
Like most of his stories, the setting is classic Prairie fiction: long horizons, blue skies, bitter cold, and not enough summer rain for the farmers’ fields. The characters, however, are the same we find everywhere in fiction these days (though rarely in stories about the West). They actively psychoanalyze themselves, watch television game shows, and drink Coke. Gowan’s own fascination with the modern West’s incongruence with its mythical persona is there in spades.
“Those are the questions that I’m trying to ask,” he says during a recent interview at his publishers’ office in downtown Toronto, before he hastily adds: “I don’t know if I’m giving any answers.”
Gowan’s recently released sophomore effort, The Last Cowboy, follows the saga of Sam McMahon, a banker from the fictional town of Broken Head, Sask. who longs to escape to Toronto as his marriage and family fall apart. The book might be something like a study in contrasts (but probably not): Sam, the successful banker, visits head office in Toronto, and all the Easterners he meets call him “cowboy”. Back home, he sees himself as anything but. Transplant the character of Ai Lee, a Toronto-based film locations scout who serendipitously becomes entangled in Sam’s souring marriage and family life, to Sam’s Saskatchewan, and bingo, you’ve got instant East-West antagonism.
When asked if the novel therefore contains something like a thesis, Gowan speaks earnestly about his work, saying that he “wants to ask questions about why people [from outside Saskatchewan] misunderstand the West.” The idea for The Last Cowboy came from an experience he had while working on Paris or Somewhere. Gowan based the screenplay on John M. Synge’s classic play The Playboy of the Western World, but changed the setting to-where else?-Saskatchewan. When the producers caught wind of this, they decided to make the TV-movie a Western.
“Most people only know the West from movies,” Gowan notes. Some might say it’s lucky, then, that Gowan’s work as an author is all about clearing up the myths and misconceptions surrounding Canada’s East-West divide.
