Fawcett, Brian 1944-

PERSONAL:

Born May 13, 1944, in Prince George, British Columbia, Canada; son of Hartley and Rita Fawcett; married second wife, Leanna Crouch (a television producer); children: (first marriage) Jesse, Maxim; (second marriage) one daughter. Education: Simon Fraser University, B.A., 1969. Hobbies and other interests: Gardening, baseball.

ADDRESSES:

Home—Toronto, Ontario, Canada. E-mail—[email protected].

CAREER:

Writer, editor, educator, columnist, and journalist. Has worked as a community organizer for Greater Vancouver Regional District; teacher in maximum security prisons and at York University, Toronto, Ontario. Former professional hockey player. Former publisher of literary magazines, Iron and NMFG (No Money from the Government).

MEMBER:

Writers' Union of Canada.

AWARDS, HONORS:

Woodrow Wilson fellowship, Simon Fraser University, 1969-70; Pearson Writer's Trust Nonfiction Prize, 2004, for Virtual Clearcut.

WRITINGS:

POETRY

Friends, New Star Books, 1971. Five Books of a North Manual, Beaver Cosmos, 1973.

The Opening, New Star Books, 1974.

Permanent Relationships, Coach House Press (Toronto, Ontario, Canada), 1975.

Creatures of State, Talonbooks (Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada), 1977.

Tristram's Book, Capilano Review, 1981.

Aggressive Transport: Two Narrative Revisions, Talonbooks (Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada), 1982.

FICTION

My Career with the Leafs, and Other Stories, Talonbooks (Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada), 1982.

Capital Tales, Talonbooks (Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada), 1984.

The Secret Journals of Alexander MacKenzie, Talonbooks (Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada), 1985.

Cambodia: A Book for People Who Find Television Too Slow, Talonbooks (Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada), 1986, Grove Press (New York, NY), 1988.

Public Eye: An Investigation into the Disappearance of the World, Grove Weidenfeld (New York, NY), 1990.

Gender Wars: A Novel and Some Conversations about Sex and Gender, Somerville House (Toronto, Ontario, Canada), 1994.

NONFICTION

Unusual Circumstances, Interesting Times: And Other Impolite Interventions (essay collection), New Star (Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada), 1991.

The Compact Garden: Discovering the Pleasures of Planting, Camden House, 1992.

The Disbeliever's Dictionary, Somerville House (Toronto, Ontario, Canada), 1997.

Virtual Clearcut, or, The Way Things Are in My Hometown, Thomas Allen Publishers (Toronto, Ontario, Canada), 2003.

Local Matters: A Defence of Donney's Cafe and Other Non-Globalized Places, People, and Ideas, New Star Books (Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada), 2003.

Contributor to numerous periodicals in Canada. Editor, dooneyscafe.com (a news Web site); former editor, Books in Canada. Former columnist, Globe and Mail (Toronto, Ontario, Canada).

SIDELIGHTS:

Brian Fawcett's literary output has been influenced by his youth in British Columbia, Canada, and his ongoing concern with the corrosive effects of globalization on local culture, regional literature, and national character. From his early poetry to his more recent nonfiction works, Fawcett has confronted such significant issues as intimate relationships, politics, gender wars, corporate homogenization, genocide—through the prism of experimental writing. "Whether measured by sustained output or the prestige of his international publishers … Fawcett has attained most of the conventional markers of literary success," observed Stan Persky in Books in Canada. Fawcett, Persky continued, "is one of the country's writers to whom serious attention must be accorded if we're to regard our literary institutional apparatus as other than mickey mouse." Quill & Quire correspondent Alan Twigg called Fawcett "a Resistance Writer. Part essayist and part humorist, he uses his frontier beginnings and his sophisticated knowledge of economics … to reveal that the quality of life in the western Canadian hinterlands is declining."

Fawcett was born and raised in Prince George, British Columbia, and his first job was with the family business, delivering bottled soft drinks and ice cream. Under pressure from larger corporations, his family sold the business in the mid-1960s and Fawcett entered Simon Fraser University, where he became part of Vancouver's literary community. He graduated in 1969 and won a prestigious Woodrow Wilson fellowship. While still in college, he founded the first of two small-press magazines, Iron. This was later followed by NMFG (No Money from the Government) in 1976. In the 1970s and early 1980s, he also published books of poetry, including Friends, Permanent Relationships, and Creatures of State.

Working as a community organizer for the Greater Vancouver Regional District, as well as teaching literature in a maximum-security prison, further galvanized Fawcett to combine his literary work with social criticism. He began writing fiction and published a series of short-story collections, including My Career with the Leafs and Other Stories, Capital Tales, and The Secret Life of Alexander MacKenzie, all of which explore the shallow nature of modern life and the loss of innocence in an increasingly manipulative corporate culture. In a Canadian Forum review of Capital Tales, Judith Carson wrote: "Fawcett is an excellent storyteller, painting a vivid picture of chilling psychological shades and intellectual textures." In a Quill & Quire piece on The Secret Life of Alexander MacKenzie, John Greenwood concluded that Fawcett, "whether by irony or abuse, wants to shake people up, and he succeeds with humour and a strong story-telling ability."

Fawcett's longer fiction is marked by its experimental qualities: pages split between narrative and commentary, sometimes in different colored type, running footnotes, and other postmodernist innovations. Notable among these metafictions is his 1986 title Cambodia: A Book for People Who Find Television Too Slow, in which Fawcett styles himself "a hostile in the Global Village" and uses the atrocities in the Congo, Cambodia, and Vietnam to reflect upon the ravages wreaked by humankind in general and Western culture in particular. Queen's Quarterly reviewer Peter Stevens described Cambodia as "a political polemic about the ways in which mass communication hides reality from us, replaces our history with empty gestures, divorces us from knowing actuality. The book puts us in the presence of a strong voice, convincing in the authoritative way it propounds its views not with jargon but with personal, social, and literary example." Maggie Helwig in the Canadian Forum declared the work "urgent, blunt, difficult—and vitally necessary…. This is a book that has the potential to make us stop. To make us think. To make our heads hurt and our stomachs ache."

Public Eye: An Investigation into the Disappearance of the World and Gender Wars: A Novel and Some Conversations about Sex and Gender continue Fawcett's exploration of literary limits by combining "fiction, social inquiry, and philosophical discourse," to quote a Kirkus Reviews critic. In each book, the top section of the page presents stories and vignettes, while the bottom section of the page deconstructs and comments upon the action above. Charles Bowden in the Los Angeles Times Book Review maintained that in Public Eye, Fawcett "presents the paranoid vision of the modernist temperament." In Gender Wars, the top half of the page explores the less-than-ideal life of Ferris, who through sexual encounters and other interaction gradually realizes that he is not a suitable companion for women. Fawcett's observations of his character's failings appear in red ink on the bottom half of the page. In his Books in Canada review of the work, Joel Yanofsky felt that Gender Wars "never really works as a novel, [but] Fawcett's alternately insightful and outrageous opinions generally make for fascinating reading."

Fawcett is also known in Canada for his online and newspaper journalism. He has worked as a columnist for the Toronto Globe and Mail and maintains his own news-and-commentary Web site, dooneyscafe.com. In 2003 he published Virtual Clearcut, or, The Way Things Are in My Hometown, a study of Prince George and the changes wrought upon it from the 1960s through the turn of the twenty-first century, most notably the 530 square-miles of clear-cut some forty miles southeast of the city—the only area of deforestation large enough to be seen from outer space. The book details several visits Fawcett made to Prince George between 1990 and 2001 and his fears for the individual and collective health of its citizens beneath the pressures of economic globalization. A BC Bookworld reviewer noted that Fawcett's book not only addresses larger themes of globalization and economic realities but also stands as a "meandering memoir in which Fawcett makes a prodigal return to speak and rub shoulders with the locals." Canadian Literature reviewer Rob Budde commented that Virtual Clearcut is "honest and uncontrived. Primarily a story about returning home, the book has the double duty of portraying the home town and portraying the outsider (a part-time Torontonian, no less) looking at Prince George from a critical distance. It would be easy to criticize Fawcett for home-town tourism, but Fawcett does well to position himself, lay bare his affiliations, and document the problems of returning."

Budde further noted that "one of the dominant tensions in the book is Fawcett's assessment of environmental damage and recovery in a town deeply divided over issues of environmental ‘management’." On the one hand, environmentalists and conservationists make urgent calls for maintaining Prince George's primary forest products. On the other hand, local industry urges continued development and the rewards of economic growth and prosperity. In between these two extremes are the residents of Prince George, most of whom are involved in the timber industry. During his earlier trips to Prince George in the 1990s, Fawcett was astonished at the devastation wrought by clearcutting. By the time of his subsequent visits in 2001, a more hopeful note had been sounded: reforestation programs were showing success, and the attitude of the Prince George area had become more optimistic. According to Susan G. Cole in a NowToronto.com review, the prose in Virtual Clearcut "is jaw-droppingly good…. No one can describe the traumatized BC landscape like Fawcett." Canadian Geographic contributor Tom Hawthorn called Fawcett a "literate, incisive, arrogant and provocative guide to the city that bills itself as the Western White Spruce Capital of the World." Andrew Kett in Quill & Quire commended the author for crafting "interesting characters out of friends and locals, avoiding both condescension and sentimentality." Kett declared Fawcett's descriptions of modern-day Prince George as "striking and astute."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

Books in Canada, June-July, 1983, Brian L. Flack, review of My Career with the Leafs, and Other Stories, pp. 17-18; June-July, 1986, Michelle Heinemann, "The Price of Progress," p. 18; summer, 1992, A. Marie Pfohl, review of The Compact Garden: Discovering the Pleasures of Planting, p. 35; September, 1992, Stan Persky, "A Curious Neglect," p. 19; summer, 1994, Joel Yanofsky, "A Guide to the Perplexed," pp. 33-34.

Canadian Forum, August, 1985, Judith Carson, review of Capital Tales, pp. 33-34; August-September, 1987, Maggie Helwig, "Moving Pictures," pp. 39- 41.

Canadian Geographic, July-August, 2003, Tom Hawthorn, "PeeGee's Forestry Fallout," review of Virtual Clearcut, or, The Way Things Are in My Hometown, p. 90.

Canadian Literature, winter, 2005, Rob Budde, review of Virtual Clearcut, p. 132.

Essays on Canadian Writing, summer, 1986, John Harris, "Brian Fawcett: The Routes of Imagination," pp. 41-69.

Kirkus Reviews, July 1, 1988, review of Cambodia: A Book for People Who Find Television Too Slow, p. 949; February 1, 1990, review of Public Eye: An Investigation into the Disappearance of the World, p. 154.

Los Angeles Times Book Review, May 20, 1990, Charles Bowden, "At Armageddon's Length," p. 12.

Maclean's, July 25, 1994, Mark Czarnecki, review of Gender Wars: A Novel and Some Conversations about Sex and Gender, p. 56.

Queen's Quarterly, autumn, 1988, Peter Stevens, review of Cambodia, pp. 568-579.

Quill & Quire, July, 1983, Catherine Russell, review of My Career with the Leafs, and Other Stories, p. 56; April, 1985, Jamie Conklin, review of Capital Tales, p. 72; February, 1986, Alan Twigg, "Brian Fawcett: Satiric Protests of the Global Village," p. 36; April, 1986, John Greenwood, review of The Secret Journal of Alexander MacKenzie, p. 37; March, 1990, Michael Coren, "Fawcett's Split-Screen Fiction Smashes Conventions," p. 62; May, 1992, Curtis Driedger, review of The Compact Garden, p. 28; March, 2003, Andrew Kett, review of Virtual Clearcut, p. 47.

ONLINE

Dooneyscafe,http://www.dooneyscafe.com (December 10, 2006), author's home page.

BC Bookworld,http://www.abcbookworld.com/ (summer, 2003), "Prince George: Love It, Leave It," review of Virtual Clearcut; (December 20, 2006), interview with Brian Fawcett.

Canadian Poets Online, http://www.ucalgary.ca/UofC/faculties/HUM/ENGL/canada/ (December 20, 2006), biography of Brian Fawcett.

NowToronto,http://www.nowtoronto.com/ (April 16, 2003), Susana G. Cole, "Life of Brian," review of Virtual Clearcut.

Ten Page News, http://members.aol.com/vlorbik/tenpage/tpn.html (December, 1997), Reed N. Wright, review of Gender Wars.