Skip to content
Account Login Winnipeg Toll-Free: 1-800-561-1833 SK Toll-Free: 1-877-506-7456 Contact & Locations

An Interview with Craig Russell

Sunday, May 02, 2010 at 2:58pm

$14.95

Craig Russell grew up on what may be the flattest half-section of land on the planet, six miles north of Carman, and is now a lawyer living in Brandon. After celebrating the launch of his novel, Black Bottle Man, he was kind enough to answer a few questions for our website.

CG: When and why did you decide you wanted to be a writer?

CR: A dozen years ago I had the time to study acting. That led to directing community theatre.

Live theatre is a great training ground for a writer's ear, teaching you to recognize effective dialogue.

Good acting demands that you live utterly in the moment. That sense of being in the now is one of the attractions, but also one of the most poignant aspects of the performance arts. Theatre is ephemeral. When a play is over, it's gone forever.

So, to find a balance to that recurring loss, about five years ago I turned my hand to writing.

While working on Black Bottle Man I've tried to apply what I've learned from theatre -- trusting the intelligence of your audience, getting into scenes late and out early, and understanding that all characters are motivated by love.

I believe that theatre has made me a better writer.

CG: Black Bottle Man first appeared as the radio-play "Rembrandt" in Brandon, Manitoba. Was it difficult to transition the work into a novel? How did the actors' performances of your work colour the revision from play to novel?

CR: Black Bottle Man has had two lives.

First, it was a novel. Then, during a vacation at Clear Lake it struck me that by attributing specific lines to the various characters it could make an interesting a radio play.

Lisa Vasconcelos, producer of Mecca Productions gave me the green light. After a few weeks of rehearsal, the eighteen local actors who participated in the staged reading of 'Rembrandt' gave us three excellent performances.

The opportunity to hear the interplay between actors and to watch and listen to the audience response was invaluable. Nothing was added as a result of the radio-play work, but it helped me cut anything superfluous.

Great Plains editor, Anita Daher has remarked on how clean the manuscript was, and I would credit the radio-play process with paring away any narrative fat.

After the Brandon performances, 'Rembrandt' was considered by the Manitoba Theatre Center. But (and I think quite rightly) they felt it was too long for a stage production, and was still very much grounded in the novel format.

One should try to listen to that kind of advice, so I said, "Right, it is a novel."

I applied the same cuts to the book and sent it out to publishers, tighter and stronger from the experience.

CG: You were a participant in the CMU writing course, what was the most valuable advice you received during your instruction there?

CR: In 2009 I had the great privilege of spending a week with Governor General's award and Giller prize author, David Bergen at the Canadian Mennonite University School of Writing.

I'll answer in two parts:

A) The best general rule David gives his students is: Cut adverbs.

Take a sentence like this: Sam was equally furious and privately believed that the clerk was slightly jealous of the magistrate.

Now kill the adverbs. (In my example, the words ending in "ly".)

Now do the same with your whole book.

B) David picked a sentence fragment from my manuscript - "when the moon was not at her post to see the things that Aunt Annie (and Aunt Emma) had done" -- and asked me to write a chapter exploring what happened to Rembrandt that night.

The result was chapter four of Black Bottle Man, and I learned that authors sometimes hide scenes from themselves. (Thanks David!)

CG: It's interesting to see the contrast between the character Gail's homelessness and the more romanticized tramp's lifestyle led by Rembrandt and Rembrandt's father and uncle. What is it about the Depression era and the hobo/tramp lifestyle that appealed to you in writing Black Bottle Man?

CR: During the Great Depression the difference between people forced to take to the road and those who were able to hang on to hearth and home was as slim as a dime.

But the men who were hobos before the 1930s -- during the good times of the Roaring Twenties -- would have been a different kettle of fish. They chose to wander. Makes you wonder why.

My parents were born in 1918 and faced the Great Depression as teenagers.

My father's parents had been quite well off, with plenty of land and a nice house in town. But the collapse ruined them, and Dad had to leave school to work after grade eight.

Through the 1930s and after, my folks saw their share of grasshoppers, drought and hard times.

But through unending work, and despite having to feed and clothe ten children, they managed to hang on the farm and keep us all together.

Mum sewed our clothes and did her own baking. We had a few dairy cows for milk, grew a huge garden that supplied us with summer vegetables and winter canning, and raised chickens, pigs and beef cattle.

Dad did custom combining for other farmers and ran a beef ring - a slaughter house for the local farm families. Without freezers and refrigerators to keep meat fresh, on a rotating basis each family would supply a heifer or a hog, and the meat was divided among the ring members.

I ask you, how could people give up all that fun, to bum along the railroad?

CG: What was the most intriguing piece of traveling man lore you came across in your research?

CR: I of course love the secret language of the hobo signs.

But as anyone who has done research for a novel knows, there are always fascinating things you learn that just never find a place in the story.

For me, it's the "hobo nickel". Do a quick internet search and see what I mean.

Despite having so few possessions, still the creative spark burned in those men. With simple tools and a coin, they made art.

CG: I loved the way you grew Rembrandt's "skin signs" from hobo way markers like "Good Fishin'" or "Police Here" to a very personal form of magic, using it to increase his own strength or stamina. Which of the symbols do you wish you could draw and have take effect?

CR: How about - a good woman lives here?

There aren't many problems that having a good woman around can't solve.

They're all around us, of course. It doesn't take a magic sign to find them.

A man just has to open his eyes.

CG: When Rembrandt's pa made the book's fateful pact, he managed to wheedle an extra 30 days of life beyond Rembrandt's allotted "four score and ten" from the Devil. What is the hardest bargain you've ever driven?

CR: The hardest bargains are the internal ones.

Like -- What must I do before I can forgive myself for the wrongs I've done to others?

I'm still working on that one. Wish me luck.

CG: Even with all the adventures and magic your story contains, at its heart Black Bottle Man seems a story of family, and the choices that bind them together or can tear them apart. How has your own family inspired you?

CR: I think readers connect with the mutual respect that exists between many of the characters in Black Bottle Man.

The understanding I have of that feeling, I?d have to attribute to my family.

It's a rare group of siblings, spouses, in-laws and children, that get along as well as we do. (Thanks Mum!)

CG: Can you tell our readers something about what you're working on next?

CR: My current project, entitled -- Fragment -- is a fast-paced, near-future SF novel. It's quite different from Black Bottle Man, but I think people will like it.

At age nineteen I lived and worked at the Mould Bay, NWT weather station in the Canadian high Arctic, and parts of Fragment draw on that experience.

Categories: Interview, SciFi & Fantasy

More articles from teens, books

See:

Black Bottle Man

- Craig Russell

Trade paperback $14.95
Reader Reward Price: $13.46



Forced to move every twelve days, what would happen to your life? 1927. Rembrandt is the only child in the tiny community of Three Farms. Soon his two aunts grow desperate for babies of their own. A man wearing a black top-coat and a glad-ta-meet-ya smile arrives with a magic bottle and a deadly deal is made. Determined to undo the wager, Rembrandt, Pa, and Uncle Thompson embark on the journey of their lives, for if they stay in one place for more than twelve days terrible things happen. But where and when will they find a champion capable of defeating the Black Bottle Man? Time ticks. Lives change. Every twelve days. . .