Author Information
James Sherrett has an English degree from the University of Manitoba. He has worked as a publisher (with Jesse James Press, a company he co-founded) and as an e-commerce and e-publishing director. In 1996 he won a Manitoba Literary Award as the Heaven Chapbook of the Year for Up in Ontario. That chapbook became the basis for his first novel, Up in Ontario. The story contained in the chapbook forms one of the middle chapters of the novel.
And in the first person:
I was born in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada, on an early fall day in 1975. I don't remember much about that day, but I do remember Carol Shields once told the story of her birth to our Canadian Lit class at the University of Manitoba. Of course, she heard the story second hand from her mother, but it didn't show much wear. Her mother, she said, recalled the day as if it had been yesterday. Carol came out, "just like a lump of butter."
I grew up in Winnipeg, in the suburbs, going to hockey practices early on frosty mornings and riding my bike to school as long as the weather remained warm enough. I was a tall kid with blonde hair and my mom seemed pleased by both these things. The best thing about playing soccer was wearing cleats, which let you turns sharp corners on the front lawn while you waited to get in the car to go to practice. I started playing hockey at the age of five and still play today. I try to wear #3. I played football and rugby and the aforementioned soccer with some competence. I realize now that my parents enrolled me in sports to keep me busy and to dampen my energy, and I'm okay with that.
Academically I slid through school with middling marks, occasional breakthroughs and consistent remarks from teachers that I would do much better if I applied myself. I liked English class because we got to argue for our opinions. I cheated a couple of times on tests and essays and one time I got caught. Now I look back on my schemes with embarassment at how easy they would have been to figure out. It took me many years to develop a taste for some of the things I love today: eggs, onions, broccolli, mushrooms, tomatoes, stinky cheeses. Maybe I just had something against the chef's salad or fergasa bread.
I moved to Vancouver five years ago to follow a girl who wanted to go to grad school. I like Vancouver fine. At times I feel claustrophobic but I am regularly awestruck by this mirage of a city, a city where there should not be one. I think about Winnipeg often and still call it home. Three or four or five times a year I return and go to our cabin at Lake of the Woods or celebrate a family event. As I keep hearing from those who live there or those who've moved back there or those who think about moving back there, Winnipeg is a great city to have kids in. I will confess to some real estate envy every time I look at house prices in Winnipeg.
Since you've read this far, I'll tell you a secret. It's not something sinister or sensational; it's something closer to home and more insidious because I suspect you do it too: I cop out of things. I hate to commit to things, and if I have committed to something, I hate having to change. I qualify statements that could bind me with phrases like, "in the foreseeable future" and "from my experience." I don't cop out all the time, just sometimes. You see?
And let me tell you, copping out has been good to me. It's only a small degree of turn from copping out to writing realism. The Duck once told me about a phrase that a professor of hers used in a lecture, and I've hung onto the phrase as apt of saying what I think I mean: rhetorical glissade. For how do any of us draw the line between fiction and non-fiction, fancy and fact? Tell me what you think. What is it you believe to be true?
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