Photo: One of Canada's most beloved storytellers, Stuart McLean, will be in town on Sunday.
I struggle with time zones.
While I usually manage to take into account the one hour difference when setting up interviews in Saskatchewan, I was overly diligent when it came to scheduling my interview with Canadian author and radio host, Stuart McLean, who was penning his latest Dave and Morley yarns in Dublin, Ireland.
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“I just lost track of time,” said the profusely apologetic McLean, who admitted he was absorbed in his writing and away from the phone, when I was due to call for our phone interview.
Nonetheless, it all worked out despite the seven hour time-zone change. Following his Irish sojourn, McLean will hit the Trans Canada Highway touring the Prairie Provinces and Ontario this month, along with a few new stories he crafted while in Dublin.
“I just finished the first draft of one of those two new stories today,” he said over the phone from Dublin’s Fitzwilliam Hotel. “I am very pleased with the story right now, so I am feeling good about things.”
The Vinyl Cafe features McLean’s fictitious character Dave, father of Stephanie and Sam, married to his love, Morley and owner of a second hand record store where the motto is: “We May Not Be Big, But We’re Small.” The popular radio show has been garnering fans for years and now McLean is bringing the concert version of The Vinyl Cafe to the Vic Juba Theatre this weekend, with special musical guests, The Good Lovelies – whom the prolific author likens to the Andrew Sisters.
McLean said he’ll be sharing an “old favourite” Dave and Morley story, plus two new stories on Sunday, one in which Dave becomes intrigued with a neighbour’s racing bike.
“He gets a little bit ambitious in what he thinks he can do with the bicycle. In the other story, during March break he is given five of the neighbourhood dogs to look after for a week, including Mary Turlington’s little teacup Pomeranian. Things go horribly wrong,” chuckled McLean, who is one of Canada’s most beloved storytellers.
Inspiration for The Vinyl Cafe isn’t found in McLean’s everyday life, instead he said the characters truly have a life of their own.
“These are all moments that just arise from thinking about Dave’s life and understanding the sort of moments that he seems to involve himself with. They are all flights of fancy,” he said. “Every once in awhile there will be something that has some basis of fact, but mostly it evolves from my understanding of these characters and my knowledge of these people.
“I don’t know where it’s going, but I know that if I sit down and spend enough time at my work, then it will go somewhere and another chapter will be written. A family’s life never ends, a family keeps going.”
While many might assume that the author identifies most with the patriarch of the popular family, Dave, whose antics range from slapstick to earnest, McLean said he connects most with the little boy, Sam.
“The details of his life are not the details of my life you know,” he said. “But motivations and the struggle, the things that concern him and take up his attention are the same sort of things that take up my attention. I don’t think I have evolved much from my boyhood.”
Children under 10 to folks upwards of 90, flock to the bestselling author’s live shows, becoming “collaborators” with him. McLean is quick to point out that he can never experience his shows as an outsider, but acknowledges and even relishes the unique experience it offers him as a writer.
“It’s a gift for me to be there at that moment because most writers don’t get to be there at that moment. As a writer you have to intuit how your story is going, I get to be there at the moment, I get to sit with the reader and feel their response,” he said. “It’s an intimate experience, it’s like an intimate exchange between two people who are talking and you know they are connecting. It’s a lovely experience and I am a very lucky man.”
While McLean calls his stories farce, “dwelling in the real of improbability” he said a good story is one that fells true. And it’s through these intimate exchanges that he shares with his audience that he tries to bring them to the heart or truth of a story.
“What makes the story good is when it connects with you in some way,” said McLean, who modestly added he’s not saying his stories are good, though many of his readers would quickly disagree.
“(A good story) takes you close even though the details are not true, it takes you close to what E.B. (Elwyn Brooks) White called ‘the big hot fire that is truth.’ If you can get the reader close to that ‘big hot fire of truth’ so that they feel the heat of the fire, I think you’ve got a good story.”
There’s isn’t an established winning formula, but should a story elicit natural, spontaneous reactions, McLean says those are the best kinds to read.
“I like stories where you can’t trust your emotions. Where laughter folds into tears and you don’t know whether you are laughing or crying – you can’t trust yourself – it makes you unsteady as a reader and I think that allows you to be open to some of these feelings,” continued McLean, who is currently reading a Bob Dylan biography and Yates poetry.
How families and people of all ages connect to McLean’s vast collection of stories through his radio show and books is a feat the repeat winner of Canada’s Stephen Leacock Memorial Medal for Humour is humbly proud of. McLean however, doesn’t focus on his body of work or the legacy he might leave, instead his eye is on the next chapter.
“What preoccupies me is not what my work adds up to, what preoccupies me day by day is the work in front of me. Can I make this story better?” he explained.
“If what my stories add up to at the end, if it provided a vehicle for people to gather up around and come together around, given what a lot of other people’s work adds up to, I think I am okay with that.”