Fellow Travellers

In this together: FCC members (from left) Chris Tenove, Alisa Smith, James MacKinnon, Charles Montgomery, Brian Payton and Deborah Campbell.

When journalist Charles Montgomery won the Charles Taylor Prize for Literary Non-Fiction last February, he could have been forgiven a moment of immodesty. The Vancouver author had just nabbed $25,000 for his first book, The Last Heathen: Encounters with Ghosts and Ancestors in Melanesia (Douglas & McIntyre), a huge sum for a Canadian literary award, especially for a young freelance writer.

The book – an exploration of myth, faith, family history and anthropology – retraces the journey of his great-grandfather, a Victorian-era bishop, through the islands of the South Pacific. The Taylor jury called The Last Heathen “an irresistible adventure in discovery, a journey into rough terrain,” and nearly overnight, this longtime magazine writer was ushered into CanLit's more exclusive quarters, alongside former prize-winners such as Carol Shields and Wayne Johnston.

But on that February day at a plush, midtown Toronto hotel, Montgomery seemed more interested in placing himself, and his work, in a larger context. He spoke with pride of his affiliation with the “FCC,” a loosely connected circle of Vancouver writers devoted to the craft of narrative non-fiction. His remarks radiated a passion that felt somehow out of time. It was an old-fashioned proclamation that put reading and writing and ideas – rather than book deals and other extra-literary freight – at the heart of his profession.

“Somebody asked me last night, ‘Who are you reading these days that inspires you?'” Montgomery recently explained in an early-morning interview during the Vancouver International Writers & Readers Festival. “And I thought, ‘Well, look around the table: these people right here.'”

There was J.B. MacKinnon, whose new book, Dead Man in Paradise (Douglas & McIntyre), braids travel writing, political history and true crime to tell the story of his uncle, a Canadian priest, who was murdered in the Dominican Republic in 1965; Deborah Campbell, author of This Heated Place: Encounters in the Promised Land (Douglas & McIntyre), who had just

Courtesy Douglas & McIntyre.

spent most of the year in Iran; Chris Tenove, whose work on international justice took him to Sierra Leone and the Netherlands and led to an article in the October issue of The Walrus; Brian Payton, a novelist and non-fiction writer, who turned an award-winning magazine piece on grizzlies into an upcoming book, Shadow of the Bear: Travels in Vanishing Wilderness (Penguin); and Alisa Smith, a journalist and fiction writer, whose recent series, Hundred-Mile Diet (co-written with MacKinnon), for online magazine The Tyee, has been so popular that it, too, might soon become a book.

Together, these six Vancouver-based freelancers are quietly becoming recognized by the name they pinned on themselves more than two years ago: the FCC. Most of their interests involve international subjects. They're preoccupied with substance and style; fly-by-night fashions are anathema to them. And they're all in their 30s.

“There's something happening here,” Montgomery says. “I'm seeing it in other young non-fiction writers across Canada. We're doing something different; we all are. You look at those old guys, [Peter C.] Newman writing this gossip, concerned with power, and [Pierre] Berton who was all about these stodgy histories. I think we're more interested in stories that carry a sense of personal urgency.”

That they arrived on the scene with a name actually feels mildly anachronistic. Early on, the FCC moniker was a genuine attempt to get some geographical grounding — the False Creek Coalition first, then, the Foreign Correspondents' Club. They soon abandoned both, played with a few others, before ending up with a simple acronym that signifies nothing in particular.

Their original connection was largely through Vancouver's small magazine community, as editors and writers with Vancouver Magazine and Adbusters. MacKinnon and Smith have been partners for 13 years, while Payton was an old friend of Montgomery's from the University of Victoria. Conversations between MacKinnon and Montgomery began in early 2003, as an antidote to the loneliness of freelance life.

Author James (J.B.) MacKinnon. Photo Jason Payne.

“We were craving mentors and mentorship,” James (J.B.) MacKinnon says, pointing to the dearth of peers who could really push them in a direction that interested them.

So they began to meet. It wasn't a self-directed survey course, although they did have a reading list: George Orwell, Ryszard Kapuscinski (The Soccer War), Bruce Chatwin (In Patagonia). The point wasn't to workshop their own work, either. Or to whinge about the business. Often, they didn't agree on things. But they threw important questions into the open. How do you get closer to stories? What's the best way to approach interviews? How do you shape raw material into a narrative?

Individually, the members of the group speak of their work with such commitment, with such single-minded enthusiasm, you might assume they're the first to do it. They're not. The New Journalism alone – Tom Wolfe, George Plimpton, Hunter S. Thompson – goes back nearly 40 years. But creative non-fiction has bumped into a full-blown revival, thanks to people like Simon Winchester (The Professor and the Madman), Jon Krakauer (Into Thin Air) or Canadians like John Vaillant (The Golden Spruce) and Paul William Roberts (War Against Truth).

But the FCC represents something particularly powerful. Montgomery's award and MacKinnon's impressive new book put an emerging pattern into play. Their collective voice, no matter how disparate, crosses literature, reportage and cultural curiosity in a way that seems committed to finding its own place in the tradition.

“The group allows us to hash out these ideas and issues and to really develop in a little bubble of collegiality that we don't have in the cruel world of freelance journalism,” Chris Tenove observes. “We are trying to do something bigger in a literary sense, and in a sense to change the world, too. We're all quite committed to social issues. It is something we share.”

The Adbusters connection is part of that — its political point of view, perhaps, but maybe even more directly, its environmental concerns; many of the FCC have contributed to Explore and Canadian Geographic and Smith and MacKinnon's Hundred-Mile Diet comes with the following tag: “In the interest of preserving the environment . . . [the authors] have vowed to eat nothing originating more than 100 miles from their plates.”

Courtesy Douglas & McIntyre.

And there's another strand, too. MacKinnon's Dead Man in Paradise shows there's real heft to their conversations about craft. The book contains a remarkable layering of voices, points of view and pure intrigue: it's equal parts Ian Rankin, Jan Morris and Joan Didion. And much like The Last Heathen, the source is a family story he'd had in his head since he was a child.

“The thing that actually made me do it was George Bush,” he says, beginning to laugh, in reference to recent American foreign policy. “All of a sudden I was seeing these resonances between the world political situation in 1965 and the political situation right now.” The unsolved murder of his uncle, Father Arthur MacKinnon, a member of the Scarboro mission in the Dominican Republic, was part of a swirling series of events during the U.S. occupation of that Caribbean country. His death, many believed, had been a plotted assassination; to some Father Art was a martyr, maybe even a saint.

Dead Man in Paradise is a virtuoso performance and, from a distance, it seems to redouble the group's emerging identity. Apart from Smith, whose own interests are more B.C.-based, it also reasserts their view outward. Being based in Vancouver, according to Deborah Campbell, is in many ways the source of this restlessness.

“It's a jumping-off place,” she admits. “I think perhaps if we were located somewhere like Toronto or New York, we would be in a big enough metropolis to occupy ourselves all the time. But we're not.”

So here, in a kind of splendid isolation, these six writers have developed something close and supportive, and yet unusually open.

“We want to make things happen in the literary world and in the real world,” Tenove observes. “I think history has shown that groups that bind themselves together often do a better job of that than just a few people who meet randomly from time to time. So we've tried to make it a bit more official. In a way, we're asking ourselves to do more. We're saying, ‘We've made this group. We're public about it. Now we've got to actually live up to it.'”

Greg Buium is a Vancouver writer and editor.

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