A Bit of Backstory

How does it come about that a person decides to leave a good-paying job with great benefits in Canada to move to South America to write a novel?

Looking back at how it came about, I am apt to say forces beyond my control. In the words of Elizabeth Gilbert, Big Magic. She writes:

When an idea thinks it has found someone – say, you – who might be able to bring it into the world, the idea will pay you a visit. It will try to get your attention. You might miss the signal because you are watching TV, or shopping, or brooding over how angry you are at somebody, or pondering your failures and mistakes. . .

But sometimes – rarely, but magnificently – there comes a day when you’re open and relaxed enough to actually receive something. Your defenses might slacken and your anxieties might ease, and then magic can slip through. The idea, sensing your openness, will start to do its work on you. . . The idea will organize coincidences and portents to tumble across your path. . . The idea will not leave you alone until it has your fullest attention.

(Elizabeth Gilbert, Big Magic: Creative Living Beyond Fear)

Circumstances in my life created the opening for Big Magic.

Having been about a decade ahead of the curve in realizing the dangers of climate change, I was the lead plaintiff in a Charter challenge to the constitutionality of the electoral system in the province of Quebec, and, by extension, in Canada, which clearly discriminates against small political parties like the Green Party, and consequently prevents people like me from having the ability to participate in the political process in a meaningful way. Given that extending the right of political representation to people who believe that stewardship of the planet trumps the desire for economic growth would inevitably dampen the desire for that growth, the Courts, while ruling that our case was justiciable, ruled against us, thus depriving us of the opportunity to mount a meaningful political response to the mainstream parties that are all in on supporting the fossil fuel economy.

I needed a plan B, but nothing came to mind that could replace the narrative appeal of being able to do battle in the political arena. So, I bided my time by working for the Canadian federal government as a speechwriter and communications advisor and by being a hockey dad.

But there was an idea floating in the air—in particular, an idea for a story looking for someone to take on the challenge—and it found me.

It all started the day the woman who owned and operated the coffee shop where I worked started talking to me in Spanish. It was like she was tempting me with the challenge of seeing if I could respond in her language. I took the bait. I started with a few basic lessons and soon could place my order and say thank you in Spanish.

What I didn’t anticipate was that I would really like learning to speak Spanish. Unlike English and French, it is a phonetic language with a one-to-one ratio between the sounds of the language and the alphabet and weird grammatical structures where you can omit the subject of the sentence entirely. I was hooked.

I started taking lessons online and searching for language exchange partners to practice my Spanish. I ended up with four conversation partners, including a woman who kept her camera off in a city I had never heard of—Guayaquil, Ecuador.

This went on for about eighteen months, during which a seemingly minor incident in my household led to an unimaginable escalation of its importance that led me to leave what had been a happy marriage. Not being one who likes to remain single, I started internet dating, but to no avail. I felt like I was bouncing from one job interview to another.

At the time, I also started to think that I would like to take an early retirement, and after doing some research, I learned that Ecuador was a popular destination for ex-pats. I thought I would check out several possible destinations and end my trip by visiting my language exchange partner in Ecuador. Little did I know that by the time my three-day visit ended, the seeds of a long-distance romance had been sown.

Over the next year, we spent time getting to know each other better, and we decided that if we were to become intimate, we would do well to get married first, seeing that my wife comes from a devout Catholic family.

So, there I was, a writer looking for a story traveling back and forth from Guayaquil and Canada, and that’s when the idea for the novel hit me over the head.

Having grown up in Winnipeg, I was well aware of the historical importance of the Winnipeg General Strike, an attempt to put pressure on the authorities to create a new social order centered on having all the workers become members of One Big Union. But the Royal North-West Mounted Police crushed the strike with billy clubs and bullets. On Bloody Sunday in 1919, the Police charged into a crowd of protesters, killing two of them and injuring many more. The strike leaders were arrested afterward, and the attempt to change the social order ended abruptly. The strike’s legacy was to give birth to a social democratic political party, but the manner in which Canadian society was organized remained unchanged.

I learned that there was also a general strike in Guayaquil in 1922, but the magnitude of the government response and the subsequent pushback were of a different order. On November 15 of that year, a large crowd of strikers gathered around the city jail, demanding that their comrades who were unjustly arrested be released. Operating under orders to use the necessary force to quell the disturbance, government soldiers began shooting at the crowd of men, women, and children. They pursued them through the streets of Guayaquil, killing approximately a thousand innocent people. A grave injustice had been administered, and a response was forthcoming. Two years later, there was a bloodless coup d’état, and the existing social order, Ecuador’s Cacao Republic, came crashing down, including its banking system, which had been under the control of the hacienda owners. A new social order emerged that concerned itself with the well-being of the nation’s citizens, who were predominantly mixed race, at the expense of the ruling class, who traced their lineage to the Spanish conquest.

Now, here was a story that needed to be told to a wider audience, especially since a hundred years had passed since the massacre. I wanted to be able to publish the novel to commemorate the one-hundredth anniversary, but the entire process of writing and editing the novel took longer than I thought. I don’t think the Lost Souls of Guayaquil mind as long as their story gets told.

Seeing that I was living in South America and had fallen under the spell of magic realism after reading Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Isabel Allende, I decided that I would try to make the style my own. What I hadn’t counted on was that I would have a catastrophic illness that left me in a coma for ten days. While in the coma, I experienced life in the Other World, which was as intense as the one waiting for me when I checked out of the hospital. Although I have never taken ayahuasca, research has shown that a near-death episode can bring about a similar experience. Inevitably, my retelling of this chapter in Ecuadorian history was colored by the lens of my time spent in the Other World.

In publishing the novel, I aim to commemorate the memory of the brave men and women who gave up their lives so that their families and their descendants could have better ones. At times, we erroneously believe that the die has been cast and that life unfolds according to what has already been determined. Fortunately, there are moments when people stand up and change the future. This is what happened in Guayaquil one hundred years ago, and we would do well to remember.