While going over a couple of scripts that have perked-up in recent days with interest from outside parties, I came to an odd conclusion. Maybe not so odd really. It had everything to do with landscape and geography that was showing-up time and time again in my writing. Now let me preface this by pointing out, it is not just my last two screenplays, but also the stories I’m working on for my book (and the visual components that will inhabit and hopefully compliment it). What am I talking about? Well, it’s the region of my formative years. My childhood to be exact. I was born in Climax, Saskatchewan and later my parents moved to Tompkins to work (later Regina). Tompkins was the town where I made my first friendships, tried to runaway from home by catching the next train through town and where I promptly fell through the ice on a fine spring day. It’s where I made my first friendships with Calvin and Percy (Percy died years later in a car accident near the same town). On weekends, my mother would take us to my Grandmother’s farm, where we’d visit. However, the farm and my Grandmother’s husband – Bill – is where I felt free. Free to use my imagination. Free to learn to drive just about every vehicle you could think of, and free to learn what a hard days work was when I was there during the summer. I also learned an awful lot about life and death.

 

Screen_shot_2011-02-06_at_12

 

The farm is not far from Cabri and just north of a town called Shackleton (now a ghost town). To the west were Leader and the Sandhills. To the North you had to drive the water truck to get H2O for the cistern. I traveled that road often with Bill, tagging along for the ride mostly. It was always a fun trip with more than a few perils that resembled Wages of Fear, except without the nitro in the back. If you take a look at the quick screenshot, you’ll notice the road seems to end at Cabri. Well, there’s road there, just not much of one if you value your vehicles axils or tires. From what I understand, the natural gas companies- who are pulling everything they can from the ground to keep all of us in the cities warm - are repairing the road (along with the taxpayer) so travel is less arduous.

 

Bills_water_truck

 

Anyway, back on topic. What I’m trying to convey here, is how a region can seep into your stories. When your write, be it a book, script, music – what have you – where you came from invariably finds its way into the work. Creators who are able to tap into their environment, their cultural roots, are generally those who actually turn the work itself into a kind of character. Something with a ‘voice’. The land. The people. The weather. I believe, no matter your genre, projects that have some truth about where they come from and do not stink of research from afar, resonate. To me this feels more like a truth. Good and bad, the Southwestern part of Saskatchewan has influenced the way I write and see things. Most of us - especially those of us in cultural industries in Canada – really don’t recognize the gold mine when we’re in it. We stand there with our shovel, looking about to others for an answer, and though the walls glow brightly with strains of gold, we squint our eyes against the light, reach down and pick-up someone else’s coal instead of gold.

 

Now, there is another environment. The one in your head. The one that’s full of your life’s experiences, your passions and all those things that get you out of bed in the morning to create. Getting in touch with my internal environment, letting the delights and the disappointments of life seep into my new work – not only personalizes it – it has been a rich source. I don’t necessarily have to tell the truth – after all as creators of fiction – we’re all lairs. It’s telling the truth as you see it. Cut open the emotional apple and find the core, not the skin. It’s not the event, its how you feel about the event. If you can get there, you can interject these feelings into the work. This way you’re writing a lie, but you’re telling a greater truth.

 

What I’m suggesting here is environment as teacher. The one you physically live in and the one inside your hectic little bean. While the farm and this area of the country taught me things like driving, how to fire a shotgun without blowing your shoulder off, a hard days work and the delights of the Hell Drivers – it also taught me to fill the landscape with my own stories. And that landscape has always been there no matter where I live. It will always be in my bones.

 

Horns_and_swather

 

PS. These are a few photos I snapped the last time I made out to the farm for a visit, including that old water truck.

 

Cheers,

Trev