The Party Scene, A Special Education

It's odd, I'll admit. I was never a big fan of the Smashing Pumpkins when they first came out. More neutral than anything else. However, one night back in 1997 I came home from a late night working in the parking lot and this video was on. I immediately sat down and wrote "Labellypock", my first short story in a long, long time. It wasn't meant to describe what happens in the video, it's just there was a lot of overlap between what I saw, and what I had experienced with my friends in junior high and high school. Set in pre-boom Calgary, with most of the city still mired in recession, "Labellypock" was about a kind of fin-de-siecle party featuring the "naked and the bored". It ended up winning me a small writing contest in university.

Fourteen years later, this video is still as evocative for me. The excerpt from A Special Education that I posted awhile back, which features it's own take on my early nineties party scene, once again leaned on the Smashing Pumpkins to help unlock those memories and experiences.

The Long Road Back, A Special Education

In my younger days, I made the 12 hour drive from Calgary to Vancouver to watch bands play many times, often in considerably less time. Usually I stayed with family and visited for a few days, but one time we drove in to see Radiohead and stayed out at the Jericho Beach hostel, hoping to avoid all family since our turnaround time was pretty quick.

The idea for the trip that Isabel, Jack and company actually take came from a former student of mine. The first high school I taught at did take the senior physics class on an overnight trip to West Edmonton Mall, and one of the girls in my homeroom went skiing instead.

Since the kids happen to run into the mysterious Mr. Sinclair at the Pixies concert they've traveled to see, here's a song I imagine he would have enjoyed the most:



This particular song doesn't actually feature in A Special Education at all:



But it did encourage me to watch this movie, which did lead to a tellingly moment as the kids make their way back to Calgary.

On the Lam, A Special Education

There's a moment in A Special Education where the kids have run away to go see a rock concert. The morning of the show Isabel and her friend are standing on the beach and she whispers a secret to him that was inspired by this song.

Isabel's Theme

The early 1990s saw a surprisingly large increase in violent crimes perpetrated by girls.This is part of Isabel's milieu.

Despite the numerous fights she gets into herself, the guitar part in this particular song always seemed to me to be the sound of Isabel laughing.



You can hear and buy more from Superchunk here.

Local songs, A Special Education

(I believe you can download all of this stuff from the Calgary Cassette Preservation Society in one form or another.)

With music playing such a pivotal role in my writing process, it should be no surprise that A Special Education is awash in it. In fact, one of the very first interviews has a character reference his fear of getting beaten up by punks on his way to and from school, a fear that many kids on my block had, largely because of the influence of bands like Beyond Possession.

I love this gritty video of them performing in the neighbourhood of Pembroke, not far from where I (and Isabel) grew up. It's also just north of where Jack and Isabel's classmate Chris was from, a place called Forest Lawn, the same community I saw my first concert in the park, featuring three of Calgary's pre-eminent bands of the early 1990s, Wagbeard, Field Day, and Primrods. It's a similar version of this concert (except at the more genteel location of Prince's Island Park) that Jack, Isabel, and Chris first meet each other, although they don't really know it. 

Here's an imaginary set list for that concert:

Piece of trivia: Isabel's math class on her first day of high school is drawn almost entirely from my own, with one little exception. Whereas the character of Chris arrives wearing a D.E.D. Souls t-shirt (from which Wagbeard emerged but not until a few years after A Special Education begins so that reference might change), I believe my friend on whom I based Chris in this scene (and who later went on to develop guidance systems for missiles, or so I'm told) wore an AC/DC "Raising Hell" t-shirt on the first day, and a D.O.A. shirt on the second. The D.E.D. Souls came third.

Bonus: A Special Education ends with a line stolen from a split Wagbeard/Primrods 10" from this era.

(Again, I believe you can download all of this stuff from the Calgary Cassette Preservation Society in one form or another.)

Songs for Isabel Walker

I'm not sure who came first, Isabel or Jack, but it's Isabel who ends up dominating much of A Special Education. Since a lot of the book is based on my own experiences growing up in NE Calgary, as Isabel does, there's been quite a bit of interest in the inspiration for this rough-and-tumble girl in the St. Jude's honour class. One of the earliest scenes I wrote featuring her takes place on the last day of school at her junior high. We see Isabel throwing a temper tantrum in her room, for no particular reason, and then shaving off her hair. She knows she's the only one from her school going to St. Jude and really wants to feel like she's leaving everyone else behind with a new future in front of her.

The inspiration for this scene came from my memories of watching Sinead O'Connor perform and the Grammies, right around the time A Special Education takes place. O'Connor's character in "The Emperor's New Clothes" is also trying to navigate a whole new lifestyle and set of expectations, coupled with a fair amount of underlying and unresolved anger. This is very much like Isabel, who enters high school with much promise and hope. As the my writing progressed, I switched this scene with Jack, primarily because the tension Isabel feels between her old neighbourhood and her new one, the conflicting advice she receives from different authority figures as to how to make good on her potential, all became important themes that run throughout A Special Education.

Feist

I think it's no secret to anyone that I listen to a lot of music. I believe I've even shared that Stars' album "In Our Bedroom After The War" was a significant influence on the story of Jack and Isabel, my two main characters for A Special Education and its planned sequels. In fact, most of the ideas that came to me while listening to that particular album are actually for the last book and it took me a whole year to figure out how to begin the first one.

But begin I did and I thought over the holidays I would share some of the music that helped me along the way. Generally speaking, particular songs help to unlock specific scenes; the music creates mental sequences that I try to capture on paper. Letting my imagination drift away was one of the things I used to love about seeing live music.

However, the writing is usually after the fact. I hear the song and then write the scene. Usually with the song on repeat again and again. Today though, I wanted to share something that was a happy coincidence.  One of the themes of this particular set of novels is the relationship between my two main teen characters, Jack and Isabel. in A Special Education it looks, for all intents and purposes, like a love story. As things play out over the next two novels, we find that's not necessarily the case, and it surprised me to hear this new Feist song, as it appears to predict where I wanted to go with them.