The Geography of Hope

Two things:

It's been a long time since I've really felt delight at a digital communications advance, but making this post from a high-speed train zipping steadily past the barren snow-dappled forests of eastern Ontario has me gee-whiz grinning. Kudos to Via for its on-board internet! (And for its complementary wine with lunch in Via 1 Class!)

Another thing that's got me gee-whiz grinning: I received word today that The Geography of Hope is officially a national bestseller. It makes its debut at No. 9 this week on the Maclean’s bestseller list. The hunch down Random House way was always that the book would be a slowburner, building by word of mouth and the tenacious touring of its tireless (and alliteratively inclined) author. And, four months on, there it is: A National Bestseller! That’ll look sharp on the cover of the trade paperback, which is out this August, and whose final edits I’m procrastinating typing up just now.

(UPDATE: Turns out, for reasons seeming to have to do with the way my blogging software talks to Via’s wireless network, that I couldn’t post this till I got to Kingston. While I remain a bit gee-whizzed, it’s symptomatic of the whole internet snap-your-fingers-and-the-novelty-is-essential thing that I’m also slightly irritated that this unprecedented level of on-board connectivity isn’t yet flawless . . .)

On a cold and eventually snowy night in Montreal, the TGOH Whistle Stop Extravaganza more or less packed the house at Concordia's lovely new York Amphitheatre. The highlight, at least for me, was hanging out with friends old and new afterward.

One of those was Taras Grescoe, who was kind enough to agree to introduce me at the York. I'd just finished Taras' excellent new book Bottomfeeder earlier in the afternoon, and it was great fun trading tales of global research trials & tribulations. Bottomfeeder is out in April, and I can't recommend it more highly (indeed it may feature a jacket blurb from yours truly). At the risk of sounding overly soundbitey, it does for the global seafood industry what Fast Food Nation did for the fast food biz. A word of warning: it'll ruin you for cheap shrimp, maybe forever.

Another guest in attendance was the ever-gracious Shannon Babcock (currently of Montreal's lovely Babar Books). Shannon got the ball rolling on this event, for which I'm much obliged, and I'm even more grateful that she offered to billet me for this stop on the tour at her cozy apartment in the intriguing St-Henri neighbourhood.

St-Henri is an old working-class district of old brick warehouses and townhouses with second-floor entries fed by those wicked-cool iron front staircases. Walking around the neighbourhood was a reminder yet again of how much better we were at building the urban landscape to human scale prior to the dawn of the automobile age. Even this neighbourhood - which was probably considered pretty hardscrabble and unattractive at the height of its industrial age - provides a genuine sense of enclosure and community, an unmistakable and unique vibe.

So now I'm sitting in a cafe on St-Laurent with a belly full of medium-fat from Schwartz's (the preferred sandwich of Mordecai Richler's ultimate Montrealer, Barney Panofsky), and I have to declare this an auspicious beginning. I said to my wife before departure that this was the closest I might ever come to that teenage dream of being in a band on tour, so it occurs to me I ought to go find a drink somewhere.

Salut, Montreal! Next stop: Kingston.

"Whistle Stop"? You bet. The February Geography of Hope Tour runs most of the length of Via Rail's Quebec-Windsor Corridor - the passenger train heartland of Canada - and my old colleagues at Via (where I worked as a summer intern in the PR department between my first and second years of journalism school) have agreed to sponsor all my travel. I'll be riding in relaxing, low-emissions style throughout.

Herewith, the intinerary:

February 12: Montreal

Where: York Amphitheatre Auditorium (ground floor)
Room EV 1.605 (opposite the FOFA Gallery)
EV Building, Concordia University
1515 St. Catherine Street West
When: 7:00-9:00pm
Admission: free
Hosts/Sponsors: University of Concordia Bookstore
More info: Concordia Author Events page

February 14: Kingston
Where:  Wilson Room at the Kingston Public Library
130 Johnson St.
When: 7:00-9:00pm
Admission: free
Hosts/Sponsors: A Novel Idea Book Store
More Info: 613.546.9799 (Novel Idea)

February 18: Toronto
Where: Gladstone Hotel Ballroom
1214 Queen St. West
When: 7:30-9:30pm (doors at 7pm; the room fills, so arrive early!)
Admission: free
Hosts/Sponsors: This Is Not A Reading Series (Pages Books), EYE Weekly, Gladstone Hotel
More Info: This Is Not A Reading Series website | Gladstone Hotel notice

February 19: Waterloo
Where: Princess Twin Cinema
46 King St. North
When: 7:00-9:00pm
Admission: $8
Hosts/Sponsors: Words Worth Books
More Info: Words Worth Winter-Spring Author Series website

February 20: Windsor
Where: Giovanni Caboto Club
2175 Parent Ave.
When: 7:00-9:00pm
Admission: free
Hosts/Sponsors: Scaledown.ca (Official Website Launch)
More Info: Scaledown.ca website

Couple of new articles on The Geography of Hope have emerged this week.

Here's an article in Edmonton's See Magazine.

And here's a great interview I did by email with Lee Schnaiberg for Green Living Online.

Keen-eyed readers of the book will recognize Lee as one of the names thanked in the acknowledgements. The proximate cause for that thanks was Lee's blog, Exuberant Pantaphobia, which I mined regularly for leads throughout my research. More broadly speaking, though, Lee's been on the climate beat since he was a filmmaker working on a documentary about climate change who used to crash on my couch when he passed through Toronto back in '97. No one knows the green world better than Lee, and no one's more generous with his knowledge and vast web of contacts. Some deep-pocketed organization should just bite the bullet and give him a permanent fellowship in sustainability research and innovation or something and be done with it.

What does that even mean? For the answer, click here and scroll down till you come to the two-panel comic strip that answers the question, "Where have all the cowboys gone?"

Anyway, details of the Montreal-to-Windsor Whistle Stop Extravaganza are now finalized, and I'll be posting them within 48 hours. Meantime, the Southern Alberta mini-tour is basically a wrap, and it was a rip-roarin' rootin-tootin' success, if I do say so myself.

Highlights, in chronological order, were as follows:

1) Banff Centre, Jan 24: Well, in addition to a couple comfortable nights hanging out with wife and daughter at one of the country's finest fine-art institutes (and surely its most scenic), I enjoyed a full house for my lecture and a couple of excellent buffet meals in collegial surroundings (one particularly memorable breakfast was spent yakking about Dawson City with the vivacious Lulu Keating of Red Snapper Films, and later I noticed Ron Sexsmith chowing down two tables over).

Greatest moment, though, was probably taking my girl ice skating on the pond behind the Banff Springs Hotel, which is as central to the iconography of Canada as, say, the London Bridge is to Britain's. And which reminded me again how much we've forgotten in this slapdash-modernist-box nation about erecting timeless buildings.

2) REAP Luncheon, Jan 25: Gotta be organizer Stephanie Jackman's humblingly laudatory review of my book, though the event itself was a lovely and energetic affair as well.

3) Step It Up Alberta Rally, Jan 26: Well, Sloane would tell you it was the proximity to Eau Claire Market's fantastic foodcourt jungle gym, but for me it was meeting the panel, which consisted of Alberta Liberal environment critic David Swann, Alberta NDP MLA David Eggen and Alberta Green Party leader George Read. If the province has half a brain, it'll elect more people like these after the writ drops (probably later this week, I'm told).

4) ReThink Red Deer, Jan 31: Humbling, exhilirating, inspiring - three words I never thought I'd use to describe a visit to Red Deer on a bitter-cold January night (-25C at best by the time I got there). The organizers optimistically set out maybe three dozen chairs in the library's basement auditorium. Something like 150 people showed up. Standing room only, the book table moved into the corridor to accomodate the crowd. I'm told half the city council was there, and the mayor came up afterward and presented me with one of his official Xmas '07 portraits - in which he's holding The Geography of Hope in his lap. I swear I thought I was being had. Thank you, Red Deer. I totally misunderestimated you.

5) Kairos Day, Feb 2: Humbled and exhilirated yet again. Always great to be among the  tireless, committed people who do the heavy lifting of social change. (Kairos is an umbrella social justice group uniting the activists from something like a dozen Christian denominations, from Quaker through Presbyterian to Catholic.) I won't pick a particular highlight, but I will say I'm eager to dig into the Very Rev. Bill Phipps' book, Cause for Hope, and if it's half as good as his oratory, you should buy yourself a copy ASAP.

So that was Alberta. Montreal, you're next. And after that, the world! (Or at least the T-Dot.)

Well, with the book sitting pretty at No. 2 on the Herald's local bestseller list, it's a good time to be embarking on a series of speaking engagements close to home. If you're in south central Alberta and interested in a narrated slideshow delineating the highlights of The Geography of Hope, here's the itinerary:

Thursday, January 24, 7:30pm:
Banff Mountain Culture Speakers' Series
Max Bell Auditorium, Banff Centre for the Arts, Banff, AB
Admission: $10

Friday, January 25, 12:15pm:
REAP Business Association Luncheon
Bow Valley Square Conference Centre, 205-5th Ave. SW, Calgary
Admission: free (RSVP req'd, contact Stephanie Jackman)

Saturday, January 26, 1pm:
Step It Up Alberta Rally
Eau Claire Market, Calgary
Admission: free (panel discussion; no slideshow)

Thursday, January 31, 7pm:
ReThink Red Deer lecture
Snell Gallery at the Red Deer Public Library, Red Deer
Admission: free

Saturday, February 2, 2pm:
Kairos Day (Canadian Ecumenical Justice Initiatives' Re-Energize 2008 workshop)
St. Anthony's Roman Catholic Church, 5340-4th St.SW, Calgary
Admission: $15 (covers entire day)

Tuesday, February 26, evening:
Second Annual ISEEESA Fundraising Gala
(University of Calgary's Institute for Sustainable Energy, Environment and Economy Students' Association)
MacEwan Ballroom, University of Calgary
Admission: contact ISEEESA (will include dinner in any case)

That covers Alberta for now. Watch this space for details of The Geography of Hope Montreal-Windsor Whistle-Stop Extravaganza, which will run from Feb 13 to Feb 20 and include stops in Montreal, Kingston, Toronto and Kitchener-Waterloo en route to the main event, hosted by the extraordinarily energetic folks at Scale Down, Windsor!

So a kind soul contacted me recently about putting up and expanding a Wikipedia entry on me. I was happy to oblige and sent him a few autobiographical paragraphs by email, but Wikipedia's rules apparently require that I publish that info here in order for it to be a proper source.

So here it is:

Chris Turner is the author of The Geography of Hope: A Tour of the
World We Need (Random House Canada, 2007) and the international
bestseller Planet Simpson: How a Cartoon Masterpiece Documented an Era
and Defined a Generation (Random House Canada, Da Capo Press [USA],
Ebury Press [UK & intl], 2004). He writes a monthly column on
sustainability for the Focus section of The Globe & Mail (Sept
2007-present).

Turner's feature writing has received four Canadian National Magazine
Awards and six honourable mentions. The four awards were all for
stories that appeared in the late, great Shift Magazine from 1999 to
2003; his Shift essay "Why Technology Is Failing Us (And How We Can
Fix It)," a call to arms for the green revolution, was awarded the
President's Medal for General Excellence at the 2001 National Magazine
Awards (the highest honour in Canadian magazine writing). The essay
was included in The Presence of Excellence, a 2002 anthology of the
best Canadian magazine writing of the previous 25 years, and formed
the nucleus for his 2007 book The Geography of Hope. His reporting on
pop culture, technology and the environment has also appeared in The
Independent (UK), The Times (UK), Time Magazine, Utne Reader, Canadian
Geographic, Azure, The Walrus, enRoute, Up!, Maisonneuve and Swerve
(the Calgary Herald's Friday supplement), among others. He has also
published a handful of short stories which very few people have read.

Turner was born in Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan, on 25 July 1973, and grew
up a military brat in the Canadian North, the American Midwest, and
the Schwarzwald of southwestern Germany. He holds a history degree
from Queen's University, Kingston (B.A., Hons., 1996), and a
journalism degree from Ryerson University, Toronto (Bachelor of
Applied Arts, 1998). He began his journalism career in Toronto with an
editorial internship at Shift Magazine while still a student at
Ryerson.

Turner launched his freelance writing career with his first Shift
feature, "Flipflops, a Desktop, & One Billion Reasons Never To Leave,"
about the internet gambling boom in Antigua; it ran in the May 1999
issue and was awarded a gold medal for "one-of-a-kind articles" at the
1999 National Magazine Awards. He has been a freelance writer ever
since. His cover essay "The Simpsons Generation" for Shift's 10th
Anniversary issue (Sept/Oct 2002) precipitated the publishing industry
interest that led to the writing of his first book, Planet Simpson.
(Turner still thinks "The Simpsonian Institution" would've been a
better title, but so it goes.) Turner lived for a year in the Indian
Himalaya and another year in the Canadian Rockies, and now resides in
Calgary, Alberta, with his wife, the photographer Ashley Bristowe, and
their daughter, Sloane.

And I didn't even have to accidentally leak a cellphone video of myself eating burgers splayed out drunk on the floor to make my first starring-role leap to Web 2.0.

(Please note I don't meant to chastise David Hasselhoff nor eating burgers off the floor in severely advanced states of inebriation; I just think that sort of YouTubery should be left to professional entertainers.)

Anyway, back in October the web-marketing gang at Random House Canada filmed me being interviewed about my book by my editor, Craig Pyette. The softballs floated in with Larry King-like gentility, and I swatted them around for awhile, and this five-minute video someone had the good grace to post to YouTube is the result.

Tonight's the night! Live from Vancouver, it's me hopefully not stammering too much of my way through an appearance on CBC's The Hour with George Stroumboulopoulos. (Airs on your local CBC station at 11pm; those outside Canada can allegedly watch it online.)

Also on the bill (and I would assume headlining) is Donalda, Alberta's own Tricia Helfer, who plays the sexy Cylon on Battlestar Galactica. I can only hope my groupies and hers don't get into a rumble. I also look forward to cornering her at the bar at the wrap party to discuss the potential for introducing renewable fuels to the ion-drive engines of Starhound Class Colonial Vipers, which I'm sure she'll find fascinating.

In any case, every other late-night yakfest is in reruns right now, so if you've got a quiet Thursday evening at home in the works, you should check it out.

Well, if the first couple days of December are any indication, the Holiday Season promises to be quite a good one for my humble tome. It goes without saying, but I will anyway, that a book about hope makes a wonderful Christmas/Hanukkah/Kwanzaa/Festivus gift. Act now, operators are standing by!



The only way to celebrate: dancing for joy like a cartoon dog fused to a jingle bell inside a plastic sheath!

First came Saturday's publication of the Globe & Mail's annual "Globe 100" list of the best books of the year, and The Geography of Hope made the cut.

(As part of the Globe's ongoing effort to actively repel internet users, the list is an unformatted mess of multipage text that'll probably be buried behind a subscriber wall within days. In the interest of maintaining hope, though, here is the introductory page of the list, here's page 8, where The Geography of Hope resides, and here's the whole list in a single webpage. And failing all of that, here's a blog entry that mentions my book, which includes a link to the Globe 100 that seems to work alright.)

Next up was Sunday's Calgary Herald, which brought news that The Geography of Hope had bested all non-fiction comers for the week and was now No. 1 on the Calgary Bestseller list for non-fiction. In your face, Mary-Ann "I Am Hutterite" Kirkby!

And perhaps the biggest news (certainly the news that's got me most excited and mildly terrified):

I will be appearing on this Thursday's episode of The Hour with George Stroumboulopoulos, which is live to air from Vancouver all this week. It seems I'll be appearing on the same episode as supermodel, Playboy Playmate and Battlestar Galactica star Tricia Helfer. I don't want to upstage Ms. Helfer or anything, but potential viewers should know that at least one of us won't be wearing a bra, and it probably won't be the sexy Cylon, if you catch my drift.

But wait - there's more news out of Vancouver. Seems The Geography of Hope is one of five titles being given away in the Georgia Straight's "Hottest Non-Fiction for the Holidays!" contest. Not too shabby - maybe they'll even get around to reviewing it in their pages one of these days.

Finally, a blog posting I wrote (and will post here later this week) about a hellish hungover visit to campus radio station CIUT at the University of Toronto back in October is now up at Random House's BookLounge.ca site, and it's attracted the attention of the good people at Quill & Quire (who also might want to think about doing a review sometime). Thanks for the notice, Quillblog dude!

But - dude? - you totally took that last line you quote out of context. I wasn't saying I was going to kill the CIUT monotone-animal-cruely-story broadcaster out of anger at him; I was saying I so desperately needed a glass of water to cut through the cottonmouth revenge of my over-indulgence at my Toronto launch party that I'd have killed the kid to get it. I mean, either way the kid's dead, sure, but it wasn't about him.