Novelist and musician Rob Ritchie. Photo: WILLY WATERTON/OWEN SOUND SUN TIMES
December 19, 2006
Orphans of Winter by Rob Ritchie
A little while back, after doing a few book reviews here, a call went out for more. And so arrived Orphans of Winter - quietly, with little fanfare, the modest cover not promising a whole lot - which if it came from a more seasoned fabulist would be plenty good enough to go into the corners against Canadian HockeyLit stars like Paul Quarrington, Bill Gaston and Dave Bidini. But Orphans (Seraphim Editions), by folk musician turned writer Rob Ritchie, is a debut novel, and as such I'd call it pretty astonishing.
Perhaps it's that folk musician's background but Ritchie is a deft storyteller, delivering a barnburner tale that combines hockey, mysticism, religion and Canadian Aboriginal spiritualism. His hero, Stephen Gillis, is a complicated mess, a western Canadian hockey scout for the Toronto Centennials (read, Leafs) whose life-path accelerates when he's tipped on to an unheralded, ignored fourth-line forward by a mysterious stranger one night at the Prince George Arena. Vancouver Island and B.C., Toronto's talk-radio fuelled hockey frenzy, and out to Newfoundland it goes, Gillis and the forward's twinned stories converging.
Whenever the whole thing appears in danger of sliding off the table - and it comes close - Ritchie is able to pull it back:
"He had this theory that what made a specific sport popular was how well it mirrored some part of society that people thought was important. He had lots of examples . . . football was like war, baseball had to do with the industrial revolution, golf was all about manners and etiquette. The thing was, he could never really nail down hockey. The best he ever came up with was that the game represented winter."
"Winter?"
"That's right. Like it was this continuous battle for survival. From start to finish. Game to game. Year to year. Novice to Old-Timers. For best results play angry, like there's this storm inside you. I remember thinking at the time that it didn't really apply. Not with kids today growing up skating on multi-alloyed blades with custom-fit moulded boots, wearing top-of-the-line pads and equipment, shooting with their brand new high-flex graphite sticks and playing their games in state of the art arenas. But then I got watching that young winger Vancouver has on the right side this year. His name's Yvegeny Kaltzov and he's a 19-year-old Russian out of what remains of their national program. Did you know he spent the last two seasons in Moscow living in an unheated apartment with three other players? Two rooms between them, windowpanes cracked or missing, so the snow would pile up on the sill and on the floor below. I used to think guys like that played hard and angry because they were scared shitless of going back to conditions like that."
"And now?"
"Now ...? Now I think they play the way they do because they still know winter."
Don't go into this looking for a homespun, Hockey Sweater kind of read. It's dense going at times. But this season, among a few titles of note, it deserves to be grouped with the best. Nice work here, and well worth it if you're looking for a last-minute present for the literate fan of the world's most "beautiful and cold" game in your life.
April 02, 2011
Orphans of Winter by Rob Ritchie
Orphans of Winter is a story about fathers and sons. It's also a story about hockey and the religious nature of sports. Even more intriguing, it's about indigenous people of the Pacific Northwest and how past and present cultures and religions collide on the wintry landscape of Canada. Most of all, it's a page-turning mystery that takes the reader across Canada with threads and clues that even the protagonist, Stephen Gillis, can't figure out. Not until the end.
The story begins with the death of a young Indian boy, followed by the death of Gillis’ father in a devastating and mysterious car crash. An anthropologist teams up with Gillis, a hockey scout, to find connections between the two deaths. Revelation comes large and personal, changing Gillis forever. Here's how the main character begins his journey:
Stephen Gillis was not a man given to curiosity. He was an uninterested man. An unenthusiastic man. He was one without any reservoir of eager resolve for any pursuits save for those that came naturally, and as such was usually out of sorts with most any surroundings apart from the small and precise boundaries that made his life manageable. The chilled air of an arena. The dank and musty corridors that led from lobby to dressing room, from dressing room to ice. The open highways of Western Canada, their never-ending orange lines dissecting the night just ahead of the high beams on his trusted Ford Taurus. The open road that bound him from one arena to the next, yet still left him the freedom that comforted him the most. The freedom of being nowhere in particular. (p. 18)
As a reader who knows nothing about hockey, I became intrigued with the cultural power of the sport, a game which one of the characters calls "Winter," and how it changed the lives of half a dozen people. Ritchie's literary style lures one in by its carefully crafted and sometimes trance-like prose, capturing the innermost feelings of the characters. The author’s musical background manifests itself in the lyrical quality of his writing, even while working with an utterly tough and traditionally masculine subject. This I appreciate, for even those of us who aren't sports minded are quickly hooked by the sheer power of his prose.
The story moves at a quick pace. Yet, it makes one want to slow down and think. The book's theme warns about the perils of religious fanaticism and sports fanaticism, and the fine line which separates them.
It's a book to read with a cup of cocoa on a weekend night when you don't have to get up early, because you won't be able to put it down easily. I read it in winter, but it is a great read for all seasons. This book has been optioned for film, one that I look forward to viewing.
January 13, 2012
Songs, novels just different ways for musician Rob Ritchie to tell his stories
A one-time hockey jock, raised in a home filled with singing and music, the pianist, songwriter and novelist Rob Ritchie has performed across Canada and around the world.
Inevitably, his youth, his travels, his environment, the people he’s met and especially his experiences as a touring musician, are all part of his books.
Hockey was a main theme throughout Orphans of Winter, Ritchie’s first novel in 2006. In a Company of Fiddlers, published last fall, he looks in part at the classical music world, sometimes using settings around his home area in Wiarton.
Both novels ask why such passions are often pursued so seriously, but without joy.
“They don’t have to be,” Ritchie said recently. “When the joy is put back in, those are the people that are doing it the best.”
Now Ritchie is 100 pages into a first draft of book three.
“I’d like to do something that’s kind of fun loving that has to do with a band out on the road, since they say write what you know and I certainly got to know that.”
Ritchie spent more than a decade in two long stints with the award-winning, five-piece, Owen Sound-based folk and roots music group Tanglefoot, which included his brother Steve. Tanglefoot disbanded two years ago.
During what he called a “paternity leave” hiatus from the band several years ago, Ritchie recorded his solo CD project Five O’Clock Shadow, shortly before publishing Orphans of Winter, his first novel.
Ritchie has toured as a solo performer, but said he prefers others on stage to interact with, and most of his solo shows lately are local. That includes a show Saturday night at 7 p.m. as part of the monthly SOUNDS at the Market series, where Ritchie will be both the featured musician and the featured spoken word artist.
He’ll play songs from Five O’Clock Shadow, with some new music, and read from the novels.
Orphans of Winter was shortlisted for the 2007 ReLit Award for best Canadian novel from a small publishing firm, Seraphim Editions. The same firm published In a Company of Fiddlers last fall. Both are available at The Downtown Bookstore, where, over a coffee recently, Ritchie chatted about his music, his novels and his influences.
Inevitably, his youth, his travels, his environment, the people he’s met and especially his experiences as a touring musician, are all part of his books.
Hockey was a main theme throughout Orphans of Winter, Ritchie’s first novel in 2006. In a Company of Fiddlers, published last fall, he looks in part at the classical music world, sometimes using settings around his home area in Wiarton.
Both novels ask why such passions are often pursued so seriously, but without joy.
“They don’t have to be,” Ritchie said recently. “When the joy is put back in, those are the people that are doing it the best.”
Now Ritchie is 100 pages into a first draft of book three.
“I’d like to do something that’s kind of fun loving that has to do with a band out on the road, since they say write what you know and I certainly got to know that.”
Ritchie spent more than a decade in two long stints with the award-winning, five-piece, Owen Sound-based folk and roots music group Tanglefoot, which included his brother Steve. Tanglefoot disbanded two years ago.
During what he called a “paternity leave” hiatus from the band several years ago, Ritchie recorded his solo CD project Five O’Clock Shadow, shortly before publishing Orphans of Winter, his first novel.
Ritchie has toured as a solo performer, but said he prefers others on stage to interact with, and most of his solo shows lately are local. That includes a show Saturday night at 7 p.m. as part of the monthly SOUNDS at the Market series, where Ritchie will be both the featured musician and the featured spoken word artist.
He’ll play songs from Five O’Clock Shadow, with some new music, and read from the novels.
Orphans of Winter was shortlisted for the 2007 ReLit Award for best Canadian novel from a small publishing firm, Seraphim Editions. The same firm published In a Company of Fiddlers last fall. Both are available at The Downtown Bookstore, where, over a coffee recently, Ritchie chatted about his music, his novels and his influences.
A freelance corporate editor and proofreader who works from home, as well as a musician and author, Ritchie said when he’s into a writing project, he blocks time. He works usually between 10 p.m. and 2 a.m., when the house is quiet. He’ll produce a first draft or a section of a book, then take a break for several weeks, even months.
Songs can come along any time. Like all musicians, he said he has a store of riffs or melodic hooks that come from noodling.
“The acid test is if you keep coming back to them.”
And he has ideas for stories he wants to tell.
Songs happen when the two align, and sometimes come in spurts, two or three songs at a time.
He starts his books with a clear ending in mind and a beginning, then fleshes out the whole story over the several years it takes to write each book.
For songs, he has “the whole theme” in mind.
“The exercise becomes condensing it, trying to get it done in three or four verses.”
Rarely, a song comes quickly. More often it’s line by line. On the road, Ritchie would write daily in his notebook, working on songs a few lines at a time.
The writer’s songs and prose come from the same place — a deep interest in telling stories.
“I’m compelled to do it.”
That was inspired early on when his parents would often take him to Owen Sound Little Theatre productions involving family members.
“I think it was just my parents taking us to events which made storytelling front and centre,” he said. “Seeing stories on stage was just very captivating.”
When he first joined Tanglefoot, founder Joe Grant became a a mentor, eventually advising on early drafts of Orphans, which began as a play and became the novel. Grant inspired with both his songs enlivening Canadian history, and his engaging tales, on stage and in the van on the road.
Some of that may work its way into the new novel, which is informed by the road stories, but is not about Tanglefoot.
“I made sure of that,” Ritchie said.
It’s about a “fictitious” modestly successful commercial touring band whose members are trying to solve what’s happening to their popular singer and main songwriter.
“His songs of late have been getting out there and a little harder to grasp,” Ritchie said.
“People question why he’s moving away from the kind of song that people love and songs that made the band popular. Each member has a theory and they’re all going to be wrong.”
Ritchie also draws on his quite different musical context as a longtime member of the Wiarton-based roadhouse country band Midnight Blue, with Dave and Bill Nixon and Sterling MacNay.
An overheard phrase on the street, an argument he hears, a mannerism, local names or setting he discovers around Wiarton can all end up in a song or a book, if altered to suit the need, the writer said.
“I like getting that local stuff in and local people seem to like that stuff,” he said. “Circumstances have tweaked my imagination and I run with it. Do you use people you know?
“Sure. I don’t think you can get away from that. That’s what kind of juices the imagination.”
To some extent, he said he is holding up a mirror, but he’s also providing a personal viewpoint.
“I am giving people an interpretation of the world as I see it. That’s undeniable. So doing a book it’s ‘come on along and see if you agree with me.’
“I like writing dialogue and creating characters with divergent views. If people can see aspects of themselves or other people in refreshing and new lights, and possibly a more compassionate light, that’s great. That’s my hope.”
bhenry@thesuntimes.ca
Songs can come along any time. Like all musicians, he said he has a store of riffs or melodic hooks that come from noodling.
“The acid test is if you keep coming back to them.”
And he has ideas for stories he wants to tell.
Songs happen when the two align, and sometimes come in spurts, two or three songs at a time.
He starts his books with a clear ending in mind and a beginning, then fleshes out the whole story over the several years it takes to write each book.
For songs, he has “the whole theme” in mind.
“The exercise becomes condensing it, trying to get it done in three or four verses.”
Rarely, a song comes quickly. More often it’s line by line. On the road, Ritchie would write daily in his notebook, working on songs a few lines at a time.
The writer’s songs and prose come from the same place — a deep interest in telling stories.
“I’m compelled to do it.”
That was inspired early on when his parents would often take him to Owen Sound Little Theatre productions involving family members.
“I think it was just my parents taking us to events which made storytelling front and centre,” he said. “Seeing stories on stage was just very captivating.”
When he first joined Tanglefoot, founder Joe Grant became a a mentor, eventually advising on early drafts of Orphans, which began as a play and became the novel. Grant inspired with both his songs enlivening Canadian history, and his engaging tales, on stage and in the van on the road.
Some of that may work its way into the new novel, which is informed by the road stories, but is not about Tanglefoot.
“I made sure of that,” Ritchie said.
It’s about a “fictitious” modestly successful commercial touring band whose members are trying to solve what’s happening to their popular singer and main songwriter.
“His songs of late have been getting out there and a little harder to grasp,” Ritchie said.
“People question why he’s moving away from the kind of song that people love and songs that made the band popular. Each member has a theory and they’re all going to be wrong.”
Ritchie also draws on his quite different musical context as a longtime member of the Wiarton-based roadhouse country band Midnight Blue, with Dave and Bill Nixon and Sterling MacNay.
An overheard phrase on the street, an argument he hears, a mannerism, local names or setting he discovers around Wiarton can all end up in a song or a book, if altered to suit the need, the writer said.
“I like getting that local stuff in and local people seem to like that stuff,” he said. “Circumstances have tweaked my imagination and I run with it. Do you use people you know?
“Sure. I don’t think you can get away from that. That’s what kind of juices the imagination.”
To some extent, he said he is holding up a mirror, but he’s also providing a personal viewpoint.
“I am giving people an interpretation of the world as I see it. That’s undeniable. So doing a book it’s ‘come on along and see if you agree with me.’
“I like writing dialogue and creating characters with divergent views. If people can see aspects of themselves or other people in refreshing and new lights, and possibly a more compassionate light, that’s great. That’s my hope.”
bhenry@thesuntimes.ca