Dictionary of Literary Biography - Twentieth-Century

Will Ferguson
(12 October 1964 –
)
Paul Matthew St. Pierre
Simon Fraser University
BOOKS: Why I Hate Canadians (Vancouver &
Toronto: Douglas & McIntyre, 1997);
I Was a Teenage Katima-Victim: A Canadian Odyssey
(Vancouver: Douglas & McIntyre, 1998);
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to Japan, by Ferguson and
Terumi Matsumoto (Rutland, Vt.: Tuttle,
1998);
Hokkaido Highway Blues: Hitchhiking Japan (New York:
Soho, 1998; Edinburgh: Canongate, 2000);
republished as Hitching Rides with Buddha: A
Journey across Japan (Toronto: Knopf, 2005;
Edinburgh & New York: Canongate, 2005);
Bastards and Boneheads: Canada’s Glorious Leaders,
Past and Present (Vancouver: Douglas & McIntyre, 1999);
The Girlfriend’s Guide to Hockey, by Ferguson, Teena
Spencer, and Bruce Spencer (Toronto: Key
Porter, 1999; New York: Firefly, 2001); revised
as Clueless about Hockey (Toronto: Key Porter,
2007);
Canadian History for Dummies (Toronto: CDG, 2000;
revised and enlarged edition, Mississauga,
Ont.: Wiley, 2005);
Generica: A Novel (Toronto & New York: Penguin,
2001); republished as HappinessTM (Toronto:
Penguin, 2002; Edinburgh: Canongate, 2002;
New York: Perennial, 2003);
How to Be a Canadian: Even If You Already Are One, by
Ferguson and Ian Ferguson (Vancouver: Douglas & McIntyre, 2001);
Beauty Tips from Moose Jaw: Travels in Search of Canada
(Toronto: Knopf Canada, 2004; Edinburgh &
New York: Canongate, 2005); republished as
Beauty Tips from Moose Jaw: Excursions in the Great
Weird North (Edinburgh: Canongate, 2006);
Spanish Fly: A Novel (Toronto: Viking Canada, 2007;
London: Harvill Secker, 2008); republished as
Hustle (London: Vintage, 2009);
Beyond Belfast: A 560-Mile Walk across Northern Ireland
on Sore Feet (Toronto: Viking Canada, 2009);
Will Ferguson (photograph by Alex Ferguson; from
<www.willferguson.ca>)
Coal Dust Kisses: A Christmas Memoir (Toronto: Viking
Canada, 2010).
OTHER: Sarah Deveau, Sink or Swim: Get Your Degree
without Drowning in Debt, foreword by Ferguson
(Toronto: Dundurn Press, 2003);
Grant MacEwan, Eye Opener Bob: The Story of Bob
Edwards, edited by James Martin, introduction
by Ferguson (Calgary: Brindle & Glass, 2004);
Noreen Olson, The School Bus Doesn’t Stop Here Any
More: Life and Times on a Rural Route, foreword
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Ray in his novel Spanish Fly (2007) in part on his
father: he describes Virgil as “looking mighty dapper
in his shimmery silk and Errol Flynn mustache” (Virgil, however, is short rather than tall).
In 1968, after ten years in Fort Vermilion,
Henry Ferguson was fired when the school superintendent discovered that he did not have a valid
teaching certificate. The family moved to Regina,
where Henry enrolled at the University of Saskatchewan to get his accreditation; Louise opened the university’s first day-care center. Henry supported his
studies and his family by working as a journalist with
the Prairie Fire, an alternative newspaper. In Regina
the Ferguson children met their teenage half sister,
Margaret, a daughter from Henry Ferguson’s first
marriage, for the first time.
While in Regina, Henry and Louise Ferguson
became estranged and divorced. In 1969 Louise and
the children returned to Fort Vermilion. Henry paid
an overnight visit to the family to leave in their care
a new “sister,” an Indian girl named Darla Jean.
Henry had assumed custody of her in his work with
Operation Mustard Seed, a United Church project
that gave assistance to Native people.
Louise encouraged her children to appreciate
northern Canada by taking their holidays in the
Northwest Territories. Nevertheless, Will Ferguson
was eager to escape Fort Vermilion. At sixteen, he
quit school and went to live with his half sister, Margaret, in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, where he supported himself with construction and other manuallabor jobs, including working as a dishwasher in an
all-night café. He then went to stay with his father in
Dauphin, Manitoba, where he got a job making pizzas. He was saved from this aimless existence when
his brother Sean invited him to come to Red Deer,
Alberta, to complete his high-school education. Ferguson graduated from Lindsay Thurber Comprehensive School in 1983. Returning to Saskatoon, he
transcribed the diary he had kept of his journey
across the prairies.
In 1984–1985 Ferguson was a volunteer with
Katimavik. Established in 1977 by Senator Jacques
Hébert of Quebec and named for the Inuktituk
word for “meeting place,” Katimavik is an educational program for people aged seventeen to twentyone that promotes intercultural exchanges, the
acquisition of both of Canada’s official languages,
community development, environmental protection, and discovery of the country. Ferguson worked
in a museum in Kelowna, British Columbia; a southern Ontario nursing home; and a conservation park
in St. Canut, Quebec. He recounts his Katimavik
experiences in I Was a Teenage Katima-Victim: A Cana-
by Ferguson (Vancouver: Douglas & McIntyre,
2004);
The Penguin Anthology of Canadian Humour, edited by
Ferguson (Toronto: Viking Canada, 2006);
Bill Gaston, Midnight Hockey: All About Beer, the Boys,
and the Real Canadian Game, foreword by Ferguson (Toronto: Doubleday Canada, 2006);
Stephen Leacock, Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town,
introduction by Ferguson (Toronto: Penguin
Canada, 2006).
In a 2010 interview with John Barber, Will Ferguson protested, “They always tag me as a humorist
but I’ve only really written one humour book. I don’t
know many humorists who have a reputation based
on one book. I’ve written books with humour in
them, but there’s only been one—How to Be a Canadian, which I wrote with my brother—that was actually an out-and-out humour book.” Ferguson uses
irony, wit, and sarcasm to teach his readers about
Canadian history and culture and about themselves.
His literary humor has no throwaway lines, and it
promotes little gratuitous laughter. He is a self-styled
curmudgeon and an acerbic social commentator
who claims in the title of one of his books to “hate
Canadians.”
William Stener Ferguson was born on 12 October 1964 in the village of Fort Vermilion, Alberta, to
Henry “Hank” Ferguson, a schoolteacher, and Louise
Bell Ferguson, a former psychiatric nurse. He has
three older brothers—Dan, Ian, and Sean—and a
younger sister, Lorna Joan. The former site of North
West Company and Hudson’s Bay Company furtrading posts, Fort Vermilion is five hundred miles
northwest of Edmonton. In Beauty Tips from Moose
Jaw: Travels in Search of Canada (2004) Ferguson calls
it “a forgotten outpost; if the entire community had
vanished from the face of the earth one night, no
one would have noticed.”
Ian Ferguson notes of their father in his Village
of the Small Houses: A Memoir of Sorts (2003): “At the
time he met my mother, he was calling himself a
salesman, but he had aspirations to be a minorleague grifter. He had previous experience as an
actor, a card shark, a pool hustler and a musician.”
He describes Henry Ferguson as “tall [six feet, five
inches] and thin as a rail, with a ready smile and a
neatly maintained pencil-thin moustache already a
few years out of style. He wasn’t quite Clark Cable,
but on a good day he might manage David Niven.
Only taller. My mother was short where he was tall,
round where he was thin. She also had a great smile,
but she wasn’t as eager to share it with strangers.”
Will Ferguson may have modeled the grifter Virgil
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as in an aside in the context of his repatriation to
Canada:
dian Odyssey (1998): “We travelled from the interior
of British Columbia to small-town Ontario to the
farmlands of rural Québec. We lived in converted
barns and suburban bungalows. We restored Native
graveyards and built outdoor nature trails. We
worked with senior citizens and handicapped children. We studied wilderness survival and sensual
massage. We were young, we were Canadian, and we
were growing up in the shadow of the Baby Boomers.”
After leaving Katimavik, Ferguson spent the
summer in Quebec City. There he joined Project
Mégapole, a theater troupe formed in 1985; experienced his first serious love affair; and had his first
direct exposure to Quebec language politics. He
then volunteered for Canada World Youth, an international exchange program for people aged seventeen to twenty that was funded by the Canadian
International Development Agency. After serving in
1985 as a laborer on an experimental farm operated
by an agricultural college in Liskeard, Ontario, he
traveled to Malacatos, Ecuador, a village near the
border with Peru, where he worked at schools and
on farms and contributed to various local projects.
Ferguson returned to Canada in 1986 and
enrolled at York University in Toronto, where he
majored in film production and screenwriting. Following his graduation in 1990 with a bachelor of fine
arts degree, he worked briefly as a location assistant
on an ABC television-film project and then signed
up with the Japan Exchange and Teaching Programme. He taught English for two years in Kawaura,
a fishing village in the Amakusa Islands, and for
three years in Minamata. He also backpacked the
length of Japan to Rishiri Island, off the coast of
Siberia, and through Korea, China, Malaysia, and
Indonesia. He married Terumi Matsumoto in Kumamoto in 1995. They have two children: Genki Alexander and Yuki Alister.
In 1996 the Fergusons settled in St. Andrews,
New Brunswick. The following year they moved to
Prince Edward Island, where Will Ferguson secured
short-term jobs with a travel agent marketing Anne of
Green Gables tours to Japanese tourists and with the
Charlottetown Guardian newspaper, for which he
wrote the column “East Meets West” on Japanese
cultural traditions. His first book, Why I Hate Canadians, appeared in 1997; it is a wryly subjective history
of Canada and an acerbic reassessment of the Canadian character as typified by the stereotype of niceness, obsession with American culture, the lingering
affiliation with monarchy, and cultural signifiers
such as the beaver and a military of peacekeepers.
The tone throughout is deliberately confrontational,
The best thing about spending five years in Asia
was this: I missed the entire Grunge era. The ratty
hair, the incomprehensible guitar riffs, the postpunk ennui: I missed it all. When I left, no one had
heard of Kurt Cobain and fortunately, by the time I
came back, he had already committed suicide.
Grunge came and went, and I was out of the country. That alone was worth going into exile.
Why I Hate Canadians sold more than fifty thousand copies. Ferguson quit his jobs and returned
with his family to St. Andrews to be a full-time writer.
In 1998 he published The Hitchhiker’s Guide to Japan,
with supplementary research and translation assistance from his wife, Terumi, and his reminiscences
of his trek through the country, Hokkaido Highway
Blues: Hitchhiking Japan; the works are also introductions to the history of Japan and to Japanese culture
and philosophy. In Hokkaido Highway Blues, which
was republished in 2005 as Hitching Rides with Buddha: A Journey across Japan, Ferguson cites the Buddhist maxim “If you meet the Buddha on the road,
kill him” and then comments, “If you meet the Buddha on the road, do not kill him. Hold out your
thumb. Who knows, he just might offer you a ride.”
For his next book, Bastards and Boneheads: Canada’s Glorious Leaders, Past and Present (1999), Ferguson says that he “relied on complex mathematical
calculations and incomprehensible algorithmic formulas to develop this system, and my research was
funded by generous government grants and many
wealthy benefactors” to produce the two categories
to which the principal figures of Canadian history
can be reduced. Ferguson notes that “in the game of
life, Bastard always beats Bonehead” and that “History is a verdict, and we are all on the jury.” The Bastards include Major General Isaac Brock, Chief
Tecumseh, and Laura Secord of the War of 1812;
Manitoba founder Louis Riel; the Mohawk warriors
of the Oka Crisis of 1990; prime ministers John A.
Macdonald, Wilfrid Laurier, and Pierre Elliott
Trudeau; Emily Ferguson Murphy, who became the
first female magistrate in Canada in 1916; Nellie
McClung, who in 1918 led the fight for women’s
right to vote in federal elections; and Agnes
Macphail, who was elected Canada’s first female
member of Parliament in 1921. Among the Boneheads are General James Wolfe and Louis-Joseph,
Marquis de Montcalm, enemy combatants in the
Battle of the Plains of Abraham in 1759; Quebec premier René Lévesque; and prime ministers Joe Clark,
John Diefenbaker, and Brian Mulroney. Ferguson
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Dust jackets for Ferguson’s 2001 dystopian satire and the retitled 2002 republication (Library of Congress)
preconquest indigenous nations through Confederation and nation building into the twenty-firstcentury multicultural and globalized society and
provides addresses for more than 250 history websites. Ferguson’s fundamental message is that Canadians have a vibrant history and should want to learn
more about it. Canadian History for Dummies received
the 2001 Award for History from the Canadian
Authors Association. A revised and updated edition,
expanded by twenty pages, was published in 2005.
Ferguson’s first work of fiction, the dystopian
satire Generica, appeared in 2001; in 2002 it was
republished under its original title, HappinessTM. It is
set in an unnamed American city that resembles
New York. The protagonist, Edwin Vincent de Valu,
“a thin, officious young man with a tall, scarecrow
walk and dry straw hair that refuses to hold a part,” is
an editor at Panderic, Inc., which “had first published The Name of the Tulip, an ‘intellectual mystery’
set in a medieval nunnery in Bastilla, whose hero was
gives radically new explanations of the Acadian
Diaspora, the War of 1812, the uprisings of 1837,
Riel’s rebellion, the conscription crises of the two
world wars, Canada’s complicity in the Holocaust,
and the 1960s Quiet Revolution and 1970 October
Crisis in Quebec.
Also published in 1999 was The Girlfriend’s
Guide to Hockey, by Ferguson, Teena Spencer, and
Bruce Spencer. A handbook and conduct manual, it
tells women how to take advantage of their boyfriends’ obsession with Canada’s national sport and
men how to make their girlfriends more agreeable
by teaching them about the game. Ferguson contributed chapter 1, “Hockey History”; chapter 7, “Stanley Cup Lore”; and chapter 13, “Women’s Hockey.”
A revised edition appeared in 2007 as Clueless about
Hockey.
Ferguson’s Canadian History for Dummies
(2000) addresses the complete chronological, cultural, and ideological span of Canadian history from
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“You had a week,” said Snake. “We picked you up
on a Sunday. Held you for two days—”
“Exactly! You let me go on a Tuesday.”
“That’s right. And today’s Monday, so it’s been
one week.”
Edwin was beyond indignant at this point. “One
week from Tuesday is not Monday! It’s the following
Tuesday. I have one more day.”
“No,” said Snake thinking aloud, “that would be
eight days. Count it out: Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday . . .” He began ticking them off on his fingers,
which was difficult because he was missing one or
two digits to begin with.
“The first Tuesday doesn’t count!”
“Sure it does. Why wouldn’t it?”
“Look,” said Edwin. “If you see someone on, say,
a Friday, and you tell them, ‘Okay, see you again
next week,’ do they show up on the following Thursday? Of course not! To the average person ‘one
week from now’ means ‘same day, next week.’ I have
until tomorrow.”
a middle-aged mathematician turned semiotician.
The author, a middle-aged mathematician turned
semiotician, had swept into Panderic’s office, thrown
down his hefty manuscript like an invitation to a
duel and had pronounced his work to be the height
of ‘postmodern hyper-authenticity.’” The joke will be
appreciated by readers familiar with Umberto Eco’s
postmodern novel The Name of the Rose (1980).
Unprepared for a new-book-proposal meeting with
his boss, Léon Mead, Edwin panics and offers a summary description of what he remembers of a work in
his “slush pile” of rejected proposals, prospectuses,
and manuscripts: “What I Learned on the Mountain,”
by Rajee Tupak Soiree, an encyclopedic thousandpage compilation of self-help manuals that discloses
the secrets of losing weight, quitting smoking, mastering the art of kissing, getting rich, making turnip
stew, and attaining happiness. Mead likes the idea.
Edwin goes to retrieve the manuscript from his
wastebasket, but the trash has been emptied. He
hurries to the city dump but cannot find it there,
either. The manuscript happens to come back into
his hands; it is published, and an economic and cultural revolution is unleashed on the world. Soiree’s
book brings about a global economic collapse in
which the consumption of commodities, including
commodified culture, is replaced by a new industry
that produces bliss. In the new blissful world, “No
one made caustic remarks. No one gossiped. No one
ever cried—and nor did anyone ever laugh until
their chests ached and their eyes went blurry.” The
book is, in fact, an elaborate literary hoax perpetrated by two confidence artists whose philosophy of
self-help extends only to helping themselves. “Tupak
Soiree” is actually a minor actor named Harry T.
Lopez, “a graduate of the Tri-State Community College Drama Program.” The real author of the books
is Jack McGreary, an old and ailing swindler who is
living out his remaining days in the Fairview Trailer
Park Community in Paradise Flats, Texas (modeled
on Radville, Saskatchewan, where Ferguson’s father
grew up, and Rapid City, Manitoba, where he was living at the time Ferguson wrote the book) and has
hired Lopez to pose as Soiree after seeing him do
community theater in Silver City. The book itself is a
compilation of stock phrases that McGreary culled
from boxes of old pulp-fiction works.
One scene in HappinessTM is reminiscent of
early Woody Allen films such as Take the Money and
Run (1969), Play It Again, Sam (1972), and Love and
Death (1975). What begins as a tense confrontation
devolves into a debate on semantics and philosophy
when Sam “the Snake” Serpent comes to collect a
debt that Edwin owes:
Though Edwin wins the debate, Snake says, “I’m still
going to have to break your thumb or something.”
Edwin’s vapid wife, Jenni, abandons him to
become one of Soiree’s concubines. But Edwin is in
love with May Weatherhill, his former colleague at
Panderic, who “changed her name to Cotton Candy,
and she floated like gauze on a warm autumn wind
from one open community to the next before eventually settling into an upstate HappinessTM Convent
(Oneida Community, Branch 107), where she was
surrounded by like loving people.” Although Edwin
liberates her from the convent and deprograms her,
she refuses to marry him. The narrator concludes,
“There is no happily-ever-after to this story. And
that, I suppose, is the whole point.” Reviewing the
book in the 20 May 2001 issue of Times-Colonist (Victoria) under its first title, May Brown wrote: “Generica is a pleasure to read because of Ferguson’s
original wit and rich writing style. It provides food
for thought, not for the self-help content within content, but for the concept that smoking, fast food,
drug and alcohol addiction and poor relationships
might be an essential part of the machinery that
drives an ambitious, competitive country like the
U.S. If there’s any drawback to Generica, it’s the size
of some of its philosophical passages, which could
use some paring to keep the story moving.” In 2002
Ferguson received both the Stephen Leacock
Memorial Medal for Humour and the Canadian
Authors Association Award for Fiction for HappinessTM.
Ferguson’s next book was coauthored with his
brother Ian. How to Be a Canadian: Even If You Already
Are One (2001) purports to offer “advice on every
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aspect of Canadian culture, including diet, dating
rituals, politics, fashion, etiquette, complex social
structures and beer. As such, it contains a wealth of
information gathered from fact-filled articles that
the authors of this book sort of remember reading
somewhere, in a newspaper or something.” They
assert that “The capital of Canada is Bay Street” in
Toronto, the country’s financial center. “The government, however, is located in Ottawa, a sunny,
semi-tropical city on the banks of the St. Lawrence
River.” Referring to Canada as sparsely populated,
they are unable to provide the statistical ratio of people to land but propose that “Someone should look
that up.” They cannot include a map of Winnipeg
because the city was under water when they were last
there. Pointing to the proliferation of nonsmoking
workplaces in Canada, where smokers huddle
together at the loading dock to indulge their habit,
they advise, “If you don’t smoke, you should think
about taking it up, since it will give you a chance to
network with a wider range of co-workers.” The hub
of Canadian cuisine, the coffee-and-donut chain
Tim Hortons, “was named in memory of a hockey
player who died because he was driving dangerously
in a sports car. In Canada, this makes him a hero.”
The national mascot is not the Russian bear, British
lion, or American eagle, but the beaver, a “fortypound water rat whose most heroic trait is that he
thinks to slap his tail to warn his buddies before he
runs away.” The provincial flower of British Columbia is “mildew,” and “The official emblem of Vancouver is an umbrella turned inside-out. With an
activist chained to it. Drinking a latte.” Citing the
writer and television personality Pierre Berton’s
famous definition of a Canadian as “someone who
knows how to make love in a canoe,” they coin the
expression “pull a Berton” and declare that “If average Canadians ever tried to ‘pull a Berton’ they’d
end up looking like Mr. Canoe Head. (For those of
you unfamiliar with His Canoe-Headedness, Mr.
Canoe Head was a superhero whose head was permanently stuck inside a canoe. But it was okay,
because he wore disguises to hide it. You know, fake
beards and whatnot.)” The Fergusons cite as the
National Ballet of Canada’s only great achievement
the defection to it of Mikhail Baryshnikov from the
U.S.S.R. before he went on to renown in the United
States, and they mock the “ex-pat Canadian thespian” and “alleged actor” Keanu Reeves for putting
his motion-picture career on hold to perform as
Hamlet in a Manitoba Theatre Centre production.
The double message of How to Be a Canadian is: do
not be the kind of stereotypical Canadian that the
book exposes, and celebrate being Canadian even if
Cover for the 2005 Edinburgh and New York edition of
Ferguson’s 2004 book, for which he received the 2005 Stephen
Leacock Memorial Medal for Humour and the 2005 Pierre
Berton Award for History (Richland County Public Library)
you are such a self-parody. Joseph Kertes concluded
his 6 October 2001 review in The Globe and Mail
(Toronto): “This book is, in fact, a reminder of what
Canadians do best: make ourselves (and others)
laugh. Bring on some more Ferguson brothers.”
In 2004 Will Ferguson published Beauty Tips
from Moose Jaw: Travels in Search of Canada, in which
he celebrates Canada as “not a country but a collection of outposts.” He starts his journey in Victoria,
British Columbia, and stops in Fort Smith, Northwest Territories; Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan; Churchill,
Manitoba; Thunder Bay, Ontario, the starting point
of the historic fur-trade routes across the West;
Chatham, Ontario, the destination of the Underground Railroad that brought American slaves to
freedom in Canada; the communities of the
Saguenay region of Quebec; St. John’s, Newfoundland; and L’Anse aux Meadows, a national historic
site on Newfoundland’s Great Northern Peninsula
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ard of Oz–type character who was behind the events
of Happiness TM. Here Jack is a nineteen-year-old
working in a salt mine in Paradise Flats, Texas, during the Depression. His mother is dead, and his
father has lost the family’s savings in a scam involving the will of Sir Francis Drake. To make ends meet,
Jack engages in some small-time scams himself. One
day the professional grifters Virgil Ray and Rosalind
“Miss Rose” Scheible come to town. (Late in the
novel it is revealed that Virgil’s real name is
Giuseppe Balsamo, and Rose’s is Avanna Sherrill.
Both names are taken from actual people: Balsamo
was an eighteenth-century alchemist, and Sherrill,
like her fictional counterpart, was a 1930s grifter.)
Rose makes a purchase in a shop; shortly after she
leaves, Virgil, impersonating a U.S. Treasury officer,
arrives to tell the proprietor that the money she gave
him is counterfeit. Virgil has to confiscate both the
counterfeit note, which is actually legitimate tender,
and the cash-register drawer, which has to be dusted
for fingerprints. Virgil promises the shopkeeper a
reward for helping to apprehend the criminal,
whom he identifies as Connie Parker, the cousin of
the notorious bank robber Bonnie Parker. Jack witnesses the events and introduces himself to Virgil,
who hires him as their getaway driver. When he
proves inept in this role, Virgil draws him directly
into the con in the role of the counterfeiter and
teaches him the jargon and tricks of the confidence
trade, at which Jack soon becomes adept. Virgil,
Rose, and Jack grow more and more brazen in their
schemes. Ferguson’s descriptions of the swindles,
some of which are highly elaborate, constitute much
of the narrative:
Dust jacket for Ferguson’s second novel (2007), in which a
character from HappinessTM falls in with a pair of grifters
in Texas (from <http://www.willferguson.ca/
books/index.html>)
where the Viking explorer Leif Eriksson likely made
landfall around the year 1000. A special outpost is
the Republic of Madawaska in the St. John River valley of southwestern New Brunswick, bordering Quebec to the north and the state of Maine to the south.
Unilaterally declared a republic on 4 July 1827 by
John Baker, an American, Madawaska evolved into
the home of les Brayons, a Francophone community
of about sixty-five thousand people who are culturally distinct from the Quebecois and the Acadians. A
staunch antimonarchist, Ferguson is fascinated by
this country within a country—a republic within a
constitutional monarchy—of which few Canadians
outside of New Brunswick are aware. In 2005 Beauty
Tips from Moose Jaw was awarded both the Stephen
Leacock Memorial Medal for Humour and the
Pierre Berton Award for History.
In 2007 Ferguson published his second novel,
Spanish Fly. It is narrated by Jack McGreary, the Wiz-
Virgil had a supply of “magic wallets” on hand as
well, billfolds stuffed full of blank paper, with one
forged hundred-dollar bill poking out, ready to toss
onto the sidewalk for a quick pigeon drop or to use
as the country-boy inheritance in a Tennessee
Switch. They played out more or less the same, main
difference being the Tennessee Switch involved a
gullible rube (me), a kindly Samaritan (Virgil), and
a passerby (the mark), and usually ended with the
mark being sent home for more funds once we got
him pinned. A pigeon drop was simpler. . . .
We all of us have our tells. With Virgil it was a
twitch of the lips holding back a smile, the dart of an
eye. With Rose it was that one strand of hair that
never seemed to stay put. That was a tell; it was also a
signal, as I’d found out when we were playing monte
at the county fairs. When Rose tucked her hair
behind her ear it meant, “Take him. Take him for all
he’s worth.”
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Ferguson returned to the humorous travel
memoir with Beyond Belfast: A 560-Mile Walk across
Northern Ireland on Sore Feet (2009). He undertook
the trek, in part, to uncover his own Northern Irish
heritage in the elusive figure of his Ulster grandfather. Beyond Belfast received the 2010 Stephen Leacock Memorial Medal for Humour.
Coal Dust Kisses: A Christmas Memoir (2010)
deals with the “coal-dust tradition,” in which children
wake up on Christmas morning with coal-dust
smudges on their foreheads that are supposed to
have been put there by an elf who came down the
chimney during the night. Ferguson speculates that
the tradition may have originated in Scotland and
come to Canada via Cape Breton. He recalls that
the family with whom he billeted in 1985–1986 in the
remote village of Malacatos, Ecuador, observed the
same tradition.
Will Ferguson is a travel writer; popular historian; social, cultural, and political critic; and novelist. He denies being a literary humorist; yet, as of
2011 he is one of only five writers to have won the
Stephen Leacock Memorial Medal for Humour
three times, and he has been short-listed for the
award two other times: for How to Be a Canadian and
Spanish Fly. On the other hand, he has been awarded
or short-listed for the Leacock Medal for only five of
his thirteen books. Regardless of how one chooses to
label him, Ferguson’s works are often ironic, amusing, witty, droll, satirical, derisive, and exceedingly
funny. Ferguson and his family live in Calgary,
Alberta.
A signal thrown is intentional. A tell is not. With
Rose it was hard to separate the two.
The title of the book is taken from a mail-order
fraud the trio perpetrates involving the sale of a powdered “aphrodisiac” that is, in fact, baking soda. The
advertisements they place in magazines and newspapers identify the product as “Genuine 100% PLACEBO,” and few customers demand a refund: “I
figured, for a lot of our clients, it did work. Maybe
spiking their loved one’s soda pop with baking soda
had given them the confidence they needed to push
on.” The partnership eventually turns into a romantic triangle and comes to a surprising end. Toby
Clements concluded his 26 January 2008 review of
the novel in The Telegraph (London): “This is a terrific book, lyrical and hilarious, bleak and funny,
with a love of history balanced against a rippingly
clever plot, and if one or two aspects do not
work—Jack’s interest in the rise of fascism in
Europe, or the overly neat postscript, these flaws are
entirely forgivable.” Elinor Cook noted in the New
Statesman (17 January 2008):
Ferguson’s USA, despite his lovely, languid prose,
is kitsch—all sharp fedoras, slinky cars and smokewreathed women. He tries to set the corruption of
Jack’s wisecracking cronies against the thrum of the
Second World War, but the snatches of newspaper
headlines are a mere conceit, designed to lend the
book depth. The war never feels real—but then, perhaps, that is the point.
This is a richly atmospheric novel that seduces
you—just as Jack seduces—with its reckless hedonism, feats of incredible ingenuity and fabulous costumes. It just never quite rises above the level of
(excellent) pastiche.
Interview:
John Barber, “The Monday Q&A: Will Ferguson’s
Coal-Dust Memories,” Globe and Mail
(Toronto), 20 December 2010.
In Spanish Fly Jack is a credible character, capable of
developing in unexpected ways, whereas in HappinessTM he—as Ferguson says of Edwin in that
novel—“has a singular lack of presence. A lack of
substance.”
Reference:
Ian Ferguson, Village of the Small Houses: A Memoir of
Sorts (Vancouver: Douglas & McIntyre, 2003).
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