Wayde Compton Clip 1
Details
Wayde Compton Clip 1
Metadata (MODS) |
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|---|---|
| Titles | Wayde Compton Clip 1: |
| Name | Wayde Compton |
| Name | Dr. Joanne Leow |
| Type of Resource | sound recording |
| Identifier | Interviewer |
| Identifier | Wayde Compton Clip 1 |
| Abstract | This clip starts with a discussion of Compton's book The Outer Harbour. More specifically, the idea of imagining Canadian spaces being in flux and how Compton’s imagining of spaces is connected to his personal history. |
| Extent | 3:55 |
| Form | sound recording |
| Note | Wayde Compton: My name is Wayde Compton. I’m a writer of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction, and the head administrator of the Writer’s Studio at SFU Continuing Studies. 0:14 Joanne Leow: One of the things that The Outer Harbour really conjures for me, your latest book, is the way that—literally imagine this idea of Canada, but specifically British Columbia and Vancouver, as a space that is geologically in flux, right. So often we imagine this idea of the nation or the settler colony as this fixed space, but the stories, what the stories really do for me is just throw this into question, so if you could just speak a bit more about that. 0:37 [‘fishbowl’ effect around some of Wayde’s words, particularly “I come from a working-class” filtering out the background noise with his quiet voice did this; thump around 1:24] Wayde Compton: Well, first, as a kid, I used to love just staring at the atlas, and just reading the atlas. I was a bookish kid in a house that didn’t really have a lot of books; I come from a working-class family. My mom read a lot of books, but not books that I wanted to read, so I would kind of scrounge our house for whatever I could find, like reference books, dictionary, an old encyclopedias that my dad bought me, and the atlas, and I would just stare at the atlas and just sort of memorize the different names. The maps, I was fascinated by the map of the world, and just the idea that, that you know, there are all of these places in relation to me that I’d never gone, because I’d also never really traveled so—other than to the States—so it just seemed like impossibly far away and almost imaginary. And then, I guess at some point in elementary school, I remember stumbling upon a book, I think at my school library, about Surtsey, the island off the coast of Iceland, which is referred to in there. And the idea that there could be a new island, that the map—I thought the map was just fixed for all time, and that’s just how—that’s how the world is, that’s the world itself right there, that’s what these books (laughs) are telling us, and so the idea that there could be new land, and they would name it and there would be a debate about which country it now belonged to. That left a really deep impression on me, and I just thought, “everything that I thought was fixed is not fixed, these things can change,” and I’ve never forgotten it. 2:11 [some muffled background noise] Joanne Leow: Translating back that idea, I guess, to where you live now, or where you live for such a long time, what was that like? Because yes, this island far away suddenly appears, but in this context, how did you draw those two things together? 2:24 [thump at 2:42; fishbowl and muffled background noise around 3:11-20] Wayde Compton: They sort of gradually came together. I was thinking about…something made me think about it again, about Surtsey specifically, and then I looked into it and looked more closely at—I think as a kid I was just amazed that it was physically possible, and then later I was thinking about it politically, and just thought that’s really interesting. There was a little bit of a debate, but it was so close to Iceland that it was never really much of a question it would belong to them. Then I saw that this had happened in other places in the world, including in the middle of the Mediterranean, there’s the same kind of volcanic spout under the water that created this little island, I think it’s called Fernandia, but it was so small that it eroded pretty quickly and it’s now below the surface. But while it was above the surface, it was claimed by everybody in the Mediterranean, the idea that it might grow larger, become a geopolitically important or strategic site or something, who knows, and so I just thought that’s really an interesting way of thinking about the land claims issue and colonization here differently. I think well, what if there’s a new piece of land, what happens, who governs it? And it kind of lays bare colonialism because, basically, it has to be…Canada is in a position where if that happens, it has to basically colonize that land now, in the present, if it’s going to maintain the idea that Canada has jurisdiction here. And so, I thought it was a good way of kind of forcing a thought experiment about what colonialism is. |
| Access Condition | Contact Dr. Joanne Leow |
| Subject Topic | Low-- |
| Subject Topic | -- |
| Subject Topic | -- |
| Subject Topic | Space-- |
| Subject Topic | Instability-- |
| Subject Topic | Maps-- |
| Subject Topic | Surtsey |
| Subject Hierarchical Geographic | North America--Canada------Vancouver |
| Subject Local Name | Low------Space--Instability--Maps--Surtsey---- |