THOMAS KING AND TOMSON HIGHWAY

In the context of Canada’s oft-referred-to Indigenous Renaissance, Tomson Highway and Thomas King qualify as elder statesmen, yet neither seems willing to make any concessions to age (King is 78, Highway almost 70). Indeed, both are as busy, if not busier than ever, with multiple genre-straddling projects, from country albums to graphic novels to musicals to children’s books. The pair were interviewed via Zoom by Emily Donaldson,

King from his home in Guelph, Ont., and Highway from his in Gatineau

It seems you’ve both made the most of a very weird year. Tomson, your memoir, Permanent Astonishment, won the Hilary Weston Prize, and Kiss of the Fur Queen was

republished as a Penguin Classic …

Thomas King: … now you’re a classic! [laughs]

Tomson Highway: Yeah, it’s right up there with Oliver Twist and Pride and Prejudice and Mickey Mouse and the Seven Dwarves …

… and Thomas, your novel Sufferance came out. Can you talk about where you’re at – creatively and otherwise – in this ongoing semi-postpandemic space we’re in?

TK: I’m not a very social person, so the pandemic gave me the perfect excuse to say no to everything. But then they discovered Zoom – I’d like to shoot the person who developed it. But aside from the Zoom stuff I’ve just been home writing the way I normally write. I don’t miss being around other people, to be honest with you.

TH: I know a lot of people in the theatre community and I felt terrible for them. The performing artists had it bad last year. But for creative artists like myself it’s been fantastic. Composers thrive on silence and solitude. I’ve never been so creative in my life. Because the pandemic delayed things, at one point I was juggling five projects at the same time. The only thing I missed was being able to hug my grandchildren – I’m a hugger. We’re hands-on grandfathers, me and my partner. I have two CDs coming out. That’s how creative I was. One coming out this month is my first country album – 12 songs with Cree lyrics. I wrote those and the music myself.

Where on the country music spectrum do you fall between, say, Hank Williams or Hank Williams Jr.?

TH: I don’t like new country. I grew up effectively in the Arctic, right on the Nunavut-Manitoba border. There was no electricity. We lived in canvas tents, even in winter. We’re talking about the true north, strong and free. And that’s one of the reasons I wrote this book, because Canadians don’t know the North. They’ve never seen our land. Babies born in snowbanks – back in the fifties and forties it was just par for the course. I’m the last of a breed. We did have transistor radios, but the only way to get reception was to hang them on trees, the higher the better. We got stations from Nashville, and so we grew up with all the great country stars: Kitty Wells, Hank Williams, Patsy Cline. That music entered our hearts and our bodies and we loved it. I play country music to this very day on my beautiful Yamaha concert grand. I took to it like a fish to water.

Tom, you’re also a triple or quadruple threat as well. What are you working on?

TK: I’ve got a children’s book forthcoming and just had a graphic novel come out. And I’m trying to mark the box of the one thing that I haven’t done yet: a musical. My mother was a big musical aficionado. Growing up, every Sunday she’d put old 78s of all the major musicals on the phonograph: South Pacific, Guys and Dolls, Annie Get Your Gun. My brother and I hated it, so we used to wander around the house singing different lyrics to her favourite songs just to annoy her. But they stuck in my head, and as I’ve gotten older I find I really do like that stuff. I’ve got the music all done, but I have to go back and redo the libretto because it just wasn’t working very well. It’s just storytelling. You don’t pick what form it’s going to take. Sometimes it’s a poem, sometimes a short story, sometimes a novel, sometimes a song.

What’s it about?

TK: It’s based on the old radio show I did years ago with Floyd Favel Starr and Edna Rain, The Dead Dog Café. I figure I’ve got the characters and should have a good time with it. We’ll see what happens. It’s about reconciliation.

Do you ever revisit your past work? Tomson, with you I imagine that’s inevitable because your theatrical work gets remounted.

TH: One of the great moments of my life happened this past summer. A play I wrote 36 years ago, The Rez Sisters, was produced by the Stratford Festival. My husband and I went down and saw it on the very last night – it was questionable if we could with the pandemic; at one point we couldn’t even cross from Quebec into Ontario. But it was fantastic, a brilliant production.

TK: The only time I read my work is if there’s interest in making it into a film, which so far has proved elusive. Normally, once I finish something, I just keep moving ahead. But I did have to do that last year, because one of my early short stories, Borders, was turned into a graphic novel. I like to see what other artists do with stuff and I’m not real good at collaboration. I don’t play well with other children, unfortunately.

Do you ever get writer’s block?

TK: I’ll get to a point in a project where I’m sick of it, but I don’t think that’s writer’s block so much as just exhaustion, especially in the long projects. What I’ll do is go to my workshop and do some woodworking. Or I take my camera out on the river and put some videos together. You can’t just sit around and watch TV – that’ll rot your brain

Not liking TV is almost old-fashioned these days. Surely there’s some guilty pleasure?

TK: Canadian Netflix is a dead zone as far as I’m concerned. Some of the movies they put on are older than me and not nearly as good. I’m not a great fan of