Stanley Park

Though this book came out quite a few years ago now, I only had the desire to read it recently. Before leaving for Serbia this summer, I was given this book to read during my trip, in the hopes that it would make me too nostalgic to stay in Serbia for permanently.

Stanley Park is so true to Vancouver, down to the smallest detail, that I assumed the story was was autobiographical. So it is with this in mind that I found this interview so fascinating.


An interview with Timothy Taylor by Scott Sellers

A magazine interview with Timothy Taylor appeared recently under the headline, “Ought To Be Famous.” For now, the 37-year-old Vancouver writer will have to make do with being one of the most talked-about talents on the Canadian literary scene. Last fall, Taylor garnered national attention when he won the prestigious Journey Prize for short fiction for his story, “Doves of Townsend.” What made the victory remarkable was the fact that Taylor had written two of the three stories shortlisted for the prize.

This spring, Timothy Taylor returns to the spotlight with the publication of his debut novel. Stanley Park is a powerful and gripping tale of food, family and the mysteries of the city. Jeremy Papier is a young chef dedicated to creating a unique British Columbia cuisine by celebrating locally grown ingredients in the food he creates. Yet trying to stay true to his culinary creed is a struggle, and the mounting debts for his restaurant, The Monkey’s Paw Bistro, prove it. To complicate matters, Jeremy is becoming more and more troubled by his strained relationship with his father, an anthropologist engaged in an unorthodox field of study. As Jeremy struggles to save his restaurant, he embarks upon an extraordinary adventure that involves unusual (and illegal) financial schemes, the homeless of Stanley Park, a decades-old unsolved murder case, a smooth-talking business man with questionable motives, and the careful preparations for an urban feast that readers will never forget.

Q. A journalist recently described you as “an overnight success after a decade of hard work.” How great a challenge has it been to get to this stage in your writing career?

A. It was hard work, sure. I think the challenge was two-fold. First, I started quite late. I came out of MBA school, did four years in banking, then ran my own Pacific fisheries consulting practice for about seven years. I wrote a little during this time but I didn’t really get serious until five years ago. As a result, I never built a community of other writers around me. I was writing on instinct, without any reliable way of estimating my own chance of success. This was kind of scary on occasion.
I guess the second challenge lay in the simple fact that it’s difficult to have serious writing ambitions and run your own business at the same time. Both pursuits deserve your full attention, but writing won’t return a living wage at the beginning, so there are some hard realities. It doesn’t help that the two communities, artists and merchant/professionals, are frequently suspicious of and critical of one another. To be frank, when it inevitably came out that I was also a writer, the news was not always well received by my professional colleagues. And there was some distrust going the other way too.

Despite all of this, I stress that I could not have begun any other way. I needed exposure to people in different fields with problems and issues and objectives outside the world of writing. If I had tried to start a novel in my mid-20s after studying creative writing, I can’t imagine what I would have written about. I admire people who succeed this way and, recently, I’ve met quite a few.

Q. Through the character of Jeremy Papier, the young chef at the centre of Stanley Park, you offer readers a fascinating inside look at the food world. Where did your knowledge of the food community come from?

A. Researching the community of commercial cooks, I read a lot. I also talked to a number of chefs and visited a kitchen in action. Together, this added up to quite a bit of colourful and useful stuff. Everything from professional tricks and techniques to how cooks move in a kitchen and talk to each other. As far as coming to understand the community of diners, the research was a little more subjective. Every time I went to a restaurant, I tried to get a feel for the kind of person that liked the place. And after you read enough restaurant reviews, likewise, you start to pick up on what the so-called trends are. So it was kind of an agglomeration of research techniques through which I tried to come to some practical knowledge of how things worked in commercial kitchens and, at the same time, develop my own opinions about culinary fashion.

Q. Vancouver’s homeless play an important role in the novel. The men and women who flow into Stanley Park after dark create a unique community for themselves, an almost netherworld within the city. You give the characters that inhabit this world, like Caruzo and Chladek, great dignity. In creating such a powerful portrait, did you feel a sense of responsibility in writing about the plight of the homeless?

A. There is a risk in writing about homelessness in anything other than a realistic way, because you don’t want to diminish the misery of it. On some fundamental level, living out-of-doors is about getting rained on and about being cold and about eating food that you find in dumpsters. There is nothing romantic about it. Also, much of what we see on the streets is the product of untreated mental illness and drug addiction. So, in answer to the question, I feel tremendous responsibility primarily not to abuse the reality of the situation.

That said, the misery of homelessness doesn’t imply a lack of humanity or individuality or personal story. When I wrote about characters like Caruzo and Chladek, I was trying to avoid the idea that they could only be legitimate people if they were somehow rescued from their homelessness. They are who they are, and they bring their histories to where they are just as everybody else does, in some tangled mix of fluke and predetermination.

Q. Over the years, the character called the Professor has become obsessed with one of Stanley Park’s great mysteries: the true-life murder case known as “The Babes in the Wood.” Can you offer some background about the case and how you became interested in it?

A. The skeletons of two little kids were discovered in Stanley Park by groundskeepers in 1953. Forensics dated the murder to the fall of 1947, when the kids would have been about five or six. When the story was made public, a young woman came forward who had been in the park in October of 1947 and had seen a woman with a little boy and girl of about that age enter the forest, then emerge later without the kids. It sounded like a solid lead and the police solicited information from anyone who knew about a little boy and girl having gone missing. Thousands of tips came in, including, bizarrely, one from Clifford Olson’s mother (Olson would have been a child himself at that time). In any case, none of the tips came to anything and years later, in the mid-90s, DNA evidence revealed that the two murdered children were in fact brothers. I have since been told that the original testimony of the young woman has been discounted as a result, although you have to wonder if a five-year-old boy might not have easily been mistaken for a girl, especially at a distance.

I don’t remember exactly when I first heard about the case, but I can tell you that I read the story at some point, probably when I was a kid, and that it drilled into my subconscious and lodged there. I know this because when I began to develop my ideas for the park side of this novel, from the beginning I had this sense that Stanley Park was twinned with an old unsolved murder of two children. And I thought I was making it up. Of course, as I began to read about park history, the true story emerged. It gave me chills when I first realized I had been “imagining” something that really took place.

It’s noteworthy that the unsolved-crime people with the Vancouver Police Department still take the case very seriously. True story: I heard from a misinformed source that there had been a Babes in the Wood deathbed confession somewhere. I searched everywhere and could not confirm this. Finally, I posted a note on an Internet bulletin board concerning itself with BC events and history. I had no responses. Weeks later, I was in the Vancouver Police Museum and I was chatting with the curator. I asked him if he’d heard anything about the confession and he became very, very interested. No, he said, he hadn’t, but he’d heard that someone had posted this rumour on an Internet bulletin board. He was very keen to know if there was anything to this. So, they were paying attention.