Poles Apart (2015)
Behind the Novel: 3
Here’s the next in a series of posts looking at what lies behind my novels. This week, Poles Apart, my 2015 feminist comic novel. As usual, my own passions, interests and experiences led to a novel that’s near and dear to my heart.
The Novel in a Nutshell
Poles Apart tells the story of a youngish feminist man name Everett Kane who moves from Toronto, where he’s a freelance writer, to Orlando, Florida, to support his father’s rehabilitation from a stroke. Everett rents an apartment above what he believes is a new restaurant soon to open. It turns out it’s actually a high-end men’s club called XY (you know, the male chromosomes). Of course, there are highly-paid exotic dancers who shed their clothes. Everett is appalled but he loves his apartment and decides to stay, even after they anchor the upper end of the dance pole using a large bolt and nut through his kitchen floor.
I haven’t mentioned yet that before graduating from university, Everett was very active in student politics on campus and became an ardent feminist, a common development for those active in the national student movement in Canada. His dream of becoming an investigative journalist has withered and he’s left writing articles for various obscure trade publications, including cosmetic and make-up magazines. Oh how the mighty have fallen.
He then meets Beverley Tanner, an older women who is a patient at the same rehab hospital as his father. A fictitious character, she is a pioneering feminist and was one of the women surrounding Gloria Steinem and the founding of Ms magazine in the early days of the women’s movement. She inspires Everett to return to his feminist roots and keep supporting the cause. To do this, he decides to start a feminist blog with thoughtful and insightful commentary on the barriers to gender equality and what might be done to close the gap. He calls it Eve of Equality.
Oh yes, it’s an anonymous blog. Everett feels strongly that a man ought not to be on the forefront of the fight for women’s equality. It would be just like a man to take over the women’s movement. Readers of the blog simply assume it’s written by a woman named Eve, not a man named Everett. Without giving too much away, Everett’s anonymous blog goes viral and becomes the most-read feminist blog on the Internet. To top it off, the slimy entrepreneur who owns the high-end strip club below Everett’s apartment, plans to “out” Everett as the blog’s author. Oh, and there’s a love story in there somewhere, too.
Why a Novel about Feminism?
Like Everett in my novel, I too was “awakened” while at university and became deeply involved in the student movement. While earning my engineering degree, I served on the Student Representative Assembly (SRA) for three years, was Vice President of the McMaster Students Union (MSU), Speaker of the SRA, and eventually President of the MSU.
I leapt into the student movement with both feet and along the way became a staunch feminist. While I was President in November 1983, a critical factor in my feminist awakening was introducing, and then listening transfixed to, Dr. Jeanne Kilbourne, an American feminist who we brought up to speak on campus. Her focus was how women were portrayed in advertising. Her presentation that night was called The Naked Truth.
I think I was changed that night, both by Jeanne Kilbourne’s presentation and by speaking with her afterwards. I’m an engineer by academic discipline, so numbers mean something to me. I decided that night that gender inequality is the most pervasive social inequity on the planet, given that it affects half the world’s population or more than 3.95 billion women. So I was a convert to the feminist cause, as odd as it might be for one who hails from the most privileged demographic in human history, the white man. But it’s true. I began by reading my way through a carefully curated list of feminist writers and books including:
Back then, being a young man who identified as a feminist wasn’t always easy—but it was still a hell of a lot easier than being a young woman. During the latter stages of my term as President of the students union, I found myself embroiled in a campus controversy, courtesy of my feminist views. No time to go into details. Let’s just say it involved an offensive greeting card that we were somehow selling in our students union convenience store.
My years in the student movement solidified and entrenched my interest in, and commitment to, the feminist cause. Poles Apart looks at the growth and maturation of the women’s movement and perhaps of how complex the issues are. Gender equality remains an important cause for me and you’ll see this lurking in the undergrowth of most of my novels, though it’s front and centre in Poles Apart.
The day before my wife and I were married, now nearly 35 years ago and counting, I was browsing in a used bookstore in Wolfville, Nova Scotia, when I stumbled upon a first edition of John Stuart Mill’s, The Subjection of Women from 1869. I immediately bought it for $50.00 and it’s remained a treasured book in our shared home library. In fact, that very book plays a role in Poles Apart. Why? Well, because I own a copy. So I put it in the novel.
The epigraph before the novel starts is a quotation from the very first paragraph of Mill’s plea for equality.
“That the principle which regulates the existing social relations between the two sexes—the legal subordination of one sex to the other—is wrong in itself, and now one of the chief hindrances to human improvement; and that it ought to be replaced by a principle of perfect equality, admitting no power or privilege on the one side, nor disability on the other.”
John Stuart Mill, The Subjection of Women (1869)
When the novel was finished, I was thrilled that Canadian feminist activists and writers Michele Landsberg—who wrote Women and Children First, one of the first feminist books I’d read—and Judy Rebick, were kind enough to provide blurbs for the back cover.
When the Novel Hit Bookstores
As I’d done with all of my novels up to that point, I podcast the novel, chapter-by-chapter myself and made if available for free on iTunes and other podcast repositories.
Bookstores were very supportive of the novel and I was very lucky that the Globe and Mail, among other media outlets, reviewed it.
Shortly after the novel was released, I nearly fainted one morning when the following tweet appeared in my Twitter feed:
Poles Apart was an instant bestseller and miraculously made it to number one just a week after its publication. So, so grateful.
In the early summer of 2016, I was honoured again to be a finalist for the Stephen Leacock Medal for Humour along with two fine writers and friends, Susan Juby and Sarah Mian.
Susan Juby won the Leacock Medal that year and deservedly so. Her Republic of Dirt is a hilarious novel that I loved.
So that’s the background to Poles Apart, my fifth novel, and one that’s important to me given its subject matter. I’d love to see it one day as a film, but I’m not holding my breath.
Next up? We’ll know in a week. Thanks for reading and do subscribe if you haven’t already. Many thanks.
Loved this one — hilarious!
Loved the book, and how you incorporate such important issues into it, and your others. A great read, with fun, humour, and terrific characters. Thanks for sharing.