By Yemi Adebisi
Author of Running Water, the 72-year-old Canadian writer, Thomas King is a great influence to a number of young writers across the globe partly because of his style of writing and choice of language.
King
King authored 15 novels and short story collections, including A Coyote Columbus Story (1992) and Green Grass, Running Water (1993), which were both nominated for the Governor General’s Award.
This author, in an interview said the writer with the greatest influence to his foray in writing was William Eastlake, foremost American novelist, who wrote series of books about Natives in the South West.
Eastlake was a highly author in the 1950s and 1960s, but his reputation, according to an American literary critic, “began to sink like a stone” in the late 1970s and by the time of his death in 1997, he was a forgotten figure.
Aside that, King said he was a great fan of N. Scott Momaday, the first Indian to win the Pulitzer prize, because of his poetic and lyrical style of writing, describing him as a writer with adjectives and adverb factories.
Above all, King said his interest in traditional and oral literatures cannot be quantified.
His words: “ I know some of—I know parts of—New Zealand literature, Maori literature, and parts of Aboriginal literature out of Australia. But I don’t know them that well. I’ve read some of those texts and I find them intriguing…What people do is just take one book, though, like Patricia Grace. I could bring one of her books in and look at and say, ‘Well, this looks like this, and this does this, and blah, blah, blah.’ But I think you need to be smarter than that. So I don’t.”
King said he also has soft spots for the writings of experts like Albert Wendt though he claimed to have almost stopped reading critical texts since he ran into the blues recently.
But how does he perceive the art of reading?
“When I’m writing, I don’t read. I’m like Eden, but not for the same reason. It’s just that reading takes up so much of my energy that if I give it to reading I can’t give it to writing. And I was a pretty good reader in my younger years, and I think now I’m just switched over to just doing the writing,” he said.
In 2003, King was chosen to deliver the prestigious Massey Lectures, published as The Truth about Stories. A year later, King was made a member of the Order of Canada.
King has a PhD in English and American studies from the University of Utah and is currently Professor of English and Creative Writing at the University of Guelph.
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