This is the website of Sam Wiebe. Sam writes fiction and nonfiction and screenplays. He plays the drums. He rarely refers to himself in the third person, as this is an unnatural way to express oneself. Occasionally, though,  he is called upon to use the third person, in situations such as developing content for his website. Which this is. 

Email: wiebesam (at) gmail dot com

Yes, I know the website looks hideous.

5/8/12: My trip to Europe changed my life. What I'm grappling with is how to express this to other people without waxing soporific and boring their pants off. I spent two hours with the Elgin Marbles in the British Museum. I saw Monet's infinity-shaped Water Lillies rooms in the Orangerie. I saw where Hemingway and Joyce lived and wrote. I visited Shakespeare's grave. I walked through Stirling and Bannockburn, the ruins of Edzell and Donottar castles, visited the Wallace Monument and went through Mary King's Close. I had a pint of Tennants in the William Wallace Pub, and a Belhaven in the Oxford Bar in Edinburgh, home base of John Rebus and Ian Rankin. Most miraculous of all, I watched two soccer games and actually enjoyed them.

I took notes during my trip and I'm going to assemble them into a book. I will keep you posted on that.

I'm very excited about the attention Last of the Independents is getting. The Arthur Ellis Awards are very cool to be a part of. Friends have asked me if I'm nervous about winning, what I think my chances are.

Here's the thing: I was in Paris when I found out. I woke up and my mother had emailed me saying that my name had appeared on the website. I left my hotel with Count Basie on my iPod, on my way to tour the haunts of Hemingway and Joyce and Orwell in the Mouffetard district. "Elated" doesn't cover the feeling of strolling the Rue Jenner in April with that kind of good news. What more could I possibly ask for?

And tonight after work I had sushi and then coffee with my friend Mel Yap along Commercial Drive, in my neighborhood, and was pretty damn satisfied.

5/1/12: Okay. All right. Okay.

It is May first. I'm just home from a three-week trip to Europe that took in London, Stratford-upon-Avon, Paris, Dublin, Glasgow, Sitlring, Edinburgh, and Montrose/St Cyrus. I've been on the go for about twenty hours now and the crash is imminent, but I want to address a few recent developments.

First, let me thank Jess Driscoll for updating my website in my absence. She keeps a great blog called Facts Are Nothing and her web site is a lot prettier than mine. I'd also like to thank the Stachura family for hosting me for a few days in Montrose. I had the time of my life.

My thoughts on the Arthur Ellis shortlist nomination are as follows: I am deeply honored and I am very thankful for the exposure. Write-ups have appeared in The CBC, the National Post, and the Nanaimo Daily News, as well as on a lot of great blogs and websites. There may--nay, there WILL--be more cool news coming up, so stay plugged in.

Doesn't have the ring of "stay tuned," does it? Ever stop to think about all the great vocabulary that digitalization is making obsolete? When was the last time a phone rang, or a doorbell chimed? When was the last time--OK, Carlin, we get it, save the rest for your comedy routine.

4/28/12: There's a short write-up about the Arthur Ellis Awards from CBC, and the Crime Writers of Canada have released the shortlist as a PDF with more information about the writers and books.

4/20/12: My novel, Last of the Independents, is on the shortlist for the Crime Writers of Canada's Best Unpublished Novel award, the Unhanged Arthur. It's exciting and a little unbelievable, but here's the list. We find out the winner May 31st.

4/10/12: I'm going to the UK tomorrow for three weeks--unless you know where I live, in which case I will be back in a few hours.

3/29/12: I've gotten a lot of positive feedback on my stories, and I must say, I don't like it. J.D.Salinger was onto something when he locked himself in that apartment in Harlem, only coming out to tutor that basketball kid and remind us how good he was in Untouchables. "You're the man now, dog" indeed.

Seriously, though, I'm glad people are enjoying "Humanitarian" and "Black Light Marker." I should learn how to take a compliment.

3/19/12: The Winter 2012 issue of Spinetingler is out now, and is available [ebook] on Amazon. My story "Black Light Marker" is in it.

Tonght I saw Werner Herzog's Into the Abyss, his documentary about Capital Punishment in Texas. There was a Skype Q&A with Herzog before the film, and his producer Erik Nelson was in attendance. It's an unsettling film. I'm very torn on the subject matter.

True to my word, as of March, my Steve Rolston sketch of Hemingway punching out Jack Kerouac has been framed, while my master's degree sits in a box somewhere at my parents'.

3/15/12: My story "Humanitarian" [full title: "He's No Humanitarian, But Damn, Can He Take a Punch"] was published online in Thousand Islands Life magazine. You can read it here.

3/10/12: Came across a great quotation in Three Uses of the Knife by David Mamet: "Solutions to the problem of the second act are the test of character." I find that to be true. On a long project you reach a point where the initial inspiration has been used up and the end is nowhere in sight, and you find yourself looking for excuses to abandon the work. What's so brilliant about Mamet is he equates this to what the protagonist goes through--just as the hero suffers during the middle act, the author suffers while writing the middle act. It helps to keep that in mind.

Is it pretentious to think of yourself as a hero on a journey? A better question: if you are to think of yourself in that way at some point in your life, isn't it best to do so in the middle of writing a novel, when you need the boost in confidence that kind of thinking affords? William James might say that if it has a positive effect, it's at least worth examination.

Mamet puts it really well:

"The artist has to undergo the same hero struggles as the protagonist. If you're sitting in the writers' building on the Fox lot and getting paid $200,000 a week, you know that you'd better stop daydreaming and start coming up with Benji: The Return.

"But if you're sitting all by yourself in the coffee shop, smoking that cigarette, you're much freer to follow your own bizarre, troubling thoughts. Because all of your thoughts, at bottom, are bizarre and troubling. (If they weren't, not only wouldn't we go to the theatre, we wouldn't dream.) So there you sit in the coffee shop, talking to yourself. "Oh my God, is this the real thing? Has someone thought of this before? Am I insane? Is anybody going to like it?"

"That's part of the process too. And it's probably a sign that you're on the right track. I used to say that a good writer throws out the stuff that everybody else keeps. But an even better test occurs to me: perhaps a good writer keeps the stuff everybody else throws out."

2/29/12: I guess I should give a proper shout to my brother's film blog Malevolent and Often Right. As much as I malign him, Josh is a unique voice, and the people he co-blogs with have done some excellent write-ups. If you care about cinema, you'll get something out of reading him.

2/25/12: A short story I wrote, "Black Light Marker," is getting published in Spinetingler Magazine. 

2/22/12: The best movie I saw this year? It's a tie between The Sunset Limited and Take Shelter. They're both bleak, both well-acted, both vaguely Southern Gothic owing more to Flannery O'Connor than William Faulkner. Dangerous Method, Coriolanus, The Guard, Midnight in Paris and Drive were also excellent. You can go to my brother Josh's film blog and find out why I'm completely wrong, and why a movie where the actor from Speed 2 has to do battle with Isabella Rosselini's naked spectral penis-licking chained-to-his-daughter's-bedpost father is actually the best film of the year. That is not an exaggeration--Guy Maddin is a creep. But a lovable creep. A Canadian creep.

Speaking of Canadian creeps, I'm reading a biography of Chris Benoit--or more specifically a history of Stampede Wrestling, the promotion that launched the pro wrestling careers of Bret and Owen Hart, the British Bulldogs, and a host of other WWE superstars. A very sad fact: if you watch a wrestling pay per view from the late eighties or early nineties, on average 17.86% of the wrestlers died before the age of fifty from drug or steroid related causes.

2/19/12: Re-posted the updated third draft of the Frankenstein script, with fewer errors. 

2/4/12: Posted full texts of the 'Bus Fight' story and the Frankenstein radio script, which are yours to enjoy--free-just for perusing this ugly website. You're welcome, internet.

1/30/12: "Credit Roll" by East Vanguard was played on CITR's "Parts Unknown" radio show. Check it out here at 1:05:00. Nice plug for the album after that. CITR is UBC's radio station. 

1/23/12: Yesterday the Island was hit by storms. All sailings from Departure Bay were cancelled. I spent the night at my friend Andrew's and caught the earliest sailing this morning. Watching the sun come up from the observation deck as we crossed the Georgia Straight was some consolation.

1/3/12 : A profitable and cancer-free 2012 to the half-dozen or so people who check here on a regular basis.

The Frankenstein recording sessions went down yesterday. I was very pleased with the result. Andrew Nicholls of Permanent Records handled the recording duties, so it should sound a hell of a lot better than Hamlet--which is no aspersion against that fine work.

Recording these radio plays, with sixteen-plus people crammed into my apartment, I feel as close to the way Swearengen must have felt during the "we're forming a fucking government" episodes of Deadwood.

Look for Frankenstein on iTunes and this website in a month or so. In other news, East Vanguard's "Open Road" was played on CITR, the University of British Columbia's radio station. A podcast of that episode will be out soon, apparently. I interviewed Mel Yap, the video of which will be added to the East Vanguard electronic press kit.

One thing I want to do this year, aside from fulfilling my writing- and health-related goals, is to read the King James Bible, the 1611 edition. Why? Because as far as literature goes, 1 Henry IV is the purest expression of the exuberance of being alive, and Lear is the purest expression of dissipation, torment and despair. Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Melville and Joyce are all up there, but ultimately the Bard holds the top position. I want to see if underneath the dogma and cant there isn't an emotional resonance to the Good Book that rivals the best of Shakespeare. And as Black says in Sunset Limited (my pick for best film of 2011, with Take Shelter a close second), "You read good books. But you ain't read the BEST book."

* * *

12/18/11: I'm very bummed out about the loss of Christopher Hitchens and of Patrice Oneal. Both were brilliant iconoclasts. Both never flinched from offering up unpopular opinions. Both were ultimately themselves, in a popular culture more and more predicated on fitting into a pre-established, safe and marketable category.

Hitchens wrote brilliantly about literature and politics. He was one of the few proponents of the Iraq War who could offer valid and thoughtful reasons for the conflict. Patrice Oneal was a standup comic who had small roles on Arrested Development, the American Office, Chappelle's Show and the Charlie Sheen Roast. His standup special "Elephant in the Room" is on par with the best of Louis CK and Patton Oswalt. Listening to Patrice and Louis argue on the Opie & Anthony show was hysterical.

Check them out. They will infuriate you and challenge you. You will agree with some of what they say and disagree, but in disagreeing you will understand your own opinions better, and your understanding will help to humanize those you disagree with. This last point is of the utmost importance if we're to continue on as a species.

If I could offer a suggestion for a New Year's resolution: people should spend at least an hour a week reading or listening to someone with different opinions than their own. The media has served up The Myth of the Fringe, that there is an unassailable gulf between left and right, right and wrong, that the Occupy Wall Streeters or the Tea Partiers are insane, stupid, evil. Actions are often evil but people rarely are. As the ex-preacher Casy says in Grapes of Wrath, "There's just stuff people do."

Being honest and standing up to the world like Hitchens and Oneal did is something to aspire to. So is staying open to unpleasant or unpopular arguments. It's a very short life and it's a bit less pleasant with those two gone. They set a very high truth benchmark for the rest of us.

12/7/11: Melvin Yap has finished his album "Material Witness" under the moniker East Vanguard. You can hear it at Sound Cloud here. I played drums on all the tracks except "Material Witness." I'm very happy with how it turned out. If you like '70s film music a la Lalo Schifrin or Oliver Nelson, you'll probably like this. And if not, then you've wasted two seconds checking out the website of an independent musician from Vancouver. Consider it patronage of the arts in the form of donating your time.

11/26/11: My esteemed colleague and fellow inebriate Michael Stachura alerted me to the fact that my undergraduate essay on Cormac McCarthy and Nietzsche had been published online and wasn't linked to my website. Now it is.

11/15/11: Got the following email: 

 

"Thanks so much for participating in the Gemini Magazine Flash Fiction Contest. With about 1,000 entries, picking the winners was no easy task. An enjoyable one, though! Plenty of dynamic, memorable flashes. The finalists can now be read online in our November issue.

"Cheers to the Grand Prize winner: "Drinks on the Doctor" by Xavier McCaffrey ($1,000 prize).

"Second Place: "Death in Nairobi" by Agatha Verdadero ($100 prize).

 

"Honorable Mentions:

"A Sip of Blackberry" by Todd Benware

"Suspicious Package" by Laura Loomis

"The Tip" by Corey Ginsberg

"A Knife or a Blade?" by Geoffrey Uhl

"The Bridesmaid" by Heather Sappenfield

 

"Notable Stories: 

"What Happens Now" by Liz Ference

"Damn Lucky Sometimes" by Sultana Banulescu

"Morning in San Pedro" by Dee Hubbard

"I Want to Show You the World" by Evelyn Krieger

"A Sibling's Rival" by Denise Heinze

"Seven Years Old" by ShrutiChoudhary

"Stolen" by Michelle Pretorius

"An Interview with J.D. Salinger" by Edward Lee

"The Bathroom of My Ex-Lover's Wife" by Kathleen Spivak

"Bus Fight in Surrey" by Sam Wiebe

"Self Portrait in Red Chalk" by Danielle LeDuc

"Trees That Bear Fruit" by Pete Clark

There were also many more well written flashes not listed here.

 

"Look for our next Flash Fiction Contest around late April.

 

"Thanks again.

 

"David Bright, Editor

Gemini Magazine"

 

So I didn't win, but I placed--sort of. Not bad.

Also of interest--I have the worst writer's name on the list. How cool would it be to be named "Xavier McCaffrey?" Or "Michelle Pretorius?" Or even "Pete Clark?" "Sam Wiebe" just ain't in that league.

In other news, rough draft of the Frankenstein radio play is complete. This one is going to be a million times better than Hamlet, which was already pretty damned good.

10/21/11: Posted some older blog posts in the "Essays, Missives and Screeds" section. Some of what's on footinmouthandheadupass.blogspot.com is embarassing--me going through reactionary grad school angst, making jejeune political statements, or picking a fight with people who didn't deserve it. But quite a few posts made me laugh to beat the band. It was a great blog, just disorganized, sloppy, and pulling in too many directions.

While I was reading through my old blog I came to this post: http://footinmouthandheadupass.blogspot.com/2009/09/don-crutchfield.html . It was about me realizing that Don Crutchfield, a "Private Investigator to the stars" who James Ellroy turned into a character in his novel Blood's A Rover, had written a book I'd read years before. It's not a profound post by any means, just me making a connection with my own reading history. But look who posted in the comments section:

http://www.blogger.com/comment.g?blogID=8568632045384977012&postID=1142581518759444786

How fucked up is that?

10/21/11: Met Ian Rankin at the Writer's Festival. Really nice guy. I asked a floor question about how closely a crime writer should follow actual investigative procedure, and he told a story about how, when he started the first Rebus book, he wrote a letter to the Chief of Police asking for permission to visit the police station. Long story short, Rankin ended up a suspect in a murder investigation.

When I got his signature later, I told him I was an aspiring crime writer. He said, "Remember, Sam, we've all been where you are just now." Which is a great point.

Also at the festival were Denise Mina, Stuart MacBride, Peter Robinson, and a local guy, all of whom seemed really cool and had interesting things to say. When asked the best piece of advice he'd ever got, MacBride answered: "Be less shit."

10/13/11: A magazine has expressed interest in publishing "Humanitarian." We'll see what happens, but that would be pretty cool. I have other stuff out right now, a couple stories, a novel. An article I wrote on the crime films of Sidney Lumet will probably end up in the next issue of Parallax, Vancouver's independent cinema magazine. I don't think my ebullience is really coming through-- I'm excited about these developments, really I am. I just  don't want to brag until it's in print.

Autumn in Vancouver is the best place in the world at the best time of the year. If it were any prettier, it would have superfluous em-dashes and have been written by Emily Dickinson.

9/21/11: My Scene of the Crime award arrived today. Framable certificate, fifty dollar check, and an offer to publish the story on their website (or link to it via mine). Either way the story should be up somewhere soon.

9/15/11: I did some drumming for Mel Yap's album "East Vanguard." He writes amazing songs. One of the demos ended up as the soundtrack to a short film Mel made to promote his friend Peng's art show at Jacana Gallery. Video here.

Mel is a real inspiration. I had him come in and give a talk to my English 101 class, about his career as a video game designer and freelance photographer. Everything he does he knocks out of the park.

8/18/11: Hamlet is now on iTunes. Check out http://itunes.apple.com/ca/podcast/wiebe-brothers-present/id458287924 .