Everything I Own

‘Everything I Own’ strikes local chords

By G. Michael Dobbs
Managing Editor
Reminder Publications Dec. 19, 2011

If the story told in the new novel, “Everything I Own” strikes some familiar local chords, it’s because the author, Raymond Beauchemin — born in Holyoke and raised in Chicopee — put much of himself into his book.

Beauchemin’s protagonist, Michel Laflamme, is born in Holyoke and returns to Quebec as a child when his family moves back there.

Beauchemin described the novel as the following: “Some bridges are built to be crossed. Others, we burn. Songwriter Michel Laflamme is about to discover the difference. Hearing his wife singing on the radio, Michel recalls the emotional and political upheavals of his own life and that of his Belle Province, but finds his thoughts turning again and again, like the chorus of a song, to his troubled past with his father.”

Beauchemin explained to Reminder Publications that in some way his novel is a “what if” book. He asked himself the question while writing the book about how different his life would have been if his parents had moved back to Canada. His parents, Julien and Pauline Beauchemin, live in Granby.
“There’s a lot of little bits of me [in the book],” he said.

Speaking from his home in Ontario, he said he was back in Holyoke on Dec. 10 for a reading and signing of his book. He noted he was the last author who would appear at the library building, which is now closed for extensive renovations. Although it has been years since he was in the city, he said that when driving around it became familiar again.

Beauchemin is a graduate of Holyoke Catholic High School. He graduated from the University of Massachusetts Amherst in 1984 and worked at the former Holyoke Transcript-Telegram from 1984 through 1985. That job was followed by stints at the Hartford Courant and the Boston Herald.

Interested in exploring his Canadian roots, he applied for dual Canadian citizenship. Wanting to expand his writing skills, he earned a degree in creative writing from Concordia University in Montreal.

He soon learned that writing fiction was a difficult way of making a living. He edited several anthologies of fiction and ran a small publishing house, but he returned to journalism when he became part of the staff at the Montreal Gazette.

Still, writing fiction was part of his life. He wrote three novels that “didn’t go anywhere.”

“There are plenty of people out there with rejected novels,” he laughed.

Meeting his wife in Canada further cemented his ties to that country.

In 2008, Beauchemin took advantage of a buy-out proposal at the Montreal Gazette during downsizing to leave the newspaper. His next assignment was helping to start up a newspaper in Abu Dhabi in the United Arab Emirates. He stayed for more than three years and then came back home to Canada.
His interest in fiction still stayed with him and “a friend of a friend” liked “Everything I Own” so much that it found a publisher, Guernica Editions, which specializes in literature.

The novel is written, he explained, in a rhythm that reflects his own interest in music and the role that music plays in the narrative. Although he had to research songwriting for the book, he explained there is an artistic connection been him and his hero.

He said much of the book’s actions revolves and reflects the political scene in Quebec and the interest in the separatist movement of the 1960s and ‘70s.
“I didn’t set out to write a political novel. I set out to write a love story,” he said.

He had few intentions, though, of where the story was going when he was writing it. His writing process includes establishing his characters and pushing them in a general direction. He didn’t write his novel with a strict outline. Instead, the way he wrote was “more organic.”

Parts of his novel were ideas that he had developed over a 20-year period that found their way into “Everything I Own,” he added.

He is now busy promoting the book, with readings and appearances at bookstores in Canada and he is working on a new novel that deals more directly with the politics of Quebec.

By day, he now copyedits stories long-distance, thanks to the Internet, for a newspaper in Calgary, but fiction is a big part of his writing life.

“I love doing it,” he said of writing fiction. “There are so many stories in my head. I want to get them out.”

Separatism, family debut novel’s focus

Cori Urban
Springfield Republican (Dec. 7, 2011)

HOLYOKE – Former Holyoke Transcript-Telegram reporter Raymond Beauchemin will return to the Paper City with a new assignment: Promote his debut novel, “Everything I Own.”

The University of Massachusetts at Amherst graduate, who was raised in Chicopee, will read and sign copies of the book on Saturday from 2 to 4 p.m. at the Holyoke Public Library.

“Everything I Own” has been described as “a Quebecois blues . . . wise, pungent and funny.” It tells the story of a Holyoke-born songwriter who moves to his parents’ native Province of Quebec as a child and grows up to marry a famous Quebec singer.

Beauchemin’s parents immigrated to Massachusetts from the Drummondville, Quebec, area for economic reasons, and unlike the parents of the protagonist in the book, they did not go back. So the book is a “what if” for the author: What if his parents had moved back and he had grown up north of the border?

The novel’s main character’s coming of age parallels the triumphs and defeats of Quebec political history from 1970 to 1995, when the last referendum to secede from Canada was defeated.

“When you’re developing a character, he’s got to have some kind of back story,” Beauchemin said.

The main character in the book, Michel, is a separatist, but as he grows, he becomes disillusioned with the separatist movement.

“I didn’t set out to write about politics, but it became a natural thing to do,” Beauchemin said. “It’s not just about a songwriter, his wife and father. It does become a story about Quebec and Canada and their relationship together.”

“Everything I Own” is Beauchemin’s fourth book, but the first to be published. “It’s not always your first novel that gets published,” he said, laughing as he noted that the first three “would need some serious work” to be published. “I wouldn’t approach the material in the same way, if at all.”

Beauchemin, 49, has dual citizenship and considers himself a federalist; he does not advocate the separation of Quebec from the rest of Canada “for a lot of reasons,” he said, some economic but mostly cultural. “I think Quebec’s strong hand is played as part of Canada. If it were off by itself, it would have a harder go of it.”

Asked what he likes about Quebec, he listed its people, language, music, literature, “all of it.”

Beauchemin, son of Julien R. and Pauline R. Beauchemin, of Granby, grew up in the Aldenville section of Chicopee, attended St. Joan of Arc School and graduated from Holyoke Catholic High School in 1980.

He earned a bachelor’s degree in English and journalistic studies from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, where he was managing editor of The Daily Collegian. He worked at the Transcript-Telegram, covering Chicopee fire and police departments, Hampden County Superior Court and religion. He later worked for the Hartford Courant and the Boston Herald before moving in 1990 to Montreal, where he earned his master’s degree in English and creative writing from Concordia University and edited several anthologies of literature.

A longtime editor of The Gazette in Montreal, he recently returned from four years in Abu Dhabi, where helped establish a newspaper. Married to writer Denise Roig and the father of two, Beauchemin now lives in Ontario.

Q&A: 1

1. What was the starting point of the novel? Did it start with music, because music plays such an important part of the novel?

As important as it is to the novel, music was not my starting point. I would love to say that it was, because I think some of the writing about music and the creative process is some of the strongest in the novel, but that came later. To start a story or a novel, I need an image. And the image I had was that of a funeral. In particular, in the scene of the funeral, the key image is that of hands. There’s Michel’s mother’s gloved hand on the edge of the pew; there’s Michel’s awareness of his hand as he takes out the key to unlock his car door.
(Later, there’s an image of Michel having to catch pucks with his bare hands as punishment by his father for having lost his goalie’s mitt.) That funeral image became part of a story I wrote in the early 1990s and which was never published. There are several other bits in that story that became incorporated into Everything I Own, such as Michel’s story about his childhood friend, Claude. These were the starting points; the music came later after I discovered who my protagonist was as an adult and what he did for a living and how he came to be who he is.

2. You kind of say so in the novel, but how do you see music and politics linked during this volatile period of Quebec history? Do artists have power to shape or change history?

There are many so-called inspirations for the Quiet Revolution that threw off the shackles of the Catholic Church and the Duplessis era in Quebec and fed nationalist sentiment. Some of these inspirations, such as Gabrielle Roy’s Bonheur d’occasion, are artistic. Many Québécois artists, poets, writers and musicians were in the vanguard of the indépendantiste movement. Folks like Michel Tremblay, the playwright, and Yves Beauchemin, the novelist, both of whom relied on joual as a fundamental expression of Quebec, singer Pauline Julien and her poet husband, Gérard Godin, and Michel Rivard, the lead singer of Beau Dommage.

In her book 13 Ways of Looking at the Novel, Jane Smiley writes: “The question arises with Quixote, as with every strong protagonist: does he shape the world, or does it shape him? This question is present in the mere process of the author shifting his attention from Quixote to the world around him and back to Quixote and back to the world around him, realizing each in ever more detail, fitting each more and more to the other in what you might call artistic unity.”

I pose the same question in Everything I Own, particularly as Michel Laflamme, the protagonist, a hugely successful songwriter, whose songs have been listened to by tens if not hundreds of thousands of people, is debating whether to throw his weight into a fundraising effort after the Saguenay floods in 1996. Michel asks the same question about songwriting. How much power does a song have to change the world? And taken to its logical next question: Since the song is a construction by an artist, by a songwriter, does the songwriter shape the world or does it shape him? And then, the next questions: does anyone shape the world? How much of the world do we, can we, shape?

Beauchemin, Tremblay and Rivard, Godin and Julien: did they shape history? Maybe. Their presence center stage in the indépendantiste debate would have influenced people, perhaps not into thinking one way or the other, but in how at least some of the discussion was carried out. Their presence was absolutely necessary: no discussion of Quebec sovereignty is possible without discussing Quebec culture, which obviously included the fine arts, the dramatic arts, and the expressive arts. They provided the vocabulary and the heart. This was a movement that swept people up. And there was a sound to that: a melody and a beat, drama, narrative. Have you ever been to a Michel Rivard concert? When the lighters go up and everybody’s swaying to Je voudrais voir la mer? When Quebecers read Beauchemin’s Le Matou or later his Charles series, they were reading about themselves in the same way their ancestors were reading about themselves in Bonheur d’occasion. And when you read about yourself and you see your life depicted in a certain way, you think, whoa, what’s wrong with this picture? And you go about trying to repaint it.

3. Are you a musician? How does music figure in your own life?

I played piano when I was young and I can still read music, so I can hear a tune by seeing it, but that’s about as far as my abilities have taken me. Music remains, however, a central figure in my life. There’s always been a song, whether it’s a tune, a lyric or both, in my head – and that was before iPods and earbuds!

Music to me is sometimes like a bookmark, a placeholder. Songs have a way of  immediately transporting me to a time and place. I hear Nazareth’s “Love Hurts” and I am in the kitchen of my neighbor on Dallaire Street in Aldenville, Massachusetts. I hear Aerosmith’s “Dream On,” and I’m getting off this old, light-blue bicycle that my father fitted with baskets over the rear-wheel guard that I then filled with newspapers. It’s mid-afternoon, about 3:30-4 p.m. and I’m delivering the Transcript-Telegram to a house on Fair Street and my ears are pierced by this amazing voice. And it’s Steven Tyler.

I think, given some of the things that were going on in my life when I was between 11 and 15, that I took shelter in pop music and this is perhaps why I am able to conjure those images so readily. I’m sure I’m not alone in this. I suppose my daughter will probably feel the same in 20 or 30 years: if they’re playing Jonas Brothers and Lady Gaga on oldies stations then, she might remember being a 15-year-old girl living in Abu Dhabi. I play with this idea of music and memory a lot in Everything I Own.

Of course, music isn’t just about nostalgia and not every song takes me to some place in history. As I got older music meant different things to me and I came at music no longer as a teenager losing himself and his problems inside a tune but physically – going out dancing – or intellectually – where I can understand what a songwriter is doing and how a song is working itself out – and then of course, there’s just pure enjoyment, where the song doesn’t come with any historical baggage and I’m just loving it for what it is.

4. What is your hunch about the similarities between writing a song and writing a novel?

I can think of three similarities, someone who writes both, like Steve Martin, could probably think of others, but first, there’s the reliance on image. The best songs aren’t going to be just moon and June rhymes but filled with solid images that make you understand by way of simile and metaphor what that means. “Sweet dreams and flying machines and pieces on the ground” is a great image for a shattered love. Second, rhythm. That’s obvious in terms of songwriting, but in a novel you’ve got rhythm as well: each sentence, each paragraph, even each chapter, is going to have its own rhythm and the novel will have a certain pace because of that. Last is economy. I talk about that a bit in Everything I Own. There’s a scene in which Michel is having beers with his wife, Bijou, and their friend Dany Vox after one of Dany’s concerts and someone says with amazement how crazy difficult it must be to convey so much with so few words. And one of the characters actually does say that, yes, it’s about economy. You know, in a three-minute song you’ve got a hundred, hundred and fifty words. Better use ’em well. In a novel, you’re economizing, too, but not in terms of brevity. You’re being wise in the words you choose. You’re also trying to avoid inflation – where a novel just keeps growing and growing. It’s best to stop when the story’s done.

5. Are we meant at book’s end to feel hopeful about the marriage between Michel and Bijou and the marriage that is Canada? Are the notes you sound at the end meant to feel hopeful?

Everything I Own ends in a flashback that is kind of hopeful, even though we know from what’s come before that things don’t end so well between the father and the son. What is important to understand from that last flashback is that Michel would not have become who he was if not for his father – as hard as it may be to accept that. So Michel becomes the father to his stepdaughter that Noël never was to Michel. That’s how the novel begins and that’s how the last chapter begins: Michel is on his way to the airport to collect Laurence from the airport to surprise his wife, Bijou, with her daughter’s return to Canada after many years. It’s reconciliation time at the Laflammes’.

In metaphorical terms, neither Canada nor Quebec would have become what it is now without the other. Am I hopeful about the marriage between Michel and Bijou? Absolutely. Because I’m hopeful about Quebec and Canada.

6. Were you listening to music, and if so what, while you were writing?

Mostly, I listened to a lot of Quebec music, everything from the 1960s garage bands of Montreal, like Mashmakhan, then on to the 1970s with Harmonium, Jean-Pierre Ferland, Robert Charlebois, the cinq géants, the 1980s and Marjo, Dianne Dufresne, all of the big Plamandon hits, Claude Dubois, then on to the late 1990s and 2000s and Isabelle Boulay, I’ve got more Isabelle Boulay on my iPod than just about anyone else!, and of course, I listened to a lot of Beau Dommage, the seminal 1970s Quebec folk group that became the model in Everything I Own for Bijou’s former band, Beaupré.

7. Why is the book structured the way it is?

A book’s structure is a way for a writer to tell a reader how to read the work. Sometimes a novel is told chronologically or, as is popular now, with short stories that are linked by people or place. It took me a long time to figure out how to tell this story about Michel Laflamme and his wife, the pop singer Bijou, and his troubled relationship with his father. I was researching songwriting because Michel’s a songwriter – I’d never myself written a song so realized I’d better know a little bit about what he did! – when I came across the modified thirty-two bar form, which is a standard way of structuring a blues song and of course many pop and rock ‘n’ roll songs. Its structure is like this:

Verse
Verse
Refrain or chorus
Verse
Verse
Refrain or chorus
Bridge
Refrain or chorus.

There are tons of examples of this type of structure in rock: Whole Lotta Love by Led Zeppelin, River Deep Mountain High by Ike and Tina Turner (and recently by the Glee cast), and the song from which I borrow the title for my novel, Everything I Own, which was recorded back in the 1970s by Bread and redone recently by Vanessa Hudgens in the movie Band Slam.

The structure suited Everything I Own, the novel, perfectly. It’s forgiving. It allows me to move the story forward and hit the recurrent important themes a couple of times until the bridge, which is the denouement.

In Jane Smiley’s 13 Ways of Looking at the Novel, she points out that in most novels, there’s a plot point or some kind of “then” moment about 10 percent into the storytelling. And a last plot point 10 percent from the end of the novel. My novel, quite accidentally and even within the confines of the modified thirty-two bar form, follows that. I didn’t do it purposefully. But it is pretty spooky how it happens.

The other great thing about this particular structure was that each chapter, whether a verse or chorus, was long enough and flexible enough to accommodate the flashbacks that are the heart of the novel. And that’s a good thing because, let’s face it, not a whole heck of a lot happens in the “real time” of the novel: Michel’s stuck in traffic for three hours on the Jacques Cartier  Bridge!

8. Did you write the novel all the way through, in order?

Except for the few parts of the novel that I’d written separately 10 years before I even started working on Everything I Own, yes, I wrote the novel from beginning to end. Once I was comfortable with the thirty-two bar form as the structure of the novel it made the telling easier. It forced me to outline, which I hadn’t done before with previous novels, and even though looking back at my old notes, I see I didn’t always keep to the original outline. But that’s OK. That’s probably the way it should be. The novel is too much an organic form to be under the tight control of an outline. And when I’d come to a point where something I’d written previously felt like it belonged there, I retrieved it, greased it up a bit and put it in.

9. Who’s the character you identify with most?

I identify with all my characters; I must: there’s a bit of me in all of them or a bit of them in me.

But if I must identify with someone I would have to say I identify most closely with Michel Laflamme, the protagonist. Readers will probably think that anyway because Everything I Own is written in the first person, they might even assume there’s a fair bit that’s autobiographical, though I’d probably have said I identify with him regardless of which voice the novel had been told in. Michel’s creative struggle is similar to mine, though he’s had much greater success as a songwriter than I have had as a novelist. That could just be me projecting! Michel’s got an older wife whom he adores even though the relationship is sometimes rocky. I have an older wife whom I love but the relationship is a lot more solid than Bijou and Michel’s. He had a difficult relationship with his father, one that was never reconciled. Michel’s father is not my father. I love my father. It wasn’t always easy growing up under his thumb, but that’s normal.

10. How did your skills as a journalist help you write the novel?

Well, it helps being able to tell a story, something that makes sense and has some kind of logic to it. Being a good observer helps, just watching people do things, how they talk, paying attention to details that give character to a person. These are all things I do as a journalist and as a novelist. It helps in terms of research, too, I suppose. Just asking questions and learning what to look for and how to get it.

Q&A: 2

1. You’re a full-time journalist. How did you find the time to write a novel?

I had the fortune while I was writing Everything I Own to be an editor and not a reporter. Being an editor meant I had set hours, except for when major news broke out, like September 11 or the death of the pope. I came in at the same time and left at the same time every day. These hours also happened to be at night and I pretty much trained my body over the course of my journalism career to hit the hay when I got home at night and wake up early the next day. So I had a set amount of time in the morning before lunch that I could devote to writing Everything I Own. It wasn’t always a lot of time; I did have my household and family duties also: shopping, cooking, mowing the lawn, feeding the cats, doing laundry (sometimes), being with my wife and daughter! Some days I wrote a whole page or more; others it was one paragraph. I was grateful either way.

2. How long did it take to write the novel?

It took me two years, roughly, to write Everything I Own, to a draft that was ready to send to publishers. By the time I moved to Abu Dhabi in January 2008, the novel was pretty well done. It took me until September 2010 to find Guernica Editions to take it on, but that was a combination, I suppose, of my being in the UAE, of the lag time between sending queries out and waiting for responses and then sending the manuscript out and waiting for the response on that. It can be demoralizing and frustrating, but I’d done it before and I’ll keep doing it.

3. What else have you written?

I’ve written quite a bit actually. Most of my published work has been journalism. I’ve written for all the newspapers I’ve ever worked for going back to my beginning reporter’s job, at the Transcript-Telegram in Holyoke, Massachusetts, which is now defunct, and including The National in Abu Dhabi. My journalism runs the gamut from reporting to reviews, commentary to cooking.

Among the books I’ve published is a cookbook called Salut! The Quebec Microbrewery Beer Cookbook, which was published in 2003 by Véhicule Press. It’s a cookbook where everything in the book, more than 100 recipes, is made with Quebec microbrewery beers, like Boréale, Unibroue, St. Ambroise and Cheval Blanc. There are a couple of essays in the back, too. One on beer and cheese, one on the history of beer in Canada and Quebec, and the other a story about my own relationship with beer over the years that I eventually expanded on and rewrote for Gastronomica: The Journal of Food and Culture.

I also edited a few anthologies of Quebec literature in English: 32 Degrees, which published excerpts of master’s degree theses from Concordia University’s creative writing program; Future Tense: New English Fiction from Quebec (again from Véhicule) and The Urban Wanderers Reader, the excerpts of which were culled from a reading series my wife, the writer Denise Roig, and I ran in Montreal in pre-Blue Metropolis days. (Product endorsement: Denise is the author of A Quiet Night and a Perfect End; translated in French as Le Vrai Secret de bonheur; Any Day Now, which was a QWF fiction nominee; and Butter Cream: A Year in a Montreal Pastry School.)

I’ve written a whole bunch of books for children, which I read aloud to my daughter. Only one probably had any chance of ever being published, but picture books are a tough racket to get into. I adapted a novel called Extravagance by Gary Krist into a screenplay, mostly for exercise, and if I had any money I would love to have optioned it formally and tried to get the thing into production because it’s such a great, visual novel.

Then there are the novels, over 18 years, which I wrote that never got published.  Everything I Own is actually my fourth novel! In Hardraw Scar, a baseball writer goes to northern England to rediscover his roots; in The Frog, the Princess and the Car Sales King, a trio of friends deal with the consequences of childhood abuse; and in These Days Are Nights, I explore freedom of speech in a time of terrorism, which makes it sound more idea-driven than it was. A suicide bomber tries to disrupt a speech about to be given in Montreal by a former Israeli prime minister. None of the novels got picked up. There was some interest in each of them, but … the publishing game is so subjective. An agent or a publisher is either gonna like something or not. Or, more accurately, a 23-year-old English lit grad is either gonna like something or not. So you either deal with it and keep writing or you let it flatten you and quit.

4. What kept you going after so many rejections?

Simply? The need to write. I have so many stories inside my head and each day I encounter more people and go to more places that feed these stories. My need to create is a biological imperative, no different than the imperative Michel Laflamme feels in writing songs in Everything I Own.

5. You were born in Massachusetts and you live in Abu Dhabi, but the novel is set in Montreal. What’s your connection to Montreal?

My parents were born in rural Quebec and migrated to Massachusetts, straight down Route 5, in the 1950s. I was born in Holyoke, a mill town along the Connecticut River, and lived there until I was about four. My first language was French and I can remember speaking it to the good sisters of the Présentation de Marie in kindergarten before being told not to. The school and the church were in a French-speaking parish or enclave of Chicopee, the hilltop district of the city known as Aldenville. We were surrounded by descendents of Quebecers: all kinds of Aubuchon, Desmarais, Brault, Gaudet, Lamontagne, Page, Lepage, Thibault, and Benoit. It just goes on and on.

My connection to Quebec has always, therefore, been quite strong, but I was probably destined to be like many other New Englanders if two things hadn’t happened almost simultaneously: the US government okayed dual citizenships with certain countries, including Canada, in 1988, and I had been thinking about going back to school. I didn’t have a whole lot of savings – I’d only been in the workplace a few years at that point – so I applied for a “delayed registration of birth” in Canada, and moved to Montreal to attend Concordia University, where I got my creative writing degree.

I lived there 17 years until my move with my family to Abu Dhabi.

The interesting thing about my history is the tie to Michel Laflamme’s. He, too, is Massachusetts born. There were many families who migrated to New England from Quebec – there are more francophone surnames in New England phone books than in all of Quebec – and many left to return when the economy in Quebec improved, or for other reasons. The Laflammes were one of those families that returned. This almost happened to my own family. When I was still in grammar school, on one of my family’s summer vacations in Quebec, my father was being considered for a job in Drummondville. My father told the prospective employer we were headed back to Massachusetts at a certain hour the next day or something like that and the employer told my father he’d call him first thing. The call came after we left. This would have been in the middle of the whole indépendantiste movement. I could have grown up a little separatist. In some way, Michel’s story is my asking “what if?

Everything I Own book trailer