Author Archives: Sarah Kurchak

by | December 18, 2015 · 3:17 pm

Oh What a Feebling: A CanRock Short Story Collection, Part 4

IMG_3796

North 44 and the pooping tree as they stand today.

Previously:

Million Days

Birthday Boy

Fire in the Head

When I wasn’t writing miserable small town psycho dramas set in poor Wainfleet, Ontario, I briefly flirted with the idea of writing a loosely connected short story collection set in Toronto. This week’s story, “Eating the Rich,” inspired by the Lowest of the Low song of the same name, is one of four stories that I actually got around to writing in 1997 before I promptly abandoned the idea and returned to writing Wainfleet psycho dramas (and that’s exactly where this series will return next week).

Of all of the bands that influenced these stories, pioneering Canadian indie rock heroes the Low are probably the most universally beloved and unimpeachable. They’re also my personal favourites of the bunch. I love them as much today as I did when I tried to make them my muse and I feel absolutely no shame for it.

Unfortunately, this story doesn’t exactly do their talent, vision, and legacy justice. It’s just a ridiculous almost-romp that shares little in common with its inspiration beyond a name and some vague proletarian leanings. I think it’s supposed to be funny and impassioned. It is neither.

Although this story technically inspired by “Eating the Rich,” there are some other things that clearly had a greater influence on the story and likely deserve far more of the blame for whatever the hell is going on in these 7,000+ words. Here’s a list of some of the most important and embarrassing ones:

  • I thought that the key to writing comedy was to create a bunch of weirdo characters, throw them into a weirdo situation, and then just let things fall apart. Hilariously.
  • I had developed a completely inexplicable fascination with North 44, a fancy restaurant up the street from my grandparents’ apartment in the Yonge and Eglinton area. It had, somehow, managed to become both a symbol of aspiration and burgeoning class consciousness in my life and I responded to this heady ambivalence by… trying to write songs and stories about it?
  • My mother saw a man shit on the tree in front of North 44.
  • I had developed a completely and utterly healthy fondness for a spy show from the ’60s called The Man From U.N.C.L.E. (This might come as a shock because I have never once discussed my fandom in the following two decades.)

Shockingly, the results of this unique alchemy aren’t great.

(North 44 is still open, by the way. It has not, to my knowledge, ever been the scene of an aborted class war. I still haven’t eaten there.)

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by | December 11, 2015 · 10:25 pm

Oh What a Feebling: A CanRock Short Story Collection, Part 3

Stormy waters

Stormy over the water

Previously:
Birthday Boy
Fire In The Head

My grandparents purchased a modest but charming cottage on Lake Erie in the 1960s. To this day, the rest of my family enjoy the property by staying there, sunning themselves on the beach, splashing around in the water, and having bonfires. At some point in my adolescence, I started enjoying it by staying up late, listening to creepy music, and writing stories about murder and guilt that were set at our charming little family cottage.

I was — and I remain — mesmerized by Lake Erie, the runt of the great lake litter whose unpredictability rivals that of its musically celebrated sister, Gitchigumi. It’s shallow and fickle. It can look absolutely stunning on a sunny day and like hell on a windy winter one. And the chunk of it that belongs to Wainfleet, Ontario, where our cottage is located, is so isolated from and forgotten by the rest of the world that I became convinced that all sorts of sinister things could go down there.

To the best of my knowledge, nothing like that has happened on the Wainfleet shore in the two decades I’ve been writing these ghastly stories. People have, tragically, drowned in Erie’s fatally deceiving undertow in nearby towns. Neighbours have come and gone, occasionally before their time. The carcass of what could have been a testicle-biting monster fish may or may not have washed up next door a couple years ago. But not once has anyone caused the death of a sibling or best friend and then engaged in untold amounts of psychodrama in and around the property.

But I have never let that stop me. To this day, I continue to write twisted stories about weird shit happening in Wainfleet, and I continue to insist that it can be the eeriest (sorry) place on Earth. If you let it.

“Million Days,” a story that I wrote curled up on the top bunk of what we creatively call “The Bunk Room” at the cottage, while I was listening to “Million Days In May” from The Headstone’s sophomore album, Teeth and Tissue, and reading even more Joseph Fucking Conrad, is the piece that started it all. I have no idea how I got this plot out of those lyrics. Or how I came up with it at all. Or how no one ever thought to take me to a therapist when I continued to write things like this.

I was so completely enthralled with my own talent and vision that I later adapted the story into a feature length screenplay. Which I then submitted in a screenwriting contest run by the Canadian Film Centre. I was so shocked and heartbroken when it didn’t win that I sobbed for a week straight.

I re-read the script a few years ago. The loss now makes perfect sense.

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by | December 4, 2015 · 10:02 pm

Oh What a Feebling: A CanRock Short Story Collection, Part 2

Junkhouse "Burned Out Car"

Junkhouse “Burned Out Car”

Previously: Fire In The Head

Before I introduce this week’s installment in the Sarah Murders the CanRock Cannon With Her Terrible Teenage Words, I feel the need to state, unequivocally, that I was an insufferable teenager. At least when it came to books and my “art.”

This was probably already clear for anyone who read or scanned the previous entry in this series — or anyone who has ever met me — but I felt that it needed to be said.

I was pleasant about most other things in life — or at least shy enough to hide all of my weird edges and flagrant cultural snobbery and random disagreeability. But when it came to literature I just couldn’t stop myself. I was, obviously, a genius, and I wasn’t about to temper my vision for anything. Especially not for an overly simplistic grade nine English assignment that I knew was brutally beneath me.

This is how I came to write “Birthday Boy” in the early days of 1997, just after I turned 15.

Although I technically attended high school in the dying days of Ontario’s destreamed grade nine, our classes had been unofficially separated into three levels. I had started the year in the ostensibly “advanced” English class but was moved to the comprehensive class after a series of bizarre fights with my teacher that involved, among other things, Joseph Fucking Conrad (of course) erupting into an all-out feud that made the learning environment pretty much impossible for everyone involved. Because the only thing worse than an insufferable teenage lit snob is an even more insufferable teacher who can’t be enough of a grownup to handle an insufferable teenage lit snob.

Anyway, my ego wasn’t taking it well. And so, when we did a unit on One Minute Mysteries and were asked to write simple, plucky versions of our own, I decided to reassert my genius. I deconstructed the form of the Two-Minute Mystery and I rebuilt it into whatever the hell is going on in this story.

What’s even more baffling and sad about this whole process is that this story isn’t actually based on the Junkhouse song. Nor is it based on the album of the same name. It is based on the commercial for the album that ran on MuchMusic that involved some spiel from Tom Wilson that does not actually appear in the lyrics of any song.

I got an A on the assignment, but my teacher commented that it was “Too deep.”

I thought this was glowing praise. Because I was an insufferable little piece of shit.

Not once during this entire process did anyone send me to the guidance counselor.

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by | November 27, 2015 · 7:04 pm

Oh What a Feebling: A CanRock Short Story Collection

Fire In The Head

Fire In The Head

Someone — maybe Ray Bradbury, maybe some other scribe — once said that every writer has a million bad words in them, and that once those bad words are gone, you can write something worth reading.

When I was a teenager of middling talent and musical taste, I chose to blow all million of my bad words on short stories inspired by Can Rock songs.

I didn’t do it consciously. I just had a deep and abiding love for listening to melodramatic songs that Edge 102.1 played to fulfill their CanCon requirements as well as writing even more melodramatic fiction and I saw no reason that I shouldn’t combine my two great loves into one throbbing mess of angst that I totally wouldn’t find adorably embarrassing 20 years later.

So I wrote. And listened. And wrote. And somehow, I managed to amass an entire collection of short stories inspired by songs that has been released by Canadian artists in the mid-1990s. Not all of those stories were terrible (arguably) and not all of them were by terrible artists (thank god for The Lowest of the Low, whose excellent music and literary references may have single-handedly saved me from this phase) but they all managed to contribute to my million.

Now that I am a nominally successful writer who never pens anything abjectly terrible, I think it’s time to celebrate and acknowledge the words and music that made me everything I am today.

So, for the next few weeks, I am going to be sharing the best/worst of the lot with you. And I’m going to start with an absolute gem.

I wrote “Fire in the Head” at some point in 1997, when I was 15 years old. I was, on the surface, a Good Kid at the time. I didn’t smoke, do drugs, drink, or bang (some of these were personal choices; others were a matter of access) but I did some things that were much worse, like reading obsessive amounts of Joseph Conrad and listening to Windsor, Ontario’s favorite Doors tribute band, The Tea Party.

I have no fucking clue what I was thinking on either count. I read Heart of Darkness at least seven times while I was in high school, and managed to miss every single pertinent point you could make about the book every single time. I somehow missed the glaring bullshit colonialism that runs through Conrad’s entire oeuvre (which is a massive, MASSIVE achievement in obliviousness) and whatever point the old white dude was trying to make himself and somehow got it into my head that all of Conrad’s works, especially Heart of Darkness, were about transferable madness. I was pretty sure that you could pass mental illness around like a common cold, and that this was the greatest literary fodder of all time.

Around this time, I started listening to The Tea Party. I don’t know how or why this happened, to be honest. I resisted for years. I actively mocked them. And then, one day, after seeing them for the 29875483975th time at some Edgefest or other, I just gave in. From one minute to the next, I was just like “Well, fuck it; I guess I’ll be a Tea Party fan.”

So then I bought Edges of Twilight and somehow convinced myself that “Fire in the Head” was listenable. And then I read Joseph Conrad WHILE listening to “Fire in the Head.” And then this story happened.

I probably should have done drugs instead.

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by | October 10, 2015 · 12:13 pm

Carly Rae Jepsen, Hanson: ‘Call Me Maybe’ Star Bonds With Boy Band Over Whiskey, Possible Collaborations

Hanson and Carly Rae Jepsen

Hanson and Carly Rae Jepsen

Before Carly Rae Jepsen caught the ear of Justin Bieber and Selena Gomez, the “Call Me Maybe” singer was already busy impressing another bunch of teen idols. Over the course of their cross-Canadian tour together this past winter, Jepsen and ’90s pop sensation Hanson became both friends and fans of each other’s work.

“I love the Hanson boys!” Jepsen gushed to AOL Music Blog on the phone from L.A. last month. “I was floored by them. Their harmonies are so in sync and their musicianship … you can tell they’ve been at it their whole lives.”

Hanson, in Toronto last week to promote the Canadian release of their latest album Shout It Out, confirm the feeling was mutual.

“She was awesome,” singer and keyboardist Taylor Hanson tells AOL Music Blog. “We had a really fun time. She’s a great performer. And we hung out a lot. We had multiple nights where she came on the bus and we just listened to records and talked about …”

“Talked about whiskey,” older brother and guitarist Isaac says with a laugh.

“Well, we drank whiskey and listened to music,” Taylor clarifies.

The boys of Hanson weren’t just impressed with her whiskey consumption and record-spinning skills, though. They were also quite taken with her talent.

“I think, as a songwriter, she has a really good sense of a hook and a good sense of melody and I think she’s going to be served very well in the future,” says Isaac.

Much like Bieber, Hanson’s also eager to collaborate with Carly in the future.

“We were talking about it on the road,” Taylor says. “I want to write some stuff with her for whatever comes next.”

Jepsen was launched into stardom thanks to the attention — and viral video skills — of Justin Bieber, Selena Gomez and their friends just as her time with Hanson was winding down. As musicians who experienced a similar meteoric rise to fame with their song “MMMBop” in 1997, did the brothers have any advice for their tourmate?

“We did actually talk about her roadmap for career and how to get from where she is to where she wants to be,” Taylor explains.

As a band who turned teen idolarity into a lifelong career as respected musicians, the brothers Hanson all agree that Jepsen should focus on the bigger picture.

“I think you really just have to start with ‘Where am I headed?’ Work on pondering what the destination is and who you are as an artist and what are your goals, and be willing to stick to your guns and just focus on that,” Taylor muses.

“She seems like she has a pretty good head on her shoulders,” Isaac offers. “It’s always good when you’re coming at things from a relatively humble place as far as not thinking that all of a sudden you’re hot shit, and she certainly has a very focused kind of ‘This is going the way I’ve hoped it will go and I want to go forward.'”

Drummer Zac agrees.

“Having had the blessing of traveling the world and succeeding, it’s easy to take it for granted. We’ve tried to not take it for granted,” says Zac. “But when you do suddenly have access to a lot of resources, I think having people around you that can help you parlay that into a lengthy time in that place, whether it’s touring partnerships or just the whole process of really stretching out that success and drawing attention to you as an artist and not just that song.

“That’s a hard thing to do, but it’s something that is really an important thing to keep in mind when you suddenly have the ears of a lot more people. I think, for her, she needs as many people around her helping her to look forward to the next process and the next record to keep that train moving forward, because she is suddenly going to be in this vacuum of ‘Wow! This song’s starting to get a lot of heat! OK, run around the world promoting this!’ Just keep the process moving forward so that you’re ready to strike on the next album and continue.”

“Because that’s the hardest part of any of it,” Isaac adds.

“Yeah,” Zac continues. “Just how do you keep it moving forward and build toward the next thing.”

This story originally appeared April 11, 2012 on AOL Music Blog

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