On Writing Canadian

Below is a reflection by Canadian author Dennis E. Bolen, written following the release of his latest novel, Amaranthine Chevrolet. As a Canadian press, we’re always glad to share writing that speaks directly to the experience of being and creating within this country. This piece, written in a personal and familiar tone, offers insight into the story behind the story.

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In late August 1967 I gazed from the back seat of a Chrysler Saratoga as we exited a farmyard full of cultivation equipment and assorted outbuildings. Against a far granary was parked the 1942 Chevrolet pick-up truck that had been my personal vehicle the summer of work I did on that spread. I had been taught to drive it at age thirteen. On my fourteenth birthday I spent the afternoon piloting an eight thousand pound diesel tractor towing a rod weeder on forty acres of gently sloping Saskatchewan wheat field. Kids, I learned, learned heavy machinery at a young age in that part of the country.

But now as I left the dry land, headed for a train back to Port Alberni in time for school, I wondered what it might be like to drive that antique all the way to the coast. Decades of school and work at various places later, I got to examine this eternal transit feeling in Amaranthine Chevrolet, a novelized distillation of that odd prairie-to-Pacific urge. It is primarily an indulgence in the linear joy of the road story.

Over a literary career spanning half a century my books have garnered flattering notices. There were laudatory accreditations for deftness of prose, accuracy of dialogue, depth of theme, etcetera. None have landed with such impact in my heart as the one or two recent readers who described Amaranthine Chevrolet as 'Canadian'. I could not have wished for a more affirmative benediction than to have been said to have written a pure expression of what it is to be of our great spread-out, coastal-mountain-plains-forest-lake-metropolitan nation.

My time setting is the summer of the centenary of Canada, while EXPO '67 was bubbling in Montreal, and the highways were replete with long-haired, flower-dressed hitchhikers traveling anywhere. Travel, such a Canadian thing. Love of travel machines...another thing particular to our spirit. The necessity of traverse over the second largest country in the world makes the maintenance, marshalling and, yes, affection to rolling machinery nearly a DNA element of the Canadian essence. My boy-protagonist Robin truly loves his machine. The drama I try to create depends on this quintessential long-distance passion.

The fact that the object of all this Canada-love is an American-built symbol of the mechanized hegemony of our southern neighbours is a wonderful irony I celebrate in my contemporary soul with particular gravitas. It took me fourteen years to write this book—seven years alone to settle on the last two pages!—so the recent confluence of national rising pride and the appearance of my Canada-celebratory novel is a happy coincidence. Though a staunch patriot—I've got the summertime cadet experience to prove it—I did not set out to proclaim any particular desire to engender national collective fealty.

My true desire was to tell a straight story of an earnest youth in search of familial love, and perhaps an incidental further understanding of himself. Canada will always be in this tale.

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Dennis E. Bolen has published six novels, two books of short fiction and a poetry collection. He holds an MFA in creative writing from the University of British Columbia and was fiction editor at sub-TERRAIN for ten years. Somewhat irrepressible in his youth, Bolen has sometimes concurrently been a part-time editorial writer for The Vancouver Sun, university writing instructor, literary reviewer for the Georgia Straight, and a freelance critic for numerous publications.

His latest novel is Amaranthine Chevrolet, released by Dundurn Press in May 2025, wherein his writing has been described thusly: ‘paired-down syntax, like a poem by ee cummings straightened out, with clipped dialogue from Cormac McCarthy.’