What does Thompson Rivers University’s Canada Research Chair in Cultural and Artistic Inquiry do to celebrate his fifth anniversary and his University’s 40th anniversary? He doesn’t take it slow and steady, that’s for sure.
Ashok Mathur’s CRC began in 2005 around the same time that TRU became a university. He is sitting down this Labour Day weekend in downtown Kamloops to write an entire novel based on some of the city’s most interesting early history.
“I wanted to do something intense and exciting to reflect the work that I’ve been doing here at TRU,” Mathur says, “so I figured how better to get things warmed up for the new term than by writing a novel in three days.”
Mathur has entered the popular 3-Day Novel writing contest, which is based in Vancouver, and will be writing from midnight, Friday, Sept. 3 through until midnight, Monday, Sept. 5, right from the famous Freemont Block on Victoria Street.
What sparked this project? Mathur has been researching the life and times of city pioneer John Freemont Smith, a three-time city councillor in the early 1900s and multi-talented entrepreneur who prospected, cobbled, and even served as an Indian agent in those early days of Kamloops. In June of this year, he hosted the great-granddaughter and grandson of Smith as they came to Canada to explore archives and the landscape of where their ancestor once lived.
“He was such a dynamic figure,” Mathur says. “There were few Black residents in the interior at the time, let alone prominent men such as Smith.”
Mathur notes he ended up renting an apartment loft in the same building that Smith constructed back in 1911, and that is where he will write his 72-hour novel.
“This book will coincide with other activities we are working toward to celebrate the centenary of the Freemont Block,” Mathur says. “So I have to get this book – a prose-poem actually – out by then.”
But the real reason for this project is not the imposing deadline. “I just wanted to do something different,” says the author of four previous novels. “The last book took seven years to write. I wanted this one to be a quicker process.”
Mathur is cross-posted to the departments of Journalism, Communication, and New Media and Visual and Performing Arts at TRU.
