Alix Hawley's Blog, page 3

I've been putting together a playlist to go with the novel--it's under "My Name is a Knife" at Spotify (if you don't have it, you can download a free version!). Below, I've listed a few of the pieces that have YouTube versions too. 

Some are traditional, some more random, but all of them tie to the book's situations or moods, I think, or were songs I listened to while I was writing. Thanks to my friend Suzy Larsen for some of the Bach suggestions. (Bach is really good for writers.) Also happy to entertain your suggestions.


Hurray for the Riff Raff, Down by the River

Shawnee Pow-Wow Drums

Bach,  Cello Suite #2, Prelude

Bach, Cello Suite #4, Sarabande

Hurray for the Riff Raff, The Body Electric

Bach, Violin Partita #3, Gavotte

Shawnee Stomp Dance

American Revolutionary ballad, All Things are Quite Silent

Couperin, Les Barricades Mysterieuses

​Tanya Tagaq, Nacreous

Buffy Sainte-Marie, Love Charms (Mojo Bijoux)

Here's My Name is a Knife's first newspaper review--thanks, Toronto Star, for this thoughtful reading.  I'm so happy the reviewer saw my characters, especially Rebecca, so clearly, and understood their conflictedness. And it's always nice to be called "vivid" and "disturbing." 

Had fun at the book birthday party for My Name is a Knife last night, an appropriately hot summer evening, as it is when the novel starts. We were at Mosaic Books in Kelowna (the best store!). My smart novelist workshop friends Corinna Chong and Adam Lewis Schroeder read from their latest--that's us posing as a trio below--and I read a little of Dan's and a little of Rebecca's parts in the new novel. I saw some friends I've known most of my life, and some new readers. And cake.

Thanks to Mary Ellen Holland, Corinna Chong, Adam Lewis Schroeder, Christina Swindells, and Suzy Larsen for photos.

Here is an interview about My Name is a Knife that I did with Katie Heindl for Hazlitt. She had a lot of good and tough questions about my writing process, the history behind the book, and my characters. I'm so proud she calls it "sweeping, tender, and gutting." I hope you get a chance to read it.

 It's publication day for My Name is a Knife, which shares a birthday with David Hasselhoff and Camilla, Duchess of Cornwall (so it's a Tuesday's-child-is-full-of-grace, and a Cancer, in the French-World-Cup-winning Year of the Dog, and I don't know what else).  It certainly feels like a strange time for book promotion (Angela Merkel was also born on this day, as it turns out). I've been thinking about parallels with the book's world, another tumultuous and uncertain era. The American Revolution was barely through, the British and French were still present, making and breaking various Indigenous alliances, and the settler push westwards was roiling.

This book is in many ways about people's inner spheres, and these events make the background as Dan returns to Boonesborough to warn of an impending attack by the Shawnee who adopted him.  His mental turmoil mirrors the historical one (and I know a lot of us have been feeling similarly in the last months). His wife Rebecca, who has left the fort with most of her children, is also full of uncertainty about what's happened to Dan, and what's going to happen to her family. Her rage at his lack of consideration for them in his drive to explore is a kind of #MeToo, and writing about the damage to their marriage felt very modern. The novel is in both Rebecca's and Dan's voices; we also get the attitudes of more ferocious settlers, and of some of the Shawnee, like Chief Black Fish, Dan's adoptive father and a powerful leader, and Pompey, their interpreter and a former slave. The roots of now are there. 

Dan and Rebecca are complicated characters who aren't always right, for all their hopes to make things work. Here's Emily Wilson, the brilliant translator of The Odyssey, the story of another legendary figure in a fraught time, and the fallout around him:
​
                     I think the capacity of literature to create these rich, complex questions or fault-lines, between what
                     this or that character thinks, and what the whole story might be saying, is one of the biggest reasons
                     why literature matters. It makes us see / feel / be more. 

I hope my book will do that in its small way. 

My Name is a Knife is out July 17, and we're having a little birthday party from 5-7 pm at the very lovely Mosaic Books in Kelowna. Everyone is welcome; please RSVP

I have a new short story up as Catapult's Friday Fiction today. It's called "I Eat Men Like Air" (thank you, Sylvia Plath, for that line). Short stories are still my first love, and I'm glad to see this one in the world, especially with the ideal accompanying illustration. New novel is out in a month, though, and I'm drafting another one now, with some further short-fiction breaks. I hope you like this one.

Campbell River's literary festival this past weekend was such a good time. It's one of the most beautiful places (the traditional territory of the Laich-Kwil-Tach people, at the south end of Discovery Passage on Vancouver Island), and its book fan community is disproportionately huge! If you have a chance to go next year, do. You might even get to see the hundred Pacific white-sided dolphins that breezed past, which I . . . missed.

I did get to talk onstage with Mark Leiren-Young about how hard it is to write openings (his non-fiction book, The Killer Whale Who Changed the World, sold out at the fest).  I was also lucky to hear him get the whole house singing, accompanied by our CBC host Grant Lawrence. Novelists Heather O'Neill and David Chariandy performed a little play, Chief Bev Sellars revealed her path to writerhood, Renee Sarojini Saklikar created a hive of sound with her poems, journalist Terry Glavin revealed his secret bank-robber past, and fiction writer Kim Fu had everyone on edge with her new novel excerpt. I gave a little teaser from My Name is a Knife.  I'm happy it hits stores in July. And I'm happy to have been among this group for a few days. That's me, Chief Bev Sellars, Terry Glavin, Renee Sarojini Saklikar, Heather O'Neill, Mark Leiren-Young, Grant Lawrence, Kim Fu, and David Chariandy. Photo credit: Words on the Water.

You can now pre-order My Name is a Knife (out in July) from your local bookstore (I love
 "Hawley's brilliant second novel continues the story of American frontiersman Daniel Boone. This is a                                                         historical novel, but more than that it's an existential novel, sensuous, philosophical, with carefully                                                                 drawn characters and deep dives into the human consciousness. If you crossed the best of Michael                                                               Ondaatje with the best of Alice Munro, Alix Hawley is what you'd get." 
--Philipp Meyer, author of The Son

“History raw and bleeding, My Name Is a Knife is a superb sequel to the inside story of Daniel Boone begun
in Alix Hawley’s first novel, as exciting as it is thoughtful. We’ll never see this American icon—and now, his wife,
Rebecca—the same way again. Move over, James Fenimore Cooper: a woman has come to take your place.”   
​--Nick Mount, author of Arrival: The Story of CanLit
 

It's a very snowy year's end in BC, and I'm thinking about the Boones and co. getting through long, hard winters. They and the Shawnee people have much to undergo  in my new novel. My Name is a Knife, which will be out this summer. I can't wait for you to read it. Here's the beautiful cover design with our Rebecca meanwhile.