Novelist and musician Rob Ritchie. WILLY WATERTON/OWEN SOUND SUN TIMES/QMI AGENCY
Sun Times staff
A one-time hockey jock, raised in a home filled with singing and music, the pianist, songwriter and novelist Rob Ritchie has performed across Canada and around the world.
Inevitably, his youth, his travels, his environment, the people he’s met and especially his experiences as a touring musician, are all part of his books.
Hockey was a main theme throughout Orphans of Winter, Ritchie’s first novel in 2006. In a Company of Fiddlers, published last fall, he looks in part at the classical music world, sometimes using settings around his home area in Wiarton.
Both novels ask why such passions are often pursued so seriously, but without joy.
“They don’t have to be,” Ritchie said recently. “When the joy is put back in, those are the people that are doing it the best.”
Now Ritchie is 100 pages into a first draft of book three.
“I’d like to do something that’s kind of fun loving that has to do with a band out on the road, since they say write what you know and I certainly got to know that.”
Ritchie spent more than a decade in two long stints with the award-winning, five-piece, Owen Sound-based folk and roots music group Tanglefoot, which included his brother Steve. Tanglefoot disbanded two years ago.
During what he called a “paternity leave” hiatus from the band several years ago, Ritchie recorded his solo CD project Five O’Clock Shadow, shortly before publishing Orphans of Winter, his first novel.
Ritchie has toured as a solo performer, but said he prefers others on stage to interact with, and most of his solo shows lately are local. That includes a show Saturday night at 7 p.m. as part of the monthly SOUNDS at the Market series, where Ritchie will be both the featured musician and the featured spoken word artist.
He’ll play songs from Five O’Clock Shadow, with some new music, and read from the novels.
Orphans of Winter was shortlisted for the 2007 ReLit Award for best Canadian novel from a small publishing firm, Seraphim Editions. The same firm published In a Company of Fiddlers last fall. Both are available at The Downtown Bookstore, where, over a coffee recently, Ritchie chatted about his music, his novels and his influences.
A freelance corporate editor and proofreader who works from home, as well as a musician and author, Ritchie said when he’s into a writing project, he blocks time. He works usually between 10 p.m. and 2 a.m., when the house is quiet. He’ll produce a first draft or a section of a book, then take a break for several weeks, even months.Songs can come along any time. Like all musicians, he said he has a store of riffs or melodic hooks that come from noodling.
“The acid test is if you keep coming back to them.”
And he has ideas for stories he wants to tell.
Songs happen when the two align, and sometimes come in spurts, two or three songs at a time.
He starts his books with a clear ending in mind and a beginning, then fleshes out the whole story over the several years it takes to write each book.
For songs, he has “the whole theme” in mind.
“The exercise becomes condensing it, trying to get it done in three or four verses.”
Rarely, a song comes quickly. More often it’s line by line. On the road, Ritchie would write daily in his notebook, working on songs a few lines at a time.
The writer’s songs and prose come from the same place — a deep interest in telling stories.
“I’m compelled to do it.”
That was inspired early on when his parents would often take him to Owen Sound Little Theatre productions involving family members.
“I think it was just my parents taking us to events which made storytelling front and centre,” he said. “Seeing stories on stage was just very captivating.”
When he first joined Tanglefoot, founder Joe Grant became a a mentor, eventually advising on early drafts of Orphans, which began as a play and became the novel. Grant inspired with both his songs enlivening Canadian history, and his engaging tales, on stage and in the van on the road.
Some of that may work its way into the new novel, which is informed by the road stories, but is not about Tanglefoot.
“I made sure of that,” Ritchie said.
It’s about a “fictitious” modestly successful commercial touring band whose members are trying to solve what’s happening to their popular singer and main songwriter.
“His songs of late have been getting out there and a little harder to grasp,” Ritchie said.
“People question why he’s moving away from the kind of song that people love and songs that made the band popular. Each member has a theory and they’re all going to be wrong.”
Ritchie also draws on his quite different musical context as a longtime member of the Wiarton-based roadhouse country band Midnight Blue, with Dave and Bill Nixon and Sterling MacNay.
An overheard phrase on the street, an argument he hears, a mannerism, local names or setting he discovers around Wiarton can all end up in a song or a book, if altered to suit the need, the writer said.
“I like getting that local stuff in and local people seem to like that stuff,” he said. “Circumstances have tweaked my imagination and I run with it. Do you use people you know?
“Sure. I don’t think you can get away from that. That’s what kind of juices the imagination.”
To some extent, he said he is holding up a mirror, but he’s also providing a personal viewpoint.
“I am giving people an interpretation of the world as I see it. That’s undeniable. So doing a book it’s ‘come on along and see if you agree with me.’
“I like writing dialogue and creating characters with divergent views. If people can see aspects of themselves or other people in refreshing and new lights, and possibly a more compassionate light, that’s great. That’s my hope.”
bhenry@thesuntimes.ca
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