S4E66: Who Am I? with Craig Davidson

Notebook on Cities and Culture

In a pub in Toronto's Swansea, Colin Marshall talks with novelist Craig Davidson, author of Rust and Bone, The Fighter, Sarah Court, and most recently The Fighter, all under his on name, and author of horror fiction under the pseudonyms Nick Cutter and Patrick Lestewka. They discuss Toronto's distance, geographical and in sensibility, from Niagara falls; his potential attraction to desperate settings; modern man's longing for "the test" to be put to; how he came to write books containing no pursuit more genteel than factory labor; Niagara Falls' national bisection, with the black-and-white divide on one side and red-and-white on the other; the effects of the possibility stream into which we each are born; his use of pseudonyms, and whether readers cross over from one to the other; his writing, no matter under which name, novels of the visceral; what Stephen King knows about putting the grotesque right up next to the mundanities of the working class; the decline of boxing, and its continued importance as a stage for pure conflict; the way a fight lets you answer the question "Who am I?", and what he learned when he lost two of them in the name of promotion for The Fighter; the 90-percent female fiction-buying audience, and how he writes for the other 10 percent; how we love wrestling as kids for its moral clarity, then come to see "the general patina of gray"; what counts, in his books, as purely Canadian; and the one simple thing you must do if you don't love your job.