The King of Solitude: An Interview with Grant Lawrence

I have to live it or hear about it to write it.
Grant Lawrence

Survival and Solitude

What does it feel like to save a life when no one else is there to help? Grant Lawrence best-selling author of Return to Solitude: More Desolation Sound Adventures with the Cougar Lady, Russell the Hermit, the Spaghetti Bandit and Others does.

“I felt an incredible rush of adrenaline. He got caught in an outgoing riptide. He was in the water up to his eyes in the water and hypothermic. I didn’t have time to put my life jacket on. I think about it all the time. I have nightmares that he didn’t make it, but then I wake up and remember that he did. He said he was from Lund. I talked to people but no one had ever seen him around before or since. I think he was embarrassed. I called the Powell River hospital but they couldn’t tell me anything except that he made it.“

Grant’s new book has a strong theme of survival throughout, as well as solitude. Grant says that as Canadians we are fortunate to have space because so many countries don’t have space for people.

Loneliness is a word that weakens that feeling of being alone, whereas solitude is an empowering word. Desolation sound is a place for those seeking solitude, and don’t want to be an ant streaming in and out of the ant hill at the beckoning of the queen day in and day out.
Grant Lawrence

His Heart Belongs in Desolation Sound

Where is home for Grant Lawrence? Is it his childhood home in West Van? The home he’s created in East Van with his own family?

“My heart lives in Desolation Sound. One hundred percent, I would live there. I’m not a city person. I would live in Powell River,” says Grant Lawrence. He sits back and sips a beer. The can is custom labeled in his honour.

He just wrapped up ten years of being the emcee for the North Shore Writers’ Festival Trivia Contest. “I only do things for seven years and I did this for ten, so it’s time to stop,” he says. Perhaps, his superstitious nature comes from being a hockey player? We sat outside at a thoughtfully provided bistro set at the West Vancouver Memorial Library on a pleasant late April evening.

Powell River is the nearest town to Desolation Sound once you get off the ferry at Saltery Bay from Earl’s Cove that links the south Sunshine Coast to the north Sunshine Coast. The main employer of Powell River was a mill but that has shut down. The economy of the place is driven by retirees escaping the city to fish in their golden years, and young families wanting to own homes and have a small-town lifestyle. Although, there to the real estate market is more a playground for millionaires than the average Canadian.

My parents live in Powell River on a peaceful pocket-sized lake, where swans paddle by, loons laugh at night, and midnight skinny-dippers trigger the motion-sensor spotlights, much to their horror. I honestly thought the world ended at Lund where the road stops, but if you have a boat like Grant does, you can get yourself even more lonesome and go to a place like Desolation Sound.

You must also possess excellent health. Powell River Hospital is excellent for treating injuries due to chainsaw accidents and ATV rollovers, but for anything requiring a more subtle diagnosis or treatment, than gashes or broken bones, it’s a long haul to Lion’s Gate Hospital in West Van.

Castle or Crash Pad

As we kick back in the money-scented air, Grant spies a homeless person pitching a tent in the green space in front of the West Vancouver Lawn Bowling Club for the night. Their headlamp flashes like a lighthouse beacon as they place poles into the well-tended grounds of Memorial Park by one of the endangered lawn bowling clubs in the lower mainland.

Grant grew up nearby in Dundarave near Horseshoe Bay. He says he, “Watched a lot of television and acted out what I saw in my big backyard.” From his current home in East Van, he can bike downtown to work at CBC Vancouver, and it’s convenient to the airport for his wife, Jill Barber (www.jillbarber.com), to get to her music gigs.

“West Van was a middle-class town when I was growing up, but tonight when I was coming here there was a Rolls-Royce behind me and a Mercedes in front of me. There were no reservations on the ferry. All my friends have moved away from here, because we’ve all been priced out of the market,” he comments on the prohibitive real-estate market in West Van.

But even East Van, which was once considered affordable, you could purchase a stately European castle or two, according to TicTocker’s Millennial Moron, for the cost of an East Van starter home. If you consider a house just shy of two million dollars, decorated with graffiti without working plumbing, that the police used regularly for training drills, a starter home.

Grant is a natural and gifted storyteller, the fact that he doesn’t have a high-school diploma, opting to tour with his band instead, “Hasn’t stopped him.” Grant wrote Return to Solitude, the sequel to Adventures in Solitude over seven years. He wrote two books in between that met with modest success compared to the Desolation Sound books—The Lonely End of the Rink: Confessions of a Reluctant Goalie and Dirty Windshields: The Best and the Worst of the Smugglers.

With his writing career established, what is Grant’s magic sauce that other writers can learn from?

“I have to live it or hear about it to write it. I make a bullet point list where I write down my ideas, like an octopus in a crab trap at the end of the dock, then I plunk out the story. I orally do it on the radio and whittle it down.” Trying out content on live audiences is not something all writers have the luxury of doing. However, writing groups, open mics, or captive audiences in your home can all be good sounding boards.

The former West Van boy identifies closely to the misfits and outcasts he portrays in his books. Why is this confident, award-winning, media personality so aligned with the locals that others might shun, rather than celebrate.

I have always been a misfit. I was like the biggest, dorkiest, Caucasian Erkle. My glasses were always askew. I was bullied, I was like the sickest Caribou at the back of the herd. My knees constantly dislocated, and looked like ostrich legs and I’d be in a heap in agony and the other kids would be laughing at me. I had this athletic dad and a preppy mom, and here I was this loner, a loser with no confidence. I didn’t do sports. My younger sister was popular.

What turned things around for this gawky gosling and made him into the rock and roll star, CBC host, and successful author was the Hermit, Russel Letawsky, who is portrayed in the book?

My parents were conservative and hated hippies. They blamed the Beatles. On our car trips up to Desolation Sound we listened to the ABCs—A for Abba, B for Beach Boys, and C for Carpenters. But when we got there, Russel would say, ‘Have you heard of Chuck Berry?’ I hadn’t heard of Chuck Berry, so when I went back to the city, I would get Chuck Berry’s LPs. He turned me into a cool hippy, long-hair. It was such a gift to a sheltered West Van kid to know this off-grid counter-culture, mind-expanding man. He became my Dad’s buddy, being that Russel was an engineer and my Dad was an engineer. When I had my own band, we cut our first record with The Kinks song, ‘I Took My Baby Home’, and a song from The Coasters and I put a copy in his dirty hands. He didn’t have electricity or a record player, but he was proud of me.

Chapter for Chocolate

Grant has devised a reward system for writing, that he primarily does at night. When he finishes a set time of writing he rewards himself with chocolate, a beer, or a movie on a streamed service. He also uses time spent flying writing. “If I write for three hours on a flight to Toronto, I reward myself with a two hour movie, but I often find myself writing beyond that time,” he says.

I can relate this to when I trained for long-distance runs. Those days when I didn’t want to do half-marathon training, I made a deal with myself that I’d lace up my sneaks, walk to the end of the block and if I still wasn’t feeling it, I’d turn around. Once I got to the end of the block, I never did turn around.

Braiding the Stories

So how did Grant balance the embellishment of stories in his new book with the facts for the sake of good storytelling?

“The first book was much blurrier. I changed the names of the villains more. The timelines were changed more. But this second book is much more journalistic,” he says. He interviewed approximately one-hundred people to write the section on the Cougar Lady and fifty for the Hermit, but somehow he braided the interviews and his own experiences together to create a seamless narrative.

The hour grew late. The camper across the street turned out their light and presumably settled in for the night, and it was time for us to go our separate ways. We would soon see each other again in Gibsons, Friday, May 5th at the Gibsons Heritage Playhouse, where Grant Lawrence and Friends would perform. He promised, “I will be trying out some material for my next book there,” and winks. His show will be on tour May and June in BC, go to grantlawrence.ca/events for details and the chance to be his test audience for his next book.

On the ferry ride home on Saturday night, I pop into the onboard store to visit my book, Rescue Me: Behind the Scenes of Search and Rescue. For the first time ever, Adventures in Solitude and Rescue Me are side-by-side on a BC Ferries shelf, at least that I’ve seen. The bookshelf fairy must have conjured this placement. His with an impressive winner’s sticker on it.

I jolly a couple of fellow passengers into buying my book and sign it for them before hearing the chirpy docking announcement code, “16”, over the PA and head to the upper car deck. Maybe for my next book cover, I should wear a plaid shirt, cut my hair short, grow a beard and some chest hair? Just kidding. . .about the plaid shirt.

About Grant Lawrence

Grant Lawrence is an award-winning author, and renowned CBC broadcaster. He is the author of three best-selling books for adults: Adventures in Solitude (2010), The Lonely End of the Rink (2013), and Dirty Windshields (2017). Bailey the Bat and the Tangled Moose, his first children’s picture book, was released in 2021. Grant Lawrence is the first author in the history of the BC Book Prizes to win the Bill Duthie Booksellers Choice twice. Grant is also the host of the CBC Music Top 20, the lead singer of The Smugglers, and a Canadian Screen Award winner. He is also a goalie for the Vancouver Flying Vees beer league hockey team. Grant Lawrence is married to musician Jill Barber and they live in Vancouver with their two children, Josh and Grace. Return to Solitude: More Desolation Sound Adventures with The Cougar Lady, Russell the Hermit, The Spaghetti Bandit and Others is Grant’s long-awaited sequel to Adventures in Solitude.

Cathalynn Labonté-Smith

Cathalynn Labonté-Smith grew up in Southwestern Alberta and moved to Vancouver, BC, to complete her Bachelor of Fine Arts in Creative Writing at the University of British Columbia (UBC). After graduation, she worked as a freelance journalist until present. She became a technical writer, earning a Certificate in Technical Writing from Simon Fraser University. She later went to UBC to complete a Bachelor of Education (Secondary) and taught English, journalism, and other subjects at Vancouver high schools. She currently lives in Gibsons, where she is the president and founder of the Sunshine Coast Writers and Editors Society, and North Vancouver, BC. Her new book, Rescue Me: Behind the Scenes of Search and Rescue (Caitlin Press) is a British Columbia bestseller.