His life is like a book you can't put down -- a whirlwind of wild tales, lullabies, poems, dirty jokes, and now a star-studded movie. What's next in the epic of Richard Van Camp? By Katherine Laidlaw; Photos by Patrick Kane

There are 30 babies seated in laps and chairs and strollers, all gazing quizzically at Richard Van Camp. He pads across the floor in his moccasins, gesturing wildly as his brown eyes sparkle behind his wire-rimmed glasses. “Happy full moon!” he exclaims to the fuzzy heads bobbing up and down. “Can I still tell some stories? I just want to tell some stories and gossip.” There are bags of Goldfish and boxes of apple juice on a long table, next to stacks of classic baby books like Chicka Chicka Boom Boom and Goodnight Moon. “All of you,” he says, planing his arm across the crowd, “were born with sacred gifts!” A squeaky toy falls; a teeny latecomer arrives in a red wagon.

Though he’s 40 years old and the North’s most accomplished literary figure, Van Camp seems right at home here. He’s at the Yellowknife public library doing a reading of his newly released baby book, Nighty-Night: A Bedtime Song for Babies, which next year will be distributed to every newborn in the NWT. Amid scratchy baby coughs and creaky baby cries, he reminds the crowd that he’s the first published novelist of the Tlicho First Nation and that he’ll be free after the reading to sign books. And then he launches into what can only be called the Richard Van Camp Show. Before long, he’s singing “hey ya, hey ya,” his sideburns dancing, his arms waving hyperkinetically. The babies are into it, cooing and gurgling, their chubby arms swaying back and forth. And the thing is, the parents are into it too.

Van Camp leads like the Pied Piper, with his animated eyebrows and soothing voice that sounds like it’s been trained for radio. Part of his effervescent charm is that, at times, he’s so packed with enthusiasm you can’t help but think part of him never grew up. Spending time with Van Camp is a little bit like running through a funhouse: a trillion projects fading in and out of focus, talk hopping from comic books to short stories to radio plays and back. He writes fiction mired in fact from his adolescence growing up in a small community in the NWT. It’s impossible to tell where the tales have been torqued and tweaked unless you’re one of the people who actually lived it.

It’s easy to believe Van Camp has led a life of misadventure, whimsically happening upon stories that bleed intrigue and Northern magic – with some raunchy teenage sex romps thrown in. After all, he’s best known for his hit debut novel, The Lesser Blessed, in which all of those play out vividly. And now, Van Camp is facing the biggest excitement of his life. He’s about to see his novel turned into a feature film with serious star power behind it, he’s got another collection of short stories coming out next fall, and his second novel is being shopped around to publishers. All of which, for a native kid from the small-town North, truly seems stranger than fiction.

**

When Van Camp was three years old, he got drunk and passed out in a garden with a carrot in his mouth. That garden was in his parents’ yard on “Sesame Street,” a notoriously crime-ridden block in Fort Smith, NWT, during a party where the cola got spiked. Born to Roger Brunt, a taxidermist, and Rosa Wah-Shee, a Tlicho woman, Van Camp spent his early childhood in Smith, a community that hugs the Alberta border. When Brunt left town, Wah-Shee married Jack Van Camp, a prominent environmental scientist and instructor at Aurora College, who adopted Richard and his younger brother Roger. After a brief sojourn in Calgary, where Rosa attended university, the couple had two more children, Johnny and Jamie. The family’s “log house,” nicknamed for its distinctly rustic appearance, became a gathering place for the four boys’ friends, who constantly cleared out the Van Camp fridge. “This was kind of like a youth centre. Kids were always welcome here,” Jack says. “They still, when they come to visit, immediately go to the fridge and start rooting around.”

But living in the log house meant crossing the dreaded Sesame Street on the way to school. Richard, the tallest, most gangly kid in his class, received more than his share of beat-downs. One was especially memorable. “I was just trying to have fun, be a little boy. And this guy came running out of his house and started wailing on me. That was Sesame Street,” he says. But then his little brother Roger turned the tables. “It was one of the most religious moments of my entire life. It was biblical. My brother just came running out of nowhere with this rake and said, ‘You leave my brother alone!’ Crunk. And it stuck! This guy was running around just in a daze with this rake dragging behind him in the sand. It was horrible. It was beautiful.”

In light of the violence and boozing that was indemic in Fort Smith in those days, Van Camp made a pact with Jack that he wouldn’t take a drink until he was 16. His 16th birthday came and went. He won the $100 bet. “Over all those years, you’d think I would have asked for more,” he says with a laugh. “But I think I made the bet when I was nine. And a hundred dollars was like a million dollars.” Because of alcoholism in his family, he still doesn’t drink.

He spent his high-school years sober and dateless. “I was scared of girls all the time. I had little math arms! Only good for doing math,” he says. Instead, he played Dungeons and Dragons with his friends, doodled constantly in a notebook, drove elders to bingo and physio appointments on the Handibus, and collected stories. “Rich carried around a tape recorder and he’d interview people. Friends, classmates, whoever,” says childhood friend Jon Liv Jaque. With that $17 tape recorder, Van Camp interviewed dozens of the Handibus elders, then fastidiously typed out their stories on a chunky home computer. “I was hungry to learn about what it meant to be a Dene. I thought, we’re rich. We gotta document this,” he says.

Attending university was an expectation in the Van Camp household. So Richard moved to Yellowknife to study native management at Aurora College, thinking he’d pursue a political career and follow in the footsteps of his uncle, James Wah-Shee, one of the founding members of the Dene Nation. (A far cry from his childhood aspiration of being a professional ninja.) There, he met a communications professor who was shocked by the quality of Van Camp’s book reviews and poetry. “He pulled me aside and said, ‘Don’t give your life to politics. Don’t do it. You’re a writer.’”

Van Camp, who was 19 at the time, took the advice seriously. He began to write a story. “Nobody was talking about the hickeys, the Northern lights, the two-stepping, suicide. So I just sat down and said, ‘I’m going to tell my truth,’” he says. Five years later, in 1995, he had a stack of paper called The Lesser Blessed.

**

When a manuscript arrived for Barbara Pulling, a longtime editor at Vancouver publishing house Douglas and McIntyre, she didn’t add it to the pile of manila envelopes snaking in a ring around her office. Though she didn’t know Richard Van Camp, she’d already heard about his work through Carolyn Swayze, an agent she respected. She devoured the book. “I knew right away that I’d like us to do it. It was so good. You could just tell right away,” Pulling says.

The story takes place in the semi-fictional town of Fort Simmer, NWT, where a lanky, awkward teen named Larry meets a feisty rebel named Johnny. Despite being hooked on the same girl, the two strike up a friendship. A rollercoaster ride of pot-smoking, fights and awkward sexual encounters ensues.

Across Canada, The Lesser Blessed was lauded as an exceptional debut, with “unnerving credibility,” according to industry magazine Quill and Quire. “This is not a novel for the faint of heart. The language is rough, the emotional landscape stark and barren: Children’s lives are depicted as one slow burn on the altar of their parents’ failure to nurture,” the reviewer wrote. Van Camp says if he could go back now, he wouldn’t change a word. “It’s a perfect novel.”

After the book’s release, Van Camp’s life changed. He amassed awards, both in Canada and internationally, and was named a “young Canadian to watch” by Maclean’s. He wrote two short-story collections, the latest of which, The Moon of Letting Go, was longlisted for a ReLit award last year. He received a diploma from the En’owkin International School of Writing in Penticton, B.C., a bachelor’s degree from the University of Victoria, and a master’s from the University of British Columbia, where he went on to teach creative writing for eight years. He tours tirelessly and wins awards for his oral storytelling, too. He’s published two comic books for teens through the Healthy Aboriginal Network, as part of a sexual-health awareness campaign with the government of the Northwest Territories. He writes baby books to help pay the bills.

**

Van Camp writes as if he’s pouring his persona onto the page. Having grown up reading S.E. Hinton, Pat Conroy and Stephen King, he funnels his voracious storytelling style into unflinchingly real tales about being young in the North. Family, abuse, grief and sex are all common themes. He draws much of his material from his upbringing in Smith and from the stories he hears through the Northern grapevine. “I couldn’t do what I do if I didn’t have great Northern gossip,” he says. His stories can seem garish but seldom vulgar. In one disarmingly poignant tale, Van Camp writes of a teen boy who, while spying on a couple having sex, masturbates as “his mullet snaps back and forth.” His Lesser Blessed protagonist Larry is based on a cousin who killed himself as a young teen. In another of his short stories, Van Camp and his brother carry the town drunk, spitting puke, to the hospital when no one else will come to his aid. “I write about things that are hurting the North and hurting our families. Some people might shy away from that. I’ve never been afraid to write about elder abuse or AIDS or STDs,” he says. “I’ve always been a reader. But nobody was telling my story.”

He hasn’t won a Giller Prize, but then that’s not the audience he’s writing for – at least, not now. “I always have this image: somebody who isn’t in college, they’re at a friend’s house, their buddy’s in school. Out of complete boredom, they pick up one of my stories and they laugh. And they go, ‘Oh my god, I didn’t know you were allowed to write like this.’ I want to be the gateway drug to aboriginal literature,” he says. In Canada, that means belonging to a genre that includes writers like Thomson Highway, Lee Maracle and Jeannette Armstrong. But his style differs wildly from theirs, and some would claim he’s more of an author of grown-up children’s literature. His work is written in such a conversational tone that it sounds like oral storytelling, and it can be so raunchy that it’s hard to imagine it winning high-brow literary awards. Van Camp, though, considers himself a literary pathbreaker. “Nobody’s writing about masturbation and that pisses me off. You know what? If you’re not going to do it, I’ll do it for you. Leave it to me. I’ll take one for the team.”

Now, he’s the writer in residence at the University of Alberta, mentoring student writers. His next collection of short stories, Godless but Loyal to Heaven, is slated for release next year. And he’s sending his next novel, The Strongest Blood, about a Fort Smith boy named Leo terrified of his own medicine powers, around to publishers. Two of his other stories, Dogrib Midnight Runners, about a secret society of streakers in Fort Smith, and The Uranium Leaking from Port Radium and Rayrock Mines is Killing Us, have been optioned for films. He shares an Edmonton apartment with his longtime girlfriend, Keavy Martin, an aboriginal literature professor at the University of Alberta. Their home is decorated with Star Wars figurines, of which he’s an avid collector. “Richard told me once that when people obtain a disposable income, they buy their childhood back,” his youngest brother, Jamie Van Camp, says. “That’s very true for him.”

**

It’s a September evening in Yellowknife and 30 teenagers have filled the beige hallway of the Baker Community Centre. The air stinks of Axe deodorant and hormones as they gather around their leader: Van Camp. He sprouts from the middle of the group, thanking them for choosing to spend their evening reading scripts for The Lesser Blessed. The movie, slated for release in 2013, has the makings of a blockbuster. Superstar Benjamin Bratt has signed on to play the father figure, Jed, and a star from the inexplicably popular Twilight franchise wants to play Johnny.

Here in the community centre, though, before the backdrop of a senior’s yoga class, it’s clear this isn’t a typical L.A. casting call. “Would I be able to get in early? I only have a sitter for so long,” asks one soft-spoken, dark-haired girl. Mukluks are as common as Converse Chucks, and some kids don’t have an email address to fill out on the requisite form.

But Van Camp is a tour de force, running up and down the hallway calling out names and breaking up fights. He’s committed. He knows there’s a Larry in the North. “I was driving yesterday and I saw three different Larrys walking down the street. It could have been any of them,” he says. The casting for The Lesser Blessed is unique, thanks to Van Camp’s persuasive skills: The director, Anita Doron, the casting agent, Jason Knight, and Van Camp are going on a whirlwind roadtrip in the hopes they’ll discover Hollywood’s newest star in the NWT. They’re hitting Yellowknife, Behchokò, Fort Providence, Hay River and, of course, Fort Smith.

Teens are shouting over one another in a sea of plaid, but Van Camp doesn’t mind. “Do you smell that? The musk of youth?” he quips as he darts by. “Thank you! This is a big day! This is a big day,” he says, squeezing the shoulders of the boy who’s just emerged from the boardroom, who flashes a smile of crooked teeth in response. Just one boy, with skeletal cheekbones and black hair spilling forward onto his forehead, sits silently along the wall. His name is Tyler, Van Camp says, and he was the first one to arrive. He’s last on the list, because he was shy to sign up. Van Camp wouldn’t dream of playing favourites – oh, no – but he’s partial to Tyler. “This makes me happy,” he says. “I’ve seen him around. He’s always fascinated me – tall and quiet and gorgeous. He’s got grace.” Tyler’s in the boardroom 20 minutes longer than everyone else. He’s the only kid that night who gets a callback.

“I want to be remembered as a pioneer for NWT filmmaking,” Van Camp says. “We’ve raised over $2 million to shoot the first novel that’s ever been written by a member of the Tlicho nation. The cultural benefits of this film cannot be measured. Let’s shoot it North of Sixty. This is an industry we could have 20 years from now.” If that sounds like a pitch, it’s because it is. Van Camp has spent the past six years campaigning for Northern involvement in the film adaptation of The Lesser Blessed. Yet despite his best efforts, he was told in early September that the film was losing $350,000 initially promised to him by the Tlicho chiefs. No money from the North means the movie will instead be shot in Ontario. A month later, he’s still devastated. “Not a penny from the North after six years,” he says. “My deepest fear was we weren’t going to get a Northern shoot at all.”

**

“How many of you have ever been involved with a miracle before?” Van Camp is standing in a moosehide vest before a huge room of 60 delegates at Yellowknife’s Explorer Hotel. They’re dressed in suits and vests, picking at half-eaten buffet breakfasts of scrambled eggs and bacon. The room feels like a high-school dance, a glut of people gathered at the back. Van Camp, a stadium-length away, is wildly gesticulating. This is the Northern Aboriginal Business Association Conference and he’s the keynote speaker – an odd choice until you consider his business prowess, honed through years of brokering book deals and applying for grants. “How many of you have ever been involved with a miracle before?” he asks again, and a couple of attendees raise their hands. “How many of you have ever had your life saved by a stranger?” he inquires, to a few more hands. “How many of you have ever saved a life?”

Van Camp now has the audience’s attention. “I want to share with you a miracle story that happened to me at the Gold Range.” In that captivating Van Camp cadence, he begins setting the scene: “I’m at this little table and I’m sitting down. There’s my cousin Squeaky, and our parkas are on the table right next to us. It’s 40 below outside. Ice fog everywhere, everyone had hoarfrost in their hair. The band’s rocking, people are drinking. I mean, people were dancing in the aisle. Just a beautiful, magical night. Great night to be a Northerner.” In walks a prominent Northern woman, he says, but he’s not naming names. Her hair is pure white, her hands are blue, her lips are blue. She’s drunk, staggering, no jacket, no purse, snow and ice between her toes. Van Camp and Squeaky take it upon themselves to see her home, dropping her safely at the house on Yellowknife’s Latham Island where Van Camp used to deliver firewood to her parents. The next day, he hears from a friend that the woman woke up naked in the master bedroom of the home her parents used to live in 10 years ago, confronted by an angry wife and a mortified and confused husband. Van Camp realizes his mistake and stays mum. When he encounters the woman two years later, she thanks him. “Because of you and your cousin, I never touched another drop of alcohol again,” she said. Van Camp says he considers that a miracle.

It may not be your typical miracle story. But then, the North’s not your typical place and Van Camp is no ordinary storyteller. He’s been described as an energy drink, and it’s true: The audience looks a little dazed after following the steady stream of words flowing from his mouth. It was classic Van Camp – a winding tale told by a childlike enthusiasm-bomb, with requisite pauses for flourish and an uplifting you-can-do-it moral thrown in. He was supposed to be discussing the “art of the deal” but didn’t hit that topic directly. Still, the businessmen and women applaud heartily. It’s clear Van Camp’s dynamism and panache won them over in the end. Clapping is followed by handshakes, smiles, great-to-see-yous, come-by-for-teas and let’s-catch-ups. “I gotta go, he’s bossing me around,” Van Camp exclaims apologetically, palms and eyebrows in the air, as one of the conference organizers retreats quickly from view. And, with that, he’s off to his mom’s place around the corner for a bowl of soup.

**

A life in stories

In his 15-year career as a published author, Richard Van Camp has been prolific and, even more so, diverse. His seven titles range from his raw, raunchy debut novel to lullabies for newborns.

Novel
The Lesser Blessed
In Van Camp’s widely acclaimed debut novel, released in 1996, gangly and insecure Larry is introduced to drugs, fisticuffs and sex with the girl he’s lusted after for years, all thanks to Johnny, the rebellious new kid in Fort Simmer, NWT. Together, the pair navigate a tough town where bullies rule, Iron Maiden rocks, and traumatic past events catch up to you no matter how fast you run. This coming-of-age tale isn’t pretty, but it’s pretty damn real.
Review: “The Lesser Blessed charts new territory on the literary map, and for this we must be thankful.” – The Vancouver Sun

Short Stories
Angel Wing Splash Pattern
His first short-story collection, published in 2002, retains the angsty, conversational voice Van Camp nails so well. Whether it’s a drunken hero stumbling upon an abandoned child and telling her a story to keep her warm, or two punks trying to convince one another to beat up the town’s first sex-and-marriage counsellor, these characters are scrappy and, for Northerners, very familiar.
Review: “Fantastic. Amazing. Great, great stories, tough and clear and passionate, right in your face!” – Simon Ortiz, author of Out There Somewhere

Short Stories
The Moon of Letting Go
This second collection of Van Camp short stories, released in 2010, builds on themes of Northern life, and doesn’t hold back. Whether it’s masturbating to the thought of an older woman, watching the orange speckles of vomit spew from the town drunk’s mouth, or a pot dealer trying desperately to turn his life around, these stories tackle the grim realities of growing up.
Review: “Richard Van Camp is a magical storyteller in the old-school sense, fully capable of holding an audience enthralled with his voice alone ... . These are important stories, recounted with deep compassion and an unflinching eye.” – The Georgia Straight

Children’s book
A Man Called Raven
Published in 1997, this story is about two young boys who assault a raven for its bothersome behaviour. They’re stopped by a man who tells them the raven’s story.

Children’s book
What’s the Most Beautiful Thing You Know About Horses?
This story, released in 1998, follows a young narrator from a small Northwest Territories town as he goes from one character to another, earnestly asking about various mysterious animals that he’s never seen in his Subarctic home.

Baby book
Welcome Song for Baby: A Lullaby for Newborns
Released in 2007 and distributed to every newborn in the province of British Columbia in 2008, Van Camp’s first book for infants sings a lyrical lullaby of a world made more beautiful with the arrival of newborns.

Baby book
Nighty-Night: A Bedtime Song for Babies
Van Camp’s most recent work, published this year, bids a poetic goodnight to babies, and was initially written on a napkin after a visit with his niece and nephew. Next year it will be distributed to newborns in the Northwest Territories.