Writer C.B. Forrest makes use of his Scot's stubborness in The Weight of Stones. Photo by Mike Levin.

By Mike Levin

Chris Forrest has spent his entire life searching for “Oh Wow” moments, where one has to bet everything or admit that the demons have won. They are points of pure clarity, and their lessons can change your life in a heartbeat. Perhaps that’s why Forrest has chosen Cool Hand Luke and Leonard Cohen as role models and, more recently in his fiction, created characters with nothing left to lose.

He says this pursuit was born of his dual affliction of perfection and overdrive. While he’ll admit neither can get him where he really wants to go, Forrest has given up trying to control them, figuring conflict that arises from dissonance is a powerful interpreter of reality. He recognized that for the first time on the night of June 3, 1990, his final year of high school, when a car crash battered his body so badly, he lost vital signs.

He doesn’t remember the arc of the flying vehicle, but did grasp the unexpected survival as his first black-and-white catharsis. He almost inadvertently spent the next 17 years translating it into Charlie McKelvey, the lost protagonist of his Arthur Ellis Award-nominated The Weight of Stones (2009). McKelvey slowly realizes his demons have taken over, that his quest a an ex-detective is less for justice than for revenge, but “it’s his opportunity to be all or nothing, to have an impact, and he feels he’s the only one to do the job,” Forrest says.

This is Forrest’s fine ability to navigate the line between real life and fiction, a literary quirk that keeps readers wondering how biographical a writer’s story is. “I do see that element of narcissism. I have a healthy ego,” Forrest says. He recognizes a self-focused motivation in himself but long ago externalized it by identifying with Cool Hand Luke, an indomitable prisoner in a 1967 movie starring Paul Newman, and source of the classic line: “What we have here…..is a failure to communicate.”

Stones opens with McKelvey in therapy trying to deal with the death of his son, which defines the book’s storyline. McKelvey walks out, frustrated, because he’s well past communicating. “I wanted to show him at absolutely his most vulnerable, where he admits that righting the wrong (of his son’s murder) is more important than his own feelings.  It’s a shedding of the skin, and perhaps there’s something of me there, just with a different temperature gauge.”

It flows through his brother, and he now sees this focused pugnacity in his daughter Abbie. “She doesn’t know how to draw inside the lines. I love this in her.”

The Arthur Ellis nomination was for a first novel, but C.B. Forrest has been sloughing his emotional skin with words since he was five or six years old, “creating my own little worlds, an imagination always out of control.” Also hyperactive, a class clown; strong academically but never accepting the boundaries that institutions like schools impose. “Cool Hand Luke, a spirit you can’t break,” he offers in comparison. “A stubbornness that comes from my Scottish ancestry, my 93-year-old grandmother, still living in Richmond (Ontario), still fighting.”

It flows through his brother, and he now sees this focused pugnacity in his daughter Abbie. “She doesn’t know how to draw inside the lines. I love this in her.” Forrest sometimes wonders whether his wife of 15 years wishes she wasn’t with someone so dedicated, so driven.

His father worked in the construction industry, and when he brought home an old manual typewriter for Chris, the creative output increased. “It really made life full. In Grade 5, I tried to kiss every girl in the class. I still want to kiss everyone today, just in many different ways,” Forrest says. His teen years instilled an ability to focus on a single purpose, even as his dissonant thoughts kept the questions coming.

One purpose was boxing, a great outlet for pent-up, adolescent energy. “Not the same as that ridiculous posing in the Market on a Saturday night. It’s an agreement you enter into. It fits my competitive spirit. I don’t like to lose, but in spite of myself I did learn that sometimes we should surrender.” But violence requires rationalizing, at the least buffering, and Forrest found a source in the library shelves of his school. Still only 15, he plucked out a book of Leonard Cohen’s poetry, and life was never the same.

Leonard Cohen. Courtesy of Wikimedia.

When he discovered Cohen’s music, the interest became an addiction. He went through the stages of Cohen’s career trying to understand the dedication to craft and how it creates magic, a sacred trust between creator and audience. “It’s not just sucking it dry, an outflow. It’s putting something back in to give people a connection to what’s real. (Bob) Dylan was the same. Jim Morrison would have continued, if he had lived.”

At 21 Forrest wrote to a letter to Cohen about revelation and his search for that “Oh Wow” moment. Cohen replied, relating his own experiences at the same age. At that point, Forrest found a poetic muse and continues to write poetry today. “It takes a week to read a novel, a minute to read a poem. It’s distilled communication, a life in one line. I’ll never be dedicated enough (to focus entirely on poetry).”

But poetry’s influence has never waned. When he sat down to write Stones, the story’s context flowed out of a poem, by Kahlil Gibran:

It is when your spirit goes wandering upon the wind,
That you, alone and unguarded, commit a wrong unto others

and therefore unto yourself.
And for that wrong committed must you knock and wait a while

unheeded at the gate of the blessed.

“We all strive to write a few lines like this in our lifetime; I’m still trying, but haven’t come close yet,” Forrest says. If he doesn’t, it won’t be through lack of effort. Blame it on the Scots, but he can be one stubborn man. “I will never, ever stop learning how to be a writer. I still have every rejection slip; each is a permission slip to sit down again and write. That’s my ego,” he says.

He needed the tenacity up north in the 1990s when he worked as a journalist with the Sudbury Star and Northern Life, a career path that flourished briefly but faded under the weight of un-met expectations. “Let’s just say there wasn’t much room for passion in it,” Forrest explains.

He saw it more as a failure than a surrender, and the disappointment was unlike anything he’d ever experienced; in fact, he quit writing altogether. “I let the angst from the publishing business get me disgruntled and had to take three years off because I forgot why I was (writing).”  Forrest moved his family to Toronto and let the self-pity burn itself out while studying at the Humber School for Writers.

By 2001 he finished Coming To, a novella that was never accepted for publishing but did end up adapted for the stage in Toronto. His short stories had better success, The Lost Father (2003) winning a Canadian Authors Association prize. His novel Chasing Face (2004) could only find an independent publisher, and then he turned to mystery. “It was accidental. Writing was always about language for me, but I like how the world works. I like people’s conflicts.”

“He has nothing left to lose, so things are pretty black and white. You know, the ‘this has been waiting for me all the days of my life’ type of thing.”

His character Charlie McKelvey was as conflicted as they come; it took a while for the writer and the ex-detective to become friends. Forrest wanted to let readers judge his protagonist for themselves, and McKelvey, having lost everything dear, just wanted people to leave him alone. The only thing the two could agree on was that there is too much “poor me” in our society.

“He has nothing left to lose, so things are pretty black and white. You know, the ‘this has been waiting for me all the days of my life’ type of thing. So I thought, if things aren’t black and white, what do you go to sleep asking yourself?” Forrest wonders.

The criticism Stones has received is that it contains too many questions like this. But Forrest’s perception of reality and all its dissonance means he couldn’t have written it any other way. Most of life isn’t black and white, all or nothing, and no mix of perfection and overdrive will help a reader empathize with a man who’s got nothing left to lose.

“You know, it takes so little to touch people. Look at Cohen’s poetry, romantic, such a simple distillation. All of a sudden you have the ammunition, and all you have to do is figure out is how to use it,” he says. And with that understanding, Chris Forrest has stumbled onto the biggest “Oh Wow” moment of his life.