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On a long-ago trip to Algonquin Park during the dead of winter, Ottawa writer Ron Corbett remembers seeing an ice hut flash with light in the darkness of a frozen lake.
The image stuck him. “It was kid of spooky,” he remembers. “Was it a shotgun going off? Or was it just someone trying to light a lamp?”
The scene would plant in Corbett’s mind the seed for a novel, one that begins with an atrocity inside a remote northern cabin.
Although it would take him more than a decade to find the time to write that book, Corbett’s first venture into fiction after seven non-fiction books has now been realized.
Ragged Lake has been published by Toronto’s ECW Press.
“I wanted to do in fiction some of the stuff I’ve been doing in non-fiction,” says Corbett, a well-travelled Ottawa newspaper columnist, radio host, author and publisher.
“I didn’t want to all of a sudden start writing about vampires or something.”
As a writer, Corbett is best known for The Last Guide, a book that describes the life and times of Frank Kuiack, Algonquin Park’s last remaining fishing guide. A sequel, The Last Guide’s Guide, was published last year.
A former Citizen and Sun columnist, Corbett introduced Kuiack to readers in October 2000 in a newspaper feature based on their four-day camping trip to Algonquin Park. Their destination on that trip? A place on the southern border of the park called Ragged Lake.
Corbett draws heavily on his experiences and travels as a journalist.
“The book,” Corbett explains, “is the same sort of geography and landscape as Algonquin Park. I wanted to have the novel set in the same location, and write about the same sort of people I’ve been writing about for years — but now as fiction.”
Corbett’s novel follows detective Frank Yakabuski as he investigates the seemingly senseless massacre of a young family living in a ramshackle cabin in the woods outside a tiny northern town, Ragged Lake.
Ottawa-area readers will recognize the outlines of many places described in the book since they’re drawn from Corbett’s lifelong fascination with the Ottawa Valley and Algonquin Highlands.
“The landscape around here I find beautiful,” he explains. “I look at it and I want to describe it somehow.”
While Corbett had long thought about writing a novel, it was only through a bit of misfortune that he found the time to attempt one. In February 2016, when Bell Media Radio laid him off from his job as a CFRA talk show host, Corbett resolved to use his sudden unemployment to finish the novel he had first envisioned on a dark lake in Algonquin Park.
Ron Corbet. Julie Oliver/Postmedia
He set to work with conviction. Waking at 5 a.m., he spent his mornings writing and, in the afternoons, he worked on another long-held dream: to launch a local publishing company. (He now operates Ottawa Press and Publishing.)
Corbett enjoyed the freedom of fiction writing.
“I found fiction a lot of fun, in certain ways: It’s neat working on a story that you completely control,” he says. “Some days, I jumped out of bed because I was so anxious to start writing: I’d wake up and think, ‘Geez, I wonder what’s going to happen to him (Yakabuski) today.”
After four months, he sent a manuscript to Montreal book agent, Robert Lecker, who immediately agreed to take him on as a client.
“I read it and I could tell after the first page that this was the real thing, this was something I wanted to pursue,” remembers Lecker, who quickly negotiated a three-book deal for Corbett with ECW Press.
Lecker says it was among the easiest deals of his career. “Ron is the kind of author who makes use of all the senses,” Lecker says. “When you’re in his world, you see things, you taste things, you smell things, you hear things. That’s what gives his prose their unique quality.”
For Corbett, the book deal means more early mornings. He has already completed the first draft of his second novel and is now at work on his third. All of the books will follow the dark and violent story arc launched by Ragged Lake.
Corbett is working in a book genre sometimes described as “rural noir” or “country noir,” and he aspires to its intensely local nature: “The landscape is so important to these stories, that it may as well be an extra character.”
Ron Corbett is married to Ottawa Citizen photographer Julie Oliver
查看原文...
The image stuck him. “It was kid of spooky,” he remembers. “Was it a shotgun going off? Or was it just someone trying to light a lamp?”
The scene would plant in Corbett’s mind the seed for a novel, one that begins with an atrocity inside a remote northern cabin.
Although it would take him more than a decade to find the time to write that book, Corbett’s first venture into fiction after seven non-fiction books has now been realized.
Ragged Lake has been published by Toronto’s ECW Press.
“I wanted to do in fiction some of the stuff I’ve been doing in non-fiction,” says Corbett, a well-travelled Ottawa newspaper columnist, radio host, author and publisher.
“I didn’t want to all of a sudden start writing about vampires or something.”
As a writer, Corbett is best known for The Last Guide, a book that describes the life and times of Frank Kuiack, Algonquin Park’s last remaining fishing guide. A sequel, The Last Guide’s Guide, was published last year.
A former Citizen and Sun columnist, Corbett introduced Kuiack to readers in October 2000 in a newspaper feature based on their four-day camping trip to Algonquin Park. Their destination on that trip? A place on the southern border of the park called Ragged Lake.
Corbett draws heavily on his experiences and travels as a journalist.
“The book,” Corbett explains, “is the same sort of geography and landscape as Algonquin Park. I wanted to have the novel set in the same location, and write about the same sort of people I’ve been writing about for years — but now as fiction.”
Corbett’s novel follows detective Frank Yakabuski as he investigates the seemingly senseless massacre of a young family living in a ramshackle cabin in the woods outside a tiny northern town, Ragged Lake.
Ottawa-area readers will recognize the outlines of many places described in the book since they’re drawn from Corbett’s lifelong fascination with the Ottawa Valley and Algonquin Highlands.
“The landscape around here I find beautiful,” he explains. “I look at it and I want to describe it somehow.”
While Corbett had long thought about writing a novel, it was only through a bit of misfortune that he found the time to attempt one. In February 2016, when Bell Media Radio laid him off from his job as a CFRA talk show host, Corbett resolved to use his sudden unemployment to finish the novel he had first envisioned on a dark lake in Algonquin Park.
Ron Corbet. Julie Oliver/Postmedia
He set to work with conviction. Waking at 5 a.m., he spent his mornings writing and, in the afternoons, he worked on another long-held dream: to launch a local publishing company. (He now operates Ottawa Press and Publishing.)
Corbett enjoyed the freedom of fiction writing.
“I found fiction a lot of fun, in certain ways: It’s neat working on a story that you completely control,” he says. “Some days, I jumped out of bed because I was so anxious to start writing: I’d wake up and think, ‘Geez, I wonder what’s going to happen to him (Yakabuski) today.”
After four months, he sent a manuscript to Montreal book agent, Robert Lecker, who immediately agreed to take him on as a client.
“I read it and I could tell after the first page that this was the real thing, this was something I wanted to pursue,” remembers Lecker, who quickly negotiated a three-book deal for Corbett with ECW Press.
Lecker says it was among the easiest deals of his career. “Ron is the kind of author who makes use of all the senses,” Lecker says. “When you’re in his world, you see things, you taste things, you smell things, you hear things. That’s what gives his prose their unique quality.”
For Corbett, the book deal means more early mornings. He has already completed the first draft of his second novel and is now at work on his third. All of the books will follow the dark and violent story arc launched by Ragged Lake.
Corbett is working in a book genre sometimes described as “rural noir” or “country noir,” and he aspires to its intensely local nature: “The landscape is so important to these stories, that it may as well be an extra character.”
Ron Corbett is married to Ottawa Citizen photographer Julie Oliver
查看原文...
