Might the rocks say ‘winner’?
Brenda Hasiuk’s Where the Rocks Say Your Name up for three book awards
Quentin Mills-Fenn

Brenda Hasiuk is just about to sit down and talk to Uptown at a street-side table at a downtown coffee shop when a street warrior pulls up, parks his car and starts booming some beats.

“Welcome to the urban landscape,” she laughs.

Hasiuk can afford to brush annoyances off. Her first novel, Where the Rocks Say Your Name (Thistledown Press) is up for three awards on April 28 at Brave New Words, the Manitoba book awards. Hasiuk, 38 and currently on leave from a position with the Manitoba Government and General Employees Union, is up for most promising Manitoba writer. Chances are she’ll have a very good weekend.

Where the Rocks Say Your Name is the story of four teenagers over one summer in Franklin, a fictional place that bears a striking resemblance to Flin Flon. Hasiuk, 38, convincingly conveys life in a small town, which is especially remarkable given that she’s never lived in one.

“I wrote the book when I was working for the Manitoba Government Employees’ Union,” says the writer, who is currently on maternity leave. “I had to go on a northern tour and I had never been north of Riding Mountain. But I fell in love with the space between Flin Flon and Thompson. was really intrigued by the place.”

After some subsequent visits she was sold on the town as the setting for her debut novel.

“It was the contrast between all that natural beauty and the mine, which is right in town,” she says. “The mine is a surreal-looking thing. It’s almost a moonscape.

“I thought I would create a world based on Flin Flon. Part of the writer’s job is to create a world. I really had to imagine this place and what it would be like to live there.”

She adds: “And when you write about something, it’s got to be about something that interests you or else you’re not going to have the endurance to finish it.”

Endurance, it turns out, is key to writing.

“A first book is an exercise in perseverance — insane perseverance,” Hasiuk laughs. “I was working full time while I was writing it. That was a crazy thing to do. There’s always other things to do, like visiting your family or cleaning your house.”

And the book itself?

“It’s a coming-of-age story, and writers can’t get enough of those,” Hasiuk says. “But in a lot of coming-of-age stories that take place in small towns, the story ends with a character getting on a bus. I didn’t want that. To some degree, I wanted to write a story about the things that draw you back, that keep you there. As someone who’s lived in Winnipeg all my life, I think about what keeps you in a place.”

As for the awards gala, Hasiuk doesn’t want to sweat it.

“I try not to think about it,” she says. “It’s an ego boost and it’s good for the book and the money’s nice, but that’s not what it’s all about.

“It’s about sitting in a room and waiting for the words to come.”

For more info on Manitoba Book Week, go to www.bookpublishers.mb.ca.