She had eyes like

mud you get stuck in.

Like quicksand,

And and never fought it.

Couldn’t.

That’s what I remember. The pull of her.

Not knowing her and needing to.

That and her mouth saying everything before she spoke.

The way it twsited, or didn’t.

The way her words widened her eyes and dripped with certainty.

I don’t know her enough to miss her.

I miss her.

That’s how it happens, and why it matters if it doesn’t.

You end up wanting to be stuck like that.

Wanting nothing.

I Hope that’s alright.

No one followed me here.

Not right here.

Into this space between us.

Because the rest of them have bloodstained paws,

The red still as wet as paint as they want you.

I was bone dry and you were right there.

Fire.

An intangible, like fire, you can see but not hold.

I want you here, now, or I miss the idea of you.

And neither is enough, really. Not tonight anyway.

Not the first night I came up for air in weeks.

Left wondering what I’ve missed out on and why.

Again.

You should have punctuated things for me. I think.

Been fire I could have touched.

My Interview with CBC’s Angela Antle:

Interoobang on Away from Everywhere

Author drags readers into story

Ivana Pelisek
Interrobang
Click here to read more Interrobang articles written by Ivana Pelisek

Published: Monday, November 16, 2009

Away from Everywhere

Brilliantly crafted through thought provoking sentence structure Away from Everywhere will make any reader believe they are one with what they are reading.

Away from Everywhere has been receiving more than its share of welcoming reviews since it made its debut and the positive feedback has not left the author anymore humbled or down-to-earth then he already is.

Twenty-eight year-old Chad Pelley spent an entire year crafting this beautifully written novel, which he then rewrote into the masterpiece it is now a year after that.

“I had a rough draft down in a year…then I spent another year rewriting it,” admitted Pelley. “I find getting stories on paper easy, but being happy with the sentence-level writing is seemingly impossible. My goal as a writer isn’t to tell a story, it’s to have my writing reach a hand out from the book and drag the reader down into that story.”

The highly acclaimed novel Away from Everywhere encouraged Pelley to explore the flipside of love and how the pace and structure of modern life interferes with who we are.

Pelley is an award-winning writer from St. John’s, Newfoundland where he sits on the board of directors at the Writer’s Alliance of Newfoundland and Labrador.

Presently Pelley is working on three very different novels of which he has written the first chapter for each.

He admitted to also having a collection of thematically linked, short stories that are at the half waypoint of being done. The (short) writings “explore the complexities and fragility of human relationships, and those few distinct moments when another person changes who we are or how we see the world.”

Pelley describes his debut novel as “part family tragedy, part warped love story, and Away from Everywhere is a full-on-heart-stomping page-turner.”

Pelley’s advice to writers everywhere is as follows: “If you do get published, be voraciously ambitious in getting your name out there so you don’t disappear under the pile of books that came out the year you did.”

The judges, and this is why it matters: Kathleen Winter, Russell Wangersky, and Joan Sullivan.

I got two thousand dollars and some media out of this, but having those judges get behind you is priceless.

“Holes to China,” by Chad Pelley.

Five foot four and a heavy breather. Smoked cigarrettes. Wore a plain red baseball hat, which is not something you see many fifty-year-olds doing. I could say he was bald on top with a halo of grey hair too, but it wouldn’t matter. What mattered was that he never told me China wasn’t down there. He let me believe it for a week. I’d get home from school, walk right through the house, out the back door, and just start digging. Half the time I still had my blue-and-red bookbag on. Blue bag with red zippers. I heard China was down there and I wanted to believe it, because I had to believe in something that week. Anything. So I dug. For hours. With a little red plastic shovel that rocks and hard patches more or less bit pieces out of. The edges of the red plastic were jagged, scuffed white, and when the handle cracked, tape wouldn’t hold it back together. So Ted, the red-hatted neighbour, lent me his gardening tools and promised me a shovel when I got in deep enough. And when I got even deeper, his headlamp, so long as I promised to grab him a few fortune cookies while I was down there.

I’d go to bed dreaming of getting even halfway there, hundreds of feet deep into dank, damp darknesss, with Ted’s headlamp on, just as close to Signal Hill as I was to some samurai den in China. It was unfair that I lived on Signal Hill, it tacked an extra 200 metres on to my journey.

My dig to China was coinciding with cancer digging its way through my father. Carving him from the inside out. Esophogeal cancer. No one gets out alive. Thing is I didn’t realize that at the time. I was eight. I had freckles and chewed Hubba Bubba and no one ever found me when we played spotlight. Dad took me to my soccer games in the summer and I’d score a few goals because he’d taught me how to play so well. I was eight and thought I’d end up a professional soccer player and Dad would love me for it. Life was that simple and nothing was supposed to change that. Dad died and I saw the other side of life, or at least the bounds of it, the margins, the lack of inifinty and simplicity. It was all there in the way Mom put on ten pounds from all the take-out, fell asleep on the couch most nights, and always walked around with masacara-smeared eyes, liquid blackness, like her pupils exploded and dripped down over her face. When that got exhausting, I distracted myself with the trip to China. Ted the neighbour must have known that. The why of the dig.

On day two or three, when I was about two arms deep, when the hole was deep enough that I could drop a dinky down there and not quite see it, Ted started showing a real interest in my trip. He didn’t tell me I was wasting my time. All he asked me was, “How do you know it’s China down there, not Australia or the South Pole?” I explained, he nodded his head. He handed me some things from his greenhouse to give Mom. Tomatoes, cucumbers, “Enough to whip up a quick salad. You are eating, right, Jacob?” His way of making sure Mom hadn’t completely fallen apart?

By the end of that week he’d taken to leaning on the fence between our yards. As I dug, we talked for so long that when he took his arms up off the fence to walk away, there were long rectangles indented into his forearms that lined up with the tops of each fence board. Usually in the same places.

Saturday it rained. My hole was a puddle, a shallow muddy pond. “Throw some fish in it,” he said, “so it won’t have been a total waste of time. They are low-maintenance pets, you know?” It didn’t matter anyway.I’d hit pure rock on Friday, and not even Ted could bust through it. He dinged up the end of a shovel so I’d be sure it was a no-go.There might have even been a spark.The sharp metal point of his shovel now a U folded back onto itself.

 “Well, the truth is, Jacob, the world over, there’s a few feet of soil and then pure rock. But it is important to believe that anything is possible, so, on Sunday we start hole two. Behind my shed if you’d like?”

As we peered into my glorious puddle on that rainy Saturday, he watched me toss the shovel and snap my arms folded. Said, “Hey, rocks aren’t so bad you know! Go ask your Mom if I can take you up to my office at the University!”

He taught geology and had an office full of rocks and minerals from all over the world: purple ones, pointy ones, valuable ones, bland ones. The thing is, he got most excited about the bland ones. Talked about each one with flailing arms and  his eyes bursting from their sockets. Every one of those rocks was his own personal hole to China. So I took one, when he went to the bathroom. Amethyst: it looked like purple glass, an octagon slowly coming to a point. Diamond like, but more like something out of a fantasy novel.

For the next two weeks or so I could fantasize all about that stone. Secret powers. Mysitcal origins. Then I got bored with it. The guilt set in. I pictured Ted getting reprimanded at work. Two months later there was a for sale sign on his house, and I thought of the ways it could be connected to the chunk of amethyst underneath all the socks in my dresser. Like, he got fired for losing it. So I talked to him less from across the fence, afraid it would come up, and our conversations stopped  lasting long enough for the rectangular indents to form on his arms. The day he moved, he drop by with the rest of his greenhouse goods in bags for Mom: unmarked, white plastic bags with green foliages spilling from the tops and poking through the bottoms. He was making small talk with Mom in the porch, but I could see his neck bending and lurching to peer around walls and up staircases to spot me. To say goodbye. I stayed right where I was, spying from above, like a hawk.

I kept the the thing in the back of a drawer right up through university. A month ago I was in Afterwords on Water Street buying a used psychology textbook. The cash is lined with clear plastic bins full of gems. Two dollars each. There was a bin full of amethyst points. Two dollars each. The whole bin wouldn’t have cost more than a hundred dollars, and I’d spent age eight feeling like a thief who cost a man his job. I never did say goodbye or see him again: the man who ruined his shovel so his kid neighbour would spend life always digging.

Silence can do far more damage than words shared. Hesitation and prevention are worse than something gone wrong, because what never was is far more haunting than something dead and harmless. It’s there in you, always. Haunts you from within, never goes away.

Silence can scream; can change more than any words shared could ever change; can pierce like a bullet and burst from you like a freight train. Silence does its damage in seeping out, in resisting being contained. Water against a dam, after all those years. Pushing. In the form of words trying to get to where they would rather be: with that person you keep it from, not you. Silence isn’t quiet, it’s just that no one else can hear it. It hurts to be shot, but no one else can feel it. Silence hides in between words, and it can smother two lovers in bed, snoring. Remembering. It can keep two people apart.

It can do all these things, and yet what it would rather is to explode silently within us. Burn those important bits: what could be. What isn’t. What we want. The smaller things, that tend to be the bigger things.

We could fall in love, you and I; we could have smashing, intelligent, interesting kids. Casiotone-playing craftmakers, maybe. This what if will float forever unsure of itself; a jellyfish in a sea of silence.

Life’s been good, though. meladramatic journal entries aside.

I can’t get enough of this Martha Wainwright song lately:

Or This Evan Dando Song:

- As a kid, Harper grew up playing music in his grandfather’s music store, which was a fertile music grounds frequented by many well-regarded musicians, and Ben had honed a distinctive, original guitar style by twenty.

- By twenty, the legendary Taj Mahal had swooped Harper up to record music with him, and tour.

- His music is wide-ranging and ever-evolving, arguably moreso than  any other artist, and he has been recording albums for over 15 years. 

“Forever” off Welcome to the Cruel World (1994)

“Better Way” off Both Sides of the Gun (2006)

“With My Own Two Hands” off Diamonds on the Inside (2003)

- Frontman for Death Cab for Cutie, Postal Service, amongst other projects … does his own thing from time to time. Including some fantastic, well-varied covers (from Avril Lavigne to Michael Jackson to Bjork.)

- Married to actress/singer Zooey Deschanel

- Gibbard is a super-collaborator. Some quick examples of the many to choose from: he and Jay Farrar did a soundtrack together for One Fast Move or I’m Gone, He and Feist paired up for the charity CD Dark was the Night, featured vocals on songs like Nada Surf’s “See These Bones” and the Sun Kil Moon’s “April,” Played drums for songs for The Long Winters and Kind of like Spitting, played bass for Pedro the Lion and The Revolutionary Hydra … etc …

“You Remind me Of Home” off Home, Vol.5 (2004)

“Yoga” off Read, Interpretting Bjork (2002)

“Train Song (Featuring Feist)” off Dark Was the Night (2009)

- Alternates seamlessly between striped-down, moving piano ballads and rowdy, ridulous rocksongs, in both cases putting the cool back in piano, so that maybe one in a hundred kids might buy something other than a guitar?

- Ben, a multi-instrumentalist,  started playing piano at age nine, when his father bartered one for him off of a customer who couldn’t pay for something or other.

- Ben Folds was the first person to broadcast a live concert over MySpace. He pulled off a prank of a man falling off a balcony during “Jesusland.”

“Fred Jones Pt.2″ off Rockin’ the Suburbs (2001)

“Army” off The Unauthorized Biography of Reinhold Messner (1999)

“Still Fighting It” off Rockin’ the Suburbs (2001)

I used to throw a camera in the empty carseat next to me.

And go.

End up nowhere and it was perfect.

Good music, a coffee.

I’d stumble on places I never knew existed, like some broken wharf in Tors’ Cove:

And sometimes I’d keep going until I was 12 hours away and I’d spend the night in some dirty hotel, hearing some man, through a thin wall, treat his wife like shit. Not yelling at her or anything. Not listening to her, is all. Done caring.

The next day I’d go, find out there’s actually a place called Nameless Cove.

I spent three days in Gros Morne once, wasn’t planning on it. I’d ended a five-year relationship. Everything in town reminded me of a girl I had to get used to not being around anymore, so just going felt right. Because we were done, grown apart. Africa and America used to be attached, but there is no proof of that now. And they’ve nothing in common. Like us at the end of it.

Something about that spontaneous trip it remains one of the best weekends of my life.

I ended up ten minutes down a hiking trail during that trip. Wasn’t planning on the hike; pulled over and used four closely spaced trees as a urinal. But there was a trail and a peak and I walked to it, and this fox followed me for thirty minutes, and right back to my car:

I was in university back then, finishing it up. Early 2000s sounds about right. And now 2009 is almost over, and I can’t put a finger on one Godamn thing I’ve done these last few months. Yes: I finally got a book published, and it’s been great: the feedback, the response.

But those days I’d get in the car. go. Those days, life was full, made sense, I was headed somewhere. It was Med School (psychiatry) or it was Environmental Engineering: Suzuki, round two.

And then writing was all that mattered.

And then some girl named Peggy was everything lacking in the world. And I broke both our hearts. Permanently, it seems.

And I’ve stumbled to here.

Trying to figure this place out. This wasn’t where I was headed. All those days I knew what I wanted from life, as I threw my camera in the car and just went. I’m thirty and still waiting for my “calling” to come to me. I think the issue is, really, when you think about it, it is less like a calling, what we end up doing, and more like a yelling from within. I got cursed, and that thing is writing, and that’s not a job job. There’s no promise that works out. Without luck, until Heather or Oprah pick you, out of the thousand other 2009 books.

But I do know life’s not a straight path anywhere. I’ve learned that along the way. I know that much. We’re all ever-changing products of yesterdays, and everything happens for a reason. Whether that benefits us or someone else.

Something big is happening right now, and I am giving in. because too many people fight that.

I remember one time, out taking pictures. I saw two kids skipping stones. And I wondered if it was right or pessimistic to be jealous: they lived in the moment, oblivious of what was to come: bills, decisions, love, hate, reality. What one career can give you that another cannot.

Funny thing happened. Later that night, I saw the same two kids, acting all grown up, catching sculpins, talking a bout how “fadder tinks deys a waste of bait, but I likes catching em’ b’y. Bit of fun is all.”

I think the problem with getting your first book published is cold reality of it: I am nobody. My book could be bland or brilliant; it doesn’t matter. No one is going to know about my book. If they don’t know about it: they can’t possibly buy and read it.

There is a pretty woman in Toronto right now. She probably likes lemon-flavoured water, keeps it in her black, practical purse. And she, Sally, finds time to paint her nails colours she is really selective over: ”Cinnamon,” “Hot Chocolate,” “Licorice.” It’s okay when the paint chips between touch ups. She’s got two kids after all. She’s had a long day, made her boss’s life easier, got no credit for doing so. She’s used to it, to a job that doesn’t excite her, challenge her; she’s smart and she knows it. All As in university, and she still talks to old profs. She reads all the national papers and the Quill, their reviews and articles on the big, big books of the year, from the big, big publishers whose books actually get reviews. Mine won’t make those lists, because who is Chad Pelley to review or award? Some young nobody from St. John’s, Newfoundland, where 2000 people read fiction.

Sally is pretty too, men in grocery stores let her go first, and she feels like the ethereal girl she reads about in all her Random House and Penguin novels, because, who the hell hears about books other than the ones published by the bigwig Toronto publishers? Sally doesn’t anyway. She’ll get the subway home from work everyday, and see the genius marketing posters Harper Collins just set  up in the subway there: Posters with stark images, and you need to jam your headphones into them to see what they are all about. And now she’s interested in the Book of Negroes, because that cool poster was the tenth time she’s heard of it. She’s still never heard of mine, never will up there in Tornoto. She knows, when she sighs and looks down at her chipped chocolate-brown fingernails, that when she gets home her husband won’t be making supper. He’ll be there waiting for her to make it, unless she doesn’t want to, he’ll order a pizza. So she’ll cook something, after that long, brutal Monday at work. She’ll round the kids up and do their homework, bathe them, and at 9:30, life’s okay, because she’s in bed reading her novel. But there is no chance in hell that novel will be mine, because how would she have heard of my novel? Me here in St. John’s, her there in Toronto surrounded by reviews, posters, word of mouth, awards announcements, booktables in book stores with 100 Margaret Atwood books on them. Random House Kiosks in subways selling nothing but Dan Brown. When she checks Chapters.ca and Amazon.ca for new books, there are the same 12 suggestive sells scrolling across her screen, so she picks the prettiest one. Not the best one. Just the one she’s seen seven times already. The one everyone’s talking about.

Maybe Sally and Away from Everywhere could be such a good match? But i have a better chace getting hit by lightning tomorrow than she does of seeing my book, picking it up, reading the backcover, sliding those little chipped fingernails over it.

And now I can’t sleep, can’t care about anything over than knowing all the Sallys will never hear of my book to buy it.

For years, I thought all I wanted, my one ambition, was to get a novel out there. And I did. And it’s been great: emails from strangers with positive feedback. Remarkable feedback from friends, and family, and three amazing writers I admire too kthe time to endorse my book, and it’s now on Chapters in St. John’s “Most requested titles” display …

I go to bed tossing and turning that I’ve wasted years thinking getting published was the goal. It’s not. That’s step one. Reaching the Sallys of the world, that’s the real goal. And only attainable for the writer with the right agent and publisher behind them. The litearary merit of a book will only get you published, and that’s not enough to sell a book.

I’m all for sabotaging my own theory though. For proving it wrong. if I win the Cuffer prize on November 13th … I’m heading up to Toronto, and not one person in that city won’t have heard of my book …

I don’t want a million dollars. I just want my book in book with the Sallys.