December 22, 2009
N.S. writer spends 32 hours chronicling life at the airport
By Oliver Moore
The Globe and Mail
Travellers' tales provide fodder for his short story
Jon Tattrie fled the Halifax airport with a sore back and wrists, exhausted and glad to be going home to a shower.
But this isn't the typical holiday traveller's tale of cancelled flights and lost baggage. The Halifax novelist and reporter had just finished a gruelling 32-hour writing session amid the maelstrom of the airport's pre-Christmas rush.
Inspired by Swiss author Alain de Botton, who was writer-in-residence at a London airport in August while working on the book A Week at the Airport: A Heathrow Diary, Mr. Tattrie was curious what it would be like to be "the motionless part of a perpetual motion machine." And passing travellers would provide raw material for the fictional short story he was writing.
Early Friday morning he planted himself near the security screening area with a stockpile of food. He heard tales that ranged from the profound to the redemptive.
A man in a Habs jersey said he had long puzzled over the lesson of his stay at a Buddhist monastery, understanding it only decades later when he saw a famine-relief ad on television.
Another traveller was going to a conference where she would see her former husband, who ran off five years ago with a salsa dancer. She had created a new life as a potter and would be meeting him from a position of strength.
The protagonist of Mr. Tattrie's story is a troubled character named Dave who had spent 10 consecutive Christmases at the airport.
"He's got problems, he can't quite bring himself to get on the plane," the writer explained as he took a break, smells from the nearby food court hanging heavy in the air.
"So in that 10 years he's been sitting here and he's been gathering stories. He kind of passes the time and deals with his neuroses by gathering traveller stories. The traveller stories in [my work] are real stories from real people but he's a fictional character."
Mr. Tattrie, whose novel Black Snow also melded fact and fiction, will reveal Wednesday if the fictional Dave makes his flight this Christmas. The story is now available online [http://www.jontattrie.ca/spec_proj/christmasattheairport.htm].
"It's a gimmick in that he had to come up with this idea and sell it to the airport authority," said Stephen Kimber, the author of eight books and chair in journalism at the University of King's College. "But at the same time, I think it's a neat idea. He had an opportunity to play around with form and style and substance. You can have a gimmick and it's still a great idea."
Mr. Tattrie, who has travelled extensively, chose the duration of his airport stay to mimic his longest trip, a multiple-hop series of flights to Cairo.
"Airports have this Kafka-esque torture device quality to them, but they make the modern world possible," he said. "I wondered what it would be like ... to sit still and watch the airport swirl around me."
Halifax International Airport Authority spokeswoman Ashley Barnes said the only literary request, a nod to the monitor displaying Mr. Tattrie's words as he worked, was that he "keep it G-rated."
Nearby signs encouraged passersby to offer their tales. It wasn't hard to get them to open up.
"Everybody wants to talk," Mr. Tattrie said. "People will just walk up and start telling me their stories. It's like it's been sitting in their head and they just need to tell somebody about it."
He finished on Saturday afternoon, feeling shattered after having slept only a few hours at a nearby hotel, but with thousands of words in hand.
"When I went back today and re-read the story, I could see ... the stories I was picking up were shaping the fiction far more than I expected," Mr. Tattrie said as he packed up to leave.