Ascension (37 page)

T
HOUGH THIS IS A WORK OF IMAGINATION
, I have drawn in places from history and the experience of real wire walkers. Ron Morris’s biography of Karl Wallenda,
Wallenda; Paul
Auster’s translation of Phillip Petit’s
On the High Wire; The Tightrope Walker
by Hermine Demoraine; Stewart O’Nan’s
The Circus Fire; Budapest 1900
by John Lukacs; and
Big Top Boss: John Ringling North and the Circus
by D. L. Hammarstrom provided much of my picture of how things “actually” happened. Some of the Romany folk tales included are made up, and others are actual lore. The stories I have not made up myself can be found in a wide variety of incarnations, in books such as Diane Tong’s
Gypsy Folktales; The Orange
of Love, compiled by Lars Gjerde, and
A Book of Gypsy Folk-Tales, edited
by Dora Yates. For some interesting descriptions of Romany life, Isabel Fonseca’s
Bury Me Standing: The Gypsies and Their Journey
and Jan Yoors’s
The Gypsies
were my favourites. However, being fiction,
Ascension
is mostly all lies.

I owe an enormous debt to Marita Dachsel, Lee Henderson, Rick Maddocks, Sioux Browning, George McWhirter, Madeleine Thien, Heather Frechette, Karoly Sándor, Lynda Milham, Chad Hunt, Gary Tayler, Mark Abbott, Timothy Taylor and Jason Willows for reading and providing suggestions, complaints and comments about the manuscript. Thanks also to Kevin Chong,
Tammy Armstrong, Anne Fleming, Annabel Lyon, Nancy Lee, Laisha Rosnau, Jennica Harper and Jeff Morris for their considerable lunching skills; to Isabel, George, Steve, Dina and everyone else at Helen’s Grill for feeding and caffeinating me; to the Galloway, Tayler and Haslett families and their extensions for support and encouragement; and to the UBC Creative Writing Program for employment and enjoyment.

I am deeply grateful to my agent, Carolyn Swayze, and to Diane Martin, Noelle Zitzer, Louise Dennys, Astrid Otto, Deirdre Molina, Jennifer Shepherd, Gloria Goodman, Samantha Haywood and everyone else at Knopf/Random House of Canada for each of the million wonderful things they’ve done for me and this book.

I would like to acknowledge the financial assistance of the Canada Council for the Arts; without their aid I would have been up a creek in a big way.

Finally, thanks to my wife, Lara. Without her, none of this would be.