Brad Spurgeon

Charles de Lint Moonheart tribute, from Brad Spurgeon in Paris

It’s sometime in late 1982, early 1983, and Charles de Lint calls me up on the telephone from Ottawa – I was a student at the University of Toronto – and he says something like: “Listen, Brad, can you send me back that manuscript I gave you of Moonheart? I’ve got an editor at a publishing house who wants to take another look at it, and yours is the only copy I have.”

My feelings were mixed: I was only about halfway through reading the novel and desperately wanted to finish it. On the other hand, I felt an insane sense of honour in knowing that Charles had not simply been kind enough, and interested enough, in sending me his latest manuscript, but that it was also his only copy of the novel! And he had trusted me with that responsibility!

This was before Charles owned a computer, so while he had perhaps other photocopies of the thing in other hands somewhere, that typescript was the only one that he felt he could get back to send to the editor at Berkley, Jove, Ace (or whatever the company was called at the time). Charles said the editor had already rejected it once before, but after having now met him in person at a convention, she asked to see it again. Those kinds of invitations must be followed up quickly! So I returned the manuscript by post immediately.

Well, my sense of honour about being the keeper of Moonheart for however short a time then went through the roof when Charles then told me a few weeks or months later that the manuscript had been accepted for publication! And that was not the end of it, as almost simultaneously, he then had acceptances for something like three other novels, and not just from the publisher of Moonheart.

So that’s how it works, I thought. And there it was, Charles setting yet another example for me of how to go about living one’s dreams.

We had met a decade earlier, when I was a 15-year-old music lover putting together my first real collection of albums, and Charles worked at a local Ottawa record store. We struck up an immediate friendship, despite him being six years older than me. I realized we were friends, in fact, when just a few weeks into this relationship he accepted a dinner invitation at my home on what we only learned once he was there was his 21st birthday.

He had arrived in his old VW Beetle with snow falling thick on our driveway, wearing his woolen gloves with the fingers cut off at the knuckles, his Martin guitar in hand. After the meal, he actually played the guitar and sang some songs for me and my family, filling our living room with his deep, melodious voice and carrying us all to realms only music can. (I recall especially the Donovan song, “Donna, Donna,” and a Celtic tune, “Foggy Dew.”) I had been dabbling at the guitar since about age 7, but I had made little progress, and the idea of singing was little more than an embarrassing dream. In fact, I assumed that people who played the guitar and sang – like those on the albums that Charles had recommended to me, many of which were his beloved Celtic music – were somehow superhuman beings anointed by some larger power. “Normal” people I might know could never do this. Then, yes, Charles did it, and I said: So that’s how it works!!

I thereby set out to play guitar and sing with more diligence and discipline than ever before in my life. It would take another more than 30 years before I got close enough to be able to perform in public as Charles did. But Charles had set the example and foundation for me. In fact, at that time, the early 1970s, I ended up going regularly to see Charles and his band Wickentree play gigs at a wonderful Irish pub in Ottawa before I was even old enough to be allowed in, but somehow I was, and I was determined to learn. (I also went once or twice to their practice sessions where I think I was supposed to sit in as a musician, but I only sat back and listened, as I was still incapable of playing along.)

Music was the shared passion of our early friendship. He was always during that period a guy who I looked up to, and who set an example for me – I even grew the beyond-shoulder-length-hair that he had at the time. The first inkling I had of his interest in writing happened in those early years when once he invited me to his home, where he still lived with his mother – the woman with the Dutch accent – and we went to his room and talked music, perhaps tried to play a tune or two, and at one point, a curtain on the wall fell opened slightly, and behold: Hundreds of paperback books were revealed behind it.

“What is all that?!?” I asked. Remember, I was a bit of a post-hippie hippie, and although my father made a living as a writer of journalism, in fact, probably because my father made a living as a writer, I thought books were for the controllers, the establishment, the old people; not for upstarts like me … or my role model Charles.

But then Charles, in the most normal way in the world, told me it was his collection of science fiction, fantasy, and other writings. He said he loved to read such books, and then revealed behind other curtains what I recall must have been thousands of them. (I wonder why they were hiding behind the curtains – or is my memory making that up?!?!)

Again, my mind was opened to something I didn’t think possible for me.

Soon, MaryAnn came into Charles’s world, and she was, as most people who know them know, a perfect match for him, and him her. And she was not just wonderful for him, but a warm, lively, and pure presence to anyone I know who met her. I have a hard time admitting this one, but when I found my first girlfriend, I was looking forward to introducing her to Charles and seeking his approval on her! (IE, was she as cool and down-to-earth as MaryAnn? I am not sure she made that much of an impression on him, and in any case, that relationship did not last long.)

As I turn 18, the story changes form. That is when I ran away from home and Ottawa, and joined a travelling circus in Toronto. It is the beginning of a long period of me trying to find my own path in life without following the example of another. It also parallels the period during which Charles was making his early way as a writer, and although Charles and MaryAnn and I continued to meet up from time to time from then until now, there was never again a period like those early 1970s teenage years of being in their close physical presence.

But what then happened is that the friendship probably got closer than it ever was before partly thanks to my living in other places around the world – from Toronto to New York briefly, then to London, England for more than a year, then a brief time in Iran during the Revolution, then back to Toronto, then to Kenya, and then back to Toronto, and finally to Paris, where I have remained since the end of that year of 1983. Thanks to this forever absence, and the two of us being wedded to keyboards, we now relied mostly on the post and written word to continue our friendship. Charles during that whole time, sent me his published writings, more unpublished manuscripts, his annual Christmas chapbooks, etc.

And it was only finally while I was at the university of Toronto and during a brief visit back to Ottawa that I met up with Charles and revealed to him that for the previous several years I too had jumped ship from the circus and showbiz ambitions to the desire to become a writer myself. I had also been writing short stories, novels, and other writings, I told him. So began a period in which Charles once again became a direct, powerful, and very strongly giving mentor, but now not for music, for writing.

The fact of my absence from Ottawa means that I now have mountains of physical correspondence and emails that the two of us exchanged from the early 1980s onwards as Charles read my manuscripts, encouraged me, set an example, and became the most important influence in my life as a growing writer. (My first computer was in 1982 – an Osborne – which is why I have copies of all the letters I sent to Charles too.)

Now, however, I had not decided that I wanted to become a writer because I wanted to follow in Charles’s footsteps. It came, of course, from a purely personal well of needs. But his help was more than invaluable. It was more than just encouraging. It felt like my own personal – no, not Jesus! – fount of knowledge from which I could always find sustenance.

One particularly proud moment was when Charles, after asking me my permission, gave a character from one of my novel manuscripts a cameo role as a character in one of his novels. It felt almost like my own publication!

You can see in that correspondence that I learned some of the most important, and even basic, techniques and concepts of writing from a first-class mentor. Such things as “show, don’t tell,” “never begin at the beginning,” “things get worse!”

So that’s how it works! And if you think such things are a silly formulaic approach to writing, just read Hamlet, just read Crime and Punishment, just read Charles de Lint!

Alas, I still have not yet had a novel published – although I think I hold the world’s record for the number agents who represented my work over the years without selling anything (7 of them). And I never actually wrote within the fantasy genre that Charles touched so deeply. I continue to try, and will never give up. I did get a few short stories published, one even nominated for an important crime writing prize. But I did end up earning my living as a writer, mostly as a journalist, and doing so in a way that fulfilled many of my writerly needs. And many of the lessons I learned from Charles were directly applicable to my articles in newspapers and magazines.

After a certain point, perhaps once I was successful on the journalism path, our copious correspondence petered out to more of a trickle of occasional shorter exchanges over the years. But in more recent times, when, after the early death in 2008 of my wife, Nathalie, I began to perform music in public for the first time and develop a kind of second, non-paying career, now as a musician, Charles and I were back in touch a little more than before, and I returned to exchanging about our first passion that had bound us, music.

I go into these personal details because I feel it is extremely important to say here that had it not been for the music – which through the decades I had come to improve at – I would never have been able to recover from that traumatic experience of losing the woman I had lived with for 24 years. And had it not been for Charles, I would never have developed that musical ability, for which he had always served as an example. After MaryAnn’s death, I have been relieved to hear that Charles finally – at least at one point – managed to get back to playing a little music himself, after a long break from it. Its therapeutic powers cannot be underestimated.

I wanted to write all these very personal words not only as a tribute to Charles and the 40 years of his arrival on the stage of literature with Moonheart, but also to make it clear to Charles – perhaps for the first time – just how important a role he played in my life, the repercussions of which have never ended. And by extension, any of Charles’s fans and readers who find this site, can also see through this, I hope, another dimension of his good nature and positive vibes. As I read the other contributions here on this site, I realize just how all of a piece the portraits are of who Charles is.

I mean, can you imagine giving your last copy of your latest opus to a friend in a city 4-hours’ drive away, and that being a friend who had, at least in the early years, never really proven that he could be trusted for such a responsibility!??

Thanks for everything Charles. And thanks to MaryAnn for coming up with the idea of this fabulous site! I am fortunate that I still live so far from Ottawa, and I can still pretend that nothing has changed chez Charles and MaryAnn, even if I know otherwise.

Brad Spurgeon, born in Canada in 1957, is a versatile storyteller with a diverse background. Raised in Toronto and Ottawa, he later lived in England, Iran, and Kenya before settling in Paris, France in 1983. Brad’s journalistic career began at the International Herald Tribune, covering Formula One racing for both that newspaper and The New York Times, between 1993 and 2017. He has appeared on television as an F1 expert on CNN, Al Jazeera, L’Equipe TV, and EuroSport. Before turning to journalism and writing, he started life as a teenage performer in the circus, TV, stage and film.

Beyond racing, Brad has contributed to countless publications around the world on a wide variety of subjects, including chess. His has published several short stories, one of which was short-listed for an Arthur Ellis Award in Canada. He has also published an interview book with British writer Colin Wilson, one of the original Angry Young Men of British literature in the 1950s. In 2021, the luxury book publisher, Assouline, published Brad’s top-selling luxury book, Formula 1: The Impossible Collection.

Brad is not only a writer and journalist but also a musician, filmmaker, and actor. He lives outside Paris with his partner, Ornella Bonventre, and her two daughters, Morgana and Ginevra.

Visit Brad Spurgeon’s websites: bradspurgeon.com and bradspurgeonmusic.com