After spending most of his life studying demographics and pursuing questions around human culture and politics, Gordon F.D. Wilson is trying his hand at fiction storytelling/writing.
One Weekend in May explores complex human conditions such as aging, mortality and relationships.
"One of the main things people are saying is that they really enjoy the characters," said Wilson, regarding feedback from his readers.
He also delves into broader, seemingly dystopian subjects, such as predictive algorithms, rising global population and a rapidly changing world.
"The principal character, Ken Graham, is a demographer who studied at Oxford University and he essentially gets pilloried from his academic profession because he predicted that absent international control and regulation over population movement and growth was going to lead to unparalleled amounts of international migration, which is exactly what we see today," said Wilson. "What [the main character] predicts is that you're going to have states cracking down and starting to breach human rights, making governments and countries pretty much unmanageable without some kind of international parameters."
Wilson lives and writes on his sheep farm near Padgett Road in qathet Regional District, where most of the setting of the book takes place. He said he hopes readers can connect with the characters in the book. While there may be some parallels with his life in the story, such as farm life, divorce and relative isolation, that is where any similarities end, he added.
"Ken Graham's ex-wife Lena leaves her palliative care home and finds a way back to the farm," said Wilson. "It is this incident that brings together the six main characters; they now have to confront realities in their own lives and in their own relationships."
​Wilson said Lena, who is suffering through a rare form of dementia compounded by a brain tumour, is convinced she is Gilgamesh, the main character of the epic Persian poem that made up her academic life’s work.
"I use Gilgamesh because historically, it's a poem about the human desire to find immortality," said Wilson. "The other characters are forced to deal with issues that are very uncomfortable to them in their lives; they need to confront those issues and to realize that life is rarely what you want it to be, but is often what it presents you."
Wilson said he included a wide variety of characters to reflect the reality of the world, including an Indigenous female RCMP officer and a queer couple.
"It's an honest portrayal of two women from completely different backgrounds and yet, very similar in terms of the issues they had to deal with through their childhood," said Wilson. "One [of the women] becomes outwardly open [about her sexuality] and very aggressive in terms of defending her views. The other remained sheltered right up until she was almost 60 years-old and decided to hide [her sexuality] from the world."
Wilson emphasized that it's those kinds of issues in the book that hopefully get people to start to think about how, at the end of the day, similarities between people are so much greater than differences.
"We often make assumptions based on false information," said Wilson. "I think all of us, in our relationships, and all of us within our family settings, are dealing with issues very similar to the issues that are being dealt with in the book."
Wilson said he wants people to enjoy the story, but also hopes it will give people pause to think a little bit about what some of the subtext in the book is.
"Humans are human, and the human condition is alive and well in all of us," said Wilson. "What affects us are the decisions we make on the assumptions we make, and we need to really think clearly and understand those assumptions may not be correct."
Wilson said he always wanted to be a writer but was discouraged when he was a youth.
"I really enjoy character development, listening to people and hearing their stories," he added. "The more understanding we have [of each other], the more we're going to be accepting of people."
Wilson will present his book at Powell River Public Library on Saturday, February 15, at 2 pm.
“There's some good characters here, and people who read the book are going to go, ‘wait a minute, this is our community, this is Powell River.’”
Wilson said he is currently in the process of writing his next fiction novel.
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