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New novel features Rossland

Keg-standing Kootenay ski bums crammed the couches at Café Books West on Jan. 28 to swill beer and hear Lisa McGonigle read excerpts from her new book, Snowdrift, which features many of the derelict debauchers who that very night filled the room with their praise, laughter, and music.
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Buzz Reed and Greg Hogg on either side of Lisa McGonigle as she reads from her new book

Keg-standing Kootenay ski bums crammed the couches at Café Books West on Jan. 28 to swill beer and hear Lisa McGonigle read excerpts from her new book, Snowdrift, which features many of the derelict debauchers who that very night filled the room with their praise, laughter, and music.

Snowdrift chronicles McGonigle’s four-year “slippery slide” from a straight-laced university lass of North County Dublin, Ireland, to a wild-eyed Kootenay snow bum, first in Fernie, then in Rossland, throwing Oxford PhD scholarships and other such whatnot to the wind along the way.

Newly graduated with a degree in English from Trinity College Dublin and a Masters from the University of Aberdeen, McGonigle came to Fernie in 2005 for a winter of snowboarding.

Describing herself as “okay” on a board and a “shocking” skier, “absolutely terrible” - something her friends dismiss as characteristic humility - McGonigle has nevertheless fallen hopelessly in love.

“This place is just fantastic!” she exclaimed. “I just love it here. I think the people here have just the right attitude and outlook on life.”

“I was meant to leave Fernie,” she recalled. “I’d booked a flight to go to Montreal. I thought, I really should see more of Canada. But I was so in love with Fernie, so in love with the Kootenays.”

At the last minute, she decided to stay for the summer, a pattern that would repeat itself.

She finally returned to Ireland where she was met with a scholarship to Oxford. “They were paying for my fees, my living expenses, everything,” she said.

Three months in, she traveled back to Fernie for a “two week holiday.” The temptation proved too great.

“As soon as I landed, I thought, You know what, this is where my heart is, this is the way of life that I want to live,” she said, deciding, “I’m staying, I’m not going back.”

“So I sent off a whole host of emails to all the official people at Oxford,” she said, “Thank you very much for the opportunity, but I won’t be returning after Christmas.”

She spent a second winter in Fernie, this time with “no work visa, no savings, nothing. I had literally the clothes I was wearing.”

“A friend of mine had a spare room in her house, she took me under her wing. I lived on a shoestring, duct tape over everything. This is what I believed in. After that, I just wanted to be in Canada. I thought, this is the best place ever.”

She returned to Ireland to “work for the man,” pay debts, build her savings, and then came right back here again.

“When I was in Fernie, I heard a lot of people talking about Red Mountain, about Rossland. They talked about the community, about the vibe, about the great snow.”

So she and two Fernie friends made the switch in November 2008.

“Unfortunately it was not a stellar season in Rossland,” she recalled, “And honestly, for the first two months I was in Rossland, I found it too small. It took me a while to slow down to West Kootenay time and really appreciate it.”

“By March, I was like, yes, this is where I want to be!” she said, citing the “long-standing relationship” between the community and the ski hill, and the absence of condos owned by Calgarians “who only come in for the weekends and don’t have a vested interest in the community, the schools, the infrastructure.”

She worked as a server and as a volunteer at Red that winter, and managed to eke enough of a living over the summer to spend a second winter here in 2009 after her work visa expired.

“I would love nothing more in life than to be able to stay in Rossland to make a life for myself, but Canadian immigration feels otherwise,” she said glumly. “They don’t really want writers or authors or journalists or whatever you want to call us. It’s just not an option for me to stay in Canada anymore, so I had to leave.”

Now she’s pursuing a PhD at New Zealand’s University of Otago, but remains unequivocal that she would return to Rossland “in a heartbeat. It’s visceral. It’s instinctive.”

There is, of course, one surefire way this attractive single lady could make it back, but she opted to spare us the “teeth-grittingly tedious stories” about her “latest emotional misadventures.”

Of her many other adventures during her four years in the Kootenays, she did not spare a pixel, writing emails back to her Irish friends the whole time, trying to capture the joys of the “impoverished and injury-ridden life of a ski-bum who’ll do almost anything for fresh lines.”

“I took a lot of care writing these emails. I didn’t just shoot them out. I’d edit them like you might edit an article for a magazine.”

“That’s how I write,” she explained. “Keep It Simple, Stupid. Just pare it down to the minimum. Say what you mean, mean what you say. The ABC of writing is Accurate, Brief, and Clear; in Kootenay parlance, get ‘er done.”

At some point, she looked back over her years of emails. “They totaled about 80,000 words. I’d written a helluva lot about ski culture in the Kootenays without even realizing it!”

After attending a writers’ conference in Fernie, to which she had submitted an excerpt, she was approached by a publisher and gave him the full manuscript a week later.

“He published the book pretty much raw, as it was,” McGonigle said, still stunned. “I feel like the luckiest person in the world.”