Arthur Eastly seems an unlikely fiction writer.
The Calgary resident led what could be described as a pragmatic life: he’s a mechanical engineer by trade who worked in the oil patch; he grew up in rural Alberta in the late 1940s when electricity and running water were something found only in cities and larger towns and, as a rural kid, he learned to trap, hunt and fish.
But Eastly is also a creative person by nature and he discovered solving mechanical challenges to be a creative process.
“It is a limitation of the sciences. Whichever one you happen to take, they teach you to follow facts and reason everything out. Is this going to work? Is this going to fit? Whereas in real life, many things people have done over the years, scientists would say, that’s not practical,” Eastly said.
“That’s an adjustment. You come out of university and they hammer you to the point where you are just a machine processing data and as time goes by you come to realize that you don’t have all of the data. You get out there drilling a well or building a pipeline and you come to realize there’s a bunch of things going on around here that there’s no data for. You have to adjust.”
That ability to adjust by being creative, including the experiences of his four grandparents who homesteaded in Alberta in 1901, has made him in an ideal novelist.
And it shows in Black Arrow, his self-published Western novel that won a silver medal at the 2013 Independent Publishers Book Awards in the Canada-West – Best Regional Fiction and is now into its second printing. Eastly is expecting to release his second novel in March.
Eastly attributes the success of the novel so far to the accuracy he strove to achieve in the setting, times and the history.
“It comes from different directions,” Eastly said. “(Readers) seem to like it because it is historically accurate. By that I mean the geology, the plains, the animals: all of that. I was very careful that I stuck to the truth as much as possible, but the story itself is fiction.”
And even though his story his fiction – a tale of action and adventure on the Great Plains – it was heavily influenced by his experience and the experience of his four grandparents, all of whom homesteaded in Alberta in the early 1900s.
“I used to sit around and listen to them talk and they talked about the plains, the weather and the crops and all that kind of thing. I’ve driven through that area a few times and I knew that the geography was accurate,” he said.
He also drew on his own experience as a rural Albertan.
“My first job that I got paid to do, I was five years old. I used to go in the summer and spend two to three weeks with a great uncle and aunt of my mother’s and I think it probably, when I look back at it, was just to keep me out of the road. But they gave me a job of catching gophers. And for each gopher I caught I cut off the tail and put it in my pocket and got paid a penny apiece. That is pretty darn young to be working, but that is what I was doing. One way or another, I always had a job,” he said.
“I have a great interest in that. When I got older, when I became 12 or 13 years old, I had a trapline in winter and trapped muskrat and beaver. I grew up to be a hunter.”
Writing about the end of the 1700s was a natural fit for Eastly, as growing up outside of cities and towns in the late 1940s wasn’t much different than in 1799.
“In many areas of the West it was still frontier up until the ‘50s, although it was a better frontier than the 1800s,” he said.
Black Arrow is available at Café Books in Canmore for $18.95.
