Technical troubles with this site? Call The TechDonkey.

About Ivan

The Long-Ass Bio of Ivan Coyote

I was born in Whitehorse General Hospital on August 11, 1969. It snowed that day. In fact, it set a record for the earliest snowfall in the white man’s recorded history of the Yukon Territory. My father has been overheard saying he should have known on that day that something was up, that he should have taken the unusual weather as a sign that his first born was going to be trouble. I look a lot like my father, everybody says so. Sometimes it freaks my grandmother out, and she cries a bit and talks about when her sons were still little, or hugs me for no reason.

There is a picture of me, I found it in a box in my parent’s living room closet when they were getting divorced and selling the house. I am sitting cross-legged inside a circle of upside down pots and pans, with a wooden spoon and a soup ladle in each hand. I am on the balcony of our first house, the one my dad was building when I was born, playing the drums in a dusty spotlight of sunshine. I am not quite two years old, and unabashedly naked, except for one baggy sock.

I count this as my first live public performance. My mom informs me she had to bungee cord the bottom cupboards shut after I took up the drums, as I had a tendency even then for getting up in the middle of the night to rehearse my new act.

At the age of five I was forced to put my performing career on hold for several years in order to attend kindergarten and elementary school. In grade three I wrote a puppet show that was interrupted and censored by my teacher, and to this day I wish I could remember the plot. I learned the recorder from grades three to five, but never found it as inspiring as playing the pots had been. I was an adequate student who didn’t really excel in anything other than talking without putting my hand up, and being sent out into the hallway to think about what I had done, all because I have always possessed an uncanny ability to make up alternate lyrics for the national anthem, right off the top of my head.

My first self published work was released sometime after spring break in grade six, it was a twenty page photocopied newspaper called Greasy Gossip. It was co-authored by my best friend Joanne and this girl Janet, who was the oldest daughter of the Baptist family that lived across the street from Joanne. Janet’s Dad wouldn’t let his kids pierce their ears or wear Fancy Ass jeans because ass was a swear word, and they weren’t aloud to listen to Rock and Roll records in his house, only classical or inspirational Christian music with lyrics pre-approved by the church.

When a copy of our newspaper ended up left in the girls washroom and was found by the janitor and turned in to the principal, all three of us had to make personal, tear-felt apologies to Mrs. Hoganson for calling her porkasaurus in our publication, we were suspended for three days, grounded for a month, and Janet wasn’t allowed to get babysat at Joanne’s place after school anymore.

Joanne lives in Drumheller now with her husband and two children, and they run a Pizza Hut. I ran into Janet on the skytrain a couple of years ago. She was living in Burnaby, but had somehow heard that I turned out gay. She turned out a Baptist. She did not seem very happy to see me. To my knowledge, neither of my co-authors pursued their writing careers after our first tangle with the critics.

I was hooked, though, and in addition to faithfully filling a shelves worth of diaries with anguished rhyming verse, I also wrote several short stories which I carried around in a navy blue plastic typewriter case until the mean girl who lived in the house on the hill stole it and read them aloud to all the popular girls in her rec room when they were supposed to be rehearsing for our grade seven class production of Grease, the musical. I was forced to clock her with my stainless steel lunchbox the following morning at the bus stop to make her return my manuscript, which was then safely stored in our crawlspace for several years, until my dad threw it out when he was making room for the new furnace, and building an auxiliary closet for my mom’s winter clothes. He said he thought it was just my old school stuff, that he didn’t realize the suitcase contained anything important. I now refer to these stories as “the masterpiece.”

In grade eight I was told that only boys could play the drums, and that four boys were already signed up, and I would have to pick another instrument. I settled for an alto saxophone, because it was that or the flute left, since I was sick the first day you got to sign up for band.

I dropped out of college four days before the end of my second year into my Bachelor of Music degree, with straight A’s and a scholarship from the Ladies Auxiliary of the Lions Club. I was coming out of the closet, I was four days drive from my home and family, and every ounce of faith or confidence in my artistic ability had been hammered out of me by an education system that measured musicality by grade point averages instead of applause. That, and one of my instructors had informed me I should give up the saxophone and pursue a career in mathematics because I could explain the overtone series on paper but I couldn’t hear the difference between a minor seven chord and a major one. I just didn’t have the ears for it. I later found out that the day after I left college he was discovered hiding under his desk, muttering about spiders in his head, and that he couldn’t come out until they turned off the cameras. He was immediately been excused from his teaching duties to seek treatment for his bi-polar disorder. He retired early and never returned to molding the minds of young saxophone players.

I didn’t touch a musical instrument for several years, until I was given a cheap acoustic guitar on my twenty-first birthday by the guy who rented the basement suite of the house I lived in that summer.

After a brief and unremarkable stint as a twenty something lesbian singer songwriter, I somehow found myself telling stories onstage, without the sloppy three chord accompaniment. I performed at open mikes, benefits, erotic lesbian cabarets and house parties. The earliest poster I can find in my files is hand-drawn and badly photocopied. It says I would be storytelling at a benefit party for Prison Justice Day, with Mecca Normal and a folk singer whose name escapes me now. It was 1991, and I was officially a spoken word performer.

In 1996 I co-founded a four-woman storytelling troupe called Taste This with poet Anna Camilleri, violinist Lyndell Montgomery and actor Zoë Eakle. We rehearsed in my attic apartment, split the cost of posters four ways, and rented a gallery for one night to do a show.

That was nine years ago. The gallery burnt down during a botched robbery attempt a few months later, and Taste This was passed a note at our second show by a woman who dated a woman who worked for a publisher, and in 1998 Press Gang published a book version of our live show, called Boys Like Her. It was shiny and slick and unbelievable to all four of us. I was the oldest one in the group, at twenty-six.

Press Gang went bankrupt and we never saw the royalties we were owed, but that book opened doors for me, in the literary world and in my own head. I was a writer. A real life writer, with a real book and everything. One night a handsome man passed me a business card after I read at a cabaret in a beer soaked basement bar that doesn’t exist anymore. Did I have anything else I wanted to publish, he wanted to know? I didn’t, not quite yet, but I got busy right away.

The handsome man with the immaculate facial hair worked for Arsenal Pulp Press, and in 2000 they published my first solo collection, Close to Spiderman. My mom took the picture on the front cover, and I took the one on the back. Dealing with Arsenal was vastly different than working with the feminist collective that had published my first work. Arsenal listened to me, and did what they said they were going to do, and they even paid me my royalty money. The book received good reviews, won an award, and people bought it and read it. My publisher paid for plane tickets to fly me places so I could peddle my stories from the stage. In 2002 I released my second collection of short stories, entitled One Man’s Trash. Between book royalties, performance honorariums, freelance gigs, writing book reviews and a part time job babysitting grow operations for out-of-town tree planters, I slowly managed to scale back working long days and nights in the film industry, and devote more of my time and energy to writing and performing.

I continued to love playing music, and combining my stories with the talents of guitarist Richard Spencer, flautist and bass player Luna Roth, go-go dancer and vocalist Shelley Frankenstein, and the prodigal abilities of songwriter and pianist Veda Hille. In the spring of 2003 Richard and I built a tiny studio in the basement of his rented house and recorded my first CD, You’re a Nation. We pressed record and ran into the soundproofed room to lay down tracks. We mixed it ourselves, and released it independently under Richard’s brand new label, Gung-Ho Records. I finally got to play the drums. We wanted to make a record that captured the energy of a live story, accompanied by music that played with the words, as opposed to music that just played along with them. Stories told with music instead of in spite of it. It was a labour of love, and our contribution to a genre beloved to us both: books on tape.

It is now February of 2005, and I have not had to take a day job for over a year and a half. I teach short fiction at night school at Capilano College, the same school I dropped out of almost twenty years ago. I write a monthly column for Xtra West, and a collection of the last four years of my column is due out this fall, published by Arsenal Pulp and entitled Loose End. I freelance for the Georgia Strait, Broken Pencil, Nerve, Curve and Common Ground magazines, and I am a writer in residence for CBC’s Round-Up. I am co-artistic director of the Vancouver Storytelling Festival, and producer of the New Word Order stage at the Vancouver Folk Music Festival. I tour the rounds of storytelling, music, writer’s, spoken word and performance art festivals, and teach workshops in colleges and universities all over this continent. My first novel, Junior, is scheduled to be released in the spring of 2006, also with Arsenal Pulp Press. It is a story about a 42 year old straight mechanic from Alberta whose wife leaves him for his hockey buddy’s wife, and how trading a suicidal man a used car for an ancient cello changed his life forever.

Writing, performing and teaching writing to others is my livelihood, my greatest joy, and my earliest remembered dreams come to life. Building and maintaining a sustainable living as a writer and artist has kept me sane, taught me how to play well with others, and allowed me to devote the bulk of my day to making people laugh, letting them cry, encouraging others to put their pen to the page, and to doing my bit to see to it that this world is made into a better place, little by little, one story at a time.

In my spare time I knit, do leatherwork, and play street hockey. I have two dogs, I live alone, and my favourite colour is orange. Dark orange, like a ripe pumpkin. I collect old cowboy shirts and belt buckles. In my most recent past life, I think I was a truck driver, and one day I hope to be able to attend university, where I would like to study architecture. I was raised a Catholic, but now worship many gods, and believe in the religion of love, art and the holy story.

Amen.