London-area author draws on Huron County farm experience for debut novel

A retired English professor who spent decades teaching Canadian literature has now added his own work to the shelves.

John Van Rys recently released his debut novel, Milksop, which has been included on the Giller Prize's Craving CanLit summer reading list.

Set in the London area and rural Huron County in 1979, the novel follows 17-year-old Evan Mulder after he's sent to work on a dairy farm for the summer. The story draws on Van Rys's own experience as a London teen working on a farm.

Van Rys, who lives on a hobby farm near Dunnville, Ont., said he hopes readers find encouragement in the novel.

"Life is not easy," he said. "But it can be good."

The former Redeemer University professor joined CBC's London Morning to discuss the novel and the experiences that inspired it.

The following interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Andrew Brown: What did it feel like to see your book on the list?

JV: Well, it was very satisfying. For many, many years I was a teacher of Canadian literature to university students, and then finally I have gotten around to making a small contribution to Canadian literature as well.

AB: At what point in your life did you decide you wanted to make that contribution?

JV: That was fairly late in my life, to be honest. I was 55, and I have been teaching for many, many years, and I thought if I'm going to make an attempt at writing fiction myself, I'd better get around to it. So, I started writing short stories.

Moving forward from there to about 2022, I had a sabbatical year from my teaching job. I thought, this is the perfect time to attempt a novel because the short story is kind of a sprint as a writer, but a novel is more like a marathon. I had the time to sit down, think about this story and what I wanted to tell in it.

AB: As a professor of Canadian literature, you are someone who is interested in writing and reading and books. How did it go when you actually sat down and wrote a novel? Did it match up to what you expected it to be?

JV: It was actually a marvellous experience. It was the most creative experience of my professional life. Basically, every day I got to imagine this story and where it was going, to think about this character, Evan, and the sort of struggles that he was going through and how he was going to work his way out of it.

As a novelist, what you end up doing is putting your character in a difficult situation. There's kind of a famous saying that what you do is put them up a tree and throw rocks at them. And then what they have to do is figure out how to survive that onslaught that you put them through.

AB: Let's get a little bit into the story. Who is Evan?

JV: Evan is a young man. He's 17 years old. He comes from a Dutch immigrant family, and he was in his winter term of Grade 12. This is way back in 1979 when there's also Grade 13. He's flunked out. He has had a terrible semester. There's a mystery in the novel about why this has happened to him.

He's in a kind of a terrible situation, and his family's solution is essentially to send him to a dairy farm for the summer, put him through work therapy to see if that can pull him out of the funk that he's in. So that's the situation that he finds himself in.

A city kid growing up in the city has no clue about what happens on a farm. He's sent to this dairy farm to experience rural life, a coming-of-age kind of thing, learning about himself.

AB: Why was this a story you wanted to tell John?

JV: I was a 17-year-old boy at one time, and I recall the struggles that went into growing up, figuring out who you are and what you want to do with your life. That was part of it. I did have an experience working on a dairy farm in the summer back then, and it was a marvellous experience. So it's partly the story wanted to celebrate rural life, the life of farming families, particularly dairy farmers.

It involved asking the question: What will it take to come to understand yourself as a young person? What does it take to face certain struggles and griefs and difficulties? How can you grow through that and become the person that you're meant to be, and live a life that has value and meaning to it?

AB: We've called this book an antidote to poisonous times. Why is that?

JV: Well, I think that it's no surprise if I say that we're living through difficult times. If we think about the pandemic, but even currently, with a sort of political and social upheaval and all of that. So I think of the story as one filled with hope. It's a story that's essentially about the goodness of people and the way that people can, individually but also as communities, get through hard times and learn to flourish in spite of those difficulties.

Even though this story is very much focused on an individual character and the cast of characters around him, for me, it kind of resonated more about a view of life that is filled with hope.

It's partly also a comic novel because you also have the situation that this is a character that we call a fish out of water. He's used to the city and has no clue about the country, of course. So there's a good amount of comedy about that.

I wanted to make the story an uplifting experience that is part of my own view of life.

AB: You spent a career as a literature professor, and you wrote your first novel in your 60s. When it finally arrived from the publisher, and you held a copy in your hand, what did that feel like?

JV: Deeply gratifying — kind of weird — but deeply gratifying to actually see it in the form of a book. It was a wonderful experience.