Grad writes successful book about dispossessed

By Barbara Black

Shaughnessy Bishop-Stall, a 2000 graduate of Concordia’s creative writing program, has hit the literary big-time. He’s done interviews across the country for a month. He’s been on TV and radio, and his book, published by Random House, the biggest publisher in North America, has earned raves in the Globe and Mail and the National Post.

The book is Down To This: Squalor and Splendour in a Big-City Shantytown. To write it, Bishop-Stall spent a year living with drug addicts, misfits and other residents of Tent City, a notorious squat on the shore of Lake Ontario in Toronto. Tent City made the national news, briefly, when it was evacuated and razed, and that forms the last chapter of Down To This.

Bishop-Stall, who was already an experienced magazine writer, moved to Tent City because he’d hit rock bottom himself. He didn’t hide the fact that he was writing a book, and he couldn’t hide the fact that he was middle-class (his good teeth were a giveaway).

Nevertheless, he formed deep friendships, and through him, readers get to know homeless people as individuals — flawed, to be sure, but spunky, and often funny and intelligent. Bishop-Stall got involved in Tent City life. He made a shack out of scrap lumber and tried to talk his friends out of some their most self-destructive behaviour.

All the time, he was writing. Once a month he handed his notes over to somebody on the outside for safekeeping.

Bishop-Stall spent 10 years at Concordia, off and on. He took a lot of courses, more than he needed, and admits that he preferred studying the history of Latin America to the creative writing sessions.

“To be a writer, you have to read a lot, and write a lot,” he said, at a brief meeting in Java U last week. “The test is when you’re doing something else, and you’re thinking, I should be writing.”

Bishop-Stall’s parents are writers in Vancouver. He knows he’s given them some anxious moments. It was his mother who suggested he go to Tent City, but just to write a magazine piece; she had no idea he’d stay a year, get beaten up and do cocaine.

Some people have taken Bishop-Stall to task for not having a political point of view on homelessness, and for not denouncing capitalist landlords or the government. He’s impatient with this.

As he sees it, the residents of Tent City ended up there because they lacked love early in their lives. It comes down, in the end, to how we treat one another. His view of the various church groups and do-gooders who visited Tent City is one of simple gratitude, although he can’t help having fun with their earnestness.

As he says in Down To This: “I had every opportunity in the world. . . but when it came down to this, even I could barely make it through. So be good to people, be good to vagrants, beggars, winos, buskers, con men and tramps. They are like you, or else you are like me, and I am just lucky.” When he’s finished his book tour, Bishop-Stall will start writing a screenplay version of Down To This with award-winning author Paul Quarrington.