The Second Life of Samuel Tyne

For Esi Edugyan, becoming a writer was the natural result of her childhood love of books. "It drove my mother crazy," she said in one interview, "but I always had it in my mind to write because of my love of reading." After completing high school in Calgary, where she was raised, Edugyan headed to the University of Victoria for its writing program, and went on to Johns Hopkins University. Since then she has completed a fiction fellowship at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown and has had work appear in the influential story collection Best New American Voices , edited by Joyce Carol Oates. The Second Life of Samuel Tyne is Edugyan’s first novel, and was originally released in 2004 as part of Knopf Canada’s New Face of Fiction program. Edugyan wrote the novel after finishing graduate school, while also working full-time: "I’d get up in the morning around 4 a.m. to write, and then go to work. I wrote on the weekends as well, and it ended up taking me a year and a half." She based the story on two areas of personal fascination: twins and Alberta’s history of black immigration. While the intense and often mysterious relationships between twins had long interested Edugyan, she stumbled upon the setting for her novel almost by accident: "A few years ago, in a history book about Alberta, I saw a picture of black settlers from the early 1900s. I remember thinking, ‘Everyone should know about this.’ So, this book started with a photo of people we’ve forgotten." From there, she began investigating the history of a settlement near Edmonton called Amber Valley. The area was populated circa 1910 by freed slaves from Oklahoma, who were lured to Canada by the government’s promises of free land, but by the beginning of the Second World War they’d almost all moved away. Like Aster in this novel, Amber Valley didn’t turn out to offer the second chance the new residents had hoped for. Edugyan visited the farmland where Amber Valley once stood and imagined what it would’ve been like if the town had continued to exist. Aster was born. In creating her main characters, Esi Edugyan was able to use many of her own personal experiences. The daughter of Ghanaian immigrants, she drew on the history, superstitions and traditions of her parents’ culture. As she commented in one interview, "I think for any child whose parents are immigrants, there is this feeling of wanting to explore that parental history, to explore that heritage. It’s this rumbling sort of tie in the distance you’re very curious about." (The novel is dedicated to Edugyan’s mother, who came to North America and pursued her dream of becoming a nurse.) Edugyan also grew up in Calgary knowing what it felt like to be seen as an outsider, something all of the members of the Tyne family endure in this novel: "I was raised in 1970s Alberta and there’s that experience of being … the only black kid in school and you’re very isolated and you do feel like you don’t have a place." Originally published by Knopf Canada, The Second Life of Samuel Tyne has since been published in the United States, Great Britain and Holland. Esi Edugyan lives in Victoria, where she teaches at the university. She is working on a second novel and a collection of short stories.

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