Michael Kluckner: Vancouver’s Cultural Geographer

The music was pumping, and the wine was flowing at Vancouver’s Petly Jones Gallery last summer for the launch of Michael Kluckner’s new graphic novel The Rooming House. The Youngbloods, Steppenwolf, David Bowie and other boomer favourites were just the ticket to set the mood.
 
Michael’s ode to hippy Vancouver in the 1970s focuses on the lives and exploits of eight twenty-somethings who meet at a mid-town rooming house while the city undergoes profound cultural and political change. Remember Mayor Tom Campbell, aka “Tom Terrific,” anyone? In addition to writing the story, Michael also populated it with over 130 black-and-white illustrations.
 
Michael is arguably Vancouver’s most popular urban critic, the author of 22 books and graphic novels, many of them dealing with the changing face of the city. Earlier titles, such as Vancouver Vanishes, Vanishing Vancouver or Vanishing Vancouver: The Last 25 Years come to mind. The word vanishing comes up a lot. And why not? That’s what interests him.

For the past 40 years, Michael has methodically documented Vancouver’s missing landmarks in text and watercolour. He’s written other books, of course, everything from husbandry (Wise Acres), to biography (Julia) but Michael’s favourite subject remains Vancouver and its distinctive neighbourhoods.
 
Not bad for a local kid who taught himself to write, paint and draw. The prolific painter never went to art school, preferring to audit open courses in architecture and art history at UBC. As for drawing, he says he learned to draw by reading Mad magazine and copying the artwork of cartoonist Mort Drucker. He intended to become an architect but ended up with a degree in mathematics and left university, as he says, “adrift and disillusioned.”
 
“The world is a safer place for the fact I abandoned architecture as a career path,” he laughs. “I would have been open to all kinds of things but there was no direct profession staring me in the face. I worked on a salmon boat off Ucluelet, I went to Banff and worked in a restaurant, I travelled and began to drift into writing articles and then doing drawings for the alternative newspapers that were around.”

Many elements in The Rooming House such as driving south to Berkeley in a camper van and working in Banff are inspired by Michael’s travels.
 
“We were young and sneering and cynical and sarcastic, you know, all that kind of stuff pretty typical of young people. If I read any of the stuff I wrote at that point I think, ‘Oh God, did I really say that sort of thing?’”
 
But he kept at it, including writing segments about local history for the neighbourhood newspaper Around Kitsilano. Increasingly curious about the streetscape and the houses he saw in his travels, he also wrote a student orientation guide for a book he was producing for BCIT. In 1981, he turned that guide into a self-published book for the public which, in turn, led to a weekly walk-and-talk segment for a local television show.

He suddenly had the stature, the audience and the makings of a crowd pleaser but how to illustrate it? Cartoons wouldn’t cut it, so he taught himself a new medium.
 
“The particular light on the west coast seems to lend itself very well to watercolour,” he says. “It just seemed appropriate.”
 
Watercolour is an unforgiving medium. You can’t make a mistake and cover it up, and it dries very quickly.
 
“You’ve got to do all your thinking before you start,” he says, “then it becomes quite easy.”
 
Michael admits it took a while to get the hang of it. “I’d look at my work and I’d say ‘okay, I can see what’s wrong with it’ and then I would do it again and get a little bit better each time. Like in the old joke ‘How do you get to Carnegie Hall? Practice, practice, practice.’”
 
Practice paid off. His watercolours are warm and inviting and representative of his fleeting subject matter. They resonate with his readers and have become synonymous with the Kluckner brand.
 
Armed with text and illustrations, he pitched his neighbourhood book proposal to publisher Harper Collins. They passed on it but introduced him to another company, which published Vancouver: The Way it Was. That was in 1984. It sold 5,000 copies in 10 weeks, making it a bestseller in Canada.
 
“That thing went through five printings and really launched me as being the person who wrote these history books on Vancouver,” he says.
 
Whether it’s a road trip through the BC Interior (Here and Now), documenting the city’s past (Vancouver: The Way it Was), or a speculative memoir like The Rooming House, a sense of place and its effect on people is a constant theme in Michael’s stories. He follows the writer’s dictum, write what you know.
 
“I create a kind of a geography in my mind. For instance, in the city where I live or the city I travel to, I always try to get that sense of where the different places are and how they relate rather than oh, here’s a history, you know, how the place was created.”
 
“It’s really all autobiographical in a way. We go to the farm,” he says referring to a property he and his wife bought outside Vancouver in 1993. “We really have no farming background and all of a sudden, we have chickens and sheep and lambs being born. I’m immersing myself in that and as I’m doing that, I’m illustrating my own life. That’s what really motivates me. I keep coming back to this thing, what is my life?”

It’s a technique he returns to time and again.
 
“I take my memories and my experiences, mash them all up together, create characters out of that and then illustrate what those characters are doing. That’s my modus operandi. It’s an inside out way of telling history. Anybody who is classically trained as a historian would say ‘well, this is just a bunch of anecdotes and what I want is the big principles.’ Well, the big principles are in there but you’re getting them kind of backwards. One story leads to another. I think if I had taken a completely different path in my life, I would never have been a historian. I might have been a cultural geographer.”
 
Atmospheric and nostalgic, his Vancouver books are deceptively critical. As the founding president of the Heritage Vancouver Society (1991) and later as a BC board member on the Heritage Canada Foundation (1998–2000), it should come as no surprise that Michael is critical of rampant, unbridled development and favours conservation.
 
“[Vancouver] is more of a generic city, the distinctiveness of its neighbourhoods is being eroded. We ought to do more,” he says. “We are a society addicted to newness, to throwing things away. I also think that cities should have a memory. Vancouver is a city that is constantly clearcutting itself. I don’t believe it can ever develop the richness, the maturity of a real city as it’s constantly erasing and replacing its neighbourhoods. The poetry is seeping away from my Vancouver.”
 
He agrees people may have seen him as an advocate and his books a call to action, but he follows a different path today – aware that “most people prefer nuance to propaganda.”
 
“If someone asks my opinion, I’ll give it, but I’m not leading any campaign. I’m not involved in anything like that. My advocacy now is for understanding the city’s history, which is a more neutral thing than heritage.”

As the President of the Vancouver Historical Society, Michael helps organize field trips and monthly lectures on local history at the Vancouver Museum.
 
His artwork has also undergone an evolution of sorts. In 2000, he turned to a darker medium, more in keeping with the gritty graphic novels he was writing.
 
“I can’t paint homeless people in watercolour, I just can’t do it,” he says about the delicate nature of the medium. His later stories involving voting rights, discrimination and class struggles suggested a different approach. Spurred by his interest in Japanese art, he turned to brush and ink, and his resulting black-and-white paintings are rough, stark, and look like woodblock prints, requiring the reader to fill in the blanks.
 
“I like the way space is defined by shadows,” he says, “and by how much you can leave out in a drawing. You really need your brain to put the thing together.”
 
This is especially true in The Rooming House.
 
Today, Michael and his wife, Christine Allen, live in an older neighbourhood in an older house, which they’ve tinkered with over the years. A fix-up here, a fix-up there. They met when they were both working at Kitsilano Today decades ago, went their separate ways and re-united years later.
 
“Christine had studied English, had a more serious mindset and became my editor when I began to write seriously,” he says. “She would just say no, no, no,” he laughs.
 
Christine no longer says “no.”

“Over the years, Michael’s skills as a writer have far outstripped my skills as an editor,” she says.
 
Also a writer, Christine is the author of A Year at Killara Farm, an account of their 13-year foray into farm life as well as three books on gardening, Roses for the Pacific Northwest, Gardens of Vancouver, and Climbing Up: Climbing Plants for the Pacific Northwest. Michael says she’s built beautiful gardens front and back with a vegetable patch at the rear, especially for him, a vestige of life on the Killara farm.
 
With two writers under the same roof, you’d expect creative tensions to develop, but Michael says it’s not that way at all.
 
“My writing and my subjects are very different from her subjects, so we’re very supportive of one another,” he says.
 
His new commission, for instance, The Bund: A Graphic History of Jewish Labour Resistance documents a movement founded 100 years ago to unite all Jewish workers in the pursuit of a democratic and socialist Russia. Michael contributed over a hundred black-and-white illustrations, which he washed in a light overlay of sepias, umbers and yellow ochre. Written by a San Francisco author, the book is scheduled for release later this year.
 
“I’ve never drawn Lenin before,” says Michael. “I must have drawn him five times.” Drawing Lenin and others kept him busy last August through December.
 
He insists he and Christine are just normal folks living a normal life, involved with the community, travelling and visiting their grandchildren. Christine’s daughter from an earlier marriage lives in Australia.
 
“We’re just sort of creaking into old age,” he maintains. And yet he can’t ignore the call. He’s planning another Vancouver book to coincide with the 40th anniversary of Vancouver: The Way it Was, the book that started the ball rolling so many years ago. He’s calling it Surviving Vancouver and says it will “stake out an attitude about coping in a city that is changing as rapidly as Vancouver.”
 
“I just drive myself forward,” he says of his need to document the world around him. “Art in theory is about communication, and my way of making a connection with people has been through my art and my writing. I’m not an artist in the sense of somebody who’s interested in the abstract issue of art,” he continues, “it’s really about the world around me and what I’m seeing and experiencing that ends up being my work.”

Is this obsession with a sense of place and its impact a way to find himself?
 
“Yeah, yeah, I think so,” he concludes.

SNAPSHOT
 
If you were to meet your 20-year-old self, what advice would you give him?
“Don’t think that you can wait around for some golden age in your life when you can do the things that you’ve put off doing. Just keep going.”
 
Who or what has influenced you the most and why?
“The old joke, I chose my parents well. I was 18 when my mother died and the influence from her was ‘don’t wait to do what you want to do.’ My father was an interesting character. He gave me some good values about planning ahead and all that. Their values were very influential.”
 
What are you grateful for?
“Through all the ups and downs of art and books and experiments and all the rest of it, there’s been my wife, Christine. It’s like my character, Justin, in The Rooming House. He figures out that maybe a friend makes the best partner after all.”
 
What does success mean to you?
“A kind of recognition I suppose. An appreciation by other people of the things I’ve done. I always wanted to work alone, and I wanted to emerge to the adulation of the crowds – I got one out of two. (He laughs) That’s success, in a way.”
 
 

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