| Douglas Coupland | |
|---|---|
 |
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| Born | December 30, 1961 CFB Baden-Söllingen, West Germany |
| Occupation | Writer, Artist |
| Nationality | Canadian |
| Literary movement | Postmodernism, Modernism |
| Notable work(s) | Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture, Microserfs, & JPod |
| Partner(s) | David Weir[1] |
| Official website | |
Douglas Coupland (born December 30, 1961) is a Canadian novelist. His fiction is complemented by recognized works in design and visual art arising from his early formal training. His first novel, the 1991 international bestseller Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture, popularized terms such as McJob and Generation X. He has published thirteen novels, a collection of short stories, seven non-fiction books, and a number of dramatic works and screenplays for film and television. A specific feature of Coupland's novels is their synthesis of postmodern religion, Web 2.0 technology, human sexuality, and pop culture.
Coupland currently lives in Vancouver, British Columbia with his partner David Weir.[1] He published his twelfth novel Generation A in 2009. He is presently working on a biography of Marshall McLuhan for Penguin's "Extraordinary Canadians" book series, an updated release of City of Glass, and a new television series, Extinction Event.[2] He will also be the presenter of the 2011 Massey Lectures.
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Coupland was born on December 30, 1961 at a NATO base in Baden-Söllingen, West Germany, the second of four sons to Dr. Douglas Charles Thomas Coupland, a medic in the Royal Canadian Air Force, and homemaker C. Janet Coupland, a degree holder in comparative religion from McGill University. In 1965, the Coupland family relocated to West Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, where Coupland's father opened private family medical practice at the completion of his military tour.
Coupland describes his upbringing as producing a "blank slate".[3] "My mother comes from a sour-faced family of preachers who from the 19th century to well into the 20th scoured the prairies thumping Bibles. Her parents tried to get away from that but unwittingly transmitted their values to my mother. My father's family weren't that different."[3]
Graduating from Sentinel Secondary School in West Vancouver in 1979, Coupland went to McGill University with the intention of (like his father) studying the sciences, specifically physics.[4] Coupland left McGill at the year's end and returned to Vancouver to attend art school.
At the Emily Carr College of Art and Design (now the Emily Carr University of Art and Design) on Granville Island in Vancouver, in Coupland's words, "I … had the best four years of my life. It's the one place I've felt truly, totally at home. It was a magic era between the hippies and the PC goon squads. Everyone talked to everyone and you could ask anybody anything."[5] Coupland graduated from Emily Carr in 1984 with a focus on sculpture, and moved on to study at the European Design Institute in Milan, Italy and the Hokkaido College of Art and Design in Sapporo, Japan.[5] He also completed courses in business science, fine art, and industrial design in Japan in 1986.
Established as a designer working in Tokyo, Coupland suffered a skin condition brought on by Tokyo's summer climate, and returned to Vancouver[5]. Before leaving Japan, Coupland had sent a postcard ahead to a friend in Vancouver. The friend's husband, a magazine editor, read the postcard and offered Coupland a job writing for the magazine.[5] Coupland began writing for magazines as a means of paying his studio bills.[6]
From 1989 to 1990, Coupland lived in the Mojave Desert working on a handbook about the birth cohort that followed the baby boom.[7] He received a $22,500 advance from St. Martin's Press to write the nonfiction handbook. Instead, Coupland wrote a novel, Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture.[8] It was rejected in Canada before being accepted by an American publishing house in 1991.[9] Not an instant success, the novel steadily increased in sales, eventually attracting a following behind its core idea of "Generation X". Over his own protestations, Coupland was dubbed the spokesperson for a generation.[10] Terms popularized by Coupland in the novel, including Generation X and McJob, ultimately entered the vernacular.[11]
His second novel, Shampoo Planet, was published by Pocket Books in 1992. It focused on the generation after Generation X, the group called "Global Teens" in his first novel and now generally labeled Generation Y.[8] Coupland permanently moved back to Vancouver soon after the novel was published. He had spent his "twenties scouring the globe thinking there had to be a better city out there, until it dawned on [him] that Vancouver is the best one going".[12] He wrote a collection of small books, which together were compiled, after the advice of his publisher, into the book Life After God. This collection of short stories, with its focus on spirituality, initially provoked polarized reaction before eventually revealing itself as a bellwether text for the avant-garde sensibility identified by Ferdinand Mount as "Christian post-Christian".[13]
1994 found Coupland working for the newly-formed magazine Wired. While there, Coupland wrote a short story about the life of the employees at Microsoft Corporation. This short work provided the inspiration for a novel, Microserfs. To research the culture that the novel depicted, Coupland had moved to Palo Alto, California and immersed himself in Silicon Valley life.[14] By coincidence, Coupland released Microserfs in the same week that Microsoft released the Windows 95 operating system.
Coupland followed Microserfs with his first collection of non-fiction pieces, in 1996. Polaroids from the Dead is a manifold of stories and essays on diverse topics, including: Grateful Dead concerts; Harolding; Kurt Cobain's death; the visiting of a German reporter; and a comprehensive essay on Brentwood, California, written at the time of the O. J. Simpson murder case and the anniversary of Marilyn Monroe's death.
That same year, Coupland toured Europe to promote Microserfs, but the high workload brought on fatigue and mental strain.[15][16] He reportedly incorporated his experience with depression during this period into his next novel, Girlfriend in a Coma. Coupland noted that this was his last novel to be "…written as a young person, the last constructed from notebooks full of intricate observations".[17]
In 2000, Coupland published Miss Wyoming, his first novel written in the narrative mode.
Coupland then published his photographic paean to Vancouver, City of Glass. The book incorporates sections from Life After God and Polaroids from the Dead into a visual narrative, formed from photographs of Vancouver locations and life supplemented by stock footage mined from local newspaper archives.
Coupland's next novel, All Families Are Psychotic, tells the story of a dysfunctional family from Vancouver coming together to watch their daughter Sarah, an astronaut, launch into space.
In 2004, the dormant Saarinen-designed TWA Flight Center (now Jetblue Terminal 5) at JFK Airport briefly hosted an art exhibition called Terminal 5,[18] curated by Rachel K. Ward[19] and featuring the work of 18 artists[20] including Coupland.
The promotional rounds for All Families are Psychotic were underway when the September 11 attacks took place. In a play called September 10 performed later at Stratford-upon-Avon for the Royal Shakespeare Company, Coupland felt that this was the last day of the 1990s, and the new century had now truly begun.[21][22]
The first book that Coupland published after the September 11 attacks was Souvenir of Canada, which expanded his earlier City of Glass to incorporate the whole of Canada. There are two volumes in this series, which was conceived as an explanation to non-Canadians of uniquely Canadian things.
Coupland's second book in this period, Hey Nostradamus!, describes a fictitious high school shooting similar to the Columbine High School in 1999.[23] Coupland relocates the events to school in North Vancouver, Canada.
Coupland followed Hey Nostradamus! with Eleanor Rigby. Similarly to the titular original written and sung by The Beatles, the novel examines loneliness.[24]
Using the format of City of Glass and Souvenir of Canada, Coupland released a book for the Terry Fox Foundation called Terry. It is a photographic look back on the life of Fox, the result of Coupland's exhaustive research through the Terry Fox archives, including thousands of emotional letters from Canadians written to Fox during his one-legged marathon across Canada on Highway 1.
The third work of fiction in this period is another re-envisioning of a previous book. jPod, billed as Microserfs for the Google generation, is his first Web 2.0 novel. The text of jPod recreates the experience of a novel read online on a notebook computer. jPod was a popular success, giving rise to a CBC Television series for which Coupland wrote the script.
Coupland published his latest novel Generation A in 2009. His website states that "Generation A mirrors the structure of 1991's Generation X as it champions the act of reading and storytelling as one of the few defenses we still have against the constant bombardment of the senses in a digital world".[25] The novel takes place in the near future, after bees have become extinct, and focuses on five people from around the globe who are connected by being stung.
On March 11, 2010,l the Vancouver Sun announced that Coupland is set to receive an honorary degree from the University of British Columbia.[26]
In 2000, Coupland resumed a visual arts practice dormant since 1989. His is a post-medium practice that employs a variety of materials. A common theme in his work is a curiosity with the corrupting and seductive dimensions of pop culture and 20th century pop art, especially that of Andy Warhol. Another recurring theme is military imagery, the result of growing up in a military family at the height of the Cold War. He is represented by the Clark & Faria Gallery in Toronto.
In 2007 Coupland worked with the CBC to write and executive produce a television series based on his novel jPod. Its 13 one-hour episodes aired in Canada in 2007. The show was canceled due to network politics, even after a major viewer-initiated campaign to save it.[27] Coupland is currently working on a new science fiction miniseries, Extinction Event, in which a group of characters experiences a different end of the world every week, caught in a karmic loop similar to that in the film Groundhog Day.
2005 marked the release of a documentary about Coupland called Souvenir of Canada. In it, Coupland works on a grand art project about Canada, recounts his life, and muses about various aspects of Canadian identity.
2006 brought the release of Everything's Gone Green, a comedy film starring Paulo Costanzo, directed by Paul Fox, and written by Coupland. The film was produced by Radke Films and True West Films. The distributor is THINKFilm in Canada and Shoreline Entertainment elsewhere. The film, Coupland's first screenplay, won the award for best Canadian feature film at the 2006 Vancouver International Film Festival.
Upcoming works include All Families Are Psychotic[28] and the Extinction Event miniseries.
Coupland is involved with Canada's Terry Fox Foundation. In 2005, Douglas & McIntyre published Terry, Coupland's biographical collection of photos and text essays about the life of legendary one-legged Canadian athlete Terry Fox. All proceeds from the book are donated to the foundation for cancer research. Terry's format is similar to that of Coupland's City of Glass and Souvenir of Canada books. Its release coincided with the 25th anniversary of Terry Fox's 1980 Marathon of Hope.
Coupland codesigned a eight-hectare urban park (as yet unnamed) in downtown Toronto adjacent to the Gardiner Expressway. The park, slated to open on September 9, 2009, is embedded with a one-mile run called the Terry Fox Miracle Mile.
Coupland has also raised money for the Vancouver Art Gallery and the Western Canada Wilderness Committee by participating in advertising campaigns.
Douglas Coupland (born December 30, 1961) is a Canadian fiction writer and cultural commentator. He is perhaps best known for the 1991 novel Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture, which popularized the terms "Generation X" and "McJob". Most of Coupland's work explores the harsher realities of life for this generation, including intense media saturation, a lack of religious values and economic instability.
Contents |
   | A Douglas Coupland fan page - The Coupland File : The site about Douglas Coupland |
| | Interview with Spike Magazine - Douglas Coupland : Polaroids From The Dead : From Fear To Eternity |
| | Douglas Coupland's NY Times Blog: Time Capsules - Douglas Coupland - Opinion - Blog - Time Capsules Blog - NYTimes.com |
| | Real Audio interview with Douglas Coupland - Douglas Coupland Interview with Don Swaim |
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