Deni bechard biography of donald

Born and raised in rural British Columbia to French-Canadian and America parents, Deni Y. Bechard was living in Montreal when he published his first novel, Vandal Love (Doubleday, 2006), about a French-Canadian family divided by a genetic curse that makes the children either runts or giants. It received the Commonwealth Writers' Prize for Best First Book.

Largely set in B.C. and on Granville Island in particular, his follow-up memoir Cures for Hunger (Goose Lane, 2012) reads much like a novel. First co-published by Milkwood in the U.S., then republished by Goose Lane in 2019, it recalls how Deni Bechard worships his charismatic, wild and fierce father, and later discovers he's a bank robber. He is forced to wonder if some parts of himself are chips off the old block. From publicity: "Eventually Deni finds himself ensnared in the controlling impulses of his mysterious father and increasingly obsessed by his father's own muted recollections: the impoverished childhood in the Gaspe he'd fled long ago, the hunger for excitement and a better life, and a trail of crimes leading from Quebec to the American west." In a subsequent book, Deni Bechard reveals, according to one reviewer, that his virulently anti-Indigenous father bore a deep self-loathing nurtured by English-Canadian stereotypes of Quebecois inferiority.

With his novel White (Talonbooks $19.95), Bechard joins a coterie of B.C. novelists who have successfully set stories in Africa such as Audrey Thomas, Arianna Dagnino, Paul Sunga and Michael Wuitchik. It follows a journalist named Deni Bechard to the Democratic Republic of Congo (formerly Zaire, Belgian Congo) to investigate and potentially expose a corrupt and elusive American conservationist. Like his protagonist in Cures for Hunger, the ostensibly fictionalized version of Bechard is plagued by traumatic memories of his father. As he encounters a range of strange characters—such as an anthropologist who tre

There’s a story my father often told me. I imagine most boys hear stories from their fathers, but not this sort. It was about a bank heist in 1967, the burglary of half a million dollars in West Hollywood. He called it the Big Job, an elaborate crime he’d started plotting when he was first incarcerated. Prison, he liked to say, turned him into a professional. He went in a petty crook and left wanting to do the Big Job, not unlike the way I went to college to study writing and left dreaming of the great American novel.

Born in 1938, my French Canadian father quit school in the fifth grade, his teenage years a gantlet of hard labor: fishing for cod, planting and harvesting potatoes, logging on the north shore of the St. Lawrence, pouring concrete on hydroelectric dams farther north, or mining uranium. During a construction gig in Montreal, as he walked the beam of a skyscraper, he watched his best friend trip and dive to stone.

The next day he smashed his finger with a sledge to get off the job with compensation. He drank in bars, trying to pick a new future, and finally befriended a criminal. He learned safecracking, claimed he was good, that he got set up for being too ambitious, betrayed while emptying the safe in a sporting goods store. As if the next two years of prison weren’t sufficient to complete a degree in crime, he added more, for armed robbery, in Calgary and then Montana, before he headed to L.A.

My father planned the Big Job for a night President Lyndon Johnson was in town, knowing the police would be busy. He rented an apartment overlooking the bank, parked a box truck in the alley next to it, and left it for a week, letting people get used to seeing it. Then my father’s partner backed the truck up to the bank’s barred bathroom window. Standing inside the box, my father cut the bars. Afteward, he went in, carrying a jackhammer.

His partner and his partner’s girlfriend both had walkie-talkies. She followed my father inside

Deni Ellis Béchard’s speculative novel, We Are Dreams in the Eternal Machine, is set in a future dystopian United States divided by a civil war. The machine, a powerful AI which was designed with the goal to protect humans from harm, determines that the only way to accomplish this task is to isolate all humans into simulated realities where people can live without suffering. The novel follows a group of different but interconnected characters as they relive traumatic memories and grapple with what it means to be human within this strange new existence. 

I was struck by this book’s stylistically complex narrative that transcends time and space, and the clever, layered way it tackles its many philosophical quandaries. In this interview, Béchard and I discuss the challenges of structure and character in a novel that was born from a thought experiment, along with its relevance to questions around changing technology, social class, and political divisions, and the relationship between AI and art.

—Shehrazade Zafar-Arif

Shehrazade Zafar-Arif: You were inspired to write this book by your time at Stanford University writing about developing AI technology. Was there anything in particular that sparked the idea for this story? How much of your portrayal of the machine is rooted in reality and how much was inspired by your own imagination or other speculative fiction, and how did you bring these together in a way that felt believable?

Deni Ellis Béchard: One of the first features I wrote for Stanford Magazine was about artificial intelligence and the news media, and I have a habit—or a manic tendency—where when I have to write about something, I go and read everything on the subject, far more than is necessary to write the article. I came across a well-known thought experiment by Nick Bostrom from his 2003 book, Superintelligence. He says that AI that’s not aligned with human values could possibly override its