Nova Scotian author Ali Bryan illuminates the musical side to rural Canadian living in her darkly funny novel, The Crow Valley Karaoke Championships.

Bryan is a novelist and nonfiction writer from Nova Scotia. Her novels include Coq, Roost, which won the Georges Bugnet Award for Fiction and The Figgs which was shortlisted for Stephen Leacock Memorial Medal for Humour in 2019.

Grieving the loss of small town karaoke legend Dale Jepson, the community of Crow Valley decides to put on a karaoke competition in his honour. The Crow Valley Karaoke Championships is Bryan's latest novel following five key characters connected to Dale one night before the championship event. Amidst mid-life crises, the news that a murderer has escaped the local prison, stolen cars and more, the residents of Crow Valley must come together to put on their very best show.

The Crow Valley Karaoke Championships will be available on July 25, 2023.

Bryan spoke to Ryan B. Patrick about writing The Crow Valley Karaoke Championships on the summer edition of The Next Chapter.

A couple years ago, I had a good friend who I knew was doing this karaoke thing but I didn't know how serious she was. She was actually competing at the national championships being hosted in Calgary and she asked me to come cheer her on and I was just blown away by this really strange world of high stakes karaoke. It was this whole thing that I'd never experienced. I loved the atmosphere and I found that karaoke was the great equalizer. It was diverse, it was accessible and there were so many different interesting people there. It was a really cool, supportive crowd and I walked out thinking this is a novel.

I didn't start out with a particular intent in exploring Crow Valley from these five perspectives but they did evolve a little bit more organically. When you're dealing with a single setting — one night in the town of Crow Valley, having those multiple perspectives really helped to give it a larger view. It was fun to play with those different relationships and how everyone in a small town is ultimately connected. Sometimes they have cause to not like each other but in the end this is really a story about community and how everyone has each other's backs especially when times get tough.

Oh gosh, the elevating power of community to get through tough times! There's something about a small town where because you don't really have anywhere to hide, people are very much just themselves. To me, that's where empathy comes from: people being themselves and accepting people for exactly who you see in front of you. It's taken me a long time to have that perspective. I moved to a small town when I was 15 years old and I look back on that time now as probably one of the places where I was my most authentic self and I think small towns allow you to be that.

Grief is so bloody unpredictable. It's not something you ever try and get over, it's something you just try and live with and move forward with. This book is just as much about that traditional type of grief in terms of loss, as it's also the grief of living. We experience grief in all sorts of different ways. Grief can creep up at the oddest times and for the strangest reasons.

Molly seems to be one of those people that is just overwhelmed by her circumstances and this idea of her life not working out as she expected. She's doing her best and her grief is more from her current circumstances and the day-to-day things that happen to her. It's easy to understand grief when you have the loss of your lover, your husband, your partner. It's a little bit more complicated when we look at the grief of everyday existence.

For her character in particular, her entire identity is wrapped up in being a mother and she has a great sense of guilt. She just needs a win. She needs a moment where she can elevate beyond this identity of motherhood and feel something different. It makes her sort of feel alive.

That is exactly what life is! We are conditioned to think it's these big moments: accomplishments, achievements or awards. But when you look back it is all those small moments — the ordinary and everyday. It's the interaction you might have with a stranger on the street or the look of your child in the morning when you capture them learning something new. To me, that is what it means to be human and that's where my own joy comes. They're not those big catastrophic things that are easy to attach meaning to, it's the everyday things that bring me fulfilment. The moments that stick out in my own life are always the small ones.

I know I have the option as a writer to go pure stand-up but the laughter is almost more funny, more healing and more effective when you nudge it up against something a lot darker.

In my own life I hold a lot of space for the darkness and for the downsides of life which make it easier to enjoy the light. I think it's really important to have both. There's not a huge difference between a poignant scene and a humorous one because they're all underlying what it means to be human and the extremes in our emotional range.