Gaining Ground by Joan Barfoot - Rerun
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What is Backlisted rerunning and why is Joan Barfoot's Gaining Ground back in print?
Hello, it's Andy. Hello, it's John. Welcome to another backlisted rerun. And this week, we are rerunning a show from July 2024, two years ago. Two years ago. Yeah. And the book is Gaining Ground by the Canadian novelist Joan Barfoot, first published in Canada with a different title in 1978. That title was Abra, but published two years later in the UK by Woman's Press, and it's I want to say three things about this podcast, Andy. Do you remember it? You do remember it a bit. You know me, I jettison memories of every episode as soon as I've been finished.
Delete, delete, delete.
Delete. Memory almost full. No, I do remember this one. Three things about this episode. One is the excellence of... of Rose Ruane novelist who came on who read this book when she was a teenager and had a sort of guarded it carefully like a little sort of flame through her adolescence and 20s and into her 30s and as a book that she really changed her life and she talks beautifully about it and It would be fair to say I think nobody had heard of this book that I knew. Certainly I hadn't heard of it. I don't think you'd heard of it that I knew until Rose brought it to us. I'm going to let listeners in on a secret. We use the internet to do research. And one thing that was notable about Gaining Ground by Joan Barfoot is that we had to rely much more on our wits than usual because there was almost no trace of it on the internet at the point we made this particular episode.
Actually, I think you can hear that adds a bit of crackle to the discussion. It absolutely does. I'm not relying on anyone else. Well, there are two other things. One is, I'd completely forgotten this, but Rose Rowan is a massive fan of Manic Street Preachers. And for people who like hearing Andy talk about music. Andy and Rose talking about the Mannix, the greatness of the Mannix, is one absolute bonus of the episode. And the final thing, and I don't know if you remember this, Andy, but it is perhaps, on this episode, the best author clip of all the 250 backlisting episodes we ever wrote. Absolutely extraordinary answer to a question about how important luck was to her writing career. And Joan Barfoot answers that quite brilliantly.
So this is honestly backlisted at its absolute best. OK, so when this episode came out, it was quite difficult to come by a copy of Gaining Ground slash Abra, depending which title you use, by Joan Barfoot's. That is no longer the case, I'm very happy to say, because the publisher Faber and Faber, with ever with the keen eye for a good thing, have brought the book back into print. In fact, I think as we record this, the book is making its way back into bookshops at the beginning of August 2026. There's a lovely interview with Joan Barfoot you can find in The Observer in which she says the whole thing had completely vanished and now miraculously after 50 years it's reappeared. And lovely Rose Ruane, quite rightly taking the credit for making this thing happen for another writer, is appearing at Foyle's Bookstore
in Charing Cross Road in London on Thursday, August the 13th at 7pm. She's taking part in an event called Unearthing a Classic, The Rediscovery of Gaining Ground, in which she and three other writers will be discussing how this classic was unearthed, who rediscovered it, I am reliably informed that Joan herself will be making an appearance by satellite link or the equivalent thereof. So that's pretty amazing, right? That's at Foils on Thursday, August the 13th at 7pm. Tickets available from their website. Speaking of websites, there are other websites.
Who is Rose Ruane and how did Gaining Ground first influence her life?
We've mentioned the internet. We've mentioned Foils. Let's mention Patreon because that's where you can find us. patreon.com forward slash backlisted all sorts of things going on on the patron uh while we're on this so-called sabbatical what we i think this whole sabbatical is interrogating the very meaning of the word sabbatical because there's more going on than there is when we're not on sabbatical anyway one of the things that you can do is you can go to the patreon and you can hear a fantastic episode of backlisted readers with a discussion featuring our our supporter uh valerie smith
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