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NORTH BAY, Ont. — Troy Hurtubise, 54, hunkers down in a forest clearing on the shore of Lake Nipissing.

He crumples the handwritten pages of a draft of his novel, piles twigs on them, and builds a small fire of dead branches. A brisk west wind whips the flames to life.

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“I’m the biggest failure you’ve ever looked at,” he says.

“Every single one of my innovations, every single one of my writings, I gave it my best shot, fell, stood up, and said fuck you let’s go again. And still not one of them has ever found a market.”

Don’t be fooled. This book burning is more ceremonial than destructive. The flaming tinder is not the only copy of his book, a sweeping historical fiction about the Holy Grail. Once the larger branches catch, he hands over a page he has saved and asks for tips, praise, validation. For all his talk of failure, Troy is still somehow proud and confident, a bit of a showoff.

Troy used to be famous.

As the star of Project Grizzly, a cult classic National Film Board documentary, he was a crowd favourite at the 1996 Toronto International Film Festival, palling around with Val Kilmer and Norman Jewison. David Carradine hugged him in warm recognition. Quentin Tarantino praised the moody, ironic, comic Western vibe of the film, which followed Troy’s efforts to test his homemade grizzly-proof body armour, first against falling logs, speeding trucks, arrows, bullets and bat-wielding bikers, and eventually in the wilds of the Rockies against a real bear.