"I've had an amazing life, man," says Patrick Lane. "I've lived a remarkable life. The things I've done and the places I've been and the things I've seen—Shit, I've lived places that would just shiver the timbers of anybody else. And, you know, I wouldn't change a day of it."

Anybody who's read Lane's 2004 memoir There Is a Season will know he's not just blowing smoke. It's hard to imagine a life more packed with drama: despite his idyllic Okanagan boyhood, the veteran poet has had to withstand more than his fair share of hardship, including the murder of his father, the premature death of his brother and fellow poet, Red Lane, and a nearly life-long addiction to alcohol. But There Is a Season also finds Lane venturing into sobriety for the first time as an adult, encountering true love in the embrace of his wife, Lorna Crozier, and discovering peace among the plants of his Saanich garden.

Lane's remarkable life is becoming more extraordinary all the time. And now, at 69, he's completed his first foray into full-length fiction, with the publication of his Giller-nominated debut novel, Red Dog, Red Dog (McClelland & Stewart, $32.99)—a development that surprised even its author.

"My first thought was that I was going to put together a kind of 'new and collected short stories' collection," he explains by phone from Toronto, where he's talking up his latest publication. "So I was just rambling through a lot of old work, and I found this little 20-page fragment. And I just thought 'This isn't a short story, this wants to be a novel.' So I just sat down, and that's where the novel began, about two weeks after I finished the memoir."

The initial fragment, which eventually became Red Dog, Red Dog's third chapter, could well be a shiver-your-timbers tale from his past. It's about a 1950s house party gone very badly wrong, wrong enough to spark a blood feud between local tough Billy Holdman and heroin-addicted Eddy Stark-heir, along with his quieter brother Tom, to a terrible legacy of madness and violence.

In a sense, Red Dog, Red Dog is a continuation of There Is a Season: it deals with the same Okanagan landscape, the complex ties that bind brothers, the destructive pull of addiction, and the redemptive power of love and the earth itself. But Lane makes it clear that it is far from the same book.

"People ask me 'Is this autobiographical?', and I say, 'No, it's not,' " he stresses. "The [Stark] family isn't like mine-the mother and father are nothing like my mom and dad. My brother wasn't a heroin addict, and I wasn't Tom; I didn't go around shooting animals when I was a kid. You know, you make a fiction out of the world. I mean, William Faulkner took a little town called Oxford, Mississippi, and he made a great mythology of the South out of that small place, and I've always believed in that, too. You build a world out of the local."

And Lane allows that the world he has created in Red Dog, Red Dog is likely to expand. "The last eight years have been the most productive years of my life," he says. "I mean, I've written a novel, I wrote a huge memoir, about three books of poetry.

"I wrote probably 20-odd books in the previous 40 years, but this last decade has just been a gift. And I love what I'm doing. I've got two more novels I'm going to write—and I'm 70 next year, so I've got to hurry up."

Understandably, Lane doesn't want to divulge too many details about the next book. "Let's not go there now," he cautions. "But I have a character, and I can say that it takes place in the Okanagan. I ended up having to stay there. It seems like a comfortable place for me to write novels about.

"I've always believed that I'm a writer of witness," he adds. "I believe we have to pay witness to the world that we live in, that we know. And don't pull your punches. Tell it like it is, the story that you know."

Patrick Lane is part of three events at next week's Vancouver International Writers & Readers Festival: the Mini Poetry Bash at 1 p.m. October 24; a panel discussion between western writers at 10:30 a.m. October 25; and another panel discussion between poets-turned-novelists, at 1:30 p.m. October 26. All three events take place at the Waterfront Theatre (1412 Cartwright Street, Granville Island).