August 15, 2008

Author Interviews@ Pickle Me This: Sharon Butala

Sharon Butala’s latest book is The Girl in Saskatoon, a memoir about the unsolved 1962 murder of Alexandra Wiwcharuk. Butala lives near Eastend Saskatchewan, and is the author of fifteen other books, which include novels, short story collections and other works of non-fiction. She is a recipient of the Marian Engel Award, has twice been nominated for a Governor General’s Award, and her book Lilac Moon won the 2005 Saskatchewan Book Award for Nonfiction. I was entranced by The Girl in Saskatoon when I first encountered it in April, and I am so pleased that Sharon Butala was kind enough to answer my questions via email.

I: In your memoir The Perfection of the Morning, you write of your discovery of nature that “I think too often the effort to find the answers only distracts us from what is really to be found there.” Can you explain how this might be analogous to your experience in writing your new book The Girl in Saskatoon?

Sharon Butala: Umm. I don’t think so. (Joke) Actually, I knew I couldn’t solve the murder. I didn’t ever try, although lots of people thought that that was what I was trying to do. I wanted to know what happened to Alex. I wanted to know how what happened to Alex had to do with who we were then – how it could happen to a decent young woman who was also ambitious and romantic and all the things girls and young women were in those days as a result of the constrictions on us and the influences that were so idiotic – malevolent, I wanted to say. The Doris Day movies, for example. Our deep and unspoken anger at how we were expected to behave. The unfairness of it. Trying to solve the murder is entertaining, but in one sense at least, not very important. What is the meaning of her death, if it has a meaning? Why did her death become a part of the city’s lore, and why can we not forget it? Those questions and the ruminations on the possible answers have more meaning than the question of who killed Alex Wiwcharuk.

I: You write of your mild reaction upon learning of Alexandra Wiwcharuk’s death, that by age 23 you had “constructed a thick barrier between words and their meanings” that prevented you from feeling and knowing “the world as it really is.” So I would like know first, as you mention words and meanings, how has such a barrier affected your experience as a writer? And also, is coming to know “the world as it is” the product of the wisdom of age, or do you think it could have been possible before now?

SB: I could not become a writer until I had torn down that barrier. I could not see the world until I had shed myself of a million unacknowledged even unknown illusions. I think that coming to know the world could have been possible long before it happened if we had been taught how the world really is rather than how the church said it is or our schools or whatever our parents thought it was important for us to believe it was.

I’ve often ruminated on this (as a former special educator), why do we lie to our children about the world? To save them pain? By lying we create more pain. Or is it because we love them so much we want to believe ourselves out of that love that the world can be stopped from hurting them. “Let them find out themselves in good time,” we say to ourselves, hoping for them to have a few happy years before the world gets them in its claws. And children are helpless and spend most of their childhoods struggling with the differences between what they see and experience and what they are told they’ve seen and experienced (or haven’t).

I: “I knew her. I knew her,” was your reaction to Alex’s death, you seeming to be as affected by this fact than by the murder itself. But your relationship to Alex was not so straightforward–you had been classmates, but you hadn’t been good friends. In your book, how difficult or surprising was the negotiation of your proximity to her, and did you always intend to have this negotiation be such an important part of the story?

SB: When I began writing it was my hope that people would tell me enough things about her that I would come to know her in a more personal way, would know her little idiosyncrasies and her foibles as well as the moments when she revealed what was really going on in her heart. But this simply didn’t happen: I couldn’t find people she was close to; I found them but they wouldn’t talk to me; or they simply didn’t remember much. So I never got close to her in the way a novelist is close to her main character.

But still, as time went on, I began to see her as me in a lot of ways – I tried hard to maintain an appropriate distance and I tried not to take her over completely – but oh those years from the late teens into the early twenties are years of such poignancy, such pain and such yearning as well as a certain amount of sheer joy. I was sure it had to be the same for her as for me, except that she must have begun to feel entitled, while I never did. I’m not sure I intended that the negotiation of proximity in the way I think you mean was meant to be a part of the story, but in a larger sense it certainly was. And I was surprised to be able to say that I had come to love her, but she had become very very dear to me. And she always will be. I hope that is not sentimental.

I: You write that you first considered writing the story of Alexandra Wiwcharuk’s murder as part of a novel, but because it was “so odd, so out of the normal flow of things”, you found that you couldn’t. In your work, how do you normally determine what form best suits a story? Further, what have you found nonfiction can do that fiction can’t, and vice-versa?

SB: Most ideas come to me in the form in which they want to be written and I rarely try to change that. But I also decide that I want to write a book about … and then I try to figure out if it would work better in fiction or nonfiction, if I could handle it better in the one or the other. Also, in fiction I do research, but not nearly as much as in nonfiction and I can obfuscate a point in fiction that I don’t feel I can manage in nonfiction without the reader picking up on my laziness right away.

Nonfiction seems to me to get a better grip on a story – well, I’m not sure I mean that. I used to think that I went to a different place in my brain to write one than to write the other, and other people say you make a different pact with the reader when you write one or the other, but I have been thinking, since The Girl in Saskatoon, that I would like to keep trying to write a nonfiction book that no one could tell from a work of fiction. I just read in Brno, Czech Republic, and the people said to me that they had had trouble at times, thinking I’d written a work of fiction but that they’d been told it was nonfiction and they were puzzled. Well, I like that puzzlement. Maybe (since In Cold Blood) we really are working toward sim
ply writing a book.

I: A lot of the The Girl in Saskatoon is based on your own speculation, based on the many facts and details you assemble in your research. You’re putting stories together, which of course is what writers do, but in particular, you imagine the details of Alex’s attack and her murder. How difficult was this experience for you? Was it different than it might have been if it was purely fiction?

SB: It took me a very long time and many drafts to write that murder scene (which I know is probably not accurate). I just felt the moment had come when I could no longer avoid imagining it and so I wrote a version that will have to stand for now. There were moments when it was terribly hard, but I have become both toughened and more compassionate over the years and the deaths and the horror of life in general, and I can do that without too much pain. I kept telling myself, you have to witness this, for Alex’s sake.

I: You write that as you delved into the brutal details of what happened to Alex, you began to see a contradiction between accepting the presence, the “banality” of evil, and then honouring Alexandra’s death. How do interpret these as opposites?

SB: I can’t say that I ever thought that through once I’d posed the question. But maybe the answer is implicit in the question. Evil is banal, yes, but we must honour every single death, or we are less human.

I: As you put together the pieces of Alex’s story, you found that they didn’t add up. So much is missing, stays missing, and your reader’s experience of the book is not so dissimilar in this way. You do allude to frightening incidents as you started “asking questions”– of strange phone calls, odd characters, your telephone being tapped. These details help create the suspense that drives the narrative, but why did you choose to remain so vague about them?

SB: I wrote one version where there is an entire chapter dealing with all those things, but my editor, Phyllis Bruce, thought I was on the wrong tack entirely and that somehow it didn’t belong in a book about Alex. So I re-wrote the whole book and subsumed that stuff to a couple of lines. Not too many readers have commented on that as a problem, to my surprise. I surely wanted to tell it.

I: In The Girl in Saskatoon, you come to find that instead of writing about a single girl, you’re writing about a time and a place, that the stories you’re gathering are “full of the humanity of the city”. You write that you come to see Saskatoon as “a living breathing entity”, and I wonder if this perspective is at all similar to the way you’ve come to understand and have written about natural spaces in your other work. Apart from the obvious, how is the city’s “living breathing entity-ness” different from nature’s?

SB: I imagine a huge difference. The city is a beehive (to coin a phrase) and it never sleeps. Nature is not so heavily inhabited and each inhabitant (spiritual, I’m talking about) has lots of room and power and is worthy of serious respect. There is time and room to find all of this in Nature, but in a city? Never. I also think of the city’s entity-ness as kind of lumbering and sweaty and heavy-footed while Nature’s is more distant always, and airier.

I: The root of your book, of yours and Alex’s stories, is the story of the pioneers on the prairies, of immigrants forced to make do with very little means, and you write, “It makes me furious to think of it; it makes me furious to think of our claim of Canada as a classless society.” Similar fury being evident throughout your other works as you write about aboriginals, other immigrants, women– people at the “periphery”. And “fury” strikes me a strong and courageous stance to take– it’s not polite, it doesn’t compromise. Is this feeling a driving force in your writing? Do you write your books with a sense of mission?

SB: Yes, I used to and probably still write my books with a sense of mission. The fury has abated however, as I’ve written it out, for the most part. Yet I always have things I want to say, that I need to say, that need to be said. My books are all political, I tell people. I am writing about the world, not about an imaginary world – I hope.

I: How do you as a writer address the kind of criticism you note in your memoir Lilac Moon that “…there now exists a national stereotype of the Western literary arts, which I occasionally see or hear being criticized by (usually young) Central Canadian critics and writers. In it we are seen as writing sentimentally only about the farm, about the past, about our legendary hard life and our endurance of it. This has become so much the stereotype that any Western writer approaching that world in an attempt to say something new and interesting about it runs the risk of being dismissed without a reading.”

SB: I wrote many of my books knowing that my readers would be urban people, not rural and I wanted to explain rural life to them in a way that would catch their interest as they have all the power in the country. The only way you can avoid being dismissed is to write so well that you can’t be dismissed, or so I’ve been telling myself for the last thirty years, only to be proven wrong for the most part. Or you can reinforce the stereotypes and write only about male heroism and the romance of the early West, and become successful that way. But I must say that women have responded to my work and Luna for example (which started lower than a snake’s belly) is now being taught here and there in women’s studies programs mostly. (Most English lit profs prefer Jane Smiley’s A Thousand Acres because – why? – they are all idiots? She is famous and I am not? The book had power, but it was Shakespeare’s power, not hers.)

I: You began your artistic life as a painter, and I would be interested to know whether your concerns and subjects then were similar to what they are now in your writing life.

SB: All those years I was a painter I was a mere babe in the woods. I had no idea what painting was, just as when I began writing I had no idea what writing is. I did still lifes, back lanes and garbage cans, potted plants and kitchen cupboards with the doors open and the sun shining on the teacups. I thought it was all about picture, just as I thought writing was all about putting words together in a pleasing way. I suppose my desire to paint domestic life (all I had to paint as I was not a world traveller and had a job and a child and a difficult husband) has shown up in my writing in that women are mostly my subjects.

I: What writers influenced you as you were beginning to write, and are there other writers you go to for inspiration now? What are you currently reading?

SB: I’ll start with now: I decided one day that I was not going to waste anymore time on writers who had nothing to say that I didn’t already know. Which rules out about 80% of the books out there and the ones that hit the bestseller lists and the ones the press makes a huge fuss over. I read the best, or what I think is the best, but I do read MSs for publishers to give a cover blurb and occasionally help beginning writers with their manuscripts. So I still read material that I don’t find very interesting and sometimes not very worthy.

I have always been a big reader, but I liked Doris Lessing, Alice Munro in particular, Mavis Gallant, of course although I was always puzzled by her work. I never liked Robertson Davies and I think Timothy Findlay became an incredibly bad, silly writer – when he was at his most famous. I didn’t much like M. Ondaatje for years despite being blown away by his gift, but now I see what he is up to and I admire his work very very much.

I used to love the Americans, but they are truly into navel-gazing these days and I am getting a bit bored. I admire Frances Itani’s work. I have never been able to read a Barbara Gowdy – i
s that a sign of stupidity? To go for inspiration I read all the good books from Blindness to Divisidaro and Runaway and Rick Moody’s The Diviners and so on. I am currently reading Bill Bryson’s book on Shakespeare (delightful, just as the critics say) and a really bad thriller I picked up for $6 in the remainder bin which is a pain in the butt and I probably won’t finish it.

Also, Riding to the Rescue a scholarly work about the RCMP from 1910 to 1939 or something, Jay McInerney’s novel about 9/11 – not bad in places – and Faludi and Christopher Hitchens are waiting as are a ton of other books. You know how that is.

I fixate on a subject – beauty and its meaning, for example – and spend a couple of years reading everything I can find on it, and when the current book I’m writing is finished, I put those books away and start in on something new.

July 6, 2008

Flirt by Lorna Jackson

My review of Lorna Jackson’s Flirt: The Interviews will be a mini review, because I really feel I ought to read it again. And perhaps one more time after that, Jackson’s linguistic acrobatics and underlying humour not immediately so easy to get one’s head around. But I post about it now because you should know about it, about its remarkable conceit. One that I was interested in immediately, as a person who reads interviews and aspires to write them (well). Jackson’s stories playing tricks with the form, playing tricks on the form, tricks on the reader too with fiction and fact.

Lorna Jackson’s unnamed interviewer is far more interested in plumbing her own depths than anybody else’s. Throughout the book she (fictionally) interviews characters including Ian Tyson, Bobby Orr, Alice Munro, Janet Jones-Gretzky. The book’s best line (though there could be many of these) being, “Jesus, Alice. I’m so sick of that anecdote. Can’t you give me something better?”

Our interviewer is suffering from a much-broken heart, a long-ago loss, a mixed-up today and unsure tomorrows. Seeking counsel in those she is supposed to be examining, much digressing, even her real questions shaded by her personal experience. She becomes a character, the entire book encompassing a sort of trajectory. Each interview standing alone as a most innovative kind of short story, relying on language alone for effect.

May 8, 2008

Author Interviews@ Pickle Me This: Emily Perkins

Emily Perkins is slight, with very pretty features and a warm smile. We met on the sunny morning of Wednesday May 7th 2008 in a conference room at her publisher’s office in downtown Toronto.

I: I read a quote you gave, that your new novel Novel About My Wife started with a “kernel of something that made you uncomfortable”, but you couldn’t talk about it then because the book wasn’t finished. Can you tell us now?

EP: I certainly can tell you now. It was a couple things. I sort of had this idea of the character of Ann, but she was very misty at that point. I didn’t quite know the type of woman she was going to be but I wanted a sense, what I was writing around, was a character with contrasting elements.

And then I got into a conversation with somebody at a dinner party in London, and I’d been living in London for about eleven years at this point and he made a remark that I found really disturbing about New Zealanders and Australians, and by sort of by implication any former colony… choosing to live in England because, he suggested, we were white people on some kind of white flight from racial issues and cultural anxiety at home.

And I was really infuriated by it because I thought it was such a narrow and arrogant and, from his point of view, a parochial suggestion to make, and I went away sort of steaming after this encounter. And I thought, If it’s making me so angry maybe there’s something in that. Maybe there’s something I can turn around and look at from different angles. I was looking for a novel— I’d had a couple of false starts since my last one, which was called The New Girl— and I was really looking for a story that would have legs, that I thought I could spend a lot of time with because I have small children and by now, I had a much better idea of the work of a novel, the long work of it, and I just had to find the right thing, and in this kernel I thought maybe I’ve got enough passion about it to build and get a novel working.

I: I never would have thought that— because I was trying to think of what that kernel might be and there were so many possibilities.

EP: Well then, of course, after you start something going and it starts to bubble away, then so many other things find their way into it. You know, the novel begins to act like a magnet pulling other elements and there’s no out-and-out autobiography but there are elements I’ve drawn from my own experience, or extrapolated from my own experience.

I: How did the book change from your initial approach to it. Did it change in any ways that surprised you?

EP: The thing I had to do next was work out who was going to tell the story, and I spent a lot of time doing that, and I’ve got all these— hopefully I’ve binned them— but I had third person subjective views of Ann, and was I writing in that close third person way? Or was I going to try and write a more detached omniscient third person who could know the whole story and bounce around different characters? And it just wasn’t lifting off…

It was a great moment was when I realized that Tom, the husband, had to tell the story— for a lot of reasons, not least because he’s trying to piece together all of this stuff about his wife and in a way he’s doing it alongside the reader…

I: A fundamental part of this book is its gaps. Do you feel confident that you know the answers? Or are you, like Tom, taking stabs at it?

EP: No, I do have it. And I had written versions where the gaps were more filled in, but in the end I just thought the thing about Tom is that he is trying to investigate or work out the truth of his wife, but the point of the book for me is that he’s left it too late. He had his chance to look her in the eye and be with her in a real way and he was so busy, caught up in himself, romanticizing her and being in love with the mystery and not wanting to know. I didn’t want to let him off the hook for that….

I: What was it like writing a first person narrator?

EP: It’s the first time I’ve written something this length in the first person, so for me it was a huge learning experience… I don’t believe that the characters do what they want and I’m just following… there’s got to be someone pressing the keys on the keyboard and that wasn’t Tom, it was me, but at the same time he was quite a formed character right form the start. His voice was pretty much there and his limitations as well.

He’s the kind of first person narrator who’s trying to write away from himself, trying to write this novel about this wife, but he centralizes himself. It’s in his character to do that. So at the same time as I was following that, I was aware that with first person you’ve got to try to give the reader a break from that endless “I I I” stuff and so I tried to make an effort for Tom to be able to lose himself inside scenes, to describe as though they were happening in the moment— scenes with Ann, with friends, to get away from his own internal [voice].

I: Is that why he was a writer?

EP: Definitely. I wanted to give him the skills that there would be some kind of context where it was plausible that he could be sitting down and doing this.

I: I am curious to know how central Ann’s pregnancy is. Do you think this story could have been told without that?

EP: The pregnancy to me is very central because it’s a transformative moment for her and it’s when the past begins to bubble up for her. It’s not her first pregnancy but it’s the first one she’s carried to term and there’s a body mirroring that we all have, we live with, that we can’t ignore or we ignore at our peril. And she’s having this somatic experience in response to her pregnancy. Without the pregnancy, I’m not sure what the trigger would have been for Ann’s other self to come calling.

And also I wanted the pregnancy because I really wanted to write about that stage in a marriage, which is an amazing time when you’re having your first child and maybe you’ve bought a house and you’ve got this terrifying mortgage and life is really changing… it’s a particularly vulnerable, and yet exciting and very tender time and so I wanted to include all of that.

I: The book is packed with a kind of ominousness, there’s danger everywhere and some of it is real and some of it might be imagined. Do you think it makes a difference?

EP: One of the things I wanted to explore was the ways we create our own demons, how we imagine demons that aren’t there. We’re certainly living in a time at the moment where it’s easy to be anxious and paranoid and I think that is as dangerous as pretending there’s nothing going on. So I did want to play with potential dangers; the danger seems to be from outside in the book but it’s coming from inside.

I: I was struck by the passage where Tom describes his parents as “so certain of the parameters of their universe, where normality began and ended.” He wants a different kind of life. Do you think he makes this choice? Does anybody actually fit within fixed parameters?

EP: He is much more like his parents than he thinks he is That’s part of the reason he really locks on to Ann. He’s sees something in her that’s beyond his boundaries It makes him feel spec
ial to be with her and he feels that he’s left his parents’ parochialism far behind, but of course he hasn’t really. He’s limited and that’s his fatal flaw— that he can’t imagine himself into another person’s skin, the way he’d need to in order to save them . And also in describing his parents, I think that’s a solid trait of a lot of people. You know “my way is the right way” and I’m always trying to resist that, I suppose.

I: If you look at all your books together, what do you think they tell us about your interests as a writer? What are your fixations in your writing?

EP: I think that if you looked at them altogether, probably— how do I talk about this without sounding like a wanker?— I’m really interested in how we construct ourselves, the building up of identity and how much we live as a known quantity and how much we’re mysteries to ourselves and how much we invent ourselves and live in other people. So I think that’s the main connection between the books.

I: All of your books also deal with characters and exile— do you think exile is possible?

EP: Is exile possible? I don’t know if self-imposed exile is possible in that way, and certainly in Novel About My Wife, ultimately it’s not possible. (Pauses) I’d like to think it’s possible. I’d like to think we have choices about these things. It’s not like these formative selves are our only selves. It’s interesting, I’ve lived in England for quite a while and gone back to New Zealand and you’ve got to merge the self you were with all of the experience that you’ve had in a different place. I think location does affect us much more than we think and you can experience freedom by going other places but whether or not that’s a permanent freedom, I don’t know.

I: As a writer, what have you learned since your first book?

EP: A lot, but I think this is the book that’s taught me the most. Or maybe I learned the most between the last book and this book. I spent some time working on a screenplay— an adaptation of someone else’s book— and that taught me a lot about structure and plotting and I think I’ve learned to embrace those technical sides of writing that were mysterious to me when I started out. I’ve learned… about everything! That I needed to feel so strongly about something in order to dig as deeply as I needed to to make this book work. But when you start a new book.. you feel like you know nothing all over again…

I: You’ve mentioned that you’re addressing characters coming to know themselves. You also address characters knowing other people, or failing to do so. Is this knowing ever really possible?

EP: Certainly in this book Tom is in love with this kind of idea, with his version of Ann. There’s a lot that he (in an unacknowledged way) doesn’t want to know. This book is saying, we’ve got to make the effort to know and without that you’re going to get in trouble. Even though it’s only ever going to take us closer to something. You can’t ever know absolutely and Tom can’t know some kind of nailed-down, absolute truth about Ann and it’s all subjective but I think you really have to try. That’s what I like about the human social project— you have to try.

I: You also write about friendships between girls, and couples being friends being friends with other couples. Why are these relationships important for you to portray?

EP: It seemed logical to me. That Tom and Ann have this very, initially, heated relationship, very intense, but they need this friendship with Tonia and Andy, the other couple, to take some of the pressure off. It’s like a self made family… I think we choose these mini communities to hang out in; for couples there’s a safety in that. Definitely it takes pressure off the one-on-one relationship.

Of course they also act as foils or mirrors or they reflect some other aspect of a person. It would be hard to write a character— I was just thinking about Sabastian Faulk’s new book Engleby which is fantastic, about a very singular man who really just exists in his own world, but he’s always trying to connect with other people— but you need other characters to reflect each other because so much of action is reaction.

I: In The New Girl there’s a line that I’ve been thinking about a lot, when Miranda says, “The world is not a place of safety” and then Mary smiles and says, “It’s safer than you think.” That relates to your new novel as well. What do you make of that passage? Who’s right?

EP: I’m not sure. I think Miranda, partly— she’s not a safe place in herself, and that’s what Mary is responding to. “You’re young, willfully finding danger out there and maybe you think that’s interesting when its less safe”, and you’ve actually got to find interesting in safety, and intimacy that way, and learn about that, which to me is part of growing up, certainly within a relationship. And yet it does relate to Novel About My Wife in the sense that they don’t feel safe in this world, they’re looking to create their own safe haven in their home. They see peril outside but they’re looking in the wrong place.

I: Was safety ever possible for them?

EP: He would have had to change and I don’t know that he could change enough.

I: In the introduction to The Picnic Virgin [an anthology Perkins edited in 1999, of short stories by new New Zealand writers], you said that initially you’d wanted to avoid works that were “boring, parochial or smug”. And you did mention you become less set about what those ideas were exactly. What do you think about them now?

EP: I think it’s good that I wanted to avoid boring work, that I didn’t want to put boring pieces in a collection. I probably was reacting to a version of New Zealand that I was anxious about. I was editing that book from London, a book of new New Zealand, writing, and I discovered that the parochialism I was worried would be there in the writing isn’t there. And what was great about editing that book was that I got to know what was going on in New Zealand fiction at the time.

I: Where did your assumption of parochialism come from?

EP: I think New Zealand fiction has changed a lot in the past 20 years and it has broadened out a lot, but it was preoccupied— and it’s a young literary history— for a long time with defining New Zealandness— who are we? what are we? And always asking that question culturally, to me, runs dangerously close to, Who should we be? What should we be? And that’s when things start getting programmatic, or moralistic. And that’s when the smugness comes in.

New Zealand, at our worst, we can cope with being so far away from the rest of the world by saying, “Well, we’re in the best place in the world, ha ha ha.” And I can’t stand that. We really need to watch that. So I don’t actually think parochialism does exist. I think New Zealanders are more open to New Zealand writing that is not just addressing the question of national identity.

I: How do you name your characters?

EP: Well, Tom and Ann— I wanted nice simple names. With Ann I wanted something that was kind of soft, but was quite plain as well. “Stone” seemed really the right surname for Tom because he’s not very porous [laughs] and then “Wells” of course seemed right for Ann. And I’m not trying to name characters in a Dickensian ways, I don’t want to be artificial about it… And then the others get named in more random ways. But Arlo, the baby— I wanted a name that sounded lovely, was nice to say. “Arlo, Arlo”.

I: You worked as an actor when you were young. When did you begin writing and when did it become a major occupation?

EP: Well I always had wr
itten and I was a big reader as a kid and sooner or later I wanted to express things in the same way I was experiencing them, which was through books a lot of the time. And so I had always written, bad teenage poetry and then when I was acting in my late teens, early 20s I was writing little unfinished stories, dialogue exchanges, vignettes, and then acting really didn’t work out for me or I didn’t work out for acting, and I thought I’m just going to throw in the towel. And I was a bit lost for a while but I was still writing and then there was a writing program at a university in New Zealand and I thought, well it would be great if I could apply to this, and get in, and at least I’d know what I was doing for the next year.

Luckily enough I did get in— and it’s funny, I don’t know how people choose things for these courses and when I think about the work I submitted, it’s just horrifying— but that was a great year You know, it was a lot of fun and we did all these exercises and we had to finish work and I had to finish a story for my portfolio and that story got published in a literary journal there and then a publisher from England read it and was very encouraging and I sent him more work. And that was how my collection of stories happened. And so that was the fundamental thing for me, being in the structure of that course and I mean, now I teach creative writing and I know a lot of people enroll in those courses because they want the discipline, they want to have to finish something, and that was pretty much my reasons too. It was helpful…. Not that I want to flood the world with creative writing students [laughs], but it was a lot of fun. It was great.

I: What were your early influences?

EP: The first book that really affected me was a book by Astrid Lindgren who wrote the Pippi Longstockings stories called The Brothers Lionheart and that was the first time a book made me cry and I had this terribly emotional reaction to it. It’s about these three brothers and one of them died and the others had to follow him into the next world, and it was amazing, about reincarnation really. And then aside from the usual children’s books, CS Lewis and that sort of thing— I was really into Joan Aiken, Madeleine L’Engle, Ursula LeGuin, and these amazing children’s version of great myths and legends that didn’t pull any punches…

And then because I was a big reader I found myself reading my mother’s books, and so when I was far too young to know what was going on I was reading Iris Murdoch and Kurt Vonnegut and most of it was going over my head but I loved certain things about it. And of course, there’s a kind of age where you read Anne Frank’s diary and Holocaust literature and books about girls’ experience of the Holocaust and reading those books at same age as protagonists was really profound.

I: What sort of authors do you read now?

EP: Now, I’ve just been really into Patrick McGrath— he’s great— a British writer who lives in New York and he writes a really sort of new gothic kind of psychological stuff, delicious. And I love some Joan Didion novels and I love Wide Sargasso Sea with Jean Rhys, And an English writer called Geoff Dyer, who I always feel strange mentioning because I know him, but he’s a really great writer. And I still just try to read widely as I can and discover new things, and tastes change. But I love those short story writers too— Tobias Wolf and Lorrie Moore.

I: What are you reading at the moment?

EP: I’m reading Tree of Smoke, a Denis Johnson book, a great book, amazing exciting book about the Viet Nam War. And I’m about to start Richard Price’s book Lush Life which I’m looking forward to. But they’re both— I’m travelling now— and they’re both huge, wrist breakers. I don’t know why I brought those ones with me.

(Read my review of Novel About My Wife.)

March 3, 2008

This weekend I read

This weekend I read Descant 139, and loved in particular “In the Time of the Girls” by Anne Germanacos, the “Synchronicities” section, and poems by Changming Yuan– “delicately hung is this earth/ a bluish cage in the universe.” I also read the February 7 issue of London Review of Books, and “Derek, please, not so fast”— a review of As I Was Going to St. Ives, a biography of Derek Jackson (to whom Pamela Mitford was but a footnote! I had no idea: “To call his carry-on goat-like would be grossly unfair to goats, who seem celibate, faithful, and even tempered by comparison”). The William Faulkner interview in The Paris Review Interviews II was stunningly awful, brilliant and profound. I will soon be starting to read Nikolski, and after that I’ll get to Brighton Rock.

I also began culling my library in preparation for our move. A shedload will be donated to the Victoria College Library Booksale on Thursday, but anyone who wants to can drop by before then is welcome to sort through the stacks. Assuming you know where I live, in which case you’re probably my friend, and I’d be happy to see you anyway.

January 25, 2008

My new quest

I had to go into a bookstore today to pick up a gift for a friend, and of course, while I was there, why not get something for myself? For this is how my mind works, and why bookstores– for me– require infinite will not to go broke in. But I got The Paris Review Interviews vol. II, which I think was most sensible. For they’re interviews with writers, of course, and good ones, and one of my favourite book bloggers has raved about it. So there is learning aplenty, but multitudinously, for this book shall also be the textbook of my new quest to learn to interview.

Interviews are the one written form I’m afraid to take on– I’d sooner write a play (which is not to say that I’d be good at that either). They’re an art-form, I think, and a difficult one done in dialogue. A dialogue in which you must be the guide… or do you follow? I just don’t know. Learning to interview will also challenge my tendency to break off into long-winded tangents about lies I told when I was seventeen, or my new favourite pop song, or whatnot. I also think it will make me a better storyteller, socializer, and writer in general. It will also be fun.

The plan is to post an interview monthly, once I’ve got some study under me belt. How exciting. Maybe I’ll even interview you!