March 18, 2012
On books, "buzz" and magic
“You can almost always find chains of coincidence to disprove magic. That’s because it doesn’t happen the way it does in books. It makes those chains of coincidence. That’s what it is. It’s like if you snapped your fingers and produced a rose but it was just because someone on an aeroplane had dropped a rose at just the right time for it to land in your hand. There was a real person and a real aeroplane and a real rose, but that doesn’t mean the reason you have the rose in your hand isn’t because you did the magic.” —Among Others, Jo Walton
It’s like magic, the way good news of a book spreads. I’m currently reading Jo Walton’s Among Others because at our last book club meeting, Deanna couldn’t stop talking about it, and then Trish tweeted, “Dying to get on the streetcar so I can get back to reading Jo Walton’s Among Others“, and this is the kind of buzz I listen to. It’s real and you can’t buy it, but I trust it because it’s the sound of real people talking about a book that’s made a connection.
But it’s not magic, of course. It’s a chain of coincidence that begins with a writer creating a work that is really good, or sometimes a work that is not very good but happens to be exactly what readers are hungry for. And then the work drifts out into the world, and of course it helps to know a lot of people well-placed to help the drifting, to have a great cover design, be published by a press that newspaper editors pay attention to, to be photogenic and/or notorious (or fictional), to have a lot of time to twitter, and a knack for connecting with your audience. But then I’m thinking of a book like Lionel Shriver’s We Need to Talk About Kevin where almost none of that happened, and the book caught on fire. What happened with that book was the most amazing chain of coincidence, a force onto itself, and no one ever could have made that happen.
In less magical terms, I despair when I listen to men on the radio talking about an invasion of Iran or moving the economy forward as though anyone actually has any understanding of or control over how matters of war or economics transpire– these things take on unforeseen trajectories and are carried by their own momentum. You can’t plot these matters the way you plot a book, and nor can you plot a book’s reception either. I recently read a comment by an author stating that he appreciated the way that social media gives him control over what happens to his books once they’re published, but that control is an illusion. The magic is going to happen or it isn’t, and it’s unfair expectation on an author to make him think he can steer it either way, or that he’d feel responsible when magic fails to occur (except perhaps for having written a book that wasn’t extraordinary or even good. I come across a lot of terrible books in my travels. It is my opinion that more writers should be feeling such a burden these days).
Sometimes the magic should happen and it doesn’t. For example, it blows my mind (and in a bad way) that there are books on this that anybody hasn’t read yet. It’s unjust. Or that Lynn Coady’s The Antagonist didn’t win a major literary award last autumn (though magic did happen there. People loved that book). It kills me when the books I love don’t take, but it’s the way it goes, and it’s in nobody’s hands. But then I go declaring Carrie Snyder’s The Juliet Stories as one of the best books of the year, the CBC concurs, and the book is getting rave reviews everywhere. This is what buzz is: a chain of coincidence that originates with a book that is awesome. (And now here, it’s your turn: buy it.)
Which is not to say that writers are powerless or that book marketers would be best sitting idle. Book marketing is a tool, and so is social media, and both are always going to aid the process. I recently purchased Emma Staub’s story collection Other People We Married because on one strange morning, she had turned up in every hyperlink I’d clicked on and somehow that managed not to be annoying. Now Straub is well-connected, which does help– I followed her on twitter after a recommendation by Maud Newton, who is a good person to know, I’d say. But mostly importantly, in none of the links I clicked on was Straub telling me how fantastic she or her book was. In one, she was using her experience as a bookseller to advise writers on “How to Be an Indie Booksellers Dream”. In another, she was included in Elissa Schappell’s “Books With Second” Lives feature. And then there was this. Such a chain of coincidence, I found, that obviously the universe was telling me to buy this book. And so I did.
So the writer is not powerless. But here it is, in two of these links, the magic had already happened– the book had connected with readers and they were telling me about it. In the other, Straub was putting her name and face out there, but doing so by participating in a wider community of readers and writers, giving them something other than a sales pitch.
Writers: stop tweeting the same links to your reviews over and over again (unless, perhaps, you’ve just been reviewed in the New York Times), stop spamming your followers, you don’t need to respond to every blogger’s review (and especially not if it’s a bad one), give your potential audience a reason to be interested in you besides the fact that you’ve written a book you want them to read. Social media is a conversation, and nobody likes anyone in a conversation who only talks about themselves.
But at a certain point, the writer has to take a step back and just let it happen. Magic can’t be orchestrated.
**
Speaking of magic, we high-fived over our pancakes this morning as The 49th Shelf received a shout-out on CBC’s The Sunday Edition in a discussion about the state of Canadian publishing. It was glorious.
March 15, 2012
Virginia Wolf by Kyo Maclear and Isabelle Arsenault
Kyo Maclear is author of the beloved 2007 novel The Letter Opener and is, with illustrator Isabelle Arsenault, the force behind the acclaimed Spork. Her latest picture book with Arsenault is Virginia Wolf, a story loosely based on the Woolfian one of the similar name and her relationship with her sister Vanessa.
There is precedent for a literary rendering of the child Virginia– those of us steeped in Woolf lore know well the stories of Virginia, Vanessa and their brother Thoby of 22 Hyde Park, and their childhood family newspaper was published in book form in 2006. And it is those of us steeped in Woolf lore who will seize to these connections, though Maclear herself emphasizes the looseness of her basis. So what is its point then? The Woolf connection is not a necessary element of the text, but it provides the book with additional texture, literary and otherwise.
In this story of two sisters, one of them, Virginia, overcome by the doldrums, is captured by a wolfish mood. This mood has an effect on the whole household: “Up became down. Bright became dim. Glad became gloom.” The other sister, Vanessa, tries to cheer Virginia up, but nothing works. Finally, Vanessa lies in bed with her sad sister and listens to her describe the world she longs to escape to, called “Bloomsberry”. Virginia is freed from her wolfish mood after Vanessa creates a version of Bloomsberry on the bedroom walls, and by the story’s end, she’s well enough to go back into the world. Down is up again.
(Must point out connections between this and another wonderful book from KidsCanPress about painted gardens and their restorative effects– Andrew Larsen’s The Imaginary Garden is much adored at our house.)
Very young children (and their parents) will be delighted by the book’s illustrations– Harriet is particularly taken with Virginia’s transformation from wolf to girl on the book’s final pages. They will also come to understand the plot at its most basic level– that there are times when we all feel a bit wolfish. It’s a name to put to what happens on those tantrum-filled days, or when Mommy’s patience is particularly limited. Wolfish moods happen, there’s no real reason for them, and they pass. We feel better.
For older readers who’ve had family members suffering from depression, I imagine this book would be particularly valuable. Yes, it is a simplified depiction of the disease but that simplification is essential for a child to obtain any real understanding what’s going on around them. The reader will understand that nothing they have done has caused their loved one’s suffering, and also that there is little they can do to relieve it.What Vanessa does to help her sister is be near her, to listen to her talk, to lie in bed beside her and look out the window to see the world through her eyes.
Of everything Vanessa paints in Bloomsberry though, most essential is the ladder, “so what was down could climb up”– a recognition that the journey will be Virginia’s alone to make. To her painting she adds also room for Virginia to wander, because wandering is what wolves like to do. And while Maclear has Virginia feeling much better the next morning, the ladder and the wandering space function on a metaphoric level to acknowledge the true complexity of her character’s experience.
The elephant in the room of course is Woolf’s own suicide, and that any child who comes to know the author through Virginia Wolf will discover a very different end to the story. Though I would argue this point by resisting the notion of reducing Woolf’s life and her legacy to her mental illness and the circumstances of her death. Yes, she suffered substantially through her life, but anyone who knows her work well will understand that she had a capacity for joy as great as she had for sorrow. There is so much more to Woolf than the stones in her pockets, and I love that this book celebrates that. She survived her bouts in the doldrums over and over again, and that she finally didn’t in no way undermines the achievement of her life, all 59 years of it. Further, rather than overlooking the circumstances of Woolf’s death, I think that Maclear is using it externally as a fitting counter to her book’s sunny ending. It doesn’t belong in the book, but the connection is there for the reader to make, and I think it is an important one.
March 14, 2012
From the reaches
Coach House fails to imPress the 3-and-under set or maybe they're just overwhelmed
From the reaches of the internet, I bring you Kyran Pittman on blogging and book-writing (“As we move away from our attachment to the vehicle, I’m noticing recently a subtle shift in the blog culture’s attitude toward publishing books”). Paper Tigers Blog reviews Joan Bodger’s Court and Castle. Behind the Mad Men twitter accounts (which I refuse to believe aren’t authentic). Lauren Groff’s Arcadia gets a rave review by Ron Charles in The Washington Post. Carrie Snyder’s The Juliet Stories gets love from Quill & Quire. Snyder’s book is also called one of the best books you’ll read this year by CBC Books in this excellent list of Canadian women writers you need to read right now. And she blogs for The Afterword about why she loves her cover art. An interview with the fabulous Caitlin Moran that references wanking to Chevy Chase (and I am so excited that so many of you want to read her book now. But of course you do!). The VIDA 2012 Count and why it doesn’t matter how many women submit to literary magazines. DoveGreyReader finally reads Possession. The spring session of my blogging course at UofT begins in one month! You can register here. And check out Kyo Maclear’s Picture Books for Grown-Ups list— I absolutely adore it. Now reading Death Comes to Pemberley, which I’m probably enjoying more than the Austenites and now I want to read Pride and Prejudice again (and let’s just say I never thought anything would make me want to do such a thing). Finally, we bought a Sam Cooke hits CD recently which has revolutionized how good it is to be at our house. Everything is better when Sam Cooke is playing, and we’ve been doing a lot of dancing in the kitchen and drinking more wine. My favourite song of the moment is the wonderful Bring It On Home.
And yes, I’ve decided to bring back my links round-ups which is a bit 2007, but twitter is too ephemeral for some things. Plus I can post photos of Harriet as accompaniment.
March 13, 2012
Never Mind the Patriarchy: Three Books for International Women's Day
Renee Rodin’s Subject to Change was recommended to me via Anakana Schofield’s list of her favourite Vancouver books, and I fell in with with the cover, its light, those clothes. And though Rodin’s approach is very different (these are essays, not short stories), I was reminded of Grace Paley’s Enormous Changes at the Last Minute all the way through, and not just due to similarities in title. Also of Madeline Sonik’s Afflictions and Departures, which more overtly links the personal and political in a collection of essays. Like Paley, Rodin writes about an eccentric, passionate, left-leaning single mother, who is dare-to-be-errant, who scrambles to balance motherhood with writing, and who sees motherhood as a role that comes with political responsibility, and knows a good neighbourhood like Jane Jacobs does. Rodin writes of her upbringing in Jewish Montreal, begins one essay with “…when I was a teenage beatnik”, recounts her experience as a bookstore owner in the ’80s and ’90s, accosts BC Premier Gordon Campbell in the street, serves on a jury, takes care of her father at the end of his life, watches the twin towers fall with her sons in New York City, becomes a grandmother, confronts grief and the unimaginable reality of violent death with the murder of her son’s fiancee– the irresolvable nature of such things, and writes, “It is hard to be consoled and it is hard to console.” These essays are familiar, engaging, and unforgettable, kitchen-sink feminism as written from the trenches. 
The best of Michele Landsberg’s Toronto Star columns have been collected as Writing the Revolution, which I heard about because when her launch took place around the corner from my house, lines of people stretched all the way down the street. To read these columns (from the 1970s to early 2000s) in our current climate is to encounter a bizarre sense of how far we’ve come coupled with being stuck in a time warp. It feels like a different country from one in which bookstores were being firebombed (also around the corner from my house, just a different corner), there was no such thing as maternity leave, and rapists went free due to a variety of reasons women were “asking for it”. But not too far south from us, they’re letting a lunatic who wants to outlaw birth control imagine he’s a serious contender for US presidency, women’s organizations in Canada are no longer publicly funded, and there was that charming police officer whose wardrobe advice inspired the Slut Walks. Landsberg writes, “Because our history is constantly overwritten and blanked out…., we are always reinventing the wheel when we fight for equality.” Landsberg’s passion for and hope for the future of feminism is inspiring and this book is essential reading, providing the kind of perspective that’s entirely necessary if feminists want to keep moving forward.
And then there’s Caitlin Moran’s How to Be a Woman, which I discoverered here. Germaine Greer meets Adrian Mole in this book that had me literally howling with laughter, and reading entire chapters aloud to my husband in bed, which is difficult when one is howling. Howling and honking, even. Yes, here is the book I’ve been waiting my whole life for and which I’m going to buy a copy of so my daughter can read it herself as soon as she cares to. So she will know from the start that there’s one woman who dares to say that brazilian waxes are stupid, high heels are crippling, who asks why no one makes porn in which women are enjoying themselves, and points out that no man really cares what your underpants look like. Liberator of obsessively-masturbating teenage girls! Not remotely sorry for her abortion! Who wants to take back the strident in strident feminist! She writes, “So here is a quick way of working out if you’re a feminist. Put your hand in your pants. a) Do you have a vagina? b) Do you want to be in charge of it?”I want to read you entire chapters too, or maybe the whole book, but that will take too long, so why not just read it? You’ll howl too, and you’ll also be uplifted by the fact that the voice of reason is fucking hilarious.
Oh, to read three brilliant, engaging, non-academic feminist books in a row. It did something to me, though spring and sunshine might deserve some of the credit too, but by the end of Caitlin Moran, I felt amazing, unstoppable, and gorgeous without caveats. As radiant as Renee Rodin in the sunshine. Enormously proud to be carrying on the feminist tradition, and content to be as strident as they come.
March 12, 2012
Think more widely
“Progress has been made… yet the struggles continue, the passion and fury can erupt at any time, and many of feminism’s most cherished victories are continually menaced. The media constantly polarize the debates by pitting groups of women against each other, like stay-home moms versus daycare users, or pro-and anti-choice campaigners, or “pro-sex” women against those dried up prudes who want to spoil all the fun. The tactic isn’t new: First Wave suffragists were also derided and parodied as anti-sex killjoys and harridans. The trick to evading these binary traps is to think more widely. Who economic, sexual, class or political interests are being served by the female mouthpieces and role models provided by the media? The answers can be complex, but at least they’re more thought-productive than the simple-minded oppositions (home or career? breast or bottle?) so dear to the media.” –Michele Landsberg, Writing the Revolution
March 11, 2012
"A Sister and a Brother" by Elizabeth Hay
“The snow had gone lacy, its surface melted and worked into very fine patterns like old leaves on a forest floor. In places broken twigs had slowly descended through the snow so that when a few feet away you saw what appeared to be a twig-print, then looking straight down you saw the beautiful black twig itself.”
There is something about the intimacy of Elizabeth Hay’s narrative voice and the specificity of her details that makes it difficult to really understand that her stories are imagined. In her short story “A Sister and a Brother”, which appeared in Issue 34.4 of Room Magazine, this point is underlined by her story’s structure, which moves between past and present with such fluidity, and is presented in a casual tone of reportage (“I am laying this out, because of what happened next…”) that at first glace suggests that the story has very little structure at all. Similarly with the story’s final sentences: “My brother is downstairs in the kitchen while I am up here at my desk. All is well between us.” What kind of story would you want to read that delivered you to that point? What is a story at all?
What a story is not is tidy, beginning, middle and end. Ruth narrates from a vantage point of now, able to pick and choose scenes from her past to create the effect she is intending. There are the explosive moments from her childhood (with undertones of wider violence), and the peaceful ones, and each of these is situated within its own particular contexts, which Hay alludes to (“It’s the Easter before our family comes apart in ways that I long for…”). And in the present day, in her relationship with her brother and the dynamic between them, she notes tracks of past resentments, long simmering outbursts. And then peering down into those tracks, as in the scene with twigs in the snow, the past is still there, vivid and real, just fallen down beneath the surface and out of sight.
Ruth never really liked her brother as much as she liked the idea of him, the ideal of him, and he never had any regard for her at all. She is self-aware enough: “And no doubt I am genuinely annoying as is anyone who is hesitant, bothersome, unsure of herself.” And theirs is a perpetual motion machine of Ruth provoking Peter’s ire by simply being, Peter’s ire diminishing her, Ruth resenting this diminishing and thus provoking his ire further. Driven by the hope of reaching him, which once in a while he lets her do, only to push her away again as soon as she lets her guard down.
It’s a complicated, precarious dynamic, and Hay has created in Ruth a character who mulls these things over and over, analysing questions of character and motivation in a way that it would never occur to her brother to do. She tries to see things from her brother’s point of view, sees herself from the perspective of an outsider through a friend’s story about her own detested sister, understands that it’s possible that she just doesn’t understand Peter’s sense of humour, as her parents tell her. That she has that put-upon-ness that so many women take on in middle age in their relations with their families, and her problems with Peter are no perhaps more complex than that. Not that she’ll leave it at that, because she wants something specific, and she’ll keep unpacking her baggage over and over: “How do we build a love out of the dark timber of the past?”
She says, “To hear an honest something, that’s what I live for.” But even as she’s listening, she’s pleading her case.
March 8, 2012
What loving Mad Men has taught me about loving books and reading
We started watching Downton Abbey last week, and I love it, but we’re only watching it because there is not enough Mad Men in the world (and heaven knows, I’ve tried to make it go further. I’ve watched Seasons 1-3 twice, and saved season 4 for well over a year before finally watching it [and was the wait ever worth it. Season 4 was better than all the others put together]). And I’ve been thinking a lot about my relationship to Mad Men lately, about how I love this show and its characters like I haven’t loved another show and its characters since Beverly Hill 90210 and Dylan McKay. By which I mean that I haven’t loved anything like this since I was 14, that age of absolute longing for life and for the world, and I feel something similar for Mad Men, perhaps because of the nostalgia implicit.
But the show absolutely occupies me too– I finish an episode, and I’m thinking about it for days. We’ve measured them out so slowly too that I have much time for reflection in between. I go looking for extracurricular Mad Men too with my Mad Men reading, and random Jon Hamm google searches. (Look! Books that Made a Difference to Jon Hamm! And also Nyla Matuk has written a poem called “Don Draper”.) I could talk about these characters and their motivations forever, and their dynamics, and I do, because people like to talk about Mad Men, and when I do, conversations often reveal new levels of depth to the stories that I never even considered.
My relationship to Mad Men is so different from my relationship to any single book. See, I love books and reading with an all-consuming passion, but I don’t love television. There is only Mad Men. So that I have more than 70 books on my to-be-read stack (which is actually a shelf. Such a stack would defy physics, I think), but I’ll continue to watch Mad Men over and over again. I watch an episode of Mad Men, and wait a week for another, but with a book, I’m starting a new one before the other is even finished. I speed through my books. I relish it every time I crack open a new one. Mad Men I savour, because there is only so much Mad Men in the world, but my supply of books will never be exhausted. Which is sometimes exhausting.
And it’s something to think about. What if instead of loving books and reading, I just loved one book, and read it over and over, and got so deep inside it? Or one author? To become an expert instead of a generalist? Which is unrealistic of course, and I don’t even want to break my speedy reading habit, but it really is rare that I connect with a book as deeply as circumstances permit me to connect with this television show. (It’s also easier to connect with a television show, which comes spoon-fed and all I have to do is lie on the couch and knit). But it occurs to me that there are ways in which the joy of my book fetishising obsession and love of reading in general come at the expense of how I relate books in their specificity. And that learning from my television habits might make me a better reader.
March 8, 2012
They're here!
This is the fourth year that I’ve measured spring’s arrival by the crocuses across the street, and I don’t think the ritual will ever get old.
March 7, 2012
The internet is made of wonderful things
For the benefit of anyone who’s not on Twitter: Larissa Andrusyshn (who wrote Mammoth, which I loved) is interviewed at The 49th Shelf and talks about “discovery channel poetry; really interesting interview with Mad Men creator Matthew Weiner about the upcoming season; Heather Birrell’s Mad Hope has been made into an actual book and we got to watch it happen; Rohan Maitzen on Virginia Woolf’s criticism, “Abandonment, Richness, Surprise”; an interview with Kyo Maclear on her new picture book Virginia Wolf (which we love); on Elephant & Piggie’s We Are In a Book as a meditation on death; Rebecca Rosenblum marks a decade in Toronto: “I survived SARS, Avian Flu, Swine Flu, the blackout, and I’ll survive Rob Ford, too.”; Daniel Griffin’s “Ten Stories Will Get You One”; Susan Swan explores past tense in the present; Maria Meindl on the perils of writing about family; and Elizabeth Renzetti leaves a box of books on the curb and watches to see what happens. Now reading Caroline Adderson’s Sitting Practice. And why don’t we all know already that Caroline Adderson is hilarious?
March 5, 2012
Author Interviews@ Pickle Me This: Carrie Snyder
I read Carrie Snyder’s first book Hair Hat in 2010 when it was one of five books selected for Canada Reads Independently, and had started reading her blog Obscure CanLit Mama around the same time. In the two years since, I’ve enjoyed getting to know Carrie through her blog and following her Juliet stories on their path to becoming The Juliet Stories.
I read the book last week and I promise you, it’s one of the best Canadian books you’re going to read this year.
Carrie was generous enough to answer my questions about her book via email from her home in Waterloo. The Juliet Stories was published by House of Anansi Press and is in stores now.
I: Although The Juliet Stories is fiction, it has roots in your own biography. As a reader, I tend to engage very little with these connections because they tend to limit the text rather than broaden it, but I know that most audiences find them interesting. How do you feel about this? Are you comfortable with such an engagement? Do you think your book is richer for these connections to your own story?
CS: First, thank you for opening with the elephant-in-the-room question. Without a doubt, “Is this real?” or “Did this really happen?” are questions asked most often about The Juliet Stories. Complicating my answer is the fact that yes, standing behind the scenes is my own family’s story. I did live as a child in Nicaragua, while the contra war was underway, and my parents were peace activists; further, one of my brothers had cancer as a child.
As a reader, I completely understand the fascination and desire to link the writer’s story to the story the writer has written. I’m reading Mordecai Richler’s biography now, almost through it, and there have been plenty of aha! moments of recognition. Humans like piecing together puzzles — in this case, the puzzle of how a writer takes an image or a moment or a place and weaves it into a story.
And there are so many different ways that the real can be used in fiction. An incident that remains mysterious and will never be answered — that could make an excellent starting place for a story. Personally, I often use settings that are familiar and likely recognizable, mainly because I can’t seem to imagine space/place in the same way that I can imagine plot or character. So a reader who recognizes a place might be fooled into believing the story is real simply because the setting is real. In that case, making biographical connections between me and The Juliet Stories would be entirely unhelpful.
I could pick apart The Juliet Stories crumb by crumb, identifying where various fragments arrived from (and it would no doubt be surprising and probably disappointing and not at all what readers might expect), but the question is: would the exercise get us anywhere very interesting? For purely critical purposes, I doubt the links add depth. After all, the whole point of creating a story is to build a fictional world replete with its own codes and themes and particular beauty and logic. And none of that actually exists in my real life. Which is at the core of why I write (and read): in order to create symmetry and wholeness.
Nevertheless, I wouldn’t dismiss biographical connections altogether. There must be some deeper psychological reason we, as readers, find these links compelling — that’s what interests me. Why do we want it to be real? Why do we want to know what experiences are sleeping under the surface?
I: I suspect readers’ interest is piqued by the rich texture of your narrative—even without the biographical elements, there is so much sleeping beneath the surface here. I’m halfway through the book now and sensing so many gaps—what Juliet doesn’t notice, wasn’t privy to notice or chooses not to notice from her childhood perspective, and also the circumstances of her life as an adult, from which this story is being told. How did you come to this particular point of view, a strange omniscience that straddles then and now? That point-of-view is so important in the spell your book casts for its reader, but I imagine it must have been difficult to navigate as a writer, to finally achieve that balance. Or did it come naturally as you were writing?
CS: The voice seems so natural to me now that I’m struggling to remember its creation. Once the voice arrived, it didn’t feel created, it felt found. That said, this was not a book that got written overnight, and in fact it began life as a novel from the perspective of the mother (whose name has always been Gloria), and then tried to be a memoir (a very short-lived attempt of no more than 10,000 words), and finally, at last, along came Juliet’s telling (her name was Mary in earlier manuscripts). But as soon as it became Juliet’s story, the voice came too. And once the voice came, the technically aspects of the story-telling style flowed naturally.
That said, there was a still a lot of finicky, tedious work to be done, finessing the voice. I completely trusted my editor’s wise and kind eye on the manuscript. I trusted her to tell me when the voice was too authorial. Too writerly. Too self-conscious. With her guidance, I removed many passages that I’d originally loved writing. But the secret to the voice and the point of view is that not much is needed in order for it to work. Those moments when we’re slipping forward in time, or we understand that there is an older Juliet looking over what is happening—those are like salt. Too much would spoil the meal; but just the right amount adds flavour.
As a reader and as a writer, I’m drawn toward the mysterious, toward those gaps you mention. So much of life is unknown to us, unregarded, or misunderstood, or lost in the moment. As you probably know from reading my first book, Hair Hat, I have an ongoing fascination with the individual’s interpretation of a shared experience. I think I’ll always be puzzling out the mystery of memory and perspective, exploring what’s missing, and leaving gaps for the reader to fill in. I don’t think the writer needs to tell the reader what to think. I think the writer needs to leave room for the reader to make her own connections. Here’s my writing philosophy: It changes the reading experience to be part of what’s happening.
I: Do you ever think about the kinds of readers who don’t like those gaps, don’t know what to do with that kind of responsibility? I’m thinking about a comment Lynn Coady made (which I’m paraphrasing because I think I only heard of it via a live-tweet from the Giller Prize gala) about it being the writer’s job to do the work of a book, not the reader’s. How do you respond to that?
CS: Hmmmmm. A long hmmmm. I guess I’ll respond by saying that it’s not my intention to make work for the reader, or to make the reader do the work. Rather, I’d say that I trust the reader. And I hope we’re going somewhere together, and I hope that it’s interesting to both of us. It’s not that I don’t think about that kind of reader, it’s just that I’m not that kind of writer. If I tried to connect all the dots I’d gum the whole thing up, it would look and sound artificial because that’s not my talent or my gift. In writing, as in life, I’ve had to accept what I’m good at, and what I’m not. It’s humbling, frankly. But also quite freeing.
I: There are points in the book where it seems so obvious that Gloria is the place from where these stories spring. It’s subtle, but there is a real attentiveness to Gloria’s point of view which shows us that Juliet has spent years putting herself in her mother’s shoes, imagining her mother’s experience. And I love these tracks in your writing, which have not quite been covered over in the finished book. (more…)
