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Kathy Page's fiction has often been the bridesmaid, not the bride. Finally in November of 2018, it was announced that her novel Dear Evelyn (Biblioasis) had been awarded the $50,000 Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize, and it was also recognized as a Kirkus Best Book of 2018.
Previously, after Page was longlisted for the Giller Prize in 2014 for her story collection, Paradise & Elsewhere, Page was longlisted for her follow-up collection, The Two of Us (Biblioasis) in 2016. The Story of My Face was longlisted for the Orange Prize in 2002. Alphabet was a Governor General's Award finalist in 2005. The Find was shortlisted for the ReLit Award in 2011.
Page's themes have been identified as loss, survival and transformation: "the magic by which a bad hand becomes a good chance."
Kathy Page was born and lived much of her life in London, England. She has taught fiction writing in universities in the UK, Finland and Estonia, and held residencies in schools and a variety of other institutions/ communities, including a fishing village and a men's prison. In 2001, she and her family moved to Saltspring Island. Page has also written extensively for radio and television and her short fiction is widely anthologised in the UK.
Her fifth novel, The Story of My Face, distributed in Canada by McArthur & Co., concerns a woman who reassesses her life while studying the origins of an unusual sect in Finland.
Alphabet (Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2004) is about a convicted murderer in Thatcher's Britain, barely out of his teens, who comes to terms with guilt and seeks possible redemption through newfound literacy. [See review]
Frankie Styne & the Silver Man (Methuen, 1992; Phoenix/Printorium 2008) is about the relationship between an obsessive loner who writes gruesome killer novels and his two new next-door neighbours, a new mother with a highly unusual infant named Jim. When the novelist Frank hatches a real-life plot, the lives of the mother Liz and her very strange child are transformed.
In Kathy Page's seventh novel, and the first to be set in Canada, The Find (McArthur & Co $24.95), paleontologist Anna Silowski makes an extraordinary discovery in a remote part of British Columbia, but at the same time, the tensions below the surface of her successful career are exposed. She finds herself unexpectedly dependent on a high school drop-out, Scott Macleod, as she recruits him to help on the excavation of 'the find' and project teeters on the edge of disaster. "Her life would have been a lot simpler if she had not liked men, if she has been a nun, or gay. Or both." The Find was partially inspired by the beautiful skeleton of an elasmosaurus that hangs from the ceiling of the Courtenay & District Museum.
Whereas Kathy Page's story collection, Paradise & Elsewhere, delves into myth and the darker territory of parable and fable, The Two of Us contains stories about pairs, couples, dyads--mainly intense one-on-one relationships whether it's a hairdresser and a client, a mother and her baby, or a girl and a fox. Her duos are all united by a primal desire for intimacy.
"My father's passion for books, my mother's habit of exaggeration, and the general craziness of our household are probably all behind my compulsion to write," she recalls on her website. "As a child, I loved everything school had to offer: writing, science, art. I studied English Literature at university and graduated in 1979. Although I had won writing competitions as a child (a bizarre children's cruise around the Adriatic, a bus trip around Europe), it was only after university, and very gradually, that I began to write seriously, supporting myself by means of temporary jobs and then a training as carpenter and joiner."
*
The Two of Us
by Kathy Page
Windsor, Ontario: Biblioasis, 2016.
$19.95 / 9781771960991
Reviewed by Paul Headrick
Now chair of the Creative Writing and Journalism program at Vancouver Island University, Kathy Page lives on Salt Spring Island with her husband and two children.
Herein reviewer Paul Headrick praises Page as "a master who seems to have tapped into ancient troubles bubbling up in our struggling world." - Ed.
*
In "The House on Manor Close," the opening story of this collection, a woman recalls her childhood with an older sister who was obsessed with birds: "I began to think that when she grew up she would become not an ornithologist but an actual bird." Her fanciful speculation isn't actually implausible, for in Page's work we can be in the territory of Mavis Gallant at one moment and Franz Kafka or even Ovid the next. Her characters manage to inhabit the subtly psychological world of literary modernism while also belonging to the unpredictable, shifting landscapes of much older literary genres.
Page's previous book, Paradise & Elsewhere (Biblioasis, 2014), an astonishing collection of contemporary folk-fairy tales, brought this ancient/modern element into relief, but it's present as well in these stories, which are more realistic, at least on the surface.
Several that begin the collection are about elderly parents and their adult children. The parents need help that their offspring mostly fail to provide, burdened as they are by old, generosity-killing resentments. "Why are we like this," asks the narrator of "Snowshill," after a failed outing intended to cheer her enfeebled father and passive-aggressive mother. "Why can't we all see how little time there is left?" The grudging reconciliation that follows seems dependent on shared self-deception.
In "The House on Manor Close" the mother exercises a weird tyranny, in part by feeding each of her three daughters differently, rewarding and punishing with dishes they like or despise. When her girls grow up and leave, alienated and angry, she and her husband indulge their passion for gardening, succeeding with plants as they never could with their girls: plants have potentials but not wills. The individual troubles here are entirely convincing while at the same time evoking the force of archetypal generational conflicts.
"Different Lips," one of the strongest of these enthralling stories, is a variation on The Beauty and the Beast tale, which Page has explored before with startling effect in her novels. The character needing redemption in "Different Lips" is Beauty, not Beast. Jessica is a self-centred, damaged young woman who long has traded on her looks but who finally discovers herself desperate, out of money and friends. She travels across town to see an old lover whom she knows still yearns for her, and she hopes for sex, her only way of making connections.
A funny and cruel reversal greets her, no redemption at all, as her former lover's lips are grotesquely swollen from an allergic reaction. After their wretched encounter, she struggles to make a last attempt to reach out to him and to save herself. The narrator pauses to describe the scene that Jessica passes:
The cheap restaurants and pubs nearby were filling up. People spilled out on to improvised terraces or else just leaned on walls, glass in hand. A few parents pushed slack-faced, sleeping children homewards, the older siblings, occupied with bright coloured drinks and ice creams, trailing behind.
The carefully chosen words - "cheap," "improvised," "slack-faced," "trailing" - establish a continuity between the alienated main character and the failed world she inhabits, winning the reader's recognition and deep assent in a way that contributes to the power of Page's work.
The exceptions in these stories, the characters who are able to love, still feel a pull toward self-interest, but they choose to resist. In "The Right Thing to Say," Don and Marla wait to discover whether she has inherited an incurable disease and to decide, if the news is bad, whether she will have an abortion. Don knows that he will also need to decide whether he is even capable of staying with Marla. The story echoes a fine Page novel, The Find (McArthur & Co., 2011), in which a couple faces a similar revelation.
In both cases, in the manner of the most gripping of folk tales, the tension-filled situations dramatize a choice that on some level we all must make, with the same ultimate consequences. (The story also gracefully alludes to Hemingway's "Hills Like White Elephants," and it's a mark of Page's accomplishment that this move doesn't seem at all audacious.) Don's eventual response, which forms the resolution of "The Right Thing to Say," is a brilliantly fitting surprise.
"Open Water," the final story of The Two of Us and the longest, creates both the most realistically detailed world and the most impressive dramatization of the way that for Page realism and myth are one. Mitch, a swimming coach, gets a big break - out of nowhere, Tara, a prodigy. Mitch must proceed cautiously in order not to put off the girl's parents, who are unenthusiastic about the extreme time commitment required by competitive swimming. He also needs to be cautious when Tara, on the verge of elite success, considers quitting swimming altogether.
Once again the story is about parents and children. In some ways Tara becomes closer to Mitch than to her mother and father, who are preoccupied with their other children, and with their own conflict - they separate when Tara is in her teens. We learn through flashback of Mitch's childhood and his own mother and father, familiarly self-absorbed. "It's tough having parents who ignore what you are," Mitch tells his wife when recounting his past.
The decision that Mitch helplessly awaits - Tara's decision - isn't as life-and-death as the impending news in "The Right Thing to Say," but still it's elemental, as the story consistently draws the reader's attention back to the importance of water and the image of a person moving through it. "What the hell is it about?" Tara's mother asks Mitch of her daughter's swimming life. "Being in the water," Mitch replies.
Earlier, Mitch recalls his lonely childhood at a boarding school that was precisely wrong for him, and the moment when he discovered the school's unused swimming pool: "He remembers how his heart lifted, how he almost cried when he saw it. Just the sight of the water, the thought of being immersed."
So Tara's choice takes on that special Page quality: will she live on land or in water, choose realism or myth? How will Mitch, her proxy father, straddling both of these worlds, respond? With exquisite timing the answer confronts us with the immense stakes for Mitch and for all of Page's characters in these stories, the works of a master who seems to have tapped into ancient troubles bubbling up in our struggling world.
PAGE WINS AT LAST!
Dear Evelyn by Kathy Page, a longtime Biblioasis author, has been awarded the $50,000 2018 Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize, in addition to recognition as a Kirkus Best Book of 2018.
"I couldn't be happier for Kathy tonight," said Dan Wells of Biblioasis. "She's long been one of our best writers and it means so much that the Writers' Trust jury has acknowledged this wonderful, deeply personal look at how love can change us, then change us again."
Dear Evelyn is available at Biblioasis Bookstore
(1520 Wyandotte St E) for $19.95
Born between the wars on a working-class London street, Harry Miles wins a scholarship and a chance to escape his station, but discovers instead that poetry is what offers him real direction. While searching for more of it he meets Evelyn Hill on the steps of Battersea Library. The two fall in love as the world prepares once again for war, but their capacity to care for each other over the ensuing decades becomes increasingly tested. Twisting and startling, harrowing and deeply tender, Dear Evelyn explores how two very different people come together to shape and reshape each other over a lifetime. It is a compelling and unconventional love story that will leave its mark on any reader who has ever loved.
Prize jurists Ann Y.K. Choi, Mireille Silcoff, and Robert Wiersma said in their citation: "Kathy Page's Dear Evelyn tells the tender and unsettling story of working-class Londoner Harry Miles and the ambitious Evelyn Hill who fall in love as the world around them goes to war. What initially begins as a familiar wartime love story morphs into a startling tale of time's impact on love and family, as well as one's complex search for personal meaning and truth. By integrating themes that are universally understood by readers and skillfully crafting endearing characters that surprise and delight, Page has created a poignant literary work of art. The result is a timeless page-turning masterpiece."
In Kirkus, where Dear Evelyn's Best Book distinction lands on the same list as luminaries as Tommy Orange and Ottessa Moshfegh, their starred review said the novel "Quietly hums with emotional charge. The war years, with Harry fighting in North Africa and Evelyn struggling with a young child at home, are especially vivid, but this watchful, empathetic chronicle retains sensitivity through the less obviously eventful decades of home-building and child-rearing... Page's watchful and very British tale remains devoted to both and forgiving to the end. A searching, and touching, depiction of the places where married lives merge and the places where they never do."
Kathy Page is the author of ten previous books, two of which, Paradise & Elsewhere (2014) and The Two of Us (2016), were nominated for the Scotiabank Giller Prize. Other works include Alphabet, a Governor General's Award finalist in 2005, and The Story of My Face, long-listed for the Orange Prize in 2002, and Frankie Styne and the Silver Man. Born in the UK, she moved to Salt Spring Island with her family in 2001, and now divides her time between writing and teaching at Vancouver Island University.
PRAISE FOR DEAR EVELYN
"Kathy Page's Dear Evelyn is a novel in the shape of a life... [true] to most human experiences of love... Page has laid bare the lives of her characters, making no claim to their significance to anyone but each other, and in doing so has demonstrated that the ordinary is infinitely precious."
Times Literary Supplement
"Personal and intimate in focus, preoccupied with the minutiae of love and the domestic. What this painstaking and painful account of a marriage - from passionate beginning to resentful, grubby end - relies on, as much as its period detail, is its precise ruminations on the nature of affection and resentment, and on how love can persist in the face of cruelty... This becomes a novel of sadness about love and its waste, and about the humiliation of aging. It made me cry my eyes out."
The Globe and Mail
"No work of fiction has ever moved me to tears. These pages so emotionally swept me away that, at one particularly heartbreaking point, the book felt so alive that it might wound me, and I launched the thing across the room. Dear Evelyn trembles with what Walter Benjamin might call an 'aura' of authenticity, deeply felt and rooted in the author's obvious love for literature and her family. The result is a profoundly moving novel that captures the deep melancholy and fundamental loneliness of the human condition with startling emotional acuity."
Literary Review of Canada
"A love story, a coming-of-age story, and a brilliantly evocative sketch of Britain in the 20th century... [a] measured, intelligent novel."
The Guardian
"Page's finely wrought story - by turns tender, acid, and poignant - reminds us that marriage is a condition as infinitely variable as the individuals who enter into it... gains dimension and complexity as additional details accumulate through Page's deft use of flashbacks and prolepsis; her precise and graceful prose gives the emerging picture nuance and shading... Page's touching novel makes the ordinary extraordinary."
Quill & Quire (starred review)
"An ambitious, and highly literary, historical fiction outing... The writing is remarkable, masterfully weaving together the personal and the political. The backdrop of global conflict infuses the story with urgency, drama, and the exotic appeal of foreign travel, while the intimate maneuverings of the characters oscillate between tenderness and profound despair."
Toronto Star
"A smartly written portrait of a marriage that is true to life, has depth and detail, and is sometimes sweet and sometimes painful…the characters linger long afterwards and are likely to leave readers with either a tear in their eye or a lump in the throat."
Winnipeg Free Press
"The detail, the nuance, and the vitality of the scenes, while disconcerting, is also supremely detailed but never overwhelming with pages of minutia... Harry and Evelyn come together for an instant, repel one another over this or that, strive to find their better selves and their compassion and their once rich love; and then, with a harsh word or passing mood, they're back to marital warfare. It's a heartbreaking depiction, if only because it's so enduring: these two are bound by family, by obligation, by history, and even by a steady if off-kilter and declining love."
Vancouver Sun
"Page charts the emotional shifts that take place over the course of their marriage, from first flush of love to old age, with subtlety and sensitivity."
Booklist
"Though a familiar tale, it's sharply drawn and told with an alertness to cliche... [T]he concluding scenes, while sadly inevitable, are quietly devastating."
Daily Mail Online
"I know of no contemporary writer who deals so convincingly with love. Page consistently dramatizes the ways in which the feelings of intimate couples are puzzling mixtures of hope, lust, genuine caring, resentment, politics, and much else... ambitious and profoundly resonant."
The Ormsby Review
"[Page] has flown largely under the radar of publishing journalism while also writing damned good books... Page is a magician at evoking a sense of past-ness, and her characterisation is extraordinarily skillful and tender: both Evelyn and her husband Harry can be extremely difficult, but the reader understands and feels for them both. Exceptional work."
Elle Thinks
"A richly textured story that feels authentic to each period, without ever getting bogged down in too many details or historical facts... Relayed with compassion, and incisive writing."
Gulf Islands Driftwood
CITY/TOWN: Saltspring Island
DATE OF BIRTH: 8th April 1958
PLACE OF BIRTH: London, England
ARRIVAL IN CANADA: 2001
EMPLOYMENT OTHER THAN WRITING: university lecturer; writer in residence at a variety of institutions
AWARDS: The Traveller Writing Prize; Bridport Short Fiction Prize
BOOKS:
Dear Evelyn (Bibloasis, 2018)
The Two of Us (Bibloasis, 2016)
Paradise and Elsewhere (Bibloasis, 2014) 18.95 978-1-927428-59-7 (trade paper)
In the Flesh: Twenty Writers Explore the Body (Brindle & Glass, 2012. Co-editor.
The Find (McArthur @ Co., 2010)
Alphabet (Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2004). 0 75381 861 2
The Story of My Face (Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2002)
Frankie Styne and the Silver Man (Methuen, 1992; Phoenix/Printorium, 2008)
As In Music (Methuen, 1990; Phoenix/Printorium, 2008) -- stories
Island Paradise (Methuen/Minerva, 1989)
The Unborn Dream of Clara Riley (Virago, 1987)
Back in the First Person (Virago, 1986)
[BCBW 2019] "Fiction"
Previously, after Page was longlisted for the Giller Prize in 2014 for her story collection, Paradise & Elsewhere, Page was longlisted for her follow-up collection, The Two of Us (Biblioasis) in 2016. The Story of My Face was longlisted for the Orange Prize in 2002. Alphabet was a Governor General's Award finalist in 2005. The Find was shortlisted for the ReLit Award in 2011.
Page's themes have been identified as loss, survival and transformation: "the magic by which a bad hand becomes a good chance."
Kathy Page was born and lived much of her life in London, England. She has taught fiction writing in universities in the UK, Finland and Estonia, and held residencies in schools and a variety of other institutions/ communities, including a fishing village and a men's prison. In 2001, she and her family moved to Saltspring Island. Page has also written extensively for radio and television and her short fiction is widely anthologised in the UK.
Her fifth novel, The Story of My Face, distributed in Canada by McArthur & Co., concerns a woman who reassesses her life while studying the origins of an unusual sect in Finland.
Alphabet (Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2004) is about a convicted murderer in Thatcher's Britain, barely out of his teens, who comes to terms with guilt and seeks possible redemption through newfound literacy. [See review]
Frankie Styne & the Silver Man (Methuen, 1992; Phoenix/Printorium 2008) is about the relationship between an obsessive loner who writes gruesome killer novels and his two new next-door neighbours, a new mother with a highly unusual infant named Jim. When the novelist Frank hatches a real-life plot, the lives of the mother Liz and her very strange child are transformed.
In Kathy Page's seventh novel, and the first to be set in Canada, The Find (McArthur & Co $24.95), paleontologist Anna Silowski makes an extraordinary discovery in a remote part of British Columbia, but at the same time, the tensions below the surface of her successful career are exposed. She finds herself unexpectedly dependent on a high school drop-out, Scott Macleod, as she recruits him to help on the excavation of 'the find' and project teeters on the edge of disaster. "Her life would have been a lot simpler if she had not liked men, if she has been a nun, or gay. Or both." The Find was partially inspired by the beautiful skeleton of an elasmosaurus that hangs from the ceiling of the Courtenay & District Museum.
Whereas Kathy Page's story collection, Paradise & Elsewhere, delves into myth and the darker territory of parable and fable, The Two of Us contains stories about pairs, couples, dyads--mainly intense one-on-one relationships whether it's a hairdresser and a client, a mother and her baby, or a girl and a fox. Her duos are all united by a primal desire for intimacy.
"My father's passion for books, my mother's habit of exaggeration, and the general craziness of our household are probably all behind my compulsion to write," she recalls on her website. "As a child, I loved everything school had to offer: writing, science, art. I studied English Literature at university and graduated in 1979. Although I had won writing competitions as a child (a bizarre children's cruise around the Adriatic, a bus trip around Europe), it was only after university, and very gradually, that I began to write seriously, supporting myself by means of temporary jobs and then a training as carpenter and joiner."
*
Ormsby Review article, May 2018
The Two of Us
by Kathy Page
Windsor, Ontario: Biblioasis, 2016.
$19.95 / 9781771960991
Reviewed by Paul Headrick
Now chair of the Creative Writing and Journalism program at Vancouver Island University, Kathy Page lives on Salt Spring Island with her husband and two children.
Herein reviewer Paul Headrick praises Page as "a master who seems to have tapped into ancient troubles bubbling up in our struggling world." - Ed.
*
In "The House on Manor Close," the opening story of this collection, a woman recalls her childhood with an older sister who was obsessed with birds: "I began to think that when she grew up she would become not an ornithologist but an actual bird." Her fanciful speculation isn't actually implausible, for in Page's work we can be in the territory of Mavis Gallant at one moment and Franz Kafka or even Ovid the next. Her characters manage to inhabit the subtly psychological world of literary modernism while also belonging to the unpredictable, shifting landscapes of much older literary genres.
Page's previous book, Paradise & Elsewhere (Biblioasis, 2014), an astonishing collection of contemporary folk-fairy tales, brought this ancient/modern element into relief, but it's present as well in these stories, which are more realistic, at least on the surface.
Several that begin the collection are about elderly parents and their adult children. The parents need help that their offspring mostly fail to provide, burdened as they are by old, generosity-killing resentments. "Why are we like this," asks the narrator of "Snowshill," after a failed outing intended to cheer her enfeebled father and passive-aggressive mother. "Why can't we all see how little time there is left?" The grudging reconciliation that follows seems dependent on shared self-deception.
In "The House on Manor Close" the mother exercises a weird tyranny, in part by feeding each of her three daughters differently, rewarding and punishing with dishes they like or despise. When her girls grow up and leave, alienated and angry, she and her husband indulge their passion for gardening, succeeding with plants as they never could with their girls: plants have potentials but not wills. The individual troubles here are entirely convincing while at the same time evoking the force of archetypal generational conflicts.
"Different Lips," one of the strongest of these enthralling stories, is a variation on The Beauty and the Beast tale, which Page has explored before with startling effect in her novels. The character needing redemption in "Different Lips" is Beauty, not Beast. Jessica is a self-centred, damaged young woman who long has traded on her looks but who finally discovers herself desperate, out of money and friends. She travels across town to see an old lover whom she knows still yearns for her, and she hopes for sex, her only way of making connections.
A funny and cruel reversal greets her, no redemption at all, as her former lover's lips are grotesquely swollen from an allergic reaction. After their wretched encounter, she struggles to make a last attempt to reach out to him and to save herself. The narrator pauses to describe the scene that Jessica passes:
The cheap restaurants and pubs nearby were filling up. People spilled out on to improvised terraces or else just leaned on walls, glass in hand. A few parents pushed slack-faced, sleeping children homewards, the older siblings, occupied with bright coloured drinks and ice creams, trailing behind.
The carefully chosen words - "cheap," "improvised," "slack-faced," "trailing" - establish a continuity between the alienated main character and the failed world she inhabits, winning the reader's recognition and deep assent in a way that contributes to the power of Page's work.
The exceptions in these stories, the characters who are able to love, still feel a pull toward self-interest, but they choose to resist. In "The Right Thing to Say," Don and Marla wait to discover whether she has inherited an incurable disease and to decide, if the news is bad, whether she will have an abortion. Don knows that he will also need to decide whether he is even capable of staying with Marla. The story echoes a fine Page novel, The Find (McArthur & Co., 2011), in which a couple faces a similar revelation.
In both cases, in the manner of the most gripping of folk tales, the tension-filled situations dramatize a choice that on some level we all must make, with the same ultimate consequences. (The story also gracefully alludes to Hemingway's "Hills Like White Elephants," and it's a mark of Page's accomplishment that this move doesn't seem at all audacious.) Don's eventual response, which forms the resolution of "The Right Thing to Say," is a brilliantly fitting surprise.
Kathy Page
"Open Water," the final story of The Two of Us and the longest, creates both the most realistically detailed world and the most impressive dramatization of the way that for Page realism and myth are one. Mitch, a swimming coach, gets a big break - out of nowhere, Tara, a prodigy. Mitch must proceed cautiously in order not to put off the girl's parents, who are unenthusiastic about the extreme time commitment required by competitive swimming. He also needs to be cautious when Tara, on the verge of elite success, considers quitting swimming altogether.
Once again the story is about parents and children. In some ways Tara becomes closer to Mitch than to her mother and father, who are preoccupied with their other children, and with their own conflict - they separate when Tara is in her teens. We learn through flashback of Mitch's childhood and his own mother and father, familiarly self-absorbed. "It's tough having parents who ignore what you are," Mitch tells his wife when recounting his past.
The decision that Mitch helplessly awaits - Tara's decision - isn't as life-and-death as the impending news in "The Right Thing to Say," but still it's elemental, as the story consistently draws the reader's attention back to the importance of water and the image of a person moving through it. "What the hell is it about?" Tara's mother asks Mitch of her daughter's swimming life. "Being in the water," Mitch replies.
Earlier, Mitch recalls his lonely childhood at a boarding school that was precisely wrong for him, and the moment when he discovered the school's unused swimming pool: "He remembers how his heart lifted, how he almost cried when he saw it. Just the sight of the water, the thought of being immersed."
So Tara's choice takes on that special Page quality: will she live on land or in water, choose realism or myth? How will Mitch, her proxy father, straddling both of these worlds, respond? With exquisite timing the answer confronts us with the immense stakes for Mitch and for all of Page's characters in these stories, the works of a master who seems to have tapped into ancient troubles bubbling up in our struggling world.
PAGE WINS AT LAST!
Dear Evelyn by Kathy Page, a longtime Biblioasis author, has been awarded the $50,000 2018 Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize, in addition to recognition as a Kirkus Best Book of 2018.
"I couldn't be happier for Kathy tonight," said Dan Wells of Biblioasis. "She's long been one of our best writers and it means so much that the Writers' Trust jury has acknowledged this wonderful, deeply personal look at how love can change us, then change us again."
Dear Evelyn is available at Biblioasis Bookstore
(1520 Wyandotte St E) for $19.95
Born between the wars on a working-class London street, Harry Miles wins a scholarship and a chance to escape his station, but discovers instead that poetry is what offers him real direction. While searching for more of it he meets Evelyn Hill on the steps of Battersea Library. The two fall in love as the world prepares once again for war, but their capacity to care for each other over the ensuing decades becomes increasingly tested. Twisting and startling, harrowing and deeply tender, Dear Evelyn explores how two very different people come together to shape and reshape each other over a lifetime. It is a compelling and unconventional love story that will leave its mark on any reader who has ever loved.
Prize jurists Ann Y.K. Choi, Mireille Silcoff, and Robert Wiersma said in their citation: "Kathy Page's Dear Evelyn tells the tender and unsettling story of working-class Londoner Harry Miles and the ambitious Evelyn Hill who fall in love as the world around them goes to war. What initially begins as a familiar wartime love story morphs into a startling tale of time's impact on love and family, as well as one's complex search for personal meaning and truth. By integrating themes that are universally understood by readers and skillfully crafting endearing characters that surprise and delight, Page has created a poignant literary work of art. The result is a timeless page-turning masterpiece."
In Kirkus, where Dear Evelyn's Best Book distinction lands on the same list as luminaries as Tommy Orange and Ottessa Moshfegh, their starred review said the novel "Quietly hums with emotional charge. The war years, with Harry fighting in North Africa and Evelyn struggling with a young child at home, are especially vivid, but this watchful, empathetic chronicle retains sensitivity through the less obviously eventful decades of home-building and child-rearing... Page's watchful and very British tale remains devoted to both and forgiving to the end. A searching, and touching, depiction of the places where married lives merge and the places where they never do."
Kathy Page is the author of ten previous books, two of which, Paradise & Elsewhere (2014) and The Two of Us (2016), were nominated for the Scotiabank Giller Prize. Other works include Alphabet, a Governor General's Award finalist in 2005, and The Story of My Face, long-listed for the Orange Prize in 2002, and Frankie Styne and the Silver Man. Born in the UK, she moved to Salt Spring Island with her family in 2001, and now divides her time between writing and teaching at Vancouver Island University.
PRAISE FOR DEAR EVELYN
"Kathy Page's Dear Evelyn is a novel in the shape of a life... [true] to most human experiences of love... Page has laid bare the lives of her characters, making no claim to their significance to anyone but each other, and in doing so has demonstrated that the ordinary is infinitely precious."
Times Literary Supplement
"Personal and intimate in focus, preoccupied with the minutiae of love and the domestic. What this painstaking and painful account of a marriage - from passionate beginning to resentful, grubby end - relies on, as much as its period detail, is its precise ruminations on the nature of affection and resentment, and on how love can persist in the face of cruelty... This becomes a novel of sadness about love and its waste, and about the humiliation of aging. It made me cry my eyes out."
The Globe and Mail
"No work of fiction has ever moved me to tears. These pages so emotionally swept me away that, at one particularly heartbreaking point, the book felt so alive that it might wound me, and I launched the thing across the room. Dear Evelyn trembles with what Walter Benjamin might call an 'aura' of authenticity, deeply felt and rooted in the author's obvious love for literature and her family. The result is a profoundly moving novel that captures the deep melancholy and fundamental loneliness of the human condition with startling emotional acuity."
Literary Review of Canada
"A love story, a coming-of-age story, and a brilliantly evocative sketch of Britain in the 20th century... [a] measured, intelligent novel."
The Guardian
"Page's finely wrought story - by turns tender, acid, and poignant - reminds us that marriage is a condition as infinitely variable as the individuals who enter into it... gains dimension and complexity as additional details accumulate through Page's deft use of flashbacks and prolepsis; her precise and graceful prose gives the emerging picture nuance and shading... Page's touching novel makes the ordinary extraordinary."
Quill & Quire (starred review)
"An ambitious, and highly literary, historical fiction outing... The writing is remarkable, masterfully weaving together the personal and the political. The backdrop of global conflict infuses the story with urgency, drama, and the exotic appeal of foreign travel, while the intimate maneuverings of the characters oscillate between tenderness and profound despair."
Toronto Star
"A smartly written portrait of a marriage that is true to life, has depth and detail, and is sometimes sweet and sometimes painful…the characters linger long afterwards and are likely to leave readers with either a tear in their eye or a lump in the throat."
Winnipeg Free Press
"The detail, the nuance, and the vitality of the scenes, while disconcerting, is also supremely detailed but never overwhelming with pages of minutia... Harry and Evelyn come together for an instant, repel one another over this or that, strive to find their better selves and their compassion and their once rich love; and then, with a harsh word or passing mood, they're back to marital warfare. It's a heartbreaking depiction, if only because it's so enduring: these two are bound by family, by obligation, by history, and even by a steady if off-kilter and declining love."
Vancouver Sun
"Page charts the emotional shifts that take place over the course of their marriage, from first flush of love to old age, with subtlety and sensitivity."
Booklist
"Though a familiar tale, it's sharply drawn and told with an alertness to cliche... [T]he concluding scenes, while sadly inevitable, are quietly devastating."
Daily Mail Online
"I know of no contemporary writer who deals so convincingly with love. Page consistently dramatizes the ways in which the feelings of intimate couples are puzzling mixtures of hope, lust, genuine caring, resentment, politics, and much else... ambitious and profoundly resonant."
The Ormsby Review
"[Page] has flown largely under the radar of publishing journalism while also writing damned good books... Page is a magician at evoking a sense of past-ness, and her characterisation is extraordinarily skillful and tender: both Evelyn and her husband Harry can be extremely difficult, but the reader understands and feels for them both. Exceptional work."
Elle Thinks
"A richly textured story that feels authentic to each period, without ever getting bogged down in too many details or historical facts... Relayed with compassion, and incisive writing."
Gulf Islands Driftwood
*
CITY/TOWN: Saltspring Island
DATE OF BIRTH: 8th April 1958
PLACE OF BIRTH: London, England
ARRIVAL IN CANADA: 2001
EMPLOYMENT OTHER THAN WRITING: university lecturer; writer in residence at a variety of institutions
AWARDS: The Traveller Writing Prize; Bridport Short Fiction Prize
BOOKS:
Dear Evelyn (Bibloasis, 2018)
The Two of Us (Bibloasis, 2016)
Paradise and Elsewhere (Bibloasis, 2014) 18.95 978-1-927428-59-7 (trade paper)
In the Flesh: Twenty Writers Explore the Body (Brindle & Glass, 2012. Co-editor.
The Find (McArthur @ Co., 2010)
Alphabet (Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2004). 0 75381 861 2
The Story of My Face (Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2002)
Frankie Styne and the Silver Man (Methuen, 1992; Phoenix/Printorium, 2008)
As In Music (Methuen, 1990; Phoenix/Printorium, 2008) -- stories
Island Paradise (Methuen/Minerva, 1989)
The Unborn Dream of Clara Riley (Virago, 1987)
Back in the First Person (Virago, 1986)
[BCBW 2019] "Fiction"
Articles: 4 Articles for this author
The Story of My Face (Weidenfeld & Nicolson $29.95)
Info
Natalie's research of an ancient Finnish cult in the remote town of Elijoki unravels events that changed her life and scarred her face. "...there may still be a small circular mark, which I made with my teeth. I remember biting hard, her screams, the salty taste of her, and I remember standing, later on, in the field, high as a kite on the entire situation, and refusing to apologize. But that was nothing, in the scheme of things."; 0-297-60785-5
[Spring 2003 BCBW]
Alphabet (McArthur & Co $14.95)
Review
While packing for a move from London, England, Kathy Page discovered a novel she had abandoned almost ten years earlier and decided to resurrect it. "Time had performed its magic-a kind of alchemy-and it was suddenly easy to see what to jettison and what to keep,"; she says.
Happily ensconced in her new, solar-panelled writing space on Salt Spring Island, complete with a view, Page proceeded to finish her grim novel, Alphabet (McArthur & Co. $14.95), about a fictional felon, Simon Austen, who is serving a life sentence in Britain for murdering his girl friend.
"When a character like this arrives,"; Page says, "you can't throw him out. Just as in a real relationship, you have to keep going until whatever you came together for is complete.";
A young, illiterate carpet layer, Simon Austen likes to command his girlfriend to do things, then he watches. In spite of her entreaties, they have not yet had sex. He strangles her when she takes off her clothes but refuses to put on her glasses.
As Austen later comes to realize in therapy, he liked to turn her on and off like she was a television screen and he had the remote. Brutal, manipulative, damaged, intelligent and occasionally charming, Austen was abandoned by his mother and abused as a child in foster care.
A widower with time on his hands volunteers to teach Simon how to read in prison. "He's got all the time in the world and it isn't like school at all... He gets into education, big time. Eighteen months later he's functional and hooked on the alphabet.";
Austen forges tentative relationships with women; first writing to the alcoholic academic, Vivienne, under a false and carefully crafted artistic identity. When his deception is discovered, he tries a second time with Tasmin. This time he tells her who he is really is and she doesn't mind. Even better, she gives him the gift he most needs for his new obsession-a typewriter.
Trouble is, Tasmin has lied to him. She is way underage and he is way in trouble.
Along comes Bernadette, the new prison shrink. She calls him courageous. The increasingly devoted Austen has that word courageous painfully tattooed on his chest to join the numerous other words that wrap around his body. It's the first word that's positive in a world that has branded him otherwise: waste of space, a threat to women, stupid, callous , bastard and murderer.
Bernadette gets Simon Austen admittance to a gentler prison facility with a therapeutic focus, but the love stricken killer at first doesn't want to go. At the new facility he begins to make some headway in self-recognition but eventually his aggressive behaviour with a superior does him in. After a year in the new prison, he's spirited away in the middle of the night. Imprisoned for ten years, he must readjust to a seamier and a more dangerous environment.
This convincing portrait of a felon clinging to the life raft of the alphabet arose from Page's experiences as a writer-in-residence at a men's prison, three days per week, for about a year, where her job mostly consisted of encouraging the inmates to write and supporting other creative projects.
"The prison was both fascinating and dreadful,"; she says. "It was a place of frighteningly intense feelings, and, at the same time, given there was no outlet for them, one of utter stultification. It was about as hard a reality as you could get, yet nowhere else could fantasies and delusions grow so thick and fast.";
Having also undergone lengthy training as a counselor and psychotherapist, Page-also a qualified carpenter and joiner, with an M.A. in Creative Writing-found she was well-positioned to revisit her abandoned manuscript in the relative tranquility of the Gulf Islands. Her seventh novel since 1986, and Page's first as a new Canadian, Alphabet was nominated for the 2005 Governor General's Award for Fiction. 0-75381-861-2
by Cherie Thiessen
[BCBW 2006]
Frankie Styne & the Silver Man (Phoenix $23.95)
Review
Kathy Page's themes have been identified as loss, survival, transformation and "the magic by which a bad hand becomes a good chance."; Her newly reissued Frankie Styne & the Silver Man is about the very odd relationship between an obsessive loner who writes gruesome killer novels and his new next-door neighbours, a new mother and her highly unusual infant named Jim.
When the novelist Frank hatches a real-life plot, the lives of the mother Liz and her very strange child are transformed. This new edition marks the onset of a new Writers' Union of Canada initiative to assist members to revive out-of-print work.
9780969079651
[BCBW 2008]
Interview with Kathy Page
Interview (2009)
Margaret Thompson interviews Kathy Page for WordWorks, Autumn 2009.
WW: Any book is the outcome of months-probably years-of hard labour, and the
exercise of a wide variety of skills. As an established fiction writer, very familiar with the
construction of novels, what would you say are the most important parts of the process?
K.P: The idea for a book can be powerful and persistent, but also quite vague: not a
totally solid foundation. I do write outlines and so on, and the finished books do
significantly resemble them, but I'm well aware that they are just stories I am telling
myself about how the book might go. For me, it's first draft, which you get to any way
you can, then revision, which is often very radical, and what makes the book. The first
draft is a very important landmark in the process, but it's often more like a survey of the
territory than an actual construction.
WW: Why do you say, "which you get to any way you can";? That suggests urgency. If
writing that draft is as exploratory as you suggest in "a survey of the territory,";
shouldn't you prepare thoroughly before setting pen to paper?
K.P: Well, that sounds very reasonable, but should and shouldn't don't really work here
(for me). It's only once I have committed myself to a story idea that it really reveals
itself. By writing, you deepen your knowledge of the story and the characters and then
sometimes your ideas about what it is, and who they are, begin to change.
WW: One of the things I was thinking of when I asked about preparations for the first
draft was research. Research is most commonly associated with non-fiction for obvious
reasons. Are the reasons the same for a fiction writer, or does a novelist do research for
specifically fictional ends? If so, can you give any examples from your own work?
K.P: I (mostly) enjoy research. My ends are certainly fictional-I'm using what I
discover, rather than being faithful to it. At the same time, though, things I learn through
research may influence the story, even change it or take it in an unexpected direction.
My research into the treatment of sex offenders, for example, supplied much of the
structure for an entire section of Alphabet, where Simon participates in group drama
therapy and is subjected to the penile plesmograph and "story tapes"; designed to rewrite
his sexual script... What I discovered in 1996 about the treatment of burns gave me a
turning point scene in The Story of My Face, where, towards the end of the book, Natalie
reveals herself and what she has suffered physically to the reader. I couldn't have written
that passage without the generosity of James Partridge, founder of the UK charity
Changing Faces, and a burn survivor himself; he put aside several hours to share details
of his own treatment and rehabilitation with me, as well as his thoughts on living with
disfigurement.
As for The Find, when a genetics counselor began to explain what they call the
"protocols"; for genetic testing for Huntington's Disease, I realized straightaway that this
was material I would be using and was able to ask her to go into a great deal of detail.
The protocols are a series of stages that have to be passed through before the test results
can be given, and they are there largely to give people time to think through what they are
doing and why, to allow them time to change their minds, and ensure they are as prepared
as they can be to take on whatever result they receive. I found the care that had gone into
creating this process both fascinating and moving and this material provided me with
several important scenes and an underlying structure for the entire book, which, despite
all the other action of the story, is shaped around Anna's decision to change her mind,
take the test, and in so doing, to look her own future in the face.
WW: You did a considerable amount of research in two wildly different spheres for your
new novel, The Find, but-correct me if I'm wrong-I don't think you have any direct
personal involvement with inherited degenerative neurological disease or discovering
fossils. Why did you choose Huntington's Chorea and paleontology as the key topics in
the story?
K.P: An idea brews for years, sometimes, and I'm only semi conscious of it. One of the
things about creativity, I think, is that apparently disconnected things are combined into
new wholes. I remember reading an article called "Bring me My Phillips Mental Jacket";
in the London Review of Books in which the author, Slavoj ?i?ek, writing about
biogenetic intervention, used this matter of the choice to know or not to know whether
one would get HD as an example of something or other-I forget exactly what-but I
was blown away by the hugeness and complexity of the choice. And I have two friends
who are caring for people with HD, so the disease and the position it puts families in (to
know or not to know) have been in my awareness for many years. Anna is a
paleontologist and I think that was inspired by a visit to the museum in Courtenay, where
they have a lovely Elasmosaur suspended from the ceiling (it was discovered by a child).
And then, when you look at them, these two things don't seem to me to be so wildly
distinct. They're intimately connected: mutation and evolution, chance and fate. And of
course, in the novel, they are both discoveries to be made, and both part of the same
person, Anna, who at the start, wants very badly to know some things, but doesn't want
to take the test.
WW: Did your own life experience provide the basic research for your earlier novels,
like The Story of My Face and Alphabet? I'm wondering whether that kind of knowledge
hold the same kind of validity as the more scholarly variety.
K.P: So far, I have tended not to write about my own life. I'm interested in what's
beyond me, in the Other. So I'm always involved in finding out.
That said, part of Story takes place in Finland, and I have worked there; Alphabet takes
place in a prison, and again, I've worked in one and it was that experience that made me
want to write the book. But in each case, there were huge unknown areas which I had to
find out about: I've mentioned the treatment of sex-offenders; social conditions and
religious sects in nineteenth century Finland, and religious sects in general, for example.
Now knowledge of the facts is one thing, but sensory detail, things you have seen and
touched, are the real resources for writing. Going inside an old wooden church in Finland
and walking around the graveyard afterwards was worth a book or two of facts (and gave
me the name of one of my characters). The vicarage nearby was a complete gift, too. So
when I research something outside of my experience, I'm not trying to become an expert
on it, I'm trying to discover what it was like to live within it, to get to that physical level
wherever possible.
In exploring the background for The Find, for example, I spent time with a genetics
counselor, and a neurologist, as well as the two people I know who have HD. I
interviewed a psychiatrist, and someone working at the testing laboratory. So in the end,
my knowledge of the test was multilayered. Because Anna is a paleontologist, I bored the
one paleontologist I know personally with endless questions about her training and
motivation. Then I made several trips to The Royal Tyrell Museum at Drumheller: I
interviewed some of the curators there, attended an entire paleontological conference,
talked to many of the delegates, hung out in the beer tent. I went on a dig, took
photographs, poked around in the storage rooms...I read many books as well, but they
were hard going... These down to earth(!) kinds of research are what I find most helpful
and inspiring.
WW: We've talked about research. Can we move on to the second R-revision, or
rewriting-for a bit? Most people would find writing a novel daunting enough; rewriting
it is almost too much. But you said at the beginning that it's what makes the book. You
are an indefatigable reviser, and I know that all your novels go through many different
manifestations before they are published. What gives you the resolve for so much work?
Do you ever hesitate to murder your darlings?
K.P: Once I have an idea as to how it could be different or better, I really want to see
how it will turn out that way. Revision (by which I mean big changes and cuts, not
tinkering) is a huge amount of work, but at the same time, it excites me. So I imagine a
new version of the novel and want to make it real. That said, I do sometimes cling to
those darlings. It can take me a long time to let go, too. It really does help if I can put the
project aside and return to it after six months or longer.
WW: How do you go about dismantling what you have written?
K.P: Print out the old version, read it, make notes, keep it close by- but also, start a
brand new file.
WW: Does there always come a time when you consult someone else? How influential is
that feedback?
K.P: Yes, I always want to test what I have done. I weigh the response against my view
of the person as a reader. People can't always articulate what they feel, or say it very
clearly, so you have to interpret. The tiniest things can be useful.
WW: How valuable have you found agents, publishers or editors as far as rewriting is
concerned?
K.P: I've found editors very useful when they do offer substantive suggestions. Many do
not. Agents have been very useful too. They have to take the book out and present it to
publishers, and if they feel it's not working, or has no commercial appeal, that's hard for
them to do. Some agents are great readers/literary critics, some are perhaps too focused
on the market place. (A degree of this is good, of course, but too much can perhaps blind
them to the inherent value of an idea or piece of writing.)
WW: Is there ever a time when you would dig in your heels and refuse to change
something? Can you give an example?
K.P: Editors can see problems, but it's the writer who must find solutions. On the whole,
I've found most editorial input useful, and have gone along with it, though not always
taking the suggested remedy.
Once, I experimented with writing a story for a women's magazine. The girl in the story
decided not to keep her baby and I was asked to change this to suit the market concerned,
and I decided against it. I wanted to subvert the romance genre, not go along with it.
And in my first novel, Back in the First Person, I have a black character who is illiterate.
This was perfectly realistic, given his environment, but I was asked to change it for
reasons of political correctness: do not represent black people as illiterate. This was in
1986. After due consideration, and consultation with several black people, I refused,
saying I was happy to take the consequences. No one complained.
WW: Just as a reality check for aspiring novelists, how many drafts of The Find have
you written, and how long have they taken?
K.P: At least four drafts, and as many years. Plus a bit of thinking and note-taking for a
year or so before.
WW: Looking back at that exercise, and similar ones with earlier novels, can you now
define the ways in which rewriting strengthened the original concept? What kind of
changes had the most significant impact?
K.P: Point of view is something that I have often changed in the course of a book.
Alphabet was begun in the first person, but ended up a close third. I didn't discover
Natalie's voice until I'd done a first draft of The Story of My Face. And true to form,
much of the revision of The Find has centred around the point of view and story- telling
voice. I began it wanting to write in a quite knowing third person, because I felt the story
would work best with that kind of flexibility, but also because my last two books had
each used the point of view of one of the characters and I just wanted to do something
different. Halfway through, I lost my grip on this, and felt that I had to write in the first
person for the two main characters. Much, much later, I realized that this didn't work
because it interfered with the momentum of the story. And I did still hanker after the
distance a more knowing third person voice could give. So although I resisted the work
involved, I eventually recast it in a new kind of third-person narration. Of course that
isn't just changing the pronouns and verbs. Every sentence and every scene needed to be
reconsidered. I think the first-person interlude helped me to understand both characters.
Structurally, I dithered a lot between two beginning points, liking them both, and in the
end managed to weld them together (the new storytelling voice helped with this), and I
also played around a great deal with how to reveal Anna's huge but necessary back
story... It's endless really! Perhaps some people get it right first time, but I am just not
one of them.
WW: Is it possible to do too much rewriting? How do you know when you've done
enough?
K.P. There's a particular feeling of exhaustion/satisfaction... Okay, I'm done. As
opposed to Well, maybe. But even that isn't totally reliable and yes, I think there's a
danger of changing things simply because you are bored with how it reads to you, having
read it ninety-six times! This is where having enough time is important-you can judge
all this better if you are allowing the draft to sit and "go cold"; between revisions.
WW: We are including a page of revision from an earlier version of The Find. Would
you set it up for us please, and perhaps explain why nobody will find it in the novel when
it's published next spring?
K.P: This passage of descriptive writing (which continues on the next page) was for
quite a long time the beginning of the book. It's one of those darlings you mentioned. I
like rain. And I like some of the sentences, and the idea of this young man, Scott, waking
up in the night and having this moment of wonderful alertness, listening to the rain,
before all sorts of trouble starts to come his way. On the other hand, it is slow, and the
story has not really started: it's the moment before the beginning, really. When I changed
to a completely different beginning, I played around with inserting this material (which I
was somehow attached to) later on, but I realized that the break in chronology was going
to be confusing to anyone who had not read the earlier versions. Eventually, I managed to
make myself cut it, and begin later in Scott's story when things are more exciting. I saved
a couple of sentences (underlined in the passage that follows this interview). Still, I like
knowing that this moment did exist; it's just that I have decided not to show it.
WW: It's always fascinating to see how someone's mind works, Kathy; so thank you for
those insights into the way you work. I know you've already plunged into that exploratory
first draft of another novel, and while that's gestating, we'll look forward to spring and
publication of The Find (McArthur & Company).
WordWorks
