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Sketching the Outline of the Dream
Margaret Thompson interviews Gail Anderson-Dargatz for WordWorks Fall 2007.
Gail Anderson-Dargatz needs no introduction. She is an internationally known and celebrated author who has earned a prodigious number of prestigious awards: her first novel, The Cure for Death by Lightning, for example, won the Vancity Book Prize, the Ethel Wilson BC Book Prize, the UK's Betty Trask Prize, and just to round things out, was a Giller finalist as well. A Recipe for Bees was also an international bestseller and Giller finalist, A Rhinestone Button made the national bestseller list, and her very first book, The Miss Hereford Stories, was a finalist for the Leacock Award for humour. Anderson-Dargatz also teaches fiction in the MFA creative writing program at UBC, and lives in the Shuswap, in the landscape of so many of her stories. In between returning from a festival at Woody Point, Newfoundland, where she launched her new novel, Turtle Valley (and had a honeymoon!) and setting out on the road once more, she drew breath at home and agreed to an interview with Margaret Thompson, conducted by email.
The publication of your first novel, The Cure for Death by Lightning, was the cue for a flood of comparisons and labels-you were compared to Margaret Laurence, Alice Munro, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and the novel was hailed as the emergence of Pacific Northwest Gothic. What was your reaction to these comparisons? Were they of any use? Relevance? Or just a burden on a new novelist?
Those labels were cool! And often quite funny. I'm really not sure what "Pacific Northwest Gothic"; means, though I'm sure because of it, I ought to wear black. But how can you complain about being compared to Margaret Laurence and Alice Munro? Both these writers were, and continue to be, my heroes. The comparison with Gabriel Garcia Marquez seemed a wee bit silly, however flattering. Anyone who throws ghosts and premonitions into the mix seems to get compared to Mr. Marquez. But his writing is so terribly different, and wonderful. I just grew up hearing a lot of weird and spooky tales in the Shuswap. That's where the magic comes from.
You have described your mother as your Muse. Can you tell us more about that?
Irene Anderson was a writer herself, and the reason I became a writer. Just as my character Beth does in Turtle Valley, my mom spent most of her days scribbling down the events of her days on stationery, sometimes to send as letters, sometimes to keep as a sort of journal, but very often to fax to me in response to the questions I asked of her as I researched for my fiction. She offered me her stories, but more importantly she gave me her approach to life. As I wrote on my blog, she helped me to see the good in everyone, and the magic in the everyday.
Magic realism, a natural affinity for the inexplicable-premonition, dreams, synchronicity, second sight-is an integral part of your novels, as much as the rural landscape. I understand its place in your own experience, but how would you describe its importance in the construction of your novels. What kind of creative advantage does it give you?
Working in magic realism gives the writer tremendously useful tools to demonstrate the psychological issues of her characters. For example, writers have been struggling forever to express the mystical experience, something that by its nature can't be expressed. In A Rhinestone Button, I gave my character synaesthesia, a cross-over of the senses, so he senses sound as colour and tactile sensation, in order to allow the reader to experience something of that mystical experience. In Turtle Valley, rather than wax on in exposition, flashback and/or dialogue about how the history of this family continues to haunt it, I expressed that in a literal haunting: ghosts walk this farm and follow its inhabitants. The past lives on.
Job, in A Rhinestone Button, is a character with a wonderfully magical quality which eventually disappears. It seems to be replaced by his happiness at an almost mystical perception of the presence of something mysterious-God?-in all things. Is this a more profound sort of magic?
The mystical experience is cool, but man, what's here, right now, in front of us, is way cooler. To hold my little girl in my arms and feel her cheek against my neck. To eat that really great, soul-altering meal. To master a skill like writing and feel that exhilaration and satisfaction that comes at the end of a writing day. To spend an evening with my lover and see his eyes glisten as he takes in my face. That's magic.
The other trademark of your novels is the rural landscape, again with obvious connections to your own background. In your new novel, Turtle Valley, you have returned to the setting of your first novel, and even to some of the same characters. Apart from familiarity, what is it about rural Canada and its people that draws you back over and over again? If you were to write a book with an urban setting, how do you think it would differ (if it did!)?
I have written urban; I started out that way. But when I returned to the small town, rural landscape that I grew up in, when I stepped off the pavement, well, that's when the magic started to happen. Things are not neat and orderly or expected here. The wild is still very close. A bear ripped off the door to my garbage shed just recently and I see from his calling card that he's returned for our plums. Coyotes regularly run through our backyard. Anyone who has spent any time in the bush knows that here is where we face the deepest part of our subconscious.
But I'm curious why I keep getting asked this question as I know many of my city dwelling buddies don't get asked why they write urban, which is something I'd be very curious about. What draws these writers back to the city over and over again when there is so much rural, small town and wild landscape in this province, in this country, to explore? If they wrote a book in a rural setting would it be different? You betcha.
The reality is, of course, that fewer and fewer writers write about rural settings because most writers live in the city. However a great many people do still live out here. Rural living is still very much our reality in this country, and it needs to be expressed, now more than ever as we struggle with environmental issues. As Jack Hodgins and I were saying on my forum, we both get a little annoyed with the unspoken assumption that the urban experience is somehow more worthy of writing about and why would anyone want to write about a rural experience (hence the comparison with rural writers from the past)? That rural living is somehow less sophisticated. But when I look for story, of course I'm looking for conflict, and man, is there ever potential for conflict in a small town setting. Everybody knows what you're up to and by god they all have a stake in it. There is much less opportunity for that sort of conflict in an urban setting where the people around you often don't realize you are there, much less care enough to stick their nose in your business!
A Rhinestone Button is set in Godsfinger, a fictional town in Alberta (a perfect name! If there were prizes for fictional names, you'd be adding to your list of awards)-again making use of your experience as a farmer. Is rural Alberta essentially the same as the Shuswap, or are there differences that intrigued you?
Oh, rural Alberta is worlds away from the rural Shuswap-Thompson I know both in terms of landscape and culture. When I was living in Alberta I went on book tour through New Zealand. I experienced far more culture shock in Alberta than I did in New Zealand! So, I'm a BC girl. And of course, the landscapes are so very different. In fact it was in that flat prairie landscape that I first came to understand that I carried a map of the Shuswap inside of me and that this was how I expected the world to look: layers of forested mountains, lakes and fog-shrouded hills. A secretive, gothic place. But in Alberta, everything is laid open; neighbours know exactly what you are up to. And in that prairie landscape my sense of perspective was off: I kept missing turnoffs or stopping for them too early because my sense of distance was so distorted by that strange horizon that contained no mountains. It gave the Alberta landscape a magical feel: the big sky, the perfect clouds receding below the horizon. It always felt a wee bit like those Monty Python cartoons: I expected that any moment God would stamp down a big foot and squish someone.
I know the feeling exactly! In A Recipe for Bees, the narrator says of Augusta's memories, "Sometimes she believed her own stories as truth; other times she believed them as fiction."; Does this reflect your own approach to using personal recollection in your novels?
Oh, for sure. I sometimes don't quite remember what is real and what I made up in my own books. But that's true for all of us. It's a fact of the way the brain works that we make up a memory each time we remember it. As we recall a memory it is reinvented, reconstructed, and that memory is deeply influenced by what we're going through right now. So, it's the old what's truth and what's fiction? As I write in Turtle Valley, "memory (is) such a mercurial companion, and one not to be counted on.";
You have said, "My job as a fiction writer is to sketch the outline of a dream."; That begs for expansion!
Many readers fail to recognize that they create a book right along with the author, that a book changes each time it is read as the reader takes in her own history, expectations, beliefs, and wonderful imagination. If you don't buy that idea, try reading the same book at twenty, thirty, at forty...each time you read the book it will be different. Of course the book itself has remained the same; the reader has changed. So, keeping that in mind, my job as writer is to provide a sketch, a vessel, in which the reader pours his own history, imagination, stories, world view and hopefully, together, we cook up something wonderful.
Your novels seem like very rich tortes to me, the tasty surface always yielding to more and more succulent strata beneath, the present events triggering buried layers of memory, each contributing to an understanding of characters, motives, lives, mariages, deaths. Does that pattern hold for Turtle Valley?
What a lovely compliment! Well, I certainly hope the pattern holds for Turtle Valley. I worked very hard to make it happen. I think the goal of every writer is to have the reader recall the book long after they have read it, to have the reader stumble upon a new realization, perhaps, as they remember some element of the book, much as we might remember a nighttime dream long after having it, and discover something new in it.
A comment you have made about books refers to their "chameleon nature";, which I assume to mean the way we discover new things in books on re-reading, or the way readers have quite different interpretations of the same text. When you look back at your own books, in what way have they changed for you? Do you detect any kind of progression?
I generally don't reread my own books. I'm always on to the next. But as many characters from The Cure started tapping me on the shoulder and asking to be written about again, I went back to The Cure and reread it. I expected to be embarrassed at this young attempt, but I found myself loving the novel, though I also found myself reading it as if another writer had written it. I had changed so much since I wrote the novel that I found it hard to identify with the writing as my own. I do think I'm a much better writer now, and that Turtle Valley is the best novel I've written to date. (I hope I can always say that!) I can see myself maturing through these books, my perspective on life enlarging. No surprise there, I imagine. I have read that a woman writer, in Canada at least, reaches her peak in her fifties. I have that to look forward to.
Every writer, consciously or not, has a compact with a reader. What is the nature of that relationship for you? Have you ever discovered that the book you wrote is not apparently the one they read?
Oh, that happens to me over and over. I'm constantly surprised at what readers see in my novels. Again, this isn't surprising as each reader reads a very different book. I remember having a reader recognize me in a bookstore in Ontario and she enthused over a passage in The Cure, delighting in the smells, tastes and textures in such wonderful detail that I felt blessed that I had written such a masterpiece. When I got back to my hotel, I read the section just to bask in the glory of it, and found that it wasn't anything like what she had described. This reader had taken her own marvellous imagination, her own history, her own experiences into the book, and, as I've said, created it with me. It was her own genius that she was reading there. Another time I got an email from a reader who thought The Cure for Death by Lightning was the funniest novel he had ever read! I was flattered, but you know, I don't think I'd invite that fellow over for dinner.
Like many writers, you also teach writing at UBC, and include Mentor in your list of personal roles. The benefits to your students go without saying; what are the benefits to you?
Oh, yes! Simply put, teaching in the MFA creative writing program at UBC has made me a better writer. There is the expected, that when you teach, you must really think about your craft. But as this program is on-line, we attract writers who already have established lives and are accomplished in so many diverse fields (and live and work all over the world; one of my students this year is in Australia). I have "students"; who are producers at CBC, working stage actors, or who work in film. Others have business ventures of their own. And others are highly accomplished writers in other genres. Each of these writers brings not only their unique voice into the workshops, but their unique set of skills as well. For example, one writer gave us all a lesson on interviewing which was so useful that I posted it for the rest of the students on our general forum. Week after week I find myself taking notes. I'm learning as much as the writers I work with. It's a terrific program as we all teach each other.
Can I quote you again? You have said, "If I'm not surprised by a day of writing, I don't feel I'm doing my job."; Would you expand that, please? What kind of surprise are you hoping for, and what, precisely, do you feel your job is?
Well, that's the great dilemma we're all faced with at the cocktail party, isn't it? What exactly does a writer do? Maybe the real question is, "What do you feel your role is?"; What is a writer's role? I imagine the answer to that question is different for each writer who answers it. Shelagh Rogers interviewed me on stage at the Writers at Woody Point festival in Newfoundland this past week. During this interview Shelagh asked me a question that, surprisingly, I haven't been asked before. She said, "You've been so candid about where your writing comes from. What has that cost you?"; I really had to think about that one. Aside from the occasional bit of embarrassment, being candid about my inspirations hasn't really cost me. Rather, it allows others to be candid, too. Each time I do an event where I talk about what has inspired a novel, at least one member of the audience comes up to me afterwards, very often in tears, and relates his or her own story. That's what it's all about for me: opening the door so that others can tell their stories. I remember reading Alice Munro's Lives of Girls and Women for the first time as a very young woman and thinking, this story is about me! A young woman. A Canadian. Living in a rural or small town setting. So my story is worth writing about! That was a revelation. So I guess to the question, "What is your role?"; my answer is that I hope I can give a similar revelation to those who read my stuff. I want to show the reader that his or her stories are not only worth writing about, but worth celebrating.
Your new book is just out, so I'm sure you've already started on the next projects. What's in the works for us to look forward to?
I'm about a year and a half into the next book. I'm again writing about this Shuswap landscape, the river this time. It's a much more poetic novel, much more focused on language. I'm writing sections of it as poetry, and then translating (quite literally) back into prose. And I expect some innovations. I'm back to my experimental self, at least a little. But, as they say in the reviews, while experimental, it will still be "accessible,"; in other words, fun to read.
"Interview"
Gail Anderson-Dargatz needs no introduction. She is an internationally known and celebrated author who has earned a prodigious number of prestigious awards: her first novel, The Cure for Death by Lightning, for example, won the Vancity Book Prize, the Ethel Wilson BC Book Prize, the UK's Betty Trask Prize, and just to round things out, was a Giller finalist as well. A Recipe for Bees was also an international bestseller and Giller finalist, A Rhinestone Button made the national bestseller list, and her very first book, The Miss Hereford Stories, was a finalist for the Leacock Award for humour. Anderson-Dargatz also teaches fiction in the MFA creative writing program at UBC, and lives in the Shuswap, in the landscape of so many of her stories. In between returning from a festival at Woody Point, Newfoundland, where she launched her new novel, Turtle Valley (and had a honeymoon!) and setting out on the road once more, she drew breath at home and agreed to an interview with Margaret Thompson, conducted by email.
The publication of your first novel, The Cure for Death by Lightning, was the cue for a flood of comparisons and labels-you were compared to Margaret Laurence, Alice Munro, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and the novel was hailed as the emergence of Pacific Northwest Gothic. What was your reaction to these comparisons? Were they of any use? Relevance? Or just a burden on a new novelist?
Those labels were cool! And often quite funny. I'm really not sure what "Pacific Northwest Gothic"; means, though I'm sure because of it, I ought to wear black. But how can you complain about being compared to Margaret Laurence and Alice Munro? Both these writers were, and continue to be, my heroes. The comparison with Gabriel Garcia Marquez seemed a wee bit silly, however flattering. Anyone who throws ghosts and premonitions into the mix seems to get compared to Mr. Marquez. But his writing is so terribly different, and wonderful. I just grew up hearing a lot of weird and spooky tales in the Shuswap. That's where the magic comes from.
You have described your mother as your Muse. Can you tell us more about that?
Irene Anderson was a writer herself, and the reason I became a writer. Just as my character Beth does in Turtle Valley, my mom spent most of her days scribbling down the events of her days on stationery, sometimes to send as letters, sometimes to keep as a sort of journal, but very often to fax to me in response to the questions I asked of her as I researched for my fiction. She offered me her stories, but more importantly she gave me her approach to life. As I wrote on my blog, she helped me to see the good in everyone, and the magic in the everyday.
Magic realism, a natural affinity for the inexplicable-premonition, dreams, synchronicity, second sight-is an integral part of your novels, as much as the rural landscape. I understand its place in your own experience, but how would you describe its importance in the construction of your novels. What kind of creative advantage does it give you?
Working in magic realism gives the writer tremendously useful tools to demonstrate the psychological issues of her characters. For example, writers have been struggling forever to express the mystical experience, something that by its nature can't be expressed. In A Rhinestone Button, I gave my character synaesthesia, a cross-over of the senses, so he senses sound as colour and tactile sensation, in order to allow the reader to experience something of that mystical experience. In Turtle Valley, rather than wax on in exposition, flashback and/or dialogue about how the history of this family continues to haunt it, I expressed that in a literal haunting: ghosts walk this farm and follow its inhabitants. The past lives on.
Job, in A Rhinestone Button, is a character with a wonderfully magical quality which eventually disappears. It seems to be replaced by his happiness at an almost mystical perception of the presence of something mysterious-God?-in all things. Is this a more profound sort of magic?
The mystical experience is cool, but man, what's here, right now, in front of us, is way cooler. To hold my little girl in my arms and feel her cheek against my neck. To eat that really great, soul-altering meal. To master a skill like writing and feel that exhilaration and satisfaction that comes at the end of a writing day. To spend an evening with my lover and see his eyes glisten as he takes in my face. That's magic.
The other trademark of your novels is the rural landscape, again with obvious connections to your own background. In your new novel, Turtle Valley, you have returned to the setting of your first novel, and even to some of the same characters. Apart from familiarity, what is it about rural Canada and its people that draws you back over and over again? If you were to write a book with an urban setting, how do you think it would differ (if it did!)?
I have written urban; I started out that way. But when I returned to the small town, rural landscape that I grew up in, when I stepped off the pavement, well, that's when the magic started to happen. Things are not neat and orderly or expected here. The wild is still very close. A bear ripped off the door to my garbage shed just recently and I see from his calling card that he's returned for our plums. Coyotes regularly run through our backyard. Anyone who has spent any time in the bush knows that here is where we face the deepest part of our subconscious.
But I'm curious why I keep getting asked this question as I know many of my city dwelling buddies don't get asked why they write urban, which is something I'd be very curious about. What draws these writers back to the city over and over again when there is so much rural, small town and wild landscape in this province, in this country, to explore? If they wrote a book in a rural setting would it be different? You betcha.
The reality is, of course, that fewer and fewer writers write about rural settings because most writers live in the city. However a great many people do still live out here. Rural living is still very much our reality in this country, and it needs to be expressed, now more than ever as we struggle with environmental issues. As Jack Hodgins and I were saying on my forum, we both get a little annoyed with the unspoken assumption that the urban experience is somehow more worthy of writing about and why would anyone want to write about a rural experience (hence the comparison with rural writers from the past)? That rural living is somehow less sophisticated. But when I look for story, of course I'm looking for conflict, and man, is there ever potential for conflict in a small town setting. Everybody knows what you're up to and by god they all have a stake in it. There is much less opportunity for that sort of conflict in an urban setting where the people around you often don't realize you are there, much less care enough to stick their nose in your business!
A Rhinestone Button is set in Godsfinger, a fictional town in Alberta (a perfect name! If there were prizes for fictional names, you'd be adding to your list of awards)-again making use of your experience as a farmer. Is rural Alberta essentially the same as the Shuswap, or are there differences that intrigued you?
Oh, rural Alberta is worlds away from the rural Shuswap-Thompson I know both in terms of landscape and culture. When I was living in Alberta I went on book tour through New Zealand. I experienced far more culture shock in Alberta than I did in New Zealand! So, I'm a BC girl. And of course, the landscapes are so very different. In fact it was in that flat prairie landscape that I first came to understand that I carried a map of the Shuswap inside of me and that this was how I expected the world to look: layers of forested mountains, lakes and fog-shrouded hills. A secretive, gothic place. But in Alberta, everything is laid open; neighbours know exactly what you are up to. And in that prairie landscape my sense of perspective was off: I kept missing turnoffs or stopping for them too early because my sense of distance was so distorted by that strange horizon that contained no mountains. It gave the Alberta landscape a magical feel: the big sky, the perfect clouds receding below the horizon. It always felt a wee bit like those Monty Python cartoons: I expected that any moment God would stamp down a big foot and squish someone.
I know the feeling exactly! In A Recipe for Bees, the narrator says of Augusta's memories, "Sometimes she believed her own stories as truth; other times she believed them as fiction."; Does this reflect your own approach to using personal recollection in your novels?
Oh, for sure. I sometimes don't quite remember what is real and what I made up in my own books. But that's true for all of us. It's a fact of the way the brain works that we make up a memory each time we remember it. As we recall a memory it is reinvented, reconstructed, and that memory is deeply influenced by what we're going through right now. So, it's the old what's truth and what's fiction? As I write in Turtle Valley, "memory (is) such a mercurial companion, and one not to be counted on.";
You have said, "My job as a fiction writer is to sketch the outline of a dream."; That begs for expansion!
Many readers fail to recognize that they create a book right along with the author, that a book changes each time it is read as the reader takes in her own history, expectations, beliefs, and wonderful imagination. If you don't buy that idea, try reading the same book at twenty, thirty, at forty...each time you read the book it will be different. Of course the book itself has remained the same; the reader has changed. So, keeping that in mind, my job as writer is to provide a sketch, a vessel, in which the reader pours his own history, imagination, stories, world view and hopefully, together, we cook up something wonderful.
Your novels seem like very rich tortes to me, the tasty surface always yielding to more and more succulent strata beneath, the present events triggering buried layers of memory, each contributing to an understanding of characters, motives, lives, mariages, deaths. Does that pattern hold for Turtle Valley?
What a lovely compliment! Well, I certainly hope the pattern holds for Turtle Valley. I worked very hard to make it happen. I think the goal of every writer is to have the reader recall the book long after they have read it, to have the reader stumble upon a new realization, perhaps, as they remember some element of the book, much as we might remember a nighttime dream long after having it, and discover something new in it.
A comment you have made about books refers to their "chameleon nature";, which I assume to mean the way we discover new things in books on re-reading, or the way readers have quite different interpretations of the same text. When you look back at your own books, in what way have they changed for you? Do you detect any kind of progression?
I generally don't reread my own books. I'm always on to the next. But as many characters from The Cure started tapping me on the shoulder and asking to be written about again, I went back to The Cure and reread it. I expected to be embarrassed at this young attempt, but I found myself loving the novel, though I also found myself reading it as if another writer had written it. I had changed so much since I wrote the novel that I found it hard to identify with the writing as my own. I do think I'm a much better writer now, and that Turtle Valley is the best novel I've written to date. (I hope I can always say that!) I can see myself maturing through these books, my perspective on life enlarging. No surprise there, I imagine. I have read that a woman writer, in Canada at least, reaches her peak in her fifties. I have that to look forward to.
Every writer, consciously or not, has a compact with a reader. What is the nature of that relationship for you? Have you ever discovered that the book you wrote is not apparently the one they read?
Oh, that happens to me over and over. I'm constantly surprised at what readers see in my novels. Again, this isn't surprising as each reader reads a very different book. I remember having a reader recognize me in a bookstore in Ontario and she enthused over a passage in The Cure, delighting in the smells, tastes and textures in such wonderful detail that I felt blessed that I had written such a masterpiece. When I got back to my hotel, I read the section just to bask in the glory of it, and found that it wasn't anything like what she had described. This reader had taken her own marvellous imagination, her own history, her own experiences into the book, and, as I've said, created it with me. It was her own genius that she was reading there. Another time I got an email from a reader who thought The Cure for Death by Lightning was the funniest novel he had ever read! I was flattered, but you know, I don't think I'd invite that fellow over for dinner.
Like many writers, you also teach writing at UBC, and include Mentor in your list of personal roles. The benefits to your students go without saying; what are the benefits to you?
Oh, yes! Simply put, teaching in the MFA creative writing program at UBC has made me a better writer. There is the expected, that when you teach, you must really think about your craft. But as this program is on-line, we attract writers who already have established lives and are accomplished in so many diverse fields (and live and work all over the world; one of my students this year is in Australia). I have "students"; who are producers at CBC, working stage actors, or who work in film. Others have business ventures of their own. And others are highly accomplished writers in other genres. Each of these writers brings not only their unique voice into the workshops, but their unique set of skills as well. For example, one writer gave us all a lesson on interviewing which was so useful that I posted it for the rest of the students on our general forum. Week after week I find myself taking notes. I'm learning as much as the writers I work with. It's a terrific program as we all teach each other.
Can I quote you again? You have said, "If I'm not surprised by a day of writing, I don't feel I'm doing my job."; Would you expand that, please? What kind of surprise are you hoping for, and what, precisely, do you feel your job is?
Well, that's the great dilemma we're all faced with at the cocktail party, isn't it? What exactly does a writer do? Maybe the real question is, "What do you feel your role is?"; What is a writer's role? I imagine the answer to that question is different for each writer who answers it. Shelagh Rogers interviewed me on stage at the Writers at Woody Point festival in Newfoundland this past week. During this interview Shelagh asked me a question that, surprisingly, I haven't been asked before. She said, "You've been so candid about where your writing comes from. What has that cost you?"; I really had to think about that one. Aside from the occasional bit of embarrassment, being candid about my inspirations hasn't really cost me. Rather, it allows others to be candid, too. Each time I do an event where I talk about what has inspired a novel, at least one member of the audience comes up to me afterwards, very often in tears, and relates his or her own story. That's what it's all about for me: opening the door so that others can tell their stories. I remember reading Alice Munro's Lives of Girls and Women for the first time as a very young woman and thinking, this story is about me! A young woman. A Canadian. Living in a rural or small town setting. So my story is worth writing about! That was a revelation. So I guess to the question, "What is your role?"; my answer is that I hope I can give a similar revelation to those who read my stuff. I want to show the reader that his or her stories are not only worth writing about, but worth celebrating.
Your new book is just out, so I'm sure you've already started on the next projects. What's in the works for us to look forward to?
I'm about a year and a half into the next book. I'm again writing about this Shuswap landscape, the river this time. It's a much more poetic novel, much more focused on language. I'm writing sections of it as poetry, and then translating (quite literally) back into prose. And I expect some innovations. I'm back to my experimental self, at least a little. But, as they say in the reviews, while experimental, it will still be "accessible,"; in other words, fun to read.
"Interview"
Submitted on July 2, 2010 in By David.
