FEDERATION OF BRITISH COLUMBIA WRITERS
Gail Anderson-Dargatz, cont’d 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 comparisons 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 own experience as a farmer, I believe. 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 ShuswapThompson 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 B.C. 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 fogshrouded 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 huge 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 are 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 the 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, at 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, marriages, deaths. Does that pattern hold for Turtle Valley? What a lovely compliment! Well, I certainly hope that 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 on 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 of the characters from The Cure started tapping me on the shoulder and asking to be written about
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WORDWORKS–FALL 2007