12 or 20 (second series) questions with Eliza Robertson

Eliza Robertson [photo credit: Sara Hembree] was born in Vancouver and grew up on Vancouver Island. Her stories have been shortlisted for the Journey Prize and CBC Short Story Prize. In 2013, she won the Commonwealth Short Story Prize. Her first collection of stories, Wallflowers, came out with Hamish Hamilton Canada and Bloomsbury this year. She lives in England.

1 - How did your first book change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?
Well- it made me a "published author" rather than "writing student," but that answer only makes a difference when you've blagued your way onto a work visa. Honestly, I feel the same way about writing as I did a few years ago.

My more recent work is less exploratory with form, I think. I am exploring other things instead, like how a character thinks. I have always had trouble with how characters think! Saying that, I just wrote a story modelled after my astrological birth chart. Old habits, &c.

2 - How did you come to fiction first, as opposed to, say, poetry or non-fiction?
That may be the nature of a class called WRIT 100 at UVic. I studied poetry first term, before I realized eighteen adjectives for "blue" was not poetic. My two favourite genres— fiction and screen-writing— were at the end of the year, after I had unlearned a lot of bad habits.

I still screenwrite, though. Right how I am working on a project with Carwell Casswell Productions in the UK. (www.carwellcasswell.com)

3 - How long does it take to start any particular writing project? Does your writing initially come quickly, or is it a slow process? Do first drafts appear looking close to their final shape, or does your work come out of copious notes?
I write so slowly! Novels take ages to start. I have to pretend they are not novels. First drafts do appear close to their final shape, though. That's one bonus to writing at glacial speed.

4 - Where does a short story usually begin for you? Are you an author of short pieces that end up combining into a larger project, or are you working on a "book" from the very beginning?
Further to #3, I rarely think of my projects as "books" until I have a book-length word count. Maybe that will change some day. Short stories begin in details or moments for me. The last story I wrote spun out of two gentlemen who suntan in front of the council flats near my house.

5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?
Neither— I would say they are separate from my creative process. I do enjoy readings. I enjoy most events where writers gather and drink alcohol. (Let's be frank— the audiences of most readings are other writers. But I like events where non-writer readers gather too. Even better!)

6 - Do you have any theoretical concerns behind your writing? What kinds of questions are you trying to answer with your work? What do you even think the current questions are?
Sure. I have concerns like insecurities (see above re: "character thought/emotion.") But I don't think that's what you mean. For my PhD, I am researching rhythm in prose...how rhythm can offer an alternative "metaphor set" to analyze style. I am interested in both micro and macro rhythms—from punctuation marks to a novel's white space. I don't dwell on theory when I am writing, though.

7 – What do you see the current role of the writer being in larger culture? Does s/he even have one? What do you think the role of the writer should be?
I am not idealistic or prescriptive about these things. I think writers should be true to what they want to write. The funnelling of that work into "culture" will take care of itself.

8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?
I have always written with an editor... Be they university instructors, workshop pals, PhD supervisors, my agent, magazine editors, friends or family. Other people's opinions are integral to my revision process. With this book so far, I have mostly worked with my Canadian editor, Nicole Winstanley. I really respect and value her notes. Where I run into trouble, on occasion, is the copy editing. My MA supervisor, Andrew Cowan, once called my punctuation "unhelpfully eccentric."

9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?
I hear so much good advice and forget it instantly. Right now one the one that applies to me might be, "just get on with it."

10 - What kind of writing routine do you tend to keep, or do you even have one? How does a typical day (for you) begin?
With porridge and coffee. Typically, I write in the morning for a few hours and do email admin in the afternoon. But that routine has been less defined of late. I write when I can, and particularly near deadlines.

11 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?
Other writers. Herta Müller and Marilynne Robinson helped dig me out of my current work-in-progress. Housekeeping and The Land of Green Plums both revitalised the project when I was falling asleep at the wheel. (Not in any discernible way to readers, I am sure.)

12 - What fragrance reminds you of home?
Woodsmoke and seaweed.

13 - David W. McFadden once said that books come from books, but are there any other forms that influence your work, whether nature, music, science or visual art?
Well, I can't write without headphones, so music inspires me in an indirect, noise-cancelling way. I am also inspired by visual art— especially photography. I talk about that more on Hamish Hamilton's The Looking Glass. (http://www.hamishhamilton.ca/looking-glass/)

14 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?
I already mentioned Herta Müller and Marilynne Robinson. Also: Mark Anthony Jarman, Zsuzsi Gartner, Annabel Lyon, Lorrie Moore, Lydia Davis, Flannery O'Connor, Raymond Carver, Anne Carson...

15 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?
Go to India or South Africa.

Make my own yogurt.

16 - If you could pick any other occupation to attempt, what would it be? Or, alternately, what do you think you would have ended up doing had you not been a writer?
I'd happily work in film. Production or pre-production, probably, though I've enjoyed editing in the past.

17 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?
It started to feel better to do something more creative and self-guided. I wanted to go into law for a long time.

18 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?
Book- Autobiography of Red by Anne Carson

Film- I recently watched Nebraska on the plane and really enjoyed it.

19 - What are you currently working on?
Well, I am technically still working on that novel I mentioned. And I've started another for the phd. So far, it's set on an island in the 1950s.

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

Ali Smith, Artful

We do treat books surprisingly lightly in contemporary culture. We’d never expect to understand a piece of music on one listen, but we tend to believe we’ve read a book after reading it just once. Books and music share more in terms of resonance than just a present-tense correlation of heard note to read word. Books need time to dawn on us, it takes time to understand what makes them, structurally, in thematic resonance, in afterthought, and always in correspondence with the books which came before them, because books are produced by books more than writers; they’re a result of all the books that went before them. Great books are adaptable; they alter with us as we alter in life, they renew themselves as we change and re-read them at different times in our lives. You can’t step into the same story twice—or maybe it’s that stories, books, art can’t step into the same person twice, maybe it’s that they allow for our mutability, are ready for us at all times, and maybe it’ this adaptability, regardless of time, that makes them art, because real art (as opposed to more transient art, which is real too, just for less time) will hold us at all our different ages like it held all the people before us and will hold all the people after us, in an elasticity and with a generosity that allow for all our comings and goings. Because come then go we will, and in that order.

Originally produced “as four lectures given for the Weidenfeld Visiting Professorship in European Comparative Literature at St. Anne’s College, Oxford, in January and February 2012” is Scottish writer Ali Smith’s hybrid Artful (Penguin, 2013). Part novel and part essay, I always wonder when reading such magnificent books as these: how many hybrids must be produced before they are seen as their very own species? I think of works by W.G.Sebald, Michael Turner, or the prose of Susan Howe, for example. Hybrid works are less the exception; so why is there still such resistance?

Composed in four sections – “On time,” “On form,” “On edge” and “On offer and on reflection,” as well as the endnote “Some sources” – Artful moves through the story of a narrator in mourning, while going through her dead partner’s papers, from which much of the essay-thread of the book is built, a combination of the pieces themselves and the narrator’s own reading. Beyond that, the dead lover manages to reappear at her desk, speaking in a language that the narrator doesn’t understand, causing the narrator to rethink her own sanity. A book on loss and love and death, how does one return from the dead? Smith weaves brilliantly her fiction-as-lectures on grieving and the nature of storytelling and art, and the impossibly known and unknown.

I’ve only read two of her books previously, but there are shades here of the returned dead from Hotel World (2002), a book I admittedly had difficulty entering, and the reworkings of Ovid, as in her brilliant myth-retelling Girl Meets Boy (2007) [see my little note on such here]. The two sides of this work – a heartbreaking story of loss, grief and revitalization, and an exploration on literary creation – blend perfectly, neither side outweighing the other. Each lecture is patterned with an opening that leans more on the side of fiction, with three sections presented as papers (again, through the eyes of our grieving narrator). The essay-fiction form reminds me slightly of the essays of Alberta writer Aritha Van Herk, from whom we’ve heard so little of over the past decade or so. (A part of me tethers the two together, that she might be the ghost Ali Smith’s narrator speaks to, but I know this not to be true.) There is the series of through-lines that hold the entirety of the work together, the abstracts of her tangible arguments, the narrator’s evolution of grief, as well as Charles Dickens, both Oliver Twist and the musical Oliver!, the works of numerous poets and Greek, as language, histories and literatures.

How lost, how deeply felt these pieces are; how might they have been received as lectures? Oh, I write in my notebook, how I wish I could have been there in that lecture hall, three rows from the back, listening. I would have been happy, and mystified.

Helen Oyeyemi, Mr. Fox

Mary Foxe came by the other day—the last person on earth I was expecting to see. I'd have tidied up if I'd known she was coming. I'd have combed my hair. I'd have shaved. At least I was wearing a suit; I strive for a sense of professionalism. I was sitting in my study, writing badly, just making words on the page, waiting for something good to come through, some sentence I could keep. It was taking longer that day than it usually did, but I didn't mind. The windows were open. I was sort of listening to something by Glazunov; there's a symphony of his you can't listen to with the windows closed, you just can't. Well, I guess you could, but you'd get agitated and run at the walls. Maybe that's just me.

And so opens British writer Helen Oyeyemi's fourth novel, Mr. Fox (Toronto ON: Penguin/Hamish Hamilton, 2011), moving the main thread of a triangle-of-sorts between the author Mr. St. John Fox, his wife Daphne, and Mr. Fox's character who comes to life, Mary Foxe. What does it mean when the muse actually appears? Wrapping the main thread with a collage of stories, some fairy-tale, some fantasy, all magical, the action collages and even accumulates into a sequence of stories furthering the main action, the dance between three characters who don't entirely know what is happening. It's impressive the way that the further Oyeyemi's diversions stray from the main thread of the novel, the closer they relate. In a wonderful display of insight and play, Oyeyemi's Mr. Fox concerns itself with the way couples sometimes come together, interplay and even, how they might fall apart, from the husbands and wives, random strangers, lovers and even to other species:

What can it mean for a fox to approach a girl? Foxes are solitary. A fox that seeks out human company is planning evil. Or it has something the matter with it. Rabies, or something worse. The fox watched the girl at play, and he didn't understand what she was doing—it certainly wasn't fox business. Still, it interested him, and he gazed and gazed at her as she sat surrounded by all that greedy, dangerous fire that she kept in jars. He gazed and gazed though it served no purpose to do so, gazed without feeling satisfied and with the sensation of a deep scratch in his side (this was an awareness of time and its disappointments, the certainty that the girl would put out the lamps before he had looked his fill). And it was through observing the girl at play that our fox learnt to recognize beauty elsewhere in the wood. Whenever he became caught up in useless looking, he knew. Moonlight on the water brought rapture. Think of a fox, dipping his paws in silver, muzzle dripping. He didn't want to drink the water, only to touch it while it looked like that. Another fox came by and laughed at him. But our fox didn't care.

As Oyeyemi writes, the fox is solitary, as are each of the characters in this fantastic novel, yet each are still drawn to something other, something unknown, whether a kind of companionship, or the search for that unknown missing piece. Mary Foxe, it would seem, was compelled with such force that she came into being, stepping out of a fiction composed at first by St. John Fox, and then by herself, before all that happened next. It's intriguing, since what the book copy calls St. John Fox's “muse” doesn't necessarily propel the author to produce his books, but instead, exists as an anchor for him during difficult periods. Might “muse” be the wrong word? Still, Oyeyemi's novel concerns itself with various questions, including What is the nature of love and companionship? What is the nature of becoming, the self, in the world? How does one strike the balance between solitary and being part of something other?

I realize I'm reading very finely between the lines here, but maybe these two had fallen in love, and wanted to spare each other the anxiety of speaking with subtext, each wondering what the other wanted. A boy of weak character and his strong-minded friend: Neither would have been likely to declare themselves first. It's not impossible, is it, that what I'm saying could be true? It's the abruptness more than anything. In the first place they seem to have chosen each other to confide in, out of all the boys in the Academy, when actually it would have been safer to do as most of us do and confide only in our diaries. For many months these two found something to say to each other every day. Then they married, and nothing. There are feelings of some kind in this matter, even if I don't know what they are. The lake deeper than either of them had supposed, Charles kicking for shore with Charlie in his arms, the seconds without light or breath before both heads rose up and claimed them...

Helen Oyeyemi launches Mr. Fox in Ottawa on Sunday, October 23, as part of the ottawa international writers festival.