12 or 20 (second series) questions with Shani Mootoo

Shani Mootoo’s novels include Starry Starry Night, Polar Vortex, and Cereus Blooms at Night. A four-time nominee for the Giller Prize, her work has been long and shortlisted for the Booker Prize, the Lambda Literary Prize, and the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. Her poetry books include Oh Witness Dey!, Cane | Fire, and The Predicament of Or. She has been awarded the Doctor of Letters honoris causa degree from Western University, is a recipient of Lambda Literary's James Duggins Outstanding Mid-Career Novelist Prize, the Writers' Trust Engel Findley Award, and The National Library’s Library and Archives Scholar Award. 

1 - How did your first book change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?
I had no idea I would continue to write after my first book was published. I was a visual artist and videomaker and had not intended to write for publication at all, but a publisher approached me and invited me to write a book for them. As a kind of dare to myself, an experiment, I wrote nine short stories and called the lot Out on Main Street, after one of the short stories. It was meant to be an opportunity taken, but I was surprised by two things--how much I enjoyed working with verbal language, as different from visual language. I enjoyed making up stories, the whole process of working on the "how-to' of this kind of story telling. And then, when the book came out, I was amazed by the reach of a published book compared to the reach of the kind of art I was making. In my world of artmaking, we artists all knew or knew of each other, we were our audience and reviewed each other's work, and often showed together. But a book travels far out of the reach of its writer, falling into the hands of people one might never meet, in cities and towns and countries one might not visit. With that first book, my world had suddenly, unexpectedly, opened up and widened. 

But there is something else that speaks to the second part of your question. Although I had not anticipated or dreamed of being a writer, I was writing--scribbling--by way of trying to answer some hard questions about my early childhood. I had written quite a bit of this material at the time the publishers introduced themselves to me, but this was never meant to be published. It was purely for my eyes only. After I was published, in between the writing of each book, I would pull this 'stuff' out of the drawer and quietly go at it again. As I became better experienced at writing, the scribbling of that material also improved in quality, and I actually began to enjoy writing it, but as story now rather than as inquiry. It ended up being Starry Starry Night, my newest book. Having worked on it as a story for publication now, I realize that this particular book could never have been written cold, like Out on Main Street was. I had to write all the other books first, to learn how to write this deeply personal one, no longer for myself only, but for the unrelated reader.
 
2 - How did you come to fiction first, as opposed to, say, poetry or non-fiction?
I did, in fact, always write poems, from childhood to adulthood. But this was sporadic, with no focus, and no intention to publish. As I say above, I had not intended to be a writer at all. I was an artist when I was offered the opportunity to write for a publisher. They showed me a contract which they had partially filled out for me, and in the space indicating what work the contract was for, they wrote in " A book of short stories and, or, a novel". I chose short stories only because of my ignorance of the genre, and imagined that 'short' meant quick, if not easy, but at least easier than a novel. One thing I would add, my art practice and those little poemy things I always scribbled did influence how I saw images and how I translated them into words and sentences. 
 
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?
This last book has complicated the answer to your question. Until this one, the writing of a story would begin with the tiniest idea that caught my attention, and yes, it would come quickly, say over the course of a year or so. Then another year would find me taking stock of what I had so quickly written, identifying the story, the real story within, and rewriting, shaping now. But as I said above, this last one, Starry Starry Night, had been in the works, so to speak, for some thirty to forty years. 

4 - Where does a poem or work of prose 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?
Everything begins with an image, a wordless image, that when scratched unearths an idea that then needs to be translated into words. It is this translation, getting it right, that then turns into a poem, or perhaps a long work. When an idea begins to be fleshed out, the excitement is then tempered by caution as I realize that I have been caught, so to speak, and can't stop myself from following a train of thought. I always say, then, "OK, but this one will be short. Not a short story, but not a long novel either. Perhaps a novella." But these things seem to develop a life of their own and there comes a point where I am just following the work to its end, and all have ended up being twice, and more, the typical size of a novella.  
 
5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?
I do enjoy giving public readings. The reading out loud starts as part of the creative process. I often read out loud, during the writing process, particularly when writing dialogue, and more so when that dialogue is in non-standard English, or includes, in my head, the accent of a Trinidadian. As an aside, public readings often include a question-and-answer period, and this engagement with readers is one of my favourite parts of putting a book out into the world.
 
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?
There are many concerns I would call theoretical. I'll mention a few. Much of my writing references Trinidad where I grew up but left more than forty years ago, and which is a place that, in a sense, no longer exists. It was a paradise once, but is a dangerous place now, because of drug-related criminal activities of the worst kinds. My first concern, then, regards nostalgia, and any trap of romantisizing old times and ways, even as an aside to the main story that is being told. A giving-in to nostalgia can be a noisy distraction, weakening a strong story-line.

In Starry Starry Night, one major challenge was staying away from the usual story-telling ideas of the need for arc and denouement. This is tied to the reason for me calling this work autofiction, and not simply a novel. It was clearly not memoir, but it was also the unfinished story of a girl in the process of becoming and understanding her place in a family. The end of the novel, or the autofiction work, is actually the beginning of her life, so to speak. Bowing to the usual desire for an arc would have suggested a movement from beginning to end towards resolution, the possibility of completion, arrival, success, and all of those to me would have amounted to too much fiction, denying the 'auto' part of the word.

I also struggled, as I suggest earlier, with whether to term this work--that was clearly not a memoir-- a novel, or to term it autofiction. What is today called autofiction is an old form given a new name, but in the case of my book, the new naming seemed important. There are too many 'truths' in the book, regarding recognizable incidents and what are bridges clearly invented between incidents. Emotional resonances that are real but whose actual causal incidents have been lost in memory, are given invented scenarios to account for them, but played out so that they are a kind of hyperreality. I use real photos in the book, of real people who are the subjects of the story, but are differently named in the story, and the photos have been altered, blurring the faces of the people, just enough to make them not fully seen, even if they might still be recognizable. This use of photos was my attempt to further openly toy with the 'auto' and the 'fiction' of and in autofiction.
 
7 – What do you see the current role of the writer being in larger culture? Do they even have one? What do you think the role of the writer should be?
To start with, I would say that the most important thing would be, as in any role, to do no harm. The word 'role' suggests to me a kind of office, or responsibility. It depends on the writer, then, I suppose. The relatively new proliferation of diverse voices and experiences in publishing has broadened readers' knowledge and understanding of the world. However, if the writer were to have a role in larger culture, then I think larger culture must also have a role in how it receives the work of a writer. Intelligence, wisdom, the ability to judge and discern would be needed on both sides. If the role is assumed on one side only, it is also being assumed that that side has power over the other, and this could be dangerous, for we can't be certain that sure these traits--wisdom, intelligence, etc., exist in all writers, or exist all around, in writers and readers in general, in amounts enough to confidently say that a writer ought to have a role in larger culture or society . 

8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?
This process can be difficult when working with an editor one has not worked with before. But, even in a case like this, I always look forward to this part. It is a gift to have someone read my work with an eye to helping me make it stronger. I am very fortunate to have had editors with whom I worked well, and who understood my intentions. In particular, my last editor fully understood when I said that it was important to me to stay away from the sense of Starry Starry Night having an arc to the story line. This was vital to the work. The arc happens, so to speak, in the person, the protagonist, but ever so subtly. It was a risk to take, and my editor understood and helped me accomplish it as I wished.
 
9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?
It is only when you have arrived at the end of the writing of your story, that you will understand what it is you have been writing. Then, you can go back to the beginning and begin to write that story. V.S. Naipaul said this, or something close to this, or wrote it somewhere, and I may have interpreted it to suit myself. Still, it works for me all the time. 

10 - How easy has it been for you to move between genres (poetry to fiction to visual art to video)? What do you see as the appeal?
For some reason, unknown to me but for which I am grateful, I have access in myself to different ways of experiencing ideas, and disseminating them. The idea usually comes first, in the form of a feeling in the body--the hands wanting to gesture that may do so then in a painting--a sense, an odd set of words strung together, that must leave the body, but get fleshed out on paper over a period of time, or must be worked out as a moving project that involves sound spoken out loud as actions are made and all captured like a jewel in one place and brought to life by the press play button. There isn't a decision to be made about which medium is suitable; that decision is the material itself. 

11 - What kind of writing routine do you tend to keep, or do you even have one? How does a typical day (for you) begin?
I have no writing routine. When a book is in the works, I will write sometimes for four hours, sometimes five, sometimes eight. And then not for three or four days before I begin again. A typical day begins early, with twelve minutes of Qi Gong, the meditation of coffee-making (cappuccini) and communing with the four parrots who are let out of their cages for an hour on mornings and run our lives for most of the day. A shake for breakfast. Then to the computer to see what has come into my inbox. I begin answering emails. This is all that is typical. The rest changes from day to day--if a book is being worked on, I approach it and might or might not work on it. Depends on where its at. A walk, a bicycle ride maybe, cooking something for dinner, barbeque, a trip into one of the nearby towns, WhatsApping with siblings. Routine might save me, but it would also surely kill my spirit. Then the birds again. They come out two more times for the day, which means they must be cleaned up after. These are the things that are fairly usual, but there are always several unplanned activities, thankfully. Right this minute, the birds are being taken out onto the porch, in their little hotel cages to get some sun and torment the hawks. I admire, more than envy, writers who have and keep schedules.

12 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?
I don't dwell on what one might call a stall, don't spend a long time on something that isn't working. If something isn't working I find the place where the trouble began and start writing again from there, usually by first wiping out the entire area that stumped me. 

13 - What fragrance reminds you of home?
The odour of oil in which something sweet coated in white flour has been recently fried. 
 
14 - 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?
Looking back at all my books, I would say that they come from my life, from the personal--which includes my observations of the lives of others, family and friends. 

15 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?
J. M Coetzee didn't shy away from interrogating colonisation in his home country of South Africa. He shone the harshest of lights on racism and its various ways of power in S.A, but this light was not blinding--it was illuminating, and courageous. I imagine he made enemies, on all sides, but he and his books didn't tread lightly. He is a beacon for me.   

16 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?
Spend time in north India, Devprayag specifically, at the confluence of the Alaknanda and Bhagirathi Rivers. I often imagine being at the source of the Bhagirathi, Gomukh, which means the cow's mouth, at the foot of the Gangotri Glacier. It is stunning that that little opening, the mouth of the cow, through which a trickle of glacial meltwater runs eventually meets up with Alaknanda in Devprayag and the two join others that then all create the River Ganges.  

17 - 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 like to have been a long distance bicyclist. In my dreams, of course. Or a cocoa farmer. Or a coffee roaster. Maybe a chef. A perpetual scholar. 

18 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?
An opportunity taken, and the joy discovered there in being able to 'speak', to use my voice, to unearth, to create order out of the unruly. 

19 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?
Texaco by Patrick Chamoiseau. 

Jonathan Glazer's The Zone of Interest.

20 - What are you currently working on?
I am writing what may end up being non-fiction, perhaps a real memoir, in which I search for the how and whys of my grand yet troublesome father.  

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

Four novels: Bennett, Kidd, Sparling, Ondaatje

Over the past few weeks, I’ve been reading far more fiction than poetry, working through various ideas of prose as I put the finishing touches on my second novel, due out this fall. Now that the (hopefully) worst of my recent stint with bronchitis is over, here’s some of what I’ve been dipping into lately.

The first I’ll mention is Jonathan Bennett’s novel Entitlement (Toronto ON: ECW Press, 2008), a lovely hardcover book that had been months sitting atop my filing cabinet, in the corner of my office. I’ve known Bennett for years, but this is the first book of his fiction I’ve read, despite being his second novel and third book of fiction after Verandah People (2003) and After Battersea Park (2001), as well as a poetry collection from the same publisher, Here is my street, this tree I planted (2004). I usually don’t find plot-driven, narrative heavy novels my thing, but Entitlement is a compelling and well-constructed novel, each fragment revealing only as much as Bennett needs, piece by revealing piece, bringing you in quickly, and then keeping you there. This is a mystery that isn’t a mystery, writing the story of Andy Kronk, a man who has managed, somehow, a “clean break” after a lifetime intertwined with one of Canada’s wealthiest families, the Aspinalls. Triggered by a journalist working to write a “tell-all” biography of the family, Andy Kronk starts to tell his story, and very soon, ends up telling too much, about the Aspinall patriarch, Stuart, to Stuart’s grown children, Colin and Fiona, and just how intertwined their lives had become.

Stuart Aspinall stepped off the cobblestone pathway and onto the dewy lawn. The hill before him faded to the lake’s edge at Huntington House. He padded his way toward the cream-coloured boathouse, his leather oxfords black and shiny, hands casually in the pockets of his suit pants. It was an unseasonably warm day. At least it was when he felt the direct sun on his clean-shaven cheeks and neck. He had removed his jacket and tie, left them in the foyer of the house.

He often came down here to think before dinner. It was the half-hour a day – not every day but often enough – that he saved for himself. Reaching the boathouse, he sat on the burgundy Muskoka chair angled at the lake’s centre. The lap of the water against the dock was rhythmical. Far away a loon called out. Light wind played the branches of the firs down the way.

Lately, he’d felt the unease. Felt it deepening within him. He knew its source and cause too well. It was almost as old as Colin himself. A chronic, imprecise hurt that a woman might call heartache. He chose, long ago, not to address it directly. Rather he monitored it, weighed it, and negotiated it down, always down, into a manageable size. If it were true that the child was lost to him, and it sadly was, then he had always supposed that one did what one must, to go on. To cope, as it were. Why did the two of them engage in such emotional sport that had no clear rules and never ended? Fact: Colin is an Aspinall. That cannot be changed. So he mustn’t hurt the family, or weaken the name.

How does he do it? Most books like this don’t have the clear craft that Bennett clearly does; plot-driven novels are often devoid of real skill when it comes to language, even falling to lines that work themselves barely over their own function from point A to point B, unable to keep some readers from skipping over whole passages, whole pages, just to get back to the action, but Bennett is able to keep the music of each line subtle, underscored. He manages the music of the line in such a way that you can barely hear it, but know it is there, helping the movement of the story itself along.

After reading her recent any other woman: an uncommon biography (Edmonton AB: NeWest Press, 2008) [see my note on such here], I found a copy of Newfoundland writer Monica Kidd’s second novel, The Momentum of Red (Vancouver BC: Polestar, 2004), which, unfortunately, the author recently told me had been remaindered. Is this what now happens to books? Kidd’s novel goes back and forth through two sides of a relationship between a father and daughter, watching Randy and Mary from different points in their lives, what brought them to this present. We watch as Randy starts his relationship with Mary’s mother, marries and carries on, loses his wife in childbirth, and further on, as the years progress. The other thread exists in the present day with adult Mary, still living with her father, who hangs out with her friends, has a job, and meets a man who she eventually moves in with, and where that eventually ends. Here is the little prologue to her novel, written from the father’s perspective:

LOVE CAN BE SO FIERCE IT WILL RIP FLESH FROM BONE.

My little girl came into this world glowing with the finality of love, pulled hot and slick from a pool of blood. Her mother lying there, the sweat cooling in the heavy curls over her eyes, her ears, the weight of her sinking lifeless into that steel table, gone from this world. All I could think of was that blistered old statue in the church. Heartsick Mary, weeping at the feet of Jesus. So that’s what I named her. I kissed her mother goodbye, hushed my little girl and named her Mary, and took her by the hand into the world.

I knew then that nothing would ever come between us.

I like the way this book moves back and forth between stories, telling us exactly why the Randy of today, for example, reacts in a particular way, showing us a story of what happened to him ten years, twenty years, twenty-five years earlier, and the stories his daughter might never know, or simply doesn’t know yet. I like the way this book moves gracefully and with great ease between difficult moments, a collage of photographs written in an order not out of order but not entirely straightforward, resulting in an impressive album. With this novel remaindered, will she have any choice but to write another one?

A while ago, I read Toronto author Ken Sparling's [A novel by Ken Sparling] (Toronto ON: Pedlar Press, 2003) [see my note on such here], the author of the previous novels Dad Says He Saw You at the Mall (New York NY: Knopf, 1996) and Hush Up and Listen Stinky Poo Butt (self-made by author upon request), books I haven’t managed to get my little hands on yet. What I have read recently is his more recent novel For Those Whom God Has Blessed with Fingers (Pedlar Press, 2005).

I lost my pen at 4:34 p.m. I knew where it was. In a puddle. Near the curb. On Bay Street. North of Bloor. I have a gift. I know where every pen I ever owned is.

At first I thought this was cool. I told all my friends. Showed off. Threw my pens away. Dropped them into potholes. Swallowed them. Shit them out. Flushed them. Days later, I went and found them.

Then I got to wondering. Was I squandering what God had given me? Maybe I should try to use this gift. Do something good.

I went to get my pen from the puddle on Bay Street. Saw a man enter the sub shop at Cumberland. His clean well-lighted face clear of any fear. His woman passing through the sub shop door behind him.

What a strange little novel this is; I’d like to learn more about this Ken Sparling. Presumably a response to his publisher’s request for catalogue/book copy, he wrote this short blurb, subsequently placed on the back of this book: “There is no way to describe the book, short of writing the entire thing out by hand. I have put a great deal of loving devotion into creating something that is just itself and I do everything I can to foil the evil plans of villains determined to summarize and label everything they lay their eyes and minds upon.” What makes Sparling’s writing, and thus this novella, interesting, is in how the book can claim to essentially be about everything and about nothing at the same time, writing about the world, about thinking, about human relationships, and about writing itself, and how books are made, wandering from fragment to fragment in ways that fool the mind into thinking they’re disconnected, and then fool the mind further by putting them together into a single unit. I think this is a magnificent and difficult work, and would like Sparling to write another one, so I can have something for my own writing to aspire to.

As I pick up my book, I know something. Each time I pick up my book, I know. I have knowledge. Un-deconstructable knowledge. Knowledge that fully resists analysis. Carnal in that respect. At best, I can muster a temporary bravado concerning this knowledge, a false platform above the abyss constructed of the knowledge that I can never know. I can fake it with conviction for a time, in other words. I can stand. Walk. Polish an apple. Even take that first bite.

After rereading Michael Ondaatje’s In the Skin of a Lion (1986), perhaps one of my most favourite novels, a year after rereading his Coming Through Slaughter (1976) [see my note on same here], I decided I should pick up his more recent Anil’s Ghost (2000), another book relegated unread for years, stacked on a bookshelf in my kitchen. In Anil’s Ghost, all the regular Ondaatje constructions held, his forceful, illuminating and elegant lyric prose, his sensual passages, a character working through the bonds of her own history, and a savvy political undertow that doesn’t overtake any part of a narrative that exists in a pastiche of characters, settings, and points-of-view. Yet why doesn’t this book strike as much as some of his earlier works? Why do I care for everything he’s doing, but somehow, the whole doesn’t hold together the sum of its magnificent parts? (I’ve heard mixed things about the last novel too.) Still, is there something I’m missing?

She arrived in early March, the plane landing at Katunayake airport before the dawn. They had raced it ever since coming over the west coast of India, so that now passengers stepped onto the tarmac in the dark.

By the time she was out of the terminal the sun had risen. In the West she’d read, The dawn comes up like thunder, and she knew she was the only one in the classroom to recognize the phrase physically. Though it was never abrupt thunder to her. It was first of all the noise of chickens and carts and modest morning rain or a man squeakily cleaning the windows with newspaper in another part of the house.

As soon as her passport with the light-blue UN bar was processed, a young official approached and moved alongside her. She struggled with her suitcases but he offered no help.