Natalie Appleton
is an award-winning Canadian writer living in Vernon, BC. She is a graduate of
the University of Regina School of Journalism and the MA in Creative Writing
(Narrative non-fiction) program at City University London, UK.
Natalie’s literary memoir, I Have Something to Tell You (Ravenscrag Press) recently launched with praise
from Alix Hawley, Elizabeth Eaves and Theo Pauline Nestor.
In her former life as a journalist, she worked at newspapers
across western Canada and her stories have appeared in publications around the
world, including The New York Times. Natalie recently won
Prairie Fire’s Banff Centre Bliss Carman Poetry Contest, and her short
non-fiction story Fourth Son of Fourth Wife was longlisted for
the 2016 CBC Creative Non-fiction Contest.
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 think I grew up as I
wrote this book, or the book grew up with me. In later years and drafts, as I
weaved in the meaning of events long after I’d told the facts, I had to use the
perspective of my older self to understand not just my own choices but the
choices of others, and how you can’t isolate events; they’re a culmination of
years of moments and things we’ve done and things people have done to us. I
gained an empathy I didn’t have before and saw my family members as individuals
with pasts and stories of their own.
2 - How did you come to journalism first, as opposed
to, say, fiction, poetry or non-fiction?
I fell in love with
writing as a teenager, but I realized I was going to need a way to pay the
bills. I was good at asking questions and one of those high school aptitude
tests pointed to journalism, so I thought that sounded like a good plan. I went
to journalism school and got a job at the daily in my hometown, thinking
someday I would become ‘a real writer.’ I discovered I didn’t have the stomach
for the aggressiveness hard news sometimes calls for, but I was enchanted with
writing longer, human interest type features. I wrote narrative non-fiction
strictly until I was in my early thirties, and then suddenly had an appetite
for fiction and poetry. At first the
idea of curling a narrative around something I could make up kind of frightened
me, after years of having someone’s story arc laid out. I still prefer to write
long-form journalism and narrative non-fiction, but I’m fond of writing poetry
and fiction now as well.
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?
It depends so much. I
tend to do an enormous amount of research for every project, from novels to a single
poem—because my poetry tends to be an act of journalism. The writing, albeit
flawed in that first draft kind of way, does come quickly if I stick with it.
Unfortunately, with trying to earn a living and keep a few little humans alive
on the side, I never have extended swaths of time. Poetry tends to look more or
less like itself from start to finish, but I seem to do much more editing for
narrative non-fiction and poetry.
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?
Poems, for me, usually
come from something I’ve read or experienced that angered me in some way. The
Annie Pootoogook poem I wrote that won Prairie Fire’s Bliss Carman Poetry Award
began after reading of her death in a national newspaper. I happened to be
working on a series of poems about missing and murdered Indigenous women and
men—and that project stemmed hearing about a Saskatchewan serial killer I’d
heard of 15 years earlier, in university. Annie’s story was a terrible and
unfortunately fitting last poem in that manuscript.
I do seem to be drawn to
writing books, though I don’t always know it, or I try to avoid it, at the
start.
5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your
creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?
Readings can feel so
vulnerable and sometimes I feel nervous, until I’m a few lines in and I feel
the story kind of taking over, coming to life, and I forget myself. I don’t
dread readings themselves, but if I never had to do a Q&A or discussion
again, that would be fine with me.
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?
Of course. I think with I Have Something to Tell You, I was
trying to figure out what makes some people remain stuck, and others to take
leaps. What our own ways of knowing are. How we cling to stories—our real and
made-up stories, other people’s stories—as we defend the steps we do or don’t
take.
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?
On one hand I think
wouldn’t it be nice to write and to have people read my writing for the joy of
the story and the fact the world doesn’t actually depend on it. But the
journalist in me also knows this is how we effect change, telling stories.
8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside
editor difficult or essential (or both)?
Essential, absolutely,
especially for memoir. It’s a story that you lived, first, and second, are
re-living as you write about it. You need an outsider to ask questions about
connections that you might not consider on your own anymore because you can
hardly see the forest for the trees.
9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not
necessarily given to you directly)?
That what other people
think of you is none of your business—good advice for any memoirist. I also
read a Sarah Polley interview recently, in which she recalled advice given to
her by Margaret Atwood, about standing up straight and using her voice. Good
advice for any writer or woman, I think.
10 - How easy has it been for you to move between
genres (journalism to poetry to short fiction to memoir)? What do you
see as the appeal?
For me they seem to have
entirely different functions. Journalism is how I tell the true stories of
others about issues I think are important or people with stories that are
simply beautiful, often heartbreaking, in some way, for some greater,
collective cause. Poetry is a way for me to write about those stories while
letting me kind of step into the picture and have a voice about those people,
compressing and fracturing events into their most basic parts, in a way you
just can’t as an unbiased journalist. Fiction tends to be a medium I use when I
want to write about something based on a true story, but there are gaps I can’t
fill in with truth.
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 do early morning
writing at least four days a week. I try to be at my desk by about 5:30 with an
idea about what I want to write about, and how much. If I don’t set a bit of a
goal, I often flounder and just re-read what I wrote the day before.
12 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn
or return (for lack of a better word) for inspiration?
I tend to do research in
those lulls and read historical works about odd events and people. Eventually,
those stories inspire me.
13 - What fragrance reminds you of home?
Dusty pick-up trucks.
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?
All of the above! I read
once somewhere that to be in the state of mind where you notice and are
emotionally moved by things you encounter in day, however small or seemingly
unremarkable, you are in a place to receive and create art.
15 - What other writers or writings are important for
your work, or simply your life outside of your work?
16 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet
done?
When my sons are much
older I’d love to live in the middle of nowhere, maybe even the middle of
nowhere in the Prairies so I can better appreciate what my settler ancestors
endured. I think I would have made a good homesteader.
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?
Librarian, bookstore
owner, psychologist—all the cliché responses of a writer, I’m sure.
18 - What made you write, as opposed to doing
something else?
I started when I was a
teenager and just couldn’t stop. I was also fortunate to have a few teachers
early on who were encouraging, and I think that gave me permission to focus on
it from a young age.
19 - What was the last great book you read?
Annie Proulx’s Barkskins, and I’m already looking
forward to re-reading it. For so many reasons, I think it should be required
reading for Canadians.
20 - What are you currently working on?
I’m writing a historical
fiction novel set in the early 1900’s in southwest Saskatchewan. There’s
something mesmerizing to me about this area, and the characters I’ve read about
it who homesteaded there. It’s amazing to me, how brave they were. Also, after
years working on a manuscript about myself, it’s been a pleasure to write about
a time and place so unlike those of my own life.
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