Carmella Gray-Cosgrove is the great granddaughter of Jewish immigrants and early French and Irish settlers. She was raised in the Downtown Eastside of Vancouver on the traditional territory of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh peoples and lives with her partner and child in St. John’s, on Ktaqmkuk, the traditional territory of the Mi’kmaq and the ancestral homelands of the Beothuk. Her fiction has appeared in Prism international, Broken Pencil, The New Quarterly, The Antigonish Review, and elsewhere. Nowadays and Lonelier was a finalist for the NLCU Fresh Fish Award for Emerging Writers. She holds a master’s degree in Geography from Memorial University and was an F.A. Aldrich Fellow.
1 - How did your first book change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?
My first book is also my only book! I’m working on a new book now but it’s in very early stages of first draft writing. My life changed while I was writing my collection of short stories for a bunch of reasons, but primarily because I wrote the bulk of it just after giving birth and during the first year of my kid’s life. So, the changes that I experienced were book related, but were also because the book and parenthood were linked experiences. In retrospect, I see that the stories in the book are all reflections on times and places in my life that are pre-parenthood, and were written while I was digesting my new life and recalling experiences I will never have again because of this big shift that happens with a kid where suddenly freedom looks different, where suddenly, for me, wild times and erratic decisions are no longer sustainable parts of existence. And so the book is maybe, in part a farewell to my past. The novel I’m writing now is partly told from the perspective of a mother, a perspective I can newly write in a concrete way that I didn’t have access to before becoming a parent.
2 - How did you come to fiction first, as opposed to, say, poetry or non-fiction?
Oh god. I wrote so much terrible poetry and continue to. I don’t think I came to fiction first, I think fiction is the only type of writing I’m not embarrassed to show other people. I’ve written and read stories obsessively since I was a kid. It’s just a big part of my life. My parents gave me that love of fiction, my mum as a reader, my dad as a writer. But I also have many journals full of very awful poems. I do write some non-fiction, and enjoy it, but I find it to be soul-bearing in a way that is almost intolerable for me. I am fairly private and when I have written personal essays I’ve really struggled knowing that people I don’t know will have these bits of intimate information about my life. At least in fiction there is plausible deniability. And the ability to make lives more interesting is irresistible.
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 produce good writing very unpredictably, but I write almost every day. When good writing comes it is fast and the first drafts are fairly clean. But there are long stretches of unusable and frankly really bad writing in between these fits. While I was writing Nowadays and Lonelier, I would have a bunch of story ideas stewing at once and would keep them in my brain and in jot notes until they festered out onto the computer, usually in one fell swoop.
4 - Where does a 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?
I have only really written short things, short fiction, some of which has amassed into this book. But I’m working on a novel now and am struggling in ways I hadn’t anticipated. I find short stories appealing and non-threatening because there doesn’t have to be total closure. Not everything is going to be solved or answered. I am finding the idea of working on a novel is very daunting because it is implicitly a book, a whole, a complete thing. Whereas, writing a collection of stories, if you bail on the book, you still have the stories.
5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?
I love readings but find them so nerve wracking. My publisher recently provided me with an online session with this amazing acting coach, Sara Bynoe, to get tips for reading and it was the most helpful and wonderful thing. I had a reading a month after the session where I used the techniques Sara gave me and it was the best reading I’ve ever done. I love performing but have this introverted part of my personality that I have to work really hard to quell. But I am working on it and so far so good.
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?
I write and think a lot about poverty and class and how these conditions affect relationships. I live in this very privileged reality where I can move freely between socioeconomic groups and have moved in this way throughout my life since being a kid, despite being brought up in poverty and as a product of my whiteness, but also because of my education and my body, my gender, my family, all these factors. So I write about that a lot, even if it’s not always explicit. About who has this freedom and who doesn’t, and why, and how. About how class privilege and class mobility change the ways we interact with people and move through the world.
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 don’t know the answer to this but I think about this question a lot. I think there has been a move toward a public demand that art and writing be productive, be toward an end, or be social justice, or be all things, cover all the bases. But I think, maybe the role of the writer is just to write the stories they think are important and urgent for them, for whatever reason, whether it’s political or to make change or to explore language or to experiment with form, or maybe just to survive this hard world. And maybe the role of the reader is to decide if it’s good. And maybe the role of the society is to decide if it’s relevant. To keep or to discard. As artists and writers and readers and as the audience and sometimes as members of all of these groups at once with the ability to project our thoughts to wide audiences over the internet, I think we get confused about what our roles are, and what they should be and so we make demands when not long ago we would have made criticism, had a conversation. More than anything, perhaps this is the role of the writer, to help us all think and talk and be critical.
8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?
I love everyone who has ever edited my writing. It is such a beautiful thing, to have someone, often someone you don’t know, read your writing and bring all their difference of experience and all their thoughtfulness to the work. With magazines and books you know that when an editor is working on the piece, they chose to work on it. It is work they like and they want to make it the best it can be. There is no one better to edit your work than someone who has chosen it from a slush pile or from a mass of agent submissions. The wonderful thing about writing short stories is that each story that is published in advance of the collection has at least one editor and then the collection has at least one editor. I try to be as open as possible to edits, to set aside my ego and to try to see the writing as clearly as possible. I am so grateful to the many many editors my book had, but especially for Shirarose Wilensky, and for the hours of thoughtfulness and clarity of mind and empathy that editing requires.
9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?
There is so much good advice! I love that kinda cheesy quote from Annie Dillard about not saving anything. She says:
Spend it all, shoot it, play it, lose it, all, right away, every time. Do not hoard what seems good for a later place in the book, or for another book; give it, give it all, give now.I think about that often as I have an impulse to hoard. On a more personal level, I think the big and unromantic advice, or just practical measure that I have heeded over the past ten years talking to so many people, but especially my mum who is a visual artist and obviously also a parent, as well as my mentor, Lisa Moore and my dear friend Susie Taylor, is that I need to write every day even if it sucks, even if it is painful, the most important thing is always to do it and if I always do it, eventually it will be okay, maybe even good. This really became more important when I had a kid and time was suddenly not in surplus. Even if writing just happens for 15 minutes in a day, it still has to happen.
The impulse to save something good for a better place later is the signal to spend it now. Something more will arise for later, something better. These things fill from behind, from beneath, like well water.
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?
My writing routine really depends on my childcare. I write as my full-time job now, as in, it’s my only job, which is amazing. But full-time when also parenting and living on a tight budget and living through a pandemic is an unpredictable thing. Under ideal circumstances I write in the morning while my kid is in childcare. In the winter I write a lot more than in summer, which is a very short season in Newfoundland, where I live, and so must be taken full advantage of. I free-write first thing in the morning when my brain is most alert, then take a break to get my kid and get him fed and down for his nap. I try not to get too sleepy and then do editing and admin work (submissions, grants, editing for other people) in the afternoon until about 3 when he wakes up, which he just did at this very moment. Since March 2020 this has obviously looked different at times, but this is the ideal scenario.
11 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?
For years I have had a list of things to do when I’m struggling up on the wall next to my desk. It says: read, exercise, write about what you’re reading, write anything, listen to something good. Moving helps me a lot. I listen to fiction podcasts most days. I try to read outside my interests. All these things help. But, much to my dismay, and a reality I often try to avoid, is that what helps most is to just sit back down and plow through it.
12 - What fragrance reminds you of home?
In Vancouver, mold. Wetness. That smell of mildew so common in the Pacific Northwest. The smell of the butcher on Keefer Street. Overripe fruit. The smell of sweet bread and coconut buns from Maxim’s Bakery. The very specific tang of the Strait of Georgia. The smell of linden trees in Mount Pleasant in summer, that almost bitter smell of cherry blossoms on tenth avenue in spring. The smell of days and days of rain on concrete. But I’ve lived in Newfoundland for over a decade and the smells here are creeping into my heart too. The Atlantic smells so different. The oysters from here taste different. The smells are colder and less full of algae and that rank smack of the seaweed. Here smells like evergreens and iceberg-fresh water and wood fires and grains boiling at the brewery on Leslie Street. My house smells like hundred-year-old timber, musty and wet, but also like food. Oregano, sage and garlic hanging from the railing to dry.
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?
My understanding of the world, my interactions with my community and family, and so also my writing are of course influenced by all these things. But maybe particularly by visual art. I think and write about art a lot, and it mediates the way I experience the world. While I was writing the stories that came to make up my book, I looked at a lot of art by Sandeep Johal, Janice Wu (who drew the cover image), Jessie McNeil, my mom Joyce Cosgrove, Kym Greeley, and also a lot of old and really famous art while travelling, in Italy and in Norway, before the pandemic. Jessie McNeil, who is a dear lifelong friend and who makes incredible collage scenes, recently showed me Louise Francis Smith’s photographs of Chinatown in Vancouver and they so exactly capture the details of that neighbourhood where I grew up, the landscape that shaped my whole life and where much of my writing takes place. I also spend a lot of time outside, in my garden and in the forest. Most of my writing is conceived while I pull knotweed, hemlock and creeping buttercup out of my garden.
14 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?
There are too many to list. Short story writers who have really affected me are Edwidge Danticat, Carmen Maria Machado, Ottessa Moshfegh, Souvankham Thammavongsa, Lisa Moore, Jack Wang, Miranda July, Heather O’Neill. The list could go on forever. I love Muriel Spark. My work is really influenced by my friends’ writing, Susie Taylor’s work is brilliant and Eva Crocker too. I’ve had the pleasure of reading their work in all stages and obviously there is always a conversation in the writing when you’re sharing work in that way.
15 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?
Finish my novel! And visit my family’s homelands, Gomel in Belarus in particular, and the Pale of Settlement from where my paternal great-grandparents fled in the early 20th century.
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 would really like to teach writing and literature. That’s the long game. I love teaching and have been so lucky to have great teachers.
17 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?
I was working doing harm reduction and housing support work after I finished my MA and loved that work. But it’s emotionally exhausting and I didn’t ever have time or creative energy at the end of a work day to write or really do much at all except subsist. When I was on parental leave after giving birth, I realized this was maybe my one shot to try and make career out of writing full time while I had EI and an infant who napped a lot, and a lot of family support to help make it happen. I don’t think there was ever really another option though. I’ve wanted to be a writer since I was a kid, I just didn’t have the confidence and didn’t realize it was a thing I could do as a career until I was 31.
18 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?
I’m reading Lost Children Archive by Valeria Luiselli right now and I love it so much. Luiselli is a master of weaving together history, politics, philosophy, and family drama. Girl, Woman, Other, by Bernadine Evaristo is the best book I’ve ever read. Loitering With Intent, by Muriel Spark is a close second. I’m terrible at watching films, which is a big point of contention in my relationship. I like watching trash.
19 - What are you currently working on?
I’m working on a novel! It is early first draft days yet, so I can’t say much about it, but I’m excited!
No comments:
Post a Comment