Sunday, September 08, 2024

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Lesley Krueger

Lesley Krueger [photo credit: Nika Belianina] is a Canadian novelist, screenwriter and short story writer. Her latest novel, Far Creek Road, was published last fall. It tells the story of Tink Parker, an adventurous, nosy and very funny nine-year-old living a happy suburban life. But the Cold War is slowly building toward the Cuban Missile Crisis. The world is in danger of ending—and Tink's innocence comes under threat.

According to a starred review in the Miramichi Reader, “I was sucked into this novel right away, and Krueger’s ability to immerse me inside of Tink’s mind was impressive. The background politics are skillfully written in the way so many of us experienced the world as kids: these things were happening and leaked into our lives in ways we didn’t entirely understand. It was a treat to be able to kick off my reading year with Far Creek Road out of the gate.”

Lesley’s previous novel, Time Squared, was published in 2021, while her historical novel Mad Richard came out in 2017. All three were published by ECW Press of Toronto. She is the author of eight other books.

Lesley grew up in North Vancouver, where Far Creek Road is set. She has also lived in London, England, Cambridge MA, Mexico City and Rio de Janeiro. She now lives in Toronto with her husband and ancient cat, Archie (17). www.lesleykrueger.com

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 was a short story collection called Hard Travel. Most of the reviews were pleasantly positive. One was an over-the-top rave, saying I was a likely candidate to succeed Margaret Atwood as a “prima donna of Canadian literature.” One it gave an extremely-frosty thumbs-down, calling it a collection of “five drab little stories and one good one,” and implicitly suggesting that I go away and die.

Unfortunately, the rave review ran in The Winnipeg Free Press and the pan was in The Globe & Mail. If the rave had been in the Globe, my career might have been different. Instead, my life didn’t change when the book came out. I continued to struggle to publish in little magazines and small presses before my writing eventually gained a degree of traction.

All these years later, I think the reviews in the middle were right. The collection was fresh and showed real promise, but Margaret Atwood had no cause to fret. I also think that from the start my work has circled around the same themes, even though the subjects have been quite different. The Free Press reviewer was right about something that remains true of all my work. “The female protagonists of Hard Travel adventurously set forth to fashion their own experiences,” he wrote, “rather than waiting for experience to fashion them.”

Differences? I think that technically, the writing is far more professional now and the subjects better chosen.

2 - How did you come to fiction first, as opposed to, say, poetry or non-fiction?

I was one of those people who knew very early that they wanted to be a writer. My parents gave me a baby typewriter for my eighth birthday, and I used it to write little stories. That means I have no memory of why I chose to write, or why I chose to write fiction. One thing I can say: I never wrote poems on my little typewriter, always stories.

Something else happened early. I was in my early teens when my father said, “If you’re going to be a writer, you’d better train for a job. Writers don’t earn any money.” He was right, and I knew that even at the time. I decided to train as a journalist, and not long afterward, signed up to work on the high school student newspaper.

That means I started writing non-fiction not long after I began to write my stories. My heart was always in my fiction, even as I earned my living as a journalist. Yet I loved journalism as well, just as I loved my post-journalism careers in film and teaching.

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?

When I started writing seriously, I began to scribble ideas for stories and novels into the journals I kept from my early twenties onward. Eventually I got a notebook so I could write these ideas down outside my journals and find them more easily. Sometimes I’d look at an idea later and wonder, What was I thinking? But some of those initial thoughts became books, and gradually I got a better feel for what might work. At that point, I began to keep separate notebooks for each serious idea, putting a tentative title on each cover and opening it periodically to write down thoughts, character ideas and snippets of information that might eventually prove useful.

These days, by the time I start writing the first draft of a project, I’ve been thinking about it for years. I first jotted down ideas about the novel I’m currently writing in 2010. I opened the dedicated notebook four or five years ago, and started the first draft of the book in January, 2022.

Once I get going, I can usually finish a decent draft of a novel in two and a half years. I rewrite as I go along, starting each day by going over what I wrote the day before, then circling back to rewrite chapters as I finish them. My first real draft of a project is usually in pretty good shape, although I beg friends for notes afterward, then do another rewrite.

4 - Where does a screenplay 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?

I wonder if I’ve answered this one above?

5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?

To me, readings are part of the marketing process, and I think of the writing and marketing as two separate things. However, I enjoy them because they’re a way to get together with other writers and to hear them read their work, as well as to meet readers with interesting questions and stories of their own.

Writing itself is such a solitary business that I think of going to readings as a reward.

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’m not an intellectual writer, I’m a storyteller. I write literary fiction, which means the writing itself is a concern to me: the precision, whatever beauty I can create, the flow of the words and sentences and paragraphs. However, the story and the characters are central to my writing, not the ideas behind them. I like concrete things, which means I’m not trying to answer questions so much as raise them. Nor do I self-consciously think about which questions to raise, or what I ought to write about. I write more instinctually than that.

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?

I think of art generally as being among the best parts of our collective humanity. Art represents our good side, what’s worthwhile about our species, what gives us value. (There are far too many examples lately of our worthless side.) This means I think the writer’s job is to do the best work they possibly can, not settling for good enough or second best. We need to do something to justify our time on this earth. Good art counts, and it lasts, however invisibly.

8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?

I love editors, and I’ve been blessed with good ones. Susan Renouf has edited four of my books, one at Key Porter and three at ECW Press. She’s made all of them far better. Susan recently retired and I’m in professional mourning, although we remain good friends. Writers need to know how other people will read our work, and editors not only read it very closely, they’re kind enough to give us detailed responses along with helpful suggestions. Some writers talk about how they write for an imaginary Ideal Reader, and that’s great (although I’ve never had one). Personally I like meeting with a real person who can call me on my bullshit. We can also do lunch.

9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?

I think writers need to find a community of other writers to support them. I’ve heard different people say this over the years, and I often suggest to emerging writers that they seek out their community. Take a course, maybe attend readings and talk to others in the audience. Writers can be loners, but we need other people.

10 - How easy has it been for you to move between genres (novels to short stories to screenplays to memoir to children's literature)? What do you see as the appeal?

When I first started writing, I was learning to write both fiction and newspaper stories at the same time. It was terribly hard. You need to be in a different frame of mind to tackle a news story than you do to sit down and work on a novel—and my first real writing project was a novel. I had trouble moving between the two different forms of writing, and ended up spending most of my time trying to improve my journalistic work. (They were paying me.) If I’d had early jobs driving truck or waiting tables, I might have learned to write fiction faster than I did.

Well, I did work as a waitress for a while, but I was so bad I got fired.

Once I was comfortable in each separate form, it got easier to move between the two. I learned something from both journalism and fiction writing, picking up research skills as a journalist, for example, that served me well in researching historical novels like Mad Richard.

However, I didn’t find the skills immediately transferable to all genres. When I started writing short stories after failing to publish that (dreadful) first novel, I had to learn another new form. When I wrote a memoir, Foreign Correspondences, I was able to marry my journalistic and literary skills, and that helped, but writing creative nonfiction didn’t come automatically. When I started writing screenplays a few years later, I had to climb another learning curve. A children’s book, ditto.

So I guess my answer is that I don’t find it easy to move into a new genre. But once I’ve got it, I’ve more or less got it. These days, I can write an essay for my Substack one day and get back to work on my novel-in-progress the next. If I’m on deadline, give me a ten-minute break and a cup of tea and I can switch between two forms. I like doing it. You can say different things in different ways. And I’m my father’s daughter: I also like getting paid, so I need to mix it up.

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’m being healthy lately. I was laid up for too long with a badly broken ankle, so now I come into my office after breakfast and flop down on the floor to do yoga stretches, moving on to a program of strengthening exercises, lifting weights and so on. Afterward, I go directly to my computer and get to work on one of the writing projects I have underway, mainly the novel I’m currently writing, but also essays for my website and Substack. I tend to write until 4 p.m. unless the novel is going really well, when dinner ends up being take-out. I can often manage this routine, which I love, four weekdays out of five. But there’s also this thing called life, and I don’t always get to write as often as I’d like.

12 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?

I’m afraid I’m one of those annoying people who don’t get stalled writing. I never have enough time to do as much writing as I want to, so I bull ahead when I can. Sometimes I’m tired and end up grinding out really boring sentences. But I’ve done this long enough to recognize when that’s happening and break off to do something entirely different. Go for a walk, read a book, do the shopping, the laundry, try to get a good night’s sleep. The next day, I’m fine.

13 - What fragrance reminds you of home?

Baking. My mother could bake anything.

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?

I find that my books come from places. Sometimes I go somewhere and feel a ping, and I know I’ll write something set there. My second collection of short stories, The Necessary Havoc of Life, grew out of a visit to an abandoned farm. I can still see the fallen-in cellar of a barn that for some reason made me picture a failed back-to-the-land commune. In the notebooks I mentioned, I almost always start with a setting. I’m sure many other writers’ books come from books, but I don’t think mine do.

15 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?

In university, I started reading 19th century British writers and their Russian contemporaries, everyone from George Eliot through Charles Dickens to Tolstoy and Chekhov. In them, I found a moral seriousness that’s been important to me—and in Dickens, at least, a sense of humour. I was born and grew up in suburban Vancouver, which is very far from England and Russia in both history and tone. But these writers were so particular to their own places, and so evocative of their settings, that they implicitly asked me to examine mine.

16 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?

Someday I’ll take a pottery course. I love pottery.

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 think I’ve been very lucky in spending my life as a writer, which means that I’ve been able to do what I set out to do, and what I wanted to do. If I hadn’t been a writer, I think I might have been a doctor, maybe a psychiatrist. It’s the only other thing that’s ever appealed to me.  

18 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?

I think I’ve answered that?

19 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?

That’s setting the bar high. Great book? I recently read Emily Wilson’s translation of Homer’s Odyssey. I’ve read several previous translations and hers was a revelation. A very good book: Epidemics and Society: From the Black Death to the Present by Frank M. Snowden. It’s an enormously-informative 582-page social history of disease and its impact on societies around the world.

Great film? I don’t know about great, but I really liked Past Lives, the directorial debut of Celine Song, which is set partly in Korea and partly in New York. It revolves around childhood friends reconnecting across cultures. There are no bad guys in this film. How often do you see that?

20 - What are you currently working on?

I’m almost finished the first draft of my new novel. It’s set mostly in contemporary Toronto, and it’s about freedom of choice and Chekhov.

12 or20 (second series) questions;

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