12 or 20 (second series) questions with Jennifer Fraser

Jennifer Fraser grew up in Vancouver and attended UBC where she could not decide between French and English literary studies so she did a double Honours BA which required a dissertation and thus dragged everything out even longer. Unfortunately, her favorite course was a year long exploration of the Divine Comedy with Professor Chiarenza. Thus, Fraser became even more undecided what to pursue in graduate studies and avoided the whole issue by doing a Masters and PhD in Comparative Literature at the University of Toronto. She wrote her dissertation on the Dante's epic poem and the impact it had on James Joyce who shared Fraser's inability to commit to one culture or language even. In 2002, her dissertation, transformed into a book, was published by University Press of Florida: Rite of Passage in the Narratives of Dante and Joyce. Fraser taught as a sessional at University of Toronto and is quite likely the first and only person to convince the Literary Studies Department at Victoria College that a course for third year students on the Divina Commedia and Finnegans Wake was a must. She also taught for Humber College and Branksome, an all girls independent school. After fourteen years in Toronto, Fraser’s husband took a position in Victoria, BC and so she moved with her husband, including her two sons, one three and one eight, back to the West Coast. In Victoria, Fraser worked for St Michaels University School and just recently has taken a position at an International Baccalaureate School, Glenlyon Norfolk. Directing plays, teaching literature, and lucky enough to work with fabulous creative writers greatly influenced Fraser who has written three plays which are available through the Playwrights Guild of Canada as well as another literary study, published in 2011 by University of Toronto Press, Be A Good Soldier: Children's Grief in Modern English Novels, and an assortment of novels the first one, Crush, published in 2013; the second one, Royal Dispatch being published this summer, two others completed but presently in a holding pattern and more in process. Fraser is a compulsive writer who cannot stop analyzing, dramatizing, and spinning tales.

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 found it liberating to write fiction as opposed to scholarly work. It was a difficult transition to make because I did not have a sense of how to construct a character or develop a plot or use dialogue. I discovered that a whole other part of the self is drawn upon when writing fiction and it made me feel more alive. Rather than the intellect being the dominant force, as in academic work whereby one seeks patterns or theoretical structures or cultural implications, the whole self comes into play when writing fiction. It made my heart beat and my senses become more finely tuned. Moreover, writing fiction allows for humour which I cannot resist regardless of how serious my focus is. I love funny people and situations and am quick to laugh myself at absurdity or folly and to allow this part of myself free reign in creative writing was an immense pleasure.

2 - How did you come to fiction first, as opposed to, say, poetry or non-fiction?
When I first started creative writing, I tried short-stories and poems, but they were not a good fit. I am not a miniaturist or a perfectionist and thus could not do my best work in these highly demanding genres. I’m very character driven in my work and found that I needed more space and time to unpack my people. I wanted to throw them into a plot that challenged them and brought out their best and worst. This takes pages and pages. I am privileged to have very talented poets and short-story authors in my writing group, but I seem to need a vast literary canvas to fully shade and colour my stories.

3 - How long does it take to start any particular writing project? Does your writing initially come quickly, or is it a slow process?
My writing comes fast and furious. My characters are relentless and they badger me. If I am caught up in teaching or attending to my children or any of the other demands of life, my characters become disgruntled and sometimes even belligerent. Then I succumb and develop a vacant stare as I cope with real life because fictional life is hounding me. It is a relief for me to carve out time and sit at the computer. It’s the only activity for me where I don’t notice time passing. I forget to eat and drink. Worse, I am shocked when I pull out of story world and need to return to reality.

Do first drafts appear looking close to their final shape, or does your work come out of copious notes?
I am a note taker and my training in academic work greatly assists me in this regard. When I wrote Crush, I was not at all a wine expert and even now am an absolute novice. However, I recorded the “stories” on Okanagan Estate Wineries’ labels. I read books. I took notes. I spent hours looking at the internet. Even then, I had a sommelier read the novel and she got completely amused in places where I had made glaring errors. Likewise, I had a RCMP officer read Royal Dispatch and he corrected quite a number of errors. To draw on experts in the final drafts process is wonderful and I’ve found people are generous with their time. I write a lot of drafts as my first ones are often rough as I am to just let the story hit the page with the sense that I can always go back and refine. I think this process comes to me through my theatre work as rehearsal is the key to depth-filled performances. Rehearsals greatly impact the nuances of timing and make an enormous difference to the interactive nature of drama that compares to the inter-related aspect of character dynamics in fiction.

4 - Where does a work of fiction 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?
Ever since Crush, I’ve learned that I can only write books. This was true in academic work as well. I tried to write articles, but it was ironically enough harder for me than writing book length studies. My thirteen year old will get utterly fed up with me as I try to advise or explain something and I think he’s nailed my character. He simply says: “You don’t have to go on and on.” In real life, he’s right and I try to hold back, but in fiction it would appear I do have to go on and on.

5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?
My initial sense of doing a reading is utter dread. As an introvert, any kind of suggestion that I need to leave the computer and worse, interact, fills me with resistance and causes me to whine and complain. However, the second I am in the classroom or lecture hall or at a reading, I delight in the interactions and dialogue, the discussion that stories spark and the sharing that happens. So although I go to readings kicking and screaming, I finish them off feeling a great deal of gratitude for the people who attend such events and who love to talk about books.

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 am fascinated by whatever it is in a person that makes them refuse to bow down before master narratives. What caught my attention in the Okanagan and inspired Crush was the aboriginal winery Nk’mip. I loved the story of Chief Clarence Louis who is a highly talented businessman and economic instigator in this area of the world. He is a leader and that absolutely caught my attention and made me want to know more. There is a metal sculpture at the entrance to Nk’mip winery and it’s a larger than life horse with a rider upon it and they face the lake and wind with cliffs rising up behind them. It is the oppression of those cliffs that represents to me all the forces in life that tell you “no” and say “you can’t,” but this rider turns his back on the wall of rocky cliffs and sets off in a new direction which is the driving force behind all of the characters in my fiction.

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 think it depends on the writer and there are many different kinds of reasons behind writing and different roles one might play in as a writer. For me, I feel like my role is as a story-teller. I feel like the most intriguing aspect of where I live is that it is paradoxically globally local. British Columbia today is a province of people from all over the world. The original settlements stretching back at least ten thousand years with the First Nations then the arrival of Europeans and Chinese and Japanese and then all of a sudden in the late eighties the whole world descended upon this wild diverse landscape forever rendering the community complex and dynamic. I find stories beckoning from all over when I’m here. What I find particularly powerful is that British Columbia is a place where people refuse to give up their stories. No matter what has been thrown at the First Nations people or the Chinese people who came here, no matter what cruelty was dished out to European immigrants or the Japanese during World War II, no one will relinquish the story of their suffering and of their triumphs. People in this community create cultures within cultures by adhering to their stories and I want to be a part of this.

8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?
I find an outside editor invaluable. Coming from the scholarly community, I like an editor who does not pull punches. I am not wedded to my every word or even character and find it easy to cut or erase or reinvent if needed. I like the dialogue that occurs when an editor examines in detail one’s work. I am particularly lucky at present because my publisher, Ben Coles of Promontory Press, is also a novelist and thus I find his editing exceptional in terms of his sense of story.

9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?
My brother is a screenwriter and he told me that when I got stuck writing, I should stop and go for a long walk. It works wonders. My best ideas come to me or the solutions to my literary problems inevitably emerge when I’m walking.

10 - How easy has it been for you to move between genres (plays to fiction to critical prose)? What do you see as the appeal?
The move from academic writing to creative writing was very hard, but I had an excellent writing group who encouraged me. I began by writing little “essays” as I literally felt baffled by the concept of fictional presentation. However, once I committed to creative writing, I find that shifting genres is quite seamless. I think because I have worked as a teacher of literature for a long time and also as a director of plays, I feel as comfortable in the world of Beowulf as I do on the stage of the Laramie Project. 

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 try to keep early morning open for writing before I have to go to work. If I’m being hounded by unsympathetic characters, I’ll write when I have spares from teaching or during lunch or just before dinner or while my son is at an activity just to quiet them. Any long weekend or extended holiday is writing time. I try to carve out as much time as possible and resent interruptions!

12 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?
If I get stuck and my long walk fails to help, then I simply leave the section of the novel I’m working on and turn my attention to something else. I have an extremely poor memory and always have; however, I am able to keep clear in my mind long intertwining narratives with all the characters and their different detailed issues. My husband finds this quality in me quite annoying as I struggle to remember a person’s name or a book I’ve read or something I really need to purchase, while I can go on and on about my plots’ twists and turns or describe my characters’ outfits or speech patterns.

13 - What fragrance reminds you of home?
Home smells to me like my kids: boys’ sports equipment, boys’ empty orange juice glasses, boys’ quilts that are rumpled, boys’ shampooed hair as they lay their heads down on our dog’s musty coat, boys’ running shoes and the warmed fabric of their school uniforms. 

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?
My books are definitely shaped by books as I truly believe in seeing the world through the lens of literature, but when I’m writing, I tend to engross myself in the world of winemakers or the world of Chinese mythology or the RCMP. I love the detail and vocabulary and ideology that define groups of people who are utterly foreign to me. I’m the opposite of the writer that writes what he or she knows. I tend to write what I don’t know.

15 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?
I have studied in depth, over the course of years and years, particular writers, and a day does not go by when I’m not under their influence. I could not have written with such intense sympathy the Irish terrorists of Royal Dispatch without James Joyce at my shoulder. I could not have written with such humorous grief the story of Gwen in Third Culture Kid without having taught Holden Caulfield’s story year after year. The torturous journey of Dante as he descends into hell in order to spiritually raise himself back up most definitely has shaped the tragic losses that occur in the cursed tale Gemini Cycle. That said, I do not think for a moment that my own fiction is anywhere near these great writers in terms of achievement. I merely hear them as I try to tell my own stories. Thus, I greatly admire the way in which Virginia Woolf obliquely delineates a character’s psychology and I strive to marshal her approach as I putter away at my laptop. I loved the movie Midnight In Paris as it told in such a sweet way the yearning we have to spend time with our favorite writers and the way in which we cannot help but dialogue with them across the ages.

16 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?
Much as I find working with young people inspiring and interesting, I would like to write for a living and not have to always divide my time between teaching and writing. My dream would be to live in different countries for stretches of time and write novels.

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 would love to act and sing. What holds me back is being highly introverted and self-conscious; hence, writing allows me to be creative and interactive yet also protects my need for quiet and alone time. I get along extremely well with my computer.

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

19 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?
I recently watched Cloud Atlas and I found its exploration of time and eternal recurrence fascinating. I especially found captivating the weight moments carry when one has the opportunity to do a kindness or a cruelty. I am in the midst of The Imperfectionists and am very caught up in the characters and premise. The writing is original and the descriptions quirky which has set my imagination singing.

20 - What are you currently working on?
Besides the arduous and painful task of editing, I am two chapters into the sequel to Crush which is the next Paige Munroe wine mystery called Celsius and it’s set on the Big Island of Hawaii at Volcano Winery. Celsius is all about what happens when literal and figurative heat is added to the mix of wine, relationships, food and so on. I wasn’t planning to write a sequel, but readers keep asking for it. I have a novel that needs minor edits and I’m hoping to have published in the fall entitled Gemini Cycle; it’s about the working out of an ancient Chinese curse in contemporary Vancouver’s China Town.  I have another novel called Third Culture Kid which is set at an international private school and is narrated by a fourteen year old girl who has major social issues because her dad is the Headmaster and her new step-mom is the new school counselor. Needless to say, no one wants to be her friend. Not sure when my publisher will bring that one out, perhaps in the new year. I am actually working on more, but I really find that this is one of my worst instances of going “on and on” and with that, I will hush.

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

Sounding Differences: Conversations with Seventeen Canadian Women Writers by Janice Williamson

Lately, thanks to a loaner copy from Janice Williamson, I’ve been reading the book of interviews she did some years back, the collection Sounding Differences: Conversations with Seventeen Canadian Women Writers (Toronto ON: University of Toronto Press, 1993). A comprehensive series of interviews, her list of interviews include conversations with Jeannette Armstrong, Di Brandt, Nicole Brossard, Elly Danica, Kristjana Gunnars, Claire Harris, Smaro Kamboureli (which reminds me of Kamboureli’s creative work, and makes me wonder if she’s worked anything since her first collection in the second person?) and Lola Lemire Tostevin, Joy Kogawa, Lee Maracle, Daphne Marlatt, Daphne Marlatt and Betsy Warland, Erin Mouré, M. Nourbese Philip, Gail Scott, Lola Lemire Tostevin, Bronwen Wallace, Betsy Warland and Phyllis Webb. As Williamson writes in her introduction:

While training in English studies encourages us to reread, analyse, and evaluate, the homely craft of the interview is often reduced to a secondary and debased pseudo-journalistic genre. However, in a textual universe where critical work on a limited group of writers can proliferate while others starve for public attention, the interview can make space for the writer’s revenge. Just as the fluid boundaries of women’s conversational gossip can disrupt more authorized forms of knowledge production, the excesses, repetitions, and circuitous routes of these interviews at times explode critical propriety. When I began this interview project, these was little critical work on many of the writers in this book; these interviews were intended to flesh out their textual concerns and provoke positive interference in canonical habits by considering the politics of contemporary Canadian women writing.

The title of these interviews draws together a cluster of meanings around the words sound and resound: ‘to sound,’ according to the OED, can mean to measure a depth or fathom a sea; ‘to resound’ indicates voices which echo and reverberate, or turn celebratory, to ‘extol loudly or wildly.’ The notion of ‘sounding differences’ suggests a process-oriented exploration which unsettles the critic from any mastering seat of authority. To sound ideas and questions with seventeen different women writers whose experiences differ through age, class, ethnicity, race, region, and sexual preference is to hear a welcome noise; silence marks the beginnings of other conversations.

So far, the interview with Erin Mouré has easily been my favourite, saying things in there that I’ve been trying to shape as disperate thoughts for years, and all said so well moons before I even knew where to begin; what I am still trying to learn. Why hasn’t a book of Mouré’s essays (which I know she’s been working on for a few years) come out yet? Why hasn’t there been a Guernica Editions book on her works? Listen to this fragment of an interview, conducted as Mouré served Williamson pancakes:

ERIN: Poetry exists within the same discourse as newspeak, alas. There’s a lot of things written that I don’t even bother to call poetry; it’s just what I call ‘the ego masquerading as the soul.’ Real poetry makes you develop a kind of self-critical relationship with language. You can’t jus use words without thinking of all the cultural and lass forces that are in a language. And even the structure of the language divides objects and processes, makes distinctions in thought possible that aren’t there, really. You end up objectifying things like space and time. I mean time is a noun. Objectified! Phase is a name. But is it an object? Touch is a name. But touch is an action, I mean, it exists in time then stops existing. Naming all these ‘durations’ or ‘movements’ that aren’t objects at all brings thought to a point where it’s co-opted by the public order again. Using language unthinkingly, then, maintains its hierarchial power. Its power to lose off an isolate relationships as things. Separate. Individual, again! [Dishes clattering.] Language organizes things and, like a camera, leaves out so much. As soon as you speak a sentence, you’ve left out every other possible sentence. The organization of structures, whether it’s a social structure, a political structure, or whatever, should evolve according to need, which is why friendship is so interesting because the structure evolves simply according to need. There’s never more structure than is needed. Two people don’t meet and say well who’s gonna be president of the board of directors. That’s jumping from one end of the spectrum to the other, but that’s what you end up with when you create these social and political organizations because language simplifies too much. But we’re afraid. We don’t wanna exist on the edge of confusion where our boundaries might not be distinguishable from the boundaries of this table…

JANICE: Well how do you…

ERIN: They’re only distinguishable because we objectify space and time. Otherwise you could interview this table. It would be fun. You would like it! You could interview this pancake.

JANICE: A morbid prospect.

ERIN: In my job I tell people over and over you have to exist on the edge of confusion, in order to find what we need, instead of deciding what we need in advance and then trying to fit in all our expectations. [Banging.]

JANICE: How do you feel about –

ERIN: Embarrassed. [pp 208-9]

Another highlight (so far, that is, as I’m still going through the collection) is the interview with Phyllis Webb, talking about a number of things including her considerations of form, the poetics of failure and the ghazal; Webb, said to have (since) put writing poetry long behind her for the sake of painting.

JANICE: Your own interest in form has led you to break down a number of different poetic forms. Your ‘Imperfect Sestina’ develops a poetics of failure or transgression, where the poem insists on breaking with convention. Your ghazals and anti-ghazals repeat this process.

PHYLLIS: I’m always rather uneasy working with inherited forms, given forms, closed forms, and yet I seem to be tempted and challenged by them. Once I start on the form, there does seem to be this anarchic part of me that wants to disrupt the form and give it a new life or a new focus or shift it in some day so expectations are disrupted and not satisfied, so it’s a challenge to the reader. John Hulcoop has been writing about this disruptive aspect of my personality, that I do not want to conform and am caught between a very conforming personality in some days and an almost childish need to be a revolutionary of some kind, and to disrupt what is given. It is my way into new territory using the old form, which just happens along; it’s handy and I use it. It’s too easy to copy and not very hard to write a sestina. The interesting thing is how to write a sestina and not write a sestina, how to write a ghazal and not write a ghazal. Again, it’s elusive and you invoke all kinds of associations from the past about other poems and how that form has been used; you develop a kind of literary historical shorthand. A sestina in our culture is better known than the ghazal, where I import new subject matter just by importing that form. Middle Eastern politics was on my mind at the time, and a whole new series of images was brought in. With the ghazal, there is a convention of using conventional imagery, but it won’t have the same meaning for us that it has for an Arabic or Urdu writer. It’s simply another rich textual source or cultural inheritance that I use while doing something new with it. It’s not terribly profound, but it is a way of not repeating exactly but repeating with changes. [pp 336-7]

Really good, in-depth books of interviews with Canadian authors always seem few and far between, but there have been some over the years that have been quite impressive, including Beverley Daurio’s Dream Elevators (Mercury Press, 2000; interviews with Margaret Atwood, Leonard Cohen, Lorna Crozier, Claire Harris, Michael Harris, Roy Kiyooka, Gwendolyn MacEwen, Daphne Marlatt, Erin Mouré , P.K. Page, Libby Scheier, Anne Szumigalski, Fred Wah and Phyllis Webb), R.E.N. Allen and Angela Carr’s The Matrix Interviews: Moosehead Anthology #8 (DC Books, 2001; interviews with Robert Allen, Martin Amis, Nick Bantock, Neil Bissoondath, Marie-Claire Blais, Stephanie Bolster, Anne Carson, Michael Crummey, David Fennario, Amitav Ghosh, Michael Harris, D.G. Jones, Irving Layton, Robert Majzels, Erin Mouré and Gail Scott), Michelle Berry and Natalee Caple’s the notebooks: Interviews and New Fiction from Contemporary Writers (2002, Anchor Canada; interviews with Catherine Bush, Eliza Clark, Lynn Coady, Lynn Crosbie, Steven Heighton, Yann Martel, Derek McCormack, Hal Niedzviecki, Andrew Pyper, Michael Redhill, Eden Robinson, Russell Smith, Esta Spalding, Michael Turner, R.M. Vaughan, Michael Winter and Marnie Woodrow) and the more recent Poets Talk: conversations Robert Kroetsch, Daphne Marlatt, Erin Mouré, Dionne Brand, Marie Annharte Baker, Jeff Derksen, and Fred Wah by Pauline Butling and Susan Rudy (Edmonton AB: University of Alberta Press, 2005) [see my review of such here], among others. I applaud very much her efforts, and wonder why there aren’t more efforts being currently made? Where are all the interviews with the next generation of Canadian writers? I would love to read lengthy in-depth interviews with, for example, Ken Babstock, Marilyn Dumont, a rawlings, Nicole Markotic, Anne Stone, Sylvia Legris, Rachel Zolf and how many others who haven’t properly been dealt with yet (there have been interviews I’ve already seen here and there with Christian Bök, Sina Queyras and Lisa Robertson that have been quite magnificent; but what can be called enough?).

I could easily say the same thing of Janice Williamson herself (one of my goals while in Edmonton is to see she has another book out…), author of various essays as well as the trade books Tell Tale Signs: fictions (Winnipeg MB: Turnstone Press, 1991), cry baby ! (Edmonton AB: NeWest Press, 1998), chapbooks by disOrientation and arsonist auntie press, and editor (with Deborah Gorham) of Up and Doing: Canadian Women and Peace (Toronto ON: The Women’s Press, 1989), but I will leave that for a future entry…