In this exclusive interview with Evadne Macedo, author of The 29th Day, Karen Connelly shares her thoughts on writing. Karen Connelly is a teacher at the Humber School for Writers and author of nine books of poetry, non-fiction and fiction including Burmese Lessons, The Lizard Cage, Grace & Poison, The Border Surrounds Us. She has received numerous grants and awards for her writing including Britain’s Orange Broadband Prize for New Writers (2007) for her first novel, The Lizard Cage and The Governor General’s Award for Touch the Dragon: A Thai Journal (at age 24).

1. The Globe and Mail review of your most recent novel, Burmese Lessons, draws the link back to The Lizard Cage – noting that “[r]eaders familiar with The Lizard Cage will experience several shocks of recognition of characters and images and ideas that become the building blocks of the novel that took her eight years to write, after the period covered by the memoir.” I think about this in the context of Touch the Dragon: A Thai Journal, published as a series of letters to unknown readers. That collection could have been reconfigured as a novel or short stories, yet the concept of letters to me (as the reader) — a person you could not have imagined years ago when you were writing the pieces — is thilling in its simple genius. You have a remarkable ability to craft the truth of the life into something that resonates with the reader. How do you decide whether to write an experience as a poem, a novel, a collection of letters or non-fiction memoir? When do you know you have exhausted the potential of an experience?

In an interview with Nancy Lee at Joy Kogawa’s house in Vancouver, I realized that I have written about all the material that interests me in all three genres. This interview took place a couple weeks ago, and my answer was a revelation to me. But it’s true. All the themes I’m interested in—the experience of the self abroad, the idea of cultural and political Otherness, the body as conduit for experience and knowledge, the effect of trauma on the individual, the family, the body politic—all of these have received some kind of treatment in fiction, nonfiction and poetry. I think poetry, for me, is the first response (the most visceral), and then fiction (which is more intellectual, more thought-out), and then nonfiction, which for me is a kind of peacemaking genre. Of course it’s not always exactly like this, but when I think about the book One Room in a Castle, which is a blur of genres, and the years I’ve spent writing about Burma, that curious formula certainly applies.

I know I can’t write anymore about Burma—it’s been almost fifteen years, and my energy for the subject is tapped out. But the themes remain the same—I’ve found my themes. Politics, the body, the resilience of love paired with an innate and learned human impulse to extraordinary violence and cruelty. Obviously those are themes that a writer, or anyone, can spend a lifetime thinking about.

2. In your 1993 interview with The ShanMonster, you spoke about the challenges you faced in finding a publisher for Touch the Dragon: A Thai Journal — a non-fiction book that ended up winning the Governor General’s Award. About 15 years later, Terry Fallis faced similar obstacles in publishing his first novel, The Best Laid Plans, which also turned out to be an award-winning book (it won the Stephen Leacock Medal for Humour in 2008). What changes have you seen in the publishing industry over your years as a writer? How are prospects for new writers starting out now, compared to those you faced when you were a teen with a plan of being a writer?

Clearly it’s all more competitive and stressful now for young writers—partly because Canada is a bigger country, there are more people writing, and publishers themselves are under more stress because of massive changes in technology. Writing programs increasingly school (and produce) new writers to have big expectations about what they can potentially ‘get’ from the publishing experience, whereas the reality remains the same, and is in fact, at this moment, probably worse than when I was starting out: it’s hard to get published, it’s even harder to make a living writing, and publishing a book, while important and formative, does not change your life. But it doesn’t matter how many times more established writers tell young writers this: most of them don’t believe us. And I suppose that is as it should be. I didn’t go to university, or through a creative writing program, so I grew up as a writer with the assumption that what I was writing might never be published, and that I might labour away in obscurity for my entire life. And I was all right with that. I had a lot of ambition, but I was also a great romantic. It was all about ‘my art.’

3. John Bemrose and Emily Schultz are poets who seem to infuse poetry into their fiction whereas you seem to maintain a stronger separation between the types of writing, perhaps like Priscila Uppal. In early drafts of my first novel, The 29th Day, I relied quite heavily on poetry and poetic language as that felt natural — I had captured moments that could then be woven together to form a coherent story. In writing my second novel, I am more consciously separating my writing into a poetry collection and a novel. What is your approach to writing  fiction and poetry? At what point do you really know that something you have written is a poem rather than a description of an idea that might fit into a novel? Is there a benefit to one approach over the other?

The work dictates itself; meaning the impulse comes to me strongly as poetry, or prose. I’m close to finishing my first collection of poems in a decade, and I know that I’ll now write fiction about the subject matter of the collection.

Poetry comes from a different area of the brain. Prose and poetry use different techniques, different voices—poetry is like a different musical instrument. Working on the new book of poetry—oh canada crack my heart—despite dealing with truly miserable subject matter–was like going swimming in almost warm salt water. One floats. In prose you really have to swim. Prose narrative is all about duty, making sure the reader gets the connections, building the whole scene, the whole world. Poetry is momentary and emotional. Clearly it can and even needs to mean more than one thing. This multiplicity means it is a freer element. Even if it is narrative, as much of my poetry is, very story-ish, it is still more watery, more fluid. And let’s face it, poetry can just jazz up and crash down and stun the reader in a way that prose almost never can. The sharpness and specificity of poetry has much to do with that. While it is the freer element, it also contains, paradoxically, the possibility of driving a stake into the reader’s heart.

What’s great about poetry for me is that no one reads it. Well, maybe a few hundred people. But it’s a secret place. Most poets complain about this but for me it’s a relief. Because of that wonderful obscurity, you can think write say express anything in a poem. There is no censorship, no niceties necessary. At least for me. I do think a lot of other poets do more censoring, more picking and choosing. Or it’s a stylistic consideration—I find there’s a lot of tightness in Canadian poetry these days, a lot of formalism that is not particularly interesting and absolutely not emotionally engaging, which is part of my poetics. As I get older I am more and more interested in—what? freedom? that’s not exactly it, since I have always had every kind of freedom imaginable. Something else. Not hiding. Telling the truth.

4.  Based on your experience as a teacher and mentor (through Diaspora Dialogues and the Toronto Writers’ Centre among other programs), are there any books — fiction or non-fiction — that you would recommend for writers to improve their craft?

Great books: Writing Fiction, by Janet Burroway, for both nonfiction and fiction writers. And The Art of Memoir, by Judith Barrington.

5. Could you please comment on the practicalities behind your writing? For example, do you keep notes in a notebook? If so, at what point do you transfer them to a computer? Do you write on a laptop or a desktop? Do you hide yourself away in a quiet room or write at cafés? And the biggest question of all: Do you use a Mac or a PC?

I write on a PC, but am considering getting a Mac. I have a pretty steady schedule and a home office, and sometimes work at the Toronto Writers Centre when I’m very busy with a specific project. I do childcare in the morning, some email, then write in the afternoon, from about 2-6. I keep a journal but writing notes, unless I’m travelling or living abroad, are not usually the stuff of the journal. That’s more a personal record of thoughts, experiences.

6. In her interview, Emily Schultz mentioned advice she’d received from poet Patrick Lane: “Endure.” What’s the best piece of advice you received on writing or making it in the literary world?

The great Indonesian writer Pramoedya Ananta Toer, while I struggled writing The Lizard Cage, told me: Be daring. Best advice ever. It has worked.

7. In the introduction to Grace & Poison, you speak of guidance counsellors who guided you towards secretarial work and teachers who accused you of anti-intellectualism, yet your identity as a writer was established from such a young age. What can we do — as teachers, parents, and caring adults — to nurture the children around us, all of whom have potential to be writers? Who, if anyone, provided you with the mentorship or support you needed to endure your challenging early years as an aspiring writer?

I think allowing children time and space to do nothing is crucial. Or to just do whatever they want, except for watch too much TV or play too much on the computer. As we all become more technologically mediated creatures, we interact less and less with the natural physical environment, less with ourselves, less with each other. Children especially see so many images, do so many things, experience so many pressures from a young age. Freedom and time have become these golden eggs that even eleven year olds don’t have anymore. It’s sick. It is literally sick, and sickening. To be outside in natural environments and to do nothing: we should all have more of that, children included.

Nancy Holmes, a dear friend and a wonderful poet—her collection The Adultery Poems probably contains the best sonnets any contemporary Canadian has written–was my GREAT mentor and supporter through my early writing life. I met her when I was fourteen, in Calgary. And she still gives me great advice when it comes to new manuscripts. And Timothy Findley and I had a correspondence which was crucial to me, while I was living in Spain and France. He was very supportive, encouraging and no-nonsense as well. Cynthia Good, who used to be the managing editor at Penguin (over twenty years ago) was also very helpful and encouraging. She now runs the publishing program at Humber.

8. In your interview with Sarah Hampson of the Globe and Mail, you describe motherhood as a sort of cultural “experience.” You say, ”It’s altering but it makes you more yourself, I found. When you have a small child, it’s such an intense experience because you are always brought to the edge of yourself.” This sort of intensity helped me write the first draft of my first novel, The 29th Day. What impact has the creative intensity of motherhood had on your writing?

The implications of power are endlessly fascinating, and depressing. Here you have a PERFECT being—literally, that is what a healthy newborn is. And you watch how your struggle for power with and over this being deforms that perfection. How society’s constructs deform that perfection. The very best parent, the most patient, the kindest, etc, makes so many mistakes. And has power. Must have power: that is, after all, part of the job description of ‘parent’. I am a good mother, but it’s the hardest thing I’ve ever done, or ever will do. Writing books is nothing beside it, honestly. Parenting is the ultimate Buddhist practice—you constantly have to reassess and release and be compassionate and loving when you just feel like saying, Oh, fuck, enough already, I’m sick of this.

I’ve already thought a lot about the parallels between one’s personal power over children and the political power wielded by rulers, because Burmese people often compare their dictatorship to a cruel, uncaring father. If it is hard to have power over a child, it is much harder to have power over a nation. I suppose having a child has taught me how truly amazing Canada and a few other nations are, how relatively well our country is run, how relatively peaceful we are as a people, and how crucial it is that we preserve that instead of letting it be ruined by an increasingly dictatorial Conservative party.

In Harper we see the classic lousy, over-controlling, withholding, hard-hearted parent. To simplify it greatly (I know, this is a long argument, not a short interview subject): the recent G20 meetings in Toronto have been a meeting of crappy parents. We have not seen more regulations formulated for banks; we have not seen more control or taxes of large money-making corporations; we have not seen power curbed or “made compassionate” in any way. Quite the opposite. Educational institutions, healthcare initiatives, social safety nets for the poor and variously disabled are all going to pay for the excesses of massive financial institutions and rich men and women. It is no coincidence that these are all bodies that, among other things, take care of the vulnerable and of children.

Allow me to say one more thing, seeing as we’re talking about babies and politics: Harper’s recent stipulation that Canada will not fund abortions in the developing world is so deeply sick, and indicative of what we are headed for as a nation: more control, more illogical moralizing. I have been in clinics in Asia where there are whole clinic WALLS covered with the hooks and sticks and wires that have been taken out of the cervixes of women desperate to abort because they cannot care for a/nother child. Many of these women died, or became so sick that their families disintegrated during their illnesses.

9. One of my goals in starting this blog was to profile writers who use their  ”platform” as a writer to achieve social justice-related goals. This could be by embedding challenging ideas about society and its values into the text of a novel or poems,  like Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale or The Year of the Flood or Don LePan in Animals. Priscila Uppal sees her writing as a sort of social work vocation, Nino Ricci supports BullFrog Power, Pasha Malla provokes people to challenge implicit racism using humour — just to name a few examples of other ways authors connect to ideas beyond themselves. I know that you have been involved with Pen Canada and Diaspora Dialogues — to what extent do you believe that you can be an agent of change, through your writing and the access to the public it gives you? Are there specific organizations, charities or causes that you use your writing, and “celebrity” as a writer to bring attenton to?

I’m never sure how to answer this question. Writers certainly have been agents for change—Zola, Camus, Voltaire, more recently the French writer Jean Yves Cendry who exposed a horrific pedophile cover-up in the northern France’s education system. And all the great feminist writers, starting with Wollstonecraft and moving right up through Betty Friedan and Susan Griffin. Some of these writers’ works have literally helped society change for the better in quantifiable ways. And writers who write in countries where censorship and freedom of speech are under constant threat—those writers and journalists often risk and sometimes lose their lives in their efforts to tell the truth, to effect change, to challenge the forces that would silence dissent. Having written a large book about a political prisoner who is in prison because he wrote protest songs, having interviewed dozens of former political prisoners, I am naturally sensitized to those kinds of issues. We have those kinds of struggles in North America too, but they are more cleverly hidden, or we ignore them because most of us are spoiled enough to ignore them. Some of our Native writers (Jeanette Armstrong immediately springs to mind) are writing or teaching about those struggles. But to be honest I find quite a few Canadian writers pretty apolitical, and, sometimes, because of that, rather dull.

I’m certainly supportive of PEN and Amnesty, and was very active doing Burma work for years. I know I’ve educated a lot of people in the West about what is happening in Burma, but I am a pragmatist: my work has not had any effect on the regime itself, and to those in the struggle for democracy there, has provided moral support at best.

10. In the introduction to Grace & Poison, you note that there is a link between language diversity and biodiversity, referring to a discovery by TerraLingua, an organization dedicated to preserving linguistic diversity. You say, “Wherever there are many butterflies, big cats, flowering plants, amphibians, and old trees, there are also many languages. But languages are dying faster than the landscapes to which they are intimately bound: fifty percent of the world’s 7,000 languages will probably be dead within a hundred years. Just as deforestation and desert-encroachment destroy ancient ecosystems, the languages and the people that name, protect, and remember those places disappear. When a language dies, the accumulated knowledge that lives inside words also perishes. We become less able to take care of our environment — and it becomes less able to take care of us — when our tongues are severed from it.” I thought this was fascinating and wonder whether there is anything else you might like to say on this topic — more recent developments, ideas for social change around this topic etc. Have you had any interest in tackling this concept in poetry, or a novel or a longer non-fiction work?

Other writers (Mark Abley jumps to mind, and Wade Davis) have written eloquently about what it means for us to lose ancient cultures and languages—how complex and grave and enormous this loss really is, how tragic it is. Because I’m a polyglot (I speak five languages quite well, and a sixth quite poorly) I am interested in how language affects the mind and spirit, who we become through other languages, how language is a form of history and a receptacle for knowledge. The study of any language’s roots affirms these ideas. But no, I’ve never been deeply pulled to write about the subject in a deep way. I think there are others who are doing that better than I could.

11. Do you have any final words of advice or encouragement for aspiring writers?

Go forth, my friends. The city is a big place. The farm is endless. The country is large. The world is a ragged, messy, exuberant, heartbreaking enormity. As is an individual life. Find someone to read your work and to be critical of it, but compassionate. Don’t take yourself too seriously. Don’t drink too much. As the Buddhist lojong slogan advises, Abandon all hope of fruition. Be daring

For more information about Karen Connelly, please visit her blog at http://karenconnelly.ca. See also her 1993 interview with The ShanMonster.

This interview was originally posted on July 10, 2010 at http://books.macedo.ca. This is the first interview in Evadne Macedo’s 2010/2011 Author  Interview Series. Please also read the interviews in Evadne’s  2009/2010 Author Interview Series:

• Emily Schultz: Heaven is Small, Joyland, Songs for the Dancing Chicken (May 5, 2010)
• Sarah Sheard: Almost Japanese, The Swing Era: a Novel, The Hypnotist: a Novel (April 14, 2010)
• Kristen den Hartog: (Water Wings, The Perpetual Ending, Origin of Haloes and The Occupied Garden with Tracy Kasaboski (March 31, 2010)
• Priscila Uppal: To Whom it May Concern, The Divine Economy of Salvation, Traumatology, Successful Tragedies and many, many other published works (March 17, 2010).
• John Bemrose: The Last Woman, Island Walkers, Imaginary Horses, Going Under (March 3, 2010)
• Pasha Malla: The Withdrawal Method (The 2009 Trillium Award; The Danuta Gleed Literary Award) (February 17, 2010)
• Kim Moritsugu: The Restoration of Emily; The Glenwood Treasure; Old Flames and Looks Perfect (February 3, 2010)
• Terry Fallis: The Best Laid Plans and The High Road (coming in September 2010) (January 20, 2010)
• June Hutton: Underground (January 6, 2010)
• Thomas Trofimuk: The 52nd Poem, Doubting Yourself to the BoneandWaiting for Columbus (December 16, 2009)
• Gina Buonaguro & Janice Kirk: Ciao Bella and The Sidewalk Artist (December 9, 2009)
• Don LePan: Animals (December 2, 2009)
• Deborah Willis: Vanishing and Other Stories (GG Finalist) (November 19, 2009)