Tag Archives: travel

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Authors in Quarantine – Mark Leslie Lefebvre

With this this series, I am hoping to capture how this cultural moment is affecting our speculative fiction authors and how our authors are surviving during the COVID-19 outbreak

Spec Can: What have you been up to during the COVID-19 outbreak?

Mark Leslie Lefebvre: I’ve actually been re-discovering a creative exercise that I used to formerly use as a writing warm up. Writing parody lyrics to songs and poems. I have always enjoyed the way that such a bit of work forces you to fit something into a forced structure but take the meaning in a new direction. It becomes something with a familiar pattern and sound, but something new. And often, something humorous.

Early on during Covid-19 isolation, my partner Liz and I started creating parody music videos. I’d write the lyrics, then we’d workshop them into something, record the song, and then make a video. We put out “Stuck In This House Here With You” a parody of the old Steelers Wheel classic. But it’s not just a spoof, there’s a ‘story’ in the tale of two people forced into isolation with one another, initially finding the annoying things about it, and one another, then coming to realize how fortunate they both are to be stuck with THAT special other person.

Our second parody video was a compilation of short parodies of Rogers and Parton’s “Islands in the Stream” (Sharing Broadband Streams), Patsy Cline’s “Walking” (I Go Shoppin’), The Carpenters’ “There’s a Kind of Hush” (You Just Need to Hush), and others, done in the style of an old K-Tel commercial.

I then did short dad jokes converted into short films, and a Cheers-parody of me drinking alone in isolation called Mark’s Tavern.

Those exercises helped keep my creative juices flowing, satisfied the part of my soul that yearns to be a storyteller, but then helped re-clear the path to get back into the prose writing that I had initially been having trouble with when the lockdown and isolation from the pandemic first started.

Spec Can: How are you adapting to social distancing?

Mark Leslie Lefebvre: Prior to the social distancing, I spent about 60% of my time working from home anyway, as a writer and a book industry representative. Just under half of my time was spent on the road, traveling to writer conferences, etc. So a lot of that time was spent in airports and hotels.

I do miss the fun of interacting with people in person, with the pleasures that come from exploring different locals, discovering great local micro and craft breweries, etc. So that has been a bit difficult. But I’ve doubled-down on doing virtual interviews with authors, both for my podcast, as well as the regular Draft2Digital live author spotlight interviews I’ve done. I’ve also done live readings and live beer and scotch tastings on my various social media outlets, as well as ongoing dad jokes. Just trying to do my job as a storyteller and entertainer – but that work also, as I mentioned already, reward me intrinsically.

Spec Can: How is the outbreak affecting your writing?

Mark Leslie Lefebvre: Initially, it was stifling. I was feeling blocked and having difficulty focusing on the writing that I figured I would now have time to do – particularly with the cancelation of all the time-consuming travel. But, as I mentioned, I channeled that creativity into lyrics, music, videos, and that helped path the path to get back into writing.

I also looked at a series I had started and planned on working on a while back, my “Canadian Werewolf” novels, and decided it was time to make some forward progress on it. I had the previous two titles, THIS TIME AROUND (a short story), A CANADIAN WEREWOLF IN NEW YORK (a novel), re-branded with a cover designer I’d had, in time for the launch of the next book in that series STOWE AWAY (novella), as well as two other works in that series. I also invested in getting audiobooks out for them. That exercise has re-inspired me to dig back into the writing of those books.

I have also committed to writing another non-fiction book about the business of writing and publishing (WIDE FOR THE WIN in my Stark Publishing Solutions series to join THE 7 P’S OF PUBLISHING SUCCESS, KILLING IT ON KOBO, and AN AUTHOR’S GUIDE TO WORKING WITH LIBRARIES AND BOOKSTORES is slated for release in early 2021), as well as a couple of non-fiction ghost story books that have been on the back-burner for a while.

And I’m sure that the pandemic, in general, will also inform and inspire more works as time goes on. I think that most writers will agree that a good part of what we do is we absorb things around us, re-adapt the things we experience, see, hear, and feel into fiction, into poetry, into other forms of creativity. I look forward to both writing about, and reading what other writers and artists create from this.

Interviewed by Derek Newman-Stille, MA, PhD ABD (They/Them)

Mark Leslie Lefebvre is the author of more than twenty books that include fiction and thrillers, and paranormal non-fiction explorations. He has also edited numerous anthologies. With three decades of experience in bookselling and publishing, Mark is a seasoned and trusted book industry professional who embraces both traditional and indie publishing options. His website is: http://www.markleslie.ca.

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Authors in Quarantine – Liz Westbrook-Trenholm

With this this series, I am hoping to capture how this cultural moment is affecting our speculative fiction authors and how our authors are surviving during the COVID-19 outbreak

COVID fashion statement: bleachy duds and shaggy hair.

Spec Can: What have you been up to during the COVID outbreak?

Liz Westbrook-Trenholm: Domesticity way up, writing way down.

I’ve been washing and bleaching everything inside and from outside our home, baking comfort foods, (state of emergency diet now enacted for the month of May) and sewing (searching for the most bearable face mask), all while listening to audiobooks, all cozy and historical mysteries as I seek respite from COVID news.

Routine has become strict and rarely varied. First it’smorning coffee, when we mutually drown in the firehose of social media, followed by a few hours spent on projectsuntil it’s time for an afternoon walk timed to beat the 3-5 pm jogging and biking rush hour on our preferred nature paths. We come back, dry off (we go in all weathers), readand play board games until wine-time, dinner, chat and music. Our day concludes with TV and bed. Rinse and repeat. Every day.

Excitement is laundry day, a video chat with a friend or relative, or Hayden’s weekly trip to the grocery store, me waiting at home for my hunter/gatherer (he has better lifting power than I do and we don’t run a car) to bring our weekly food, which I dunk in bleach mixture, except for eggs. Trust me, eggs in soggy cardboard containers do not go well. 

​The routine is comforting, at first, giving a sense of control to the uncontrollable situation we all find ourselves inhabiting. How can we react to the endless torrent of sorrow, disaster, fear and conflicting advice pouring from our media? Why, bake cinnamon buns, what else?

Aaaand it doesn’t take long for the comfortable routine to become a prison. Hayden starts taking dyspeptic pictures of himself in his bathrobe and turning them into silly gifs. I’m trying one hair style after another. After gentle discussion, we decide we need to schedule in some spontaneity. We write lots of activities on slips of paper which go into a cookie tin. (Hayden rejects ‘give each other haircuts’) We pull one out every couple of days when we get edgy. Sometimes just a game we haven’tplayed forever. Reading to each other, possibly with dramatizations. Looking at photos from years ago. A take-out Mexican food fiesta. Birthday party, with home-made hats (I knew there was a reason I’d kept a shoebox of orphaned earrings and feathers for decades). Other activities that are MYOB, so there. It’s not so much what we do, but that we burst out of the wire cage of routine we’ve built, and change things up a little. It’s surprisingly refreshing. Sex in the afternoon is awesome. Oops. I said I wouldn’t talk about that.

Spec Can: How are you adapting to social distancing?

Liz Westbrook-Trenholm: All of which spills over into how we deal with social distancing. Note the ‘we’. This would not be possible without each other. Always a close couple, a kind of two-person party, we’ve become, if anything, even closer, more careful and tender. Of course, it was disappointing for two inveterate travellers like us to see our plans collapse and our world shrink to only anywhere we can walk to. We can get tetchy, but we cut each other slack when the black dog drops by, or when one or the other wants to be all alone. We don’t take offense. It all makes sense. An old friend once said, “Where is it written you should be happy?” Sometimes it’s necessary to sit under the dark cloud and just breathe until the sun comes out again. It does come out again.

That being said, we work hard at keeping in touch with others via Zoom, Facebook chat, phone, email and text – whatever medium works best for each. We have especially upped our calls with family. I talk often now with my daughter who is distancing alone in London (the UK one). She’s worked out some solutions and has produced some powerful art in her off-work time, but it got pretty dark and desperate before she found her COVID groove.My sister and I vent constantly, bless her for being there.Calling friends and acquaintances and hearing that they’reokay releases swacks of relieved endorphins and hugely shortens the list of people I have to worry about. If they’renot okay, I’m there to hear it out and keep in touch. Sharing their burden paradoxically lessens mine.

​Another side-effect is my tendency to babble uncontrollably at sight of another human. I strike up two-meter distance chit-chat with total strangers or the pharmacy clerk behind her plexi-glass shield. My urge to chat about anything anything at all, at some length, is difficult to contain. I try. Truly I try. Let me tell you ALL about it sometime.

​I’m also thinking about what comes next as treatments and, we hope, vaccines evolve over the coming one or two years. Years. Yeah. As an asthmatic baby boomer smack dab in the middle of one of the at-risk demographics, I’ll need to keep shying away from close contact with anyone who might be a carrier. While we’veall been in it together, it’s been do-able. When I become a minority, it’ll pose new challenges. My friends with disabilities and health issues are nodding their heads with grim grins and saying, ‘Yuh-huh. Tell us about it.” No need. In sharing your stories and concerns, you gave the world a lot of information and demonstrated a lot of coping strategies, long before COVID came along. I expect to be using them shortly! I’ll likely write about it.

Spec Can: How is the outbreak affecting your writing?

Liz Westbrook-Trenholm: The times have affected my writing in two main ways. One is that I have done much less. My writing often takes me deep into dark corners and edgy issues that can leave me drained. I’ve been a little nervous to approach it.

But now, after a hiatus for bleaching and retreat, I find I’m approaching it with a gentle, cozy style. A young woman, a run-away on her last legs, physically and psychologically, falls into a carefully dug hole in the middle of a forest. She looks up from the pre-dug grave at a man silhouetted against the dawn who says, “That’s mine.” And they go from there, into a gentle interaction of restoration and understanding between generations.

Or the old woman, isolating alone in her apartment, who opens her door to the god of the underworld in the form of a lost toddler in a really odious diaper. She draws him into her home and nurtures him, fearless and practical. What deal will they cut when he reaches his full size? 

End of life is a theme in the back of mind for all of us right now and in both of these stories. It’s a topic that turns up in my fiction regularly, but in these, my emerging ‘COVID’ stories, I find the characters less fierce and more wise and accepting than my frequently angry, feisty dames. 

So. How about that COVID thing, eh? Who among us thought we’d be living through history in the making? How can anything be the same again, any more than it was after the plague years, or the potato famine, or the abolition of slavery in the west, or the world wars? So many scabs have been ripped off our social shortcomings. So much strength and ability has emerged, showing us what we, as a society, could be. What will we do with it? Where will we take this experience, both within ourselves and in the way we interact with each other? Now, there’s a good writing topic for any spec fic writer.

Interviewed by Derek Newman-Stille, MA, PhD ABD

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Gossamer Threads of a Tale

A Review of Dominik Parisien’s “Spider Moves the World” in Lackington’s Issue 6 http://lackingtons.com/2015/04/08/spider-moves-the-world-by-dominik-parisien/ 

By Derek Newman-Stille

Like Dominik Parisien’s poetry, his prose story “Spider Moves the World” captures the beauty in the grotesque. Parisien takes the figure of the spider and reveals the beauty of spidery movements, the wonder of being carried on a spider’s back and the essential relationship between human and arachnid. These spiders revel in music evoked by instruments of spun threads and eight-legged dances, weaving tales as easily as webs. 

Parisien spins gossamer threads of spider silk between poetry and prose, pulling the two together into a web of beautiful metaphors, roping words into a multiplicity of meanings that extends their scope to include the nuanced potential embodied in poetry. 

Parisien reverses the paradigm of the spider as a figure who lurks at the periphery of human interactions, largely ignored and cast off and places this periphery onto the human narrator, a figure who reaches out to the much larger spiders only to touch his own insignificance in their experience.  Yet, all of the spiders’ seeming aloofness is part of their difference from human experience and simultaneously part of their acceptance of him or her as another spider, a human with a spidery core.

The caravan is a central image to this short story, evoking the desire for change and the constancy of movement. The narrator desires some form of change and movement and has moved to the region of Greensea seeking new experiences, and, perhaps, an escape from the past. But the spiders are figures of constant change, alternating who leads the group each day and allowing their young to float away in billowing clouds of silken parachutes… but all of them reply to questions of identity with “I am spider”, speaking of their fundamental similitude. 

The narrator (nameless because he or she, like the spiders themselves, is never only one thing but always shaped by travel, by change) feels cushioned by this arachnid community, after all, what could be more comforting than being wrapped in a silky blanket of community….

To find out more about Dominik Parisien’s fiction, visit his website at https://dominikparisien.wordpress.com

To read this story for free online, vizit Lackington’s at http://lackingtons.com/2015/04/08/spider-moves-the-world-by-dominik-parisien/ 

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Poetry Reading from Sandra Kasturi – reading “Reschedule the Zeppelins”

Happy New Year! I have a gift for you – a poetry reading by the brilliant poet and my friend Sandra Kasturi. This is one of her unpublished poems, Reschedule the Zeppelins, which I had the pleasure to listen to at Trent Radio when she read it on air. Sandra has an absolutely wonderful reading voice, so I am excited to share one of her readings with you. This poem has quickly become one of my favourites (and not just because it is about zeppelins and I adore the idea of airships).

Click on the image below and allow a few moments for the audio file to buffer.

Explore Trent Radio at www.trentradio.ca

Explore Trent Radio at http://www.trentradio.ca

I am so honoured that Ms. Kasturi was willing to share her poem with us here on Speculating Canada, and I hope that you enjoy “Reschedule the Zeppelins” as much as I did.

To find out more about Sandra Kasturi, you can visit her website at http://sandrakasturi.com/.

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Creating Community in Isolation

A Review of Julie Czerneda’s Riders of the Storm (Daw, 2008)
By Derek Newman-Stille riderss

Displacement is a factor that is prevalent in the lives of many people who have had to leave home for whatever reason. The finding of “home” is a nebulous, complex, and constantly changeable phenomena. Julie Czerneda explores the search for home in a foreign and confusing space in Riders of the Storm. On a planet with three self-aware and hugely biologically different species (the Om’ray, Oud, and Tikitik), agreements exist to keep the balance between these three peoples from shifting. Czerneda focusses on one group, a small band of travellers from the Om’ray who defy social customs by their biological differences. They threaten the balance that the Om’ray seek to maintain by the fact that they are different, that they represent change in a society that resists change and prefers to conceive of existance only in the form of living people (ignoring notions of the past). This small group of travellers are manifesting new abilities beyond the natural abilities of the Om’ray, which include telepathy, healing, collective dreaming.

The telepathy of the Om’ray has created a notion of fundamental racism. Since they are only able to telepathically sense each other, they cast all other non-Om’ray groups as “not real”. They see themselves as the centre of the world and believe that the world only exists where they are. They have created an isolated society both from other races, but also from other periods of time. They see their society as always having been the same, that history does not exist and isn’t worth exploring because it would suggest that things were capable of changing.

Aryl Sarc has been forced to become the leader for her small band of Om’ray, leading them on a journey that they believe to be impossible because it represents the possibility of change, something her society resists, and the necessity of shifting the status quo. Aryl doesn’t seek leadership, but she is a figure who represents change by her very body – she has abilities that are far beyond other Om’ray and the uncertainty within her body makes her more willing to accept uncertainties and therefore willing to confront challenges.

In a society that focusses on static notions of culture (the idea that things don’t change) and has an interest in keeping secrets, Aryl tries to make everything open to her people. She is interested in opening questions in a society that largely accepts things unquestioningly. She and her group of exiles finds an abandoned Om’ray village, one that presents the inevitability that things do, in fact, change. It represents a place for a new start and one that embodies history, opened secrets, and the challenge and potentialities of a new future that is different from the now. The uncertainty of this village, Sona, makes it an ideal place for a changeable people.

The group of exiles have to create a new sense of home in a place that is embodied by history, a history that speaks to them (literally through dreams about the past and figuratively through their need to interpret objects that have remained). Those who have been exiled out of a fear of change, now have to live with change and the flexibility, fluidity, and the general flux that is represented by an uncertain future. They seek to create an idea of belonging in a place that is different, that has history, and that keeps reminding them that things can and do change. They are haunted by the reminder that the land they are on predates them.

Aryl becomes more comfortable with ideas of change and with notions that would have been considered threats to her society. She is able to help her society to accept and be comfortable with ideas of chance. Aryl’s comfort with change makes her an ideal person to speak to people of other races – she is willing to speak to the Oud, the Tikitik, and even a human visitor to her planet. She is not restrained to notions of the Om’ray’s singularity and superior significance. She learns to be willing to accept that those who are “not real”, may in fact just be different and that intercultural communication, although uncertain and potentially confusing, is worth approaching. When trying to approach the Oud and Tikitik, she learns from the human visitor to her world, Marcus, that she will need to take into account both cultural differences and also biological differences since what is biologically normal for the Oud would be threatening for the more vulnerable Om’ray.

As outsiders wherever they end up going, Aryl’s group of exiles create community through their willingness to accept change, to create community through difference and to cooperate with others who their society traditionally resists or views as insignificant.

You can explore Riders of the Storm and other books of the Clan Chronicles series through Julie Czerneda’s website at http://www.czerneda.com/sf/clan.html .

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“Everyone wants to go home. That’s what home is. Home is the place you want to be coming to, even when you wish you were leaving it. The world is only so big and a man can only travel so far before he finds himself curving back to where he started from.”

-Helen Marshall Hair Side, Flesh Side (ChiZine, 2012)

 

Quote – Everyone Wants To Go Home

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Interview with Helen Marshall

An Interview with Helen Marshall

Author Photo Courtesy of Helen Marshall

By Derek Newman-Stille

After reading Helen Marshall’s new book Hair Side, Flesh Side and seeing her interest in the role of memory and the body, I wanted to inquire further about her writing process and get some insights on the interplay between texts, memory, and the body since this is something that has been of interest to me in my own academic work. This incredible interview grew out of that inquiry and I hope that all of you enjoy Helen Marshall’s insights as much as I did. I will let Helen Marshall introduce herself below.

Spec Can: Can you tell us a little bit about yourself to begin this interview?

Helen Marshall: I’ve worked as an editor for several years for ChiZine Publications, and in addition to that I’m currently finishing off a Ph. D in medieval studies on fourteenth-century manuscripts. This means I spent a great deal of my time traveling and pouring over ancient tomes in libraries across England and the United States, seeing how they were stitched together, comparing and identifying the hands of medieval scribes, measuring punctuation marks…

This might seem like painstaking and ridiculous work to many of you, but I find it genuinely exciting. I love the feeling of reclaiming some piece of the past that was otherwise lost. Even if it is only the barest trace of human presence in an object that seems otherwise opaque and indecipherable.

Spec Can: What role does the macabre have in modern Canadian fiction?

Helen Marshall: When you say “role” it seems to imply that the macabre is accomplishing something specific… if it is, I’m not sure what exactly that might be. I think the macabre in Canadian fiction accomplishes what the macabre accomplishes in all fiction: it gives us a sense of our own mortality, of the body as something that will inevitably die. It reacquaints us with fear, and at the same time it enlivens us. Does Canada have its own unique brand of the macabre? Most definitely. Canadian literature has been traditionally considered to have a strong vein of realism to it, but the macabre, the Weird—the kind of books that ChiZine Publications has championed–are doing something to open that up. That’s good. I don’t believe in straitjacketing literature.

Spec Can: Where do you see “weird fiction” going from here?

Helen Marshall: Jeff VanderMeer recently wrote a wonderful article on how “weird fiction” is moving past H. P. Lovecraft (available here). That’s a good thing: not because Lovecraft doesn’t deserve to be studied and reread, but because he himself has become something of a straitjacket. He has created a pattern or a template that is, perhaps, a little too easy to follow right now, and so perhaps it is time for something new.

China Mieville’s success (and those who have followed him) ultimately convinced publishers that there was a market for strange, dark fiction. It gave them someone to point to in the same way that Stephen King did for the horror genre many moons ago. But what I find I love about “weird fiction” is the utter delight its authors take in surprising the reader, giving us something we haven’t seen before, taking risks in both form and content. It’s a great genre precisely because it isn’t really a genre: it isn’t codified, it doesn’t have rules. It means you can have some real fun with it.

Spec Can: What is it like to shift back and forth between author and editor? How do you manage both your life as an academic and as a fiction author? How do they support each other or conflict with each other (or both)?

Helen Marshall: I feel like my work as an editor, an academic, and as an author all feed into one another. The process of writing Hair Side, Flesh Side was the process of trying to explain to myself how that might work. Both the role of the editor and the academic are about finding some piece of truth in another person’s writing, and then uncovering it and helping it into the light. A good academic makes writing come alive. A good editor does exactly the same. An author, though – an author has to find a way to shut up all those bits that are outwardly focused, at least for a moment. It’s still a process of uncovering. But it’s about bringing to light something that you feel deeply, and in the end the thing you are revealing is yourself. That’s scarier in many ways, and more exhilarating. But working as an editor and an academic has given me a depth and shape to that process.

Spec Can: As someone who studies the past and someone whose fiction work often involves concepts of memory, what role does the past play in your fiction writing? What is the importance of memory? How do memories haunt people?

Helen Marshall: The past and memory are interlinked for me. To some extent, Hair Side, Flesh Side comes out of the fact that when I was in high school my dad suffered a serious brain injury that played havoc with his memory. Around that time, I was developing an interest in the medieval. Looking back, it’s probably no surprise that those two things are related. The study of the past is a way of recovering memories, I think, of rediscovering things that have been forgotten, lives that have been lived. And art, or writing anyway, is really a way of making ourselves live longer and speak louder than we might otherwise.

Canada has always seemed to me to be a place struggling with memory. Both of my parents emigrated to Canada just before I was born, my mom from South Africa and my dad from England via Zimbabwe. I didn’t feel a strong connection to Canadian history. I grew up reading books about European history, reading children’s literature that was grounded in mythologies that seemed very distant. Stories were things that happened in other places. As a medievalist in Canada, I find I always have to explain why I do what I do. When I go to England, they get it. Because it’s a part of their history and it matters to them. I’ve learned to live with that dissonance.

Spec Can: What role does the body play in horror? Why is the body so important?

Helen Marshall: I suppose, at its most basic level, the body is where horror happens. We desperately want a control over our bodies we don’t have. That scares me. That scares me a lot. There’s something terribly frightening about the idea that the thing that seems to be most me is something I can’t control.

Spec Can: In your short story Sanditon (from Hair Side, Flesh Side), the protagonist

Cover Photo of Hair Side, Flesh Side courtesy of the author

discovers that her skin has become a text and she becomes hollowed out inside. As an editor, do you ever feel like you have been hollowed out by other authors’ work? How does this story speak to you?

Helen Marshall: The obvious answer is, yes, absolutely. Sanditon, and a rather large chunk of Hair Side, Flesh Side, came out of a four-month period of study abroad I did in Oxford. It was amazing to spend weeks at a time in the Bodleian with really old books, but it was also fantastically lonely. That loneliness was what gave me the chance to write, but it is a strange feeling to realize that you are devoting your life to the study of authors who have been dead for six hundred years while you yourself are still alive. Sanditon came out of that. It was about me trying to figure out what it meant to be a writer. But it isn’t just about the way that the work of dead authors can hollow you out: it’s also about the rather crushing and self-destructive relationship between Hanna and Gavin. There are a helluva lot of ways to get hollowed out by another person and they don’t all have to do with writing.

Spec Can: Two of the short stories in Hair Side, Flesh Side feature skin as a text. What is the significance of skin for you? What do you feel is the social significance of skin for our society overall? How can the body be a text?

Helen Marshall: Medieval manuscripts were written on the skins of animals that had been stretched on a frame, scraped, and rubbed with pumice and chalk until they were smooth. So when you look at the page of a medieval manuscript, you still see it as a piece of skin: it has a hair side (the part of the skin facing outside the beast) and a flesh side (the part facing the muscle and organs). They have a different texture. You can even see the hair follicles. So here’s a time when writing was closely linked to the death of an animal.

And there’s a trope in medieval writings in which Jesus Christ is figured as a charter. The fourteenth-century Short Charter of Christ, for example, imagines the body of Christ as a written document with his wounds figures as seals to mark the text’s authenticity:

“In this way Christ, when his hands and feet were nailed to the cross, offered his body like a charter to be written on. The nails in his hands were used as a quill, and his precious blood as ink. And thus, with this charter he restored to us our heritage that we had lost.” [from Siegfried Wenzel, trans. Fasciculus morum : a fourteenth-century preacher’s handbook (University Park : Pennsylvania State University Press, 1989), p. 213.]

I think it’s a gorgeously powerful metaphor for writing, but it’s also a metaphor grounded in horror, as was made clear to me when I went to a talk by Bruce Holsinger that later inspired “Skin”. I love the contradiction: Writing as a means to immortality comes at the cost of genuine sacrifice.

Spec Can: Your work reads like a surreal dream. What is the role of dreaming in your stories and for story formation overall?

Helen Marshall: I attended the Clarion West Writing Workshop over the summer, and Kelly Link said something that really stuck with me: there’s daytime logic and there’s nighttime logic. Daytime logic is automatically familiar to us. We know its rules. But nighttime logic has a power of its own. It may be associative and subconscious, but it still has a certain truth to it. Surreal or absurdist writing can sometimes come out feeling very cold because we can’t see ourselves in it. We know, at a gut level, that it is not our world and so the consequences don’t feel real. What I try to do is find a bizarre premise and use it as a way into something that is deeply emotional: every new oddity ought to feel like a natural extension of the rules of the world. It feels like it fits. For me, the process of writing strange fiction is falling into a world where each new revelation comes with a shock—but also with a sense of recognition.

Spec Can: In your short story No ghosts in London, the main character escapes to the city to avoid ghosts. What is the role of the urban environment as a place of escape and forgetting?

Helen Marshall: I spend a lot of my time traveling. When I stay in the same city for more than a couple of months, I start to get edgy.  Travel to new cities opens up in my eyes to the world around me again after I’ve got a little too comfortable. But at the same time the city is a place where it is easy to disappear. Or to reinvent yourself. It seems to give you the promise of a blank slate. But the problem, of course, is that everywhere you go, you carry yourself with you. When you wipe the slate clean, you’ll always find a point where bits of your old self start to bleed through again.

Spec Can: Ghosts often feature as figures of memory or reminders of the past in your work. Where did this idea come from? What inspired you to view ghosts as figures haunting us from the past?

Helen Marshall: Ghosts scare the Hell out of me. Really. I tried to watch the Japanese movie Juon a couple of months ago and it terrified me so badly that I burst into tears four minutes from the end and demanded that we shut the movie off. Even though I knew I would feel better if I saw those final four minutes and got some closure to the story, I just couldn’t bring myself to do it.

For me ghosts are terrifying because they are us. What I see when I look at a ghost is myself. And so if the ghost is really just an image of your own future—that is, you when you are dead, the you that you can’t comprehend or imagine—then in some way you are also the ghost of your own future self. We leave things behind, and mostly those things are former versions of ourselves. It seems natural, then, that ghosts are also a figure for something that wants to be remembered, even if we want desperately to forget it.

Spec Can: Several of your stories involve Jane Austen in some way. In what way does Austen speak to you? Inspire you?

Helen Marshall: I think there’s something intrinsically funny about Jane Austen. And sweet. And sad.

Spec Can: What can Weird Fiction do for readers that realist fiction is not able to do? How can it inspire or challenge readers?

Helen Marshall: Weird fiction, at its best, unsettles us. Realist fiction can also do that, but that isn’t necessarily its goal. I love the idea of a kind of writing designed deliberately to shock, to surprise, to unbalance and unnerve. It has a kind of intensity to it, and it makes us consider ourselves from oblique angles rather than head-on.

Spec Can: What questions do you hope that your work evokes for your readers?

Helen Marshall: All the questions above are a pretty good start!

I hope my readers think about my work. But I also hope they just experience it and see what comes to them. The thing is, it’s terribly difficult to predict what’s going to resonate with a reader, what’s going to work for them, what’s going to touch them.

The biggest thing I fear I have to fight against with my academic background is demanding that the reader bring a toolbox with them when they come to my writing. Whatever happens when they read happens. It ought to have a little magic to it. A little spontaneity.

I want to thank Helen for taking the time to do this interview and provide such enlightening and well-thought-out replies. You can read more about Helen Marshall’s work at http://www.manuscriptgal.com/ . She has a website totally dedicated to her book Hair Side, Flesh Side that you can also explore at http://hairsidefleshside.com/ . If you are interested in reading a sample of her work, you can check out her short story “Blessed” for free at http://hairsidefleshside.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/BlessedPromo.pdf

Since Helen has mentioned ChiZine a few times in this interview, you can check out their website at http://chizinepub.com/  and perhaps find some additional exciting and interesting fiction. You can check out some of my reviews of ChiZine books by clicking on ChiZine in the Tags section of my website.

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Upcoming Interview with Helen Marshall on Thursday November 15

Helen Marshall’s book Hair Side, Flesh Side has recently been published. I was so excited about reading it that I wanted to interview her and get some further insights.

You can check out my review of Hair Side, Flesh Side posted on October 27, 2012.

Check out this interview on November 15 to get some more insights on the interplay between memory and haunting, the role of Weird Fiction, the importance of the body in fiction, the way past authors speak to current authors, and Canada as a place that is struggling with ideas of memory.

Here are some highlights from the interview to tease and intrigue you:

Helen Marshall: “I love the feeling of reclaiming some piece of the past that was otherwise lost. Even if it is only the barest trace of human presence in an object that seems otherwise opaque and indecipherable.”

Helen Marshall: “I think the macabre in Canadian fiction accomplishes what the macabre accomplishes in all fiction: it gives us a sense of our own mortality, of the body as something that will inevitably die. It reacquaints us with fear, and at the same time it enlivens us.”

Helen Marshall: “What I find I love about ‘weird fiction’ is the utter delight its authors take in surprising the reader, giving us something we haven’t seen before, taking risks in both form and content”

Helen Marshall: “An author has to find a way to shut up all those bits that are outwardly focused, at least for a moment.”

Helen Marshall: “The study of the past is a way of recovering memories, I think, of rediscovering things that have been forgotten, lives that have been lived. And art, or writing anyway, is really a way of making ourselves live longer and speak louder than we might otherwise.”

Helen Marshall: “Canada has always seemed to me to be a place struggling with memory.”

Helen Marshall: “We desperately want a control over our bodies we don’t have. That scares me. That scares me a lot. There’s something terribly frightening about the idea that the thing that seems to be most me is something I can’t control.”

Helen Marshall: “For me, the process of writing strange fiction is falling into a world where each new revelation comes with a shock—but also with a sense of recognition.”

Helen Marshall: “Travel to new cities opens up in my eyes to the world around me again after I’ve got a little too comfortable. But at the same time the city is a place where it is easy to disappear. Or to reinvent yourself. It seems to give you the promise of a blank slate. But the problem, of course, is that everywhere you go, you carry yourself with you. When you wipe the slate clean, you’ll always find a point where bits of your old self start to bleed through again.”

Helen Marshall: “For me ghosts are terrifying because they are us. What I see when I look at a ghost is myself. And so if the ghost is really just an image of your own future—that is, you when you are dead, the you that you can’t comprehend or imagine—then in some way you are also the ghost of your own future self.”

I hope that all of you enjoy her interview on November 15 as much as I enjoyed the experience of interviewing her. You can read a bit more about Helen Marshall at her website http://www.manuscriptgal.com/ . If you haven’t read Hair Side, Flesh Side yet, you can get a taste of her work by reading her short story “Blessed” for free at http://hairsidefleshside.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/BlessedPromo.pdf