KIRBC Interview with Kathleen Winter

Yesterday I posted a review of Kathleen Winter’s Annabel (House of Anansi, 2010), and today I’m happy to share an interview with the author herself. This interview is the last stop on her blog tour, and you can read other great posts at Kevin from Canada,  Serendipitous Readings, Kate’s Book Blog, SaltyInk, and Books@Torontoist.

Both Annabel and your award-winning short story collection, boYs, are deeply concerned with gender and gender relations. What kinds of connections do you see between the two works? Do you think Annabel offer any resolution to the sexual disconnects raised in boYs?

The secrets men and women keep from each other is at the heart of some stories in boYs, and this idea that there are secret compartments within the male and female aspects of being human is also in Annabel. Wayne lives on a frontier line, the meridian between what society considers male and what it considers female, so he glimpses both kinds of secrets. There is a key part in the book where he looks at men and women passing him on a downtown street and sees the chasm that separates them, and the loneliness of this is an annihilating kind of loneliness. Overcoming that sense of isolation is what Annabel is partly about, and the theme plays within Wayne but also between his parents, Jacinta and Treadway, who approach life worlds apart from each other.

Wayne identifies with both sexes, and yet belongs entirely to neither, making him a figure who is defined by gender norms and transcends them at the same time. How did you deal with the either/or nature of gender when shaping Wayne’s character and his voice?

It was very hard to do this because our language and culture are set up to contain assumptions that no one will even try. I continually found that while it is easy to write from a point of view that accepts an existing gender binary, it is hard to ditch the entrenched notion of duality and speak from a world where gender is a unified continuum or a sphere. I have always felt that language and words can only point toward real things, toward life itself, and are not life. But there is a mysterious connection between language and reality as well, that we don’t talk about very much. It is almost as if by stretching language to reach beyond known forms, the world as we know it can actually change. And there are many, many worlds that our language does not yet map. But yes, the duality in society and in our language was always tight around me as I wrote, always something to strain against and try to get beyond.

Have you had any feedback on Annabel from the intersexed community?

I am waiting to see. I know what my own place is within the gender sphere, and my own place is very porous, and I hope a sense of possibility comes through in the novel. Because Annabel has been released so recently, I am just beginning to hear back from readers. There are some gender news sites online that have told their readers about the existence of the book, and I’m glad about that.

You were a long-time resident of Newfoundland and you currently live in Montreal. What is it about Labrador that captured your imagination?

I have spent time in Labrador, in hunting camps and with trappers and with children and old people there, and have also spent time alone in the wilderness and have studied Labrador maps and non fiction. But it was my body’s response to the land, the ice, the mountains and the rivers and sky that influenced landscape in Annabel. In the book I describe Labrador as possessing a magnetic energy and a striated light that comes from the land and compels a person to connect with a new, energizing force. I know other people feel this and I wanted as best I could to portray it in the book. The first time I went to Labrador, I found myself weeping in the airport on the date of my return flight out, the land had such a hold on my spirit.

Much of the novel is concerned with Wayne’s search for a physical space that provides emotional “limitlessness.” Do you have a space of your own that you feel possesses this quality?

Yes. When I was twelve years old I felt a sense of limitlessness pass over and through me like water, or like a new element; a sense of what people might call eternity or something sublime and infinite. Since that time I searched for it but it comes when it wants to and often hides. You can’t control it, but you can live your life knowing it exists and is the most important thing, because in it lie wisdom, love and connection as well as mystery and the unknown. From that place of limitlessness come messages, and you never know when they will come, or where you will notice them. The limitlessness of a landscape like Labrador is a portal to this, and so is music, and so are certain relationships or people. The friendship between Wayne and Wally Michelin has this limitlessness. I wouldn’t be able to be an artist if I did not know about this limitless world within the world of forms, although my knowledge is patchy and often vanishes.

When you look back at the finished book, what part of it are you most pleased with? Was there an element that was particularly challenging when you were writing it?

I am most pleased with the character of Treadway, Wayne’s father, because he transcended the dimensions he appeared to possess when I started writing, and became a man with depths I did not know he had, and I grew to love him as if he was a real person in my life. Most challenging for me was rewriting the last third of the book so that it became an integral whole, structurally and emotionally, with the earlier sections. This took a lot of questions on the part of my editor Lynn Henry, and it made me realize that writing a book is not, has never been, and will never be a solitary process for me, the way I once thought it was.

(On a personal note: though I most strongly identified with Thomasina, and was initially most taken with her, by the end of the novel Treadway was the character I held most dear. So he certainly is a character to be proud of, Kathleen!)

Which writers have inspired you or influenced your craft?

My earliest connection with literary tenderness came when I read the books of Heinrich Boll. I love E.M. Forster’s exquisite language and his explorations of class and gender barricades. Roald Dahl is a deep favourite because he is so dangerously close to the edge of darkness and is held from falling by a thin gold thread of intelligent compassion. I love the letters and journals of Katherine Mansfield and Virginia Woolf, and my favourite latest reads are Little Bee by Chris Cleave, Douglas Coupland’s Eleanor Rigby, and Alice Zorn’s Ruins and Relics.

At the Keepin’ It Real Book Club we ask people to recommend books that really moved them — those ones you clutch to your chest after reading and then attempt to thrust upon others. What books would you recommend to us?

That is hard to do, but I could start with Francis Turner Palgrave’s Golden Treasury of Poetry, The Letters of Katherine Mansfield, James Joyce’s Pomes Penyeach, In the Old Country of My Heart by Agnes Walsh, The Wind on the Heath: a Gypsy Anthology edited in 1930 by John Sampson, Dylan Thomas’s Under Milk Wood, Roald Dahl’s Danny, the Champion of the World, and Norwood by Charles Portis.

Thank you for taking the time to speak with me, Kathleen! Your incredibly thoughtful answers have only deepened my appreciation for your remarkable novel.

Interested in reading Annabel? You can win your very own copy courtesy of House of Anansi. Just leave a comment on yesterday’s review or today’s post, and I’ll enter you in the draw! Winners will be selected July 19th!

A final note to publicists: I’m happy to consider KIRBC author interviews! Just send me an email at j.k.knoch[at]gmail.com and we’ll talk details!