INTERVIEW: LYNN COADY – Saints of Big Harbour from  www.bookmunch.co.uk I gather you had some difficulty in settling on the title – Saints of Big Harbour. What did you think was the problem with it? Everything was hard about this novel. By the time I had finished it, I had no idea what it was about, whether or not it was good—I didn’t even know my own name, let alone what to call this thing I had produced. Throughout, I wanted to call it ‘Town,’ but near the end ‘Town’ seemed so bland and inexpressive. But I guess mentally I had committed to that title, and I was so enmeshed in the book by the end of it all that my objectivity was shot. The novel, for me, was a huge eye-opener. It dawned on me that small-town Canada is not nearly as saintly or idyllic as I had liked to believe. Why do you think many people associate small-town America as being backward and ‘retarded’ but not the more remote parts across the border in Canada? I think the western world has been allowed a window into small-town America through the pervasiveness of its popular culture—but of course, these depictions always manage to congeal into stereotype. The two stereotypes that are fixed with regard to American small-towns are 1) Brutal, backward or 2) Homey, old-fashioned, with a slower and more benign pace-of-life. Of course people and communities are never this simple or easy to pin down. In short, if small-town Canada is seen as saintly or idyllic, it’s a stereotype based on a lack of knowledge. I think in general cultures love to fetishize and sentimentalise one another. We dearly love to think the grass is greener on the other side—that somewhere out there is an idyllic human existence that we all can ‘get back to’ if we were just able to summon up the correct moral fortitude within our own corrupt societies. It’s well documented that you think your hometown was ignorant and disenfranchised. Cape Breton Island is a chronically disenfranchised region and profoundly conservative in some aspects—some might say as a result of that legacy—but I would never use the word ‘ignorant.’ . . . In the first pages of the book you quote a folk song containing the lines: here I am where I must be, where I would be I cannot. I thought this was clearly pertinent to Guy in relation to his home, but is that also how you felt growing up? Yes—one of the things I was trying to get across in the novel, and that I remember most palpably from my adolescence is a feeling best summed up with the words: “I must get out. I can never get out.” The thing about the small-town working-class existence is that there is no sense that the world beyond—whatever it might be—is permitted to you. To aspire to it is considered preposterous and bigheaded, and you are tacitly told that people like you ‘don’t do that sort of thing.’ ‘That sort of thing’ equals basically anything well-to-do people take for granted: travel, becoming educated in anything but the most practical of disciplines, or—heaven forbid—devoting yourself to art. In general, the epigram was meant to indicate the overall powerlessness experienced by the young people in the novel—particularly Guy. Guy thinks his freedom resides in Big Harbour—the place where he spends the first half of the novel wanting to be. He needs to find his way to greater self-awareness before he can understand how much more deeply entrenched his powerlessness is—that it will take an enormous shift in his own personal perspective if he is to leave all the things that restrain him behind. Among these are the so-called ‘values’ that his uncle Isadore is always touting, such as Family and Community. When you’ve been told your whole life that these are the only things that matter, it takes considerable fearlessness to slough them off. The book is acutely panoramic and one of the most human I’ve read in a long time. All of the characters (barring Algernon!) have lived in and around Big Harbour all their life, speaking the same way. Yet you’ve managed to convey that each person – Guy, Leland, Corinne, Hugh, Isadore, Howard, Pam etc – no matter what age, thinks differently to one another. How did you go about delving into the minds of misfit teenagers to abusive alcoholics and articulate their thoughts so realistically? This is a hard question to answer for me, because I don’t really know. I sometimes think it’s a process akin to method acting. That is, just sitting around thinking about the characters so much that you begin to know instinctively what makes them tick, how they would respond in any given situation. The other aspect is that I always knew something about the ‘core’ of every character—for example, basically everything that Isadore does and says is motivated by fear. If you have this one basic thing in mind at all times, the character begins to act and react with remarkable consistency and believability, in my experience. The school’s in Saints of Big Harbour are suffused with boredom, are full of students that don’t fit in – especially Pam, Ann and to a certain extent Guy – and simmer under an unfocussed, floating “nebulous rage.” How much did you draw upon your own school years in Port Hawkesbury, Cape Breton? Extensively. I mentioned above that Cape Breton is a chronically disenfranchised area, but in the era in which the novel is set—early 80’s—this was acutely the case. The result was a lot of angry, down-and-out parents and kids with no real outlet for their boredom and frustration with the fact that the town was falling apart economically. Violence is one of the major constituents of the novel. You do say in the book that it only occurs when called for, but you also comment that it’s arbitrary and unpredictable. But don’t you feel that it can also be the result of a great accumulation of angst, that spills over? Does it have to be so precipitous? It is Guy who reflects that violence occurs “only when called for”—but he is thinking that this is how it’s depicted on television. Later he thinks, “But that’s not how it is in real life,” and goes on to describe it as arbitrary and unpredictable—like the weather, or madness (and a moment later, this is graphically brought home to him). That’s how I think of it too. Of course, violence can be systematic, but then again so can madness—madness is frequently systematic thought in overdrive. When I was in high school, it seemed like guys roamed the streets in packs, literally “looking for trouble,” like Howard and Hugh in the novel. I think that kind of focused, driven need for confrontation is very much the result, as you say of an “accumulation of angst,”—if not just plain rage. A few of years ago, incidentally, I was asked to speak at a conference concerning adolescent mental health here in Dartmouth, Nova Scotia. The evening I arrived was the day after Halloween, and all over the local news was a story about something that had taken place in my hometown the night before. Basically over a hundred teenagers got together and went on a rampage of vandalism, breaking the high school and the courthouse windows and so forth. It certainly added piquancy to my speech. I thought, for the love of God, give these kids something to do, give them some hope. And all the authority figures were talking about was punishment—how these were bad kids with bad parents who needed to be held accountable. No sense that perhaps the entire community should be held to account. On the back cover of the novel, Isadore is described as ‘monstrous’; I’ve also seen him called sadistic. I really liked him, though I’ll readily admit I wouldn’t like to have him living on my sofa; truck or no truck. Where did you get the inspiration for this fantastic, disarming character? There were a lot of men in my life who went into Isadore. I always found such characters troubling because in so many ways—as you say—they were likable, even lovable, but somewhere along the line these men had it drilled into them that they had to be in control of everything, at all times, otherwise they were no men at all. Ultimately that kind of pressure destroyed them, and inevitably destroyed their relationships with the people they loved. Of all the characters in Saints, Isadore breaks my heart the most, because there is no hope for him—he’s too steeped in self-denial with regard to all the harm he’s done to himself and others to ever begin to make amends, and to start living in good faith. He doesn’t have that in him anymore—he’s got too much invested in his self-deception. Guy is the hopeful one, the one who is able to throw off all those oppressive masculine ideals and get on with real life. Throughout the novel you interlace humour with great deftness. I found myself laughing many times, in particular when Isadore became bedridden and filled his days watching television. How easy do you find it to juxtapose humour with themes such as addiction and violence and why do you feel it’s necessary? For me, this comes naturally—tragedy and comedy go hand in hand in art as in life. I was looking at a friend’s old photographs with her one time and we came upon a photo of a baby asleep in his high chair—face down in his food, basically. My friend remarked “That reminds me of Dad, last Christmas,” and we just about killed ourselves. Her Dad, need I mention, is an alcoholic. It’s funny, isn’t it? It’s not funny, is it? You have been critical of CanLit in the past. But firstly, I’m confused as to what CanLit is. What is the common denominator in all of CanLit? At first I thought it’s defined by the nationality of the author. But then would you say Rohinton Mistry writes Canadian novels and that The Shipping News is not Canadian because Proulx is not? Does the backdrop of the novel make it CanLit? But by the same token Lord Of The Rings takes place in MiddleEarth and yet is as British as British can be. So what defines CanLit for you? A friend of mine replied: “Trees,” when asked this question. It’s too hard. Canada is such a big, culturally diverse place—what could the common denominator possibly be? I think right now Canadian literature is in its flower—it’s too young to define at the moment. We had a wonderful growth spurt in the 70’s, and the authors who came into their own then—Atwood, Ondantje, Findley, Richler, Munroe, and Gallant—are now our canon. But they laid the foundation for the spectacular diversity we’re seeing now—Canlit is no longer predominantly white, middle-class and Ontario-centric, as it was (by necessity, some might argue) in those days. Really the regionalist stuff that I do is a bit of a throwback to that time. It’s much more international now, as evidenced by the recent article by Pico Iver in Harper’s magazine. My kind of thing is old hat. Following on from that, why are you disillusioned with a lot of Canadian literature? I’m not. I love Canadian literature. I think a critical perspective is an important thing to have with regard to any beloved institution—after all, you want it to be the best it can possibly be. But this isn’t anywhere near the same thing as disillusionment. You’re quoted as saying that you write about things that obsess you. Which obsessions are you intending to put into print next? I’ve got a new novel on the go called “Mean Boy.” I’m moving out of Cape Breton and high school into the realm of academia. It’s going to be a kind of satirical novel set in the 70’s Canlit heyday I was discussing above. A very exciting time for Canadian writers—very nationalistic. All about a young, earnest, would-be poet and his mercurial mentor—a supposed back-woods, working-class poetic genius. It will be a skewering of academia and literary academics in particular along the lines of “Lucky Jim.” Should be light and fun after Saints of Big Harbour. I guess I chose the above subject matter, because the one thing that’s obsessed me all my life was writing and that vast mystery of “becoming a writer.” That’s what my young protagonist will be grappling with. What does it mean to “be” a writer, and how does one “become” one? Let’s just say he makes a few wrong turns trying to figure this out. I believe a monocle might be involved. How do you write? I mean, do you first begin with your message, your obsession, and build the story around that? Or do you first have a story in mind and allow the message to grow from within it? So far it’s been different with every book. Strange Heaven was quite organic—I just sat down and wrote. With the short stories, I began with a kernel of an idea, for example: “A boy who falls in love with blasphemy,” and build from that. With Saints of Big Harbour, it all started with the character of Guy, and it seems as if I layered characters on top of him. It’s the most character-driven thing I’ve written. But I literarily had no idea where the novel was going when I started it, and continued to have no idea until around page 200. With the likes of you, Jonathan Safron Foer, Nick McDonell and others, North American literature is on the crest of a wave at the moment. Why do you think all this young blood and talent from your continent has come to the fore recently? I don’t know about the US, but in Canada it comes down to one thing: financial support. We have a wonderful grant system that has nurtured this new generation, but even more important is the fact that Canadian book publishing, as a business, is flourishing. There’s always been great writing in Canada, but this is the first time our writers and publishers have the resources to provide a stable and wide-reaching forum for our work. And finally, for my own personal knowledge of course, what is a ‘charley horse’? It’s a muscle spasm you get in your quadriceps—a hard punch can initiate it. Don’t they call it that in England? Business Inquiries: The Bukowski Agency www.thebukowskiagency.com Copyright 2002, Lynn Coady designed by cmandotca