An interview with Kathleen Winter
Two months ago I published a post on this blog,
which was a review of Kathleen Winter’s novel, Annabel.
It was followed, soon after, by a review on my other blog, Zero to One,
where I called it “a book of contrasts.” The novel had been a finalist in the 2014
edition of Canada
Reads, the most important book-reading event taking place in Canada.
I was a little upset when the novel was excluded from the competition based on
an interpretation that I found (and still find) completely wrong and unfair. As
my friends know too well (and as will become apparent below), I am not a
Canadian. But Annabel caused avalanches
of thoughts in my mind, a lot of them too Canadian not to be highlighted. So I
wrote the blog posts mentioned above. But I wanted to know more. And there was
only one way I could find out the author’s perspective on place and space
(which are, to me, the strongest elements in the novel). I contacted Kathleen
Winter and asked her to give me an interview. To my delight, she accepted. Here
is the result of our electronic exchanges:
The novel features
a strong contrast between geography and urbanism. On the one hand, there is
Croydon Harbour, a place that doesn’t exist on real maps – a mythical place of
vast expanses, of white winters, of seasons that follow their own path, where
humans are nothing if not subservient to ontology. On the other hand, there is
St John’s, a real place in Labrador-Newfoundland – a place of human interests,
of explosive colours, of distances that can be measured, of streets that limit
movement or channel people’s actions. This contrast reminded me of the French
philosopher Gilles Deleuze, who proposed a distinction between what he called
“smooth spaces” (the equivalent of your Croydon Harbour) and “striated spaces”
(your St John’s). Would it be fair to say that the novel hinges on the
understanding of this relationship and its own hermaphroditical nature? ||| My brother Michael
told me that my writing about Croydon Harbour is really about a place he calls
“Kathleenville”. He sees it as an extension of my imagination, which I suppose
in a way it is. I have to admit, though, that as I wrote about Croydon Harbour,
I thought I was writing about the real Labrador, and not really an imaginary
place. It surprises me to find out that what I think of as earthy, real,
tangible aspects of a place might in fact be none of those things. When I was
writing Croydon Harbour, I envisioned Labrador communities I had seen and
known. The landscape, the animals, the vegetation and the skies are “real”. But
yes, the power and electricity and magnetism of the place, well, I guess they
are real as well, but in order for them to be manifest they need a person,
or consciousness, to meet them. St. John’s is a place I lived in for decades,
but there again, in a way, it represents layered myth and story, to me. It’s
sort of like a ragged, east coast San Francisco – the hills, the coloured houses,
and what my daughter calls the higgledy-piggledyness. I love it there. The
contrast between Croydon Harbour and St. John’s is, for me, partly about
intimacy. Croydon Harbour is a place where the soul expands out into great
space, whereas St. John’s is where it rests, like a cat, kittycorner and
protected.
Croydon Harbour
feels like a place that had to be
imagined. My question is: what came first – Wayne or Croydon Harbour? Which one
started the engine of the novel? ||| The character, the
person of Wayne/Annabel, started the engine and caused me to begin writing a
short story that would turn into the novel. I met a Labrador artist who
had worked a startling and mysterious figure into a beaded work on black felt,
and when I asked her about this figure, she told me it was “a hermaphrodite.”
She told me people of dual gender were known about and accepted in Labrador as
having special powers. I had already begun writing the book when she told
me this, but she helped me see a bigger picture, and Labrador was part of that
picture.
Did you imagine
the other places mentioned in the novel (I mean, of course, the places visited
by Thomasina, which you describe to a certain extent) or did you actually see
them all yourself? ||| I knew some of the
places, such as London, from experience. My dear friend Elizabeth wrote me
postcards from Bucharest that I used, with her permission, when describing
Thomasina’s postcards. Elizabeth was my friend in St. John’s and she rented her
basement apartment to a pair of Mormon missionaries. They came upstairs in the
evenings and she gave them tea and cookies and they enraptured her so
thoroughly with the Book of Mormon that they converted her and she became a
Mormon missionary herself, which is how she got to Bucharest. Elizabeth is an
artist and she has the best stories of anyone I know, the most humane and
heartrending and compassionate. I beg her to let me use them and every now and
then she does. Other places in Thomasina’s travels I researched or imagined.
In my review, I
reflected on the myth of the androgyne, because it seemed so obvious to me. I
have not seen this aspect mentioned in other reviews. Of course, I haven’t seen
all of them! But how does this stand with you? Did you draw inspiration from
literature that accommodated the idea of the hermaphrodite? ||| I have always been
fascinated with gender, and have always felt a tension at having to play-act at
being female. All my inspiration is unconscious, so it’s hard for me to be
exact about a question like this. I just know that androgyny excites me and
always has, whether in myth and story, or in life. Whenever I see or hear of
someone who has broken the prison of gender duality, I feel released, somewhere
deep in myself. Every single one of my favourite writers lives or lived beyond
gender.
Wayne is written
as a boy. Did that make it difficult to you to imagine him, to write his
‘gender-specific’ thoughts and actions? ||| It was the most
difficult part of the book. In some ways, I feel it was impossible for me to do
justice to this, which is why if you examine the story it becomes obvious that
most of the gender-defining comes from people around the main character. In a
way, Wayne/Annabel is transparent, and might even be said to be nonexistent.
This is why I needed the idea of bridges in the book. The structure of bridges,
their substance and their engineering, along with their overarching beauty,
loftiness and grace, gave me a sort of whole entity that Wayne and Annabel could embrace
and be interested in. I mean, you can’t have one without the other.
 |
| A Canadian trapper (a type embodied by the character Treadway) Source: Le Dernier Trappeur, via www.avcesar.com |
Wayne is the
protagonist of the novel, but his father, Treadway, covers a lot of narrative
territory as well. And of course, the ending belongs to him too. I don’t have
the right metrics to measure this, but it seems that he appears more often than
other characters in the novel. Why is that? ||| I began with one
opinion and vision of Treadway, as a macho, one-dimensional man. But I based
him on several men I know, and I think perhaps because of this, he quickly
taught me that pinning him down would not be so easy. He taught me that nobody
is one-dimensional. He taught me that love can make a father change his mind
and question his own fears, and accept one’s child. He was not what I expected.
My editor, at one point (when a fourth or fifth draft was not working), asked
me if I should maybe “kill off” Treadway in the second half. I think that when
she asked me that, I suddenly knew how important Treadway was, to the book. Her
question made me work on bringing out his power and loveliness.
Also on Treadway:
he never struck me as a person capable of thinking about murder. He kills
animals for a living, but that’s where his capacity to kill seems to stop. He
is not violent, he is not unfair, he is not revengeful. And so his
determination to punish those who had dishonoured his son took me by surprise.
Not that I though him incapable of reaction; but to me he seemed more likely to
respond with a reflection rather than such a drastic action. When did that
transformation happen in him? ||| I think of that
time in Treadway’s mind as the time he regretted that he had not been able to
protect his daughter. He thought of the attack as an assault on a daughter, and
felt a father’s quiet, poisonous and lethal rage. I think it was fuelled by
deep sorrow and regret that he had failed to prevent the violence against
Annabel. Also, I felt that he knew the perpetrator would hurt someone else in
the future. He wanted to at least prevent this. From a purely practical
standpoint, he would dearly have loved to incapacitate the cruel, stupid bully.
To end with, there’s another aspect that I find
striking in your novel: reading. Your
characters read a lot. And not just each other’s letters, but books, serious
books: Aristotle, Diderot, and so on. Is that normal for a man who goes out
trapping in the Labrador wilderness? ||| Yes, it is normal
for a Labrador trapper to read. I spent time with an old trapper who told me
this, and I also heard it from other people. Trappers like Treadway were part
Inuit and part Scots, and there was a lot of European influence on the Labrador
coast. If you go to some of the coastal communities now you will find libraries
full of books brought by the Moravian missionaries, and Labrador is full of
fascinating people who combine practicality and deep knowledge of the land with
a knowledge of literature and philosophy, as well as music.
 |
| Photo for Le Monde, (c) Jessica Auer |
This is where our interview finishes. But I have to say I felt, from the
very beginning, that I could spend days talking to Kathleen Winter, on all the
intricacies of her novel and the specificities of her characters and stories.
In order to understand all this, her novel needs to be read. Annabel needs to be on people’s bookshelves.
For its hermaphroditism, for its themes, for its beauty.
||| Also, visit Kathleen’s
blog, with a title taken from Elizabeth Bishop’s poetry, to see her other
ways of approaching writing, as well as the other wonderful talent she has:
drawing. |||
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