TDR
Interview: Rebecca Rosenblum
Rebecca
Rosenblum was born in Hamilton, Ontario. She attended McGill
University and received her Honours Bachelor of English in 2001. In 2004
she received a Certificate of Publishing from Ryerson University, and in
2007 she graduated from the University of Toronto with a Masters of Arts
in English and Creative Writing.
In November 2007, Rebecca was awarded
the Metcalf/Rooke award for "Once", a collection of short
stories. "Once" was launched on September 15, 2008 by
Biblioasis.
In February 2008, Rosenblum was
announced as one of three finalists for the $10,000 Writers’ Trust of
Canada/McClelland & Stewart Journey Prize, which is awarded annually
to a new and developing writer of distinction for a short story
published in a Canadian literary journal in the previous year.
TDR caught up with Rebecca just after the launch of ONCE in
Toronto.
Her story "Grade
Nine Flight" was published in TDR in 2006.
[October 2008]
*
TDR: Tell us about your life up to now.
Where were you born?
RR:
I lived in Mount Hope, Ontario—between the Hamilton escarpment and the
Grand River—until I was 19. There are many farms in Mount Hope, though
I didn’t live on one. There is also a library, a gas station, a store
called The Store, two schools, several churches, a Chinese restaurant
and many lovely people. It’s very nice place to be from, though most
don’t see much point in visiting.
TDR: Where did you go to school?
RR:
I went to high school one town over (Mount Hope doesn’t have one) and
McGill for undergrad. As a teenager, I was a pretty undiscriminating
reader, but some of my favourite characters were Colette’s show
people, J.D. Salinger’s Glass family, Francesca Lia Block’s
fairy-tale teenagers—like most kids, I liked books about weirdos,
losers, nervous people. Well, and now too, I guess.
TDR: Who have been some of your
literary heroes?
RR:
I liked the usual suspects of CanLit—Atwood, Munro, Laurence, Ondaatje—but
it took a long time to find out there was much else. My folks are
American, and in school, Canadian books always seemed like supplements
from another class—Obasan to learn about the history of the internment
camps, Stone Angel to learn about the sociology of age, etc. It wasn’t
I got towards the end of high school and into university that I found
anything by anyone less than 30 years older than me, or about Canadian
cities in the present tense. Let’s be clear—I had no idea what
Russell Smith and Michael Turner were talking about, but their language
was aggressively weird and sexy and funny and I liked it.
TDR: What inspired this story of
bookselling grad student heart break?
RR:
Ok, so "Cal Is Helpful" does contain some of my stuff—bookselling,
being a grad student, heartbreak… life creeps in. But the story is
really about those characters. I’ve written so many stories about them
over such a long period, I sort of feel like they’d go on with or
without me. That line of thinking leads to psychosis, I know, but I
really do obsess over people I make up—I have tons of complicated
back-story for everybody that I can never use. I’ve known for ages
that Cal worked in a bookstore and got pushed around in relationships,
that Sarah had anxiety problems, that Alan spent all his free time
wrapped in a duvet. It was just the time to write this story, and to put
all those things together.
One thing that catalyzed the story for
me was thinking about is how a good break-up isn’t what it’s used to
be—by the time you’re in your twenties, it’s hard to divest
yourself of some even after burning the sweater they gave you. The
after-life of relationships is interesting. Also around that time, I
wanted to write a friendship story and a roommate story, of which there
aren’t enough. And I really like John Milton’s poetry, but with
imperfect understanding, and I’d been looking for a way to use it
somewhere.
TDR: What was the process like going to
deadline with Once?
RR:
It was a very unscary deadline for me, because when I won the Metcalf-Rooke
Award, in my mind I only had a few pieces to rework and six months to do
it in. John Metcalf edited the book, and we were going through the
problems, mailing the different drafts back and forth. I had some extra
time to keep working on my next book, a novel. Except I discovered
really rapidly that I hated working on the novel, plus I was learning a
lot about stories from working with John and I wanted to try out some
stuff. I went back to writing stories, and ended up writing perhaps half
a dozen new…plus the rewrites of past failures.
It was a lot more than I expected to
get done, though I don’t know what anyone else expected, and I was
happy to have a broader range of pieces in the end. I vaguely thought
the Beatles’ goal for the White Album—to make it sound like
listening to the radio—would be good for a first book. So I was trying
a lot of different things, though not quite so well as the Beatles. It
was fun, but it made it a bit tough for me to compare pieces and decide
on one over another when we assembled the final book.
TDR: Were there stories you were
hesitant to include, or that were omitted? Tell us about your team.
RR:
If we’d published everything I had, it would’ve looked like the
bible. So the end was hard. It was like having to line up your children,
and say, well, you were always my favourite… I just balked and balked
until John made a table of contents for me. I only switched a few things—he
pretty much nailed it. I was really happy with how the book ended up,
and I’m glad to know that there’s nothing in it that either of us is
doesn’t like. In my opinion, the stuff that didn’t make is also
good, but those stories can be published elsewhere, and some have been.
TDR: What's the difference between a
short story with a non-traditional narrative arc and just 15 random
pages out of a novel?
RR:
I feel like a novel requires a lot more patience, a lot more
self-confidence, and some things just can’t be as precise in 200 pages
as they can be in 20. I’ll spend a lot of time in a short story making
lines a dozen pages apart chime with each other, or echo each other. I’ll
try to get the minimum number of references to something to have it be
clear, and space them out in the story so no one will forget about it. I
read aloud all the dialogue together to make sure the voices are
consistent. All that can’t happen until I’ve written a first draft,
which with a novel (I’m guessing) would take over a year of fairly
steady work! The not-knowing, the leaving things wrong or wrongish and
moving on, the need to keep tension but vary pace—those are things I’ve
never had to do with stories, and I’d need to learn to do them if I
wanted to write a novel that doesn’t suck. Which maybe I will someday.
TDR: What’s next for you?
RR:
I actually went back to the bad novel for a couple months after handing
in the final-final Once, before I understood the challenges mentioned
above. It was pressure I had put on myself to do a novel next, so no one
cared when I decided to retry it as a collection of short stories. I
cared: I was very joyful and this version working much better—well, in
my opinion it is. I’m enjoying working on it, anyway, which is the
important thing according to children’s soccer coaches everywhere. |