TDR Interview: Lynn Coady
Lynn Coady's website
summarizes her biography this way: "Lynn Coady is mostly a fiction
writer and essayist. Born in Cape Breton and now Vancouver-based, she's
working on Mean Boy, her third novel and fifth book. Mean Boy
is about poets, ambition, class, ego, magic mushrooms, small towns and
academia. It is set in the seventies. Lynn's also been doing lots of
journalism lately. She has a column that appears every other Tuesday in
the Review section of the Globe and Mail." Coady is the
author of Strange Heaven, Play
the Monster Blind, and Saints of Big Harbour. She's also
written plays and other stuff. Michael Bryson interviewed her by email
in November 2004.
*
Here at TDR, we're currently rallying support for a genre under
stress, the short story. John Updike has suggested that the short story's days
as a "news-bearing medium" has diminished, and Jonathan Bennett has seen
dark processes at work, claiming "the current publishing climate is hostile to
the short story." What are your thoughts on the short story as a
form -- and the current climate for the genre? Is it besieged? diminished? going
through a dry spell? alive and kicking?
I agree the publishing climate is deeply hostile to the short story right
now, and even though I am always encountering people who tell me they
love short fiction, my friends in the publishing industry tell me collections
just "don't sell". I don't know what to say about this except to point out that Alice
Munro's latest collection is a best seller and poised to win at least one of our major
literary prizes this year [editor's note: Munro won the Giller;
didn't win the GG]. We have some brilliant practitioners in Canada, who have been
acknowledged as such, so as a genre, I think the short story is very much alive and kicking, but I
don't know how long it can stand in the face of such relentless discouragement from the
industry.
Maybe part of the problem, or part of the reason popular magazines don't
have as much of an interest in promoting fiction anymore, is the ubiquity of
the idea of the "New Yorker short story". The work of Munro is an exemplar of this,
and it's fine work, but somewhere along the line this orthodoxy seems to
have sprung up that the fiction featured in magazines has to be of a certain
character -- third person narration (usually), carefully crafted, with no particular
surprises when it comes to language, structure or voice. It's possible this is an outmoded
ideal. Maybe magazine fiction needs to change with the times, adjust itself to
the new media environment.
Maybe it's time for editors at magazines like
Harpers and
The New Yorker to start leading the way in this regard, to start taking some
risks and making a deliberate effort to get readers excited about stories again.
Your work is quite strongly identified with a particular region of Canada, and you've also had your work translated and sold in other countries. Have you experienced a transition from being a "regional
writer" to being an "international writer"? I'm most interested to know if you
have a different sense of who your audience is now, what your "project" is,
and how you think about your work going forward.
I can't say I've experienced much of a transition. I think one of the aspects of my work that made it attractive, at least in
Europe, was the element of the exotic, by which I mean the regionalism, weirdly.
In the UK some people seemed fascinated to read about a place in Canada
where people drank and swore and beat each other up and spoke in a
distinctive, accented vernacular. I was surprised to note a somewhat pollyanna
picture of Canadian life over there.
About my 'project': I've never given much thought to my audience,
except to be grateful one exists, but recently I talked to a guy at a conference
on Atlantic Canadian literature who said some very kind things to me about my writing in terms of the way it turns the spotlight on Atlantic
Canadian life, and particularly the lives of AC women. He told me this after I had, in a
spirit of perversity, read from a piece of speculative fiction I'd written, and
said he hoped I wasn't 'giving up on this region.' That was the first time I ever
felt a kind of responsibility toward my subject matter.
But the thing is, his suspicions were correct. I don't see myself as
giving up on the region, but with the book I just finished (Mean Boy), I very
much have the feeling I'm moving away from eastern Canadian subjects and
preoccupations. It's no accident Mean Boy has the theme of betrayal woven
throughout it.
When your first novel, Strange
Heaven, came out, it seemed to me
that the reviews broke into two camps -- those that said the book was too
dark and depressing, and those that said the book was brilliant because it
was dark and depressing (while also being funny). How do you react to
reviews of your work? or do you? Do you think reviews in Canada have much to
add to the literary debate?
With regard to those 'dark and depressing complaints' -- to me this
exemplifies one problem with Canadian book culture right off the bat . .
. book culture in general, probably. It's really, really middle-class.
This is by necessity I suppose and therefore understandable -- but still.
The feeling I got from those who felt the darkness of Strange Heaven was gratuitous was that they simply resented the idea that
people like this could exist. That communities like this existed, that
lives were being played out in such a way. It's the same kind of
knee-jerk resentment people have against the poor -- because they can't
understand how anyone could end up in such a situation and, more
importantly, they can't understand the way it shapes people. They know
that poverty sucks because you can't afford to buy stuff, but they don't
understand that it doesn't make you noble or strong as a result, it
doesn't build character. On the contrary, it makes you petty and hostile and
small-minded unless you have supernatural reserves of personal integrity,
or else someone in your life who actively works to counter such influences.
So that doesn't always make for a happy story, and it goes against all the
societal myths with which we like to reassure ourselves.
The positive thing about the Canadian corner of the literary debate is that we seem to have an easier time talking about class in this
country. We're not saturated in its influence the way Britain is, and we're not as
in denial about it as the United States. Some reviewers of my books,
I've noticed, have pondered the dominance of middle-class literary values, and this is
something I really appreciate. (So I guess I've just admitted that I've read and
reacted to my own reviews, goddamnit. I'd planned to come across all aloof on that
front.)
Your website says that you're working on _Mean Boy_, a novel about
"poets, ambition, class, ego, magic mushrooms, small towns and
academia." My first question: Where's the sex? My second: How's the manuscript
going?
None of my books have sex in them because I'm a Cape Breton Catholic,
which means if I even approach the keyboard with such thoughts, blood begins to
seep from my palms.
The first draft is finished, and stupidly long. My good editor and I are
working on that.
A question about your Globe and Mail column. Is it a challenge to
write in your own voice, as "Lynn Coady," after working so diligently on
some deep-digging, big-hearted fiction books? Students of literature are
told not to mix up the author and the narrator, but there's no hiding in a
newspaper column. How have you adjusted?
That's kind of you to say, but you would be amazed how many places there
are to hide in a newspaper column. The very foundation of that kind of
writing, really, is a thick layer of glib.
What are you reading? What has knocked your socks off lately?
Oh man, I can't find anything lately. Ever since I read Youth, if it
aint J.M. Coetzee, I aint interested -- and his books are so *short*. Let me
know if you have any recommendations.
***
Thanks Michael, let me know if anything here doesn't quite make sense or
requires clarification.
best,
L
Hello again,
New photo and more on Coetzee, etc. Not sure how good the quality is on the
JPEG -- let me know if it doesn't do it for you.
cheerio,
L
> Hi Lynn,
> I've got three brief (I hope) requests related to the interview ....
>
> 1. Have you got a photograph of yourself in jpg format (that's not the one
> of you with the coffee mug -- which is a nice pic, but a bit ubiquitous
....)?
No prob, I will send you the one with the Jack Daniels bottle instead.
>
> 2. This sentence: "Some reviewers of my books, I've noticed, have pondered
> the dominance of middle-class literary values, and this is something I
> really appreciate."
>
> I like the point it makes, but I had to read the sentence twice to get it.
> Is there a better way of saying it?
Ahhhmm I don't know what about getting rid of "I've noticed" and then
changing "pondered" to "discussed"? My brain is stalled on this one
Michael, I'd welcome any editorial suggestions.
>
> 3. Just to give the interview a better sense of conclusion ... could I add
> a final question: "What it is about Coetzee's work that you like?" Maybe
> you could suggest in your answer how Coetzee's work is related to stuff
> you're trying to sort out for yourself at the moment, if it does -- or if
> it doesn't, just forget I even said this ... I just think the interview
> could use a better ending ....
Oh, he's just such a cold-eyed bastard. He never lets himself get sucked in
by the need to warm things up, never indulges the urge to sentimentalize or
to try and get you to love his characters. I admire that ruthlessness. I was
re-reading Elizabeth Costello this week and was struck by the ineluctable
awkwardness and unpleasantness of every scene -- it's just torture, but it
feels so honest, so bitterly true to that world. There are no easy
conversations, no one is every particularly comfortable in anyone else's
presence -- even husbands and wives, mothers and sons. It strikes me as a
very fearless, uncompromising way to write. He's crafting something beyond
a good yarn and he's going to do it right, no matter how uncomfortable it
makes us. And it's worth it, for a reader -- the brain-feeding rewards of a
Coetzee novel are some of the richest of anything I've read.
That said, I could really use a good belly laugh now and then. Vintage
Richler has been known to do it for me.
Many thanks on the book suggestions. I haven't looked at Roth in a while --
would be interesting to see what he's up to these days.
your pal,
L
PS -- Oh did you read Jonathan Franzen's appreciation of Munro and her work
in, I think, The New York Times? Bookninja posted
it -- really good, really
pertinent to your defense of the short story project.
>
>
Michael Bryson is the
editor of The Danforth Review.
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