Sara Tilley’s debut novel Skin Room (Pedler, 2008) alternates between Sanikiluaq, Northwest Territories (now Nunavut), and St. Johns, Newfoundland; between 12-year-old Teresa Normans crash into Inuit culture and her later life as a 23-year-old adult in the harrowing final phase of coping with the tragedy of her year in Sanikiluaq. She is an innocent victim of severe cultural misunderstanding. Sara Tilley is describing the mores of Inuit schoolchildren or the contemporary downtown St. Johns arts scene, she carries a reader close, every step of the way. TDR recently asked Tilley a few questions about her literary debut.

"I'm not really sure whose writing influences my work," Tilley says. "It's probably a question better left to impartial observers. I can tell you a few of the writers whose work I love, instead, knowing that I am leaving a great many out at the same time: Angela Carter."

Tilley has been absorbing Carter’s work as of late, fresh off the heels of releasing her own debut novel Skin Room. "Actually, I'll soon have read everything she ever wrote. I tried to start an Angela Carter Discussion Group, but no one but my boyfriend wanted to join. I think she's strangely unknown to many readers, in Canada anyway. I also adore the book Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing by Helene Cixous and can honestly say it gave me courage to persist when I was alone and wavering. I love Salman Rushdie, Shakespeare, Margaret Atwood, Reinaldo Arenas, Jean Genet, Clarice Lispector. My magic realist habit. I grew up reading the work of wonderful writers from Newfoundland: Michael Winter, Lisa Moore, Michael Crummey, Agnes Walsh, Carmelita McGrath, and many more. Those writers made me want to write when I grew up."

I spoke with Sara about the process of developing a major work of fiction over a span of years, juggling work and waiting around for publishers to respond. She said, "The manuscript is both vastly different and exactly the same as it was when it won the first prize in 2004. By which I mean that the writing itself is a lot different, as my style has matured in the past four years. The writing is bound to change the more that you work on something. However, the heart of the book is the same, the essence of the character is the same, and the central themes are all the same."

Tilley submitted the manuscript in 2004 to the Percy Janes Award after a six-month period of working with Lisa Moore through the Banff Centre's Wired Writing Program. Tilley found the experience "fantastic. ... I worked through my first eight or so full drafts, holed up in my parent's basement. (It probably wasn't so great for Lisa, who was getting new material sent to her every two weeks or so). My writing process is very intuitive and it follows its own course. It feels like excavation sometimes - like the original, pure and perfect novel is sitting there, intact, from the moment I write the first word, and I am just digging and digging through layers until I get as close as I can to that unchangeable thing, so for me it's never a question of the work being 'finished'."

Later that same year, Tilley won the Percy Janes First Novel Award in 2004 and began working full-time in theatre, revising the manuscript sporadically. "I think by May 2005 I had stopped revising altogether and was just waiting to hear word from publishers, which of course as we all know can be a very long process. So, when the Fresh Fish Award was begun in 2006, I came back to the book with fresh eyes and was able to make some really important structural changes. 

"When it won the award, I was ecstatic. It afforded me the chance to work with an editor of my choosing, and Stan Dragland agreed to work with me through another two drafts. We really didn't change much, focusing on overall style and deepening one or two scenes which still weren't fleshed out enough. Stan was a lovely editor, and suggested I submit the work to Pedlar Press. Both he and Beth Follett then worked lovingly with me on the final spit and polish. It was a wonderful, positive experience... I am still swooning a little."

Interview by Nathaniel G. Moore (April 2008)

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ST: I started out by writing some of the young Teresa material. This was my initial impulse, to get certain tangible sense memories out onto paper, for though I lived in the Northwest Territories as a child, it's not something I talk about often. The memory of the tundra led me to the character, to her voice. Then, after I had written about eighty or so pages about the young Teresa, I wrote what is now the first and the last chapter of the book, which are set in present-day St. John's. 

Again, it was an impulse about the landscape which led to the voice, and an impulse to write out Teresa's story from that perspective. As a playwright my work is often based in monologue, and that form led naturally to work on this book. Once I find the rhythm of the character's thoughts, their playfulness, their fears and their hopes, then the voice comes naturally. Once I knew that there were to be two versions of the character, I began writing interlocking chapters, and would work back and forth on both voices at once.

ST: Yes, it is a real game. Or it was. It was like tag except, well, you had to tag the person in the crotch, the harder the better. The charming lives of children! One time my mother and I were out for a walk, and the night before we had watched the Degrassi episode where Wheels goes hitchhiking and is molested by the driver who picks him up. As we were walking, my mom said to me that if anyone ever touched me like that man did to Wheels, in my privates, that I was to tell her immediately. I said that people had already touched me there, lots of them. Practically the whole class. My mom turned white and shook me.

"What do you mean?"

"Yeah, crotch tag, mom. You've never heard of it?"

ST: I went to York University and graduated with a BFA in Acting, although I also spent a year studying costume, set and lighting design. This has served me well, since I have worked as an actor, director, designer, stage manager and artistic director with various theatre companies in Newfoundland, including my own company, She Said Yes! 

Right now I am in Vancouver for six months doing a one-on-one mentorship with Ian Wallace to learn to teach Pochinko Clown Through Mask, which is a form of clown technique based in Native American shamanism, and an intensely creative process. Part of this work is the development of a new clown show, which is not done in the usual scriptwriting process, but through physical exploration and improvisation. It's currently centered around a wild child raised by seagulls and a spider woman...

ST: I am working on a second novel, which is based on about 200 pages of letters, log book entries, and poems that were written by my great-grandfather, Duke, and his family, when he left Newfoundland to travel to the Klondike Gold Rush in the early 1900's. He planned on going up to his brother's logging camp on the Tanana River for a year or two to make enough money to get his father out of debt, and ended up staying there over a decade, making notes each day on life in Alaska. 

It's fascinating, mysterious and terribly sad stuff and I have been working on the research side of this for a couple of years so far. Duke's writing style is quite unique, with its own turns of phrase, and long, run-on sentences without punctuation but with plenty of Capital Letters. I am just starting to work on the first draft and I have no idea where it will lead me.