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]

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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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.