Elaine McCluskey Talks to Debbie Bateman about her latest collection of stories.
1. In your short story collection, Rafael Has Pretty Eyes, every person counts. Strangers contribute meaningful insight. We get a catalogue of individuals carefully shaped by telling details. Would you like to share your thoughts on representing the diversity of human beings in fiction? Is there any such thing as a minor character?
In real life, no one is minor, I would argue. In fiction, characters may be minor if they have been assigned that role by the author, in this case me. I use them to illustrate a place or to flesh out the main character’s mindset. How the main character reacts to others gives insight into their state of mind and their value system. Are they comfortable with the irrational bus person obsessed with “bear dogs”, or do they want to escape her? Do they dislike the cheesy duo performing Eagles hits at a Lions Club roast, or do they find them noble? I make liberal use of minor characters with telling details because I find people fascinating, be they marginal, resilient, and/or self-destructive. I have always sought to represent the outliers.
2. Throughout the collection, there are short passages that employ an unspecified “you”. As I was reading, these passages knocked me out of a position of comfort. I felt that I was being spoken to and should pay attention because the story might well be in some way also about me. For example, in It’s Your Money you write, “Most people in life want you and people like Maria to fail, and once you know that you shouldn’t give a shit what they think. What you should do is this: hide your dreams, hide your hopes, hide your savings…” How do you handle the slippery attribution of thoughts expressed in second-person? In those passages, do you intend for the reader to identify more strongly with what is being said?
It is, I suppose, my way of breaking the fourth wall. By using “you,” I address the reader directly and ask them to think about what is being said. There may be a truth here. It may be universal. This may apply to you! In It’s Your Money, I state, as you noted, that “most people” want you (and Maria) to fail. I am enlisting the reader to Maria’s side. The story then recommends that you protect your hopes and dreams, and I think that is sound advice. I believe that Canadians, as polite and lovely as we are, have a collective failing—the desire to keep people in their place. I am not sure that this mindset is as prevalent in every country, although Schadenfreude was not coined here.
3. The narratives slip easily backwards and forwards in time, sometimes veering even into a hypothetical past or present such as in Dirty Little Lair. This lends breadth to the stories, a sense that they are not locked in place by any particular moment. Can you reflect on the use of time in fiction? Do you have advice for other writers on the usefulness of time shifts and how to navigate them?
I am an experimental writer. Dirty Little Lair is an exercise in exploring what is happening and what should have happened if only life were more fair and merciful. The main character, David, finds himself in unpleasant and even dire situations, and I offer options. In this story, I am not only shifting between the past and the present, but between reality and an alternate reality—what happened and what should have happened. I did this in another story as well. I propose a just outcome. In It Will Happen, the final sentence is, “And all of this will happen because it has to.” Here, I, the author, have supplied an ending that has not yet happened; the all-powerful narrator is allowing a shattered family a degree of future happiness.
4. The stories employ a wide range of narrators, the most endearing of which may be Beau, the comfort dog, who gives us a surprising view on his owner. No one else could have told the Skunk Boy story as well as this dog. How do you figure out whose story it is to tell? Do you experiment with different narrators, or do the stories mostly show up with the best narrator already speaking?
Beau came to me after I started the story, which was meant to explore what it is like to be an unlikeable person. I have known some—such as the man who tells a baby to shut up at a family dinner—and I wondered if they had those moments at night when they realized that no one likes them. Beau’s owner, Caspar, is an unlikeable person. A comfort dog, I decided, would not be judgmental of Caspar; he would be understanding. He could protect Caspar in anxious situations. I decided that Beau should come from the US South and have better manners than Caspar. He would have been trained in a federal prison, and therefore be unruffled by incidents at the PEI nursing home where Caspar works. I had fun with Beau’s dialogue. “I come from the South where manners grow on peach trees, where people call you ‘honey’ and ‘pumpkin.'”
5. There is an omniscient presence in many of the stories, watching everything and speaking up as the rough edge of truth. This leads to moments of humour and sometimes a cutting sense of sadness. What does a writer gain in using an omniscient presence in their stories? Are there hazards that you have noticed and would like to share?
This is my sixth book of fiction, and I am ready for the rough edge of truth. I see it as part of aging. Unfortunately, I have by now known people who have lost children; I have seen bad things happen to good people, so I am at that point. The hazard is that not everyone might like the omniscient presence, but I am willing to take that risk. I have always tried to neutralize life’s blows with humour—that is a constant in my writing—but I am now more willing to go to the sad places. People have told me that they not only laughed when reading Rafael Has Pretty Eyes, but they cried. I think readers can handle it: the gut punch.
6. A work like this is about many things. How would you describe the most important questions this book deals with?
My book is about humanity and resilience. It is peopled by odd socks, misfits, and outliers, who have been my people since I began writing fiction twenty-five years ago. The questions in this book are: a) how do you survive life’s cruelty? and b) is life sometimes too absurd to be taken seriously? I look at absurdity a lot. One of my characters is traumatized because he is laid off after thirty years at his job, and then receives a tone-deaf Exit Interview from HR, asking him to rate his experience. This sends him over the edge. A national newspaper (and this did happen in real life) asks Twitter followers to respond to this question: “Are you on your third marriage? What’s it like? Pros? Cons?” The replies are as mad as the questions.
7. Are any characters in the book based on people that actually exist in the world as we know it? Can you talk a bit more about the compositing process you followed in selecting and accumulating character traits from real people that may have inspired the fictional characters?
When I create characters, I borrow from people I have met, and I transfer feelings I had in different circumstances. I transfer my sadness, my elation, my disappointment to them. Most of my characters are composites. In Is That All You Got?, I did base a character (a former prize fighter), on someone from my own family, someone hard and soft at the same time. My father’s family had a long and intense relationship with boxing, and this is something that creeps into my work. My novel, Going Fast, was set in the world of boxing. The last story in this collection, Gábor, came from a conversation I overheard at a Toronto airport. I could not see the individuals sitting behind me but their exchange, their power play, was so mesmerizing, so unusual, that I created two characters and followed them onto a plane to Budapest, where the unexpected happened.
8. How long did it take you to write the first draft? What was the core of the developmental process between drafts? As you moved through drafts, were you working mostly on the structure, the story world, aspects of style and language, or something else?
I wrote the 17 stories over a period of roughly two years. During that time, some of the stories were published in literary journals. When I approached my final draft, my editor Bethany Gibson helped me identify gaps. We did not feel the need to change the structure or the language of the stories, but Bethany asked valid questions such as: “What does this character do for a living?” or “Why does this person feel this way?” I come from a background in journalism, and I have always been an economical writer, but occasionally I am too economical. When revising Hope, I made the narrator a struggling stand-up comedian and that transformed the story. In Is That All You Got?, I gave the narrator and her identical twin jobs that were not in the early draft, and that added ballast.
9. What kind of research did you have to engage in order to create the story world?
Setting was important in many of these stories, so I researched that. I attended two political roasts so that I could write It’s Never What You Think It Will Be. For the story set in a payday loan company, It’s Your Money, I visited outlets, and I interviewed an employee, who gave me anecdotes and insights into customers, called “loaners.” He explained how the system works. For Little Green Men, I went to the tiny UFO museum in Shag Harbour, Nova Scotia, about three hours from Halifax, and I spoke to Laurie Wickens, a character in the story. Wickens was the first person to call in the sighting that night in 1967. I read books on the UFO incident, which remains unexplained after 50+ years. I also carried a notebook and jotted down observations on the bus.
10. If you were on a bus and you happened to run into someone reading this book and you wanted to ask one question of that reader, what would that be?
“Do you get it?” And as my one allowable follow-up: “Does it all make sense?”
Elaine McCluskey writes about the people you might find in the corners of life. Rafael Has Pretty Eyes is her fourth short-story collection; she has also published two novels. All are set in the Maritimes. McCluskey’s stories have appeared in anthologies and literary journals including Room, The Dalhousie Review, The Antigonish Review, and The Fiddlehead. One story was a Journey Prize finalist, others prize winners. McCluskey has worked as a journalist, a book editor, and a university lecturer. She lives in Dartmouth, N.S.