Barbara Scott talks to Debbie Bateman about her debut novel
1. Your novel, The Taste of Hunger, tells the story of a Ukrainian family living in the Canadian prairies in the early twentieth century. Their personal struggles are interwoven with a folk tale about Baba Yaga and Vasilisa. In the Notes at the end of the book, you explain that you took this folk tale and made it your own. What was it like to write with these two stories growing in your imagination—one shaped from the retelling of a folk tale and the other shaped freshly from your imagination?
Right from the beginning, I read all the Baba Yaga and Vasilisa stories I could, from children’s stories to Nikolai Gogol’s terrifying version for adults, “St. John’s Eve.” Many of the more benign tales didn’t suit what I was doing but all of them offered useful details, especially Gogol’s which introduced me to Baba Yaga’s shapeshifting abilities. As the novel grew into what it is now, the fairy tale began to weave through the other events in the novel in ways I hadn’t anticipated, each narrative feeding and influencing the other, both narratives changing throughout the process. Early readers had said that the fairy tale was nicely written but didn’t really contribute to the novel. Subconsciously, I knew it did; I just had to figure out how and it was a hugely satisfying moment when I did!
2. Each part of the novel begins with an epigraph that sets up a question or a paradox like a riddle demanding to be solved. I read the novel looking for answers and meaning for the epigraphs, the fullness of which did not arrive until I’d read the entire book. How did these epigraphs influence your process as you were creating the story?
The epigraphs too, were a matter of collecting whatever resonated, often in ways I didn’t particularly understand. I kept them in a huge file. I always knew the Sappho quotation had to open the book, and that the Dennis Lee quotation had to close it, but the others came more slowly and in ways that often felt so serendipitous as to be miraculous: a friend sending me Neruda’s “Ode to Salt” at just the right moment; coming across the Levertov poem by opening an anthology just at that page. As the book developed, I had to drop some excerpts I’d chosen initially, and move towards others that were more apt. I found one excerpt that was too apt, beautiful though it was, and luckily a wise friend pointed that out and back it went into the file.
3. The point of view shifts throughout the novel. Members of the family, and even more transitory characters, are given turns sharing their perspective. This leads to many points of comparison, contrast, and connection. Would you like to share your thoughts on this roving point of view? Do you have any advice for other writers who might want to try this technique?
My initial plan for the novel was completely different from its current form. I wanted to create many micro points-of-view threaded together to form a cohesive whole. But then Olena and Taras just took over. I resisted for a while, kept two other generational narrative lines with their distinct points of view, but in the end, after readers kept insisting Olena and Taras’s storyline was the most compelling, I surrendered. My editor, Deborah Willis, and I pondered whether to keep Betsy’s point of view, since she’s not a family member, but I loved her and wanted her to have a voice, and her section prepares the reader for later, when we slip into Marie’s head. This preparation was what decided me on the use of second person in the Prologue, to show the reader that here is a narrator who can, like Baga Yaga the shapeshifter, take on any persona she chooses.
4. Each main character presents as the star of the show. They show up with a strong voice, powerful yearnings, and formidable struggles uniquely their own. I found myself rooting for them all, knowing full well the satisfaction of one character’s yearning could make it impossible for other characters to get what they wanted. In piecing together the story, I found myself asking tough questions about how the actions of the characters affected one another. How did this approach affect your relationship with the characters? Did it lead you to be more compassionate in exploring their flaws?
I’m so glad to hear you rooted for them all! Often I couldn’t like the things these people did, but I never failed to love them, warts and all. One advantage of using multiple points of view is that you can’t take sides. Well, I suppose it’s possible, but less likely when you have to slip beneath the skin of a character. But even when writing from only one point of view, I remind myself that in fiction as in life no one feels like a minor character; we all experience ourselves at the centre of our lives. I try to approach every scene with a full knowledge of how even walk-on characters position themselves, which often leads to surprising insights into main characters. In this novel I wanted there to be no one protagonist, rather a number of characters insisting on their right to be at the centre of their lives.
5. The title is precisely the focus of the novel. We linger in the experience of insatiable desire to the point where it is uncomfortable to witness the characters yearning so painfully. Did you know the title early in the writing process? How did the title impact your writing process?
Such a good question. Yes, I had the title almost from the very beginning and it survived all manner of changes to the text. A friend did suggest that simply “Hunger” might be better, but I wanted a sense of unfocused yearning, the notion that it is possible to live in a state of desire without knowing what you long for. And since hunger doesn’t have a taste, that elusiveness is embedded in the title’s wording. I wanted also to explore the way poverty and other extreme conditions can curb one’s desires by not presenting the possibilities that exist for people less restricted by their circumstances. If you’ve never seen a piano, how can you know that playing one would satisfy your deepest self? This relates to literature too: the idea that there is an absence within us we don’t know is there until the exact-shaped book comes along to fill it.
6. What was your intention in writing this book? How do you intend for the value of the work to be assessed: as a piece of work that shares a compelling message or makes a social, political, or practical point; as a cultural event/phenomenon; or as an object of taste or a statement of your aesthetic?
Honestly, my only motivation was to write as well as I could about characters I loved, to do them justice and not let them down. During the many times I thought about abandoning the book, that desire would always bring me back to it. A review of my first book, The Quick, mentioned something that Flannery O’Connor, a hero of mine, said: “You can’t pull meaning out of a story, like a string out of the top of a bag of chicken feed.” I don’t have a message, and my only aesthetic is to pull people into the story and let it resonate inside them with a meaning they half discover, half create for themselves. I believe narrative is a fundamental way for tellers and readers and writers alike to make sense, however fleeting, of our worlds. My favourite books are those that seduce me with the whisper, “just one more page.”
7. Was there a specific incident that inspired this piece of work?
Shortly after I married, my grandmother told me, with terrible bitterness, that at fifteen she’d been forced to marry my grandfather, who was twenty-nine. I was shocked. They’d divorced before I was born, but I always assumed they’d simply grown apart. Some time later on CBC a number of Ukrainian-Canadian women told the same story of being married off to men much older than they in the early part of the twentieth century. The same terrible bitterness reverberated as they talked of being trapped in marriages they’d never wanted. I couldn’t imagine how a fifteen-year-old girl would negotiate such a bitter beginning, or why a man would marry someone who didn’t want him, so of course I had to write it. This was the ‘one true thing’ that fuelled the story, which is otherwise pure fiction, because by the time I started the book my grandmother was dead and I could no longer ask her.
[As a footnote, at age forty my grandmother left my grandfather to live with a twenty-year-old man, and they stayed together, unmarried, until her death at 85.]
8. Can you reflect on any social contexts that might have been inspiring or generative for this work?
I’ve always been proud of my connection to Saskatchewan, the birthplace of Canadian universal health care. Before Tommy Douglas, The Associated Traveller Clubs, composed of groups of travelling salesmen, raised funds for Saskatchewan’s Anti-Tuberculosis League, focusing on prevention and treatment. The money they raised meant that tubercular patients could go to sanatoria like Fort San in Fort Qu’Appelle without impoverishing their families, or being forced by poverty to stay within their families and infect others. Tuberculosis, like so many others, is a disease caused by conditions of poverty: inadequate ventilation, poor nutrition, and over-crowding. It was almost eradicated by the miracle of streptomycin but before that time, the Travellers Clubs were a godsend in getting medical care to people regardless of income. In other provinces, people had to pay for care at the sanatoria. My mother was in Fort San for seven years. Under no circumstances could my grandparents have managed to pay for that long a stay.
9. In terms of sheer length, what did the book look like after the first draft? Did the length change?
Well, it was pretty sprawling! My first draft, and many subsequent ones, had three narrative lines: the 1926–1949 one you see in this final version, but also a 1950–1957 line, and a 1980 line. The problem was that Olena and Taras’s story kept overwhelming the other stories; as characters they were just so much more alive and interesting. I’m a pretty stubborn person, but in the end I had to agree that almost two-thirds of the book had to go. And then it was a matter of fully exploring what was left until the book became what you read now. It’s still about the same length as the initial draft but it took a circuitous route to get here: I figure I wrote three novels to arrive at this one!
10. What kind of research did you have to engage in order to create the story world? So much I can hardly fathom it all! Ukrainian history; Ukrainian Canadian history; the tuberculosis epidemic in Saskatchewan; homesteading in the early 1900s; the Depression and small-town life in the early years of the Second World War. In the 1980s, a wonderful government program encouraged small towns to publish their histories: these books are a treasure trove of detail. My mother was in Fort San for seven years and had many stories about her time there. She and my aunt also gave me invaluable details of life as children on a homestead. I read endlessly, took boxes full of notes, then shoved it all to the back of my mind and used only those details that filtered up when I needed them. I’m not fond of books that shoehorn every bit of research into the finished project. I prefer books where research is like an iceberg: most of what’s been done eludes the eye.
Barbara Joan Scott is a writer and editor from Calgary. Her first collection of short stories, The Quick, won the City of Calgary W.O. Mitchell Book Prize and the Howard O’Hagan Award for Best Collection of Short Fiction. The Taste of Hunger is her debut novel.