Writer Andrea Routley talks to AW’s Debbie Bateman about her new collection of linked novellas.
DB: This Unlikely Soil, your collection of linked novellas, explores the lives of contemporary queer women. While the novella form gives space to the complexities of their lives, the linkages create a sense of possibilities for wider community. How did working in the novella form shape discovery of the lives you explored? In addition to the characters who make repeat appearances, did you look for other ways to link the narratives?
AR: I wrote these stories during the seven years I lived on the Sunshine Coast, a string of small towns along BC’s south coast, which must be reached by a ferry from Vancouver. I think it’s really my environment that shaped these linkages, rather than the novella form itself. The landscape is dense west-coast rainforest, and the ocean and inlet and coast mountains are the borders of this world. In these stories, Freddie runs into the IGA cashier at the library or the librarian at the IGA, Elana can’t avoid running into her ex…. In small communities, such connections and encounters are unavoidable. And everyone wears many hats—while I lived there, I worked as the library’s outreach coordinator, a piano technician, and a Pride organizer—so we experience linkages in practical and psychic ways. This is what is both great and terrible about living in small communities.
DB: You make masterful use the omniscient point-of-view, slipping from one character’s experience to another’s and pulling back at times to a wider view that never feels godlike. A few descriptions even felt of indeterminate origin, as if they could be what a character is experiencing or they could be from a wider view, which made them all the more unsettling and resonate. Could you please talk about the omniscient point of view—its potential and challenges? What can writers do to ensure smooth transitions?
AR: What I love about omniscient is how much it pushes against an understanding of a singular reality. My favourite point-of-view meander is in “Guided Walk” when we briefly go into the mind of Janice, Carol’s “woman-lover.” In that passage, we quickly gain an understanding of what’s at stake for Janice plus a wider context for relationships similar to the one she’s having with Carol. All of this contrasts in a funny way, I think, to the way Carol talks about their relationship. In terms of smooth transitions, when rewriting, I always open a new document and start again. I may have the previous draft as a blueprint or a reference from which I can retype passages that I want to keep, but I do retype them. I think this process aids in ensuring those smooth transitions you mentioned. When the point-of-view moves to another character, it is in response to the previous character, and it shows something important about their interaction. So in this way, I avoid that sometimes clunky feel of alternating points-of-view.
DB: You also make strong use of the objective tone, especially in “Appropriate Behaviour,” the story about a woman recovering from a brain injury. We see Freddie observing the world and herself, reviewing the present and the past, and trying to help herself survive a crazy-making world. The objective tone lands as if it were indisputable scientific fact. When emotions are revealed, they arrive with overwhelming intensity and feel more valid. Would you share your thoughts on using the objective tone in fiction?
AR: Freddie doesn’t know how to feel her way through anything, and this results in that objective tone—so the tone arises out of character. When the feelings do arrive, this contrasts with her Mister-Spock-like analysis, which I think is what creates that impact—the restraint, the delayed gratification. I remember an acting teacher once saying it is more powerful to almost cry than to cry. Because when the actor is withholding, the audience also withholds, feels a need for release, and will cry for the character. I believe this restraint in fiction creates that same tension that longs for release.
DB: Time moves forward in the present, while freely wandering in and out of the past. It even veers into the unknown future with rehearsals and predictions of calamity. We get a rich discovery of complex lives without ever losing the narrative thread. How did you do it? Do you have any precautions on managing time in fiction that you would like to share?
AR: We constantly have thoughts about the past and future, so this is all a part of how we experience and make sense of our present lives. Alice Munro masterfully expands a story through deft movements through time, and I have tried to copy her approach in many ways. Sometimes, it’s as simple as a sentence like, “Later, she will realize/wonder…” “Later” can do so much. Talk about the future in the narrative. When characters imagine conflicts or outcomes, this creates tension and suspense. We become curious about how it may actually play out, and the potential for contrast in that is another opportunity for humour, insight into who a character wants to be and who they really are, and recognition of the uncertainty inherent in every interaction. So, I don’t have any precautions, no. I say try anything and see what works.
DB: Many of the stories end with loose threads, complicated situations, and unanswered questions. I found myself continuing the imagined lives in my own thoughts, coming up with possible future developments and wishing I could know more. Rather than being unsatisfying, this was an added benefit I didn’t expect. What are your thoughts on writing endings?
AR: I try to write a story that is, even on its surface, entertaining, and that offers some unravelling of action. In terms of endings, I think of writing them twice. I will often complete a draft and feel that the ending is correct… but not quite enough. In later revisions, I find a way to add another beat—something to expand the scope of the story or change the possible interpretation of everything that preceded it. Often, this means threading a whole new narrative into the story, such as in “Damage.” In earlier drafts, that story ended with a conversation between Rita and Naomi, still together, and then an image of Rita’s feet. I later expanded the story to weave in a conversation with Rita’s ex, to create this dimension of looking back and making sense of what happened from some later point in time, which I believe amplifies Rita’s difficulty in knowing herself. My advice would be when you think you’ve got your ending, try writing the ending that comes next and see what happens.
DB: Delightful bursts of humour are scattered throughout the stories, highlighting moments of frustration, suppressed feelings, and the simple insanity of how people sometimes behave. Would you like to share your ideas about humour?
AR: I’ll paraphrase, but in his book on writing, A Swim in a Pond in the Rain, George Saunders explains that he’d wanted to write like Hemingway, and his own stories were decent, but never excellent. One day, he hears his wife laughing, and she’s reading some comical little poem he’d written just for the hell of it. He remembers this as the first time someone delighted in his writing. He gave up on writing like Hemingway and accepted that he will write like Saunders, however less important that may be, because only he can be excellent at being himself. My values and interests are expressed within my earlier stories, but my personality less so. I am funny, so why were my stories so dark? “Guided Walk” was the first story of this collection I drafted, and I took enormous pleasure in finding opportunities for humour. Humour is fundamental to how I connect with others in life, and so why shouldn’t it also be fundamental in my fiction?
DB: What books were you reading when you wrote this? Are there any books that you had to keep visiting for inspiration when writing this book?
AR: I read and re-read many Alice Munro collections while writing this book, analyzing her techniques, and stealing many of them. During this time, I designed and taught a workshop I called “How to Write Like a Nobel Laureate: Exploring the Techniques of Alice Munro.” I was so familiar with her approach to story that I could quickly rattle off an outline for any fairy tale in the style of Alice Munro. I’m expanding my Nobel Laureate course to also include Isaac Bashevis Singer and Toni Morrison. There is so much to be learned from reading. You love some passage? Why? What is going on in that passage to make it so wonderful? Try it. Steal it. Make it your own.
DB: 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?
AR: I find that people sometimes recognize themselves or mutual friends in my writing. One friend and reader told me that he had more compassion for so-and-so after reading one of these stories. I hadn’t told him the story was inspired by so-and-so (an exaggerated and fictionalized version, which so-and-so supported), but he recognized them. His comment moved me to tears—that the story enabled him to feel some understanding for this person who is so hard to understand. There is no greater compliment for me, and I experienced a feeling of relief, because I care deeply for so-and-so, too. It’s true that some traits are consciously “selected,” as you said. Taking that analytical approach to character building can ensure we are continuing to expand our understanding of others—ensuring we are expanding the range of people we do the work to understand.
DB: Are there threads of the story that were not told? Were there ideas that you couldn’t use? Were there threads you had to keep for a later work because of editorial reasons or plans for a sequel?
AR: In an earlier draft of “Guided Walk,” the trail guide was explicitly Indigenous. I was riffing on a trail guide I’d worked with years ago, a bubbly young Gwich’in woman who was pursuing photography at university. Another guide who was white had complained that she was giving out wrong information about salmon. I’d asked this guide why she didn’t just give her the information between guided hikes, and the white guide said she felt awkward because the other guide was Indigenous. In “Guided Walk,” Miriam feels almost competitive with the guide in her knowledge about nature, and I thought this challenge to an Indigenous guide was an interesting and loaded interaction, one that can be steeped in racism—as if any lack of knowledge about the natural world somehow delegitimizes Indigenous title or identity, rather than simply being another impact of colonialism in general or just a perfectly natural human state of not knowing everything. In terms of writing, incorporating the guide’s Indigeneity more fulsomely increased the tension and subtext and complication of an interaction like that. But I also felt it made Miriam so entirely unlikeable and I didn’t know how to manage this additional complicated interaction within the context of the story. I felt in part that an interaction like that, to do it justice, needs its own story entirely. I feel in one way that I missed an opportunity there. In another way, I still have that opportunity in the novel I am currently writing.
DB: Did you have an intended audience for the book?
AR: Because my characters are basically all middle-aged small-town lesbians, I believed this demographic would connect most with my writing. But I’ve also learned not to make assumptions about who my readers are or what any reader will be drawn to. It might surprise some writers from very different contexts than me that I love their writing, so why should I be surprised by anyone’s interest? At a joint reading in Kelowna recently, most of the audience were in their twenties. I was surprised and delighted when half the attendees bought my book. So while writing fiction, I don’t generally think of audience. I feel imagining this hypothetical reader is an unnecessary and limiting judgment for both myself and future readers.
Andrea Routley is a writer, editor, and the 2022/23 Haig-Brown House Writer-in-Residence. Her work has appeared in literary magazines, such as Geis and The Fiddlehead Review. In 2020, the title story of her new collection, “This Unlikely Soil,” was shortlisted for the Malahat Review Novella Prize. Her debut collection, Jane and the Whales (Caitlin Press, 2013), was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award. She holds an MFA in creative writing from UBC (Okanagan) and is currently at work on her third book, a novel entitled Field Guide to Bats and Other Damage.