Vancouver author Chelene Knight talks to AW’s Debbie Bateman about her new novel.
DB: Your novel, Junie, takes us inside of the lives of women in the Black community of Hogan’s Alley in 1930s Vancouver. The sense of interdependence within their community and the inner strength of the women stand in sharp contrast to the racist elements in the society that would push them aside. You mentioned in the Author Note at the end of the book that you want to encourage readers to envision Hogan’s Alley not in decline, but in full bloom. I wonder if you would like to share a little more about what it was like to research and re-envision this community.
CK: I encourage readers to envision Hogan’s Alley not in decline, but in full bloom because this is the part of history that has not been written. I encourage us to bring back a time and place where folks were being heard, being listened to, and were able to celebrate and come into their full selves, versus creating or recreating a story told through the lens of pain of destruction.
DB: The story follows the lives of two daughters and their mothers, as they seek to reconcile their yearnings for connection with a need to become their fullest selves. The women are part of one another and yet distinct. I was struck by the similarities and the uniqueness of each woman, and the relationships they have with one another. How did these threads come together? As you were writing from one woman’s perspective, did you gain insight into the others?
CK: When I was writing each character, I would glean a new idea or perspective or thread that I could connect to another woman in this story. I think it was really important for me to think not only about how these women lived inside of themselves individually, but to consistently ask myself what would happen when I put them in a room together. What would happen if I put them in a situation that they’ve not faced before? What would happen if I took all of them and put them in this reimagined world? What would it look like for them in terms of their search for joy, and their search for love, and their goal of finding themselves inside of this community? They are all woven together.
DB: The outer layer of the novel alternates point-of-view between the women as they seek to engage with each other. An inner layer delves into the private domain of wild imagination and raw sensations. We know we have stepped into the subliminal world when the scenes are no longer numbered, the verb tense switches to present, and everything gets compressed into tight paragraphs as short as a single sentence. I came to love those compact and profound moments in the inner world of each woman, and I marvelled at how full a nearly empty page can be. How did you come up with this strategy? Did you write the inner layer in conjunction with the outer? Were there differences in process as you wrote each layer?
CK: In terms of the shapeshifting point of view, this was incredibly intentional. And this was something I came into in a later draft of the project. This structure is meant to showcase the main character Junie’s introversion. The ways in which she sees the world are very different from the way the rest of the world sees the world. We’ve got her looking at the world through this very different lens. She slows down and she pays attention to everything around her, while everyone else is kind of zooming around.
This is why we have these sections in the first-person point- of-view and in the present tense, because to Junie, these things that she’s observing, these things are incredibly urgent. Having that in present tense kind of tells the reader, or signals to the reader, that this is something that you really need to pay attention to.
DB: Junie is a painter. From the moment we meet her, we know how important colour is to her growing sense of self. Even love has its colours. Would you like to reflect on the painterly aspects of character and story in your novel? As you were writing, how did you nurture that way of seeing and being alive in the world?
CK: Junie being a painter is connected to her personality and her introversion. The ways in which she sees the world are so incredibly different, and colour is her way of communicating and paying attention to the changes she witnessed every season. Colour was her entry point into conversation and colour was her entry point into the self; colour was her entry point into discovering and defining love for herself.
DB: The novel is filled with delightfully surprising metaphors driven by unexpected sensory experiences. For example, in explaining her feelings about her relationship with her mother, Estelle says, “She spent so much time inside of her mother’s absence it started to linger on her tongue like powdered cinnamon or whole cloves of garlic.” I wonder if you could tell us a bit about your creative process. How do you tap into these fresh images and visceral descriptions?
CK: To talk a little bit more about my creative process, we have to dive into the beautiful world of poetry. I am a strong believer that poetry is a foundation for all writing. And so, the use of lush language and unique images and visceral descriptions comes from my work in poetry.
I read a lot of poetry, I’ve written and published poetry, and I also teach poetry at the grad level. I am always immersed in it. Playing with language is what separates us writers when we are telling the same stories over and over.
How many stories can you name that are connected to the theme of mother-daughter relationships or complex family dynamics? When you insert this unique way of playing with language, this is one major element that will help a book stand out from all the other books that are essentially telling a similar story or the same story.
DB: A work like this is about many things. How would you describe the most important questions this book deals with?
CK: I thought deeply about the themes that this book was going to cover. Themes like Black female relationships, introversion, queer love, what it looks like to discover yourself, and then to take all of these different things and put them in conversation with one another. It was really important to me that a lot of these different themes were given a very gentle entry and that I was not overdoing too much of this because I also wanted to trust in my reader to do some of the work and to be able to insert their own ideas and feelings too. What does it look like to have a community demolished or removed, or to even not have that feeling of belonging?
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?
CK: I was reading so many books while I was writing, and for me, a lot of poetry. I went back to some of my favourite books by Dionne Brand. Patricia Smith’s Blood Dazzler is probably my favourite book of poetry and it’s one that I go back to all the time. I spent time rereading Jamaica Kincaid’s The Autobiography of My Mother, Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, and David Chariandy’s Brother. These are all these beautiful books that I keep close.
DB: If you had to draw the shape of the story, what would it look like?
CK: I love this question about shape because this is something I thought about throughout the whole drafting process. Even prior to drafting, I was looking at ideas for containers and shapes when I was deep in the unstructured play phase of writing. And to be honest, I didn’t come into a specific shape for the story, instead I came into an action or a movement. And the movement is water gushing from the tap. What I mean by that is we start off at the beginning of the book, with the water gushing out from the tap at full force. It’s lush, big, all encompassing. And then, as we near the end, the water starts to slow, and we have these trickles, these droplets of water that kind of pour from the tap slowly. The community is slowly disappearing. No one sees this. Junie predicts it. She sees it through her paintings.
When we think about what those drops do when they hit the bottom of the sink, maybe there’s a bowl at the bottom of the sink and each drop contributes to the other drops. Together they build a community at the bottom of the sink. I actually mentioned this very, very early on in the book, in the scene when Junie is having breakfast with her mother.
DB: If this book were optioned for film or TV, what aspect of the original work would you be most conscious of preserving? Why?
CK: If this book were to be optioned for a film or TV, I would really want that essence of colour to come to life. I’d also be curious to see how they use the structure that I’ve built for the book to their advantage. How would that come to life on-screen? I would also hope that they would play up the notion of love in the book. Amplify it!
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?
CK: There’s definitely a lot that I left out of this book intentionally. But the original draft spanned 50 years. There are so many threads that I think can be uncovered and can be explored, especially if we do eventually look at the actual destruction of the community.
The destruction of Hogan’s Alley was not a story I wanted to write, but I definitely have remnants tucked away in folders. I wanted to make sure I left the book in a place that made the most sense for Junie to thrive. My goal was just to bring her home.
Vancouver-born Chelene Knight is the author of Braided Skin and the memoir Dear Current Occupant, winner of the 2018 Vancouver Book Award. Her essays have appeared in multiple Canadian and American literary journals and newspapers, including The Globe and Mail, the Toronto Star, and The Walrus and her work has been widely anthologized. Her poem “Welwitschia” won the 2020 Contemporary Verse 2‘s Editor’s Choice award. She was shortlisted for PRISM‘s 2021 Short Forms contest. Chelene is the founder of her own literary studio, Breathing Space Creative, through which she has launched The Forever Writers Club, whose members are writers focused on creative sustainability. Chelene works as a literary agent with the Transatlantic Agency. She lives in Harrison Hot Springs, British Columbia.