Toronto based author of Proof I Was Here talks to AW’s Sabyasachi Nag about her craft and artisanal practices.
“What’s the point of trying to leave a mark when everything disappears?” (excerpted from CBC, 2019) is the one sentence synopsis for your debut novel. Could you walk us back to your process of distilling the novel down to one essential idea? Did you know at the start that you were authoring this novel? Or did you reach this place of clarity after a few drafts?
Proof I Was Here began as a short story about a woman who had lost everything and was in the process of starting her life over again from scratch. It was the kind of sharp-edged, messy story I sometimes write all in a rush to work through a problem, so I figured it was just a moment of catharsis. But after the writing had time to settle down, I discovered that this story (which was eight pages) felt like a sketch for something larger. When I began to expand on it for my MFA thesis, the same events in the story became the first 80 pages of my novel.
I don’t think I was able to crystallize the book’s central preoccupation until I had completed the first draft. I just knew the story was about impermanence and how art—or mark-making—seems less possible during times of grief, but how it can also help to bring us back to ourselves.
How did you define the scope and the dramatic structure of Proof I Was Here? What were your considerations in selecting the scenes for the opening sequence?
I wanted to write something about a woman who has suffered a loss and who then begins to follow other people who have been robbed to see how they cope. I also wanted to research a bunch of things that I was fascinated by while living in Barcelona: freeganism, squatting, graffiti artists, pickpockets, and the Catalan independence movement. So I had to come up with a story that was expansive enough to make room for all of those things. I decided to open the book with Niki in motion: pushing out through the door of one life and into another. Niki is on the move through most of the book, constantly meeting new people and changing her location and perspective.
Why did you choose Barcelona as the place where the novel unfolds? How did you determine how to place yourself (as an expat) in relation to Catalan politics which appears as a sub-plot in the novel?
I lived in Barcelona halftime for three years and during that time I had occasion to learn about the independence movement from Catalan friends and to attend one of the most important protests that lead up the 2017 referendum. My protagonist in the novel is also a new transplant to Barcelona (from Toronto) and her process of learning about the city’s politics and history roughly parallels my own: starting from a place of unfamiliarity and asking a lot of questions.
What (if any) adjustments did you have to make in your artisanal practices in order to transition from short fiction to the longer form?
For me, the short story form was the way I taught myself how to write, and the way I figured out what type of writer I wanted to be. The first short story I ever published was just one page long and it took me a few months to complete. After that, my short stories very slowly increased in length over a period of years, until one day I found myself with a story that contained the seeds of so many ideas that I knew it was a book. Producing short stories, I had learned how to write something compact that was doing what I wanted it to. I thought writing a novel would be a similar process, only longer, but that’s not exactly true. Novels have a different pace and shape, as well as a different length. But short stories tricked me into thinking I could write a novel, and that was helpful in getting me started.
As a writer of successful short fiction (CBC prize 2013) what are some of the strategies you employ to create narrative tension in the shorter form?
I love to start a short story in medias res—situating the reader smack in the middle of a dramatic scene and then slowly revealing where they are and who they’re with. I also have a compulsion to find patterns in things, so my stories usually include echoing images and ideas. These moments of connection in the text are sort of like Easter eggs for readers to find as they progress—little treats that I hope will sustain them enroute to the final page.
As a writer of successful nonfiction (CBC prize 2017) could you tell us how a young writer of nonfiction must craft ‘truth’ when the writer is quite often the subject, much of the story is composited after the fact, timelines are often compressed or expanded and narrative structures are not always chronological?
I teach two 10-week courses on writing creative nonfiction and it takes pretty much all of that time to answer these questions! But I’ll say that although “truth” is subjective, we can still work hard to be truthful in our nonfiction. We can fact-check our lives via interviews, journals, and photos. We can also challenge ourselves to capture the emotional truth of a personal story. This can be hard to do—to look at ourselves as an objective character with all of our flaws. But it’s only through deeply interrogating our personal truth that we can write something that feels honest and valuable to readers. Honest and valuable to ourselves as well.
Can you reflect on a specific performance, song, painting, film, or other non-written artwork that generated or strongly influenced any of your recent work?
The streetwise protagonist, Niki, from Proof I Was Here was inspired by (and named after) the main character in the Luc Besson film La Femme Nikita. The new novel I’m working on has been pulling inspiration from a number of non-traditional sources: clinical research studies, psychic readings, and video games.
Is your writing practice influenced or in any way informed by a sense of writing to or for others? Do you have an audience in mind when you write?
I don’t consciously think about audience while writing, but after finishing my first novel, I did feel in some way that I had written it for my younger self; it’s a book I would have liked to read as a young woman. The essays in the memoir I just finished feel more like pieces I’m using to introduce myself to people I don’t know. And for my new novel, I guess I’m imagining an audience that likes a fast literary read with lots of characters, ideas, and plot twists. My partner recently called my first draft “zany.” So maybe I’m writing this new book for fans of Wes Anderson films who flunked out of philosophy class.
Are there any books that you keep visiting for inspiration?
The existential philosophers just won’t let me be. Ever since I was a teenager, Camus and Sartre keep popping up with their gloomy reminders of life’s meaninglessness and their slightly unsatisfying solutions on how to cope with that fact. Does revisiting these books count as “inspiration”? I guess it does. Their ideas certainly light a fire under me, encouraging me to try to find, or maybe write, my own unsatisfying solutions.
Can you recall an experience where you might have worked with another poet/writer or maybe you collaborated with a visual artist, or a performing artist (say a musician/actor/dancer) – how was that experience different or similar? Or seminal or generative?
My sister, Kara Blake, is a filmmaker and editor. Working with her on a couple of documentaries, I discovered how elusive the truth can be. In one film, when we couldn’t track down the facts, we had to create an imagined scene (and to signal this for viewers). That process of blending fact and imagination made me think more about how the truth and fiction are always intertwining for us as humans. And my memoir-in-essays, currently titled Everything I’m About to Say Is a Lie, explores that idea.
Author Bio
Becky Blake is a two-time winner of the CBC Literary Prize (for non-fiction in 2017 and short fiction in 2013). Her debut novel, Proof I Was Here, was published by Wolsak & Wynn’s Buckrider Books in 2019. Becky teaches Creative Nonfiction at the University of Toronto’s School of Continuing Studies. She is currently working on a second novel and a memoir-in-essays. Read more about her work at: http://www.beckyblake.ca