Vancouver-based comedian, theatre maker, writer, and mad activist J D Derbyshire talks to AW’s Debbie Bateman about her new novel.
DB: Your novel, Mercy Gene, makes a melting pot out of our notions about genre and form. You use lists, narrative, and poetry with equal power. One point-of-view or degree-of-objectivity is quickly replaced by another. I was reminded of dance, well choreographed movements, a unity obtained through change. And so, I have to ask, how did you do it? Did you know the shape you wanted the movement to take? How did you modulate the scenes to create a unified whole?
JDD: Thank you for the comparison to dance. I did not have the shape of the whole when I started. I took the scenes from the play Certified that seem to want other words or perspectives, and started to think up ideas or other scenes from there. I set a low minimal word count of 100 words a day to stay in touch with the writing, and to not be daunted by the length that a novel would eventually have to be. I thought of the process as filling out a buffet table with lots of dishes, without thinking too much what I’d eventually put on the plate. I just had to stay playful and trust that I would know what to choose from the buffet when the time came. I worked early on with the editor Zsuzsi Gartner. I sent these little dishes to her and sometimes she would say, this is really tasty or I’d like more of this or less of that.
I also think that because I’m used to processing fragmented thinking in my own brain and having to line things up later to make things make sense, that writing this way made the best use of my brain. Once we had enough pieces, Zsuzsi took a crack at putting them in order and I did the same. Our choices were remarkably similar. We made a few adjustments and that’s the manuscript that went out to publishers. When Beth Gibson came on as the editor with Goose Lane Editions, she requested a few other dishes and I had to rearrange a few things and write some new pieces, but I managed to find a bigger plate and make it work.
DB: The novel explores the possibilities of auto-fiction, touching horrific truths about traumatic experiences and offering insights from the depths of imagination. How did you happen upon auto-fiction as a way of finding and sharing this story? In what ways, does this form offer possibilities for truth seeking that might not be available from conventional fiction or memoir?
JDD: I didn’t know the term auto-fiction when I began this work. I was drawn to the form, but I didn’t know what it was called. I read and admired Maggie Nelson’s work, and one of my favourite novels is Homeland Elegies by Ayad Akhtar, a Pulitzer Prize winning playwright. Zsuzsi called that book auto-fiction and also told me to read some other books that were auto-fiction. I usually read three books at a time: a novel, non-fiction, and poetry. I don’t trust any of these forms fully. As a person who lives with psychosis, I also have a different relationship to so-called reality, that is to say, I don’t feel confident to vouch for reality. I also really value the imagination as a sacred space where things come together—ideas, thoughts, voices, and ways of looking at things that can’t really be explained. We live in a world that’s run under the tyranny of rationale. We’ve been told that everything is explainable or will be one day, so let me just say, I can’t explain what I’m trying to explain. I think we’re more mystical and magical, and my calling to write has never been about trying to get to a concrete understanding of things. It’s been more about trying to transcend the binary of fact and fiction. I think there’s a sweet spot for me there, so if that’s what auto-fiction is, I like it. Does that answer this question?
DB: The text slides easily from deeply personal experiences to larger views of cultural memes and persistent philosophical questions. Some passages encourage us to imagine ourselves within your life, other passages invite us to partake in a universal body, and all of this flows. I wonder if you’d like to share a little of your creative process. Was a lot of the writing created in a fast-moving freeflow style without revision? Did you at some points need to steer the flow, take a second trip down the river, or even pull out of the water?
JDD: A lot of my first drafts are verbal. I speak them out loud, record, and then transcribe them. But then, it’s revision, revision, revision, revision, revision. I think that’s probably what kept me from writing a novel for so long. As a dyslexic person, I didn’t trust that I could make the words look right on paper. I learned I could, but it took a lot of time. I am really laughing right now because there was so much revision going back and forth between me and me. I worked so hard with each of the pieces to get them as right as I could. So yes, I went down the river more than once. I went up the river. I lost the river. More than once, I found myself in a backyard in someone else’s kiddie pool. So for me, I guess it was spill, spill, spill until I had a river.
DB: Given their objective detachment, a few scenes have the tone and style a person would expect in a science textbook. You also make use of the rules of logic. These passages contrast powerfully with more conventionally creative ones, and they are as essential as any other part of the novel. As writers, we may sometimes forget to employ the gifts of science and logic in creative work. Would you like to share your thoughts on the possibilities related to using these areas of learning to deepen narrative?
JDD: Thank you for this question. Maybe it’s because I didn’t know the rules. Maybe it’s because I read all kinds of different books, that some of those styles ended up in this book. I don’t live fully in delusion and imagination, and I don’t live fully in the world of rational thought and logic. I read to try and know everything I can, and I read to be led into unknowing. I read poetry for the way words can sound. I don’t know. Maybe it’s as simple as—what was in the mix in my head ended up on the page.
DB: Perhaps because you use all powers at your means, you unravel deep truths. “We pee, we poo, we cry,” is one of my favourites. But I linger more over your sharing of this powerful suggestion: “I wish we could go by pro-verbs instead of pro-nouns.” As the novel arcs towards its end, I felt a wave of healing, messy and transitory yet very very real. Would you like to share how it felt for you to create this work? Are there things you hope readers might feel or do as a result of your work?
JDD: I was motivated to expand ideas from my play Certified into a book form because so often the stories of living with trauma and mental illness are told by curious observers and not by the people actually experiencing such a life. Fiction writers are particularly prone to wanting to get into worlds that they don’t know, and that’s fine, but for me there are stories that can only be told from the inside of experience. Unfortunately, those of us inside ‘different’ lives often lack the confidence to believe those stories matter. My dot (daughter) gave me a tote bag once that read, “May you have all the audacity of a mediocre white man.” I wrote this book, pretending to have that kind of audacity. I chose to believe that I had something to say. I felt mostly full of doubt with a smattering of faith, that these stories and the way I chose to tell them, mattered. I had to stay in relationship with my own brain and trust that what it had to offer was good. I want people to have an individual relationship with their own brains, with their own ways of telling and to believe we want to hear it. I also wanted to celebrate the wisdom of the imagination. There seems to be so much suspicion around the usefulness of flights of fancy these days, especially in how closely its associated with madness as in be careful, be careful. It felt so good to write this book, and it felt surprisingly awesome when the book came in the mail, and it was an object in the world and I got to hold it. With apologies to the trees.
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?
JDD: There was a lot of writing that I didn’t use. It didn’t fit in the way that I wanted things to fit, loose but connected, complementary but odd. Then there was the time that elapsed between the manuscript being accepted by Goose Lane and the editors requests for changes. It had been so long since I’d been inside the work (two years, I think), and I was onto other things. So, I put it all back up on the wall again, each little piece and thought carefully about what the editor was asking for. After a few weeks, I got back into my original writing rhythms and wrote and played with the order and sent it all back. I think that added 20 or 30 pages, I’m not sure. I think this book is about anger and acceptance, and begins to touch on forgiveness, and the next book is a bit more about how to be a little more tender towards self and others in this world, to forgive. The working title of the next book is Mentally still. Maybe. We’ll see.
DB: 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?
JDD: I love this question. If I saw someone on the bus reading my book, what would I ask? I mean the first thing I’d want to do, and maybe this is my theatre background leaking through, but I’d just want to watch for a while, to see what their face did. Unfortunately, watching someone read on the bus is a very creepy thing to do, so maybe I wouldn’t do that. And honestly, I can’t imagine myself interrupting someone reading a book on a bus because, everyone knows that if someone’s reading a book on the bus, they don’t want to talk with anybody else, except maybe the people in the book. But let’s say, they happened to finish the book, and they close it and they take a deep satisfying breath, and we get off at the same stop and we start walking in the same direction. I might say, listen not right now, but if later, you’re thinking about this book and you want to have a cup of coffee about it, that would be great. You’ll notice that the picture in the back looks a lot like me and in fact it may be me. Anyway, I don’t want to exchange numbers or anything, but maybe we’ll run across each other in time and space if it’s meant to be, I’ll have a question I’ll want to ask you about that book.
DB: Were there any other endings that you considered?
JDD: Yes. I mentioned that the book was written in pieces, and that the first editor I worked with ordered them, and then I ordered them, and how we ordered them was very, very close. However, one of the big differences was that the beginning of the book right now, about the drunken older women, was the last thing the editor put in the book. I switched it to the front. I just wanted those drunken ladies up front.
DB: How do you see this work situating itself in terms of genre, literary ideas, time and place, and literary history?
JDD: I don’t know where this book is or where it will be in terms of literary history, genre, times and places, etc. Although I read a lot and my choice of genre varies, I’m not educated in literary language or history or terms. I had been calling this book a fictitious memoir because that’s what I called the play Certified, a fictitious memoir. I have since learned that we can call this book an auto-fiction novel. I like that. In the visual arts, we have something called outsider artists—artists whose practices and processes don’t come from traditional training or well-travelled roads, but somehow become known to the public. I think this book may end up being talked about as outsider literature. Who knows? I’m very happy to see it on my bookshelf next to some other writers that I really admire. I hope that it opens a few people’s minds to believing that they too can have all the audacity of a mediocre white man and find a form that works for the stories they want to tell from the brain they happen to have. I love a straight ahead, well-crafted novel, but that wasn’t going to work for this telling. That’s all for now.
DB: What was the most satisfying aspect about writing this book (other than perhaps the satisfaction of finishing it)?
JDD: The most satisfying aspect of writing this book is that I found a way to work with my doubt. I gave myself a few permissions that really helped me do the work.
1) I didn’t have to write in order.
2) A low daily word count of 100 words
3) An editor/friend I could be accountable to. I could send her the pieces as I finished them and I felt like someone was holding them, that someone cared.
After every 20 or 30 pieces, I’d have tea with my editor and she’d tell me what she noticed. The voices seem to have this point-of-view, and when you have an unreliable narrator, etc. I often went home to look up terms. We didn’t talk about the meaning of things or devices or anything too fancy, just what she noticed and what she was curious about. I was also reading a lot of poetry at the time because I love how poets are so specific and concise and I kept revising and revising to get the words as close as I could to the meaning I was after.
So, that was the most satisfying thing, working through my own doubt day after day. I came to understand that my confidence was building on 100 words a day. Confidence wasn’t some place I would arrive at and never have to leave; it was something that could only be given to me in little pieces. It was enough to put to sleep, at least for a few hours a day, the part of me that doesn’t have any self-worth. These little pieces of confidence accumulated into a kind of trust that I would find the right structure for the novel. It was also satisfying to actively defy perfectionism, because I knew I was never going to get it exactly the way I might have imagined, but it was going to be the best the book that I could write at this time, in this way with the brain I’ve got.
Author Bio
JD Derbyshire (they/them) is a Vancouver-based comedian, theatre maker, writer, and mad activist whose work examines mental health, neurodiversity, queerness, and gender exploration. Derbyshire has toured Canada as a stand-up comedian and solo performer; has written over twenty plays that have been produced by companies in Victoria, Calgary, Toronto, and Vancouver; and co-hosts the mental health podcast Mad Practice. Their play Certified, which served as partial inspiration for Mercy Gene, turns the audience into a mental health review board to determine Derbyshire’s sanity by the end of the show. Certified won two Jessie Richardson Theatre Awards in Vancouver and was described by the Georgia Straight as “a testament to a dynamic performance and delicate storytelling.” Mercy Gene is Derbyshire’s first novel.