Featured novelist, short story writer, teacher and author of two novels and two short story collections Shaena Lambert, talks to AW’s Sabyasachi Nag about her craft and artisanal habits.
SN: Your latest novel, Petra (Penguin Random House, 2020) is about the feminist eco-activist Petra Kelly. Why did you choose to write it as historical fiction rather than as a biography?
SL: First of all, thank you for inviting me to talk about craft in The Artisanal Writer. It’s a real pleasure to be in these pages, and to think about and answer your questions. This first one is an easy one, because I don’t write biography, and so it never occurred to me to do so with Petra. Also there have been biographies written about her – and I was trying to do something different. Not so much fact as brooding over the inner lives of the characters. I was inspired to write the book because the elements I could fictionalize – the what ifs and whys – seemed really tantalizing and involving. The story is of Petra Kelly, a powerful, anxious, sexy, true-life leader of the anti-nuclear movement in 1980s Germany, who falls in love with a much older German general. So the two characters are dynamic opposites. The novel traces their complex and fraught relationship. A lot is known about the two real life people, but their motives, and what drove them beneath the surface, are a continuing mystery. That is what I wanted to explore.
SN: Did you know from the start that you were writing Petra as a novel? Did that change your research process in any way? Or was it during your research that you decided on the form?
SL: I actually first tried to write Petra as a play! I tried many times, and got a rather limp play draft out of my struggles. Then it morphed into a novel. I kept the narrator, who had wandered in to tell the story at some point. (I was inspired by Peter Schaffer’s plays Equus and Amadeus.) My narrator, Manfred – my Birkenstock-wearing storyteller – became very helpful as I dramatized the novel. He ended up with his own story arc, which acts as a foil to Petra’s.
SN: In what way does your second story collection Oh, My Darling (Harper Collins, 2013) build on, or get away from the first collection (The Falling Woman, Vintage, 2002)?
SL: I think with The Falling Woman, which was my first book, I was just trying so very hard to write a book at all – ten complete stories good enough to publish. I sweated and groaned giving birth to it, and it took a long time, as I was learning the craft at the same time, and each story felt very hard won. With Oh, My Darling, I hope there is more immediacy, more playfulness. “Oh, My Darling,” the title story, came out quickly in response to a cancer diagnosis – and so I think it feels more consequential, more alive, than many of the stories in The Falling Woman.
SN: Can you describe your process when you are putting together a story collection? Do you consciously write around a thematic motif, or do you prefer to freewheel and allow the pieces to connect themselves?
SL: I definitely don’t write to a theme, not so far. Though I love the idea of themed story collections, linked story collections, such as Ellen in Pieces, by Caroline Adderson, A Visit from the Goon Squad, by Jennifer Egan, and Elizabeth Strout’s Olive Kitteridge books. But I have never worked around a theme. Nevertheless, I do think both of my collections have ended up having a cloudy theme anyway, a kind of atmospheric theme, like weather. That happened because of the basic preoccupations I had when I was writing. As you say, the pieces end up connecting themselves.
SN: Your first novel Radiance (Random House, 2007) is about American guilt following the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and in Petra you explored post-war guilt in the Germany of 80’s. Guilt happens to be one of the most enduring themes in literature – from Aeschylus to Huckleberry Finn. How does guilt motivate you as a writer? Or (in other words) what are you trying to do as a writer when exploring themes that deal with guilt?
SL: That is an interesting question. I don’t think I set out consciously to explore guilt, though both these books do explore it. I think rather than taking on a large theme, it was more that the subject matter as a whole appealed to me – and guilt was attached to that chunk of subject matter. There were so many complexities and oppositions all grouped together in these situations. So, for instance with Radiance I was fascinated to think about the degree to which post-war America, having used the atom bomb, was drawn to, repelled by, and fixated on the damage it had inflicted. So if a young woman came to America – a ‘victim’ – what would happen? Could her hosts even see her through their multitude of projections? And how would she see herself? How would she fight for herself, against the taint of being seen, fundamentally, as a capital V, victim? That was my starting point, more or less. With Petra, it was the two generations – Petra’s, which had the blessing of ‘being born too late’ to experience the German war, and the General’s generation, which fully participated in the war and its atrocities. I found this intergenerational conflict – especially enacted in a love affair – fascinating.
SN: At what point in the life of short story are you absolutely certain that it needs no further revision?
SL: Oh god. I revise so much. Sometimes entire stories turn into other stories. And I have to stop myself, because I’ve spawned new material, and it turns out the older story might have been better. It’s a very weird process, writing stories. Very beguiling, tantalizing and frustrating, all at once. However, there is a moment when you can feel – this is done. Then, of course, when it is published, you do have to stop working on it! Which is a great benefit to publishing: it forces you to move on.
SN: Do you have a writing routine?
SL: With novels, I get up early and try to write while I’m still feeling fresh. In the first draft I try to go fast, get things down in a hurry. I find the speed helps the writing. Later, I do slow down, and that is when a lot of the growth actually happens. All that slow thinking and brooding and tweaking. The author Kathy Page described it to me once as ‘endless fiddling.’ I do believe in endless fiddling. I think it’s a wonderful way to describe what writers do. George Saunders also describes this process so well in A Swim in a Pond in the Rain. How a not very good piece of writing can gradually become so much better by the light, constant process of thinking about it, altering it.
SN: 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?
SL: I often find a piece of art that speaks to me, and it becomes a visual motif to encourage me in the writing. With Petra, I found (somewhere) a lithograph of a warrior fighting a wolf-like creature. I think it may be very old. Anyway, that image became a motif for Petra’s psychological war with her General. I would stick it on each of my writing books, where I kept my handwritten notes.
With my present novel – -which takes place in a forest – I’m very inspired by William Blake’s watercolour of Midsummer Night’s Dream.
SN: Do you remember any experience around learning to write that became formative for you in the later years?
SL: I do remember reading “A Good Man is Hard to Find,” by Flannery O’Connor and beginning to notice her use of light and shadow in that story. I don’t know how my mind got fixated on noticing this one element, but suddenly I realized that her description of running out of ‘white sunlight’ towards a chinaberry tree in a court yard – this sense of light and shadow — was a progressive motif in the whole story, and that in the end the forest into which characters walk (to be shot), is utterly full of shadow, a gaping mouth. Seeing the artful, yet utterly alive, way O’Connor created movement and meaning through light was a revelation. I remember getting so excited I couldn’t stay seated. After that I read Mystery and Manners by O’Connor, and what she says about anagogical ways of seeing – how we can see very basic things, tables, chairs, a valise, with a larger, spiritual lens – helped me understand how complex and exciting it is to describe ANYTHING in a short story. Stories have the ability to become so freighted partly because symbols exist in the dirt and dust of the story – in the setting, in objects, in the cast of light. I remember feeling this also while reading a Saul Bellow novella, Seize the Day – how the reflection of a glass tumbler on a white tablecloth held so much significance, and stood in, in a way, for the character’s exact state of feeling at that moment.
It’s very absorbing and mysterious, how all this works. I love it. It feels like a truth beyond fiction. Something hidden yet very true about the nature of life itself.
Author Bio
SHAENA LAMBERT is the author of four works of fiction: Petra, Oh, My Darling, Radiance and The Falling Woman. Her work has been nominated for the Atwood Gibson Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize, the Ethel Wilson Award, the Evergreen Award, and the Frank O’Connor Award for the Short Story. Her stories have been anthologized four times in Best Canadian Stories, as well as in the Journey Prize Anthology, and published in The Walrus, Zoetrope All Story, Ploughshares, Toronto Life and other magazines. Her recent novel, Petra, was inspired by German activist Petra Kelly who transformed environmental politics, only to find herself caught in a triangle of love, jealousy and murder. The Boston Review wrote: “As a work of historical fiction, Petra brings Kelly to the fore in a way that no biography or work of scholarship yet has.” Petra won the 2021 BC and Yukon Book Prize, Ethel Wilson Award for fiction, and was a CBC best book of the year.