Art of Camouflage

Shelly Kawaja talks to Ottawa author Sara Power, about her debut collection of stories, Art of Camouflage (Freehand Books, 2024)

Shelly Kawaja: Congratulations on your debut short story collection, Art of Camouflage. I was excited to dive in! What inspired you to write it?

Sara Power: Thank you, and thanks for having me!

Art of Camouflage is a collection of stories about girls and women. Most of the stories have a military background or theme, but the heart of the book, for me, is the capture of the lives of girls and women. It’s my absolute favourite thing to think about, to read about, to watch on screen, to converse about randomly on a trail or while picking out a birthday card at Sobeys. The infinitely interesting and complex inner landscape of women never ceases to inspire and excite me. I love women—their rituals, their obsessions, their hobbies, their bodies, their babies, their beauty, their ugly, their sex, their secrets, their mothering, their daughtering. I am inspired by the breadth of their physical and emotional prowess and stamina. Very often, the thing about women is that they are masters of pretence, and so it gives me endless joy to untangle the ways in which women pretend.

So, to settle down and sum up, what inspires me to write the stories in Art of Camouflage is women and their multitudes.

Shelly Kawaja: The characters in this book, mostly women, sometimes children, are all connected to the military somehow. How did your own experience in the military influence these stories?

Sara Power: I completed my undergrad at the Royal Military College of Canada in Kingston, and my artillery training at the Combat Training Centre in Gagetown, NB. I was posted as a junior artillery officer to the 2nd Royal Canadian Horse Artillery Regiment in Petawawa, then the Canadian Forces Leadership School in Saint Jean, QC, and finally, the Aerospace Engineering Test Establishment in Cold Lake. Around this time, I had my children, and decided to stay at home with them. My husband is also in the military, and when I decided to leave the CAF, I slipped rather seamlessly into the role of military spouse. Our family has followed my husband’s career to Alaska, Colorado, California, Winnipeg, Cornwall, and now Ottawa. My experience as a military member wasn’t unique in that it involved working in a variety of diverse environments across Canada. Likewise, my experience as a military spouse is typical in its transience. I honour the experiences I’ve had in the military, and as a military spouse, and I absolutely draw from them in many of my stories.

One thing I can do when writing stories in a military setting is isolate my characters. The chronic transience of military life allows for a close study of remoteness. In a controlled and informed way, I’m able to think about what it means to live without roots, without family, without history, without friends. The processes that military people go through to establish these things again and again, in every new place, are captivating to me. Military culture, in some ways, is a lack of culture. The sort of reinvention of self that takes place upon every military move is the stuff of adventure and comedy and tragedy; it comes with a unique set of joys and perils.

Shelly Kawaja: There is so much tension in these stories between what the characters want—usually something deeper and more meaningful—and what the situation they are in allows. How important was this tension to you in crafting these stories? What does it say?

Sara Power: Thank you for saying this, because dramatic tension is almost always the driving force of a story for me. We are taught to consider What does the main character WANT, when drafting stories, andI often/always have a difficult time engaging with this question. I rarely know what my character wants when I start a story. My favourite characters are the ones who don’t really know what they want, and it is this bewilderment, this naivety, and ignorance that is compelling to me.

In one of my favourite classes at UBC, with Doretta Lau (heart heart), we got to Zoom meet Karen Russell. Karen wrote Orange World and Swamplandia and St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves, among other brilliant masterpieces, and she spoke about ratios in stories. The ratio of light to dark; the ratio of joy to sorrow, of nurture to deprivation, generosity to cruelty, kinship to solitude. I like to approach story in this way. In the initial drafting stage, I’m free! I take a seed and run with it. I rush the words and the ideas and type without looking at the screen, but when a story starts to take form, I absolutely think about these ratios. It is, in a sense, an act of hypersensitivity to what a story needs. As my teen daughter says, it’s the vibe. It’s checking into the energy of a story, and making decisions about when it might flare, and when it might settle, find resolution, or not. When the vibe might go right off the rails entirely, and then what? What things have to happen to a character or to the plot to ensure this tension is engaged and reconciled? It is hard to show this process without having a story in front of me, but I think of it all the time in short fiction. Maybe a visual metaphor is a messy bun that holds itself together without any bobby pins or supports. A mess of hair intertwined just so, creating the larger messy structure of the bun, but if a strand is loosened or tightened too much, the whole thing will fall apart. 

Shelly Kawaja: I have to bring up the vibrator, The Womanizer, in, “In the Skin of a Lamb.” The Womanizer has myriad capabilities in terms of penetration, and only one mode for clitoral stimulation, leaving the wife who spends way too much time solo-parenting, over-pummelled and underwhelmed. It is such a great example of how you frequently use inanimate objects to reinforce the underlying message in the story. The steamer in Kijiji BFF is another that stands out to me. Is this something that comes to you as you write, or do you have this in your pocket when you start?

Sara Power: I have never met a conversation about a vibrator that I did not like, so thank you for this, and thank you for saying over-pummelled and underwhelmed. I wish I’d said it. I plan to steal it. May I steal this phrase, please? And the steamer!! It is with immense pleasure that I share the seed of the clothing steamer in Kijiji BFF. It’s from one of my favourite Miranda July stories, Roy Spivey. The steamer doesn’t actually appear in her story but on the story podcast. David Sedaris reads the story and mentions how he met Miranda July one time, and she gave him a clothing steamer as a gift, and how it was such an odd and random gift, but actually a perfect gift, and how her character in the story, could have used a clothing steamer. I mean, just stop. It’s too good!

I’m starting to realize that yes, this is something I like to do in short fiction. I think the vibrator is definitely more subject than object in this particular case, but the idea of fixating on an external unthinking thing, an object like a steamer, or a Rudolph mask, or a wall map, or a Duolingo lesson, or a or a ring made of seashells, gives me a sense of unity and connection. When a story circles back to some random thing like a steamer, it is sending a signal. There is meaning here; look, here is the meaningful bit! Yet, it’s not preaching meaning. It is not coercing or persuading. It is presenting something to the reader like a gift. Here, what do you think? After all this, here we are again at the clothing steamer, thinking about wrinkles in a curtain. It is one of the many reasons I find short fiction so enchanting; the compressed form asks for a very real economy and distillation of ideas. Seemingly random elements are under pressure to connect and give that crystalline short story effect.

Shelly Kawaja: Yes! You can absolutely steal over-pummeled and underwhelmed J When did you begin working on this collection and how long did it take you to finish it? Can you tell us a little about that journey?

Sara Power: I submitted my first short story to a literary magazine in 2016, on my 40th birthday. It was rejected, but the editor provided generous feedback. I kept writing stories, and sending them to literary magazines all over the place, and reading a lot of the literary magazines. I’ve always loved the short story form, and especially the masters: Lisa Moore, Alice Munro, Carol Shields, Grace Paley, Mavis Gallant, KD Miller, Annie Proulx, Edna O’Brien. The wonderful world of literary magazines introduced me to brand new writers, new styles and forms, new ideas. Writers doing super interesting things on the page. I started listening to the New Yorker fiction podcast pretty much every day—and that cracked my world open altogether. I’m sure you remember during our MFA, how I recommended that podcast to anyone interested in writing short stories. On the podcast, they read a story, and then discuss it in depth. The exposure to all these stories!!! and you can listen to them while you’re folding socks into ovals. It’s heaven.

I met an author at the Ottawa Festival in 2018 who was touring her first novel. (Her name rhymes with Baron Sala and her book rhymes with Goat Steeple!) She is also an incredible short story writer, and she shared some advice about her robust submission process to literary magazines. When a number of her stories were ready, she’d send them out to her favourite magazines that were open for submission, then she’d forget about them. In six to eight months, when they came back rejected, she’d send them out again to a new batch of literary magazines. After a piece got rejected three or four times, she’d revisit the story with fresh eyes, make revisions, and send it out again. The patience! I was so impressed with her dedication and her casual acceptance that rejection is a part of the process.

I started to send out my stories at the end of every month, and always felt pumped when I had three or four stories floating around out there, waiting to get plucked, or rejected. After many many many many rejections and rewrites, I gradually started to receive acceptances from literary magazines, which meant working with editors to prepare and finesse a story for publication. Getting to work one-on-one with editors was a formative part of my experience as an emerging writer.

By the time I had enough stories for a collection, most of them had been published in literary magazines, and a few had won awards. I submitted to a few agents who passed on my work, and then I crawled under my bed. I decided on a whim to submit my collection to my absolute top choice of Canadian literary agent. It was absolutely a long shot, but I think submitting consistently to literary magazines and dealing with consistent rejection fostered my healthy relationship to rejection. I just went for it, and the stars aligned, and now I have this book that I’m so proud of.

Shelly Kawaja: How is your writing practice informed by a sense of writing to or for others? Do you have an audience in mind when you write?

Sara Power: I don’t think about an audience when I write stories, no. I guess at a later stage in the writing process, the editing and revising stage, I focus on clarity, which is thinking about the reading experience, but that’s not the same as writing for an audience. When I write for a particular audience, like this interview, or a craft essay for a literary magazine, I think about the audience, and that subtle gaze alters my writing tone. I become more or less formal, more or less natural. With short fiction, I sink into the world of the story, and the tone of the writing is dictated by the elements of that world and its characters.

Shelly Kawaja: What elements or aspects of writing give you pleasure?

Sara Power: Breakthroughs! Oh, breakthroughs! When I’m wrestling with some piece of a story, maybe an ending or a title, or maybe a particular decision of a main character, or an element of plot, and finally, after a wretched period of confusion and doubt, after considering abandonment of the story altogether, a breakthrough happens. Maybe I’m in the shower, or maybe I’m peeling vegetables or driving my daughter to BMX, and it arrives, and I am fit to be tied.

Shelly Kawaja: How do you deal with aspects of writing that might provoke frustration, doubt, disappointment, etc.? How do you talk to yourself when things are hard?

Sara Power: I drink too much wine and I eat too much chocolate and I am impatient with my children and my husband and I avoid housework and I neglect to walk my dog.

I say to myself, even this will pass, and it does, but it’s hard sometimes. I’m really grateful for my writing sisters and my actual sisters during these times because usually I just need a break from writing and some perspective and a hug.

Shelly Kawaja: What’s next for Sara Power? Are you working on something new that you can tell us about or is that top secret?

Sara Power: I’m in the messy first draft of my first novel which is based on my short story, The Circular Motion of a Professional Spit-Shiner, which takes place at the Royal Military College of Canada (RMC). It’s a braided narrative set in 2018 and 1998. Two ex-RMC cadets are women now and are living together on York Street (St. John’s) for the summer. Marlis is single-parenting two teen daughters while her husband is deployed overseas. Karley is a playwright and is writing and rehearsing a play/puppet show about a group of first-year cadet girlfriends at RMC in 1998. The theatre company Karley is working with includes veteran soldiers who are now amateur actors. I’m working on a scene right now in which the veterans are building the female puppets based on the body specs provided. They will build the puppets, move their bodies, speak their voices, think their thoughts. I’m actually in love with where it’s going. I can’t even!

Not top secret, no. Ha! I wish!

Author

Sara’s writing has appeared in literary journals across Canada, the US, and the UK, including the anthology Best Canadian Stories 2024 which was edited by Lisa Moore. Her fiction has been awarded The Malahat Review Open Season Award, The Riddle Fence Fiction Prize, and been a finalist for The Toronto Star Short Story Contest, The New Quarterly Peter Hinchcliff Award, The Bath Short Story Award, and the RBC/PEN Canada New Voices Award. Originally from Labrador, Sara now lives in Ottawa with her husband, three children, and hound dog. Art of Camouflage is her first book.