Skater Girl

Tena Laing talks to Toronto author Robin Pacific about her debut collection of essays, Skater Girl (Guernica Editions, 2024)

Tena Laing (TL): Congratulations on your memorable memoir, Skater Girl! This ‘archeology of the self’ is a book of personal essays which explore the various periods in your life including early childhood and coming of age to late adulthood, and themes ranging from creativity and art-making to socialism and spirituality, as well as love and loss. Given the lifetime of material you had to mine for these essays, I wonder if you could speak about how you made decisions about shaping the collection as a whole (for example essays are not necessarily chronological), as well as your process and experience crafting the essays individually?

Robin Pacific (RP): I don’t really consider Skater Girl to be a memoir, although many, if not most, of the essays are about remembered events in my life. I was more interested in pastiche, assemblage, collage – I wanted the essays to glance off each other, obliquely. It was a way of imagining the self as fragmented, of memory as true to my inner life.  My first essay sets this up, talking about the unreliability of memory from a scientific viewpoint, and ideas of the self as mutable. Is there an essential self? No from the point of view of fragmentation, yes from a spiritual vantage point. I meant this essay to be a lens through which the rest of the book is read.

TL: You address the slippery nature of memory in your book. As a memoir, the deeply personal essays in Skater Girl necessarily involve many other real people (family members, many lovers, dear friends) that were important in your life. Can you explain how you approached writing about people you know who might or might not share your version or memory of these stories? 

RP: It was – and is – a charged and difficult question. In some places, it was problematic for me not to use real names, especially in the two essays about childhood. However, the editor assigned to me by the publisher said it was their policy not to use real names, presumably to avoid libel charges, so I altered the surnames slightly. I sent my older sister and brother early drafts of a few essays, and they did in fact not remember certain things at all, or remembered them differently, particularly about my mother. But neither of them was living at home at the time, and my memories of her stroke and the aftermath are particularly vivid. I think they are both somewhat reluctant to read the book.

In essays about later periods of my life, I used first names only, or sometimes changed them. I never could decide on a consistent approach.

TL: As I read Skater Girl, I found myself laughing in delight and, at other times, spilling tears over the alternately mundane, profane, or transcendent pieces of your life’s puzzle. How important was it for you to balance the heavy with the light, the earnest with the irreverent, in your memoir?

RP: I think this just mirrors who I am, without deliberately trying to strike a balance in the work.

I can be intensely (and perhaps annoyingly) earnest and the next moment be cracking up laughing. One of the nicest things I heard about the book was a friend saying it felt like listening to me talk, like having a conversation with me. I can’t really say I “found” my voice because in the years I was working on visual art projects I wasn’t really looking for it. But when I started (in my seventh decade!) to write, it just was there, and writing felt easy and natural.

TL: As a lifelong artist, you’ve expressed yourself in so many art forms: acting, playwriting, visual art, community and performance art, music, and no doubt more. You’ve also expressed how you dove into these various forms of self-expression with a lack of initial expertise. Can you speak a bit about that seeker’s mindset you employed, how these other art forms have fed your writing, and perhaps how your writing feeds them in return?

RP: Writing this book was just like any other art project. There are the same stages – inspiration, manifestation, dissemination. There is the same process, which for me means having some kind of endpoint in mind but not having a sense of how to get there. Then there is the acquisition of technical skills, which for writing I did by getting an MFA in Creative Nonfiction from Kings College in Halifax.

I’ve always been fascinated by the relationship between images and words. In fact, in the essay “How I Became an Artist” I talk about having a vision of words as physical objects, with volume, texture and colour. I’m going to have a solo launch and installation at Gallery 1313, on Queen Street West in Toronto, on June 6-16. I’ll be printing fifteen or so of the essays on 12” x 9’ long strips of paper, dipping them in beeswax and hanging them from the 14’ gallery ceiling. The gallery will smell lovely! People will be able to wander around and read the book that way. Like a forest of words, or a giant artist’s book.

TL: What writers (or artists in other forms/media) have been formative in shaping how you write? What specific song, painting, film, or other non-written artwork inspired your recent work? What specific book(s) inspired your recent work?

RP: Rembrandt’s self-portraits, the ones in old age, are the most brutally honest works I know. You can see and feel the remorse and regret he portrays, it almost feels miraculous to me, it’s like reading King Lear. I wanted the same honesty in my writing, the same ability to acknowledge mistakes I’ve made, and people I’ve hurt.

Mark Rothko’s paintings for their ability, even in abstraction, to convey deep emotion. I’ve cried twice, ten years apart, seeing his work. This led me to an exploration of how art can make us feel. I think if we feel it, our readers will also. The one essay I found difficult i.e. painful to write is “In Memoriam: Brian Shein and Me”, because I still have so much remorse about how I treated him, and still have so much grief about his death. And this seems, for some people, to be the most moving in my book.

In literature that is formally different from mine, I would cite Zong! By M. NourbeSe Philip. This book-length poem, about captives being thrown overboard on a slave ship, is composed of words floating on the page. NourbeSe has given performative readings all over the world, for fifteen years, many of which I’ve attended. Once again, it is her courage which has inspired me, courage to look into the very core of evil, and of grief.

And, for obvious reasons, the spiritual memoir of Saint Augustine, The Confessions.

TL: How do you become conscious of the craft in your work?

RP: I spent the first ten years of my adult life studying English literature, eventually obtaining a PhD. So I have long appreciated the craft of writing in many forms and genres. And I continue to be an omnivorous reader. Writing, as opposed to reading, is of course a different matter, but I think as I write the voices of many other writers are just under the surface. When I did my MFA in Creative Nonfiction at Kings College we studied the craft of nonfiction, everything from journalism to lyrical essays. Since then I’ve been even more alert to such stylistic things as narrative voice, similes, metaphors, wit, irony, and brevity.

TL: How do you know as a writer if a piece of work that you have been labouring on, is finally completed?

RP: I don’t. Whenever I finish an essay I think it’s perfect. Then I go back and revise. And revise. Eventually, I have to put a stop to it. But even after the book is published, when I use quotes from it on social media, for example, I want to rewrite it. So it isn’t ever finished. I could polish the damn thing forever.

TL: How was the title chosen for this book? Who had input and what were the deciding factors?

RP: I thought for quite a while, that I had the perfect title for the book: “Gather Up the Fragments”.

This came from a quote from the 2018 Nobel Prize winner Olga Tokarczuk, who said “Constellations, not sequencing, carry the truth”.  And from the New Testament story of the loaves and the fishes. After the multitude had been miraculously fed, the Apostles asked Jesus what they should do with the leftover food. “Gather up the fragments” was his response.

My friend, Joss Maclennan, who designed the cover of my book, is a graphic designer and communications expert. She kiboshed this plan, claiming the title was clunky and wouldn’t mean anything to anyone! And then it occurred to me to use the title of one of the essays, Skater Girl, which Joss approved. And I have this little 10” statuette of a girl on figure skates, which became the image for the cover, so it all came together.

TL: What’s next for Robin Pacific? What are you working on now?

RP: When I think about the state of the world right now—climate change, wars, the move to the rabid right—I feel quite numb as a writer. I want to get out of my head and go back to making visual art. I’ve been pondering coracles and I want to construct life-size coracles. These were little one-person boats made out of branches and animal skins in the Middle Ages. They look like giant cups, or the beautiful pea-green boat of the owl and the pussycat. Irish monks set out to sea in them, with a little sail but without a rudder. They believed that their destination was the will of God and that they needed to trust in God. This got many of them drowned, I assume. But the image tugs at me, because aren’t we all and each alone on a perilous sea, with no idea where we’re going?

Author

In 2012 Robin completed a Diploma in Spiritual Direction at Regis College in the Toronto School of Theology, and now practices Spiritual Direction one day a week. She holds a PhD in English Literature from York University and a Masters in Theological Studies from Regis College. She is currently enrolled in the University of Kings College MFA in Creative Nonfiction. Skater Girl is her first full-length book.