Cocktail

Shelly Kawaja talks to author Lisa Alward about her debut story collection, Cocktail (Biblioasis, 2024)

Shelly Kawaja: Firstly, congratulations on winning the Danuta Gleed Literary Award for your short story collection, Cocktail! I first encountered your writing when Orlando 1974 was longlisted for the CBC Short Story Prize in 2018. I’ve come across plenty of your work since, so I was waiting to read the Cocktail before it came out J Can you tell me a little about when you began writing short stories?

Lisa Alward: I didn’t begin writing short fiction until 2012, the year I turned 50. I’d always wanted to write, as a child and a teenager and all through my university years, but in my mid-20s, I convinced myself that I wasn’t good enough and there was no point in even trying. Instead, I did what a lot of young women with English degrees of my generation did, especially if they didn’t want to teach — I looked for a position in book publishing. For the next three decades, I worked in a series of writing-adjacent jobs, from publicist at Dundurn Press to sales manager for the Literary Press Group, to (once my husband and I moved to Fredericton) freelance copywriter and editor, and ultimately to contract instructor in the University of New Brunswick’s English department. I never stopped thinking about writing, though and kept hoping I’d discover the courage, or whatever it was I needed, to try again. Then, to my surprise, one day in the fall of 2011, I did. Why this day was the one I don’t know, except that I remember noticing on my walk home from the university all these diseased yellow leaves on the pavement, which suggested a mood and a metaphor. My children were mostly grown by then and I’d been teaching the same clear-writing course for several years, so I had more free time, which helped. That first day, I wrote an opening paragraph about the leaves, not fully realizing that this was what it was. The next day, I drafted another paragraph and the following day, a third, and before I knew it, I’d finished my first short story in nearly thirty years. I called this story “The Trail,” which, looking back, feels quite apt, as it did open a path for me through the wilderness of my own fear.

Shelly Kawaja: Do you write every day or think that’s absurd?

Lisa Alward: Not at all absurd! I wish I wrote every day. I admire writers who can report to a home office (or a coffee shop or the library) at the same time each morning and write for three or four hours. For me, writing always seems to be something I can only do in jags. When I’m deeply in a story, I write all the time, including sometimes in the middle of the night. But I often take long breaks between stories. It occurs to me that I may need these breaks. In a way, even the three decades when I didn’t write at all was a valuable — if rather long — fallow season, during which I gathered material and thought about stories and how to tell them.

Shelly Kawaja: What I love about so many of the stories in this collection is that I understand all the characters. I get where they’re coming from and what’s going on with them. It doesn’t matter if I like the character or not, I like nodding my head and smiling and thinking, Oh yeah, I’ve been there, or, Oh yeah, I know who that is. This is relatable everyday stuff. This also means you have endless material to draw from. How do you decide what “stuff,” is story-worthy?

Lisa Alward: I never know at the beginning of a story if the material I’m exploring is going to feel worthy to readers. It’s always a risk to commit without knowing this, but it’s what I (and I suspect other writers) do, often quite early on. I also feel strongly that no one is boring. That however ordinary a character might appear on the surface, there are hidden depths that they themselves might not even be aware of, and that it’s the writer’s job to probe these. Alice LaPlante talks about writers having a “location,” by which she means not just the physical place where they live but also everything that has come before, everything in their lives, and I think this applies to characters as well. We are all types, but we are also all unique.

Shelly Kawaja: All your characters are treated with care. Side characters play important roles that aren’t always clear until the end; the group of mom friends in Hawthorne Yellow for example, and your stories pull tight because of it. This is blissfully patient writing. How long does a story exist in your mind, and in draft form, before each character fully emerges? Is this process actually blissful?

Lisa Alward: Writing fiction has, for sure, its moments of bliss — otherwise why would we do it? — but I suspect you’d be hard-pressed to find a writer who describes the entire process as blissful! The moments that feel the most this way to me are the thinking ones, when I’m out for a walk and realize what I need at a particular moment in a story or how a metaphor connects to the plot, and, later on, the editing. The first full draft absolutely terrifies me because I have no clue yet where I’m going to end up and feel as if I’m just groping in the dark, though I’ve learned to be patient, to trust the process. And I would describe myself as a slow writer. I usually start with hand-written notes, then a very careful first draft, and then a second one where I make big changes. Finally, I share the story with a band of “ideal readers,” and edit, edit, edit. The stories in Cocktail each took between four months and a year to get ready to send out for the first time to journals, but some (“Hawthorne Yellow” and “Maeve,” for instance) I’ve been editing for years.

Shelly Kawaja: What comes first in your stories; characters or relationships? 

Lisa Alward: I don’t think I’ve ever started a story with just an idea for a character alone. Even with “Maeve,” which is the closest of the ones in Cocktail to a character study, I saw myself, right from the beginning, as exploring a relationship between two women. The narrator’s judgment and ultimate cruelty in that story is the filter through which we see Maeve and, in turn, the narrator herself. Often the impetus of a story for me is more an image or a fragment of one, but ultimately a situation always seems to emerge between two or more characters.

Shelly Kawaja: The relationships these characters have appear simple, but they are extremely complicated. In, Meave, we meet two women arranging playdates for their kids, but we also encounter latent, menacing, and life-dictating conflict. The two women are different, but not really. They’re both white, middle-class, new moms and yet they are at war with each other, like they are on opposing sides of something. What is it? What prevents them from connecting?

Lisa Alward: For a long time, my draft title for this story was “Mummy War.” These wars were such a big thing in the 90s when this story is set, much amplified, of course, by the media, which has never passed up on a good hen fight. Middle-class women of my generation who’d gone to university and started careers in their 20s faced — practically for the first time in human history — an actual choice when they started having babies. Would they go back to work after their maternity leave, or take time off from their careers, even end them altogether? Maternity benefits were not what they are now, and paternity leave was almost unheard of, so this was a choice that many women struggled with and felt judged about, no matter which way they leaned in the end. There was a sense that if you were a working mom, all the stay-at-home moms looked down on you, and vice versa. When the story opens, my narrator is “at home” with her baby but feeling deeply ambivalent. She’s essentially a spy in this granola world of homemade muffins and crafts that Maeve appears to rule, and not to be trusted — but then, to her surprise, neither is Maeve. These two women do have things in common — their university degrees and middle-class milieu, their challenges raising small children without much family support — but they find themselves on opposite sides of a battlefield that has been designed to keep them apart, which is why my narrator can convince herself that there’s no need to respond to the “call to arms” she senses after Maeve opens up (however obliquely) about her marriage, that she can ignore this appeal to a “long-ago ideal of sisterhood with its sewing circles and home births, its consciousness-raising meetings in smoke-filled living rooms.” “Maeve” actually is one of my favourite stories in the collection, partly because I worked on it for so long and because during the proofreading I had this very Lily Briscoe-like moment when I finally saw the line (“So maybe she’d taught me something after all”) that I needed.

Shelly Kawaja: How do other people; writers, friends, mentors, contribute to your writing practice?

Lisa Alward: I mentioned earlier a trusted band of ideal readers. These include my husband and three adult children and various close friends, some of them writers but most not. What I want from these readers, especially in the beginning, is less sentence-level editing and more a response to each story as a whole. Does it resonate? is a question I find myself asking a lot. At the same time, I’ve learned, through hard experience, to also trust my own instincts. There have been times, especially when I was first starting out, that I took advice I later realized I shouldn’t have. At a certain point, if you bring too many people in, you can lose control of a story and that did happen to me with a couple of my early stories.

Shelly Kawaja: Do you have an audience in mind when you write?

Lisa Alward: When Cocktail was in production, Biblioasis asked me to fill out a couple of marketing forms that included a question on my sense of my audience. I hedged a bit but came down ultimately on the side of older, middle-class women. Yet after my book came out, I discovered that a lot of men seemed to really, really like it, and also much younger readers in their 20s and 30s. I’ve had people tell me since that while they don’t normally read short fiction, or even literary fiction, they can’t stop thinking about my characters (Ray, from “Bear Country,” and Ruth from “Bundle of Joy” come up a lot). And everybody, no matter what their age, seems to remember sitting on the stairs as their parents’ party guests arrive. This response from readers has been an incredibly lovely experience. Yet also in its way quite humbling. The publishing industry and I think writers too sometimes, want to compartmentalize readers — these ones like this, those ones that — but what I’ve realized is that they’re much more maverick in their reading tastes than we might give them credit for — which is a good thing!

Shelly Kawaja: What do you like most about writing short stories? What can a short story do that other forms cannot?

Lisa Alward: Alice Munro said in an interview once that one reason she couldn’t bring herself to write a novel is that she felt so many of the ones she read would have worked better as short stories. I feel the same. I love novels, but in the lesser ones, there can be a bagginess, a sense of hubris even, this okayness with wasting a reader’s time, that I find aggravating. Focus, I want to tell these novel writers. Not that all stories are as focused as I might like them, but the form, I think, encourages more compression and modesty. And I find I remember short stories when I often don’t novels. Maybe because I feel more of a participant in the meaning-making of a story, or maybe just because they’re just so much tighter, and I can carry the whole thing about in my mind.

Shelly Kawaja What’s next? Are you working on something new?

Lisa Alward: The book I’m working on now is a linked collection. The first story is inspired by a family drama from my childhood. After my grandfather died, my grandmother made a rash and ultimately disastrous second marriage to a handyman who had lived down the road from her for many years in the same village on Nova Scotia’s south shore. This was in 1967, the Summer of Love, and gifts of flowers were involved. Four years later, my mother and her sister drove down to the south shore and kidnapped her. How they came to this decision and what happened that morning has always intrigued me, and I’m excited to see what else I might discover.

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