*Old London Live

“Did you visit London before writing The Singing Fire?”

Yes, I did and I was able to see some of the streets and buildings I wrote about, with a guided tour from a relative who had herself lived there before the war. Unfortunately much of Whitechapel was bombed out, but this film is a wonderful live glimpse of London 1903.

And here is Petticoat Lane in 1903.

*Favourite Characters

“Who is your favourite character in The River Midnight?

I’m often asked this question by readers who have their own favourites and I’m happy to report that their favourites include all the characters in the book other than Yarush. That’s to be expected in a novel with nine major characters.

All of the characters have something of me in them and something that isn’t me. They’ve all taught me, as have the characters of my subsequent books. The one that is most like me is Faygela, because of her passion for writing. In early drafts, I had some trouble in writing about her, identifying too closely, until I made her the mother of 6! Her domesticity and early motherhood brought a natural distance between us. Rather than being a young mother in a small, tight, but restrictive community, I am an old mom of just two in Canada’s largest city!

However, I would have to say that Hayim has a special place in my heart. The best aspects of him are based on my husband.

*Historical Facts

“Do you change historical facts when you’re writing fiction?”

My own personal contract with history is that I use the facts as they are. Sometimes that’s limiting because the facts aren’t as I would (at first) like them to be for the sake of my story. But then i find that historical facts open up new avenues for my story that I’d have never considered because the facts are often more surprising than fiction ever is. It is my challenge and my opportunity to make the story both truthful emotionally and historically, and at the same time an engaging and engrossing one. I love history and that love of it is for the complex and rich reality of what has come before our time and has led to our time being what it is. My current work is with a novel set in the present, but in creating this present time in a specific place, I’m interested in what’s come before and so there is still some history in it. I’ve really enjoyed doing research on my neighbourhood and broader research on my city and what existed before its founding.

*Writer’s Trajectory

“Did you always want to be a writer?”

When I was fourteen, I already thought of myself as a writer and when I was sixteen I started submitting short stories to magazines. But the path wasn’t at all straight-forward. I lost all confidence in myself when I was twenty and thought I didn’t have what it took because a real writer should be getting up at 5:00 am and writing before going to work and I was already so old! It was a sad and difficult time. I did not believe in my gift or myself, and there wasn’t anyone in my life then to encourage me or to set me straight on the 5:00 am thing. So I gave it up, not realizing that it was like giving up my arms and legs until years later I started writing again, at first just in a personal journal. Then slowly, very very slowly, I got the confidence to write short stories, again, and submit them, to write about my life, to write a novel. One step at a time. Slowly, slowly, slowly as loving people came into my life and my life flowered so did my work

*Unusual Structure

“How did you come up with the structure for The River Midnight?”

The River Midnight evolved naturally even though the structure is an unusual one. I started out with a short story, titled “Big Women and Small Men,” that was published in Parchment, a small literary magazine. It was about a midwife, Misha, in a small shtetl in Poland, who was admired by Faygela, the baker’s wife, and hated by Hanna-Leah, the butcher’s wife. Misha was unmarried and pregnant, and the story was about the reaction of the village. After writing the story, I still couldn’t get the characters out of my mind. I wondered first about Hanna-Leah and the intensity of her feelings about Misha and where they came from. That led to another story, “The Stranger in the Woods,” published in another small literary magazine, Fiddlehead. But the characters still wouldn’t leave me alone! I wondered about her husband, and what was behind his impotence. At that point, I knew that I needed the scope of a novel, but I continued on with that approach. Each chapter was a discovery of another character’s point-of-view and experience, adding to my (and the reader’s) larger picture of their world as a whole, and the way that people’s limited perspective gives rise to false assumptions about other people’s actions. With a bigger perspective and more information, those actions take on a different significance, which can lead to reconciliation and redemption.

*Outlines

“Do you use an outline or other method to plan your books?”

I’ve tried using an outline, thinking that it would keep me on track and off the tangents and detours that seem to plague me. But instead I ended up totally stuck and that book has been shelved now for several years while I went on to another.

Every writer has an individual process. Some writers plot and outline, some work out a chapter or a scene in their heads before writing, others work it out by writing. That’s the kind of writer I am. I have to write before I figure it out, badly at first, then better. I start with a character and a setting with dramatic potential, and see where it goes–usually somewhere else entirely.

Wandering in the mist, taken by author Dec 27/08

There are twists and turns, surprises, revelations, and only when I’m finished five, six, seven drafts does it all come together. At that point it all makes sense to me, but I never see it in the beginning. Not so far anyway. Every book is different. Who knows what the future will bring!

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*Pen and Paper

“Do you write long-hand or directly onto the computer?”

The very first sketch I wrote of The River Midnight was long-hand on fullscap, typed onto my computer every evening. But it was only about a hundred pages of manuscript! A book length mansucript is four to five times that. My wrist cramps up when I write long-hand. Not to mention how scrabbly and illegible my handwriting is. An extremely boring and useful highschool course in typing (yes, actual typing, on an actual old-fashioned typewriter) plus many years of writing have made me a fast typist (or keyboarder as it’s now called!). Ever since that first sketch, everything has gone straight into my computer. On the note of typewriters, my first short stories were typed on an ancient portable typewriter that wasn’t even electric. Not all of the keys printed visibly. The e was half gone. And from time to time I’d have to clean, untwist, and otherwise baby the keys. When I left home I got an electric typewriter, which sat on a closet shelf. My kids were fascinated by the antique technology when I took it out and dusted it off, but it didn’t work at all and I laid it to rest.

*Timeline

“How long does it take you to write a book?” submitted by Paul Campbell

It takes me about 6 years on average to write a book. I’ve done it in five and I’ve done it in seven (which included spending some time on a book that didn’t go anywhere so I dropped it and turned to something different).

I say to my kids that I’m not the fastest swimmer in the pool or the fastest skater on the ice, but I’ve got endurance. I can outlast practically anyone else. The same is true of writing. I’m short on the quickness talent, but long on stick-to-it-ness. And I’m not willing to leave my work until it’s the best it can be. That’s where I’m stubborn.

*Discipline

“You must be so disciplined. How do you manage your time, do you write so many hours or so many pages or words a day?” submitted by M-A. J.

I have regular office hours, after my children leave for school to about mid-afternoon. Then I have to flake out for a while before they come home so that I can switch from writer to mom. It’s difficult, with writing on a computer, where it’s so easy to go back and revise, to judge how many pages I’ve written a day. The main thing, for me, is sitting at the computer whether I feel like it or not. Inspiration is important, but it’s closely related to perspiration. It’s the sweating it out day by day that gets to the connection with light and love that is the true heart of my work. Sometimes that isn’t easy and it’s as much a work in process as the writing itself. I’ve done my share of letting everything and anything interfere: laundry and even a dentist appointment can sometimes be easier than facing a blank page or worse…a terrible page and God knows there are plenty of those before the good ones. But the good pages depend on the terrible ones that precede them. Writing, unlike some other things, is not a matter of getting off your butt, but sitting on it.

*Visiting London

“I feel like I’m walking the streets of London’s East End in The Singing fire, did you visit Whitechapel?”

Whitechapel was heavily bombed during the second world war, but I walked through the

Petticoat Lane 1903

East End of London with a cousin who remembered it from before that time. The donkeys braying in the stable next to the wash house is  an example of something she told me. But I also used the maps and notebooks of Charles Booth and his team of reformers who mapped out the East End, talking to residents, at the end of the nineteenth century. Each street was colour coded by its level of poverty: dark blue for starving poor, light blue for hungry poor, pink for getting by, red for shop-keepers, black for criminals, and just one colour, yellow, for the upper middle class. I was fasinated by the fine distincations of poverty, which spoke to the times, and by how close and interlocked all these streets were. At first I studied the maps at the university library, but Booth’s maps and notebooks are now available online here.

*Women in the Shtetl

“I loved the portrayal of the Shtetl in the River Midnight, which I’ve never seen anywhere else, how did you come up with that?”

Modern material on the shtetl tends to be either sentimental, i.e. it was a perfect, loving, close knit place or else looks at it as completely supersititious, dirty and ignorant. I wanted to write about the shtetl (Jewish village) as a place where people had aspirations, talents, hopes and stupidities, where people loved and fought just as we do, now. At the same time it was a place that had a particular character, historically and geographically, one that is rich and complex and interesting. I was especially interested in the items that often get left out of books about the shtetl, except for marginalia: sex, women’s lives, crime, the concrete ways that people live.

The challenge was in finding specific reliable detail, especially about women’s lives. Memoirs were a great source of information. The first time I read that a woman cried on the day she was married I thought it might have been because she didn’t like the arranged marriage. But after seeing the same thing a number of times in different memoirs, I discovered that girls were expected to cry and be very sad that their childhoods were over. There was social acknowledgement for the fact that marriage was a dangerous business for women. There was no knowing how their husbands would treat them and a woman would have a good chance of dying in childbirth.

Jewish men & women at Wailing Wall, Underwood 1908, Library of Congress (note no separatation btwn them)

I read about a hundred books in the course of researching The River Midnight, looked at a number of collections of photographs, and watched Yiddish films, such as Yidl Mitn Fidl (Young Jew with a Fiddle), starring Molly Picon, which predated the war. I used contemporary sources primarily, that is fiction and memoirs and essays written between 1881 and 1905. Folks songs were also a good resource, because they reflect ordinary people’s attitudes, for example a collection of Yiddish songs about gangs and criminals, published in Warsaw in the early twentieth century.

Because the Second World War colors Jewish life in Europe with wistfulness and grief, I avoided post-WWII sources with a few exceptions. Memorial books were quite useful (post-war collections of survivors’ memories of daily life in their hometwons), and so was a scholarly journal, Polin (Poland), published by the Institute for Polish-Jewish Studies in Oxford over the last fifteen years or so.

*Origin of a book

“How did you get the idea for The River Midnight?”

During an exercise for a course in writing and personal creativity in 1993, I imagined a large earth-mother type laughing; she was standing on a beach in prehistoric Hawaii beside a rack of drying fish. Unfortunately I don’t know anything about prehistoric Hawaii, so I wondered if I could find a more familiar setting that would retain the mythical quality of my vision.

Head of a Jewish Bride by Maurycy Gottlieb 1876

I immediately thought of the shtetl. I loved the incongruity: this big woman, free, independent, in a structured society in which women’s roles were quite restricted. That led to a short story. Then another story. And I still couldn’t get the characters and their village out of my mind. So the next summer I rented a cottage on Prince Edward Island to see what I could do with writing a novel.

There I sketched out The River Midnight. The last chapter has a description of the view from the cottage window.