Launched: Watermark by Christy Ann Conlin

Q: Reading these stories had me recalling Ernest Buckler’s The Mountain and the Valley, although it’s been years since I read it in university—but isn’t this his geography, too, the harsh mountain where the main character dies, covered by snow?

I grew up on the Bay of Fundy shores. Buckler spent his life inland in the shadow of the South Mountain. The North Mountain and wild sea I grew up with had a very different impact on my life and by turn, how it shapes my work. When I was a teenager, I read The Mountain and the Valley. Its main impact on me was that I would die very young if I didn’t get the fuck out of Dodge, ha ha ha. While glimpses of the pastoral world Buckler loved still exist, for me the world was gashed open by technology. Both worlds exist, in conflict with each other, rarely in harmony. The only story in Watermark which speaks directly to Ernest Buckler is Beyond All Things Lies the Sea, where Seraphina flees the oppression of a traditional and conservative society which demolishes females and preys on vulnerability. Flight drives Seraphina’s life, escaping a restrictive past that imposes itself on younger generations. Seraphina is a Classical Studies scholar, and a student of Seneca. It is his words, beyond all things lies the sea, which she remembers, how we are nothing more than water and salt, that in the end, we return to the ocean. This story became the opening of my first novel, Heave.

 Q: In “Dead Time”, we follow the thoughts of a teen who may or may not have committed murder. The story is told in the first person, from her cell, as she recounts the events that led to her incarceration. What inspired this story and its form? 

Stylistically, it’s a stream of consciousness piece, a subversion of fairy tale, an extremely privileged unreliable narrator, who tells herself stories and explores her past, her choices and decisions. She is both preparing for what she’ll say publicly and conducting an excavation of self. What she discovers both horrifies and bewitches her. The story came about through two things. First, reading about the 2008 Toronto murder of Stefanie Rengel by teenager Melissa Todorovic. Todorovic was convicted of masterminding the murder of Stefanie Rengel, using a young man as her operative. Second, I taught literacy at a youth detention centre, working with young people who had committed very violent crimes. I came face to face with their humanity and inhumanity. It was a real reckoning of the idea of human and monster, what society creates, how it tries (and often fails) to protect and nurture the young. Isabella, the protagonist, is also telling her story in order to understand how adults and society have shaped and created her. It’s an origin story, of sorts, a distortion of autobiography. She views herself as a creature who has leapt out of a mythic realm. This allows her to justify crazy violence and brutality while at the same time, because she is so young, this is the only way she can make sense of what she is.

Q: Several of the stories reference characters that appear later, in other stories. There is a sense of weaving a community. Were the stories planned that way, or did the notion of subtly linking them come later, as you were compiling the collection?

The literary landscape in my mind has many intersections and this is why there are often glimpses of other characters, like glimmers and shimmers of a lake through a forest, the sound of a waterfall in the woods. I wrote the stories over a long period of time, from the late 1990s right through to 2018, so it wasn’t a question of planning, but of how my creative process works, returning to the same artistic terrain but exploring it from a different perspective, examining an alternative side. I wrote the stories individually, not with a collection in mind, so many of the subtle links surprised me when the stories came together in book form.

Q: How easily did the collection come together for you? I’m fascinated by decisions around ordering stories, and also, which to include and leave out.

This is such an interesting question. It’s my first collection, so it was all very new to me. Now that Watermark exists, I can say with hindsight, that I think writing stories with the intention of a collection is very different than how I did this—gathering the stories unto me, like a strange sort of shepherdess in the wilds, rounding up the wild wayward black sheep and seeing how they worked together as a flock. It’s a question of literary purpose and artistic form, but also, with the reader in mind, how they’ll enter into the world of the book, and come out the other side. The same goes for title selection. What a process that was!

It was really hard to know which story should go where. Of course, there are considerations such as length and contrast of style, as well. I wish I could have contemplated and played with story order for a long, long time. My amazing editor and I played around with different orders, and a few writerly friends also weighed in. It was like working with an opera, though, and moving one piece altered the collection as a whole. I have a new reverence for order of story. And what I was also very focused on were the titles, and how they looked together in the table of contents. They become a found poem. Even with a novel, I look at the chapter titles together on the page as a form of poetry.