“The Small Moving Things of the World”: An Interview with Kathleen Winter
As a writer of journalism, fiction, and creative nonfiction, Kathleen Winter has long shared her fascination with the details of everyday life, and this same curiosity pervades her upcoming collection of short stories entitled BoYs which won the 2006 Metcalf-Rooke Award and will be published by Biblioasis this fall.
In the climactic scene of “Binocular,” one of the stories previewed here, we encounter a young girl who has been confined in a room empty of all furniture or personal belongings aside from a pair of binoculars which she is so attached to that the rings of the lenses are etched around her eyes. This Hitchcockian premise teases us with the possibility of a swift resolution, one Winter is reluctant to provide. As the narrator guesses at the mundane things the child may have been watching, we realize that the point of the story lies not in what is seen but in the very act of seeing. Through the child’s eyes, the ordinary is transformed. It is our attention to the“small moving things of the world,”things often taken for granted, which not only gives life meaning but which somehow sustains us and keeps us alive.
Throughout BoYs, this insight belongs to those who exist on the margins. Stories such as “Malcolm in Blue,” also in this issue, examine outsiders who have uncanny insight into their surroundings. Winter writes refreshingly about female eccentrics and intellectuals as well. In “Binocular” and “Where the Nightingales are Singing” we learn about the imaginative lives of women, lives which simmer just under the surface of daily life. Winter’s characters are restless and striving and often, as with the girl with the binoculars, their very isolation allows them to see the world anew. Their sadness, as Winter tells us in“Binocular,”must be relieved, and insight, one hopes, is the reward for suffering.
Winter’s characters undergo what could be seen as the modern epiphany. The higher insight they achieve is momentary and rooted in the mundane, often disjointed experiences of life. The narrator in“Rock Talking to Bone about Light” declares that “the way you do one thing has everything else you do within it.” The same theory holds true for Winter’s work in which the smallest, most random detail of a character’s life contains the conflict and pathos of the entire story. In “You Can Keep One Thing,” which follows, we learn about the difficulties of immigrating at a young age through a child’s fleeting impressions of her surroundings, such as the smell of burst sap bubbles on her school uniform. In other stories, the ordinary morphs before our eyes. Basketball nets talk back or the golden threads of a skirt come to life. More often, meaning reveals itself in the details of the way a character “disintegrates … olives with [her] tongue” or the way moonlight refracts on the ocean at night.
Throughout our interview, which took place both in person and by email in late May 2007, Winter exuded the same delight in commonplace things that she does in her work. We met in downtown St. John’s on a hot and sunny Victoria Day weekend. There was a strange vibration in the air that I could not decipher. I attributed it to the unusually nice weather, the holiday atmosphere, the eerie stillness of a city abandoned on a Monday. Winter made the pilgrimage to the city from her country home in Holyrood, arriving at my door flushed from the beauty of the trek she had made by foot from her parking place on Signal Hill. As we began to discuss the importance of the details of everyday life in her work, Winter looked out the window towards the view of the harbour and surrounding town as if preparing to divulge the secret of the beautiful day. Then she confided in me that, as we spoke, the leaves of the mountain ash were opening. The whole city, hitherto brown and bare from the continuing threat of frost, was being transformed by this almost imperceptible act. In the same way, Winter’s stories evolve from the simplest of things.
Later, turning to the surrounding beauty of the geraniums that framed the windows, her attention focused characteristically on the clay flower pots that contained them. Her observation seemed to epitomize the“way of seeing” that she refers to in our discussion and which she captures so vividly in stories such as “Binocular.” Those pots are “simple and humble and old and beautiful,” she said. “And everything [here] is like that.”
—Tiffany Johnstone
Have you always been a writer?
Always. I remember when I was four, knowing that that’s what I wanted to do.
How did you know?
Somehow I learned how to read when I was really young, maybe two or three, and I just remember sitting on the doorstep with books from the library and feeling like, “Oh I’m making these. That’s what I’m going to do.” There was just no question about it in my mind.
Did your family encourage you to write when you were younger?
That’s a good question. In a way they did. They didn’t discourage me. My family is from the industrial north of England and my father is very practical. For any artist, there’s always a struggle to sort of explain what you’re doing to the people who love you. I didn’t feel a struggle but I didn’t feel terrible amounts of encouragement either.
So it was books that you feel compelled you to become a writer?
Yeah, once I found out what was in story books that was my world right from the very beginning, and poetry too.
Who are some of your favourite authors and/or works of literature and why?
My favourite author is E.M. Forster. I love what he reveals about class structure, and I love his sense of beauty, and his humour. His writing is graceful to me. I could curl up in one of his sentences and drift into heaven. I love Leon Rooke’s work because it is emotionally so true it is searing, while seeming to be about the most absurd, outlandish scenarios. I love how you can never know which direction the writer is going to take. I love how the work makes me guffaw out loud, alone in my room. I think he is experimental and in control at the same time, and I have to hand it to him, on every occasion, for going on safari in brand new territory. So that is another reason why I was floored when he and John Metcalf chose my work for the Metcalf-Rooke Award. Leon Rooke was one of the first people to even read my manuscript. Imagine a favourite writer being the first person to read your work, and then giving it an award. I also like Ali Smith, Jeanette Winterson, Lisa Moore, Agnes Walsh, Mary Borsky, Katherine Mansfield, Miles Franklin, Penelope Lively, Joyce Carol Oates, Colette, Jean Rhys, Ray Bradbury, David Eggers, Neil Gaiman, Roald Dahl, VirginiaWoolf, Michael Winter, Shaun Prendergast, Anton Chekhov, Christine Pountney, Gabrielle Roy…
Tell me more about your reaction to winning the 2006 Metcalf-Rooke Award and what the award means to you.
I was astonished to win it. John Metcalf phoned me to tell me and I was speechless. I have been writing most of my life and am used to the solitude of writing, the occasional inclusion in a literary magazine for which I am grateful, the many rejection slips. But I had begun seriously looking at my work, respecting the rejections, sitting on work for a time and thinking, how can I make this better? How can I turn it into something someone wants to read? What is self-indulgent about it, and how can I cut that out? I began looking at the rejection slips as prompts to work harder, and I had renewed my wish to keep going. But I remember thinking, the day I sent three stories to John Metcalf, I hope he likes them. If he doesn’t like them I’ll know they’re not good enough. So when he asked to see the whole manuscript, and when he and Leon Rooke gave my work this award, it was a huge day for me. It was a day of celebration. Two writers whose work I respect so profoundly.
What has it been like working with John Metcalf?
John has been kind, so kind. He and Myrna, his wife. I look at them as a team. John has carefully read everything. He is a mentor. Any writer who has a chance to work with an editor of his stature, his kindness, his discernment, is blessed. I know how it is to go for years, working away, without a good editor. You can make a lot of mistakes, and get discouraged. He tells you the truth, as he sees it. His kindness has nothing to do with his critical eye. He is kind, as a person, and true to his own vision as an editor and critic. He has worked for many years on behalf of writers in whom he believes. He does it for them, or more accurately he does it for their work, and not for himself, and I think this is rare. He cares passionately about the work, and this is the first time anyone but me has cared about my work with such intensity. It’s as if, when he works with a writer, he values their work as much as they do themselves. So it becomes a joy to write more, to edit the work, and to look forward to the next piece. I have told John Metcalf that I look at his suggestions not just as ways to make these stories better, but as ways of approaching work I may start in the future. He has taught me things that I hope to remember.
What was the best advice that you received about being a writer?
Persistence, hang in there. One time at a reading of her own work, Joan Clark and I were having a little talk and she said, “You know, Kathleen, Carol Shields told me when my children were still at home, and I was going through that [sense of never having enough time and concentration], ‘You’ve just got to hang in there. You’ve just got to keep going’ and so I’m telling that to you.”
Do you make a habit of writing everyday, or do you wait for inspiration to strike?
I can’t wait for inspiration any more because of my family and the kids, but I do have to respect that some days I can’t write and some days I can.
Have your other writing pursuits such as journalism contributed to your short story writing?
I look at these short stories as a new thing. It’s an incredible opportunity to experiment for one thing and to get at material that I can’t get to in any other way. I’m excited about them as a new thing springing up, but the other writing that I’ve done has helped me with discipline.
Which of your own stories are amongst your favourites and why?
I like “Binocular” because of the power of the central images, and because, though there is unredeemable loss, there is some form of redemption. I also like “A True Conductor” because it says something about music that I didn’t think I would be able to say, and I like the characters, and I think it is true to life, and I think it might be one of my most gracefully written stories. I wrote it with a pen in Tim Horton’s one night after a particularly moving choir practice. I edited it a lot afterward, of course, but I like the strong feeling it still contains, without—I hope—being sentimental. I have worked, on my own and with literary magazine editors and with John Metcalf and Daniel Wells, on editing the stories—I love that part of the writing. I think my favourite stories are the ones I have let sit for a good period of time and then edited most carefully. Of course I could go over them all again and take out something else. I guess my favourites are always changing too.
Have you been working on BoYs for a long time?
Well I tried to write five novels and they were all really dismal failures, so I thought, well, there’s something that I need to learn about story and structure. Two years ago I decided to start focusing on short stories. I started writing the stories and sending them away and I was getting nothing but rejection slips, but then I started reading the rejection slips. I realized I had to become less self indulgent and more concerned about the story and where the story is going and would anybody care to read it.
I find that your stories are characterized by a lot of restraint. For instance in “Malcolm in Blue” a lot is left unsaid. Is that something you’ve worked on as a writer?
I do try to let readers picture certain things themselves, and that’s something that I learned. I try not to describe things too fully, but because I used real people as models, maybe part of it comes from that as well. I do know Malcolm in Blue, and there’s a lot that I don’t know. I really think when you’re writing from real models, every true detail that you do tell contains many others within that you’re not elaborating on. In order for him to have that periwinkle blue sweater, a whole lot of other things had to happen. One true detail carries a whole bunch of luggage with it and gives weight to the story. I’m terrible at making stuff up.
I’ve always liked the way that you weave together elements of fiction and nonfiction.
I experiment with that. Not a lot of the stories but maybe three or four of them are me thinking what would happen if this situation happened to these characters, so the characters are real but the situation is something I was imagining. I’ve done that maybe more times than I realize.
Is art the process of sifting through the details of life and picking the ones that ring true?
Maybe. For me, it has to fall on me. Something has to affect me. It can be a story I hear or the way a person does one thing, like eats a piece of toast.
Is character the most important thing to you when you sit down to write?
It’s definitely one of the most important things. And listening to people. I think I’m a person who listens to people, and therefore people tell me stories. I try not to exploit that.
It must be hard.
Well, sometimes you’ll just have a story come to you that you absolutely have to use, and then I try not to write in a hurtful way. I try to disguise things so that the person won’t feel recognizable. I think that is something that Michael [Winter] and Lisa Moore and other people here have talked about because [Newfoundland, St. John’s] is a small place.
Stories such as “Jolly Trolley,” “Where the Nightingales are Singing,” and “French Doors” have a distinctive Newfoundland setting. How much do you identify with Newfoundland in your work?
Well, I wrote them after I went to live in St. Michael’s for a while. I had never been to the Southern Shore, and I’ve always felt a lack of belonging because of moving [from England] when I was a kid, but when I went there, I met a lot of old people and people who were just so kind. I loved it there—I really loved the people—and maybe that’s what makes the stories the way they are.
How did moving from England to Newfoundland affect your writing? I think it has had a profound effect. I was eight when we moved to Marystown, so for a long time I didn’t count those first eight years as part of my material.
Can you discuss “You Can Keep One Thing,” which is drawn from those early years?
Well, I had written a few memories of my father, and I had written a little bit about living in Marystown, but the memories of my father were set in England. It was just a little three page fragment and the Marystown thing was another fragment. When John Metcalf asked me to show him everything that I could find, I tossed those in and then he said to me, “These are part of something else, and I want to see what they’re part of.”
Elsewhere, do you set out to write about Newfoundland?
No, I don’t really. I mostly write about something that I’ve experienced, so it just happens to be where I am. I never set out to write with an aim in mind.
How does nature fuel your work?
I really get a sense of land and the plants growing on it and the energy coming from it. I think that depending on where you are, what the land is saying is very powerful and eloquent and unique. I remember the first time I walked anywhere in Labrador, the land was saying all this stuff to me. I could almost see waves of energy coming off it, and then I went back to the place in England where I’m from and a little bit up in Scotland, and that land said something different to me as did the land on the Southern Shore and the Gaff Topsails. [Wherever I am,] the land really talks to me.
Why do you think there are so many talented writers coming out of the province now?
It is strange, isn’t it? You know, when I was writing these stories, John kept saying stuff about the stories set in Newfoundland. He told me that he thinks people who aren’t from here really like that material. I guess it’s a bit hard for me, being here, to understand that. I guess we take so many things for granted here that are so wonderful to people who haven’t been able to take them for granted, the whole gorgeous landscape and the ocean and the simplicity. People go on and on about how hard it is living in the suburbs of Toronto, and I guess it must be. I don’t know what they’re talking about (laughs).
Do you try to avoid the inevitable discussion of your work in relation to your brother’s?
I don’t mind it at all. I haven’t really talked about it before and I might be asked about it when the book comes out because he has a book coming out the same week. But Michael and I are close and we really get along well so I don’t mind that at all.
Can you bounce ideas off each other?
Yeah and it’s really funny when we talk to each other.We joke around a lot. When I was starting to send things out again and I was having absolutely no success, I would email him and say,“Why does nobody want my stories?” and he’d email encouraging things back. There were a couple of times when I sent him something and said, “What do you think?” But we don’t do that anymore because nobody knows what you should write, even your beloved brother. It’s more like just joking around together.
A lot of your stories made me laugh out loud in a way that surprised and challenged me. For instance, in “Town with Moses” a potential axe-murderer is seen carrying a tupperware container of rice krispie squares. That struck me as very funny.
(Laughs) It seems funny to me too when you put it that way. [The humour] is something that surprised me when it started to happen because I used to write very much out of sadness or a sense of injustice or lack, and then I think somewhere along the way, maybe with getting older, things began to strike me as funny. I don’t really know why. I know when Michael started to do readings, I would go and I’d listen to him. He’d say something funny and people would be cracking up, and he would be kind of surprised. I think we’re both a little bit like that. We’ll dotter along saying something and we don’t always know what’s going to seem funny to other people. Sometimes a thing can be desperate or sad or really hard, but when you write it, it turns into humour, and I’m ok with that. It’s really healing to have a good laugh, right?
I love the way you blend realistic elements with the surreal. Is that important to you?
I really love juxtaposing ordinary things with outlandish things, and I would like to do that more if people would give me any encouragement whatsoever (laughs) because that’s the way I think.
What is it about that juxtaposition that appeals to you?
I think it’s an urge to escape from the ordinary. Even though I love the ordinary, I want things to change into other things, and I think things do change into other things. Just walking downtown now, I mean, pigeons are vermin of the sky, yet they’re absolutely exquisite—those oil slick colours and the way they’ll arc their tail feathers. To me, ordinary things really aren’t, so I guess it’s a way of seeing. It’s only a pigeon but it’s also this enchanted creature. It’s really easy for me to go over the line, to where the enchanted creature starts talking to you and basketball nets start having something to say. Being able to do it in writing, I think, prevents me from being completely insane in life (laughs).
I found a current of hope throughout the stories.
I would really like it if people thought that because a lot of writing doesn’t have that. I think I do have to have at least the idea of redemption over somewhere in the corner, the possibility.
How important was that kind of redemption to you in “Binocular”?
I couldn’t have written that story if the ending hadn’t happened the way it did. But because it had that amazing ending where she got another child, even though it was still all very sad, I was able to write it.
What draws you to write about outsider figures?
I’m really fascinated by them because I identify with them. I’m very respectful of people who are schizophrenic or people who have nothing because my experience in life has been that sometimes these people have the most amazing things to say. And they have the kind of heart that I love in a person. I’ve also been in the kind of dangerous lives that they have. I haven’t been homeless, but I’ve been drifting. I’ve been very poor. I’ve been unemployed and penniless. I’ve been to food banks, and I’ve been so lonely or imaginatively distressed that I could probably have ended up in a mental institution even though I’ve always had the resources not to get completely off the rails. But I’m very sympathetic to marginal ways of looking at the world.
Does it have something to do with being an individual and resisting social norms?
Well, I think we do get sort of herded into a common view of what reality is. We’re all socialized, that happens to all of us, [but] somehow I escaped and was secretly thinking all kinds of off-the-wall things at all times. Maybe that happens to all artists because you’re trying to create something, so you can’t be part of any general way of thinking.You have to have independent thought. You have to have your own vision, but that’s always kind of treacherous. I’ve had my life saved lots of times when I’ve been on the edge. I’m very lucky.
To be pulled back or to be able to straddle the lines?
Both. To be able to live on the boundary without falling off and to have materially a roof over my head and enough to eat.
Does Mrs. Snellan in “Where the Nightingales are Singing” straddle those lines?
She was a person that other people in the community all had something to say about. It was “Keep away from her or watch out for her. She’s crazy.”But really she had her own very self-contained and adept way of living. She had everything she needed. She had her little stove and she had plenty to eat and she had her ally, the tinsmith, who would help her patch up her roof and these mysterious men who’d come and fix her stove. So she had a way of operating in the world. You didn’t need to feel sorry for her or worry about her survival, and she had this rogue quality to her. I love that about people and I guess I tend to find people like that in my life.
I like the way that you in particular deal with the inner lives of women, and the need for that inner life outside of roles such as wife, caretaker or mother. Do you feel that it is still harder for women to have a sense of self apart from those traditional roles?
I think we all have secret lives. Women know, better than some men, the landscape and territory of their secret lives. They know the furniture, and what is hidden under the floorboards and buried in the back garden. They have incredible wanderlust.They share this with each other. I don’t so much think women find it hard to have a sense of self, as I think they find it hard to make that secret life part of their tangible reality. I think a lot of women have that inner life going on so volubly within themselves that it is about to explode. Sometimes it does explode, and sometimes small pressure holes open, and there are smaller outlets for this pressurized inner story.Yes, a lot of my stories are about this. I feel it even now as I answer the question.
As a female artist, is it still hard for you to find the freedom to create?
I find it easier as I get older. As the daughters grow more independent. As the first husband dies and the second husband is more understanding. The second husband dug a writing room for me by hand with a shovel, and when I asked that the door be able to be locked from the inside, he did not question that—he put a lock on the inside, and I have the key. My eldest daughter used to say I was a bad mother for disappearing to write. Now she is going next year to Concordia to major in Women’s Studies!!! And she thanks me for all the times I insisted on doing the work that was my own, separate-from-family-life, creative work. She thanks me for considering my work important, and says it will help her to do the same.
Is it still harder to be taken seriously as a female artist?
I have decided to act as if that is not the case. I don’t intend to waste energy on the problem. Still, I recognize that the problem exists for women. I have only to ask my daughter, for instance, how many women writers she has studied in her high school curriculum. I have only to count the number of women writers in any anthology of so-called world literature.
Does motherhood inform your writing in any particular way?
It has to. Once I became a mother, the whole of life cracked open into a new thing. There was no more self-preservation. Well, there was self-preservation, but the preserved self was different from the old self. It was bigger, and had more holes and spaces. It was annihilated, really , and sort of rebuilt into a cobbled-together new thing. In some ways tragically ruined, and in others gloriously transformed (laughs).
How does the topic of marriage inform your work?
I write about marriage from inside and from my observations. I think marriage often creates insanity. You have people working around each other, hiding their truths, tenderly protecting the other from the self, just as tenderly protecting the self from the other, shutting off, turning on, trying again, wishing to be better, wishing to be worse. You have friends telling each other husbands’ and wives’ secrets whose betrayal would strike the betrayed dead if they knew. I don’t want to write about marriage because it is so dangerous, but it keeps coming up.
How do you manage to write about female desire in stories like“BoYs”and “Malcolm in Blue” without being sensationalist or saccharine?
I found it hard to write about in “BoYs,” the story, because it was teenage stuff, and when you are sixteen you don’t have the same vocabulary, or the same psychological knowledge, so it was hard for me to write it accurately. With Malcolm, the character with the desire was closer to my age, and had more self-awareness, and I did not have any problem writing that character’s real desires. Sometimes, like in the moose scene in “Rock Talking to Bone about Light,” I write from the territory of lust/sex/desire and later when I read it, I say, good grief, what are people going to think of me now? I guess I’m going to find out.
Can you tell me more about what Malcolm meant to you as a character?
What made me finally write about him was that his status changed. You decide who somebody is and in his case, he was a bit of a drifter and a person who fixed things up for people and hung around cafés and was beautiful when he was young, and then he changed and became more jeopardized and more marginal and more of a poor kind of person, but then he changed again. I wanted to look at how somebody can transform before your eyes over part of a lifetime.
A lot of your stories discuss the aging process, particularly in relation to women. Do you try to address certain assumptions about aging in your work?
It’s something that, at my age now, I’m very aware of. It’s almost like in a fairytale. Instead of transforming into a beautiful girl, when you’re becoming a middle-aged woman, you’re transforming into an invisible person. For me it’s a big shock. I do like dealing with it, and I have a lot of questions about it, so it might be something that I do consciously address. But it’s been there all along, even when I was young, because having lost my grandparents when I was a kid, I was always looking for people like my grandparents, and I always loved it when older people got to know me and shared their lives with me.
Does the invisibility of aging allow for some kind of freedom?
Yes, and I’m just finding out about that and questioning that. There is a feeling of losing one kind of power and gaining another.
Many of your characters find some kind of spiritual fulfillment in unexpected places. For instance, the narrator in“Binocular” discovers the power of the “small moving things of the world.” Can you discuss that line in relation to the story?
When I wrote that story, it was based on a true story that somebody told me. I thought I was going to go back later and find out all about the court case and have this big court scene. Meanwhile I just wrote the story and that ending. I just wrote it really fast and after time went by, that ending became more important to me because it encapsulated all the things about life that, when we’re busy striving, we overlook. We overlook the beauty of a pigeon or the wonderful way it feels to eat a really cold orange, all those little things, and it doesn’t matter what those details are.
Back to the idea of the extraordinary qualities in the everyday?
And the fact that that little girl survived on being able to see out of that window, that she had those rings around her eyes. That was a true detail that I was told.
That was all drawn from real life?
Yeah, I look at it as a gift when I find stories like that. People tell me these things, and I’m very grateful for them.
From the Award Judges, Leon Rooke and John Metcalf:
Kathleen Winter’s stories delighted us for various reasons. They have a clarity and lucidity of thought and language which is rare. They offer a portrait of small-town and rural Newfoundland life in a mixture of stories and sketches and in language electric.
We enjoyed the gritty detail in which all of the stories were grounded; we enjoyed her quirky eye; and we revelled in the humour which lights up even the grimmest of her stories. We are pleased to welcome a new and distinctive voice in Canadian writing.
Read more