I have written eight novels in fifteen years. They have been described as pleas for awareness, wake-up calls, probably because I find human evolution fascinating in all its glorious and ugly detail. We are the dominant species of our time but, as Logan, the eight-year old environmentalist in Blind Night suggests, “evolution has always ensured the ruination of the dominant species, but there will still be cockroaches.” Mankind’s situation is unprecedented because, unlike the dinosaurs, we are accelerating the process through short-term thinking. We want everything now and we’re paying for it.
Not long ago, a grade twelve student, writing an essay on two of my novels, spoke to me of symbols and hidden meanings in my books – symbols and hidden meanings that I didn’t know were there. It reminded me of the power of fiction, how it skips beyond the writer’s imagination and slips deeply into the reader’s.
I write to maintain my sanity, to feel less alone – extracting information, absorbing it, allowing it to ferment, then using it on the page and in so doing learning something about myself and the world. Here in the age of media bombardment, the stillness of writing – actually taking time to think about words and formulate sentences, to complete thought – can be a life saver. Some readers have asked me how I know what they’re thinking. My response is, “I’m thinking what you’re thinking.”
To write is to speak the unspeakable, to put our fears on paper, enabling us to look at them and see that that’s all they are, fears. To make people laugh. To record the tableaux of the human condition, now, as we live, I note. To see and record, for example, an old woman in worn Keds and overcoat, with a head scarf firmly knotted under her chin, bent over a shopping cart carrying forty-two tins of gourmet cat food and a large box of denture cleanser. To see and record this old woman inadvertently nudging her cart into the man in the angular glasses and North Face jacket in front of her; and the man trying to signal his irritation by making indignant noises and turning slightly towards her while clutching his selection of deli items, until finally he can tolerate the nudging no longer and almost shouts, “Stop pushing me with your cart!”
Why write these tableaux? Because they reflect our frustration, confusion and inability to communicate in the age of communication. I record them so that we can see ourselves and maybe learn and laugh, because our tendency is to avoid looking at the horror around us, even to run from it. I write them down so that a grade twelve student can find symbols and hidden meanings I didn’t know were there.
There is always redemption in my novels and it is to be found in human relationships. In a world overrun by technology, and advertising designed to make us hunger for material gain, the value of human touch can not be measured. It’s all we have.
Not long ago, a grade twelve student, writing an essay on two of my novels, spoke to me of symbols and hidden meanings in my books – symbols and hidden meanings that I didn’t know were there. It reminded me of the power of fiction, how it skips beyond the writer’s imagination and slips deeply into the reader’s.
I write to maintain my sanity, to feel less alone – extracting information, absorbing it, allowing it to ferment, then using it on the page and in so doing learning something about myself and the world. Here in the age of media bombardment, the stillness of writing – actually taking time to think about words and formulate sentences, to complete thought – can be a life saver. Some readers have asked me how I know what they’re thinking. My response is, “I’m thinking what you’re thinking.”
To write is to speak the unspeakable, to put our fears on paper, enabling us to look at them and see that that’s all they are, fears. To make people laugh. To record the tableaux of the human condition, now, as we live, I note. To see and record, for example, an old woman in worn Keds and overcoat, with a head scarf firmly knotted under her chin, bent over a shopping cart carrying forty-two tins of gourmet cat food and a large box of denture cleanser. To see and record this old woman inadvertently nudging her cart into the man in the angular glasses and North Face jacket in front of her; and the man trying to signal his irritation by making indignant noises and turning slightly towards her while clutching his selection of deli items, until finally he can tolerate the nudging no longer and almost shouts, “Stop pushing me with your cart!”
Why write these tableaux? Because they reflect our frustration, confusion and inability to communicate in the age of communication. I record them so that we can see ourselves and maybe learn and laugh, because our tendency is to avoid looking at the horror around us, even to run from it. I write them down so that a grade twelve student can find symbols and hidden meanings I didn’t know were there.
There is always redemption in my novels and it is to be found in human relationships. In a world overrun by technology, and advertising designed to make us hunger for material gain, the value of human touch can not be measured. It’s all we have.
