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1. What is the main message of the body of your work?
I'd like to be remembered for creating powerful female characters who have the mythic force to endure and represent new ways of being female in the world.
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2. Is The Biggest Modern Woman of the World based on a real person? Why didn’t you invent a giantess instead of doing something so biographical?
The novel is based on a Nova Scotian giantess named Anna Swan who was 7.6" and weighed 413 pounds. With the hoops skirt of her Victorian gown she could knock a man off his chair when she walked in the room. Even the actual biographical facts of her life are mythical. She was born into a family of Nova Scotia crofters. She had to sit on the floor at dinner so her head would be level with her siblings when she ate her meal of cold potatoes. She she exhibited with P.T. Barnum in the early 1860's during the American Civil War. It was in the days before Barnum ran circuses and Anna, like the other giants and midgets, entertained New Yorkers with their renditions of Shakespeare's classics and lectured the audience on the benefits of being physically different. She did marry the Kentucky giant; she did have two giant babies - both died. And she died at 44 worn down by gravity, in a farmhouse built by Martin Van Buren Bates who stood 7.2 in his stocking feet, four inches shorter than Anna. Why invent a giantess when I had someone like Anna to work with? At the time, I saw her as a real life giant and as a symbol of Canada - a female giantess looking for a way of putting her size to best use. Martin on the other hand in my story represents the American ethos. He was a male giant who thought he was big enough to tell everyone else what was good for them.
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3. Why did you divide the novel The Last of the Golden Girls into two completely different sections? What is the meaning of insect imagery in The Last of the Golden Girls?
The books is divided into two different time periods to represent the two different stages in young women's sexual awakening, which in this book happens in two adjacent but completely different cultural time periods, the 1950's and the 1960's. I grew up in the Canadian north that in the summer is populated by bugs and people and I saw a lot of similarity between us northerners rushing to enjoy the summer and the mayflies that mate and die so briefly all on a summer evening. Insects are all about instincts, and in the summer that's what people are about too. It's about freedom and possibility and during the summer we give into to some of our deepest and most instinctive longings. In other words, part one of the novel deals with female mayfly larvae, and in part two we get to see the mayflies break the surface of the lake.
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4. What is the reason for the apocalyptic ending in The Last of the Golden Girls?
The ending came to me in a creative trance. I didn't want to have all my characters go down to the bottom of Georgian Bay in a geodesic dome but I realized apocalyptic visions were the way our imaginations worked in the 60's. And besides my narrator had had a few too many morning glory seeds.
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5. Is your novel, The Wives of Bath, based on a true story, like The Biggest Modern Woman of the World?
The novel was triggered by an actual crime that happened in Toronto in 1978 when a 17 year old girl named Susan Wood lured an elderly taxi cab driver to her room, killed him with a baseball bat, cut off his genitals, and pasted them on herself with crazy glue to prove to her lover's father that she was a man. The characters in my novel are my inventions and have nothing to do with Susan Wood but I borrowed her crime as a device to explore young girls' feelings about being female. The Biggest Modern Woman of the World is loosely based on a real person and her real life, the giantess Anna Swan.
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6. Why did you choose to focus on such a terrible crime in The Wives of Bath?
The crime in The Wives of Bath isn't the focus of the novel - it's the dénouement. And for me, it's the basis of a gothic parable about penis envy. I wanted to debunk the notion that women want a literal penis. In my experience, the penis is only a symbol for other yearnings, like the desire to be respected in your own right.
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7. How do you feel about the film, Lost and Delirious that was based on The Wives of Bath?
I loved the film. It was like three women sat around a campfire, the novelist, the screenwriter, and the director, and they passed a story about female adolescence and rebellion on to one another, each one adding what they could to dramatize the tale. Making a good movie out of the book is the only obligation film has to literature. Film adaptations of novels are really translations, not literal reproductions.
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8. Why did you choose the title Stupid Boys Are Good to Relax With for your collection of stories about interim relationships?
I didn't plan it. These are the words of Mouse Bradford, one of my female characters. During a Caribbean holiday, Mouse endures the attentions of a slightly pompous American teenager, but she is more excited by the calypso singer at the hotel and getting her father's attention. Mouse has an optimistic nature so she says, "Maybe you never realized this before, but stupid boys are good to relax with. You don't need to do much except smile encouragingly as they try out their authoritative manner on you. Meanwhile, you get to think about the really interesting things that matter." As I wrote the title story, I realized that Mouse was right. Short-lived encounters can seem awkward or stupid, but often these experiences give us the crucial information we need to develop ourselves.
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9. Why did you divide the collection Stupid Boys Are Good to Relax With into two parts, traditional short stories and cyber tales?
I wanted to show the traditional approach to the short story vis a vis the stories people are telling each other on the Internet. I always see different ways of representing narrative and when I visited Gerard Richter's show at the MOMA in New York recently, I immediately identified with the way this German artist uses so many different styles of representation in his painting and photographs. I really don't understand the need to be wedded to one traditional literary style, whether its postcard fiction or 19th century literary realism.
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10. How will your new novel fit into the themes and concerns of your other books?
I think my new novel called What Casanova Told Me is a summing up of everything I've learned about how to move in the world as a woman and as a writer. My earlier work seems to often critique the way women have been perceived as cultural and social figures. In this novel, I'm drawing on my experience in order to pay homage to the need to celebrate human creativity and the way it's expressed in the various human faiths starting with Casanova's faith in human sexuality and love. It's important to create; but maybe at this point in our culture it's more important to develop ourselves to appreciate and enjoy our creations. And I really think Casanova's ten primary principals of travel give us some idea how to do this. Of course they are not really his principles, they're mine, and he exists in this piece of fiction as Susan's Casanova, although he has some resemblance to the legendary man of letters and lover of women, born 1725, died 1798.
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