An Interview with Kathy Page about Writing on Prisons and Transgender Issues

One of the aspects of our Fall 2014 list we're most excited about here is our relaunched Biblioasis Reprint Series.  (For which we have not yet settled on a name: if you have any suggestions please let us know!)  Designed in a uniform fashion by Gord Robertson, the first installment includes titles by Kathy Page, Clark Blaise, Ray Smith, John Metcalf, Ray Robertson and Terry Griggs; Spring 2015 will include work by Caroline Adderson, Hugh Hood, Norman Levine and others.  The series means a lot to us at the Biblioamanse: it's a way to pay homage to the past ten years and those writers who originally inspired us to start on this strange and wonderful journey, while helping to ensure that their books -- many of which we believe rank as among the most important published in this country -- survive and remain, to borrow a line from a certain provincial license plate, yours to discover.

That is really, in the end, what this series is about: Discovery.  And not just for you, gentle reader, but for us as well, which is what I wanted to write about today.  One of the most important discoveries I've made over the last two years is the work of Kathy Page: we've signed four books with Kathy, including three collections of short stories -- the first of which, Paradise and Elsewhere, a wonderfully compelling selection of Carter-esque fictions, we released this past Spring -- and one of her earlier out-of-print novels, Alphabet.  Alphabet is without a doubt one of the best books we've been part of here at the press, a taut, compellingly fierce psychological thriller which explores how much a person can really change.  Though part of the reprint series, it is also being released under a separate cover and ISBN as a original first edition trade back original in the US, where it is already generating a wonderful amount of buzz (there will be more on that in future posts) and looks set to be one of our lead titles of the season.

We sat down with Kathy to talk about Alphabet, resulting in an interview which ran in its entirety last month in Publishing Perspectives, and which we reprint below in its entirety.

You once commented that it felt like you “spent the three years it took to complete Alphabet co-habiting with a dangerous man,” and over the course of the novel it becomes clear that you have both extraordinary sympathy and affection for him, as well as a (perhaps personal?) understanding of why the other characters in his life keep him at arm’s length. Were you ever tempted to walk away?

Simon’s ability to set alarm bells ringing and evoke profound sympathy at the same time – that combination of vulnerability, charm and dangerousness – is where the book began. It was the thread I followed all through the story, and the experience of ambivalence, of attraction and wariness or even revulsion, is what I hope to create for the reader. The book arose from a year I spent as Writer in Residence in a men’s penitentiary in the UK. The men I worked with were serious, violent offenders, and many of them were themselves the victims of child abuse, neglect and so on. One young man serving a life sentence told me that the that the penitentiary was actually the best place he had ever lived in. Since I was in a supportive role, providing an activity that helped the time to pass, those I worked with were often appreciative of my efforts with them. I could feel very sympathetic. But I had access to the records, too, and I chose to look at them (many of my colleagues in the education department preferred not to), so I could also be utterly horrified by the actions of that very same person I felt so sorry for. So it was not a matter of either or, but of both. I knew that already, in an intellectual way, but in the penitentiary, and in writing Alphabet, it was a matter of experiencing it, and in his case, of wanting him to come through, but knowing he might not. Now to answer your question simply, yes. I began the book not too long after my experience in the penitentiary, and I wrote the early material in the first person. This made me inhabit in a very intense way the more dangerous side of the character; it or he was too much for me, and that was one of the reasons I put the book aside. When I returned to it later I used a close third person which gives me and the reader a little more distance.

One of the key conflicts in Alphabet derives from Simon’s longing to connect with someone, and the ways in which that longing is misunderstood, mistrusted, deemed inappropriate, or outright rejected by the people in his life. To what degree is this conflict a universal one? What makes Simon’s case unique?

Well, the drive to connect does seem pretty much universal. But as the reader gradually learns, Simon has committed a horrific crime and it is quite possible that he could do the same again. He may have been unfairly rejected, but he’s also very manipulative. He may want to connect, yet he has much to learn. One section of the novel takes place in a therapeutic prison for sex offenders where the authorities blunderingly attempt to fix him.

It’s only been recently that the needs of trans persons, trans children, and particularly transgendered inmates have received attention—some good, some bad—within policy and health care debates. Some of this is attributable to the popularity of trans actor Laverne Cox in Orange is the New Black, and some from the controversy when, in January of 2014, a Massachusetts federal court of appeal mandated the reassignment surgery of convicted murderer Michelle Kosilek. Could you comment on the character of Charlotte (formerly Vic)? Where did she come from? Why was it important for the person who helps Simon through his intimacy issues to be transgendered?

I didn’t know, when I began the book, how it would end, though I sensed it would not be a walk in the sunset with everything tidily resolved. At one point I thought he would end up working in a laundromat. Charlotte came along when I was more than halfway through writing the third person version of the book. I came upon a newspaper report about someone in transition who was marooned in the hospital in a men’s penitentiary “for his own protection” while fighting a legal battle to be incarcerated with women. It seemed such an extraordinary thing, and a situation that demanded extreme courage and openness. I don’t want to romanticize trans people, but in my imagination at least there can seem to be an almost mythical quality to those who, with tremendous effort, cross gender boundaries and move from one life to another. Change, whether it’s possible at all, and if so, how much we can transform ourselves, has always fascinated me. So I was very curious as to what would happen when Simon woke up in his hospital bed with Victor in the process of becoming Charlotte in the bed opposite. It’s one of those encounters that comes at the right moment. Simon has struggled and suffered considerably by the time the two meet; he feels a connection with Charlotte because of what she is going through. She is open-minded, brutally honest and kind, at the same time, very fierce: that’s key. She would never be afraid of him. I felt and thought about it mostly in terms of character as I wrote, but in retrospect, I can see that perhaps what Charlotte does is allow him to reinvent his relationship with the “opposite” sex. Since it is not longer exactly or simply opposite, and it can be seen as a made thing, there is freedom for them to begin again, and make it their own.

The concept of change and transformation is important to this novel, yet often it seems as if both Simon and Charlotte, rather than changing in an essential way, instead alter the learned behaviors and/or physical traits that previously have inhibited their self-realization. How deep do their changes go? By the end ofAlphabet, do you see Simon and Charlotte as new people, or rather as people more free to be themselves? And if the latter, how does that complicate the way we think about prison, rehabilitation, and therapy?

This is a very interesting set of questions. I see both characters, but especially Simon, as just beginning to become what they might be. Nothing is certain. He might still regress or lapse; he could continue inching forwards and become an ordinary decent person who will always struggle with a terrible past, or even someone who does something extraordinary, a hero of some kind. In the end, I’m somewhat optimistic about him because the one quality that seems fundamental him is his desire to connect. I intend to write about him (and Charlotte) again. I was struck, when I worked in the penitentiary, by the sheer scale of the stated task: to take dangerous offenders in at one end of the system, and have them emerge decades later not worse, but better, and ready for reintegration into society. In practical terms this means dealing with traumatic childhood experiences, gaining an education of sorts, at the same time as unpicking and unlearning whole ways of being and thinking, and learning how to have relationships—all of this in an environment that’s both physically and psychically very challenging, actively hostile, even, to the kind of openness and trust required. So living up to the mission statement is very, very difficult. I wondered whether it was even possible and what it would be like to go through so much change. I wrote the book to imaginatively explore those questions. During my time “inside” I decided to give up smoking, something I had been meaning to do for a long time. I found it very difficult indeed. So I have great respect for those in prison systems, staff and inmates, who do try to bring about positive change.

You’ve spent time in a high-security men’s penitentiary, and spent considerable time thinking about Simon’s experience of incarceration. What does prison reveal about people that other settings and conditions may not? Do you think the way we think about incarceration has changed much since the late eighties, and if so, how?

What do we do with those who hurt us and why? The answers depend on where you live: Turkey or Sweden, for example. Even within the UK or USA institutions and regimes vary a great deal. Even in its milder forms, however, incarceration is something that will test a person’s resources to the utmost. In that sense it makes great drama. An inmate has to fight for survival and will discover how able (or not) she or he is to make something of what little is there. The senses are starved, relationships are limited and involuntary, it’s brutal, dangerous, depressing and tedious. Incarceration, while it keeps the offender off the street, tends also to be very destructive. For some, like Simon, it may sometimes also present an opportunity in terms of new learning. Simon is illiterate when he enters the system, and learning to read does open many doors for him: though again, given who he is, that’s a double-edged sword. On the whole people think very little about incarceration: it’s a matter of out of sight, out of mind. But when populations rise, or when there are clear inequalities in the way people end up behind bars, the issues and choices become harder to ignore. Given the enormous costs, human and economic, of locking people up, it’s clearly important to consider what we are trying to do with it, and how successful it is.

In a piece for Storyville you comment that, when you wrote a story called “The Kissing Disease” (Paradise & Elsewhere, 2014), you were thinking of HIV/AIDS. “That pandemic surfaced during my twenties,” you commented. “Everyone lost someone. There was a before, and an ongoing after. It was terrible time, but there were eventually some positive consequences: increased honesty and more open public discourse about sex, for example.” How does the AIDS crisis of the 80s figure in Alphabet? What is it about that period you find so compelling?

Well this was a time of great struggle, ideological, political and religious too; the way we responded emotionally and in terms of public health to HIV AIDS was caught up in all that. In the UK, Thatcherism was in the ascendant. In many ways it felt like the end of civilization as we had known it. There were riots on the streets and in the prisons, too. At a time when we needed to act together, we were being told there was “no such thing as society,” but fortunately the department of Health and Social Security in the UK did not take up the mantra and the Don’t Die of Ignorance campaign with TV ads and posters reached pretty much everyone, including inmates in penitentiaries. AIDS is a huge issue behind bars, though it’s not a major theme of Alphabet; you get a sense of it as part of the eighties though, through the bits of news, posters and so on that make their way “inside.”

2014 will mark the first American publication of a prison novel that appeared in Canada and the UK in 2004, was written between 2001-2004, and draws on direct experience from the time you spent with inmates ten years prior to that. Do you think readers are more willing to approach this story in 2014 than they would have been in twenty years ago? If you were to approach Simon Austen’s story today, how do you think it would be different?

I think that people are more open thinking about the issues and questions at the heart of Alphabet than they used to be. On the other hand, I don’t think Simon’s story would be much different now, though Charlotte’s would be.

If you could choose one thing for your reader to take away fromAlphabet, what would it be?

A rich sense of complexity and possibility. One of the things that drove me wild when I worked with inmates was the way they used phrase “end of story.” It would be used to suggest what was to follow and its inevitability: a man caught his wife in bed with someone else, and so, “end of story,” beat her to a pulp. Or he opened the door to the arresting officer, fought, was overpowered and ended up inside, where nothing more would happen until he was released. I hated the phrase because it seemed to me that a) something else could have happened, and b) the story was never over. Even inside the penitentiary, a new story could begin, which is what Alphabet is about.

The Carnival Barker Speaks... ( A Canada Reads Post)

[cue Tom Waits' Black Rider]

Ladies & Gentlemen.... Canada Reads 2011 Brings to the Big Top tonight, not only human oddities (& what better description can there be for most authors and publishers?) but the 40 essential Canadian novels to be voted on by YOU, to be whittled down to the 10 essential Canadian novels to be voted on by YOU, to be further whittled down to the 5 essential Canadian novels to be selected and defended by... someone else. Or, at least, so we assume. No one knows for sure what the Canada Reads folk have in mind for this. If you want predictions, you're in the wrong tent. Go see the woman with the feather in her cap and the mirrors under her table.

There's been a lot of discussion about this new approach to Canada Reads, both for & against (mainly against). It's left me a bit ambivalent. I agree with much of the criticisms Beattie & co. have made of the process, and though those who have countered by saying it's just marketing or a populist response to a populist program make valid points, it doesn't mean that there isn't something at least slightly distasteful about it. It's led to a bit of a sense of inertia here: though I have posted a Canada Reads memo here late last week (Canada Reads Needs More Rock & Roll [which it most certainly does]), and done the FaceBook thing, and *Tweeted*, and arranged a few newspaper stories and a radio interview regionally to get the word out, I haven't been able to beg my mailing lists on our behalf. I will, selectively, likely later today, but felt I needed to make a case for this book, here, first.

But how to do so? Readers of Thirsty have other commitments, even public ones. There's no reason they shouldn't vote for Sean Dixon, a very worthy candidate. To ask them to vote for a book that they haven't read, or read and did not love, merely because we published it, seems ... unreasonable. Erin Balser tweeted that more than 6000 people have voted for the final 10 books: if any of the handful of small press books make the cut, it's likely that they have been carried by people who haven't even read them, who are voting for it out of some sense of team spirit or for other reasons entirely their own. And there's nothing wrong with that either. But there is something queasy-making about it. Getting repeated Facebook messages to vote for one book or the other when, as a publisher, I have a book on the list, seems callous, and makes me feel as if the writers and publishers sending these messages either don't know who their audiences are, or don't care. It is, in the end, all about them. I can't ask Kerry Clare to vote for Moody Food because she's already made it clear she's voting for The Girl Who Saw Everything. Or Bronwyn Keinapple, as she's already said she didn't like it. Or others, who represent other presses, or may have books of their own in contention. Or who have friends with books of their own in contention. Or ...

There is a difference between marketing and popularity contests: mainly one of knowing your audience. Whatever else I might say about all of this, I have no doubt that Canada Reads knows theirs, and whatever they do to reach out to it can't be an entirely bad thing. We may wish the audience was different, but that is not the same thing at all.

Yet, had Canada Reads not opened it up to the public in the way that they have, a Biblioasis book wouldn't even be a contender. The token small press inclusion would be a Coach House or Cormorant, which isn't meant to disparage either press, because they are both exceptional: it's merely to acknowledge that we do not often look beyond our own noses, and one can see it time and time again when Toronto tastemakers decide to get charitable. So, despite the discomfort I feel about all of this, I owe a debt of gratitude to the Canada Reads crew in this instance: without this, we wouldn't even be on the list. We've been able to generate considerable regional media for it, and sold at least a handful of copies we would not, likely have otherwise done. By opening things up, there's at least a slight chance that Moody Food, a book we believed in enough to bring back in print last year, might find a real audience for the first time in its history. And, for me, that is the most exciting thing about Canada Reads, when it works well. And who can complain, really, about that?

We published Moody Food last year as part of our Renditions reprint series. When we started this series 5 years ago, we dreamt of doing two, then four, then six or more titles a year. It was part of our commitment to bring back books that we believed deserved to find their audience. In that sense, the Renditions series and Canada Reads, at their best, share a common goal. Moody Food was the sixth title in the series. It is also the last. We've been forced, by necessity, to shelve the series for a while, simply because we couldn't sustain the losses. It's no less costly to produce a reprint, and in several instances we have done so without even the benefit of funding. To publish a great book and see it sell 20, 40, 100 copies, is heartbreaking. No one will review a reprint. And in our focus on the new, new, new, no one cares about what was published a decade ago, or four decades ago. The only chance a book like this has, or a series like our Biblioasis Renditions has, is if we see course adoptions, the writer in question wins a major prize, refocusing interest on backlist, or we get lucky and get the book on CanadaReads. So, for now, Moody Food needs to represent the series, the idea of the series, from Ray Smith's Century -- a book we need to get on Canada Reads some day -- to Terry Griggs's Quickening. And all of the others we would like to do, a list of books and authors longer than my arm.

So why vote for Ray Robertson's Moody Food? First, hopefully, because it's an excellent book by an excellent writer, voted among the Top 10 Rock & Roll novels of all time. It's fun and sexy and witty and moving and thoughtful and -- in the best of all possible ways -- moral. But it also isn't for everyone, which is fine too. You need to know your audience. But it's a book, like others on the list of forty, which deserves a chance at a wider readership, a readership which, at this moment and time, for this particular book, only CanadaReads can provide.

But if this isn't enough for you, perhaps you might also vote for it because it does represent something, as part of the Renditions series, larger than itself. The idea that we need to keep these key books around so that eventually they will find their audience, so that they won't get lost in the weight of what is new, new, new. Every author and aspiring author and perhaps even every reader knows something about that, or at least the fear of getting lost in the mass and mist. A vote for Moody Food, frankly, will help us keep the series going, which will ensure that other Moody Foods and Centurys and Quickenings have their chance to find their audience as well. And that, my dear Thirsty Readers, is no small thing.

Carnival Barkers, of course, know their audience very well. They are the impresarios of the boardwalk. They know both what their customers want, and what they can provide, and do their best, even if only with occasional smoke and mirrors, to find the spot where the two meet. And, I suppose, in the end, there's no shame at all in that.

So: if you can do so, please vote for Ray Robertson's Moody Food. You have until Sunday.

http://www.cbc.ca/books/canadareads/2010/10/the-verdict-is-in-the-top-40-revealed-and-your-chance-to-choose-the-canada-reads-top-10.html

Thank you.

Canada Reads Needs More Rock and Roll

Ray Robertson's Moody Food (Biblioasis Renditions), his great novel of sex, drugs and rock & roll, has made the Canada Reads list of 40 essential Canadian novels of the last decade. We all know Canada Reads could use more rock & roll. But Moody Food won't get any further without your help. Please consider voting for Ray's Moody Food over at CBC's Canada Reads site, to help us ensure it makes the Canada Reads Top 10. You can vote for it -- or (sigh) another of your favourite non-Biblioasis books -- by following the link: http://www.cbc.ca/books/canadareads/

But, really: Moody Food, people.

Ray Smith's Cape Breton is the Thought Control Centre of Canada

Over at That Shakespearean Rag, Steven W. Beattie continues his 31 Days of Short Stories with a thoughtful and spirited exploration of the title story of Ray Smith's first book -- and our first Renditions title (& the reason why I thought of starting the Renditions series in the first place) -- Cape Breton is the Thought Control Centre of Canada.

The title story of Ray Smith’s 1969 collection is a postmodern collage that neatly puts the boots to the kind of earnest Canadian nationalism running rampant in this country at the time. Subtitled “A Centennial Project,” the story traverses the nation from Cape Breton to British Columbia, with detours to Poland along the way, in the process touching on subjects as diverse as American hegemony, Expo ‘67, and the literary technique of The Bible. Clearly, Smith’s story is not a typical piece of Canadian naturalism.

Commenting on the story in his introduction to the Biblioasis Renditions edition of the book, Smith says, “Large political enthusiasms (and there were lots about in the late sixties) seem to me to suffer loss of clarity, complexity, subtlety. ‘Cape Breton …’ was my attempt to retrieve and fix some nuances in a valid balance.” Readers unsympathetic to what Smith calls “soi-disant originality” may find little apparent balance in his story, which appears on its surface to be a series of unconnected, technically discrete scenes. But “Cape Breton …” evinces a deep structure, not on the level of plot (there is no plot to speak of) but on a thematic level. The balance in Smith’s story results from the involutions of his sustained examination of power dynamics on several fronts: personal, national, and international.

For the rest of Beattie's post please go here.