Roundtable

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The Horror! The Horror!

Novelist Kathryn Kuitenbrouwer in conversation with Tony Burgess, novelist and scriptwriter

 

Kathryn Kuitenbrouwer: I first met you, though you do not know this, in a Book City in Toronto. I had been told by the ReLit people to size my finger for a ring in the event I won the prize and, gleefully, I had gone down to a jeweler in Bloor West to do this. Then, I went to look at all the books of the competition, as if I could still affect the outcome. I picked up Pontypool Changes Everything, your second novel, and I said to myself, “Shit, this guy is gonna win.” And I was right. I am glad I am no longer a jealous person. Dear Tony, tell me about your new YA mockery, Idaho Winter. Where does this strange hybrid originate?

Tony Burgess: Well, really it started with me wanting to write something my kids can read. It was taking the tradition, from, like, Little Dorrit on, of cruel childhoods – chewing that up with some high school drama teacher’s class performance of No Exit and a bad beta dupe of Night of the Hunter and some `rag and bone’ collections from under a kid’s bed and other hunks of stuff. The most important thing is making the writer the reader. That was the key. The writer had to have a similar memory of text as a reader. And sometimes not a very attentive reader. I did this part by putting the writing down for months and, in the longest stretch two years, and when I returned to it I would go forward and never back, never refresh, so that I had to go ahead with a text that was now a fog and try to resolve what I remembered and what I couldn’t.

The voice becomes a `now’ cliff. Terrific fun though. My favourite was forgetting the genders of two characters, who I had named androgynously. The amnesia, the headlessness had to happen; it couldn’t be imitated. 

There is no unreliable narrator – agents of conventional objectivity are reduced to moles in a Wacamole game – the real maker is the unreliable reader.

The tone, at least the tone that sets things in motion, is Reader’s Digest/Boy’s Own Adventure realism – that is, the type of realism that presumes itself to be everystory’s natural guarantor…never challenged, always good and careful with diction.

K.K.:  I’m not sure I’ve heard the reliability of the reader challenged but I like the thought – and it’s true. We are all fallible readers, filled with bias, perception, and memory fugues. Idaho Winter repositions the writer too, into a place of not so much unreliability (though in the strictest sense this too) but more a place of ignorance, and also incredulity. Your author laments at one point that he has flatly formed one character, who now is so limited, he’s almost useless – the fate of secondary and tertiary characters were they to come to life. This shamed me as a writer – no, it horrified me.

I liked the play of the writer who has created something out of the sludge of memory – for that is what we all do – and then had to actually contend with it. Do you think writing is so much grappling with memory and influences?

Also, have your children read the book yet?

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