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?
Kathryn and Tony, that’s a marvelous interview!