“I did not actually make the commitment to writing until I met W.O. Mitchell.”
I was encouraged by several professors during my university years to “do something with this writing,” but I did not actually make the commitment until I met W.O. Mitchell at the University of Alberta in 1972. He encouraged me with the kind of enthusiasm that only W.O. could muster, and the timing must have been right, because I began to believe in the possibility of becoming a writer. I was twenty-nine when I began to venture into poetry and fiction. I had already practised and taught nursing for eight years and
had worked in five Canadian provinces and in three countries. I had one child and would have another when I was thirty. During those early writing years, the acts of child-rearing and writing became so entangled that they are now hopelessly enmeshed in my memory. It would be impossible to untangle the writing, the studying at night while I completed two arts degrees and the raising of two babies.
“I knew that the novel would encompass thematic contrasts of sound and silence, love and war, survival and loss.”
Deafening
represents an extraordinary amount of historical research and background reading, and yet there is a cohesiveness to the novel, and the characters move effortlessly through your narrative. Can you talk about what it is like as a writer to create such a story and how you were able to make the emotional lives of your characters shine through?
I confess that at the beginning I had no idea where I would take the story I was trying to create. I knew that the novel would encompass thematic contrasts of sound and silence, love and war, survival and loss. I knew that I would be writing about a deaf woman. But when I started to do research on the First World War, I had to trust my instincts that two separate and very disparate paths would somehow intersect. I began to imagine and visualize various scenarios of sound during possible war scenes while, at the same time, I was reading archival material at the former Ontario School for the Deaf and probing possible ideas about Grania’s world of silence.
Perhaps simultaneously, I was imagining
what kind of people Grania and Jim might be and what shape their love might take. As I began to piece their outer world together from my extensive research (including a visit to First World War battlefields on the Western Front), I was also permitting their inner selves to move around my imaginative landscape. I knew from the beginning that Mamo would be a strong and important influence on Grania’s life; also, that Grania would have a sister with whom she would have a close and complex relationship. I became interested in the way strengths and dependencies shift back and forth between sisters, as well as between other family members. I knew that Grania would have to have strengths of her own if she were to be interesting at all. And I wanted Jim to sing, to have an ability that would be outside Grania’s sensory realm.
“I gathered up…stories; I paid attention to detail, and I read and I read.”
Creation of character happens at so many levels that it would be impossible to be definite about how all of the musings, thoughts, dreams, ideas while I’m out walking, etc., come together to make up credible fictional people. Also, I sometimes use an overheard detail, or an observation from an interview or from my own memory, to shape the main trait or action of a character. Of course, I was dealing with an entire family and had to work out the multiple relationships within that intimate group. I also had to create and invent the characters of young men who were going off to the Front and who would soon experience the terrible horror that was the First World War. I listened closely when I interviewed veterans and experts in the field. I gathered up some of their stories; I paid attention to detail, and I read and I read.
“I would say that the biggest influence as far as craft goes is Chekhov.”
Because I create fiction in an entirely organic way, I allowed the material to begin to lead me. As it grew out of itself, I followed. It is the only way I can write. I never start a story or a book with an overall plan.
What writers do you read and is there any writer who has greatly influenced your work?
I would say that the biggest influence as far as craft goes is Chekhov—his attention to detail and his ability to use the suggestion of brush stroke to create an entire picture. For storytelling, it would be Heinrich Böll. For sheer beauty of prose and imagination, Virginia Woolf. I loved reading her letters and journals, and those many volumes helped me enormously during the first decade when I began to write. Also, the early stories of Audrey Thomas helped me to believe that I could write about my own world. Paulette Jiles has a wonderful and unique imagination. Her poetry stops me in my tracks every time I read it, because it always takes me by surprise. Lorna Crozier’s poetry is astonishingly concrete and moving. The poetry of Michael Ondaatje and Seamus Heaney carries me through times when I can’t read fiction while I am writing fiction. I love the stories of William Trevor. His novel
Fools of Fortune
is an engaging work of perfection.
I like to read fiction that allows the reader to move in emotionally—fiction that does not rob me, as a reader, of my right to enter the story and “feel” what the characters are feeling. I learned an important lesson
from W.O. Mitchell, which was to “exercise restraint.” He also stressed the importance of using concrete, sensory detail to tell my stories. I experimented, early in my writing career, with building story from that which is concrete so as to allow the reader to move to the abstract.
Writers I’ve read and re-read within the past two or three years whose work I like very much are: Kate Grenville, Helen Dunmore, the plays of Arthur Miller and Don Hannah, Richard B. Wright, Edward P. Jones, Michelle de Kretser, David Guterson, Charles Frazier, Gabriella Goliger, Robert Graves, Sharon Butala, Kaye Gibbons, Ian McEwan, Bonnie Burnard. There are more, of course, but these are writers whose work I’ve recently read.
“What I probably use most from family is a certain way of understanding language.”
In
Leaning, Leaning Over Water
and in
Deafening
, you admit to drawing on your family experience for imaginative inspiration. Why are you attracted to such experience as a basis for fiction?
I am blessed to be part of a large extended family—particularly the family of my late deaf grandmother. She had eleven hearing children—seven of whom are alive—and each of these had children and grandchildren. When there are more than a hundred people in your background as a small child, of course you are going to absorb the many facets of human experience that surround you. But I don’t write about my own family!
In actual fact, as a writer, what I probably use most from family is a certain way of understanding language. Language and
voice
. I use and value and know the voices
that are and have been around me all of my life, particularly the voices of my mother and my aunts and uncles. A certain way of using speech, the expressions of an area, the particularities of a wry kind of humour and a toughness and ability to laugh through sorrows and woes. All of my relatives on my mother’s side use language in an exaggerated way because of my late grandmother’s deafness. I grew up watching the people I love motioning and waving their hands, words spilling from their lips, fingers spelling through the air for my grandmother or hands tugging at her sleeves, feet stomping the floor or fists pounding a table to create vibrations—and I was surrounded by much laughter. All of these things made up what was normal for our family—our everyday language.
“All of my relatives on my mother’s side use language in an exaggerated way because of my late grandmother’s deafness.”
A note, here, about my next novel—working title
Celebration
—which will be about four mothers and daughters. Each is the mother or daughter of the next, and together they span four generations, their ages being from 25 to 103. Unlike my preparation for
Deafening
, I plan to do no research whatever except for checking occasional details of a period. I have already begun, and this novel is spilling out of my imagination—and I hope it will continue!
Readers of the novel have commented on your remarkable ability to create a believable emotional world for a young deaf girl at the turn of the century. What were the challenges for you as a writer in creating such a world?
The biggest challenge was voice. I did not know the inner voice of a young woman who had been deaf since early childhood. I knew from the beginning that if I was going to create a deaf character, I would have to get to know people who are deaf. In 1998, I contacted several associations in Ottawa and began to learn ASL (American Sign Language). I studied for several years and was welcomed into the community of the Ottawa Deaf Centre. When I felt comfortable enough to cope with the communication barriers, I began to conduct interviews. Many deaf persons were helpful and generous, obliging and candid; I could not have written the novel without their help. They answered intimate questions about childhood and offered detailed information about their inner lives—lives I could never have imagined. It was in this manner, and by compiling the sensory detail, that I was able to create my character and to work with the inner voice of Grania O’Neill.
“The discovery of the voices of children from almost one hundred years ago was moving and interesting and exhilarating.”
I also used actual writings from deaf children (1900-1919), which I found in bound newspapers from the archives of the former Ontario School for the Deaf in Belleville (now Sir James Whitney School). As I began to read these old papers, the children’s voices began to emerge without any help from me. The deaf children were, in fact, telling the stories of their time. I used these school newspaper excerpts exactly as I found them, to head most of the chapters of my novel. For me, this part of the research—the discovery of the voices of children from almost one hundred years ago—was moving and exhilarating.
My maternal grandmother (1898-1987) was profoundly deaf from the age of about eighteen months as a result of scarlet fever. Born in Deseronto, Ontario, as a young child she was sent, for seven years, to live at a residential school that had been built in Belleville in 1870. At the time she entered the school it was called the Ontario Institution for the Deaf and Dumb. In 1913, it was renamed the Ontario School for the Deaf. It is now known as Sir James Whitney School. Belleville is the small city where my parents, my late sister, my four brothers and I were born. My grandmother married my hearing grandfather, and they had eleven hearing children, of whom my mother is eldest.
“I was driving with my husband along old Highway 2 in Belleville, and as we approached the school my grandmother had attended, I suddenly veered…onto the property.”
The beginnings of
Deafening
seem accidental enough. In 1996, I was driving with my husband along old Highway 2 in Belleville, and as we approached the school my grandmother had attended, I suddenly veered through the gates and onto the property. Unannounced, I found my way to the main building, and there I was offered a tour. When I was taken to the various buildings, including the girls’ dormitory where my grandmother had lived, I was very much aware of tracking her footsteps through the residence, probably walking in and out of her very room. During that visit, a document confirming my grandmother’s admission to the school was found in a ledger next to the main office, and I was given a photocopy. Even though I was finishing another book
at the time, I knew that I was hooked. As it turned out, I had entered the school and found the document on my late grandmother’s birthday. I wept.
Deafening
was never intended to be a book about my grandmother’s life. Indeed, from the day the school document was turned over to me, I began to create a fictional world with the school as part of its setting. My grandmother never spoke about her years at residential school, and I had no knowledge of her experiences there. I did, however, become interested in the way the voices of the children began to emerge through school newspapers of the period, preserved and bound in the school archives. As I read, I realized, with rather a sinking heart, that if I were to tell a story set during the period 1900-1920 it would not be possible to ignore the First World War. Virtually every aspect of the children’s lives was affected by that war.
“As it turned out, I had…found the document on my late grandmother’s birthday. I wept.”
I returned to the school many times during the next several years, travelling between Ottawa and Belleville by car. In the meantime, I finished writing
Leaning
, and then I dived headlong into full-time research for what would become the background for
Deafening
. Some of the research I did in preparation for the writing of the book included learning American Sign Language (ASL). When I was able to communicate in a rudimentary way, I began to conduct interviews. I had also begun to read the broader history and the literature associated with the deaf community.
In a parallel way, I started to research the First World War. It was easy to see that I could be overwhelmed by material, but I read
histories, memoirs, letters, journals, telegrams, etc. I attended lectures and spent one summer at Vimy House in the Archives of the Canadian War Museum. I pored through photographs, interviewed veterans at the local veterans’ hospital, inspected surgical field kits and medical paraphernalia and tried to kick open a very stiff stretcher used in the First World War. Because I have a medical background, I decided to approach the war sections of the book from the point of view of a stretcher bearer serving with a field ambulance unit. I felt that I needed to see the terrain of the Western Front, so I consulted a First World War expert in Ottawa and then travelled to France and Belgium with a friend to visit battlefields, museums and military cemeteries. When I returned home, I learned that word was getting out: people began to approach me to tell me where I could find one more journal, one more photograph album, a rare book or pamphlet. I received phone calls from descendants of war casualties, everyone wanting to tell me the stories of their grandfathers or fathers or uncles.