This Thursday I’m reading a new short story at the University of Alberta’s Modern Languages and Cultural Studies Graduate Students’ Conference here in Edmonton. Everyone’s welcome!
Tag Archives: fiction
An Interview With the AML
Earlier this year, Sistering was awarded Best Novel by the Association for Mormon Letters, an international community that’s been very kind and supportive of my work. They sent one of their best and brightest, Michael Austin, to do an email interview with me–the most Mormon and, interestingly, the least gender role fixated one I’ve ever done. The link to read it is here.
“Sistering” Reviewed in “Publishers Weekly”
This week, my second novel, Sistering, landed a good review in the American industry standard magazine Publishers Weekly. It’s not long but it does say things I can use in arguments with my loved ones like “Quist clearly knows family and sibling dynamics.” The best line is
This is a captivating story bound to resonate with readers who have sisters, and Quist’s sharp observations of human nature and sense for comedy will entertain a broader audience.
Arriving at the “Twilight” Party Years Too Late
The words have been said so often by so many millions of lads to so many millions of lasses, that they must be worn to tatters. But when you hear them for the first time, in some magic hour of your teens, they are as new and fresh and wondrous as if they had just drifted over the hedges of Eden. Madam, whoever you are, and however old you are, be honest, and admit that the first time you heard those words on the lips of some shy sweetheart, was the great moment of your life… L.M. Montgomery, 1924
While my husband was away from home this winter, fighting crime, I fought to keep my happiness from capsizing. Little sorties became important, like roaming alone through Wal-Mart during Valentines week. It was there, in a seasonal hearts-and-flowers display, that I found a three-in-one DVD collection, the trinity of twenty-first century young adult romances, the first three movies of the Twilight series, for $9.99.
I have a secret weakness for young adult romance (secret up until a moment ago, anyways). I spent my teen years reading Greek drama and the Victorians. My idea of escapist reading was L.M. Montgomery. My idea of desperation reading was my mother’s Stephen King collection. The Sweet Valley High novels on my sister’s side of the room neither interested nor tempted me.
My appreciation for YA romance is an adult-onset phenomenon but it’s genuine. When I paid $3.33 per flick to catch up on Twilight five years too late, I expected to be indulging in a guilty pleasure. Ironically or not, I wanted to like the series. I understood a lot of people didn’t like it. But haters’ gonna hate, right? And Stephenie Meyer and I have more in common than just our professions. Rock on, Sister Meyer. Thanks for the good time. That’s what I hoped to be saying.
But instead of cheering, I was groaning my way through Twilight.
“Nooo.”
“Whyyy?”
“Dooon’t.”
Carol and Mike from the Brady Bunch
There wasn’t a lot of dialogue in the movie version of the story. The film was mostly heavily filtered frames of pretty scenery, clunky CGI action shots, quiet staring, and slick soundtrack. When there was talking, the lines were often awkward and incongruous. For instance, big daddy vampire and his bride—the Cullen “parents”—were written and played like Mike and Carol Brady.
Sometimes, when I wondered why a character says something in a certain odd way, I’d find out it was because he was repeating a stand-out line from the original novels. What was more puzzling than these strange lines were the ones that weren’t nearly strange enough—the obvious lines a writer might jot down in a first draft but then refine into something more nuanced and artful as the story matured.
“Never go for the obvious kill,” a Twilight vampire warns a werewolf, “They’ll be expecting that.”
Never a truer word…
Forty minutes into the fourth movie (yes, I keep buying them) Twilight’s appeal started to *ahem* dawn on me. By that point in the movie, nothing has happened except exactly what we knew would happen. In all that time, the couple gets married. That’s it. The plot doesn’t advance a single step. It just delivers in hair-shoes-makeup detail what it’s been promising all along. It’s “fan-service.” Twilight gives its target audience, mostly teenaged girls, precisely what they want—the pretty boys, the comfy wardrobe, the smooching, the cool parents, the social one-up-manship— everything, right down to each word of dialogue. That’s the genius behind the series. The entire endeavor is fan-service.
As a jaded old lady and a writer in my own right of fiction approaching a Gothic love story, my first reaction to Twilight—the groaning—was about weariness with cliché, disappointment with the people behind the story and the audience in front of it for going for “the obvious kill.” As a demographic of writers and readers, we can do better.
Romantic piggy-back: looks like it can be pretty boring
But L.M. Montgomery’s advice (the quote at the beginning of this piece taken from Emily Climbs, her folksy, nineteenth century flavoured, Maritime-y take on the gothic teen romance) is worth considering. So sit down, Madam—or Sir—and remember high school dating. I remember it as a cringe-worthy mess marked by a few perfect moments—iconic moments that are a lot like everyone else’s perfect moments. Epic piggy-back rides, private musical recitals, handmade jewellery, working on a car together, catching someone staring from across the parking lot, secret knocking at the window, dancing in public with everyone gawking because it’s obviously a huge deal (or so we imagined) —those aren’t just personal moments. They’re ones we share with each other and with stories like Twilight. That’s what makes them clichés: their truth.
Twilight is criticized for the expectations it fosters in young girls about romantic love. I don’t know if there’s much anyone could do to prevent those expectations. The romantic words, the gestures within the story are fairly universal in contemporary Western adolescent relationship scripts—or, at least, in my old diaries. Maybe those expectations are just as inevitably widespread. Twilight didn’t strike a nerve with young women because it unearthed the vampire fad at just the right point in history. It resounded because it told our own stories back to us, without trying to dress up or disguise the worn out “tatters.” It didn’t so much create young women’s culture as it reflected and codified what was already there.
Here is where I could plough into the fact that movies like The Avengers and Transformers perform the same fanciful but clichéd reflective function for young men only they get away with it without the searing social commentary leveled at Twilight for no reason other than sexism. I could, but instead I’ll stick to girl-talk. I’ll continue with L.M. Montgomery and her description of what our sweet, tattered words look like to onlookers:
Everything had suddenly become ridiculous. Could anything be more ridiculous than to be caught here…That’s how other people would look at it. How could a thing be so beautiful one moment and so absurd the next?
This is what impresses me most about Twilight: its refusal to balk at its own ridiculousness, its headlong dive into the absurdity of everybody’s love story. I don’t know why she did it. I don’t know whether it was calculated or not. But I’m going to choose to believe Stephenie Meyer is a brave writer. She wrote what we all know, what so many people apparently wanted to hear repeated. And she did it with that “unflinching” spirit critics usually praise. It’s like a teenaged girl stood up and used her own fingers to flip off the entire literary world. There’s something fierce and kind of admirable in it—but nothing that can keep me from flinching my face off.
“Love Letters…” Live on Calgary Radio
Last winter, I traveled to Calgary to do a live radio interview at CJSW about my debut novel. My hosts were Paul Kennett and Emily Ursuliak, a writer deservedly known as one of the most generous and hardest working people in the Calgary literary scene.
Since it was live, I didn’t get to hear the interview anywhere but in my headphones and I was pleased this week when Emily sent me a link to a podcast of our talk.
Here I am talking about the Catholic Church, my bff, and commenting on technical elements of the book that I’d never had a chance to speak about in public until this smart interviewer raised them.
Announcing Book #2
Today I signed and mailed away the publishing agreement for my second novel. Once again, I’m working with Linda Leith Publishing in Montreal and the novel is a blackly comic literary treatment of family life. Our projected release date is Fall 2015. And I still can’t believe this is really my life.
Watch this space for more and more and more details to come.
Enough Envy for Everybody
Big stage for big literary celebrity
Maybe there comes a time in every writing career when quiet, solitary writer-person gets curious about the literary world’s version of hype — popular, public, celebrity hype.
It’s true for me, anyways. So before they were sold out, I bought a ticket to see a celebrity author passing through my city. He’s a Canadian now living in the United States who appeared before a crowd of 500 people a few blocks from my house.
The author and I are strangers. I haven’t read his books. I didn’t go to see him as a fan or as a friend. Maybe I was falling back into my social science habits – acting the clinical outsider, coolly observing the phenomenon of celebrity enacted literary-style. There’s something nobly aloof about telling it that way. It lifts my delicate, fretting artist’s heart out of the story.
I arrived at the theatre just as “please find your seats” was announced. Arriving late at a sold-out event means making a rough, rude spectacle, crawling over people to lone seats in the centres of rows. I hadn’t dressed up and I arrived smelling like the onion I’d diced making dinner. That was me — rude, sloppy, late-coming, envious spectacle.
Goodwill and admiration don’t negate envy. Envy, my dad taught me, is different from jealousy. Envy is simply wanting the same thing other people have. Jealousy is wanting to get it by taking it away from them. Jealousy is hating them for having it. Those were the semantics I was raised on.
I knew sitting in a crowd gawking at a celebrity author wouldn’t get all the people who read and talk about his books to read and talk about my book too. Still, reading seems to work on a positive feedback cycle (social science!). The more people read, the more they keep reading. Reading is always good for writers.We lose nothing in supporting our colleagues — even when we’re just a tiny, anonymous faces on the far side of the footlights. There’s something slightly less noble about telling it that way.
Onstage, he read from his latest work. It was masterful and when I applauded, I felt like I meant it more than anyone else in the theatre. Then he talked. He talked about choices he’d made in his career that I wish I’d known to make in mine. He talked about disadvantages I don’t have that make his work rich and stirring and advantages I don’t have that make his work rich and stirring. He has more sisters than me. That stung. He must’ve mentioned his sisters three times — just like I would have.
Near the end, a book club leader from the audience asked him what he’s been reading lately. This isn’t the kind of amazing story where he answers, “Love Letters of the Angels of Death by Jennifer Quist. Check it out.”
That’s not what he said. He answered he doesn’t read other writers’ fiction very often. Especially when talking to a book club member, it’s a claim that demands defending. The author explained, “You read it and it’s like, ‘ah, they’re so good, why do I even bother?’”
That’s what a celebrity author looks like, lit onstage with his delicate, fretting artist’s heart. He looks a lot like the rest of us – rough and envious, unsure. I hadn’t known when I left my house that night, but this was what I’d come hoping to see for myself. There might not be much that’s noble about telling it this way.
Carbon Copying Vulcan – Shreds of Reality in Fiction
The Roman God Vulcan, smashing stuff
If my youngest brother-in-law was a Roman god, he’d be Vulcan. Wait — let’s not let Star Trek confuse us. I’m not trying to say he’s cold and hyper-rational and his sleeves are too short. He’s like the original, Classical Vulcan — fiery and powerful and smart. Like Vulcan, he makes his living building things out of metal with torches and hammers. When he’s having fun, he still likes to yell and hit things. I adore him. And if I was a goddess, I’d be Juno, the shrill but scary wife of the boss-god Jupiter (Zeus, to all you Greek fans). I also like to yell and hit things. It’s a sign of enthusiasm and love. Both Vulcan and I understand that very well.
In the years and years I’ve known him, Vulcan has not been a voracious reader of contemporary Canadian literary fiction. It’d be out of character for him to rush out and buy my novel when it’s released this August. But I hope he will. In order to encourage him, I did what Juno would do: I got up in his face and bullied him about it.
“Hey, are you going to buy my book when it comes out?”
He paused. “Uh — how much money will you get from each one?”
It wasn’t the response I expected. “I don’t know,” I said. “About two dollars maybe?”
He reached into his pocket. He said, “How about I just give you two dollars right now?”
“What?”
The Roman goddess Juno
He was laughing at me.
“You have to read it!” I bawled at him. “You have to. Because…”
This is where my Juno started to lose her nerve. Even with my loved ones, I am a shy, apologetic promoter of my work. I tell my friends and family where to find it and then I leave them alone. There’s no follow-up – no awkward audit of their patronage of my art. My loud, bossy questioning of Vulcan was not about getting him to cough up a twoonie. It was about something much more delicate.
He was standing in front of me, towering over me, one hand still in his pocket. He was looking down with his big brown face, waiting for me to finish.
I began again. This was important – something between a warning and a gift and a confession. “There’s this character in the book – and – he might seem like he’s kind of like you.”
Vulcan’s eyes got a little bit bigger.
“But he’s not you,” I hurried. I explained there’s a scene in my novel where a woman meets her in-laws for the first time. That meeting is written a lot like the time I first met Vulcan, when I was twenty-one and he was not quite ten years old.
“They’re not us.” I said again. “They just look like us for a minute. The little boy grows up and does things you don’t do. He’s not you.”
“But someone might think he’s me.”
“Yeah.”
“Would he be in the book if you didn’t know me?”
Strictly speaking, it’s an impossible question. How can I say whether I could have imagined someone so much like my brother-in-law ex nihilo now that I already know him?
What I could say was this. “If I hadn’t lived the life I’ve lived, I wouldn’t have written the book the way I have.”
This was honest and fair to both of us. The fact is I could have this same conversation (hopefully without the offer to pre-emptively buy me off) with dozens of people. There are sparks and shreds and sometimes even long swaths of all sorts of real people in my work. It feels inevitable. Even if I switched genres and started writing hardcore science fiction, the spaceships and alien planets would still be full of traces of my friends, family, neighbours – everyone.
I’m certainly not the only writer who’ll admit this. In an excellent essay, novelist Corrina Chong reflects on “writing as thievery.” She says, “here’s the truth behind the fiction: as a writer, I am a thief…My writing is a collage of the bits and pieces I’ve stolen. Once your piece is glued on, it’s no longer yours. Finders keepers, I say.”
She sounds flippant but writing real life into fiction isn’t something done lightly. We agonize over it. We weigh the benefits of doing it against the risk. And we understand the people unwittingly serving as our literary models might not agree we’ve struck the balance right. Frankly, it’s scary.
Chong goes on to acknowledge that this theft is actually more like an exchange – a swap. She says, “the very act of writing a story and releasing it out into the world assumes that readers will be able to see something of themselves in the characters, thereby stealing their own little pieces as keepsakes…any idea that rings true in your universe becomes your own.”
Maybe that’s what makes it possible for my self-consciousness at my own thieving audacity to be outweighed by my sense that it’s important for my reluctant, metal smashing baby-brother-in-law to read my novel – the one with a scene rooted in our shared history. It’s not about the two dollars. It’s about us. Maybe that’s why I want all of the poor souls I’ve pilfered to read it. I want to complete the second half of the exchange. I want them to take something from me now – something bigger than my thanks for the inspiration. Take yourself back, I say, and with it, take a piece of me.
Jennifer Quist, PhD 