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Q. Where did the inspiration for the novel come from?
A.
The book is rooted in a few different places for me. It began
as a textual response to the art of Joseph Cornell, an American
artist who was known for collage-like sculptural works, most of
which were assembled in glass-fronted boxes. When I first saw
Cornell's work, in 1991, it affected me in a visceral way that
no other artwork had ever done. Part of my reaction was simply
one of recognition, but the work also engaged me intellectually,
especially on the level of what it means to love objects, to keep
them obsessively, as we do, and to give them the task of bearing
memory. To me, there is nothing more moving than the mute talisman
brought forth out of childhood, or the thing that, given to you
by someone missing or dead, takes on the weight of life.
Martin
Sloane emerged, at first, out of encountering artworks that
seemed to express all of this without words. The first drafts
of the novel were attempts to create a collage of a fictional
life, and they failed mainly because there was nothing that held
the disparate elements of the story together at its centre. Plus,
coming from a background in poetry, I didn't yet know enough about
structuring a work as complicated as a novel, and these early
drafts tended to come apart any time something needed to be resolved.
So other inspirations entered into the process. It seemed to me
that the congress between things and people is in the knowledge
that human relationships are not as constant as the physical world
(although we often impose our expectations of the physical world
on spiritual matters), and I found a dramatic counterpoint for
the novel in the metaphor of disappearance. And so the character
of Martin Sloane became an absence in the novel, and the things
he left behind parsed the emotion of this loss for the main character.
This character, Jolene Iolas, came to the fore at this stage of
the writing and assumed the role of narrator as well, so most
of the novel is written in her voice. These are the concrete "inspirations"
for the novel. The rest of them, perhaps the more important ones,
are ones I can't really voice, except that they have to do with
the danger inherent in loving other people.
Q.
Was it difficult to create the character of Martin Sloane out
of this process of responding to Joseph Cornell's art?
A.
The character of Sloane is not based on Joseph Cornell's personality,
nor is the book any longer meant as a response to Cornell's artworks.
The character of Martin Sloane came out of a gradual process of
revision, partly as a result of understanding what it is Jolene
had lost, and also the process of writing scenes between the two
of them. One of the balances that had to be struck in this book
was between revealing Sloane's character in detail and accepting
that he isn't a presence in the book, at least not in the present-tense
part of the story. I hope that he's a strong enough presence that
the reader will hold him in her mind as she goes on with Jolene's
journey.
Q.
Does Martin Sloane see in the boxes he creates a means of capturing
moments in his life?
A.
The boxes don't so much capture moments in Sloane's life, as they
contain emotion and experience in surrogate; the surrogate being
the objects that Sloane has entrusted with carrying the feeling
that is the inspiration for each artwork. There is also the action
of transforming feeling into a private symbolism, so Sloane's
work is full of swans and boats, rivers and stars, personal letters
and photographs, all of which tie in talismanically to his experiences
and the way he's coded his inner life. It's in the way the objects
relate to private memory, and also to each other, that a version
of experience is rendered in the boxes.
Q.
You're a poet, a playwright and a novelist. Was the process of
writing a novel very different for you?
A. The main difference, for me, is simply one of time. A poem
may take years to write, but the actual amount of time spent,
draft to draft, is fairly compact. It's not unusual for me to
revise a poem thirty times, but it's rare to start over. This
is not the case with plays or novels, 've found so far. I wrote
eleven drafts of Martin Sloane, and I started from scratch
with the novel at least five times -- I may have blocked out others!
My play Building Jerusalem went through eleven drafts as
well, and countless half-drafts. So the mechanics of writing and
revision differ according to the complexity of the work, and the
amount of energy and time that goes into this revision differs
as well. The actual writing processes are different, but considerations
of tone, of voice, of rhythm, of pacing, and of language itself
are central to all writing, I believe, and in this sense all writing
makes similar demands on the writer, at the roots of his craft.
Interview
reprinted with permission. Copyright Random House Canada.
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