Even so, over steak and mushrooms, the conversation turned to the inevitable: how much of my writing comes from my own family stories? It’s the question, asked in some form at almost every literary event, that makes fiction writers shift uncomfortably in their seats. I talk freely about how my mother was hit by lightning (an event that sparked The Cure for Death by Lightning), and how my husband, a beekeeper, underwent brain surgery (elements that inspired A Recipe for Bees). Now that A Rhinestone Button has been published, I talk about how my husband’s mystical experiences, brought on by a brain tumor, were the model for those my character Job has. Still, I wince when I’m asked about the origins of my fiction because I’m aware that readers sometimes make assumptions about me, or the people I love, based on my writing.

Most often the assumptions are amusing or merely ego-bruising. One of the Calgary book club members had assumed (before she met me, I hope) that I was much older, a woman of her own generation who had lived through the Second World War. She had thought this because of the details in The Cure for Death by Lightning, details particular to the era of WWII that I had gathered through interviews. That I’m older than I am is the most common assumption I hear from readers (I haven’t hit forty yet, thank you very much). But sometimes the assumptions are more troubling. On several occasions I’ve been approached by women who have suffered the kind of abuse my character Beth does in The Cure for Death by Lightning, and assumed I had as well. A hurtful assumption for my father, who is a loving and gentle man.

Novelists feed off the stories of others, and confusions of this kind must be taken as occupational hazards. Like all fiction writers, I do listen carefully to the stories told by those around me, alert for material I can use. But these stories are only the raw stuff from which a book is formed, and they are transformed in the process of shaping and reworking the novel. Writing fiction is very similar to nighttime dreaming. In the morning, as we struggle to make sense of a dream, we may pick out elements from the day before, things we thought about or saw. But the dream has evolved beyond these small bits of reality in strange and surprising ways. We wonder where the dream came from, and suspect (sheepishly, perhaps) the work of a divine hand. The dream seems to come from outside ourselves. So it is with writing. If I am surprised by the day’s writing, and wonder where it came from, then I know I’ve done my job.

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On her new novel
When I give a presentation on my latest novel, A Rhinestone Button, the first thing I do is introduce my husband Floyd and our baby Graham. I introduce Graham because I was pregnant with him as I wrote. My doctor joked that I had to finish the novel before I would go into labour, and he was right: my labour was finally induced and I finished the novel two weeks after Graham was born. I introduce Floyd because beside being a full-time dad and running my office, he was also my muse for A Rhinestone Button.

When Floyd was in his late teens and early twenties, he began having mystical experiences. As he was raised in a Baptist community in rural Alberta, he tried to make sense of these experiences within the context of his worldview.

By the time I met him, at the University of Victoria, he had lost his faith. Even so, shortly after we were married, Floyd came to me, trying to describe an experience as he was having it. It was a feeling of profound awe, a feeling that he understood . . . something. It went beyond the ‘eureka’ feeling, the great ah-ha! It was a true mystical experience that by its nature can’t be articulated. Within the belief system he grew up with, the experience was God. But now he didn’t believe in God, and neither of us knew what to make of these experiences.

Some time later Floyd had a seizure in our kitchen and was hospitalized and a brain tumor was found. He underwent surgery and then, as a couple, we both underwent many years of very difficult recovery. Floyd couldn’t have coped with a child over the years of his recuperation, so, for us, Graham’s birth is a celebration of the fact that Floyd has regained most of what he had lost.

A Rhinestone Button is not about Floyd’s brain surgery or his recovery. That, perhaps, is for another book. It is only about that core mystical experience and what it can mean to a person’s life, in this case my character Job Sunstrum’s life. But how to write about an experience that can’t be described with words? I chose to give my character a very visual and tactile experience, that of synesthesia (Job feels and sees sound) so the reader can feel something of that awe and mystery along with him.