- Lynn Coady is among the featured writers at the Vancouver International Writers Festival, Oct. 18-23. Coady is set to appear Oct. 21, 22 and 23. Tickets and info: www. writersfest.bc.ca.
LYNN Coady laughs when she explains she found out she'd been shortlisted for the 2011 Scotiabank Giller Prize via Twitter.
"I managed to put it out of my mind right up until the night before," says Coady, reached Wednesday from Edmonton, Alta., her home base. "And then the night before, I'm like 'Well, sleep's not going to come easy.' And it didn't.
You try not to care about these things but then you start thinking about what a big difference it would make to your book sales and career in general and, you know, just generally how much of an honour it would be."
Treating the social networking site as a sort of modern day radio, and opting to "tune in" to events as they're happening, Coady, 41, logged in and realized a few of the people in her feed were actually in the room where the Giller announcement was being made in Toronto, Oct. 4.
Writers shortlisted for this year's prize include: Coady, for The Antagonist, released last month by Anansi, her first Giller nomination; David Bezmozgis (The Free World); Patrick deWitt (The Sisters Brothers); Esi Edugyan (Half-Blood Blues); Zsuzsi Gartner (Better Living Through Plastic Explosives); and, Michael Ondaatje (The Cat's Table). The winner will be announced Nov. 8.
Coady quickly joined the tweet fest, adding "Mother of pearl!" followed shortly by "Husb: "Oh God, it'll be like living with Kanye."
"I think he was kidding. Have I been like Kanye? I'd like to think not. Every once in a while I like to refer to myself in the third person. You know, who doesn't?" she says.
Coady's sense of humour plays an important role in her fiction; her stories, while at times tragic in nature, feature characters tending to "wisecrack their way through their pain." It also plays an important role in her Globe and Mail column, Group Therapy, whereby a relationship question is posed, readers weigh in and the ever-optimistic and compassionate Coady gets the last word.
The Antagonist, Coady's fifth book, tells the story of Gordon Rankin. 'Rank,' a hulk of a man, is called upon as an enforcer in a variety of capacities over the course of his life - chasing punks out of his father's ice cream shop, on the ice as a hockey player and a bouncer in a dive bar. As an adult, Rank discovers Adam, a trusted confidant from 20 years ago, has made use of his story, incorporating it into a novel. Rank decides to set the record straight and fires off email after email to his old friend, endeavouring to tell his own story, which proves much harder than he originally thought.
The Antagonist came together in two ways following the publication of Coady's previous novel, 2006's Mean Boy. One character, Charles Slaughter (a sideline character just as Rank is in Adam's novel) kept trying to take over the book. Coady found herself compulsively focusing on Slaughter, yet it wasn't his story so she ended up having to cut a lot of him out.
"When I finished Mean Boy I really strongly felt like I wasn't finished with that character and there was more to be said. I kind of put a pin in him, but I didn't want to reproduce the character of Charles Slaughter. I knew that I'd have to come at him in a different way," she says.
The second contributing factor was an incident that occurred while Coady was touring the book. For Mean Boy, she'd used the biography of a poet, John Thompson, whose work she greatly admired, to help structure its plot. Thompson passed away in 1976 and had been a professor at Mount Allison University in Sackville, N.B. During a reading at the Maritime school, people who had known Thompson expressed anger at what Coady had done.
"That moment of standing up at the podium, having people stand up and tell me basically I didn't have a right to the story I had written, that it didn't belong to me, was a really interesting moment. That's how it all kind of clicked into place. I knew how I was going to bring Charles Slaughter back. I kind of conceived of Rank as having read Mean Boy and seen the character of Charles Slaughter and recognized himself and decide he wants to tell his story, and that's The Antagonist," she says.
However, the question of where the line is for writers, in terms of using actual people and events as inspiration, remains. Coady believes incorporating aspects of real life into fictional tales is okay. Raised Catholic, if she didn't, then she wouldn't be able to do so as she'd be unable to live with the guilt, she says.
"I think every writer has to set their own boundaries and it's always going to be a question whether or not they've crossed the line of being unethical. It's not something we can define. There are no hard (and) fast borders," she says.
Coady hoped that in the writing of The Antagonist, she would come up with a solid argument for what writers do when they're taking from their own lives and borrowing from others'.
"I thought I could come up with some kind of ironclad justification for it but it's still all pretty up in the air for me," she says.
Nonetheless, she feels the best means of explaining her perspective is to have someone sit down and attempt to write their own novel.
"Then they would understand how it works, how it's a semi-conscious process and how they're tapping into something that's not necessarily under your control when you're creating a fictional world. That really was the seed for The Antagonist, that's what I imagined happening to Rank from the very beginning," she says.
The Antagonist, while in the same vein as her previous works, is evident of a few shifts in Coady's perspective. Originally from Cape Breton, in recent years she's called Vancouver and now Edmonton home, settling there in 2008.
"A lot of my work was geographically situated quite firmly on the East Coast for a long time. But The Antagonist is more of Canada and I think that it's just a result of me not having lived on the East Coast for a really long time," she says.
She's naturally grown and changed as a person and therefore has an interest in writing about characters more like her now.
"When I was 20, I still felt in some ways very oppressed by small town Atlantic Canada and a lot of my characters were very much of that world and couldn't conceive of what the world outside it was like. All they could really do was look across the causeway and dream and yearn. Whereas Rank, he's shaken all that off. He's of the world. He's of Canada in a broader sense and he just thinks of the Maritimes as the place he's from. He's not threatened by it and oppressed by it in the same way as some of my earlier characters," she says.
This is the first time Coady has written from the point of view of such an angry character.
"That was really energizing for me when I was writing," she says, and in turn something that has resonated with readers.
"Creative Writing 101, they always say, 'The story has to have conflict' and Rank is all conflict so I think that's where a big part of the draw comes from," she says.
In addition to touring The Antagonist, Coady is busy with her Globe column, which she's been writing for two years.
"It's just the perfect gig for a writer," she says. "It's all these little nuggets of human conflict. . . . It's like all these people are sending me the beginnings of a short story and asking me to write the ending."
She's also the co-founder and editor of Eighteen Bridges (eighteenbridges.com), a new general interest Canadian magazine focused on feature-length narrative non-fiction, set to release its third issue in mid-November.
"We wanted it to be known for really great writing, above and beyond everything else, and have broad appeal. . . . We just thought there's a need for this and there's a craving for it," she says.
Coady is also currently serving as writerin-residence at Edmonton's Grant MacEwan University.
