The Writer Who Is Montreal: Zsuzsi Gartner in Conversation with Heather O'Neill, Saturday, April 18 at 4 p.m., part of the North Shore Writers Festival, today and tomorrow (Friday, April 17 and Saturday, April 18), at the West Vancouver Memorial Library. Free. northshorewritersfestival.com.
Heather O'Neill recently came across a great quotation by fellow Montreal-born writer Mavis Gallant.
"Perhaps a writer is, in fact, a child in disguise," wrote Gallant, a Governor-General's Award-winning author of short stories who spent much of her adult life in France and passed away in February 2014.
"I thought that was just perfect," says O'Neill. The quote spoke volumes, offering insight into her own unique and celebrated approach to storytelling.
In her two award-winning novels, 2006's Lullabies for Little Criminals and last year's The Girl Who Was Saturday Night, O'Neill wrote from the perspective of youths navigating the inner city streets of Montreal. In Lullabies for Little Criminals, 13-year-old motherless Baby finds herself in a relationship with a dangerous pimp, and in The Girl Who Was Saturday Night, twin Nouschka, 19, tries to find her own identity apart from her erratic brother and their father, a legendary Québécois folksinger who's fallen on hard times.
O'Neill, reached Monday at her home base of Montreal, says she's continually drawn to younger perspectives in her writing because as main characters, they offer an opportunity to describe things in new ways. Often, a child's perspective, in contrast to an adult's, has yet to be categorized, allowing them to see the world through a fresh set of eyes.
"If the child sees a person who an adult would perceive immediately as a loser or a bum, or an addict, the child might see that person for their other qualities, like might see them as a storyteller, or someone's who's really funny, or someone who's very generous," she says. O'Neill also views writing from younger perspectives as a means of enabling her to experiment with "imagistic metaphorical writing." "(For) children, the line between what's real and not real is kind of thin and they live in the land of make believe. With my metaphors I kind of leap back and forth from the mundane things to magical realist possibilities. I think that's why I was drawn to a child's perspective. I'm not always going to write from a child's perspective. My characters are growing up," she says.
Maybe so, however, hot off the presses and welcomed into the hands of her legions of fans is O'Neill's first short story collection, Daydreams of Angels, intended as a "book of magical tales," she says, for grownups. "The collection I kind of conceived as a whole. I wanted it to be seen like one of those old anthologies of children's literature that I used to get for Christmas in the '70s. They would just have little chapters from Dickens novels and then a fairytale, and then an Aesop fable and then a story from the Bible. So I wanted it to be like one of those big children's compendiums but then they would all be dark and for adults and with my own sort of twisted, perverted, little trademark things stuck in there," she says.
O'Neill also set out to showcase the family storytelling tradition, casting light on the mythology that people can grow up with, hearing children's tales from parents or grandparents and keeping them alive.
"I find that is so much in the fabric of our imagination. Not only what we read, but the stories that are part of our family lore," she says.
Examples of short stories featured in Daydreams of Angels include: "Dear Piglet," depicting a naive cult follower; "Snow-White and Rose-Red," exploring the struggle of two young women in occupied Paris; and "The Ugly Ducklings," the story of generations of failed Nureyev clones in post-Soviet Russia. O'Neill has received a number of high-profile accolades for her works. Her debut novel, Lullabies for Little Criminals, won the 2007 Canada Reads competition, the Hugh MacLennan Prize for Fiction, and was a finalist for the Governor General's Award for Fiction and the Orange Prize. The Girl Who Was Saturday Night was shortlisted for the 2014 Giller Prize and has been longlisted for the 2014/2015 Encore Award for the Best Second Novel. O'Neill is beyond grateful for all of the honours that have been bestowed upon her.
"It's wonderful because it allows you to continue what you're doing. With each thing, I feel a little more confident going back into the fictional realm. I'm working on a novel now, I do feel more confident than I did with the other ones, so that's a great feeling. So you can take risks and be more experimental. I don't know, I just feel a little happier in my place, in my imagination. It's sort of like people have said, 'Yes, you may go there,' as opposed to just feeling like, 'Well I'm here. Nobody cares. Does that mean I'm insane?'" she laughs.
When asked where her interest in storytelling is derived, she says it goes back to her childhood and a lifelong love of books and literature. "Since I was quite young I wanted to be a writer. I loved it when I was a kid, being able to write. I always kept journals. It's what I did all the time. I would go to the library, I had this grocery cart, and I would come back with 15 books. And I would scribble about things that I had seen in my journal. It started off as a lot of fun. But it's always like, that's where the initial impulse comes, but then to actually get good at your craft, you have to slave away for at least a decade of torturous failures and rejections. But you know, it's like that, any profession is difficult. Now there's just no turning back. Even if I wanted to stop, I'm qualified to do absolutely nothing else," she says.
O'Neill's first two novels developed conceptually as character studies of sorts, the result of her fascination with people with big, interesting or odd personalities.
"I was always inspired by that as a kid so then I wanted to create my own characters that were really full of life, and kind of philosophers. I had the desire also to create characters who came from different walks of life who weren't normally seen as being particularly bright, or having any sort of integrity or nobility. So kind of the lower classes and to find characters from there but describe them in a way that people would really relate to them and really understand their journeys and what was special about them," she says.
O'Neill is currently in the throes of writing her third novel, a process she's thoroughly enjoying. A historical work set in 1930s Montreal, she's anticipating its release in the next year or two.
A major difference between the new book and her previous two works of fiction is her choice of narrative point of view. Rather than continuing on using first person, she has adopted third person this time around, giving herself a bit of a break. "Just being able to leave one person's head, it's kind of nice. I feel more like an author somehow when I'm writing third person," she says.
O'Neill is among the featured authors at the North Shore Writers Festival, back for its 16th year, being presented today and tomorrow at the West Vancouver Memorial Library. The free celebration of Canadian authors is presented by the West Vancouver library in addition to the City and District of North Vancouver's.
Tonight's programming gets underway at 7 p.m., featuring John Vaillant in conversation with Grant Lawrence, followed by the Third Annual Literary Trivia Quiz Night, also hosted by Lawrence.
Saturday programming kicks off at 10 a.m., with a writers workshop and local author book fair, followed by a number of author panels throughout the day; for example, Where Stories Come From: Aislinn Hunter in Conversation with Doretta Lau at 2:45 p.m. O'Neill will cap off the festival at 4 p.m. in a presentation entitled The Writer Who Is Montreal: Zsuzsi Gartner in Conversation with Heather O'Neill. A public reception will follow.
