This question looms large when setting out to circumnavigate a novel. Indeed, it might be the most important question of all. The narrator is everything to a story. The lens for the reader’s view. The grasp of the reader’s hand. The whisper in the reader’s ear. Get the narrator right and a lot of bumps on the road may be smoothed out. Get the narrator wrong and you’ll end up in a ditch, calling for a tow truck.
In my previous work, the question of who tells the story tended to have ready answers. Kindling was always going to be the alternating voices of father and son. The fabulist fable of Infinite Blue would only ever be served by a Brothers Grimm-esque third person. In Most Valuable Potentialand Munro vs the Coyote / Exchange of Heart, the narrator needed to be a guide for the reader as they engaged with experiences outside of the mainstream for many: those of the the immigrant and the disabled. Are You Seeing Me?wasn’t quite as straightforward — the original draft had much of the third act delivered from mother Leonie’s perspective; during it’s two and a half year struggle to find a home, that approach was abandoned in favour of focusing solely on the twins (a decision that played an enormous role in the work finally securing a deal).
Any author who’s ever had work rejected is familiar with these statements. Over 20 years and eight novels, I’ve had my fair share of ‘fitness’ fails and I’ve come to understand it’s sometimes literal, more often publisher shorthand for ‘We don’t think it will sell’ or ‘We don’t love it’ or ‘We don’t love it enough’. Typically, I would shake it off and saddle up for the next response, hope springing eternal from decisions not yet made.
The eighteen months of contractual futility that haunted my upcoming 2022 novel, Boy in the Blue Hammock, though? It was different. The parade of passes based on fit seemed to be communicating a new shorthand, not so much a situation of square peg / round hole.
Infinite Blue— a collaboration between myself and younger brother cum San Francisco Giants tragic, Simon Groth — has now officially hit the shelves. As this little fabulist novella makes its way into readers’ hands, I thought I might provide some insight into the IB inspiration we derived from our brothers-from-another-mother: Jakob and Wilhelm Grimm.
It’s short.
Despite what Disney would have you believe, The Brothers Grimm fairytales were brief affairs. So brief they crammed 86 tales into the first edition collection. We weren’t into that level of abbreviation — IB comes in at just under 180 pages — but we did want to honour the Grimm tradition of concise legend.
It’s archetypal. Characters in IB, though contemporary in construct, should still call to mind those populating the pages of Grimm lore. The Caregiver, The Hero, The Villain, The Mentor, The Sage, The Jester, The Orphan. Even water — our constant presence and ‘shadow narrator’ — could be tagged as The Ruler, perhaps even The Lover.
At the beginning of May, I had the privilege of touring Ottawa, Rideau Lakes and Hamilton as part of the Canadian Children’s Book Centre’s Book Week Tour 2018. Look out for a post or two soon about this mighty adventure.
In the meantime, enjoy this interview I did at the Hamilton Public Library with the incredible Amy Mathers. Amy and I connected up at the end of Book Week and discussed coming to Canada, magic realism, neurodiversity, disability, writing from personal experience, and how I need to stop writing about dodgy mothers.
On Saturdays, I bring my wonderful teenage son into downtown Vancouver for speech therapy. While he surrounds himself with words – learning new ones, retrieving old ones – I do the same at the bookstore across the road, Chapters on Granville.
A number of things are on my checklist when I’m there. I look at the new releases and the discounted fiction and, if my gorgeous teen daughter has come along, the ‘Daredevil’ titles in the comics/graphic novels section. I browse the ‘Heather’s Picks’ table (I don’t have the foggiest who Heather is, but she’s probably quite nice. She sure reads a lot). I try to telepathically convince random shoppers to buy my books. And always, always, I look for the Oz YA that has made it over the pond.
#OwnVoices is an essential movement. If you don’t know about it, you should read this. Incontrovertibly, marginalized groups must be afforded every opportunity to tell/write/publish/sell their own stories. Privileged, able, cishet, white, middle-class, dude scribblers like me do not have to stay out of the imaginative lanes of these groups, but we must drive with extreme care. It bears repeating — #OwnVoices is an essential movement.
No less important are those groups with #NoVoices.
11.00am, July 21st 2001. In the too-familiar confines of Brisbane’s Wesley Hospital, my daughter is born. Three minutes later, my son follows.
How to properly mark the arrival of my children into the world? What can I do to let them know they are loved from the first second forward?
I will write them a journal. One each. Until their fifth birthdays. It makes sense; I have so few skills, but seeing lives, conjuring thoughts, assembling words – these are my staples.
I write. Moments of hilarity, of poignancy. I fill small pages with tiny details and big imagination. Flickers of a technicolour film in its formative months. I write fast for ten months.
Are You Seeing Me?is on the shelves and the initial response has been terrific. Readers have shared their experiences of laughing and crying and wishing earnestly and thinking differently and, when all was said and done, not wanting to let go.
A major reason for this response has been Perry Richter. The young man with the “brain condition” seems to be touching hearts and souls in a big way. I’m delighted by this – in the character’s simple eloquence and careful observance, there are lessons for all of us, his author included.
So, as both an early thank you to AYSM’s readers and a brief foray into the beautiful mind of a special person, here is Perry’s “No Lie” guide to living a good life in an unstable world:
Back in May of 2007, as Term One of our twins’ first and last year of Australian schooling was drawing to a close, we understood the situation:
On Fridays, there would be no teacher-aide support in mainstream class for our autism-diagnosed son. The other four days were fine, but the ’emergency funding’ for the fifth had run out. If we wanted support, we could pay for it ourselves, or we could come to school with him. Of course, we could always keep him at home if we wanted. This was how it would be for the remainder of the year. This was how it would be for the next twelve years.
You can imagine our emotions – anger, disbelief, disillusionment.
It may surprise you to know there was also relief.
Question: How do you figure out the narrator for a novel when the two protagonists speak very little or not at all?… twitter.com/i/web/status/1…1 hour ago
Looking forward to being the only author with a new book shopping around because every other scribbler has abandone… twitter.com/i/web/status/1…2 days ago
Myperbole 