Susan Sanford Blades Susan Sanford Blades’ debut novel, Fake It So Real, won the 2021 ReLit Award in the novel category and was a finalist for the 2021 BC and Yukon Book Prizes’ Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize. Her short fiction has most recently been published in Gulf Coast, The Malahat Review, and The Master’s Review.
Susan will be showcasing new/ previously unpublished work at the festival.
Interview by Barbara Pelman
Barbara Pelman (BP): I had the chance to read some of your current project. The details are so clear, I’m right along with you as the story unfolds. My question is: where do you take it from here? Is this a short story? Beginning of a memoir? A novel? At this point, do you know? Where is the energy leading you?
Susan Sanford Blades (SSB): I’m glad you enjoyed it! The piece I sent to you is actually the prologue to a novel I’m writing. I actually have a full draft of it that I’m in the process of editing. It’ll follow the main character, Frances, whose perspective the prologue is written from, from September to June of her Grade 12 year as she finds and attempts to connect with her birth mother and goes through all of the other sorts of turmoil that eighteen year old girls go through. It’s set in 1994–95 in Edmonton, so in the background will also be the riot grrrl movement, which Frances is inspired by, third-wave feminism, feeling on the outside of things in a small city in Alberta, boy–girl relations, gender, sexuality, consent, mother–daughter relationships.
BP: Do the peripheral characters begin to tug at you as you write, or do you choose to keep your focus on the narrator? At what point do the other characters begin to call for your attention?
SSB: Hmm, that’s a good question! When I was writing my debut novel, Fake It So Real, I began by writing all of the chapters from one character’s point of view. As the book progressed, I realized I was very interested in her mother’s story, as well as her sister’s, so the book expanded into being told alternately from those three characters’ perspectives.
I am seeing this new novel completely through the eyes of my main character. It’s not that the peripheral characters aren’t compelling, but it may be that I’m very invested in this one character. Also, I wanted to try something different this time in terms of the form of the book. I didn’t want to write another novel from various characters’ points of view, because that could start to get tired. So, with this new novel, when the other characters matter to my main character, they matter to me and to the story. That doesn’t mean that they’re static, but that they’ve sort of grown as my main character has worked through her relationships with them, her impressions of them, and what they mean to her as she’s finding herself throughout the novel.
BP: One of the themes you seem to be exploring now is how little we really know and how we make up the missing bits, the vague bits. Will that theme continue as you write more?
SSB: I guess in a larger sense, I tend to begin with a character who feels there’s something lacking in her interactions with the world and with the people around her. She’s not revealing her true self to anyone and no one is revealing their true selves to her. In any relationship, we tend to patch together a story for ourselves based on the facts we do have and patterns of behaviour we’ve noticed in the other, which are generally shaped by our own past experiences and not necessarily on the truth. This creates most of the tension in relationships between people, I think, in the real world and in fiction, so it’s some rich soil to tend.
This new book I’m writing is very much about how little we know of the people who are close to us. It’s also about how my main character doesn’t truly understand what she wants from the people she’s close with or how to receive what she needs from others. It also ended up being about how she attempts to patch together the missing bits of herself by connecting with others she’s close to, and how frustrating and lonely and disappointing that process can feel.
BP: You present another tantalizing idea: Our desire to find a person that will “house us” as we “become human”. Is this an idea you work with often?
SSB: Yes, definitely. I think the search for an authentic connection with another is something I’m always writing about, in one way or another. In this new book, Frances is searching for connection with her birth mother and she’s also sorting through her relationship with her adoptive mother. She wrestles with her fear of intimacy, which is often in opposition to her wish for a soulmate, or a mother, or somebody to house her, or, I suppose, put another way, to love her unconditionally. She feels that everyone around her falls short of this, in one way or other, but is also aware that her expectations are unreasonable.
BP: Can you talk a bit about your writing process? Do your stories come out ‘intact’, with edits after, or slowly, little by little? How do they arrive on your page?
SSB: I am a very slow writer. On a given writing day, I’ll churn out maybe a page of writing, maybe only a paragraph, but it will be clean and it will feel good to me. If I write a sentence that I know is garbage, I won’t be able to move on until I’ve fixed it or trashed it and started over.
My first book was written as a novel in stories, so I wrote it one short story at a time, and filled in the missing pieces by writing more stories. I want this new book to feel more like a coherent novel. I’ve still approached it by thinking of each chapter as a short story, in and of itself, with its own theme, and a beginning, middle and end. This was the only way I was able to wrap my head around the larger beast that is a novel. Now that all of these chapters are written, I need to go back in and weave threads between the chapters, make them correspond with one another a bit more, adjust the side plots and peripheral conflicts I created along the way to be sure they’re working for the novel as a whole.
BP: Is your current project similar or different than your other work? Is it a departure in form or theme, or an extension of ideas you have been focusing on?
In some ways, I’m probably working with similar themes to my debut novel with this one. This also deals with female-centric, feminist themes, and family. My last book focused heavily on motherhood too, but that one was more from a mother’s point of view whereas this one is from a daughter’s point of view. This book isn’t as gritty as my debut, but I think provides the same introspective examination of human behaviour. The big difference with this work is that it has graphic elements to it. The main character makes a zine, and issues of her zine appear between each chapter. In the zines, we get a look at how Frances felt about the chapter’s events in the moment they happened, when she was eighteen, so they’re a nice juxtaposition with the retrospective point of view, Frances as an adult retelling this story in the main text.