Alissa York’s internationally acclaimed novels include Mercy, Effigy (shortlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize), Fauna and The Naturalist. Her most recent novel, Far Cry, was partly inspired by time she spent as a child with her dad in a skiff off the BC coast. York now makes her home in Toronto.
Far Cry, set in 1922 in a small northwest BC cannery town, is a novel of unspoken and forbidden love in which pain and longing are braided together along treacherous lines. It is also a mystery that only reveals its shocking truth at its end, upending all of its reader’s assumptions.
Interviewed by Nancy Pearson
Nancy Pearson (NP): Far Cry is suffused with historic details about things like cannery operations, fishing methods, and life in the 1920s. All contribute to a strong sense of place, of life in an isolated west coast village where the characters live. A place that Shelagh Rogers described as a “beautiful, harsh world where people hold their secrets close as they cling to the edge of the continent.” Could you tell me how you went about your research to create the characters’ world? Did you, for example, explore an old cannery site in B.C.?
AY: No, I didn’t. Funnily enough, the book just sort of began just with the feeling of a cannery, which I don’t even know if I’ve ever been in one. But I’ve certainly read about them and I’ve kind of had that idea in my mind, and somehow, I think, the book grew out of that. I started just to think, “Oh, there’s a cannery.” I started to read more about canneries and that took me to the West coast of B.C. where, of course, I grew up.
Basically, most of my work requires a lot of research. I have this process of following my nose. I read a great deal. I take a great many notes. I also watch videos and I contact individuals with very particular questions that I am unable to find in other ways. I’ll approach all kinds of experts when necessary. In this case, for example, my brother—he now works for the B.C. Government, but in the past he worked in a different role as a Fisheries Officer and then he was a conservation officer. So, he’s a wonderful resource for checking in with.
And, then, yes, I follow my nose and then I get ideas along the way, which then lead me to further research. And it becomes this kind of symbiotic relationship between the imagination and the research that is very fruitful for me with my particular process.
Like I say, I take a ton of notes. I keep paper files, I cross-reference them when I’m going to write a scene. I have all kinds of pages of paper out for me so that I don’t get lost along the way and say, “Oh yah, what was that thing called?”
With this book, in particular, there was that childhood time spent time in the boat fishing. We weren’t gillnetters, but we did fish for salmon. My dad just had a little boat and we fished for salmon, trout greenling, and rock fish, and any number of things. So, a lot of that feeling of place comes through that personal, deeply embedded experience as well.
The other thing I would add is there’s this phrase, “naked research,” where you do an information dump. Where you really want to pile in all of the cool stuff that you’ve learned, and you just have to, you really have to work to make sure that you’re integrating that knowledge fully into the narrative. And that you’re leaving things out if they aren’t serving the narrative. So, there are always all kinds of cool things that stay in the files and don’t get into the book. But knowing them helps you to fully imagine the narrative. You need to encounter them whether they end up on the page or not.
NP: In his first sentence in what turns out to be a long, confessional letter to Kit, his surrogate niece, Anders Viken draws the reader in with an idyllic image: “This morning the bay is green.” But then he describes the water’s stench from the “shithouse drift.” This is his manner, I soon realized: Anders describes the beauty of Far Cry and also its dark undercurrent, gradually revealing the secrets characters withhold. Would it be fair to view this as a type of dismantling of any sense of Utopia, a pulling apart of the image of a place of refuge for characters who all have secrets?
AY: Yah, that sounds perfect to me! [laughs] Sometimes it’s hard to get the distance from your own stories and then other people will say things to you and you say, “Oh, yes, that does sound right.” So, this is one of those moments.
And it’s very interesting, right, because the B.C. coast was a place where people, various groups, tried to set up Utopian kinds of villages. There were some on Vancouver Island and some on the Mainland, as well. And, of course, I think they just end up succumbing to human nature.
But, Far Cry is never conceived of that but, in a way, these people end up there. I mean, there’s the summer town when it’s in season [salmon fishing]; it just swells to become a real town. And then it’s like a ghost town in the winter, except there are the winter watchman and his wife and child, and together they make a family. And there is this interesting thing where, in a way, compared to the rest of the world, for a time, at least, it is a peaceful place where people can count on one another. Things develop from there. But there is a kind of refuge or a hope for refuge.
NP: The Chinese immigrant characters, such as the camp cook and the ones in Vancouver’s Chinatown, are really humanized in Far Cry. The racism directed at Yo Lim by Knox, the cannery manager, for example, and Frank, Kit’s father, is deeply disturbing. Lo Yim, the cook, is central in Anders’ story. Could you tell me about how you went about creating Lo Yim and other characters with such sensitivity to their cultural differences.
AY: Well, that again goes to a research process. To be honest, when characters take on a life of their own, or in order that they should take on a life of their own, they have to be multi-dimensional. They have to be real people to you as the writer, I believe, for them to be real people to anyone who reads it. There’s never really an option for a two-dimensional character. And that means that the further a character’s experience is from your own, the more deeply you must read and think and feel about that character in order to inhabit their life. Your job as a fiction writer is to inhabit lives other than your own. Even though Lo Yim—he’s not a point-of-view character; he’s not a character such as Anders—he is very important to the story, and he does have this life of his own.
So, through research and reading wonderful writers like Paul Yee and, of course, Wayson Choy. I find it as part of my research process, looking at photographs just really, really feeds the imagination. Lo Yim came into the book through a photograph of a young man. I understood a certain amount about Anders, but then when I saw this one photograph, I suddenly understood, “Ah.” It’s like spaces will open up in your understanding of the narrative and then something will move into that space and then you will be closer to being able to bring the entire story to life. So, Lo Yim entered first through a photograph where I was very taken with this young man’s gaze. And I thought, “Ah hah,” here’s an important piece of the narrative.
NP: That’s really fascinating, about the photograph, in particular. It kind of leads into my last question. Far Cry’s characters have stayed with me, even weeks after finishing the novel. It makes me wonder what your relationship is like with your characters once your novel is finally on bookshelves? Do they still have stories to tell? Do you miss them?
AY: I very much miss them. The only thing that really helps is getting going on the next book, which I have. I always try to do that. And because I do so much research, that is a kind of a gentle process for me because I can ease myself into the next one. That’s the only thing that really helps with the bereft feeling of leaving a group of characters and a story behind and a world. And the longer it’s been since you wrote it—for me—the more it feels like it was written by someone else. So now, when I look at it, if I read a little bit for some purpose or another (if I’m going to do a reading or something), Anders maybe stands a little bit more on his own every time. It’s maybe not so much written by someone else but just a human life that I didn’t imagine but that just came into being. A group of human lives, I should say.