Tunnel Island, Bill Gaston‘s eighth fiction collection, appears next Spring. Others—Mount Appetite, Gargoyles, Juliet Was a Surprise, Mariner’s Guide to Self Sabotage—have won or been short listed for the Governor General’s, Giller, BC and Victoria Book Prizes. He has also written novels, memoir and drama. He lives with writer Dede Crane on Gabriola Island.
Bill Gaston is taking part in a panel curated by The Malahat Review, that features authors who have published short fiction in the journal.
Interview by Nancy Pearson
Nancy Pearson (NP): Your short story, “Jack’s Christmas Dinner,” published in The Malahat Review this Spring, brings a kettle of neighbours together for a Christmas meal of roadkill wild turkey. What transpires in the days leading up to and culminating at the dinner illustrates what writer Tony Tremblay said about you some 30-plus years ago: You are “a master of comic incongruity, able to translate the excesses of our culture into the exaggerated peculiarities of [your] characters – and all this without compromising the basic humanity, frailty, and unfailing optimism central to each.” What is it that draws you so strongly to capturing human peculiarities in your stories?
Bill Gaston (BG): One simple way (as opposed to a complex way, which might involve psychiatry) of looking at why I write this way is that I like to be entertained. At the risk of cheapening the whole thing, as I bang away on the keyboard, not knowing what’s coming next, I do write to entertain myself. I admit that I’m drawn to the odd, the eccentric, to characters who are in a tight spot and floundering a bit, and who knows how they’re going to act. My hope of course is that I might entertain some readers as well. I wouldn’t agree with Tremblay’s suggestion that I “exaggerate” a character’s peculiarities, though. I think rather that I “highlight,” them, by peeling the skin back a bit and shining a little flashlight beam in there. Come to think of it, I’d also beg to differ with “peculiarities”—certainly the events of the story can be peculiar (that’s also a hopefully entertaining part) but the characters themselves are acting out of purely human, completely recognizable impulses based in what we can all understand because we share them too, like fear, shame, pride, shyness, lust, arrogance, and the list goes on.
NP: You’ve been called the “Eveready Bunny of the short story,” Bill, and here you are with another collection (number eight, I believe) that will be released in 2025. Can you say something about this eighth collection?
BG: That Bunny quote was from Michael Winter, in his review of maybe my fourth or fifth collection, and he said it out of jealousy, of course, because he’s long been able only to write novels, which demand actual work and take a horribly long time.
This new collection, Tunnel Island, is of linked stories, which some time ago became a trend, or you might even say a new genre. After reading a bunch, and realizing how much I enjoyed them, I finally jumped on board. Novels are more beloved by readers because we get to form an intimate bond with a character through spending time with them as they wrestle life. We root for them as they succeed, fail, change. Linked stories provide at least some of that. We get to see what happens to someone ten years down the road as a main character from an early story has a cameo appearance in a later one. I found myself getting close to some of the characters, too, which is what I experience in writing a novel. Tunnel Island itself becomes a character, a quite mysterious presence in fact, and that was a surprise to me.
NP: When we last spoke in 2018, we talked about your memoir, Just Let Me Look at You. You said then that you’d like to write more nonfiction. Can we hope to see a new nonfiction work sometime soon?
BG: I do like writing nonfiction, mostly memoir, as it turns out. And maybe the main reason is that in one aspect it’s easier–you don’t have to make stuff up. It’s almost effortless, in the same way that constant inward thinking—thinking about ourselves—is effortless. We can do it forever. On the other hand memoir can be tricky in that we might fall prey to thinking that our lives are inherently interesting to others. So, unless you’re a famous movie star, or a rehabilitated politician or criminal, or have climbed lots of mountains, you have to hunt through your life and find the wellsprings that provoke the deepest feelings. Which, obviously, can be painful. Sometimes you need a shot of whiskey and bite down on a leather strap as you type down what a fool, creep, narcissist or blind idiot you were. (I hope you’re enjoying how I’m using second person here.) Another pitfall to nonfiction, particularly memoir, is that your words can hurt people you care about. That all being said, I’ve just finished a new one, a book describing an eleven-day road trip I took with my two adult sons to Tabor, Iowa, to the grave of our ancestor George B. Gaston. This was during Covid, and we drove through a bunch of hyper-red states in a rented muscle car. Gaston founded the town in the 1850’s in order to set up the western-most hub of the Underground Railroad, and he housed the fierce abolitionist John Brown in his basement. Another sidenote, and bizarre coincidence, is that the novelist Marilynne Robinson had based her Gilead trilogy on the town of Tabor, and on Congregationalist minister Gaston and his best friend, Presbyterian minister John Todd. The weird part is that my favourite novel of all time had long been Gilead, before I discovered the Tabor connection, so it turns out that my favourite novel of all time happened to be based on my family. In any case, we had many adventures on the road trip—we fell asleep floating naked on Great Salt Lake; we fed hotdogs to snapping turtles; we almost got arrested several times; we meditated in a stupa in Colorado; we spent a day on Thomas McGuane’s ranch. If there’s a binding theme, it’s the dumpster fire of American politics, and Canada’s relationship to it. Also family, and what family might mean. It’s called Spying on America from Heaven. At the moment I’m waiting to see if anyone’s interested in publishing it. I have no idea if or when it might come out.
NP: One last question: Do you have a favourite public place to watch and listen for character and story ideas?
BG: No, that approach strikes me as kind of limiting. When I’m in writing mode, I simply have my antennae out. Good ideas can come anywhere, any time, and be as big as novels or small as someone’s unique hair colour. Shining ideas go on and off like fireflies. Often they come when I’m alone, inventing a new sandwich, or so bored that it’s painful, or I’m at a mirror and understanding, again, that I’m seventy. It might sound a bit vain to repeat the saying, “I contain multitudes,” but we can dial Whitman’s words back and suggest that we do contain awkward encounters, and yoga workshops, and family memories, and grocery store checkout lines. I think we have to pay attention to ordinary life, the emphasis on “ordinary.”