Pauline Holdstock is an award-winning novelist, short fiction writer, and essayist with books published internationally. In Canada, her work has been shortlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize, the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize, and others, and has won the BC Book Prizes Award for Fiction and the City of Victoria Butler Book Prize.
Pauline is taking part in our annual panel of authors sharing unpublished writing. She will be reading from, and discussing, a new project during the festival.
Interviewed by Yvonne Blomer
Yvonne Blomer (YB): First, thank you so much for your most recent novel [Confessions with Keith]! Vita is such a character, and the diary format of the book really lets the reader enter her head. As I went along, I began to wonder how trustworthy she was, but that seems also natural since the book is her journal, it captures her personal conversation with herself. Between her real life and her imagination, the book is quite a ride!
You are on the panel titled Field Reports: Four Writers Share Their Works in Progress so you will be reading from new work, which is exciting (I’ve read a short excerpt). How do you feel though, sharing a part of a work in progress?
Pauline Holdstock (PH): It’s something I’ve always avoided, sharing work. As a rule, I’ve always written from the conviction that the work will be somehow tainted, spoiled, on exposure to air. It will fly away! The story excerpt I sent to you is from a forthcoming collection of new fiction called What Endures, so it’s really a bit of a stretch to call it “in progress”. It’s more like a work “in process”, as in “in production”. For that reason, I think I’d also like to share some short unpublished ‘poems.’ Reading untried poems would be for me a much more challenging exercise. It’s definitely time to let go of that resistance and try a little bravery! I’m turning towards poetry, I think, as a way of responding to what’s happening in the world on all levels, because global events land every day right here on our screens and demand a response. Poetry seems to be for me at the moment the only valid way forward.
YB: Back to Vita Glass, she is a writer and a mother who lives on Vancouver Island so comparisons between the author and the character are easy. I’m curious what drew you to write her story? Also, what drew you to humour in this novel?
PH: The book draws on the fabric of my experience raising four children (thankfully not single-handedly) while simultaneously trying to establish a writing career. A mad endeavour, though not as uncommon as I had thought. I kept a journal during those years written in an arch, sophisticated voice quite at odds with the half-baked chaos that reigned then in our home. I think that voice was a kind of life-ring to keep me afloat above the daily wreckage! In any event, it amused me to revisit it and I could see the potential for another comic novel. I had already enjoyed writing Here I Am! which seemed to arrive out of nowhere in daily doses. I always looked forward to sitting down and discovering what my protagonist would say next. And, you know, that kind of writing is almost like the opposite of the poetry I was talking about; it’s respite from the world and we need that, too, just to replenish our energy.
YB: I wanted to also ask about Vita’s experiences at readings in the novel. She seems to have this close but competitive relationship with writer/friend Marlene. It felt to me like you were having a lot of fun and even capturing your own friendships with writers in your community. Can you talk a little bit about the process of writing a new book while being a part of the literary community?
PH: Well you don’t want to show up at an event with a notebook and pencil in hand, though you could, I suppose, start making notes on your phone. But writers are always taking mental notes. When you’re in the process of writing a new book, your radar is always on for anything useful. It’s inevitable. The Marlene of the book has many characteristics I’ve lifted from an actual friend but she also has traits that belong to other writers I’ve met or come across. She’s a composite because that’s how characters are put together at the desk. My IRL best friend has some good advice about using people you actually know in your work: Just make sure everyone comes out looking good at the end.
YB: Speaking of community, how do you view literary awards? You have won the Victoria Butler Book Award twice, for Confessions with Keith and for The Hunter and the Wild Girl. Both books are rich and complex, but incredibly different. Are you encouraged by prizes? What part can they or do they play in your own literary career?
PH: I am encouraged by prizes. Generous prizes like the Victoria Butler Book Award are validation that what we do matters, is valued, and is a contribution to the culture we live in. The recognition that it can bring works in the same way as a good review. It does wonders for the fragile ego; just to be short-listed is jet fuel for a writer’s creative momentum. It can carry you far.
And then there’s the good publicity prizes can generate for the books in an increasingly competitive field. It’s often hard for a writer to access that kind of attention unless they make a serious commitment to social media platforms, and that in itself is serious work and is for many of us a depleting exercise, a distraction from where we really need to be in order to actually do the writing. Social platforms are by definition the opposite of solitude.
YB: I’m contemplating the seriousness of The Hunter and the Wild Girl, the play of Here I Am and Confessions with Keith, I note that your novels are or seem to be focused on character and how their choices drive the narrative. Can you speak to the next book and what direction it will take in comparison (or not) to the previous three?
PH: My next book will be a collection of short stories. Short stories were my first love and I still get great satisfaction from writing them. I love the constraint of the form. They can represent a single moment in time or a whole life but they must always have the aha moment, either for the reader or for one of the characters, the moment that represents a blooming, a blossoming, even an explosion of meaning. It’s the moment of illumination and the reader understands it a very deep level: “Ah, that! That’s what matters in this life!”
YB: What story or kind of story have you always wanted to write? What are things that hold you back from writing?
PH: A story driven from the very first page by suspense, a page turner, one that constricts the breath.
What holds me back? Plot. By which I mean the right material. It can’t be anything lifted from the plethora of such stories in good TV or film, or even remotely reminiscent of such stuff. But thank you for the question! In the attempt to answer it, the material for this story suddenly came back to me from fifteen or maybe twenty years ago!
To answer in more general terms: what holds me back from writing is always, always, daily life. So, back to Vita Glass!