Natalie Southworth’s award-winning stories have appeared in literary journals in Canada, the U.S., and the U.K. Originally from England, she has lived all over Canada and today makes her home in Montreal.
There’s Always More to Say is a collection of nine stories that explore family and human fragility, ambition and dislocation.
Interviewed by Nancy Pearson
Nancy Pearson (NP): A huge congratulations to you, Natalie, on your fine debut collection of short stories. Each story stands on its own as a concise, compelling glimpse into the characters’ lives—“one of those moments that life turns on,” as one character says. The binding theme throughout is mental illness and how it affects characters and the people around them—children, spouses, parents, classmates, a high school play’s audience, and so on. Your stories also include a great deal of humour. Can you elaborate, please, on how you created this delicate balance between painful details about the characters’ struggles and humour.
Natalie Southworth (NS): That’s a great question. I didn’t set out to intentionally create stories about mental illness. I was writing mostly about individuals and families struggling under the pressures and expectations of our times, and how they were trying to hold it together. A collapse of some kind was almost inescapable. I found one way to show these themes was through family dilemmas. Dilemmas involving multiple people and how they interact with each other, and their dynamics, fascinate me. I think the humour in the stories comes through some of those interactions and the ways people play off, and reveal, each other.
When you have a cast of characters, there’s an opportunity to explore levity in darker themes. I also think doing that was my own form of relief. Some of these stories were tough to write and I drew on humour to help guide that emotional process.
NP: One of literary fiction’s most significant values is the way it helps readers to get into the minds, lives, experiences of characters, and social or historical contexts, and to apply this as a way to understand the world around us. With There’s Always More to Say your stories focus a lens on mental illness that can encourage readers to look more closely at a topic that may help them see, feel and possibly relate to what’s happening off the page. Or, as Lynda Williams expresses in The New Quarterly, your “superpower seems to lie in creating small moments of discomfort and unease.” What is it about mental illness that motivates you to reveal it to readers through fiction?
NS: I never set out to write about “mental illness.” Those words seem limiting and even judgmental to me. I would use words like ‘psychological fragility.’ Mental illness represents such a continuum of experience, but our language is so diagnostic and limited and loaded when it comes to meaningfully conveying those experiences.
It means there’s an innate silence and yet so much to say, which partly explains the title of the book. In the title story, there’s a moment at the end when the narrator, Cora, returns to her mother’s apartment and listens to her mother, even though she’s in the throes of what could be called a hallucinatory experience, or psychosis. Cora could have chosen not to stay there. Her sister, Rachel, wants nothing to do with her mother; she has written her off in a very black-and-white way. But Cora stays at that table and listens to what her mother says even though she’s terrified. Then, when she’s older, she remembers back to that moment with her mother, and what she heard and has a new understanding. It’s as if staying there, listening to her mother helped Cora later understand more of herself.
It’s the idea that if we listen to people who might be deemed weak or lost or who’ve opted out or stepped away, we might learn more about ourselves and possibly even discover a new kind of sanity.
NP: I do appreciate what you’re saying about the term ‘mental illness.’
NS: There’s not a lot of language available, which provided the opportunity in these stories to try and show what I think most families contend with in some way. We all have friends or relatives who have gone through psychological struggles, yet there is very little language available to express and convey their experiences, including the family’s experience.
NP: That’s partly why the people who are suffering from these conditions remain silent themselves.
NS: Exactly. And their trust surely must be low because of that disconnection in communication.
NP: To expand on that thought, Fiona in “Spectacular” suffers from anorexia. She “dipped squares of lettuce into honey mustard, or ate carrot and beet shavings…her jaw clenched… She sucked the life out of fleshy morsels of food…before she spat the pulp, dry and mangled, into a napkin.” Seriously, Natalie, that is so powerful. Do you do a lot of research into these illnesses before writing about them?
NS: Some of the details and behaviours are drawn from what I observed growing up and also from what I researched. The narrator in “Spectacular” is twelve and observes a classmate who she presumes to be anorexic. I think it’s important to note that she is twelve. ‘Anorexic’ is a word she’s heard, but she’s not seventeen or twenty-one. There’s a lot more we take in as women about eating disorders over the course of our lives. The narrator is really at the beginning of that knowledge, and I thought that was quite important. The narrator is ultimately concerned that she doesn’t see much concern from adults for this incredibly thin young classmate who looks increasingly sickly.
I researched eating habits at that age because anorexia can span a whole life. But at twelve, thirteen, it’s the beginning. I also knew several girls who were not at that stage but definitely experimenting with diets and laxatives. It was prevalent in the nineties, when the story is set. I think body image has possibly improved but it’s hard to know.
NP: Three of the stories—set at the beginning, middle, and end—focus on two sisters at different stages in their lives. As with the other stories, Cora and Rachel are profoundly affected by their mother’s illness and her struggles to function. What we see as the girls mature into women is the profound, rending ways they cope and move through life. It seems to me that giving us their fuller story also works to help readers consider the other stories and characters beyond the limits of their pages. Is this a fair statement to understand the way the collection is structured?
NS: I struggled with the structure of all the stories and the ordering of them. In fact, I’m still not one hundred per cent certain that I like the way it landed! But ultimately the order does what I intended. In taking the whole book, the earlier stories tend to involve younger narrators or younger protagonists and their private doubts about the world in which they live and the demands on them. The later stories involve older protagonists, young women, and men, who seem to have gotten far away from themselves. They’ve gone against their natures, yet there seems to be no way to stop it. The book’s ordering is like a cause and effect between the early stories and the later ones. The three interconnected stories, for me, put that approach into sharp relief as the characters – two sisters and their mother, who they become estranged from– start out young and move into middle age, and in the case of the mother, old age. This allows readers to see the implications of their youthful choices and experiences with their mother as girls and women. I didn’t want to focus solely on a moment of crisis, which would be one story, but three stories allowed a more in-depth picture of the lived experience of psychological fragility.
NP: Your writing portfolio is rich with a broad variety of writing accomplishments: journalist, editor, documentary film producer, and short story writer. Topics you covered as a reporter for The Globe and Mail varied from online privacy to crime to protecting historic buildings and their legacy. You have also produced documentary films such as “Alexandra’s Echo.” Now you work in environmental communications. Throughout, you’ve been writing and publishing short stories. Each of these different ‘roles’ requires a different writing voice. How do you switch channels to do this? Are there benefits or challenges to writing such a range of topics?
NS: What a brilliant question! When I was working as a journalist in Toronto, I found myself growing dissatisfied and wanting to write differently. I wanted to enter other points of view and see around something. I met people and there was so much take in, so I was regularly inspired. But there was no way to make sense of all of it operating in the way daily news demanded.
After I left journalism I found myself in Vancouver and I enrolled in a continuing education course in short fiction at University of British Columbia. That opened me up. Although, I didn’t start writing fiction in a serious way for several more years, not until my kids were older, from then on it was something I knew I would get to. I was incubating ideas and reading lots and my time as a reporter had helped me develop my observational skills and eye for detail. But, more than any other writing form, fiction was how I made sense of what I was observing and feeling. As I’ve gotten older, writing fiction sort of keeps the mind from suffocating under its own grief. It’s different to the other kinds of writing in that it is necessary.
I write on Fridays; I don’t work that day. That allows a kind of divide for my brain where I can enter into a new head space and switch channels away from the more strategic brain required in my communications work. I read poetry to start. Poems introduce tenderness to the brain and help me move into fiction.
NP: There’s always so much more to say (no pun intended…well, maybe a little), Natalie, when talking about writing! Is there anything you would like to add?
NS: Thank you so much for the questions.
Interviewer Bio: Nancy Pearson chronicles stories and issues on her Facebook blog, The Great Laundromat Adventure. She is a former government communications professional. In addition to the hundreds of government news releases and speeches she wrote, her published work includes literary and personal essays, as well as articles about laundromats.