The Voice Is the Story: Conversations with Canadian Writers of Short Fiction (review)

Laurie Kruk's ten interviews with major Canadian writers are by turns interviews, conversations, as it says in the title, and performances. They are also, over the course of the collection, meditations with two voices, as Kruk returns to the big questions time and again: Is your work autobiographical? Who are your influences? Do you consider yourself a regional writer? A Canadian writer? Does gender affect your writing? Are you a realist/postmodernist? Feminist? What are the differences between writing novels and short stories?

However, the careful contextualizing of these touchstone questions provided in her introduction, becomes, in the course of the conversations, a deft drawing out of each author until he or she provides comments of substance rather than the mere sound bites that might disastrously have resulted from such an 'obligatory' list.

Kruk's voice is at times confidently academic: 'This is what we call metafictional, and it was a real departure for you, wasn't it?' (Alford interview); 'Do you mean what we call magic realism?' (Birdsell interview). (I am unsure whether her 'we' in these instances includes the interview subject, and rather suspect that it does not.) She asserts her own voice with confidence and thoughtfulness, occasionally disagreeing with the authors ('I wouldn't go so far as to say...' (Clark interview); 'I question that' (Findley interview). It is therefore all the more striking, when, as in the interview with Jack Hodgins, the questions of gender become uncharacteristically self-conscious: 'Another aspect of story-writing I'm interested in, without - I hope - being either simplistic or dogmatic, is gender. The ways in which men and women might write differently. Have you got any thoughts on that, from your experience?' (Compare this with the directness of the question put to Carol Shields: 'What do you think about the argument that women write differently than men?') Interestingly, with Hodgins Kruk uses the very subordinate clauses that Hodgins himself cites only to dismiss: 'I have spoken to one linguist who went to great lengths to explain how women use more subordinate clauses than men and all kinds of things like this and I thought, "Well, I guess."'

The conversations are at their best when they appear to lack self-consciousness and the 'realism' of the conversation predominates: when Kruk and Timothy Findley are so in tune that she supplies the middle of his sentences, for instance, or when Jane Rule briefly and testily chastises Kruk. Conversely, in a highly postmodern moment of playfulness (I suspect), the editing process plays a punctuation game with Carol Shields in the course of transcription: 'Shields: Actually, I love punctuation too'; 'Ed Carson does not like semicolons. And I do, because I really like British novels; they use a lot of semicolons. There was a time when I didn't use many dashes, and now I'm using them more. I find that sometimes it functions like a semicolon, but it also gives - when you set something in dashes - that marvellous thought, just beneath the thought before.' We may never know whether the punctuation here is Kruk's or Shields's, since the authors were given the opportunity to edit the transcripts themselves, but it is a nice moment nonetheless.

The editing (and punctuation) is not always so well performed, sometimes rupturing the sense of 'conversation' with a sudden sense of the construct. Why does it appear that Kruk interrupts Alistair MacLeod, who ends his comments with a dash, rather than a period, and creates a sense of unfinished statement:

MacLeod: And Guy Vanderhaeghe has some very very good short stories -

Kruk: Do you think the short story is of particular interest to Canadian writers?

The wonderful range of the conversations shows in the index at the back of the book, after the short author biographies, and so do the preoccupations: Dante (one reference); Colette (one reference); Alice Munro (twentysix). Of course the authors say many things about the short story, and, perhaps predictably, reflect consensus...