Books in Canada

I felt I had a responsibility to the people and the place ... I don't believe I exploited anybody or appropriated any territory' OAN CLARK's The Victory of Geraldine Gull was short?listed for both the W. H. Smith/Books in Canada First Novel Award and the Governor General's Award for Fiction (English) this year; and it won the 1988 Canadian Authors' Association fiction award. Although it was her first novel for adults, she is far from being an inexperienced writer of fiction: she has published six novels for young people and a collection of short stories (From a High Thin Wire, 1982). A number of her books have been published outside Canada, and one has been translated into French. The Victory of Geraldine Gull centres on an Ojibwa woman who lives in a community of Swampy Cree on the shore of Hudson Bay. The Cree are divided over the question of whether to move their village to a more favourable location. Geraldine's "victory" helps them ? indeed, forces them ? to make up their minds. Clark lives in St. John's, Newfoundland, on a quiet street in the fashionable Pius X area of the city. Patrick O'Flaherty interviewed her there recently.

BiC: How did you get started as a writer?

Joan Clark: I didn't consciously choose writing, the way some people do. I'm a late starter. I was married and I had a year?old son and I had never written a story in my life. Then one day, I just sat down ...

BiC: How old were you?

Clark: I was about 29 or 30. And I wrote this story, about a girl and a bear in the mountains. I filled a scribbler. The story was still going on in my imagination, so I filled two more scribblers. When I was finished, I realized I'd written a ? well, I don't know if you'd call it a novel, but a story., I went out then and bought a typewriter, learned to type, typed it up, and gave it to somebody to read. She read it and said, send it off. I sent it off to two publishers, and my God if it wasn't published! That was Girl of the Rockies. When the book appeared, I got to page 26 and burst into tears. I couldn't read it. I was editing as I read. So much wrong with it! And I thought, I'm really serious about this, this really matters to me. That story was my awakening!

BiC: Between there and Geraldine Gull, what happened to you?

Clark: Then I had more kids and started writing short stories. I 'wrote some poetry, and five more children's books. I knew that I was serious, and that more than anything else this was what I wanted to do. But at the same time I didn't have any household help, so it was hard, and I would go for long periods of time ... I'd get very discouraged. The message I was always given was, just hang in, don't give up. If anybody said anything helpful or positive, I just hung on to that.

BiC: Id like you to comment on the importance of children's literature.

Clark: I feel it's very important. I didn't set out to write children's books. It Just happened that I did. I think because I liked children, genuinely, and I was spending quite a bit of time with children, my own and other people's. I found it easy to slip into the persona of a young person. Having said that, I don't think children's writing is more difficult or easier than adult writing. I think there's been a lot of nonsense spoken about this. I'm talking about children's writing that is well done and serious. There are differences in writing it; the point of view is different, and I also think that the greatest challenge in writing children's literature is to suggest complexity without being complex. In terms of craft, you need the same skills, and working in both fields I notice a lot of condescension towards children's books, particularly by writers, who should know better. I had one very well known writer say to me, "How do you write your children's stories? Do you just write down the stories you tell your children at bedtime?" The implication being that I didn't sweat it out! It took me five years to write Wild Man of the Woods. There is this notion that children's books are not quite up to scratch. I'm talking about the good stuff here. There's good writing at every level, whether it's for adults or children.

BiC: In Geraldine Gull, you have one of your characters, the Chief, Xavier, say "the only people who can write about Indians are Indians. " A very bold thing for you to say, considering who you are. By the way, who are you? Where do you come from?

Clark: I was born in Liverpool, Nova Scotia.

BiC: You're living now in St. John's, Newfoundland, in a fairly comfortable suburb and you're writing about Indians. Can you comment on that? Clark: I hate the word suburb. BiC: A comfortable middle?class neighbourhood?

Clark: I hate "middle?class" too. The fact is that soon after we were married, when I was still a bride, I went with my husband to a reserve on Hudson Bay. I was there for three months. Before I went there, I knew nothing about Indian people, having been brought up in the Atlantic region. The Micmacs were on the reserve largely, and your paths hardly ever crossed, especially in the small towns where I lived. So this was another awakening in my life. I completely changed in my perceptions, in how I felt. It turned out that I felt very strongly about what I saw there. So I wrote long letters to my sister ? at that time I wasn't writing, but I used to write long letters. I never dreamed that I would write a story about the place or that I would be a writer. And then as I began my writing, this whole place kept coming back to me and I started to write about it. I found it very difficult, because I wasn't a native person, and I always knew that I was writing against that, that I was an outsider, and this is one thing that's in the story, of course. It's not just about native people, it's about white people too.

BiC: You have an artist, Willa, come into the community. She is a type of what you were then?

Clark: Yes. Technically, in terms of craft and structure, it was hard to structure that novel, hard to write it. I was fighting it, fighting myself. Of course, now there's a lot of controversy over who has the right to write what ...

BiC: Did you have the right to write that?

Clark: Yes, oh yes, I did.

BiC: Still feel that way. ?

Clark: I still feel that way. And I was scared when I wrote it. I had Xavier say those words; you know, you can write it, but I'm not going to read it. And I knew that was out there. I was acknowledging it. I had some idea where he was coming from. But I don't believe I exploited anybody, I don't think I appropriated any territory. This is fiction, I made it up. I did a lot of research. I felt I had a responsibility to the people and the place ? I always feel that, a tremendous sense of responsibility ...

BiC: Do you? Is that a ? I won't say proper, because it's your view of fiction, you can write your own way,? but does fiction naturally spring out of that kind of urge? Or does a writer have a principal responsibility to the creation, and to what is in it? Rather than to something outside it?

Clark: They're not exclusive of each other, are they? As far as I'm concerned, I felt both. I just think that as a writer you have a responsibility to get it right, insofar as it is within your power to do so. That is to say, don't be sloppy in your research, try to get it right. That's what I meant by responsibility.

BiC: Isn't that a documentary rather than a fictional impulse? To get a world out there right?

Clark: A good question. And actually in my next book, Swimming Toward the Light, a collection of stories that Macmillan will bring out in March, I don't fictionalize places; they are Liverpool, Sydney, Sussex, they are not fictionalized. And the West Coast, Victoria ? they're coastal stories. I was at pains to try and get it all, again, right. I guess I feel it's history, in a way.

BiC: You are on the side of Geraldine Gull all the way through the novel. Is that a fair comment?

Clark: Well, I identified with her, more than with anyone else.

BiC: She's a prostitute, a thief, a drunkard, an arsonist, she's described towards the end as a dangerous criminal, and in fact she is a dangerous criminal because she burns down the Hudson's Bay Company store in the community,? she slaps the teacher's face when she gets off the plane, she disrupts a meeting, she's a disruptive and uncontrollable person in the book ? but you like her and identify with her. Why? Clark: She's a survivor. She refuses to give up. She had every reason to give in, and this is something, by the way, that native people have to cope with, the despair that leads to suicide and alcoholism. And although she was an alcoholic, she just would not give up. There was something in her that hulled her way through; by God, she was going to do it, and I admire that. She was based on a character whom I did not know well, a woman who, one night when we were living on the reserve, got drunk and came over to our shack and tried to get in. She was a big woman, really big. My husband is big too; he was on the other side of the door, and she could get it open, that much. We were both scared. She was yelling and cursing. I went to the window and looked out; I was the intruder, really, the outsider. She just picked up this piece of log and pitched it right through the window at me. Glass all over!

BiC: Can anger justify everything that Geraldine Gull does? "at could she do that would make you feel doubtful and equivocal about her?

Clark: I didn't have any doubts about her. When the woman broke the window, I thought, who is she? I didn't take it personally at all. We didn't know each other, really. And this is where Geraldine started. There's passivity and there's anger, right? And there's been an awful lot of passivity among native people. Now we're seeing a lot of the anger. And it's very healthy. I believe there's a need for anger.

BiC: I think it's fair to say that in this book you are not sympathetic to either of the two dominant white, exploitative influences in the Indian village ? the Church and the Hudson's Bay Company. Your sympathies are entirely with the native people. Can a novelist be so one?sided in her view of a community? Does that seem to you to be a completely legitimate approach for a novelist to take?

Clark: Yes, I think so. We have to take positions:. I mean, I didn't set out to write a political novel. In fact, I try to keep Politics with a capital P out of anything I write. I don't see that the function of a novel is to make a political statement. But it's there anyway; my opinions certainly came. through. And I wouldn't want it otherwise. I mean, why would I write if I had nothing to say? If I was just sitting on the fence? On the other hand, I thought I was being careful; I was trying to be fair. And I think it is very important to be fair. I tried to show the difficulties that the Hudson's Bay manager had there. Real difficulties. His job was on the line, he had very mixed feelings about the job he was doing, and I tried to show that. In terms of the history, I went by the facts. You know, the history of the Hudson's Bay Company and the Church. It is a fact that those people wouldn't have been in that awful swamp if the, trading post hadn't been put there.

BiC: You say, why would I write if I had nothing to say? Care to elaborate on that?

Clark: I don't think there's anything the matter with feeling you've got something you want to say. I don't mean that I think my job as a writer is to sermonize or moralize. I try to tell a good story as well as I can. Naturally, I'm going to write about what interests me, what I care about, but my primary aim is not to persuade the reader but to offer a story. I happen to be passionate about certain things. And that's part of me. I don't think I should deny that. But I don't think you should hit people over the head with it either. I'm not interested in writing a political treatise, and I don't think I did.

BiC: To turn to a question of technique. As we read the novel, we're often inside Geraldine Gull's ? an Ojibwa's ? mind. Was it hard to get inside that mind?

Clark: No, I didn't find it so. When I get into a character, I operate on feeling; it's very subjective. I just felt very strongly about her. And the more I wrote about her, the more strongly I felt. It was scary, absolutely scary.

BiC: We don't hear a lot about sex in the novel. Although Geraldine is a very sexual person, she's had a number of children, she's been a prostitute, and so on. But the actual experience of sex is not described.

Clark: I had a scene with Willa and Patrick, the Cree teacher. It was pretty good, I think. But I decided to take it out.

BiC: Yes, he falls asleep on her couch ...

Clark: It wasn't that night, it was the next one.

BiC: The next night, he stays over. I noticed that in the novel, she comes back to it and says things about last night and making love to him. At that point I thought, have I missed something?

Clark: Some other readers have had problems with that, but I took it out. I didn't want to give it more importance ... it was good, what they had, but that's all it was. I didn't want to make it precious in any way. So, it was a calculated risk. This wasn't a romance I was writing. Some people don't miss it, some people do.

BiC: I missed it, because she alludes to it. It's a big thing to her. just to come back to what she does have with Patrick Eagle. He comes into her house after she gets "bushed" ? he comes in, this man with whom she's in love ...

Clark: Infatuated.

BiC: She hugs him, and she feels "his sex against her belly." Margaret Laurence also referred to cocks as "sex. " Why is it that certain writers in Canada can't call a cock a cock?

Clark: Sometimes I do.

BiC: Yes, but not there.

Clark: Sex is very hard to write about. There may even be ? I don't know if there's a feminine way of doing it and a masculine way, I don't know ? but I'm actually just going on instinct. My instinct as a woman was to use that word there. It just seemed to be the right word. Cock would have been too pointed, if you don't mind the pun; it would have just been too, almost too gross there, and I didn't want to be gross. There are times I do want to be. And if there are, I use it, but I'm very careful about the way I use words. To me, that's the right word there.

BiC: It's just that I've never heard a man use that word about his crotch.

Clark: I'm not a man.

BiC: Let me raise another question. The book centres on the Indians' decision to move their village to a location where they can have, among other things, a sawmill, a factory, a greenhouse, an airstrip, an art gallery, and so on. I wonder if that is what Indians would want to build. It might be my idea of what Indians would want to do, but would they want to build such a village?

Clark: The village I lived in, on Hudson Bay, moved. People talked about moving ?talked about it for years. I've been keeping track of people on reserves in northern Ontario. And in fact these are things that are wanted on some reserves. There is a need to be self?sufficient; this comes up over and over again. Those ideas aren't new. I got all those ideas from reading, from my research. None of that is what I think Indians would want.

BiC: Is Geraldine Gull the culmination of your work? What do you think you've done in that novel? As an artist?

Clark: I don't know what I did. I'm so close to the material. I just know that I found it very hard to write. I felt very, very strongly about it.

BiC: The novel ends with a redflag ... Clark: I'm working with images all through the book ? of war, of confinement, inmates, all the jackets the Hudson's Bay store issued which people wore, they wore them as if they were in jail or a concentration camp ? I work with images all the time.

BiC: The "brave and tattered flag" with which the novel ends is Geraldine's beret, which fell off her head and caught on a branch as she drowned ...

Clark: 'Mat's right, the war is over for her. That's her flag, it's planted there. As somebody who writes from images, I get very worked up about them. They just matter to me so much. The more I got into that novel, the more it mattered to me. But as to what I think I did in it, I couldn't say.

BiC: To turn to your new collection of stories, the one due out in March. Can you tell me about that?

Clark: These stories are all about the same woman, one of my generation, who grew up primarily in small, out?of?the?way places. It's about family, forgiveness, and love. It's really her journey. I'm very careful there, too, to get it right.

BiC: Are you worried about hurting people?

Clark: l have worried a lot about hurting people. I worried about it in my first collection, From a High Thin Wire, worried about my dad, because the last story in it was about my mother's death. But he didn't read it. I warned him, I said I think you'll find this story too painful.

BiC: Is it important for a writer not to hurt anybody?

Clark: I don't believe in using writing for revenge. I think you have to be very careful about that. People hurt each other in all kinds of ways, and the writer has that edge of being able to write, of being able to, get back by writing. I'm aware of that, of the power of that. So it's a moral question, a very difficult, question. Because the truth as you see it matters, and you shouldn't, well, not tell your story because you're so afraid of the reaction of other people. That's self?censorship. You always have to be on the lookout for that. I have been torn by that, and I don't have the answers. thing for you to say, considering who you are. By the way, who are you? Where do you come from?