GH: I was very taken by your editor, James Langer's comments at the launch, in
particular that when he got the manuscript he thought it was a dystopian novel
but that by the time it was in print (i.e. post Trump) it had taken on an
unsettling reality. I agree
wholeheartedly and would put Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale in the
same category. I think this is the
basis for my love/hate relationship with your book. Do comment!
CFP: It’s funny because someone wrote me to say they had just
finished Skeet Love in a weekend and the only other book they’d done that with
was The Handmaid’s Tale, which they hated and admired at the same time, so
that’s a compliment I guess.
Watching the primaries and the election in the States
while I was working on the book was a strange experience in that the way things
unfolded had an inevitable and nightmarish quality to them, but it did not
strike me as particularly surprising that Trump won, or that Bernie Sanders was
screwed out of his party’s nomination, or that Clinton ran a campaign that was
virtually free of any kind of policy that would appeal to working or middle
class voters.
I think the election showed a lot of the justified rage
people have toward the political elite in the States and that was something
that happened to be coming across in what I was writing. I think there’s a
similar feeling in Canada as well, where you have this neo-liberal selling a
fuck load of armaments to the Saudis and then saying in this smug kinda way
that there won’t be any electoral reform in Canada because everyone’s so happy
with the current government as opposed to the Harper regime—all the while
paying lip service to being socially progressive.
While Shane, Nina and Brit are young people, and lead
these sort of fucked up lives, they aren’t stupid, and this sham of a democracy
is something they can see right through. Shane’s take on conspiracies doesn’t
really seem that far-fetched given what we’ve learned from Snowden, Chelsea
Manning, and WikiLeaks. It is true that there are powerful forces working
counter to the interests of the working-class, but it’s not what people like
Alex Jones and David Icke describe; it’s more COINTELPRO, and that realization
for Shane is something I felt I needed to explore.
GH: My daily research life and your
novel collided, I had just read
the section about violence with a hammer and then came across hammer-violence in an interview. Next,
I'm reading in the Guardian about sex robots as a growing industry in the U.K.
(now that dolls can be invested with A.I.) and I come across Shane's rant about
clones. No wonder, I started
having nightmares.
CFP: There’s an obvious homage to Philip K. Dick in Skeet
Love, and that notion of the clone or replicant is at the heart of it, and at
the heart of Shane’s paranoia for that matter. Incidentally, “skin job” (how
Shane’s Dad refers to his taxidermied animals) is lifted from the movie
Bladerunner, and is a colloquial term for replicant. Part of what I was
interested in as someone who reads and writes books was my feeling that these
fictional characters who take up so much of my time often are more dear to me
than real-life people, and the question of whether the fact that these
characters are fictional lessens somehow the meaning of my love for them/real
people. Thus, the letters from Brit.
GH: I couldn't make up my mind if the writing was a form of
exorcism or indulgence.
CFP: Both.
GH: The other "young" writer with an attraction for
the "dark" side is Joel Thomas Hynes but I don't know if I am off the mark in saying this: Joel's
territory is around the bay and yours is urban. Joel is trying for primal and you are more stylish (and I'd
say sophisticated). Share your
reaction please.
CFP: I think there are similarities in our work, though I’ve
only read Down To The Dirt, so it’s tough for me to say.
I remember reading a Ray Guy blurb for that book in which
he says something to the effect that Joel’s work was an antidote to the many
embroidered fantasies about Newfoundland culture with which we’ve become so
enamoured, or something like that, but I’m not a fan of replacing one fantasy
with another, even if the things described are “grittier” or “darker” or seem
more truthful simply because it is
grittier or darker, just for the sake of doing so.
Honestly, some character getting bombed at a dive in St.
John’s and fucking his cousin or whatever isn’t much compared to what Angela
Carter, or Ta Nahisi Coates, or even Margaret Atwood has going on, so I
wouldn’t consider my work particularly dark compared to those.
GH: Do you think "the angry young man" label goes
against you? I am concerned that
older readers will not give the book its due citing "generational"
differences.
CFP: As a white, straight (?), cis male, I have very little reason
to be angry.
And given what I write about, and given that the readers
of literary fiction are predominantly middle-class, white, Baby Boomer women
with plenty of leisure time, I’m not expecting to be catapulted into literary
superstardom anytime soon, so those differences, if they exist, are not
generational, but class based.
Many of my characters are angry, and rightfully so. As someone
who comes from a working-class background, I’m drawn to those stories, and
drawn to representing the beauty and the tragedy of those lives without
romanticizing them. Unlike Shane, I’m no tourist, who’s a phone call away to
Daddy for help when the shit hits the fan.
GH: The book begs to be read aloud.
CFP: Agree.
GH: I kept searching for the music in the dialogue and
narrative. Can you comment on the
influence of rap on the rhythms and vocabulary?
CFP: Rap is the filter through which the characters speak, but
their story is almost classic Canadian. I was thinking a lot about Atwood’s
examination of the three generational narrative in CanLit (from Survival I think), and was
exploring how it would manifest in a more contemporary or near future setting. 8
Mile was a big influence, and
watching the movie and reading that script, I thought how wholesome it is—I was
bored with it actually.
GH: Actually, the example of rap as a way of understanding the
novel intrigues me. Lots of people
like rap but don't condone violence, guns, drug culture, perhaps they tap into
the discontent or anger. Is that
what they share in –that could make Skeet Love a book "for our
times"…?
CFP: Yes.
GH: Something in the novel confused me as a reader and you are
welcome to tell me I'm just stunned.
I found the "voices" of the three central characters so
similar that I had to check who was speaking.
CFP: There is def some overlap, but I wanted Shane in
particular to speak as though he’d just lifted things from Urban Dictionary,
while Nina and Brit are more organic and slightly less self-conscious.
GH: I was curious about the convention of the letters
to C.F. I like the emotional truth
of them but how did you intend them?
Was it an ironic device?
CFP: With the letters, I was interested in some of the things
Shane mentions when talking about quantum mechanics—in particular the notions
of entanglement, superposition, and the measurement problem. Entanglement I
find especially fascinating, and is an apt metaphor for the relationship
between an author and their characters. To a degree, Skeet Love is a book about
art and the artistic process—all of the characters are explicitly creative—and
I think that Brit’s final dilemma at the end of the novel is representative of
how an artist can proceed (or not) in the face of an overwhelmingly brutal
patriarchal culture.
I also find appealing the idea of making myself
vulnerable in what I write—if I’m in a position to explore so intimately the
lives of Shane, Nina and Brit, shouldn’t I be at risk in some way outside
beyond professionally?
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