No place like home
Bookninja has posted a lengthy conversation between authors (and good friends) Lynn Coady and Christy Ann Conlin, in which they debate the pros and cons of writing about a place you’ve never lived in yourself. Because they’re both from Nova Scotia, they talk a lot about Maritime-set novels by non-Maritime authors, like Scotch River by Linda Little and The Wind Seller by Rachael Preston.
CONLIN: I opened [Little’s] book with that bristling sense of territorialism we’re talking about. But her book was great. It transcends place and culture. It’s bigger than that. She does nail contemporary Nova Scotian culture as though she’s from here. […] It makes me think of Teodor Józef Konrad Korzeniowski who we know as Joseph Conrad. He didn’t even speak English until he was sixteen and then he didn’t even publish a novel, god bless him, until he was in his mid thirties. And he is considered to be a fine English novelist. He adopted English culture and I think he was able to see into the heart of it, if you’ll pardon the phrasing, in a way few from England could.
Then Coady turns the conversation around and begins to wonder if it isn’t harder to write about a place that you lived in.
COADY: This is a whole other problem: the feeling that, as a local writer you are somehow complicit in the construction of a twee, fakey stereotype simply by having written what you know best. Then the meanies in Toronto make fun of books set on the east coast for being full of caricatured, kilt-wearing alcoholic fisherman and you remember your last novel and think, Oh shit. Then the phone rings and it’s your drunk uncle Pete slurring something about how he dropped his sporrin over the side of the lobster boat.
The conversation starts off kind of draggy but gets a lot more interesting and lively in the second half, so Quillblog recommends skimming their lengthy opening exchanges and reading from there.
