Author Interview

My son was trans and bullied. He took his own life in 2010. I wanted to write a novel that helped to de-‘other’ trans people. And I wanted to portray a heroic trans character, while at the same time educating readers about gender identity in an easy way—through a love story.

The Life Bestowed is a tale about a woman who is nobody’s second-class citizen. Kit Delaney is dealing with complications that have arisen as a result of her transition, yes, but she is wielding love as her most powerful tool, and through love, gradually restoring peace to her chaotic world. Kit is a university professor—a strong, loving, decent woman who quietly claims her space, and refuses to cast herself as a victim.

Scout Neal, who was introduced in The Hum of Bees (the first book in the Prince Edward County series), is Kit’s love match. Thrown out to the world alone at an early age, she has always taken the safest path possible, but now in her early 50s, she is realizing that she has lived her life so cautiously that she has missed half of it. It is Kit’s constancy, and the support of her friends, that helps her heal old wounds, and take the leap into a richer life.

I have a particular interest in the complexities of love and identity, so my novels often explore those two themes. The Life Bestowed is deeply emotional, and unfolds like a long, slow wave, gathering depth and momentum until it crashes to shore and sweeps your heart along with it. Though it is the second book in the Prince Edward County series, it can be read as a stand-alone novel.

I think The Life Bestowed is especially timely because of the resurgence of homophobia in some parts of the world. I think that representing our most visible—and hence most-at-risk—community members in our literature helps us all to remember how strong and brave our people really are for daring to be themselves. When I say ‘most visible,’ I’m thinking not only of trans people, but also of ‘masculine’ lesbians, ‘feminine’ gay men, and visibly non-binary folks. I’m referring to those of us who walk into a gendered bathroom, or down a street, and get singled out because we express ourselves in ways that don’t match societal expectations. It helps to remember that it was the most visible among us who led the Stonewall Riots (USA) and the Bath House Raids protests (Canada), and laid the foundation for our current civil rights movement. I think that our creative works should reflect that some of us stand out, and that we aren’t all assimilated.

Who is your favorite character in the book?

I don’t really have a favourite character. Scout and Kit are a well-matched couple. Both of them are deeply good women who are feeling their way through their lives, and doing their best. Each of them brings enormous strength to the story, as well as deep kindness. They help each other flourish. Neither is more favourite than the other.

For me, writing is like spending a lot of intimate time with other people. I never write characters I don’t like because I simply don’t want to be around them. Instead, I write about fully-human folks who make mistakes, have blind spots, and sometimes fail to be at their best. Their mistakes may have adverse effects on themselves and others, but they are never ‘bad’ people. I don’t generate conflict by pitting people against each other. I generate it by creating flawed humans thrown into difficult situations. My main characters are all worthy of forgiveness, capable of redemption, and deserve to be loved. I hope that in those ways, I aspire to be as good as they are.

What inspired the idea for The Life Bestowed?

I had the idea of writing Scout’s love story, after the night in The Hum of Bees, when she drove a tipsy Darcy home and gave her a wise piece of advice. Scout was a such quiet character, and then that scene surprised me. In writing it, I discovered that there was a lot more to her than showed on the surface. That made me want to find out what made her special. This journey of discovery is mirrored in the story line of The Life Bestowed. At the outset, Scout seems very ordinary—a little brown bird that hides in the hedges—but as the novel evolves, what is revealed is an extraordinary woman of resplendent plumage.

What was the biggest challenge writing this book?

I am not trans. My experience with the trans community first occurred via my son as he transitioned. But a teenaged, female-to-male scenario is very different from what a Canadian woman in her 50s would have experienced, coming to terms with herself before there was a visible trans community anywhere but in select larger cities. (And remember, the internet would not yet have existed in her youth!)

Writing the ‘other’ (however close a cousin the ‘other’ may be) is super fraught. There were many times, thinking about how unforgiving people can be online of any error a writer might make, I was tempted to just write something easier—like, say, two white chicks on a beach. I almost self-cancelled, in other words, instead of seeing it through.

Though I did complete the book, there are nevertheless a couple of very sensitive scenes where I chose to keep authorial distance, because I didn’t feel that those extremely personal passages were mine to depict, as a non-trans person. Could I have figured out those scenes? Yeah, probably. I’m human. I can empathize with how a person might feel. Does authorial distance make the book be less than it might have been, in those two scenes? Yeah, probably. But I have a thing against being publicly crucified, and social media makes it all too easy for critics to bring out the hammer and nails.

The writing community talks about the problems of inclusivity and diversity in the books we write, but I think there can also be reader resistance to having a straight person write about the queer experience, or a cis person writing about really intimate aspects of the trans experience, for example. From a creative point of view, the crux is that an author can’t ‘be’ everyone. I’m me, of my background and life experience. I can’t ‘be’ every other type of person, and draw on first-hand experience to write all those diverse folks into my novels. At best, I can research, and get expert reviewers to look at my work to try to catch anything that doesn’t ring true. But no writer can guarantee getting it all right, to suit readers’ wildly different expectations. By its nature, storytelling requires a narrow focus. It selects out what will be in a tale, and what has to be left out. You simply cannot describe the universe in one book, and have it take place in every different point of view.

The overall tone I took in The Life Bestowed was that of a cis-lesbian learning about loving a trans-lesbian. I didn’t try to pretend that I was a trans ‘expert,’ writing from an insider’s point of view, because I’m not. But I drew on my own life experiences that I feel are similar to trans women’s, like how stressful it is for me to go into a Ladies washroom and be challenged about my right to be there, or how in my youth, especially, I feared being mistaken for a man, and being gay-bashed on the street. Also, I had experience with being erased, when I came out in the mid-1980’s. At that time, there was no such thing as a lesbian—we were perceived as merely being ugly women who couldn’t catch a man, or who’d had a bad experience with a man, or who’d just needed a good f*ck by a man to be straightened out. Everything that made our hearts lesbian was denied.

After writing The Life Bestowed, I can certainly understand why our literature tends to run in the grooves we know, and therefore why our body of work may lack diversity. It is wickedly difficult to write the ‘other,’ both in terms of content, and in terms of public reception. And, economically, hiring subject matter experts and editors and sensitivity readers just adds to the cost of producing a book that will only ever appeal to a narrow niche of readers, and never repay the cash outlay—never mind the 4,000+ hours of writing!

The Life Bestowed was nothing short of a labour of love for me.

How did you come up with the title for your book?

My titles often reference a line in the book. In this case, the line comes from Kit, who says: “Every life is holy and I decided to live mine as it had been bestowed.”

How much research did you need to do for The Life Bestowed?

Mountains.
It took me two years to research and write this book. I had to reconnect with the community in person. And I had to sift through huge amounts of material online, some of it very technical. At one point, I had to tape several chapters of my manuscript pages to my dining room wall, just so I could more clearly “see” the flow of technical details through a particular sequence in the story. It was like trying to assemble a single puzzle from a pile that contained the pieces for ten different puzzles.

What I’ve learned is that you can research the heck out of something and still get it wrong. This can happen for a whole slew of reasons, the most significant one being that you don’t know what you don’t know. You can unknowingly overlook critical aspects of an issue, that you simply didn’t know to look for. Or you can mistakenly adopt one viewpoint as being authoritative over another more legitimate one—or you can pick an outmoded viewpoint over a more cutting-edge one. In short, you can discover that “truth” isn’t truth after all, but situational, or regional, or generational, or cultural in nature.

Another thing I’ve discovered is that research can’t give you the information you need to describe the moment-to-moment private reactions and thoughts of a specific character in a particular situation. At best, you research their world, draw on their back story, and hopefully come up with something that rings true. Sometimes you plow through hundreds of pages of documents so the character can speak one line—but say it with authority.

There are pitfalls everywhere. For instance, I use Google street view to see what a place looks like. But street images don’t give you the smell and sound and context of a place. You could see an idyllic beach in Place X and set a romantic picnic there, only to discover (after publication) that in fact that place stinks because it’s downwind from a paper mill. In my upcoming trilogy, I’ll Get You Home, a prominent Envoy lives in a wealthy section of Washington, D.C. What I knew from having lived in that city, was that that rich enclave had been built atop an old Army chemical dump. I set his home there intentionally, to show that grand outward appearances can also mask a toxic underbelly.

Online research is complicated by the fact that search engines do not give you “everything there is” on a given topic. As you work, the search engine ‘learns’ what you click on, and gives you more of that, selecting from its own internal index of most visited sites. So you aren’t necessarily going to see divergent viewpoints or minority viewpoints on a given topic, unless you specifically go looking for them. And, again, you don’t always know what to go looking for.

If at all possible, I try to visit the environments I describe. You discover details in person that you will never learn online. For example, while writing The Hum of Bees, I visited a lavender farm in Prince Edward County. The friend I went with noticed that in the fields, you can hear the hum of the bees pollinating the plants. That observation became part of a scene in the book, and from that, I pulled out the book title! I never would have gotten that online. (Thank you, Linda!)

Another thing you learn in person, is how people talk about what they do. Farmers don’t talk like sailors. Occupational speech is informed by the work. Harvesting the land is different from harvesting the sea. By visiting in person, I get a chance to pick up dialogue as well as physical details no one would bother sharing online. A sample detail? Where does the farmer keep their secateurs—in a pouch on their hip, or hanging on a rusty hook in the shed? That detail may underpin character description. (One of those farmers lives and breathes gardening. The other may be a farmer who’s mechanized everything, or lost their love of gardening, or retired, or…whatever.) Every detail helps to tell a story.

Although your novel will be judged as if everything is fixed and definable, the truth is that research aims at a moving target. Here’s one example: Hospitals develop their own protocols for treating a given medical condition. Benchmarks for treatment (e.g., lab values, or criteria for surgical intervention) may thus differ from Hospital A to Hospital B, or from region A to Region B.
Also, some information just might not be available to answer a particular situation in your story. For example, medical research is concerned with protocols that keep patients alive, so there are plenty of studies about how to do that. But what if a family has to decide whether to remove a patient from life support? It’s not like there are clinical studies where they pull the plug on one group of patients and leave it on for a control group to see what happens. (Some research is simply unethical to conduct.)
For The Hum of Bees, I read over 600 pages of documents about how cases move procedurally through the British Columbia Supreme Court. I boiled that complicated process down, wrote my scenes, then asked a lawyer-friend to review my work. Despite my extensive research, I still had errors to correct. For this reason, I think that getting help from experts can be super helpful. (Finding the right helpers is its own conversation.)

Research fuels the creative process. I read somewhere that if you have writer’s block, it’s because you don’t know enough to be able to continue. If you are missing something, that is why you are stumped. I find this true. When I get stymied, I go do more research. Often, that sparks a new idea or solution.

For The Life Bestowed, I hired a professional editor, trans sensitivity readers, and a medical subject matter expert tocheck my work. That doesn’t guarantee that I got everything right, but at the very least it gave me more confidence that I had my feet beneath me, and that I wasn’t just inventing stories in the private world of my own head.

Despite the challenges, I consider research to be the lifeblood of a novel.

What is your writing process like?

Any time I ever tried to use a detailed outline, my characters felt too constrained, and rebelled. They demand the right to be who they are, and to have things evolve organically. When I start writing, I know the general direction of travel—but from there, I ‘pants’. I find that by letting the story unfold dynamically, I end up with far more layering and subtlety than when I try to follow an outline. IMHO, an outline forces you to know everything at the outset. An organic approach allows things to bubble up that you never would have dreamed of, until it revealed itself in the thicket of the story.

The hardest part of pantsing is that when you finish a scene, you often don’t know what happens next. And that’s like stepping out over an abyss. Usually, I just have to go walk the dog or wash dishes until it comes to me, what to do next.

I think that when I write, I am connected to a creative energy in the universe. I like my muses and their work process just fine.
How do you celebrate when you finish your book?

I read someone else’s book for a change. (I don’t read other people’s work while I’m writing. I need to be in my own head.)
What is the most valuable piece of advice you’ve been given about writing, and by whom?

I’ve worked as a professional writer and editor for most of my work life, so I’ve been accumulating bits and pieces of craft all along. My years as a reporter and technical writer built a lot of self-discipline. I can sit down and write non-fiction on command, and produce professional-quality documents to deadline.

Creative writing, though, is different. For me, it comes from a soul place, so I am disciplined, yes, but I do not force anything. I don’t demand that my novels meet deadlines. I may go for weeks—or even months, when I’m between books— before the next story coalesces enough to start writing it. This simmering is vital to my writing process. As a book starts bubbling, random scenes come into my head, and I start jotting down notes and bits of dialogue. (I joke that when I die and folks come to clean out my house, they’re going to find all these little pieces of paper with dialog all over the place.) Once I get rolling, a lot comes to me at bedtime, so I keep a notepad by my bed. My poor dog must think I’m nuts: I turn off the light. Pause. Turn on the light. Scribble. Turn off the light. Pause. Turn on the light. Scribble. .. etc. She’s learned to sleep through.

I’ve only ever felt blocked once or twice, and it was when I was trying to use an outline, and to force a story to go in a direction that it did not want to go. Inevitably, the solution was to unravel the story, like a knitted sweater, back to the point where I tried to force it to submit to my outline, and to start again from there. After that happened a couple of times, I just quit trying to work with outlines. They don’t breathe enough for me.

One thing I DO find helpful, is to write a point-form list of things that need to happen in a character arc, as in: To get from this attitude to that attitude, this character has to change in the following ways: item 1, item 2, item 3… etc. Once I figure out an arc, I have to come up with ways to dramatize the growth. Every novel is a tapestry of interwoven character arcs, and plot arcs.

What has helped or hindered you most when writing a book?

Help: I write about themes that interest me. The process of writing helps me to figure things out.

Hinder: I physically can’t sit at a keyboard for the long hours that I used to.

When you’re writing an emotional or difficult scene, how do you set the mood?

Mostly, the emotions are in my heart, so I just draw from the feelings. Occasionally, I’ll use instrumental music to help me hold onto the character’s state of mind or mood. Sometimes, especially at the beginning of a book, I’ll use photos and music to help me hold onto the emerging character. Later, as I get to know the characters better, those props aren’t necessary.

What do you do to get inside your character’s heads?

I find that writing in third person past tense creates an emotional distance between me and the character, and keeps them at arm’s length. Third person makes me write like they’re someone I’m observing, rather than someone I’m being. That leads to narration (telling) instead of dramatization (showing), and it blocks a lot of insights that I would gain if I were “living them” instead. So, I write the first drafts of my scenes in first person, as if I am the point of view character living that scene in the current moment. After I’ve harvested all the intimate physical and emotional insights that come from ‘being’ that character, I change the scene into third person, past tense and edit and revise future drafts from there.

The other thing that helps is that sometimes I just have a sequence of dialogue in my head that’s the emotional core of the scene. I’ll get that down, then circle back to fill in the POV character insights and action tags. Another key thing is to write the scene from the point of view of the character who has the most to lose in it. That raises the emotional stakes, and gives you material to work with (i.e., what they’re feeling and fearing). These approaches have been very helpful to me.

Do you feel bad putting your characters through the wringer?

When you love your characters, you are tempted to make life easy for them because you care about them and you don’t want them to suffer. However, in order to build tension, not just in a scene, but over the arc of the novel, you have to leave them aching, or feeling inadequate, or regretful, or in some other state of unresolved emotional turmoil. The reader takes that in, and this builds the angst in them. Little by little, you build the desire in the reader for that character’s needs to be fulfilled. This creates reader buy-in, dramatic tension, and page turning.

One excellent writer I used to read in my younger days, had this series where an unrequited relationship ran through the novels. But in one novel, she requited the love, and it was like popping a balloon. All that juicy angst disappeared. They were happy, the yearning gone. If you want reader engagement, you have to make them yearn for something that you won’t give them until the end of the book. You gotta make everybody ache—characters as well as readers. I think that’s why people read romances: to feel.

The other reason why it is important not to fix everything for your characters is this: There’s a kind of hero’s quest in romance, too. Lovers have to earn their mates. They have to prove that they are worthy of each other. Setbacks and tribulations are tests that show whether the characters have what it takes to see a relationship through. That way, as a reader, when you get to the Happily Ever After (HEA), you are confident that these lovers can make it. And this makes you feel good.

I also think that for readers to have confidence in the story, they have to be able to see inside the minds of both of the main characters, to know what they are honestly thinking and how they are processing the events as they are happening. Without both perspectives, I feel that the love is only hearsay—one person’s interpretation of a set of encounters. I personally don’t commit my heart to a story written in only one character’s point of view, because I don’t know what’s going on in the other person’s head. I am not given evidence that both of those characters have bought into the relationship, so I remain cautious, rather than invested.

As an example of ruining a character’s life: In my upcoming trilogy, I’ll Get You Home, Brenna is forced to make a wartime decision that she knows her lover Grace will be shocked by. Since this book is not only about surviving war, but about getting home again afterwards, the decision carries the tension back home with them, in the form of a secret Brenna can’t bring herself to confess. The stress of getting out of the war zone is resolved, but the relationship isn’t. Oh, how heartache makes great reading!

Have you ever hated one of your characters?

I think there’s plenty of drama in just trying to be a decent human being, so I don’t write unlikeable central characters, in order to create conflict.

In the ‘Look Inside,’ I’ve seen some Ice Queens start out very mean and as a result, not bought the book. I don’t want to spend time with her. I think that if you write a hateful character, readers won’t form an attachment to her. But if you write a flawed, good, person, then no matter what blunders she commits, the reader will still root for her. Better to write a good woman who’s temporarily behaving poorly, due to other pressures. A reader can still connect to her.

But say you need a villain? Well, even a selfish, villainous, walk-on character can be layered by having there be a reason why they behave that way, or providing evidence that they’re not always that way. You might not resolve their issues in your novel, and they might still remain a source of friction for the MC, but even so, you haven’t created a one-dimensional person, either. Here’s a snippet from The Life Bestowed about a hater: “Look at him. He’s a yard dog. He’s been on a chain so long, all he’s got left is snarling. You could set a bowl of compassion in front of him and he’d knock it over, trying to bite you.”

Some day, I’ll tell you about the unexpected generosity showed to me by a homeless ex-con (triple manslaughter) that I would later sit with in a doorway and chat with. You might think such a man had no scruples, but in fact, he actually had his own sense of honour. (“Oh, no, Patty. I’d never hit a woman.”)

Have you ever fallen in love with one of your characters?

I’m a little bit in love with all of my main characters. I really like my gentle-hearted strong women.

What type of books do you enjoy reading the most?

The first chapter book I ever read by myself was called Mrs. Mike. It was a romance set in Canada. I still have that book, loose pages held together by rubber bands. Romance is my favourite genre. In the past, I also read detective stories and sci-fi. Today I wouldn’t mind reading detective stories, but I find the level of violence in them is over the top. I don’t need my brain filled with horror—I say this, just as I am finishing up a trilogy set in a war zone! (Long story.) Anyway, I would be interested in a whodunit, if it omitted the gruesome details. (I DO read some Louise Penny…) I am just rediscovering sci-fi.

Are there any books or authors that inspired you to become a writer?

I really like Luanne Rice’s early fiction. (Her stories are heterosexual.) Her books are literate, and always feature a love story, family relationships, and sometimes a bit of magic. She didn’t inspire me to become a writer, but her stories seemed like something to aspire to execute as engagingly.

What books did you grow up reading?

I read everything from Nancy Drew to romances to John LeCarré to murder mysteries to funny essays and science fiction. In my 30s, I realized that all the authors I liked were over 50, because their books contained interesting insights into life and human relationships that younger scribes didn’t yet usually have.

Do you only read books in one genre or do you genre hop?

My favourite novels are ones that are a blend of romance and drama (what I call ‘chewy’ romances). They’re not just a superficial girl-meets-girl story, but often explore a theme. I like a diversity of story types but usually end up in the romance section because I need a happy ending. I don’t want to fall in love with a character, then have her be killed off or screwed over in the end. Put her through hell, fine, but let her have her happy outcome, dagnabbit. I have enough real life to deal with.

Because I am having trouble finding chewy romances—especially ones that feature older women—I decided to write them myself.

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