Why am I not writing more explicitly about what it’s like to be a woman in the wings of CanLit, second-guessing my work at every opportunity? Why am I not writing novels that talk about my family’s working class background, for example, or my grandfather’s Quebecois history, for another, or novels that funnel themselves into dialect and humour and relevancy? Why am I drawn instead to that God-or something-that spoke to me on that tiny little island, to novels of men who grow wings, to stories about girls who are overwhelmed by miracles and Tooth Fairies who come to collect? Less intelligent, less political, less aware, less ambitious. Who cares about fairies and miracles in a world where the gritty stories are the ones that seem to speak the loudest truths? I worry that writing about pretend things-as opposed to realistic things on the pretend stage of the novel-marks me, somehow, as less. In the age of the global story, where the talk is ever more about the political that sings in a novel or the racial tension that plays itself out against the family saga of Person X, there seems to be comparatively little room for stories that play with whimsy as much as they play with words. This was hard for me to admit, as a writer.
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