Full of Lit: Paradise & Elsewhere From Kathy Page is Filled With Worlds That Might Have Been

The Globe & Mail included today’s featured short story collection, Paradise & Elsewhere by Kathy Page (Biblioasis), as one of their “best in new small press books” earlier in the spring and we’d have to agree. “Of Paradise,” included in our Short Story Month anthology Full of Lit, will give the reader an excellent feel for the collection as a whole. Keep reading to find out more from Kathy Page and Biblioasis!

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Amy Bloom called Paradise & Elsewhere a "moody, shape-shifting, provocative" collection, and that’s a good place to start. Imagine stories as moody and incendiary as Angela Carter’s, but as wondrous as One Hundred Years of Solitude. This collection is a departure for Page, whose previous works (including Alphabet and The Story of My Face) were much more realistic: Paradise & Elsewhere is more like a book of myths for worlds that might have been. The people and places we visit are just to the left of reality. There are stories of journeys, travellers, pilgrims, and strangers; there are stories about how we relate to the world, how we acquire wisdom, and how we gain or lose power; and—as there are in many fairy tales, way deep down—there are stories about how we reconcile ourselves to death. There are themes of globalism, and feminism too. Her work shows the influence of Borges, Marquez, Calvino, Barthes, Cixous, Jung. You open the book and the thought emerges almost like a smell: here, you think, is someone who reads smart and reads deep.

"Of Paradise" demonstrates many of Kathy Page’s strengths. You’ll notice it’s extremely short—the printed version runs only ten pages—and written almost entirely in the second person plural, which is extremely rare. The speaker of the story is one member of a collectivity of women, who were once (we assume) the inhabitants of an ancient village. A desert village that prides itself on the beauty of its skin-painting, its bowl-work, the grains it harvests, that sort of thing. Over the course of the story we see the narrative shift back and forth between a time when all was peaceful, and the not-quite-so-peaceful present: a stranger’s arrival disrupts their (unreflexive? previously unchallenged?) sense of unity. They experience sexual conflict, their values shift, they grow uncomfortable with one another. In other words, within ten pages Kathy Page gives us the fall from grace in miniature, without falling back on names, allusions, or religious doctrines. Everything you need to know about this civilization can be seen in how the narrator uses words like we, I, she. It’s brilliant. And the conclusion—which we WON’T give away—is one heck of a surprise.

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We asked the author… Kathy Page

Tell us what your collection is about in 140 characters or less.
Travel, trade, money and sex: what happens when a stranger arrives at the gate. Or on the shore.

Do you have a favourite story in your collection?
I think it has to be “Low Tide,”  the newest story in the book. This story was inspired by the Scottish selkie myth, but takes the idea a stage or two further. I really enjoyed writing it because it was one of those times when the character, in this case the narrator too, was in the driving seat and pushed the story along. I just had to let it happen. It was also a great pleasure to write about lighthouses, which have always fascinated me, and to include the albatrosses and their wonderful courtship dance.

One that gave you more trouble than the others?
Most of my stories go through many drafts and I don’t really see this as trouble because I enjoy playing with them. But “Clients,” a slightly futuristic take on the way we trade parts of ourselves to each other, was an obstinate piece. I kept looking at it and feeling there was something not right. It was only when putting  the manuscript together to send to Biblioasis that I realized that the problem was in the voice of the narrator. Once I understood, it was easy to fix.

Did you consciously decide to be a short story writer — or did the format choose you?
The story chooses. It chooses you and it tells you what it is. Some ideas feel like story ideas, and some feel like novel ideas (I’m a novelist, too). It’s normally pretty clear from the outset, and you can’t force one to become the other. But perhaps you can make yourself more open to one or the other.

Who is your favourite short story writer and why?
One? I have at least forty favourites! But how about the four Cs: Carver, Ray; Carter, Angela; Calvino, Italo and Chekhov, Anton.

Carter and Carver are polar opposites: he grittily realistic and pared down; she, playful and baroque. Calvino’s range is extraordinary and his most wonderful story, “The Spiral,” is told from the point of view of a mollusk, yet still makes me cry. All-seeing Chekhov sees us warts and all and never judges. I was going to say he stays with the human, but that’s not true: for example, there’s a wonderful story called “Gusev,” at the end of which the narrator seems to slip into the point of view of a shoal of fish, and then of the ocean itself.

What makes short stories so different (besides the obvious) than other writing formats?
From both the writer’s and the readers’ points of view, there’s an amazing opportunity to take risks and explore possibilities, without investing years (as writer) or days (as reader) in the process. Another wonderful thing is that because a short story is taken in whole, at one sitting, it may be understood structurally and remembered very clearly afterwards. It’s perhaps more like a poem than it is like a novel.

What would be the title of your memoir, if you were ever to write one?
I promise not to. But if forced, I quite like What If?
 
Kathy Page is the author of seven novels, including Alphabet (a Governor General’s Award finalist in 2005), The Story of My Face (longlisted for the Orange Prize in 2002), and The Find (shorlisted for the ReLit Award in 2011), as well as many short stories, previously collected in As In Music. She recently co-edited In the Flesh (Brindle & Glass, 2012), a collection of personal essays about the human body, and has written for television and radio. Born in the UK, Kathy has lived on Salt Spring Island since 2001. Alphabet will be reissued by Biblioasis in Fall 2014.

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We asked the publisher… Biblioasis
 
Biblioasis prides itself on publishing more short story collections than just about anyone out there, so when we say we think this is one of the best collections we’ve seen in a long time, that’s saying a lot. We love short stories because there’s so much room for playfulness—in voice, structure, point of view, the compression and expansion of time, in dialogue. You can pack them full of emotion or load them up with philosophy and not worry about reader burnout. You can read one on the subway to work or read another on lunch break, which is how they were read originally, when the form really started to flourish in nineteenth-century newspapers and magazines. When a good short story is in my hands it can be as therapeutic as a weekend at the cottage or a trip to the park.

Otherwise? We believe that the short story is the genre in which Canadian literature has made its most indelible contribution to world literary culture, and we’re proud to foster the authors who are trying to take that contribution to the next level. We love the way Kathy Page incorporates the beauty of European and Latin American magic realism with a grounded (if-not-gritty) North American approach to the big questions: death, love, sex, power. She’s got a poet’s ability to compress significant details into small phrases, and her intellect is phenomenal. Most of the time it feels like you’ll never be quick enough to catch her mind at work.

–Tara Murphy

Biblioasis is a literary press based in Windsor, Ontario, committed to publishing the best poetry, fiction and non-fiction in beautifully crafted editions.

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Thank you to Kathy & Tara for answering our questions! Get your copy of Full of Lit, including Kathy’s story "Of Paradise" by clicking the buy button below. Get caught up on all of our Short Story Month coverage here.

_______Edited from the original post, published on the LPG blog