ALU Summer Book Club: An interview with Lynn Hutchinson Lee, author of Nightshade

Lynn Hutchinson Lee’s novel Nightshade draws you into its magical and haunting orbit with the story of Zelda, a young Romany woman who’s restless in her life and deeply drawn to the idea of something more. When Zelda and her family are hired to work on a tobacco farm in Southern Ontario, Zelda is pulled into the world of the wealthy and magnetic Trixie Tormentine. What begins as a kind of escape from her own humble lifestyle slowly takes on a more unsettling edge of power and manipulation. With her grandmother Puri Dai’s cautions about a devil in the fields, Zelda finds herself questioning what she’s really stepped into.

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Read on for our interview with the author.

ALL LIT UP: Thanks for taking time to talk to us about your novel Nightshade. It’s a book that resists easy categorizations and has a dreamlike quality to it. Were you thinking about genre as you wrote, or did the book just naturally settle into its own shape?

LYNN HUTCHINSON LEE: I didn’t write with genre in mind. I considered the heart of the story and ways in which it needed to be expressed. The narrative unfolded along its own path, each part incorporating its own character. Anuja Varghese called Nightshade “evocative and surreal, laced through with dread and magic.” The elements of dread and the surreal are one aspect of the book.

It’s also been described as literary fiction, magic realist, gothic, and so on, and it definitely has those aspects as well. They serve Nightshade’s trajectory rather than having the narrative confined to a specific genre, which for me would have made the story and characters one-dimensional. But having said that, Nightshade does tick all the boxes in the Southern Ontario Gothic tradition, described in a Toronto Reference Library blog as “elements of the Gothic – repression, desire, trauma, monstrosity, the uncanny, the supernatural – to explore or expose racial, gendered, religious, and political hypocrisies.”

ALU: One major theme of Nightshade is labour and exploitation. The novel portrays the harsh realities of agricultural work among marginalized and migrant communities but does so alongside moments of care and connection within Zelda’s family. What kind of research went into the novel? What informed the way you wrote about those communities and dynamics?

LYNN: Nightshade emerged from stories of my dad’s family who came to the southern Ontario tobacco belt in the early 20^th century and settled in Tillsonburg. He told me of their gruelling work in the tobacco fields there; but because I set Nightshade in the 1980s, I had to research the changes in working conditions, equipment, housing, and so on. At that time, migrant workers were brought in from Jamaica and Mexico, so I researched those working conditions, which were no less harsh than during the 1920s.

My research covered decades from the 1940s to the present. I read historical records, monographs on the tobacco industry, labour practices, testimonies and personal histories. There was a short NFB film from I think the ’50s that really drove home the nature of work and precarious lives of the tobacco pickers. I was particularly moved by a girl’s narrative in the U.S., who picked tobacco alongside her mother in order to lighten her mother’s work load. I also visited the tobacco belt, and was horrified to see a migrant worker deliberately run off the road. That really stayed with me. I ended up writing versions of it in two places in the narrative.

I thought of the ways in which people might survive, persevere, or break apart. Families or communities could either fracture and self-destruct under the weight of such dire conditions, or they could come together. I thought about family and community solidarity, and the tenderness and resilience required to live with daily racism, exploitation, poverty, and grinding, precarious labour. The clear strength that Zelda’s family and the Guatemalan women brought to their experiences and to the unfolding narrative informed the ways in which I dealt with their intimacy, solidarity and steadfastness. Above all, I discovered their inherent dignity.

ALU: Puri Dai is such an unusual and memorable narrator. What possibilities did writing from the perspective of a puppet open up for you?

LYNN: Puri Dai is inspired by a puppet made by my dad and his family, part of a small troupe of puppets that they built and travelled with across southern Ontario, performing at garden parties of wealthy tobacco farmers. She’s over 100 years old, the size of a child, and is the guardian of our household. She keeps watch from a chair on our second floor, and for some people she’s a terrifying sight. I became acutely aware of her power, if that’s the right word, when a dying relative lived with us for a time. In those days, Puri Dai was in a glass cabinet in our relative’s bedroom, and knowing how people often reacted to her, we asked if we should remove her. Our relative said no. She considered Puri Dai to be a guardian, a protector.

That gave me some ideas, along with living our daily lives around Puri Dai, about how her voice, her essence, and her specific character would resonate with humans. A wise, all-seeing crone. Because a puppet embodies whatever stories and energy I chose to put into her, the possibilities were endless. One important element was Nightshade’s backstory that needed telling, and which I filtered through her voice. I thought of her as channelling the wisdom of the elders, particularly at a time when Zelda lacked the firm hand and guidance of a grandparent. For Romanies, families are at the core of everything, and Zelda was in a way rootless. I wanted Puri Dai to fill that empty space.  

ALU: The relationship between Zelda and Puri Dai feels like an emotional centre of the novel. What did you want to explore through that bond between younger and older generations of women?

LYNN: I’ve been at both ends of that spectrum—the younger restless reckless woman and the watchful outspoken grandmother. (Sometimes as I was writing Nightshade I thought of this relationship almost as a conversation between my younger and older selves!) I wanted to explore the stern love, patience and protectiveness of the grandmother intuitively knowing when to speak her mind and when to hold back; and I wanted to explore the wilful resentment and desire for autonomy and even precarity of the younger generation; and finally, the struggles in which the women of both generations grew to respect, appreciate and deeply love each other.

ALU: The devil of the tobacco fields feels both real but also a manifestation of Zelda’s psychological state. Did you think of the devil as a literal force within the world of the novel, or more as an embodiment of temptation and destruction, or something else?

LYNN: For me, the devil of the tobacco fields occupies both spaces. When I was writing him, I saw him as being much more than the supernatural embodiment of a fearsome cautionary or folk tale. For me he was flesh and blood and then some. In a way he’s a terrifying cipher, becoming what a reader either most fears or requires of him. I see him as a very real being in a hazy material sense—Zelda finds his cigarette butts in the motel parking lot. The veil between the worlds is thin when supernatural beliefs are involved; and to me, at least, he’s simultaneously a living and a supernatural being who embodies the essence of evil and temptation. In existing in more than one world he’s as ephemeral as a nightmare and leaves the reader guessing.

ALU: What surprised you most about your own characters by the end of the writing process?

LYNN: As the story evolved, what surprised me was how the characters found their true natures and autonomy, and ended up growing beyond my expectations. For instance, I marvelled at Rhodie’s newfound defiance after a lifetime of trying to stay invisible. As well as Zelda’s. I was startled by Zelda’s appreciation of revenge—even though she wasn’t responsible for the death at the end of the book, I think in her own way she celebrated it. As I wrote the aftermath, I realized that the event, grim as it was, allowed the characters to move forward with their lives.

Nor was I expecting reclusive Liza May to come out of her shell, particularly after the hideous events that drove the women from the motel where they’d been lodged. I also hadn’t expected to discover Zelda’s single-minded determination about her future, particularly when it meant a serious conflict with her mother. But Zelda stood her ground. I hadn’t planned for that! It’s wonderful to see characters coming into their own. The author sometimes just has to follow their lead.  

ALU: Now that readers are spending time with your novel, are there aspects of the book you feel people are noticing in ways you didn’t anticipate?

LYNN: Readers made some things much clearer to me. One reader talked about what she suddenly realized was the true—and deeply malevolent—nature of Trixie Tormentine, after (the reader) connected the dots, so to speak—remembering gossip about a tragic death mentioned much earlier in the book. Along the same lines, another commented on Trixie’s real motives in engaging Zelda, particularly after the ugly ‘picnic’ incident. Those two observations clarified much about Trixie’s character and motives that I hadn’t thought about too deeply.

An interesting observation came from one of my daughters, who lives in the midst of coyote-land—she said Nightshade’s coyotes would have eaten their prey, leaving only bones and entrails. It hadn’t even occurred to me when I was writing that part. She also said that the final puppet performance was more real to her than that particular scene. (But she and her sister grew up with our puppet so Puri Dai is real as it gets!) Other readers made a guess at where the friendship between Zelda and Harry, a local farmer, would go. I loved that friendship, and I deliberately left it open, inviting readers to imagine how it might blossom in any direction; so I enjoyed hearing the possible scenarios.

Lynn Hutchinson Lee is an award-winning author of Anglo-Romany descent on her father’s side. Her short fiction was published in Room, Wagtail: The Roma Women’s Poetry Anthology, and elsewhere. An excerpt from Nightshade  won first prize in the 2022 Joy Kogawa Award for Fiction and was shortlisted for the 2022 Swedish Writers’ Festival Prize. In 2023, Nightshade was shortlisted for the Guernica Prize. Her flash fiction won the Editors’ Choice Award in Guernica’s This Will Only Take a Minute. Her novella Origins of Desire in Orchid Fens is published with Stelliform Press. Lynn writes in Toronto, cooks for friends, feeds birds, and gets lost in her garden. Visit her online at lynnhutchinsonlee.ca.

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Thanks to Lynn for answering our questions! Get Nightshade here on All Lit Up for 15% off (discount code SUMMEROFSTRANGE), all summer long. And join us next Tuesday when the team gets together to chat about our reactions to the book!

Keep on top of all summer book club happenings here.