Getting Ready To Get ‘Low’

Nova Scotia writer Anna Quon is preparing for the release of her second novel, Low, published by LPG member Invisible Publishing. Her first novel, Migration Songs, was a big hit with us (as well as critics, it was nominated for the Dartmouth Book Award), so we were excited to catch up with Anna to learn more about Low in anticipation of its release on June 15th.

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Tell us what your book is about in 140 characters or less.
Sometimes it takes a hurricane, a mental illness and a man who talks to dead people to lose your inner child and find your grown up self.
 
Low is your second book; your first, Migration Songs, was published with Invisible in fall 2009. What was different about writing your second book compared to the first?
Writing Low was easier in some ways and harder in others. With my first book I felt like I had nothing to lose, I just wrote it the best way I knew how. This time around, I had a bit of an agenda. I wanted to write about the experience of being mentally ill and ending up in the mental hospital, in a fairly realistic way. I don’t think that I succeeded but what I ended up with was still a story I wanted to tell. 
 
With my second book I also had some idea of what to expect from the revision and editing process. My editor, Michelle MacAleese, had a different style than Stephanie Domet, who edited Migration Songs—more hands off, which meant less hand-holding for me, which was a bit scary, but I think I had fewer emotional ups and downs this time around, so maybe I was ready for that.
 
Where did the inspiration for Low come from? Are you inspired by other writers? Do you pull material from your own life and/or from your friends and family?
I was inspired by my own experience of living with mental illness and of spending time in the NS Hospital, the province’s biggest mental hospital. I kind of hoped I could make a book like One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich but I am a little lightweight compare to Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. I am inspired by other writers in a general way—that’s why I am a writer at all—but I think I am most enthralled by life. In both my novels, I seem to be trying to work out the events of my own life and relationships to friends, family and to the place I live, or lived (now I call Antigonish home, after moving from Dartmouth last year). And I guess both my novels are very much drawn from my life experiences but they are decidedly not autobiographical.

How is this a story only you could tell?
Well, it is informed by my experience of being half Chinese and a mental patient and set in a real hospital I know fairly well, around the time of Hurricane Juan. I think I am peculiarly taken with the idea that I got held up on the journey to adulthood, and am still trying to figure out how to grow up, something which is a theme of both my novels. It’s a little bit like being spell-bound, I like to think, rather than being stuck. And not everyone else would see magic in that and want to write about it.
 
What is your favourite quote from the book?
I am not sure, but I kind of like this one:
 
‘Now she was part of a tiny constellation—herself and Beth and their father—pinned against the darkness. She belonged to something—unwilling and resigned as she felt, she saw no other way. Family was the gravitational bond that kept a person from being swept off, alone, in the ineluctable expansion of the universe.’
 
Is there anything you would do differently next time?
Oh my God. A lot of things. Next time… well I hope next time I would work on rewriting more before submitting to a publisher. I think I have caused myself and those trying to make this book happen more grief than was necessary.
 

What’s next?
Hopefully I will complete the manuscript for a creative non-fiction e-short for Fierce Ink Press soon… and then I’m going to take a break from writing except for things I just really feel like writing… probably nothing more exciting than blog and Facebook posts! I kind of dream of pulling together a book length poetry manuscript at some point… and leave novels for a while… but somewhere in my brain I feel the stirrings of another novel. So I guess we’ll see.
 

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Thanks Anna! Don’t forget to watch for Low when it’s released on June 15th!

_______Edited from the original post, published on the LPG blog