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Women Asking Women: Shawna Lemay & Margaret Macpherson
Authors Shawna Lemay (Apples on a Windowsill, Palimpsest Press)
and Margaret Macpherson (Tilting Towards Joy, Signature Editions) share a thoughtful conversation about the quiet magic of writing and reading—how stories can reveal hidden layers of our everyday lives, the authors who have inspired them, and the meaningful ways their work connects with readers.
In honour of Women’s History Month, we asked women writers from across the country to pair up and interview each other about their process, their inspirations, and everything in between.
Interview: Shawna Lemay & Margaret Macpherson
MARGARET MACPHERSON: I’m very curious about the way your work(s) taps into the metaphysical world, the realm that travels beside us or surrounds us, but is often evasive because we humans are just too busy to see. Could you speak to your writing process as a way into that realm and what you think you impart in these essays?
SHAWNA LEMAY: This is the heart of writing for me. I’m acutely aware that we exist in multiple registers and the constant register is that we’re all in some form of heaven. But because of conditions, we might also be in hell, we might be in a thousand possible realms. And you’d like to say to people, choose your version of heaven!, but we all know that life is so much harder than that. And it’s probably going to get harder. In my longtime day job at the library, I’m privileged to talk to people who are going through difficult times. I’m always humbled when I talk to someone who shares some bright spot in their day, something they’d seen or experienced, and I think if they can do that, then I have no excuse.
There are all sorts of ways to get to the transcendent, to experience radiance. I’m a secular person, so my path to this other realm has been nature, poetry, art. And I think we all have access to it in our everyday lives. You don’t have to go on expensive trips or spend money to get there. The beyond is right here, maybe on your kitchen table when the light swings in at a certain time of day. That’s what I want people to know—you deserve transcendence.
SHAWNA: Maybe it’s because I’ve been immersing myself in Jane Austen this year in honour of the 250th anniversary of her birth but reading Tilting Towards Joy, I kept thinking about the advice she gave to her niece Anna: “You are now collecting your People delightfully, getting them exactly into such a spot as is the delight of my life;—3 or 4 Families in a Country Village is the very thing to work on—& I hope you will write a great deal more, & make full use of them while they are so very favourably arranged.” Who are the writers that you look to for inspiration?
MARGARET: I’m not a huge Austen fan but I do like the idea of examining a few people—possibly related through blood or marriage or even linked through proximity or geography—and seeing how they act, react and interact with each other. It brings up questions about which face we present, and to whom, the psychological aspects of character and motivation. Delicious.
As far as influence goes, I’m a big fan of Lucia Berlin’s fiction, so much so I named my main character in Tilting Towards Joy after her. I’ve been reading A Manual for Cleaning Women, Berlin’s posthumous collection and I’m so floored by her turn of phrase, her immediacy, but mostly how one can tell she is writing from lived experience. I don’t think I’ve ever seen it done so well! And her stories are gritty, really, really raw, showing characters mired in poverty, despair, acute alcoholism and yet there is such love for her characters and such incredible tenderness. The smallest observation, a snatch of dialogue, an encounter, nuanced and unpredicted, can completely change the course of the story.
Another writer of short fiction (and novels) who has influenced me is Elizabeth Strout. I love the way she comes back to her characters again and again, how they are perceived by different people and how we, the readers, never stop learning about the vagaries of our humanity though the different points of view. Every time I read Strout I think how diverse and interesting and perplexing each of us is, one to another.
I love Strout’s use of interiority and her ability to say so much with a single detail or gesture.
MARGARET: This question is harder, I think. Given the current climate of insta-best sellers and diminishing returns for the small presses, with authors shouldering more and more of the marketing and promotional tasks, what do you see for the future of your work? You have a base of readers and people (including me) who are excited by your vision and its quiet execution, but how will you grow readership in a prize culture that often ignores or trivializes the meditative, the still small voice?
SHAWNA: Margaret, I feel like you’re in my head with these questions. I was just thinking about how I’m probably about as popular as I’ll ever be. As someone who has been on social media since the beginning and who avidly follows the latest in book publishing, I can see what it would take to maybe be more well-known. But I’m not interested in those things. And I guess those books that I most love are often the lesser known, the unsung, the quirky beautiful weird ones. That’s not bad company to be in. Of course, it doesn’t pay the bills. So, we’re always going to be giving something up to write or create something outside the mainstream. We’re always going to have to struggle to some extent. I have to be okay with that. Very few writers these days can operate without at least a part-time job. Why should I be any different?
It’s not that I wouldn’t like a greater readership. I’ve always hoped that the right book finds the right reader. So, I do try and put myself out there because I owe it to my work to give it a chance. I think I’ve always sold my books one by one, winning over one heart at a time. They’re not for everyone but what book is?
SHAWNA: The linked short story is such a beautiful, perfect form for you. I was honestly entirely thrilled and mesmerized with your ability to say so much in this faceted, layered, delicate and yet so realistic mode. What was your approach in writing Tilting Towards Joy? (I kept asking myself while reading, how did she DO this?? with great admiration.)
MARGARET: This comes around to your other question about how I approached writing Tilting Towards Joy. When I was living in France in 2019, English language books were hard to come by, particularly in the countryside but I found Strout’s collection Anything is Possible in a small unban bookstore. I read the book four times, first as a reader, then as a writer, thirdly I went through all the stories taking notes in the margin to figure out the connections, and finally as a roadmap for my own work. That collection helped me find thematic commonality among my own seemingly desperate collection of stories.
This book started with me recording my own experiences at a dinner party, being a non-French speaker in a rural French home, being a foreigner in a new country and it grew from there. Another couple at the dinner party reminded me of a story I had written years ago about a couple dealing with infertility so I superimposed that story on my British dining companions. In a way I was recycling old unpublished stories and breathing into them the themes I wanted to explore in this collection.
I also wrote new stories about the younger life of some characters in order to help readers understand why particular people behaved the way they did. The backstories had to be independent of the initial stories and reveal their own truth; that was the only rule I set for myself.
Lucia Berlin showed me I could write about my own experiences and Elizabeth Strout gave me a roadmap, but because I read very widely, there are legions of others who have influenced my work. Canadian writers like the late Gloria Sawai, and Guy Vanderhague’s earlier works come to mind. I’m also a not-so-so-secret fan of Jamaica Kincaid, Jeanette Winterson, and Margaret Drabble, all completely different writers but equally influential. I can’t really talk about Alice Munro yet but, I would be remiss if I didn’t include her as an author whose work I greatly admired.
SHAWNA: As a writer, what are your reading habits like? How has your reading practice evolved along with your writing practice?
MARGARET: As I’ve gotten older, I’m more discerning in my reading habits. Unless it’s for a book club or for research purposes I won’t read a work of fiction unless I’m completely captivated by the text. The writing must compel me to carry on. If it’s predictive or the writing isn’t nuanced, I basically put it down. I guess that means I’m not really a reader of popular fiction, but reading is still one of my greatest pleasures and there are so many great writers out there! I read more non-fiction now that I’ve published my own memoir. Essays and creative non-fiction give me lots of food for thought.
MARGARET: Could you imagine a world where still life was appreciated? What would that world look like?
SHAWNA: I sort of can imagine that world! And I’m able to do that because of this realm, or bubble, I suppose you could say, that my partner, Robert Lemay (a visual artist) have created over our lifetime together. Our friends are all in on the magic tricks of still life, and when my two books of essays on still life came out, my readership sent me the most amazing photographs of still lifes they’d made or that they’d come upon in the world or in their own homes. That was such a delight! It was the best part of publishing Apples on a Windowsill—receiving all these still life messages. So many people told me how they looked at things differently after reading that book, and what more could I ask for?
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Shawna Lemay is the author of The Flower Can Always Be Changing (shortlisted for the 2019 Wilfred Eggleston Award for Non-Fiction) and the novel, Rumi and the Red Handbag, which made Harper’s Bazaar’s #THELIST. She has also written multiple books of poetry, a book of essays, and the experimental novel Hive. All the God-Sized Fruit, her first book, won the Stephan G. Stephansson Award and the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award. Calm Things: Essays was shortlisted for the Wilfred Eggleston Award for Non-Fiction. She lives in Edmonton.
Margaret Macpherson is a writer originally from Canada’s Northwest Territories. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from UBC and has worked as an essayist and journalist in Atlantic Canada, Bermuda, Vancouver, and Edmonton. She has published eight books including Tracking the Caribou Queen (winner of the IPPY Gold Medal for Western Canada Regional Non-fiction and shortlisted for the Alberta Book Publishing Awards for Non-fiction Book of the Year), Body Trade (De Beers NorthWords Prize, winner), Released (Mary Scorer Award for Best Book by a Manitoba Publisher, finalist), and Perilous Departures (Mary Scorer Award for Best Book by a Manitoba Publisher, finalist). Margaret lives in Deep River, Ontario.
Many thanks to Shawna and Margaret for their thoughtful conversation on writing and inspiration.
Order Apples on the Windowsill here and Tilting Towards Joy here, or from your local bookseller.
Next up on Women Asking Women is Andrea Scott and Kamila Sediego. Stay tuned for their discussion on Monday.
