Women Asking Women: Zilla Jones & Elise Levine

ZILLA JONES: I was struck by how many of these stories, including the first one, “Arnhem,” feature strong relationships and tight bonds between women; sometimes as lovers, sometimes as friends, sometimes as sisters, sometimes as friends who are more like sisters. Why is it important to you to write about women interacting with other women? Do you approach writing a story centred around women differently than one where men play a more prominent role? do you find the line between both, if there’s any?

ELISE LEVINE: I’m interested in writing about unsettled and unsettling voiced-over lives. Through my stories I ask, what are some of the manifold inflection points of erasure? What are the psychic costs? How do people find ways of rendering themselves scrutable, at least to themselves? And what acts of self-creation, and self-deceit, might selfhood entail over time? I ask these questions in part because I believe the experiences of women-identifying-women—in all their specific and extraordinary complexity, with all the confusions and ambivalence and ferocity of full selfhood—are still being written, sometimes against considerable pushback. Among other places, I see evidence for this when women writers are enjoined to write “relatable” women characters—to ‘warm them up’—in ways I seldom see men writers either asked to or criticized for failing to. I also see similar attempts to flatten portrayals of the experience of women when fiction that explores the physical and psychological violences so many experience is dismissed as “trauma porn”—a label which in recent history serves a backlash to the #MeToo movement. So it continues to strike me as an urgent project to centre narratives with women characters, within a subset with which I’m most familiar. I’m especially interested in showing them in relation to each other, unmediated by men, at least to an extent—or at least for moments of stark or pleasurable self-awareness.

When I do focus primarily on men characters, as in two of the stories in Big of You—“Once Then Suddenly Later” and “Sounds Like”—I’m preoccupied by the same questions as I am with women characters. But the ground from which the men spring is different: they’re typically contending with societal codes governing masculinity.

ELISE: Your novel has such breadth and depth, encompassing both the US invasion of Grenada and the challenges faced by a mixed-race woman who is a singer pursuing a career in the predominantly white world of opera. Music plays a large—and fascinating—role in The World So Wide. Why did you choose to have your main character, Felicity, be an opera singer?

ZILLA: Opera has been a big part of my life for a long time; I studied opera performance as my undergraduate degree and pursued a career in opera throughout my twenties. Although I love the music, I was very conscious of being an outsider in that medium, and like my main character, Felicity, I struggled to reconcile the sometimes insular and elitist nature of the operatic art form with my own history and culture. I come from a family which was heavily involved in the decolonizing movement in the Caribbean and the struggle against South African apartheid, and I wanted to write something that would bring these two worlds together: opera and the history of Afro-Caribbean resistance. In Felicity, I saw many of the same dichotomies that have made up my own life: opera and politics, being of mixed race, being of Caribbean descent but living in the Diaspora, being a woman in a man’s world. I wanted to see if I could write into being a reconciliation to all these conflicts.

As well, I find the story of Grenada’s revolution and the subsequent US invasion to be very operatic—it cries out for someone to write a libretto about it and that is the way I first conceived of the book. In the Grenadian story, we see all the elements of a good opera (or novel): love and loss, betrayal, jealousy, revenge, and maybe a little room for forgiveness. I felt that my life experiences uniquely placed me to write about the history of the Grenadian revolution and racism in opera in the same book. As the novel took shape, I thought of there being three parallel stories in the novel: the rise and fall of the Grenada revolution, the rise and fall of Felicity’s opera career, and for a little autofiction, the rise and fall of me, the writer.

ZILLA: The language in Big of You is so gloriously decadent. I found myself catching my breath at lines like “Grope through dark water and mouldy substrate to the other side of the dark, sonorous earth…” from Dig!  I am curious about your approach to craft. How do you write a short story? Which aspect or aspects of the short story come to you first? The richness of your language makes me wonder if you sometimes start with an image.

ELISE: Character almost always comes first when the idea for a short story occurs to me—a sense of a person, who they are, what challenges them and what they want. First lines also sometimes come to me from the outset, and occasionally closing lines, along with partial scenes, which might include lines of dialogue and images. Setting also arises first, an element I find to be indistinguishable from character. I’ll even have an initial sense of length and some notion of style and voice. It’s as if all of these occur to me in a super-compressed ball of yarn that I sense I can unwind. At this stage I’ll make notes and over time a lot of these will accrue before I get to work drafting the story, since I’m usually working on completing something else, or have other commitments.

Once I’m writing the story in earnest, the language arises from the character: from who they are in various moments, and what about themselves they might be hiding from. I’m glad you picked up on that moment in “Dig!” It’s a moment of grandiosity and self-inflation for the narrator, who feels desperately in need of it, but this moment is immediately punctured by her sense of realism—her awareness that she’s self-aggrandizing—and this deflation is mirrored in the sentences that follow, which are very terse and have a flat affect, including the use of empty repetition. I write in this way, using these shifts in syntactic strategies and patterns of diction, in the hope that instead of directly telling the reader how the narrator feels, the voice and style do the heavy lifting and allow the reader to intuit what’s going on emotionally and psychologically.

ELISE: The settings in The World So Wide range a great deal, in terms of place and time—from cities in Grenada, Canada, and England—and your narrative doesn’t follow a strictly linear chronology. Both of these aspects help impart a dynamic and nuanced understanding of Felicity’s character, and I found I was very drawn in by the tension between past and present. What were some of the freedoms and some of the limitations (if any) you encountered in structuring your novel in this way?

ZILLA: The World So Wide is historical fiction, and in writing historical fiction, I must grapple with the past and the continued weight of its traumatic legacies. In telling the story of Grenada, I mined both remembrances specific to my own family and the broader historical context. Memory is non-linear, especially when the memories are of trauma and loss. I was fascinated with how past, present and future continuously collide and re-make each other, and the past is always pulling us back and pushing us forward. Though the timeline of the novel is 1958-1983, Felicity’s final act on the last page resonates into our time and beyond.

In terms of the international settings, the title The World So Wide, a quote from the libretto of Aaron Copland’s opera The Tender Land, symbolizes to me that Grenada is an island so tiny it is difficult to find on a map, yet it had an outsized revolution big enough to trouble the government of the United States. It also refers to Felicity’s humble beginnings in Winnipeg, considered in England to be a backwater town on the Canadian prairie, and Felicity’s ascent to stardom in the world’s greatest opera houses in cities like London and New York. The frequent shifts in time and place reflect the movement of a Diasporic people—the people of the Caribbean. Felicity is never quite sure of where home is, at one time observing that it is “where she is not.”

I chose to divide the novel into three acts, like an opera, but they do not follow the traditional three act structure. Act I moves back and forth between Felicity’s time under house arrest in Grenada in 1983 and her childhood and youth in Winnipeg and London. Act II takes us more chronologically through the development of her career and her reluctant journey through motherhood. Act III returns to Grenada and the bloody climax of the military coup. This gave me the freedom to juxtapose a moment from the past with an event later on that was influenced by the past, or for experiences in the present to trigger a recollection. I don’t know that there were limits: I find that writing is always limitless, and any constraints come from my own abilities.

ZILLA: The stories in your collection take place over a wide span of time and multiple places, from “Once and Suddenly Later,” set in France in the 1880s, to “Cooler,” set partially on a space station in 2091, and contemporary stories set in different locations in the United States and Europe. The beauty of short stories is that you can immerse the reader in a complete world for just a few pages, and then do it again somewhere completely different. How did you choose these settings, and what do you see as the common threads connecting them all? How familiar were you with these places, or did you have to do a lot of research?

ELISE: Not to get too woo-woo about it, but I feel like the characters chose their settings, since for each story the character and setting arose together organically, already fused. As I was writing the book, I increasingly saw that the different settings were linked by how they each presented the main character with restrictive expectations or represented the ways in which the character had become disenchanted with the selves their ambitious strivings had led them to inhabit.

“Penetrating Wind Over Open Lake” is set in a particular South Side Chicago neighbourhood at the turn of the millennium, which I was quite familiar with, having lived there for eleven years that spanned that time (though I did take many fictional liberties with the doctoral music program in which the main characters are students). But for the historical fiction “Once Then Suddenly Later,” I did a lot of research about the early rise of modernity centred in nineteenth-century Paris: from architecture to urban planning, to early photography and portraiture (and with it, a nascent celebrity culture), to the development of aerial and underground photography, and the invention of air mail. I loved doing the research, but the trick was to then, in the writing, not overload the story with information and to instead maintain the focus on the main character and his struggles as the overlooked younger brother of a renowned artist and inventor. The setting for the closing story, “Witch Well,” is a complete invention: a fantastical, surreal composite of gated communities, which stands in for the main character’s trying to wall herself off from her profound grief over a terrible family tragedy. With this story, as with the other two I’ve mentioned here—even the Chicago one—the challenge was: put character first.

ELISE: What is it like going from writing short stories—for which you’ve received considerable acclaim, and have a collection forthcoming in 2027—to writing your first novel?

ZILLA: When I first began writing short stories, I naively thought that they would be great training for writing a novel. In fact, I learned that they are two very different art forms. To me, a short story is harder to get right than a novel. A novel grows slowly but insistently—for the amount of time you live with it, you reach a point where all the research and character development and development of themes coalesce and become part of you. The story starts to carry itself and brings itself over the finish line. A short story comes together more quickly and doesn’t take over your life the same way, and yet it takes so much longer to hone and polish it into something that shines. With so few words available, every single one counts and must be perfectly placed. You simply can’t give that much attention to a novel and have to accept some imperfection. I struggle with this!

On a more practical level, it is much harder as a debut novelist to get your novel noticed than it is your short stories. There are so many excellent vehicles for emerging writers to receive attention for short stories, and thankfully many of these help when a first novel comes out. But there are very few supports or avenues for recognition specifically for debut novelists. You are in the pool with all the other novels, and it’s overwhelming how many of them there are. So, I am thankful for every recognition or accolade this novel has received; they are the precious little gems of validation that keep us going.

Zilla Jones is an African-Canadian anti-racist educator, lawyer, mother, and singer of Caribbean, Chinese, and European heritage, writing on Treaty 1 territory (Winnipeg). She was born in the UK and now lives in Winnipeg, Manitoba. She is a winner of the Journey Prize, a finalist for The Writers’ Trust Bronwen Wallace Emerging Writers Award, and a finalist for the CBC Short Story Prize. Her writing has appeared in many literary journals including Event Magazine, The Fiddlehead, Prairie Fire, The Malahat Review, and Bayou Magazine.

Photo of Zilla by Ian McClausland

Elise Levine is the author, most recently, of Say This: Two Novellas, the story collection This Wicked Tongue, and the novel Blue Field. Her work has appeared in Ploughshares, Copper Nickel, Blackbird, The Walrus, and five times in Best Canadian Stories. She lives in Baltimore, where she teaches in the MA in Writing program at Johns Hopkins University.