Writer’s Block: Marilyn Bowering

All Lit Up: Tell us about your new book. What can readers expect?

Marilyn Bowering: A woman writing with a reed pen sits at a table in a mud-walled room. Through the open window in front of her I watch a green sea splash onto a pink sand beach. She turns and looks at me. I know she is a scribe and dancer and that she has stories to tell. It is clear she lived long ago, but where? What was she writing? How does it connect to me?

Unwinding the threads gathered in the image that resulted in The Unfinished World took years and a series of journeys, some back to places I’d lived in decades earlier, others to places I knew I had to go, and still others into long buried thoughts and memories. One by one, the stories and their characters began to emerge until there were six tales reflecting patterns and a line of immigration that culminated in my contemporary character, Pearl. She lived on the Pacific west coast of North America where she was struggling to find meaning in a world intent on erasing memory and connection. Through her grandmother, Nora, the stories became her resource. I come from a story-telling family. My Newfoundland grandmother was my resource, her remembered presence and stories, losses and resilience still keep me company.

All Lit Up: Are there any real-life experiences or people that have influenced your storytelling?

Marilyn Bowering: I tracked the scribe from the Middle East, where I had found her, to her origins in a cave I’d visited in southern Spain when I was living in Seville. Caves turn up in several of the stories as  places of refuge as well as origin. I’m claustrophobic, but I like caves anyway. I was once nearly stuck as I crawled through a low tunnel in an ancient marble quarry on the island of Paros. Other caves I’ve visited are in Cappadocia, in western France, on Vancouver Island, on the Island of Scarba in the Scottish Hebrides: they are places where stories are kept – and found. Picasso discovered images for his art in pre-historic cave art. Guiliam, a 12-year-old troubadour apprentice in my tale of his part in a Crusade against the then Moslem city of Almeria, finds beauty, then inspiration for verses he has to write to motivate the Spanish army, in a crystal cave.  Later, he hides there with a young girl whose life he saved, even though she is one of the ‘enemy’.

All Lit Up: If you could spend a day with one of your characters, who would it be and why?

Marilyn Bowering: I would like to spend more time with Guiliam. The troubadour love song he composes for the girl he rescues, is passed down through generations, all the way to Pearl. But he is also the cause of unnecessary deaths when he sabotages a peace proposal to end the Christian/Muslim conflict. I’d like to know how he turned out. Did he understand what he had done?  Making peace with past deeds and their consequences is a theme in the novel, and it is part of everyone’s journey. I believe it can cast a healing influence, backwards and forwards through time. My mother was the healer in my family. There are stories about this, perhaps one day I will write them. 

All Lit Up: Where do you find inspiration for your characters? How do you overcome creative blocks when they arise?

Marilyn Bowering: Ideas and images — like the one of the story-telling scribe — often arrive at night when I’m not paying attention to anything in particular. They arise from stray thoughts during the day, or from something I’ve read; or they can be like the feux follets my friend, the artist Liz Rideal, describes as instigators of her paintings. These ‘will o the wisp’ moments are like the flicker of lights over marshes, which draw those who glimpse them towards revelation or else into endless wandering. Have I been lost this way? Yes, certainly, spending years once on a project that never escaped its own circling. To me, this is the worst kind of writers’ block: you write because you feel you must be productive, or have a commission, or a deadline to meet. The drive to write, itself, can get in the way. It is only with the glance sideways, out of the corner of an eye, with no expectation, that inspiration arrives. My grandmother believed in fairies, which some say are the source of the feux follets. With the building-over of open marshland and commons, with loss of fairy habitat, they may eventually disappear. A flickering quality to inspiration rings true for me: unpredictability is its nature. Her ideas may have helped me keep an open mind.

All Lit Up: Which writers have had the most impact on your writing? What books have you read lately you can’t stop thinking about?

Marilyn Bowering: A book I often think of is Voices of the Old Sea by Norman Lewis. During his sojourn in an isolated fishing village in northeast Spain in the early 1950’s, he listens to fishermen recount their day’s work in unselfconscious blank verse. In this way, their lives are given dignity, and the human connection to the sea over millennia, is reaffirmed. Their way of life was obliterated by mass tourism; and yet, re-call of its existence is a root that may regenerate some other way. Alice Oswald’s Memorial, a retelling of the Iliad in which the identification and naming of the dead of the Trojan war form plot and narrative, ennobles character and the task of witnessing without shirking from war’s horrors. Her language, drawn from Homer’s, is a balm; as is language in the work of the novelist Olga Tokarczuk. The protagonist of Drive Your Plough Over the Bones of the Dead quests for truth while living in a near-incomprehensible physical, geographical, emotional and metaphorical borderland. Tokarczuk’s work honours those who find courage and a level of clarity even when besieged, invaded, oppressed, and wounded, or are targets of murderous tyranny. Within each of these books of tragedy and resilience, are moments, even chapters of humour, friendship and generosity.  

All Lit Up: What do you hope readers take away from your book?

Marilyn Bowering: That survival against the odds and second chances in love and life are possible.

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Marilyn Bowering is a Canadian novelist and poet who grew up in Victoria, BC, and lives there now. Her first novel, To All Appearances A Lady, was a New York Times Notable Book; her second, Visible Worlds, was shortlisted for the Orange Prize, nominated for the Dublin IMPAC Prize, awarded the Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize—and was praised by The Independent as “a tour de force” and by The New York Times Book Review as “a vast, sprawling feast of a book.” Her most recent work, More Richly in Earth, was longlisted for the Saltire Prize. She is also the librettist for Marilyn Forever (Gavin Bryars) and the author of essays including “When We Walked on the Backs of Fish” in Green Matters.