“You can get away with anything in fiction as long as you make it believable” – An Interview with Dave Margoshes

All Lit Up: What first attracted you to the biblical themes that form the central mystery in Carpenter (namely, whether the protagonist is or isn’t the second coming of Christ)?

Dave Margoshes: I’ve always been interested in myths – Greek, Roman, Norse, and biblical, though I didn’t have a religious upbringing. The biblical fables of the Old Testament – Adam and Eve, Noah and his ark, Job, Tower of Babel etc. – have had special appeal. Over the years, several of those characters have turned up in poems of mine. And in an early story collection, Fables of Creation.

I don’t ever write with a plan or an agenda. I usually begin with a character and a situation – it could be anything, something that happened to me yesterday, a story overheard in a bar, something in the news – and see what develops. In this case, it was a memory of lying in the sand on a beach. Those ruminations on sand developed into the scene at the opening of what became Chapter 4. The idea of someone lying in sand evolved into an idea of a shipwrecked sailor on a desert island – and the novel took off from here. The Creature that speaks to my protagonist, Najjar (Arabic for carpenter) flew right out of my imagination. The next thing I knew, he’d been on the island for 40 days – echoing the 40 days Jesus spent in the wilderness, and the central motif of the novel had presented itself to me.

All Lit Up: Tell us a bit about the experience of writing a character who is a “blank slate” of sorts – one without any memory or identity. I’d imagine there are important narrative beats you have to hit (e.g. the protagonist’s experiences re-learning language, coordination, history, etc.). Moreover, you introduced this intriguing idea that follows him around throughout the book of a person being “corrupted” by memory and past deeds.

Dave Margoshes: Characters with memory loss are almost a cliché – I can think of several movies with such a plot. So it was a challenge making it feel both real and fresh. Balancing it with Najjar’s newfound language ability – being able to speak, read, understand all languages, even dead ones – helped a lot. (By the way, he didn’t “learn” or “relearn” languages, they just came to him.) But more importantly, loss of memory gives the novel its focus – a search for identity. That’s a powerful metaphor, especially in the Israel/Palestine context. But also, my not knowing anymore about him than he does helped make it feel authentic.

All Lit Up: There are a handful of women characters that guide the protagonist in various ways, from Sister Mark in the convent clinic teaching him about world religion, to Maryam teaching him about intimacy and relationships, even the brief doctor character who gives us, the readers, a glimpse into his appearance and bodily state. Was this intentional or did it happen by chance in the process of writing?

Dave Margoshes: …and don’t forget the women of the Arab family who “adopt” him late in the story, and the woman art dealer. I guess I’d have to say it was by chance at first, and then, after I noticed it, deliberate. I’ve been told, on occasion, that my female characters are not as strong as the males, so I try to make an extra effort with them.

All Lit Up: The Hedberg character, a friend and mentor to the protagonist at the UN, says at one point in the book: “They call us peacekeepers, but there is no peace to keep.” How did you engage with the Middle East, a particularly conflict-ridden part of the world, and its continued devastating history, in this book? 

Dave Margoshes: Hedberg also says, at one point, “In Palestine, there aren’t two sides to every story, but a million.” And several other pithy comments about the Israeli/Palestinian dilemma and the Lebanese civil war. He’s with the UN, so is neutral. I guess I see him as the conscience of the novel, its moral compass. When Najjar moves on from Lebanon, where he’d been working as a translator with the UN peacekeeping force, to Israel, that’s the end of Hedberg’s presence in the story. I was sorry to see him go. I gave some thought to bringing him in again toward the end, but it didn’t seem practical. But Yusef, the Palestinian clockmaker, who also has a balanced view of the situation, plays a similar role in the story’s later period.

All Lit Up: Likewise, this book displays a lot of insider knowledge about places in Lebanon, Israel/Palestine, and other locations in the Middle East. Did you visit any of these places while researching?

Dave Margoshes: Ha ha. Nope, never been there. I have some generalized knowledge of the situation in the Middle East (I’m a news junkie) and fortified it with the help of my invaluable research assistant, Professor Google. I also spent a lot of time looking at maps of the region. But honestly, I rely much more on my imagination than on research. This is not a history nor is it journalism. It’s a story.

All Lit Up: There are magical elements to this novel, too – the various creatures that visit the protagonist on his shipwrecked island, his sudden ability to speak and understand all languages – but it feels incredibly real. How did you go about balancing the real and the fantastic in Carpenter?

Dave Margoshes: Ah, that’s the magic of fiction. If I give a writing workshop or teach a class, I always say “you can get away with anything in fiction as long as you make it believable.” But how I do it? Sorry, that’s a trade secret. 🙂

All Lit Up: You’ve had a storied writing career. What about Carpenter sets it apart from your other books thus far? And, is there another project in the works you could tell us about?

Dave Margoshes: I’ve written a number of magic realism short stories, and I often let my imagination off its leash with poems, but my previous novels have all been realistic. This one might have been too until the talking Creature showed up. Then imagination revved up. I mean, the story – the background of the Middle East conflicts, terrorism and so on – is all grounded in reality, but the story of Najjar and what I might call his “mission,” that’s all imagination on steroids. It’s very liberating.

As for what might be next, short stories. I’ve got a bunch of new ones (some realism, some magic realism, some post-modern) and I hope to get a collection together soon.

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Dave Margoshes is a fiction writer and poet living on a farm west of Saskatoon. He grew up in the US and attended schools in New York City, rural New Jersey, Vermont, and Iowa. The author of twenty-one books, including four novels, Margoshes has had his work published in numerous magazines and anthologies throughout North America, including six times in the Best Canadian Stories volumes. Margoshes worked as a newspaper reporter in the US and Canada, and has taught journalism and creative writing. He was writer-in-residence in Winnipeg and Saskatoon and has led creative writing workshops across Canada. His writing has won a number of awards, including the City of Regina Writing Award, the John V. Hicks Award for Fiction, and the Stephen Leacock Prize for Poetry. Margoshes was given the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Saskatchewan Arts Board (SK Arts) in 2022.