Spotlight on Canadian Authors: Lauren B. Davis the Interview

 Lauren B. Davis was born in Montreal, and now lives in Princeton, New Jersey, after spending a decade in France with her husband, Ron. Lauren is the author of the bestselling and critically acclaimed novels, The Radiant City, (HarperCollins Canada 2005) a finalist for the Rogers Writers Trust Fiction Prize; and The Stubborn Season (Harper Collins Canada, 2002), chosen for the Robert Adams Lecture Series; as well as two collections short stories, An Unrehearsed Desire (Exile Editions, 2008) and Rat Medicine & Other Unlikely Curatives (Mosaic Press, 2000). Her short fiction has also been shortlisted for the CBC Literary Awards and she is the recipient of two Mid-Career Writer Sustaining grants from the Canadian Council for the Arts - 2000 and 2006. Lauren is a mentor with the Humber College School for Writers, Toronto, and Writer-in-Residence at Trinity Church, Princeton.

With all of this recognition, one would think Lauren would be difficult to reach, but no, she's still Canadian to the core, no matter where she lives. Friendly, helpful and talented, Lauren sat down and answered a few questions for the Toronto Publishing Examiner on writing, publishing in Canada and gave some great tips to new writers out there hoping to publish in Canada.

TPE: What are your thoughts on the Canadian publishing industry?

Lauren: I think times are rough for publishers everywhere these days, and Canada's no different, although I'm told by folks-in-the-know it hasn't suffered quite the way the US has. Until the whole e-book thing sorts itself out, none of us really know what's going to happen. I'm in an odd place with Canadian publishers, I think, since I started publishing when I lived in France and haven't lived in Canada since. I consider myself a Canadian writer, but I'm not sure Canadian publishers do any more.

TPE: Was it difficult to find a publisher for your work?

Lauren: When I started publishing, back in 2000, it was easier, I think, to find a publisher. I had published RAT MEDICINE & OTHER UNLIKELY CURATIVES, a collection of short stories, with a small press, had a few good reviews, and as a result publishers were interested in my first novel, THE STUBBORN SEASON. That book, I'm happy to say, also got good reviews, and made a best-seller list or two, so Harper Collins was willing to publish my next novel, THE RADIANT CITY. The publishing model at that time was that you would build on your readership with each book. There wasn't this pressure on publishers to make every book an instant best seller, and thus they could take a risk on an emerging writer. Although it wasn't a cakewalk finding a publisher, it didn't feel like the climb to Everest it does now.

TPE: Is marketing difficult?

Lauren: Living out of the country has made marketing difficult for me. Gone are the days when a book had a long time to find a readership. Now you get a few weeks to make a bestseller list and if you don't the publicity department moves on and you're on your own. Some folks are brilliant at on-line marketing, but I don't think I'm great at it. It takes up so much time and effort and seems to me, sometimes, like howling into an empty canyon. But I do what I can - I love going to book groups and writing blogs and that sort of thing. I try to keep a balance between marketing/publicity and actual writing. If the business parts of the work start to outweigh the actual writing, I pull back. I'm a writer, first and foremost, not a publicist, and it's through writing I find meaning and comfort.

TPE: What was your inspiration, if there is a specific one, in writing Radiant City?

Lauren: I began writing THE RADIANT CITY just after the horrible events of 9/11 and those events haunted me as worked. Because I was living in Paris at the time, and not New York I didn't feel qualified (and still don't) to write about the attacks on the World Trade Center specifically, but there's no doubt they affected me. I suffered a fairly bad depression. I was obsessed with the news, cried on and off for months… and I felt increasingly guilty about that. After all, bad things have been happening since the beginning of time… marauding hordes, berserkers, Vlad the Impaler, the Holocaust, the Rwanda massacres, to name just a few.

I felt I should have already known what this awful disillusionment felt like. It shouldn't have ambushed me this way -- how could I not have known? I was disappointed in myself. I was disillusioned not only with the world, but with my understanding of it, and my empathy. So, what was it about this particular event that crushed me more than any other? I suspect I felt closer to 9/11 than to Chechnya, or Yugoslavia, or Auschwitz, or Rwanda, and although that may be a justification, it's hardly a satisfying one. I'm ashamed to admit it, in fact, because I think of myself as someone whose mental borders are global, not national, and certainly not tribal. But for whatever reason, I now knew something, viscerally, profoundly, about the world's potential for barbarity, that I didn't fully recognize before. And it shocked me. And the fact that I was shocked, shocked me. So I began writing in order to figure it all out. As writers, that's what we do - we write about things that obsesses us.I wanted to know if it was possible, after suffering a profound disillusionment, to continue to walk through the world with a compassionate heart, or if one was doomed to cynicism. How do we protect ourselves against the insidious cancer of cynicism? And so, Matthew and Jack and Saida and Anthony were born, people full of disillusionment, hounded by their devastating pasts. They are all battered, brittle survivors of violence in one form or another, and yet they still may be powerless to turn away from violence.

And then one day, Rev. Ernest Hunt, the priest at the American Episcopal Cathedral in Paris at the time, said, "Cynicism is the last refuge of the broken-hearted." It was as though he'd been reading over my shoulder. And he was kind enough to allow me to use the quote.

TPE: What do you hope readers take away from this particular story?

Lauren: What do I want writers to take away from the book? Well, I hope they'll think about some of these things. That's what I always hope my books will do - apart from providing readers with a rollicking good read - trigger conversations, get people thinking, perhaps even looking at their world in a new way, or from a slightly different perspective.

TPE: What are a few of your favorite authors or people who influenced your writing?

Lauren: The books of my childhood were C.S. Lewis's Narnian Suite, the original version of Wind in the Willows and Peter Pan (not the dreadful Disney version) and The Water Babies - lots of dark Victorian children's literature. There are always wonderful new authors, but the ones who found me first were James Agee, Gabrielle Roy, Margaret Laurence, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Steinbeck, Graham Greene, Carson McCullers, James Baldwin...

TPE: What advice would you give new authors?

Lauren: Authors or writers? There's a difference. Lots of people, including business folk and speakers with a product to sell can be authors - churning out a book to support their particular agenda.
Writers are a different breed entirely, and they're the people I'm interested in. People who make meaning of the world through writing, people who write because writing is in their marrow. They could no more stop writing than they could breathing. (Spurred by rejection and depression, I've TRIED to stop writing, and found I couldn't. I'm far saner when writing than not, even given the insanity of the publishing industry.) If you can stop writing now, you probably ought to. The writing life is bloody hard. Lots of people want to be ‘authors,' with their books in the shop windows and their face on the television, but few people want to be writers. Writers write, and frankly, that's about all we do. Every day. For hours and hours, often with little to show for it. We spend enormous amounts of time alone, we generally have to work at other jobs to support ourselves since the pay is stupefyingly low, we suffer rejection and criticism with alarming frequency, and rarely get much support or recognition. If these truths haven't put you off, if you still feel compelled to write, then get on with it -- Learn your craft. Just like playing the violin or brain surgery, you have to study, train, and practice. Yes, it takes years to be a decent writer, just like neurosurgery, okay? Find a mentor, take workshops (yes, I do think they help, if the leader is good and the participants supportive yet honest), study from good books like WRITING FICTION by Janet Burroway, write EVERY DAY and….

Read. READ EVERYTHING. I can't tell you how many students show up in my classes wanting to be writers, but when I ask them what they read, tell me "Oh, I don't read much." Good Lord. Then you aren't a writer.

Forget about the business of writing until you actually have a completed manuscript ready to send out to agents. Again, so many students want to spend all their time asking about how to get agents and how to market their blogs and set up book tours. I ask them what their book's about and they reply, "Oh, I haven't written it yet." Really? Again, good Lord. First things first. Write the book; and make it the best possible book it can be.

Accept that you will fail, often, and don't let that stop you. Accept that the book you imagine before you write it won't be the book you write. It's like trying to capture the essence of that startlingly vivid dream you had last night - you might come close, but its purity will always evade you. Every writer must come to terms with that. Becket said, "All of old. Nothing else ever. Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better."

When you are ready to publish, try not to attach too much of your ego and psyche to the business. Great reviews are wonderful, but they won't sustain you. Only more writing will sustain you. Bad reviews are corrosive to the writer's energy and last forever. Put limited time into fretting about how low/high your advance was compared to others, book sales and awards and market share and platforms and all the stuff that doesn't have anything to do with your life as an actual writer-at-the-page. Of course, there will always be business to attend to, but what I'm saying is, don't let it replace the love and vigor you put into your art.

If you are a real writer, then just surrender to the writer's life, all of it, even the bad stuff. When you do that, the beauty appears: the peace, the meaning, the joy, the fulfillment, the sense that you are doing what you were born to do and what could be better, in the end, than that?

Thank you, Lauren, for both your inspiring words and taking the time to sit down with us. Readers can check out the Toronto Publishing Examiner's review of Radiant City here. Want to know more about Lauren? Check out her blog, website and the blog for the Trinity Church Reading Series.

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