InFocus Magazine — A Writer’s Curiosity
Oct/Nov ‘09
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A Writer’s Curiosity
Amanda Hale draws on culture and history in her latest book, ‘My Sweet Curiosity’…
By Laura Busheikin • October & November 2009
Amanda Hale’s third novel could be described as part historical fiction, part contemporary urban romance and part immigrant saga, with a poetic sensibility infusing the prose throughout.
Amanda Hale is not daunted by borders. In fact, this Hornby Island writer, who recently published her third novel, seems to thrive on crossing them.
As a creative person, Hale has travelled back and forth between visual art, theatre and writing, not just crossing borders but also forging paths, bringing ideas and inspiration from one genre to another with prolific ease.
Home, as well, takes her across borders. Hale lives part of the year in her sunny cottage overlooking the beach on Hornby Island, part of the year in Toronto, where she teaches creative writing, and part of the year in Cuba, home to the man she loves and a new-found community of artists and writers.
And on top of that, she’s an avid traveller. When I meet with Hale to talk about her latest novel, she is getting ready to head off to Europe, where she will be writer-in-residence at Masaryk University in Brno, Czech Republic.
This penchant for border crossing shows up in her novels—perhaps even defines them. The new novel, My Sweet Curiosity, published by Thistledown Press, has multiple plot lines located in different parts of the world and different centuries.
If you were forced to identify it by genre, you could say it’s part well-researched historical fiction, part contemporary urban gay romance, and part immigrant saga, with a poetic sensibility infusing the prose throughout. You could also call it a philosophical meditation on science, love, music, the medical profession, and the ways in which our family heritage both does and doesn’t define who we are.
If you found that description a bit overwhelming, don’t worry. The novel is held together beautifully by strongly wrought characters who easily slip under your skin, so you soon feel that you know and care about them.
There’s Talya, a brilliant, charismatic and often maddeningly self-absorbed medical student, who, when we meet her, is falling deeply and passionately in love, while at the same time falling just as profoundly into grief, as her mother lies dying of cancer. There’s Dai Ling, the gifted and dedicated musician Talya falls in love with, who surprises herself—but even more so, her traditional Chinese immigrant parents—by her choice of a woman partner. There are Talya’s glamorous Russian émigré parents and there are Dai Ling’s Chinese parents and grandparents, their stories entwined with China’s complex history.
And there is Andreas Vesalius, the real-life 16-century doctor who revolutionized medicine by being one of the first to dissect the human body. The fictionalized story of his dramatic work and his passionate yet troubled marriage runs alongside the story of the two women. Vesalius shows up in the contemporary section of the book as well: Talya and Dai Ling first meet in the library, where Talya has gone to find Vesalius’ book of anatomical drawings, with which she is obsessed.
It was Vesalius who planted the first seed of the novel for Hale, she says.
“Back in the early 1990s I was on Hornby and I was only doing visual art. I had a book from the library on anatomy drawing, and there was an illustration by Andreas Vesalius—who at the time I’d never heard of—in the book. There was a bit written about him—about his passion to understand the human body, about his clandestine activity and how he used to rob graves, and how he was the father of anatomy.
“He captured my imagination,” she says. “I thought, ‘What a wonderful character.’ I toyed with the idea of writing a play about him, because I’d been trained as a playwright, but didn’t go anywhere with the idea then.”
Through Vesalius, My Sweet Curiosity sheds light on the history of medicine. As well, the novel offers a number of windows into modern medicine, through Talya’s experience as a medical student, her mother’s treatment for cancer, and especially through Talya’s fascination with the reproductive technology that gave her life. This piece of the novel, says Hale, can trace its origin back to her earlier work in politically engaged theatre. “I was living in Toronto in the 1980s and was involved in an agit-prop theatre collective. We did things for conferences, union conventions, schools, women’s centres and so on. There was all this stuff in the press then about reproductive technology, and we were asked to provide some entertainment for a conference of the National Association for Women and the Law. I did a lot of research into repro-tech and we took that and did some really fun, absurd skits. Back then it all seemed like science fiction, but now much of it is just normal,” says Hale.
Hale’s fictionalized character, Vesalius, is obsessed with finding the soul, the very seat of life, as he dissects bodies. He looks for it in the tissues, but in vain. ‘Where is it?’ he wonders, and prays fervently for an answer to be revealed. His obsession steals his attention and energy, so much so that he loses touch with his own heart. Similarly, Hale seems to be saying, modern medical technology seeks to know and control the genesis of life itself, but risks losing touch with its own heart.
“Something that intrigues me is the journey the medical profession has had. Like many people I resent the control the medical professional and the pharmaceutical industry has over us. I try to show that in the book. I didn’t want to rant about it, but rather tried to embed some of those issues in the story. After all, the story is how you engage people,” she says.
My Sweet Curiosity is Hale’s third novel and, although it is entirely unique, it could be called a ‘typical Amanda Hale novel,’ with multiple points of view and intersecting stories.
Hale’s first novel, Sounding the Blood, is set in BC on Haida Gwaii (formerly known as the Queen Charlotte Islands).
“It came about when I went to that place. The history and the feeling of the place just grabbed me. But I was well into it before I realized it was a novel. I had started out to write a travel journal,” she explains.
Her second novel, The Reddening Path, has a similar structure to My Sweet Curiosity. There is a contemporary plot about a woman named Pamela, who has been adopted from Guatemala and brought up by a lesbian couple in Canada. The book centres on her return to Guatemala and her discovery of her own heritage. There is a secondary plot about Cortez and the conquest of the Aztec, focusing on Cortez’ translator, an indigenous woman. “She is a fascinating character,” says Hale. “In a way, she enabled the whole conquest.”
In all three books, Hale takes on the point of view of characters from cultures not her own.
“I seem to always write out of my culture,” says Hale, adding that writing from multiple cultural and historical perspectives is a way of affirming our commonalities as humans, while at the same time exploring the richness of our variety.
“I’ve travelled a lot and I don’t like to acknowledge the boundaries between us. I’ve always felt at home wherever I go,” she says. Not everyone is entirely comfortable with this literary culture crossing, Hale adds.
“In the 80s there was this huge insistence on political correctness,” she says. Part of that was the conviction that it was potentially oppressive for a white woman to write in the voice of someone from another culture.
When Hale published The Reddening Path, where the main character is a Mayan woman adopted into a Canadian family, the Women’s Bookstore refused to stock the book. “I was quite surprised,” she says. “This is where most of my friends would have gone to buy it.” When she asked the management why, they said they had a policy not to sell books about adoptees written by someone outside the culture of that character.
“And yet, they stocked Memoirs of a Geisha, which is written by a man!” says Hale wonderingly.
These sorts of attitudes have never deterred Hale from telling the stories that, to her, call out to be told.
“I understand where those kinds of concerns come from. But Canada is such a multicultural society, and it’s hard to write in a multi-cultural society without including a multiplicity of voices.”
Besides, she says, she doesn’t really choose her characters. They come to her—often, she says, fully complete and with stories to be told. And sometimes, real-life people ask her to tell their stories as well.
“When I was in Guatemala to paint a mural and do art installations we were interviewing women and children from destroyed villages, hiding out in churches. They said please, please go back to your country and tell people what we have told you. They wanted their stories told and had no way to get them out into the world.”
Because she writes outside of her own culture, Hale relies on extensive research in order to create convincing voices and worlds for her characters.
“For instance, my first novel had five voices, including a Chinese Canadian immigrant and a Japanese Canadian immigrant. I had to do lots of research and also to enlist the help of readers from those traditions. There are many things I can’t learn from [book] research; I need to learn from people.
“When I first moved to BC I got to know a Mayan family in Surrey and learned a huge amount from them. I took two trips to Guatemala to stay in my friend`s village. That gave a much stronger sense of place to that book.”
For My Sweet Curiosity, Hale’s biggest challenge was the character of Vesalius. She began by absorbing his anatomical drawings, then read and re-read his autobiography. But that was not enough, so she got on a plane and went to Italy.
“I was able to go to Padua [where Vesalius lived and worked] and to the university where he held the chair of anatomy. To stand in the operating theatre where he did his dissections was absolutely thrilling! To stand there, feeling the same sunlight, seeing the same pillars, knowing that there across the courtyard was where Galileo had lectured, there was the same wooden lectern he’d stood in front of.
“Being there and walking the streets is so important. It gave me a sense of confidence and it re-inspired me, because after that, when I am writing, I feel I am there.”
Hale’s next novel, which she has just sent out to her publisher, is set in Cuba, and she has another one in the works set in Europe during World War II. “I’ve been working on that one intermittently for many years and now that I’m on my way to Europe, it feels very timely. I really want to immerse myself in the European atmosphere and history.”
The Europe trip came about because Hale’s work has a following in academia. Both of her earlier novels show up on university reading lists, even as far away as Brno, Czech Republic.
Hale says she’s very happy with this academic acceptance, not just because it is a marker of literary success, but also because it brings her books to a community of passionate readers—people who read and re-read, discuss, write about and deeply engage with the books. “Who is going to read a book more closely than someone who is going to write an essay on it?” she asks.
Hale didn’t go looking for academic attention, however. “It was something that came out of the blue,” she says. “It happened serendipitously.
“I was doing a reading of Sounding the Blood on Commercial Drive in Vancouver and when I finished, this man came up to me and handed me an envelope and said ‘read this later.’ It turned out he was a professor at Simon Fraser University and the University of British Columbia. He had reviewed the book for a literary magazine and liked it so much he put it on his reading lists. I was thrilled.” From there it spread to other universities.
The recognition for her work is gratifying, but Hale’s motivation for writing doesn’t hinge on it. Like most writers, Hale writes because she must.
“It’s a passion,” she says simply. “As an artist, running creativity has always been something I needed to do. It hasn’t always been writing for me. I started in my late 20s. As soon as I took a creative writing course it became a way of making sense of my personal existence, and then as I matured it became wider and wider, as I started wanting to make sense of history and the phenomena of the modern world.
“Without going into it much, I would say that I had a pretty bad childhood. The world outside was not acceptable so I went into the world of the imagination. It was essential for my survival. So I’ve always had fantasies, inner dialogues, stories coming from my imagination. Writing is a way of giving voice to all that,” she says.
“As a result, I am a very complex writer. I have all these tangles and all these threads that I’ve been interested in and explored in other realms, and they all coalesce in the novels. I try to keep things simple, and I never can; I just can’t do it,” she says with a laugh.
Shaping the expression of that complex inner world into a finished novel is a long and demanding process. Hale often works on a novel for years, focusing intensely on it for a while, then taking breaks to get distance and work on something else, then returning for re-writing and re-shaping, then more distance, and then another re-write, and so on.
“Typically, I need about nine drafts till a novel is finished,” says Hale.
She keeps to a fairly stringent writing routine, sitting down at her desk at eight or nine in the morning and writing until mid-afternoon. Once she’s immersed in a project, she doesn’t like to take breaks, because she begins to feel disconnected from the characters and story. However, these days she has to take time off to promote My Sweet Curiosity. And then there is travel and teaching.
Hale’s semi-nomadic life evolved naturally out of her passions, and at the same time feeds those passions. In the spring and summer, she is on Hornby, where she loves the peace and beauty, as well as the vibrant community of artists and writers.
In Toronto, where she spends each fall, she enjoys the urban cultural energy and the contact with her creative writing students. And in Cuba, where she lives from Christmastime into spring—well, there is much she enjoys about Cuba.
Hales’ Cuban connection came out of her visual art. She first went there eight years ago when her friend and fellow artist Lynn Hutchinson invited her to come to Havana to paint a mural. During that trip she made contacts in the Havana art world and was invited back a year and a half later to create an art installation about colonialism, slavery and sugar.
“At the end of that I had two weeks on my own and I wanted to see more of Cuba,” she says. She decided to take the 21-hour bus trip down to Baracoa on the Southeastern tip of the island. To explain why she chose Baracoa, she navigates the conversation back to Hornby Island and its renowned summer festival.
“There’s a wonderful Cuban folkloric dance and music troupe called Bara Rumba who has performed at the festival twice now. They are from Baracoa,” she explains, adding that she’d had a chance to meet them on Hornby and talk to them about their home.
Baracoa is a small seaside community filled with musicians and artists, says Hale. “If you’ve been there three months, you start to recognize everyone. It starts to feel very similar to the community here on Hornby, and yet very different.”
On her first night in Baracoa she went to see Bara Rumba perform. A friend introduced her to a man named Victor, a writer who works for the Casa de la Cultura. “I just fell totally in love with this man and have been going back to Cuba to spend as much time as I can with him,” says Hale.
It’s not surprising at all, really, that for Hale, love means crossing borders. In her life, as in her writing, she continues to happily step right past the artificial boundaries humans create, to inhabit a world where it is the connections—not the divisions—that matter.
Luckily for her readers, Hale knows no bounds.
For more information visit amandahale.com
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