Odd lot.

Talking with Barbara Gowdy 

BF: The stories in your collection We So Seldom Look on Love feature a girl with two sets of legs and genitalia, a man whose two heads are at war with each other, and a woman whose sexual inclination is toward young male corpses. Your latest novel, Mister Sandman, centers on a family in which both parents are secretly gay, one child is a brilliant and beautiful mute dwarf and the grandmother is obsessed with Queen Elizabeth. I suppose the most obvious opening question would be, Why are you so attracted, as a writer, to oddities?

Sometimes people make the assumption that I'm doing this to get attention, when really, this is how I see the world. I come from a family of jokesters, and I was allowed to unleash my imagination. I think "normal" is a pernicious concept, because it doesn't exist. What's normal in one culture or time isn't in another. In the stories, all the characters came out of things I'd either read or heard. I'm really in mourning for difference, for a time when it was more celebrated,

An amazing quality of your work is that it never seems exploitive.

For me, it's not voyeurism or ghoulishness. I look for the commonality between these characters and the rest of us. I think what we all want is to be loved and understood anyway. It's something of a mission with me to present characters who are different, to love their oddness, not flinch from it. I love people who are genuinely eccentric or physically different; they have a big chunk of my heart. I'm impressed that they've negotiated a difficult world. They make more possible for the rest of us. Those who stand at the edge tell the others where the edge is.

You live and write in Toronto.

I was actually born in Windsor the day the Korean War began. My family moved here in 1954. Since then, I've moved house quite a bit - twenty-three times in twenty-seven years. I've never had to defrost a freezer. I was married twice, but now I live alone. I've been in a relationship for eight years with a poet, Chris Dewdney; we live across town from each other.

How did you come to writing in the first place?

I never thought I'd be a writer. I studied theater arts, then piano performance. I had delusions of making money as a pianist, but I was laughably inadequate, although I did get a job editing music books. Gradually, I worked my way into fiction, first editing, then, in the late '70s, I began writing. I was married at the time, and my second husband supported me while I wrote what we thought would be a historical blockbuster. Four years later, I wound up with a novel with a bodice-ripping cover my agent sold as a cross between How Green Was My Valley and Through a Glass Darkly. They called it Through the Green Valley; it should have been called How Green Was My Glass Darkly. By the time it came out, I was deep into Falling Angels [a novel about three sisters growing up with a fragile, alcoholic mother and an abusive father], and that did very well for me.

How would you describe your writing process?

When I'm writing I try to write five hours, four days a week. I work at my sentences to make them invisible. I hate a sentence that draws attention to itself. On the other hand, I'm crazy about language.

When you write, do you have in your imagination a particular reader?

I don't write for any ideal reader. The way I work is mere like trying to recapture all the right notes in a song. I comb my books, going over and over what I've written. When I get to the end I've revised the last page three times, the first page, four thousand times.

Have things changed for you with the growing recognition of your work?

I'm getting more known, but not to a degree where I can take it for granted. I now have a couple of hours a day of stuff around writing. I say no to most things, but even saying no takes time. As for how my work has been affected, I don't find the writing gets any easier, or the criticism.

But now you're finishing a new novel?

Yes - The White Bone. It's a quest story told from the point of view of African elephants. I'm not trying to anthropomorphize them, I'm not trying to write an Animal Farm or a Watership Down, i'm not using animals to illuminate human folly. I'm just trying to use as much imagination and sensitivity as I can to capture what it would feel like to be that big and that imperiled and have that kind of memory. I wanted to explore how you'd view the world when your primary sense wasn't visual. I had to do it with a lot of reverence, all the while knowing I'd get it completely wrong. Animals are always considered lesser; we always want to either eat them or infantalize them. We judge them on our terms, which is like trying to take their temperature with a ruler; we have a measuring device but it's the wrong one. The great failure of human beings is a failure of imagination. We fail to imagine what the other experiences. The great evolution of our species would be if we could start to see through the wall of our own experience.

Barbara Gowdy's novel Mister Sandman has just been issued in paperback by Harcourt Brace /Harvest. interview conducted by Carol Anshaw.