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Montreal-based author Nairne Holtz has just finished her first 'lesbian conspiracy novel' The Skin Beneath. Diva went to college with Nairne, and recently interviewed her about the novel and writing in general
Diva: I really enjoyed The Skin Beneath, especially as I lived in Montreal during the time period of the novel. It brought back memories! And, congratulations on the Lambda Literary Award nomination and being shortlisted for Quebec's McAuslan First Book Prize.
Can you talk about the evolution of the plot? What things surprised you the most in the terms of the way the story ended up? Or did you pretty much have a sense how things were going to turn out?
Nairne: The most surprising element was the character of Amanda. She was supposed to be minor, a light comic element, but instead I found her taking up more and more space. She’s the only character I’ve considered writing about in a future book; she’s complex and morally ambiguous.
I remember talking to you a few years before the novel was published, and you were researching conspiracy theories. How did you settle on this assortment of conspiracy theories for the novel?
The actual conspiracy is a product of my imagination, although there are a few elements of the conspiracy some people allege are true. I wrote about the Gulf War because I’m interested in war period. I was raised Quaker while my partner was in the Reserves; while I was going on peace marches, she was learning how to use rocket launchers, so we’ve had lots of stimulating discussions about war over the years. I wrote about the Hell’s Angels because, living in Montreal, I’ve met a few people who have been involved in organized crime or who have family members who are. And I wrote about the CIA conducting brainwashing experiments at McGill in the 1960s because it actually happened and, moreover, happened in Canada. That’s the paradox of conspiracy: documented cover-ups and conspiracies, though rare, can appear indistinguishable from the ravings of a clinically paranoid person.
Do you have a favorite character, and why?
I don’t have a favourite character, although I’ve found it hilarious when people are disappointed that I’m not Sam!
Why did you set your novel in Montreal, besides the fact that it's a fabulous city!
I spent a chunk of time in Montreal in my 20s and moved back in 2003 after an absence of eight years and found myself falling in love with the city all over again, so writing about Sam discovering the city seemed natural for me.
What is your writing process? Are you methodical, sporadic? How do you overcome writers block?
I’m methodical and treat writing like a job. I go to the gym regularly; I write regularly. Writing is hard work basically. Writing is much tougher than working as a line cook or managing a library, which are the other jobs I’ve held for extended periods of time. If I don’t feel like writing for a few months or even six months, I just go do something else. My goal for the rest of my life is to write five well-crafted books; I’ve written one, am working on my second and have done some research for the third and fourth books; no idea about the fifth one, but I’m not too worried.
Some of your work centers around the gathering of Canadian lesbian literature - from co-editing No Margins: Writing Canadian Fiction in Lesbian to your Annotated Bibliography of Canadian Literature with Lesbian Content
http://www.canadianlesbianliterature.ca/ . Can you talk about the importance of culling
together Canadian lesbian writings?
James Miller, the director of the University of Western Ontario’s Pride Library and Archives, asked me to do some collection development in the area of fiction. I used to work as a librarian and when I discovered that there were no bibliographies or pathfinders for Canadian lesbian fiction, I decided to create one. The vast majority of Canadian lesbian and bisexual women writers have not published with gay or lesbian presses, so it is difficult for anyone who doesn’t have a passion for this theme to even gather together the most basic information about what is available. I’ve been contacted by professors, students, publishers, librarians, book clubs, writers, and readers thanking me for my annotated bibliography, which is essentially a history of Canadian lesbian-themed writing. I hope some PhD students take my bibliography a lot further some day.
What does it mean to you to be a Canadian author? A Canadian author who writes lesbian content? How does being from Canada shape your work, or does it? Is there a particular Canadian sensibility?
Well, first I must confess I’m a dual citizen. I was born in Philadelphia. My parents are Americans, back-to-the-land hippies who came to Canada at the end of the 60s, and all my relatives are American. I think of my own literary style as a hybrid of Canadian and American; I have more of a love of plot and popular culture than most Canadian writers, and I try to avoid the earnest Gothic thing that so many Canadian writers do, especially writers who, like me, grew up in the Maritimes. The culture of Canadian writers is a bit academic and more literary than most Americans; we’re more interested in landscape, lyricism, metaphors, and imagery. Also, Canadian humour is more deadpan; I’ve done readings in the US where I pause and wait for people to laugh and they don’t! A reviewer for Gay City News said my humour was “as spare and dry as an old bone.” At least she noticed I have a sense of humour!
I think that publishing houses shape writing to a large extent. In Canada, the focus is on literary fiction and the government and media support the thirty or so small presses that do this. Most lesbian writers in Canada are either with these small, literary presses or they start with them and move up to one of the four big houses.
In the States, you have your lesbian genre fiction, mostly romances put out by Bella and Bold Stroke Books in which the writers are wonderfully explicit about their sexual desire, while being quite unsophisticated in terms of their writing style—and I don’t say this because it’s genre fiction—these are writers who often don’t read much at all and who create mysteries that lack structure or forensic detail, and love stories with very thin characterization etc. Then you have the underground types from California and New York—writers like Michelle Tea and Ali Liebogott and Bett Williams and Eileen Myles and so on who usually started by doing spoken word or being published by small, alternative presses. And finally you have a tiny handful of women, mostly based in New York, who do literary fiction and are with big houses and tend to have done the whole MFA and/or Ivy League route and don’t necessarily just write about lesbians—I’m thinking of Ahba Dawesar and Ellis Avery. American lesbian writers I’ve met often seem either unaware of or hostile to each other. It feels like you have to choose a scene in the US, and those scenes shape what lesbian writing is available.
Many Americans I know dream of moving to Canada, but I think the country often gets romanticized. What's life like in Canada now, compared to how it was say 20 years ago?
Honestly, I can’t believe the sea change that has occurred around homophobia in the last 20 years. Otherwise, a lot of environmental politics that were once fringe are now mainstream and our attitude towards smoking cigarettes has radically shifted. But America is huge and is always churning up something new. I’m interested in animal rights issues and Quebec is so backwards on that front. People involved in animal welfare issues here often look to legislative and judicial initiatives in the US and in Europe. I think Americans probably underestimate more subtle cultural differences; in my experience when American queers move here, they tend to discover they are more American than they thought they were.
Your book is available widely in Canada, but through smaller publishers in the States. What are some challenges breaking into the American literary market?
First of all, no Canadian writer has access to shelf space on Barnes & Noble and so on until their agent sells their rights to a US publisher. It is possible to be a successful Canadian writer who is with Penguin Canada and not have your book be available in the US period since the big Canadian houses don’t (or can’t) do distribution in the US. Some small Canadian presses have arrangements with smaller US distributors; some don’t. One of the reasons I went with Insomniac was because I knew they were one of the few Canadian indies who could get my book into American lgbt and feminist bookstores because Consortium is their distributor.
Otherwise, I do think the American market is more conservative and more segmented. I was in New York last fall and I got into this big discussion on the subway with this black guy about The Wire. He was surprised that I, a white person, am a big fan of the show.
While The Skin Beneath is your debut novel, I know you've been writing short stories forever. Do you have an all-time favorite short story that you've written and/or read?
My favourite short story writer is Mary Gaitskill. Jane DeLynn’s Don Juan in the Village also influenced me; her humour is so delightfully dark.
Who or what are some of your influences?
Sarah Schulman; comic book authors such as Peter Bagge and Gilbert and Jaime Hernandez; the whole queer sex culture of On Our Backs and Susie Bright and Patrick Califia. And, I almost hate to say it, but getting an M.A. in literature at conservative McGill, in which you cover the canon, did give me the tools to think about literature and how it works.
I still have a dog-eared copy of the sex-'zine you created—Pornorama, which was totally ahead of its time in terms of the queerness. Can you talk about this 'zine, what happened to it?
I lived in San Francisco for a few months in the early 90s. An old friend, Fish, put out this philosophical S/M ‘zine called Brat Attack, and she inspired me to do my own ‘zine. At the time I had a boyfriend, but all my sexual fantasies were about women, so I wanted to do a ‘zine that included all genders and sexual orientations and tastes. I only did two issues, but they were fairly professional with a high design aesthetic and larger than typical print runs. Pornorama was a very queer ‘zine that included trannies and lesbians and fetishists and bisexuals and gay men and straight people, but, collectively speaking, we were all young, mostly white, skinny, and fairly conventionally attractive. The ‘zine is on the Queer Zine Archives Project on the web, although that site is having some problems right now.
What's your next project?
I’m working on my second book, This One’s Going to Last Forever, which is about relationships that are mostly doomed. It contains seven short stories that have a lot of black humour; for example, one story is about a woman who believes she was a Holocaust survivor in her past life meeting a man online who believes he was Josef Mengele in his past life. The stories are written, and I’m working on a novella that will also be part of the book. The novella is set in 1989 and is about young radicals at McGill and how political betrayal because personal betrayal. I hope to have this book finished by July because I’m headed to work on an organic farm in August, which will be the setting for my second novel, The Law of Large Numbers.
Every review I've read about you mentions your miniature dogs. Can you elaborate on these now famous dogs?
I have an Italian Greyhound, Franky, and a Toy Manchester Terrier, Toby. They’re ill-trained but loving and well-loved beasts.
Okay, any questions you'd like to answer that I didn't ask?
None are leaping to my mind, but maybe I just need another espresso.
And...what are the most annoying questions that you are asked? Did I manage to hit any of these?
You’ve asked me some standard questions, but no annoying ones, and you’re the first person to ask me about Pornorama!
The most annoying question I’m asked is, “How long did it take you to write your novel?” The answer is about two and a half years, but I’m always tempted to respond by saying “a month” or “I’ve been working on it since I was 12.”
I dislike the question because I think it is often disingenuous. What people are actually asking is: how hard is it to write a novel and/or could I do it? And the answer to that is, probably not. Writing, unlike becoming a musician, seems accessible to people. They think all they need is some free time and a laptop. Supposedly Margaret Atwood once responded to someone who told her they were thinking of becoming a writer when they retired by saying, “I’m thinking of becoming a brain surgeon when I retire.”
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Nairne Holtz reads from
The Skin Beneath
Wednedsay, February 27th
at Women and Children First Bookstore
5233 N. Clark St.
Also reading: Achy Obejas & Kathie Bergquist
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