Carol Shields is staking out the territorywhere fiction, biography, and autobiography intersect CAROL SHIELDS, although bestknown as a novelist and short-story writer, is also a poet, critic, andplaywright. Her novels include Small Ceremonies (McGraw-Hill Ryerson,1976), The Box Garden (McGraw-Hill Ryerson, 1977), A Fairly Conventional Woman (Macmillan, 1982), Swann(General,1987), The Republic of Love (Random House, 1992), and her latest book, TheStone Diaries (RandomHouse), which won this year`s Governor General`s Award and was shortlisted forthe Booker Prize. Her short fiction has been collected in Various Miracles (General, 1985) and TheOrange Fish (RandomHouse, 1989). Shields, who is currently teaching at the University ofCalifornia in Berkeley, spoke with Anne Denoon in Toronto. BiC: You`ve said you had what youconsidered a prolonged girlhood. That puzzled me, coming from someone who had -was it three? - children by the age of 25, and published poetry in her twenties. Carol Shields: Well, I just didn`t knowmuch about the world and how it worked; I had a somewhat narrow upbringing. Ihad travelled a little bit, and I did have these children. But I think Ilearned about the world through reading fiction. BiC: Speaking of reading, who hasinfluenced you in your writing, through your career? Shields: Oh, probably everyone I read!Mavis Gallant is a good example. I don`t write anything like her, but readingher sort of shows you what`s possible, and that was a big help to me. I wouldlike to feel that Alice Munro has influenced me; she`s certainly my favouritewriter. I like William Trevor`s work a lot. Updike - I feel I`ve gone throughmy life with him in a curious way. He`s always got there first - I mean, he`s afew years older - but he shows you how to pay attention to things. I read a lotof V S. Naipaul this summer, and there`s something kind of hypnotic about hiswriting. BiC: When people talk about your work,there seem to be two basic articles of faith: one is that your writing changedradically in 1985 with Various Miracles I and the other is that you are an unjustly neglected writer. Shields: Oh, yes! (Laughter) I don`t think my writingchanged drastically with those short stories. I was still paying attention tothe same kind of things. I can see why people say "you write the same bookover and over," because I do seem to have these life themes. The storiesgot a little bit off the ground, and that made them feel different. When you`rein it, the work feels kind of seamless; you finish one, and before that`spublished, you`re into another, so it looks like it`s all continuous. And theunjustly neglected ... oh, I`ve heard that for years! I`m still hearing it. BiC: Well, I don`t think you`ll behearing it much longer! Shields: I remember Joan Barfoot sayingonce, "How many novels do you have to write before they stop calling you`promising`?" BiC: I read a quote in the Britishpress from you, and I think you`ve said something similar before, to the effectthat a writer should not aim to better each book, but to do somethingdifferent. Shields: What I mean by that is that Idon`t think you should try to top your last book and then top it again. I justdon`t think that that`s the way a writing life works, and I think you can beterribly hobbled by that kind of expectation of yourself. And I don`t thinkanyone else should expect you to, either. This is one of the problems I havewith reviewers: they sometimes don`t look at each book as a separate endeavour.I think you can find correspondences between books, but I don`t think youshould always be comparing. BiC: Perhaps people like to labelwriters, particularly someone like yourself, who started out writing what havebeen called domestic novels. But I`ve always felt that domesticity is just acontext for you, rather than a subject. Is that right? Shields: Yes, I remember someone sayingonce: "Well, you don`t write about washing machines, but Ican always feel them in the background, churning away." I do think thatthere`s been an enormous change in writing in general, and now even men admitthat they have a domestic life. This used to be something they hid, and I couldnever understand why. Have you read Jane Smiley`s book A Thousand Acres? I`ve never seen so muchdomestic detail; she talks about shampooing, the carpets and makingpiecrust ... shedoes it wonderfully, and it doesn`t get annoying. BiC: You seem to be very methodicalabout your work, which rather contradicts the romantic image of the novelist asa tortured being. You make writing a novel sound pleasant and accessible. Shields: Welt, I often get students inwriting classes who feel they can only write short stories, because that`s whatyou do in creativewriting class ... but you see right away they should be writingnovels, just from the texture of their writing. So I always have to convincethem that novels are written in little bites, and that they can at least getstarted. I haven`t been very good at selling this, though. BiC: I recall your saying that yourfirst two novels each had a gestation period of nine months, at one hour a day,with half an hour for rewrites. What was the gestation period for The Stone Diaries? Shields: I spent two years on it. I stilljust write about two pages a day, even though I have all day. I have all thetime I want. BiC: Old habits die hard? Shields: Yes, or else there`s just somuch juice. I don`t know. I hate to think about what it could mean! (Laughter)Yes,two years I worked on this book. When I wrote Swann, it took me much longer;I kept starting and stopping. But this, I very quickly got myself a structurefor it, and that makes a difference. Then you can roll it forward more easily,more confidently. It went consecutively, I should put it that way. It doesn`talways work so that you can start at the beginning and work right through it,but this one did. And I loved writing this book. BiC: Well, I loved reading it. It wasso enjoyable to read. Shields: Oh, good. It didn`t make youfeel too sad? BiC: No, but that sadness wassomething I hadn`t really felt before in your books. Shields: Well, I think it`s somethingthat`s inevitable as you get older, there`s a kind of darkening. I see it inAlice Munro`s work lately, don`t you? I suppose it`s a question of age andperspective. BiC: The ages of the writers ... ? Quite a fewwriters seem to be interested in recreating the past now. Shields: We`re about to enter a newcentury, I think that`s what`s happening. Whether we`re frightened of what tiesahead or not, or whether we just want to know what this last hundred years hasbrought us to.... Have you noticed all the people who are writing about the 19thcentury suddenly? And I think this has to have something to do with the factthat we`re about to enter a millennium. BiC: You set up The Stone Diaries in10 chapters, corresponding to the 10 decades of the 20th century. Although youperhaps didn`t set out to write a social history, is it a kind of summation ofthe century? Shields: Well, more of a journey throughit. BiC: Your interest in biography goesright back to your first novel I Small Ceremonies. There`s a passage in it about the basically fraudulent nature of factualbiography, which is a topic a lot of people are thinking about right now. Yourprotagonist, Judith, also talks about the "whorish field of biographicalfiction. " Were you trying to revalorize a debased genre - as you did withthe romance novel with The Republic of Love -by writing TheStone Diaries? Shields: I don`t know about revalorizing...I guess a sort of usurping, almost, of the genre. BiC: Have you read the recent piece byJanet Malcolm in the NewYorker about the biographers of Sylvia Plath? Shields: Do you know, I read that on theplane coming from California, and I just found it enthralling. Although I wouldnever give her an interview - oh no! - she`d be writing about ... oh, my dusty shoes! BiC: But how do you know I won`t? (Laughter) Malcolmtalks about the impossibility of telling the truth in biography, and how truthcan only be achieved in fiction. This idea seems to be implicit in The Stone Diaries, butone thing I really liked was the fact that you did not belabour the question,although it was always there. Shields: Good. I`m glad, becausesometimes I tend to be very expository. I always ask my daughters to readeverything and they do catch me out on that sort of thing, where I say"Just in case you missed the point, let me lay it on you once more!"My youngest daughter, Sara, is a journalist, and she had some good suggestions.There was one place where I had romanticized the Jewish pedlar and had himutter this gnomic dictum, something like "A man should always have a childand write a book and build a house..." -you know, one of those things -and she just wrote in the margin "no." I knew just what she meant,and I trust her judgement, so out it went. BiC: You obviously have a greatrelationship with your children, and they`re your critics as well! It soundsquite idyllic. Shields: I do, and you know I thinkthey`re tactful, but they`re honest. BiC: In The Stone Diaries you usethe conventions of both biography and fiction in a rather parodic way, which issomething that perhaps was missed by people who felt you tied up the ends ofthe plot too neatly. Shields: Yes, Daisy tied it up becausethat`s what we do with the details of our lives; it`s a deliberate tying up. Wetry to make those connections because I suppose that justifies our lives to us.Of course, Daisy isn`t really writing this diary or journal or autobiography,she`s thinking it. It`s just a thoughtconstruct of what her life is, the kindof construct that I think we all carry around with us. BiC: You play with different voices,switching from first person to third and back again, all over the place. Was ita challenge for you to keep this all going, keep it all in the air? Shields: Yes, it was. Well, there were acouple of really hard things about the book, little problems - but I likeworking on the little problems. One was the idea of trying to write thisautobiography in which she herself is erased from the centre. The other one wasto try to get all those voices working. When she comes out with the"I" voice, which is kind of an intrusion into her life in a sense,the difficulty was to get them all working so that it`s not confusing to thepeople who are reading it. The first time through, I had to go back and do atot of fixing of those voices. There wasn`t a lot of editing on this book,except for one thing. I think sometimes writers fall into a stylistic tic. Iremember reading the proofs for Swann, and I kept using the word"sweet"; I don`t even like this word very much, but I had it about 50times, so I had to change them all. But [with The Stone Diaries] what my editor suggestedand what I soon noticed once he`d suggested it, was that I`d used a lot ofparentheses, thousands of them! And I think it was because there was thisundervoice .... ButI never use a lot of parentheses, and I don`t like my students to overuse them,either, because I think they`re distracting. So I just took them out, because Ididn`t need them. BiC: Another piece of yours that seemsto relate to TheStone Diaries is a short story called "Collision" from The Orange Fish. Now,I`m not sure that I really even understood the difference between what you callin the story "works of the bio-imagination" and"biography." Shields: Let me just start with thestory, and see if I can get this straight in my own head. "Collision"was about this random encounter, and what a small encounter it was in the lifeof these people - very small, soon to be forgotten, and yet at the same timeutterly central. But it was the sort of thing that was just going to join inwith the biographical debris, it wasn`t going to remain central ... am I makingsense at all? BiC: Yes, definitely. Now I`m startingto understand it ... so the "debris" is sort of floating around inspace.... Shields: There was a bit of a sci-fi jumpthere. I mean, what happens to all this, all our little narrative encountersduring the day? I`ve always felt they have to go somewhere. BiC: One thing that sort of scared mewhen I first picked upThe Stone Diaries was the photographs; photographs in a work of fiction areso postmodernist, and that`s a label I`m uneasy with. But what did you have inmind? Shields: Well, when you read 19th-centurynovels, they`re illustrated all the way through, and they have that little lineof dialogue underneath. I`ve always loved that, and wondered how it happenedthat this fell out of fashion so utterly. BiC: Didn`t you have a frontispieceillustration in TheRepublic of Love? Shields: Yes, I wanted a gesture towardthe 19th century, although it didn`t turn out exactly as I had in mind. In TheStone Diaries itwas because I was writing about biography. When you read biography, there`sthat section of photographs, always, and I love looking at them again and again,as I`m reading. So I wanted some of this paraphernalia.... BiC: But in fact there wasn`t much muchconjunction between the photographs or the family tree and the story, whichthrew the reader off balance. Was thisintentional? Shields: Yes ... so that was the postmodern part! (Laughter) We`ve got to stoptalking about postmodernism anyway, I think. BiC: Why? Shields: Well, I was doing these radiointerviews in Ottawa yesterday, and out of my mouth - pop! - came this word"postmodernism," and I thought, Aw, forget it! Who are we talking to,anyway? It`s kind of exhausting, I think, for people to always think in theseterms. At the Edinburgh Festival this year, I went to hear a panel on "TheDeath of the Novel," and the thing that interested me was that the fourpeople on the panel all were talking about characters in novels, theimportance of character, and I thought, Oh, they`re back, thank heavens! BiC:We`ve talked about how you used theconventions of 19th-century fiction in TheStone Diaries, and I noticed that when Clarentine left her husband, she leftbehind a stash of trashy novels, and a copy of Jane Eyre. Shields: I got the names of those novelsfrom an Eaton`s catalogue. I didn`t realize there were paperbacks then, butthere were; I guess they were kind of "penny romances." BiC: Jane Eyre, ofcourse, is in a different sphere, but Magnus, the abandoned husband, memorizesit. Was there any specific meaning in that? Shields: Why, I can`t remember. (Laughter)Well, Isuppose I was just thinking about fiction, and how you can swallow it up whole,make it part of your life. When I used to keep a diary, I always used to leaveout what I was reading, as if that wasn`t part of my life. But then I realized one day, I shouldwrite about the books I`m reading, because this is as much a part of my life aswhere I go, and in fact maybe more. So I think he took the book into his bodyand soul, and made it his. It was a whole other dimension, another world tolive in besides the one he was stuck in. Then, later, it gave him a sort ofcelebrity. BiC: Another question that comes up about your work is that of nationality. As a Canadian writer, bornin the United States.... Shields: You know, I`m not going to beable to help you with this one at all. I love to evolve theories abouteverything in the world, but I`ve never evolved a theory about the differencebetween Canadian and American writing. BiC: It`s irrelevant for you? Shields: It`s quite irrelevant. We have this bigwriters` group now; we call it the Common Ground Group, and we have theselittle conferences all the time. Minnesota, North Dakota, Manitoba, andSaskatchewan are the members; it`s a loose association, but we`ve all got toknow each other. If you look on the map, it`s a huge area that`s almost empty,it`s such a tiny population. But that`s much more the common ground thanManitoba and Ontario, for me. The border doesn`t mean much to me. BiC: It seems that the British press grumbled about the factthat all the Booker Prize nominees this year were either Canadian, Irish,Australian, or immigrants to Britain from other countries. Shields: I wondered about that, becauseCaryl Phillips lives in the UK, and the Hungarian writer Tibor Fischer has alsolived in London most of his life. In Canada, we would call those peopleCanadians. This is another thing that came out of the discussion about thedeath of the novel that I heard in Edinburgh. James Wood of the Guardian was talkingabout what he thinks has happened to the English novel; he thinks that "asense of wonderment" - I love that word - has gone out of it. And maybe -wonderment, what does it mean? this is something that is alive on the frontiersrather than in an old, evolved society, which is cynical in some senses, andalso very sentimental. I think the English are tremendously sentimental,sometimes. I also think that some of these things are just curiosities,historical accidents that writing is coming from one part of the world and notfrom another. But it`s heartening, rather than disheartening. BiC: Do you have new work in progress? Shields: A few things. I`m working onsome short stories; I`ve been doing that this summer. I did some reviewing thissummer, too, and I hope to do some more. I love reviewing, although it makes menervous in the beginning. But then I get into it. BiC: You seem to be someone who is verygenerous to other writers. You`re not too tender-hearted to review? Shields: Well, I try to he fair. I hadone book this summer that was so terrible I really couldn`t be tender-hearted.I couldn`t think of anything nice to say about it, so I didn`t. Something I dosee about book reviewing is this unwillingness, it seems, to appreciate thebook as a whole. I`m never going to use that phrase again, the one people useat the end of reviews: "And I just have one quibble...." If you just have onequibble, can it! It`s not worth it; it`s so small-minded and you do wonderwhere that comes from. Is it just, "I`ve caught you out on this"? ButI like writing about literature, about books; I like the essay form. I didreviews for English and American newspapers; I think it`s better, maybe, not todo reviews in your own country. And then I`m doing the screenplay for TheRepublic of Love. It`sjust a very small production, by a Winnipeg producer, and we`re just waitingfor our next level of funding. I`ve done the first two stages, and when thefunding comes through, I`ll do the actual script. The hard part is done. BiC: You`ve also written a couple ofplays. Shields: Yes, and I want to do anotherone; in fact, we have a commission to do one. Another of my daughters, wholives in Winnipeg, and I are doing it together. She`s actually done a lot ofthis with me, on the other two plays, so we thought we`d make it official thistime. BiC: It must have been very difficult to renderThe Republicof Love into a screenplay; there`s so much in it. Shields: Well, we took so much out! Youhave to take an awful tot out, and you really have to compress scenes. It waskind of painful, and it was hard work. But that was the hardest part, and onceyou decide on your scenes.... Now, I`ve never done this, but they keep saying Ican do it, so we`ll see how it works out. We hope to be filming by next summer. BiC: So you haven`t got another novelin the works? Shields: No, I don`t. But of course I`malways thinking, because nothing is more wonderful than being in the middle ofa novel, carrying this big thing around in your head all the time. I love to bein the middle of a novel. These other projects have little rewards as you go,but they don`t give you the satisfaction of a large construct that you`reshaping all the time. BiC: It`s not a burden? Shields: Oh no, no, quite the opposite. Itmakes your other burdens easier.