Links Mentioned in This Episode:

Skin (Short Story Collections)

Blaze Island (Novel)

The Rules of Engagement (Novel)

Resilient Writers Radio Show: Interview with Catherine Bush – Full Episode Transcript

Intro:

Well, hey there, Writer. Welcome to The Resilient Writers Radio Show. I'm your host, Rhonda Douglas. And this is the podcast for writers who want to create and sustain a writing life they love. 

Because let's face it, the writing life has its ups and downs, and we want to not just write, but also to be able to enjoy the process so that we'll spend more time with our butt-in-chair getting those words on the page. 

This podcast is for writers who love books and everything that goes into the making of them. For writers who want to learn and grow in their craft and improve their writing skills. Writers who want to finish their books and get them out into the world so their ideal readers can enjoy them. Writers who want to spend more time in that flow state. 

Writers who want to connect with other writers to celebrate and be in community, in this crazy roller coaster ride, we call the writing life. We are resilient writers. We're writing for the rest of our lives and we're having a good time doing it. So welcome, Writer. I'm so glad you're here. Let's jump right into today's show.

Rhonda:

Well, hey there, Writer. Welcome back to another episode of The Resilient Writers Radio Show. I'm excited to have a Canadian author with me today. Her name is Catherine Bush, and she's the author of five novels, including the widely acclaimed Blaze Island and The Rules of Engagement, which was a New York Times notable book. Her books have been shortlisted for the Trillium Prize, the City of Toronto Book Award, and Books in Canada First Novel Award. She's been the recipient of numerous fellowships and was the 2024 writer and resident Landau's fellow at the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society in Germany. She is an associate professor of creative writing at the University of Guelph, which is not too far from Toronto, and she lives in Toronto. 

We're going to be talking a little bit today about Skin, which is her first collection of stories, and it's out now, right, Catherine? It's because I saw it in my local bookstore this week. 

Catherine:

Yes, it's just come out. 

Rhonda:

So, I wanted to say, I feel like you're doing it backwards. Like don't writers do like the collection of short stories and then they do the novel, but you did five novels and then you did a collection of short stories. So why the stories instead of a novel this time around? 

Catherine:

Yeah, thank you. And it's great to be here, Rhonda, and thanks for the invitation  and thanks for that starting question. 

Well, I think  like many writers, I started out writing and publishing short stories. But I also feel that my temperament was a novelist temperament from the time I was young. I mean, I was scribbling these novels, you know, when I was 11 years old.  And, you know, one of the first stories I published began as this rather ungainly want to be a novel's story. And I turned it into a conventional well-made short story to prove that I could do that. 

But the real beating heart of the material wanted to be longer, wanted to be a novel. And I think my impulse and my pace as a writer is largely novelistic. I tend to think in long form narrative, but not exclusively. And so one of the things that happened to me during the pandemic was like everybody else. I just suffered  from extreme exhaustion. I was baking too much sourdough bread and making too much bread like everybody else. 

And I decided  to turn to short stories. I also couldn't do the research I needed to do on the novel I wanted to work on next because it required travel. But I also just felt, you know, I have a novel, Blaze Island come out during the pandemic. And so you know, that was hard and also great to discover all the possibilities of being able to access people online. But it was also really tiring. And I just wanted to turn  as a writer to somewhere that where I could find pleasure. And the short form  became a source of pleasure. It was somewhere that I could play.  Not that all the stories are necessarily happy ones, but but I just wanted a different challenge. I wanted the challenge of just being able to dive in quickly. 

I love flash fiction. I love the really short, short form. And I wanted to try it, just try it out. And the stories in the collection range from being really short, like a page or two flash, to being novella length. I think the longest is 80 pages or so. And then there are numbers that are in between. And the stories also range across my career. 

I mean, some exist in earlier versions from when I was a much younger writer. I reentered and revisited them all in the final year of editing, which was an interesting process in itself. So they're kind  of like a culmination of my writer's life so far and a kind of strangely fractured writers' autobiography without being directly autobiographical. And I have loved just diving into all these different worlds. 

Rhonda:

I mean, that is the glory of the short story, right? As you kind of can dive into a world and then finish the story, get your dopamine hit, all good and gone, you know, done, few months, done, and then dive into another world. So I absolutely get that.

So your material lately, and I'm thinking most recently of Blaze Island, which as you know, I loved that novel. Your material has been, has had an environmental focus and particularly climate change. Did you dive into that in this collection as well, or are there stories in there that kind of you know, mind that environment. That's a horrible analogy. That's a horrible road I'm going down there, but sort of, you know, delve into that  environment, the environmental concerns that you have and that many of us have. 

Catherine:

Yeah, absolutely. You know, as I said, the stories have been written over a span of many years. So the earlier ones focus  more on human to human relationships. So I categorize them all as dealing with unusual forms of intimacy, even in the  human to human relationships. 

But the stories that are the most recent that were really wholly conceived most recently are more ecological and focus with the exception of a rewriting of Cyrano de Bergerac from the perspective of a fan and if you know the play or the movie,  you might be interested to see what I do with Roxanne's story. But there is  a longer novella titled Diretto after the wind. It's a kind of windstorm, not a tornado, but one that comes directly at you. There's that, which is really a story about a man who  falls in love with extreme wind events and pursues them, not quite in the manner of a conventional storm chaser. I was interested in doing something different while thinking again about intimacy and love in connection with our current climate predicament. 

And there's also a story in which a woman has a very strange unstrangely intimate encounter with a glacier. Well, shut up in a hut. And an island, you know, off the coast of Svalbard in the high Arctic, which takes its origins from something that happened to me. was also... 

Rhonda:

Didn't you go there last year? Was it last year or the year before? 

Catherine:

When I was on Svalbard? I was there in 22, which is in the June of 22. I was supposed to go in the summer of 2020, but that didn't happen in 2020 for obvious reasons. So I was part of an artist expedition run by an organization called Arctic Circle. It was a two week residency and an old sailing ship, and we traveled up the coast of the Svalbard archipelago and in Arctic waters and met a number of glaciers, each of which is a distinct character. And that really fascinated me. I had no idea  glaciers could be so different. So the glaciers- 

Rhonda:

They're all beautiful. 

Catherine:

Yeah, beautiful and scary because they're all melting and they're all melting in different ways very quickly. And we were out once in a boat in a Zodiac with a GPS on open water. And the GPS said we should have been under ice. So, or on ice, but basically there should have been ice there where we were. 

So, and it's also just a writerly challenge that interests me. How do you make an encounter with a glacier  dynamic and unusual, also encounters with wind? What language can we bring to that? That's not cliche, even verbs, verbs do we bring to describing the wind that aren't the usual roar, howl, scream. 

And so I'm interested in these kind of encounters at a writerly level and how not to go to the expected narrative places, you know, the dystopic, the straightforward disaster narrative when it comes to encountering the wind. And, you know, even with the glacier, the straightforward, oh, they're melting, it's terrible. You know, what do we do? So how can I through the lens of intimacy reimagine these encounters? That was the challenge I set for myself.

Rhonda:

I think that's so important because I feel like increasingly climate change has this like blah, blah, blah climate change sort of narrative to where people stop listening. You know, they, they, I think a lot of us are in denial about how bad it is, you know? And so often when I talk to people about climate change, you know, folks are really quick to change the subject because it can be so dire. 

So I love that you're thinking about, you know, how do we think about this  and write about this in different ways? Can I ask you, how does your process differ when you're writing a novel versus when you're working on you know, together a collection of short stories. 

Catherine:

I mean, I started writing Skin, the story collection without really having a sense of it as a collection. I just I had an impulse to return to some of the older material. There were a couple of stories that I'd never published, camouflage and the story that novella that became, well began as a story and became the novella Benevolence. 

And in both cases, there was, there was something still alive in them for me. And I didn't feel,  you know, in their earlier non-published forms that I had  taken them,  you know, to  a place that was satisfying, at least satisfying to me now, the writer I am now. So I wasn't trying to reconstruct what I had been trying to do decades earlier, but really re-entering them. And with benevolence, there was, you know, there's a fundamental narrative reversal from what happened in the original original one. 

So it was, you know, a really deep reentry and reimagining with, you know, from the perspective of my current writerly self.  And so that was an interesting process in itself to re-encounter my younger writer self and and be in a kind of conversation with. 

Rhonda:

You didn't judge it too harshly. Like you didn't kind of go in and go “Oh, what were you thinking” you know, but you sound like it wasn't like that. 

Catherine:

Yeah, it was just, how can I carry on this conversation? How can I take it further and deeper? And it took, you know, in both instances, like multiple drafts, you know, like current drafts over the last, you know, five years, it was, it was full on, mean,  I re-drafts multiple times, both as a novelist and as a writer of short stories. I'm slow and I'm messy.  I mean, it's good for me in some ways that stories are shorter because they still take me years, but not as long as novels. 

And so I had to commit to that with the stories too, that yes, this is going to take several iterations. It's going to be messy. People are going to say, I'm not clear what you're trying to do here. But one of the things that I  love about stories is that you can put one aside and go to another. And that's especially true when you're writing flash forms. But even flash can take years to find their, you know, their heart and their true living iteration. So,  you know, they may just be two pages, but it requires a lot of  going back to them, going back to them.

And, when I started out as a writer, I did write poetry and I really haven't written poetry since, but certainly poetry and some flash has,  you know, it's on a continuum and the way that you're listening to language has that kind of intensity. 

Rhonda:

I think it's working in the short story and poetry is great training for  the work that you do in a longer form with language, right? Because so often when I talk to writers who are working on a book, you know, the first draft is kind of vomited out  in many cases. And then we're not really profoundly conscious of language at the level of the line until we get much further down the line, down the road with the book but I think those are really good forms for learning about  language as a writer. So it's fun to come back to them. 

So this book came out with Goose Lane. I love that they're an independent Canadian publisher. They do gorgeous books. They do really fantastic short fiction collections, I think.  What was your experience like working with Goose Lane? I love the book. I love the cover. You're happy with it? It's gorgeous. 

Catherine:

I extremely happy with the cover. Yeah, you know, we had conversations about it back and forth and, you know, the end result is something I'm so pleased with. So that's great. I think  it looks really stunning. And Julie Scriver, who's the designer there, does beautiful work. 

You know, the genesis of this collection really, as I said, I wasn't really working towards a collection. I had sort of a background awareness that I had compiled enough stories to make a collection. And  I...have good friends with the writer, Andre Alexis,  who also has a story collection, Other Worlds, coming out this spring from M&S. And we read each other's work and edited each other's work. And he had edited some of the stories in the collection independently as I edited some of his short fiction. And he was the one who came to me and said, I'd be interested in editing this as a collection. And then Goose Lane amazingly agreed to hire Andre to edit the collection to work with me. 

Rhonda:

Oh wow! So that's great. Bethany Gibson, who is the in-house fiction editor at Goose Lane is a fabulous editor in her own right. But it was a wonderful gift to be able to work with Andre on this collection. He's a brilliant editor, super intense, put me through my paces. And he reads  both at a micro and a macro level Compelled me to bring ever greater intensities of focus to the work. And the wonderful thing was that I was on this fellowship at the Rachel Carson Center and living in this with the nine other fellows in an old manor house south of Munich in Germany, up in this tower room looking over the Alps. 

I had concentrated time to bring to the collection and, you know, revise and redraft and, and,  you know, I'm always telling my students, you know, to think deeply about revision, that it  really means to re-see things. It's not just about moving around words, but re-entry and just, you know, to be able to find ever deeper specificity about your intentions, you know, the intentions of the character, what every single word on the page is doing. And it was just such a gift to be in a place where I could bring that intensity of focus to the page day after day. 

Rhonda:

Lovely. Wow. I'd love to talk about that some more. This idea of the re-seeing, re-visioning the book in revision. What is your... Oh, I can see your poodle in the background. So cute. That's Hilda. Hi, Hilda.

Um, so what's your process for revision with the novel? And then we'll go to, you know, a little bit to the stories, but with when you're revising a novel, how, how do you approach that? 

Catherine:

I mean, I would tend to write all the way through a long messy draft. That said, I will also revise within sections. If I feel something is stuck or not working for me in a way that will enable me to go on to the next section. So if I can't hear the voice clearly enough, or I'm still trying to figure out narrative shape, like how are the sections going to function? What is their, you know, what is their arc, their trajectory, their music, their intensity. 

So I'll work through that way with the aim of trying to get through a messy first draft which, you know, if I'm lucky takes me a year or two years, and then I will go back to the beginning and go through it again, probably seven or eight times. I mean, you know, so my novels take me between five to 10 years to write.  

Rhonda:

Because you're redrafting them constantly. 

Catherine:

Yeah. I got time, I just need it to get the work to  the focus and yeah, the focus and the liveliness that  it needs to be able to see and re-see it deeply, which  is a combination of specificity and liveliness. 

Rhonda:

Right.

Catherine:

It has to feel alive, and yet it has to be as  deeply specific as it can be at the same time. So the stories really aren't different than that. They still require multiple iterations because they're shorter, you can do it, you can move between them. And it wasn't until late in the process that I had a sense of Skin as a collection and we thought a lot about how to order it and to try it out different orderings. 

And so I was working on the stories independently while at a certain point trying to find a relationship between them. And I do think  that the collection creates thematic whole  around these issues of intimacy and touching and skin and its  porousness and sensitivity. 

Rhonda:

Yeah, lovely. You teach creative writing as well. You were teaching at UBC when I was there. What's the relationship between your teaching and your writing? Do you find it hard to write while you're teaching? Or does one feed the other in a, you pretty easily, pretty smoothly? 

Catherine:

Yeah, I mean, I do teach during the semester if, if I can. I mean, like many writers, I, you know, I need to work to support myself. And so, life is a juggling act. It's you know, it just it just is. You know, I think that the thing about teaching is that it's useful for thinking about process and articulating processes. And, you know, I love being in a classroom with my students and to feel their own focus  on the art of writing and their commitment to it. 

Writing can be lonely, but community is also so essential to the writing life. And I find that in you know, in community with my students. And I, you know, I tried to, I guess, I tried to convey to them the importance just of paying attention. You know, writing is a way of paying attention to the world, to ourselves, but the world that we live in. And, you know, who knows which of us will be able to go out and make a professional career as a writer. 

But all of us can learn so much through  the art of paying attention, bringing a kind of focus and tenderness and  love to the world, love through language. And we do need as writers to love that process.  it can be really gratifying moving students beyond their own you know, barriers, obstacles of self judgment, which I know so many writers face and God knows we all face it. God knows I feel it myself. But just to try and  and to indicate the ways that we, we need to love what we're doing. And we need to love the words and bring that, that attention to the worlds that we're trying to create on the page.

Rhonda:

I love that you brought up tenderness. I feel like the writers I admire most, know, if you, so I love the work of George Saunders, his short stories, his novels as well, but the short story in particular. And that's something I always feel, you know,  it can be the wildest story, the most speculative story, but at the heart of it, there's such, you feel the tenderness  of the writer's gaze. Is there anything in particular you do to foster that in yourself?

Catherine:

I think it's really just a practice of paying attention and, you know, finding joy and coming back to love, which sometimes can involve all the other feelings. And, you know, over time, I think of stories and I certainly, you know, I've spoken to my students in my recent novel writing graduate workshop about the way, you with a novel you're entering into a long-term relationship with a world, a set of characters, and that's gonna involve all the feelings, frustration, boredom, fury, depression, feelings that you can't go on. 

And yet underneath that, a passion and a commitment to go on and be able to,  yeah, source joy and tenderness, which in tenderness there's that capacity, I think, to acknowledge another, whether it's an imaginary world you're trying to create or a real other person or a non-human being, but to acknowledge the possibility of a reciprocal exchange. And that  involves listening  to them, maybe, you know, listening in its most expansive  sense. So maybe not just with your ears, but with your whole being. So all of that is tied up in tenderness to me. 

Ronda:

Yeah, yeah.  Do you think about the reader at all? And if so, at what point in your process are you thinking about the reader? Because sometimes when we think about the reader, can be challenging. We feel someone looking over our shoulder maybe, or we may infuse it with some censorship. How do you think about the reader and when do you think about the reader? 

Catherine:

Yeah, I mean, it's interesting thinking of the reader as being over the shoulder. I mean, that gets back to what I think of as the unhelpful, you know, judgmental framing. Whereas, I think that writing is, as I've just been saying, this fundamentally reciprocal act that requires the deepest kind of listening. 

And so the reader is always there for me because the words are sent outwards  to someone else who might be listening. Someone who I want to be listening, I want to hold their attention. So the writing is a gift exchange. I may not know who the reader is going to be, but I want them to be there in their potentiality and not in a relationship of judgment, but one of reciprocal listening and possibility. 

Rhonda:

Right. Yeah, I love thinking about the reader and  our relationship with the reader, you know, that it doesn't fully come alive until the reader reads it. And, you know, in many ways. Thank you so much for being with me today, Catherine. So the collection is Skin. It's out now. Now, you can order it wherever you get your books.  And  thanks so much for talking to me today, Catherine.

Catherine:

Thank you, Rhonda. It was a lovely conversation.

Outro:

Thanks so much for hanging out with me today and for listening all the way to the end. I hope you enjoyed today's episode of The Resilient Writers Radio Show. While you're here, I would really appreciate it if you'd consider leaving a rating and review of the show. You can do that in whatever app you're using to listen to the show right now, and it just takes a few minutes. 

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