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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. So I'm here today with my friend Barbara Sibbald. Barbara is an award-winning fiction author, compulsive organizer, ardent environmentalist, and gardener and a relentless reader. Mostly, though, she's a writer who will publish her fourth novel, who has published her fourth novel, Almost English. It's the story of the racism and hardships her great grandparents endured in the Northwest Frontier of India from 1885 to 1912.
Her other books of fiction include The Museum of Possibilities, an award-winning collection of short fiction, and three novels Regarding Wanda, which was shortlisted for the Ottawa Book Award, and The Book of Love: Guidance in Affairs of the Heart, as well as the online serial Kitchen Chronicles. Her work has also appeared in two anthologies and more than a dozen literary journals. Welcome, Barbara. I'm so glad you're here.
Barbara:
I'm so happy to be here. Thanks for inviting me.
Rhonda:
Yeah, this is going to be great. So I know the story of this book, but um let's just start way back at the beginning. Like where did the idea for it actually come from in the first place? And when did you know, oh, I think there's a book here.
Barbara:
Oh, it goes way back, know, because I knew that my grandmother was born in India, which is a little exotic. And I had always been told things that I remembered, which weren't necessarily true that somehow she was related to some Indian princess and that she had a pet elephant and, you know, things like that—
Rhonda:
Oh really, exotic.
Barbara:
Just weren't true at all. And I don't even know where I got them. My imagination when I was a kid, I'm not sure. Then my mother diligently spent almost two decades writing a genealogy of that part of the family. So it's a maternal history of her family in India. And she shared part of that with me at one point around 2018, 17, 18. And then I finally gleaned what the truth was. And so that was really very interesting for me. And I thought, gee, could, this is a great story. I could write something about this, especially about my great grandparents and their early life in India.
Because not only did I have my mother's very well documented genealogy. She also shared with me a bunch of letters and photos and things like that. So suddenly what seemed like this remote story came to life for me and I started doing my own research. So that was sort of the beginning of it.
Rhonda:
And when you first started writing this book, you thought, oh, I think this is a book of creative nonfiction, right?
Barbara:
I did. I did. Because I had all these factual documents, you know, the letters and the genealogy and everything, ah I thought, yeah, this is going to be creative nonfiction, which is just the perfect melding of who I am, which is a fiction writer, but also a journalist. And so I thought, oh, great, this is going to work. This is going to great. And plus a friend of mine was taking the creative nonfiction course at uh King's College in New Brunswick... or Nova Scotia.
And so I talked to him a little bit about it. And then I joined the creative nonfiction association here in Canada. And I talked to uh Lorri Neilsen Glenn, who's an instructor and expert in that area. And I read a ton of creative nonfiction to get a feel for it and did a whole bunch more research as well.
So my mom and I went to England together and we visited some of the elderly relatives and I got still more letters, bundles of letters even that nobody had really looked at for a really long time, plus a ton more photographs and all sorts of things to sort of bolster the nonfiction part of this.
And then I began to read histories of the Raj and British India, what it was like at that time, what was it like in the Northwest Frontier, which is where my great grandparents lived. They lived in a place called Quetta, which is about 40 miles due south of Kandahar. So they were right on the border.
Rhonda:
It's Pakistan now.
Barbara:
It is Pakistan, that's correct. It is Pakistan now. But at that time it was considered to be part of the British held territories, part of the British Raj and was uh run by them basically as much as one could say it was run.
So anyway, so armed with all of this information, I said about my first draft and I wasn't really sure where to start. And so I started at the very beginning, which was, you know, with my great grandfather's father and what happened to him and what happened to the family fortunes and then onto his story and it just on and on and on.
And at the end of that draft, which I think, yeah, at the end of that first draft, had something like 140,000 words which is uh way, way, way too long for a novel uh or for any book for that matter, which, you know, 60 to 80,000 words is what most publishers are looking for.
So I knew I had a real problem and I asked my friend, David McDonald, who does film scripts and things like that, if he could, you know, help me. And so he said, I had to find a good starting place. And the starting place was not with my...great-greats. It was with my great-grandfather and what was the story I wanted to tell, which basically was the story of his time that he was married to my great-grandmother and the hardships that they underwent.
And my hook on all of this, which was so like you need to have something more than just a story about your relatives, right? So my hook was is that my great-grandfather in fact was a quarter Indian. And because he was a quarter Indian, the Raj, the ruling Raj, the English who were very racist, um discriminated against him as they did to all Eurasians, as they were called in that time. um And they sort of lumped them in with the Indian folk and so relegated them to really poor jobs on the railway or as low-paying, lowly paid clerks called crannies.
And so that's where my great grandfather, Stephen, those were the jobs that he had, but it wasn't really enough to support him and his family. And there was all sorts of hardship and poverty, et cetera. So I ended up with a second draft that was shorter than my first draft. And that was also creative nonfiction. And then I, and then I thought, well-
Rhonda:
I can remember you and I going for coffee at this point. Right? And then you were like, I don't know, is it creative nonfiction? Is it, I don't know, what am I doing with this? So when did you make the decision to kind of move it more towards fiction?
Barbara:
Well, I decided to uh hire, um I'm blanking out, Lorri Neilsen Glenn. I decided to hire her as sort of uh a reader to give me her opinion because she's the expert. And she said that it could be creative nonfiction, but equally it could be fiction.
And the thing that I had done in the creative nonfiction, and I sort of knew it was against the rules, is I had dialogue. And I separated the dialogue with M dashes, thinking somehow that people would know I had made that up. like, you're not allowed to make stuff up in creative nonfiction. And so I would have had to lose all the dialogue.
At the point at which the real turning point for me was I realized that in order to truly know these people, I had to be able to access their internal thoughts. had to hear them speaking to one another. All of the, had to see them in their acts of everyday living, you know, which are all of which I would have had to make up. And so I thought, it's going to be fiction. And so I turned it around and started rewriting again and I didn't just—
Rhonda:
Didn’t you start writing it from scratch or oh wow okay.
Barbara:
Yeah did I a lot of it was from I mean I had that I had those initial two drafts so I was able to use you know material out of them but basically I started from scratch and I started at a different point in the story after they were married and scene was—
Rhonda:
If I remember it's the earthquake scene, right?
Barbara:
That's right. And I opened with the earthquake scene and for a long time, I thought I should open with when he first meet, when they first meet, which was in church in Quetta one day. And I had thought that that would make a good opening. But in the end, I went with the earthquake because it's really dramatic and sort of sets the tone for what is to come sort of one series of disaster and, you know, bad luck after another.
Yeah, so that's where I started it. So then I had a third draft after that. So all of this, like the first two drafts probably took me about a year and half, maybe two years with all the travel and the research and spending time in the British Library and looking at old maps and like all of that stuff.
And then I set it around to do this third draft, which probably took another eight or nine months. And circulated that debate to readers. I'm really a huge believer in having other people read your manuscript and offer you opinions. It's really, for me, it was a pivotal thing.
Like it really allowed me to see the book in a new way and to realize maybe, you know, I need to dramatize this more or that more. And this section is really boring, just get rid of it. And if it, the cardinal rule for me became, if it does not feed into the central question of the book, it doesn't belong there. So the central question of the book was how could Stephen Turner become accepted into the Raj despite his background, his lineage. em so that became, that was his aim. And Lily, his wife, supported him in that aim. And that's what they were striving to do. So a lot of stuff just went.
And then by the fourth draft, it was still by end of the third draft was still too long. By the fourth draft, was getting to be the right length because I had cut out huge swaths of it. Like they spent time in Indore, for example.
Rhonda:
How did you decide what to cut? I mean, I think a lot of, you I always say there's two kinds of writers. There's like the overwriters. You end up with 140, 150,000 words and you've got to bring it, you know, you got to wrestle it down or you, you know, I'm an underwriter. So when I first write, don't, you know, there's not a lot of like description or whatever. So how did you make the decision about what to cut?
Barbara:
Well, a lot of the backstory, I found different ways of integrating it into the text, either through letters or um in other means. And I also, I went back to that central question, does this have to do with his aspirations to be accepted by the Raj? And if the answer was, well, maybe or no, then I could get rid of it. um But at the same time-
Rhonda:
I love that idea of having a central question to guide the version. So smart.
Barbara:
Yeah, I think it really worked for me. And although you see, have to be careful too, because you don't want to cut, cut away the things that are funny or, or really dramatic in some way. And, and I had a trajectory of a story to write as well. Like they had seven children and I couldn't just eliminate some of the children. They all had to be there.
Rhonda:
I guess that's the problem when you're using material based on your own family. It's like if it was just fiction from that you were making up, you could eliminate one of the children, but in this case, no.
Barbara:
That's precisely right. Yeah, I had to include all the children, especially because I knew that my cousins were going to be reading it because by this time, of course, I had talked to all the cousins and... uh you know, got their information, whatever information they had. So they were sort of all apprised that this was going on, that I was doing this. And so I really felt an obligation to include all the children.
And it was part of the story in a big way too, because suddenly, you know, they had this huge family to support. And so what that meant was, even though this was like 1890, 1900, like the trajectory runs 1885 to 1912.
So in that period even, Lily starts working. She works from home, but she has a couple of cows and she sells the milk. She gets tea from Stephen's brother who has a tea plantation in Dharamsala and she starts selling the tea to like the, to the local messes and whatnot to the military.
So she has these businesses going that she's running on the side to make money to help support the children. And also a big aspiration of theirs was to send their children home, which means India or England, to send them home for their education.
Because the feeling at that time was that education in India was inferior. And if you wanted to get ahead of the game, you really had to have a British education. And Stephen himself, when his family still had money, he had been educated in England. And so had Lily. Lily was the daughter of a Scottish couple, and her father was in the military. He was a in charge of the commissariat for the Northwest Frontier. So he was like uh making sure all the supplies were there for the military.
Anyway, so um to make the family finances work, there was a lot oh more involvement from the wife than maybe there normally would have been, which I found really interesting. She was really ahead of her times. It was great.
Rhonda:
Yeah, for sure. So what was the biggest challenge for you in taking this manuscript from creative nonfiction into fiction? Like what's, what was the hardest part of doing that?
Barbara:
I think cutting material is always really hard. You become close to it. And although it wasn't written in a perfect way, um it was, you know, I worked on it and it's really hard to, you know, cut those things that you've worked so hard on, you know, and I really liked the scenes in Indore, but I had just, there was no reason for them to be there. So I had to get rid of them.
And yeah, so I think that was really hard cutting material. um What wasn't hard is finding their voice and the voices of Lily and Stephen. And I think it was because I had so many original letters. I had letters from two periods in their life. One was when they were engaged.
When they got engaged, Lily's father was not keen on her marrying this guy who he knew would have a really tough time in his career, who would probably be poor or even worse. And so her dad was not keen and he made them wait a whole year. And during that year, they wrote letters to one another.
Lily kept his letters and I, Stephen's letter, I don't know, the letters she sent to him are gone. So she was the letter keeper in the family. So she had these letters that she'd kept.
Rhonda:
So you had all of those letters, wow.
Barbara:
I found them at my, I went up to visit one of my cousins who lives in Inverness near where Lily's family was from. And she lives up there and I went and she had two batches of letters. She had a whole bunch of letters that were already typed up. Her mom had transcribed them and typed them up. So my grandmother's, what, first cousin, I guess. She had already typed them all up.
And then she had another batch of letters that her mother hadn't gotten around to typing and they were tied with this, you know, once white, now yellow piece of ribbon. And I just like, I opened this ribbon and I thought, when was the last time this was opened? Like decades ago. And there were all these other letters, you know, from the time that they were engaged.
And those letters, it's really interesting what happens when in a courtship, when you're separated by distance. Because usually in a courtship, you'll tell each other your story once and rely on them to remember somehow what you've said. But when they're written down in letters, I think you really have an opportunity to go over them and really get to know them at a deeper level.
And so those letters were really revealing. And then there was a second batch of letters. They were separated early on in their marriage, like maybe not that early, I guess, maybe six or seven years in. They were really poor and Stephen decides to go to demarcate the boundary on this expedition to demarcate the boundary between Afghanistan and India. was called the Durand Line.
And so he sets off to go to camp as they called it because he was going to get paid basically double what he would have been paid at the agency in Quetta. So off he goes and she kept all his letters. So she has this remarkable record.
I can't help but think it would be of interest to historians too because it really explains why the demarcation was delayed and all the things that happened. But you also get a real feeling for who they are and the sort of the sauciness between them and the repartee and they're still flirting at that age for goodness sake.
Rhonda:
Oh love that. Did you ever at any point feel overwhelmed with all of the material that you had?
Barbara:
Not the material that I got from my family like in terms of letters and stuff. But I was just reading like every history of India that I could lay my hands on.
Rhonda:
I mean the Raj itself just like, oh my God, you could do so much.
Barbara:
I know there was so much material. And then I had things that were specific to the Northwest, like things like the Frontier Doctor by this guy named Henry Holland, who was the doctor in Quetta at the same time that they would have been there.
And there were all sorts of sort of other documents like that, you know, and um, so I was, I had a lot of material to go through and I kept copious notes and I sort of divided it up, know, like, here's the stuff around women. Here's the stuff around what it's like in a household, how they would run a household.
You know, there were recipe books and things like that. There was a book of medicine that I found particularly interesting because Lily ends up running sort of what she calls her veranda hospital when they, they end up living in a very remote area and the native women have no health care.
So she sets up this veranda hospital for them where they can come and get treatment from a woman, which is what was acceptable to them being Muslim women. I found a copy of that book and I just imagined that maybe she had the same one and there we were, but she probably didn't that anyways, yeah, so way too much material.
Rhonda:
But once you were fictionalizing it, you know, you could, as you say, you could go into their heads, you could be in their bodies, you could, you know, really be in the whole experience. Was there any part of the material where you're like, I don't think I can fictionalize this, you and you actually just brought in the real stuff, because you brought in some of the letters, right?
Barbara:
Yes.
Rhonda:
Yeah. So how did you choose, like, when to be using something from real life? um And when to be fictionalizing?
Barbara:
So I did use a lot of the letters, that's a good example, and I did quote from them, more or less verbatim, but then I made up some letters too, where in their, towards, just before they got married, and she talks about having read Frankenstein, which she probably did, it was published, know, and it was probably a hot commodity among school girls, which is how she envisions it, and he uses the trope of the monster to describe sort of how he is, how he feels like an outcast in the Raj.
And so that was, you know, I just felt that that would work well for him and for what they were talking about. They were both people who read a lot of literature. So things like that I would bring in. ah Mostly the story follows the trajectory of their lives, where they lived and when they lived with a few exceptions, but mostly it just follows that.
So um I like to think that it's fairly, you know, in lot of ways it's quite close to what really happened. But then I had to, as I said, bring them to life by having them have little arguments with one another or to dramatize a scene where she, for example, finds out she's pregnant when her last baby is only like four months old and she's pregnant again. And how does that feel for her or when her friend lost a baby to a miscarriage, which was so common and how that made her feel. And so there's a lot of things like that.
I couldn't do a sex scene. That was beyond me. just, even though I'm usually fine with sex scenes, like these are my great grandparents couldn't do it. But I did do a lot of research on what the undergarments were in those days so that I could have him undressing her. That's as far as I got, but. It was interesting just to see all the layers of things.
Rhonda:
Yeah, there's so many layers.
Barbara:
Yeah, yeah. So that was kind of fun.
Rhonda:
So great. How does the writing of this book compare to, you know, other novels that you've written, like Regarding Wanda or, you know, other books that you've worked on?
Barbara:
So Regarding Wanda was my first novel and it was very much, today it would be called Auto Fiction probably it was very close to life except that I kill off the father and he was still alive. But aside from that, it was very much like auto fiction. It was my first novel out of the post and it was originally a collection of short stories that I wove into a novel.
And yeah, that was interesting and a different uh sort of process for sure. And then I wrote The Book of Love, which was based on friendships, women's friendships, basically. And some of that was autobiographical, but not very much. Most of it was made up.
Museum of Possibilities was a collection of stories. So it was some of this, some of that, you know, it was a little bit of everything. And the Kitchen Chronicles, which was the online novel, it was mostly stories out of my life things that were told around a kitchen table basically.
So this book though is not really from my life. Like the main, so the novel has two parts and I wouldn't really—
Rhonda:
But it's from something that was true.
Barbara:
It is something that was—
Rhonda:
Bit of a theme here.
Barbara:
Yes, that's true. It was something that was true, although I changed it and I, you know, embellished it, whatever. But there's a second part in the book called the interstices. And so every few chapter you'll-two chapters, you'll come to this thing that says an interstice.
And what it is is sort of a nonfiction, very short essay by me talking about the process of writing the novel and more importantly, how I was on the same sort of journey as my great grandparents in searching for a place to belong because I come from an itinerant military family and I never really felt like I belonged anywhere.
So I identified with them on a very, very personal level. So in that sense, the book is many things. It is historical fiction. It is biography. It is also autobiography in terms of the pieces about me. So that melange of genres makes it very difficult to find a publisher.
Rhonda:
Yeah. Publishers like things that are very neatly categorized.
Barbara::
They want to know which section of the bookstore is it going to be in?
Rhonda:
Right. What shelf is this going on?
Barbara:
Exactly. And my book didn't really fit into those parameters. So by draft seven—
Rhonda:
It did take you a while to find a public.
Barbara:
It took me forever. I finished, I felt like the novel was finished, like draft seven, um after about four years into the process, four and a bit years, and then it took me like almost another three years to find a publisher. And yeah, was really, was—
Rhonda:
Wow. I would have said like a year, year and a half.
Barbara:
No, it was brutal. I even went to the London Book Fair because I thought, well, I'll find somebody there maybe, you know, and I had a couple of nibbles, but no, but for this reason, because it crosses genres, nobody would touch it. And then, but while I was there, I did talk to this fellow from the Indian government who was in charge of their publishers there.
And so he sat down with me for a couple hours and we went through all the publishers in India and he pointed to the ones he thought might be interested. And it just so happened that when, as the book was just published in Canada, it's going to be published in India probably next month.
Rhonda:
Oh, I love that. I didn't know that. That's so great.
Barbara:
Yeah. two things happening both at once.
Rhonda:
So it's going to be translated or is it being published in English?
Barbara:
It'll be published in English out of Pune by Vishwakarma Publications. So for 370 rupees, whatever that is.
Rhonda:
Yeah, that's great. Wow.
Barbara:
And they're using the same cover, but obviously put their logo on it and stuff, and then they redesigned the interior. Yeah, so that's exciting. After having no publisher, I suddenly have two publishers, including an international one, which is really interesting. So I mean, the process of getting a publisher, mean, I just... you have to remove your ego from it. And it's just like, send it out, send it out. I sent, I approached 48 publishers.
Rhonda:
Wow.
Barbara:
That's a lot of publishers.
Rhonda:
A lot of publishers.
Barbara:
I eventually realized that nobody in the States was going to be interested. This was, so I went to Scotland and UK and you know, I thought maybe I would get somebody, but I was really impeded because I don't have a agent. It's really hard.
Anyways, and the publisher who took it at Bayeux Arts, Vishal Gupta is Indian. And so he saw something in this book that maybe other people hadn't seen so.
Rhonda:
Sometimes that's what happens, right? Exactly. Okay, great. So um what's your plan now? Like are you planning to do more auto fiction, more autobiographical fiction, more things based on history? You're go back to CNF. Like where do you see yourself going from here?
Barbara:
Well, I think I'm doing a couple of things. I've started writing poetry. When I was sending the book out to publishers, that's sort of what saved my bacon as I started writing poetry every morning. And so I had some creative outlet because I really need that. So that was really great. And I got a poetry group.
So I might try to put together a chapbook. I don't know. I'm working through some of my poems and thinking about that. I also have about a half a dozen short stories that are more or less finished. And I'm thinking of maybe another collection of short fiction.
And I'm also playing with the idea of another historical uh novel, but this time something that has to do with my other great love in life, which is gardening. So if I could meld gardening with historical fiction, then that might be a possibility for me.
So I'm looking at a few historical figures that might be good for my model. Yeah, it's kind of a, I'm sort of at a transition point with my fingers and a lot of pies and so.
Rhonda:
See where the energy is. This is so great. I mean, I just think it's really interesting to start a project office, creative nonfiction, and then go, nope, it needs to be a novel, but it's a novel done, you know, your own way that pulls in. As you said, like a little bit of autobiography and a little bit of uh historical, you know, material as well. So yeah, I just think it's a fascinating process. Thanks so much for being here and talking to us about it today, Barbara.
Barbara:
Well, thank you so much for having me, Rhonda.
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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