My friend,
the writer and blogger Terri Favro who is the author of The Proxy Bride, invited me to answer these four questions
as a writer. I like the idea of it because it helped me focus on what I write, why I write and why I love to do it.
1.
What am I working on?
I have two
projects I am concurrently working on. The first piece of work, that I am on
the cusp of completing, is a sort of memoir/ day to day account of my
daughter’s transition as a Transgender man (from female to male) entitled The
Unfinished Dollhouse. This was originally begun as weekly blog posts but I
think has evolved into a memoir.
The second
project is a novel (working title Her Enchanted Objects) is about an average
middle class woman, Vita, with a complicated past, who keeps encountering a
homeless man, Billy, on the streets of Toronto who reminds her of a former
lover, Michael. It’s set in the course of one day in June and covers the back
stories of all three – Vita, Billy and Michael.
2. How does my work differ from others in the
same genre?
I think my
work can be a bit rawer and make more people uncomfortable. I tend to delve
into the darker side of human
relations at times and I can be more explicit about the disconcerting aspects of
life that might not be examined in commercial print – such as the inner life of
someone living on the streets,
the sometimes tortuous sexual relations between the men and women, the
experience of being a Trans teenager.
3. Why do I write what I do?
I enjoy
stories about average people under difficult or unusual circumstances and how
they navigate them – the
Italian born housewife/factory worker obsessed with opera (my first novel Made
Up of Arias) – the
life of the Sicilian bandit Giuliano who was thrust into banditry to feed his
family (my unpublished
second novel We Were Like You) – the homeless Billy (current project Her
Enchanted Objects) and
in a future project the Trans young adult Julia who magically appears at her
parents’ wedding
(Julia at the Wedding). I don’t like to read, or write, fantasy or spec fiction
or romance. I enjoy writing and
reading stories about unexceptional people thrust into unexpected situations.
4. How does my writing process work?
I usually
start with the end of the story/novel … think of the novel as an alphabet. I
start with “Z” (the ending even
if it’s only in my head) and then I fill in the rest of the alphabet. It might
not necessarily be A or B it could be F
or Q or L in the story.
When I am
starting something new I force myself to write a minimum of 500 words each day
– quality is good, bad or indifferent -
first thing in the morning, before I do anything else. This seems to get the creative motor going.
