Farrar, Straus & Giroux: Excerpt from The Volcano Lover by Susan Sontag, copyright © 1992 by Susan Sontag. Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus & Giroux, LLC.
Gillon Aitken Associates: Excerpt from Impossible Saints by Michèle Roberts, copyright © 1997 by Michèle Roberts. Reprinted by permission of Gillon Aitken Associates.
Harcourt, Inc.: Excerpt from “Saint Joseph: A Family Man” by Paul Baumann from A Tremor of Bliss: Contemporary Writers on the Saints, by Paul Elie, copyright © 1994 by Paul Baumann. Reprinted by permission of Harcourt Inc.
HarperCollins Publishers (US): Excerpt from River Angel by A. Manette Ansay, copyright © 1998. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers Inc.
HarperCollins Publishers (UK): Excerpt from Charlotte’s Web by E. B. White, copyright © 1952, 1980 by E. B. White. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers Inc.
Harvard University Press: Excerpt from Poem #1263 by Emily Dickinson from The Poems of Emily Dickinson, Ralph W. Franklin, ed., Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, copyright © 1998 by the President and Fellows from Harvard College, copyright © 1951, 1955, 1979 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College. Reprinted by permission of the publishers and the Trustees of Amherst College.
Henry Holt & Company: Excerpt from A Big-Enough God: A Feminist’s Search for a Joyful Theology by Sara Maitland, copyright © 1995 by Sara Maitland. Reprinted by permission of Henry Holt & Company, LLC.
Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc.: Excerpt from The Crime of Sheila McGough by Janet Malcolm, copyright © 1999 by Janet Malcolm. Reprinted by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc.
McClelland & Stewart Inc.: Excerpts from Cat’s Eye by Margaret Atwood, copyright © 1988 by O. W. Toad Ltd. Excerpt from Alias Grace by Margaret Atwood, copyright © 1996 by O. W. Toad Ltd. Reprinted by permission of McClelland & Stewart Inc.
New Directions Publishing: Excerpt from The Glass Menagerie by Tennessee Williams, copyright © 1945 by University of the South and Edwin D. Williams. The complete poem “This Is Just To Say” and an excerpt from “A Sort of Song” by William Carlos Williams from Collected Poems 1939-1962, Volume II, copyright © 1944 by William Carlos Williams. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp.
W. W. Norton & Company: Excerpt from Louisiana Power & Light by John Dufresne, copyright © 1994 by John Dufresne. Reprinted by permission of W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.
Perseus Books Group: Excerpt from Mid-Life: Notes from the Halfway Mark by Elizabeth Kaye, copyright © 1995 by Elizabeth Kaye. Reprinted by permission of Perseus Books Publishers, a member of Perseus Books, L.L.C.
Riverhead Books: Excerpts from The Cloister Walk by Kathleen Norris, copyright © 1996 by Kathleen Norris. Excerpts from Amazing Grace: A Vocabulary of Faith by Kathleen Norris, copyright © 1998 by Kathleen Norris. Reprinted by permission of Riverhead Books, Penguin Putnam Inc.
Nan A. Talese, The Doubleday Broadway Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc.: Excerpts from Cat’s Eye by Margaret Atwood, copyright © 1988 by O. W. Toad Ltd. Excerpt from Alias Grace by Margaret Atwood, copyright © 1996 by O. W. Toad Ltd. Excerpt from The Gift of the Jews by Thomas Cahill, copyright © 1998 by Thomas Cahill. Reprinted by permission of Nan A. Talese, The Doubleday Broadway Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc.
Gregory Wolfe: Excerpt from “The Christian Writer in a Fragmented Culture,” originally published in IMAGE: A Journal of the Arts and Religion, #7, Fall 1994; reprinted in The New Religious Humanists: A Reader, published by The Free Press, New York, copyright © 1997 by Gregory Wolfe. Reprinted by permission of the author.
P.S.
Ideas, Interviews and Features
About the author
Author Biography
Diane Schoemperlen has been described variously as “one of the most vibrant and original voices in our literature,” “incredibly intelligent and observant,” “funny,” and “creatively innovative.” She is the author of Forms of Devotion, an illustrated short story collection that won the Governor General’s Award for Fiction in 1998. Her first novel, In the Language of Love, was nominated for the Smithbooks/ Books in Canada First Novel Award in 1994 and chosen by Toronto Star critic Philip Marchand as one of the year’s ten best novels. Both In the Language of Love and Forms of Devotion have been adapted and performed as stage plays by Threshold Theatre of Toronto.
She is also the author of several short story collections including, most recently, Red Plaid Shirt, as well as Double Exposures, Frogs and Other Stories, Hockey Night in Canada, and The Man of My Dreams. Frogs and Other Stories won the 1986 Writers’ Guild of Alberta Award for Excellence in Short Fiction. The story “Red Plaid Shirt,” which first appeared in Saturday Night, received the Silver National Magazine Award for Fiction in 1989. The Man of My Dreams was nominated for the Governor General’s Award and a Trillium Award in 1990. In 2004 she published her first book of nonfiction: Names of the Dead: An Elegy for the Victims of September 11.
Born and raised in Thunder Bay, Ontario, where she graduated from Lakehead University, Schoemperlen then studied with Alice Munro at The Banff School of Fine Arts in the summer of 1976. She lived in Canmore, Alberta, for the following ten years and now lives in Kingston, Ontario, with her son, Alexander.
About the book
A Conversation with Diane Schoemperlen
HC: Writing about the Virgin Mary must have involved months of research. What can you tell us about how you launched yourself into Marian lore and mythology?
DS: This book is the first I’ve written that involved a lot of research, and I very much enjoyed that part of the process. I continued to do research for the entire three years that it took me to complete the novel. It was not a process whereby first I did the research and then wrote the book. Rather, the research was ongoing and frequently altered the course of the book as I discovered new stories and ideas about Mary.
While my interest in the topic was first piqued by a television documentary, the rest of the research was done from books and the Internet. The first two books I read were Meetings with Mary: Visions of the Blessed Mother by Janice T. Connell and In Search of Mary: The Woman and the Symbol by Sally Cunneen. These in turn led me to other books, which led me to other books, and so on. I did the research by twists and turns, following a variety of avenues of investigation as the manuscript required.
“I read close to 150 books related to Mary and the other topics covered in this novel.”
Fairly early on in my research reading, I learned of the Marian Library at the University of Dayton, Ohio, which houses the world’s largest collection of printed material about Mary, including over 90,000 books in fifty languages and more than 55,000 clippings from newspapers and magazines. This was more than a little daunting! Of course I could not read them all…In the end I read close to 150 books related to Mary and the other topics covered in this novel, such as quantum physics and Werner Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle.
HC: The idea of fact and fiction intermingling is something you explore throughout the novel. Your narrator asks, “What is the difference, how can you tell, and who decides?” Has this always been a concern in your work? Did you know when you began writing Our Lady of the Lost and Found that it would be an opportunity for you to work through such questions?
DS: Because most of my fiction has had a fairly large autobiographical component, I have always been interested in the mingling of fact and fiction from that angle. About my novels and short stories, I have been frequently asked, “How much of this is true?” to which I like to reply, “Some parts are true and some parts are not, but I’m not going to tell you which is which.” I have always been fascinated by the process that turns real-life people and events into fiction, and I have enjoyed playing with this aspect of blurring the lines between autobiography and fiction in my work.
“Some parts are true and some parts are not, but I’m not going to tell you which is
which.”
When I began writing Our Lady of the Lost and Found, I knew I wanted to play with this some more, to make the narrator of the novel both like me and not like me. But then I began to see how central the intermingling of fact and fiction is in the stories of Marian apparitions: are they fiction or nonfiction or something in between? Does it matter? I was most inspired and intrigued by my friend Merilyn Simonds’ essay on the fiction/nonfiction continuum, a piece called “Liars and Damned Liars,” which appeared in Brick just as I was beginning to contemplate these questions myself…a fortuitious event, as this essay became essential to the development of these themes in my novel. It also led me to further investigations of the uncertainty principle, Heraclitus, Herodotus, Thucydides, and the nature of recorded history. Although I did not know this would happen when I began writing, the more I worked on the novel, the more important these themes became.
HC: You say you were raised in a Christian but non-Catholic family, in which devotion to Mary was not a large part of your religious consciousness. What aspects of your research into Mary surprised you most? Were there stories (of believers having visions, for instance) that strained your willingness to believe?
DS: My family was Christian in name only. When I was a young girl, I was the only member of my family who went to church regularly. Each week I was sent off to Sunday school alone or with the neighbours. For years I sang in the choir as well. I went to a United Church, and Mary did not figure largely into the teachings or the artwork. My church, like most Protestant churches, was focused primarily on Jesus. When I began doing research for this book, almost all of what I discovered about Mary was new to me. Essentially, I was surprised over and over again by everything I learned. The research was so rich and varied.
“When I was a young girl, I was the only member of my family who went to church regularly.”
Of course, there were many stories of visions that were hard to believe, particularly the contemporary North American ones. Some of these are included in the book: Mary appearing on the bumper of a late-model Camaro, on the concrete floor of an auto parts store, and on the glass panels of a finance company building; Jesus appearing in the picture of a plate of spaghetti on a Pizza Hut billboard in Georgia and on the brick wall of a Tim Hortons in Nova Scotia. When I read about this last one, I laughed out loud and thought, Well, of course he would appear at a Tim Hortons…it’s the Canadian place to be! I go there every day myself.
Whether or not these kinds of sightings are believable, I very much enjoy the humor inherent in these stories. Because I wrote this novel from the premise that all these stories were true, I felt no need to explain or justify, to prove or disprove, any of these sightings, preposterous though they may be. The juxtaposition of these more frivolous stories included along with the serious well-documented sightings such as Lourdes, Fatima, and Medjugorje worked well, I thought, with the questions I was asking about the “thin places” between fact and fiction.
HC: It’s been several years now since you wrote Our Lady of the Lost and Found. How does Mary figure in your life now, if at all? Have you remained intrigued by her, and do you notice her in everyday life in the same way that you did while she was the focus of your research?
“I will always feel a special connection with Mary.”
DS: I think I will always feel a special connection with Mary. I think of her in a very proprietary way as “my Mary.” I am definitely still intrigued by her and find that I am still buying books about her for my own personal interest. My particular favourite is Mary of Canada: The Virgin Mary in Canadian Culture, Spirituality, History and Geography by Joan Skogan. I so wish I had had this book when I was writing mine! As it is, Joan Skogan quotes my book in hers, so I’m very happy about that.
I am also tickled whenever Mary makes the news, as she still does quite frequently in stories of new visions and sightings around the world. I do indeed notice her in my daily life now, just as I did when I was working on the novel. She is still popping up all over the place and this always pleases me immensely. Like the narrator of the novel, I too have a large statue of Mary beside my desk. When I finished writing the book, I found that I didn’t want to put the statue away, so she still stands there smiling patiently. Like the narrator, sometimes I still talk to her and I no longer hide her away in my bedroom closet when I am expecting visitors!
HC: Our Lady of the Lost and Found contains many moments of humor, something that may come as a surprise to readers. The premise itself—of Mary appearing in the flesh and simply needing a break—is a source of humor. Why did you use humor so much in a book that is about quite serious things? Does humor happen naturally when you write?
DS: In her recent book, Plan B: Further Thoughts on Faith, the American writer Anne Lamott says that one of the secrets of life is to know that “laughter is carbonated holiness.” I agree wholeheartedly. I have often described this novel as “a very serious book with lots of funny parts or a very funny book with lots of serious parts.” In a review in Elle magazine, this novel was described as “a holy hoot,” while in The Globe and Mail it was called “genuinely heartbreaking.” Either way, the combination seems to work. Perhaps readers are more open to approaching serious topics if humor is used as an avenue into them. Perhaps in literature, as well as in life, a little comic relief is always in order. In this book, I was extremely careful to make sure that the humor was not likely to be offensive to anyone.
“Perhaps in literature, as well as in life, a little comic relief is always in order.”
Speaking generally, I do find that humor happens naturally in my writing. I think it is simply a reflection of how I see and experience the world. My sense of humor and irony has helped me through many difficult times in my life. In my writing I have found that I must let that unfold naturally. The one time I intentionally tried to write a funny book, it failed miserably and I abandoned the attempt.
HC: You recently wrote and published a book called Names of the Dead, about the victims of the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. What inspired you to write that? What effect did your writing of fiction have on the approach you took?
DS: Like most people, I spent September 11, and many days following, in front of the television. When I did go out, I was shocked to discover that while I remained in a trance, still watching CNN and feeling paralyzed, daily life was going on just as it always had. During those days, I could not even think about writing. Fiction suddenly seemed impossible and completely unnecessary in this world we were now uneasily inhabiting. In the face of such a tragedy, I was rendered mute.
I did not begin this project with the idea that I was writing a book about September 11. Rather, I thought that if I could compile a list of the names of the dead, it would be a kind of therapy that might release me from my paralysis and allow me to begin writing again. I spent four months working on just the names. When I arranged them in paragraphs, the names alone filled eighty manuscript pages. It was then that I began to admit to myself that I was indeed writing a book about September 11. I did it because I felt I had to. Writing was the only thing I knew how to do, the only way I could even begin to address my own grief, the only way I knew how to honor the dead.
I think now that much of what I learned while writing Our Lady of the Lost and Found served me well with Names of the Dead. I had done so much thinking about the fiction/nonfiction continuum and had discovered many ways to handle that. I had learned how to do research and how to cope with a resulting mountain of material that must then be distilled somehow to fit into a normalsized book. In Names of the Dead I was also able to make ample and varied use of my penchant for making lists and for writing in short sections, two elements that have always figured largely in my fiction. With Our Lady of the Lost and Found I think I was able to write a novel about a religious subject that is not a religious book; with Names of the Dead I think I was able to write a book about a much-politicized event that is not a political book.
HC: In your past four publi
shed works—In the Language of Love, Forms of Devotion, Our Lady of the Lost and Found, Names of the Dead—you have used very different structures and styles of writing. Can you talk about how you decide upon a structure and why you chose the structures for each of these books? Are there ways in which all of these works are connected?
“I have always been un-accountably interested in unusual structures in my writing.”
DS: I have always been unaccountably interested in unusual structures in my writing. Even in my earliest published short stories, I was using experimental forms. I don’t know now what gave me the nerve thirty years ago to think that I could do whatever I wanted with the structure of a story or a novel! When I sit down to begin a new book, I don’t think, Now what crazy thing can I do this time? It just seems to happen that way. The structure of each of these four books came about in a different way.
For my first novel, In the Language of Love, I had the idea for the structure of 100 chapters long before I had the story itself. I came across the initial idea for this structure when looking something else up in a library book about general psychology. I don’t remember now what I was really looking for, but what I found was a table of the 100 stimulus words of the Standard Word Association Test. This list of words intrigued me immediately. For two years I kept it in the back of my mind, but I had no characters, no story. Having only written short stories, I was very intimidated by the prospect of writing a novel. Eventually I began, still without really knowing where I was going with the story. I wrote the first chapter first and the last chapter last but the rest I wrote at random, choosing to work on whatever chapter was clearest to me at the moment. Then I put them together in the original order of the test and did a major revision for chronology and consistency. It worked: I had a novel!
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