Letter from the Author
I began to write as a child, not long after I learned to read. It was like a light flicking on or someone turning a faucet ñ I always wanted to make something with language not just take it in. I was lucky enough to have an amazing Grade Three teacher in my suburban Toronto public school, who had all of us writing poems, stories and short nonfiction pieces that she called Thoughts, often personal responses to world events, like the Vietnam War. This was in 1969, in Don Mills, Ontario.
Photo: Danielle Schaub
I began my first novel at ten, about a family of four children who hijack a NASA rocket on its launchpad — a work inspired by a combination of C.S. Lewis's Narnia series, my love of the Apollo moon missions, trips to the planetarium, and Holst's The Planets suite.
I didn't say to myself as a child, oh, I'm going to be a writer when I grow up, although I was aware of women of my mother's generation, Canadian women, women who even shared my mother's name, Margaret, who were pursuing careers as writers.
I remember an epiphanic moment in Quebec City, aged sixteen, when it seemed absolutely clear that there was never going to be the perfect uninterrupted time in which to write: either you got down to the work amidst the muck and muddle of real life or you didn't.
At eighteen, I told myself I would either be a journalist or an academic. But I didn't go to graduate school, and at twenty-five I pulled back from being a dance and theatre critic because I didn't have enough time to write fiction. The only way I could live with myself was if I tried to write a novel, no matter what happened to it.
My desire to write sometimes strikes me as odd because I don't think of myself as a naturally wordy person. My father, a doctor, came from a family of quite talented natural artists. His father worked as a draughtsman, designing radios in England for the Marconi company. My mother's family are readers, her father a man who never had the chance to go to university but who was a lifelong autodidact and book collector. On both sides, I come from lines of reserved people, British folk not always ready with words or stories. Perhaps a certain generational pressure builds up: someone has to come along and start finding the words. Still, I get to words by seeing things first: gestures, movement, the way a woman walks into a room. I think of myself as a primarily visual person, so that writing for me becomes an act of translation.
Yet I love the narrative arc of stories and I'm drawn to fiction in which kinetic energy propels you from page to page. I look to stories for movement, think of story as a form of movement. I'm attracted to characters, often women, who are pulled in two directions at once and forced to choose — this, too, becomes a form of movement. I write fiction that takes the reader to moments of choice but cannot necessarily offer resolution or neat endings. I've explored the lives of women who are passionate about their work and for whom the desire for intimacy is set against the desire for solitude, perhaps because this is a drama that has played out in my own life. I also love the deep immersion that novels afford, the way both the reading and writing of them unfolds over a period of time. When I read, I'm drawn to novels that are in some way deeply true to themselves: they may not be perfect (the novel's an imperfectable form) but they have the ring of authenticity, they're pursuing a vision not quite like any I've read before. As a writer, this is what I aspire to do.
Catherine Bush