ALUMNA PROFILE

Claudia is a novelist, playwright and columnist. She wrote the Globe and Mail’s Coupling and Group Therapy columns, as well as Toro magazine’s sex column under the pseudonym, Bebe O’Shea. Her plays have been produced internationally and include Beaver, Trout Stanley and The Gwendolyn Poems, which was nominated for the Governor General’s Award and the Trillium Award. Her debut novel, Stunt, was chosen by The Globe and Mail and Quill & Quire as Book of the Year and was shortlisted for the Amazon.ca First Novel Award. Her non-fiction follow-up, How to Be a Bush Pilot: A Field Guide to Getting Luckier is published by HarperCollins. Claudia lives in Toronto where she is an Adjunct Professor in the Department of English at the University of Toronto.

Claudia Dey was interviewed in June 2009.

What projects are you currently working on?

Right now, I’m writing a non-fiction book, which is a departure for me. It’s part of a two-book contract I signed with HarperCollins this past winter. I’m in a non-fiction frame of mind - the perfect antidote after having written a novel. The novel demands you be sequestered in solitude; it’s hungry and exacting. Whereas this non-fiction book is a book for men, about sex, full of jokes; writing it is like watching Chaplin movies – with the necessary accretion of facts and tips. It is the outcome of a column I wrote for TORO magazine for nearly five years. My next novel is making some kind of subterranean appearances and I’m recording the small details as they arrive. A third project is a screenplay/adaptation of my play Trout Stanley.

You’ve been writing a weekly advice column in the Globe and Mail; where does all your wisdom come from?

Thank you. I think experience and observation - as well as the act of paying attention and being moved by what you’ve beheld - is the best teacher. I try to write from a place of consummate empathy. When I was growing up, I felt like a confessional, a secret-keeper; people would come to me and confide and look for direction. I guess I had a lot of practice from an early age. However, I’ve just resigned from the Globe and Mail, after two years and nearly 90 columns.

You mentioned that your next novel is making “subterranean appearances,” can you talk a bit about your process?

Usually, it begins with an image and, thereafter, I start to take notes quite furiously – on nearby receipts, in the middle of the night, while driving. I remember John Murrell – when I was studying with One Yellow Rabbit and attending the PlayRites Colony – saying: when a new story presents itself, it rages through you like an infection. The only cure is to write it. So I take down the often surreal, non-sensical notes as they come; those notes start to take the shape of discernible prose and that prose, through meticulous editorial work, becomes the novel. It can be many years in the making. I tend to think long and write fast.

Is it difficult to let go once the novel is finished and sent to the publisher’s?

Yes, there’s a kind of melancholia because you’ve existed in such a clearly defined, constantly sharpening world with these characters who are, frankly, as real to you as the other people in your life. If these characters walked into the room, you’d know exactly how they’d move, what drink they would order, who would sidle up against the wall, and who would be dancing. When they are snapped up and sewn into the finished book, you miss them terribly. Returning to living is an awkward act of assimilation – like you’re suddenly a tourist or amphibian. Or you’ve been in space and must re-enter the atmosphere and people clamor around you, the astronaut, and ask: so what was it like? Is there water on Mars? It’s lonely and solitary and disorienting. A writer compulsively needs to live inside that creative universe. It is very much alive in them and makes them awake. The insight I have now is that in future, it’s really important, when you are finishing a project, to have another one burgeoning just behind it so that you’re never quite left in that liminal state.

Where do you do your writing, is there a special place you like to go to?

Indeed, and I’m in it right now! It’s the attic of our house. The former occupant, a Buddhist illustrator put in these beautiful skylights and created a sublime space. There’s a huge wall covered with paintings by my son (three year-old Dove) and images of my sultry heroes: Gwendolyn MacEwen, Patty Smith, David Bowie, and Serge Gainsbourg. And I look out onto our roof-top deck which is currently being planted with kale, carrots, basil and possibly a pumpkin by my part-time farmer husband. I spend a lot of time here.

What would you like to write about that you haven’t already explored?

I re-visit a lot of the same themes. My curiosities don’t actually shift that much, but are just expressed in different ways. For instance, I’m fascinated by the sense of belonging; how do we define ourselves when all of the markers of identity vanish? Right now, I’m also fascinated by a kind of Twelfth Night androgyny. I’m always curious about relationships and the complexities of love. I don’t know how much of my hunger is for new questions or for old questions that I’m answering differently. I ’ll know more in a few years - once I finish this novel.

Did you always know that you wanted to be a writer?

Yes. I’ve been writing for as long as I can remember. I used to make little books when I was a girl and I had a million journals. I would use whatever scraps of paper I could find to take notes and record thoughts. It was like a navigational tool. Nothing has changed.

What brought you to the NTS?

A convergence of three passions: writing, the theatre and Montreal. I had studied at McGill University before applying to the National Theatre School. I remember that I was in White River, Ontario, in a motel room, getting ready to cook for a tree-planting contract, when I got the news that I ’d gotten into the School. And I was thrilled, of course.

What aspects of your training at the NTS have served you best during your career so far?

I believe it was the constant, constant practice. The constant doing. Like a carpenter, a medical student, a pastry chef, it is about the hours you spend in the wild of your training. What I loved so much about the structure of our program was that it was like this barrage of offerings: art history, theatre history, etc. We had countless ways of entering the work: from biography to mask work to tai-chi. I loved the multiplicity of inspirations and through that, being given the space and charged with the discipline to construct our own processes; this is a pivotal discovery for a writer. I developed my voice at the NTS. I also had players and production teams there to support the presentation of that voice; this was enormously instructive. To have someone like Jackie Maxwell direct my first play was, as an educational tool and thrill, the equivalent of ten years of uninterrupted writing.

I also loved the energy in the halls, being there until midnight, the intensity of the work, the intensity of the expectations, I loved how much we were asked to read, how impossible our tasks seemed. I loved the standard of excellence. The dare of it all.

How did you find the transitional period after you graduated from the NTS?

It was a huge adjustment. What I ended up doing was extending that sense of community. Morwyn Brebner (Playwriting, 1996), one of my closest friends, was in Toronto at the time, so I just called her and said “Okay, what do I do now?!” We rode around on bicycles and went to pubs and she gave me guidance and she continues to be that invaluable hybrid: the peer-mentor. I was also invited into another kind of community, the Factory Theatre, which proved to be completely formative. Preceding that, I had a short play – it first premiered at the exercise d’ensemble – accepted at the Rhubarb Festival. This felt like the moon landing. Then I was part of the Factory Theatre’s Lab for emerging writers and ended up being their playwright in residence for many years; they even gave me an office with the kind of swinging door you find in barns – this seemed appropriate.

What would you have done if you hadn’t become a writer?

If I hadn’t become a writer, I’d be living in a cardboard box under a bridge! I cannot imagine having become anything else. I might have gone into the performing arts – perhaps playing music. In fact, my husband is teaching me to play the drums right now for a girl band I’ve been invited to join. But, really, it’s an impossible consideration. I can’t imagine another life.

Please complete this thought: “If I’d known then what I know now…”

I would change nothing.