PETER BEHRENS’ first novel, The Law of Dreams (2006), won the Governor General’s Literary Award, one of Canada’s most prestigious book prizes, and has been published in nine languages. His second novel, The O’Briens, was published in 2011 in Canada (House of Anansi Press) and the following year in the United States (Pantheon Books). Behrens has published two collections of short stories, Night Driving (1987) and Travelling Light (2013). Stories and essays have appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, Tin House, Brick, Best Canadian Stories, Best Canadian Essays, and many anthologies. Behrens is a native of Montreal and was educated at Lower Canada College, Concordia University, and McGill. He held a Wallace Stegner Fellowship in Creative Writing at Stanford University, and was a Fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Massachusetts. He lives in Maine and Texas.
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My students and I welcomed Peter as guest author for a session of my online course Memories into Story: Life Writing (University of Toronto, SCS). What follows is my edited version of the collaborative interview based on questions the class asked him after reading his work (you can read several of his personal essays here). I’m sure you’ll find Peter’s responses thought-provoking. We did!
“One of my rules to myself as a writer, and a person, is PAY ATTENTION. To me this means paying attention to the physical tactile world, the way the light works, the way it smells, everything.”
When did you know you wanted to be a writer?
I’ve wanted to be a writer for as long as I can remember. I had an instinct for syntax, and I always knew what a sentence was. I was a fluent writer before I had anything especially interesting to say. I had an almost tactile relationship with words, phrases, and sentences. I could “handle” them; make them do what I wanted. I was interested, always, in language. Perhaps more interested in the language itself, the telling, than story, than plot. When I was growing up in Montreal I didn’t know any writers. I had only the most vague idea of how to make a career of it . . . I was lucky to meet the American/Canadian short story writer Clark Blaise while he was teaching at Concordia U in the ′70s. Clark was the first person I knew who lived the writer’s life. Which meant a fanatic dedication to reading widely, and writing well, and rewriting, rewriting . . . I wrote my first piece of memoir when I was in my thirties. It was about my father’s death and my/our dislocation. Living in California, him dying in Montreal. It was called “Refugee Dreams.” I wrote it to sort out my own feelings about his life and death.
When you’re turning to a new writing project, how do you know which idea, among many, is worth pursuing? Is there a gut feeling? Do you experiment, and tackle some ideas only to put them aside?
With novels I seem to own a limited number of ideas for books and the ideas seem always to have been there, lurking, latent. Or at least they have been since I began thinking of myself as possibly a novelist, twenty years ago. Each book is inspired by a chunk of my family history. “Inspired by” . . . The books are novels, not memoir, not history. I am using and interrogating my family history in the novels, and because there is so much I cannot know, I make things up. Characters are based on real people in the family but my obligation, I feel, is to the character I have created, not the “original” model.
I experimented with the book I am writing now: I began to write it as a kind of memoir of my father. But that ran out of steam for me. I didn’t know enough about his life in detail. Instead I used the research I had done into his life to begin a novel about a young man with an English/Irish/German background coming of age in Germany during the Weimar and Nazi eras. With memoir essays . . . there is usually a scene that I remember that seemed very powerful and kind of shocking that I am trying to see in the round and understand in the process of writing. For “Father’s Son” it was standing by the highway in Saskatchewan with my father, him in his beautiful tweed jacket and tie and suede shoes.
Do you write for yourself, or with a specific audience in mind?
I write for myself. Don’t think much at all about an audience. When I’m writing essays, stories, or books, I can’t imagine anyone possibly being interested in them except me because they are so “personal.” But then, they’re not. Finally, if they are any good they are not about me at all.
Sights, sounds, colours, and smells form an important part of your stories. I’m thinking of the way “Father’s Son” ends. Have you kept a journal, or do you have a good memory, or a fertile imagination, or all of these?
Someone told me that in The Law of Dreams I had written a novel about how Ireland smelled in the 1840s. One of the things I seem to need to do is ground myself very deeply in the tactile sensual worlds of the pieces I write. I need to “be there” in all kinds of ways. In novels that means imagining the physical worlds of the scenes in their depth and roundness. Light is important, the various qualities of kinds of light. I need to see the scene myself so I create it for myself and then the reader can have it too.
When I’m writing I need to spend as much time as I can in places where the scenes are set. In The O’Briens I had a lifetime familiarity with most of those places: Westmount, Santa Barbara, the Selkirk Mountains, Maine. With the novel I’m writing now, set in Europe: well, it didn’t really catch fire until I was able to spend six months in Europe, thanks to a fellowship. There’s a kind of magic accessible only on the real ground. I have to know that light, how the light works, what the smells are. Certain walks I took in Ireland were absolutely essential for establishing the Famine world of The Law of Dreams.
In memoir . . . well I am usually writing about landscape that has registered deeply with me. It’s a character in the piece. One of my rules to myself as a writer, and a person, is PAY ATTENTION. To me this means paying attention to the physical tactile world, the way the light works, the way it smells, everything. I think my job as a writer is not to tell readers what to think, but to bring them as close as I can to the actual tactile physical world my characters are in, in novels or in memoir. I think I was given one powerful gift and that is memory. I remember scenes — I even remember scenes that happened to other people, that they have forgotten. Scenes register with me. Their light. I had the physical tableau of that last scene in “Father’s Son” locked in my brain. I just had to sort out its meanings.
Do you use clustering or any other particular technique to jog your memory or come up with story ideas?
My novels arrive as big hazy ideas: I never really know at the start what the books are “about” . . . I have always begun with a world, a period, and a few characters that interest me. I may know one or two things about them and know one or two things they are going to do, but there is an awful lot I don’t know. That is scary sometimes but I have learned to accept it and just push on. And trust the process. It’s in the process of writing that I find out who they are, what they want, what the stories are, and what the book is, maybe, about.
The same process for the memoir essays. I write about, and interrogate, events, people, scenes I can’t get out of my head. “Love Cars” started with remembering that as a boy I was obsessed with the steering wheels of 1959 Pontiac Catalinas. What was THAT about? I write to figure things out.
Do you outline your plot, or your characters, before you write? Or does your structure develop through the writing?
I have outlines but I never seem to follow them. They are most important to me at the very earliest stages when they make the process of starting out on an essay, story, or book seem less scary, less of a void. I don’t often outline a scene or chapter but I usually know where I want it to end. I know where I have to get to, maybe not how I will get there. In a memoir there is always a key scene I can’t get out of my head that is the centre of the piece, and the rest of the essay is an exploration, interrogation, investigation of the meaning of that scene.
Do you freewrite, or are you practised enough now that you self-edit as you write?
Sometimes if I am stuck in a scene or don’t know how to get where I need to go in a chapter, I leave the laptop alone, pick up a pencil, and start scribbling. Somehow — and I don’t know why — writing longhand lets me be wasteful and indirect and foolish and risky and do the kind of experimentation that can end up helping me find where I need to go. Making bizarre connections that aren’t actually bizarre. Sometimes a character will say something that is just out of some unexplored part of my writer brain, I don’t know what they mean, but I’ll let ’em say it and follow it up and see if it goes somewhere interesting. Sometimes I only know dialogue a split-second before I write it down, or even less time than that — it’s occurring to me in the act of writing it down. I’ve learned to trust the parts of my writer brain I don’t seem completely in control of. In memoir that phase of writing is when I suddenly see connections: between antelope and children, between different romantic relationships.
What do you believe to be the most essential characteristic of a well-written memoir?
That the writer learn something about the material through the experience of writing it that she did not know at the beginning. That there is a huge element of discovery, or self-discovery, in the writing. A sense that the writer is not from the beginning wholly in impeccable control of the past, or memory, that it’s meaning was not resolved for her before she sat down to write, that the writing has been a way of wrestling with the subject, that the issue/problem/memory/meaning of it all is not really decided or discovered until the last page is being written. The writing has connected the dots that weren’t connected before. They may have been a powerful, mysterious, radiant blur — now they are sharp. Now they are clear. Something new. A new awareness is born. Writing memoir is a process of discovery.