October 7, 2008 Literary Arts

Once... upon a time

An interview with Toronto’s Rebecca Rosenblum

by Leila Amiri

Once
Rebecca Rosenblum
Bilioasis Publishing
September 2008
192 pp
$19.95

Open a book and what you usually get are a couple hundred pages of someone else’s life, and if it’s well-written, you’re left wanting to see more. Rebecca Rosenblum’s Once is aptly named, for we meet these people but once and are left to think about them at our leisure after the story is done.

We have one encounter, one story, one glimpse into the lives of sixteen characters, everyday young adults, lost but always on the move. Gracious and eager to speak to her readers, Rosenblum has a confident hand that pulls her readers along for the ride. Rosenblum lives in Toronto, and incorporates the city into her work, so that for her Canadian readers this series of sixteen short stories has a way of touching home.

The Link: Do you take ideas from your life, from those around you, or is your fiction pure imagination?
I do take small events and impressions from the real world to spark some of my fiction, but the writing is far more imagination than anything else. These people are like the people in my world, like me, but I find it difficult to try to record directly from real life—there are too many extraneous details to weed out, too much personal weight that doesn't translate to the reader. Some true stories are too good not to try to use, but in general, I prefer to make things up.

Do you ever think about your characters after the story is done? Do you ever wonder what happens to them?
I am pretty over-involved with my characters—I often work out all the days and weeks and years surrounding the story that I end up telling. Sometimes I think about how they’re going to die. I am not sure if all the work I do is relevant, but my writing process is definitely maximalist—I think of far more than I can write, and I write far more than I can use. I like to think that “excerpts of someone’s life” is exactly what these stories are—that the characters have been somewhere before the first page and are going somewhere after the last page of each.

You bring us into the lives of adolescents and young adults. What is it about them that attracts you in this way?
I think that people are at their most interesting when they don’t know something—what to do, who they are, or just what’s going on—or they don’t have something, like love or respect or confidence or money or a job. And then there’s the simple fact that I’ve only ever been a child, an adolescent and a young adult so far. I absolutely don’t believe one can only write what one knows, but what I have experienced so far sure has absorbed a lot of my attention.

A lot of writers, like Haruki Murakami for example, are writing about these urban scenes, little snippets of people's lives, something out of the everyday. What attracts you to this and what do you think attracts readers to these scenes?
I write mainly from the world around me, though of course through the filter of my brain. So, though there is sometimes some magic and/or weirdness in my stories, I think that they are pretty firmly rooted in the everyday life of a lot of people. Cities are important to me, because they push people up against each other who might not elect that experience given the choice. That's the same reason I'm drawn to writing about jobs and the workplace—incidental relationships are fascinating to me. There's plenty of room for the imagination in what I see on the bus every day.

Is writing what you’ve always wanted to do? Do you see it as a passion, a job, a hobby?
Writing fiction is not my job, because no one is making me do it—though I have tons of help and support, I could stop tomorrow and no one would mind. That’s a really good thing for me to remember when I’m tired and bitchy and writing the nth draft of something hard: no one asked me to write this, no one is dying to see it but me, but no one will write it if I don’t. That’s usually enough to keep me working, and when it isn’t, I probably shouldn’t have been writing that piece in the first place.

Do you think you'll ever write a novel?
I think I'd like to, someday. A year ago, I saw this as a much more pressing concern, how I could marshal my forces to write a long narrative. And for a brief time this spring, I was working on something I thought would work in that form, although I quickly discovered that it wouldn't. I'd been writing stories for so long before I began to have some insight into how they work, what the parameters are, what I wanted to do with them, though I haven't explored tonnes of possibilities. Working in 15 page chunks is a whole other skill from working in 200 page chunks-most of what a story-writer knows won't help him or her write a novel. No one ever asks a novelist when she or he will write a book of poems. I would love to develop those other skills, but for now, I am pretty deeply involved with, and fascinated by, stories.