CanLit’s It Girl

It’s the week before Thanksgiving, and author Johanna Skibsrud is looking forward to spending the holiday with her family in Pictou County. But first she has to wrap up a week packed with readings and interviews promoting her new short story collection This Will Be Difficult to Explain and Other Stories (Hamish Hamilton Canada).

 

Despite the pressure-cooker pace she’s been operating at since her surprise Giller-win in 2010 with her novel The Sentimentalists, CanLit’s new It Girl is as charming and approachable as her fresh-faced blonde good looks would lead you to believe. She answers run-of-the-mill questions as if she has never been asked them before, and gives the impression that there is nothing she’d rather be doing than being interviewed.

 

The stories in This Will Be Difficult to Explain were written between 2004 and 2007. Originally, they were slated to be published with Nova Scotia’s Gaspereau Press, the small artisan publisher that was the centre of a controversy over its inability to meet the huge demand for The Sentimentalists after the Giller win. With Gaspereau’s blessing, Skibsrud brought the collection to Penguin’s literary fiction imprint Hamish Hamilton Canada where she reworked and polished the stories with the help of editor Nicole Winstanley.

 

“Obviously Penguin is a much bigger publisher,” Skibsrud says over a cup of Earl Grey in Halifax’s Prince George Hotel. “But as a writer, I’m far less interested in the business of publishing. It’s the editing relationship that is the most important to me, so when Gaspereau stopped having a full-time, dedicated editor in 2009, I knew I needed to look for a place where I’d have a good writer-editor relationship.”

 

Skibsrud found this coveted relationship with Winstanley, who she describes as “the most passionate reader and editor” she’s ever met.

 

“I’ve been so lucky. I’ve never had a negative editing experience,” she says. “Kate [Kennedy—Gaspereau’s editor in 2009] was absolutely the best person to work with on The Sentimentalists, and now I have Nicole, who is such a champion of short stories.”

 

The transition from writing poetry to novels to short stories (and back again—she’s presently working on the first draft of a new novel) seems very natural for Skibsrud. She says that often when an idea doesn’t seem to be working, it’s because she’s simply chosen the wrong form.

 

“I’ll be writing something and suddenly think, ‘This isn’t a story, it’s a poem!’”

 

In fact, Skibsrud says that “Clarence”, an amusing story in This Will Be Difficult to Explain that ends with a cub reporter basicallyinterviewing a corpse, began life as a scene in The Sentimentalists.And while she came to realize that the scene really didn’t work in the novel, with some major changes, it became the easiest story in the collection to write. (Though not necessarily the one she likes most. She insists that choosing a favourite story would be too much like a mother choosing her favourite child.)

 

She also finds that ideas seem to present themselves in whatever form she’s immersed in at the time: when she’s writing poetry, she sees poems everywhere, and the same can be said for short stories or scenes that could fit into a novel.

 

The globetrotting Skibsrud has lived in countries all over the world, and sets most of her work in places other than Canada. But she leaves little doubt that Nova Scotia is the place nearest and dearest to her heart.“

 

I’ve heard other writers say that they needed to get away so that they could write about home, but I think for me the opposite is true. My feeling of belonging here is so strong that I write about other places to establish some sort of a distance.”

 

While the world seems filled with ideas for Skibsrud to explore, the time to write about them is tight at the moment. As well as embarking on an extensive promotional tour for her new book, Skibsrud has just moved to Tucson to be with her fiancé who is an English professor at the University of Arizona, is currently completing her PhD thesis on the poetry of Wallace Stevens which she’ll defend in April and is planning for her May wedding.

 

“I like to write consistently,” she says with a wry laugh. “But let’s just say I’m learning to be flexible.”