Welcome to the Prefaces & Afterwords, Q&A interviews with authors. Watch this space for our conversations with writers who will be featured in upcoming events.
The Proust Questionnaire is believed to reveal an individual’s true nature. We have asked 2013 Incite authors 17 questions inspired by the questionnaire in an attempt to uncover who they are...
What is your idea of perfect happiness? Hearing my name announced as the winner of the 2012 Rogers Writers' Trust of Canada Fiction Prize. An unreal hallucinatory happiness.
What does your ideal day look like? A five-hour uninterrupted stretch of reading and writing, followed by hanging out with my kids, followed by friends arriving with a pile of liquor and food.
What is your greatest extravagance? Buying more books and music than anyone should have a right to.
What possession would you be heartbroken if you lost? My laptop.
If you could change one thing about yourself, what would it be? My panic and paranoia. No, actually, I'd change my inability to think quick on my feet.
What childhood fear has followed you into adulthood? The fear of the dark. Even today, at the ripe age of 43, there are moments in hotels and other places where I need to turn on a light in order to fall asleep.
Do you take comfort in darkness or light? Light, for sure. I love light. But by that I mean lights of all kinds: the light of a summer morning, the light of a fall day in Vancouver, the last bit of light before sunfall.
Do you remember your dreams? No. Thank God. But I have a feeling that they remember me.
How do you collect snippets of observations and ideas that come to you unexpectedly? I carry a notebook at all times. Seriously. The unexpected is the place where all the best writing gets done, and if I don't note it down it's lost forever.
In 2009 and 2011, I had the pleasure of volunteering for the Vancouver Writers Fest. This year I made the transition from Festival volunteer to Festival author, and yes, it was just as fabulous as it sounds. I appeared in the All-Canadian Crime event last Saturday, October 20, with Robert Rotenberg and crime fiction superstar Louise Penny.
Here are a few things I learned:
Authors wander
One of my favourite volunteer jobs was to “Walk-A-Writer” to their festival events. Sometimes I’d just walk them as far as next door, but near or far, festival authors are always assigned a walker. Now I know why.
We wander. We really do. We see shiny things. We want coffee, fruit, handi-wipes. We start talking. Robert, Louise and I were so busy chatting on our way to the venue that left to our own devices we might have ended up at Jericho Beach and never made it to the event at all. Our walker, Katie, kept us on task.
First, a disclaimer: I have never been big into genre, those shifting delineations that mark where one style of writing ends, and a new one begins. I love the work of authors like Iain M. Banks, Ursula Le Guin, Kurt Vonnegut, Margaret Atwood and others. But ask me to place their work into distinct genres and my eyes glaze over. It feels arbitrary and beside the point, like sorting my hat collection by gauge of tin foil or length of antenna. That's just me though.
Writing a biography of long-lived, intensely creative Patricia Kathleen Page was no walk in the park for Sandra Djwa. It took her fourteen years to research, write and publish Journey With No Maps: A Life of P.K. Page.
The book’s glossy cover is filled to the margins with a detail from an arresting portrait of Page when she was young. You see her trademark red lipstick, thickly applied, and the gaze of her large, transfixing eyes.
What would you say if in any given year, in a small but populous island state, orange people wrote 65% of the novels published, while green people wrote 35%, and orange people bought 83% of the novels, while green people preferred books about real things, big things, like climbing mountains, and wars, and yet when it came to handing out an annual major prize for ‘the best’ among these novels, green people received the prize twice as often as orange people? In other words, green people wrote one third of the published novels, but received two thirds of the prizes. On further inspection, it appeared that over time green people somewhat outnumbered orange people on the judging panels for this annual prize, and in the event that the four judges were deadlocked 2-2 regarding which novel should be the winner, a deciding vote would be cast by the chair of the panel — 82% of the time (as of 2012), a green person. If you were an orange person, expected to smile nicely and put up with this sort of inequity year after year, you might eventually exclaim, “Bugger this! If the green people aren’t going to give us a fair share of the prizes, we’ll just create our own prize. We’ll call it the Orange Prize!”
“The Vancouver Writers Fest is the best of the large festivals, with a busy combo of panels, readings, one-to-one interviews as well as poetry jams and a mix of invitees from all over the world.”
What is your idea of perfect happiness?
Digg
Facebook
Twitter
In 2009 and 2011, I had the pleasure of volunteering for the Vancouver Writers Fest. This year I made the transition from Festival volunteer to 
What would you say if in any given year, in a small but populous island state, orange people wrote 65% of the novels published, while green people wrote 35%, and orange people bought 83% of the novels, while green people preferred books about real things, big things, like climbing mountains, and wars, and yet when it came to handing out an annual major prize for ‘the best’ among these novels, green people received the prize twice as often as orange people? In other words, green people wrote one third of the published novels, but received two thirds of the prizes. On further inspection, it appeared that over time green people somewhat outnumbered orange people on the judging panels for this annual prize, and in the event that the four judges were deadlocked 2-2 regarding which novel should be the winner, a deciding vote would be cast by the chair of the panel — 82% of the time (as of 2012), a green person. If you were an orange person, expected to smile nicely and put up with this sort of inequity year after year, you might eventually exclaim, “Bugger this! If the green people aren’t going to give us a fair share of the prizes, we’ll just create our own prize. We’ll call it the Orange Prize!”