Interview With The ShanMonster: Karen Connelly

Some time in 1993....

Karen Connelly is the 1993 Governor General's Award-winner for Touch the Dragon: A Thai Journal. She is the youngest person to have ever won the prestigious award (she was twenty-four years old at the time), and the only award-winner at that point to have a pierced nose. She is also an award-winning poet, and has published a few collections of her work. She went on to become writer-in-residence that year at the University of New Brunswick, which gave me an opportunity to interview her. This interview was first published in the Albert Ross Society Newsletter and the Prairie Fire literary journal.

The ShanMonster: Since you have won the Governor General's Award and have become UNB's writer-in-residence, you must be very busy. What kind of effect is this having on your writing?

Karen Connelly: Well, actually, I'm not writing anymore. That's what kind of effect it has on your writing initially because of other commitments, engagements, and interviews, interviews, interviews! Just like this one now!

The ShanMonster: I see what you mean! As a professional writer, do you see universities as having an important role in creative writing?

Karen Connelly: I think university does have a very important role in creative writing, mostly because it creates an audience. I think that even without university courses in creative writing, people would become writers. People would find their way as writers and would find mentors and find teachers. I think the university process really can help because it gives you a community of like-minded people who are trying to do the same thing and are trying to go in directions which are often similar to yours. But again, like I said, I think that all of this would happen without university courses. What I think it's important for is the fact that it creates and sustains interest in writing.

The ShanMonster: What is your opinion on writers' workshops?

Karen Connelly: It really depends on the workshop. Some workshop processes are amazing, and the people who participate reap incredible benefits. But I think other workshops probably fail just as a writer alone in his or her own room probably fails part of the time and succeed another part of the time. Workshops can be as beneficial or as negative--sometimes as damaging--as many other creative lessons a writer will try to subject himself or herself to. One way or another, the writer comes to what the writer needs, whether they do workshops and whether they have a good teacher or not. Sometimes workshopping can make a process happen faster simply because you have people giving you feedback. But, it can also create a kind of sameness in writing, because if you have a head critic in a workshop, which is often the case, a teacher who leads the workshop, then that person's vision is very much in control in some ways. I don't think that that control is a good thing, even if the writer makes mistakes.

The ShanMonster: While reading Touch the Dragon I noticed that upon occasion you would only touch upon more personal elements. This leads me to believe that there were many out-takes. Are you planning on creating an even more personal set of memoirs?

Karen Connelly: Oh yeah! The big exposé is coming soon! Is it ever gonig to be a hot book! (laughs) Touch the Dragon is a book that I tried to keep about Thailand. I tried to make it about Thailand. So, if I'd taken my journals and re-composed or re-edited everything that was in my journals it would have been a totally different kind of book. But that wasn't a book I wanted; what I wanted to write about was Thailand, obviously very much filtered through my own sensations and processes and everything else, but still, not a book about me, my personal life, and not so much as to what was happening to me, as affecting me, as what was happening outside of me. So, certainly the writing that I'll do later in many ways will be more personal. Even the non-fiction book that I'm working on about Greece right now is more personal. I don't think it's much more intellectual, but it's more philosophical. I'm also working on essays about Spain, and about France. Lots of different things.

The ShanMonster: What kind of problems did you have to face to determine at what point you ended the book?

Karen Connelly: The ending of the book came very naturally. I knew when the ending of the book was coming. Where to begin the book was harder, and just what to actually put into the book was more difficult. I wanted the book to end with a very powerful image of Thailand, which came to me in a dream. That was set already. But other elements of deciding what to put in and what to take out were more difficult. It was hard for me to know where to begin the book in terms of well, where do I tell these people, my audience, where this all began for me? I looked after that problem by including a very short preface, and did, in fact, begin with leaving Canada in a plane.

The ShanMonster: I head that you had some problems getting a publisher for Touch the Dragon. Did you ever think about just giving up?

Karen Connelly: No way! I thought that if I'd gone through a list of maybe two-hundred publishers, every publisher that I could find, and no one wanted it, well then.... But you don't really think of that eventuality. You just look at your list and you keep going and you say, "Well, I've got a rejection slip from these ten, and there are five more to go...."

The ShanMonster: How would you compare the publishing experiences of This Brighter Prison and The Small Words in My Body with Touch the Dragon?

Karen Connelly: Touch the Dragon has by far been teh best publishing experience for me just because Turnstone Press is Winnipeg is organized, very professional, very very adept, and they know what they're doing. The other two presses are smaller, and not necessarily less professional. THey have less money, but they are less professional in the sense that they're not as firmly based. Kalamalka was very good, actually, for being such a tiny press. Brick is a wonderful press, a great bunch of people, very very talented people to work with, who just love books and love poetry. But, they don't work out of a central office, and they don't have full-time employees. That makes it very complicated for them, because it's kind of a disorganized situation for them. Their people are moving around on them all the time. In some ways this is also a benefit because it gives them a chance to get out into a wider community. But it also makes things a little bit difficult.

The ShanMonster: Did Don McKay work with you at Brick Books?

Karen Connelly: Don McKay edited This Brighter Prison. He's a wonder editor. Once again, they're amazing people to work with. Don McKay is just incredible, and Jan Zwickie is very perfect as far as the way a poem works. They really understand that magic.

The ShanMonster: How do you determine the ordering sequence of the poems in your poetry books? Do you sort them alphabetically, or chronologically, or ...

Karen Connelly: It's much like the process a singer goes through in putting together an album. You choose things to complement other things. Certainly, in both of my books of poetry there have been a very strong chronological sequence, very much a narrative, although technically when I wrote those poems, some were written before other poems that are in the beginning of the book. It's not necessarily a chronological writing process. I like the idea of stories, and making complete stories/journeys, out of things. This is why I'm really looking forward to writing a novel. I like the idea of connections between experiences.

The ShanMonster: Do you have anything additonal to say for prosperity, er, maybe I should've said posterity?

Karen Connelly: (laughs) That's a Freudian slip!

The ShanMonster: I hear there's lots o' prize money in this here writin' business!

Karen Connelly: Basically this has been a very interesting experience for me, winning this big award. I think that after you live through the trauma of the Governor General's Award at such an early age, it's interesting to be seen in the public eye, however small that eye may be, as a better writer than you were two weeks before you won the award. Of course this is totatlly ridiculous. I kind of resent that a little bit. I haven't really changed. An award doesn't make you change anything. It's such a long process, it's such a long and difficult process. When I think about writing this book about Greece, the book about Lesvos that I'm working on, and THE NOVEL, although I feel something like that gives you more confidence, it doesn't really change the effect of the work. In some ways it's intimidating because I know that people tend to be harsher critics to those who have been successful. The criticism will be harsher now, which really doesn't bother me too much, but it does bother me a little bit. But we'll see. It's a lot of fun.