PREFACES
Karen Mulhallen and Mary Newberry

TALKING GOWDY
Steven Heighton and Barbara Gowdy in conversation
Margaret Atwood draws a Gowdy memory

SITUATING GOWDY
Adrian DiCastri and John Bentley Mays discuss suburbia
Robert Teteruck gives us the images

CRITIQUING GOWDY
Debra Martens, Cheryl Cowdy Crawford, Neta Gordon, Sally Hayward, Deena Rymhs and T.F. Rigelhof

FILMING GOWDY
Mary Newberry

GOWDY SPEAKS
An excerpt from Barbara Gowdy’s novel in progress, Helpless

POSTCARDS FROM GOWDYLAND
Catherine Bush, Catherine Gildiner, Marni Jackson, Natalie Onuska, Catherine Graham, Susan Swan and Shyam Selvadurai

THE WEIGHT OF GOWDY
New fiction and poetry influenced by Barbara Gowdy from Pamela Stewart, Kathleen Kelly and Jim Johnstone

We talked for a couple of hours on Barbara Gowdy’s back porch in mid-September, 2004. It was warm and sunny. Apparently the hardwoods of Wellesley Park were full of noisy cicadas; I say “apparently.”because somehow I failed to notice them at the time. But as I transcribed the interview a few months later, there they were on the tape, so loud in a few places that I had to strain to make out our words. Steven Heighton

SH: The Latin dramatist Terence wrote that because he was human, nothing human was alien to him. I realize this credo has become something of a chestnut, but after reading your books in sequence, it was a line that kept declaring itself. The other one was Milan Kundera’s brilliant remark that “Kitsch is the absence of shit.” Your work, I think, is the opposite of kitsch, in that definition. Do you want to comment on either of those quotations?

BG: Well, the first one, about nothing human being alien to me…A whole lot of what is human is alien to me, but it’s hardly my job to decide whether or not it should exist or be explored. I can be as repelled as anyone else. I struggle against my reactions, though, when I feel that they’re getting in the way of my finding out something interesting or important. As far as I’m concerned, there’s no such thing as “too much information.”

SH: Okay, here’s another quote for you. A reviewer in Saturday Nightonce remarked — about the stories in We So Seldom Look on Love — that “Gowdy stares down the things she finds repulsive.” I quote this one partly because I think the reviewer has it wrong. To me, the evidence of your writing doesn’t suggest any revulsion, any recoiling from the “abnormal.” but instead, the natural fascination of a child.

BG: No, I’m not revolted by the abnormal, not as a matter of course. When I say I can be repelled, I mean by bodily functions, certain ones. What the necrophile does in “We So Seldom Look on Love.” repels me, for instance. It’s nothing I could have concocted. I lifted it from an interview in which a real necrophile, a woman named Karen Greenlea, describes how she expresses her love for dead men. In fact, every one of the stories in that collection is based on something I heard or read about, however outlandish.

SH: Well, any repulsion or revulsion you felt seems to have become invisible, or was transformed, in the process of writing the story [“We So Seldom Look on Love.”] I don’t read it and think, “The author is really struggling with the material here.” It feels totally natural. You’ve got right into the character’s mind, her body and voice, and she’s obviously not repulsed.

BG: There’s no point in exploring anything if you’re not going to try to get right inside it and be empathetic. What fascinated me about the real necrophile’s story was that she was embracing death, quite literally. Whereas most of the rest of us don’t even touch death. We rarely have open-casket funerals these days. You know, the only kind of aberrant behaviour that disgusts me is the kind that knowingly or indifferently does harm. I get more upset about corporate environmental behaviour than about someone having sex with a dog. As long as the dog’s enjoying it. Not that I’ve written about that.

SH: In the opening paragraph of the story, you write: “There is always energy given off when a thing turns into its opposite…There are always sparks at those extreme points.” I wonder if those lines could be reread as a kind of aesthetic credo, since your fiction is so often situated at the intersection point of morbidity and vitality — the place where mortality and life, especially in its basic sexual guise, interpenetrate and even become indistinguishable.

BG: Most writers seem to write to temperament, and my temperament often has me describing things in an extreme way simply because I’m not happy with euphemisms or half-truths. I sometimes go overboard for the sake of cutting the bullshit, and then I try to pull back to a place of truth.

EARLY IN MY FRIENDSHIP with Barbara Gowdy, I was a dinner guest at her apartment on Walmer Road. I think it was the one on Walmer Road — she’s moved eighteen times, so I’m not entirely sure. I was already a fan of We So Seldom Look on Love, which I found nervy, original, tender and comic. In particular, her care with language was stunning; each sentence felt resonant and solid, the way the door on an expensive car feels when you slam it.

I had brought along the sort of eager dinner-guest gift that perhaps says too much — a set of painted Russian nesting dolls, four varnished female figures, diminishing in size, right down to the tiniest peanut-sized one. I think it reflected my sense that Barbara contains many ages at once. She can be fifty, fifteen or five. With her dark, bright eyes, floating bangs and quick gestures she still looks like the smartest girl in English class, hand up and waving, hoping the teacher will choose her first. At the same time, she has a mother-lion maternalism that kicks in whenever she comes to the defense of a friend, or a principle she believes in. One of these principles is the humane treatment of animals and other innocent creatures.

Barbara lives on the edge of a park in downtown Toronto, where she maintains a stewardly relationship with the urban animals that share her environment. Arthritic raccoons are lucky to slide down her eavestrough; they will be treated well. Her own housecat began life as an abused, abandoned, semi-feral animal that she rescued from the pound. But the cat kept pouncing on her feet and clawing at them, or scratching her face as she slept. Most of us would take the cat back, or at least cage it. Instead, Barbara caged herself; she had a special wrought-iron and glass curtain built for her doorless bedroom. In this way, the cat could have the run of the house at night, as cats prefer to do, while she remained sequestered.

It was a long process, but the animal eventually learned to trust her and was transformed; she became glossy, calm, happy and almost Cheshire-catlike in composure. I imagine that fictional characters, in their feral beginnings, can be as unruly, chaotic and unpromising as that cat. The same principles she demonstrates in her treatment of other creatures, Barbara brings to the care and maintenance of her fictional people, some of whom are flawed, damaged or marginalized. She allows her characters to rule the roost. She serves them. She believes they deserve her total focus, loyalty and care. In this way her characters are allowed to be strange, uncivilized, damaged or dangerous. With proper attention, empathy and patience, an abused animal has a chance to become the creature it was meant to be. In the same way, the vulnerable or contradictory characters that populate Barbara’s writing are allowed to become fully human on the page.

During the long, self-doubting process of building the world of a novel, she hovers over and shelters these not-quite beings, until they achieve full stature. She wants her cats and her characters to assume their true lives. And she will do whatever she has to, arranging her life around their survival, to ensure that they flourish.

“THIS BREAD IS THE SLUT of the bread world,” Mildred says, holding out the heavy loaf filled with organic raisins and citron fruit, nuts and whole grains. “It’s such a sensuous experience, this bread. It’s promiscuous tasting. An orgy in your mouth.”

“No thank you,” the woman says. “I’ll have a plain loaf of bread, any bread, just a plain monogamous loaf, if you don’t mind.”

“I’ll take two of what she’s not having,” a male customer says. While he’s paying, he stares at her cleavage. She catches him and looks down.

“You’ve got flour on you,” he says. “That’s all.”

Mildred thinks it’s because he doesn’t want to look at her face. She is not hideous, but it is not a face to linger on. She has tried to counter this with lipstick the colour of red food dye no. ten, black eyeliner, a garnet stud in her left nostril, a stainless steel ring in her right eyebrow and rows of rings along the edge of her ears.

She does up one more button on her baker’s shirt and turns, bumping into Rudy, who is standing behind her with his arms crossed.

“How many times do I have to tell you to just sell the goods, don’t describe them. People don’t want bread they think has been fucked with or is fucking itself or whatever you were trying to say.”

“I bake it, and I just want to get across to them how special it is.”

“They’ll know by the taste. Just say artisanal bread, organic ingredients, tell them that. People like those words. Just the facts. Let them come up with their own strange fantasy. I just eat the stuff, I don’t have a need to give my food a life of its own.”

“You are not involved in the process, the creation,” she says, appealing to Kat who had just entered the from the back.

Rudy inherited the store from his parents. His interest in baked goods extends as far as the cash register. He deals with the customers. His cousin, Lawrence, not Larry, who works the late afternoon shift and keeps his thoughts to himself, and the new employee, Kat, not Katherine, help with baking and serving customers.

“It’s just bread. Kat, I hope you aren’t going to go crazy like her,” he says, “one time Mil…”

“Mildred,” Mildred corrects him.

“…Mildred described a loaf of rye as the pit bull of breads. ‘It has real bite. It just grabs you and won’t let go,’ is what she said. The customer complained. She said that her five-year-old daughter was attacked by a pit bull and had to have seventy-five stitches to her face and is facing years of plastic surgery just to look sort of normal. They had to get rid of their own pet dog, because the girl is afraid of all dogs now and she didn’t need to be reminded of this while buying a loaf of bread. I had to give her a free loaf and some cookies for the girl, but she never came back,” Rudy said.

“I’m passionate about my work. You should be happy,” Mildred interrupts.

“I am, trust me. I’m just glad you’re not a guy. When my parents owned this place they actually caught a guy jerking off into the butter cream icing because they wouldn’t give him a raise. Mil, it’s those crazy books you read. Books about people fucking dead people and girls with four legs and two pussies. I think that’s right. Isn’t that right? No wonder you have some kind of dough fetish.”

“Maybe you should read romance novels, like Rudy’s women,” Kat says, adding in a too-loud whisper to Mildred, “They kind of have to, it’s the only romance they’ll get.”