Author returns to where it all began
Late owner of Munro’s Books helped launch career of former clerk Deborah Willis
One story in Deborah Willis’s new book was inspired by her brief stint as a reporter for a Salt Spring Island newspaper.
The Dark and Other Love Stories includes a tale titled Last One to Leave. It’s about a young woman, Sydney, who lands a job with a weekly paper in Tahsis. Sydney is thrilled when she sees her first bylines underneath such headlines as “Garage sale attracts 200!”
A former bookseller with Munro’s Books, Willis achieved national acclaim (including a Governor General’s Award nomination) for her 2009 short-story collection Vanishing and Other Stories. On Tuesday, she returns to Munro’s, this time as a noted author, to launch The Dark and Other Love Stories, her second book.
Willis studied creative writing at the University of Victoria. As part of her studies, she had a four-month placement as a reporter for Salt Spring’s Gulf Islands Driftwood. She loved it. “I thought it was so interesting to just call people and talk to them and ask them questions,” Willis said from Calgary, where she now lives.
Her experience contrasted with that of another young woman who subsequently worked at the Driftwood — and found the job less than thrilling.
“She said: ‘I couldn’t believe I had to write about a garage sale that attracted 200 people.’ And I thought: ‘But that’s great, though. Because the people who were there, they’re going to talk about that.’ ”
The Dark and Other Love Stories is further proof of Willis’s considerable gifts. There are stories about bored teenage girls who break into houses, a strangely alluring falconer, a man whose girlfriend travels to Mars, a crow that falls in love with a cablebox installer. A master of the sharply observed detail, Willis spins imaginative tales that are strange, beautiful and sometimes a bit frightening — just like real life.
Vanishing and Other Stories placed her firmly on Canada’s literary map. One of her literary heroes, Alice Munro, praised the “astonishing” emotional range and depth of her work. The book’s critical success led to writer-in-residence positions at Vancouver’s Joy Kogawa House and the University of Calgary.
Willis said the success of Vanishing and Other Stories had at least one unexpected result: She experienced the literary equivalent of stage fright. After writing in relative obscurity for years, the countrywide scrutiny made her feel “stuck.”
“It was like a silly self-obsession. I had this feeling of being really exposed, that now I write things and they get published rather than writing them for myself,” she said.
“I had an exaggerated feeling that the world is watching, which I really discovered it is not. Once I kind of figured that out, I got unstuck.”
With The Dark and Other Love Stories, Willis stretches her literary muscles, boldly trying different things. An admirer of Franz Kafka’s Metamorphosis, she occasionally embraces magical realism. Take, for example, The Hole, in which a young couple is curiously unperturbed by a black hole in their living room floor that grows ever larger.
There’s often a sense of undefined foreboding in her stories. Willis said one of her favourite writers is Flannery O’Connor, who influenced her collection’s title story, The Dark. It’s about two girls at summer camp who like to sneak out at night. The nocturnal world they visit is strange and sexually charged, both menacing and irresistible.
“There’s an underlying threat that you can’t really place [in the story], where you don’t quite know what’s going to happen,” she said.
Willis, who’s working on a novel, grew up in Calgary. Her father was an English professor turned psychologist; her mother was a French professor. Willis worked at Munro’s books for seven years, leaving in 2012. She preferred working an afternoon/evening shift, which allowed her time to write in the mornings.
The late owner of Munro’s Books, Jim Munro, was instrumental in Willis’s early success. He became interested in his clerk’s literary endeavours after she won a story contest in PRISM International, a literary magazine. Munro subsequently handed a batch of her stories to the president of Penguin Canada. The company ended up publishing Vanishing and other Stories (Hamish Hamilton, a boutique Penguin imprint, has released her latest book).
Willis plans to attend Jim Munro’s public celebration of life, happening at 3 p.m. Monday at the Victoria Conservatory of Music’s Alix Goolden Hall.
Her interest in writing goes all the way back to her childhood. One day, Willis wrote a series of poems.
“They came out of me in a rush. I was nine years old. I wrote this poem about what it would be like to be a shoe. To have someone walking in you all the time, and when you lie on the ground or whatever,” she said.
“I just remember the feeling. It was almost like a high, a feeling of elation. And then I showed it to my dad and he said they were good. And that added to the elation.” It is a feeling that still spurs Willis on. “I think part of it is chasing that high. It comes so rarely as an adult writer. But when it does come, it’s pretty remarkable. I had it a couple of months ago, and I remember thinking: ‘Oh yeah — this!’ ”