THE WORLD WE KNOW, BUT DISTURBINGLY NOT
Canmore writer’s short stories presuppose a disaster for civilization
Author Paige Cooper has a favourite dinner-party question. It’s not particularly cheery, but it is intriguing: When do you think civilization is going to end?
“It’s not a very popular question,” Cooper says with a laugh, in an interview from her home in Montreal. “People are like 'It’s not ending anytime soon.' The humanists are, like, 'We’re doing fine.' But I’ve always been more of the opinion that it’s going to be on us before we know it. Whether it’s conscious or not, it’s always top of mind for me.”
Not surprisingly, this tends to find its way into Cooper’s fiction. It’s not that all of the stories found in her strange and occasionally bewildering debut collection, Zolitude, are dystopian, although a few could certainly be described that way. But a common thread is that most have a certain sense of dread — or, at least, instability.
Many of the pieces in the book, longlisted for the Giller Prize and a finalist for a Governor General Literary Award, take place in a fuzzily defined time period and remote setting. The stories are both exhilarating and jarring in their ability to plunge readers into the middle of desperate situations and alien terrain that slowly come to focus as the tale progresses. Often, the situations are just recognizable enough to be disturbing.
“I don’t think I thought about time period very much,” she says. “I guess a lot of them take place in a near future, because things are always a little bit off. Almost none of them take place exactly in our world. There’s always something weird. The time period — to use a science-fiction term — is like an alternate universe.”
Record of Working is probably the most traditionally apocalyptic, telling the story of a multinational nuclear reactor being built in a South American jungle as North America descends into chaos. Pre-Occupants is about a couple attempting to adjust, and have a healthy sex life, as they help transform the harsh terrain of Mars. Spiderhole takes place in a touristy jungle populated by giant reptiles, while Moriah is a tale about a village of isolated sex offenders forced to deal with a predatory and very angry giant eagle. So it may seem strange that a number of reviewers, and Cooper herself, sees most, if not all, of the pieces in Zolitude as love stories.
“Years ago, I would jokingly refer to them as my lonely women stories, being like 'Oh no, this woman is lonely, too! Oh God!'" Cooper says. “I was trying to hide them. Love stories? Oh God. no. That would be embarrassing to write. So I had to couch them in all sorts of imaginative boxes that would hopefully distract from my very quotidian concerns of 'Oh no, what if I’m unlovable?' "So often the settings, situation and time period seem just a few degrees removed from our known world. This presumably flows back to Cooper’s early rejection of the “write-what-you-know” cliché. Born and raised in Canmore, Cooper made her way to the University of British Columbia’s prestigious creative writing program, a not-altogether pleasant experience that forever changed her approach to writing and nearly turned her off the pursuit for good.
“I was a young woman and I just got it accidentally drilled into me that young women are self-indulgent and no one cares about young women; it’s just not what good literature is made of,” says Cooper, who will be appearing at WordFest on Oct. 9 and 10. “I stopped writing for several years after that. It took massive cultural shifts and seeing young women be successful writing about their experience to think 'yeah, I can write, too.' But even then, I would never write autofiction because it is still too terrifying to be that exposed.”
"'Write what you know’ kind of scares me,” she adds.
After giving up writing, Cooper moved to Calgary for a few years, where she worked as a librarian for the school board. One day, while grocery shopping in Inglewood, she made the decision to return to her first love. Eventually, she looked for a foreign place to relocate. After learning that an American author she admires, Salvatore Scibona, had written a story she liked while doing a residency in Riga, Latvia, she decided to head there in 2011.
Zolitude, also the name of the opening story, is a community in Riga. Other stories in the book were written in Vietnam and Cambodia.
“You have to take yourself away from what you know in order to see a little bit more clearly,” Cooper says. “And also, because I grew up in Canmore and it’s a tourist town, I hate being a tourist. It embarrasses me so deeply having the entitlement to show up uninvited and be like: ‘Here I am, misinterpreting your lives.’ As a writer, I feel like I steal a lot from the people I’m around and that’s a good thing as well as a bad thing. By travelling, I feel like I end up in a place where the alienation and isolation can free me up to interpret as I need and to trust my own lens a little
more.”
Cooper published her first story in 2015 and her work has been anthologized in The Journey Prize Stories and Best Canadian Stories. As for the short-story form, Cooper says she is drawn to it for the control it affords her. “Down to the comma, you can make it exactly what you want it to be,” she says. “There’s also an imaginative breadth that comes with being able to work on three different ideas at once. You can jump from thing to thing.”
As for whether she’ll stay devoted to short-story writing, however, Cooper hasn’t yet decided.
“I feel like the form has to follow the idea,” she says. “Is a short story really doing less than a novel does? Are its ambitions smaller? I don’t think so. Lately, I’ve been asking myself: ‘What would it take for an idea or a question to be a novel rather than a short story?' Having only written a couple halves of unsuccessful novels, I’m not sure what the answer is. But I’m pretty sure novelists know ... I just need to ask them.”