‘EXPLODING MY LIFE’
She quit work to travel and found her writer self
“I’m overwhelmed.”
Paige Cooper’s sense of disorientation is understandable. From a writer with a profile confined mostly to keen readers of Canadian literary journals, she has in a matter of weeks become the consensus newcomer of the year, with her debut story collection Zolitude (Biblioasis, 236 pages, $19.95) long-listed for the Scotiabank Giller Prize, a finalist for the fiction category of the Governor General’s Literary Awards and a double QWF Awards finalist, for the Hugh MacLennan Prize for Fiction and the Concordia University First Book Prize.
She’s not taking the attention for granted.
“Whenever I think about it, I try to think about it from my perspective of six years ago, when I was exploding my life because I had to write,” the 33-year-old Villeray resident said last week.
The self-set explosion Cooper refers to came at the end of a fitful path. After growing up in Canmore, Alta., she attended the University of British Columbia, where she was in the creative writing program as an undergraduate but concluded that her early efforts weren’t up to snuff.
“I came out of that believing my writing was bad and selfindulgent,” she recalled. “So I tried to go live as a librarian with a mortgage and a dog and a car in Calgary. But at some point I realized I’d be miserable forever if I didn’t at least try to write. By 2012 I’d quit my jobs, sold everything and taken off to Latvia.”
It was in the Baltics that Cooper began serious work on the stories that came to make up Zolitude. The surroundings clearly seeped in: the title story takes its name from a bleak Soviet-vintage district of Riga, where a foreign graduate student is grappling with winter depression and relationship dysfunction.
It’s a scenario that can serve as a fair representative of Cooper’s story strategy: her heroines and heroes are often away from home, underfunded, out of sorts, in delicate states that might appear on the edge of epiphany but could just as easily lead to
total breakdown. Add to this an element of the fantastical that grows organically out of the narratives, and these are stories that deftly combine serious inquiry and sensory immediacy with the uncanny.
“Travel is fruitful because everything is so intensely unfamiliar,” Cooper said in response to a question about her inspirations and methods. “In general, research for me tends to be stealing a lot — from experiences and anecdotes around me, what I’m reading, the news, and seeing how that intersects with what’s sparking my imagination. I try not to over-research, and let factual details in as necessary, rather than suffocating under what’s ‘correct.’ ”
An unexpected but delightful ingredient in some of the stories is Cooper’s penchant for rare and exotic words: dipterocarp, imbricate, judder, hippocampal. Wisely not employed to the point of gimmickry, they serve as an incidental pleasure that pulls the reader further in.
“Unusual words are a way of leaving gaps in the story, because a reader might not go look it up, but just allow whatever interpretation they like to fill up the hole in meaning. Also, if a certain subject or field has a rich jargon around it, I’m often more attracted to it, just on the merit of the language. This morning I was grilling my dad about logging terms: cutblocks, cords, bucking, mauls.”
A good sample of such words can be found in Spiderhole, a story set among a group of expats in Southeast Asia.
As an evocation of place, it recalls Michael Herr’s Vietnam War memoir Dispatches, but with a crucial difference: the presence in the jungle of what appear to be giant prehistoric lizards.
“With that subject matter in particular, I was interested in how interested people are in the white male American narrative, which has been told over and over without the input of other voices,” Cooper said. “And also how all those atrocities have been commodified as lopsided entertainment. Which is where the Jurassic Park-style dinosaurs come in.”
Given Cooper’s interest in escapism — “in ways in which it intersects with human emotion and leads us back around to face what we’re trying so hard to avoid” — fans of Zolitude will want to investigate her first essay, Towards a Poetics of the NFL, published this summer in the online journal the Western.
“I liked that I couldn’t read it closely,” she said of the jargonheavy sport she unexpectedly started watching during a recent period of isolation and writer’s block.
“American football seemed like the only place I could look that didn’t remind me of my complicity in the world’s brokenness. Of course, that’s not true at all — the NFL is a godawful institution on almost every level, but writing about it as I learned about it became a way for me to process suffering and responsibility on a larger scale.”
That micro-to-macro permeability is showcased in Ryan & Irene, Irene & Ryan, a Zolitude highlight.
Drawing on Cooper’s experience working for a Montrealbased record label, it expands into a meditation on how “violence scales more effortlessly than art” — an idea that infuses the whole collection to varying degrees, and is something that preoccupies Cooper as an artist in a culture that can often feel about to implode.
“I feel guilty that I have the privilege to write, while simultaneously often feeling unable to, wondering if writing is a worthy or ethical use of a person’s time right now,” she said. “People are in so much pain. It’s tempting or necessary to close yourself off from it, but the job of writing is to be open, uncertain, vulnerable.”
For now, at least, the peripatetic author is finding that the best place to pursue her vocation is Montreal.
“I’ve lived in most of Canada’s major cities, and I have a feeling all cities are hostile in a different way,” she said. “I’ve been in Montreal for five years and I have terrible rural Albertan French that I’m too humiliated to use, and so I feel like I understand and deserve Montreal’s particular, minor breed of hostility toward me. But it’s the only city that doesn’t feel like it wants to eat me alive, in a late-capitalist sense. So I’ll stay until I get kicked out.”
Meanwhile, as she works on her next book — “I think it’s something about reputation, and information, and doom. I thought it was a novel, but now I’m not sure” — Cooper can’t help but reflect on her sudden wave of awards-driven recognition.
“This obviously was not something I would have ever had the gall to hope for. I already felt so grateful just getting a book of weird short stories published, you know? Anyway, literary awards culture isn’t exactly a meritocracy. So many brilliant, deserving books go unrewarded. It feels like mine just won the lottery.”