Kathleen Winter is no stranger to writing, in any form. She has written for television — from Sesame Street to CBC documentaries — and for newspapers, including her former weekly column, Naturally, in The Telegram.

Her last book, boYs, a top-notch collection of short stories, won the hip-assuring Metcalf-Rooke Award and the prestigious Winterset award. boYs is a rare gem of a collection, showcasing a rare vibrancy of language. The book is alive, sentences pop like firecrackers: it is ultra-modern, punchy, lucid diction. Every paragraph is blocked full with a microscopic attention to detail, and it makes for captivating read that is a lesson in creative writing. Click here to buy boYs now.

Her latest novel, Annabel — hot off Anansi’s press and only a month old — was released to immediate acclaim and buzz, and Kathleen has been reading that wave of success on a very engaging and remarkable blog tour. Her writerly stamina is commendable. Catch her being interviewed or thinking out loud at palces like The Afterword, Open Book Toronto (who have just revealed that Annabel is part of Ben McNally’s Summer Reading Presentation), Kevin from Canada, and a rather fantastic read on The Globe and Mail’s website.

Already a bestseller in many of the country’s finest bookshops,  and already sold into the US and the UK, critics are eating it up.

“Read it because it’s a story told with sensitivity to language that compels to the last page, and read it because it asks the most existential of questions. Stripped of the trappings of gender, Winter asks, what are we?”- Globe & Mail

“Finely observed detail and gut-wrenching honesty, together with some rich characters and a perfectly rendered world, make Annabel a rare treat.” – Winnipeg Free Press

Annabel is an unforgettable novel of struggles, personal and inter-personal, and Kathleen’s empathetic voice does them justice in a way that connects reader to story. Destined to be one of the biggest novels out of Newfoundland this year, this is a story of isolation and a communication breakdown that breaks a family down, and breaks the reader down along with them. Click here to Read Salty Ink’s summary and review of this sure-to-be-a-book-of-the-year novel. Her writing is a mesmerizing combination of crisp language, deep empathy for her well-wrought characters, and a world-savvy wisdom. Click here to buy Annabel now

For a chance to win a copy of Annabel, email chad@saltyink.com by July 10th — subject line Annabel giveaway. (Also, she will be having a St. John’s launch on July 20th, at The Ship. 8 pm.)

Click the book covers below to read more about boYs and Annabel at their publisher’s websites.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Enjoy the Interview Below ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Off the top of your head, without struggling for “favourites,” name one or two books you really liked by a fellow Atlantic Canadian author.

Well I have to say the first one is House of Hate by Percy Janes. It is a dark book but beautifully written, and it is set in Corner Brook where I lived from the ages of 12 to 16, so reading it was the first time I read a piece of literature that was set in a place about which I had my own intimate perspective. Another work that affected me is the journal of Lucy Maud Montgomery, with its compelling undercurrents of isolation and revelations about barricades of class and gender.

How did you end up writing books?

My dad taught me to read phonetically long before I went to school. I knew when I was four that I wanted to write books, because I loved them so much. There was always a library near where we lived – at one point, in Curling, the library was a mobile library in a van.  I have learned how to live in the real world by now, but I remember that feeling of escape, entering a book, and I can’t remember a time when I didn’t just assume I would make that happen for other people; create worlds.

What, in your mind, marked a turning point or real upswing in your writing career?

I will never forget the night John Metcalf phoned me to talk about some stories I had mailed to him. I was at a point where I began writing notes to myself on the outsides of the stamped, self-addressed envelopes you have to include with fiction submissions to editors. I was receiving so many rejection slips that I felt a need to write, on the envelopes that I knew would come back to me containing these rejections, “Kathleen, you are a good writer. Keep going and do not give up.” Believe it or not these notes cheered me up, though I had written them to myself, sometimes six months before. So John Metcalf phoned me and said he loved my stories. He said he felt, on reading them, as if he had come home, and he wanted to put the manuscript on the shortlist of the Metcalf-Rooke Award, which I later won.  The award was in his name but was also named after Leon Rooke. I had no money then, and before this phone call I used to visit the local bookshop and take Leon Rooke’s stories off the shelf and read them, and rejoice that someone in Canada was writing crazy, wonderful, immensely satisfying stories like this. Rooke was my hero. And now John Metcalf, one of the most eminent editors in Canada, was telling me I was being considered for the Metcalf-Rooke Award. That was the turning point, the upswing, in my writing career.

Any advice for aspiring writers?

Take rejection slips as reminders that you can improve. Look at the stories when they come back. It takes a long time to get a story back, so you have time to gain perspective about how to write it better. What is the reader getting out of it? Have you a clear vision? Work on a new draft, and send it out again. Always have something sent out. No matter how wretched you feel when it returns, have another piece ready and send it the day you are rejected. Then hope will come back to you. That crazy bird, hope. I felt hopeless all the way to the post office the day I sent my stories to John Metcalf. Always have a package of big envelopes nearby (many submissions still cannot be done online) and remember postage is less if you write the address horizontally.

What is your favourite part of the writing process? Your least favourite?

I guess I love the inspiration part, the new idea part, the “what if” part, when a magical world opens up, a new story with its own rules of physics, psychology, spirit and event. I also love the craft part though, working alone and with an editor on things like structure and technique. What I don’t like is those moments or hours or days when the writing is dead. You write it and you look at it and it is a corpse and it stinks and you are afraid the life inside the work has abandoned you.

Which piece of yours are you the most satisfied with in hindsight?

In my story collection, boYs,  I’m particularly happy with the stories Binocular and The History of Zero, because they pack an emotional punch. Binocular is a big, fully-realized story that might have become a novel there is so much that happens, but because it is  short it is highly concentrated. Binocular makes people cry, and The History of Zero makes some people laugh until they cry, though it was inspired by events that I originally thought were tragic. I don’t have hindsight yet about Annabel since the book has just been released.

Annabel is a novel about many things. It is also, undeniably, an evocative portraiture of ethereal Labrador. It is convincing, right down to the plants, the smells, or how a blind man can navigate a canoe and hunt ducks, and the details of work on a trapline. How much research was involved here, or how much time have you spent in Labrador?

Labrador captivated me the first time I went there. I made a television documentary there, and for that documentary I spent quite a bit of time on the land, and was invited to stay with an Innu family in their hunting encampment. I also met people of Scottish and Inuit descent, like Treadway in  Annabel, and these people too showed me a great deal of beauty in the land, taking me ice fishing and teaching me how to do Labrador arts like making moccasins. The description of Labrador in Annabel as having a unique, magnetic energy, comes from my personal experience of the land. I have visited with children as part of the Labrador Arts Festival, and I have also visited for personal reasons. Each time I have been, the land has deeply affected my spirit. I have also studied Labrador maps and non fiction.

In Annabel, there is an engaging tenderness and empathy in the writing that connects the reader to the story. It must have been exhausting to dip yourself in and out of these people’s lives? What were some of the biggest challenges in writing Annabel?

The biggest challenge for me is always telling a story. I love writing character, and I love the characters in this novel. They surprised me, especially Treadway. But the bones of the story, that’s what I find hard, because my natural tendency is toward character and atmosphere and I have to remember the reader needs reasons beyond these to keep turning the page. The reader has to be dying to know what happens next. I have had to work like a dog to know how to achieve this compelling quality in a book. I practice in hope that my weakness can, with hard work, become a strength. The tenderness and empathy come easily to me, compared with the bones of the story, and I’m really happy that reviewers of Annabel have called this story compelling to the last page. That is a huge achievement for me.

Despite Wayne/Annabel’s hermaphrodism, predicaments, and role as the main character, in my mind, the father, Treadway, is the most complex character in this novel. He is a man whose ability to connect with the natural world exceeds his ability to connect with his family, yet he is there, faithfully, when needed, and out of love, not fatherly or marital duty. Knowing how the writing process works, would I be right in saying his character evolved as you wrote the book? Were you, in the end, as taken by his depth of character and complexity as readers were/will be? 

Yes, Treadway really surprised me during the writing. I had no idea he would become so conflicted, or that he would show so many sides. He has made me think a lot about the difference between who we appear to be (both to ourselves and others) and the true selves or longed-for selves inside us. He has made me look at people differently and not come to conclusions about them so fast. I love that this could happen even though, supposedly, I am the one who created his character. Maybe the depth of people I have known in my life has manifested in Treadway. I write unconsciously much of the time, before the technical work, and I stop if the writing goes dead, so maybe this is how Treadway came alive for me in a way I did not predict.

Wayne/Annabel’s physical status is a crux of the book, but, in my reading, wasn’t “what the book is about.” What is the book “about” in your mind?

The book is about how point of view can change identity. I deliberately chose an omniscient point of view for the writing, as well as a consecutive storyline that you might call old-fashioned. I wanted to restrain myself structurally so that I could know, and the reader could know, what was going on in everyone’s minds as well as how the big picture looked. This is not my ordinary way of writing. I like to get more close-up and more stream of consciousness. But to me this story was always about other possibilities inside the self we choose to project at any one moment.  For Wayne, there was an obvious and dramatic conflict between the inner and the outer person. But we all possess unexpressed selves, and this story explores the tension in that. I would love to know what you think the book is about. Thank you for these wonderful questions.

 [Salty Ink: the pleasure was mine, so thank you. And what did I think the book was about? I thought that Wayne/Annabel's gender ambiguity was simply a great means by which to explore questions of identity, and several societal constructs that can box us in. Also: that it was a novel about the basic desires and humanity that overide gender and age and connect us all.]