Featured Artist - Geoff Butler

An Interview with Bernice Morgan

LF:

Bernice, I recall your telling me about twenty years ago how much you wanted to write full-time. Did you always know you wanted to be a writer?

BM:

Well, to be a writer, I think is overstating it. I always knew I wanted to write. Well, as long as I can remember. Of course, I have been writing since I was in my twenties. Forty-two years ago I won my first Arts and Letters award. So I was writing before I had any significant body of work published.

LF:

Talking to writers, I'm constantly reminded of Forester's advice: only connect with the reader. Who are your literary influences? Is there a consciousness on your part to connect with any writer in particular?

BM:

No, there's no conscious effort but looking back on my work, sometimes I can read a story or something I've written and I can almost tell that I was reading Margaret Laurence, and it's frightening.

LF:

Yeah, I read in a previous interview that you admire Laurence, and Munro, eh?

BM:

Oh, Margaret Laurence was a real revelation to me. And strangely enough, Lydia Campbell's book on Labrador because so much of what I grew up with were Hemingway type stories about war and foreign places. We really did have the feeling that you couldn't write about here. And women, of course, had the feeling that you couldn't write about what happened inside houses. I'm on the cusp of that generation where everything changed.

LF:

And it wasn't really until Laurence and people like Munro and Marian Engel that things started really exploding for female writers.

BM:

And Atwood, that's right. And for Canadian writers as a whole.

LF:

Bernice, there's an amazing amount of new talent in Newfoundland. It seems every day a new writer appears on the scene. What do you think accounts for this? Do you think Newfoundland has something special going for it? As opposed to say, Manitoba?

BM:

Of course I do. I suppose every place to the people who live there is special and particular. But in Newfoundland it's almost as though there was a great back-up, like a dam had been there. We didn't have an outlet. There were no publishers here. And off the island people didn't consider our place interesting or attractive and never considered that there might be writers here. And indeed, we did not consider it ourselves. So there's been a sort of a dam holding everything back.

LF:

Yes, Margaret Duley was even hidden.

BM:

That's right, she was out of print. I didn't know about her until I was in my twenties. But I think now the dam has broken and all this material is there, all this wonderful historical resource.

LF:

Yeah, Flannery O'Connor once said in a letter to a friend, if you have history and religion, you can outwrite anyone.

BM:

Well, we have that. In abundance.

LF:

And there was a proliferation of publishing houses around that time: Breakwater, Creative, Harry Cuff, Jesperson, Killick Press.

BM:

That's right. To write for years and years and never see anything in print, as most of my generation, Helen Porter, Gerry Rubia, myself. We wrote for years. You sent articles but not fiction. Fiction was not being printed.

LF:

If you had to give advice to our young Newfoundland writers, young men and women who would like to be as good a writer as you are and who would like to achieve some of the success that you've achieved, what would you say to them?

BM:

Well, it's very straightforward and very repetitive. Read! It's just amazing how many people start writing without reading. No matter how much you want to write, if you haven't read, you cannot write. Not that you want to duplicate other people but the flow of language and an appreciation for a balanced sentence and seeing how people evoke emotions. I'd go as far as to say, read the bible. You know you have a wonderful benchmark if you've read the bible.

LF:

Well, quite a few writers come out of that orbit, don't they? In the beginning was the word ...

BM:

That's right.

LF:

Michael Crummy said the same thing recently when I spoke with him. Read, read, read. Bernice, your work is on the provincial high school curriculum. Many of our young people are reading Random Passage in particular. Are you getting any letters from young female students? I ask because there are many who feel that you have had a feminist impact.

BM:

Not really. Most of the letters I receive are from older women. Women who are my own age. And sometimes very old people who are in homes and are so happy to read something that evokes their childhood and that of their parents. I get an amazing number of letters from older women. The young women in our schools certainly like my work. I get that reaction. It's very seldom that I have had the subject of any feminist leanings in the books brought up.

LF:

Yes, but there are women, female academics in particular, and ordinary women who believe you've blazed quite a trail. They think you've made quite a contribution to the feminist viewpoint. I don't like to use the term revisionist history. But the truth is, you are a pioneer. Why has nobody picked up on your lead? Or has anyone?

BM:

Oh, it's becoming more balanced. It's quite a strange thing. When local publishers began bringing out books, I had this feeling that there was a whole army of men who had written down everything they had ever done all their lives, every time they ever bought a ship, every time they ever put supplies on a ship. And it was all there written down and they started sending it in. So there's a huge amount of stuff about community histories and histories of churches and shipping families, and it got into print much of it and it's great stuff.

LF:

Well, the quintessential ship log.

BM:

Yes, and it was very good stuff. Unfortunately, if you read enough of it you begin to think that there must have been a male conception program going on because women were never mentioned.

LF:

Well, that's the history of women, isn't it?

BM:

What women did was not recorded.

LF:

Well, Mary Ann Evans had to write as George Eliot. As we said, it's only quite recently that the floodgates have opened for women. Bernice, in conversation recently with several Newfoundland writers I discussed the phenomenon of the outsider dropping in and writing, people like Howard Norman, Annie Proulx in particular, because of The Shipping News. Both the book and the film had such a mixed reaction. And we do hear much these days about the appropriation of culture. Do you have any thoughts on this subject?

BM:

I don't think I feel strongly about it. I would not like to think that I could not write from the point of view of a woman who grew up in Toronto if I wanted to. I wouldn't want to.

LF:

Or a man.

BM:

Or a man. And I have. I've written from the point of view of an Irish priest. My God, up until then, I hadn't had a long conversation with one. LF: That's the power of the imagination, isn't it. 'What is now proved true was only once imagined.'

BM:

So, I'd hate to think that I was limited. But I think that anyone who is surrounded by a culture has a great advantage, the nuances of speech and the things that flow into your writing without research. Well, it's so much more natural.

LF:

You like Annie Proulx's writing?

BM:

I had read her stuff before she wrote The Shipping News. Postcards and some of the other stuff and I liked it better than The Shipping News, I have to say. The Shipping News was one of those books I had to start about three time before I got into it.

LF:

The same thing happened with me. But when I got into it, she blew my mind. She has amazing power.

BM:

Yes. What I really love about it is when she describes work. When she describes any type of work, and it's true in whatever she writes, you can tell that she just loves watching the movement of hands and things like that. I love that.

LF:

One of the things that struck me reading Random Passage was the accumulation of solid detail, whether it was the fishery, carpentry, masonry, cooking, clothing, the list is endless. I think it was Maupassant who said the accumulation of detail is the measure of a writer's success. Several of your short stories, "A Commission in Lunacy," for example, are the result of some research. When you were writing Random Passage did you set out a time frame to do academic research? You've really captured the Newfoundland experience. It's quite gut-wrenching. Was the source of fodder for your imagination talking to relatives or were there books? Wayne Johnston said recently that he read thousands of pages in preparation for his new novel, The Navigator of New York. Do you work that way?

BM:

Well, I did read a lot and I do in Waiting For Time have a long list, a very incomplete list of books I've read that impinged upon the story. My parents were from that environment. My father grew up on Random Island, my mother on Cape Island, very remote places. So the background they grew up in I knew very well, not because I lived there because I had actually only visited those places once. But they were places that occupied my imagination, places I was totally preoccupied with as a child.

LF:

Yes, I recall you once said you made a deep connection between the death of your mother and going back to Bonavista North.

BM:

When I was writing the book and finding there was something there except the graveyards, the headstones sticking out with these names, Lavinia and Cassandra and Darias, you know, all these dead children. You had to get down in the sand and dig to find their names. So the place, I knew. Now there were huge, huge things - things such as navigation, church construction or barrel-making I knew nothing about. I didn't know how you became a Catholic priest. I was not even aware that in the time period I had outlined you could not become a Catholic priest in Ireland. So I had to transport my character to Spain. I'm not an academic so my method was to go to the library, get to that section and start to read. And just read and read and read and make notes. I didn't use a time frame. I did it whenever I was stuck but I did much more research than was necessary.

LF:

Well, how does one know how much to do?

BM:

That's right. You don't know. And I've forgotten every bit of it. That's the terrible thing. Sometimes I get phone calls asking some question about something I've written and it's gone. LF: You mentioned somewhere that finding a publisher for Random Passage was very difficult. Only Breakwater Books seemed to be interested. I find that mind boggling. I mean, it's an agent's dream. Would you care to elaborate upon why finding a publisher was so difficult?

BM:

As I said earlier, Newfoundland stuff was not being published outside the province. It has only been in the past eleven, twelve years that Newfoundland writing started to get noticed. Writer friends and I were on the cusp, just before Wayne Johnston and others who have been so successful. Helen Porter had been published by Breakwater. January, February, June or July. A wonderful book. But I was on the edge and, I don't know, Random Passage hit a chord in people that I don't think anyone anticipated.

LF:

It's so often the case, isn't it? Catcher in the Rye was rejected by several houses.

BM:

Yes. Random Passage was a book that came out just when the cod crisis occurred. And the impact that had on this place!

LF:

Yes, it was timely, wasn't it?

BM:

And then, of course, The Shipping News came out. That's Annie Proulx's art. She put us on the map. I mean, Newfoundland had never been mentioned in a New York book review before. Just the word Newfoundland.

LF:

But Jack McClelland of McClelland and Stewart was quite helpful, I'm told.

BM:

I sent ten or twelve letters to agents. Only Jack McClelland responded and I'm very grateful to him for that. He liked the book and encouraged me to change it to a trilogy. But he could not place it, even with his name behind it. Of course, Breakwater knew of it by then. I've been writing this book for - God, it's like being pregnant for seven years. It was a very discouraging process at the end. And when I wrote it, all the years I was writing it, I deliberately didn't think about publishing it because I knew if I focused on what kind of book it was or where it was going or who was going to read it I knew I'd get bogged down. So I didn't even think of that. I figured I'd write the book and work all of that out later.

LF:

When I taught Cassie Brown's Death on the Ice the students were always blown away by the Newfoundland struggle, the hardships our people have endured for centuries. I've given that book to several people from out of the province, adults, who've had the same response. Why do you think few, if any other Newfoundland writers, have been able to zero in on this struggle for survival, which defines us, really, growing up under such harsh conditions. Is it a product of age and experience or readings and personal reflections? How did you get the bug to pursue that theme?

BM:

Until my generation, it wasn't something to be proud of. It was something to be ashamed of. And we had been conditioned to think we should be ashamed of our past. I have to say that some of our politicians injected a degree of shame into it, that nobody else in the world would be in our condition.

LF:

There was a powerful political force that opposed the Newfoundland spirit for quite some time, wouldn't you agree?

BM:

Yes. And we absorbed that. We accepted second class status. It's only my generation that started saying, my God, look what we've done. Anywhere else in the world you'd celebrate the fact that this place is still populated and we're still alive. It's cause for celebration. We didn't disappear like the Greenlanders. We're still here. And I think you had to come out of that mindset. It's the immigrant experience too, you know. Remember, my generation grabbed on to every new invention. We loved it. Nobody wanted to go back to the old furniture, the homemade bread .

LF:

Yeah, it was a Coney Island of the mind, wasn't it?

BM:

That's right. We wanted everything and we wanted it new.

LF:

You mentioned once that you were at a Writers' Conference here in St. John's and the guest speaker said, 'Let's forget about Newfoundland's past, let's write about the future.' And for a moment you agreed but something inside you rebelled against that.

BM:

Well, I was at the point where I thought even if I put this book between covers and my grandchildren read it, I'm going to write it. If nobody ever reads it in my lifetime, I'm still going to record what our ancestors did - how they lived. It doesn't matter, I'll have done it. It will be there.

LF:

The book was writing you.

BM:

Yes, and to some degree, you know, I think we are driven.

LF:

I remember Alex Hailey of Roots fame saying once he'd walk into the library and he hardly knew how to use the card catalogue and he'd just find things, the exact things he needed. He was driven to write Roots. Was it Thoreau who said, if you follow your dream, the universe conspires to help you.

BM:

It's absolutely true. It's amazing when you focus on something. I say to the librarian, where's the section on myth and religious ceremonies, and I sit there and things happen. One day I was driving to the library to research how barrels are made. And lo and behold on the radio I hear that at the Interpretation Centre on Signal Hill they're doing a display on barrel-making.

LF:

Incredible! Talk about serendipity.

BM:

It's quite amazing.

LF:

In a review of Wayne Johnston's The Colony Of Unrequited Dreams, you praised his sense of place and his love of place. It's clear from reading your work that you have immense affection for Newfoundland. Would you comment briefly upon how place informs your work.

BM:

I think place dictates everything in Waiting For Time and Random Passage. The fact that my characters are in that place makes everything happen. Anywhere else and it would be a different story. Anywhere else the characters' reactions would be different. The characters would evolve differently. The fact that they are in this isolated place and that they depend upon one another for everything. In another place, you would pack your bag and walk away. Mary Bundle certainly would have. So, the place, its isolation, dictates everything.

LF:

There's been some discussion about historical fiction and the accuracy of Random Passage. Do you think you owe something to future generations who will see the book as an accurate rendition of Cape Random from the 1800s on? Do you have any thoughts on that?

BM:

That's a frightening thought. I tried for accuracy, especially in the second book, Waiting For Time. Someone told me the other day it's time I wrote a political novel. I said I thought I had. Every quota, every act of government, every study mentioned in Waiting For Time is accurate. The two books were structured quite differently before the cod moratorium was announced. It was a terrible time. I'd throw away more than I'd type because I'd keep going off into a ranting rage.

LF:

During my research for this interview, the only negative commentary I came across was by David Hickey who said that the narrative flow of Random Passage was disrupted by a documentary voice, to use his term, a PBS voice riddled with authorial comments. The narrative voice, he felt, came from the future, telling readers how things would work out or be perceived down the road. Do you think this is fair criticism?

BM:

Once in awhile, I try not to do it too often, I say something like "in the record of Cape Random, Bonavista North, no woman's name will be mentioned." There may be justification for his comments. He's the only one who wrote that. That review was devastating. It was the first review I'd gotten.

LF:

Well, it's a time honoured technique. Dickens does it in David Copperfield.

BM:

Many writers do it. I'm a great admirer of Margaret Drabble. She does it all the time. But if you don't like that kind of writing, it will grate on you.

LF:

And David also thought there was too heavy a dose of ideology.

BM:

Well, I was surprised at that. Maybe there was but it was sure subconscious.

LF:

He thought Lavinia Andrews was one dimensional. He felt that Mary Bundle was realistic, the men were realistic, but Lavinia was, to use his phrase, a puppet used to promote a feminist perspective. Someone once said that all good fiction shows characters as humanly flawed.

BM:

Mary Bundle is much more feminist than Lavinia. Lavinia spends most of her time mooning over Thomas Hutchings.

LF:

I think he saw Lavinia as having no flaws, as a character who reacts to things rather than one who causes things to happen. Would you say that's a fair comment?

BM:

Oh, that's fair. She's very passive. And in fact, she's a person in shock. I've read about young women going into concentration camps during the war and their periods stopped. Young women fourteen and fifteen years of age. Partly malnutrition, partly cultural shock. Lavinia was a young woman in shock. Everything she'd ever planned or wanted to do in her life suddenly changed. She was transplanted to a different place. And a good part of the time she was hungry and uncomfortable. That was how I saw her. She's certainly not the aggressive character Mary Bundle is. Mary Bundle is much more the feminist.

LF:

Recently, Random Passage was made into a television mini-series. The ratings on SuperBowl night were, I think, 1.2 million. How do you feel about that? Des Walsh's adaptation? The director, John Smith's, recreation of your work?

BM:

It was wonderful. I told myself, this is a very different medium, don't get hung up on the book. The only character who looked the way I imagined was Ned. He looked exactly as I'd imagined him. But they were all terrific. By the third episode I was quite adjusted even to Thomas Hutchings. I was really pleased. I thought they were all too well dressed for my ancestors. That's my only criticism. The clothes they wore were the clothes my ancestors would have saved and worn for church and funerals.

LF:

Bernice, you've written a wonderful collection of short stories, which we'll discuss in a moment, two novels, a stage play. You've been published in magazines across the country. You've won numerous awards, including the Newfoundland and Labrador Artist of the year award. You're fulfilling your dream of being a writer. You must be extremely pleased.

BM:

I am very pleased. I'm not really as exuberant as people expect me to be. It was in the back of my head for so long that it sort of evolved. But I think it's true for most writers that you're always thinking about the next thing. And you start from scratch every time. You start fresh every time with all of the insecurities, maybe more, than you had writing the previous work. I had no concept of what writing a novel would entail. If I had known it I would still be working for the NTA.

LF:

Did you find as you got into it, you really identified with the characters more than you imagined? Faulkner said once he kept writing because he couldn't believe that people who were knocked down so often would keep getting up. And we hear these stories of Dickens weeping over his characters.

BM:

Oh, on a good day, it was as if I was there on Cape Random. There were lots of bad days when that wasn't happening. But on a good day, it was. It's a sort of hypnotism. For me, it takes a long time to get into that state and a long time to get out of it. I can't go into a room and just start writing. I know some people can but I can't.

LF:

Are you disciplined? I know certain writers simply have to be at their desks at certain times. Graham Greene had to write so many words a day.

BM:

No, my only thing is that I have to be alone. I really do. Preferably not in my house.

LF:

Do you have a writing room, to quote Virginia Woolf, a room of your own?

BM:

The writer, Joan Clark, and I for five or six years rented a room with no phone, just a kettle and a desk and chair. Joan uses it in the morning and I use it in the afternoon.

LF:

I'd like to chat a bit about writing for the stage. Each genre has its challenges. You wrote the play, Big Game, a few years ago. You mentioned you had great fun with it Do you think you'll return to that genre? Is there a genre you prefer? BM: It was the subject matter with Big Game. It was a story I'd heard on the news about people actually going to these hunting cabins to feed bears so that when the hunters arrive in the interior of Newfoundland, they can choose the size of bear they want 300, 400, 500 pounds, whatever size they came for. The bears are marked. I tried to get more information on the news report. I was making notes while I was listening. But I never got another word on that story. That was it.

LF:

But it clearly triggered something, didn't it?

BM:

Yes. Then I met a man who was trying to set up a lodge, he and his wife, a hunting lodge. And I learned about all of the friction that entails trying to make a living at it. You know, things going wrong, the plumbing isn't working and guests are expected. I'm very concerned about how we use our rivers and lakes. In the play one of the guys isn't coming to hunt. He's actually coming to check out the river which he thinks will be a power source and he wants to acquire water rights too, but he says he's a hunter. In the end, there's a murder. Anyway it was performed by The Beothuck Street Players but it didn't take off. I'd like to redo it. I think the story is right. Maybe I didn't use the right medium. Maybe it shouldn't be a murder mystery. You know at the beginning of the play that someone has been murdered but you don't know until the last scene which of the five characters has been murdered. The opening scene is in the darkened theatre and you hear a police call going in. Someone is going to this cabin in the backwoods behind Gander. And in the final seconds of the play you discover who is dead and who the killer is.

LF:

It sounds like you had a lot of fun with it.

BM:

I loved it. I loved work-shopping it. I love drama. I love watching it. There's nothing I'd rather do than go to a play.

LF:

One writer said of your short story collection, The Topography of Love: "God seems to have very little to do with the world of suffering and redemption that you evoke. In your fictional world, we save ourselves." In one of your best short stories, "Folding Bones," after finding her lost son, the narrator says: "The worst thing about not believing in God is not that you cannot ask him for help, but that you cannot thank him for happiness." That's quite a beautiful statement. While religion doesn't feature prominently in your work, there are references to belief and non-belief. The title of your collection, from Patrick Kavanagh's Gaff Topsails speaks volumes: "This is what God sees: this is the topography of love." How does this fit with your own thoughts on God? Religion? Are you a Christian?

BM:

No, I come from a very strong religious bent. Methodist, Bonavista North Methodist, background right up to my generation. But I've never never never accepted the premise that there is a God who intercedes on our behalf. And if there is, I don't want anything to do with him. Because why would he intercede on my behalf and not on behalf of some suffering child in Africa? I mean who would want that God? I can't accept that. I'm not a Christian. No, I don't know what I am.

LF:

But what of the notion of consciousness? Human beings have consciousness. That's what it means to be human. And where there's consciousness, there's freedom. Where there's freedom, there's inevitably conflict and suffering. That's eternal, isn't it?

BM:

Yes, there is choice. We tell young people about the need to set goals, to know where they are going. And to some extent that's true. If you headed North and keep trying to get North, you're not likely to end up South but you'll probably end up North East or North West. "Time and chance happeneth to all men." And certainly to all women! Time and chance is what I write about - what all writers write about.

LF:

I referred to Joan Strong's praise for The Topography of Love earlier. She said that the fact that you "challenge the reader's perceptions in their own lives is not only the mark of a great writer but of a humanist who is at work to redeem something we ourselves often cast off - the ability to value one another as individuals whose possibilities cannot always be represented in the stories we tell." High praise!

BM:

It was a wonderful review. I think I'll write her and thank her.

LF:

It was a beautiful review. Well written. And long overdue.

BM:

Well, thank you. I like to think the writing in Topography is better than the writing in either of my novels.

LF:

Well, you're more like Alice Munro there. You head toward some pretty deep water.

BM:

It's easier to structure a story than a novel. I believe that in most ordinary lives there's a great deal of good. I've had people treat me with such kindness and such thoughtfulness, people I didn't even know. People do things for each other and sometimes to each other, both nasty things and wonderful things that reverberate through people's lives. They may never touch each other again, perhaps never know how they have affected others or been affected by others.

LF:

Well, Jesus to leper number one: 'Were not there ten made clean?'

BM:

That's right. I like to think that an act of kindness can send ripples through generations. Or likewise, an act of cruelty.

LF:

In your review of The Colony of Unrequited Dreams you comment upon a reflection of Smallwood, suggesting it is the sentiment of the author as well. That reflection: "Perhaps we Newfoundlanders had been fooled by our geography into thinking we could be a country, perhaps we believed that by nothing short of achieving nationhood could we live up to the land itself, the sheer size of it." The blurbs on the flaps of your books make a point of stating that you were born in pre-confederate Newfoundland. You were a teenager in 1949. What were your thoughts about confederation then? How did you feel about growing up in the Canadian-Newfoundland of Joey Smallwood? What are your thoughts on confederation today?

BM:

My immediate family, the Vardys, were anti-confederate. But my mother's brother, Ted Vincent, was one of the members of the confederate team. It was all pure sentiment. I wrote a story that was published somewhere about listening to the radio debates between Cashin and Smallwood. We all held these wonderfully strong views but it was rhetoric. We were overflowing with, you know, we love England, we'll never leave. Dad used to say, "What are Canadians? They're just Americans with some of the varnish rubbed off."

LF:

How do you feel about confederation now? I know you have very strong feelings about the loss of one our greatest resources, our cod. Do you feel we've been hard-done by?

BM:

It's a dreadful thing to say, you know, but whenever I hear we want to take control of our fish, my heart sinks because it's been my experience that the nearer the control of anything is to home, the more graft is involved. As bad as the feds have been, and they have been, I have grave doubts that we would have done any better. Look how we treat our other resources! We are a country of gatherers and hunters. We think that anything growing is to be chopped down, anything moving is to be eliminated. Honestly, it's very hard for me to say that we would have done better.

LF:

The other night during the televised Mordecai Richler Celebration, there was a clip of him commenting upon the nature of the writer. He said that writing is essentially a conceit. The writer is attempting to leave a record of a time and place. For him, it was contemporary St. Urbain Street. Is Cape Random of the 1800s, the circle of deprivation, the struggle for survival that so many Newfoundlanders experienced from the earliest days on our shores the record you wish to leave behind? Helen Porter said that you've always had a strong emotional attachment to the things people leave behind.

BM:

I have. It's always seemed so unjust to me. It still does, to go and see tools that people used or a foundation that they built or stones that they piled up or even clothing, the most fragile things, but they survive us. Our lives are so short and so fragile. Yet we act as though it's going to last forever. The things we leave behind make me feel deeply sad and proud too of how brave, how eternally hopeful we humans are.

LF:

I'm sure that's why you write with such power.

BM:

And I do agree with Richler. It is a conceit, to think that you can impose your vision of what happened or what you think happened and you know your vision is different from another person's.

LF:

But there's only the trying, isn't there?

BM:

My God, if you don't try. If nobody tries, who leaves it?

LF:

A final question, are you working on anything at present?

BM:

In a very abstract way. I don't begin a book and go through it. There are certain parts of a book that I might write. I circle around. And I'm always really afraid to write the first sentence because it seems to me that when you write the first sentence you're committed to a certain path. Until then you're still circling the story. You know, who's voice is it? Who's story is this? What's the feeling? What atmosphere are you entering? But when you write the first sentence, you're committed. I've been two years circling something. The frightening thing is, if after two years you might think it is a lousy story to begin with, you have 200 pages you have to throw away. It's always possible. I'm a slow writer and it's sad to be a slow writer at this point in my life. I have no problem thinking about ideas for stories. That's one of the wonderful things about this place. I could sit down any day and jot down five outlines for books on different subjects. Each of the stories in Topography could have been a novel. I started realizing that when characters started to pop up, going from one story into another. I could have turned it into a novel but I wanted to leave that space for the imagination of the reader. It jarred me at first to find a character from a previous story showing up in another one but I followed where they led.

LF:

Bernice, you've been so generous with your time. Thank you so much and continued success with your marvelous writing career.

BM:

Thank you.