Sharon Berg Interviews Kim Fahner

(Latitude 46, 2024)

Kim Fahner

​Sharon Berg:   It’s a great pleasure to interview you with a focus on your new book, The Donoghue Girl, Kim. Thanks for carving time out of your busy schedule to do this.
 
Writing historical fiction should be expected to present a challenge as our social mores have changed so much over time. You’ve done very well portraying this. To write about women and describe life decisions they made in the context of historical times is especially challenging. Can you describe how you decided the details of their social surroundings that sufficed for the setting in The Donoghue Girl, while keeping in mind that contemporary readers live in a very different context?

Kim Fahner:    I spent a lot of time looking at photographs and doing research in the local archives of the public library to get a sense of Creighton Mine in the 1930s. The social fabric of mining towns was important, and so it was important to me to create a setting that felt realistic and timely for the Donoghues, but also for the other people who lived in Creighton then. Many European immigrants came to work in Northern Ontario mines, so Creighton had a richly diverse population.

Contemporary readers do live different lives, and perhaps that’s why some of us are drawn to write (and read) historical fiction. I feel that if the characters are believable, are well-imagined and -written, then it’s just about being mindful of how differently people spoke and how there were many social conventions to consider. Men like Michael existed back in the late 1930s and they exist now, as well, in dating circles. The characteristics of certain types of people, then, have remained the same, even if the social mores have changed over time.

SB:       I remember having discussions about boyfriends with friends and my sister in the 1960s and we agreed that none of us would ever date a boy who’d been with any of the others in our group. It felt like ‘loyalty’ to make this agreement with each other. Yet, I’m aware that people from small communities in historical times travelled far less, and had a much smaller pool of people to consider as possible mates. While it seems that dating a sister’s boyfriend is disloyal, I know my father dated his brother’s wife first, so perhaps when push comes to shove it happened more than people have talked about. Can you respond to how you dealt with the idea of ‘loyalty’ between sisters in The Donoghue Girl?

KF:       While I initially thought my family’s rumour was shocking, the more I speak to people in Northern Ontario, the more often I hear variations of similar stories. As you say, there were smaller pools of people, and travelling through Northern Ontario at the time wasn’t simple. A journey that today might take three and a half hours by car in good weather (Sudbury to Timmins, for instance) might have taken much longer back then when you consider the ways in which roads and cars were built.

The question of loyalty and trust is an important one in the book, and the notion of personal desire is one that is at war with more moralistic ideals, so it’s a question of how a person self-regulates in terms of their choices and then deals with the outcomes of their decisions. Lizzie is somehow able to rationalize her decision to be with Michael because she is so intensely drawn to him sexually. He’s an enigma to her, so he’s magnetic and mysterious. It doesn’t mean he's a healthy match for her. That attraction overwhelms her common sense at several points in the novel. The tension between she and Ann continues to weave itself through the story because, somewhere deep inside, Lizzie knows she’s chosen Michael over her sister. In the back of her head, she’s haunted by that choice.  

SB:       Lizzie is definitely someone who resists the role of women in her own historical time, but there are times when she also seems to acquiesce to the will of society at large. How important was it to you, as a contemporary woman with a different social setting, to find your own comfort in her decisions?  

KF:       I don’t know that my role, as a writer, is to find comfort in Lizzie’s decisions because she isn’t me. I find some of her choices are poorly thought out, but I also know that humans are complex, and so a purely rational approach to life decisions isn’t always possible.

I was very much aware, while writing, that I come from a different time period, and that I’m a feminist, so I know that my bias was there as I created these characters inside the world of the novel’s architecture. It’s a bit of a delicate dance when you consider that the genre of historical fiction requires a lot of careful choreography on the part of the writer, especially when you’re aware of how things have changed for women in the last century, specifically in reference to desire, sex, career opportunities, love, and marriage. There are fewer social rules now, and lines are more easily blurred. Then, in the late 1930s, it was easier for men than women in terms of sexual and romantic relationships in terms of social ramifications. Now, the field is more equitable, but oftentimes just as confusing and deceptive.

SB:       In terms of the audience for The Donoghue Girl, you will be aware there is a group who are drawn to reading it, and a group you believe should read it. Are those two groups different? Please elaborate.

KF:       I know that readers from Northern Ontario will read it because there are so few historical fiction pieces from this area. The places I’ve written about are places some people here will know intimately. A lot of people still have mining families, or at least roots in the mining industry. Creighton Mine, as a town, was taken apart by INCO in the late 1980s, and there’s a strong group of Creightonites who might be interested in reading it, too.

One woman I know stopped me the other day and told me her experience of reading the book so far. She mentioned that her husband is a miner, and that she often feels the way Lizzie does—worried about whether he will come home after his shift, and encouraging him to apply for a surface job rather than a position underground.

I hope people from outside of Northern Ontario will want to read it, just because I think it’s an interesting story with a strong female protagonist, and maybe people who live in other mining and resource industry-based towns will find it interesting, but I’d definitely hope for a wider audience, as well.

SB:       Is this a book that seemed to fall onto the page quickly, as if it were channelled, or did you need to put a lot of effort into its structure? Was there a developmental process? Please explain.

KF:       This book took a long time to conceptualize and then write and revise. I took my time. I’ve never been someone who’s rushed to publish in any part of my writing life. I’d rather marinate in the process of creating, writing, and revising than rush ahead. The family story that stuck in my head sat there for a long time and emerged in an introductory playwriting class I took at the Sudbury Theatre Centre back in 2014-15 with Matthew Heiti. We were tasked with writing a monologue from the point of view of a character, and Lizzie started coming forward. Then, I met Lawrence Hill at a Sage Hill Writing in Summer 2015 while I was there for a poetry symposium with Ken Babstock. I mentioned to Larry that I had an idea for a novel. He encouraged me. A year later, I attended a historical fiction workshop with him at Banff in Spring 2016, and by then had written quite a bit. Through that time, I also worked with Marnie Woodrow as a writing coach. I wanted so much to bring this story to life that I kept at it over a long period of time. The first full draft was likely done in 2017. Since then, it’s gone through more incarnations, and I was glad to work with Natalie Morrill as my editor through Latitude 46 last fall, which spurred another final re-write.

SB:       In terms of your development as a literary artist, what do you hope this book will achieve for you? Ignoring any reviews that you may have received thus far, do you think it accomplishes this?

KF:       I think that the novel—for me, as writer—is an accomplishment in that I proved to myself I could do it, and it’s added to my confidence as I continue to explore the genre. Now that I know I can write a novel, a whole bunch of new ideas are flooding into my mind and I want to write them down, so that’s exciting for me. I hope that the book fills a void where women’s stories weren’t always valued or heard in Northern Ontario. Mining towns were male-dominated, but the women were crucial to how well they functioned. Those women’s voices and stories deserve to be considered, so maybe that is part of the work the novel does.

SB:       How does this book fit in the stream of your own literary works? Is there a fundamental difference between The Donoghue Girl and your prior work?
 
KF:       My literary works have always explored the tension that exists in the landscape of Northern Ontario. I wrote an unpublished short story called “The Ground Beneath Her Feet” back in my 20s that explored life in a mining town. All three of my plays, “Sparrows Over Slag,” “Letters to the Man in the Moon,” and “All the Things I Draw” are set firmly in Sudbury. “Letters” is a story that focuses on how a little girl copes with the loss of her dad in a mining tragedy as she writes letters to the man in the moon, hoping that they get to her deceased father.
 
Regardless of which genre I’ve written in over the last thirty years, I’m exploring the notion of ‘surfaces and underneaths,’ as I like to call them. Here, in Sudbury, I know that much of what happens in life is underground. My family history, on both maternal and paternal sides, is tied to INCO’s history, and both my father and paternal grandfather worked in the mine and at the copper refinery in Copper Cliff when I was growing up. Here, there are ‘bumps’ all the time, when the earth and rock move without warning and those can have fatal consequences. I suppose, to people from other places, these might feel like earthquakes, but they’re common to those of us who live here. The bumps continually remind me that there’s a maze of shafts and tunnels underneath this whole area. There’s always something on the surface, and something hidden underneath, and those are the themes that I find cross over into my writing, regardless of genre. 

SB:       Readers are often interested in knowing how much of a work is invented and how much is autobiographical. Would you care to share your approach/thoughts on this aspect of your readers’ curiosity?

KF:       The Donoghue Girl was inspired by a family rumour that two of my great aunts told me while I was in my 20s. They mentioned that my maternal grandfather, William Leonard Ennis, had courted my great aunt Norah Ann Kelly, and then moved on to court my maternal grandmother, Alice Elizabeth Kelly. I took the middle names of the ‘girls’ for the two sisters, but used the name Michael Power for the male character in the triangle because the surname Power was in my mother’s family tree.

In my own life, I never knew my maternal grandfather, except for meeting him once in a Garson nursing home when I was very little. My mother had told me that he had been in mining, and that he had travelled to Finland with my grandmother for some time. My grandmother had loved her time in Finland, and so I heard a great deal about Petsamo. My grandfather was never around while I was growing up, and my grandmother rarely mentioned him. I’m not sure where I thought he had gone just because he had never been there during my lifetime. I was extremely close to my maternal grandmother, so I’m still surprised she just never shared a lot about her relationship with her husband with me. It made it easier to create fictional characters—to not know him, and to not know about their dynamic. That absence of information, on my part, made it simpler to create characters who weren’t biographical to my family’s history.
 
SB:       If you were asked to name another author’s work that you feel compares to the overall theme in this book, which author and what title would it be? How are they the same or different than The Donoghue Girl?
 
KF:       From the time I first read it years ago, I have loved Sheldon Currie’s The Glace Bay Miner’s Museum. I can’t recall how I first encountered it, but I think I picked it up in the late 1990s, when I was in Cape Breton. I read it there and remember thinking, “Someone else knows what it’s like to live in a mining town.” It resonated with me, especially in that I kept reading and found so few other stories that could fit into that sort of content. Where were the mining stories from small northern towns like my hometown? They were missing. For me, studying Northern Ontario history as an undergraduate student, I was curious about the lifespan of mining towns. These company towns often became ghost towns, and that intrigued me, too. Lives disappeared when towns were dismantled, and people who had given their lifetimes to the wealth of the company were dispersed. Social history, too, always intrigued me just because that’s where the stories live.
 
SB:       Are there any questions you feel The Donoghue Girl has left unanswered about the topics it deals with? Is there something you wish you had engaged with? 
 
KF:       There’s more to write about Ann’s part in the story. The Donoghue Girl is largely Lizzie’s story, so it’s always been in my head that there might be a sequel that would focus more on Ann’s story. While she’s away in Kingsville, what does she do, and how does she grow as a person? I do have part of Ann’s story written down, but I’m not sure of it yet. I left the end of the story open-ended on purpose, just in case.
 
The other character who intrigues me is Michael because he’s so easily able to compartmentalize his emotions, moving from one ‘girl’ to the other without care for the damage he does to either of them. He knows he’s taken Lizzie’s agency to make wise decisions by not clearly answering her questions about his relationship with Ann, and he knows that he has a magnetic power over her, but he behaves selfishly. I’ve met these types of men in my own life, so I suppose there’s a complexity there, and a lack of depth in character, that I still find could be further explored in a second novel. The family relationships, between Bridget and James, and between Bridget and the children, are also of interest to me.
 
SB:       Thank you for this, Kim. I agree that it is important to explore stories that originate in the more northern realms of Canada, in general, whether they are stories of mining communities or places that rely on different industries and endeavours. Best wishes to you in exploring more tales about the region where you live.

Kim Fahner lives and writes in Sudbury, Ontario. Her first novel, The Donoghue Girl, was published by Latitude 46 this fall, and her next book of poems, The Pollination Field, is being released by Turnstone Press in Spring 2025. One of Kim's poems was a finalist in the 2023 Ralph Gustafson Poetry Contest. She is the First Vice-Chair of The Writers' Union of Canada (2023-25), a member of The League of Canadian Poets, and an associate member of the Playwrights' Guild of Canada. She may be reached via her author website at www.kimfahner.com

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Sharon Berg attended the Banff School of Fine Arts Writing Studio in 1982 and was accepted to Banff’s Leighton Artist Colony in 1987. She is also an alumni of Humber College’s Writing Program. She did her B.A. in Indigenous Studies at Laurentian U, followed by her B.Ed for Primary Education at U of T. Her M.Ed focused on First Nations Education at York U, and her D.Ed focused on Indigenous Education at UBC. She also received a Certificate in Magazine Journalism from Ryerson U. Sharon founded and operated the international literary E-Zine Big Pond Rumours (2006-2019) and its associated press, which released chapbooks of Canadian poets as prizes for the magazine’s contests. She's published five full books and three chapbooks, working in poetry, fiction, and nonfiction. Her work appears in periodicals across Canada, the USA, Mexico, the UK, the Netherlands, India, Germany, Singapore, and Australia. Her 3rd poetry collection Stars in the Junkyard (Cyberwit 2020) was a Finalist in the 2022 International Book Awards, and her narrative history The Name Unspoken: Wandering Spirit Survival School (Big Pond Rumours Press 2019) won a 2020 IPPY Award for Regional Nonfiction. When she retired from teaching, she opened Oceanview Writers Retreat in Charlottetown (Terra Nova National Park) Newfoundland.