Sharon Berg Interviews Suzy Krause
Sharon Berg: First, I would like to congratulate you on being a finalist for four categories of the Saskatchewan Book Awards and winning the City of Regina Award in May this year. That is a truly remarkable feat for one book. Yet, I can understand it because your writing from page one of I Think We’ve Been Here Before took me inside the head of your protagonist, thinking what she thought, feeling what she felt, saying what she said. In fact, I once had the same experience as Nora in those first pages when she met Jacob for the first time. Of course, I met a different man than Nora and my story turned out differently, but I recognize the experience of deja vu with a complete stranger. It stops you in your tracks, makes you believe in reincarnation, even convinces you that you’re remembering a previous encounter—which I guess is your point. Have other readers mentioned making this sort of connection with the book to you?
Suzy Krause: Yes, this seems to be such a common occurrence—and one I’ve experienced myself, which inspired this scene. The night I met my now-husband, I had that feeling of familiarity, an inexplicable closeness. We completely bypassed the awkwardness of not knowing each other because we already did, somehow; I went home and emailed five different friends to tell them about it because it was so strange. It’s a common experience, but one which, I think, a lot of people talk themselves out of examining too hard because it’s so unexplainable—and those are the things I love to lean into. SB: It occurs to me that while most authors seek an enticing theme for their book, and some might even want to begin by setting up a thrilling mystery or an ominous threat to their protagonist, few would start their book by predicting the end of the world. Even fewer would predict the end with so many examples of deja vu. It makes me want to ask, how do you fit such a dramatic tale into your everyday life? And did you know how I Think We’ve Been Here Before would end before you began writing it? Please speak to your writing process. SK: This book was born out of a recurring dream I had where the world was ending and I was standing on a hill watching it happen. It was, weirdly, a lovely dream, one that made me feel calm and loved and okay. One day, I woke up and thought, I wonder if I could write a book like this dream, where the world ends but rather than invoking chaos and fear, it could make the reader feel calm, and loved, and okay. So that was the starting place, and I kept having the dream as I was writing the book, like my subconscious was reminding me of the tone and the intention, getting me back on track when I started to veer into hysteria or extremes. It was like working with someone else, but that someone else was just me, asleep. SB: One of the interesting things about I Think We’ve Been Here Before is the moments when you insert a philosophical insight, something we’ve all grown up hearing that suddenly takes on greater meaning within the context of the apocalypse the characters are facing. For instance, a flight attendant says that tragedies don’t change a person, just make them more of who they are. This got me to wondering if writing about a tragedy as huge as this one made you, the writer, more of who you are? I mean, your story ends with a portrait of family bonding and optimism. It’s an injection of positive thinking about how human beings would deal with such an end. Are you someone who sees the glass half full, Suzy? SK: It's funny, I don’t think of myself as an optimist. I am a worst-case scenario dweller, a worrier, someone who is not always able to enjoy the now because I’m already thinking about the next. But I have always wanted to believe in the best outcome, I want people to be good and loving, I want to think that disasters could bring out the best in people. I actually love this question because I think this book is a very good picture of these two sides of me: I am a person who obsessively anticipates the worst but hopes that the worst could contain or bring about the best—like the apocalypse bringing a family together. SB: Every book takes a stance in the midst of the contemporary social and political concerns it presents. How do you describe the position of I Think We’ve Been Here Before and its areas of concern in today’s world? SK: I’m sure it’ll be fairly obvious to anyone who reads this book that it was written shortly after 2020. I needed to write something in which I could think about and work through some complicated emotions around the unexpected ways I’d seen human beings—including myself—react to certain Big Events. Why do some people lean into conspiratorial thinking? Why do some people act like nothing’s wrong? Why is it so hard to get along with the people you love when you’re all in the exact same boat—why do people, instead of uniting against a common threat, turn against each other? I wanted to explore those things, but I also wanted to imagine a world where people do unite, make amends, work together and get on the same page. Heal. This is a book in which I tried to acknowledge, somewhat, but imagine more. SB: Are there any questions you feel I Think We’ve Been Here Before has left unanswered about the topics it deals with? Is there something you wish you had engaged with? SK: Definitely. I don’t think anyone could write about death and the end of the world and claim to have answered all of the questions that could possibly be asked. This is actually part of the reason I chose to focus on one family in a very remote setting (a farm on the Saskatchewan prairies). An event like a planet-destroying gamma ray burst is going to bring different things out of different human groups, depending on their location, the number of people around them, their history, their previous experience with natural disasters, their religion, etc. By zooming in on a group of people that I, personally, am very familiar with, I was able to explore the way they specifically might react, but even then, I know that if I were to expand the frame just a little, I could explore different reactions, different takes on death and the end of the world. It’s a bottomless topic, and I think that’s why there are so many books about it. It’s kind of too bad, for this reason, that there’s no room here for a sequel. I guess that’s the downside of killing everyone at the end of your novel. I’ll never do that again! SB: Titles are often difficult to come up with. Some authors seem to begin there. What was your experience in developing a title for I Think We’ve Been Here Before? SK: This book was originally called Last Christmas, because I thought it would be funny to write a book using the Christmas song title where it ends up literally being everyone’s last Christmas (and is the reason this book takes place when it does). My publisher rightfully pointed out that this could give the wrong impression, that people might think they were picking up a cute Hallmark holiday romance instead of a speculative fiction novel about the end of civilization. So then we semi-landed on It’s Not the End of the World (I just love a slightly ironic title), but the marketing team said no because the incomparable Judy Blume already wrote a book with that title (dang it, Judy!). I Think We’ve Been Here Before ended up being the winner from a long list after an arduous brainstorm, and I like it because it’s kind of a spoiler, but you can’t really understand how until you’ve read the whole book. SB: Yes, and it also embraces that deja vu factor, once again. So, I have to ask, 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 elaborate. SK: The first draft of this book fell onto the page. I thought I was on track to write the whole thing in two months. But at that point, it was a very straight-forward (and short) book about a farm family facing the apocalypse. There were no speculative elements, no Berlin storyline. I got all the way to the end and was in the middle of writing the last chapter when I realized that I had—subconsciously—set myself up to do so much more. I had written another book during the pandemic about a young couple who meet each other and have this intense feeling of déjà vu, as though they’ve experienced an entire relationship together, but I got about halfway through writing it and realized I didn’t know how to land the plane; I didn’t know how to explain their strange connection. I set that book aside and forgot about it—until I realized that I had everything I needed to solve that problem in this book. So I went back to the beginning and began the difficult work of braiding the two books together, while also adding this third dimension, the explanation for the déjà vu. My developmental editor, Laura Chasen, was absolutely essential, because by the time I showed the whole thing to her, my brain was in absolute knots. SB: Some books require intensive research of a topic or an historical era or some other aspect of the story. Please describe the most intensive research you did for I Think We’ve Been Here Before. How far would you travel to conduct research? Have you done most of your research on the internet or through books and printed documents? SK: I fell down so many great rabbit holes while writing this book. I read a lot about quantum entanglement, a phenomenon where two particles can become connected in such a way that they behave the same as each other, even when separated by great distances. It’s a subtle part of the book, but an important one, and I felt like I needed to really understand it before I could even hint at it, lest I make myself look stupid. I also did a lot of research into what exactly your brain does in the last moments before you die—and in the few moments after you die. It would be a spoiler to say why, but the entire book hinges on this information. I also had to do a lot of research into Berlin, a place I have never been. I walked up and down streets using the street view on Google Maps, read restaurant reviews on Yelp, consulted with friends who have lived there and have friends there still, and read so many blog posts written by Berlin residents. I was very, very anxious about getting it right, so a satisfying writer moment for me was when a person from Berlin emailed me to tell me that she’d read and enjoyed the book, and that she had a hunch that we might live in the same neighborhood, judging from my descriptions of the city. SB: How did you describe this book to a potential publisher before you began to work on it? Or did you complete I Think We’ve Been Here Before before you ever approached a publisher? SK: My American publisher had rights of first refusal for my next project in the contract for my last book, so I was able to sell it to them based on a synopsis and first three chapters—which was tricky, because the language of a synopsis is so detached and couldn’t properly convey my intention to write a book about, “yes, the end of the world, but also it’s not going to be doom and gloom and chaos.” That publisher is not a sci-fi/spec fic imprint; they really specialize in more heartwarming stories, and my previous book was very cozy and sweet, so I had to have quite a few backs and forths through my agent where we had to convince my editor that this book was not so far from my wheelhouse, that it could be marketed under my same pen name, that even if everyone died at the end, it could be redeeming and even hopeful and funny. I pitched it as, “if Stuart McLean wrote an Iain Reid novel.” I felt really unsure of myself at that point, because I wasn’t totally convinced in my own mind that I could write something about the end of the world that had “good vibes.” But so much of pitching is just false confidence, and when we sold the book, it was huge for me, that my editor and agent believed I could pull it off, and I had no choice but to step up. SB: How does this book fit into the stream of your literary works? You started to say something about this earlier. Is there a fundamental difference between I Think We’ve Been Here Before and your prior work? SK: I’m always very conscious when I’m writing that there needs to be some thread of continuity, that I want people to read each of my books and see me in them, not to feel like they’re meeting a new writer each time. But I also love exploring new territory, and even moving into different genres—challenging, for sure, just because of the way the industry seems to need authors to fit into one box or another. I’ve found that the way to approach this is to mash genres together, to dip my toes into other genres (in the case of this book, speculative fiction) without fully leaving my ‘home base’ genre (literary fiction). So yes, I’d say this book fits, tonally, with my others, but it also goes places I’ve never tried to go before, and now that I’ve gone there, I’d like to go even further into that realm. SB: Thank you for dipping into this conversation about your prize-winning book with me, Suzy. You’ve offered a perspective on how you came to write I Think We’ve Been Here Before and given readers some unexpected glimpses into your writing process. This interview also speaks to the difficulty a writer can experience when shifting away from what you’ve called your home base, meaning your usual genre for writing. It’s good to know publishers can be convinced to publish a genre that may not have been in their wheelhouse before you wrote your story. Clearly, after collecting so much attention through the Saskatchewan Book Awards, you hit the mark. 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.
|