Berg Smythe

Sharon Berg Interviews Karen Smythe

(Palimpsest Press, 2025)

Karen Smythe

Sharon Berg: The life of a writer who has just released a book can get very busy, and your book is grabbing a lot of attention lately, so I appreciate you giving your attention to this interview, Karen. While it may seem odd to say this, I found there is a complexity to A Town with No Noise that seems not to be part of the initial story. So that brings up questions. For instance, the way the characters are created explores their inner landscapes as well as their interactions with others. Have you received comments from other readers about how your writing explores your characters, even some with bit parts, from both inside and out?

Karen Smythe: Thank you, Sharon. Yes, a few readers have commented on the variety of perspectives the novel provides in unusual ways, including the third-person italicized pieces, and on the way these techniques broadened their understanding of the lives portrayed in the book. These storylines are inserted into the main, first-person story because the narrator, Sam, would not have access to the information portrayed therein; the inner landscapes, as you put it, are important because they contrast with Sam’s opinions and observations and suggest the complexity of the lives she is judgmental about. These vignettes also contain multiple secrets that the characters don’t discuss or share openly. The themes in their lives are common to those in Sam’s and her boyfriend J.’s families’ lives.

SB: With the title of the book being A Town with No Noise, I had to chuckle to myself because the title seems to contradict the impression the novel offers to readers. There seems to be lots of noise in the town, including a fire at one point, the sound of rifles being shot as Sam and J. enter Upton, ambulances visiting across the street, let alone the chatter between residents or the submerged secrets in various families. This gives the impression that the title of the book is meant to be ironic. Please comment.

KS: First, let me tell you about the title and why I chose it. It is a line from a Derek Walcott poem—interestingly, an untitled poem! —first published in Brick magazine in 2006, then included in his book White Egrets in 2010, and republished in The Poetry of Derek Walcott, 1948-2013 in 2015. The poem, to me, is a description and an enactment of both the process of reading and the shift of perspective you get when you look at a town from afar, perhaps as a tourist, but then get closer and closer until you are there in the midst of things. Things might look quiet from a distance, but that distance hides the reality, the goings-on, if you will, of the life the town contains. So it is ironic in a way, yes. I include the entire poem as an epigraph to the novel, almost as a guide to how to read the novel. Both Upton Bay, Ontario, and Faldskaus, Norway—the two fictional towns that this novel is about—do seem quaint, picturesque, attractive, and ideal to the uninformed, but their apparent lack of noise is a mirage that needs to be brushed away to see them properly, accurately, truthfully—as limited as that truth might be.

SB: Your novel is also structured in an unusual way, employing footnotes as an essay or an academic thesis would. Those footnotes offer information from a narrator who is a step back from the action. I get the impression that narrator struggles to become a character in their own right, but they do interrupt the flow of the story, making the reader question what some of the main characters are saying or doing. Can you explain how you came to use this device?

KS: The introduction of an omniscient voice via footnotes in Part 1, which is mostly set in Upton Bay, immediately tells the reader that there is much that Sam does not know about the town, which is important because Sam is a first-person narrator and is telling the entire story. So the device calls into question not just Sam’s authority, but the authority of any single voice and its ability to get at “the truth” of a matter. I wanted to plant this seed of doubt in the reader immediately in the novel, because it is such an important notion in terms of the larger themes of the book about historiography and memory. It is disruptive for a reason, and the act of disruption is almost a model for the reader, a message saying, “disrupt the way you think about stories, history, what you think you know about people’s lives or about historical events.”

In Part 2, wherein Sam begins investigating her own Norwegian family’s past and the facts of the Holocaust in Occupied Norway, I have Sam using footnotes in more of an academic or journalistic way. Here we see Sam citing sources she has found on the internet or in books, referring the reader to those sources for both validation and for more information than she is providing—because her writing can’t contain everything. The archive of writing about World War 2 is of course vast, but Sam selects specific pieces of information to point her readers towards both for amplification and to pull in multiple points of view, since she has learned the importance of doing this in her own writing. In Part 2, the “official” Norwegian story about the Holocaust that took place there is disrupted by Sam’s writing; she gives voice to her grandmother’s experience by creating a dramatic dialogue and posting it on her blog, which sometimes contrasts with the “official” information she cites in footnotes. Sam’s writing becomes almost a mise en abyme, a novel within the novel, in this way.

SB: It can’t be denied that we are living in a time of political and social unrest. As every book takes a stance in the midst of its contemporary surroundings, how would you describe the position of A Town with No Noise and its areas of concern in today’s world?

KS: My book is concerned with contemporary social injustices—abuse of migrants, neglect of the elderly, racism, economic disparity—and with the fact of the Holocaust, the impact of which is ongoing, both in terms of intergenerational trauma and national denials of accountability. While writing the novel and to this day, I frequently read articles about “temporary foreign workers” in Canada, antisemitism, and restitution of artworks to the descendants of Holocaust victims who fight in courts for decades for the return of their property. (The cover image on my book is a work by Egon Schiele, stolen by the Nazis from the Jewish art collector Fritz Grunbaum and returned to his heirs after decades of legal battles in 2014; a fictional Schiele appears in my novel).

Norway has only fairly recently begun its reckoning with its actions during and after WW2 and the rest of the world is relatively ignorant about what happened there: A documentary film by Elsa Kvamme, based on the diary of a German Jewish refugee in Oslo who was sent to Auschwitz, was released in 2021, but Kvamme is still seeking international distribution; English translations of important books about Norway in World War 2 are starting to appear, but this history is not widely known. Migrant workers in Canada continue to lack adequate housing, health care, and transparency from their employers. So much has changed and so little has changed that the elements in my novel are as relevant now as ever.

SB: I wonder if you can offer readers a synopsis of the literary surrounds for A Town with No Noise? What are the books that most impressed you while you were writing it? Were there any live performances, events, or conversations with others you feel influenced this book?

KS: I am a voracious reader so there are too many books to list as having impressed me during the writing of my novel. A few novels include Visitation and The End of Days by Jenny Erpenbeck, All for Nothing by Walter Kempowski, EEG by Daša Drndić, Anniversaries by Uwe Johnson, Katalan Street by Magda Szabó, The Book of Blam by Aleksander Tiśma, and The Dark Room by Rachel Seiffert. I watched a puppet performance at Harbourfront during this period called Kamp, by a Dutch group Hotel Modern, one of the most harrowing and visceral works of art about the Holocaust I’ve come across. I also read several memoirs and survivor testimonies, which I include in a Resources section at the end of my novel.

SB: Okay, so now I am curious: is this a book that you’d say almost fell onto the page, as if it were channelled, or did you need to put a lot of effort into finding its structure? Was there a developmental process? Please elaborate.

KS: The grandmother’s story in Part 2 was the part that I would say was “channeled” to me relatively easily. But conceiving the structure for this book was a struggle. I used a whiteboard to draw relationships between people in Upton Bay, in a kind of grid, listing the themes underlying each of their stories and cross-linking those that echoed between characters. At first, I was going to create a pattern of vignettes, following each of the townspeople or couples in discrete storylines, but the texture was too hard to maintain. Then I put Sam in the centre of a concentric circular novel structure, and I knew she would be the first-person narrator and that the vignettes would be voiced by a third-person narrator.

I didn’t know the book would be about the Holocaust in Norway until I had written much of what became Part 1, set in Upton Bay. The character of Otto was the key to the expansion of the war theme into Part 2. And I then let Sam take over how she wanted to tell her own family’s story; she wants to be a writer, so I had her design her grandmother’s narrative as a dramatic dialogue that she will further develop in a project after the novel ends. Sam links Parts 1 and 2 together, and it is Sam’s character that structures the book, really.

SB: Some books require intensive research of an integral topic, or an historical era, or some other aspect of the story. Please describe the most intensive research you did for A Town with No Noise. How far would you travel to conduct your research? Or is most of your research done through the internet, books, and printed documents?

KS: Clearly the amount of information on World War 2 is enormous, so limiting myself to books and articles that were accessible in hard copy or on the internet was necessary. I’m not a historian and this is a work of fiction, so making Sam a writer who is doing research for herself was a helpful means of setting boundaries; and her footnotes allowed me to include important content in a way that is appropriate to her style.

SB: Readers can be nosey, though most would claim it is friendly curiosity. It’s been said that the cost of celebrity is dealing with their desire to know how much of a work is invented and how much is autobiographical. Will you share your approach/thoughts on this aspect of your readers’ curiosity?

KS: I’m the kind of writer who, in addition to making use of observed behaviours and events, remembers details of stories I’m told about people. I tuck away these fragments and they surface when I am in a creative mode; I hold each one up to the light, in a way, to see if there is a fit with what I am working on. My characters are composites, in effect, sometimes radically different from the original observation or detail. For first-person narrators, I suppose there is always more of me contained in them, simply because it is so easy, with the “I” voice, to incorporate aspects of myself into the character. In the case of this novel, though my mother’s parents were immigrants to Canada from Norway and my father’s father was born to immigrants from Germany, my Norwegian and German characters are completely imagined. And I am not my narrator! Sam, who is much younger than I am, leads a completely different life than I lived at her age.

SB: Now I’m feeling very curious. Would you place this book in a particular genre? Does it touch on literary ideas from a particular place in history? Or is it so intent on ‘revealing truth’ or developing an individual voice that you weren’t overly conscious of where it fell in terms of its genre?

KS: I think I would say A Town with No Noise belongs in a literary genre, but it is a hybrid of social realism and historical fiction. It is also experimental in its use of tropes of history writing, journalism, and documentary forms. It is a tough one to categorize, but it is definitely a work of fiction, no matter what adjective might get attached to it.

SB: If you were asked to name another author who wrote something that compares to the overall theme in this book, which author and what title would it be? How are they the same or different?

KS: My friend Kasia Jaronczyk’s novel, Voices in the Air (Palimpsest Press, 2025), is also a hybrid of fiction and history. Her brilliant book is about a group of people who hijack a plane from Warsaw to escape from Communist Poland. Our novels share several features: both focus on women who make life and death decisions; include citizens who live under oppression and fear of an authoritarian regime; portray antisemitism and brutality; feature characters who are creative people seeking the truth about the past; and include historical documents, transcripts of tape recordings.

Another novel I read recently reminds me of the themes and voices in my own book. After A Town with No Noise was published, I read a review in The New Yorker by James Wood, called “Let it Lie,” about Austrian writer Eva Menasse’s just-translated novel, Darkenbloom (Dunkelblum in German). Wood says Menasse’s narrator is “Godlike” and “has attitude”; he compares her to Walter Kempowski, who “used a wry, interrogative, omniscient voice to examine postwar German history, a point of view [that is] simultaneously close and distant, possessive and judgmental.” I would humbly compare A Town with No Noise to Darkenbloom in that one of my narrators (in the footnotes, in the vignettes) similarly has an attitude and uses an interrogative voice to render the inhabitants of Upton Bay to readers in a knowing way. The subject matter of Menasse’s novel is similar as well: Darkenbloom’s residents were complicit with the Nazis and its inhabitants have forgotten or refused to recall their own actions. So our reimaginings of history are about bringing the past back to life, giving voice to the past to interrogate it, to empathize with its victims, to try to get under the skin of the people who lived there at the time—not to forgive, but to address and account for what happened. And I strongly believe that this is what novels can do.

SB: Thank you, Karen, for indulging my curiosity after reading the novel by answering my questions. I know this interview will interest several people in picking up and reading A Town with No Noise.

Karen Smythe’s previous books include the novel This Side of Sad (Goose Lane Editions, 2017), the story collection Stubborn Bones (Polestar/Raincoast, 2001), and the critical study Figuring Grief: Gallant, Munro, and the Poetics of Elegy (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1992). She lives in Guelph with her husband, the writer Keith Hazzard.

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 taught in Ontario after studying to become a teacher with a focus on First Nations Education: B.A./Laurentian U.; B.Ed/U of T; M.Ed/York U; and D.Ed/UBC. She received a Certificate in Magazine Journalism from Ryerson U and is an alumni of Humber College’s Writing Program. Sharon founded and operated the international literary E-Zine Big Pond Rumours (2006-2019) and its associated press, releasing chapbooks of Canadian poets as prizes for the magazine’s contests. Her poetry appears as full books with Borealis, Coach House, and Cyberwit, and she has four chapbooks with BPR Press. Sharon’s short fiction is with Porcupine’s Quill, and her nonfiction appears with BPR Press. Her writing appears across Canada, the USA, Mexico, Chile, England, Wales, Netherlands, Germany, Siberia, Romania, India, Persia, Singapore, and Australia. Her 3rd poetry collection Stars in the Junkyard was a Finalist in the 2022 International Book Awards, and her narrative history The Name Unspoken: Wandering Spirit Survival School 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.