Sharon Berg Interviews Alice Zorn |
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Alice Zorn
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Sharon Berg: I am thrilled to be talking to you about your new book, Colours in Her Hands, Alice. This is a sensitive portrait of the family dynamics that can develop around the needs that are too often invisible to society at large for disabled people.
The tension found in the relationship between Bruno and Mina appears so real as to look, at times, like a peep show on an existing relationship rather than an author’s invention. For instance, growing up with and loving someone doesn’t guarantee the people involved will understand everything about each other. That point is demonstrated by Bruno’s inability to see Mina’s embroidery as art, until it’s pointed out to him at the end of the book. Why was it important to you to illustrate this particular flaw in Mina’s guardian? Alice Zorn: I write character-driven fiction and I’m very aware of how tension between characters fuels a novel. Among the many possibilities for creating tension, one would be how even people who know each other intimately have blind spots. It made sense to me that Bruno, who grew up with Mina, was used to the different ways their mother had taught her to keep busy. He didn’t see her embroidery as anything more than a pastime. I think family members can often have blind spots about each other—because of family dynamics or being too close to get perspective. There are lots of reasons. As a writer of fiction, I see my role as describing, not analyzing—or judging. I wasn’t trying to blame Bruno for not recognizing how creative and expressive Mina’s embroidery was. It simply never occurred to him. However, it was important for me that he finally acknowledge it. As he did. SB: Your portrait of Mina is truly a loving and brutally honest portrait of how her differences complicate the life of her brother, Bruno. He expresses frustration, as does Mina, at times—yet there is never a sense that either would choose a different life for themselves. The Acknowledgements page of Colours in Her Hands suggests that much of your understanding in developing Mina as a character was modeled on your sister-in-law, Joann Aubé. Yet I suspect Mina is a meld of your observations of many people with recognizable idiosyncrasies. Am I wrong? Can you speak to this? AZ: Indeed, I’ve met many other people who are differently abled in various ways. I’m curious about how differences shape one’s way of interacting with and perceiving the world, as well as how people respond to diversity. I observe—rather shamelessly. But I didn’t do research as such. Mina was always meant to be an individual, not a type. She in no way represents all people like her. Mina is herself. What guided me in creating her was my imagination, my experience as a writer, my observations, and my sense of what seemed possible. Saying that, I also wanted to make Mina a little larger than life—her special relationship with colours, how she explains the world through the fairytales she remembers from her childhood, her conviction that she’s always right, and so on. She’s a bit of a mythomaniac. SB: One of the things that makes your novel impressive is the way various characters display both their flaws and the aspects of their character that make them endearing to others. The reader can see everyone—Mina, Bruno, Iris, etc. —as real people without a hierarchy of their value as human beings. It’s my impression that you feel seeing everyone as equally human rises above the importance of seeing Mina’s embroidery as art, though the reader is quickly convinced Mina is, indeed, an artist. Have I caught an important impetus for you to write Colours in Her Hands? AZ: Thank you, Sharon. I hope that despite the characters’ flaws, I’ve also given them endearing qualities. It’s always a balancing act, isn’t it? And yes, I believe that first and foremost everyone is human. Equally human. However, in the novel Iris seems to value Mina more when she’s making art. What does this say about her? I’d like the reader to think about it. When Bruno realizes that Mina’s embroidery is more expressive than he thought, he’s impressed but he doesn’t begin treating her differently. What is always primary for him is that she’s his sister. You know, this is an interesting aspect I haven’t thought about before. SB: You allow us to see flaws in both Iris and Bruno, but at the same time they are both reconsidering her after she had that brain bleed. I think the reader puts that information into the mix in considering what Mina does/doesn't do at the end of the book. In other words, I think the reader is given the opportunity to be even more understanding of Mina and her quirks. What the reader gets from a novel can be different from what the individual characters achieve. AZ: You’re absolutely right. The reader understands more about the different characters than they understand about each other. That’s the advantage of writing from different points of view. SB: Titles are often difficult to come up with, though some authors seem to begin there. What was your experience in developing a title for Colours in Her Hands? AZ: I always find titles hard. I’ve had lots of advice about taking an image from the book, a compelling refrain, something evocative. Titles still elude me. During the ten years that I worked on this book, I had an ongoing list of possible titles on my desk. I seem to have a knack for churning out bad ones. When I tried them out on friends, they groaned. When I applied for a grant, I always made it clear that I was using a working title only—not one that would stick. A title I liked a lot was Needle Dance, but I was told the reader would think the novel was about drugs. The USB pen where I stored revisions simply has MINA written across it. 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 elaborate. AZ: I always wanted that opening scene that introduces Bruno and Mina. Fairly soon after I began working, I had a sense of the ending I was moving toward. Mind you, I wasn’t sure how I was going to get there. I usually have only a loose sense of an arc. From day to day, I decide what scene needs to be written next. When I’m using several different voices, I tend to work chronologically. I don’t think much about structure when I’m writing the first draft, and I finish a first draft before I begin revising or I would never move forward. In this novel, Iris was a complicated character to develop, because she believed she was right, but did she have the right to act as she did? Even if readers don’t agree with what she did, I want them to understand her rationale and emotion. Bruno was difficult because he truly wanted to do his best with Mina, but he also got so aggravated with her. Bruno and Gabriela’s situation was hard because they’re in a bind with no solution. The character who was easiest to write was Mina. I knew exactly how I wanted her to think and speak and act. SB: Authors often speak of the necessity of writing multiple drafts for a book. What is your experience? Did the length of the book change dramatically at any point in time after you finished the first draft? Please explain. AZ: I write many drafts because that’s how I develop the characters and the story. I have ideas before I start working, but I don’t think too much about how they’ll come together. I write my way into a novel. I pile on description; I hammer home what I want to say; I repeat myself; I write reams of backstory and exposition. Once I have a huge, messy first draft, I start cutting and reorganizing. It’s not an efficient process and I don’t recommend it, but it’s how I write. SB: I find that interesting. That is the way I approach my own stories. Did you remove any parts of the early drafts that you think may offer the starting point for another book? Can you help us to understand why you made the decision to discard pieces? Were those parts simply developing in a different direction from the rest of the text? AZ: I hope this never happens again, but I ended up cutting almost the whole of the original first draft. I wrote it and then spent four or five years revising it. In that version, Bruno was the protagonist. The focus was more on him as Mina’s legal guardian than on Mina. There was an important secret about his mother’s past that she would never speak of, and after her death he found clues that made him decide to travel to Austria to find out what it was. Iris was in that version too, but she was a background character. The reader was supposed to understand that Mina was more creative than anyone in the novel recognized—until a cousin came from Austria and said so—but that was as far as I took the artistic angle. When I sent this version of the novel to my agent at the time, Shaun Bradley at Transatlantic, she felt I’d told the wrong story. She suggested I consider making the novel about Mina, not her chronically exasperated brother and his trip to meet his mother’s siblings in Austria. That first version of the novel had merit, but I think what I finally wrote is better—although it took me a few angry and stubborn months to come around to the idea. I knew it meant writing a whole new novel. I was able to salvage some scenes here and there (such as the opening scene with Bruno in Mina’s apartment), but mostly I had to start over. I knew I didn’t want to write from only Mina’s point of view. I still wanted to include the people around her. Some of the material from the earlier version might one day surface as a short story. I don’t know yet. SB: Was there a collection of works, or a literary movement that inspired you to map out Colours in Her Hands? What was your initial inspiration, even if it’s something counter-intuitive? AZ: What made me want to write this novel was that there is no novel in English about a middle-aged person who has Down Syndrome. There are novels about parenting a child with Down Syndrome, but they’re about the parents. Occasionally I’ve come across a cameo appearance of a character with Down Syndrome, but it’s brief. I wanted Mina’s presence in the novel to be front stage centre, even if the novel wasn’t going to be all about her. I also wanted to write about an older adult where the question of continued autonomy arises. It felt very delicate to write the chapters from Mina’s point of view. I knew what I wanted to have happen and what I wanted her to say, but did I have the right to assume that voice? I took courage from Mark Haddon who wrote The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time (2003) in the voice of a boy who probably has Asperger’s, although he’s never identified as such in the novel. In 2013 I saw a Québécois film, Gabrielle, about a young woman who has Williams Syndrome and no longer wants to live in a group home. The camera follows Gabrielle closely. A camera obviously doesn’t go as deeply as writing from inside a character’s head, but it helped show me a way. It was a powerful film that affected me deeply. For the embroidery that Mina creates, I was inspired by Judith Scott, an internationally-renowned textile sculptor who had Down Syndrome. There aren’t many videos of her at work but there are a few. In 2016 the World of Threads Festival in Oakville, Ontario had an exhibition of her work. It was fabulous! SB: Can you describe the central idea that links the sections of this collection and why you felt it was important to address this in contemporary times? Or was this more connected to your personal time and place? AZ: The central idea is Mina. I don’t call her the protagonist, because Bruno and Iris have more pages than she does. And yet I think of Mina as the hub of the novel. Everything that happens with the other characters reflects back on some aspect of her life or is influenced by her presence in the novel. There’s a personal connection for me through my experiences with how people responded to my sister-in-law, Jo. Often people only saw what she couldn’t do, but there was so much that she could do. In this novel, I wanted to show readers what Mina can do. I hope that reading about Mina will make readers more aware of how they respond to an individual who is differently abled. Even though this is connected to me personally, because of Jo, I also feel it’s way beyond time to address this as a contemporary social issue, given the trend toward deinstitutionalization and the growing likelihood of interacting with people who deserve being given an extra moment if they need it. SB: How does this book fit in the stream of your literary works? Is there a fundamental difference between Colours in Her Hands and your prior work? AZ: I am a first-generation Canadian whose parents came from elsewhere. We ate different food. We sometimes dressed differently. The values I learned at home were different from the ones in the community and at school. I’m not saying that I suffered, but I was keenly attuned to that tension. Not surprisingly, I write about people with different cultural identities and beliefs; people who come from different economic and class backgrounds; people who question their identity; people who navigate the world differently. It’s what will continue to interest me. SB: Thank you, once again, for doing this interview with me, Alice. Your answers have me wanting to re-read the book now that you’ve revealed here what you intended. I hope your book inspires greater sensitivity towards people of all differences. It truly is time that literature explored a broader selection of diversities in the human fabric. AZ: Thank you, Sharon, for inviting me to do this interview and for asking such perceptive questions. It’s lovely to talk about these characters I’ve lived with for so long. |
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Alice Zorn lives in Montréal/Tiohtà:ke. Colours in Her Hands is her third novel. Her second novel, Five Roses, was a finalist for the 2017 Ontario Library Association Evergreen Award and translated into French. Her book of short fiction, Ruins & Relics, was shortlisted for the 2009 Quebec Writers’ Federation First Book Award. Her short stories have won prizes, including the 2013 Manitoba Magazine Award for Fiction. A new book of short fiction will be forthcoming with NeWest Press in 2026.
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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.
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