Sarah Stonich Interviews

Shelter Q & A
Readers and bloggers ask:

Q. What most surprised you while writing this book?

A. In doing research, I realized how much I’d romanticized the past with a sort of soft-focus vision. In reality, the Minnesota my grandparents settled in was pretty harsh. I was reminded how difficult daily life was – laundry day alone for a family of twelve in 1920? The dozens of conveniences I don’t give a thought to, like flipping on a light, would have been ultimate luxury to them.

Q. You’ve written about your grandmother’s era in Northern MN before as the setting for These Granite Islands. And you mentioned your next novel is contemporary and also set there. Now, in Shelter you’re writing about the very real place in the present. What about it keeps providing material for you?

A. A lot of writers, I suspect, find that places once thought boring or plain actually become inspiration for a lot of work, once you get far enough away from them.

Q. Most who write about the north tend to be very reverent of it, but you seem to have a love-hate relationship with it. Do you?

A. To a degree. If I could go back in time and convince my grandparents to keep traveling west to the Pacific Coast, I would. I pine for the ocean. I love Minnesota in spring and fall, but not during those six months I hardly ever see my feet. I don’t believe surviving the climate builds character, and can’t get excited that the town down the road holds the record cold temp. Then again, you can’t beat Lake Superior in July. So, yes, a little love-hate.

Q. In Shelter the theme of land providing solace and retreat plays heavily for you as an adult, has it always been so for you?

A. Growing up, the lake often felt the calmest place to be, especially during the years of my parent’s divorce. I went to a Catholic school, where I found the religion frightening and my studies difficult. Our cabin was a haven from all that, not the building, which wasn’t much, but the woods and water. A rowboat is as good a place as any for an awkward, introverted kid.

A. You said you wrestle with how you “fit” on the Iron Range and the political divisions there – are those still issues?

Q. Well, not quite wrestle. But politics is really a toxic topic for a lot of folks up here – especially around the real land issues that make my own little dilemma seem trivial. There has been an historic, constant tug of war over land and its ultimate best uses – it’s all about mining and money versus conservation. If the natural resources were left alone, they would become the most valuable, sustainable resources, and, a legacy. There are a lot of mines in the world, and plenty of places to jet-ski, but there’s only one Boundary Waters.

Q. It’s been ten years between your first book and this one. How has publishing changed for you as an author in that span?

A. Publishing as it was no longer exists: far fewer books are being published, the business is slow to embrace technology and the old model has worn out. Editors and marketers don’t seem aware that the entire next reading generation of twenty and thirty-somethings will inevitably do most of their reading on devices, and won’t necessarily want long novels by debut authors. They will likely read ebooks first, then, if they love it, they, might buy the physical book.

Q. Shelter is available as an ebook – how do you feel about readers experiencing your book on an electronic device?

A. I have mixed feelings. One of my sisters had been in Mexico over this month as Shelter is being released, so she ordered the Kindle edition. I wished she’d had the physical volume, since it’s a lovely little book to hold and I think it would have added to the experience. That said, I don’t generally have any problems with ebooks – they are the future, and while my first book is no longer in print, at least it will soon be available as an ebook. The Ice Chorus is also out in ebook. If done right, the author gets a better percentage of sales.

Q. In finding land and building a retreat did you achieve your goal of bridging some connection between your father and son?

A. Sam never had the chance to bond with a grandparent the way so many of us have. But, I think observing me write this book, and building our little place, he began to appreciate the land and learn more about his grandfather. So, yes, mostly, just not in the way I’d imagined.

Q. At the end of Shelter your son was in Tokyo. Where is he now?

A. After some visa problems in Japan he’s back in the Twin Cities, a full-time student with a double major in art and design. We have lunch, it’s great.

Q. If there was one principle message in the book, what would you say it is?

A. I never intended a message, and can’t predict what readers will take away from it, but for me, the meaningful bit would be that buildings and land only set the stages we live on, that family and the people we choose to live with are the real deal. The land, no matter how well we tend it or how badly we screw it up, will be there long after we aren’t.

Q. What’s next?

A. I’m hoping to find a publisher for my latest book, Vacationland, set in a remote resort in (where else?) northern MN. The bulk of the story is told by visitors over the sixty-year life of the place, and by the granddaughter who returns as an adult to paint there.

Q. Sounds a little like Shelter. Is it at all biographical?

A. No, just set on similar ground. I’m also halfway through writing a novel based on a screenplay I recently finished, Fishing With RayAnne, about the camera shy host of the first all-women fishing/talk show on public television. It’s a dark comedy, really fun to write.

Q. What is the status of your land now? Is it safe, or will the road project go through?

A. I still don’t know – we just have to deal with not knowing. The cabin is on shaky ground, but at least for now, we still have our place in the woods. Thankfully, my family is rock solid. I’m thinking of getting a dog…it’s all good.

Q. The Ice Chorus follows a Canadian filmmaker working through her memories after she's escaped to a remote Irish village. You've mentioned sometimes not knowing the underlying goal or premise of a book is until it's written. What did you discover after writing the The Ice Chorus?

A. I've heard other writers claim this - that we don't always know what we're on about until the end. In my case, I didn't know what besides the basic story compelled me to write The Ice Chorus until another writer pointed out what he thought the parallel was. He insisted the novel was about the importance of telling our own personal histories, if not to others, at least to ourselves.

A. She was so caught up in telling the stories of others it took her awhile, but in the end, she tells, reveals herself her own history, puts together the hidden and stowed memories in order to understand herself... to move into a future, to go into it with an awareness, and how even the denied bits of a past form who she is today.

Q. The phrase "Irish Yarn" comes to mind when reading the passages about Remy Conner, the patriachal figure who takes Liselle under his wing.

A. I think Remy facies himself a 'sanachie' of sorts - a dying breed of the Irish storyteller who once roamed the country giving history, or stories, for a bed and a meal, and drink, of course. Remy though, isn't itinerant. He does enlighten Liselle that there are many ways of telling a story, even suggesting that with her camera and her documenting of peoples lives, she might just become a modern version of a 'sanachie'.

Q. The Irish settings and characters - especially their dialogues, are so vivid. What is your history with the locations and people you write about.

A. Other than times spent in Ireland and reading tons of Irish literature? very little, actually. I'm not Irish, but during my visits I've always felt completely at home - with the people and the landscape - I love the cadence and the manner of the language - the average Irish person speaking an English so descriptive and colourful it's nealry a different tongue, and the articulate Irish person practically speaks in lyrics...

A. Ah, besides the people and the sea? Something I cannot articulate well - but to simplify it at its most basic, the air on the West Coast seems to be the sort of air my lungs were meant to breathe, a mix of molecules that include both calm and inspiration.

Stonich is now at work on a third novel, and a volume of short fiction. The recipient of a Loft/McKnight Award, and a Minnesota State Arts Board Fellowship, Stonich has traveled China to collaborate with a Chinese American painter on a book of essays and paintings. She has been awarded residencies at Ledig House International Writers Program, the Ragdale Foundation, and the Tyrone Guthrie Centre. She lives in St. Paul, with her son.

A. These Granite Islands winds back and forth between the final days of a milliner, Isobel Howard, and a summer sixty years earlier, when she’d befriended an extraordinary but troubled woman. After this new friend, Cathryn, takes up with a local man, Isobel becomes a reluctant accomplice to their tumultuous affair. In small town America in 1937 that complicity tests Isobel’s loyalty and her definitions of propriety. When the situation dissolves in tragedy, she’s left with a life-long mystery, and, the immediate need to assess her own future, her own marriage.

Q. While you focus on the enduring consequences of friendship, the very friendship at the center of your novel seems sort of country-mouse, city-mouse pairing. Why have you chosen such opposing personalities for your characters?

A. Isobel has lived a sheltered life. I wanted her to be profoundly affected - awakened, you might say, by Cathryn, who is her social, temperamental and cultural opposite - yet also someone Isobel admired and valued for those very differences.

A. I have a novelist friend who when speaking to students challenges them, “write what you don’t know.” I like that defiance to clichés often proffered in creative writing classes. I set this story towards the end of the Depression, as I was living and writing during the affluent late nineties. I also chose the thirties for the starched morals and the implications of disregarding them. It was an aesthetic decision as well. I really enjoy writing descriptively, and the sparseness of that era conveys a sort of uncertain innocence. “Back when sheets were white”, was something I’d heard my grandmother say often - and wistfully. I think I share that aesthetic nostalgia.

Choosing Minnesota as a setting was more difficult because I was afraid of being flagged a ‘regional’ writer. I didn’t want to define myself and my readers with my first published novel. I initially considered setting the story in the Canadian maritime. As it turns out, I shouldn’t have worried, we aren’t done selling to foreign markets yet, but so far the book will be published in several countries, and even translated into Hebrew. So while place is prominent, the story itself transcends regional boundaries. It’s about people, after all. It could be anywhere.

A. In the first draft of the book, Isobel takes to her grave the fates of characters Jack and Cathryn. I felt strongly that the reader would be able to make his or her own deductions and come to believe, as Isobel does, that what might have happened to these people wasn’t at all important. My agent and publisher thought differently, and so I rewrote the ending to give away more than I originally intended.

A. At the most difficult juncture of writing this novel - about two-thirds of the way through - I was ready to chuck it and even give up writing altogether. I walked away and started reading poetry. I happened upon T.S. Eliot’s Marina and it revived the whole story for me, closed all the gaps. The lines, what seas what shores what grey rocks... what granite islands towards my timbers provided an analogy for all the strife that comes at Isobel during her own long journey. No one lives to be ninety-nine without tragedies, and she’d had her share. My original title, true to the poem, was What Granite Islands, but marketing people insisted that was ‘too literary’ a title, whatever that means. I asked a lot of writer friends their opinions, and most backed me up. I was in a pub in Ireland with Frank McCourt and I asked him what he thought, fully expecting him to support me as well. He shook his head and said “It’s terrible, terrible. It’s a dirge of a title.” I still disagree. The novel I’m working on now has no title - but if These Granite Islands is successful, I’ll be able to call it whatever I want.

A. Actually, I get the opposite of writers block, a sort of idea overload, too many, so that when it comes time to sit down and write, I struggle to not go off in wild directions. I’ve got dozens of stories and novel ideas that will never be finished. As for what inspires me - being out in the world, I guess, just soaking it up. I travel a lot. I like to think that even if I'm writing about a corner of my garden, having explored and experienced other bits of the world might allow me to do so more convincingly.