As to happy endings I don’t know if a happy ending is cliché. I wish it were. Longing is in vogue, has always been in vogue. The ending of Grief Point is inevitable – someone is going to die. The second line tells us Andy has a gun. My dear friend Nance Knauer told me a quote, and I’m kicking myself because I don’t remember who said it, “If there is a gun in the scene it must be acknowledged.” For it not to be heard of again would be folly. The gun in “Grief Point” is a main character as it’s with Andy the entire time.

The ending is sad, so sad. I love Andy Taylor. I would have married him. More than anything, I wanted the reader to love him just as much as I do, to know him well enough to understand why he did what he did and be saddened by it.

Grief Point is a real place in Powell River, British Columbia where my husband, Phil grew up. I had to set it in another pulp town of B.C. called Port Alberni, as it is an island, while Powell River is part of the mainland.

I have stood on Grief Point and saw the herons and asked myself if Phil would ask me to marry him. The heron flew right and he did ask, not that day, but eventually, and I stood on the edge of the beach with nothing but rocks on one side and the mill on the other. The ocean is the only way out. Phil’s mother’s ashes were thrown from Grief Point. Her name was Molly.

*

You are halfway through a novel. Is it your first? Can you, will you, tell us anything about it? How do you like the novel writing process?

I adore the novel writing process. It’s hugely rewarding and I’m having a blast with it and the best part is that I think it shows in the writing and this makes me very happy. I love my characters. I am in love with them. I think of them all the time, wonder what they’re doing, hope they’re okay, I haven’t had a good long visit with them for a while, for too long of a while that I’m trying not to think about. Last time I saw the two main characters, Joanna is entering her mystery lover’s building on the heels of an elderly woman who’s carrying an animal in her purse and Gina is on the brink of a dry humping kiss goodnight. They’re suspended in fear and horniness! Just like the author! Write what you know. Isn’t that the first rule of thumb? But the thing is this, I’ve come to these two scenes where one, if not both of them are going to have sex and I am just…frozen in well, fear that my horniness will be too horny or not horny enough or too romantic and not horny at all. You know? I have to write through it, which should make my husband happy, as research will more than likely be involved.

Writing a novel has given me a sense of freedom with my writing, helped stop the editor in me by constantly moving forward, not going back. It’s hard to do at first, but a mind blower when you reach that place and just put it out there. The energy is felt. It’s been a real thrill to create these people. I have 31,827 words and have to finish this while I still look good for the book jacket. Really. God….

*

When and how did you start writing? I know there was a defining moment in your life when you started to take your writing seriously. Can you talk about that?

From the time I was twenty-eight until my first marriage at thirty-two, I shared a townhouse with my girlfriend Debbie Bellefontaine –- Deb the Reb. My nickname was, well, never mind, I’ll leave that to your imagination.

Our townhouse had pink walls and bleached oak cabinets and peach carpet and an island covered in peach laminate that we danced on and bashed our heads against the sunshine ceiling but kept dancing. We had big hair and wore massive shoulder pads, one pad stuck to the Velcro of the other in our flash dance sweatshirts, and on my birthday Debbie and I took a limo to the Vancouver International Airport and hung out in the Domestic Departures Lounge and pretended to be travelers –- which she did all her life, travelling everywhere while I had babies and mortgages and didn’t dance on an island again.

We met by chance in the bathroom at a party. It was a big bathroom with a separate toilet room and a large soaker Jacuzzi tub. After sitting for hours on the carpeted steps leading up to the tub after Debbie barged in on me in the loo and yanked down her pants before I had a chance to close the door, it was decided we’d live together.

We had best friend boyfriends, until I broke up with mine and she married hers, but our friendship was about us, not about guys.

“Men,” we said. “Barf.”

Deb and I hung out like slugs; slugs in fuchsia nylon sweat pants with matching scrunches. We laughed and laughed and sometimes cried but mostly laughed and sometimes smoked, what we referred to as Howard, our code for marijuana in case the CIA might be listening in.

“Do you have any Howard?” we asked each other.

“I’m picking up Howard on the way.”

We either had Howard or were getting Howard, or, worse case scenario, couldn’t find Howard, anywhere! While we slugged, usually in my room as I had a TV and a big bed we could crash on as only die-hard slugs can do, between laughing and Howard and the munchies — Debbie ate chips, I liked pb on multi grain with sliced bananas, I wrote in my journal.

“What are you writing?” Debbie asked.

“Nothing,” I said.

Writing is one thing, sharing it is another thing altogether.

And then it came about, somehow, I don’t remember, that one night, I think I wrote something and laughed out loud and this time when she asked, “What are you writing?” I read it back to her.

“You’re such a fucking weirdo,” I think she said, it’s something she would say, and we laughed till we spit and our abs ached and all I could do was collapse on the bed next to her and breathe in and breathe out and share the air.

My reading became a tradition, a thing I would do for her that ended up being part of a Christmas present, and later, when we got married, a reason to get together or a reason to call and say, “Listen to this.” We drifted and ebbed and flowed, I was the stay at home mom and Debbie’s career was on the rise and there were Christmas’s with only a call or a card and Halloween parties unattended and two babies and no babies, ever. There were Christmas’s of illness and loss and divorce, and one a week before the holidays, a call at eleven thirty p.m.

“I’ve got Howard,” she said, whispering.

In my housecoat ready for bed, I begged off but she wouldn’t take no for an answer. She arrived around midnight. My bedroom was being painted but true to form, Debbie and I slugged out on my bed that was pushed into the middle of the room, all the furniture stacked up around us covered in sheets and I lit candles and for a few hours I was the girl I had been fifteen some years before, reading to my friend, I was a writer.

We made plans to hook up in the New Year when she came back from visiting family and a business trip.

“For real this time,” we both said, as we were famous for canceling out. We hugged and kissed and held hands as she went out the door, turning to me as she left.

“You got to do something about that writing shit of yours,” she said. “For real.”

Her business meeting was with a client who moored his boat on Vancouver Island. They went out for the day. It was beautiful, clear and crisp on Desolation Sound, surrounded by mountains, so blue they were black, peaked with snow in the shots they showed on the news. And because there is no doubt in my mind that spending the night on a boat on the ocean, our favorite place, held more appeal than making the long drive to the ferry terminal, Debbie missed the last ferry. She died from carbon monoxide poisoning.

Debbie passed away January 2004. My first story, “39 and Holding,” a story I started before she died, about a character named Debbie Lewis who kills herself with carbon monoxide in her car on eve of her fortieth birthday, was published by Gator Springs Gazette March 2004.

On the first anniversary of Debbie’ death, such a morbid expression, we had a memorial bash in her honor, an annual get together that just held its third annual party. Phil and I got married in 2004 as well. I took lots of risks in 2004. Anyway, we had just purchased our first home, a major deal for the two of us - marriage and financial involvement, a twenty-five year financial commitment, yikes. The house has a pool, something we didn’t look for or ever think of but there is something about this house, about the day I first saw it and stood in the yard and walked through the rooms, I had to be here, somehow I knew I would live in the pool house.

We were sitting at a table in the banquet room with George, Deb’s husband. Phil and I yakked away, blah, blah, blah, about our new house this and our new house that and George asked,

“Are the kitchen and family room in the back of the house? And is the yard pie shaped with the pool in the far corner?”

Phil and I nodded.

“Is the house on 197th Street?”

We nodded again.

“No way!” George said, and slapped his leg. “My old boss built that place. Deb and I used to go there for company barbeques every year. She swam in the pool,” he said, and I cried then for the first time.

It’s the same water.

*

What do you love most about writing? What do you wish you could change?

Oh Kelly, there are so many things that I love about writing, so many things. I have read and read and reread this question, and I have to say that the thing I love the most, is the way I have evolved as my writing has evolved. I am no longer as afraid as I once was of showing people who I really am and accepting that perhaps they’re not going to like who I really am, and being okay with that. Maybe it’s just because I’m older and wiser, I am, it’s true what they say, and wiser comes. All bullshit aside, my writing has made me truer to myself.

As far as change, the only thing I would change is that I would like to have more time to actually write, but, then again, the best things I’ve written have come to me fast and furious, so, other than the natural response being I want my writing to change and grow and expand and get better and better, something we all want, I wouldn’t change a thing. It’s a process I have to go through.

*

You are such a kind and giving person. Your family must love you to death! But you’ve had some adjusting to do. When you married your current husband, you blended two families. And then you added a foreign exchange student or two. Do you have any tips on how to achieve bustling household bliss? Or at least functionality?

My husband Phil had to blend more than we did. He had not been married before and has no children of his own. We met when my son, Erik was 14 months old and my daughter, Helaina was three. I was a lioness single parent for five years before Phil, a perpetual bachelor, who told me on our first road trip together, “I’ll never get married,” and I got married. I am not in any way the same person I was when I got married for the first time. I grew up. Somehow, to this age that no longer thinks forty-five is too old to have sex, which my girlfriends and I did think at age eighteen, imaging the saggy horror of it all.

The first time I got married was for security, which turned out to be a bi-product of control and manipulation. How could I have known? This time, I married for passion. There are pros and cons to this approach, as passion tends to be tumultuous or it wouldn’t be passionate now would it? So, to say that our blending has been some peachy keen Cuisinart smoothie would be a big fat lie, to say we’re a family would be the truth.

As to functionality, I’m a big organizer on-the-go person. I seldom sit, which is not necessarily a good thing. As to tips on how to achieve bustling household bliss – when I first read this I thought, Ha! Is that what they’re calling organized chaos these days? And then I thought, yeah, it is bliss. Realizing this is the key to making it happen. But, that being said, the biggest tip I can give any harried mother or father or person in general, is this, have a place where you can go in your house that is just your place. For me, it’s my bathroom, I can be alone and think and smoke and no one bugs me. They know to give me a minute. Sometimes you just have to duck out.

And one last thing, lol…our student, we have a lovely, so lovely girl, from Taiwan living with us right now. On the weekend she helped me plant my geraniums and impatiens. She has never dug in the earth or planted anything. She lives in a high rise in Taipei and has done more for me than I can ever do for her.

*

Okay, Miss I Y Canada. Tell us what’s so great about your country!

Well, me for one! (I couldn’t resist. I’m so predictable.) Being Canadian is no different for me than for anyone of any nationality or culture or ethnic group from any other country that is proud of their heritage. Maybe I can be a voice for mine. Maybe. Also, in Canada we allow this, and don’t like these, and have heroes like this, and are home to these guys , and this writer.

*

You appeared in the Spotlight of Insolent Rudder’s Winter 2007 edition. This is my favorite passage from your resolution:

And the thing of it for me, all I can say to you or to anyone about writing and life and everything that happens when we sleep, is this– are you poised in anticipation? Laughing?

How important is anticipation, and laughter, in life? In particular, a writer’s life?

Oh my, one must laugh and have fun! Really. What else is there? Angst? God. It’s so horrible, so horribly addicting and swollen. Anticipation in writing is foreplay, totally. How do you expect the reader to read on if there’s no anticipation of something, some revelation or answer to a mystery? Anticipation to me is the first stage of a relationship when all you want to do is rub against each other in bookstores and neck and make out in cars or in public as if no one exists but the two of you. I try to live in the moment, it’s all so cliché isn’t it? But there’s nothing wrong with anticipating that the next moment is going to be a good one. Self-fulfilling prophecies work both ways.

*

Do you ever steal from your dreams and incorporate bits and pieces of them into your writing? What did you dream about last night?

Most definitely. My story, “Empathy”, linked below, was written as an exercise prompted by the oh so talented and handsome Jeff Landon, to incorporate ten real life things that happened to you during the week with ten dream like things. That week I had gone to my son’s school assembly, something I always attend with my best friend whose daughter goes to the same school. We’ve been friends since grade seven, we’re lifers, thank God, but she was not there that day, as that same week Jeff posted the prompt, I had also taken her to chemotherapy. I was frightened. Still am.

Last night I dreamed about the house. I don’t know what house it is or if it is even mine. Throughout the dream, I move room-to-room looking for someone that I saw in the earlier part of the dream that came before the dream itself. I catch glimpses of them, a man or a woman or a child, through windows and doorways. We met eventually, but something has changed, I don’t know what it is, maybe that’s why I write, to understand the change.

*

You love to garden. What is your favorite plant to grow?

I’m loving hostas. My lilacs are in bloom and their fragrance fills the yard. It’s intoxicating. When I walk by in my grubby jeans and ripped sweatshirt that’s eight sizes to big and sweep my hair back with garden glove hands, that are covered in shit, literally– this year, I’m topping my beds with organic composted manure, it’s all about the soil — it is — I bury my face in the blossoms that are filled with dew, cool and fresh and breathe in for all I’m worth. It’s the best any of us can do.

*

Contact Patricia

Read:

“Gilda”
published by SmokeLong Quarterly

An Inconvenient Truth
an issue near and dear to Patricia’s heart

“Empathy”
creative non-fiction
published by Cezanne’s Carrot

“Monarchs”
fourth place in edificeWrecked’s 666 contest

“Three of Me”
published by All Things Girl

“The Codependent Guide”
published by Salome

“Our Vacation”
poetry
published by Eclectica

“The Day”
published by The Hiss Quarterly

“Women in Training”
published by Chick Flicks

Filed Under: The Writer Profile Project |