A SHARP INTAKE OF BREATH

Q1. You obviously don't have cleft lip or palate yourself. What was it like to write about a person who had suffered the way Toshy did?

Everybody, at some point in their life, feels unattractive. Some people feel this way most of the time, while for others it comes and goes. I had to tap into that feeling to imagine what it would be like to for someone who, as Toshy says, feels "ugly. not just ugly, but different enough to draw attention to it." I did a lot of research about cleft lip and palate. The impact of it goes beyond being judged based on looks.  Cleft palate is assumed by the ignorant to always be paired with intellectual disability, and what complicates this prejudice is that there it on occasion is accompanied by some other disability.

Q2. Do you believe in assisted suicide?

THE FEATHERBED

Q1. Why did you choose to write in a female voice in The Featherbed?

When we step into the shoes of people who’ve been marginalized, it helps us understand the world better. Delving into research about New York’s Lower East Side in the early 1900s, the lives of women seemed more layered, more complex.

Also, I didn’t want the novel to be autobiographical in any way, and was worried that if I wrote from a young man’s perspective, too much of the real me would creep in. Boring! If you want the real me, read this website. Writing from a woman’s point of view liberated my imagination and took me places I would never have gone.

Q2. How did you come up with that story? Is any of it based on your own family history?

The story came from my fevered imagination, and from considerable research. I am Jewish, and my grandparents’ families did emigrate at the turn of the 20th century, but they settled in Toronto, Ottawa and Buffalo. Although the story is not about my own family, or about anyone I know, experiences or character traits did creep in here and there.

Q3. The story is about women. It’s not based on your family… So what ever happened to writing about what you know?

Yah, yah, whatever.

I say, go ahead, write about what you don’t know! Unless your life has been terribly dramatic, it’s more interesting anyway. But you’d better do your research, and make sure there’s something in your life, some experience to draw on that will give you the empathy to fill in the gaps in a convincing way. And then, check it out with people who would know if what you’ve written is nonsense, or worse, horribly offensive.

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Q4. Is it realistic to insert gay and lesbian themes into a story set in the Jewish community in the early 1900s? Also, Rebecca’s family doesn’t really seem as religious as I thought a family might have been in that era. Is that realistic?

Many people are sceptical that such relationships would have existed ninety years ago, particularly in a community thought of as being so focused on the traditional family structure. If we only read mainstream literature, we’ll get a picture of immigrant life that is one-dimensional and caricatured. It’s easy to presume that because social sanctions were more severe in those days, nobody stepped outside of social conventions.

But gay and lesbian historians have done an excellent job in the last thirty years of uncovering the hidden lives of people in same-sex relationships prior to the Stonewall riots of 1969. The details of these lives are mostly known through photographs, letters and oral histories. More recently, fiction writers have helped us imagine these lives more fully. Some Jewish authors who have done this beautifully are Lesléa Newman (A Letter to Harvey Milk) and Lillian Nattel (The River Midnight).

Information about lesbian and gay history can be found in a number of excellent books available in local libraries. Other information can be found on the websites of the Canadian Lesbian and Gay Archives, the National Archive of Lesbian and Gay History (U.S.) - and the Lesbian Herstory Archives.

Regarding the realism of the Ignatow’s and the Kalish’s religious practices: The Lower-East Side in the early 1900s was still being populated with new Jewish immigrants from all over Europe. If there are many ways to be Jewish now (from secular to ultra-orthodox, and from left to right wing), it was even more so then. With the influx of so many cultures and religious practices, no dominant “American Jewish” culture had yet coalesced. One thing has not changed: just as now, the secular and less observant were accused by the more religious of not being real Jews.

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Q5. Are you writing another novel?

Yes, My second novel will be published in January 2007.

Q6. What’s your new novel called and what’s it about?

My new novel is called A Sharp Intake of Breath and I'm not very good at summarizing my own work, so I'll post here the publisher's catalogue copy:

For Toshy Wolfman, a simple breath can inspire terror. The decisions that can affect a lifetime are made in the moment between that sharp intake of breath, and what happens next - the words we speak or the acts to which we commit.

Born with a split lip and cleft palate, Toshy begins life as an uphill battle. Believing he is dim-witted and ugly, Toshy's resentment slowly builds as he finds himself ridiculed, used, and misled. Ultimately, he is imprisoned when caught stealing a valuable and famous diamond, the Orange Sunset.

But Toshy's story is not his alone. It is a story that he shares with his two sisters: Lil, a radical, and a devotee of the anarchist Emma Goldman; and Bessie, who, in a strange coincidence, goes to work for one of Goldman's enemies, and the owners of the Orange Sunset. Toshy's love for his sisters drives him to make some of the bravest decisions of his life.

But despite overcoming his obstacles, and despite the fact that his prostate cancer is in remission, an aging Toshy stuns his nephew by asking for his assistance in committing suicide. Toshy won't fully explain his decision. Nor will he fully explain why, at this late stage in life, he is obsessed with making a journey to France, a country in which he's never lived.

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