“The Kitchen Sink”: A Short Interview with Craig Francis Power

  Craig Francis Power’s debut novel, Blood Relatives (Pedlar Press, 2010), won the 2011 ReLit award. The book also garnered prize attention in Newfoundland by winning the Fresh Fish Award, The Percy Janes First Novel Award, and was shortlisted for the Winterset Award for Excellence in Writing. The following interview was conducted via e-mail in the fall of 2011.   Editor Stan Dragland on editing Blood Relatives: “My own feeling about the editing process is that you do it and then forget about it, since the book is the thing and not how it got to be what it is or who was involved.” “And mostly I concur,” says publisher Beth Follett, “Though I would like to add that Craig made a friend of Stan during the editing process, and that in itself was transformative,” she explains. “Between winning the two Unpublished Novel Awards and my reading Blood Relatives for the first time, the manuscript had gone through a round or two of revisions and was quite polished. I remember asking Stan, who continued as editor after acquisition, to nudge Craig in particular around questions of diction. I believed that below the agitation in his main character, Charlie, there was a high intelligence at work, and that the diction could be more even, elevated to match that obvious intelligence. For the rest I will say: Craig did it all, and beautifully.”   Nathaniel G. Moore: When did you begin Blood Relatives? Craig Francis Power: I started Blood Relatives around 2005. It began as a couple of short stories I was messing around with and just sort of grew from there. In 2006, I went to the Banff Centre’s Wired Writing Program, and my mentor, Curtis Gillespie, convinced me that what I had on my hands was a novel, and not stories. NGM: Can you talk a bit about pre-production? What was omitted or added, and what was the editorial feedback like in pre-publication? CFP: Stan Dragland was my editor at Pedlar, and he has a bit of a soft touch, you know? I didn't get drafts back that were dripping in red ink. It was pretty collaborative. He made suggestions and I could either take them or leave them. Maybe this is standard practice, but I’ve never worked with an editor before so I don’t really know. I think generally, Stan’s task was to sort of reign me in a bit. I have a tendency to get overwrought and run on with my sentences, and Charlie, the narrator, is so at his wit’s end that his little rants would verge on just taking over the book. NGM: How does having a partner in your life, who is also creative, work for you? Is it a major influence and is it helpful? CFP: It works for me. Maybe she feels different. We are generally each others’ first reader and we really seem to understand each others’ strengths and weaknesses as writers and generally just get each other, you know? So it’s extremely helpful. I've really learned a lot from Sara. NGM: Can you describe your writing routine and writing community? CFP: I don’t have one. A routine, that is. I wait tables, so my writing is determined by my work schedule pretty much, so sometimes I work late at night, sometimes in the morning, sometimes in the afternoon. I tend to work for a couple of hours a day, maybe more, maybe less, but the one constant is the amount of pacing and muttering I do while writing. The writing community in St. John’s is very strong and supportive. I have a couple pals I meet with sporadically to exchange material we’re working on or whatever. And I’ve found it to be a very open kind of group. With few exceptions, it’s very unpretentious, and I don't think there’s even much back-biting or other bullshit going on, which, as someone who also identifies as a visual artist, is refreshing. That said, for all I know, there could be a million little rivalries and petty hatreds going on to which I’m oblivious. NGM: Do you think our generation (1970s born—actually, we were both born in ’74) end up trying to eke out a new family identity in our twenties? CFP: Well, I don’t know. I can only speak for myself, and in my case, it’s true. But my book is less concerned with family identity than with what you might call the idea of the Father, or the law of the Father, or even patriarchy if you like. My twenties were spent flunking out of English Lit, and eventually attending art school, where I found I was pretty keen on experimenting with, let’s see, what do they call it? My Interpersonal Relationships. Like everyone else, I guess. But I remember me and some pals of mine had a game/art piece going wherein you punched your friend or your lover or whomever in the face at parties. We thought of it as painting. I never tried it with family members, but I guess that sort of behaviour points to (amongst other things) a desire to test and strengthen one’s intimate relationships. It’s played some part in my thinking about family, I have to admit. NGM: Do you think our Trudeau parents are so alien to us because we grew up in such a superficial era of mass culture and anti-humanity that we sort of became these emotional cripples and introverts by the onset of 2000? CFP: I wouldn’t identify my parents as Trudeau parents, but rather, being Newfoundlanders, as Joey Smallwood parents. At that time, there was huge social spending in the province. There was free university education, the baby bonus, all kinds of government intervention in the economy that had a real positive effect on the daily reality of people’s lives. Ironically, Memorial University students at the time protested the dominance of Smallwood’s political vision for the province. I heard in a documentary they gave him the Nazi salute as a “Fuck you.” But more broadly, the Trudeau era just makes me sick to my stomach. Was there ever a time with more smug “internationalists” in history? And Charlie (from Blood Relatives) is an emotional cripple for his own reasons, of course, which have little to do with mass culture or the anti-humanity of a Trudeau generation, but rather with what comes from poverty and being working-class. NGM: Young adults of our generation had to redefine what a family was from previous incarnations, and in Blood Relatives there is a sense of the new family being established. Do you agree? Was this something you thought about, the difference between our parents’ social bonding rituals at 20 or 30 and our own? CFP: Of course. Sam and Eva represent the best and most hopeful chance for a redemptive relationship in the book, and they’re not conventional, really, even though they are making moves toward being assimilated. But I think it’s important to remember that there are so many factors effecting our parents’ generation’s social interactions that it’s almost impossible to nail down. But yes, I would say that my own social interactions (see answer 1) were quite different than those of my parents. NGM: Can you discuss your editing process for the novel? CFP: The editing process, like for all books I assume, was done piece-meal and sporadically. My partner, Sara Tilley, provided essential advice at the very beginning and throughout, and encouraged me to attend the Banff Centre’s Wired Writing Program, where I met Curtis Gillespie. He really helped transform the original manuscript into something more polished, and convinced me that what I had on my hands was a novel, and not a short story collection like I had first thought. Working with Stan Dragland was an utterly amazing experience. He was very gentle. I remember his first go-through, the margins of the manuscript were marked very lightly in pencil. No bloodbaths thank God. And of course, Beth was very accommodating and wonderful to work with. I generally hate editing. I just want things to come out boom you know? I’m also frequently lazy, but then again will have bouts of working extremely hard on something. Logging long hours, blah blah. NGM: What are you working on now? CFP: Right now I’m working on a second novel, more or less having to do with two things: (1) Lee Wulff, the real life American sport-fishing icon who, to a certain degree, helped foster what has become Newfoundland and Labrador's cultural tourism industry. And (2), the publishing industry. Specifically, I’m writing about book tours, literary festivals, book clubs and so on. Even with the moderate success of Blood Relatives, I got to travel in support of it quite a bit in Canada, and it was a real shock the number of writers and book enthusiasts I met who are just so worthy of being skewered. Especially here in NL. Even though I was lucky enough to publish a book, I don’t really feel a part of the literary scene, you know? Maybe everyone feels that way, but having gone to art school, I find I relate to visual artists more so than to writers. But don’t get me wrong, there’s plenty in the world of visual art worthy of mockery as well.