[Video] The Giller Book Club: The Strangers
March 24, 2022
Daphna Rabinovitch
Hi there, everybody! Hi from Toronto where it’s evening. I’m not sure where in the country you’re from, but welcome to the 2022 Giller Book Club. My name is Daphna Rabinovitch and I am thrilled to welcome you to our fifth book club this year. Please make sure to have your Zoom on the side-by-side view for the best possible experience. And it is my profound pleasure to introduce you to our interviewer tonight, author and person extraordinare Catherine Hernandez. Catherine is a proud queer woman of colour and an award-winning author of, just wait until I actually fully talk about her bio because it’s really quite extraordinary. She is of Filipino, Spanish, Chinese and Indian heritage and she married into the Navajo Nation. Her first novel Scarborough won the Jim Wong-Chu Award for the unpublished manuscript. Was a finalist for the Toronto Book Awards, the Evergreen Forest of Reading Award, the Edmund White Award, and the Trillium Book Award and is now a finalist for Canada Reads 2022. Yes, I know it’s so exciting. She has written the critically acclaimed plays Singkil, The Femme Playlist and Eating With Lola and the children’s book, books, M Is for Mustache: A Pride ABC Book and I Promise. She recently wrote the screenplay for the film adaptation of Scarborough, produced by Compy Films and levelFILM and which premiered at the 2021 Toronto International Film Festival. It was the first runner-up for the coveted People’s Choice Award. Won the Shawn Mendes Foundation Changemaker Award, was nominated for 11, I repeat 11, Canadian Screen Awards including Best Picture and Best Adapted Screenplay and won the Panavision Spirit Award for Independent Cinema at the Santa Barbara International Film Festival. I could go on and on and on because her work has won so many awards. She’s you know, voiced books for audiobooks for Audible. And, just, your bio is tremendous, Catherine. Let me just say that she is currently working on her third novel PSW, which is going to be published in 2023 by HarperCollins Canada. And tonight, Catherine will be interviewing katherena vermette, author of the novel The Strangers, longlisted for the 2021 Scotiabank Giller Prize. Please feel free to submit your questions at the bottom using the q&a button. And I hand it over to you, Catherine.
Catherine Hernandez
Thank you so much. Thank you for that introduction. You know, it’s always a little unnerving when people read your bios and you just sort of have to sit there in a live situation and it’s even more uncomfortable in a Zoom situation. And now it is katherena’s turn to feel really uncomfortable while I read her bio. Are you ready? Are you ready, katherena?
katherena vermette
I’m ready.
Catherine Hernandez
Yeah, we’re always talking about that like about like, what kind of faces do you make during these events, right? Because now it’s all your face. You know, in live events, at least people can sort of be distracted by other noises and everything. It’s not just about you, but now it’s all about us. And our backgrounds.
katherena vermette
And our backgrounds, our judgy backgrounds. Hey, I got some, I got some art today, so…
Catherine Hernandez
Oh, yeah, that’s right. That’s amazing. Okay, so let me read this astounding person’s bio because it is unbelievable. And I’m so honored to share space with you today. So katherena Vermette, she/her/hers is a Red River Métis (Michif) writer from Treaty 1 territory, the heart of the Métis Nation. She has worked in poetry novels, children’s literature and film. Born in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada. Her father’s roots run deep in St. Boniface, St. Norbert, and beyond. Her mother’s side is Mennonite from the Altona and Rosenfeld area treaty, one. Vermette received the Governor General’s Literary Award for poetry for her first book, North End Love Songs, The Muses’ Company, The Break, which is published by House of Anansi won several awards, including the Amazon.ca First Novel Award and was a best seller in Canada. Her National Film Board documentary This River won the Canadian Screen Award for Best Short. She holds a Master of Fine Arts from the University of British Columbia. Her second novel The Strangers, which is this brilliant piece of fiction here, won the Atwood Gibson Writers’ Trust Fiction, Fiction Prize Award. Sorry, Atwood Gibson Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize, and was a named Chapters/Indigo Book of the Year 2021. It was also longlisted for the Giller Prize. katherena lives with her family in a cranky old house within skipping distance of the temperamental Red River. Welcome, welcome. Thank you so much for being here. Can you do us the honour of please giving us a reading of this beautiful book?
katherena vermette
For sure. I’m happy to do that. Um, I first want to acknowledge my, oh, there’s my big face right over. I first want to acknowledge my territory in this blessed place I am honoured to be on. I am in Treaty 1 right now homeland of the Métis Nation, also known as Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada, and the Red River yes, is indeed just about six houses down behind me. I like to honour both of the land and the water in this place that literally gives me home and keeps me alive. So I’m going to read from The Strangers. I’m going to read from Cedar’s chapter. So this is from the point of view, very little setup is needed. It’s from the point of view of a young girl she’s about 14 at the time. And this is when she meets her father. And for the first time in her memory, and her stepmother.
They seem nice enough at the start. They’re still nice, just different. I met them at the social work office downtown a few weeks after my mom told me what was happening. It was still summer, still hot, and I still had the same respite worker. I thought Mama would be at the meeting too, but she wasn’t and no one mentioned it so I didn’t ask. They just took me to the big room with a TV and a couch. It somehow looked really rundown from the last time I was there, like the furniture needed a wash. I felt embarrassed by all of it. They ran there waiting for me. A young-looking, dark-haired put-together man. The only grey on the side of his face made me think he was older, and a nice-looking blonde lady with shiny gold rings, earrings and necklace. Shawn and Nikki. Nikki stuck out her hand when she was introduced and pulled it back and blushed, like girls do in the movies. The social worker did most of the talking of first. “Cedar is going into grade nine, high school. Isn’t right, Cedar?” I only nodded. Didn’t look up not much. My dad Shawn, smiled whenever I didn’t mean shy. “And your daughter is about a year older?” The lady Nikki, piped in. “Almost exactly. She’s going to be fifteen. Her birthday’s just a few weeks after hers. Yours.” She turned to me. “You can celebrate together if you want.” She had deep blue eyes almost a grey, and when she smiled, the lines around them twisted. Her makeup glittered under the yellow lights. She even wore lipstick. I could see the line around her lips and it didn’t smudge at all. “And they have a room for you in their house,” the social worker continued as if she was trying to convince me of something. Like I had a say. “It’s just a bed, dresser, desk right now,” Nikki said. “I figured you’d want to decorate however you like, and bring your own stuff, type thing. We can go shopping and get school supplies and stuff. You can get whatever you’d like, really.” Nikki took a breath and looked at my dad, at Shawn, and said, quiet, “I’m so nervous.” “It’s okay to be nervous, Nikki,” the social worker said. “I think that’s to be expected. I bet Cedar is nervous too.” She smiled over to me. She was nicer than she usually was, more polite. I could tell Nikki and Shawn were not like the other parents in here, or even like the foster parents. They looked richer. Something in the way they sat there, the way Nikki looked uncomfortable, made everything around them look more poor. I didn’t know if they were rich or anything, really. It was only a feeling. A too-good-to-be-true kind of feeling. A too-good-to-be-trusted. Nikki said, “We’ve got everything ready that we can. And Faith, my daughter is so excited to meet you. She would have come too, really wanted to, but we didn’t want to, you know, overwhelm you with all of us on the same day.” She took my dad, Shawn’s hand in hers. “We wanted to have more, have a little brother or sister for you, but God decided that wasn’t to be. But I’ve always wanted to meet you, Cedar. As soon as I heard, as soon as we heard, about everything, we just knew we had to get you somehow. Knew we were your real family.” Her eyes filled with tears. I was afraid for her mascara. That her yes would run dark and be ruined. Nikki kept talking, stopping only to awkwardly laugh. “My daughter is also Native, well, mixed, too, Metis, I guess. Like you. Her dad is from Alberta. He’s not, um, around, but she, she is the spitting image of his mom. Thank God she doesn’t look a thing like me. So I know, I know what it’s like. And well, I married your dad. didn’t I? We’re a pretty… we’re open and diverse, you know. We don’t see colour in our house.” The social worker leaned back. Looked like her job was done and she could relax now. Shawn too, my dad, seemed like he usually just Nikki do the talking. I wanted to tell her that’s not what Metis means. That it’s not mixed, not like that. But I only looked at my dad, at Shawn, but tried not to look like I was looking. Did he look like me? Or would it be, did I look like him?
Catherine Hernandez
Thank you so much for that beautiful reading. Thank you. [Breathes out] that’s what I did after every chapter.
katherena vermette
I know. God. I just always write the heavy stuff. God.
Catherine Hernandez
I just want to remind everyone that’s out there that is watching. Can you please just remember like, while I’m going to be asking kathereana some questions. But this is also a time for you to ask her some questions. So if you’re going to do this, just okay, so if you look down below, no, don’t do it. Don’t put it in the chat. Put it in the q&a section. Okay? So I can look at it and look at the questions and we’re going to try to get through as many as we can. But this is the time, you know, get the wheels turning. This is your moment to be able to ask questions and at the same time, I want you to think about like asking questions that are actually questions and also respectful questions would be really lovely. Okay, um, because if it’s not respectful, I’m not going to read it. Okay? All right. So I always like to set those boundaries you know what I mean, right? At these, sometimes these events.
katherena vermette
Lighten our hardass.
Catherine Hernandez
You know you kill them with kindness. Okay, so. Usually, and we both know as authors that we get this question a lot, “What inspired you what inspired you?” And instead, I want to ask you, what, what drove you to tell the story? What made you understand that the story had to be told? And I want to know about the moment you finally put pen to paper, or rather fingers to keyboard? Tell me about that.
katherena vermette
Oh, I like that. Um, well, I wrote The Break a few years ago. And the break really felt like the tip of the iceberg of this world I had created in my head. I had, you know, I really liked genealogy. So I had genealogies and families all lined up. And I knew where people lived on the grid, of the street grid. And when I came down to write The Break, it really felt very tip of the iceberg to everything I had created, because it was one story in amongst many stories. So there was a lot that I didn’t fit in, that just didn’t fit into that story. And I just thought that was normal, because it was my first time writing a novel. And it was hard enough to write that novel. So I thought that was just normal. And I was going to leave everything else behind, maybe pick it up in pieces or something. And then I was actually at a writers festival and I remember this author, I don’t remember who it was, but um, they just said something like, yeah, I wrote my novel, and then my characters like left, and I was done. And away we go. And I just remember thinking lucky bastard. Because I felt they weren’t letting me go. They just kept like talking to me. And I made up all these friends and they just kept going. Friends in quotation marks – some of them are not my friends. Some of them have very complicated relationships with me. But I thought, oh, well, maybe there’s something here. So I knew, I knew I wanted to continue with Phoenix’s story. Phoenix is loud. She’s a very loud character in my head, and I think on the page, and I knew exactly where she was going. I knew a little bit about Cedar and Elsie because actually one of, I had written the first chapter of Cedar’s, I had written as a short story many years ago. So I really took them up and knew where I wanted them to go. And, and then Margaret too again, force of nature, loud ass – sorry, I’m going to be swearing. These characters, I wanted to, and they kind of came together as this family. I really just talked, thought about this family and the family dynamics and how people, you know, go into and out of each other. I wanted to talk about estrangement and how sometimes we just do not need to talk to our families, but we’re still, they’re still in us and we’re still all a part of each other. I really wanted to dive into you know, those great Michif stories. I wanted to spend more time, I’m really into Michif kitchens. You know, with tea, all my stories take place in a lot of kitchens with a lot of tea, and separate cooking in the background while everyone’s gossiping. So I just wanted to be there and it really just, I think it was that writers festival I decided that I wanted to jump back in and see where it would go.
Catherine Hernandez
Did it feel familiar? Like once you did jump back in. Did it feel like as if you were, there was a reunion of sorts?
katherena vermette
It happened really fast. I write… because there’s four different voices here. I wrote each of them in turn first. So I wrote Phoenix first. And I really wrote, I wrote her first chapter over the course of I think a day, and I cried. It was it never happens that fast for me. I tend to pluck over things and like piece things together and like end up being like this puzzle of mess for years, right? But Phoenix really just came and I knew exactly how she was going to go and then I wrote each one after that. So, they weren’t all fast like that. But Phoenix was a truck, a train, truck? Train. She was barreling down the road anyway.
Catherine Hernandez
Why do you think that was? What do you think it was about Phoenix that it almost like as if like it was like a conjuring for you?
katherena vermette
I think Phoenix herself has always kind of been a conjuring for me actually. I know, Phoenix has been around me for a really long time. I don’t know who she is or where she came from. I can literally picture the first time I saw her image, where I was living and I know that, like my daughter who’s 20 now with a baby. And she just, I never knew how to tell her story but she just kind of lingered there like this weird friend. Friend in quotation marks because I think that I wanted to tell her truthfully, I also wanted to tell her compassionately, and with as much love as she would let me cram in there. But it also took me a long time to write her. By the time I wrote The Break, I hadn’t written Phoenix. She had been around me for 10 years. And then it took me like another 10 years to write The Break kind of thing. So by the time she got started, though, I think she just had a lot of story in her and it was a very obvious moment too like, you know, story-wise, because she was about to give birth, you know. We left her at the, during the break, finding, the break – the story. She was about to give birth, and that just seemed like this perfect moment to start. And that actually became like a big theme throughout The Strangers, this idea of birth, and choice of birth, choice of parenthood versus not choice, that choice being taken away the ability to parent being taken away. That became like this overwhelming theme. And it really just started with Phoenix and her demanding raging voices she was labouring.
Catherine Hernandez
That that scene is, yeah, it, I had to have a cup of tea after that, that’s for sure. Yeah, and if you can imagine I was reading it in like, just like at dawn, we had just moved into the house. So like, you know, no lights were put up yet. And it was just like, just like maybe like my cell phone light just reading it going [gasping]. Yeah, and just having enough electricity to have myself a cup of tea because I needed it. That was so powerful, so powerful. Like, tell, because of the fact that there, okay, so you were talking about genealogy and stuff like that. Like there is a literal family tree here in the beginning of the book. And yet you then go narratively, like you build this tree so that we understand the structure of it, and also, the gnarly ways that this, this tree is growing because of so many systems that are failing this family. Tell me about that. Tell me about this enormous task of mapping out this family and making sure that it was clear to the reader.
katherena vermette
Um, well, the making of the family wasn’t difficult at all. I’m used to big families, I’ve always kind of, I come from two big families. My dad comes from a family of five, my mom comes from family of nine. And I’ve always been obsessed with, you know, genealogies and making them. I remember my first year of university, I did an anthropology project where I had to make this giant like family tree on both sides, that kind of culminates into myself, and I still have it. And because I loved that action of figuring out all of these things that make me you know, who I am. And so I love that. And so it wasn’t difficult to create a family, I actually made this family, you know, comparatively smaller, because there’s only four children and, and it’s really, um, and in that one generation, kind of the generation of Margaret, that kind of builds it into subsequent generations. So that part wasn’t hard. And I just I, because each one of their narratives, their stories is essentially separate. You know, they’re, they’re defined not only by how they’re connected, but also their incredible separateness throughout the book. So I wanted to make sure to give each one of them connections to that family, you know, so Elsie, as wandering as she is, and as lost as she is, she still has her uncle Toby. You know, she still has that connection. And you know, Cedar finds her dad, Shawn, who becomes an intimate connection, he is a friend of the family. So he becomes an intimate connection. Phoenix has has been, who is not associated with the family, but she has connections to Cedar and they all kind of weave in and tell stories of one another into one another. So they kind of create the bigger fabric of the family. And I mean, that of course was we know from family stories that could go on and on and on into, you know, infinite you know, all these like, funny stories and not so funny stories that we tell over and over again. If we’re lucky enough to hear over and over again until we’re bored of them. So that’s when Margaret became really essential because Margaret was, as much as her story is so lost to the others narratives because of separation because of systemic intervention. But also she was able to kind of make that connection to not only her mother’s generation, which the other younger ones don’t have that connection, but the overall story of the family so she’s able to give that foundation to them. Which they don’t really know, uou know? Like Elsie and her girls, they’re not, they’re separated from that. So they don’t know all of that story, but it’s still their foundation, it’s still something that they have inside of them. So I just had so much fun with that, because there’s so many characters in the family that, like her dad Mac and his silly stories and swear words. Her mom with all her sad stories, and also swear words. But yeah, I just had fun with the individual stories, right? And I wasn’t worried about the whole because I was just picking little stories and stuff. And that’s what made it fun. And altogether, they have, they make the bigger story, but…
Catherine Hernandez
That’s beautiful. That’s beautiful. Like and tell me about the authenticity of voice given these beautiful perspectives, and that make up the tapestry of this novel. Because each one seems to have, like, it definitely feels like its own little spice cabinet. It has its own very specific palette. So tell me about that as an author, like making sure that was really clear for the reader.
katherena vermette
I’m a little obsessed with voice and point of view. Point of view, I totally blame UBC on that they kind of drill point of view in. You know, like, you know, the amount of times we would just go “POV slip, POV slip.” And you know, your classmates would come at you with like, you know, axes, which are really just red pins, you know, which are proverbial anyway. But I, so I have point of view drilled into me and most of my writing, most of my fiction, I used to always write in the first person and I really lavish myself with that luxury of being in the first person and just, you know, stuck in people’s heads. So going into a close third, I take myself out of the person’s head thank God because no one wants to be in there. And but I still stay so close to characters and I love the idea of embodiment of a character and really just like… My cat really wants to be known today.
Catherine Hernandez
Oh, gosh, no worries. No worries. I love interruption seriously,
katherena vermette
She’s going to come up anytime now. Taking over the whole show. Um, so I really love that idea. Like I feel almost like an actor when I’m writing these characters because I’m all like, I’m just obsessed with getting them right and getting their voices right and, and having, how they appear on the page, how their words appear on the page to be exact. So I wrote them all how I heard them. And then I went back as I folded the stories together, I noticed similarities and also crafted a lot of similarities between them. So in a lot of ways, Cedar becomes like Margaret, her grandmother who she doesn’t know but they’re both institutionally educated women, right? They talk very similar. They’re both you know, sharp as a tack. You know, they’re sharp is tacks. Elsie who’s more struggling, her sentences are more choppy, you know, her sentence, her narrative is a little more shifting because she’s literally shifting and twitching in her in throughout her life. And Phoenix, just, God love her, she’s you know, she F bombs like punctuation. But that to me is, that is important for her voice. I know so many, I know so many young people, and I was certainly a young person who just you know, you use your cussing in your language and you talk a completely different way than other people. And to do her justice I had to just let those fly and I’m a pretty sweary person to begin with. So I was not judging her. But she’s angry. You know, and when we meet her as she comes into the story, like her freight train, she is birthing a human being you know, she is like, like and all her anger and all her rage and all her fear is right at the forefront and it kind of just continued like that. So I just kind of had to show that as much as possible. Because she was not pulling any punches. Well, she was punching. Yeah, I guess that’s the term right? Pulling punches means you’re, yeah, she was not pulling punches. She was getting right in there. I just had to let her go.
Catherine Hernandez
It’s so funny. It reminded me of, you know, in, in theatre and for puppetry is that the main thing is to make a puppet breathe. You’ve got to breathe into it, whatever the object is that you are animating, and I found myself breathing the way your characters were breathing. In every chapter and, which made it a lot like, it made it like this really like, it was in the body kind of experience reading, reading your book, which made it both difficult and captivating at the same time. So thank you. It’s just, it’s brilliant. Um, so a sentence that is said over and over again, in the book is “I don’t want to get your hopes up.” And I almost felt like as if you were saying that to us as audience members. I don’t want to get your hopes up. Because hope is given and taken away, hope is given and taken away. And for someone like me, who’s had life experiences that are vastly different from the people in this novel, is that I caught myself with my privilege being like, oh, I keep on thinking that where you’re going is, you’re going to a place where you’re… Sorry, can you hear me because there was a weird blip in the audio? You can hear me? Okay. Again, it’s rural internet, you know. So, I’m, with my privilege, thinking that, oh, you know, what katherena is going, she’s, what’s gonna happen is A, B, and C is going to happen, and then this family is just going to boop, boop, boop, boop, boop, everything’s gonna be fine. There’s the, you know, even like, you know, with the naming ceremony, everything I was just like, that’s what’s gonna happen, there’s gonna be a convergence of all of them there. One of them’s going to suddenly, like catch a, catch a plane and get… in my mind. I’m thinking, this is what’s going to happen. And it just constantly how, I’m constantly having to reconfigure what hope means. So tell me about that. Tell me about your big use of “hope” in this novel.
katherena vermette
Um, that’s interesting that, I tend to repeat myself all the time. So I hope I didn’t repeat it too much.
Catherine Hernandez
No, I loved it. I thought it was intentional.
katherena vermette
My copy editor should have caught that! But I really think it’s a term and it’s something particularly through Cedar and Elsie. So Cedar is a child, she’s under the age of 18. And she’s trying to read with her sister who is incarcerated, and her mother who is, she’s, no one really knows where she is. She’s transient. And it’s also Cedar trying to be a hard-working, non-white, non a lot of things, student. So she’s trying to, she has aspirations for university. So it also comes up, I remember it very clearly in the, in the conversation she has with a guidance counselor about not getting your hopes up. You know, that’s something I remember being told so many times, in so many ways, throughout my young life throughout my life, you know. It’s this idea that you have to have the realistic expectations, you come from this, and you can expect to go over here. You can’t expect to go over here, don’t look at that, like, you know, shoot for the stars sure, but you know, what, you know, manage your expectations, you never know. Which I find incredibly, you know, perhaps it’s realistic, and perhaps it’s correct, but it’s also, you know, really, you know, really has a way of just cutting everything down. But it’s also something that I’ve heard so many times when you’re dealing with the system, and in this case, it was the child welfare system, and it’s also the youth detention system. It’s this idea of, don’t get your hopes up, because that’s the other part that it, it happens with, with Phoenix as she’s trying to better herself, while she’s incarcerated, she’s trying to better herself, so that she can be there for her child who gets taken away from her right after he is born. And she too, is not supposed to get her hopes up. You know, it’s always these ideas of managing the expectation, because the system is always working to protect the system. You know, it’s in theory, protecting the vulnerable, but it’s also, you know, caging, those vulnerable persons in, hopefully, protection, hopefully, but also in, you know, that you have to maintain your space. So as a young person under 18, you don’t have a lot of agency in where you’re going to go as a young person who’s incarcerated. Of course, you don’t have an agency of where you’re going to go and as a mother who has had your children taken away from you, and despite your repeated attempts, there’s only certain places you can go and you’re very restricted. So in a sense, even though Phoenix is the only one in prison, they are all in a certain prison. If I may. That might be a challenging thing to say and definitely not a complete thing to say because Cedar is is a young girl who’s growing up in a suburb and she has a lot of privileges and a lot of opportunity. But she’s also kept from a lot of things, you know. And her mother is someone who’s suffering from drug dependency, you know, which is its own cage of a different kind, you know. So no, they are not incarcerated and no, they are not in jail, but it’s still they’re being kept in a lot of ways. So I think that’s where that you know, dying of hope or that you know, shooting the arrow through the coke bubble and having it all crash down. Like, I feel that in so many different ways, in my lifetime and in lifetimes around me.
Catherine Hernandez
Well, it looks like people have so much to ask you. Yeah, so I’m thinking it’s just so that, I know that they were telling me like around like, 740ish start like, letting people ask questions, but I think now is probably a good time. Do you feel good about that, katherena?
katherena vermette
Yeah, and I can also say, I’m pretty open to questions. You know, for those who are on the fence of whether or not to ask questions, I tend to answer anything. And if I don’t answer anything, I’ll just tell a story about something else.
Catherine Hernandez
Nice. So we have a question here. When is the next book coming? Loved, loved, loved The Sgtrangers? We’re all in the same boat. Yeah.
katherena vermette
Love it. Thank you. Um, the next book is being drafted. It is coming out next fall, I think. Twenty twenty-three for sure. I don’t think I’m going to be any sooner than the fall. I yeah, I slow, I slow right down. But it is coming. It is coming. Sooner than later.
Catherine Hernandez
Well we can’t wait. I can’t wait to hear more about that. We have a question here. I have read The Break and thoroughly enjoyed it are your books based on your life story or that of your family?
katherena vermette
Um, no. My short answer. Um, I do take a lot from my life experience in a way and those around me I do purposely fictionalized, everything I write in the way that I might, you know, certain characters might be reminiscent of certain people, certain situations might be reminiscent of something. But I purposely choose things that are not, I mean, sometimes there’s parts of my story, but I purposely never take from anyone else’s story and stories that do not belong to me, unless I have permission to do so. But mostly, I really try to stay in the fiction realm. I mean, inevitably, as authors and you know, this, we end up always talking about ourselves anyway. But I felt it was important to not only symbolically as far as the situations go, particularly in The Break, because there’s very specific situations that revolve around another situation. And same too with The Strangers, it’s very much my family, but my family also wants everyone to know it is not my family. And it’s not, it’s not it’s, it’s like there’s echoes of my grandparents and my father in there. My aunties and cousins are all over there and in their ways, but it is fiction, because I have very specific things that I’m talking about, and I and they don’t belong to any one person.
Catherine Hernandez
It is interesting, too, is that sometimes when you’re writing fiction is that there are people that are in your, in your lives that, you know, the part of it is that if you write really well, people can see themselves in it. And sometimes, like the horrible thing is that sometimes they think that it is about them. And it’s like no, it’s just yeah, it’s just that it’s, it happens to be that if we’re doing our jobs well, it definitely feels real. So…
katherena vermette
I was thinking of a story in that actually. There’s a really, there’s a depiction of what happened – I won’t reveal anything, I don’t like to get into the heavy parts when I’m doing talking. But I will say in The Break for anyone who’s familiar with it, there’s a situation that happens with Elsie which for me is, it’s an assault. And for me was something I had heard of, and was really, and I depicted as carefully as I could. And numerous people not only from the city but from other cities have asked me if I was depicting a situation that they were familiar with, which to me is tragic, because it, because these stories are everywhere. And these stories look the same. And they’re happening to so many people. So I thought it was something that was, you know, not unique. I knew it wasn’t unique. But I didn’t know it was as common as it was, you know? So I mean, it’s definitely not something I took from any one particular situation. But yeah, we, you know this, what is it? The specific is the universal and the universal is the specific. I mean, when you talk about things, anything, yeah, you know, you want people to relate to it. And unfortunately, sometimes people really relate to it, unfortunately, fortunately.
Catherine Hernandez
Yeah. We have a question here about, because of the connection between The Break and The Strangers, it will, and will there be another book based on these same characters?
katherena vermette
Yes. And yes, I’m answering questions so succinctly. The next book is called The Circle. And it is, intended, should end up being like this, it’s, you know. It’s it’s kind of the characters from The Break and the characters from The Strangers together. But not all the characters from The Strangers and not all the characters from The Break. The starting point of The Circle is when Phoenix is released from prison. And it’s kind of the events that unfold after that. It’s a lot of connection and if you, like, the last chapter of The Strangers really puts both of those worlds in clashing. I don’t want to give anything away. But I mean, they are connected. And they are connected. And it’s a small world, small Winnipeg, as we say. So they are, they do intertwine in both books, but also in the next book is kind of more of a crashing together.
Catherine Hernandez
And which one was the hardest voice to write?
katherena vermette
Ohhh. In this book, um, I think I would say Elsie. I mean, Phoenix is hard to, hard to everything. But, you know, but Elsie it was, I was so frustrated with her. And there’s something so lost about her and being in the midst of, she’s in a heavy, heavy opioid addiction. There’s so much helplessness in there and learned helplessness and also like, you know, she has so much has been taken away from her. And I relate to her so much. I feel so similar to Elsie in so many roles, and I think I really had to confront that own, you know, those only times in my life when I was helpless and not acknowledging my own power. And that was really hard for me. The easiest was Margaret because Margaret’s just curmudgeonly and angry and that’s just fun. Well, it’s not always fun. But I mean, when she was just a purely grumpy old lady, I had good fun with her. She takes it a step too far, most of the time, but I really had fun with when she was just being a grumpy old lady. I’m getting to be a grumpy old lady.
Catherine Hernandez
I don’t know about you, but I’m kind of like, I’m really embracing the grumpy old lady that I’m becoming. I’m like, yeah, I want to give unsolicited advice. I want to, I want to be curmudgeonly. I mean and you know what I think it is, I think it’s just like less of a filter you know what I mean? Like, I don’t care. And I am now realizing why, you know, so it’s great.
katherena vermette
Yeah, my thing right now is, I have two older children who are 20 and 22. And I’ve completely lost my filter with them. I’m telling them shit about like, all the things I didn’t tell them. I’m just like, anyways, blah, blah. And they’re enjoying it, or at least they’re quiet and polite about it. But I’m enjoying it. It’s great, you know?Less F’s to give.
Catherine Hernandez
We have a question here. Your characterization of all the women in the novel is so rich and nuanced. And sometimes I would reread parts simply to enjoy the description and dialogue once again. Given the age-old stereotypes of that often are associated with Indigenous folks, was it hard to also expose characters challenging traits as well? I know that other artists in the past, authors in the past Mordecai Richler, for example, were criticized by their own communities for further exposing the challenging aspects in each character because they sometimes potentially play into unfair stereotypes. So what are your thoughts about that?
katherena vermette
Um, well, stereotypes are bad. That’s my first thought. Um, but perfect characters are boring. That’s my second thought with that. I don’t think I do anybody any service by trying to, I think it actually feeds into stereotypes when you try to make a character perfect because God forbid someone from the outside world can see that character. You know, I mean, we have this idea of modelness, you know, model minority, right? You know, you have to be this perfect person, you know, that we have to go through and have no faults, and we don’t get to be, you know, make mistakes. And that just takes away our humanity as much as any other kind of thing, any other kind of stereotype. The truth of these characters is that they have been imposed by overarching surveillance of the state for the entirety of their lives in the entirety of their grandparents lives and the entirety of their grandparents lives. The problems that they’re facing, and the issues they are presented with are not they’re doing. Their responses to the myriad attempts of genocide that have happened on Michif people and all other Indigenous people since contact. And I want to, I always get, I get a little huffity when I when I start talking about this, because I do not think Indigenous people have anything to be ashamed of. I think we are responding to attempts of genocide that, and have been imposed upon us, whether it’s through bureaucracy, whether it’s through interventions into our parenting, whether it’s interventions into our land sovereignty, or any of the other things. Responding to that is a human, we’re human, we get to have human responses, you know? Elsie is someone who was put on opioids to respond to a pain and she became addicted, that is not a Michif problem. That is not an Indigenous problem, that is a human problem that happens in communities all over the place, because of a bunch of factors that, you know, have nothing to do with her. She is, you know, her parenting was interrupted by surveillance on the state because her family and her parenting was viewed with more scrutiny, then, someone who was completely equal to our situation, who was non-Indigenous. That is a fact she, her kids were taken away from her because of mistakes she made true, but that doesn’t make her a horrible person. And that doesn’t make her mistakes any bigger than a whole bunch of other people. And that doesn’t mean she didn’t need help. And that doesn’t mean she didn’t need resources to access. But the response of the state is usually first and foremost, to break up the family because it’s cheaper to do so. And keep putting kids in foster care is cheaper than helping families stay together. That’s my rant. And I could go, but I don’t think, I think that showing people, what I do whenever I sit down and write anyone, is I want to write them authentically. And in order to write them authentically, I have to write them with strength, and love and hope. Because those are the people I see. I see people, those are the people I know and those are the people that are in my family and in my community. Many of us are struggling. Many of us are thriving. Many of us are doing amazing, wonderful things, and aren’t. Some of us are up and down everyday like me. Um, but it’s not, people get to be human, and to not show people as human would be doing them a disservice. And I think each one of these women, each one of these men, and these people in this book, have something of value to give to the world. And I think we all have something of value to give to the world. And I think that people who might not look like your typical heroes and heroines also warrant literary attention. So that’s the people I want to write about. If I get come at with pitchforks and stakes and run out of town, I know that my intention was always love. And I tried to do that. As much as I was showing their pain. I was showing how strong they were. Okay, okay.
Catherine Hernandez
Oh, no, thank you so much for your generosity. Thank you. Speaking of imperfections we have a question here. I love this one. About Cedar’s father. Do you think that he regrets his absence from her life before she came to live with him? I do love that character. The imperfection of him. Yeah.
katherena vermette
I actually named him after my first crush.
Catherine Hernandez
There you have it, Shawn wherever you are.
katherena vermette
So I’m going to find this Shawn Dupree out in elementary school and, and I’m going to say, I named this guy after you. You know, Sean was absolutely, I think, I don’t know Shawn’s motivations, necessarily. I’m not in his head, well I was in his head a little bit. But, um, I think he does. I think that there’s a level of powerlessness that we have to understand in certain people in certain situations, sometimes we are not aware of our own power. And I think when Shawn made that choice, it was when he was newly out of prison and feeling very ashamed of himself, this is giving away the story. But he was, he was vulnerable to an opinion, and led him away from his kid, kids, because Phoenix was definitely also his kid. And I think that was definitely a choice that he regrets. I don’t think that we always know how much, how powerful we are. We don’t always know how important we are. And I think sometimes we make ourselves absent in other people’s lives because of our own shame. And because of our own, we don’t understand that we add value to their lives. And I think that’s what Shawn did. And I really applaud Nikki, for all her faults, I love Nikki. She really drew that out of him. And she made that connection. And for all her faults, and she has many, I really love that she was able to do that, because I don’t think that he knew, he would have been able to do that. without her. I think that he would have stayed in that same cycle without her. But yeah, he is, he just really like stands up and, you know, brings it out. And I love you know, and it really becomes when I write sometimes most times all the time, I surprise myself and when I put people together and just have them come out. And one of the most beautiful things I love in this book is Shawn and Cedar in the rec room with the pizza, you know, watching action movies, which is something I did with my dad, still do with my dad. Um, and, and really, he just, you know, he not only gives her stories and connects her to her family and her past and him, but he also gives, she gives that back to him and he understands and learns how to be a father and learns how powerful he actually is and how important he is.
Catherine Hernandez
I love that because you know, parents are learning too. Parents are learning too.
katherena vermette
Spoiler alert. We don’t know it all.
Catherine Hernandez
Exactly.
katherena vermette
Don’t tell anyone I said that.
Catherine Hernandez
That’s all right. Um, I kind of really love this question. Because I, it’s so different for everybody. But, how do you choose the names of your characters is one of the questions we have here.
katherena vermette
I’m a total name nerd. So I’m gonna like, I go off on names. Um, with this one, I had a lot of fun with French names to English names. You know, we had a lot of like, Margaret is actually the Anglophone version of her auntie who was Marguerite. You know, and that kind of signifies the Anglosizing of many, many, many people but specifically Michif people here in Winnipeg. My family went through this, we have the generations and generations of French names going back, you know, since we had French names, and then suddenly in the last two couple generations, you know, we have just English names everywhere, you know. Elsie was named after her Mennonite great grandmother, which was the only name that Margaret knew, but because Margaret had so much shame of her own race, she named her daughter after, you know, her white, after her white father’s family. So forever Elsie has like not only an anglicized name, but a white name. You know, so it’s like, signifying Margaret’s hopes for her. Phoenix and Cedar-Sage and Sparrow which are Elsie’s kids, I just love those names. And Elsie is such a young mom, you know, so she, I think she picked such beautiful names for her kids and really just poured in so much imagination and love to her, her names. Cedar-Sage is well two of the sacred medicines, you know, and it was kind of signified that time when Elsie was learning about her culture. But Cedar-Sage put together is just like medicine, medicine, power. But I don’t know why I really like them. I could go on. I mean, in The Break, I actually named a bunch of characters after street names in the north end. I did after Lorraine and Cheryl in The Break, are actually named after, there’s a book called In Search of April Raintree and that is, was formidable for many and formidable and seminal for many of us, but it was like, it created me as a writer. And the sisters in In Search of April Raintree are Cheryl and April. And I changed those to Cheryl and Rain. So still April Raintree, but just after rain. So, and who else? Street names – I like to go through and pick like lots of cool old Michif names. I like to make sure I’m representing. And in this book, I make a lot of fun of all the Josephs because it’s true in Michif families, we have lots and lots of Joseph’s because Joseph, St. Joseph is not only our patron saint, but everyone’s named after their father who’s also named Joseph after his father who’s named Joseph. So we have, we have lots of Josephd so, and so in my books, I actually have like three main Joseph characters. I like to have fun. Yeah, I have tons of fun with names.
Catherine Hernandez
No, I love it. No, I’m glad. Yeah. Because like I, because of the fact that I always wondered how names were made up, like for television shows, and I just finished being in a television writers room, and I was realizing how random it was the way that we come up with names. Let’s just say that a Tar, Tar, Tarek comes in and then he says to Lucy that like it was full on, we were just making up random names. And so just sometimes there’s just no romance. Your story sounds way better. Like your process sounds way better than ours.
katherena vermette
That would kill it for me. I want names. I want meanings, you know?
Catherine Hernandez
Yeah, I know. It’s like it would be, it means Delta Dawn, get like, I don’t know. It’s nothing, yeah, no, it’s nothing like that. Oh, we have a question here. How much did the pandemic change your plans for the final section of The Strangers and his inclusion of the early pandemic indication that when you were writing you were writing in the now of the day time you’re in?
katherena vermette
Um, yeah it changed a completely. The first draft had none of the pandemic in there. And then the pandemic hit, and then it wasn’t going away. So like all of us, like all of us, I was just kinda waiting it out and seeing like, how big of a deal is this? I did want to keep it to kind of like, it’s a year, it’s five years, kind of connecting The Break to The Circle through The Strangers’ story. So I did want to keep it in real time, without actually date stamping everything and tech stamping everything, which sometimes can get really onerous and too much. But I wrote, rewrote year five and I wondered how it would change in the pandemic. And it actually became, you know, there’s so many symbols and kind of plays in this book about like that separation and about, you know, things that are keeping these people apart. And the pandemic is, is the perfect symbol for that because it literally puts barriers in front of us with other people. And it literally made everything 10 times harder. So if Elsie has been trying to see her, her kid or rather Cedar’s trying to see her mom and Phoenix is trying to get visitors to see her but of course, the pandemic puts that all on pause and everybody, everything becomes limited. And then suddenly everyone who is gets, who did get to talk to one another it’s through plexiglass and with masks on so it kind of became a part of like, just another barrier that everyone had. Everyone in the book had to kind of overcome and hurdle over. Yeah, I but I also think like we’re so pandemiced out, I wonder, I really this is this my total aside, I really wonder how art and TV and and film, which is of course is still art, but I wonder how much that is actually going to show the pandemic, you know. Because I think we’re all like, sick of the pandemic and whenever a show, TV show goes into the pandemic I’m like, oh no! I get enough of that in my real life. I don’t need to deal with my entertainment. So I wonder how much we’re actually going to show it because I think we’re all just going to skip right over in our imaginations as we all wish we would have. You know, and then revisit it in 10 years when we romanticize it, you know? But yeah, I totally skipped over it for the next book, I’m really hoping, unless something drastic changes, I just really wanted to, like, be post pandemic in The Circle, because it was really hard. It’s really hard writing about the pandemic, it’s really, it really is a really depressing time as far as human connection.
Catherine Hernandez
Yeah I know. It’s like writing in a pandemic about the pandemic, it just seems a little – yeah, it’s a little bit intense.
katherena vermette
Yeah, it’s, I write fiction, I can skip right over that.
Catherine Hernandez
I could do what I want. I’m the writer, I can do what I want. Oh, my gosh. Oh, katherena thank you so much for this amazing conversation. And thank you all for these wonderful questions. I wish that we could like sit here all day answering all of them but because like, I could listen to you all day, like your process and everything. But then again, if we were to talk and talk and talk it would mean that it would take forever for the next book to come out. So yeah, but thank you so much. And thank you so much for the Gillers for hosting us and allowing us to share space in this way.
katherena vermette
Yeah, thank you, everyone. I just want to give a shout-out to Canada Reads contender over there and good luck. It’s gonna start up right away. Good luck!
Catherine Hernandez
Oh my gosh, there’s not enough wine. There’s not enough wine to be able to listen to the conversation. Let’s see. Let’s see if I can make it. I just need a big big block of chocolate. So yeah, thank you. Thank you.
katherena vermette
Chocolate, vodka, wine. You’ll be fine!
Daphna Rabinovitch
Well, I too want to wish you so much luck, Catherine. Thank you. And katherena, thank you. This was just an amazing evening. I loved hearing all about your process and your love of genealogy and your love of names. And so thank you so much. And thank all of you for joining us. It’s always a pleasure to know that so many of you are asking questions. And we have another wonderful book club lined up for April 4 when Eric Dupont will interview Kim Thuy, author of the novel Em which was also longlisted for the 2021 Scotiabank Giller Prize. If you haven’t registered for that, please visit our website. And of course this interview, like all of our interviews, both for our book clubs and our power panels will be available on our YouTube channel. And thank you again so much Have a wonderful night and a wonderful week.