Interview by Leslie Palleson
Katherine Fawcett is the author of two collections of short stories, Little Washer of Sorrows (Thistledown Press, 2015), shortlisted for the ReLit Short Fiction Award and for a Sunburst Award for Excellence in Canadian Literature of the Fantastic, and The Swan Suit (Douglas and McIntyre, 2020).
Leslie Palleson: You are a teacher as well as a musician. When and how did you start writing?
Katerine Fawcett: I can remember being a little girl and writing stories and plays and poems for my friends … for their birthdays, and for my family. [My mom would] say, just write me a story. I got out of creative writing when I got more into freelance journalism and commercial writing, but it’s been a part of my life for as long as I can remember.
LP: Many of your stories incorporate, or are retellings of, traditional fairy tales. In your interview with the Calgary Herald in March 2020 you said “Traditional storytelling forms are a short story. They are short explanations for what makes people serious–
KF: Can I interrupt you? That was a typo! I didn’t say what makes people serious, I can remember reading that–it’s what makes people curious. I remember seeing that, and thinking, what the heck?
LP: Good news is that we can clarify that.
KF: Clear that up to the world!
LP: You say referencing fairy tales “is a way to explain the unexplainable and I find that fascinating. It’s answering questions by digging in and telling a story.” When you say “it’s a way to explain the unexplainable,” what does “unexplainable” mean in this context and how do you use story to help explain it?
KF: That’s a good question and leads to the root of folklore and fairy tales and traditional storytelling form. Like, why is the moon in the sky, or, why is the wolf howling, and, what makes a person lose a temper? Is there something inside that person? We can’t understand why someone would sometimes have this characteristic, and sometimes have that characteristic, and maybe it takes a little storytelling and imagination to explain stuff that we don’t get. Either this element in nature, or human nature, and we have to conjure up histories and backstories and adventures to explain.
LP: Many of your stories are embedded in mundane reality with everyday details providing a background for fantastic fairy tale creatures to navigate. In other stories–for lack of a better word–“normal” human characters leading seemingly average lives find themselves in some fantastical circumstance, such as a middle-aged man just fired from his job who sprouts mushrooms in the shower.
KF: I knew you were going to ask about this one.
LP: These stories, otherwise not fairy tales, cross the line into the absurd. What attracts you to this combination of the mundane and the fantastic?
KF: I like to play with the totally “out there” and grounded, or totally normal and shoot it out there.
It wouldn’t be as fun if the guy who grew mushrooms in the folds of his skin happened to be an ogre. It’s so much more fun if it’s just Buddy in the shower and it’s like–what!? I related to this guy and now?
LP: This plays on the symbolic level as well. For instance, the guy growing mushrooms has a thought equating himself to the dead forest.
KF: It gives so many opportunities to play with language, with imagery. I’m thinking of the witch’s daughter and her life apart from her mother; she just wants to be normal, but she’s not. Having characters that are avoiding the fantastical that is showing up in their life, or fairy-tale characters yearning for normalcy, creates friction, humour, tension.
LP: The author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie said: “Many stories matter. Stories have been used to dispossess and to malign. But stories can also be used to empower, and to humanize. Stories can break the dignity of a people. But stories can also repair that broken dignity.” How do your thoughts regarding the importance of story interplay with your retelling of fairy tales?
KF: I totally agree with that quote–how stories can be used to malign a people and also restore dignity.
I would say [my stories] are universal because they’re personal … about self-discovery and finding truth within, not necessarily within your community, but within your heart, and I’m thinking about the importance of looking inside and not quite knowing quite what to expect when you go there, when you dig deep within yourself, or when you’re afraid of what’s inside.
I’m thinking of the title story, “The Swan Suit”, when you’re thinking what’s really underneath here, and what’s underneath what’s underneath, and what’s the false front we’re presenting to the world and if it’s being presented, then is it false? There are questions of truth and self-identity that I like to explore.
LP: In many of your stories, characters that seek to use others–to marry them against their will, or marry them off for their own profit, or steal the souls of children–seem to get their comeuppance at the end of your stories.
KF: Damn right!
LP: How intentional is it, that your badly-intentioned characters don’t prosper?
KF: Well, these aren’t like Aesop’s Fables where I’m trying to teach a lesson or bad guys always suffer in the end. They just turn out that way.
Some of them are pretty dark but … even the last one when a woman shuts down all of her orifices, she’s just shutting down as a person and then at the end there’s love.
There’s also love in the mushroom story. Things do end on a more uplifting notes, and I won’t say that’s intentional … but I guess I do have a optimistic view of the world and I do tend to look for stories that reinforce that attitude that there’s goodness everywhere and sometimes you have to dig a bit for it, and sometimes there’s a bit of muck around it, but there’s goodness in characters that might have been thought of as villains, and in bad stories there is maybe some kernel of joy or happiness there as well, and you just have to dig around.
LP: No gracious maidens populate the pages of your work. Instead the would-be maidens are determined to take hold of their own destiny. What is influencing this?
KF: Oh, that’s my mom, my sisters, my girlfriends. That’s the world of women who are not your traditional fairy-tale princesses. They are loving and powerful and compassionate and strong-opinionated women who are my kind of ladies. Those are my mentors, my idols. Those are women who I strive to be, someone who is going to be in control of their destiny and not take shit along the way.
You know, I didn’t realize these were feminist stories until I read Zsuzsi Gartner’s blurb on the back. She says something about 21st century feminism meets folktales. I was like, are these feminist stories? I mean, I’ll take that!
But I didn’t consider myself a feminist writer … I think it has come out because those are the women I have surrounded myself with: larger-than-life women who are ready to take on the world and are also fully self-aware.
Katherine Fawcett is a Squamish-based author, teacher and musician whose latest book The Swan Suit (Douglas & McIntrye, 2020) was released the day before Covid-19 was declared a global pandemic. Her first book, The Little Washer of Sorrows (Thistledown Press, 2015) was a finalist for the ReLit Award and the Sunburst Award for Excellence in Canadian Fiction of the Fantastic. Katherine is a graduate of the University of Calgary and the Simon Fraser University Writer’s Studio program.
Leslie Palleson’s work has been published in Room, Descant, Prism Online, Plank Magazine, and been shortlisted for PRISM International’s Jacob Zilber Prize and the Walrus sponsored Writer’s Adventure Camp Fiction Prize. An MFA candidate at UBC, she is a member of the editorial board of PRISM International Literary Journal.