The People Who Stay
The People Who Stay is a tale of love and redemption in which
the heart of family beats like the relentless tide against the rugged
Newfoundland shores. Recently e spoke with author Samantha Rideout about the
novel and her passion for writing.
When
and why did you want to be a writer?
As
my mother can attest courtesy of the hundreds of exercise books and binders
filled with loose-leaf stories, I have been a diligent writer since I learned
how to print. I was always mesmerized by the process of creative writing and
how a few blank pages could transform into a something beyond reality. Plus, I
was big fan of Robert Munsch. That guy spins a good story; comedy, heart, he
has it all! My first grade teacher, Mrs. Barnes, was able to find me his
address so I could send him fan mail. I think it’s the only fan mail I ever
felt compelled to write, probably (in part) because mail is a fading out as
vehicle to express admiration, but I wanted to write him because I was
impressed with what he could do and that admiration of him and authors in
general made me want to become one.
Are
they the same reasons you do it today?
Somewhere
along the way, no matter what your profession is, I think all people ask
themselves: “Why am I doing this? What is this contributing to society? Am I
doing this for selfish reasons? Is this worth the time I’m investing here?”
Usually these questions don’t crop up during the fun, exciting writing phase.
These are more questions for the editing process, when it’s not so fun and you
wonder if there’s a point to your labour. As
a reader, I think about how books have a powerful impact and that’s what I want
to achieve with my writing. From highbrow to lowbrow, books across the spectrum
have made me feel inspired, empowered, emotional, and a million other things.
Whether a book is teaching me something or making me feel something, that
connection with the written word is something that encourages me to write.
Maybe I’ll spend two years working on a book and only one person will read it
really connect with it, but if you flip that around, I’ve written something
that someone connected with in a meaningful way. That makes it worthwhile
during the non-so-fun revision phase when I’m not all hyped up on inspiration. I
write because I love it, but I feel my efforts are justified because of the end
product: books! If I wasn’t such an avid devourer of books, maybe I wouldn’t
still be writing as diligently as I did when I was a little girl. When you’re
little you just do what you love, because that’s why kids do, but when you’re
older and there are constant demands on your time it feels good to have a
reason to keep doing what you love. So
I guess I do it for the love of writing and reading books.
What
inspired/motivated you to write The People Who Stay?
I
wrote the first draft of this novel about five years ago in the awkward summer
between my undergrad and the rest of my life. After five years at Memorial
(that’s a lot of coffees from Treats in the UC), I had moved home from St.
John’s for four months before I started my job in Miami the following
September. It’s an awkward age to come home. The people who stayed had their
own families, children, houses now and the people who left were still gone. I
was in this weird in-between place with ample free time to think and write
about all this. I went on long walks through my hometown and spent too much
time thinking and listening to introspective music on my iPod, and somewhere in
all that I wrote The People Who Stay before I moved to balmy
Miami in September when the Atlantic Ocean air was just starting to get crisp
and cool. I became a person who left…Now with more perspective I’d like to
rewrite it but it would be a different novel about different characters and
even Newfoundland would be different in a new version. You can only write about
a specific place and a time at that moment in history. Nothing ever feels the
exact same way twice.
What
was the most challenging aspect of the process?
It
was be difficult to create a version of Newfoundland that is true. Its fiction,
but you want readers to feel like it’s real. There are competing interests
because I definitely didn’t want to legitimize any “Newfie jokes” because even
the word “Newfie” strikes me as offensive because of the pejorative
connotations that have been created by the jokes and negative perception
outside the province. People seem to believe that Newfoundlanders aren’t
intelligent or cultured, but there are some incredible smart people and plenty
of culture. Next year a play about Newfoundland is going to be on Broadway here
in New York, and these are the inconvenient truths (and I apologize for
inadvertently quoting Al Gore) that people would rather ignore and plaster over
with a joke about “how to get a Newfie out of a tree.” On the other hand, I
didn’t want to write a novel that felt like a tourism commercial or an iceberg
calendar. I didn’t want to create an idealized Newfoundland. I wanted it to be
Newfoundland as I experienced it growing up and perhaps growing out of a small
town “around the bay.” Caught between opposing interests, I tried my best to
write about a town that felt like my own small town. I wanted it to feel
authentic. Some parts were a little gritty or ugly, but in the end I’m glad I
embraced some of less flattering aspects of our “East Coast Lifestyle.” It’s
better to be real and a little unflattering than to create an adulated fantasy
to which no one can relate.
What
was the most rewarding part of the experience?
I
think it would have to be seeing the beautiful cover by Graham Blair when the
book was about to be released. Book cover design was one of the things I
studied in grad school and unofficially study at least once a week as I shop
for books (in a real bookstore, not just online), so I understand how a cover
can make or break a book. The cover is the first impression of the contents and
it’s kind of like trying to meet someone at a bar, it doesn’t matter how great
the personality is, if the outside isn’t attractive, it’s going to be hard to
get picked up! Book shopping and meeting people at bars have more in common
than one might think and seeing this cover made me think this, “Hey! This book
has an awesome opportunity to get picked up!” It was an incredibly validating
moment.
What
did you learn during the process?
My
mother is always right. I originally finished writing what is now Part I of The
People Who Stay, thinking the novel was over. After I gave it to my mother,
who is always my first reader, and she told me the ending was “terrible” and
that sounds like I’m exaggerating but I think that’s actually a direct quote.
Maybe she said terrible and depressing, but either way, she didn’t like it. So
I went back to the drawing board and came up with Part II, which gave the novel
a more satisfying end. I’m a big fan of the bittersweet ending, as a reader and
a writer, but my mother reads more than anyone I know so I have complete
confidence in her opinion. And if I wasn’t sure, it was clear when I read a
review earlier this week that said they almost wrote the book off as chick lit
until the second part saved the day—in other words, my mom saved the day.
Between you and me, she’s always right.
How
did you feel when the book was completed?
It
felt gratifying to finish it because unlike a lot of the concepts or characters
I build into stories, this felt like a story I had been working on my whole
life, long before I ever thought up Sylvia or Charlie. However, once it was
written I worried that it catered to such a niche market that it might never
end up going from a binder of typed pages to a bookshelf. There was some
validity to that worry because it did end up being years before it became
anything more than a personal project, but now that it’s out there on
bookshelves across the world it feels great to have created a medium to share
the strange and sentimental shores of Newfoundland with people who stay, leave,
and those who are discovering Newfoundland for the first time in these pages.
What
has the response been like so far from those that have read it?
I’ve
been critical of it myself, which is the double edged sword from any writer who
is also an avid reader (unless they are kind of arrogant). I read so many
phenomenal books that when I re-read my own work it’s pretty depressing, but
the feedback I have received thus far has been better than I could ever have
imagined. Most surprisingly, there have been many men who have expressed great
appreciation for the book. One man told me he loved the funny details, another
couldn’t put it down, and one man said it’s the first thing he’s read in years
and he finished it in two days! All the while I’m stunned because I set
out to write a book for millennial women to combat the usual fare of Newfoundland
literature (you know, fishing boat captains, hunting seals, not something you
would necessarily chase with Me Before You by Jo Jo Moyes) and
yet it seems to appeal to that same audience I was expecting to sit out this
Newfoundland read. What I didn’t realize was that when Newfoundland is the main
character, the gender or age of the protagonist doesn’t matter. People who love
Newfoundland love to read books that showcase their beloved province. I think
it’s probably the same reason all the front row seats at elementary school
concerts are highly coveted. It doesn’t matter if a kid hits all the right
notes, parents want to see the object of their unconditional love center stage.
What
makes a good book?
I
love this question because I love good books! Any book that leaves me feeling
satisfied is, in my opinion, a good book. Yet within that there are pockets of
different types of good books: Works like Margaret Atwood’s The
Handmaid’s Tale disturb you with a dystopian reality and challenge you
to think about gender roles and package feminist ideas into a fictional
resource that rivals profound speeches or a long form journalism approach to
conveying those ideas. P.S. I cannot wait for the ten episode series
scheduled for production next year—over thirty years after the book was first
printed. There are books that you can’t read without sharing them—the
book club books that demand discussion; The Paris Wife by
Paula McLain, Everything I Never Told You by Celeste Ng;
anything by Meg Wolitzer. Then there are dazzling books like The Great
Gastby by F. Scott Fitzgerald that pack a lifetime of drama into a
hundred pages. Of course, the books that make you laugh from writers like Mindy
Kaling and Aziz Ansari, they are good books too. From the can’t-put-down books
to the change-your-life books to the re-think-everything books to the
can’t-wait-for-book-club books, there are just so many different definitions of
what makes a book good that it’s impossible to boil it down to one simple thing
that suits everyone. Yet every reader knows when they’re reading a good book,
no matter what type of books they prefer. When you find a good book, it’s
something you just know. Some readers have specific must-haves for a book to be
good, like those terrible read-the-last-page-first people (*cough* my mother
*cough*) and they won’t bother reading a book without a happily ever after.
Meanwhile, to someone else the devastating ending is what makes it a good book.
My appetite for good books is broad but as long as I feel satisfied, even if
(spoiler alert) Gatsby dies at the end, to me, it’s a good book.
Is
your creative process more 'inspirational' or 'perspirational'?
Inspiration—100%!
When I get fired up about a new idea for a novel, I might as well say goodbye
to my family and friends for the next couple months because I’m writing in
every spare second and even in the back of my mind while I have to be occupied
with something other than my story. When I was back in Newfoundland a few weeks
ago to do book signings and interviews for The People Who Stay I
got a germ of an idea for a Christmas novel about a big family set in the same
town of Cuddlesville, which readers got a taste of inThe People Who Stay.
In less than a month I’ve plotted out the entire novel and I’m already nearly
100 pages into it. When I’m inspired it’s like I need to get the whole story
out as soon as possible. I write the same way I read a page-turner. I have the
same desire to write about what happens next, the same way I want to read “one
more chapter” until I finish a book at two in the morning.
What
are your thoughts on Newfoundland's literary scene?
There
are certain misconceptions of Newfoundland’s literary scene and I know because
I’m part of the problem. When I think about Newfoundland books, the first thing
that comes to mind is my Pop Anstey’s bookshelf. It’s unfortunate because there
is a new thing happening in “Hashtag NL Books” and there are books being
written and published for a new audience, but we, speaking as part of the
millennial generation, need to start consuming these books and changing our
antiquated perception to encompass the fresh and fun Lisa Moore reality of new Newfoundland
literature. Newfoundland
books aren’t just for your grandfather’s book shelf anymore! Maybe
#NotYourPopsBookshelf will become a trend and change it all overnight. But
probably not.
What's
next on your creative agenda?
I
recently finished a completely out-of-the-box project that I took on to stretch
myself as a writer. I’ve titled it How I Lost My Best Friend and
it’s a cold case thriller about a flight attendant who went missing from a
transatlantic flight in the eighties and now her best friend is trying to
locate her before the missing woman’s mother dies. Though
I should be up to my waist in editing to turn this draft into a polished
manuscript, I’ve instead become completely carried away with my new passion
project, tentatively titled A Girl Named Christmas. I’ve wanted to
write a novel about a big family for years now but it always seemed like it was
too ambitious a project, but with some wind in my sails from the positive
feedback for The People Who Stay I decided there’s no time
like the present. Besides, my mother is probably the single biggest consumer of
Christmas books this side of Montreal, so if nothing else I can potentially use
it as a Christmas gift! I’m really excited about it and I haven’t been able to
stop writing this new novel since I finished plotting it out a couple weeks
ago. Maybe if I can keep up this momentum I can come back for another interview
with Arts East next fall with a new release!
