Carol Shields took a sabbatical from her University
of Manitoba teaching job last year, but it was hardly a time of
quiet reflection.
Instead, Shields was the centre of international literary attention
when her 1993 novel, The Stone Diaries, was shortlisted for the
Booker Prize. The story of a Canadian everywoman whose life spans
the history of the 20th century, The Stone Diaries eventually spent
40 weeks on the bestseller list and garnered Shields the Governor
General’s Award for fiction.
Shields also spent part of her sabbatical writing a screenplay
based on her 1992 novel The Republic of Love, which is a Guardian
Fiction Prize winner.
“I’d much rather write novels, I’d just rather!” Shields
said during a recent Edmonton visit. “I’m not very
film-literate. I don’t go to many movies, and I’m always
disappointed in them.”
Ironically, Shields’ novels seem to lend themselves to film
projects. Cynthia Scott (A Company of Strangers) is slated to direct
The Stone Diaries for the National Film Board while a British-Canadian
consortium is working on Swann: A Literary Novel.
Shields focuses on telling the stories of ordinary people. Her
fascination with the biographical style of fiction writing arose
from her university masters thesis work on Ontario pioneer Susanna
Moodie.
“I had just finished my masters on Susanna Moodie and I
ended up with far too much material, and the most interesting material
was conjectural and I couldn’t use it,” Shields said. “Being
the daughter of a thrifty mother, I wondered what I could do with
all this stuff. So I decided I would write a novel about a woman
who was writing a biography of Susanna Moodie. That was my first
novel, about a woman who was a biographer and who was trying to
deal with the material, so I was able to use some wonderful stuff.”
Much of The Stone Diaries is set in rural Manitoba at the beginning
of the 20th century, but Shields concentrated on portraying Daisy
Goodwill as an individual and not as a metaphor for historical
movements.
“You’re not constructing someone who epitomizes the
whole period. You’re just taking one woman. I suppose I just
go with the notion that people’s needs were very much the
same then as they are now: the need for basic security, the need
for someone to love,” Shields said. “The human personality
hasn’t changed that much.”
Certainly, people’s opportunities have changed. Shields
did research real-life pioneer biographies to help construct Daisy
Goodwill.
“Now these aren’t great books. These are amateurs
who wanted to write their lives, and the public library has a little
shelf of these good/bad books, as it were. I have to say I love
them. They’re like primitive biographies. Actually most people
don’t know how to tell their own story. But they’re
full of revelations between the lines, so I didn’t use half
or a quarter of what I came across.”
Shields’ fascination with the interconnectedness of strangers
is probably best illustrated by the intersecting streets and winding
rivers of Winnipeg in The Republic of Love. Shields, who grew up
in Chicago and has lived in Vancouver, Toronto and Ottawa, says
she likes the sense of community she had found in Winnipeg.
“I found that right away, as soon as I got there (in 1980)
and started going to gatherings of any sort. People were always
knowing each other’s great-uncles, or making connections,
like having gone to varsity, as they called it, together,” Shields
says. “I was always fascinated by that kind of network because
I’d always lived in larger cities, and cities where people
were more transient, although where I grew up it was a very, very
stable population.
“Whenever I go downtown in Winnipeg, I always meet someone
I know. When I go to the airport I always do. And I love it. I
know there are people who don’t life it, and find it intrusive,
but I adore it.”
Shields and her husband recently returned to Winnipeg after her
15-month sabbatical.
Shields is teaching at the University of Manitoba and has just
begun a new novel.
While her work has been recognized with honours, awards and much
media attention in the past year, Shields says the great reward
of the writing process is the process itself.
“It is the process. It’s not the finished book in
publication. I always think of Jean Renoir, the filmmaker, not
the artist, saying, ‘art is making’. That’s exactly
how I think of it.
“I think I am making something when I’m writing a
book, sort of pushing it into shape and moving it around a little
bit. That’s where the pleasure is, because when you’re
closed in, you’re really like you’re living in a different
place. And it’s a nice place to live, you know, to walk around
with this big construct in your head all the time. I can’t
wait to get back into it again.”
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