Sarah Canary
by Karen Joy Fowler
List Price: $13.95
Pages: 320
Format: Paperback
ISBN: 0345416449
Publisher: Ballantine Books
Karen Joy Fowler, A PEN/Faulkner and Dublin IMPAC nominee, is the author of Sarah Canary, The Sweetheart Season, Black Glass: Short Fictions, and Sister Noon.
Fowler, born on February 7, 1950, lived in Bloomington, Indiana--where her father was a professor of psychology--until she was eleven years old. "Bloomington lives in my mind as a sort of Oz-like place where I caught fireflies and watched lightning and ran around. None of the yards were fenced, so we could play games that covered massive amounts of territory." She then moved to Palo Alto, California, and was outraged to find that all the yards were fenced. "As part of growing up, I suppose, the things I was expected to do got smaller and smaller anyway, in the same way that the territory I was allowed to occupy got smaller and smaller because of the differences between California and Indiana."
She majored in political science at the University of California at Berkeley, and had her first baby at twenty-three during the last year of her master's program at the University of California at Davis. After completing her master's degree, she entered what she refers to as her "child-rearing years." Though she loves her two children with an intensity that still amazes her, Fowler--then thirty years old--began to feel restless. She decided to take a dance class to reclaim some territory of her own. "And it was only after I realized that I wasn't going to make it as a dancer that I took a creative writing class in Davis."
Fowler began to publish science fiction stories. She soon made a name for herself in the sci-fi community with the publication of Artificial Things, a collection of short stories. She then wrote her first novel, Sarah Canary, a critically acclaimed book that she hoped would bridge the gap between mainstream and science fiction. Fowler considers her second novel, The Sweetheart Season, to be "a romantic comedy with historical and fantastical elements."
In 1991, Fowler, along with science fiction writer Pat Murphy, created the James Tiptree Jr. Memorial Award which, in Fowler's words, "is presented annually to a short story or novel that explores or expands our understanding of gender...both to honor Alice Sheldon [the science fiction author who used the pen name James Tiptree] and to remind the field of its own importance in the continual struggle to re-imagine more livable sexual roles for ourselves." Karen Joy Fowler, who lives in Davis and now writes full time.
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Q: Where did you derive the inspiration for Sarah Canary?
Karen Joy Fowler: I had picked up the first volume of a three-volume history of Tacoma, Washington, thinking to myself, Who could write a three-volume history of Tacoma? And I found an account, from 1873, of an Indian who murdered a Chinese cook at an insane asylum. The Indian was sentenced to hang for his crime, but the white settlers were nervous about carrying out the sentence. So they persuaded a Chinese man who happened to be in the area to do the actual hanging for them. It was only one paragraph long, but it really struck me. First I thought, What an ugly story--what an odd way for the three races to come together. And then I thought, Why did this Chinese man agree to carry out the sentence? There were no names given in the account and I knew I would never, through research, find an answer. If I wanted an explanation, I would have to make one up. That's how I started with Sarah Canary and that's how I developed the character of Chin.
Q: In reviewing Sarah Canary, critics have compared your style to John Dos Passos, Jack London meets L. Frank Baum, E. L. Doctorow, and Francine Prose. Who are your influences?
KJF: I'm not sure if I even know who my influences are. There are so many writers I love, including Francine Prose. But I did read all of Baum's Oz books, and I did base the plot of Sarah Canary on The Wizard of Oz--with Sarah Canary as Dorothy, Chin as the scarecrow, Adelaide as the lion, and B.J. as the tinman. Harold, of course, is the wicked Witch. I used that book quite consciously as a model to help me get from one end of my own book to the other. Only a few very discerning reviewers noticed.
Q: How would you describe your process of writing?
KJF: Very, very slow. Sarah Canary took me two years to write. I start in the morning by going for a long walk with my dog, while I collect my thoughts and try to focus in a very specific way on what I'm going to write that day. When I return from the walk and sit in front of the computer, I'm still collecting my thoughts and it's still difficult to start. I'll get up and walk around the room, eat, pace, do this and that. Having a plot and characters in mind still doesn't make it easier. I get up and sit down on and off all day long. At the end of an eight-hour day of working--I'll have spent about four or five hours on actually writing and rewriting--I'll have about two pages. I intensely dislike doing first draft work, although I love to rewrite.
Q: Why don't you reveal the identity of Sarah Canary?
KJF: The paradigm of the book is that what you perceive has more to do with who you are than what you're looking at. Everyone in the book has a different explanation for who Sarah Canary is, based on who they need her to be or wish her to be. If I, as the author, revealed her true identity, I would be putting myself beyond my own paradigm. I would be claiming to be more perceptive, more clear-headed, more intelligent than Chin or Adelaide or B.J. I would never abandon my characters that way. Besides, I really believe in the paradigm. I believe in my own limits.
Q: How did you come to choose the characters of Sarah Canary--a Chinese railway worker, a suffragist, a mental patient?
KJF: I admire outsiders. And one of the things I wanted to play with was the literary convention of the minority sidekick in popular fiction, like Kato or Tonto. I hate the implication that these characters, their lives and concerns, are of a secondary magnitude of importance. As a reader, and also as a movie-goer, I frequently find the hero actually quite annoying. So I wanted to reverse the convention--in Sarah Canary the white man is the sidekick and the Chinese man the hero. Yet nobody in the book who meets them understands this. This is another example of the way people's perceptions are shaped by what they expect.
Q: Before writing Sarah Canary, you were known as a science fiction and short story writer. Why the departure of style and genre?
KJF: I think I'm writing the sort of thing I was always writing. Sarah Canary was plotted like a string of short stories and can also be read as a science fiction novel. Again--The book is about perception and I thought it would be nice if, taken as a whole, it bore out its own premise. Wouldn't it be great, I thought, if for those who picked it up expecting a science fiction novel, that's what it would be, and for those who expected mainstream, it would be that? So if you're a science fiction reader, I wanted you to see Sarah Canary as an alien in what we call a "first-contact" book. On the other hand, if you are a mainstream fiction reader, I wanted you to see it as a mainstream book in which the mystery of Sarah Canary is never solved. She could be supernatural, as Chin thinks, or horrific, as Harold does, or human, if you agree with Adelaide. All equally legitimate interpretations.
Q: So to the reader of science fiction Sarah Canary is most definitely an alien?
KJF: Yes. Sarah Canary has been sent here on a mission but has been improperly trained for it. She looks human--she can pass a visual test--but whoever this alien race is, they really haven't understood us well enough to know what would be required to pass as a human being. So the lack of imagination goes both ways. The people that she comes into contact with can't really imagine what she is about or what she wants, and whoever has sent her here is equally mystified about us.
Q: Why does Sarah Canary try to elude all who come into contact with her? Why must she be chased? If she is an alien sent here to gather information about us, why does she seem so uninterested in the humans with whom she comes into contact?
KJF: An assumption that a lot of science fiction makes is that we would be the most interesting thing on the planet. That's being called into question here. Sarah Canary seems more taken by the seals.
Q: Who do you perceive Sarah Canary to be?
KJF: I don't really see her as a character. Her moods and her impact are more random. I see her as force--like the weather.
Q: One of the themes of Sarah Canary is the clash between the sexes. The character Adelaide Dixon, the "Chautauqua- circuit suffragist," is maligned by both men and women for her "feminist beliefs." In ninteenth-century America, strong, independent women, particularly suffragists like Adelaide, were not taken all that seriously. At one point in the story, Adelaide says that "the women men really desired [were]: imprisoned, untouched and half-alive." In light of the recent antifeminist backlash, do you believe that America's perception toward women--feminists in particular--has changed?
KJF: You can't study the late 1800s without noticing how many advances for women were undone as quickly as they were won. Nothing in the current wave of feminism is any more radical in theory than that of a hundred years ago. And yet I do think, I have to think, that we've made enormous progress in extending opportunities for women and that we won't see those opportunities revoked. Nevertheless the level of hostility directed at women who are successful does astonish me sometimes. The amount of venom directed at Hillary Clinton, for example, just astounds me. I can't account for it. But progress is never clean and it's never easy and it's never made without the concomitant creation of enemies. I think that positive change has occurred and will continue to occur--I think that there are enough men and women committed in this country to these changes. But, of course, I can see that there are many cultural, political, and religious enemies that this progress creates.
Q: You intertwine your narrative with chapters of actual recorded history, but the facts as you relate them take on an almost surreal quality. What is your intention in doing this?
KJF: Well, to give you an example...I read a contemporary account of Victoria Woodhull, who was apparently touring lumber camps in the Washington Territory during the period in which the book is set. As nearly as I can decode the rather cunning language of this account, I think she was lecturing to lumbermen on the rights of women to have orgasmic sex. This is a bizarre and wonderful thing to think about. Not what you find in your usual high school history book. One of the things that really struck me was that I had this impression in my mind about how restrictive the roles of women were in the Victorian age. But the more I read the more I discovered individual women leading lives of wild abandon and adventure. The kind of history we study is often the kind of history that leaves the odd fact and the odd person out. I really love history but what I love is the kind of history that might be reported in the National Enquirer, the kind that you don't quite believe even as you read it. The sort of stuff that seems too strange to be true. I loved the stories of the people who worked and lived out on the edges. I like the idea of those who don't really fit into society carving a space for themselves--I wanted to explore how they do it, where they do it, and how successful they are at creating their own world with their own rules.
Q: One of the messages of Sarah Canary is that America hasn't changed since the nineteenth century--we still persecute those who are different, we still try to outsmart nature, and so many of our leaders are brought down by sexual indiscretion. Why do you think history repeats itself and that man does not learn from his mistakes? Is it all just human nature?
KJF: Well, all I know about human nature is how it looks from the inside. What interests me about our sexuality is my sense that we've never been able to create a society which maximizes the positive aspects of our sexuality and minimizes the dangers of it. I can't even imagine such a society. Take the leader of a church who's made a reputation preaching restraint, abstinence, and discipline to other people. How could such a person be so stupid as to then get caught in an infidelity or indiscretion? Yet they are, they do. It seems we're always falling--men and women both--down the rabbit hole, to use an obvious metaphor, of our inexplicable, irrational, unreasonable sexual impulses, which seize us so powerfully that we suddenly risk everything. Wouldn't it be great if society were structured in such a way as to make this really admirable? Well, admirable is probably too much to ask, but it does have its own forlorn sort of courage.
Q: As a teacher of science fiction at Stanford, as a mother, as a woman, as a student of political science, how does your life inform your writing?
KJF: Actually the border between my life and my writing is so porous as to hardly exist. Sometimes when my life is hard and unhappy, my writing is a wonderful place to get away from it. When something in my life angers me I can use my writing to respond. And then I can rewrite my response several times until I appear both clever and right.
Q: What are you currently working on?
KJF: I'm writing my third novel. I'm back in San Francisco in the nineteenth century again. I'm doing a lot of research, which I love, about odd events, like the Crockers' spite fence, the diamond-field scam, and the Sarah Althea Hill divorce case, which went on for years and ended with her attorney (who was also her husband) murdered and she, herself, incarcerated in an insane asylum. The trick is to try to make up anything half as interesting.
Q: What do you want your readers to get out of Sarah Canary?
KJF: Truly, I try first and above all else to write books I think would be fun to read. I always maintain that I'm extremely funny and, although I clearly have my dark and brooding side, my main hope always is that the book will be entertaining.
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Excerpted from Sarah Canary © Copyright 2009 by Karen Joy Fowler. Reprinted with permission by Ballantine Books. All rights reserved.
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