Interview with

Marina Endicott &
Charlotte Gill
Canadian Women Reading and Writing
February 5, 2009

Marina Endicott was born in British Columbia, grew up in Nova
Scotia and Ontario, and studied acting in London, England,
where she began to write fiction. Endicott returned to Canada
in 1984, working in Saskatchewan as a director and dramaturge
with the Saskatchewan Playwrights Centre. She currently lives
in Edmonton and teaches creative writing at the University of
Alberta. Her novel Open Arms (2002) was serialized on CBC
Radio’s Between the Covers. Her second novel Good to a Fault
(2008) was shortlisted for the Giller Prize. Endicott’s short
stories are widely anthologized. She is at work on a novel about
the Belle Auroras, a sister-trio vaudeville act who toured the Canadian prairies in 1909, as well as series of Young Adult novels
called Time in Hand.

M.E.: I didn’t get stuck on them at all, in fact I went backwards
to them. When I started reading, you won’t remember this,
because it’s a long time ago, but people didn’t have a lot of
books in their houses usually in those days. We didn’t anyway,
although both my parents read enough. But we moved to Nova
Scotia and had a very big old house that had a library in it with
glass-fronted book shelves. So my mother would go to auctions
and buy boxes of books, just boxes of books to fill up these
bookshelves. So I read voraciously and completely catholic.
Whatever was in the shelf was my meat. So I’m probably the
only person you’ll ever meet who’s read all of Marie Corelli.
(Laughter) And it has clearly maimed me. I read Victorian
schlock. It didn’t matter at that point whether it was good or
bad, it mattered that it was new material, it was saving my life,
really, to read. Volume was almost all that mattered but in the
processing of all that volume, I began to like some things better
than other things, and to think about why I liked them better. I
didn’t read, for example, classic children’s books until I was in
my twenties. Wind in the Willows—I was given it and I thought
it was boring. I wanted to read French pornography! (Laughter) And I was eleven. Some of those books, if my mother had
known what was in them, she would have been quite horrified.
I was never forbidden a book. The only children’s book I really
read when I was young were books my parents read to us. Anne
of Green Gables and all the other ones, and then the Narnia
books, which they were very keen on, because they conformed
to their religious ideas of course. And I liked them very much at
the time. Why I go back to YA now—I guess I think that good
YA is the same as good adult fiction. It’s written from a passionate obsession or interest in the subject matter. I love reading
books from every genre and every era, because I do think that
what is good in fiction runs through every genre, it doesn’t stick
only to literary fiction. In fact, during some slow summers at a
cottage I’ve found good Harlequins. It’s the quality of the imagination that is good, whatever that imagination is obsessed with
or bent upon.

Charlotte Gill was born in London, England, but was raised
in Toronto and rural New York State with brief stints in New
Brunswick and Nova Scotia. She earned her B.A. at the University of Toronto and an M.F.A. in creative writing from the
University of British Columbia. Her Masters thesis became her
first book Ladykiller, which was nominated for the Governor
General’s Literary Award and won the Danuta Gleed Award for
best debut short story collection, as well as the B.C. Book Prize
for Fiction. Her work has appeared in many Canadian magazines and anthologies. Gill is currently the 2008-2009 MarkinFlanagan Writer-in-Residence at the University of Calgary and
is working on a non-fiction project, a memoir titled Spade Life.
We had the opportunity to interview Marina Endicott (M.E.) and
Charlotte Gill (C.G.) following an event entitled “Marina Endicott, Charlotte Gill, and Tom Wharton—in conversation,” which
took place at the University of Alberta on Thursday, February 5,
2009.
CanWWR (Clare): We’ll try to conduct this interview chronologically. And this doesn’t have to be one person goes, the other
person goes, we were hoping this could be sort of a conversation. Were you both avid readers when you were children and if
so, what kinds of books did you read? Marina, you were talking
earlier about how you really got stuck early on on the Young
Adult books, and I was wondering specifically why you think
you keep coming back to those?

CanWWR (Clare): So as a child did you start to develop certain
tastes for any writers or genres or titles or was it more, as you
were saying, volume?

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M.E.: I certainly did develop taste, but there weren’t enough
of the books that I wanted. I was addicted to it to the extent of
never being at school without a book on my lap while work was
being done. I was always being sent home for reading at school.
(Laughter)

must take this back” or “Oh no, we can’t afford it,” he got in the
car and drove me down and paid the man right away. That was a
huge thing for me, to have that book that I needed, and for him
to recognize that.
CanWWR (Patricia): And your Dolly actually reads Vanity Fair,
doesn’t she?

C.G.: You could read more at home? I had kind of a parallel situation in the sense that I grew up in a fairly small town
without a book store in it. My parents were doctors and they
were so busy working 24/7 that there wasn’t a lot of leisurely
reading going on in the house, although I think they had a deep
respect for books. So when I was doing a lot of young children’s
reading, it was British classics. So I started out with the Beatrix
Potter books, and a lot of frilly female protagonists, which really
didn’t interest me at all. It wasn’t until I got to my adolescent
years when I really just went looking for books myself. So
around that time all the Judy Blume books were coming out, A
Swiftly Tilting Planet, all of those books were fantastic, the Narnia books I also really loved. I became so attracted to a certain
kind of female protagonist who had a really masculine sense of
swashbuckling. I really loved that; that’s always what I read.
So I don’t know how that influences my writing style or literary
tastes today.

M.E.: Yes. And so did my sister and I when we were eight or
nine. Because we were just reading everything. We read a lot of
Tom Swift, [the protagonist of a series of Young Adult science
fiction novels], don’t get me wrong. (Laughter) There were
no Judy Blumes then, though. Is Are You There God? It’s Me
Margaret her?
CanWWR (Clare): Yeah, that’s Judy Blume.
M.E.: So that was the only one I saw in those childhood years.
Another one that I wanted to mention just because I loved it
so much was Terrible Horrible Edie, by E.C. Spykman. It was
a Scholastic Book and Scholastic was great. Again, we didn’t
have the money to do that often, but from time to time I would
successfully beg and get a book. And Terrible Horrible Edie
was one of the ones I got. It was by E.C. Spykman, who’s an
American writer. The book is set in about 1911. And I think it’s
been a book that has made me a writer and has made me want
to continue writing, and it’s entered into all the books I’ve ever
written. Anything I’ve ever written has had pieces of Terrible
Horrible Edie in it.

CanWWR (Clare): Are you still attracted to the same kind of
characters?
C.G.: I know when I read now I am less interested in characters
who make small movements. I like very drastic, wild reversals
between one kind of life and another kind of life. People who
are stuck in any way—like As for Me and My House. I read that
in my undergrad years and I thought it was tortuous. (Laugher) I
would never pick a book like that to read.

CanWWR (Clare): Wow. Do you still own a copy?
M.E.: I do. I had to send away. It’s not in print anymore.

M.E.: The girl in Good to a Fault, Dolly, reads in the same way
that I read when I was little, and has as much trouble finding
books, and steals them when she needs to. And although I don’t
remember stealing a book, I certainly would have, if it had occurred to me. But the scene where she finds Mistress Masham’s
Repose, the T.H. White book, which I had never heard of before
then of course. And you really very rarely hear about it now, but
the illustrations are just so beautiful, and it’s got a map inside
it. I was being chased home from school, and dodged into an
antique store to save myself, this book was on the counter. Mistress Masham’s Repose—because of the French pornography
thing, I thought, “Well, mistresses, those are good.” (Laughter)
So I looked at that, and then it really turned out to be a children’s book after all.

CanWWR (Devorah): I’m interested to know whether there was
a moment in your life when you knew that you wanted to be a
writer, an event or someone that influenced you? And I was also
wondering if you went to writing because you felt the need to
write, or if writing kind of came to you?
C.G.: I’ll take that one first. I had one of those epiphany moments, which I don’t think very many writers have, and I think
when I talk to people who have had those moments, it’s because
they’ve left it for too long. They felt that somehow they really
wanted to do this thing, and they didn’t even know, what do
you call that thing you want to do? No one’s a writer, that’s like
being a rock star. It’s just unfathomable. So I kind of pretended,
I think, that it wasn’t something that interested me, and I was
in an undergraduate English class, I think it was a Canadian
literature class.

CanWWR (Patricia): How disappointing!
M.E.: No, it was such a good one! So I did ask the man to save
it for me, and he said I could take it home with me. When I got
home, and showed it to my father—they were really quite poor
then and we didn’t buy stuff—and instead of saying, “Oh, you

CanWWR (Patricia): Reading As for Me and My House!
(Laughter)
C.G.: Possibly. I’m sure we did it in that course. I had a young
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professor. It was the first time that I had someone who was still
doing their PhD, and he had a tremendous amount of energy
and he taught us all kinds of things, all kinds of writers that
I otherwise wouldn’t have read. I went to a fairly old-school
Canadian university with an old-fashioned English department,
so he introduced us to lots of new writing and I had never read
anything like it before. And he was talking about his trip to
school one day and how he had been stuck in traffic behind this
garbage truck and there was a man on the back of the garbage
truck kind of pirouetting off the side and picking up a bin and
chucking it into the back, and he was so happy in his job. And
I don’t know why this made me think, “I have to be a writer!”
(Laughter) Then I thought, “Oh my God, this is terrible! This is
the worst thing that could’ve happened to me! Because writers
are poor, right? Writers are really poor. History is full of them.
And then, how do you do it? There’s no rule book, I don’t know
any writers, I can’t go and phone somebody up and ask them
how to do it.” I didn’t have a clue!

New Yorker and that would be it. But I was in Saskatoon when
I had been writing long enough and finally showing my stories to some people who I knew. And one of them said, “Well,
you should go see the Writer in Residence at the library.” And
it was Gertrude Story at the Saskatoon Library and she said,
“You should send this to Grain Magazine.” So I sent it and got
it published right away. To tell you the truth, I sort of thought,
“Well, naturally. Why wouldn’t you?” It wasn’t until later that I
realized that that doesn’t always happen. (Laughter)
CanWWR (Devorah): So what I’m hearing from both of you is
that it started with something very private or secret, or your energies were elsewhere. Charlotte, you mentioned a community
earlier. Did you find one or actively seek one? Did you relish
those early solitude years or find them lonely? Did you find it
hard to find your own voice?
C.G.: I did write alone for many years. And I didn’t really know
any other writers. And whenever I made attempts to join someone else’s community, it just felt wrong, I felt like an outsider. It
wasn’t anything organic, I didn’t know these people as friends.
So it just kind of naturally fell apart. Which is probably a good
thing. You know, writing for that long in isolation you kind of
get used to certain psychological processes, like the learning, the
failing, the learning, the failing. You’re used to a different level
of difficulty that comes later on once you start getting published.
In some ways, the learning curve is still very difficult. And you
need a strong stomach, certainly. But after about ten years of
doing it mostly by myself I thought, “You know, I’m not learning anymore. I don’t really know how this business works. I’m
learning as much as I can by myself, but now I’m just reinventing the wheel. So how am I going to meet some people who are
my peers truly, not people who I’m going to ask to mentor me,
or not people who know less than I do, but some people I can
share information with on a peer-to-peer basis.” So I thought,
“I’ll just go back to school!” So I applied to do a Master’s in
Creative Writing. And I think at that time no one really knew
what that was. Like, you went to school and got another degree
in Creative Writing. Well what’s that? That’s like finger painting
for adults. (Laughter) It’s not a big deal. And that really changed
my life. Being able to share the experience with other people.
Other people found it difficult. I felt bad for a long time because
I thought, “Oh this should be an entirely pleasurable experience!
I should love what I’m doing!” And actually I really couldn’t
stand it. I wanted to pull my hair out half the time. And I found
other people who were also having this experience. “Oh, that’s
just normal. Oh, phew, thank God.”

CanWWR (Devorah): How did you get from that moment of “I
don’t know what to do!” to “I’m doing it.”
C.G.: Well then I started writing. Secretly. I didn’t really tell
anybody I was doing it, and just kind of started collecting enormous volumes of printed material, which I haven’t kept through
my many moves. Then eventually I thought, “Well, maybe I
should try and get this published.” And I did as much research
on how one would do this as you could at the time without the
internet. A lot of bumbling, really. A lot of serious bumbling.
I think if there was a faster way of figuring out how to do it, I
don’t even know if I would have benefitted, because it took me
so long to practice, to get it to the point where it was even readable.
M.E.: Was there a moment when I decided that I wanted to be a
writer? I think I was becoming a writer when I was quite little,
but I wanted to be an actress. And so writing was what I did, but
acting was what I was planning to do. So I spent a lot of time—I
can’t say wasted it, because it was certainly not wasted, and it
was all work on training your imagination and creating a character. But I spent a lot of time pushing towards something that I
wasn’t supposed to be doing. I wrote the whole time that I was
acting. When I was creating a character I wrote volumes about
the character. In fact one of my acting teachers early on said,
“I think maybe you should be a writer.” (Laughter) It’s funny,
because I was in England, still trying desperately to get into the
theatre and they couldn’t have been less interested, and I was
trundling along on the bus between London and Oxford. Outside
the window a flock of birds flew up from the field and it was
like ashes blown off a plate. That’s what it was like! It was the
plate and then the ashes and there were the birds. And I thought,
“I think I’m doing the wrong thing.” (Laughter) So I kept on
acting for a while but writing more, and really I didn’t know
either how you became a writer. How you published. I didn’t
know any of that. I think I thought you sent off a story to The

M.E.: Just an addendum to that little thing about trying to be
an actor and not wanting to be a writer. My daughter is now
thirteen and determined to be an actor and writes forty pages
a night. She’s writing constantly. Every time we say to her,
“Maybe you should think about writing,” she says, “I’m an
actor!” (Laughter) So funny. But the thing about acting and
writing is that when I moved to Saskatoon—which is where I
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found the Writer in Residence—the circles between different
arts intersect very much there, unlike larger cities. There are
just fewer artists. So I knew visual artists and I knew musicians
and I knew a lot of writers, and they were luckily writers that
I really admired. Guy Vanderhaeghe. It was, again, finding a
community of people who were, in my case, not necessarily my
peers, but people who I could talk to and could see as ordinary
workers, not mysterious, but continuing to work, out there every
day doing it and then out drinking at night. I also started, as a
dramaturge, working on other people’s writing and thinking
about their writing as playwrights. And running writing retreats
for playwrights with the Saskatchewan Writer’s Guild Retreat at
Muenster. So every summer I would go to Muenster and run a
two-week writing playwright’s colony.

I’ve completely run out of steam I’ll start attacking my email.
CanWWR (Lindsay): And you’re cross-legged on the couch the
whole time?
C.G.: Well, you know, I get up. But mostly cross-legged on the
couch.
M.E.: Do you have a lap desk? A little pillow thing to put your
laptop on?
C.G.: No, I have a little blankie.
M.E.: I mostly developed my writing process while I had
children. In fact, I started out with the luxury of being taken
away from my working life and taken off into the country with
my husband, who was going to work and I would write, and I
spent two years unable to write, getting it all wrong, writing on
the wrong tangent. And then I had to work because we had no
more money. So, my secret to writing is that I get myself a lot
of jobs and then I don’t do them and I write instead. (Laughter)
The more work I have that I ought to be doing the better I’m
writing, usually, when I’m avoiding money work and doing
the writing work. I write first thing in the morning from 4:30,
5:00 to whenever I have to get the children up and then I write
between all the things I should be doing all through the day. I
never leave my desk, is my secret, I just sit there. And I sort of
work the other way. I’m tentative in the morning and I’m getting
very spidery ideas in the morning and gradually through the day
my work gets stronger, I think. I’m able to do better work in
the evening after a long day of working. And I learned to work
with interruptions. In fact, I have to leave my office door open
because it’s easier for me to work when I can hear what people
are doing out there and then I can get sort of trance-like.

CanWWR (Patricia): At the monastery?
M.E.: Yes, it’s the monastery, St. Peter’s Abbey in Muenster.
Fantastic. So for the first week they would all be writing busily
and I would have no work to do, so I would write short stories.
And then the second week I would actually have to work. But
I had that one week a year of writing in the company of other
people who were all writing. And there were always fiction writers there as well as, and lots of poetry writers. I don’t know if
that answers your question.
CanWWR (Devorah): Yes, it does, it definitely does. Thank you.
CanWWR (Lindsay): Now that we’ve moved into the writer’s
life, I’m wondering about your writing process and hoping you
can describe a typical day. A typical writerly day. (Laughter) Do
you have any rituals? Is there a typical day?
C.G.: Yes, but it’s really embarrassing! (Laughter)
M.E.: Ok, you go first and I’ll see how embarassing it is, see if I
can top you.

C.G.: I always wonder how people manage to write whole
books when they have children. I mean you must have to learn
to work with burping children and phones ringing.

C.G.: Writing routines, ok. I write every day. It’s not always a
pretty sight. I get up in the morning, I drink—

M.E.: Well, that’s the good thing about having children. There’s
a lot of physical work involved but they’re not really engaging
your mind so much. They’re very boring. (Laughter) It’s pretty
well the same stuff most of the time so you can have a pretty
rich inner life, cogitating about whatever your work is on and
then in the four hours—no, not four, what am I saying?—the
hour and a half that they’re asleep and not crying and nobody
else is demanding anything then you work really fast.

M.E.: Voldka? (Laughter)
C.G.: Enough coffee to kill a small child. (Laughter) No food,
though, no food. And I sit on the couch cross-legged in my
pajamas and I just start writing. I mean if I talk to someone or
the phone rings—”Hi, it’s the bank, your cheque bounced” or
whatever—it’s all over. The bubble has popped. It has to happen
first thing in the morning and I can’t go outside or meet any
people. None of the outside world can happen yet. So I try to get
it done in the morning and then usually that’s the more creative
part of my day. I’ll try and get big chunks of visual stuff down
on the page as quickly as I can and then as the day goes along
and I’m losing steam then I’ll start doing the refinements. It’s
just the editing—I call it the secretarial work. I’ll start doing the
line editing, the things I can do at any time of day. Then when

C.G.: So you’re writing when you’re not writing and then
you’re just putting it down on pages?
M.E.: I think so.
C.G.: So you’ve had all day to kind of gel your thoughts.
4

M.E.: Yeah. And all the times when you’re lying beside them
and trying to make them go to sleep or something, you’re sort of
dreaming—less thinking than dreaming—of the story. Because
your mind is not really capable of thinking.

pages; that’s just a completely personal bias.

C.G.: I believe it!

C.G.: I think historically it has been, which is fine. I think it’s
just a question of personal taste. Women do most of the reading
in this country, absolutely they do.

CanWWR (Amy): And would you say that you think a lot of
Canadian women’s writing is fairly domestic?

CanWWR (Amy): Well, we started out with what you read as
children and we want to end up with what you read now. I know
you already discussed this a little bit during the Q&A but since
our project is about Canadian women you could sort of channel
your answers, if you want. Do you read Canadian writing? Do
you read it by women specifically or do you still read everything
you can get your hands on? What genres, what writers? What do
you think about contemporary Canadian writing?

M.E.: It’s funny because I can’t think of any, I mean aside from
my own book, I can’t think of any domestic books by Canadian
women just lately. Your book and Melanie’s book aren’t really
domestic. Aside from Bonnie Burnard’s Good House I’m sort of
blanking on it.
C.G.: Let’s say Carol Shields, for example.

M.E.: I read less volume than I used to. I used to be a 3 or 4
book-a-day person. I used to read all the time and now I’m trying to write instead. But I do read Canadian fiction a lot. I try
to read more than I sometimes manage to read because there’s
an awful lot of it. And there’s an obligation to read a lot of it
because if I’m on a panel with somebody I read their book, if
I’m on a jury with somebody, I read their book, I often review
books. So a lot of the reading that I’m doing is assigned reading in a way and it has to be done. But of course there’s joy in
that as well. I have a lot of women friends in Canada who are
writing books and I get to read their stuff, and a lot of women I
don’t know in Canada whose books I’m reading.

CanWWR (Amy): This is interesting because we did a survey of
some undergraduate students and some graduate students as part
of this project, and we asked them similar questions. Do you
care if it’s men or women writing the books you read? Do you
care where they’re from? And generally people say no.
M.E.: I’d be surprised if people said yes. If they were choosing
books because they’re Canadian.
CanWWR (Amy): Unfortunately, they also seem to believe,
whether or not it’s true, that they only ever read Canadian
women’s writing when they are forced to in class. They had this
idea that they had to read Margaret Laurence in high school,
they had to read Margaret Atwood in university.

C.G.: Can you think of some?
M.E.: Lynn Coady is one that I read with huge pleasure. In fact
when we were talking earlier about which book would you like
to have written I was tempted to say Mean Boy but I thought she
might be a bit embarrassed. I think that book is so perfect.

C.G.: This is what I mean. It’s like books that were published
up to a certain point in Canada ... I think things have completely
changed. And when people say, “Oh, Canadian fiction!” their
eyes roll back in their head. (Laughter) Because they remember
what they had to read in high school, they remember what they
had to read in their undergrad Canadian literature classes. I think
that’s all there was at that time. Canadian literature was just kind
of finding its footing. There was Margaret Atwood and only a
handful of other women writing in Canada. Nobody was being
published in Canada. There wasn’t even Canadian literature in
universities for the longest time. There were American professors teaching British classics and F. Scott Fitzgerald, you know?
So I think we’ve grown a lot and maybe we have some growing
pains.

C.G.: I read about a book a week, which is not outrageous by
anyone’s standards. I read a lot of Canadian fiction and nonfiction. If I can create this completely artificial spectrum with,
on the one hand, very complicated, stylistic work, and then very
thematically rich work on the other hand, I’m more attracted
to the stylistic, experimental work, which tends to be the more
modern stuff. So to me it doesn’t really matter what country it
comes from. I read lots of work in translation. Certainly I try
to keep up with the books that are coming out of Canada every
year and there are more and more of them every year. If they’re
written by a man, if they’re written by a woman, it doesn’t
really matter to me so much. There are certain kinds of stories
that I like more than others. I don’t have children so I don’t
tend to gravitate towards the domestic story that’s just limited
to the house, which is not to say that story never interests me.
If it’s written in a way that’s fresh and startling and surprising
and there are things happening in the story that I’ve never read
before, then I’m completely interested in it. But to me just the
domestic scenario is not enough to keep me going and turning

M.E.: I’d forgotten about Margaret Laurence too. Isn’t that
funny? I’m really trying to make a list in my own head but of
course you can never think of it when someone asks you what
your favourites are. The women writers that I’ve been enjoying
in the last couple of years—as I said the list is mostly people
whose writing is very little based in the home. Maybe it’s just
that the literature has matured, as you say. When I put this book
out I was worried about how domestic it was. In fact, I didn’t
5

really want to write it. I thought who on earth would want to
read about a spinster and a priest? It’s just so deeply grounded in
really boring, ordinary, daily life.

do with the reading demographic or just the way the publishing business seems to work these days. It’s also populated by
women. Women make all the buying decisions, they acquire all
the books.

C.G.: But that’s ok. It’s the way that it’s conceived.

CanWWR (Patricia): And you mentioned earlier that women are
primarily the readers too, in Canada.

M.E.: Absolutely.
C.G.: It’s not that the book is plotless or not plotless but there’s
something about the sensibility of the voice that is very dated in
a way that was so anachronistic compared to literatures of other
countries. I mean, in the 60s and 70s what was going on in the
States was pretty radical stuff and yet we were kind of trapped
in this really backwards-looking way of thinking about ourselves and I don’t know why that is. I don’t why we’ve been so
slow to speak in a voice that’s more recognizable to us. It feels
like “Is this the way people really deal with each other in a marriage or talk to each other in the street?” It felt more artificial
than real.

C.G.: Yes. Everywhere, it seems.
CanWWR (Patricia): Reading is a gendered activity. I was asked
that question when I was at the University of New Brunswick
in St. John recently, talking about Canadian women writers. A
British man in the audience, who was a visiting landscape architect, asked me, “Do only women read these books?” I was quite
taken aback by the question. And I said I didn’t think so. “And
should there be awards just for women?” And I knew it was a
trick question (laughter), so I said, I don’t think so, it should be
open and if women’s book are in the running then they should
be given the award. But it did cause me to think about the degree of circulation of women writers. Maybe they are of interest
primarily to women readers.

M.E.: I have worked with a lot of Canadian women playwrights
and I’d say the opposite was the case in playwriting. A lot of
the more radical voices were women. They were less concerned
with writing “the well-made play” and more concerned with
pushing away at what a play could be and who could be in it and
how the voice could be used.

M.E.: I certainly hope that’s not true. I would hate that to be
true.
C.G.: I hope it’s not true, but anecdotally, I know plenty of men
who would never pick up a recent novel written by a woman.
They just assume there’s nothing in the pages for them. I mean,
it’s not an openly chauvinistic choice—”I would never read a
book by a woman”—but they look at the cover and they say
“There’s nothing in there for me. I’m not going to read that.”

CanWWR (Patricia): Like Sharon Pollock.
M.E.: Connie Gault has written plays where you can’t even
understand what’s going on half way through and then you
suddenly see the whole thing sort of shuffle into sense. Lots and
lots of them.

CanWWR (Patricia): It’s like their response to a chick-flick.
CanWWR (Amy): Chick-lit is a thing now too.

CanWWR (Amy): That’s definitely supported by what we’ve
found in the other part of our project, a database of Canadian
women’s writing from 1950. It’s all genres, everything we can
find. We’re obviously still working on it because it’s a huge
amount of stuff but one thing that’s really interesting is how
suddenly the volume of titles grows in the 70s.

M.E.: I’m hoping that’s an ending thing now. I think it was a
thing about three years ago and that it was a bad thing. A lot of
bad books came out of it and a lot of good books got categorized
as chick-lit when they shouldn’t have.

M.E.: It expodes.

CanWWR (Amy): They get those covers slapped on them and
then they get relegated on that basis.
CanWWR (Clare): Marginalized.

CanWWR (Amy): It really explodes. But the awards are the
other thing that are really interesting because we keep track of
which works have won which major Canadian awards. And they
also explode.

M.E.: That’s an attempt to make money, really. It’s seen as a
way to sell a lot of books so manuscripts were packaged as
chick-lit that shouldn’t have been.

C.G.: I think statistically women are dominating the literary
industry in Canada these days. Women are nominated a hell of a
lot of times, Margaret Atwood in probably the best paid author
in Canada right now. I think the best known poet in Canada is
also a woman. I don’t know if those standards—a glass ceiling
for women, or women can only get so far—I don’t think that
even really exists anymore. I don’t know whether that has to

CanWWR (Patricia): You’ve been really generous with your
time, Marina and Charlotte. Thank you very much.

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