by Sara Tilley ~ Pedlar Press ~ Review: Halifax Herald, May 2009
More and more, Canada is producing exciting new writers who present the Canadian culture and landscape in ways that are as different and unique as the individuals who write them. With the publication of Skin Room, we can add another writer to the list. Sara Tilley shows us a north that is “white and flat and goes on forever”, a dream-scape of white and snow. I talked with her earlier this week when she was in Halifax for Atlantic Ink: TheWriters’ Festival. Skin Room was shortlisted for the Thomas Raddall Prize for Fiction, an excellent achievement for a first novel.
Like her fictional character, Tilley’s family moved to Sanikiluaq, NWT, when she was in early grade school. Like Theresa, she is pale, white, and there is no way she can slip unnoticed into a class of bronze, black haired Inuit children. “It was a difficult book to write,” said Tilley. “The north was a buried subject for me after we left and no-one talked about it. It was hard, living in the north. I was a supersensitive kid in a class of Inuit teenagers who didn’t want me there. My brother was younger so he slipped under the radar, but I stuck out. I was an easy target.”
Tilley started working on Skin Room in 2001, writing in bits and pieces. At Banff in 2003, she ‘started going at it hard’. Twenty-three drafts and four years later, it was done! “It was a very intense time,” she says. “Theresa is a strong character, damaged but strong, and she kept teaching me things I needed to know. While her view of the world is not mine, I learned from her. Her voice wrote itself and it kept me going.”
Tilley captures the awe of a pre-adolescent girl who is captivated by the northern landscapes, the geography, and who falls deeply and silently in love with Willassie Ippaq, the boy who flicks a pencil at her on her first day, resulting in several stitches in her face. Willassie is a schoolboy, a bully and a sculptor who can “look at a stone and see an animal living inside.” Theresa yearns and loves with a childish simplicity that fully understands the impossibility of the cultural chasm, and an internal sophistication that allows her to hold that love for years after she leaves the north.
Skin Room alternates between the older Theresa who lives in St John’s, and her younger self. Tilley has managed the timelines perfectly. Both realities feel real and immediate. The adult Theresa continues the internal intensity of her connection to the north, mourning as Willassie fades. “... you’ve slipped too far into the past and I don’t have the skill to bring you back.”
“When I was in theatre school at York University, I did a project about problems in our childhoods,” says Tilley. “When my teacher asked how my voice felt, I told her sometimes it feels like there’s a fist in my throat. She encouraged me to write my memories, to get out things that had not been discussed. Once I started, the character took over and I understood that the story was about someone whose memories are still affecting their life a decade later.”
As a reader, there can be anxious moments when we are unable to know where the writer is going, willing them not to cross that line into cultural appropriation. “I worried about that,” says Tilley, “about taking ownership of something that is not mine. But I write from a child’s point of view, as a white child in an alien culture. I grew up there, it was my home and I still connect with the landscape. It’s the landscape I think about.”
Her next novel is also set in the north, Alaska this time. She received an inheritance of letters from her great-grandfather, who kept a daily logbook of his life in Alaska during the gold rush. For 14 years, he noted everything, journaling the minutiae of his daily life. “I am working with this,” she says, “but its taking a long time to transcribe and compile. While it’s definitely a work of fiction, I can feel my great-grandfather, my father’s father, becoming vibrant, coming alive. It’s a little nerve-wracking, opening up family closets, but that’s how life is.”
These days, Tilley is a busy person. As well as the novel in production, she writes, acts, and runs She Said Yes, a small theatre company based in St John’s. “It started as a way to produce my work when I graduated,” she says. “We get enough funding to put on shows and run a dramaturgy program.” She finds theatre production very complementary to writing novels. “They are finite,” she says. “They end!”
Sara Tilley is an actress, playwright, theatre producer and author. Skin Room is her first novel and was short listed for the Thomas Raddall Fiction award at Atlantic Ink: The Writers’ Festival in 2009. She lives in St John’s, Newfoundland.
