Joan Thomas, author of the powerful tour de force Reading by Lightning: A Novel, took the time to answer a few questions about her fine novel, its characters, and some of the powerful literary themes uncovered in the story.
Thanks to Joan Thomas for taking the time to answer the questions, and for providing such illuminating and insightful answers. Thanks as well to Goose Lane Editions for helping arrange this wonderful interview.
What was the background for telling the story of Lily Piper and her family?
Joan Thomas: I created this family as a means of exploring the experiences of my parents’ and grandparents’ generations. The arc of the story is somewhat based on their lives. My grandfather immigrated from England with the Barr colonists, and one of my aunts was sent back to England at 16 to look after her grandmother. But Reading by Lightning did not rise out of family stories as much as out of the absence of them. I never knew my grandfather, and I found my parents and my aunts and uncles extremely reticent and matter-of-fact about all the challenging things they experienced through the depression and the war. My novel was an attempt to write an emotionally intimate story about these events that were so rarely talked about.
The title of the novel is intriguing, and I see the story as a series of lightning flashes of insight by Lily. Is that how you planned the book and what you wanted the title to convey?
Joan Thomas: That is exactly what I intended to imply by the title, although in fact this title was not chosen until the very last minute. When Goose Lane acquired the manuscript, the novel was named Problematica, a term drawn from George’s comments about fossils that have no existing analogous life form. We eventually decided that this notion was too peripheral to the book. Then we settled on This Breathing World, a phrase from Shakespeare’s Richard the III (Lily alludes to it at one point).
But a week before the book went to the printer’s, we discovered the existence of a book with the same title. At that point about 30 different titles were floated in an exchange of e-mails between myself and my editor Bethany Gibson, as well as other Goose Lane staff. Many of the suggested title played with the term “lightning”, as this image is key to the last scene. When I suggested Reading by Lightning, there was unanimous enthusiasm. So I didn’t plan the book around those flashes of insight, just tried to make it a true psychological profile; I think it’s a good metaphor for how we do learn about ourselves.
The parallels to John Bunyon's The Pilgrim's Progress are quite obvious in the novel. Were Lily's life and that of her father intended as echoes of that allegory?
Joan Thomas: Well, funnily, again the references to The Pilgrim’s Progress were only added in the last draft. I had a curious burst of creativity at the last moment and added a couple of thousand words of text, those passages among them. It was a bit like adding that dab of white paint to the eye of a portrait to bring the whole face to life.
I am intrigued that you know The Pilgrim’s Progress as well as you do! My mom was a great reader, and there was a dearth of books around (this was in Carberry, Manitoba, where there was no library at the time) so she just read everything to us that she could put her hands on, and somehow there was a copy of PP in the house. Hearing it as a child was very powerful, and I guess it never left me.
Award winning author Joan Thomas (photo left)
It's intriguing how you chose the ill fated Barr Colony as part of the story. What attracted you to that lesser known part of Canadian Prairie history?
Joan Thomas: I mentioned that my grandfather came with the Barr colonists. This is what I believed growing up, and what drew me to the story. But in fact, I never was able to find his name on the ship’s passenger list, so I’m not sure whether this fact is accurate. In any case, by then I was very drawn to this bit of history—Isaac Barr’s perfidy and narcissism, the nationalist ideology that made the colonists so blind to what really lay ahead for them.
As you may know, Reading by Lightning has just won the Commonwealth Writer’s Prize for Best First Book (Canada and the Caribbean) and I’m off on May 8 to a festival in New Zealand with the regional winners from around the world. I suspect that it was partly this aspect of the novel, this exploration of colonialism, that attracted the Commonwealth judges to the book.
The growth of Lily in mind, body and spirit is central to the novel. How much of her life is autobiographical?
Joan Thomas: Well, none of these experiences are mine, but of course in writing about how a young woman develops a sense of self, I reached within.
The character of George is interesting as the voice of science, and of ideas unknown to Lily. Indeed, he seems like Mr. Worldly in Bunyon's tale. Was that part of George's role in the book, beyond a romantic interest and a mirror version of Russell?
Joan Thomas: Yes, I think you’ve nailed it. In his artless and undiscriminating passion for the world and knowledge of every kind, he’s kind of the antithesis of the narrow, life-denying world Lily came from. I loved writing George. He’s emotionally not quite there yet, but he would have been a brilliant human being in time.
What is next for Joan Thomas?
Joan Thomas: I’m just doing the last revisions on my next book, which is historic fiction. It’s based on the life of a working class girl named Mary Anning, who was born in 1799 in Dorset, England. As a 12 year old, she unearthed the fossil skeleton of a huge marine reptile, an Ichthyosaur—the first recorded find of this species in England. This was 50 years before Origin of the Species, and Mary Anning’s find was perplexing—a dragon? a relic of Noah’s flood?
Anning went on to become an amazingly adept paleontologist, although her reputation was obscured by her sex and social class; all of her finds are credited to the collectors or academics who bought them from her. My novel is based on her life as a young woman, and her relationship with one of the gentlemen she did business with. It is tentatively titled Curiosity, and will be published by McClelland and Stewart in the spring of 2010.
Thanks very much, Wayne. It was a pleasure to hear the response of a reader who approached this book with so much thought and insight.
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Joan Thomas (photo left) has been a regular book reviewer for the Globe and Mail for more than a decade. Her essays, stories, and articles have been published in numerous journals and magazines including Prairie Fire, Books in Canada, and the Winnipeg Free Press. She has won a National Magazine Award, co-edited Turn of the Story: Canadian Short Fiction on the Eve of the Millennium, and has served on the editorial boards of Turnstone Press and Prairie Fire Magazine. She lives in Winnipeg.
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My book review of Reading by Lightning: A Novel by Joan Thomas.
