Author Eden Robinson. Photo Steve Carty.
Eden Robinson is convinced that sharing a birthday (Jan. 19) with Dolly Parton and Edgar Allan Poe accounts for her dual nature. In person, she has Parton’s earthy exuberance. She’s bubbly and funny, with a distinctive laugh that starts as a shy giggle and then swells to a room-filling crescendo. But in print, she’s Poe on smack: dark, disturbing and frequently bloody.
Of Haisla and Heiltsuk heritage, Robinson was born and raised in Kitamaat Village, on the central coast of B.C., where she currently resides. Her gift for the macabre was revealed in her first book, Traplines (1996), a collection of gritty short stories written when she was a student in the University of British Columbia’s esteemed creative writing program. The book’s centrepiece is the novella Contact Sports, about a sadistic sociopath named Jeremy and his obsession with his striving-to-be-good younger cousin Tom. Traplines became an international sensation, and received a nod from the New York Times as a Notable Book of the Year. In 2000, Robinson followed up with her first novel, Monkey Beach, about a young woman’s search for her missing brother, an aspiring athlete believed to have drowned. Set on the Kitamaat reserve, the novel (which was nominated for both a Giller Prize and a Governor General’s Award) mixes social realism with visits from spirit beings. It’s a kind of Northwestern Canadian Gothic, with a reach into both the contemporary and mythic worlds.
Blood Sports, Robinson’s latest book, revisits the characters from Contact Sports. It’s five years later: with Jeremy in prison, Tom and his recovering junkie girlfriend Paulie (Jeremy’s ex) have established a peaceful, if fragile, life for themselves and their baby daughter on Vancouver’s East Side. But their idyll is short-lived. Jeremy is due to be paroled and his former drug-dealing associates drag Tom and his family into a violent power struggle. With spare, taut writing and scenes of torture that would make Spanish Inquisitor Torquemada proud, Robinson has conjured up gripping, page-turning horror in the vein of early Stephen King.
In Toronto on her book tour, Robinson talked about sociopaths, Buffy the Vampire Slayer and her occasional frustrations with her sinister muse.
A: I still can’t figure that out. I thought that the story was done, I really did. After Monkey Beach I had started work — I did years of research — for a new novel. But I think that I wanted to give Tom a better ending. I started writing his back story, and then came more back story. And then I named it Blood Sports. Once it was named, it took over. Finally, I said, “Okay, let’s make this conscious. I’m writing this as my next novel.”
A: Yes. It’s called Death Sports. It took about 10 years to finish that first novella — I went through about 30 drafts — and then another few years for this book, so I have a soft spot for the story. At this point, I feel like Tom is a really good friend and I’d hate to end it where I did in Blood Sports. The secret optimist in me is pining for Tom and Paulie to have a really good ending.
A: It is very hard to escape your past. I guess it really is a secret optimism that I have. [Laughs] Blood Sports was actually lighter than I expected it would be. My editor and I took out pages and pages of the story that were really brutal. Tom and Paulie’s optimism inspired me to try to find a happier ending.
A: Partly it’s my influences. My mother is a huge true crime fan. I grew up with a lot of True Detective and True Romance in the house. I’m a fan of Stephen King, of course. It sounds funny, but I could relate to his characters. Horror and surreal elements aside, King’s books are full of working-class people who have shitty jobs and live in small towns. They’re people I would know. And, then, when I was in Grade 4, my teacher loved Poe and taught us his work. I don’t know if that would happen today; he might be considered too scary. But I think in Grade 4, kids are actually quite bloody. I loved it.
The other part is that I think we all have mildly sociopathic tendencies. You have to develop a certain distance to get through modern life. There are so many horrible, horrible things that we see every day around us and on the news. If we couldn’t pull back, if we were totally empathetic and sympathetic, we couldn’t walk down the street without being broken by the end of it. It’s a coping mechanism. There are moments when empathy becomes overwhelming and I think [that ability to shut down] is one of the things we were given, along with adrenaline, as a survival tool. In that way, we’re closer to darker aspects of ourselves than we’d like to think. Slipping into that kind of emotional shutdown is not that difficult.
Wow, I’m listening to myself and thinking, how is that going to translate in the interview? Eden Robinson thinks anyone could be a sociopath! [Laughs] But it’s true!
A: Oh my God, yes! Absolutely. I’ve really fought it. I tried writing a Harlequin romance quite early on and the main character developed an obsession with power tools and self-mutilation. I figured that by then I had strayed from the [Harlequin] formula, so there was no point in going further.Courtesy McClelland & Stewart.
There’s usually this weird point when I’m so immersed in the writing that that world seems normal and mine seems slightly strange. I couldn’t write any of the violent or abusive situations when I was staying with my sister [CBC Newsworld host Carla Robinson] and her two young kids. It felt too creepy. But any other time, the story just keeps going in the back of my head.
It’s funny. This was supposed to be an incredibly erotic book. There were supposed to be long scenes of tender love between Tom and Paulie, but I found out very soon that I was really bad at writing that. Sadly, it was the violence and the torture that came so easily. [Laughs] The strange gifts that one is given. Through Blood Sports, I’ve learned that my gifts as a writer are for character, mood, dialogue and violence. A talent for erotica and plot would be so much nicer. But fighting it just seemed to lead to writer’s block and frustration.
A: It’s not conscious. I happen to be a huge TV-aholic in recovery. All these pop-culture references are constantly floating around in my head and so my characters are always aware of what’s happening around them in terms of music or movies or TV. I have an amazing amount of memory storage for the inane stuff. I took chemistry for years, but I couldn’t remember a formula to save my life. But for Buffy the Vampire Slayer, episode number 23, I have perfect recall.
A: Well, I know I won’t be invited to carry the Olympic torch in 2010. Some of the new fiction that tackles urban life gets marginalized or radicalized. I was very aware that this book might be a hard sell. But my muse just doesn’t migrate to happy, perfect places. When I reached for locations, it was the places that were familiar, places where I lived or had family. I do love Vancouver and the neighbourhoods I write about and I hope that comes through. East Vancouver is my milieu. It’s not foreign to me. University was strange. That was the first time I met people who’d never struggled. People who didn’t know the price of a loaf of bread. I thought those people only existed on TV.
Rachel Giese writes about the arts for CBC.ca.
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