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Adrianne Harun: Some years ago, I heard a radio interview with a writer who’d recently published a book on places NOT to vacation. He mentioned Highway 16 in British Columbia, and I was stunned into listening more closely. I’d been up through Northern BC before and considered it one of the most beautiful places on earth. Then he began talking about missing girls and women. For decades, girls and women have gone missing or been found murdered near Highway 16, also now called the Highway of Tears. Worse, those cases were, at that time, all unsolved. Worse still, many believed that they’d gone largely uninvestigated because most of the victims were indigenous women and girls. I found my way to a website about the Highway of Tears and fell down that rabbit hole. It was like an online scream, with many photos of the missing and murdered, some of them children, many young mothers who left children behind. The situation haunted me, and really, I think it should haunt everyone.But I’m a lousy journalist, and I also didn’t want to co-opt a real family’s tragedy. So I struggled to find a way to write towards this situation, to call attention to it, without trying to own or define it or even be polemical about it. I wanted more than anything to make the situation and that world emotionally felt. At the same time, such tremendous evil—whether it be personal or systemic or cultural—called up questions I wanted to explore about how much control we might have over our actions, about the nature of good and evil. This will sound ridiculously grand, but I wanted the characters to be alive and to keep living in the reader’s consciousness.
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Eudora Welty—what a compliment. Thank you. I love, too, that you speak of tenderness towards the characters—and of the characters as “souls.” I do think of the world, our experiences in it, as “porous”—that is, I believe we invent a lot of the separation we build between seen and unseen worlds to protect ourselves from a kind of chaos. I’m not a believer in any one god tied to an institution, but I do believe in energy, consciousness, and human volition, all of which can take us closer to—oh, a Higher Self or… well, you know, exactly the opposite. I don’t fully believe in forces acting upon the character, but I do heartily believe that energy is there, not just lurking but fully active. “Look sharp,” Leo wants to warn his dear ones. Me, too. Me, too.
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Magical realism is used so offhandedly these days, it seems. Any time a story deviates from the instantly recognizable, the label hovers. I persist in thinking magical realism is a specific mode, one that represents the world as it truly is. The walls we build between real and unreal, seen and unseen are probably necessary most of the time for mental health, but that doesn’t mean the unseen is not real. As I often say, c’mon, we disappear each night for hours, our consciousness landing in places that are not “real,” we fall in love, we grow old, we feel huge surges of emotional upheaval, we measure our lives by the invisible counter of Time. These are inseparable from human experience, but they also feel like spells.The devil is often directly mentioned or alluded to, and characters that seem to possibly represent him influence the actions of other characters in the novel. (It occurs to me that I have an aversion to even bringing up the devil; it makes me uncomfortable.)
I think you’re right to feel uncomfortable. Here’s something funny: We’re trained not to mention evil as if we might conjure and give it substance through our thoughts. Yet we are also trained to think of such conjuring as nonsense. All of us have felt it, if just in a passing acquaintance, in public figures, in varying degrees. An extreme example: My husband and I were once traveling, sleeping in the car or in out-of-the-way campgrounds, only once feeling ill at ease. No, ill at ease is too pale a phrase. At one point, we stopped in a roadside turnout to eat lunch. A van pulled in and parked at the other end of the turnout, an ordinary van with an ordinary-looking fellow driving. Almost without a word to each other, we stuffed our sandwiches back in the bag, all but ran into the car, and fled. Only miles down the road could we catch our breath, the dark feeling coming from that van was that intense. Years later, we still remember how quickly we moved, how it seemed as if we were pushed, and how when we finally could talk, we could not give name to the terror that occupied that oh-so-ordinary van. Later, we learned that area had been the hunting ground of a particular murderer who preyed on young couples. True story.
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