Interviews, Reviews & Adventures
INTERVIEWS & PROFILES
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The eleven stories collected in Watermark upend expectations. They are quite varied—specific worlds yet all grounded in coastal geographies—with settings on the Atlantic and Pacific coasts, even the shorelines of Hudson Bay. Natural beauty comes with bleakness and danger: the sea as a source of wonder and peril, the remote mountain roads.
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In her new collection of short stories—already in its second printing—Christy Ann Conlin explores connections between water, life and death.
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Now here's a question for you reader: Why do male authors seem to get so much more press and win so many more literary prizes? I've never heard of Christy Ann Conlin, but the Toronto Star said that the book should come with the warning, "Excess of Talent," and I think the reviewer is right. The Globe and Mail named it one of the best books of 2002.This is Conlin's very first novel, which is on par with Hage's first effort in terms of the quality of the writing. So where's Conlin's international award?
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How does your writing inform the radio show?
I think they’re cousins, or direct relations, as we say in Nova Scotia.I love talking to people and I love writing. It felt like the radio show was very much a beautiful marriage of these two things. I find people fascinating, and that’s why I became a writer. Why do people do what they do? I think that drives writers. In radio, that’s what you’re doing, too, trying to learn through people’s stories what it means to be human.
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I won the B+A prize for my first short story. I got $500 and the story in print. I was over the moon. It felt unreal to see my words on a magazine page. I went to a fancy Toronto night and got to hang out with Alistair MacLeod who told me to stay true to my voice. The story became the prologue to my first novel Heave. The full short story, “Beyond All Things Is the Sea,” is a story in Watermark.
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In conversation with acclaimed East Coast writer Christy Ann Conlin. Her superb collection of short fiction, Watermark, is out this month with Astoria. The book is chock-full of Conlin’s trademark touch and ability to create empathy for her complicated, hard-luck characters.
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And as much darkness as there is in my books, in all these stories are these little threads of hilarity, like little beams of sunshine those characters coast on to ultimately, I think, be triumphant in their own lives.
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Gothic beauty and brutality of the Nova Scotia she lived in represented on the page.
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George Saunders talks about keeping the magic of a story throughout the writing process, and by extension, creating that experience for the reader. I see this as fictional sparkle, which is embedded in an artistic honesty which allows each story to find its own shape and form.
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Christy Ann Conlin should be glowing with happiness this evening after her wonderful reading from her new short story collection. (She even sang! Because she CAN.)
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We really can never come home again, even though we can see it, but there is also that sense of yearning for something bigger than what we have come from.
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Here, Conlin shares the music and artifacts that helped breathed life into this “coming of age story with elements of ghost stories, haunted houses, family curses and folk tales.
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The domestic life of women has spawned some of the world’s best short stories. The Annapolis Valley has been a persistent muse for Conlin even after she first left Nova Scotia to live abroad at age 17.
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Q: If your walls could talk, what would they say?
A: ‘Do these people ever stop laughing?’
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Your stories are very much informed by the geography around you, but they also definitely transcend ‘regional’ writing. How has your landscape so imprinted itself on you that it must be in your stories?
WATERMARK, short story collection, House of Anansi
Globe and Mail: Christy Ann Conlin’s Watermark examines the Every Tyrant and the Marks They Leave
Sarah O’Connor Writes: Watermark is an absolutely astounding short story collection
The Unexpected Twists and Turns: I've been a fan of this writer ever since I read Heave, her first novel in 2002. Both Heave and The Memento, Conlin's second novel, are set in the Annapolis Valley of Nova Scotia, a place I visited about five years ago with my family just to get a view of the "Mountain," or mountains that flank the Valley, with its dark forestland and picturesque fields that unfold onto the shores of the Bay of Fundy.
HEAVE, a novel, Doubleday
A SAMPLER -- STORIES, ESSAYS, & ADVENTURES
VIDEOS
Displacement of Bodies in Time, a short film by Julian Bowers & Christy Ann Conlin
Watch Here
Sisters in Outlaw – The Doc Project, a podcast by Christy Ann Conlin
Listen Here