About the Author

Joan Barfoot is the award-winning author of 11 novels, ranging from Abra (republished in 2026 as Gaining Ground), which won the Books in Canada (now Amazon) prize for a first novel, to Critical Injuries, longlisted for the Man Booker Prize and shortlisted for the Trillium Award, to Luck, shortlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize.

Her work, which reviewers have variously called ‘harrowing and hilarious,’ and ‘gloriously subversive,’ has been compared internationally to the fictions of Carol Shields, Anne Tyler, Margaret Atwood and Margaret Drabble, and also include Dancing in the Dark, which was adapted into an award-winning Canadian entry in the Cannes, Toronto, and New York Film Festivals, Duet for Three, Family News, Plain Jane, Charlotte and Claudia Keeping in Touch, Some Things About Flying, Getting Over Edgar, and Exit Lines.

Translations include French, German, Italian, Russian, and various Scandinavian languages. In English, the novels have been published in the U.S. and U.K., as well as Canada.

A recipient of the Marian Engel Award, she has also been a journalist during much of her career. She lives in London, Ontario, Canada.

Awards

Shortlisted, 2005 Scotiabank Giller Prize
Longlisted, Man Booker Prize, 2002
Shortlisted, Trillium Book Award, 2001
Marian Engel Award
Books in Canada First Novel Award
Honorary doctorate, Western University, 2013
Huron University College Medal of Distinction, 2005
London YM-YWCA Women of Distinction Award, 1986

Why I Write Fiction

Here are some things I’ve liked about writing fiction:

  • That I get to live inside other lives, not only my own. This is a kind of dehydrated reincarnation: add words and stir;
  • That it’s a way of testing some themes I think I discern in the world. These include simple surprise: that a life can turn on a dime, that every human contains a multitude of possibilities, that the rubbing of one against another creates a friction of change, that, mainly, you just never know;
  • That what we see is not necessarily there, what we hear is not necessarily true, and memory is edited and unstable and unreliable. But that this isn’t terrible, but interesting, and often awfully funny, as well;
  • That the unlikeliest people are entirely capable of extremes, and are also most naked and pared-down when they’re standing at the edges.

Some readers (and reviewers) recognize and live all this sort of thing, some decidedly don’t. The best personal thing about writing fiction is that unlike the rest of life, the work, whatever it is and for as long as it’s being created, belongs only to the writer. After it goes into the world, readers bring their own lives to bear and become co-creators—which is when things can really get interesting.

Frequently Asked Questions

Here are some of the favourite questions people ask all writers, and some of the answers I’ve tended to give:

A: Virtually none, in terms of events, characters and most dialogue. Now and then I do steal a habit or an expression from myself or someone I know, but I never “use” people who exist in my world, or their lives.

For one thing, while lots of writers feel justifiably otherwise, I don’t figure when friends and family entered my life and vice versa that they signed up to be material. For another, I already have my own life. One of the joys of writing is exploring other lives that aren’t mine.

That said, the other answer to how much is autobiographical is, everything. This doesn’t refer to surface events or actual people, but to everything so far that I’ve noticed and absorbed and thought about and felt, transformed and translated into some other person’s life history.

When people point out that writing instructors tend to suggest, “Write what you know,” I say, “But what you know isn’t just what happens in your life. It’s a multitude and a universe of knowledge and information and sensation. What you know is bound to be huge.”

A: Yes. I think the tool used does affect content, and something handwritten with a pen may very well be shaped and toned differently than something typed.

I use a computer because, having been trained in journalism, it’s the most comfortable tool for me. I think most easily at a keyboard, most painfully with a pen. I need to work at the rate at which I think, and unlike a pen, the keyboard will go as quickly—or as slowly—as my mind.

The trick with having the ease of a computer is paying close attention to the delete key. In revising and editing, it is absolutely the most useful one.

A: A lot. Often this has involved entire rewritings. Plus a great deal of editing, adding and subtracting. That delete key, so useful.

A: I’m smartest in the morning, so that’s prime time for getting anything at all done. But sometimes late at night is a good time to run through the day’s work to edit it.

A: Sadly, a novel is never done. It just has to be let go of eventually—otherwise it would be quite possible to keep working on one book forever. Sometimes I know it’s getting about time to let go when I start having vivid dreams about the characters.

An Interview with Joan Barfoot

A: I spent my first 18 years on a thin-soiled, gorgeous, rocky farm just outside the small city of Owen Sound in Ontario, Canada. My parents raised cattle while I played with the dog and fell off the horses.

A: I had one highly cherished sister, Pat, who had a banking career. I’m the only writer in the family—in fact I’m also probably the only dedicated reader—but I see some prospects in the developing generations.

A: Oh, I was so bored! I remember a few thrilling teachers – one who taught grammar using her own home-made rhymes, one who acted his way through Shakespeare and Hardy, and that essential one who said I wrote well and might want to consider some kind of word-related career—but for the most part I was marking time in an academically clever sort of way, doing what had to be done to get free.

A: I’m the first—but not the last—person in my family to attend university, which is where I went the minute I was 18. I have a B.A. degree in English, but following that smart high school teacher’s advice, I aimed for work in journalism, which I happily found. I’ve never been in the mood for creative writing programs (except for teaching them now and then), since I ‘ve had no desire to discuss work-in-progress. The process of writing, for me, has been an entirely private pleasure and puzzle. As I rather think it should be.

A: I wanted to be a pilot, then realized fear of heights might be a professional deficit. I wanted to be a psychiatrist, then realized I’m not actually all that good at prolonged listening. I wanted to be a social worker, then realized I was too cowardly to take responsibility for other people’s lives. So I became a newspaper reporter and eventually an editor, which was perfect preparation for fiction. As a news journalist, I could enter situations that are basically barred to civilians; I could legitimately ask people all sorts of invasive, rude questions; I could affirm to my complete satisfaction that absolutely nothing, good or bad, is beyond the reach of some human somewhere. All this knowledge, from medical to criminal to accidental to basically incomprehensible, comes in very handy for fiction. At the same time, journalism helped propel me into fiction-writing just because dipping into people’s lives and straight out again is unsatisfying—there’s no knowing where people’s stories wind up, and I wanted the space and time and proper attention to know. I would certainly have dreamed of being a novelist when I was contemplating careers if I’d thought such a thing possible. But as far as I could tell at the time, authors either inhabited an exalted and probably unattainable level of airy existence, or they were dead.

A: One day when I was about four—before I started school, anyway—my mother and I were sitting at the kitchen table watching the activities of a squirrel in the yard and discussing what it thought it was doing, and why, and whether it had a family, and whether it was playing or working and so on and so forth, and she said, “You tell me the squirrel’s story and I’ll write it down.” I don’t remember the story, but I do remember the power and delight of creating it. Parents and teachers—they never know what small moment will stick, do they?

A: I don’t think I have role models—wouldn’t care to be one, don’t care to have one, and in terms of writing itself, I’m not sure I would speak of influences, either. I’m a ferocious reader, and see virtues in a huge spectrum of styles, subjects, characterizations, techniques, themes and obsessions. I can say that as a fairly pretentious teenager, I busied myself among the great men of Russia (and elsewhere), and then was much relieved to discover Margaret Laurence. She was a Canadian who wrote about lives, particularly of women, in ways that first persuaded me that it is not necessary for fiction to contain swaths of tragic, icy, blood-stained tundra in order to be great. Obviously she’s not alone in that, but she was the first I read who proved it.

A: For the most part I conducted a simultaneous career in newspaper journalism. When the deficits of journalism finally came to outweigh the pleasures, I quit and wrote fiction full-time—a few novels’ worth.

A: My aim was always to entertain and challenge myself with story and character—to see where a theme, a person, a notion of plot will go. I am interested in extremities, since that’s where a human’s actions and reactions will be most true and acute, and so I’ve liked to find out where those extremities are. And I have a belief in fiction as expansive—that each of us, including myself, has one life, one set of experiences that unfold in a limited number of settings, and fiction gives us, readers and writers both, a universe of other lives and experiences and places.

It’s hard to think, for instance, that a stupid or narrow person could possibly remain stupid and narrow if they read lots of good fiction. (This is one reason it’s very distressing when busy people of influence and power in the world apparently mistake facts for truths and insist they have no time to read fiction. That’s bad news for us all.)

A: It’s almost impossible, for me at least, to connect specific personal experiences with writing—even an experience that has made its way into a novel has done so in such transformed, translated ways that it’s not obviously related to its source. This is, actually, a matter of some discussion in my novel Luck. Most of the people in my novels are either quite different or in quite different circumstances from me and mine, but we certainly develop strong relationships as we evolve together. I am very fond of some—Aggie in Duet for Three, for instance; respectful and admiring of others—Isla in Critical Injuries, for one; and protective towards one or two who strike me as too vulnerable and raw-skinned—Edna in Dancing in the Dark, Jane in Plain Jane.

A: Anything—you never know. A scene on the street, a conversation in a restaurant, all sorts of little moments can blow up into ideas. In an overarching way, wonderful writing is inspiring – not to steal ideas or compete with the brilliant, but to be awed and challenged and stirred by a Shields, Munro, Ford, Trevor, Cunningham, or the several British Penelopes.

A: My mother used to speak of “running ram-stam through” a project, and that’s what I’ve liked to do: roll through a first draft without too much looking back. I’ve begun in various ways—with the idea of a theme, or of a kind of relationship, or of a triggering event, but I’ve only tried once to plan out a novel, and that not only didn’t work, it was tedious. Like life, fiction takes surprising turns, which has made it fun for me. Many days I ‘ve wakened up wondering in an anticipatory sort of way what would happen to so-and-so today even though, obviously, that’s pretty much up to me. Of the first draft of a novel, very little would likely survive. I’ve done an enormous amount of rethinking, refeeling, and restructuring, as well as rigorous paring, until the people have become more familiar than my friends, and their situations are thoroughly embedded, I hope, on the page.

A: The longest time I’ve spent was four years and thirteen thorough drafts. It’s never been possible (for me) in under two years. I did learn that when I started having occasional dreams of the people and the interior life of the novel, it had truly grown roots in my head.

A: I read, I nap, I shovel snow in winter, and in summer mow the lawns and eat and drink with family members and friends on my excellent porch. I go to movies and occasional plays – all the regular things people do. I tried an actual hobby once, when I thought rug-hooking might be a gentle, unmindful pursuit, but it made me compulsive instead of relaxed, so I gave that up.

A: Margaret Atwood once told an audience that before we met, she’d pictured me with high sharp cheekbones draped—camouflaged—in long hair. By which I think she meant that on the basis of my first novel or two, she expected someone slightly eerie. My very first editor arrived for our very first meeting carefully costumed, she said, in the expectation of meeting Abra, the isolated protagonist of Gaining Ground—which at least meant she was wholly persuaded of Abra’s existence. The fact is, though, that I’m practical and organized, fairly sociable and reasonably amusing, and outside of fiction I oppose pain and grief to the extent that I don’t eat meat and fish or wear leather. Whereas in fiction, I’ve found the dead quite useful.

A: It occurs to me how miraculously fortunate it is to live in a generally peaceable and prosperous country doing something, writing, that so thoroughly suited my own nature. This circumstance has little to do with any personal virtues and gifts, but is the utter blind luck of the time and place draw. Which, in a circuitous sort of way, led me to some of the themes and aspects of Luck.

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