An Interview with Martha Wilson

Arts & Community Editor Addy Strickland interviewed author Martha Wilson over Zoom on July 16, 2020.

Martha Wilson's short story collection, Nosy White Woman, was recently awarded the Alistair MacLeod Prize for Short Fiction at the 2020 Atlantic Book Awards. The prize was established in 2015 to honour the memory of Alistair MacLeod, a masterful short fiction writer who called Nova Scotia home. Wilson was also a finalist for the New South 2018 fiction prize and runner-up for the 2017 Peter Hinchcliffe fiction prize, and has published work in the New Quarterly, Real Simple, The New York Times, The Japan Times, Kansai Time Out, and the International Herald-Tribune. Nosy White Woman is Wilson’s first published collection of short fiction.

AS: Can you start by telling me a little bit more about you?

MW: I’ve been in Canada for twenty-five years. I’m American, and I feel very grateful and lucky to be in Canada. My husband is from Nova Scotia. We were in Toronto for ten years and moved back to Nova Scotia when our children were small, so my children have grown up in the country, in rural Nova Scotia, which has been a wonderful experience for them. I’ve really appreciated having the chance to have lived, as a younger adult, in a big city, and then as a mom in the country. I read a lot, though especially during this pandemic it’s harder for me to read a book than it used to be. And I do read Twitter a lot. Like, way, way too much. I especially read political Twitter, and since I still vote in the United States, I follow a lot of Washington journalists and track U.S. political news pretty closely. That takes up a lot of my attention, and I don’t know a lot of Americans here in Nova Scotia who are as focused on it as I am. It can be a little bit isolating, since my family doesn’t want to hear about it. That’s probably my big “hobby” —following U.S. politics.

 AS: Can you also tell me about your journey as an author?

 MW: I always knew I wanted to write, so it was really so satisfying to have published this book. It took me twenty years to complete it, and in finishing the book, I realized that I was able to finish it and publish it because my mother had died. She died in the spring about five years ago, and in the summer, I signed up for the Humber distance writing course, and I thought, “I’ll finish this short story collection.” I worked on it for a year and then started the publication process, with literary press Biblioasis. We were well into the editing of it before it dawned on me that I’d been able to write it because my mother was gone. I was really surprised by that. Not by not having been able to finish it, but by the opacity of that process—that I did not realize what was going on for months and months, even though I was really engaging with the stories and the publishing process. So I’m very interested that things that can be so apparent in retrospect can be so invisible at the time. It’s not that I thought the stories would be painful for my mom, or too specific—my mom’s not in the book—but it was just too close while my parents were still around.

 AS: Did you go into writing these stories with the intention of publishing a collection?

 MW: No, but I've always loved short stories, and for years and years I subscribed to Harper's and The Atlantic. Those two were monthlies. The New Yorker obviously has amazing fiction, but it comes every week. I could never finish a New Yorker before there's another one dropped through the mail slot; they just come all the time. The Atlantic and Harper's, during my twenties and most of my thirties, were publishing one story a month each; it was the perfect amount. It was as if the fiction was titrated at a dose to perfectly match the attention and thought I would give it over the course of the month. A novel, you choose it yourself: you go to the bookstore, you order something; or you like a writer, so you buy their book. With the short stories in monthly magazines, it's like they're assigned to you. They just arrive. That had a really big impact on how important short fiction became to me. I still remember a lot of those stories that I read when I was a young adult. I remember them with great clarity. It's something that has nearly disappeared from public life during my adulthood, and that makes me sad. (But it's okay; we didn't have Twitter then.)

 AS: For people who are interested in reading Nosy White Woman, can you give us an idea of what to expect?

MW: Because I'm so interested in politics, there's a lot of that; I'm extremely interested in the effects of policy on our daily lives. I'm always telling my daughters who are teenagers that policy is more important than anything else. At the same time, that’s not exactly what the stories are about. They're about families, they're about adult children, they're about marriages, they're about fear and worry and happiness. They're a lot about privacy, and the fact that we all have that private internal life that’s separate from the life that even our most intimate family members see.

Most of my stories are not about race, but I was very conscious about not having whiteness as the default. The title story is about police brutality, especially against men of colour in the United States.

 AS: Can you talk to me a bit about the book’s title? Why did you decide to call it Nosy White Woman?

MW: At Biblioasis, Dan Wells (who established the press), suggested it. Fiction editor John Metcalf and I had “The Golden Bra” as the title story, and Dan said to me, what would you think of changing it, making “Nosy White Woman” the title story, because that's really more reflective of your interest in policy and politics and societal issues, and how those play out in our daily lives. And I agreed. I'm not sure of the date; I think it was probably fall of 2018, but one thing that I talked about in “Nosy White Woman” was that we had seen on YouTube and on social media the deaths of Philando Castile, of Freddie Gray, and several African American men shot by the police, for not-valid reasons. It became clearer and clearer over the years I was working on these stories that my experience with the police in the United States is a completely separate reality from the reality that a lot of people have. I've been shocked to come to understand how different those are, and that's the reckoning that white people are coming to. We've really seen that this summer with how white people regard the Black Lives Matter movement: the belief that white Americans have in the validity of that movement has just skyrocketed over the summer.

AS: What do you hope that people take away from reading this collection?

MW: Even though I talk so much about politics, and it sounds like that's all I write about, that's not it at all. One of my early readers, Catherine Newman, called the book “gloomy and hilarious.” I really love that description, and asked the publisher if we could put that on the front—it's my favourite tagline. So I guess I couldn't imagine a better way for my book to be described.

AS: You were recently awarded the Alistair MacLeod Prize for Short Fiction for this collection. What does receiving this prize mean to you?

MW: It was very exciting. It was encouraging and gratifying to be linked with such an admired name in Canadian fiction, someone so beloved. That was a lovely thing. I also thought it said that my book is in some way speaking to this moment. This particular summer, at least. Especially in the United States, white people are learning more about white privilege, which is one of the most important ways our society is going to move forward.

AS: You’ve lived in Nova Scotia for the last 15 years, and before that, you lived in Toronto after coming from the United States. Has living here, or moving here, impacted your writing?

MW: Yes. It brought me back to my childhood, because I grew up in a small town. I live near Windsor, Nova Scotia, and it's very much like the town in Georgia I grew up in. One of the things I wrote about in what's probably one of my favourite stories, “Midway,” is how small towns used to be much more rural. Talking about when the protagonist is growing up, I wrote, “Since we lived in a town, I thought that was my identity: town person. Now I can see how newly scratched in the dirt that life was, how essentially rural it remained. How all of that held me.” That's something that I've really gotten back in touch with since moving to Nova Scotia 15 years ago. I grew up in a small town but it was really like the country. So many of the people I went to school with were farm kids, and we had FFA—Future Farmers of America; we had 4H. Many of the kids I knew a raised chickens, and the boys would be driving tractors after school and on the weekends. That was the life I was familiar with. Moving back to Nova Scotia has reignited those memories, because that way of making a living is still so apparent here, in ways I never saw in Toronto.

 It's really important to honour that lifestyle and not look down on it a second-best. My younger daughter is dying to get out of Nova Scotia. She has very specific plans to go to university in either Toronto or Montreal, and she is out of here the day she gets that high school diploma. Which is fine, obviously. But it's important that we not fall into a trap of believing cities are somehow cooler, or a better way to live.

AS: What can the world expect next from Martha Wilson? Are you working on anything new?

MW: I'm working on a new short fiction collection. A lot of it is about working in a church. Church life really fascinates me, especially the behind the scenes of church life that isn't about attending church, but about the church office. That's something I'm working on now.