Bookpleasures.com welcomes as our guest Canadian novelist, Joan Thomas. Joan's fourth novel Five Wives won Canada’s prestigious Governor General’s Award for Fiction. Described by the Globe and Mail as “brilliant, eloquent, curious, far-seeing,” it is an immersive dive into a real event, the disastrous attempt by five American families to move into the territory of the reclusive Waorani people in Ecuador in 1956.
 

Joan’s three previous novels have been praised for their intimate and insightful depictions of characters in times of rapid social change. Reading by Lightning, set in World War 2, won the 2008 Amazon Prize and a Commonwealth Prize. Curiosity, based on the life of the pre-Darwinist fossilist Mary Anning, was nominated for the 2010 Giller Prize and the IMPAC Dublin Award. The Opening Sky, a novel about a family navigating contemporary crises, won the 2014 McNally Robinson Prize and was a finalist for the Governor General’s Award.
 
Joan lives in Winnipeg, a prairie city at the geographical center of North America. Before beginning to write fiction, she was a longtime book reviewer. In 2014, Joan was awarded the Writers Trust of Canada’s prize for mid-career achievement. 

Norm: Good day Joan and thanks for participating in our interview.

How long have you been writing? And how long did it take you to get your first major book contract?

Joan: Thanks for hosting me, Norm. I appreciate the conversations you create between readers and writers. 

Writing fiction was like a secret ambition for me for most of my life. It takes a lot of courage to believe you can write a novel. When I finally took the plunge, I ended up writing four, one after the other. My first book was published by a small press, but Curiosity, my second, was picked up by a Random House publisher. Now I wish I’d started writing sooner. 

Norm: What do you think most characterizes your writing?  As a follow up, why do you write? Do you have a theme, message, or goal for your books?  

Joan: When my first novel came out, a woman I had never met told me that she loved it, and said, “I felt as though I was reading about myself.”

I considered that the highest compliment, and it became kind of a guiding principle for me, to create intimacy and a sense of recognition for readers. I want to capture the texture of daily life, but also to situation characters within the big things happening in the world. Many of my characters are in that vivid space where the way they previously saw themselves, and the way they saw the world, is crumbling.  

Norm: Do you think about your reading public when you write? Do you imagine a specific reader when you write?

Joan: I wrote my first novel with a particular friend in mind—I was always knocking myself out to make her laugh. Since I’ve been published, I would say I have a stronger sense of a public audience. Readers’ comments have influenced me. I’m more aware of the need to keep the story moving, for one thing. 

Norm: How do you deal with criticism?

Joan: When my editors’ feedback letters come in, I spend a day pacing around the house and ranting, composing a mean rebuttal in my mind. By the next morning, the wisdom of their ideas will be apparent to me.

I don’t accept every suggestion, but when a criticism is right, you know it. And then I begin to feel grateful, and thrilled that my editor has helped make my book better.  

Norm: Does the line between truth and fiction sometimes become blurred for you?

Joan: My two biggest books were based on real events. Onto the infrastructure of history, I weave invented details and incidents. And yes, eventually the two fuse into one, and my own construct feels to me like what really happened. 

Of course, history itself is a construct. It doesn’t know the whole story and it picks and chooses details that fit the assumptions and values of a certain era. Fiction can challenge that. I’m a big believer in the profound truths of fiction.  

Norm: How do you choose the names of your characters?

Joan: With historical fiction involving real people, you don’t have a lot of choice, and that can be a problem in itself.

In my novel Curiosity, almost every male character was named either William or Henry! But with invented characters, when I’m picking names, I aim for words that resonate with meaning or colour—Justin Challis or Justin Carpenter instead of, say, Justin McDonald. 

Sometimes I go for a name with symbolic weight: Sylvie for the girl who loved the woods, Noah for the biologist trying to save animal life. You have to be careful not to be too on-the-nose with symbolism. Several of the characters in Five Wives are related and their last name is Saint. I wouldn’t have dared to use that if history had not given it to me. 

Norm: Are you ever lonely when you write, and if so, how do you deal with it?

Joan: In a word, no. The deep pleasure writing brings is a well-guarded professional secret. Writers pretend we are suffering in our garrets because it would hurt our families to know that we would rather be writing than doing pretty much anything else. And in very hard times, your writing is the one place you can go to where you are in control.   

Norm: Do you ever dream about your characters?

Joan: What an interesting question! I never have, but then I rarely dream about people who are close and important to me. The figures in my dreams tend to be, you know, my lab partner from high school, who I haven’t seen in decades. 

Norm: What has been your greatest challenge (professionally) that you’ve overcome in getting to where you’re at today? 

Joan: I’m pretty shy. I once heard Irish writer Nuala O’Faolain say in an interview, “What is a writer but a failed talker?” and I thought, “That is me in a nutshell!” I had no idea how much on-stage and media work I would have to do as a novelist. But of course it’s what I want, the chance to tell people about my work, so I muddle through. 

Norm: Could you tell us about your latest novel, Five Wives?

Joan: Five Wives is based on true events—a 1956 missionary enterprise in Ecuador known as Operation Auca. Five young American men died in an effort to take Christianity to a reclusive Indigenous nation in the rain forest.

But shortly after, two women (the widow of one of the men, the sister of another) trekked into the forest and made peaceful contact with the men’s killers, converting them to Christianity. In the novel I enter these characters deeply, imagining my way into their experience and feelings. 

Norm: What were your goals and intentions in this book, and how well do you feel you achieved them? 

Joan: Operation Auca was really well known in North America, mainly because of Through Gates of Splendor, Elisabeth Elliot’s memoir.

I had a very religious upbringing, and the Operation Auca missionaries were viewed as martyrs in our church.

Of course this intrusion into the life of a reclusive Indigenous nation looks very different to the world now than it did when it happened, and I was interested in revisiting this story through a contemporary lens and looking at the long term consequences.  

The story seemed more amazing to me the longer I worked on it. And it had so many resonances with things that were reported in the news in the years I was writing it. The “othering” of refugees at the US-Mexican border. The way political and religious affiliations colour our points of view.   

Norm: What was the most difficult part of writing this book and what did you enjoy most about writing this book?  

Joan: I was fascinated by the personalities and voices of the missionary wives. They look very similar in photographs, modest, plainly-dressed. But they came alive to me as dramatically different personalities, and I was moved by their dilemma as young moms who love husbands, being asked to embrace this incredibly risky endeavor as God’s will.   

Today we question the very premise of Operation Auca, asking, What gives you the right to impose your ways on other people? The wives were not openly critical of the mission. In real life, they rarely expressed doubts. So that was the main challenge of writing the book, to provoke the questions my characters were not asking, to enter the cognitive dissonance they lived with, because what they believed was so often at odds with what was happening in the world. 

Norm: Did you write the novel more by logic or intuition, or some combination of the two? Please summarize your writing process.  

Joan: Intuition always outsmarts logic for me. I’ll hit a wall with my writing, and struggle to solve a problem, and then a day or two later the solution will come to me out of the blue, something totally different than anything I had been thinking.

Novels are huge, you work on them for years, and I’m in awe of the way your unconscious mind carries the whole thing. The way that, as you write page 300, you will tease out an image you planted on page 100 and then entirely forgot about. So it’s a little closer to dreaming for me. Which is not to say that I don’t do a lot of rearranging and revising, relying on the logical and critical mind at that stage.  

Norm: If you could invite three writers, dead or alive into your living room, who would they be and why? 

Joan: I’m going to forgo the delight of meeting Virginia Woolf and Jane Austen and invite living writers. Capturing life in the 21st century is a daunting, almost impossible challenge, and these three do it in ways that astonish and provoke me: Ben Lerner. Zadie Smith. Jenny Offill. 

Norm: Where can our readers find out more about you and Five Wives?

Joan: They can check out my WEBSITE,  I’ll be speaking at on-line events throughout the fall, and links will be posted on the Events page. Any book club reading Five Wives can invite me to join the conversation virtually. My e-mail address is  joan@joanthomas.ca.  

Norm: What is next for Joan Thomas?

Joan: I want to write a contemporary novel next but it’s tough because things are changing so fast in the world—the target you’re aiming at is constantly moving. At the moment I’m just riding the seismic waves, watching, thinking, sometimes writing passages that might or might not end up being part of a new novel.    

Norm:  As this interview comes to an end, what advice can you give aspiring writers that you wished you had gotten, or that you wished you would have listened to?

Joan:  Write the book that only you can write. This is old advice and I didn’t entirely appreciate it until I launched into Five Wives.

As a young person, I felt like an outsider. I grew up a long way from any city, I spent my entire childhood in church, I was not allowed to watch TV or listen to pop music. I did read, avidly, and I imagined novelists as being sophisticated, worldly, on the growing edge of culture, a whole different species from me. But actually, not being part of the mainstream is a huge gift to a writer.

You have an outsider’s perspective. And then to move out of your ideological bubble and to discover that the world is transformed simply by changing your point of view—well, that’s at the heart of novel writing.