An Interview with David Bergen
by McNally Robinson - Wednesday Sep 10 2008 7:51 pm
Posted in: Interview, Authors, Winnipeg, Event News, New Releases

David Bergen's award-winning fiction include Sitting Opposite My Brother, A Year of Lesser, See the Child, and The Case of Lena S. His 2005 novel The Time in Between took him to a whole new level and earned him an international readership.

His latest novel, The Retreat, opens in 1973 outside Kenora when a policeman leaves an eighteen-year-old Ojibway boy for dead on a remote island. The haunting, finely nuanced tale that follows reveals the clash of two cultures. It is the story of two brothers separated in childhood, a complicated love between a white girl and a native boy, and a family on the verge of splintering forever. Bergen will be at our Grant Park location on Wednesday September 10 to launch The Retreat.

Bergen recently took the time to answer some questions for our website. The interview was conducted by McNally Robinson staff member Nikaela Peters.

NP: To what degree are the characters in your books based on people you know?

DB: I write fiction, which means that my characters are fictional. However, the people around me, the people I have met, relationships from my past, these influence the creation of my fictional characters. I might use a real person as a taking off point or inspiration for a character, but at some point, usually early on, the character takes on a life of his own and becomes fictional. This is the pleasure of fiction writing, creating a world that springs from the imagination, from the sub-conscious. It would be folly for a reader to point at a character in my novel and say, "This is so and so, who lives on this specific street in this particular city." Readers, these days, seem to prefer that, but to my mind this shows a lack of imagination.

NP: Can you describe your writing process? How much of a story, of the world in which your characters live, do you have in your mind before you start?

DB: The Time in Between began with a woman in a hotel room in a foreign country looking out at the ocean. The Retreat began with a family traveling east across Canada to a commune in Kenora. In each novel I tried to figure out the dynamics, the reason for Ada being in the hotel room, the motivation of a couple who carry their four children across the country. From there, I discover new characters, more layers, and eventually I find the story.

NP: Where do you write? Do you eat while you write? Do you listen to music?

DB: I have an office with a computer, a few of my favorite books, a comfortable chair for reading, and two windows that open onto a view of an old brick five-story building with an ancient fire escape. I have a phone, but no internet hookup. I do not like being distracted. I cannot write with music playing in the background. I eat when I'm hungry, but usually take a break from my writing when I have lunch.

NP: In The Retreat, which character is your favorite?

DB: That's like asking which of my children is my favorite.

NP: Can you name me a few characters in fiction who are your favorite? With whom do you most sympathize?

DB: Sympathize is a better word than identify. Identify implies feeling 'the same as,' and readers tend to get caught by this notion that "I love this character because she is just like me." This is not a bad thing, but it does tend to be too narrow, and it makes us less sympathetic to someone such as Humbert Humbert in Lolita, with whom we may not identify, but who is a fascinating character. I am reading The Red and the Black, by Stendhal, and I love Julien Sorel, the main character. He is so tortured, and so young and vulnerable. My favorite characters tend to be the ones in the novels I am in the process of reading. That said, my all time favorite characters are three women: Emma Bovary, Tess, and Anna Karenina.

NP: Can you compare writing The Retreat to writing The Time in Between? Did The Time in Between feel more ambitious as it spanned a greater length of time and took place across the world?

DB: These are very different books in time and place. The Time in Between is more interior, more dream-like. It travels to another country, but then all novels, if they succeed in some way, take the reader to another country metaphorically. The Retreat is more political and more about the divide between children and adults, but it too should take the reader to another place.

NP: Who are your favorite authors? Who most influenced you?

DB: I was first influenced by pulp writers like Zane Grey. I am still influenced by his penchant for narrative pull. Then there was Irwin Shaw, who I read in my late teens. And then I discovered John Updike and tried to imitate him, very poorly I confess. Then Raymond Carver and Hemingway and Flannery O'Connor and Chekhov and Cormac McCarthy, who is mythic and sometimes overwrought. Graham Greene has been an influence.

NP: Your writing has been described as bleak. Do you agree? Would you say you prefer sad stories to happy ones? Which emotions are easiest to write?

DB: I don't write emotions so much as discover and develop characters who react to their own emotions. Bleak? I don't think so. Perhaps realistic and pared down, in a 'Protestant animus against the ornamental…a monkish distaste for swollen rhetoric' sort of way (to quote Terry Eagleton), something I come by honestly.

NP: You told me once to write as if no one was looking over my shoulder. Can you explain that? If someone is "looking over your shoulder," who is it? ie. whose criticism do you take most to heart?

DB: Initially I tend to take all criticism to heart. And then I become dismissive. And finally I find a balance. I look at who is doing the critique and what is being said. Criticism is less about personal taste than asking what the author is trying to do. When I am writing I don't consider what the reader or the critic will think. If you look over your shoulder you will be constantly second guessing yourself. No-one can write well in that kind of atmosphere.

NP: What are you reading right now?

DB: A Light in August by Faulkner.

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