How/why did you start to write?
I started to write creatively after completing a graduate
thesis in 1994. I remember driving
home from UBC after my oral defense, thinking it was too bad that I had
finished the project because I had enjoyed the writing process, the business of
chewing over ideas and arranging them.
And revising. And then
immediately the idea of writing a novel popped into my mind. And I don’t have to include footnote, I
thought. So the next morning before I
went to work, I began my novel. Fifteen
minutes in a coffee shop. it was about
four chapters long before I abandoned it.
In the meantime, I had joined a writing group, enrolled in a writing
class and started to write poetry, which is my main love.
How did you become an author?
I kept taking writing classes. I did a reading or two. I
made friends with other writers. One
day, after sending my new manuscript to several presses, one of them accepted
it. The process was more complex, and I
began to think the manuscript would never get published, but one of the
editorial board at my first published was willing to take a chance on an
experimental book – mine.
What was your first published piece?
I took the SFU Writers’ Studio program with Betsy Warland in
2001/2. It lasted a year and was
organized to accommodate people with full-time jobs. I learned so much. At the
end of the year, the students put together an anthology. I think that was where I first published a
number of poems. The program is in its
12th year, and is very popular.
I think it’s really important to learn as much as possible about
writing, retreats, workshops, classes, programs, degrees. I’ve taken them all, and I still want to
take more.
Where was it published?
How long ago?
What did you do before embarking on your writing career?
Was it an asset to your writing? How?
I became a writer late in life. I was forty-nine when I began writing the novel. I called it Lake City. I worked for
over twenty years as a social worker and social work administrator in Vancouver
mental health services. I am a
mother. After I had children I went to
McGill University and became a social worker.
I keep going back to school. I
love going to school. I wrote my first
published book about working in government bureaucracy. It’s called Paper Trail (NeWest Press, 2007) and is written in mixed genre,
much like Leaving Now. People who work
in bureaucracy have told me that Paper
Trail speaks to their own situation.
It contains some poetry, some narrative, some fantasy, with Franz Kafka
racing around the corridors of the office building. It won the 2008 Victoria Butler Book Prize, and was short-listed
for the Dorothy Livesay BC Book Award for Poetry. Both are very prestigious BC prizes; I was enormously chuffed.
What inspires you?
Reading other poets, good and excellent poets can inspire me
most.
Please share one of your successful marketing techniques
I think networking is important. Going to classes.
Getting to know different authors.
Using the new technologies, like blogging and face book. I think these activities can help to market
authors and their books.
Parting words
Leaving Now (Arleen Pare's most recent book)
In Leaving Now Arleen Pare, winner of the 2008 Victoria Book Prize, weaves fable, prose and poetics to create a rich mosaic of conflicted motherhood. Set in the volatile 1970s and 80s when social norms and expectations were changing rapidly, Leaving Now is the emotionally candid story of a mother's anguish as she leaves her husband to love a woman. In this second book, Pare masterfully blends aspects of her personal journey with her own version of a well-loved fairy tale. Gudrun, the five-hundred-year-old mother of Hansel and Gretel, appears hazily in the narrator's kitchen--presumed dead, all but written out of her won tale, but very much alive. Gudrun spins a yarn of love, loss and leaving, offering comfort and wisdom to the conflicted young mother.
Raising children is not for the faint of heart, all parents know the anguish of parting from a child, even if for the briefest moment. Leaving Now is for mothers, fathers, son and daughters. It is for anyone who has ever lived in a family.
Arleen Pare's website
