Deborah Joy Corey

Deborah Joy Corey was born and raised in Temperance Vale, New Brunswick, the sixth of seven children. Rural New Brunswick would also become the setting for her first novel, Losing Eddie. Narrated through the eyes of a young girl, the book received extensive praise and won the SmithBooks/Books in Canada First Novel Award. The Skating Pond is Corey’s second novel, and she is also the author of numerous articles and stories. Her writings have been published in such literary journals as Ploughshares, Carolina Quarterly, Crescent Review, Image, and Grain. Today, she lives in a small coastal village in Maine with her husband Bill and their daughters Georgia and Phoebe.

While writing The Skating Pond, Deborah Joy Corey drew not only on her experiences in her current hometown — which is not far away from the actual town of Stonington, Maine — but also her youth in New Brunswick. For her, the act of telling stories has always been associated with family and with an intense sense of place. As she’s said in one interview, “Most of my characters come from my home place. My parents were both from a very strong oral tradition. When we sat down at lunch and dinner, we’d tell old stories over and over again. When I was growing up, nobody had written many stories about New Brunswick so you relied on your family for those stories.” And in creating her narrator, Elizabeth, Corey was able to draw on what it feels like to be a teenager in a small maritime town. “I could definitely relate to Elizabeth in her desire to leave or her desire to know what was beyond the next hill. Also to her restlessness.” Corey herself moved away from home when she was seventeen, to work as a model in Toronto.

In The Skating Pond, Deborah Joy Corey explores what happens to small-town families when tragedy strikes, and follows the life of Elizabeth in particular, as she tells her own story. As Corey has explained, it was important to look at not only the major events that happen when Elizabeth is a teenager, but also how her experiences play out over her life: “I wondered what happens to a girl in a place she can’t leave. I was also interested in how we are shaped by the smallest things, accidental things. I like to write about the small things that make us who we are.” And it is the uncovering of such details, particularly in the lives of women, that drives much of Corey’s storytelling: “It’s important for me to try to be truthful about motherhood, sexuality, coming of age, to write frankly about these things, because that’s the kind of story I’m drawn to, myself. Women have multi-layered lives.”

Since the publication of The Skating Pond, Corey has continued to write short stories (her first love) and has started a third novel. Most often, Corey devotes just two to three hours each morning to writing, then leaves her work for another day — as she’s told one interviewer, “The rest of life is for living.”