What was the first inspiration for this novel?
The book has its roots in the Don Valley itself. Even before I moved to Toronto in 2005, I used to visit friends in Riverdale, so I was always taking the subway across the Bloor Street Viaduct. I love the moment when you leave the tunnel and shoot out over water and woods. The valley was an endless source of questions for me: what and who lives down there, and how do they survive? It wasn’t long before a host of strays, both animal and human, began to populate my mind. Next came a sanctuary of sorts where they might find refuge. How that sanctuary became a wrecking yard, I’m still not sure.
Even in the city, the characters in Fauna have profound and complex relationships with animals and the natural world, relationships that define them and change them. Does this reflect your own experience at all?
Absolutely. I’ve always been fascinated by animal life, domestic and wild; in fact most of my early memories revolve around birds and beasts. Even though I choose to live in cities, I find my daily experience is greatly enriched by encounters with wildlife. A peregrine falcon flew over my head earlier this evening while I was eating dinner on the upstairs deck—definitely the highlight of my day.
This is your third novel: how was writing it different from your other work? Has your writing process changed over your career?
I have a system that works for me, so I stick to it. I tend to proceed intuitively, reading everything I can get my hands on in relation to the subject(s) at hand, taking copious notes and generating a complex system of files with titles such as “Don Valley Fauna,” “Pony Express,” “Butchery” and “Catholic Mass, Pre-Vatican II.” This first leg of the process generally takes about a year, after which I follow up by sifting through these primary files for the beginnings of characters, settings, themes and ideas for individual scenes. This stage takes several months, and results in a secondary system of files which are organized by character and which contain detailed, cross-referenced notes for the many scenes that will make up a novel. Then and only then—when my imagination has all the tools and materials it requires in order to bring the narrative to life—do I sit down and begin to “write.”
Fauna is full of books about animals, from The Jungle Book to Ring of Bright Water; it joins an interesting group of recent novels with the same concern, from Yann Martel’s Beatrice & Virgil to Paul Auster’s Timbuktu. Do you see your novel in this company? What is it that draws writers to the subject of animals?
I loved Beatrice & Virgil, and by coincidence, Timbuktu is nearing the top of my “read this now!” pile. Another “animal book” I can’t recommend highly enough is Dog Boy by Australian author Eva Hornung. That novel taught me more about what it is to be human than almost any other book I’ve read—as well as what it is to be a feral dog. We read (and write) fiction in order to inhabit lives other than our own; why would we limit ourselves to human lives when we might also explore the experience of panthers or eagles or whales?
If you walked into a book club meeting about Fauna, what would you say to add to the conversation about your book?
Ask yourselves, how are these creatures wounded and how do they heal?
