Five Questions for Author Mary Rose Donnelly

The novelist’s first book, Great Village, explores life in small-town Nova Scotia, as the narrator, Flossy O’Reilly, looks back on her eighty years in the community and the family tragedy that she has kept secret for so long. Zoomer talked with the author about poets, finding her character’s voice and inspirations.

Athena McKenzie: What drew you to Great Village, Nova Scotia?

Mary Rose Donnelly: Part of my reason for setting it in the Village was because of the connection to the poet Elizabeth Bishop. I discovered her in about 1998 when I was down there. There was a great play in Parrsboro — they have an old ship in the harbour and I saw a performance of this play on the ship. It was quite remarkable. I thought it was interesting that this poet was here and I didn’t know. And because the kernel of the story came from Nova Scotia, from the area, I just moved it up to Great Village to connect it with her.

AM: So what was the kernel of the story?

MRD: A friend of mine had been doing a lot of family research into the area and she was telling me about a young man who came in from the fields and who went to bed and he stayed there for forty years, his entire life. His name was Thomas. Thomas the Peculiar, they called him in the community. And they didn’t really know what to make of him. It was pre-psychology, when there was no real help. When I heard that story, I thought, “how interesting.” Initially I began writing it from the perspective of Thomas, but that was grim. So, then I thought, “let’s move it to the sister and see how the family copes.”

AM: Where did Flossy’s voice come from?

MRD: Another friend has an aunt who is very eccentric. She uses words in a very peculiar way. I began to write Flossy from the perspective of someone who is quite eccentric. An older woman who loves words, who loves language, who loves literature but is eccentric and used words in a funny way. And then the other character I had in mind was Marianne Moore, who was the American poet who probably gave Elizabeth Bishop her big break, because Marianne Moore was editor of The Dial and she encouraged Bishop. It’s hard to know whether Bishop would have found her way if Marianne Moore hadn’t taken her under her wing. Marianne Moore was very wild. She wore these triangular acorn hats, she loved the New York Yankees and she lived with her mother in an old apartment in New York — a very strange woman but wonderfully talented and a good poet of that time. And so I used bit of the flavour of the writing that Elizabeth Bishop did on Marianne Moore. She wrote a beautiful eulogy for Marianne Moore after her death and it is in Bishop’s collection of short stories. It’s wonderful and it really gives a sense of what Marianne was like. I made Flossy somewhat eccentric like that. Now, in an earlier draft I had written the novel from the perspective of four characters and my editor said to me that it would be a better book if I wrote it from Flossy’s perspective. It was a good exercise because I got to know her a lot better and she emerged a stronger, not so eccentric character, though still passionate about literature.

AM: Did you find it was hard to let her voice go when you were done?

MRD: Yes, I think I found that her voice was still it my head. And then it was hard to switch to another person. It’s always hard when you start a novel to find the voice of the characters and it’s always hard to leave off the voice of the one before. Because of the writing process, I finished Great Village in 2008 and then over the winter I had to revise various proofs and then pick up with the new book I’m working on and then go back to Great Village. So, it’s like riding a horse and pulling another one along behind, if you’ve ever had that experience — a bit awkward.

AM: In one scene, you have an older character watching the carefree behavior of a young couple and wondering if she was ever that young. Was the difference between the generations something you wanted to explore?

MRD: It’s not to say that they [the young couple] don’t have their own heartache and grief but it’s different than their grandparent’s generation. So, yes, I wanted to explore that. The reason for setting part of the book back in time, was so that Thomas would be a young man between the wars. Both the years of the wars and the Depression made that generation fearful in a way that you might not see in Ruth and Phil [the young couple]. And I wanted to explore that difficulty of not being understood. When you straddle culture it’s very hard to find understanding in our small villages and in our small places. So, you have a young man who is not really suited to farming, when farming is the only thing that there is. Here is a young man who is so unsuited to what he is forced to do. And they are all young there and they just have to do what they have to do. Like, when we’re talking about the fisherman who has lost fingers off his hand. No one ever asked him if he liked what he was doing. It’s what they did to make a living. Ruth and Phil’s generation would have a future with a few more options.

TO READ A PREVIEW OF GREAT VILLAGE, CLICK HERE.