The Voice Is the Story: Conversations with Canadian Writers of Short Fiction

Naomi Brun is a freelance writer and a book reviewer for The Hamilton
Spectator.

Between 1990 and 1999, Laurie Kruk took it upon herself to interview
some of the finest living Canadian short-story writers in existence. Her
interest originally stemmed from a necessity to collect qualitative
research on the short story for a Ph.D. thesis. Kruk wanted to
understand the essence of the short-story voice, deviations from that
standard, and how these particular authors related to the norm. Her
discoveries, presented in the original interview format and synthesized
in an expansive introduction, fill the pages of this book.

Kruk formulated her questions with an expected set of answers in mind:
that women (and women’s fiction) were undervalued, that the male voice
dominated the short story, and that innovative writers developed a
postmodernist voice. With the exception of Carol Shields, the authors
all disagreed with Kruk’s bias. These writers wanted simply to write,
and literary theory did not concern them whatsoever. Most of the
interview subjects, in fact, rejected any sort of terminology. Joan
Clark, for example, explained that she made it a habit “to avoid all
forms of labeling or jargon,” a sentiment echoed by Timothy Findley:
“Labels are confining. I refuse them.” The authors firmly stated
that they wrote from their own creative voice using their own
experiences and imaginations.

Kruk’s introduction puts a political spin on the responses of her
subjects. Writers who refuse gender pigeonholing by shifting attention
to the difficulties of the urban poor become the “Voices of the Lower
Class.” As a reader, I experienced a great deal of frustration with
Kruk’s questioning methods and analytical treatment, for she seems to
have been more interested in garnering the appropriate response than in
exploring the views of her subjects. On a more positive note, Kruk does
mention some noteworthy ideas about the importance of storytelling, but
these ideas do not constitute the majority of her introduction.

The main accomplishment of The Voice Is the Story is its clear
demonstration of the two sometimes opposing spheres of writers and
literary critics.