The Story Behind the Story with Author Alison Taylor of Fredericton, New Brunswick, Canada.

 

Let’s welcome someone new to the Scribbler. 

Alison has kindly accepted our invitation to be our guest this week and share the news of her debut novel.

Read on, my friends.

  

 

Alison Taylor (they/them) is a writer, editor, and filmmaker based in Fredericton. Taylor’s short stories have appeared in various journals, and their debut novel Aftershock, published by HarperCollins Canada, received the John and Margaret Savage First Book Award (Fiction), and was shortlisted for the Rakuten Kobo Emerging Writer Prize. They received the 2024 David Adams Richards Prize for Fiction for their work-in-progress, Confessions of a Binge Drinker (working title). As a video editor, they cut a hundred-plus hours of television and many award-winning short films and music videos, and their own experimental films have screened at festivals internationally. They currently work in the communications field for the Government of New Brunswick, and freelance as a video editor and as an editor of books.

 

Title: Aftershock

 

Synopsis:

Shame and nightmares still haunt Chloe thirteen years after her baby sister died. Her mother, Jules, has lost herself in her tech career; she has a long history of chronic pain—and little time for Chloe. Aftershock follows their parallel journeys: When Chloe drops out of university to travel for a year, Jules’s Oxy dependency quickly escalates. Jules struggles to regain control of her life while Chloe, after a rocky visit with her estranged father in New Zealand, takes herself offline and off the map. When Jules suddenly can’t find her, the feeling is all too familiar. Mother and daughter will need to address old secrets and the emotional impact they have wrought before they can reconcile with each other, with the past, and with themselves.

 

The Story Behind the Story:

Aftershock, my first novel, began as a story I wrote for a short story masterclass I took through Continuing Studies at U of T. The class was amazing — a sixteen-week workshop, where every participant emerged with four stories that had been intensely critiqued by the whole class.   Terrifying, but amazing. One of the stories I wrote for this class was called “dead baby.” Someone had once told me to “write about what scares you,” and what scared me then, and still does to some extent, is my own family history, my own upbringing, my own life.

I had a sister who died from SIDS before I was born, and there was always this shadow presence in the house, because both my parents and my oldest sister had been through this horrible thing together, and they still carried within themselves that shock and that grief. It filled the air in the house like a charge. It ran under the surface of their relationships with each other. 

So I wrote this story, wanting to imagine what that was like for them, and how it shaped them, and ultimately, how it shaped me. And of course it’s all imaginary: these characters are not my mother and sister — at all. If anything, I would say both the mother and the daughter are different versions of me. In order to figure out a character and build empathy for them, both in myself and in the reader, I imagine myself into that character’s situation and explore how I would feel and react.

“dead baby.,” then, is told from the alternating perspectives of Jules, the mother, and Chloe, her six-year old daughter. It starts with Jules getting a call from the babysitter, saying the baby isn’t breathing, and we go through the next few hours with them: Jules, in shock, going through the motions, going to the hospital, coming home, trying to be a mother to Chloe while she drinks a bottle of whiskey; and Chloe, trying to stay out of sight, watching the paramedics come, watching her mother unravel, and thinking about how she’d been playing with her sister, but then her sister had started crying, and Chloe just wanted her to be quiet because the babysitter was busy with her boyfriend, and she could be really mean, so Chloe had tried to get the baby to suck on a stuffed animal… the story ends with Chloe crawling into bed with her mother, who’s half-passed out, and whispering that she’s sorry, because she’s pretty sure she killed the baby. 

As a story, it’s not very successful. It was undoubtedly underdeveloped, and at least one guy in the class couldn’t stomach that a mother would act the way Jules acted. Also, alternating perspectives in a short form is tricky, because you only have so much time to invest in each character, and to get readers invested in each character. So the general comments from this workshop about “dead baby” were that there was some great writing in it, but they weren’t completely sold.

I still felt like there was something there. And the comment from that guy about it not being a plausible depiction of motherhood really got to me. For two reasons: one, because patriarchy. Two, because while the story was definitely fiction, the aspects of the characters that my classmate was reacting to were definitely real.

But then, as one has to do with all feedback, I had to find the value in it, and examine what made him say that. What was I doing or not doing, and what did I need to do to make it work? Another classmate, one whose sparse, cutting writing I admired, said she really wanted to know what happened next. She felt the story ended just when it really began. Finally, I had done a great deal of writing about the world, the backstories, and the inner workings of the characters. I wasn’t done with it.

Fast-forward a couple of years, and I was applying to the Humber School for Writers’ 30-week correspondence program. Intended for people working on book-length projects, they pair you with an author-mentor who will give you feedback on up to 300 pages. And because you have to send ten pages a week, it really encourages momentum.

I remember the night I was completing my application. For my project proposal, I had this idea that I would do a short-story collection, because it seemed less daunting, and maybe a good place to start. But as I was filling out the application, I remember thinking, why am I forcing myself to do that step, when I know I just want to write a novel?

So then I had to come up with something pretty quickly, because the deadline was probably that night, knowing me. And then it all just came together in my brain. I would write a novel about the characters from “dead baby,” but set it 10 or 15 years later: how had those events affected them, and where were they now? I already had this meaty, traumatic backstory to build it around, and some deeply troubled characters to explore. So that’s what I did. I applied with that idea, got accepted, worked with David Bergen as my mentor, and wrote my first draft.

  

Website: Please go HERE.

A question before you go, Alison:

Scribbler: Who was your favourite author, or story, growing up?

Alison: The first book I remember loving was Judy Blume’s Superfudge. I read it in one sitting, seven hours on the couch, when I was about eight. But the book that sticks in my mind, that I would have read when I was about 14, and that I actually tracked down a few years ago because it’s haunted me ever since, is The Missing Persons League, by Frank Bonham (Scholastic, 1986). Dystopian YA at its best: a dying world, a missing family, a mysterious ring. And an ending you won’t see coming. It’s out of print, but worth it if you ever get the chance.

An Excerpt from: Aftershock.

© 2020 by Alison Taylor. Reproduced by permission of the author.

[Chloe is in New Zealand at her father’s house. Amanda is her stepmother, and Char is her half-sister. Lizzie is the baby that died, and Mo-mo, for Maureen, was the babysitter who was at home with Lizzie and Chloe. Lance is Amanda’s friend who is living in a tent in the backyard because he lost his house in the last big earthquake.]

Neptune.

When a kid invites you to see their room, it’s like being invited into their mind: you have to pay it the reverence it’s due. And you can’t say no. Unless you hate the kid. Which I apparently didn’t.

As Char took my hand and led me through the house to her room, Amanda called out that I shouldn’t judge her by its state because she tidied it every evening but then Char happened every morning. I heard Lance telling her she should just blame it on the earthquakes.

The room was a mess, but I’d seen worse. I thought it was probably genetic.

Stuffed animals crawled over piles of books and blankets, and the dog I’d met earlier (Spot) sat at a toy piano. A princess castle dominated one corner, which made my lip curl a little, but the whole centre of the room was cleared to make room for a pad of paper as long as Char when she lay down beside it.

Sit down here, Chlo. She pointed to a spot beside her. I moved to sit close by. No, not there. Here.

Okay, I laughed. I’ll do what I’m told.

Yes, she said. Here, you can draw with this colour. She handed me a blue crayon. Over there, she said, pointing to one corner of the paper.

Okay, I said. Not really knowing how to act around kids, I found her instructions quite helpful. What should I draw?

Char looked up at me for a few seconds, thinking. Can you draw . . . a dog?

I think so. What kind of dog?

Um . . . the kind that rescues people.

I looked at her, remembering the torn-apart buildings of this city she lived in. That’s bleak, kid.

She nodded.

Okay. And what are you going to draw?

She looked down at the paper and started sketching a shape in purple. I’m going to draw our spaceship, she said.

Our spaceship?

Yes. We’re going to go to Neptune.

I froze, watching her, a whorl of forces scrapping it out in my brain, my chest, my stomach. Love, kinship, jealousy, resentment, fear. At Char’s age I had a favourite game, invented by me and my father. He would smooth out the sand in the sandbox in our backyard and draw a rocket ship in it, big enough for us to sit inside its outline, me in between his legs, and Lizzie, a few months old, propped up between mine. He’d already taught me the names of all the planets, we’d paint them together, uneven splotches of colour across a page in the order of their distance from the sun. Neptune was our favourite destination, the beautiful purple-blue jewel that called to us, invited us to go as far as we could, and then farther. David would make some sound effects while I narrated our trip through the galaxy and Lizzie giggled and gurgled in my arms. I knew he would look after us, and we would both look after her, and we would adventure together every minute we could before he went away again for work. And then it would just be me, keeping my sister safe.

Char looked up from the very not-aerodynamic shape she’d drawn, saw my blank corner of the page. You’re not drawing, she said. Draw! But I couldn’t.

I left her there looking confused, and I felt even worse. But I wasn’t about to get too attached.

The pressure from Amanda didn’t help.

I knew she was just trying to make me feel welcome, but her approach was all wrong. First there was the conversation where she asked me if I would babysit while she ran errands.

I don’t babysit, I told her, thinking of Mo-mo and how that turned out.

But she’s your sister.

I barely know her. I’m not good with kids.

Well, you’ll have to learn sometime.

Why?

Don’t you want kids of your own?

No.

You’ll change your mind.

I don’t like kids, I finally said.

But she’s your sister.

And maybe I would have caved, just to be nice. The truth was, I found it hard not to like Char. But then Amanda called her in from the backyard, where she was terraforming with her mini-bulldozer, to the kitchen where I sat reading at the table.

Wouldn’t you like Chlo to stay and play with you while Mummy goes out for a little while? As she talked, she bent over, wrapped her arms around her daughter and nuzzled her face into her curls.

Char’s face lit up. I closed my book.

I wish I could, I lied. But I’m still so jet-lagged. And I went to the guest room and shut the door, trying not to hear my half-sister crying in the kitchen.

I felt bad, but I hate being manipulated.

 

  Buy the book HERE.

 

Thank you for being our guest this week, Alison. WE wish you continued success with your writing.

Thank you to all our visitors and readers.

Feel free to leave a comment below.

We’d love to hear from you.