Credit: Darshan Stevens

5Qs - Vanishing Act

Meet Summer Fiction judge Deborah Willis

Not every writer gets complemented by Alice Munro when they release their debut short-fiction collection—but Deborah Willis isn’t like every writer. The queen of Canadian short story said the “emotional range and depth of these stories,” in Vanishing and Other Stories was “astonishing.” Willis, a twentysomething Victoria author, works at Munro’s Books and her writings so impressed owner Jim Munro that he personally handed her stories to the head of Penguin Canada, the big-name publisher that printed Vanishing. The collection has already garnered praise and prize nominations and we were thrilled to have her judge our annual Summer Fiction Contest.

Monday Magazine: What was the genesis of this collection for you?

Deborah Willis: I wrote it over a really long period—well, not really long, but about seven years—so I can’t remember exactly how it started. When I got accepted, I had finished about eight stories that I thought were good enough for a collection and when I read them over, I realised they were all kind of thematically linked, so I started writing with that in mind. That was two years ago.

MM: What would you say is the thematic link?

DW: I basically took Vanishing, the story itself, as the title story and the main theme that’s happening. So it’s all about people going away and people coming back. When I was writing it, I was thinking along the lines of writing stories about people coming to town and people leaving town as the really broad thing to work towards . . . I definitely wanted to write about loss from different perspectives and I think the book is kind of dark for that reason.

MM: How did Jim Munro first get exposed to your writing?

DW: I won this contest in Prism Magazine and the store carries Prism. That was right when I started working there and I mentioned it to someone. I didn’t really want everyone at the store to read it, but they did and Jim was one of them. After he said that he liked it, he said, ‘Show me everything you’ve ever written’—which I didn’t do, but I showed him five or six stories.

MM: Do you find working in a book store impacts your writing?

DW: It certainly effected me in terms of my expectation of what happens to books. In university, we talked about books as though they were these pristine things that last forever. In a way they are, but in another way, there’s this business behind it and they come and they go and are in and out of print. Bookstores carry a book for about a year and then usually it goes back to the publisher if it hasn’t sold or it gets remaindered or it gets pulped. Just seeing that was pretty eye-opening.

MM: What are you reading right now, other than the Monday Summer Fiction Contest entries?

DW: I’m reading Interpreter of Maladies, short stories by Jhumpa Lahiri, a non-fiction book called The Gift Inside, I’m just about finished Mordecai Richler’s The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz—I read a lot of books at one time, I could keep going.

Visit deborahwillis.ca for more information on Willis and her new book.