INTERVIEW: NATALIE MORRILL

INTERVIEW by SERIF AYDIN

Natalie Morrill: The Ghost Keeper

Winner of the HarperCollins/UBC Prize for Best New Fiction, this powerful, sweeping novel set in Vienna during the 1930s and ’40s centres on a poignant love story and a friendship that ends in betrayal.

 

S. Aydin: Thank you, Miss Morrill, for agreeing to be interviewed. I believe there is a connection between an author’s work and an author’s life experiences. So let’s start at the very beginning. Can you tell us more about your childhood?

N. Morrill: Sure. I grew up in a diplomatic family, so we moved around to a couple of different countries. I was born in Vancouver. Next  we lived in Jamaica, and then we lived in Maryland, and then we lived in Austria. I think that’s probably the time period that’s significant, at least to my first novel, because it is set in a city where I lived. After we lived in Austria, we did moved back to Canada, and I finished high school in Canada. So definitely, Canada feels like home. But when I was younger, we did live abroad quite a bit.

S. Aydin:  How long have you been in Canada?

N. Morrill: I moved back when I was about 11, so quite a long time.

S. Aydin:  I can understand why Canada feels like home. Thank you very much. So, let’s talk about Vienna. It seems to be a very important location in your novel. You lived in Vienna, where most of the novel was set. Is there a specific reason for you to choose Viennafor the setting of your novel?

N. Morrill: Is there a reason I chose Vienna for the novel? I mean, I don’t know that it was really a process of deciding where to set the novel so much as it was that the story itself kind of came out of the place.  The story is about a gentleman who looks after the neglected Jewish cemeteries of Vienna. And I think having kind of held an image of particularly one of the cemeteries in Vienna that was very poignant to me in my mind and in my heart, I think this character kind of came out of that, and then his story sort of flowed out of him, I guess. So that’s kind of how it came about.

S. Aydin: Do you have any schedule for writing?

N. Morrill: Is there a schedule for writing? There probably should be more of one. I think the way I typically end up writing is that I really love having a long period of time to write. I think maybe I need to get over that. But I usually look for four times when I have at least a couple of hours of dedicated time. So it’s, I’m not very good at making it work. On days when I have a full schedule of work, I tend to look for moments when I have the whole evening or the whole morning, or if I have some time off, then I could take a whole afternoon or something and write. I recognize that that’s sort of a luxury that I’ve been able to hang on to during a lot of my working life because I had kind of irregular hours. But I think in terms of the sustainability of my writing practice, I realized that I do need to learn to make use of free time. I think, you know, like the half-hour periods or the hour-long periods or waking up half an hour earlier and getting some things done then. It’s a bit tricky, but I do, especially with longer projects; I feel like I almost need like 20 minutes or half an hour to kind of reorient myself in the world of the story and in the characters. So at this point, at least in my writing style, I guess I do prefer to have those longer chunks of time. But I think just realistically, in terms of getting the writing done that I want to get done, I need to learn to move towards using those more found chunks of time, like half an hour or so.

S. Aydin: I think you write more than just novels, you write poetry, correct?

N. Morrill:  Yes, I write poetry or short stories.

S. Aydin: Well, it’s a fact that writing poetry needs to be emotional; on the other hand, being a  writer needs more creativity. Can you describe Natalie to our readers as a writer and a poet?

N. Morrill: I don’t know it. I work well. I can describe myself, I suppose, but a reflection on that. I mean, it’s interesting the way that writers who work in different genres kind of get typecast or something. I think it is interesting to me. I do have a bunch of friends who are poets who seem to understand one another in particular ways because perhaps there is some element of personality or something that, that comes with love and poetry and wanting to immerse oneself in this I mean, I don’t want to say thankless art, but like definitely one that you’re not going to make a lot of money doing like with poetry.  You’re kind of aware that you’ll have a fairly small audience, but it’ll be very intense artistic work. But at the same time, if I think about my friends who are poets, they’re quite diverse in terms of their interests and personality types. So where I would kind of place myself in all of that, I don’t know. I mean, I think there are things about the technical aspects of poetry and the challenges that come with a form that is so interesting and so much like puzzles kind of in a way that that it’s just very stimulating and interesting to work in that form. Honestly, I don’t think I’m very good at it, that I do a lot more. I’m glad that I’ve had a few poems that were quite successful. But, in terms of fiction, I think for me, it is just loving a story, right? Like just loving hearing stories, coming up with stories, getting to live inside somebody else’s story. I think it’s what I’ve always looked like since I was a kid.

S. Aydin: Awesome, thanks! I’m just wondering when you wrote your novel did you use your poetry skills? 

N. Morrill: It’s interesting. I mean, I used probably everything that I had at my disposal, I guess, to get that novel done, because on the one hand, exactly as you say, it does deal with the historical subject matter and not just historical subject matter, but the very fraught historical subject matter. Like episodes in history that are very high stakes and that are still within living memory… So, that was very significant to me in terms of being able to get the facts right and being able to tell the story that didn’t kind of confuse the issues of what had happened to people. But at the same time, it’s something that was very significant to me in writing that book was, I guess, finding a voice and a form that made it work. So one thing that is probably pretty noticeable to people who read that book is that the narration sort of flips between first person and third person, which is something that if you’re teaching creative writing, you tell people to never do. Like, it’s a mistake, kind of. But, in this case, I was trying to figure out, well, I was trying to access this character who was himself trying to figure out how to tell a story. And it just struck me that this might be one of the kinds of mental tricks that he would play on himself in terms of if something, if he was having a really hard time telling a story, perhaps he would try telling it as if it happened to somebody else instead of as if it happened to him from the first-person perspective. So, it does sort of have this, this flipping effect which definitely, I don’t know, maybe comes back to the sort of more poetic side of things and doesn’t deal strictly with the history.

S. Aydin: Did you type the same page more than one time? 

N. Morrill:  If I typed the same page more than one time? I probably end up writing each page multiple times. I read at various points. I like it. I mean, I guess it depends on what you would consider rewriting a whole page, but they go through so many revisions or at least minded that there are very few sections that I did not rewrite in that book. There are maybe a few, and actually, the very opening is more or less what it was when I first wrote it, but very often, I mean, I would write whole chapters and then delete them, like they were just not good so I started again. So that was definitely part of the process for that book. And I think it’ll probably always be part of my process unless I, I don’t know, gain some skill in terms of being able to write something. Right the first time. It seems doubtful.

S. Aydin: Well, Ghost Keeper! An interesting name. Why did you choose this name? Why The Ghost Keeper?

N. Morrill: The Ghost Keeper. So there are sort of two answers to that, and one of them is kind of the more disappointing answer, which is that it’s kind of that my publisher chose it. I mean, the entire time I was working on that book, I didn’t have a title for it. So we kind of got to the end of the revision process, like, more or less. My editor had kind of signed off on the book, and we still didn’t really have a title. And he was like, “Natalie, could you please come up with a title for it?” And I couldn’t think of one. So I think I sent him a few ideas, and then he emailed me back and said, “Okay, well, here’s a list of ideas that we thought of, like at the publisher, the big list.” I think of about like eight or ten different options, and then I emailed him back and said, “Okay, I’m kind of deciding between these two, and I had picked two options on the list.” I said. He emailed me back and, I think, said something like, “Okay, well, we’re deciding between one of those and The Ghost Keeper. And I sort of was like, I think they want me to pick The Ghost Keeper. So I said, “That one!” And he was like, “I’m so glad you picked that one. I think it’s the perfect title.” So that’s sort of the disappointing kind of publishing behind the curtain answer to that. But, actually, I am pleased with that, with that title, and I think it’s a good title for the book. It’s, I mean, I think the idea of ghosts, even though this isn’t, it’s by no means a book about the supernatural, really.

It’s a book about memory and about contending with death. I think so. Of course, in the context of the book, not just death in a natural sense, but death in terms of like mass murder, unfortunately. So it does deal with these questions of memory and death and grief as well as this the idea of the possibility, I guess, of remembering, which I think it was, you know, this idea of keeping something comes back into it. And I also like the idea that whereas the certainly the protagonist of the book, Joseph, is himself someone who has this mission of kind of keeping souls or remembering the death. He, the book itself, kind of also has that effect. Like it’s so I guess the conceit in the book is that he’s kind of trying to set down these memories, so he doesn’t have to hold them, sort of personally anymore. So, in my mind as well, sort of feels like the book itself is kind of the keeper of these things. So I do like the title, and I think it’s a good title for the book, but it does have that sort of slightly disappointing answer as well in terms of my publisher picked it.

S. Aydin: What about the characters? Are they based on real people?

N. Morrill: Based on real people? The individual characters in the novel are fictional, so there’s no character with that name. There’s no character who had exactly that life. But I try it as much as possible to make the lives of the characters in that book reflective of real experiences at the time. So I read a lot of memoirs from people who lived in Austria right before the Anschluss who perhaps had to flee Austria during the Second World War or just after the Anschluss, particularly memoirs of Jewish people in Vienna and what that experience was like. So as much as possible, I tried to have the experiences of these characters reflect that, and I guess to the best of my ability, have them be realistic lives, if not real lives. That said, the particular things that happened to these characters specifically are not, as far as I know, exactly like the experiences of people who lived at the time.

S. Aydin:  I want to talk about the main character. Your book follows the life of the main character, a Jewish man, Josef. Can you tell us about Josef?

N. Morrill: He’s the main character of the book. He’s the character from his perspective; the whole story is told. He is a Jewish man who was born in 1909. So before the First World War, it kind of raised up during the First World War. And then kind of comes of age in the interwar period and at the time has a very ordinary life like he has. He works at the same company that his father worked at. Gets married, has a child and doesn’t really get involved in politics in any meaningful way. But one thing that is perhaps unique about him is his devotion to the neglected Jewish cemeteries of Vienna, which at the time that he first becomes invested in them, are perhaps not as neglected as they would be after the war and after the kind of decimation of that community. But sort of in his discovery of his own spirituality and his kind of reclaiming the faith aspect of his Jewish identity, which his family is not really invested in; he comes to have a relationship with the cemeteries in Vienna and becoming very devoted to them. And that kind of impacts what happens through the rest of the story. Because first of all, when the Angelus happens, when Nazi Germany kind of annexes Austria, Josef and his wife are separated in their attempts to flee Austria, and both are only able to escape the country thanks to his friend Friedrich, who is not a Jewish man and in fact, ends up joining the Nazi Party, which is kind of a conflict, obviously, that they face. But he does help them both escape. And then, later in the book, Josef has to kind of contend with what his friend has done and what his friend has become kind of over the course of the war. And in returning to Vienna after the war, largely due to his relationship with the dead and his need to kind of come back and make sure someone is remembering these events, he ends up in a situation where he has to confront these betrayals that happened.

S. Aydin: How did you create this character? Josef? Have you been inspired by any stories of people around you or any stories from real life in Vienna?

N. Morrill: Oh, I mean, I did read a lot of personal testimonies of people who had to flee Vienna after the Anschluss or who had to go into hiding or various things. A lot of people, thankfully, who survived that period wrote memoirs about their experience, which was very helpful to me, especially since, I guess, in the 21st century. It’s very easy to kind of find things online and order stuff. And anyway, I got my hands on a whole lot of different memoirs and personal testimonies of various people, even videos from survivors who were you know, telling their stories orally. So I did have access to a lot of those. And, I think to a certain extent, those shaped the characters’ experiences in my book. I definitely wanted to be faithful to the real experience of people at that time. I think maybe this character specifically kind of came about more in me asking, like, what kind of person would be devoted to these spaces? Like these sort of, I don’t know, liminal spaces of that are the cemeteries and particularly. From a Jewish perspective, since you know, there might be a very specific sense of what it means to take care of the dead in that.

S. Aydin: An American writer argued that Jewish people separated into two groups after Holocaust: Dead Walkers and Survivors. The first group, Dead Walkers, said that there was nothing to do from now on and gave up, but the second group, Survivors, didn’t give up, and they kept working to save the people from the bad situation and they did it. I know that you read a lot while writing a novel. Is he right?

N. Morrill: My goodness. I mean, I think I hesitate to kind of claim the authority to be able to speak to that. It’s a really interesting idea, which I guess, to a certain extent, just resonates with my sense of how different people respond to events that traumatic I guess, right? To events where not only an individual person has experienced something devastating and traumatic, but in a sense, they might feel that their entire people or that their sense of identity or their sense of security in the world is taken away. You know, a state more than a state. A state and various peoples have been so nearly successful at eradicating their people from a continent, without a great deal of, I don’t know, immediate kind of intervention from other countries. So I think that would be deeply deep. I mean, I don’t even have to say I think that would be, deeply traumatic, and people, as you say, like to respond so differently to that. I mean, I think one thing that I was trying to deal with a little bit in my book, again, without having the kind of firsthand insight into it that perhaps some Jewish writers might have, was to somebody who was almost a generation removed from the tragedy. So, for example, the protagonist has a son who is very young during the events of the Holocaust and who kind of comes of age in the decades afterwards like his experience is very much that his family did survive, that the Nazis didn’t win, basically like that, you know, they survive, that they can have a life. But he is at the same time dealing with the fact that his parents or his, specifically his father, I suppose, is so haunted by all of these things. And perhaps he was very held back by them. And he’s also very devastated by the fact that people like survivors that he knew died by suicide and things which to him seems so counterintuitive that like why would fight so hard to survive and then kind of let them win in a way, like take your own life kind of thing.

And I think all of that, in ways that I probably couldn’t fully articulate or understand just yet again, speaks to how deeply devastating and traumatic those events were. I guess people do not really know how they’re going to respond to an event like that. And I certainly don’t know I would have coped or responded.

S. Aydin: Do you think that you have a role as a writer in society, in the country or in the world?

N. Morrill: Do I have a role? I think so. I don’t want to overinflate the sense of the significance of my writing about the Holocaust in Canada. In 2018 or whenever the book came out, compared to say like the way it would have been 50 years ago or 75 years ago or something. But certainly, first of all, it gives me an opportunity to keep memories alive in a way that’s certainly one thing that I think the book can do very effectively. To keep memories of a time alive that is very quickly fading from living memory. The people who lived through those events and can recall them are dying. They’re becoming older and most of them have passed on by this point. So to kind of keep those memories alive, even in fiction, I think, is a worthy goal. 

At the same time, a lot of the kind of rhetoric preceding the events of the Holocaust. Before those events happened, as I was researching the book and as I was writing – it was eerie to me – how much of it seemed almost familiar. Almost as if I would hear that kind of rhetoric in politics, even in North America sometimes. Maybe not in mainstream politics but conversations would be happening in various social circles that struck me as weirdly similar to the kind of conversations that were happening in the decades leading up to the events of the Second World War. So I think, even if somebody were to read that book and kind of have this moment of recognition of the things that people were talking about in 1935 sounds weirdly like the kind of things that we’re talking about now. So let’s please, please make sure that we don’t go in the same direction that it went at that time. I think that that could be a very useful thing to just kind of like awakening that sense of those were not totally different times. People are the same now. Politics is certainly capable of producing similar results now.  We’re not immune to these things now. So can we think about that and then also think about what it feels like for individual people, which is certainly something that I think a big fiction can accomplish, like awaken that sense of it didn’t just happen to statistics, it didn’t just happen to nations, but it happened to individual people. And you can kind of put yourself in their shoes.

S. Aydin: Wonderfull, thank you very much. The last two questions.

N. Morril: I passed.

S. Aydin: Almost 🙂 You are a professor at Algonquin College in Professional Writing. Do you have any advice or message for young writers?

N. Morril: I guess the first thing would be just with relation to the amount of work that goes into becoming a writer. It’s a lot of work. And again, I don’t say that to discourage anybody. I say that hopefully to encourage people because young emerging authors do often come to me and show me work and ask this impossible question: “’Do I have what it takes?’ ‘Can I be a writer?’ ‘Should I give up on all this?’ ‘Am I crazy for thinking I can do this?’” It’s not a question I can answer. I have to say, I don’t know. Regardless of what I read, when you give it to me, I don’t know. It really depends on you.

S.Aydin: Once, an artist of the Ottoman Empire decided to write a poem. After he completed his poem, he asked one of the famous poets to criticize it. The poet took a quick look at it, then gave it back and said, “Keep painting!” So my question is, you have students who want to be a writer; they may send their craft and ask your opinion. And you see that he/she doesn’t have writing skills enough. Can you be so straight when you give your feedback?

N. Morrill:  Brutal. But you know what? It’s so interesting because like, somebody could give me a piece of their writing and ask me. And even if I was totally harsh like they say,  I read something, and you know what? “Don’t quit your day job. This is not very good. You don’t have it.” Like, some people, they’d be like, “Oh, I guess I’ll never be a writer.” And that would be the end of it. And for other people, they’d be like, “I’m going to show you!” And that would fuel their journey and then that would be like the story they told when they were a famous author would be like, “Natalie Morel told me I didn’t have it, but I showed her.” So, I don’t know what kind of person somebody is. Some people take that to heart, and some people feel fired up and challenged by it. So it really depends.