Home Schooling, by Carol Windley
In an email interview with Ambrose Musiyiwa which took place on Oct. 16, Canadian author Carol Windley spoke about her latest collection of short stories and the challenges short story writers face.
The short stories in your most recent collection, Home Schooling, are set against the rural landscape of Vancouver Island and the cities of the Pacific Northwest. Why is this so? Is there a particular reason for this?
I’ve always felt incredibly lucky to have grown up on Vancouver Island. The landscape is in one way quite gentle and benign, but it’s also complicated and dense and mysterious — an ideal setting, I think, for fiction. Some of the stories in Home Schooling are set in Washington State because it’s an area with strong geographic and historical connections to [British Columbia] B. C. The international border adds a note of interest and complexity — another demarcation, like the edge of the sea.
In these stories, what would you say is your main concern?
I wanted to look at how family is the place where we first learn about relationships and community. Parents hope to give their children a sense of family history as well as certain attitudes and values and while children are very receptive, very willing to learn, they’re also very critical and sceptical. In a child’s imagination, received wisdom can undergo startling changes. And in a family, everything is fluid and mutable, anyway, as a result of personality and temperament and circumstance, so trying to give of a sense of this in the fictional families in Home Schooling became my main concern.
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