Knockout debut

After publishing four critically acclaimed books of poetry, Laotian-Canadian author Souvankham Thammavongsa’s debut short-fiction collection, 2020’s How To Pronounce Knife, wowed readers and critics, winning the $20,000 Trillium Book Award and the $100,000 Giller Prize.

The Toronto-based Thammavongsa’s debut novel, Pick a Colour, published Sept. 30 by Knopf Canada, is a slim but immersive novel about a former boxer turned nail salon owner, and her employees and clients, that takes place over the course of one business day.

The novel returns to the world of one of the stories in How to Pronounce Knife — and, like the story collection, has landed on the five-book short list for this year’s Giller Prize, which will be awarded Nov. 17.

Thammavongsa launches Pick a Colour tonight at McNally Robinson Booksellers’ Grant Park location, where she’ll be joined in conversation by Lindsay Wong, author of The Woo Woo.

Thammavongsa wrote Pick a Colour in six weeks.

“I was really locked in. What was really important to me was the language and the flow of a single day. I set myself a really difficult parameter: one voice, one room, one day,” she says.

That voice is the salon owner, Ning, and the day is spent in her nail salon, Susan’s, up the street from Bird and Spa Salon, where she cut her teeth before leaving to start her own shop. (Bird and Spa featured in the story Mani Pedi, which appeared in How to Pronounce Knife and also featured a esthetician with a boxing background).

Combining the sweet science and the daily grind of a salon was no small task for Thammavongsa.

“These are two very different worlds … and to bring them together and make it feel like they fit was difficult,” she says.

To help incorporate elements of boxing into Pick a Colour, Thammavongsa, 47, stepped into the ring.

“For a year-and-a-half, I took boxing lessons, technical boxing lessons. A lot of writers, when they do research for their novels, they get so excited, and rightly so — they’re learning something new,” she says.

“I worked really hard to make the story of the novel really shine, and not to bury it underneath everything I learned about boxing.”

Ning works with Mai, Noi and Annie, who playfully spar with each other and take jabs at unknowing clients in an unnamed, non-English language. The character’s memories of her time in the ring play into her emotionally guarded nature.

“There’s that line, protect yourself at all times — it becomes her life philosophy in the nail salon,” Thammavongsa says.

Thammavongsa’s poetic pedigree also helped shape the novel’s narrative.

“My poetry had always looked at small objects, or things that are considered ordinary. I make such an ordinary object feel like you’ve never seen it before, or you’re seeing it for the first time. The novel is built of these small, ordinary moments of work, like touching someone’s hands, painting their nails, washing their feet, plucking hairs from their eyebrows or chin. It asks you to value these small, ordinary moments,” she says.

For Thammavongsa, getting Ning’s perspective just right proved one of the most important aspects of writing Pick a Colour.

“When an author is in control of their tools, the reader doesn’t have to think about it, but for an author, on the other side, we think about it, obsess about it,” she says.

“The novel takes a look at point of view and perspective. Point of view is something you choose — it’s very easy. But perspective is how you build the world through the eyes of the person who tells the story, and I feel like that’s where the magic really comes through.”

Thammavongsa felt the world of customer service was the ideal setting for exploration of perspective, taking a different tack than literature that uses professors, writers or artists to tell the story and steer the narrative.

“But this is just an ordinary person who wants to work, and we see her observe, think and opine with such precision. She’s also an artist, a thinker, but she works in the world of a nail salon.”

Exploring the depth of complexity of a retail worker stemmed in part from Thammavongsa’s musings on her parents, who moved from a Lao refugee camp to Toronto when the author was an infant.

“When we think about knowledge, we think about reading books about people who’ve been educated, formally educated. My parents are Lao refugees — they’ve never been educated because there was a war in that country. The minute I walked into a kindergarten class, I had more education than my parents. I was thinking about their intelligence, and how it allows them to get through the day, the month, the year, the way in which they carry themselves to survive, that’s an act of intelligence,” she says.

The levity in Pick a Colour is also thanks to Thammavongsa’s parents, who she says have an “incredible sense of humour” and the ability to find joy in any situation.

“My mom worked in a cake-making factory, and it’s long hours,” she says. “Most people would not want to do that work and if they did, they would complain about that work, but when I asked my mom about that work, she said she’s grateful that she gets to make this thing that will go out into the world on a day when someone is celebrating something special.

“She feels like she gets to participate in their joy in that way. That kind of thinking, that kind of intelligence, to me, it’s just something I value so much.”

ben.sigurdson@freepress.mb.ca

@bensigurdson