Shorter, but far from sweeter

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 11/03/2020 (2315 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Over the course of the last 20-plus years, Winnipeg author David Bergen has become one of Canada’s foremost novelists. With his latest book, though, the 63-year-old Bergen has returned to the genre in which he had his published debut — short fiction.

Bergen’s latest book, Here the Dark, compiles seven short stories and a novella that span his writing career. Unlike his novels, Here the Dark was published by smaller publishing house Biblioasis; the collection, released earlier this month, will be launched at McNally Robinson Booksellers’ Grant Park location at 7 p.m. at a free event, where he’ll be joined in conversation by Winnipeg poet and novelist Catherine Hunter.

“In a way I guess it’s like coming full circle — I started off with short stories,” says Bergen, whose first book, Sitting Opposite My Brother, was published in 1993 by Winnipeg publishing house Turnstone Press.

“For me, learning how to write a short story was a good way of testing the waters. Can I write a 20-page story? Will someone actually read it? Will someone accept it for publication? It was a way of finding my way into writing itself.”

Since his first collection, Bergen has published nine novels, including The Case of Lena S., which was shortlisted for the 2002 Governor General’s Award, the 2005 Giller Prize-winning The Time in Between and the 2012 novel The Age of Hope, which was featured on CBC’s Canada Reads in 2013 and was defended by Hockey Night in Canada host Ron MacLean. Bergen’s most recent novel was 2016’s Stranger.

He finds writing shorter fiction is nearly as time-consuming and taxing as writing novel-length books.

“The short-story form is tough; it can take me a long time to write a short story, which is weird,” he says. “There are times where I think I could write a novel faster than I could a short story.”

The earliest story in Here the Dark, How Can ‘N’ Men Share a Bottle of Vodka, dates back to the late 1990s, and won Bergen the CBC Literary Award for short fiction. Many of the other shorter pieces in the collection feature characters grappling with matters of faith and doubt, some underlying hopelessness and, in more than once instance, violence.

“Thematically, they all kind of fit together,” says Bergen. “I was talking to someone yesterday about (American author) Flannery O’Connor. I’ve always loved her stories — they’re always full of surprise. And there’s violence, and surprising violence, there’s the Bible, there’s grace… if anything she’s been a model.”

The most recent writing in Here the Dark is the striking title story, a novella-length piece of fiction that closes the book. It’s the story of Lily, a teenage girl (and later a woman) who comes of age in a religious rural community, struggling with her doubt in the faith, her marriage and her stifling community relative to the “outside world.”

Bergen had attended a birthday dinner in a similar community, and the inspiration came when talking to a local.

“I started wondering: how does someone either accept this community or move away from the community,” Bergen says. “I asked the guy across from me whether they’d ever had anyone move away or doubt, and he said ‘never.’ I thought there was no way — so there’s Lily.”

Bergen also saw similarities in his own upbringing in a religious household. “In some ways it parallels how I moved through life and growing up in a fairly religious home, and finding books, and university and education and realizing there’s a whole world out there to explore, and to ask questions. That’s Lily.”

The novella was written after Bergen had completed Stranger. “It was supposed to be a novel, but as a writer you can see when you’re over-extending. I chopped about 100 pages — it worked better as a novella.”

The format, while not commercially popular, appeals to Bergen, as it offers opportunities more in line with novels that short fiction cannot. “I think a novella can have incredible power. There’s a bit more room to breathe — it allows us to go inside the head of the character a bit more, a chance to explore where the character is coming from.”

Bergen is once again at work writing, having turned back to novel-length fiction that may take a historical bent. He’s in part motivated by having won the Writer’s Trust Matt Cohen Award in 2018, a prize presented to an author in recognition of a lifetime of distinguished work.

“It’s sort of like, ‘die already,’” he says, laughing. “It’s implied that you only support yourself through writing, which is kind of a joke these days because it’s impossible now. But it’s also sort of like a statement of ‘OK, you’re done.’ So it was almost like a bit of a challenge.”

books@freepress.mb.ca