Living out the “big dream”

CYNTHIA RAMSAY

While Dream Inc., a fictional magazine publisher dreamt up by Toronto-based writer Rebecca Rosenblum, may be struggling to survive, Rosenblum herself is thriving.

Joined by fellow Jewish community members Cory Doctorow, Nancy Richler and Robert Rotenberg – Michael Chabon headlined a pre-festival event – Rosenblum is one of the authors participating in the 25th annual Vancouver Writers Fest, which includes the likes of Margaret Atwood, Alistair MacLeod and M.G. Vassanji, to mention but a few. During the festival, which runs Oct. 16-21, Rosenblum will appear in two events: the Human Carnival, featuring writers whose fiction features “[o]ff-kilter, slightly twisted characters,” and the Afternoon Tea, “a thought-provoking afternoon of tea and tales from a diverse selection of Writers Fest authors.”

If her latest collection of short stories is any indication, Rosenblum will have much to contribute to both discussions. The Big Dream is full of quirky characters – some with actual names, such as Clint, Suyin and Mark; others identified only by their job description, such as Research and the chief financial officer (CFO after first reference, of course) – and each of their stories offers readers an opportunity for reflection on how we approach work, love and life. The main characters in The Big Dream work at Dream Inc. Canada, and readers often will be amused, sometimes shocked, at their ponderings and behavior. Though Rosenblum writes with a cynical sense of humor, her affection for her characters – even the disturbing ones – comes through, and there are many touching moments.

Downsizing is one of the themes that dominates The Big Dream: staff are laid off, magazine titles are discontinued, morale diminishes accordingly. Meanwhile, Rosenblum actually works in publishing. She has a blog called Rose Colored. Her writing, which has been shortlisted for various awards, has been published in numerous magazines and anthologies. Her first collection of stories, Once, won the Metcalf-Rooke Award and she is working on a third, with the first story of that hoped-for collection, ‘The House that Modern Art Built,’ coming out in the fall issue of PRISM International. “That project is taking a long time – it’s challenging,” admitted Rosenblum, adding that she “just got married, so wedding plans kind of took over the writing space for awhile. But I’m back at my desk and excited to see what I’ll write next!” All told, her outlook for the publishing industry can’t be as bleak as The Big Dream implies.

“I don’t claim to have the answers here, but as a writer and editor I do have ringside seats for the show,” Rosenblum told the Independent in an e-mail interview. “It’s a big wrenching change that the industry is going through, but it parallels the wrenching changes in manufacturing, in retail, in education. I think we’ll still have all those industries 100 years from now – the human race is not going to stop making things, selling things, learning things, reading things. But it’s hard for the individuals who are having to navigate the changes right now.

“Publishing is where I see the larger shifts in our culture and economy playing out in my own personal world. I’ve only been working for a decade and I’ve already had to learn and relearn a bunch of things to stay relevant. It’s hard to know what to do, and folks are going to sometimes make the wrong choices for their careers and their businesses – that’s inevitable in theory, but very sad and hard to watch in practice. The unemployment rate is a number, but an unemployed person is a person, you know? All that said, I’ll work as an editor as long as I can – it’s challenging, and I’ll never be rich, but it’s never boring. And, of course, I’ll write forever.”

In interviews with other media, Rosenblum has noted as inspiration for her stories people with whom she has merely crossed paths.

“I write towards understanding characters,” Rosenblum expanded for the Independent. “When I see someone briefly or know them a tiny bit, or imagine how a person would be in such-and-such situation, I wonder; I don’t understand, and I want to. If I get a chance to get to know the person better, my curiosity is generally satisfied, but if they disappear down the subway stairs and the curiosity still rankles, I start writing. I write to explore how it could be to be this way or that way – to be 40 and single and powerful, to be 16 and poor and depressed, to be a Russian immigrant, to be a tech-support specialist, to be someone who isn’t me. The characters develop on the page for me – writing is trying to imagine what they would and wouldn’t do, and editing is removing the parts that don’t ring true. Hopefully, what I end up with are people you can imagine actually meeting, though I bet they have very little in common with the folks I first glimpsed in real life.”

About how you might feel after having met these people, Rosenblum would “like the reader to have space to form his or her own opinions on the characters.

“If I start saying, ‘This guy is a jerk – let me show you how!’ it really shuts down how many ways you can read the story,” she explained. “I definitely have my own opinions, and some things are just obviously bad (murderers) but I really don’t feel the need to make statements in my fiction.

“Another way of explaining: I usually write characters from a pretty close POV [point of view] – I don’t always exactly get inside a character’s head, but I’m often pretty close. That means, to varying degrees, I’m looking at characters the way they look at themselves – with the blinkers and blindspots we all have about ourselves. Whereas a more distanced perspective would show a guy getting in trouble at work for slacking off, then driving aggressively on the highway and cutting people off, I would write about the guy feeling persecuted at work and then getting into a random accident on the highway. It would be up to the reader to make a judgment call about who was at fault at various points. You’d have to read the whole context and bring your prior experiences of work, life and highway driving into the decision, and whatever decision you make would be the right one. Just because our character here would be a jerk by my standards doesn’t mean that he doesn’t have a perspective that is incredibly valid in his own mind. And that, in turn, doesn’t make him less of a jerk to me – it’s just that jerks can be complex and interesting too. I write to explore and understand as much as I can, not to exonerate or judge.”
Rosenblum also leaves to readers the question of whether to classify her as a “Jewish writer.”

“I am a writer who is Jewish, and it is up to readers (and bookstore shelvers, I suppose) to decide what category my books belong in,” she said. “Certainly, I don’t write a lot about what many would consider traditional ‘Jewish themes’ and, in fact, many of my characters aren’t Jewish. This reflects my reality – I live in Toronto, a big multicultural city and, before that, Montreal, another one. I am surrounded by people of every ethnicity and culture, and they are all pretty fascinating to me.
“However, I always extensively imagine the lives of my characters, and just because it isn’t relevant to the story at hand, doesn’t mean I don’t understand the cultural places they are coming from. One of my favorite characters, Isobel, originally appeared in my story ‘Fruit Factory,’ which was published in The New Quarterly and also my first book, Once. At that point, she didn’t even have a name on paper, but I knew a lot about her and wrote a dozen more stories about her, fleshing out the character, until in ‘Christmas with My Mother’ (which appeared in Best Canadian Stories 2010), where the character is clearly Jewish (the story’s title is ironic). That subject hasn’t come up again in any of the stories I’ve written about Isobel since, but I imagine it will someday – it’s not like I don’t consider Jewish life and culture fascinating, I just don’t always consider the most interesting thing about a given character in every context.

“Similarly,” she continued, “in The Big Dream, in the story ‘The Anonymous Party,’ I wrote about Yaël and her family thinking about Jewish families I have known. But there was never a moment in the story where I felt any of the characters would have a real reason to say the word ‘Jew,’ so they don’t and, if a reader wants to draw the conclusion that these folks are Greek, Italian, whatever, I wouldn’t have an argument to offer. To be honest, I wrote the story thinking about how I once met a girl named Yaël – this was 10 years ago, easily – and the only thing I knew about her was that she was Jewish and she was stunning. Seriously, she was so gorgeous, if you had met this girl, you would’ve wanted to write a story about her too. But there is no reason for a reader to know, or need to know, any of that. The stories in my head are by necessity 10 times longer than the ones I finally wind up publishing – I figure readers have their own ways of filling in that space.”

The full Vancouver Writers Fest lineup can be found at writersfest.bc.ca. For tickets, visit VancouverTix.com, call 604-629-8849 or head to the box office, 1398 Cartwright St.

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