Welcome to the 5 Questions Series. Each week, I’ll ask five questions of some of my favorite authors, editors, publishers, and other industry professionals. This week, I’m talking with Sara Power.
I was so thrilled when I saw the announcement that your short story collection sold. Can you talk a little about that book, what it’s about and when we can expect to read it?
Art of Camouflage is on its way in May! It’s my first collection of short fiction, and it features the lives of girls and women who are connected to the military in some way. A number of stories include military kids who are figuring things out while growing up on military bases across northern Canada. I grew up in Goose Bay, Labrador, so how could I resist writing about teen hangouts like the old nuclear storage bunkers and abandoned US Air Force barracks? In one story, I give the kids superpowers of magnetism and chameleon superpowers, just because. A number of my stories are about young women in the early stages of their military careers. I like working with female characters who are new to the military because there is an element of discovery happening in the narrative. One of my characters is a first-year cadet at the Royal Military College in Kingston. Another is completing her initial army training at the Combat Training Centre in Gagetown. Both of these characters are closely connected to their past lives as non-combatants, as civilians, and they find themselves immersed in closed military environments, with all the doctrine, language, social codes, and gender dynamics of a military institution. I like to work with the changing qualities of naivety and ignorance when a character is placed in a strange new and rigid environment. I find it compelling to think about situations in stories when the option to thrive is not an option.
The other theme I explore in this collection is contemporary motherhood. Placing my mother characters in remote and transient military settings gives me the opportunity to think in a controlled and clinical way about contemporary parenting; I am able to isolate my subject and study it closely. I get to dive into these intimate spaces of power dynamics, and nurture, and gender roles, and fatigue of spirit. I study the sly creep of burnout, the manifestation of cruelty and abandonment and love and forgiveness and failure and guilt. I have three teenagers, yet mothering is a mystery to me on most days, which is probably why I find it satisfying to think and write about it.
On the publishing side, what was your process for finding an agent and what do you wish you had known about the whole process before you started?
I submitted my first short story to a literary magazine in 2016, on my 40th birthday. It was rejected, but the editor provided generous feedback. I kept writing stories, and sending them to literary magazines all over the place. I’ve always loved the short story form, and especially the masters: Lisa Moore, Alice Munro, Carol Shields, Grace Paley, Mavis Gallant, KD Miller, Annie Proulx, Edna O’Brien. The lit mags introduced me to new writers, new writing styles and forms, new writing ideas. Writers doing super interesting things on the page. I started listening to the New Yorker fiction podcast pretty much every day—and that cracked my world open altogether. I’m sure you remember during our MFA, how I recommended that podcast to anyone interested in writing short stories. On the podcast, they read a story, and then discuss it in depth. The exposure to different styles and forms of all these stories!!! and you can listen to them while you’re peeling an orange or driving to work. It’s heaven.
I met an author at the Ottawa Festival in 2018 who was was touring her first novel. She was also an incredible short story writer, and she shared some advice about her robust submission process to literary magazines. When a number of her stories were ready, she’d send them out to the different magazines that were open for submission, then she’d forget about them. In six to eight months, when they came back rejected, she’d send them out again to a new batch of literary magazines. After a piece got rejected three or four times, she’d revisit the story with fresh eyes, make revisions, and send it out again. The patience! I was so impressed with her dedication and her casual acceptance that rejection is a part of the process.
I started to send out my stories at the end of every month, and always felt pumped when I had three or four stories floating around out there, waiting to get plucked, or rejected. After many many many many rejections and rewrites, I gradually started to receive acceptances from literary magazines, which meant working with editors to prepare and finesse story for publication. Getting to work one-on-one with editors was a formative part of my experience as an emerging writer.
By the time I had enough stories for a collection, most of them had been published in literary magazines, and a few had won awards. I submit to a few agents who passed on my work, and then I crawled under my bed. I decided on a whim to submit my collection to my absolute top choice of Canadian literary agent. It was absolutely a long shot, but I think submitting consistently to literary magazines, and dealing with consistent rejection has provided me with a healthy relationship to rejection. I just went for it, and the stars aligned. So in the end, I didn’t spend a lot of time querying agents. Most of my querying labour and time happened when I was trying to get things published in literary magazines.
We’ve talked about misogyny in the military and how that informs your art. In general, do you view your writing as acts of healing and resistance?
I often think about different forms of misogyny in military settings. Whether or not the stories I write are acts of healing and resistance, I’m not sure, but I think both of these things might be possible through a ruthless interrogation of misogyny. The current study of misogyny within the Canadian military has opened floodgates for thinking and conversation about reform of military culture with respect to the status of women. My writing is a small piece of this larger conversation.
I have studied the reports and recommendations of Justice Louise Arbour. Her work has resonated broadly, creating revolutionary change in a culture with a vast history of normalized misogyny. The power of stories within this social movement is to present a crystalline experience of women in a military setting. As with many forms of normalized oppression, there is a widespread hunger to give language and shape to a particular kind of harm. This is story. This is what stories do.
The word misogyny can often feel vague to me. It’s an umbrella word that shelters a wide variety of experiences. A contempt of women and femininity that produces physical or psychological manipulation, usually over an extended period of time. It causes woman to question the validity of their own thoughts, their perception of reality, their potential for self determination. It leads to confusion and loss of confidence or self esteem, and debilitating self doubt. I know and have felt these things to be true about misogyny, but in story, I am able to better visualize these truths when they are attached to a person and a time and a place.
I think it was in one of Deborah Levy’s books where I first read about benevolent sexism. It’s a mode of misogyny that I wrestle with in my writing. This type of sexism functions below the radar of hostile sexism, and as such, has the potential to be even more invasive. It’s like a pretty weed, those patronizing attitudes that are seemingly positive, yet reinforce women’s subordinate status and power. Protective paternalism, for example, is a quintessential feature of military culture. An expectation that men provide safety for women and children. It seems harmless, chivalrous, yet this classic attitude can destabilize the equal footing of women in a professional military environment. Benevolent sexism quietly undermines institutions, work, hobbies, or habits associated with women, giving them a weaker and inferior status.
I think about the styles of leadership and command presence that are taught in military training. What does strength look like, and why? What does weakness look like, and why? What does confidence look like? Something as seemingly innocent as ascribing value to the stereotypical feminine attributes of nurturance and maternal nature is problematic within a military hierarchy. The assumption that women are more suited to roles of nurture and support and caregiving, while men are built for assertive leadership and command. Fictional narrative provide an infinite safe space to tackle and invert these stereotypes.
So, yes, maybe my writing is geared toward healing and resistance, although, I don’t think it’s my goal when I feel a story evolving. But maybe I don’t think about goals as a story is evolving. For example, just yesterday, my military husband was going through his collection of coins and badges and pins that he’s received over the years of collaborating with military members from different organizations and nationalities. He’s a Star Wars fan, so he keeps his collection in a metal can that’s shaped like the head of R2D2. My daughter, a devoted fan of Taylor Swift, asked him about his collection of colourful and shiny items. “So,” she said, “they’re like friendship bracelets. Like the friendship bracelets that Swifties exchange as a token of friendship and generosity.”
What a tangle of an idea! I wanted to drop everything and crack that idea wide open.
What are you working on now?
I’m in the messy first draft of my first novel which is based on my short story, The Circular Motion of a Professional Spit-Shiner, which takes place at the Royal Military College of Canada (RMC). It’s a braided narrative set in 2018 and 1998. Two ex-RMC cadets are women now, and they are living together on York Street (St. John’s) for the summer. Marlis is single-parenting two teen daughters while her husband is deployed overseas. Karley is a playwright, and is writing and rehearsing a play/puppet show about a group of first-year cadet girlfriends at RMC in 1998. The theatre company Karley is working with includes veteran soldiers who are now amateur actors. I’m working on a scene right now in which the veterans are building the female puppets based on the body specs provided. They will build the puppets, move their bodies, speak their voices, think their thoughts. I’m actually in love with where it’s going. I can’t even!
If you could give one piece of advice to emerging writers, what would it be?
Find a way to keep notes. On a phone, or in a notebook or whatever, so when you are out in the world, and sparkly ideas arrive, you can jot them down/record them. Oh, and the TNY podcast!
Bonus question: Have you ever taken a picture of a weird bird?
Hmmm. I didn’t take a picture, but when I was posted to Cornwall ON for two years, I walked on a trail that started to be taken over by geese. I had to swing a tree branch and walk very assertively, swinging the branch, making barking noises to get through the hoards of geese. It wasn’t my most graceful self, but it did become a story about the absurd escalation of violence, so all dignity was not lost.