Q: King Lear is a recurring theme in The Lobster Kings. Why
did you decide to include that as an element in the book?
A: I started The Lobster Kings interested in writing
about fathers and daughters. I've got two girls, and I wanted to address the
kind of pressures I put upon them to become the sort of strong women that I
want them to grow into, women like Cordelia, the narrator of The Lobster Kings.
And once I realized that's what I was writing about, King
Lear seemed like an obvious jumping off point. I studied the play in
university, when I was abroad in London for the semester, and it always stuck
with me.
But what I was always intrigued by was not what it meant to
give away the kingdom, which is what Lear is about, but rather what it
meant to be the one who was inheriting, and that's what The Lobster
Kings is really about.
I really was riffing on King Lear much more than
retelling the story, because I wanted to write about the version of Cordelia
who could look at her father and say, how do I take on the burden of the crown?
Q: How did you come up with the character of Cordelia, and
also that of Brumfitt Kings?
A: One of the questions I'm getting a lot of as the book
comes out is why Cordelia? Why such a strong female voice? The honest answer
is, why not? I'm a feminist and I'm trying to raise my daughters to stand up
for themselves, and even though I'm a man, a man's voice doesn't have to be my
default.
Because I was writing about the lobstering industry, a
traditionally male dominated field, I thought, if I've got a woman who is
trying to be part of this, she's going to have to be able to hold her ground.
I wanted a character who would say, I don't care how it's
been done, this is the way it's going to be. And I wanted somebody who was
smart and funny and charming, who was real - faults and all - and who readers
would fall in love with.
I knew I couldn't do the female voice, because there is no
such thing as the female voice, just as there is no such thing as the male
voice. I couldn't write the voice of women, but I could write the hell out of
Cordelia.
And to get to Cordelia, you had to start somewhere mythical.
The Kings family is a family that traces themselves back to the beginning of
Loosewood Island. Cordelia needed to be able to look back to someone who saw
Loosewood Island for all of the beauty and magic that it has, and who was also
able to be the anchor that held the Kings' family myth steady.
Brumfitt. A man who could sail half of the way from Ireland
and then walk the rest of the way, the lobster making a road with their
backs.
Q: Is Loosewood Island based on a
real place? What inspired the setting?
A: Loosewood Island is both entirely fictional and entirely
real. You can't find it on a map, and it is made of bits and pieces of images
and ideas, but it is also the kind of place that can be found up and down the
coast.
If you live in a bigger city or in a town that doesn't
survive on industry, it can be easy to forget that there are entire communities
that still make their living with their hands.
But I was very deliberate about making it somewhere unique,
because I wanted a place that allowed the stories and myth of the Kings family
to flourish.
One of the best things about writing in North America is
that the continent is so big. It gives me the space, as an author, to put
stories in places where we can imagine that there might be things we don't
understand, that we haven't discovered yet.
Q: Are there any authors that have particularly inspired
you?
A: When I first started reading seriously, the authors that
I came to were Alice Munro, Michael Ondaatje, and Margaret Atwood. I think I
fell in love with the idea that big, serious books can also be fun. And for a
boy who read a ton of science fiction and fantasy, the worlds of Atwood and
Ondaatje were an easy transition.
Q: What are you working on now?
A: I'm always working on a number of projects, but I'm loath
to talk about them. I feel like the instant I talk about them is the instant
that I'm committed to whatever I've said.
One of the best tools a writer has is the ability to go back
and fix mistakes. I feel like I constantly have to ask, does this make the book
better? And by saying, "this is what I'm doing," I've made it so I
can't ask the question.
Q: Anything else we should know?
A: I'm proud of my first book, Touch, but it is definitely a
quieter book than The Lobster Kings. That being said, I hope that anybody who
picks up The Lobster Kings can do so just expecting a great book.
I think if you go in with the assumption that it will be
this kind of a book or that kind of a book, you'll be disappointed. I'm a huge
fan of speculative fiction and fantasy and literary fiction and, well, almost
everything, but I think that The Lobster Kings isn't neatly slotted into a
genre. Heck, I'm even resistant to the idea of it being called magical realism,
though there is a bit of magic in it.
--Interview with Deborah Kalb
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