Gail Kirkpatrick is our esteemed guest for this Power Q & A. Gail is the author of the beautiful novel, Sleepers and Ties (Now or Never Publications, 2023)—a story about the importance of rebuilding community and friendships, and how these connections are often missing from (but necessary to) our everyday lives. This lack of connectivity is something so many of us feel, despite our increasingly digitally-tethered productivity-obsessed existences. We had to ask Gail: how does she take it slow?
Q: Could you speak to your writing practice, which you’ve described as slow. How do you maintain and importantly, honour this pace, in a world that can often feel oppressively obsessed with speed? We’re also thinking of how the message in your book seems to encourage resisting this modern-day pressure, and reconnecting with ourselves and each other.
Sleepers and Ties, by Gail Kirkpatrick (NoN Publications, 2023)
A: Thank you for this most interesting question.
For the last many years I have lived within a five minute walk of PKOLS (Mount Douglas Park) on Vancouver Island. I have a very visceral need to be deep in the forest as often as I can be. Here nature keeps its own pace; the leaves fall when it is their time and the camus and white fawn lily bloom in their own season. This revealing, the mystery and magic is never hurried.
I believe that landscape plants itself in us if we allow it to. If in small measure I have somehow osmosed that process or that it is reflected in the way I work, and certainly as I’ve gotten older, in the way I connect with people, in patience or being a better listener, then I am very grateful.
Of course, when there are deadlines to meet, when I was the mother of young children, I got up early to get the day’s writing done in a two-hour window, or I wrote when everyone else was asleep. There was more pressure to hurry. Then, I mostly wrote short magazine pieces that didn’t need a whole overarching time-line or plot and character development. Still, I am not immune to checking my phone too often in the day, and when I am writing I often write ‘offline.’
In the case of my protagonist, Margaret, in Sleepers and Ties, she is trying to hurry through her grief, get her executor duties over with so she can get back to her job as a museum curator, get ‘back to her life,' whatever that is. Events take place that force her to slow down and to see with fresh eyes a changed and changing landscape, to examine her oldest friendship, her marriage, and the legacy of her sister, for whom she grieves. It is largely through taking time in the landscape in which she finds herself, both physically and emotionally and she is able to reconnect. I planted her there and as the work evolved, though I may have been honouring a pace, the words in my book were revealed at their own pace too.
Gail Kirkpatrick. Visit her website.
More about Sleepers and Ties:
Grieving museum curator Margaret returns to her childhood home to leave behind her sister Shirley’s ashes and attend the final reading of her will. Unbeknownst to Margaret, Shirley has left her eight million dollars and a letter asking Margaret to return to its former glory an abandoned railway line—a fanciful notion, everyone tells her, with no real legal binding. Embarking on an adventure that will test more than just an executor’s duty and loyalty to her sister’s legacy, Margaret is forced to make decisions now and for the future that will challenge and forever change a landscape, her career, her marriage, her friendships, and her very own legacy.
More about Gail Kirkpatrick:
After receiving her undergrad at the University of Victoria, Gail Kirkpatrick completed her MA in writing at Lancaster University where she explored the parallel and converging lines of memory, shared history, and landscape. Her writing has been published in various literary and trade magazines in Canada and the UK, and Sleepers and Ties is her first novel. She currently resides in Victoria, BC.