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This week’s story, “St. Alwyn Girls at Sea,” is about a school of girls who board a ship to the North Atlantic during the war. When did you first come up with this premise? Did it arrive fully formed, or did it start with a single image, episode, or character?
I think it’s complete. Last spring, I had a dream about a girls’ school on a ship. I attended an all-girls school in Toronto called St. Clement’s for a good portion of my childhood (from grade 4 to the end of grade 9), and I think I always imagined that I might one day write about girls’ schools. Seeing the school on the ship, somehow it suddenly became possible. As a child, I would pretend to be sick and stay home from school, drawing different girls that would appear in future books, changing their hair colors, giving them names, and then It was really fun. I didn’t have a story, just the girls and their personalities.
Madame Ghislaine, headmaster of St Alwyn’s School, came up with the idea and persuaded the headmaster of a boys’ school to follow suit. Although the schools are on separate ships, they meet once a month at sea. Many girls spend a lot of time thinking about boys. Is this inevitable at girls’ schools, whether at sea or on land?
I don’t know. Actually, I don’t remember thinking that much about boys. Some of the other girls were doing it too, but I found them a bit scary and really adult. One of my best friends from my previous school went “boy crazy” in 6th grade and I was really pissed off about it. I didn’t know many boys my age, so they seemed exotic, distant, incomprehensible, and in some ways outliers. For me, romance was between girls. In my story, their unrequited love and fantasies are not about the boys. They are like objects that girls can hold, talk about, and share with each other in order to relate to each other in different and intimate ways.
The girls are preparing for a talent show, but when it is announced that the boys’ ship will not make it in time, they, and perhaps the principal, believe it is pointless. Why did Madame Ghislaine decide to cancel the show?
I don’t know! Maybe he didn’t want to write a talent show.
One of the girls, Dani, begins corresponding with a boy named Sebastian whom she met at a dance. It’s the first time she’s fallen in love with a boy. Did you draw on your own memories when thinking about Dani’s feelings? What does epistolary form contribute to early relationships?
I remember being with a boy at a 7th grade dance. He was the shortest boy in his grade and I was the shortest girl in my grade. Our friends were sure we would be happy to dance together, but he was grumpy and so was I.
I had a friend named Alice, who was the same age as the girls in the story, and around the time I dreamed about ships, I went out to eat sushi with her several times a year. She talked about her latest love life. I wrote the story soon after. It contained memories of many unrequited loves I’ve had, but it was her intensity (our dinner conversation was entirely about her unrequited love) that really inspired the story. did.
As for letters, I rarely receive them in the mail, but I still receive them from time to time. I have a suitcase full of letters from the 90s, when I regularly exchanged letters with friends. Letters are very special. They include the whole human being. In my story, email was the only way I could think of for Dani and Sebastian to communicate.
One girl, Lorraine, has no interest in obsessing over boys. She watches the nightly news and tries to tell others what is happening in the war. She looks at a map – “For her, a map wasn’t a meaningless mess. It was a war, a territory built by the passions of its people” – and dreams of becoming a diplomat. . She’s not necessarily the most diplomatic character. But will she be able to hold her ground at the negotiating table?
I don’t know. The way Lorraine describes her extroverted personality doesn’t seem like her at all. However, we do not know what kind of person will be successful at the negotiation table. Maybe she’s good.
Sebastian already has a girlfriend, whom he has known since kindergarten. However, she becomes extremely upset when she learns that Dani is writing a letter to another girl on the ship. How introspective is Dani? Will this force her to look more closely at herself and her own moral values?
I think so. Dani is not interested in introspection. She is the type of person who likes to take action and make things happen, but she doesn’t like to think about it because it gets in the way of her performance. This may be the first time she has followed her train of thought to its end. Usually it is she who comes up with the rules and games and creates everyone’s reality, so knowing that someone else may be creating reality is especially surprising and unpleasant for her.
Are you going to write more about St. Alwins and life on board? Can you tell us a little more about the war?
I might write more. This story has already been cut from a long one. When I started writing about them last spring, I imagined it might become a book. So I turned that into a story, and I was like, that’s it. After I finished turning it into a story, I started thinking about turning it into a novel again. Now I’m curious to see if publishing will make me feel like the project is finished, or if it will make me want to write more.
I didn’t imagine going into more detail about the war. But I liked the idea, even if part of the fun of writing this story was focusing on the kinds of details that people who like war stories might find trivial and upsetting. is.
