Historical fiction author Anne Lazurko joins me today to chat about Dollybird.
Bio:
Anne Lazurko is the author of two novels. Dollybird (ShadowPaw Press Reprise 2023) received the Willa Award for historical fiction and was shortlisted for a Saskatchewan fiction award. What is Written on the Tongue (ECW Press 2022) received the Saskatchewan Fiction Award and was shortlisted for Book of the Year and the Glengarry Book Award. A graduate of the Humber Creative Writing Program, Anne has short fiction and poetry published in literary magazines and anthologies and is active in the prairie writing community as mentor, editor, and teacher. She writes from her farm near Weyburn, Saskatchewan.
Welcome, Anne. Please tell us about your current release.
Dollybird is the story of Moira Burns, the daughter of a Newfoundland doctor and an aspiring doctor herself, who is banished to the bleak landscape of the Saskatchewan prairie in 1906 by parents unable to cope with her unplanned pregnancy. There she is forced to come to terms with her predicament, the pioneer environment, and her employment as a ‘dollybird’, a term that means anything from housekeeper to whore—or both.
Dillan Flaherty has come to the prairie on a harvest train and looking for a new start after his wife died of typhoid, leaving him with a small boy to raise. He too is an outsider trying to survive the judgment of others and his own past. When his story intersects with Moira’s let’s just say the sparks fly, but not in the way you might imagine.
The two stories intertwine into a saga of birth, death and the violent potential of both men and the elements. Dollybird explores the small mercies that come to mean so much under a vast and sometimes merciless prairie sky.
What inspired you to write this book?
I came across the term Dollybird doing research for a completely different project. In the context of my research, it was used to describe a woman who went out to homestead with a man, to set up the house, get it ready for the wife and children to arrive, or, in some instances to stay. It was mostly used in a derogatory way, and that got me wondering who these women were and what their role was, how they were seen in the community and how they survived. I created Moira to carry the term dollybird, and the story to show just how difficult life was for women at the time, especially in a pioneer place where it was preferred women were seen and not heard, and where outsiders were objects of suspicion and disdain. I grew up on the prairie and still farm here, so I wanted to write about this history from a woman’s perspective.
Excerpt from Dollybird:
“I wrapped my arms around myself and rocked. It’s not so bad, I thought. That never-ending sky offered comfort in its own way; there had to be possibilities in something so big. Running my hands over tender breasts and slightly distended belly, I ignored the skeptical voices in my head reminding me that I had no money, that I’d have to take the first job I could find in order to survive, that I had every reason to be terrified…
…I returned to Moose Jaw exhausted and hungry, impatient with the rampant changes of my body. Before sending me off, Father had explained what might be expected throughout the pregnancy, what was normal and what was not. I’d have been better off had he prepared me for men—how a man could run off at the first mention of the baby he’d helped create, how another could encourage such abandonment and, mostly, how a father justified sending away the daughter who loved him most.”
What exciting project are you working on next?
This spring I walked two hundred kilometers of the Via Francesco in the Apennines in Italy, the setting of my new project.
It’s a novel about Sophia Bakker, a mother walking the camino as a way to grapple with the brutal assault of her daughter. Along the way she meets other women who share the road and their stories, becoming friends, enemies, and sometimes unwitting accomplices. I want to explore feminism across time and generations and examine women’s rights, sexuality, and motherhood and what it means to find joy. It’s a big project!
When did you first consider yourself a writer?
That’s a tough question. I’d been writing poetry and short stories for a very long time before being published, took workshops and programs, that sort of thing. Halfway through writing Dollybird, and just as I realized it was becoming a novel, I received some very good feedback about it, and I thought, “I think this is it. I think I’m a writer.” So it didn’t take being published to call myself a writer, it was doing the work. Since then I’ve had more work published and become an editor and mentor as well.
Do you write full-time? If so, what’s your workday like? If not, what do you do other than write and how do you find time to write?
I am fortunate to have a flexible schedule because we farm. Since the publication of my second book, I’ve dedicated a lot more time to writing, so I’d say I’m a two-thirds-time writer. I try to keep to a routine: breakfast and coffee, thirty minutes of yoga, and then doing creative work for the morning. I find if I stick to that regimen it helps keep my brain tuned in to the new work I’m creating. If I leave it for too long, I have to spend a lot of time getting back into the characters and story. If I have more time in the afternoon, that’s when I’ll do research, marketing and that sort of thing.
What would you say is your interesting writing quirk?
I don’t know if it’s a quirk, or a way to avoid my quirks, but I am terrible for wanting to make things perfect in the first draft. All of us know that first drafts are ‘shitty’ as they say; so to stop myself editing too much as I go, I let myself edit the last two or three pages I wrote, and move on from there. It allows me to relieve the editing anxiety and also gets me back into the story.
As a child, what did you want to be when you grew up?
Ha! My dad told me that when I was about eight years old, I said I wanted to marry/be a farmer and write a book. I did both! So… I guess you could say I was a pretty confident kid!
Links:
Website | ShadowPaw Press