What They Wanted (43 page)

Q:

Sound plays an integral role in this book. For example, Sylvie seems to hear the sea in her father’s chest when she first visits him in the hospital. The morning she leaves for Alberta, she recognizes the first sounds she must have heard: gulls, ocean waves, sounders. And in Alberta, the unremitting roar of the rig, Cook’s rattling cough. Do you pay particular attention to sound when you’re writing a scene?

I pay attention to all of the senses when I’m writing. I close my eyes, and I try to see, feel, hear, smell what a setting brings. It’s critical for bringing a reader into the setting of a story. It’s a critical tool for me—writing through the senses—for it helps me define the tone and mood of each scene; it helps me to present the personality of my characters, their mood.

Q:

At the end of the book, Adelaide says in conversation with Sylvie, “Perhaps accidents are the way of life, and it’s for us to bring them meaning.” Are your books ways of bringing meaning to the accidents?

Writing for me is a way of understanding life. It helps me delve deeper into character and learn the psychology of that character, to understand the archetypes reigning within us. It pushes me to learn from the old philosophers, history. There’s much that I learn in looking for a character or setting or in psychological behaviours that never makes its way into the book. I love researching, but most of it never reaches the page or else it gets edited out before the book is printed.

Q:

Did you find it necessary to travel back to Alberta while writing the book? Were there parts of the story that required further research?

No, I didn’t have to travel back to Alberta … at least, not the rigs. I remember them as though it were yesterday. Those things I didn’t know—the inner workings of the rig—I learned from several roughnecks who gave me their time. Google is also a writer’s best friend— gawd, it was tedious learning the parts of a rig and how they all fitted together. And then in the end, as I already said, most everything I sweated over understanding got edited out.

Q:

Do you read for inspiration? What kinds of stories do you find yourself drawn to?

I read all the time. I read the classics, I read psychology, philosophy, ancient history, space stuff … I go through stages where all I want to do is read, when I want for nothing but to be a student. But then my bank account signals, and I gotta go to work.

Q:

What are you working on now?

I’ve recently started a new novel. It opens in the town of Stevenville in Newfoundland (surprise, surprise) but then migrates to Halifax. And that’s all I want to say about that … Did I just quote Forrest Gump???

DISCUSSION QUESTIONS

1. Why do you think Morrissey chose the title
What They Wanted
? How does “want” play a pivotal role in the book?

2. How does Sylvie and Chris’s relationship change throughout the novel? Does their interaction in Alberta differ from their interaction in Newfoundland?

3. If not for his father’s heart attack and his guilt about losing the boat, do you think Chris would have left Newfoundland?

4. The night before Sylvie and Chris travel to Alberta, Sylvie asks Gran why everyone gets so upset when someone leaves the bay, and Gran answers, “From the way we used to live, I suppose. All by ourselves, getting what we wants from the other. When somebody leaves then, we feels crippled.” Yet, in the same conversation Gran declares, “But you got to go.” Why do you think Gran feels they must go?

5. How did you respond to Chris’s drawings? What did they tell you about him?

6. The only time Sylvie sees fear in her father’s eyes is when he imagines being forced to leave the bay. Where do you think this fear comes from? Do you think he felt fear when Chris and Sylvie left?

7. Why do ghosts, spirits, and shadows populate this book? What do you think Morrissey is saying about memory? About what it means to be haunted?

8. As a girl, Sylvie often hid in a closet near the porch hoping to see one of the ghosts in the walls. After Chris’s fatal accident, Sylvie hides once more in a closet in her hotel room. Why do you think she does this? And what finally changes inside her to allow her to leave that dark hiding space?

9. We get to know Trapp only through other characters’ perceptions of him. He is a character who haunts the book from beginning to end, but we never know exactly what he’s thinking. Why do you think Morrissey decided to present Trapp in this way?

10. Do you think that Sylvie eventually comes to understand Ben’s need to look after Trapp? Why do you think she initially rails against it so vehemently? What does it reveal about her own feelings regarding freedom and responsibility?

11. At one point in the novel Sylvie says, “No matter whose table I was sitting at, or how sweet the jam, it always felt like I was just halfways home.” The book begins with the Now home being literally split in two. Does Morrissey offer a definition of home? What do you think home means to Sylvie? Does this change throughout the book?