An Interview with Ontario Jubilee author, Darrow Woods: Part One
We’re celebrating the publication of Darrow’s new novel: The Book of Christmas Joy. Darrow was kind enough to sit down with me for a conversation about his writing process and what inspires him. This is the Part One of our conversation (Part Two will follow next week…):
Catharine Mitchell: Well, Darrow thank you for agreeing to have a chat. We like to shine a spotlight on our community.
Darrow Woods: Well, thank you. Yeah, and I think your email said you were actually going to go back and re-read the first one. That's taking your job very seriously!
C: I did go back and reread the first book! I just had to get my head back into the world. I love books. And it just seems like most of my time these days is taken up with nonfiction. So, to have a good fiction book that I enjoy, my relaxing genre of choice is mystery/crime.
D: Mhm.
C: So this sort of fits right in, so I did go back and re-read The Book of Answers, your first book. And I am 90% of the way through The Book of Christmas Joy, so no spoilers from the end, please!
D: Okay, okay. So, so other than my books, who do you like to read in mystery and in crime?
C: A lot of British authors. I love P.D. James. And I like Agatha Christie, if you want to go for the classics. Looking at important issues - which is part of why I really appreciate your book so much - we have the added beauty of that sort of pastoral, spiritual direction. And with Tom's mother, the educational focus. I was a teacher for 30 years, so I find there's so many things, so many nuggets that are there for people with the eyes to see them.
D: Yeah, in the video game world, they call those Easter eggs. Like, little things you only get if you know.
C: Well, okay, so I have a whole list of things here, but one of those Easter eggs is your use of names.
D: Mhm.
C: For example. Reverend Thomas Book, the main character, his daughter Hope, Michael Powers, who's always there when Tom needs him. Estrella, Alegria, Sifra and Pua…I love the way that you use names and locations to give a deeper meaning.
D: All the ones you noted, all those names, they were… they were deliberate choices. So Thomas Book - there's several things going on there. One is he's doubting Thomas. He has questions. He’s “Book”, first, because one of my favorite old movies is, Witness - the Harrison Ford movie - and the detective who enters the Amish community is named John Book. So, Thomas is doing the opposite. He's going from a pastoral world into the world of crime, so he's doing the reverse of what happens in Witness. Like the world of crime is invading his, sort of, pastoral setting. So there's that. I never put this in the books, but Tom's middle name is Merton.
C: Oh, really? I love that!
D: So he's Thomas… he's Thomas Merton Book. And, all the books about Tom Book have a book in them. So, so the first one was The Book of Answers. And in that case, the book was the journal he finds. That has clues to, sort of, you know, solving at least one of the murders, or one of the reasons for a dead body in the first one. The second one which you're reading now is The Book of Christmas Joy, and that's a reference to the diary that Hope is keeping, working towards writing an essay about joy.
C: Mhm.
D: So every one of these stories will have a book in it that is sort of key to understanding some level of the story. So each book about “Book” has a book!
C: I… I love that! With Christmas Joy, I'm thinking about the child who was born, Alegria. Which means joy. And that sort of connection was there – during the stories when Tom was talking to the children, and he was answering real questions about what it would have been like…
D: Mhm.
C: …2,000 years ago for someone to have a child away from home and safety. One of the notes I wrote for myself was that these diaries or journals that are in these two novels are so important. The first book is from Thomas's perspective, even though Doug's work in his journal gives us some more information. It caught my attention in The Book of Christmas Joy when Hope is writing in the journal that she's doing for her assignment. And we get her point of view, not just from the journal that she's writing, but also what's going through her mind as she's writing.
D: So, when I wrote The Book of Answers, I was part of a writing class at Sheridan College. And I was writing that book in third-person. Like, over, over Tom's head, but not in his head. And the teacher pointed out that the genre that I'm working in - which is sort of the cozy mystery genre - most of those are first person. So, I rewrote the book and put it in first-person. I'm also trying to challenge myself as a writer. And, you know, trying to learn more of the craft, so I made a deliberate choice to make the second book third-person POV, over the shoulder of Tom. Originally, I was not going to give Hope her own POV, but I was going to have her journal entries. And then several of the entries that I wrote in her voice to carry the story, my beta readers - who I call my midwives - all pointed out to me that what I was writing was actually from Hope's point of view, and I was describing a lot of action, and doing it in a way that would not happen in a real diary. So then I converted those chapters into scenes from her point of view. And the…I'll continue to challenge myself, so for the one that I'm working on right now will be written probably with 4 or 5 different points of view over the shoulders of 4 or 5 different characters. And that's just because I'm feeling more confident in my ability to do that, to make sure that they each kind of have that character's voice, even though you're not directly in their head. There's kind of an author's cheat that happens there, where you're over their head, but you're able to say what they're thinking and feeling without saying “I”. You can still say Tom, or Hope, or whoever. But you can get across what's happening for them. So it's just learning the craft, learning how to do it.
C: You know, I'm hearing the technician in terms of understanding writing, but also trying different things. There's a sense of playfulness there. It has a light touch to it.
D: Well, I'm glad you hear it that way. And after, you know, after writing sermons and churchy things for 35 years, I don't really have a lot of sensitivity about my words, or about what I write. They're just words. And if they don't work, I can make up some new ones. When I put the book out to my midwives, I had about 8 people read the book before it was ready for publication, including my wife, who was scared to tell me what she really thought.
C: Mhm.
D: I took everybody's comments - I didn't always agree with them, but I took them seriously. And I think that whenever something happens in the text which causes a person to step out of the story with a question, or something's not working for them - that's my problem, as the writer, and I have a technical issue that I need to sort out so that they can stay in the stream of the story. So I'm not really precious about what I write. I can fix it, or I can work on it. And the other thing, and this is probably more relatable to the Jubilee folks – especially with the first book - I've had to learn to be organized and to organize my notes. So, in the first book, I was writing on, you know, whatever scrap of piece of paper I happened to find, or I'd open a computer file on one of my devices and start writing. And I often will lose stuff or not remember what I filed it under. I'm a little bit better about it now, but…In the beginning, it was pretty chaotic. And what I found - and this is what I thought was really interesting - there were times when I would rewrite an entire scene, an entire chapter, and then find the first one I wrote, and they were remarkably similar. And what… what that said to me is that whatever deeper place that we work from when we write, it's kind of the same territory that dreams come from. Like, the inner producer, the inner director of our dreams. You know, however God is working through us is working with particular material that we carry. You know, memories and hopes and, and all that stuff is within us, that's always there. So, when I lost a scene and rewrote it, it came out pretty much the same because it's coming from a deeper place. So my role as the… sort of the conduit is to get back to that place. And do a better job of expressing it. So it's not about the particular words, it's about what is it I… what is it that's in there that needs to be written or said, to make this scene, to make this character work. After writing the first one, I trust that a lot more.
C: Mhm.
D: And with the second one, a similar thing was happening. I would get… I would get stuck, you know, people talk about writer's block. What I was experiencing, it might be called writer's block, because I'd be… I'd be stuck on a scene. I would kind of know what I wanted to write, and who needed to be in it, and how it was going to feel, and what it was going to look like. Then I’d sit down at this desk with my computer, and I couldn't do it. It just would not come out, and I would go off and scroll on Facebook or something. And what I would eventually figure out - and this happened 4 or 5 times with the new book - the problem was, the scene I thought I was writing was not right. I wasn't being true to the character, I wasn't being true to what the story needed to be. So, my gut wouldn't let me write it.
C: Mmm…
D: So I was just like, don't even bother, because that's not where this is supposed to go. I'd have to back up, look at the macro again and see, so where is this going to fit? Well, it doesn't fit. So, what would fit? And then I get the right thing and then it would flow. There's something about paying attention to the inner…
C: Yeah. Yes. I noticed, when you mentioned trusting your gut, you have Tom say to one of the characters who asks “Can I trust you?” And Tom's… Tom's response is “What does your gut tell you?” You know, even if we think about the collective unconscious and the personal unconscious - wherever we park all of that stuff, whatever filing cabinet it's in - just being able to access that is so foundational to writing authentically and with a deep truth. I sense this a lot in your work. I also love the southern Ontario settings. I found that enchanting from the beginning of the first book. A friend of mine lives in the Bronte Creek area – the setting for The Book of Answers - so that was really interesting. And The Book of Christmas Joy is set in a place that's closer to your home right now.
D: Well, when I started writing the first one, we were living in Oakville, and I spent a lot… I spent a lot of time in the Bronte Village area. I based the church that I [spoilers] on Walton Memorial. And that happened because I was working at another congregation in Oakville. And I knew I couldn't write a murder mystery and it'd be the one I was working at. Probably just too close to home, so I went over to see the pastor at Walton for, like, 45 years, and I said, so can I borrow your church to [spoilers]? And we talked about some of the characters in that congregation over the years, and he told me some backstories and gave me a history of the church. So, I rooted it all in Walton but didn't call it Walton. It's called St. Mungo's.
C: I'm curious about that.
D: Well, there are two reasons. There was a crime novel or series of them years ago, where the main character was named Mungo, and I just liked that, and then when I was in Scotland, I learned about St. Mungo. I also made sure that if I was going to name a church after a saint, there isn't actually a United Church that's called St. Mungo's so that I wasn't treading on anything unintentionally. Mungo or Kentigern, the other name for him… he's just a cool guy. In the first draft of The Book of Answers, I had Tom looking at a stained-glass window of Mungo, and was going to do some stuff with that, but it was too much, so I cut it back. But it felt… it feels good to ground the book in a place that I actually know. And then, when I got here [Kingsville], I'd published The Book of Answers and was selling it here. People liked that it was in a real place, but I got a lot of questions, like, so you live in Kingsville, why don't you write one in Essex County? So, that was a natural choice to set one here.
C: Mhm.
D: Also, by the time Tom finds the murderer at St. Mungo's, he doesn't have much of a future there after that. He needs to get out for lots of reasons; he migrates so I made up a new community for him called Sun Parlour, because that's a name that gets used around here, because this is the, you know, the southernmost community in Canada. It could be Kingsville, it could be Leamington. I was selling books at a bazaar last weekend in Leamington, and they… so the folks all think it's Leamington, that's okay.
C: Mhm.
D: One of the things I like about crime fiction is a real sense of place. When I read Michael Connolly's books about Harry Bosch, they're all set in Los Angeles. I've never been to Los Angeles. But I feel like I have a sense of it.
C: Mhm.
D: Or there's a bunch of books about Dave Robichaud that are set in New Orleans and I love feeling like I've been in a place. And it doesn't really matter what place it is. I can get interested in a place if the author can sell me on it.
C: Well, Charles DeLint is a Canadian fantasy… urban fantasy author. Are you familiar with his work?
D: Yep.
C: Every time I cull books, like when I moved and downsized after I retired from teaching and moved to an apartment from a house, I had to get rid of a lot of books. Every time I've downsized, his always make the cut. I would not live without his Newford books. He's created a place, and the place that he created is so alive, I feel like I know that place. If I went there in a dream, I'd know where to go.
D: Yeah. Well, one of his early books, didn't it kind of start out in Ottawa area?
C: You know?
D: And then… and then he drifts into another place? Yeah. Yeah.
C: Yes, he had to create a new place. One of my favorite things that he does is he takes Celtic spirituality and Indigenous spirituality, and he brings them together and shows how they butt up against each other. And one of the things that I really, really appreciate about your books is the integrity with which you approach a lot of issues, societal issues that are current, like mental health: suicide, addiction, trauma, grief, dementia, diversity, drug and human trafficking, and - with a deep respect - Indigenous topics. And I can hear… I want to say the pastoral voice, but not all pastors speak from that voice, but just that exquisite respect with which all of these are approached, and they're not done with bells and whistles. They're done with a gentle, this is the way things are and should be, touch. I love that.
D: I try to be aware when I'm writing these stories, that I'm a 60-something-old white guy.
C: Mhm.
D: Um, a person of privilege, from a colonial culture, so… so what I try to do is Tom Book knows about some of this stuff. But he doesn't know everything. So he's not an authority. But he has an open heart to it all.
C: Yes, yes, open heart, that's it.
D: And that's where I kind of position him. And he's usually the lens through which you see all those things. He's not an expert on anything. But he cares about stuff.
