Interview with author
Richard Scrimger
by Brenda Sutton

Richard Scrimger, the award-winning Canadian Children's and Young Adult's author, won a Mr.Christie's Book Award in 1999 for Nose from Jupiter. It was the birth of a series of delightful children's books featuring the affable alien Norbert and his peculiar habit of taking up residence in the noses of children whose lives need a turn for the better. The Norbert series, including A Nose for Adventure and the latest installment Noses Are Red, has taken children's literature by storm. Richard is also the author of two adult novels, Crosstown and Mystical Rose, and a new book for young children, Princess Bun Bun. His latest YA novel, From Charlie's Point of View is told from the perspective of its blind young hero.

Right before Mythic Journeys '06, a small package landed on my desk. In it was a slender copy of Richard Scrimger's recent novel Mystical Rose, a token of thanks from the author for arranging his attendance at the conference. Crazy busy as it was then, I tossed the book in my suitcase when it came time to head for the Hyatt. Saturday night of the conference, bone weary and dragging my tired self back to my hotel room, I should have gone straight to sleep. Instead, I picked up Mystical Rose for a nightcap chapter. I couldn't put it down until 3 a.m. — the story is that good.

Many online conversations later, Richard graciously agreed to a Q&A session accompanying the inclusion of his short story, Questcon Quest. We feature his dark and serious tale of fantasy computer gaming and an emotionally damaged family in this month's Mythic Passages. I hope that you enjoy getting to know him better.

Brenda: Mystical Rose is a journey into the mind of an elderly woman in the last hours of her long life. Rose, living with senile dementia, slips in and out of lucidity. Sometimes Rose is remembering her youth in Canada in the 1920s, and other times she's having problems remembering yesterday or even acknowledging the face of her worried daughter. Trapped in her own confusion, bound to a hospital bed, Rose engages in some serious sorting out with God. What drew you to this character, and why did you choose to examine her life from the perspective of mental illness?

Richard: Rose's dementia is central to her character, but it does not define her. It's more a tool. For the author, it's a way to reveal her past with the immediacy and excitement of the present. As far as she and the reader are concerned, these long-ago events are happening now. For Rose herself, the dementia is a way of breaking down the barriers to understanding, so that she can achieve a sense of completion, integration, one-ness.

Gee, this is all true, but awfully writerly. The short answer is that I love Rose as much as any character I've written about. She is so flawed, so imperfect, so damaged — and so funny with it all.

Brenda: Time and memory are such slippery and illusory concepts. Did adding dementia to Rose's equation make it harder to plot and pace this story? Did it affect your personal perceptions of "real" time?

Richard: Short answers here: yes, and yes. I kept copious notes with page references indicating when this or that event was happening in Rose's present, and in the false past, and in the real past. Remember, Rose is ninety years old and dying, and re-living her past, but it may not be a real memory since she's also two years old and dying. Several readers have alertly concluded that she may already be dead. It was like following several different coloured threads through a whole tapestry. My own sense of time was jabberwocked completely for several weeks while I was finishing off the book. Not that I became Rose or anything, but I'd stare at one of my kids and think: how old is she really?

Brenda: What were the most important metaphors that you chose to weave through her tale? Where there other metaphors that you decided not to employ?

Richard: I love analogies. They mark, I think, the difference between the storytelling and philosophy. The philosopher wants to know what things are. The fiction writer wants to know what they're like. And the best philosophers, for me, are the ones who can put down the stylus and pick up the storyteller's harp. I can't understand a philosophy text on the topic of pure extension -- but the idea of truth as a poorly glimpsed shadow on the wall of a cave? That works.

For Rose, the truth of the past has been blurred by time and dementia, but certain motifs emerge over and over, like echoes from a fogbank. Drowning ... the language of flowers ... and the life of Mary come to mind. My use of fractured Christian archetypes to frame Rose's life is a lie, in that neither Rose nor I are Christians, but the lie reveals an important character trait, a searching for God that is true for both of us.

Read an excerpt from Mystical Rose

Brenda: Mystical Rose is a departure from your more well-known Young Adult's and Children's stories. Was this a scary leap or a joyous one?

Richard: Whether I write for adults or children, my approach is the same. Make them laugh, make them think, make them care. Make them want to turn the page. The process is always both scary and joyous for me. Scary when it's going badly, which is most of the time, and joyous in those few precious moments when it's going well.

Writing is in fact like my golf game — the three really good shots I hit every round make me forget about the 102 bad ones.

Brenda: Your most recent release, a YA story called From Charlie's Point of View, features a young hero who is blind. What is his most important characteristic? To whom do you think Charley speaks most strongly?

Richard: Charlie is blind, but that's not the most important aspect of his character to me. To me he is a regular guy. I never write about superheroes like Harry Potter or James Bond -- I write about, well, guys like me. Charlie happens to be blind, but he is still cool, dorky, funny, and committed to his friends and family. His blindness is no more defining than Frodo's shortness. Charlie speaks most strongly to the same person all my characters speak to: me. I figure if I can't understand them, no one else will.

Brenda: Please tell us about your short story in this month's issue of Mythic Passages. Questcon Quest tackles weighty issues in a setting of real life, gaming, and fantasy.

Richard: I wrote Questcon Quest after spending hours listening to my thirteen-year-old son describe a mythic battle game he was playing online. (In fact, Drakkir and Plazmic are two of his character names.) I was fascinated by the alternate realities — both world and personality — that the game offered. And I love the idea of characters jumping dimensions. My concern was to keep the storyline "real" in two places at once, and to keep patricide off the menu. The dad turned out to be such a bastard I wanted to kill him myself.

Brenda: What are you working on now?

Richard: I have two YA novels out there now. Life After Life is a version of the Scrooge story with an evil teen instead of an evil old man. Jim, about to die, visits a limbo world. The character he becomes there will depend on which of the five crossing emotions — fear, surprise, regret, contentment, anger — he experiences as he dies. My Canadian publisher loves it, but we're still talking to a couple of American firms.

Another novel — Into the Ravine — follows three teens on a raft down the creek that runs through their backyards. Think Huck Finn in the suburbs.

And I am just about to begin a series for younger kids called Zomboys. Yes, it's funny. But it's also strange and slightly scary.

After that ... but I'd better stop now, or I'll never get any of it written.

Brenda: You came to Mythic Journeys '06 as an attendee with few (if any) preconceived notions. What were your stongest impressions of the conference and its participants? How did it differ from other conference experiences? And would you come again?

Richard: Mythic Journeys 06 was a wonderful experience. There was greater awareness of the conference's totality than I've ever seen at a large affair. Some of the presentations were astounding — Michael Meade and Chungliang Al Huang stand out. I am grateful to Coleman Barks for introducing me to Rumi. And I was happy to better acquaint myself with fiction writers like Charles de Lint and O.R. Melling, whose work I already admired. Would I come back? In a heartbeat.

Meeting author Richard Scrimger was one of those happy accidents for which I've made offerings of gratitude to the gods. Although we only met a couple of times at the conference (usually in a hallway or on a dance floor, one going one way, one going the other), he's since become an online friend, and now a contributor to Mythic Passages. You and your entire family should read his books. He has powerful, creative and beautiful stories to tell you.

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