Intimacy and Camouflage: An Interview with Sara Power
September 18, 2024
“You can find yourself as an artist in these places with stories. It might be that someone says something; it might be that someone wears a Rudolph face mask. It could be so many things.” – Sara Power
Jaclyn Desforges interviews SAra Power about her debut book, The Art of Camouflage.
A former artillery officer in the Canadian Armed Forces, Sara Power is a graduate of the Royal Military College of Canada, and has a Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing from The University of British Columbia. Sara’s writing has appeared in numerous literary journals and anthologies including Best Canadian Stories 2024, which was edited by Lisa Moore. Her fiction has been awarded The Malahat Review Open Season Award, The Riddle Fence Fiction Prize, and been a finalist for The Toronto Star Short Story Contest, The New Quarterly Peter Hinchcliffe Award, and the RBC/PEN Canada New Voices Award. Originally from Labrador, Sara now lives in Ottawa with her husband, three children, and hound dog. Art of Camouflage (Freehand Books) is her first book.
Jaclyn Desforges: My first question is not a question. My first question is: you're so amazing. Your stories have been recognized with awards from all sorts of literary magazines, you've been featured in Best Canadian Short Stories, you've been nominated for a National Magazine Award. My first question could be: how did you get to be so great? But maybe a better question is: what is it about your stories that makes them resonate so deeply with people?
Sara Power: Okay, that is a good question. There’s an interesting difference between the writing piece and the public facing piece, and I'm still growing in that. I mean, why do people win awards? The stars align, there are unicorn tears involved. I mean, who knows the answer? I don't think it's entirely random. I think it takes a lot of dedication and commitment and hard work, but you never know who's going to be reading the stories that you submit to these magazines or to these contests.
And so when I write stories, I'm not thinking about an audience. I'm just thinking about my own story and my own feelings about the story and what parts of the story are giving me cold shivers. What does the story need, based on all the marinated experiences that I've had in my life and my own imagination? What is making the story sparkle?
And I do labour over the stories. But oftentimes my favourite stories – the ones that feel sparkly and compelling – they're the ones that just came, they just came quickly. Some of them I laboured for months, or even a year, or more than a year. But there are a couple of them that just arrived. When I saw someone walking in the retreat centre with a Rudolph mask on her face I thought, Oh my gosh, that's a story. That woman!
So I don't know what makes stories great, but I feel like it has to come from something that creates excitement in the artist in me.
JD: It sounds like it's a somatic experience for you. I know that's how it feels for me: a certain line just has this kind of energy or resonance that just hits you. And I felt that a lot when I was reading your book. I felt that sense of there not being any artifice, just lines that were very real and very beautiful. But how do you even logic that, how do you even break that down? I think we can come up with explanations for it, but really, it's like we're vessels for something.
SP: Yeah, I do think we are vessels for something. I mean logic is not something that I rely on a lot, but I like what you said earlier: it's the real and the beautiful. And that is something I tried to remember: the real and the beautiful, and that you are turning toward the beauty. And so that almost gives you an infinite well. The real and the beautiful: what does that mean?
I'm in a military wives choir and I am in love. I'm falling in love every Tuesday night. I was there last week and we had tea afterwards, and cookies, and everyone was telling stories. And I was fully in heaven, listening to the stories of these women. Talk about no artifice – they were wanting to connect and be together, so they were just being together. But they were telling these stories, and I'm thinking about the words that were popping out of the stories. About being organised, and planning, and dishes, and jewellery, and scarves, and poppy themes (that's always a theme with military wives), and tea that smells like hay. And there were so many ideas all mushed into this big soup. And I was shivering. I was like, I love all these women and all these stories. You can find yourself as an artist in these places with stories. It might be that someone says something; it might be that someone wears a Rudolph face mask. It could be so many things. And when it erupts – this kind of feeling of excitement and curiosity – I try to make note of that.
JD: Hearing you talk about all this, it makes me feel like maybe what's so wonderful about your stories is you and the power of your own noticing. You seem to be the type of person who can be in a situation and pick up on all of the magical things that are already happening. I think that really comes through in your writing.
SP: I love that. My favourite writers are good noticers. They're such acute observers. I feel like those are the writers I love, the writers that notice the kind of unassuming things.
“When I write stories, I’m not thinking about an audience. I’m just thinking about my own story and my own feelings about the story and what parts of the story are giving me cold shivers. ”
JD: And it's hard, too. It's hard to be that kind of person in the world because it means you're quite sensitive in general. It's hard to be a sensitive person.
SP: It's true. It is, and it can be exhausting. I'm sure we've kind of had these conversations before, but it's those highs and those lows. And also, when you're in situations in which you're deprived of those details that lift you, or you're deprived of those types of environments or atmospheres that cause you excitement or nurture that part of you, that's really hard. And that happens a lot in a military life, because sometimes we're in places that don't have a lot of focus on the arts, maybe, or they don't have artistic communities. Sometimes. Not always. But you can find yourself in spaces where the cultural atmosphere is not really nurturing. And that can be a big challenge for the sensitive artist.
JD: Your collection focuses a lot on the transient nature of military life. Do you feel that you write best when you're in a place in which you feel you have roots, or a place which is new to you? I know that you've travelled for many different residencies, and I noticed some of those locations appearing in your book.
SP: I write best when I'm able to not have interruptions. It makes all the difference for me when I can just not think about the clock, not think about feeding my kids, not think about walking my dog. And so I do like these periods in which I can just go away. It might be for a long weekend. I've also had a couple of very luxurious long-term residencies. But that's it – it's about not being interrupted. I'm comfortable in my house, but you know, I have three teenagers and a hound dog and a husband. They all have infinite needs. At home, I still try to get to that space of non-interruption. I’ll say, "Okay, there's something very important, I need to not be interrupted."
I have cross-country skis which I purchased when we moved to Ottawa. Because I was like, I'm moving to Ottawa, I need to become that person who's skiing, cross country skiing, and so I purchased cross country skis. And the first or second time I went out, I fell and hurt my shoulder, and I think I still have a hurt shoulder because of that. So I don't cross country ski anymore, but they were not a waste of money because when I really need to focus without interruption, I actually take my skis and put them outside my door in an "X". And when the kids see that the skis are there, they know not to interrupt.
A lack of interruption is a big part of my ideal writing space. And then I just need a couple of thick books to prop up, if I'm not at my own desk. I need to make sure I have the books propped up, so that I'm not gremlining over like this. [Sara hunches her shoulders.] And I need a comfy chair.
JD: It’s those physical things you don't really think about until you start hurting. Whenever I go to see a massage therapist, they're always like: "What do you do for a living? Are you an air traffic controller? You're so stressed." I'm like, "No, I'm a poet."
SP: True. It's so true for writers. And I have yet to meet a writer who does not relate to this. Maybe really young writers. But the shoulder pain is real, and pain is going to stop you from writing. And actually, when I was at UBC, Doretta Lau was my fiction prof for one course. And that was so fun. It was incredible. And I was struggling with shoulder pain. She was very strict with me. She said, "Sara, you need to take breaks." And she was showing me stretches. And she said, "You know, it's the long game, and you need to respect your body."
When you're sitting, when you're really focusing, and when you're in a flow, those are wonderful days. But you can be sitting for two or three hours hunching over. And yeah, I've suffered with shoulder pain. I do think more about it now. I set timers to get up and walk around and do stretches.
“What does the story need, based on all the marinated experiences that I’ve had in my life and my own imagination? What is making the story sparkle?”
JD: How do you feel about structure? How does structure work in your stories? What's your relationship to it? Was it something that you felt like you had to learn? Is it something that you felt like you had absorbed through years of reading?
SP: I love that question. "What is your relationship to structure?" I was just thinking about structure in the shower last night.
JD: That's why we're friends!
SP: I’m working on a novel right now, and I keep thinking to myself: What shape do I want this novel to be? And I just finished reading Americanah [by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie] and Shut Up You're Pretty [by Téa Mutonji]. And I also read The Idiot [by Elif Batuman] just last week and I was thinking about the different shapes of those novels. And trying to pin a shape on a novel versus a shape on a short story. It’s a challenge. I haven't figured it out yet. With a short story, I don't think about its shape at the get-go. The story will evolve, and then there is a certain point in the creation of a story where I'm like, Okay, it's leaning toward this shape, and then I will jump in there and start orchestrating and say, Okay, the pacing needs to do this here. And the energy needs to do this here. And the sorrow needs to do this here. And to sort of lean into the shape I feel the story is asking for.
So I do think about structure, but when I say shape, I don't mean – well, sometimes I do mean a triangle – but sometimes the shape might be a braid. Or when you have two different, separate stories happening, but they're touching, they're linked, not linking necessarily, but they're in conversation. So that's kind of a shape. Or there might be a story that feels really slow, and the speed of the story, the energy of the story, is going to be bottlenecked until just before the end. I have a pyramid-shaped story and I love it. I wonder, will people know? And they probably won't know, and they don't need to know; they don't need to know.
I remember thinking: Of course it's gonna be about a pyramid scheme. It's a pyramid-shaped story!
I love to think about structure, but I don't even know how I could teach it. Well, maybe that’s how I would teach it: you pick a structure, pick a shape. And it might be the shape of a PacMan face, whatever. But even that could just be some kind of like a little motif. It’s a little voice that stays with you as you’re writing the story. And it can help. You never know what it’s going to generate. It might generate a bullfighter, or it might generate bubblegum. Who knows?
JD: Does structure feel different in novel writing than in short story writing? I'm writing a novel too, and I'm curious how it feels for you. How structure feels for you.
SP: It’s taking more patience for me, because I think you really need to do the messy first iteration. You really need to just let yourself write messy, messy narrative. And you need to be forgetful – like forgetting about different characters. That's how I'm doing it and that's been really hard for me, especially because short story writing is quite controlled. You know, you're taking pieces, and you're wanting to have echoes, and I think that the novel will eventually do that down the road. At this point I'm just craving structure. But I'm telling myself, No, this isn't the time for structure. You need to get the story out there, and then let the story tell you the structure. Let the story kind of direct you to the structure. Because structure does feel good. I mean, it feels kind of like scaffolding; it feels kind of like support. And so I do; I crave it, but I'm finding with the novel that I have to be patient. And I have a sticky note on my computer that says Allow yourself to write crap.
“You really need to just let yourself write messy, messy narrative.”
JD: I can't wait to get to second-draft, third-draft land. That's going to be so delicious.
SP: Yeah. Although I do love the messiness too, like the stuff that comes up with messy drafting. I put on a song the other day on repeat that was a very important song for the novel, and then I looked at the video of the song, and I was just writing down all this imagery from the video. It was a Nine Inch Nails song. Sometimes the messy first draft can be so much fun if you can be patient. And so that's a constant back and forth for me, because I'm not patient.
JD: What is the story of your short story collection? If you could tell the story of how it came to be, what does that story look like?
SP: I submitted my very first story to a literary magazine on my 40th birthday. So that was the start. And that's before I did my MFA – I think I had done one writing course, outside of my chemistry degree. I did a writing course (which was incredible) at Athabasca U, an online university. That kind of got me hooked. I mean, I've always been writing stories, but I had never sent them out to literary magazines before.
The story of the collection – I think it was kind of gradual. I just started writing these stories. I certainly like the book copy – I do love “the stories of girls and women caught in the military's orbit,” but I don't think that was the start. That kind of evolved, certainly. I even have issues with the word orbit. Although it does it well, it does the job. But I don't feel like it was an orbit. I really feel like each of these stories evolved from personal experiences, or they might have evolved from a story that a neighbour told me, or a person that I met, or a person that I grew up with, or a story that I read in the New Yorker that completely sparked another story (that happened twice).
So they came from all very different places, but if I'm thinking about it, they all came from places that just caused excitement for me, that caused a high level of curiosity in me. And sometimes I just had this craving for really high quality gossip. I mean, if something feels juicy.
I feel like sometimes it’s such a random process. But, what is the story behind the stories? It's usually a response to some aspect of myself that I probably don't understand, that I'm not able to articulate clearly. But it's a craving. It's like I'm craving an understanding about this, or I'm craving a better relationship to it, a closeness to this particular subject. I have my beacons, you know? My books, my friends, the museums in the area, the art community. And I kind of just let them guide me until the story takes form and makes me happy.
JD: A major theme in your book is camouflage and the title is The Art of Camouflage. What does camouflage mean to you?
SP: So that's certainly like the performative side of ourselves, versus the real side of ourselves. And I think just being a woman. And Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie says this: we learn pretence. I mean, we grow up, pretence is a part of our scaffolding, and I am fascinated by that idea. And you know, every now and then you meet someone who is less camouflaged, and I usually fall in love with that person. Whether that's just not shaving their legs, or whether that's smoking, or whether that's swearing – I don't know, I mean, it could be a lot of things. But it just doesn't feel camouflaged. It doesn't feel like we're putting on airs. It just feels true and honest.
And it's so hard to get there. I mean, I try, but I'm performing; I'm always performing. And that’s why there are some stories that are from the perspective of kids, in my book, because oftentimes with kids you get that – well, they might be pretending, but it feels like a direct line of engagement between two people versus an agenda or a performance. It's just this very raw, very open engagement.
Which I think is also connected to generosity. I think when you can have that kind of a close connection with a person, with a writer, with an artist: it's generous. It's courageous and it's generous for a person to be able to be this honest with their work and to be this honest with what they're trying to achieve with their work. And so, camouflage. To me, it’s very interesting – the things that people do to just be in the world, to just to feel comfortable in the world.
“Sometimes I just had this craving for really high quality gossip. I mean, if something feels juicy.”
JD: When people are open with themselves and with the world about who they are – even when that doesn't necessarily line up with public expectations – that's when you can have true intimacy and connection.
SP: Yeah, that's it. And I love that, I absolutely love that. And I am fascinated by that, and that’s what makes me want to write stories.
And this is making me think about that amazing Miranda July story called "Roy Spivey." It's the story of these people who are on a plane together. And this woman is sitting next to this guy who is quite famous. And so she goes through this whole bit about sitting next to a famous person, and then at one point he's sleeping. She’s like, "It's like we're sleeping in bed together." And she's looking over at his face while he's sleeping and how innocent he is. And then they wake up and they're having their meal and she's thinking, "It's like we're in bed. Like, having breakfast in bed together." But still, you know, there’s not a whole lot happening.
She goes to the bathroom and she splashes something on her skirt when she's washing her hands. And then she's like, "It's gonna look like I peed on myself. Oh my god, this is so embarrassing." And so then she actually takes off her skirt in the bathroom and makes it totally wet and wrings it out so that it's all one colour. I mean, this is Miranda July. So then she goes back, and she's crawling past him to get to her seat and he's like, "What the hell happened to your skirt?"
And so then they just open up. They tell each other. They just have this beautiful interaction on this three hour flight. At one point they're smelling each other's armpits, you know? And it’s so uncomfortable – I mean, I'm not going to go around smelling someone's armpit, but I think the point that came through for me in this story, and reason I love it so much, was that these strangers had such an unveiled interaction. And it just creates this kind of memorable story of human interaction. Because they weren't just smelling each other's armpits. They were sharing random experiences. And at the end, he even says, "You know, I really had a good time." And he – I mean, I'm not going to give any more of the story because oh my goodness, I'm ruining the stories. Spoiler! But that’s the point; it was a completely uncamouflaged interaction versus the norm.
JD: I think that's what people are craving. Not the armpit part, but the uncamouflaged part. Somebody was asking me yesterday, do I get nervous, going up on stage and doing readings or events or whatever? And I said not really. Because I feel like my public persona is bumbling weirdo, which is so close to who I actually am that I can't mess it up.
SP: That’s beautiful, though. That's a really good setup.
JD: It is. I'm always telling people to be themselves and it's so cheesy, but I think that's all we want from each other. It can be so scary for us to be open, but it's so delicious when someone else is.
SP: It's generosity. I think it's such a beautiful soup of courage and generosity when you can be that open. And I also recognize that some people are not capable of being that open because they come from very different life experiences.
I feel like I keep coming back to tell stories, but it's reminding me of a Claire Keegan short story. The man says something to her and she's like, "You can't even give me that." She's talking about generosity. Like, you can't even give me this little bit of openness.
JD: It’s so funny how it's often a moment of embarrassment that opens the door. I'm just thinking of the wet skirt on the airplane. So if you post something a little embarrassing online, or you say the wrong thing, or you stumble walking up to the microphone, it can feel bad and weird. But often that's what makes you so human and lovable and helps you connect.
SP: It's so true. I love that. It’s such a gateway. I mean, whether it's embarrassment, or sometimes humour, or adversity. I mean, something that is really uncomfortable can erase a certain level of camouflage. Like, camouflage is no longer useful at this juncture. And so you're able to get to a different level. You get to have a different kind of connection with people.
Jaclyn Desforges is the 2023/2024 Mabel Pugh Taylor Writer In Residence at McMaster University and Hamilton Public Library. She’s the queer and neurodivergent author of Danger Flower (Palimpsest Press/Anstruther Books), winner of the 2022 Hamilton Literary Award for Poetry and one of CBC's picks for the best Canadian poetry of 2021. She's also the author of Why Are You So Quiet? (Annick Press, 2020), which was shortlisted for a Chocolate Lily Award and selected for the 2023 TD Summer Reading Club. Jaclyn is a Pushcart-nominated writer and the winner of a 2022 City of Hamilton Creator Award, a 2020 Hamilton Emerging Artist Award for Writing, two 2019 Short Works Prizes, and the 2018 RBC/PEN Canada New Voices Award. Jaclyn was a finalist for the 2023 CRAFT Short Fiction Prize and her writing has been featured in literary magazines across Canada. She holds an MFA from the University of British Columbia’s School of Creative Writing and lives in Hamilton with her partner and daughter.