“I think the universal is found in the local, the minuscule, the intensely personal.”
In The Horseman’s Graves, you draw your reader into the gossip and intrigues of everyday life among the people of the Sand Hills. Can you discuss your approach to storytelling?
The nature of storytelling, how stories are passed along, not just from person to person but throughout the generations, how they transmute, is very interesting to me—and the relationship between truth and history and how it is impossible, try as we might, to really ever get at it. That is interesting to me. And I wanted the form to reflect the content, if you see what I mean.
“I have always been a great fan of storytelling novels.”
Unique features of The Horseman’s Graves are the narration and multiple points of view, which expertly move back and forth from omniscience to intimacy. Was such a flow difficult to achieve?
I struggled enormously with this aspect and wrote and then discarded two almost-complete versions of the novel with differing narration and point of view before finally settling on this one. I did not want to use a straight-ahead, omniscient, chronological approach because that would be in conflict with what the novel communicates about truth and history. And then it is related to structure, too, which can be a very difficult thing—structure is, at least in my opinion, so absolutely crucial to the success of a novel.
I have always been a fan of storytelling novels, because they are so great to read (and really bloody hard to write, as I’ve recently discovered). I think the postmodern opinion is that the old storytelling voice is easy, overdone, and that fragmentation, deconstruction, is the challenge and goal. All I can say to that is: try to write a good old-fashioned story sometime. Try making everything tie together—character, plot, setting, narrative voice, structure, et cetera—without being too obvious about it. Try subtlety and subtext, but keep your reader engaged in the story. And make it all mean something in the end. Make it mean something more every time it is reread. That is great writing. Márquez and Faulkner. Politics, yes; innovation, certainly. But their storytelling!
You have said that among characters in The Horseman’s Graves, Elisabeth, the beautiful girl who lives in rags next door, was the most difficult to render. Why is that?
I think she is the most complex of all the characters. She is slippery. And it took me, like the other characters, a long time to figure out who she really was. In the end, I didn’t want her explained too much. I still don’t. Let me just say that Elisabeth is the character balanced perfectly and excruciatingly between old and new, faith and despair, evil and good.
“Elisabeth is the character balanced perfectly and excruciatingly between old and new, faith and despair, evil and good.”
How does your sense of place—or “home”—figure into your work?
For me, the two are inseparable. I’ve lived in many different places since leaving Saskatchewan, and I will probably write about those places someday. But the place of one’s childhood seems so crucial somehow, so much more vivid. Maybe because it was the time (and therefore the place) when our imaginations were strongest. My home lives in me, the place of my childhood, and as a writer, I draw from it. I know many other writers disagree with this approach, and of course it is different for everyone. For me, the place where I grew up is so geographically remarkable, so historically remarkable—my ancestors were so intimately, so tenderly, so brutally tied to the land there—that I really don’t see how I can shake it or why I would want to.
“I have lived in many places, and some really did not call to me as a writer.”
When I moved to Kentucky in my mid-twenties, the place and the people there were, in one way, so foreign; it was as if I had stepped through the looking glass. But in another eerie way, everything was so familiar. I don’t know how to describe it. Sort of like looking at your reflection in a darkened window—it’s you, but not really you—the ghost of you. The sensation was comforting and oddly familiar, but a bit creepy, too. And I felt an immediate kinship with it. I’ve wondered a lot about those similarities, not the place or the landscape, but the feeling I got there. I think it might have something to do with the death of a society. The Southern landscape is haunted, the same way the place where I grew up is haunted. And it is that feeling that really intrigues me, that haunted landscape. I’m sure it informs my writing quite heavily.
What attracted you to your current home in British Columbia? Does it call to you as a writer?
That’s an interesting question because I have lived in many places, and some really did not call to me as a writer. Calgary, for instance. Edmonton. Or, the absolute worst: Victoria. Don’t get me wrong, I loved living there—Victoria, that is—it was perhaps the place that suited my lifestyle best, and I would happily live there again, but the actual place, the landscape, and I suppose the people too, did not speak to me at all. Saskatchewan does. Kentucky does. Tete Jaune Cache does. I don’t think it’s necessarily a rural–urban issue, as Covington, Kentucky, was intensely urban in every way. In Covington, I lived on the edge of the projects. I could hear gunshots at night. And it’s not an issue of history either, or ghosts; Victoria has those things in spades. It’s something else. I don’t want to think about it too analytically; it might rob my writing of something.
“It’s not an issue of history either, or ghosts….It’s something else.”
Read on
Stained Glass Bluegrass
I have always been drawn to the American South, and for many reasons, not the least of which is the way the land holds its ghosts. I don’t know any other way to describe its appeal, to account for that feeling that is at once eerie and familiar, that feeling that there is so much more there than what you can see—and that you’ve known it all, intimately. It is almost as if every joy and grief and fear has somehow attached itself to the landscape in perpetuity, as if it is all there. It was a feeling I was surprised to find, so far from home.
I think, for instance, about one Sunday shortly after I’d moved to Kentucky. It was late October and I took a slow, aimless drive down one of those hypnotically winding roads, past rambling horse farms and pumpkin stands and old tobacco barns and handmade signs that said, CORN 4 SALE and FOR HOWEVER YE SOWETH, SO SHALL YE REAP. It was windy and the tree branches sifted autumn light across the road and set coloured leaves loose, gracefully, like sparks from a grass fire. Everything moved together so beautifully—the wind and the leaves and the light—it was as if it had all been rehearsed. I was charmed, of course, as I felt I was meant to be, and so I drove on, following roads and taking turns at random, late into the morning, until around one bend I spotted an old barn bearing the sign YARD SALE, and I stopped.
“It was late October and I took a slow, aimless drive down one of those hypnotically winding roads.”
There appeared to be no one there, so I poked around outside, tentatively, feeling oddly as if I were intruding and waiting for someone to come. There was a lot of stuff laid out—several pieces of supremely ugly furniture, old stereo consoles and end tables and sofas and a kitchen table covered with utensils that no sane person would dream of using to prepare food, and boxes of knick-knacks and yard tools and drugstore paperbacks with the covers ripped off. A long string tied from a tree to the corner of the barn was hung with an assortment of women’s garments—dresses and slips and blouses, nightgowns in slippery, unpleasant fabrics of pale green and yellow and lilac, even a couple of pairs of stockings that still held the shape of some woman’s legs, all worn thin and swinging wildly in the wind. No one came, but the barn doors were open, so I went to see if someone was in there.
“I had to stop and listen, thought it was my imagination until I saw it …”
I was overwhelmed with the darkness inside, and it took some time before I could really make out what I was looking at. During that minute, I harboured both the hope of better discoveries with which to furnish my still-empty house—a big two-storey Victorian that I rented for cheap because of it
s location on the edge of the projects—and a dread of finding some sad woman swinging from the end of a rope or a crazed farm boy wielding a pitchfork. But inside, there appeared to be just more of the same kind of junk, more cardboard boxes and chairs with the stuffing busting out and stacks of magazines that looked like they’d been used to line the bottom of something’s cage, except—I had to stop and listen, thought it was my imagination until I saw it—this beautiful old radio, in a carved wooden case shaped like a cathedral window. It was playing so faintly I could barely hear it, tuned to the Stained Glass Bluegrass hour. Just this radio playing softly, softly a song I knew vaguely, and all that junk and those nightgowns and stockings whirling at my back and that wind and those leaves everywhere, I could hear them scraping in dry bunches across the yard, and me just standing there in the middle of this big, dark tobacco barn. Not a person in sight, but everything there. Everything.
I waited a while. No one ever came.
“I waited a while. No one ever came.”
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An Excerpt from “Sand Hills” in A Hard Witching and Other Stories
It wasn’t that she lied. At least, I don’t think she did—not what she would have considered lying, anyway. The thing about my mother was that she always loved a good story, right up until the day she died, tucked under my grandmother’s wedding quilt on the chesterfield in the airless and darkened front room. She simply believed in a little embellishment, a little bending of the rules. She believed in constant and impromptu revision to keep things interesting.
It was a family trait that ended, apparently, with her. I would try sometimes, at her urging, to produce an adequately dramatized version of some dry bit of information I’d learned at school, something from history or science class, even bits of gossip I was privy to in the girls’ washroom. I tried to recreate these stories the way my mother did, vividly, punching life and colour into everything; but I always ended up losing my place, confusing details, forgetting that I should have provided a vital fact sooner—No, wait a minute, there were actually two Indians waiting around the bend, and one was really tired, or, no, he was sick, really really sick, and it was dark out, I should of said it was dark, and one of the Indians, well, no, let me go back a bit.
“The thing about my mother was that she always loved a good story.”
This failure in me was a flaw my mother could never accept, as if I had been born of alien and uncultivable flesh.
“That’s all right, dear,” she’d sigh, patting my leg halfway through some dull and tortured tale, perhaps sensing my misery or simply no longer able to listen. Releasing us both from my inadequacies. She would smile a little to keep me from feeling discouraged, scanning my face in a way that made me feel she was still trying to decide whether or not we might come to like one another.
“Once, I thought, I could breathe her in now, her body like this, in such fine particles.”
Once she said abruptly, “I never told you enough,” and I’d thought at first she meant stories, that she was excusing me, taking responsibility for my failure. But then she closed her eyes and shook her head, patted my leg again, and said nothing more. Her silence was my cue to read from one of the books we were studying in school, A Tale of Two Cities or The Old Man and the Sea. She liked best those set somewhere else, somewhere other than the prairies, somewhere exotic, tropical, unleashing the possibilities in a shell, a vine, a fish. She had me read The Pearl twice during her illness and once more toward the end. She was so small by then that I would tiptoe in quietly some afternoons when the blinds were drawn and the winter light was a dull, dusty gold, and think for a moment that she had disappeared, simply evaporated from beneath the smooth blue of the quilt, that it was her dust that floated all around me, turned and glowed in the heavy light cracking from the edges of windows where the blinds did not quite meet. Once, I thought, I could breathe her in now, her body like this, in such fine particles. I could take all of her in. And I stood there enchanted by the thought, both desperate and afraid to breathe, caught in that one moment of pure, terrified longing.
“Mom?” she said then, and for a second I thought I’d spoken out loud, felt my heart thudding against the back of my throat. But the quilt rustled and her still-dark head turned on the pillow.
“Oh, Del,” she said, half-apologetic, half-disappointed, “I thought it was Grandma.”
“‘Oh, Del,’ she said, half-apologetic, half-disappointed, ‘I thought it was Grandma.’”
Jacqueline Baker’s Recommended Reading
Fiction
Independent People, by Halldór Laxness
One of my all-time favourites. Epic and heartbreaking. Brutal, tender. A fine example of the universality found in an ordinary life.
Light in August; As I Lay Dying; Absalom, Absalom!; The Hamlet, by William Faulkner
Lord, how many times I read these books while writing The Horseman’s Graves. No doubt I’ll read them again.
Love in the Time of Cholera, by Gabriel Garcia Márquez
Ah, to have written that opening, “It was inevitable: the scent of bitter almonds always reminded him of the fate of unrequited love.” Exquisite writing, completely compelling, wise, funny, sad.
Mystery and Manners, by Flannery O’Connor
One of my favourite books on writing, not least for her thoughts on mystery, religion and the shaping of a culture. And then, of course, her razor wit.
Non-fiction
Paradise on the Steppe and Homesteaders on the Steppe, by Joseph Height
Required reading, as far as I’m concerned, for those interested in the history of the Germans from Russia.
The Saskatchewan, by Marjorie Wilkins Campbell
A fascinating history of the river during the fur-trading era.
Web Detective
www.prosecast.com
Listen to Jacqueline Baker discuss The Horseman’s Graves. On the main page, key “Baker” into the search box.
www.cbc.ca/ideas/features/literary_atlas/traces.html
CBC Radio One’s website includes a photograph and description of Jacqueline Baker’s childhood home, as well as an audio excerpt of the Ideas host and Baker exploring the old house as part of the series “A Literary Atlas of Canada.” Scroll to the bottom of the page for the audio excerpt.
www.lib.ndsu.nodak.edu/grhc/
This bilingual (English and German) archive is privately funded by the North Dakota State University. Named the “Germans from Russia Heritage Collection,” it is one of the most comprehensive archives of German-Russian resources in the world. It includes audio oral-history interviews, photos and electronic discussion groups.
www.newadvent.org/cathen
This online Catholic encyclopedia provides readers with background on Catholic “interests, action and doctrine.”
www.therealpresence.org/eucharst/mir/a3.html
The Real Presence Eucharistic Education and Adoration Association presents this Vatican photo exhibition of “Church-approved” Eucharistic miracles around the world.
About the Author
One of our most accomplished new writers, JACQUELINE BAKER is the author of A Hard Witching and Other Stories, which won the Danuta Gleed Literary Award, the City of Edmonton Book Prize and the Howard O’Hagan Award for Short Fiction. Raised in southwestern Saskatchewan, Baker has been the writer-in-residence at Grant MacEwan College in Edmonton and mentors through the Banff Centre for the Arts. She lives with her husband and two daughters in British Columbia.
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Acclaim for The Horseman’s Graves
“The people, incidents and storyline are convincingly executed…. Baker’s poetic rendition of the prairie landscape will resonate with readers.”
—Winnipeg Free Press
“Authentic and, more importantly, well written…. The land
scape and its people live vibrantly and memorably.”
—The Globe and Mail
“Baker writes fluid, lyrical prose that sweeps you into this astonishing story so that you taste the hot summer dust on your tongue and suffer the cold winter winds at your back. Her remarkable and complex characters—passionate, contradictory and all too human—inextricably bound to the land and to each other, are both memorable and affecting.”
—Lewis DeSoto, author of A Blade of Grass
“Completely compelling…. A novel that is as haunting as the pasts of its characters.”
—Quill & Quire
“A disturbing giant of a novel…. Baker does for Saskatchewan’s Sand Hills what David Adams Richards has done for New Brunswick’s Miramichi: create a fictional world so haunting that we will never pass the place on a highway, on a map or in our heads without stone-vivid memories of her imagined people, with all their flaws and beauty and tragedy.”
—Fred Stenson
“A tour de force…. Baker’s characters gleam as they rise off the page.”
—Bill Gaston
Copyright
The Horseman’s Graves
© 2007 by Jacqueline Baker.
P.S. section © 2008 by Jacqueline Baker.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
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