Nerys Parry

The question I most often receive at my events and in interviews is this: what inspired you to write this book?  It’s a tale I’ve told many times, but for those who haven’t heard it, I wanted to share with you the personal story as to how I found Simon, and how he drove me to tell the Freedomite story.

The idea for Man & Other Natural Disasters came to me all at once, while I was living in New Zealand, pregnant with my second child and hanging my first child’s diapers on the line.  I was thinking about the book I was reading at the time, Supernature by Lyall Watson, when seemingly out of nowhere, Simon’s voice came to me: “I know how I’m going to die”.  Simon, still nothing more than a disembodied voice, then went on to dictate most of the prologue while I waddled to find a pen to write it down, and within minutes, I knew the construct of the novel: a man, suffering from fugue memory, had lost each of his family members in a terrible natural disaster—or at least that’s what he believed, until one girl forced him to face the truth, a truth which was, of course, so much worse than the original tale.

The only problem was I didn’t know what Simon’s truth was, and the effort to seek it out would take me over a decade. I had written my first attempt at the novel within nine months of first hearing Simon enter my head, but even five years and several drafts later, I was no closer to what had actually happened to the man. He was still lying to me.  For the life of me, I couldn’t figure out what had really set him off into a fugue state that summer in 1962, and so I gave up and put the book aside.

Then, as I was researching information at the National Archives for my next novel, Those Things We Cannot See, I stumbled upon a photo.  It featured a heavy-set Freedomite woman standing outside of a house she’d set on fire. She had her sizable back to the camera, her arms crossed on her chest, and was stark naked, wearing nothing but black socks and laced-up shoes.  There was something about the violence of her act of arson against the naivety of her nakedness that caught my interest, and so, even though it had nothing to do with my current project, I sought out the only significant Freedomite collection at the National Archives, the Fred Davidoff papers. Davidoff was one of the Freedomites active during the Kootenay bombings and his collection contains, among other things, notebooks he filled with his hand-written autobiography/manifesto. Right from his first sentence, there was something eerily familiar with his story, and after a few pages, I suddenly realized I knew him.  It was positively uncanny, but there, after more than five years, I had found Simon’s true identity.

It took me longer than I expected to get the book to print, partly because of bad luck, but also because I had another novel to finish and also because the Freedomite story proved a challenge to unearth after all these years of being buried.  Meanwhile, fears of increasing natural disasters and terrorist movements was growing, and it was becoming more and more important to get Simon’s story out. The novel, begun in 2000, was finally birthed in 2011, and Simon’s cautionary tale of extremism and memory saw the light of day.

While I relied a great deal on inspiration for this novel, the true stories covered in both this novel and my as-yet unpublished second novel are important to me.  I love hidden histories, especially complex ones, and am driven to re-tell these true stories of the past in such a way so as to try to shed some light on our present confusion. After all, we are not so different people than those who created and survived the Holocaust, or the French Revolution—and certainly not the bombings in the Kootenays and the institutionalization of the New Denver children. While cliché, it is something I believe, that only by understanding the past will we be able to envision a better future.  If nothing else, at least “things might be done differently if we were to do them today,” as the B.C. Ombudsman report states, and that alone is something worth writing for.

The comic e-zine Cracked.com has a great read on 6 man-made natural disasters waiting to happen.  Scrolling down the comments, there appears to be some science in question, but the story still opened my eyes.

Is this the new “ghost story” of the 21st century?  Apocolypse tales?

Check it out here.