Building empathy through short story writing: Caroline Adderson shares A Way to Be Happy
The Vancouver-based writer spoke to The Next Chapter’s Antonio Michael Downing about her new book
An anxious husband undergoing a routine medical procedure. A Russian operative with a bizarre lung condition. Two addicts crashing a new year's eve party. At the outset, these are all characters living very separate lives, but in Caroline Adderson's short story collection, A Way to Be Happy, the common denominator between them all is the human desire to connect.
A Way to Be Happy is a short story collection that follows various characters as they try to find happiness, in experiences ranging from mundane to extraordinary.
Adderson is the Vancouver-based author of five novels, including The Sky is Falling, Ellen in Pieces and A Russian Sister. She has also published two short story collections, including the 1993 Governor General's Literary Award finalist Bad Imaginings. Adderson's awards include three B.C. Book Prizes, a National Magazine Award Gold Medal for Fiction. She is a three-time winner of the CBC Literary Prizes and was longlisted for the 2024 Giller Prize.
Adderson joined The Next Chapter's Antonio Michael Downing to talk about her love of reading and writing short stories.
Every short story is its own world but they're very short, so you don't have a lot of time to build that world in such a short format. How do you tackle this problem?
I'd say I do it by layers. My method of writing short stories is to do a draft and put it away, do another story, put it away. I usually get about four stories and then I begin to cycle through them and then I'm adding layers and layers as I go and taking out all the excess words so it becomes very compressed.
By the end you should really be able to say almost as much as a good novel in a good short story.
These characters have a long way to go before they even get a glimpse of happiness. What's it like for you to get in the head of characters who live, from what I know, very different lives than you do?
Yeah, that's the point for me. Let's just say I'm not an auto-fiction writer; if I were to compare it to another art form, I'd say I'm like an actor. I'm really interested in exploring other lives and the writing process for me is really an act of empathy. I'm not interested in examining my own life.
Well, I am for myself personally, but I don't think anyone else would be terribly interested in it. I just try to embrace people who are different than me and try to figure out what it is like for another person.
I'm not interested in examining my own life.- Caroline Adderson
The opening story is called "All Our Auld Acquaintances Are Gone," which is a reference to Robbie Burns song and so there's a lot of intertextuality here. Why did you take this approach?
I've been writing for a long time and at a certain point I thought, "Does the world really need more words?" How about I embrace other people's words and envelop them in what I'm doing? I also feel that as a writer, I learn so much through reading and I want to pay homage to those other texts. So in this case, this is a very minor example, a line from the poem which became the famous song we sing on New Year's Eve, that's the point, that the whole story takes place on New Year's Eve.
There's also the irony of [that being] such a celebratory song and these people are really, really desperate so it sets up what we know over the poem, the song, with the irony of the situation. But other stories in the book, it's a much deeper dive into another text.
What are some of your favourite short story collections?
I love Runaway by Alice Munro. I teach that book, I've taught it for 25 years. I was nervous about bringing it forward this time and most people, everybody in fact, said they felt they could learn from it, despite what we now know about Munro's unfortunate choices in her personal life. I appreciated that because she's a master stylist.
Mavis Gallant, I love. I'm reading a wonderful story collection now by Richard Kelly Kemick called Hello, Horse. He's just a nut — I'm loving it so much and the language is incredible. I read those stories voraciously. Reading a lot of short novels now, I'm humbled every time.
In terms of short novels, I read somewhere where you said you're only going to read novels on less than 200 pages? Why is that?
Well, not forever, but right now … I decided that I only wanted to write novels that were under 200 pages. I just decided that will be the only criteria, the book has to be under 200 pages. I got a bunch of lists online which led me to reading books that I never would have picked up, a lot of work in translation and I'm just really loving it. It really makes me realize, "Wow, why so many words? Why did I write such long books before?"
I also want to get into writing novels the way I write short stories, which is to finish one, put it away, take one out, start another one. And so that would be really hard if you're writing 350 pages. If they're short, I think it might be possible.
There's a lot of loneliness in these stories and often it becomes most apparent when someone's confronted with their mortality. In the moment where they kind of need companionship the most, that's when they're most alone. What are you trying to say with this theme of loneliness in A Way to Be Happy?
I think we need other people, especially at this time when everything feels so divisive. We have to reach out to other people and we have to try to understand other people who are different than us and understand why they are the way they are. We all have backgrounds and upbringings and things that have happened to us and that informs our decisions and our opinions as much as anything.
That's not who we are, we're not our opinions.- Caroline Adderson
But that's not who we are, we're not our opinions. We're not the things we think we believe on a particular day. We're actually all just human beings struggling to connect and I hope that's kind of the overriding feeling that people would get by the end of the stories.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
