Eva Crocker wrote a coming-of-age story for uncertain times — now it's longlisted for the Giller Prize
Ashly July | | Posted: October 2, 2020 8:35 PM | Last Updated: October 2, 2020
Eva Crocker is an author and freelance writer from St. John's. Her short story collection Barrelling Forward won the Canadian Authors' Association Emerging Writer's Award and the Alistair MacLeod Award for short fiction. CBC Books named Crocker a writer to watch in 2020.
Her debut novel All I Ask follows Stacey, a 20-something in St. John's who wakes up one morning to the police at her door searching for 'illegal digital material.' In the aftermath, Stacey and her group of friends search for fulfilment while dealing with the day-to-day uncertainty of modern life.
The novel is a critical look at policing and focuses on themes of financial insecurity, relationships and sexuality.
All I Ask is on the longlist for the 2020 Scotiabank Giller Prize, making Crocker and her mother Lisa Moore — a three-time Giller Prize nominee — the first mother and daughter to ever be nominated for the prize.
Intrusion
"I started working on the book in 2017, after this unpleasant experience I had. A group of police officers — all male — forced entry into my home in St. John's, very early in the morning. They told me I was under arrest for transmission of child pornography. Pretty quickly into the incident, they realized that I wasn't the person that they were looking for.
"It was a disturbing experience. But I'm sure it would have been much worse for me if I weren't a white woman, if English weren't my first language, if I had kids there with me. But it was so scary and disturbing.
In real life, we often don't get the satisfying ending, and especially when you're dealing with the police.
"They didn't go through this process, but they would have searched through all my hard drives for evidence of illegal activity. That made me start thinking a lot about privacy and our digital mirror image. How much of ourselves is captured in that? What does it feel like to not have control over the parts of yourself that you show to the world?"
Unsolved mystery
"I struggled a lot with where to put that opening passage. I knew that it sets it up to feel like a mystery, as if there's going to be a satisfying ending where you learn the answer to, 'Who's the bad guy?' But that's not what the book is about. In real life, we often don't get the satisfying ending, and especially when you're dealing with the police. I wanted to make readers feel that.
"It's also a queer love story. It's about choosing to show parts of yourself to someone and how joyful and empowering that can feel."
Writing about home
"I wrote All I Ask partly in Newfoundland and partly in Montreal, where I live now. It was interesting to be writing about a place where I spent most of my life but I'm not physically at the moment. Living in that place in your mind and thinking specifically about the geography and what it feels like to move through it — it's like a way of visiting home without going there.
"My mom [Lisa Moore] is also a writer. She writes about Newfoundland. She often talks about, for her generation, there were not a lot of people from Newfoundland and Labrador who were writing stories about it. I think that's less true for me. There are a lot of Newfoundland authors whose work I admire.
It's also a queer love story. It's about choosing to show parts of yourself to someone and how joyful and empowering that can feel.
"I feel like it's important to note that there's this incredibly powerful movement to dismantle and demilitarize the police. A Black Lives Matter chapter recently formed in Newfoundland that's doing incredible work. There's also an Indigenous organization that's part of the important push to acknowledge historic and ongoing racialized violence enacted by police people in the province."
Tense times
"In 2017 in St. John's, there was this case that was mentioned in the book — the Snelgrove trial — which has been in the news again recently. There were a lot of protests happening around that. There was also an Indigenous movement resisting the Muskrat Falls hydroelectric dam and a protest about these austerity measures put in place by the Liberal government. It was a bleak time, but it was also this historic coming-together.
I also wanted to talk about the larger context of what was happening in Newfoundland and Labrador at that moment.
"I initially started writing about [the police break-in] because I was trying to understand what had happened to me. It was a way of trying to take this incident that made me feel very powerless and take some ownership over it. But I also wanted to talk about the larger context of what was happening in Newfoundland and Labrador."
Eva Crocker's comments have been edited for length and clarity.