Who are you?
I’m Janice Lynn Mather, a Bahamian-Canadian based in Vancouver, Canada.
What do you write?
I write for teens and for adults, with a focus on telling the stories of Bahamian girls and women.
The first thing I remember writing was a travel journal after my first trip to England, where my Jamaican-born mother grew up. I was six, and we went for two weeks in the summer. When we got back to The Bahamas, my mother gave me a notebook and suggested I write and draw pictures of what I remembered about the trip. I have no clue what happened to that book, but the act of recording stories stuck with me.
I enjoy telling stories that feel unheard or underheard, using language that is authentic and inviting. I know the feeling of reading a book and seeing a distasteful or harmful depiction of myself. It’s worse than not seeing myself in a book at all. It’s a work in progress, but my intent is to create stories with real people, and that feel like a mirror, not like a door slamming shut in any reader’s face.
I absolutely do love writing. I get huge satisfaction from connecting with a character, allowing their experiences to shine through, capturing a part of their life journey, and then exiting the story at the right moment, when they’re settled, or this part of their journey is done. Writing is a chance to address things that bother me. It’s an important way for me to process experiences, whether those are my own, or ones that I witness others living through.
Where do you write?
I have a beautiful wooden writing desk that was in my husband’s family for many years before he refurbished it for my birthday a while ago. In my most picturesque moments, I perch there with my laptop and feel like a pretty classy lady.
In reality, I write wherever I can, whenever I can. With each of my four books thus far, the writing, revising, and book release stages have overlapped with having young humans inhabiting my body and/or my home. Right now I have a baby and a kindergartener. Stuff gets done on sleeping surfaces or crouched in whatever quiet corner I can curl up in where the click clack of fingers on keyboards won’t wake anyone up. In a pinch, I jot something down on my rusty android, but mostly I use my ThinkPad (which has so far survived both a spill and a high fall). Writing by hand is currently rare; too inefficient. When I do write by hand, though, my late father’s Cross ballpoint pen is preferable. He liked to put on a dress shirt for bank visits, and preferred to have a fancy pen in his shirt pocket. His pen can make a grocery list feel official.
When do you write?
Robust chuckles.
I was going to chalk my writing ‘habits’ up to having small humans, but I’ve always written with the wind, snagged opportunities wherever I can. I remember being in grade four and having a piece of paper slid under my classwork so I could work on a story during dull moments in school. I’ve written a novel mostly while riding to and from an old job sitting on the back of a bus. Learning to Breathe, my first book (also for teens) was revised either in early morning sessions (5am) or late at night (after 10), with a bit accomplished on scant half hour lunch breaks from a warehouse gig, sitting in my 97 Honda Civic with the manual windows cranked down and the hatchback propped open for maximum ventilation.
Where Was Goodbye got written during my daughter’s naptimes, while she watched Daniel Tiger and Sesame Street, and after bedtime. Revisions happened between preschool and prenatal appointments with her two younger brothers.
Typical is a myth. Time limits are unicorns. Word count goals are pointless—I write as hard as I can for as long as I can, and when an interruption comes, I grit my teeth, type RESUME in the manuscript so I can easily find where I left off, and close my laptop down. If you ever find RESUME in the middle one of my finished books, now you know why.
Why do you write?
I’m intrigued by the exploration of what if? that fiction offers. I’ve worked as a journalist, writing the facts of a happening. Through novels and short stories, though, I can slow down in a happening, and think about the humanity of an event. What do you do when a storm unexpectedly decimates your home town? How would you live through the experience of a house fire? We humans are resilient—we do live through, we do go on. Stories let us explore how.
They let us answer why, too. Every single person, every single odd event, or strange encounter, has context and back story. Woman boarding a bus with a chicken in her purse? She’s got a story. Family friend loudly comments on your 15-year-old body in public? She’s got a story. Writing is a way for me to explore why humans are humaning in a particular way. I might not like what a person does, but it can be interesting to try to understand their reasons.
Also—and this might sound self serving—but I feel better when I write. When too many weeks pass and I’m not writing, I feel antsy and restless and grumpy.
How do you overcome writer's block?
There are so many ways to deal with writer’s block, but one of my favourites is a five senses exercise that I actually learned in a grief support group. Much like Karmen, I was grieving a sudden and absolutely unexpected and unexplained death, and I was feeling a lot of anxiety at times that didn’t make sense to me. The group facilitator led us through an exercise where you basically work your way through the senses, going from five to one. Start with noticing five things in your surroundings that you see, then four that you hear, three you feel, two you smell, one you taste. It helped me in working through more crippling moments of grief-triggered anxiety, but I also find it useful in connecting with my surroundings and noticing little details when I’m trying to write.
Bonus: What do you enjoy doing when not writing?
I love nature. I love its cycles and its beauty, both unexpected and expected. Right now, there are gorgeous magnolias bursting into bloom all around Vancouver. The petals are fleshy and lush. The flowers smell like sugar apples from my childhood back yard in Nassau. I love going out into nature to smell those magnolias, to feel home, to find that sort of unexpected connection. Nature is thick with beauty, meaning, and unexpected miracles. I enjoy immersing myself in it.
My thanks to Janice Lynn Mather for today's interview.