I Flirt with Lorna Jackson

It’s a bit strange interviewing Lorna Jackson about interviews. After finishing her latest short story collection, Flirt: The Interviews—a collection of fictional Q&A;transcriptions with real celebrities like Bobby Orr, Michael Ondaatje and Ian Tyson—and talking to her about the construct of celebrity and the artifice of the interview, I can’t help but feel a bit self-conscious about it all—especially once she starts to reference our conversation.

“We present, as I am now presenting to you, whatever I want you to hear and know about me. They are artificial, they are a construct that arise out of what we both want from this,” she says of interviews. “These are celebrities, they are icons and they are personas that are constructed quite carefully for their own gain. That too is why we get hooked into that celebrity and why we allow ourselves to be seduced, quite literally, by those images. That’s something that interested me.”

My mind starts racing. Is Jackson playing me for a sucker right now? Has every seemingly meaningful conversation I’ve had with someone for print been false? What about when I meet people in person and they find out what I do for a living? Do I have any real friends? Is any satisfaction I feel in my job about connecting with others a total lie?

But enough about me, let’s talk about Jackson’s new book.

It all started with Ian Tyson. The groundwork for Flirt was actually laid before Jackson’s previous book—Cold Cocked: On Hockey—was started, when her flirtatious Ian Tyson interview was published in the literary journal Brick as a one-off thing.

“Then I got going on Cold Cocked and got interested in Bobby Orr again, so I tried another one,” the University of Victoria writing instructor says. “I realised I was doing something different with the short stories in Flirt and I made them more self-consciously fictional.”

The result is a collection of eight interviews with celebrities, all conducted by the same fictional character. Her subjects are a bit of a grab bag, with hockey stars (Markus Naslund), literary icons (Alice Munro) and composers (Benjamin Britten) appearing behind the microphone, but Jackson says the selection process was a careful one.

“I chose people who I myself felt some heat with—including intellectual, creative, from my past and sexual heat as well,” she says. “Even though the interviewer isn’t me, I had to feel something for them in order to flirt, whether it was metaphorical or literal flirting. I chose ones who had meant something to me creatively, with sports, music and literature as the three genres I’m working with.”

It’s not surprising Jackson had to feel some affection towards her subjects given the amount of research she put into each story. While the interviews may be fictional, she did a lot of legwork—reading biographies and magazine articles, watching TV interviews, scouring liner notes—to make them not only feel like they were real, but also to help her character feel comfortable and blossom within the interview’s setting, which Jackson says was key in making the stories flow and developing her narrator.

“I only did one at a time. Even if I started to read about one of the other ones, it wouldn’t work. I had to be really immersed in Janet Gretzky, for example. I had to be looking at her photos, reading everything I could about her,” recalls Jackson. “Luckily, at the time I was putting that one together there was a cover of Canadian House and Home or something where Wayne Gretzky’s house was on the cover and there was this photo spread. It was just, ‘Aha! There’s my setting. In the sauna with her.’ I had to stay totally immersed in the research so that it felt authentic and so I could get a little bit of her voice.”

The interviewer—who is never named—is as much of a character in the book as any of the celebrities she speaks to, perhaps even more so. By the end of Flirt, we learn more about her than we do about the people she’s speaking to, which was yet another angle Jackson wanted to examine in the book.

“I wanted to explore fantasy versus reality, but also the celebrity or the cultural icon; why we choose those people and why we become fascinated with them and what they have to show us and tell us about our own lives. There’s a reason why we choose the people we do to be interested in as celebrities and as icons. It has to do, I think—and I talked about this in Cold Cocked—with what we’re trying to figure out about ourselves and heal in ourselves,” she says. “There’s a lot in this book about grief and loss and shame and addiction and aging and the sadness that comes out of that . . . I see those figures—Bobby Orr and all those guys—as kind of consoling.”

Not a bad shoulder to be crying on, really. But there were others Jackson wanted to flirt with who didn’t make the cut.

“I had thought about flirting with Steve Nash, but everybody else was flirting with him at the time and it was like being in high school where if everybody else was flirting with him, I couldn’t do it,” she says. “Emmylou Harris was another one I was going to flirt with, but then she cut that awful record with Mark Knopfler and I couldn’t do it. It was really weird, I had done all the research and had all my stuff ready. I was looking forward to getting the CD and then I got it and it was so awful that I had to take some time away.”

Perhaps we can look forward to more flirtations in the future.

Lorna Jackson

(with Bill Gaston, Dede Crane, Steven Galloway and Patricia Young)

7pm Sunday, June 8

Fernwood Inn, 1302 Gladstone

Free • 412-2001

A complicated dance

Author Lorna Jackson describes Flirt: The Interviews as “a complex little book,” and it’s a bang-on assessment. Not only does the 93-page book, which contains eight fictional interviews with eight real celebrities such as Richard Ford, Janet Jones-Gretzky and Ian Tyson, take on the idea of celebrity obsession, it also examines the validity of the interview format itself. Jackson’s unnamed narrator uses her interviews to reveal details about herself: a story about her first exposure to Tyson’s music turns into a confession about attempted suicide, swapping knee surgery tales with Bobby Orr paints a picture of her struggles in her late teens, asking Alice Munro about when she found time to write while being a busy mother morphs into a recounting of her failed marriage.

At the end of the day, the interviews are almost more a therapy session for the narrator than they are an exercise in learning more about the figures she talks to. While the strict use of the interview transcription format may seem a bit contrived at first, further reflection made me realise just how much Jackson is able to accomplish within its confines: a detailed picture of a complex character struggling to figure out who she is by reaching out to those she admires, a meditiation on our celebrity-soaked culture, the blurring of fantasy and reality and the role of the interview in the wider world.

—A.F.