Getting 2 Know Caroline Woodward

What is your favourite thing about writing?

To be completely immersed in an imaginary world I’ve created, one where the characters I’ve been slowly getting to know become 3-D, a world I can escape to and nobody else knows I’m there…what a delicious feeling! To be able to dream and synthesize memory and imagination and research, all of it, to get the tone right, the voices down pat, well, nothing much on earth beats it. It’s rare though. I always think I could have gone deeper, could have found more layers in someone, but that’s also when I tell myself to hush up and let the reader apply his or her vast life experience to the story, to leave enough ‘white space’, to trust in that interactive process too.

Why do you think what you do matters?

Because when I was growing up, I did not read about my childhood or teenage life experience, or the experience of very many of my friends, in English classes or outside of them either. Yet I knew our lives were every bit as interesting and worthy of stories as lives lived elsewhere in the world, especially the U.S. and England, which seemed to be where English class stories came from.

When I wrote Disturbing the Peace, my first collection of short stories published in 1990, I was bombarded with people telling me how much they enjoyed reading about the North from a female point of view and the same thing is happening now with Penny Loves Wade, Wade Loves Penny because people, both men and women, are reading about themselves and their neighbours and about dodgy characters who threaten their sense of safety.

Lots of people tell me they like seeing middle-aged love affirmed in print because it so often isn’t and why not? That just pleases me enormously. I want the work, my books, to speak for me, to share with any reader, from those who know me very well to complete strangers, that these ordinary hardworking people matter, the plight they are in and the stress they are suffering matters and the troublesome forces arrayed against them really do exist in this world, so that we all care about them and ultimately, each other.

It’s such an act of empathy, to write and to read, with real generosity of spirit and when it works, when the art is there along with the heart, it’s a wonderful thing. I feel I’ve done my job well when people like the medical receptionist I phoned yesterday blurted out, “Congratulations! That’s a good story!”  before moving on to make an appointment with my doctor for me!