Dyke Type
Anne Fleming ponders the Ins of Out writing
BY Zoe Whittall
Being a queer writer is hardly an unusual thing in the small press world. I can always count on rubbing up against a fellow ’mo at book fairs or readings. I write about queers and non-queers and hope that what matters is the quality of the writing. That said, I know I live in an urban bubble and I publish in small spheres. Being queer helped me navigate the beginning of my career—small feminist or lesbian anthologies accepted my writing; I connected with a grassroots network of writers and zinesters who shared resources and advice.
But the more I take baby steps into the larger world of publishing, the more shocked I am to find out how very capital-G Gay I am, how sexuality can still be a contentious theme in my writing and how occasionally this can be an obstacle in ways I don’t anticipate.
I have opposing opinions about what it means to be a queer writer. I cut my 18-year-old teeth in the age of identity politics and, as such, found myself lobbing a magazine at the TV when Ann-Marie MacDonald didn’t “come out” on Oprah. The very next minute I wondered why I even cared. Was this progress—to have it not be an issue anymore? How annoying is it to be called a lesbian writer and not simply a writer? Happy as I am to be done arguing essentialism and the ridiculous quest for a monolithic lesbian identity, the assumption that heterosexism is no longer pervasive in the arts is far from accurate. Queer writers who achieve high levels of success do so without exclaiming their sexualities too overtly—especially women.
As soon as I read “Albino teen goes punk, dyes hair black, drives her mother crazy”—the simple idea behind Anne Fleming’s new novel, Anomaly—I was hooked. Eager to converse with her about her hot new novel and the state of queer literary Canada, I tracked her down by email.
Anomaly is a tale of two misfit sisters—one tomboy, the other albino—whom you may remember meeting in the short story of the same name back in 1998. “Anomaly was a novel in my head before it was a short story in Pool-Hopping,” Fleming says, referencing her first book, a collection of short stories nominated for the Governor General’s Award.
“The culmination of the story—one sister causes a piano to fall on the other sister’s leg as she is pretending to be the Wicked Witch of the East—is the inciting incident of the novel.” Fleming was so intrigued by these characters that she wanted to follow them into adulthood. “The horrified mother’s character I didn’t pin down until I realized she’s a Brownie leader and believes in the Baden-Powell spirit,” says Fleming. Robert Baden-Powell was the British Major-General who founded the world of scouting in the early 1900s. “While researching the history of the Girl Guides, I discovered that the name of one of the early Guide leaders in England was Miss Balls, which was altogether too perfect,” Fleming adds.
Toronto-raised and now Vancouver-settled, Fleming wanted to capture the imperative for coolness that existed growing up in Toronto. “It started early, around age seven, which is Glynnis’s age at the beginning of the book, and the age at which Carol, the albino, begins to be ostracized for not being cool. Age seven was around the time we started saying, ‘That is so gay,’ and we kept on saying it, with varying degrees of irony, until some of us discovered we were gay.”
Given that Fleming still sometimes uses the phrase, I was keen to hear her opinion on the current climate in Canada for queer women writers. “Here’s what I think: lesbian stories are a-okay if a straight writer writes them. In fact, they’re great! How progressive, how cosmopolitan, yes, yes, lesbians are as ordinary as other folk,” she told me, amending, “I don’t mean to be snarky. I’m glad straight writers are doing it. I am talking about how these stories are received in the book world, not about how writers write them.
“When a queer person ventures to write a queer story, well, that’s a little iffy.” Fleming acknowledges that small presses seem much more comfortable with queer content than large ones. She herself came out of the small press world, before Anamoly was taken on enthusiastically by Raincoast Books. “To be fair, being queer and writing queer content is far from an absolute obstacle to publication and I don’t think is any more of an obstacle than, say, being a woman writer over 50 publishing a first or second book. Queerness is nowhere near as weird and scary as it used to be; there’s even a cool factor to it now. Or there can be.”
Fleming’s earlier book, Pool-Hopping and Other Stories, is a first-hand example. It generally garnered rave reviews, but did receive some criticism in relation to the queer characters. Canadian Literature critiqued it for “championing the uniqueness of lesbianism” while rendering the male characters as “insensitive, adolescent klutzes.” As a queer reader myself, I find it aggravating when critics tend to focus on the queer characters, assuming their innate narrow viewpoint, and interpreting any hint of feminism as an attack on hetero-normativity. “Yeah,” Fleming agreed, “there was a review in subTerrain that was even worse. I got quite steamed up about it, to the point of writing a rebuttal, in which I itemized the ‘good’ and ‘bad’ characters in the book so as to prove men and women were treated equally.”
Fleming never sent the letter, but understands without a doubt that if she writes anything but glowing portraits of men there will be people who assume, because she’s a lesbian, that she’s insulting all men everywhere. “I really, really hate it. And it does affect my approach to writing queer characters, even if only to make me more conscious of potential readings of the characters…. It shouldn’t be so loaded. None of [the characters] should be seen to be representative of a larger group.”
By the same token, marginalized writers are often expected to talk politics, be spokespeople, or else they get criticized for it. One review suggested she read up on lesbian theory. “I’m not interested in manifesting lesbian theory in my fiction,” Fleming responded. “Theory and specific people: it’s not always an exact fit.”
But regardless of politics, Fleming’s work really comes down to a love of language and story. She says she decided on the writing life when nothing else would sustain her interest. “Everything I read that has perfect sentences influences me to want to rival them. Writing’s harder than anything I’ve ever done, and that’s a good thing.”
