Webber pleased with the process of her first novel
by NICK MILIOKAS
Leader Post, June 3, 2000
Jennifer Webber was delighted with the publication earlier this spring of her first novel, Defying Gravity.
What she is particularly pleased about is that the book was allowed, if not to write itself, then at least to find its own direction.
"I let it be what it wanted to be," Webber says. "I just got out of the way
and let the story flow."There were some doubts along the way, and Webber smiles now while making jokes about automatic writing, but she is convinced that this approach does, in fact, work.
"I'm fascinated by the process of how the imagination can guide you if you permit it," she says. "If you stay faithful to the content, to the characters and to the story, the rest will follow. It will shape itself into the structure of what it wants to be. Writing a book is like a river for me. It has a current, a pull, a life of its own. It's going to go where it wants to go."
Published by Coteau Books, Defying Gravity tells the story of Miranda, a young woman who works as a broadcast journalist for a television station in Edmonton, and who is unceremoniously dumped by her boyfriend, a musician with an appetite for drugs and groupies, during a vacation in Jasper - she is abandoned in a gift shop on Whistler's summit to be exact.
Miranda is about to cut short her holiday and return home when she meets Indrin, an East Indian man of her own generation who was raised in Calgary as a Christian and is heading to the West Coast before entering a Catholic seminary.
She impulsively decides to join him on the journey, and the two subsequently become involved with a Rwandan refugee whose family has been slaughtered in the bloody civil war.
In part, this last element is derived from events which occurred on a bus ride Webber took from Edmonton to Calgary several years ago - more specifically, from a conversation she had in French with the passenger seated beside her, a man from Rwanda.
"The book isn't his story at all," Webber says, "but he was most definitely the inspiration for it. The fellow I met on the bus kept popping into my head. If I hadn't met him, it would have been an entirely different novel - and I don't know what that would be.
As it stands, Defying Gravity, in the author's words, is "about reality, it's about life, it's about being alive."
Webber, who has herself been employed by television stations in Edmonton, Calgary, and most recently Saskatoon, where she reports on the fine arts for CBC, started working on the book some five years ago. She had been toiling away at a non-fiction project, but the prospective novel kept interrupting. So she devoted a holiday weekend to the novel "just to see what would happen, and at the very least get it out of my system," and what happened, of course, was Defying Gravity.
Webber, who was born in Ottawa but has lived in Saskatoon since she was nine, studied history at the University of Saskatchewan, and it was during her student days that a friend, himself an actor from Toronto, persuaded her to audition at the Persephone Theatre.
"This was back in the mid 80's, during my activist period," Webber says with a smile. "I had no time for theatre. I was too busy stopping the cruise missile. I was trying to save the world. Later on, I thought 'Am I crazy? I'd love to do theatre!'"
Since then Webber has not only performed on the stage; she has written for it as well.
"There has never been a time in my life when I didn't consider myself a writer," Webber says. "The one constant through everything has been the writing".
That and a hunger for knowledge.
"To me everything is a school", Webber says. "Everything is a big university - and I've never stopped taking courses. I've been very fortunate as well," she adds. "I've been lucky in that people have been willing to take chances on me."