Writer is hungry to understand people
Debut novel jumps from the top of a mountain to the deeper story
by TREVOR KLASSEN
Fast Forward, (Calgary) June 22-28, 2000
Jennifer Wynne Webber is famished as our interview begins. Her hunger pangs serve as an apropos metaphor for her literary life. The woman speaks with great alacrity, her face conveying energy and vivaciousness, her excitement perhaps betraying that Defying Gravity is her first novel. And her hunger? She is a woman starved to learn the different perspectives of her preferred subject: people.
"The book is about changing views," she says. "I was curious about jumping into somebody else's mind - I saw this woman at the top of a mountain, and wanted to know what her story was, where it would take her."
The woman Webber speaks of is Miranda, her strong-willed protagonist with a quick mind and quicker tongue. One is tempted to mistake Webber as Miranda, not merely for their similar backgrounds as television reporters but for the earnestness, the intimacy with which Miranda is written.
But if the two aren't diametric opposites they are at least very different. Webber is a practicing Catholic while Miranda is a staunch agnostic; Webber's vivacity is at odds with Miranda's more strict analytic nature - it is difficult to picture Miranda in Webber's neon-green blouse and natty black clamdiggers. At the novel's opening, Miranda hardly defies gravity but is weighed down by it; Webber veritably flies, her greyish-green eyes sparkling.
"I'm not as world weary as she, but I, too, know emotional loneliness, to know my personal world ending. My own father died when I was nine - that isn't this story but relates in how a person manages to pick up again after loss.
"It's harder to deal with real emotions than the captioning she's used to as a reporter. Her knowledge is limited by her occupation - she has to analyze and summarize so quickly it prevents her from getting the deeper story. Her problem is quick judgment.
"Then she meets this fellow, Edmond Rebero, a refugee from the Rwandan genocide, a story she covered, and she discovers she really knows nothing of its true depth. People are walking around in the wake of this tragedy and what she knows of it is reduced to 15-second sound bites.
"I'm interested in how people survive - I mean survive anything. People have all these troubles and yet get up in the morning to go to work. Sometimes that amazes me. I suppose the book is something about that and about being open to different views of reality, like the different doses Miranda receives from Edmond and her friend Indrin."
Indrin Krishnayya is Miranda's co-pilot on the road trip from Jasper to Vancouver that is the novel's core. It is through Indrin, a young man who wishes to become a Catholic priest, that Miranda's strength is regained. Indrin's and Webber's Catholicism lends credence to interpreting Defying Gravity as a religious work, but it is hardly that.
"I certainly don't set out to be a Catholic writer. I'm just a writer who happens to be Catholic," says Webber. "I just want to be faithful to the images that come to my mind. I can always change it later, but I need to record it first."
Webber, who worked in Calgary during the '90s, is still producing and writing for television part-time out of Saskatoon. But by her own admission, the impulse to write books has always been there.
"As a seven year old I chased my dad to publish a book I had titled Susie and the Little Bear. It's been a long wait for the second one," she says, laughing heartily, obviously feeling the wait was worth it. Her energies are spent writing, driven by what appears to be a palpable need. Such hunger tends to die hard.