Power Q & A with Ian Colford

Books have long lives, but if it’s possible to be late to the party celebrating an amazing book, we’re definitely late to this one. Ian Colford’s 2023 Guernica Prize-winning novel, The Confessions of Joseph Blanchard, is a mesmerizing read that runs a dazzling gamut of human emotion: love, greed, grief, jealousy, rage. You name it: the characters in this novel—particularly our protagonist, Joseph—sing with range that would make Mariah Carey weak with envy.

In Joseph—a man who falls in love with his 19-year-old cousin—we find a person to rally against and even (surprisingly and often against our better judgment) a person to rally for, despite his slippery moral footing. We are delighted to welcome Ian to our series today to ask him about creating the complex, haunting, and fascinating character of Joseph.

The Confessions of Joseph Blanchard by Ian Colford (Guernica Editions, 2023)

Q: One of the great feats of your book, to our mind, was the character of Joseph: a man who is repugnant in many ways but who we also couldn't help feel compassion toward—a surprising and disturbing realization. What is your advice to writers who want to create morally murky characters?

A: As I noted in a recent blog post about writing The Confessions of Joseph Blanchard, the character of Joseph came to me more or less fully formed. At the time I was writing the book, I wasn’t giving much thought to his status in the reader’s eyes, as someone they would like or dislike. My aim on days when I sat down to write was simply to keep the story moving forward. But as I got deeper into the story and saw what Joseph was doing, I grew more aware of the notion of sympathy. And after I finished it and started letting people read it, I had to wonder what they’d think of him.

Writing the book was a learning process and a lot of the time I was writing on instinct. But one thing I was sure of was that I didn’t want Joseph to be a nefarious schemer. I knew that if his intention from the get-go was to cause harm, the story would be boring, for me and for the reader. Instinct told me to dig deep into his history and find ways to give his character complexity and nuance. I wanted Joseph to be a puzzle for the reader to unravel. Because people behave in puzzling ways. They behave badly. Sometimes they even act against their own best interests. For the novel to work, the reader had to see Joseph as flawed and vulnerable. What makes our response to him so complicated is that we’re witnessing a fundamentally decent man struggling against base impulses. He knows he’s behaving badly. It eats at him, and yet he comes up with justifications that make it possible for him to carry on with behaviour that the reader will regard as unforgivable.

My advice for writers who want to create a morally murky character is to get to the root of why the character acts the way he does. If the reasons are simplistic (he’s doing it for revenge, or for kicks), then—probably but admittedly not always—the character you create will be one dimensional. If your character isn’t engaged in a struggle, not only will the reader quickly lose interest, but you, the writer, will tire of him. As a writer of fiction, your first responsibility is to write something the reader will find interesting, and a dependable compass to help you navigate your way through a novel manuscript is your own sense of what’s interesting. If you find your character boring, it’s likely the reader will too. But if you’ve endowed your character with the kind of depth that brings them convincingly to life and fires up your imagination every time you sit down to write, then there’s a reasonable chance your reader will be transfixed by what you’ve written.

More about The Confessions of Joseph Blanchard:

The Confessions of Joseph Blanchard is a contemporary tale of obsessive love, sexual transgression, and tragic loss. Bachelor and professional accountant Joseph Blanchard has led a socially active but emotionally cautious life until his late thirties. When he discovers that his beautiful cousin Sophie, a talented concert pianist, is in love with him, he finds he is powerless to resist her youthful charms, and against his better judgment embarks on a passionate affair. To avoid causing pain to her parents, the two lovers conspire to keep their relationship a secret. For a time, they are happy. But Sophie's career forces her to spend time in the company of other musicians, many of them young men. Consumed by jealousy, Joseph allows rage to take control, with tragic results. Grieving, he prepares to destroy all evidence of the affair. But when a family secret is exposed, it reveals the past in a new light. Eventually, his health in decline and with nothing but memories, he reveals his secret to a confidant.

Author Ian Colford.

More about Ian Colford:

Ian Colford was born, raised and educated in Halifax. His reviews and stories have appeared in many print and online publications. He is the author of two collections of short fiction and two novels and is the recipient of the Margaret and John Savage First Book Award for Evidence.

Behind the Books with Noelle Allen

Behind the Books is a River Street interview series celebrating the hard-working visionaries creating the magic of small press CanLit. We are honoured to have Noelle Allen join us for our first installment!

Noelle is the publisher of Hamilton’s powerhouse small press, Wolsak & Wynn and the recent winner of the 2024 Arts Champion Award. She is the organizer for Sharp Words: Hamilton’s Winter Book Fair and works with Supercrawl to program the author talks. She is also the past chair of gritLIT and has long contributed to the literary community.

Welcome Noelle!

Wolsak & Wynn Publisher, Noelle Allen. Photo credit: Banko Creative.

1. Tell us about Wolsak & Wynn. What makes your press singular?

Wolsak and Wynn is a small literary press based in Hamilton that publishes a rich range of books. We’ve always gone a bit against the grain. When Marja Jacobs and Heather Cadsby started the press in 1982 it was dedicated to poetry and only published poetry for the first twenty years. As poets themselves Marja and Heather felt that authors they knew and admired were being overlooked by the current publishers. They decided that they would start a press and do something about that. When they had the press incorporated the lawyer also added stationary publishing to their papers, in case they decided they wanted to make money at some point. But they never wavered from poetry. 

When I purchased the press and moved it to Hamilton, we continued going our own way, as the steel city was not seen at that time as a place for the arts. But we found a thriving literary and arts community here and we’ve grown much since then. I believe this ability to see potential where many companies might shy away is what sets us apart. Whether it’s a dedication to poets, seeing the beauty in a post-industrial city, encouraging our authors to blur literary genres and making space for new voices, we find books that change how people think about literature in Canada. 

2. What’s one misconception people have about small press publishing?

That our books aren’t as good as something published by a multinational because they don’t sell as many copies. There are fabulous, innovative books being published by small presses across Canada, which I think are often better than much of what comes from those presses. What we lack is the heft of those enormous marketing departments. If I had as much money to spend on marketing as Penguin Random House does, our books would top every bestseller list.

3. Share a proud moment in your career as a small press publisher.

Why don’t I share two. The first was watching an author who has long been with the press, Richard Harrison, be awarded a Governor General’s Award for Poetry. I had attended a few of those ceremonies in other roles in the industry, and I had been struck by the power of seeing publishers I knew introduce their authors and then watching the authors be awarded those prizes. This was one of the earlier titles edited by our senior editor, Paul Vermeersch, after he had joined the press and it was lovely to be in Ottawa as this new version of Wolsak and Wynn, with a new publisher and new editor, was recognized in this way. 

The second one is a bit more humorous. I was walking down my street in Hamilton one day, when one of my neighbours stopped me to tell me about this book she’d just read. She was sure I’d really enjoy it. She couldn’t quite remember the name, but it was by a local writer, something like Garden Work and it was put out by a publishing company in Westdale, just across the city. After a few questions I realized she was talking about Daniel Coleman’s Yardwork, which I had acquired and edited and which the press had released that spring. That’s when I knew our Hamilton books were really resonating with the community, even if the readers didn’t quite know where the books came from yet.

Yardwork: A Biography of an Urban Place by Daniel Coleman, published by Wolsak & Wynn, 2017.

More about Yardwork: A Biography of an Urban Place:

How can you truly belong to a place? What does being at home mean in a society that has always celebrated the search for greener pastures? And can a newcomer ever acquire the deep understanding of the land that comes from being part of a culture that has lived there for centuries?

When Daniel Coleman came to Hamilton to take a position at McMaster University, he began to ask himself these kinds of questions, and Yardwork: A Biography of an Urban Place is his answer. In this exploration of his garden – which Coleman deftly situates in the complicated history of Cootes Paradise, off of Hamilton Harbour – the author pays close attention to his small plot of land sheltered by the Niagara Escarpment. Coleman chronicles enchanting omnivorous deer, the secret life of water and the ongoing tension between human needs and the environment. These, along with his careful attention to the perspectives and history of the Six Nations, create a beguiling portrait of a beloved space.