Joyland (32 page)

BackLit:
You’ve written two other novels since finishing
Joyland
: how did it feel to return to the world you’d created? Has your work since then made you see this first novel differently?

Emily:
I still have a depth of feeling for this novel, complex good and bad feelings, like a first love. I don’t want to say I worked harder on it than
Heaven Is Small
or my new novel,
The Blondes
(which is still forthcoming), but I worked at it the way you can only work at a first novel: obsessively, in such a way that you and the novel are one and the same, and if it doesn’t succeed (or you don’t see it as succeeding) it will literally kill you. Now, my work comes from me, but there is much more of a distinction between how I see myself and what I produce.

BackLit:
You also published a Trillium Award–nominated collection of poetry,
Songs for the Dancing Chicken
, in 2007. Does your work as a poet inform your fiction writing, or do you try to keep the two separate?

Emily:
In this case, I was still very much developing as a poet and considering myself one, so I do think that
Joyland
is informed by that love of poetry. The poetic influence is there in glimpses in my other work, but I read much less poetry and aspire to it less than I used to. There was a time where you couldn’t catch me without a volume of poetry in my purse. Lately, I’m more likely to be dipping into short fiction than poetry — still an abbreviated form relying on symbolism, but with stronger narrative.

BackLit:
Joyland
features gorgeous line drawings by Nate Powell. How do you think the images shape or complement the text? How were you involved in the process of selecting or developing the illustrations?

Emily:
After conversations with Michael at ECW, I approached Nate Powell. My thought was that the novel was a time capsule of youth, and I liked the idea of the winking gesture of adding illustrations for each chapter, similar to young adult vintage mystery books. From my work as an editor at
Broken Pencil
magazine, I was familiar with Powell’s zines, comics, and graphic novels.
Tiny Giants
and
It Disappears
had just come out from Soft Skull Press. I liked his dark, desolate style. His illustrations had a lot of emptiness in them; his focus on things like a lamp post or telephone wire really spoke to me as it was the same kind of microscoping detail I was also trying to deliver in my prose. Although he’s lived in several places across the United States, he had recently moved to Indiana; terrain-wise the Midwest is similar to the flat southwestern Ontario I was trying to portray.

BackLit:
Interestingly, a book that combines video games and literature gave birth to an online literary publication and a digital-only imprint. Tell us a little bit about how the digital iterations of
Joyland
came to be.

Emily:
I purchased the domain name Joyland for the novel and it acted as my author webpage throughout the book’s initial run. But after a few years, it felt vain to continue to promote only myself. My husband (and now co-publisher at
Joyland
the magazine), Brian Joseph Davis, suggested that I use my website as a vehicle for something else and begin to publish others there. I saw a lot of my peers wanted to write short but, due to industry pressure, were struggling to write long-form, so even though
Joyland
was once the name of a novel we decided to dedicate the web space exclusively to short stories. He and I were doing a lot of touring and promoting our own books and meeting others and peering in on different literary and art communities, so the idea emerged to arrange the writing on the website by location. I feel that this part of
Joyland
the magazine is true to
Joyland
the novel in that both are very much about place. We networked with writers across Canada and the United States who would act as editors. We began with four regions and eventually expanded. We hadn’t met everyone in person who would come to be involved, and there are still a couple editors we only know in the virtual world. The magazine has since spun off into an ebook series in partnership with ECW Press.

We began and grew the magazine with very few resources other than the people who agreed to be involved. For someone who wrote a novel about technology and is now a digital publisher, I’m really not a tech-savvy person . . . but the thing about the internet that excites me is that it’s a folk culture. It’s written by its users, it’s written by everyone.

EASTER EGGS: SCENES REVISITED BY EMILY SCHULTZ

[Continues from
“Joust,” Player 1
]

Ball-capped and snickering, the gang grabbed their BMXs. David and Kenny popped wheelies, each riding a couple of metres on back tires. Dean wove in and out, wheel wiggly. Reuben stood on the back nubs of his brother’s bike. He held onto the plastic seat by his fingernails, his bovine body still for once, unquivering, laughter quelled. Chris brought up the back of the pack, eyes on his running shoes — still too white for the first day of school, no matter how he tried to scuff them.

The streets topped, wobbled, spun, the details of them seeming to slow. Chris felt it — anticipation of a thing before it happened. It was like the holding down of a spinning record. The needle sunk to silence, then — letting it go again — bobbed back up, all noise. Chris observed the activity in the streets as if he had never travelled them before. He drifted across four lanes of St. Lawrence Street without looking. Cars throbbed in blue-veined lanes, but delayed for the boys. Chris’s gaze lingered on the back of Kenny’s grey T-shirt, its shifting set of wrinkles. The bells in the chicken take-out place tinkled under Lego-red roofing as a girl of ten or eleven raced out to an idling car where someone sat waiting, the paper bag not yet acquired, bills sticking up from the girl’s fist like some unrequired bit of punctuation — a physical question mark. The girl’s hand split into symbol — V-ed — numbers. A nod. She turned to the car for answer and back again quickly to her quest.

Chris cruised on. Sometimes he saw himself as if from a distance, and particularly this morning. He could feel the sweat sinking into his clothes. He imagined someone in another
town, far away, also riding his bike on the last day before high school — someone who had no idea where Chris’s town even was, just as Chris had no idea where this imaginary one might be — riding with all the earnestness of feeling these final moments of summer. He would be in one of those places named on the packages Chris turned over in the grocery store to see where the thing had been made: Battle Creek, Tilbury, Strathroy, Grimsby, Oshawa, Belleville, or Boucherville, Quebec. If Chris could find this invisible doppelganger, he wondered, would the kid tell him it was a good plan? This thing he intended to do? Would he say, “Yeah, man, go for it”?

The sidewalk cracks ushered a soft
thwack
into the motion of Chris’s vehicle.
Thwack, thwack, thwack . . .
His mouth filled with warmth, the dry salt of fear. Thoughts arrived without words, a series of fast-play pictures, visual
perhaps’s
and
possiblys.
Chris yanked on his handlebars, leaned back, and left his wheel to lift. When the gang passed his corner, he ducked his head, as if his mother or father could see him from the living room window. Then, so as not to look like a mama’s boy, he gathered the cracks from his tongue, leaned to one side and spat.

Kenny dropped back.

“Are you really —”

Chris looked at him.

“Are you really —” Kenny stammered again beneath Chris’s appraising gaze. “What are you gonna do?” Kenny managed finally. His eyes blinked repeatedly behind the lenses of his glasses. He was offering Chris an out.

Chris shook his head like it didn’t matter, pumped the pedals hard, and soared ahead, leaving Kenny behind. “Pussy,” he said not entirely beneath his breath.

The cardboard in the windows of Joyland had begun to peel. One day soon they would fall inward. The masking tape would let go, its tongue suitably numbed with the grit of old paint and sill dust. It would decide it had had enough, lean back, allow itself to crumble to the empty floor. When the boys pulled their bikes up alongside the old squat, though they had been there just the day before, Chris noticed for the first time that the outside sign had been removed. He wished for a second he had thought to steal
it — then the thought was as lost as the sign; they turned the corner of the building and saw Adam Granger. They pressed hand brakes and foot brakes, skidded softly to a stop.

He lounged against the back wall of the arcade, his nose in consultation with his knees. He straightened when he heard them, his face pinched and red.

“Gonna lose your lunch, Granger?” David called.

Adam pulled up his T-shirt and used it to wipe the sweat from his forehead. His belly was thick and pale, a brown-hair spiral in the centre around his bellybutton. Against the tongue of the Rolling Stones’ mural, even Adam was small. Chris watched as he pulled back his elbows, forming fists, and shook his head. His whole throat jostled with muscle, the cord along one side of his neck taking the opportunity to introduce itself to the gang of onlookers. A preparatory cracking was issued. His hair flicked back with reinstated confidence. He shrugged his shoulders. He swung his arms in circles as if he were warming up. His blotchiness faded.

“I been waiting to pound this fucker for a long time,” he said.

Chris stared at Adam’s face. Everything in the universe slipped a little bit, that feeling again of things being out of sequence. Chris wouldn’t call it fear. He glanced at David, then Dean. Kenny’s gaze met his for a second. The boys all paused, perhaps to consider what they did or did not know of Adam. Even Reuben, who had one foot down as if he intended to step off the wheel of his brother’s bike, stopped, a leg on the ground, the other still positioned for travel.

“H-how come?” The question came from Kenny.

Adam put his arms out, his hands hooked together. His knuckles popped. “Genevieve Cartier,” Adam said, as if they surely had to have heard of her.

Apparently, in the bungled cosmos of Grade Nine — yes, even Marc Breton’s was bungled, Adam assured them — there existed a girl named Genevieve Cartier. “He had this crush on her, and she was, like, his science partner” was how Adam put it.

“Just like your beanpole buddy, J.P., Marc was — at that time — this hundred-and-twenty-pound dork who sweated acne.”

Adam said that Marc’s behaviour toward Genevieve was that of a psychopath. Marc had shown some guy in his first period English class a story he had written about a girl, cleverly named “Genevieve,” highly derogatory. Because it had sex in it, the assignment got passed around secretly underneath desks. Marc seemed to have been smart enough not to hand it in for class assignment in the end. “But then, at the same time,” Adam said, squinting off into the distance, “Marc’s trying to impress this girl. He devotes half his lunch hour to pumping iron to bulk up, and the other half to cold showers.

“By afternoon science class he’s so exhausted all he can do is lie across the desk and watch her as she does all their work. He don’t say nothing to her, not a word. I dunno if it’s because he’s petrified she’ll think he’s stupid, or if he’s freaked she’ll see how much he wants her.”

According to Adam, Marc watched Genevieve shooting light through a prism, recording results of yellow, blue, magenta. He watched her marking down point-form observations on their assignment sheet. He watched her decorate her binder with word balloons and smiley faces and song lyrics and green felt-tip exclamations. He watched her face in the glow of the tremulous blue of the Bunsen burner, and her hands shaking when she sliced open the mouse they were given for dissection, unfurling the red pendant of its stomach on the long grey chain of its entrails. All of second semester freshman year passed without incident. Marc laid with his head on his arm across the desk and watched through half-closed lids.

“I don’t know, maybe this guy’s never jerked his dick over a real live girl before. We
were
only fifteen.” Adam balled his fist and wiped something out of his eye.

The boys stood silently, waiting for him to go on. David set his bike down on its side and sat on a parking block. Chris dropped his head, stared down his jeaned legs at the pavement beneath his bike and remembered Laurel Richards’ hair against his cheek.

“I’m at this bush party —” Adam said. “I forget whose, Somebody VanderSomething. I’m hanging out with Danielle Desrosiers from my French class. She’s good friends with Genevieve. ‘Will you do it for a beer?’ Genevieve goes to me, so I go, ‘What? Sure.’ I don’t even know what I’m supposed to do. I just want another. So I go up to Marc and I say, ‘Genevieve Cartier wants to know if you’ll go out with her.’ I don’t know, maybe I elaborated a bit at that point. I might have, I can’t say —” Adam held his hands up at chest height as if to push something away. “But come on, it’s too good. I think she might have been serious — maybe all that time he spent at the gym paid off — but sometimes that question is a joke. I guess that’s how this fucker took it cuz the next thing I know I’m buzzed at a party and then I’m fucken flat on my ass on the hard ground and this guy’s hauling off . . .”