LOVE IS AN OCTOPUS
by Zhauna Alexander
(Slipstream Books)
168 pages/17.95

In-store appearance:
Chapters (WEM)
Sat, Dec 27
12 pm—4 pm

Going to meet Zhauna Alexander, I wasn’t sure what to expect of her. There’s this quality to her writing that I’d describe as being wild–in touch with something primal and long forgotten, something that I imagined would take a toll on whoever tried to wrestle it onto a page. After reading Love Is An Octopus, I imagined someone who would generate the impression of being just a little bit off–not in any way that I would be able to pin down, exactly, but one who emitted a subtle sense of not being quite right. But I was wrong: it turned out she was the well-dressed woman browsing through the magazines. She suggested the name of a little place not far from where we were, a better place to sit down and talk than in a Chapters. I agreed, and off we went for a foray into a mind that can compare love to an eight-legged sea creature.

Love Is An Octopus revisits Amelia Blue from Amelia’s Aquarium, one of Alexander’s earlier projects. That was a deck of 64 cards, each bearing a short description of some part of Amelia’s life. Taken as a whole, the deck maps out a very unusual and slightly mad woman, and, flipping through the deck gives the reader the impression of wandering through her life, a little bit at a time. It is an intriguing project, but one that keeps its subject at too comfortable a distance–Amelia is too much like a fish on display in an aquarium, separated from you by glass.

This disconnect is something that Love Is An Octopus addresses. There is no comfortable distance in this novel: we are not sitting back and taking a safe peek at this woman. Amelia speaks directly to us, as only someone who is as messed up as Amelia turns out to be can do. The novel reads a bit like a protracted hallucination, but despite, or perhaps because of, its tenuous relation with reality, its feel is all the more honest.

Writing a novel like this was no simple task. "Sometimes," Alexander says, "it felt like swallowing razor blades." It was a four-year project: two years to flesh out what she’d written for Amelia’s Aquarium, searching for a voice for the novel, and two years working under the editorial guidance of Timothy J. Anderson. Once she had the feel of Amelia right, Alexander would sit and write for hours on end, just letting whatever was there out onto the page. At this point in her writing process, she worked intuitively: there were things that presented themselves in order to be written. Where those elements came from, she acknowledges, is a mystery: "The subconscious, some higher power, I just don’t know." Then came the task of wrestling all of that into a novel–pouring over every sentence, making sure it was just right, and all the pieces in the right places.

And now that it’s done? "I feel much calmer," says Alexander. With her previous work–her poetry, her plays, her films–she says she was too young and just running wild. Now that she’s spent four years bringing a single project to fruition, she feels more knowledgeable about her craft and confident in her ability to represent her distinctive vision. And she’s already at work on her second novel.