“Woman lives better while dying” – In just five words, author Amy Spurway describes her debut novel, Crow. In all its tragi-comic glory, Crow is a multi-layered story of a woman facing certain death, forced to return home and own up to her past. Unexpectedly to her, she ends up better off for it. But first, Crow offers up a whole lot of laughter, tears, and absolute madness. (For more on Crow, see my review here.)

With so much rich content to explore in Crow, it was a pleasure to chat with Spurway. We discussed laughing through pain, homecomings, environmentalism, and finding inspiration in Buddhist teachings.

If you were trying to make readers laugh, you succeeded. And if you were trying to make them cry, well you did that too. Reading Crow was like rollercoaster of emotion. The highs hit so high and the lows hit devastatingly low. Did you set out to write a tragic comedy or was that dark comedic voice natural to you?

The people and place I come from have always found ways to laugh in the face of sorrow and hardship. So, when I set out to tell a story about a dying woman, the comedic element wasn’t something I really thought about. It was just there, jumbled in with the tragedy. That’s the lens through which I’ve always seen the world. Shadows and light go hand in hand. Beautiful flowers grow from piles of rot. Laughing and crying at the same time is being human, in a nutshell. Dark humour is certainly a mechanism for coping — for survival, even — and so is exploring and embracing both the highs and lows of life, in all their intensity. My goal as a writer has always been to make readers feel something, and subtlety has never been my strong suit. When it comes to emotion, I’m go-big-or-go-home.

A lot of the experiences detailed in Crow will be familiar to rural and impoverished communities, including corporate exploitation. When Spenser Mining Inc. and an Alberta Firm attempt to frack beneath Crow’s (recently hard-won) land, a very pregnant Crow and her band of misfits stand against them. While this is an arguably small plot point, it packs a real punch, especially when real communities are out here standing up against the same thing—fracking, pipeline expansion, deforestation. Was this inclusion meant to be a response to those real-life issues, or was it simply inspired by them?

When I was a kid in Cape Breton in the ‘80s, there were plans to do aerial herbicide spraying over our area. My parents took me to meetings and marches, and I was out there carrying signs and singing protest songs about forest diversity and protecting our wells, at the top of my little lungs. They sprayed swaths of Cape Breton, but a small group of vocal people succeeded in stopping the spraying over our community. That lesson stuck with me. I also grew up knowing about the coal mines, the steel plant, the tar ponds, and the impact those things had not only on the environment but on the physical health of people, and on the social and economic health of Cape Breton as a whole. Then, just a few years ago, there were murmurs about potash deposits around where I grew up, and where my parents still live on sixty acres of land overlooking the Bras d’Or Lakes. My younger brother and I got into a very heated debate about what we’d do if some company wanted to mine that land someday. He was heartily in favour of cashing in on the opportunity, and all I said was “Over my dead body.” That place is precious to me, and as my mother always says, when it comes to land, “They ain’t makin’ anymore.”

So, that element of Crow’s story came from something both deeply personal for me, and from this long and complex history of struggling communities being vulnerable to industrial exploitation. In some ways, it is a small plot point in the story, but it amplifies the larger theme of getting to the heart of what matters most in life. The next generation won’t give a rat’s ass about economic growth or how many corporations the low taxes and loose regulations attracted, if people can’t drink the water, breathe the air, or grow anything on the land.

Crow also tackles the assumptions we make about the people who leave rural communities and the people who stay. In trying to escape, and be better than, where she came from, Crow ends up alienating herself. We get the sense that she loses sight of what really matters. What assumptions do you think we make about those who go and those who stay? Do you believe there’s something grounding about Home?

The assumption among most people my age in Cape Breton was that we would leave. That we had to leave in order to get an education or find work. So, many of us did, on the assumption that we’d somehow be better off because of it. Meanwhile, the assumption made about those who stayed was that they’d settle for some random job, maybe marry somebody they went to high school with, and just work and live and die on the Island never having known the freedom, the pride, the joy of leaving. Or maybe that’s just what we told ourselves to relieve some of the guilt we felt, or to ease the alienation. There always seemed to be this weird push and pull going on, with a culture that simultaneously said, “You have to leave, or you’ll never make a good life for yourself” but also, “Don’t you dare leave! This is the best place on earth!”

Another assumption was that if you left, you couldn’t or wouldn’t come back, and I think that’s proving to be false as well. We might not go back to the exact community we grew up in, but many of us who are now in our 30s and 40s keenly feel the pull of ‘Home’ for a variety of reasons. There is something deeply grounding about that place, and about our identities in relation to it. At times, we might experience that ‘grounding’ as smothering because the notion of ‘Home’ brings up all kinds of complicated emotions and dynamics, and I think all the characters in Crow experience or express that in some way. That being said, my secret Apocalypse/Crisis/Shit-Hits-the-Fan plan has always been and continues to be very simple: head for ‘Home.’

There are some supernatural elements to Crow. It really plays with belief in unexpected ways. In the Acknowledgements, you mention that the book was at least partially inspired by Buddhist teachings. Can you tell me a bit more about the role belief played in the writing of Crow?

A number of times in the story, Crow characterizes a belief as “when it suits me.” At first, it might sound a little smarmy, or cynical, or dismissive, but once you scratch beneath the surface, there is a deeper level of sincerity and honesty to that. We believe things because they work for us, somehow. Not because they’re true, or because we’ve conducted extensive rational examination of evidence that led us to a logical conclusion. We believe things if, and when they suit us. That’s not to say that what suits us always comforts us or make us feel good, but rather that our beliefs serve some function in our life. Examining what those functions really are is tough, but worthwhile.

I started studying and practicing Buddhism not long after I began writing Crow because it suited me. I needed a way to come to terms with big existential issues like death and uncertainty. I also needed a way to resist what I saw as a rising culture of shiny happy, self-serving “positive” thinking, without plunging into the pit of morose nihilism that tends to be my default. Buddhism suited me there, too. It helped me surrender a bit more to the uncertainty and contradictions that come with being human, and Crow is very much a story of uncertainties and contradictions.

The supernatural or mystical elements of the story were also really important to me because I have been obsessed with such things for as long as I can remember. But I definitely like my woo-woo served with a side of cold, hard reality.

You’ve said elsewhere that you stumbled into writing. Can you elaborate on that? What has your “writing journey” looked like so far?

My “writing journey” so far has looked like a Salvador Dali painting: very surreal, kind of confusing, and with melting clocks all over the place.

It was specifically fiction writing that I stumbled into. I’ve been writing since I was a kid, but most was non-fiction. Speeches, essays, commentaries, plays, super emo diary entries, bad teenaged poetry. I always knew that writing would be part of whatever I did because I loved it, and I was good at it. But I wasn’t the kid with her nose buried in a novel, who dreamed of writing one someday. I was a performer, at heart. My plan was to write for TV, so after I finished an English degree, I did Radio and Television Arts at Ryerson, with a concentration in scriptwriting. I graduated from the program and promptly realized that I couldn’t survive in Toronto doing the expected unpaid internship, so I took jobs as a waitress and a nanny. Not long after, my partner and I got married, and had a set of premature twin girls who ended up having some medical and developmental issues that made working on somebody else’s schedule impossible. They were babies when I began writing Crow. They are 16 now, and our youngest is 12. Whenever we needed extra money, I turned to writing and took whatever gigs I could. I did editing, magazine articles, ad copy, marketing materials, creative non-fiction, you name it. All the while, I was slowly picking away at this novel because the voice of Crow and my need to tell the story were relentless. A few years after we moved back to Nova Scotia, I got it together enough to do a Pitch the Publisher event at [the] Word On The Street [festival]. Writing the pitch helped me zero in on what I was doing, and although the manuscript wasn’t finished, some publishers were interested. That was the push I needed to finish the thing, and ta-da! Five or so years after that pitch, Crow landed in the world.

What’s next?

I would lunge at the chance to work on a screen adaptation of Crow, so I’ve got fingers and toes crossed that that little dream could materialize someday. In the meantime, I’m having an absolute blast doing readings and festivals, picking up freelance gigs here and there, developing some unique writing workshops, and bouncing between researching and writing my second novel. I won’t give much detail much about it yet…but I will point out that Crow said she was “smack dab in the middle of a story about a long line of lunatics and criminals.” So, I’d best not make a liar out of her.

Amy Spurway was born and raised on Cape Breton Island, where, at the age of eleven, she landed her first writing and performing gigs with CBC Radio.

Amy holds a B.A. in English from the University of New Brunswick, and a degree in Radio & Television Arts (writing concentration) from Ryerson University. She has worked as a freelance writer, communications consultant, editor, and performer. Her work has appeared in Today's Parent, the Toronto Star, Babble, and Elephant Journal, as well as in the realms of advertising, marketing, non-profit and corporate communications, education, health, and politics. Amy lives in Dartmouth, Nova Scotia, with her husband Matthew, and their three daughters.