Erika de Vasconcelos

Erika de Vasconcelos was born in Montreal in 1965, and knew from the age of seven that one day she would be a writer. Her mother “would have been a writer if she’d been born twenty years later.” Her grandmother and aunt were both book lovers who collected old editions of French poetry. She grew up reading in three languages: English, French and Portuguese. Today, Erika and her mother still send books to each other.

De Vasconcelos was over thirty by the time she launched her writing career, deciding it was time to start writing seriously after she attended a high school reunion and everyone asked her what she had written. She published her first novel in 1997, and its success was astounding, receiving the highest praise. Now her work is also published in Germany, Holland and Portugal. A finalist in the CBC/Saturday Night short story contest, she has also published fiction in Toronto Life and This Magazine, and teaches creative writing at Humber College. She is married to the novelist Nino Ricci, and lives in Toronto with her three children. Though she misses the bilingual culture and the beauty of Montreal, she loves the writing community in Toronto, the “literary heart of eastern Canada.”

The novel My Darling Dead Ones is a story of three generations of intelligent, strong, passionate women; it follows the connections between a European past and North American present and the emotional legacies we inherit. The women’s stories are told through Fiona, a second-generation Portuguese-Canadian in a collapsing marriage, torn between the last vestiges of affection for her husband and her desire to take a lover. Trying to assuage her own present pain through an excursion into the past, she turns to the experiences of her mother, grandmother and great-aunt for guidance, learning about them through letters and photographs – and finds she is only the latest in her family for whom marriage has not always brought happiness. The novel explores the healing powers of life and sexuality and, against a rich backdrop of Portuguese culture, the difficulties of being an immigrant.

While writing that book, de Vasconcelos made a life-changing discovery, which she decided she wanted to write about: the possibilities of a mother/daughter connection between two people not biologically related. “I was interested in this idea that, at certain times in your life… someone can mother you in a very profound way.” The theme of human warmth being the only source of comfort for the wounds of the past, begun in the first book, is more fully explored in the second; just as Dzovig appears briefly in the first book, and Fiona in the second.

Whereas My Darling Dead Ones was about embracing the past, Between the Stillness and the Grove explores how people cope with “a past that’s so devastating that you don’t want to face it at all.” De Vasconcelos does not have an Armenian background, though she had taken a course on Armenian architecture in university. She found it a challenge to write about something she knew so little about at the outset, as well as something so sad and emotionally draining. But the story allowed her to explore what moves her as a writer. “I’m really interested in those big human questions. Questions about history, about death, about silence, the price you pay for the choices you make.” She is interested in what keeps people going after tragedy, and how great human suffering is carried forward from generation to generation.

She found the best way to explore these themes with subtlety was to move through different times and places. “I don’t like the linear-type story. It all has to do with how much you want to reveal at what stage. As you read the novel you start to make more and more connections.… I’m very conscious of how much information I’m giving out and when, and how I want it to build up.” This technique lends the novel an emotional tension which, along with the vibrant language, vivid characterization and deeply affecting history, make Between the Stillness and the Grove a book that’s impossible to put down.

“A book always starts with characters.… For me, writing this novel was the process of getting to know Dzovig and Vecihe, bit by bit, solving the puzzle of who they really were. It’s a journey that took me deep into Armenian history, and finally, to Armenia itself. When I got to Armenia, I was finally able to see the churches I had studied and imagined, hear Armenian voices, feel the weight of the mountains.… One night, I sat at a table with three Armenian artists, drinking wine and eating pears.… They toasted the birth of Dzovig and Vecihe, and I felt then as if the novel had been blessed.”