Process Talk: Martine Leavitt on Buffalo Flats

When I finished reading Buffalo Flats by Martine Leavitt, I wanted to go back to the beginning and read it all over again. I had a visceral memory of the spirit of her protagonist, Rebecca, from Martine’s readings of drafts at VCFA residencies. I found that spirit in these pages, carrying its sparkle all the way through. It made me feel as if I were encountering an old friend. Here’s my conversation with Martine about this beautifully crafted book. 

[Uma] Buffalo Flats speaks to its time but it also spoke to me in this present we live in now. How do you think historical fiction does this, operating in two time-frames at once—the past, and the reader’s own present?

Photo courtesy of the author

[Martine] I have to find a personal and even intimate connection with my protagonist, historical or otherwise. No matter what I’m writing, I have to make this mind-meld of the imagination – I have to put down my pen sometimes and close my eyes and inhabit the mind and body of my fictional characters. The imagination helps me cross barriers of time and gender and even species. It helps me give voice to those whose precise experience I have not shared. Without this connection, I can’t write a word, and the cost of this connection is compassion. I keep discovering that, in the most essential ways, we are all the same, even if I’m writing about a character who lived over a hundred years ago. Someone once said, “Bring so much compassion to the page it might kill you.” I think of this as the one writing rule I never want to break.

[Uma] Talk to me about Mother! Her character rings with compassion. She starts out as a quiet ally, “only a little lower than the angels.” Then her quietness almost seems to harden, so we know there are all kinds of tensions boiling up beneath. By the end she seems imbued with a fire all her own, its flames fanned by the events of the story. How did her character grow for you and where did her layers come from? 

[Martine] What a beautifully phrased question – I’m so glad you asked about Mother! The personal histories upon which I based my book documented the incredible physical and emotional and spiritual strength of these pioneer women. They were not considered “persons” under the law in the British Northwest Territories, and yet they had all this soft power in their families and communities. I wanted to create a story that would show Mother exercising that soft power, but also bring her to a point where she realizes that sometimes that is simply not enough. Rebecca thinks her mother is good because she is quiet and kind and devout. But she learns, through her mother’s example, that goodness is also strength, that it involves, at times, taking a stance. Mother’s character continually surprised me. It was as if she was always telling me, don’t make me into a cliché. I’m more than you think.

[Uma] The setting felt alive to me: "The pulsing prairie arched its back…”  And the flood, the flood! That “mud-brown water shouldering through the riverbed" made me think of when you lived through being flooded yourself. Not that you couldn’t make this up whole cloth, Martine, if you wanted to--but will you talk about taking life and bending it in the service of fiction? 

[Martine] I was at a writer’s conference in the States on June 20, 2013, sitting in the lobby of a hotel and waiting for a cab to take me to the conference venue. I was half watching CNN on the large flat-screen TV in the lobby when the reporter began to talk about a serious flood in Canada. I looked up to see footage of a whole house floating down the river. Oh those poor people, I thought. I was shocked when I saw that it was my little town of 13,000 people they were talking about! Was my house okay? Were my family and friends okay? Three people died in that flood, and the total cost of the damage was around five billion dollars. So yes, it wasn’t the biggest leap to be able to imagine that moment when my ancestor’s house was also picked up and floated down the flooding Lee Creek. I was able to write authentically, I felt, about how dangerous and devastating that must have been for them. I was glad this part of the histories found a place in my novel.

Another element in the story was a flu epidemic – they occasionally swept through the real-life pioneer community I was writing about. It was easier to imagine the epidemic after living through a two-year pandemic myself.

Here’s my theory: no pain or trouble need be wasted on a writer. We take our sorrows like straw and we spin them into gold, if we can.

[Uma] “We take our sorrows like straw…” I’ll hold that close. But let’s talk about what’s unsaid, especially in dialogue. Meanings are implied, and become clear in later scenes. And yet, we find passages where the narrative is lushly funny and extravagant—Rebecca's description of her brothers, e.g.:  "Mother said her brothers were handsome as Greek statues, but, in Rebecca’s opinion, that didn’t say much for Greeks or for statues.” Or her comments about LaRue, with a “heart...like a jewelry box” or Radonna with her “forkish smile.” My question is—I know writing is half-intuition and half-reordering and revision but how do you end up with this fine balance of lightly layered dialogue and narrative that delivers character in spades?

[Martine] Uma, do I end up with such a thing?

[Uma] You do, you do!

[Martine] Fine balance and character in spades? I’m so glad if I do. I’m pleased that you mention the funny bits – I think Rebecca is delightfully funny at times. I don’t know how I made her funny. I’m not funny. I can bring the mood down in any lively conversation.

Here’s the truth: I will sometimes open one of my published books and read just a paragraph or two, and think, how did I do that? how did it happen? I have no memory of writing that first sentence, or coming up with this description, or deciding on that plot point... Did I write this book? It is certainly true for me when you say writing is half intuition and half reordering and revision. But there may be a third half in there somewhere – the pure-magic half, the wondrous half, the half that can’t be explained at the end of the day.

If there’s a balance in the book, it came from that third half. I don’t mean to discourage young writers who are looking for practical advice – magic? they say – what magic? what if I don’t have said magic? But I believe that if we trust our intuition as we’re getting that rough draft down, and if we will do the reordering and revision, we can trust that the magic will happen. It’s in the words! Just because we throw words around every day, doesn’t mean they aren’t powerful spells.

[Uma] Martine, you always point me back to that magical space and remind me why I write (that is to say, beyond the fact that I’m unemployable doing anything else)! Is there something you’d like to say to beginning writers?

[Martine] I think I want to say that Buffalo Flats is a poster book – you know, like a poster child? only a book? – for the importance of never giving up.

[Uma] I love that!

[Martine] From the time I first got the idea for Buffalo Flats, to the time that it was a book in my hand, was seven years. When it was over, I stacked up all the versions I’d done over the years – it comes hip-high. (photo)

I wonder how many manuscripts living in dark drawers are saying, if only you hadn’t given up on me! If only you hadn’t got the idea that a book has to just come together easily to be legit! Now, I’m not saying that every book you work on for years will be publishable. Some books are our cadaver books – the ones we learn on but which will never live. But it’s also true that some books come hard and need time and persistence. If you’ve got a story you once believed in, sitting in a drawer, I say take it out and give it another thought. Once it’s a book, you’ll forget the pain of all that labor...

[Uma] Will I?

[Martine] I actually don’t know why I said that. I don’t forget the pain of writing Buffalo Flats, and I don’t forget the pain of childbirth, either, for that matter. But keep believing, keep working. That book baby will be worth it.

[Uma] Martine I can think right away of five writers who need to read this and one them is me! Thank you.

Martine Leavitt is the author of award-winning books for young readers, including Calvin (winner of the Governor General’s Award), My Book of Life by Angel (finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and winner of the Canadian Library Association Young Adult Book of the Year) and Keturah and Lord Death (finalist for the National Book Award). She teaches in the MFA program in Writing for Children and Young Adults at Vermont College of Fine Arts, where she is serving as the Katherine Paterson Endowed Chair. Martine lives in High River, Alberta.