In conversation with U of G’s writer in residence
Following a performance of Confessions of a Fairy’s Daughter at Lower Massey Hall, The Ontarion continued its conversation with U of G’s writer in residence Alison Wearing, discussing her influences on her work in both fiction and her memoir.
Tanner Morton: How did your experience growing up in Peterborough inform your work as a performer and writer?
Alison Wearing: I think it’s that old Anglo-Saxon stiff upper lip—that whole tradition. We were surrounded by that. It was so white when I grew up there. […] What would that city be if it didn’t have Trent, that pulls in so many interesting people and has managed to make it a far more diverse community than it was? It still is so painfully white, but it’s a really decent place now. I love Peterborough now. It was really important for me to love that place. When you loathe where you’re from it’s a form of self-loathing, even if you think it’s not.We do, at some point, have to make peace with where we’re from, we have to make peace with our home in some way. That was important to me. That didn’t happen until I was an adult. I think I felt very corseted in Peterborough. It was not a place where I felt free and it was so clear that it was not a place where I fit or was a place that would allow me to be fully myself. What happens to children of gay parents is that we at some point have to come out too, meaning we have to be transparent about our parents’ lives with everyone in our life. It’s part of coming out for a gay person and it’s part of coming out for their family. I could not come out in Peterborough—that was impossible in those times. Now it would be nothing. It probably propelled me on many of my first travels, but what I realized of course, you can’t be out in most of the Middle East or much of Latin America, so it’s a tricky thing.
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TM: So you were saying that you enjoy writing fiction, but also that it’s all informed by your own personal experiences. What would you say was your influence to do a memoir?
AW: I guess the easiest answer is that wasn’t a choice. It’s funny that these stories just move through us and they sometimes just want to come out and we are the vehicle for them. It doesn’t matter if we’re a dancer, a musician, or a painter, we just become a vehicle for whatever it is that is trying to live, trying to come to life. For instance, I had no interest in writing a memoir about growing up with a gay father—none.
I started performing when I was living in Mexico, someone saw me do a reading in the bookstore and my readings are always very animated. I go into characters and do accents. He came up afterwards and asked me if I ever thought about doing theatre, and I said, “No, I’m not really interested in doing theatre. I just like doing really animated readings.” Then he said, “If you ever change your mind, here’s my card,” and eventually I did change my mind and I called him and we created a show that was actually set in Mexico, and I toured that for a couple of years.
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It was when I was touring that show that I kept thinking about this story of growing up with a gay father and I kept thinking about how it would come to life, particularly my parents would come to life because my dad is so theatrical, but my mother is too. You don’t get that in the show, but she really is too, and they’re both musicians, so I could imagine weaving their voices into different pieces of music and having different instruments stand in for them. That’s how it started. I just thought that this would make a great play, it would really come to life on the stage. I didn’t really see it as telling my story.It was a story about growing up with a gay father and it was my director who actually had the idea of the images [in the show], which ended up being images from my childhood.They were the real things. It suddenly became very personal, but that wasn’t my initial inspiration to tell my story and make it a memoir.
The nice thing about doing theatre is no one asks you if it’s true or not true. They’re willing to just sit and watch and say, “Well some of it might be.” But it’s a play, we’re playing, this is make believe. Then turning that script into a memoir, it was a bit like having to step into this box that had very strict limits and rules. I’m not very comfortable with rules or boxes, generally, so that was a bit of a struggle for me. I think I would have preferred to just call it a story about growing up with a gay father and not have it wear this label of memoir which is when the non-fiction police come out.