Sandra Ruttan is a walking disaster.
She has been hit by a car, had a foot partially severed, fell down a waterfall
and survived a car crash in the Sahara Desert. There is absolutely no
explanation for how she's managed to stay alive as long as she has. Ruttan has
five published mystery novels, including Harvest
of Ruins, What
Burns Within and Suspicious
Circumstances. Her next book, The Spying Moon, is due out
September 2018 from Down & Out Books. Get the latest news from her author
Facebook page @sandraruttanauthor or her website http://sruttan.wordpress.com/
That’s the official bio. The Sandra
Ruttan people meet in real time is a tireless supporter of writers on multiple
levels with no mean level of talent herself. How she finds time to do all the
things she does is imposing enough, but she still found time to sit down with
me and talk about The Spying Moon.
One Bite at a Time: First, welcome to the Down & Out
Books family. I hope you enjoy working with Eric and Lance and everyone as much
as I have. How did you get together with them?
Sandra Ruttan: Sandra Seamans posted on her blog
about Down & Out being open for submissions a few years ago. I took the
deadline as a challenge and submitted. I got an offer for publication and it’s
been a fantastic experience. Really wonderful working with people who are
committed to the genre and making each book shine.
OBAAT: Give us the meat and potatoes of your new book, The
Spying Moon, in a hundred words or less. (And I will count.)
SR: Constable Moreau is stuck on an assignment she doesn’t
want, with a bunch of colleagues who want nothing to do with her. Even the case
she’s supposed to be working is hijacked by the death of a local teen. When
everyone seems to have an agenda or a bad attitude, it’s hard to know who to
trust, and that already isn’t easy for Moreau. As an orphan she’s been isolated
her whole life and she has to learn to trust her instincts, as well as some
members of her team, to solve this case. (Editor’s Note: 94 words. Well done.)
OBAAT: The Spying Moon
takes place in a small town in southern British Columbia. You’re a Canadian
expat living in the United States now, but I believe you’re a Toronto native.
What made you choose this location?
SR: I’m not quite a Toronto native. I grew up in Muskoka,
which is a district north of Toronto. It’s cottage country. Sixteen hundred
lakes in an area that’s 2500 square miles. Most of my life I’ve been a rural
girl. As an adult, I moved out west. I spent three years living on a Gulf
Island, several years living in Calgary, and I also lived in the Greater
Vancouver Area for a few years. I’ve driven through British Columbia many
times. It’s such a great province, but it has some unique challenges. Weather,
mountains, First Nations land… There’s also a rich history of smuggling across
the 49th parallel. British Columbia makes a little more sense than
Alberta for that type of story because of the ports and proximity to Seattle.
Think about when the G8 summit was in Kananaskis. I love Kananaskis. One of my
favorite places to go hiking, between Banff and Calgary. But they were able to
shut down protesters because it’s harder to get to a place like that without
going through airports. British Columbia has a long coastline. And a history of
feet washing up on shores without bodies. How can I not set crime fiction
there?
OBAAT: The Spying Moon’s
protagonist of RCMP Constable Kendall Moreau. She’s the child of a white father
and an Aboriginal mother who raised Kendall along until she disappeared and the
child was whisked into a series of foster homes. Where did the idea for her
come from?
SR: I went to school with kids who lived on what we then
called Indian Reservations. One of my best friends in high school was part
Native. There’s a lot of prejudice and a real lack of understanding about
Native cultures and communities. Did you know that the most at-risk group in
Canada is Native women? Nobody is more likely to be murdered than they are.
The fact that
so many have disappeared or been denied justice because of indifference to the
issue is Canada’s shame. It’s also a motivation for Moreau. Her mother
disappeared on BC’s Trail of Tears. It’s a real place and real problem,
although Moreau’s mother is a fictional character. The fact that anywhere from
19 to 40 or more women have gone missing or been killed there and there has
only been prosecution in one case is staggering. The police can’t even verify
all the potential victims. And we’re wondering why First Nations people might
not trust the government? The list of injustices is too long to cover. We can’t
fix everything from the past, but we can stop perpetuating the injustices in
the future. If we don’t do that every apology is just words.
With Moreau, I
wanted to be able to touch on these issues. At the same time, I wanted Moreau
to have her own alienation. Her father (a white man) raped her mother. She
doesn’t know him. Her very origins stem back to the abuse of Native women.
Then there’s
the whole residential school issue. Native children were stripped from their
families and lost their sense of identity and cultural heritage. Moreau isn’t
taken in the same way, but when her mother disappears she’s lost in the system.
This book is very much about her starting the journey of finding out who she
is. In no way would I ever be so arrogant as to say I understand what Native
children who were residential school victims went through. Moreau can only
highlight how being denied your history and heritage can damage you. Think
about it. We’re sending our DNA to Ancestry and searching for long-lost
relatives to connect. These people lost their lands, their families, their
cultural identity. It was stolen from them. In her own way, Moreau is lost and
she represents things in my own life in a symbolic way. She’s the protagonist I
feel closest to, of all the ones I’ve written, and yet she’s the hardest to
know because she’s been victimized in a way that cuts right to the core of
understanding who she is as a person.
Sadly, Moreau’s
state at the start of the novel means that I don’t get to use her as a conduit
for referencing great Aboriginal music. While I’m listening to A Tribe Called
Red, Susan Aglukark, Iskwe and others, she isn’t. Yet. I’ve got Prolific the
Rapper with A Tribe Called Red Black
Snakes playing right now. Burn Your
Village To The Ground is next. Iskwe did a song called Will I See that was a response to the murder of a 15-year old First
Nations girl. (https://nmc.ca/iskwe-announces-new-album-releases-new-single-inspired-by-missing-and-murdered-aboriginal-women/)
It feels like this should be in the background, but it would be a cheat because
Moreau has only thought of finding out what happened to her mother for her
whole life. She’s held on to what little she remembers about Willow Moreau and
the kind of person Willow was raising her to be. She hasn’t been able to let
anything else in. This is why she puts her personal issues aside and focuses on
the case, and it’s really hard to get much insight into how she thinks and
feels because she isn’t putting on music or talking about movies or friends or
sharing personal details. She just buckles down and focuses on work. Her whole
life has been about one thing. What happens if she never gets the answers she
seeks? Can she survive that?
OBAAT:
Cultural appropriation is a hot topic lately, especially in Canada. What
concerns did you have and precautions in writing did you take when writing a
protagonist who is First Nation?
SR:
"The act of taking or using things from a culture that is not your own,
especially without showing that you understand or respect this culture."
That's how the Cambridge dictionary defines cultural appropriation. I think the
key starting point here is with the definition. Moreau is mixed race, which
puts her in a slightly different category. The other consideration is intent.
If I have a mission, it's to raise awareness for how Indigenous people have
been mistreated and the issues that are facing Indigenous people. And what I
lack in understanding I hope I make up for in respect.
Cultural appropriation can be a real issue. It can also be a deterrent
that keeps people from including characters of different ethnic backgrounds in
their works. I would never say that a man can't write a story from a woman's
perspective. Some men might betray some of their own... misunderstandings about
women, but that's down to how an individual man deals with the issue. Same with
women writing men. We don't live in androgynous, monochromatic worlds. In order
to truly represent society we need to be able to incorporate people with
different backgrounds.
With Moreau, I'm coming at this from a place of wanting to know more.
When I researched one of my novels 13 years ago, one of the RCMP officers I was
able to learn from was part Native, part French. I've been fortunate to have
people talk to me that could help me prepare to write different characters. The
biggest issues I see are with writers who bring in Indigenous people or people
from different ethnic groups to make them the obvious bad guy, or people who
write about different ethnic groups with a clear bias against them. I've been
fortunate enough to travel widely. I've been to over 25 different countries on
four continents. I've tried to maintain a respectful attitude in those travels.
If it was offensive to the local people to show your knees then I made sure to
wear a skirt that covered my knees. I never traveled with the attitude that I
was there to stuff my culture down anyone's throat. You travel to learn and
experience different things.
Stories are another way of traveling. We can go places we might not
otherwise visit and experience things that aren't part of our everyday
experience. In my travels I've been fortunate enough to visit the Northwest
Territories, Yukon Territories and Alaska. I've been to Tuktoyuktuk. I've seen
beluga meat being stripped and smoked to prepare for winter. Do I understand
what it is to live there year-round? No. Can I enrich someone's understanding
of different cultures and customs by sharing about what I've seen or learned?
I really, truly hope that I write my characters in such a way that it
honors Indigenous people. I hope we see more Indigenous crime fiction authors
we can enjoy. We do have a tendency, as a society, to commercialize cultures
and limit them. Ask Adrian McKinty how he feels about leprechauns and Lucky
Charms representing Irish culture. Ask a Canadian how they feel about being
mistaken for being American. (I have to be honest - most Americans can't tell
with me.) Ask a New Zealander how to they feel about being mistaken for being
Australian. I met a gal once and I'd recently been traveling and inside of a
minute I put out my guess on her accent and she was shocked that I didn't say
Australian first. It really pleased her that I recognized where she was from.
I think... I hope... that everyone feels positive when someone is
trying to present their race positively and with respect. It's like kids with
Cabbage Patch dolls, wanting to adopt one that looked like them. I hope people
feel they can go into a bookstore, pick up a book, and identify with characters
that are in the story. That they don't pick up book after book and see that all
the characters are white. If we really believe in diversity we have to use our
platforms to support it.
Also, initially I thought about doing this as a series that switched
protagonists in different books. It was going to be tied to cross border
policing. That would mean having American cops as well as Canadian cops. The
trouble is, Moreau is so compelling for me that I don't feel her story is
finished.
I may be at equal risk of backlash over a short story I wrote called Crossing
Jordan. Jordan is a post-op trans woman. I am not. Part of the reason I
wrote the story was because I have a member of my immediate family who
identifies as a different gender than the one they were born with. Fiction
gives us a chance to see the world through different eyes. I can be braver than
I am through a heroic character. I can be down and dirty and break the law with
a criminal protagonist. I can step outside the limits of my own life experience
and step into someone else's shoes. I take the philosophy that at the end of
the day, we're all people. Everything after that is degrees of differences. Not
all Scottish people think the same way. Not all Canadians share the same views.
Not all Americans voted for... Well, you get the idea. While cultural appropriation
can be a legitimate issue, my fear is that if people stop incorporating
different characters in their works then we're imposing fictional segregation.
OBAAT: Among the things I liked about The Spying Moon is that the investigation that dominates the book
is peripheral to the putative reason for Moreau to be in Maple River, which is
as part of a drug task force. It’s a nice bit of misdirection and shows how cops
never get to work just one case at a time like they do so often on TV and the
movies. Was that something you planned from the outset, or did things just go
that way? Either way, was it hard to keep things balanced?
SR: I have such a strange mind that I’m always connecting
random things and thinking big picture. I have a system for trying to keep
track of my storylines. In truth, this is the first book I’ve written that has
one single POV character. The challenge for me was making sure I only put things
on the page that she was supposed to know at that point in the story. My idea
had always been to start a series, and putting in this other case that ended up
being in the background to some extent originated from that plan. The thing is
that big cases with task forces don’t get solved in short periods of time.
They’re the type of investigations that can go on for months or even years.
Moreau wants to be done with it, so she hopes it can be wrapped up quickly, but
other cases get in the way of making any progress at all. She’s stuck with
Duncan on one case and McIver on another and isn’t happy about any of it.
Everything in the story mirrors her isolation. She’s shut out by most members
of her team. She’s shut out from the actual investigation she was sent there to
work on. She’s facing roadblocks in town and derailed by construction inside
and outside of the police station. She drives down a road as part of her
investigation and it’s blocked and closed. She wanted to investigate her
mother’s disappearance and was barred from doing that. It’s obstacle after
obstacle in this story.
OBAAT: You’ve had a long-time presence in the short
fiction/review/magazine realm, first with Spinetingler and now with Toe Six.
Where did the idea for Toe Six come from, and what does the name mean?
SR: One of my favorite books is The Chrysalids by John Wyndham. In this post-apocalyptic world,
anyone who isn’t made in the image of God, with five fingers and five toes etc.
etc., is a mutant and must be sterilized and cast out. When it’s discovered
that David’s new friend Sophie has six toes, all hell breaks loose, and that’s
not even the worst of it.
The sixth toe
is the catalyst. It’s the discovery of that toe that kicks the story into high
gear. That’s why I went with Toe Six. There has to be a reason for a story. And
nobody else was called Toe Six Press. I want to keep publishing short fiction
and also start publishing novels. I’m working on it, and hoping to take things
to the next level very soon.
OBAAT: Does the Hamburglar still haunt your dreams?
SR: My husband just bought me a retro glass with Hamburglar
on it. The family got me a stuffed one years ago. I hide clowns in their rooms
and they inundate me with Hamburglar. There’s no escape. Honestly, he’s creepy.
The real question is why he doesn’t cause more kids nightmares.
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