10 Questions with Kerry Clare

Kerry Clare is the author of the novels Waiting for a Star to Fall and Mitzi Bytes and the blog Pickle Me This.

In my last post, I talked about the magical way that, every once in a while, social media does exactly the thing it is supposed to do—it connects us into genuinely interesting people with genuinely interesting ideas. Kerry Clare is one of those people.

Although I’ve never met Kerry Clare in real life, hers is one of a handful of voices I hear in my head every time I post anything online. The creator of the beloved blog Pickle Me This, Kerry constantly reflects on what meaningful online engagement looks and feels like.

Consider, for example, the following nugget of wisdom, which she shared in a blog post called entitled “The Opposite of Scrolling”: “When you participate online, you complicate things with your humanness. (When you participate by blogging on your own website, you complicate things even more, and challenge the idea that the web is a corporate space wholly navigable by algorithm, and this is no small thing!) The opposite of passive is active, and the opposite of scrolling is creation . . . Stop Scrolling and make stuff!” See? Genius!

Because of Kerry, I have started thinking more consciously about the kind of presence I want to have in the online world. She reminds me to always think about the goal of social media in terms of going deeper instead of wider, aiming for humanness instead of perfection.

Oh, and she is also, like, a brilliant novelist. No big deal.

1. Were you a bookish kid? What role did reading and writing play in your life as a child? Were there specific books that made a mark?

Kerry: I was always a bookish kid! There is a photo of me when I was about five with a giant pile of books on my bedside. When I was in Grade 4, we had to do a project on a tourist attraction, and I chose The World’s Biggest Bookstore in downtown Toronto. Books, for me, have always meant magic and pleasure. 

I was a huge Anne of Green Gables fan out of the gate (the Megan Follows movie came out when I was 6—I saw it before I read the series, so she is forever my Anne.) Like so many others, the Scholastic Book Order flyer was my favourite periodical. I devoured books that were series, the Babysitters Club in particular. (I SWORE I would save these novels for my children, and I recall that my mom didn’t take me seriously, but this is the one thing she was ever wrong about, because my kids LOVE those books, albeit in brand-new editions.) 

I really liked The Westing Game by Ellen Raskin, and everything I read by Kit Pearson, Gordon Korman, and Bernice Thurman Hunter.

I remember reading Little Women because I thought it sounded kind of like my favourite sitcom, The Facts of Life. 

Kate: Same to absolutely all of this. Specifically:

• I can vividly remember coming home from school, sweaty from the uphill walk, and immediately flopping down with the Scholastic flyer and a pen to circle what I wanted. 

• While I am embarrassed to admit I didn’t read the Anne books until I was an adult, my VHS box sets of Anne of Green Gables and its sequel, Anne of Avonlea, were among my most prized possessions. If Tiger Beat magazine had made Gilbert Blythe posters, I would have had them tacked all over my bedroom walls. But the real draw was Anne herself, her inability to conform, her restlessness, her growing understanding of herself as A Serious Writer. In so many ways, I saw her as a sort of Canadian Jo March double, except that she was always searching for the kinds of sisterly bonds that so defined the March sisters. 

• I also didn’t actually read Little Women until I was 25, but I was obsessed with the 1994 film adaptation, which I still watch every Christmas. Just as Megan Follows is my forever Anne, I have always considered Winona Ryder to be my definitive Jo. I still watch that 90’s version every Christmas, but she has been unseated by Saoirse Ronan in the Greta Gerwig adaptation, which I think is so very brilliant.

• When my dad told me that Gordon Korman had written and published his first novel in grade 8, I thought, “Well, for sure then I can do that.” And so, every day after elementary graduation that I had not published a novel, I felt like a secret failure. 

• I effing loved The Facts of Life. Jo forever. 

• Without a word of a lie, in the time between my sending you these questions and you answering them (which was less than one day!), I gave up on my dream of ever finding my horde of beloved Babysitters Club books (pretty sure my mom secretly threw them out) and sent my husband out to buy a new copy of Kristy’s Big Idea for our girls. This was prompted by us binging the Netflix adaptation, which I think is truly great, for the second time last weekend. I love that this series presents a version of early teen-hood that is focused on friendship rather than romance.

  2. What does a day in the life of Kerry look like?

Kerry: My day is framed by my children going to school, which I will never ever take for granted. Ordinary life is such a gift. And once they’re delivered to their places (one takes public transit by herself now!), I sit down and write fiction for about an hour before I do anything else. At the moment, I am writing a first draft and no one is waiting for it, so I have to prioritize this time, or else it will be so easy to let other tasks encroach upon it. Soon, however, I’ll be getting edits back on my next book, which means getting to sit down and work on fiction that I know that somebody is one day going to read—which is such an extraordinary privilege. 

Once that work is done, I do all the work I have to do. For the last ten years, I’ve made most of my living as editor of the Canadian books website 49thShelf.com, which means that I get to read and celebrate books and it pays my rent. Again—an extraordinary privilege. 

And then I write blog posts, work on any freelance work I’ve picked up, spend too long composing and deleting replies to comments on tedious Facebook threads, and post snarky comments to Instagram stories. Happily, these days I’m even managing to go swimming a couple of times a week. When my blogging course is running, I will also spend this time reading and responding to posts from the course, and it turns out that this is fun and enormously satisfying. 

After that, it’s time to get the kids from school! And my work day is done. 

Kate: I am inspired by your ability to use your time is such a focused, linear way, to prioritize what needs prioritizing. I am forever grateful for the magic of being able to send my children off and have the whole school day to focus on my work. But as soon as the school bus pulls away in the morning, it feels like an imaginary clock begins ticking. There are so many different kinds of work I am trying to squeeze into those six hours— writing fiction, but also exercising, walking the dog, blogging, organizing the basement, sewing, tutoring, booking dentist appointments, querying agents and publishers, cooking, cleaning the kitchen, weeding the garden, laundry. I am trying to get better at focusing my attention on one thing at a time, but mostly I just spin around my house like a top, starting 78 things and finishing none of them.

3. Can you describe your work space? What are your favourite writerly tools and rituals?

Kerry: I work at my kitchen table. My only tool is my laptop—I just got a new MacBook Air after my ancient previous model finally expired in July. I don’t believe in the potency of rituals, really. Sit down and get ‘er done, is my ritual. I actually have a poster of Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own on my living room wall, which is ironic, because I don’t actually have such a room, but I think having a symbolic room—in my own mind and in those of the people who I live with who value and support my writing life—is actually more important than four walls and a door. 

Kate: Other than the fact that I have a Dell instead of a Mac and a battered old copy of A Room of One’s Own (from the Victoria College Book sale!) that lives on the shelf above my desk rather than a poster, our desks look suspiciously similar. While I don’t work at my literal kitchen table, my I work on the little pine table that my family ate around when I was growing up.

I do have an actual room of my own, which is my favourite thing about my house, but as you said, its power comes more from the fact that it represents the resources of time and space my family and I are willing to invest in my work than from the walls and door themselves. Though actually the door is also pretty powerful; it keeps out my crazy dog, who is always eating my pencils.

Kerry’s Desk vs. Kate’s Desk

4. Yours is one of my very favourite Instagram feeds of all time. It’s so smart and big-hearted! You manage to strike such a great balance between posts articulating bold-but-nuanced positions on important social and political issues, and posts that celebrate small, ordinary moments of beauty and love. It is an intensely satisfying mix that feels so human and honest. How did you come to find your voice on social media? What metrics do you use to think about what successful online engagement feels like for you?

Kerry: Thank you! That is very kind. I think I am very comfortable on Instagram, because I bring to it the same sensibility I bring to my blog, where I’ve been hanging out (in various guises) for more than twenty years now. I learned how to be myself online in a moment where being “authentic” wasn’t even a thing, you just showed up with what you had, and the only real metric for success was what you got out of it—for me, mainly friends, inspiration, and a creative outlet. And this is still, for me, pretty true.   

Kate: For me, too. For whatever reason, I have never been able to get comfortable on Twitter—I freeze up every time I try to post anything, unsure who I am speaking to, and why. But Instagram has always felt like an easy place to show up and risk being seen as I really am. I will never have a huge following, but I have made a large handful of meaningful and useful connections with interesting and thoughtful people.

5. You are the author of a long-running and much-loved blog, Pickle Me This, and you also teach courses in blogging through your Blog School. What is it about this particular form of writing that hooked you? What does it give you, or allow you to do, that novel writing does not?

Blogging has been the through-line of everything I’ve done. It taught me how to make sitting down to write into a habit. Eventually this habit showed me the way toward “finding my voice,” instead of trying to sound like somebody else’s. My blog has made me a better reader, helping me to process my responses to the books I read (too quickly!), and it taught me how to be a book reviewer. Being able to write about the world through my blog has helped me figure out what I think about certain things, and complicated other ideas I might otherwise have thought were simple. And it’s so immediate, which novel writing isn’t. I love being able to sit down and get a post done. The processing I do via my blog finds its way into my fiction writing, too—everything I write is a way to figure out what I think. And during the times when the rest of my creative life was the absolute pits, I still had my blog as a space where I could be a writer and engage with literature and the literary life.

Kate: I recently listened to a great interview with John Hodgeman on the wonderful podcast First Draft with Sarah Enni. He talked about how writing for The Daily Show taught him the value of seeing your work as kind of disposable, because they had to produce new material every day, most of which was forgotten pretty quickly. He talked about how thinking this way can help take the pressure off, to avoid the overthinking that can cause a lot of writers to become paralyzed. Also, it helped him to understand that his ideas were a renewable resource, that there would always be more. I thinking blogging is kind of like this, too. I am someone who tends to get in my own way, who can just go over and over the same words indefinitely. I struggle to find momentum. Blogging forces you to write something, spend a reasonable amount of time editing it, post it, and then let it go. Move on to the next thing. 

6. One of the things that we have in common is that we attended the same graduate program in Creative Writing, although in different years. What would you say your education as a writer has entailed, both inside and outside of the classroom? How did you learn how to actually write a novel?  

Kerry: Grad school was a mixed bag for me. I learned that I am NOT an academic. And I don’t think I was well matched with my mentor, and still had some years to go before I was capable of writing work that wasn’t just me trying really hard to “be a writer”. It was a stressful, heady time in which I did NOT learn to write a novel. The novel I wrote in grad school was over-earnest, full of effort, reflected my lack of life experience, and had no plot. Afterwards it seemed unlikely that I would actually become a writer at all. 

But during those desperate times, I had my blog. I also had my friend and classmate Rebecca Rosenblum, whose master’s thesis was published as the short story collection Once in 2008, and she was very generous about letting me ride on the coattails of her success. And I had my favourite quotation from Caroline Adderson who said, “Of course, the best antidote to the disappointment of the literary life is to read.”

It was having children that changed everything for me, upping the stakes of my investment in the world and giving me so much more to think about and write about. My first book was the essay anthology THE M WORD: CONVERSATIONS ABOUT MOTHERHOOD, which I edited and published in 2014.

And then sometime that very same year, I discovered there was such a thing as PLOT, and suddenly I knew how to write novels, which remains my favourite thing to do. I think it also helped that I realized that commercial fiction is what I want to write, instead of the pseudo-literary fiction I was trying to pull off before that. 

Kate:  I can remember holding my breath in those workshops in grad school, desperately hoping I had produced something other people would approve of. It was always a guessing game; I never knew if what I had turned in would count as Serious Literature. It felt like trying to assemble Ikea furniture without instructions, like fumbling in the dark. My fear of being discovered as a fraud was crushing. It would’ve been so lonely except for the friendships I formed with the other women in my class. 

I laughed out loud when I read the words “the novel I wrote in grad school was over-earnest, full of effort, reflected my lack of life experience, and had no plot”. Me, too! Except even moreso, because my book was a poetry collection. So I finished that program extra useless when it came to plot! When I write fiction, I struggle to think beyond the level of the line. 

Joining two amazing critique groups in the last few years was a game-changer. Suddenly, I saw there was a wide world of literary genre and form open to me, including commercial fiction and children’s literature. I obviously knew these existed, but had come out of university believing they weren’t serious options to pursue. Each of us gravitates toward a different point along the spectrum between commercial and literary, and so we all have unique and valuable skills to bring to the table. I have learned so much about the importance of stakes and pacing from these women. It has made me so much better.

But of all the things you mentioned, the thing that resonates the most is the bit about motherhood upping the stakes. There were a handful of years between grad school and having kids when I was living in Seattle, unable to legally work, with very few responsibilities. I often look back at those years and shake with anger that I wasn’t using every precious second to write. But I just couldn’t. It was not until I had children and found myself with barely enough time to shower and feed myself that I figured out what it was I wanted to say, and felt a strong enough sense of urgency to actually sit down and write. By then, the fear of looking uncool or revealing myself as not smart enough had worn off. I was too tired to worry about those things, and I didn’t have any time to waste. I realized I had a choice between modeling for my kids never doing the things you wanted to do because you were afraid of what other people might think, or modeling what it looked like to show up.

7. One difference between us is that you live in an apartment in the city while I live in a house in the suburbs. I can think of so many wonderful reasons to live in an urban centre, but I am wondering what yours are. What has kept you there? What gifts has city life has given you and your family?

Kerry: I live where I do first because I love where I live. We don’t have a car and can walk almost anywhere we want to go to, or use transit or carshare for the rest. It’s a really beautiful neighbourhood and my kids’ schools are great, and I have wonderful, interesting neighbours. But a reason that’s just as important about why I live where I do is because my rent is very affordable, and so moving anywhere else wouldn’t make economic sense. We moved into our apartment in 2008 after deciding that buying a house wasn’t in the cards for us, because continuing to rent would mean we could have a baby right away and I could quit my less-than-fulfilling office job shortly thereafter, all of which turned out well for us, and our apartment continues to be a comfortable space where we’re happy, even now as a family of four. 

I wish our story wasn’t so rare. I wish there were many more places like ours where a) landlords aren’t greedy, and b) renting doesn’t have to be a compromise. 

And sometimes I wish I owned a house, but most of the time I am very happy with the choices that we’ve been lucky enough to make. 

Kate: I love how consciously you made a choice that allowed you to build the life you wanted to live. And I love seeing peeks of your home in your Instagram posts. It seems like such a warm, joyful place to grow up.

8. If you could throw a fantasy dinner party with any 10 people, who would you invite? What would be on the menu? The playlist? 

Kerry: I don’t know if I could do that. One time at a get-together for our grad program (I wonder if you were there? I can’t remember when it was…) I was introduced to Miriam Toews, which LITERALLY rendered me unable to speak. Not my finest moment. 

This summer, however, I actually DID host my fantasy dinner party? After many long months of Covid, once we were all vaccinated, I was able to host a gathering of some of my favourite writer friends in my backyard, and I don’t know that I’ve ever been so happy in my life. We call ourselves “the Coven,” and these women—Marissa Stapley, Jennifer Robson, Karma Brown, Kate Hilton, Chantel Guertin, and Elizabeth Renzetti—for years now have been making me laugh until I snort and helping me through the lows of the writing life, and that evening in August in their company once again was such a dream come true for me. Writer friends are everything. 

We ate a lot of cheese, naturally. And there wasn’t a playlist, BUT can I tell you the story of being at Marissa Stapley’s 40th birthday party which DID have a playlist, which mysteriously included two very different songs that I had been listening to over and over myself. What are the odds of two different playlists including “Down the Line,” by Gary Rafferty and “Waiting For a Star to Fall,” by Boy Meets Girl??? Anyway, it was about six weeks after that I realized the latter track’s name was also the perfect title for the book I was working on. Playlists are powerful, and mysterious things. 

Kate: I have nothing to add to this except applause. Writer friends are everything! Playlists are powerful and mysterious! Cheese is the very best food!

9. What food offered you the most comfort as a child? What about now?

Kerry: I love to eat. Have I mentioned cheese? Throughout the pandemic, especially when everything was awful, planning out good things to eat and treats to look forward to was my favourite thing. As a child, I ate cans and cans of Campbell’s soup right out of the plastic containers in which I’d microwaved them (yikes!). Mercifully, I grew up and learned how to cook, and I make my soups from scratch now. Smittenkitchen gives me life. I punctuate my life with ice cream cones, which you already know if we’re friends on Instagram. I’m still baking sourdough bread and just bought a proofing basket. One thing I love about our less than fantastic contemporary moment is that ordering takeout is a public service. THRILLED to be reporting for duty.

Kate: I also love to eat. It took me a long time to be able to admit that out loud, because, well, diet culture, the patriarchy, etc. I grew up understanding that it was admirable to love cooking, but eating was something else. But during those years I was busy Not Writing in Seattle, I was also wandering around markets and restaurants and cafes, learning to like and cook food that was nothing like what I grew up with. I read a ton of cookbooks and food blogs, which were a pretty new phenomenon. Writing and food became linked for me. While I admired the work of restaurant chefs, I gravitated to home cooks like Deb Pearlman , Molly Wizenberg, and Julia Turshen. These women LOVED to eat, and they were not afraid to talk and write about that. Slowly, this gave me the courage to embrace the pleasure of eating, too. They also taught me that the point of both food and writing is not to impress people. When you let go of trying to impress people, you make space for so many other things, like comfort and experimentation and laughter. 

Also, every time I try to cultivate a sour dough starter, I become distraught. I already care for two children, a very high-maintained dog, and a lot of plants. A starter is one too many things. But during the pandemic, my husband started one. He watched hours of YouTube videos, bought proofing baskets, a razor for slitting the tops, special flours—the whole bit. He became very skilled and produced a lot of very delicious bread. But then one day he put his starter in the oven on the proof setting to warm it up after a week in the fridge, and despite the fact that he told me it was there, AND put a note on the stove to remind me, AND set the lock on the oven, I somehow managed to bypass all of these safeguards without really registering that they were even there and preheated the oven to 450 degrees, thus murdering his precious starter. 

10. What should we all be reading this fall? 

Kerry: So I NEVER read ahead, even when I get all the advanced copies, because I’m very much a civilian reader and want to pick up a fresh copy on the pub day along with everyone else. Which is to say I don’t have special fall 2021 intel, BUT I think everyone should read Michelle Butler Hallett’s Constant Nobody and Krista Foss’s Half Life, which were two of my top reads last spring, along with my friend Chantel Guertin’s novel Instamom. I’m also looking forward to a new novel, The Prairie Chicken Dance Tour, from the brilliant and hilarious Dawn Dumont, and new novels by Lianne Moriarty, and Miriam Toews, and Lauren Groff. Right now I am reading a very smart and funny novella by Barb Howard called Happy Sands, about a family vacation gone wrong, as well as Good Burdens, by Christina Crook, which has the most enticing subtitle: “How to Live Joyfully in the Digital Age.” Yes, please!