Bookends with Mattea Roach25:44Corinna Chong: Uncovering long buried truths against the backdrop of Alberta’s badlands
Corinna Chong describes visiting the Badlands in Drumheller, Alta., as being transported into another world.
She starts her debut novel Bad Land in an eerie, contradictory landscape — charting the transition from kilometres of predictable, flat prairie landscape into a valley full of “weird layered hills” — and laying the groundwork for hidden family secrets to be explored.
Bad Land was longlisted for the 2024 Giller Prize.
“The setting is such an important part of the tone, the atmosphere, the mood, even the conflict with the characters,” she said on Bookends with Mattea Roach, CBC’s new author interview show.
Just as the imposing natural beauty of the Drumheller’s landscape contrasts with the kitschy, “fake” landmarks and giant dinosaur statues, Chong’s characters also reckon with the idea of what’s real and what’s fake.
“They are lying to themselves in many ways by repressing a lot of their traumatic, painful memories,” she said.
Bad Land centres a misfit named Regina who’s been living alone in Drumheller for years. Her relative isolation is partly by choice, but it’s also due to the way she’s been ostracized throughout her life, said Chong, who was raised in Calgary and now based in Kelowna, B.C.
“She has a hard time connecting with others. She is a very large person and therefore is very visible. And at the same time, in a sort of metaphorical social sense, she is invisible. She is rendered invisible because she’s seen as having very little power in the society.”
When her brother unexpectedly shows up on her doorstep with his six-year-old daughter, it’s clear something terrible has happened — and as the story unfolds, she uncovers dark truths that expose her family and her life in a new light.
Bad Land is Chong’s first novel following her short story collection The Whole Animal, which includes Kids in Kindergarten, the winner of the 2021 CBC Short Story Prize.
Bringing in her own experiences
As she does in The Whole Animal, Chong draws from her own experiences to bring to life flawed characters and complicated family relationships in Bad Land.
In particular, Regina’s mother Mutti —German for “Mummy”— is a character inspired by her grandmother, who she calls oma. Like Mutti in the novel, Chong’s oma grew up in Germany during the Second World War.
Although Chong didn’t have a close relationship with her oma, partly because of the language barrier and the fact that she lived in Germany when Chong was growing up, she was interested in exploring some of the mystery behind her through Mutti in the novel.
“In maturing and growing beyond childhood, I realized I had all these questions about her and her life and the glimmers that I got of what her life would have been like as a child growing up in Germany in the Second World War,” she said.
In an Instagram post, Chong described her oma as caring, but “not warm and fuzzy” and wrote about how she got along well with Chong’s Chinese dad and never made her granddaughters feel unwelcome, despite having grown up surrounded by racist Nazi ideals.
“In writing her [Mutti], I was trying to figure out my oma a little bit and try to unpack some of that mystery or even imaginatively put myself into her space because it felt so distant from me in so many ways as a kid,” she said on Bookends.
The difference between truth and fact
While Bad Land draws on her own experiences, the novel still remains rooted in fiction — fiction that offers insight into things that are true.
“I am a firm believer that fiction needs to be truthful in order to be powerful,” she said.
Though fiction is inherently not factual, the difference between truth and fact is something Chong is conscious of in her writing. Just because something is factually incorrect, that doesn’t mean it’s not true, she explained.
I am a firm believer that fiction needs to be truthful in order to be powerful.– Corinna Chong
“The most powerful pieces of literature are those that kind of force us to confront truths about ourselves, about our world, that we didn’t even know until we read that piece of literature. It’s about encapsulating or articulating a certain kind of experience that we all feel in our bones is truthful to some kind of shared experience of humanity.”
This interview was produced by Lisa Mathews.