Author spotlight: Elliott Gish

Dea Toivonen, Program Officer (Arts Education): Grey Dog is a work of speculative historical horror set at the turn of the 19th century into the 20th. What about this period compelled you to write about it?

Elliott Gish: The Victorian era is a period that has always spoken to me. On the most basic level, that is because so much of the literature I loved when I was growing up either came from or was set in that era. Authors like Louisa May Alcott, L.M. Montgomery, Charles Dickens, Laura Ingalls Wilder, and Lewis Carroll sank their claws into my developing brain. Due to that early imprinting, I still find myself drawn to stories that include hoop skirts, buggies, and bonnets.

I also find that liminal space between one era and the next to be extremely interesting, especially as it pertains to social change. The time in which my protagonist, Ada, lives is one of tremendous upheaval. You’ve got class reforms, the emergence of socialism and anarchism, increased educational opportunities for women and the emergence of the “New Woman” as an icon of female independence. Things are changing, but older ideas about how people—particularly women—should behave still hold tremendous power. That creates an internal conflict that is really fun to explore!

What was the initial inspiration or seed of the story, and how long was that germinating before it became Grey Dog?

The very first seed of inspiration for Grey Dog was planted back when I was eleven and attended a historical summer camp in a “living museum” in New Brunswick called Kings Landing. I spent a week learning how to hook rugs, milk cows, and square dance, and had the time of my life. (I was a very cool eleven-year-old, obviously.) That experience made such an impression on me that, when I began to write the book, I used the Kings Landing layout as a blueprint for the town of Lowry Bridge. Actual buildings from the museum appear in the book multiple times, including the one-room schoolhouse.

Another seed was planted when I read Mary Rubio’s biography of L.M. Montgomery in my late twenties. Montgomery had been one of my favourite authors for years at that point, but I knew very little about her life outside of her work. I was fascinated to discover how unhappy she was—and how starkly her rather grim personal life contrasted with her fiction. Revisiting her books in the wake of that biography, I saw flashes of misery everywhere, even in her sunniest novels. I wanted to pay homage to Montgomery’s heroines and that darkness beneath the surface of her work. I wanted to create a character who bore many of the hallmarks of a Montgomery protagonist—a love of books and nature, a “genteel” and ladylike occupation, a penchant for journaling—and let her howl.

The novel is told through the diary entries of the main character, Ada Byrd, written in an honest and confessional tone. What about the epistolary form made you chose to write in this way? Did you consider writing in a different way, or was this form part of the conception of the story?

The book was a diary from the very beginning. The first little bit of narration that appeared in my brain was entirely in Ada’s voice, and I knew that it would be important for me to keep the audience anchored in that viewpoint. Throughout the book, Ada is not sure if what she is seeing and feeling is real. I wanted readers to be unsure about that, as well. What better way to do that than to stay in her mind the whole time?

There is also much to be said for the historical significance of the diary format as women’s literature. Women were restricted in so many ways during this period in history, their voices silenced in the public sphere, but it was considered appropriate for women to keep diaries. They were recording their thoughts and feelings, even as those thoughts and feelings were devalued by the world at large. You might not be able to talk back to your husband, or your father, but you could write down what you wanted to say to them. Writing in a diary was a radical act dressed up as feminine propriety. This ordinary, socially sanctioned activity becomes a vehicle of transformation for Ada. She is not an honest person in her day-to-day life, but she is able to tell the truth in her diary. And that truth ultimately frees her.

I love to read accounts and stories about ‘women on the edge’ especially as they relate to contemporary feminist struggle and understanding the experiences of the marginally gendered in a patriarchal society. I am wondering why you gravitated to writing a character like Ada that both suffers from societal pressures on women, and in turn continues to project and enforce those expectations on some the young girls that she teaches? Do you think that there something about the feminist perspective of Grey Dog that resonates with contemporary gender politics?

One of the worst things about oppression is how often we are made to be complicit in it. Just about every woman has, at some point in her life, chafed against restrictive and reductive gender roles. Just about every woman has, at another point in her life, expected other women to toe the line. We are none of us completely innocent of reinforcing patriarchy, just as we are none of us exempt from being victimized by it.

In Ada’s case, she has tried her whole life to conform to gendered expectations, even though they do not come naturally to her. She sees proper female behaviour as something that must be learned, considering it her responsibility as a schoolteacher to teach her female students how to be “young ladies.” When her experiences in Lowry Bridge erode her ability to conform to acceptable modes of femininity, she is able to let go of that need to project gendered expectations onto other women and girls. I think that this is a very common experience for women: when we feel freer in ourselves and more comfortable with defying gender norms, we are less likely to try and police the behaviour of other women when it does not fall within accepted parameters of feminine behaviour.

A theme that runs throughout the Grey Dog is the difference between appearance and reality. Ada is often ‘translating’ the true meaning of sentiments disguised by social niceties, and much of her existence in Lowry Bridge involves her concealing her past and her desires. This made me really think about what the horror of the novel actually is—is it the eldritch forces lurking out of the village, or is it the village itself or a social order that surveys and represses people’s (and specifically women’s) instinct and behaviours? Can you say more about how you were thinking about this dichotomy of appearances and reality in Grey Dog?

I wanted the reader to question Ada’s reality throughout the novel—not only whether what she sees and feels is really happening, but also where the true source of evil lies. The thing in the woods is a force of nature, divorced from good and evil as we understand it. It even becomes a source of liberation for Ada as the novel progresses. But Ada’s disciplinarian father, her sister’s abusive husband, the closed minds in Lowry Bridge, Ada’s own self-loathing and repression? Those, I would argue, are abundantly evil. Lowry Bridge appears at first to be a sweet town full of quaint, folksy people, and the woods around it a frightening and dangerous place, but small towns can harbour the worst villains, and the deep, dark woods can be a source of joy and beauty.

What were some of your biggest influences and inspirations for Grey Dog?

L.M. Montgomery was Grey Dog’s primary influence and inspiration. I was really trying to capture that golden, sunny feeling that pervades many of Montgomery’s books, from Anne of Green Gables onwards, and slowly pervert it over the course of the novel. The setting and tropes of Grey Dog are familiar to anyone who has read Montgomery’s work. You have your idealistic schoolteacher, your idyllic natural setting, your small-town gossips and precocious children. And then, as you go on, you have your eldritch abominations and malformed deer fetuses!

Another author whose work influenced me tremendously was Sarah Waters. I have been a fan of hers since high school and have tremendous respect for how she uses historical settings, making the reader look at them in a whole new way. She does this particularly well in The Little Stranger, which is both a horror novel and a story about the decline of the landed gentry after World War II. Every time I reread that book, I am delighted by how deftly she weaves together history and horror, the supernatural and the mundane. I wanted to do something very similar with Grey Dog.

And, of course, I would be amiss if I didn’t mention Shirley Jackson as an influence on this book and all my other work as well. She was an absolute powerhouse, and lives rent-free in my head at all times.

What was your biggest challenge in completing the novel?

I would say that the biggest challenge with this book, as with all long-form projects, was knowing when to stop! There comes a point in the writing process when all the changes you make start to feel lateral, as though you are just moving things around for the sake of moving things around. At that point, I was very glad that the final decision to stop writing was taken out of my hands by my wonderful editor, Jen Sookfong Lee. At a certain point, making further changes was no longer an option, and thank goodness for that, because otherwise I’d probably still be tinkering with the manuscript!

It was also challenging to always remain inside of Ada’s head. I like to play with different narrators and points of view in my work when I can, and that was not an option for Grey Dog. I had to come up with other ways of including other characters’ stories and opinions. That is why there are so many scenes of other characters telling stories, writing letters, or relaying gossip—it was a way to include other people’s points of view while remaining entirely within Ada’s.

What was you research process like in putting this book together? Did your research take you to any surprising or unexpected places?

Most of the research I did involved natural history, particularly from the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. I did not need to do too much research into the period in general because I already had that historical interest in the Victorian era, but I am very much an indoor cat and went into this book knowing very little about the natural world. Through various online archives, I was able to access some works of natural history that would have been publicly available at the time, which was very edifying.

The books of a self-taught Scottish naturalist named Eliza Brightwen were an especially wonderful resource. Her books were hugely popular because she made natural history accessible to ordinary people, writing about the creatures and plants she saw in her own backyard. Her work is referenced in Grey Dog, and Ada reads aloud from one of her books, Inmates of my House and Garden.

The most unexpected place I ended up was a weird corner of YouTube devoted to videos of deer giving birth. That really messed up my algorithm for a while.

Do you feel like you want to keep working in the genre of speculative horror, or branch out in other directions? Do you have anything new in the works now?

I definitely want to keep including speculative elements in my work, with an emphasis on the weird and unsettling. That is where I feel most at home, and what feels most natural to write!

I am currently working on three full-length projects as potential follow-ups to Grey Dog. The first is a historical magic realist novel set in 1961 called Ruby and Jude. The second is another nature-based horror novel, this time with a focus on the ocean, called A Wilderness of Salt. The third is a horror-fantasy inspired jointly by the Parker-Hulme murder and Enid Blyton’s boarding school novels, tentatively named The Book of Hideous Splendours.

I am also compiling a collection of short stories, mostly speculative. Its working title is Girls and Dead Things because I realized, after looking at all the stories I wanted to include, that girls and dead things are the bulk of what I write about!