My husband, Mitch Krupp, is a photographer, and when we were courting he emailed me, as he put it, "bouquets of photos." The photo pictured to the left was the first he sent, taken the day we met. When I first saw it I assumed the photo was taken in the states somewhere, Arizona, I imagined. Then I read Mitch's email. He had taken the photo along the South-Thompson river in south central British Columbia, in the area where I grew up. I had driven past this scene countless times in my life and yet in this photo I saw a landscape that was completely new. That's what a good photo can do: take what is so ordinary, so familiar that you are blind to it, and make you see it, as the extraordinary thing it is.

I accompanied Mitch on many of his photo shoots as I wrote Turtle Valley, and as a result I got to know my home country all over again. It was very much like falling in love with an old friend I had known from my youth, someone I hadn't seen for a long time. Both I and that landscape had changed, but the affection remained.

One Sunday evening, when Salmon Arm was empty, Mitch and I walked through my home town photographing backstreets, the old courthouse, the laundry, the Salmar Theatre. During this walk I found myself seeing a great many things I had never noticed before. There is a very skinny "alleyway" between two buildings on Alexander Avenue, too small for a man to pass through, and yet the outside wall is covered in the ornate tin tiles like those that once decorated the ceilings inside hotels. In the golden evening light the tiles glowed orange. I had passed by this little decorated alleyway for more than forty years and had never seen it before this walk with Mitch. Annie Dillard wrote in her essay, "Seeing," that "The lover can see, and the knowledgeable." With his well-trained photographer's eye, Mitch helped me to see my own home landscape, and to fall in love with it all over again.

Mitch and I have a joint show on the Shuswap-Thompson region at the SAGA public gallery in Salmon Arm, BC throughout the month of October called Turtle Valley: Memory and Magic in the photography of Mitch Krupp and novels of Gail Anderson-Dargatz. We'll both be on hand to talk about the show on opening night this coming Friday, October 5, from 7 to 9 p.m. If you're in the neighbourhood, we'd love to see you there.

For more of Mitch's photos, go to www.mitchkrupp.com. You can listen to Mitch talk about his photography show on Daybreak South airing provincially on CBC Radio British Columbia on Thanksgiving Monday, October 8 at 6:45 a.m. For more on Daybreak South, go to: http://www.cbc.ca/daybreaksouth/marionBarschel.html

Shelagh Rogers interviewed me on stage at the Writers at Woody Point festival in Newfoundland in August. During this conversation, Shelagh asked a question that, surprisingly, I haven't been asked before. She said, "You've been so candid about where your writing comes from. What has that cost you?"

"Aside from the fact my family and friends won't talk to me anymore?" I said, and laughed.

Fortunately for me, my friends and family do still talk to me, and for the most part understand the process involved in turning fact into fiction. However, a great many readers do assume that, because I'm candid about where my inspirations come from, my fiction must be strictly autobiographical or even memoir. It's an assumption that a great many fiction writers face, whether they are honest about their inspirations or not. But the reality is that the process of writing fiction is very different from writing memoir.

Up to this point at least, I've started a project with a story that is meaningful to me on a personal level; writing a novel is a five-year commitment, so I must be bonded with the subject matter in some fashion or I lose energy for it. But that personal story is only the starting point. Along with the usual routes of research, I interview as many people as I can find who have gone through a similar experience.

Here, in the stories of a great many others, is where I find situation, plot lines, details, dialogue, character, structure, and the conflicts that will drive the narrative forward. But more importantly, this is where I find perspective: in the process of interviewing others, my own personal prejudices and assumptions are bumped to the side and I start to see the bigger picture, the patterns in behaviour that we would all share if faced with this given set of circumstances. In short, through interview, that story I started with is pushed far past the personal and into the universal. It moves from fact into fiction.

And that's just what happens during research and interview. Once I sit down and start to write, my subconscious takes over, transforming the material much further in often magical ways. When I talk about the process of writing fiction with my students at UBC, I often liken it to night time dreaming: when we wake in the morning and recall a dream, we can often pick out elements of our waking life -- a bit of conversation from the day before, perhaps, or something we saw on television -- but our subconscious transforms those bits of reality in sometimes startling ways. We think, where the hell did that come from? In the same way I'm surprised daily by what turns up in my writing. Writing fiction is very much an act of discovery.

The result of the research, interview, and the writing process itself is a story that moves beyond the personal; it doesn't belong to me or someone I love anymore. Rather it becomes a story that a great many people have lived through and shared in some fashion. Each time I do a reading event, at least one member of the audience comes up to me afterwards, very often in tears, and relates his own story and how the fiction I wrote was so similar to what he lived in one way or another.

That's the power of fiction: we very often see ourselves there. When I read Alice Munro's Lives of Girls and Woman for the first time as a young woman, I thought, This story is about me! So my story is worth writing about! After reading so many books that bore little relation to my life as a young Canadian woman, that was a revelation. I no longer felt alone.

As Ann Lamott pointed out in her book Bird by Bird, "Writing and reading decrease our sense of isolation... We are given a shot at dancing with, or at least clapping along with, the absurdity of life, instead of being squashed by it over and over again. It's like singing on a boat during a terrible storm at sea. You can't stop the raging storm, but singing can change the hearts and spirits of the people who are together on that ship."

So, in answer to Shelagh's question, being candid about what inspired my fictions has given me much more than it has cost me: it has given me a community to sing with. And I hope it has given a great many readers something as well: that revelation that their stories are not only worth writing about, but worth celebrating.

Shelagh Rogers and I will have another conversation on CBC's Sounds Like Canada on September 11 and I'm so looking forward to it. That interview airs live starting at 7 a.m. PST. I hope we get around to talking about the fun we had at the Woody Point festival, because it was absolutely magical.


For more on the stories that inspired Turtle Valley, see my blog entries below. The photos above are, of course, of the lovely Shelagh Rogers and myself, in conversation at Woody Point, Newfoundland. Photo credit: Mitch Krupp.