Oct 5, 2011

Kris Farmen - Author Interview: Characters

Pick one of your favourites among the characters from your published fiction stories or a character which is an interesting example from your published fiction. What makes this character one of your favourites or an interesting example of your fiction?

Jack, the primary character of my first novel The Devil’s Share, interests me because he is very much a wild animal, in a very literal meaning of the term. He’s not a halfwit or anything like that, he’s actually quite sharp, but his only ideology is survival and to that end he possesses an animal-like cunning that trumps everything else. He sees the world in terms of where he can find dry firewood, game to eat, grazing for his horses, and whatever means necessary to keep himself from the possibility of going to jail. He’s basically the type of young man that would have been a market hunter in the colonial American frontier of the 1700s, or a mountain man in the early 1800s in the Rocky Mountains, but at the dawn of the 21st century, there’s nowhere left for him to go. This makes him a tragic figure, but also an ironic one in that he’s been raised with movies like Jeremiah Johnson and Dances with Wolves, and novels like A. B. Guthrie’s The Big Sky. Jack’s understanding of frontier and wilderness have just as much to do with these stories as with his personal experience within it.

What kind(s) of character do you consider this character primarily to be, or how would you describe this character?

[See answer to the question above.]

What is a character from a published fiction story by another author you would compare this character to and why are they similar?

Jack reminds me to some extent of “The Kid” in Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian. Both of these characters have some decency within them, but it is often as not overridden by the circumstances in which they live and the aforementioned animal instinct for survival.

To what extent did you use any pre-existing character formula, template, paradigm, character design, archetype, or theory or principles of making or analysing character in planning, writing, and refining this character?

I don’t create characters with any sort of formula—that’s the road to hackdom as far as I’m concerned. However, I did consciously make Jack the sort of archetypical Western hero, but placed in a 21st century context.

How would you describe the first chapter, scene or section of this story in one paragraph?

In the opening chapter of The Devil’s Share we meet Jack as a child, twelve years old. We see his youthful live in Fairbanks: Few friends, a love of horses and dogs, a poaching incident and his punishment of having to shoe all the family’s horses. A few paragraphs later we meet the eighteen-year-old Jack, and we also meet Gwen, the girl next door who hates Alaska and can’t wait to leave. She and Jack have made love several times, but she’s never allowed him to call her his girlfriend. Jack flies out Bud Cowell’s lodge where he will spend the summer working. Bud sets Jack up with a wall tent and woodstove, telling him stories of the days when Bud and Jack’s father were footloose young men, making their living as trappers in the mountains. Later, Jack meets Bud’s horses, which sets him to remembering the funeral of an old sourdough his parents knew well. Jack spends the next couple weeks digging the foundation for a new sauna. Then a strange plane lands at the lodge, bearing a man and a young Indian woman who will soon have a profound presence in Jack’s life.

Pick one of your published stories. How would you describe the introduction of the main character, or one of the main characters, in this story?

Jack is introduced to the reader in the very first line of The Devil’s Share: “His name was Jack.”

What makes this an effective character introduction for this story?

It’s short and sweet, and ultimately tells the reader most of what they really need to know about this kid. The events in the story tell the rest.

What major changes does this character go through, or what major challenges does the character encounter and how does the character respond to them?

Jack goes through a personal transformation through the course of the story. Because of the federal land claims legislation (ANILCA) that cost his family their wilderness home, Jack has been raised with a pathological hatred of the United States government, and the National Park Service in particular, hardly a unique sentiment in Alaska.

How would you describe the most important minor characters in this story and the changes in their character, or the challenges they encounter and how they respond them?

During the course of the story, Jack comes into contact with individuals whose entire personalities have been molded and twisted by this hatred to the point that they have become grotesque parodies of humanity. The violence and bloodshed they and Jack visit upon one another bring Jack to the realization that he does not want to wind up like these men.

What does the story gain from the minor characters?

The story of The Devil’s Share (and arguably, any novel) simply would not work without the minor characters. Some of the minor characters show Jack a mirror of his own hateful attitudes, while others allow his better side to come out so the reader sees that Jack is not just some mindless brute, but a young kid not so different from any eighteen-year-old.

To what extent would you describe the characters in this story as typical or atypical of characters in your fiction stories?

Jack is typical of characters in my fiction in that he’s more comfortable in the woods than in town, which also happens to be true of myself. He’s also born and raised in Alaska, as opposed to having come to Alaska from someplace else. I’ve noticed my characters are almost always lifelong Alaskans, contrary to the dominant paradigms in Alaskan literature. Ultimately, I suppose I write about characters whose experience and personalities were shaped from their earliest days by the Far North because that’s what I know.

My website is http://www.krisfarmen.wordpress.com/. My publisher is McRoy & Blackburn http://www.alaskafiction.com/.

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