Interview with Darren O'Donnell

Darren O'Donnell is artistic director of Toronto-based theater group Mammalian Diving Reflex, and author of multiple plays, including A Suicide-Site Guide to the City, pppeeeaaaccceee, and White Mice. New York Press spoke with him about his first novel, Your Secrets Sleep with Me (Coach House), which is reviewed in this issue.

Would you call Your Secrets a dystopia? If anything, I would call it a hypertopia; I'm just heightening what I see happening today-both good and bad. The magical connections between the kids are a sort of utopian vision, the political climate being a dystopia. But, really, the book depicts events that are happening today. In March of 2003, for example, thousands of Pakistani people came to Canada from the U.S. and applied for refugee status (something that is getting harder and harder to do); the hostels were overflowing with them. There really isn't much in the book that hasn't happened in some form or another. I've just condensed it and maybe bumped up the contrast to bring things into high relief. What's the role of miracles in Your Secrets Sleep with Me? There's an incident in the book where the children visit a Hindu temple on the occasion of Lord Ganesh (the elephant god) drinking milk. That actually happened for about a week in the fall of 1995. It was happening all over the world. So I went to check it out, and what happened to me is what I depicted in the book. I can't explain it. I've looked into various explanations that skeptics have put forth, and none of them can account for what I experienced. I think the miraculous is more of an everyday occurrence than is commonly accepted. Extraordinary things are happening all the time, their occurrence is somehow patterned and sometimes that pattern can be glimpsed. In 1993 I had what is commonly known as a psychotic episode-lots of hallucinations, delusions, etc.-and, after the fact, the thing that struck me was that it wasn't that my perceptions were incorrect, but rather it was my interpretation of my heightened perceptions that was off the mark. The incredible things I was seeing were real; I just made some interpretive mistakes-and it was those misinterpretations that were "crazy."

You capture aspects of youth and childhood dead on. I'm thinking of when Ruth notes that James is "that little piece of shit who had walked on water." That resonates on so many levels. Was it a stretch to capture the nuances of youth?

I didn't really worry about youth. I just tried to accurately portray my milieu, a place full of childish behavior. And, honestly, I am a case of severe arrested development, and infusing childishness into serious topics is something I work with a lot. I love being a brat-and having a character refer to another character who had walked on water as a piece of shit makes me very happy. One of my favorite parts is the conversation between Katherine and James while they have a coffee on the CN Tower-when I wrote that small exchange it was so simple and satisfying to present James' childish petulance because I was able to give expression to my own frustration with my life in a way that feels honest. Depicting the less regimented and constrained world of youth came naturally.

How would you characterize the book's adults? The kids' relationship to them?

Basically, I think the child/adult dichotomy is false and, ultimately, not healthy. Adulthood and the various layers of personality armour one has to adopt to function as an adult are, for the most part, a performance or a fiction. Adults are, ultimately, very childlike and, conversely, children are actually far more mature than most people are willing to acknowledge.

So the children in the book are actually adults-composites of me and a few of my friends. The adults in the book barely exist. My influence in this department is Charles Schulz and Peanuts. Adult consciousness in the bodies of children is a pointed inversion of what I believe to be the actual case: adults with childlike worldviews. That there are next to no adults in the book is simply a reflection of my experience of the world where I can find next to no people behaving in the way that I was always led to believe adults are supposed to behave.

The one thing we tell children over and over is the virtue of sharing, and yet we live in this place that glorifies wealth, rewards greed, a place where the gap between the rich and the poor continues to grow. The adult is a mythical creature, as far as I'm concerned. I'm working on putting together a performance called Haircuts by Children, where I will get a bunch of kids between eight and 12 to offer free haircuts to the public in an established salon. The piece, for me, is about trusting the aesthetic judgment and skills of kids, that they can be trusted with not only our most sacred bodily attribute-our hairstyle-but also with political decisions.

I believe that kids should be granted the right to vote. There's concern about a lack of interest in the electoral process-well, no wonder, people who have been politically disenfranchised for the first 18 years of their life are going to have a hard time finding much value in the process. While researching the haircuts piece I found a lot of information about child suffrage. There's somewhat of a movement out there. In Denmark, they have a children's council that polls kids for their response to legislation affecting them and reports to the government.

In the novel, queers seem to be a matter of course. Was that intentional, or did it just happen? How does sexuality fit into the book?

My community in Toronto is queer. Though I am more or less straight, the first place I found a spiritual home in Toronto was at Buddies in Bad Times Theatre (founded by American-born Sky Gilbert), North America's largest queer theater. In the book, the use of queer sexuality as a matter of course was a device to create a context that was felt to be just a few degrees into the future. We are not quite there yet but, for the most part, it's feeling pretty inevitable.

What is the significance of the CN tower to Toronto? Is it something important to Canada as a whole, or just Toronto? Was there a reaction to your tipping it?

It's a really important icon for the city; it's what makes the skyline unique. Toronto, as I mention repeatedly in the book, is like an awkward teenager-shy, lacking confidence, but, ultimately, really very, very beautiful, with a charming innocence. Until quite recently the civic leaders were always going on about it being a "world-class city." I think people are a little less hung up about that these days. The place is beginning to come of age.

The CN tower is, I think, a reminder that we can be the biggest and best in the world, if only occasionally. And I think for much of the rest of Canada, it functions in the same way. Canada is a teenage country. There's a tension between Toronto and the rest of the country, and people often dis it. I, however, was one of those people who grew up longing to be in a big city, and Toronto looked good to my eyes. I was born in Edmonton, Alberta: a small city with few mixed-use neighborhoods and a total car culture.

My knocking the tower down and suggesting it could be a shopping walkway to the U.S. was often brought up but never fully explored in any of the reviews or commentary. I think maybe the metaphor speaks for itself.

What's your sense of the seeping of the U.S. into Canada, and its effects on Canada?

You may have noticed that the word "Canada" doesn't appear anywhere in the book. I'm trying to reference the idea that the nation state is not as relevant a political formation as the city state. I think that was pretty clear in the recent U.S. elections, where all the urban centers elected Democrats-the same kind of thing is happening in Canada. A city like Toronto has more in common with Chicago and NYC than it does with much of the rest of the country. Sociologist Saskia Sassen talks about the potential for alliances between cities around the world, the potential power that mayors have with all the hype around creative cities as economic engines in the post-Fordist economy. Canada is in an interesting position, being marginal but heavily influenced by the U.S., UK and the EU-culturally we are totally overshadowed by elsewhere and tend to generate less innovation but, being on the margins, we have a sort of detachment and perspective that the U.S. lacks. That's why we make such great comedians.

But, that said, culturally and economically, the divisions between Canada and the U.S. are small. Canadians approach the question of cultural difference with an irritating superiority, as if we are so much more progressive and not brainwashed by big American media, but the truth is that alternative media outlets in the States are far more radical than anything up here.

How did you conceive of the book's particular experimental structure? Because of my background in theater, I'm accustomed to having the audience right in front of me and working with that presence. This was hard to give up, so I wanted to create a narrative presence that could prove to the reader the interconnectedness of everything-could prove to the reader that their bodies were being altered by the encounter with the text, that we are always leaving traces of ourselves in the other (and vice versa), that we are, in fact, always us plus everybody else-that we are never alone, even in the empty echoing of our minds. It's common enough to experience a lack of words in the presence of some people, or a gregariousness in the presence of others; some people make us feel stupid and others smart. A few years ago, I noticed that when I was with these two friends of mine, my personality would shift into something that was totally unique. I had a particular style of humor, a particular delivery, a particular attitude. It was so unique and only manifested when I was with these two people. This led me to conclude that we are never who we are, but who we are and who we are with. That, maybe, energetically, we are able to either pool our intelligence, or access the intelligence of others to create entities that exceed our own capacity. That when I'm with you, I will be a person unlike the person I'm with when I'm with anyone else. That we, in fact, create a third person, or entity that we are both a part of. These kinds of ideas informed what I was trying to do.

-Kate Crane