Anne Fleming's novel Curiosities transports readers to the plagues, witch hunts and love stories of the 1600s
The Vancouver-based writer discussed their Giller Prize-nominated novel on Bookends with Mattea Roach
In Curiosities, Anne Fleming inserts herself into her fiction as a "goofily overenthusiastic" amateur historian to piece together the story of two 17th century girls as they navigate their way to adulthood.
Weaving together different fictional accounts, the novel recounts the lives of Joan and Thomasina, who goes by Tom, the only two survivors of a village ravaged by the plague, and how they eventually find each other again — in a tale of witchcraft, forbidden love and the very nature of truth itself.
"I loved reading Curiosities," said Mattea Roach during their conversation with Fleming on Bookends. "It was like a fun little treasure for me to unwrap."
Fleming is an author based in Victoria. Her books include Pool-Hopping and Other Stories, which was shortlisted for the Governor General's Literary Award for Fiction and the Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize. She has also written a middle-grade novel, The Goat, which was a Junior Library Guild and White Ravens selection.
Curiosities is shortlisted for the 2024 Giller Prize.
In their chat, Fleming and Roach discussed their insatiable curiosity, the appeal of niche historical fiction and what makes a witch.
Mattea Roach: Why do you think that people have this drive to dive specifically into the lives of these people that are not of great historical significance?
Anne Fleming: Well, that's the exact appeal. It's very, very hard to find or to know from the primary sources, from the written record that actually exists. So it feels like a perfect thing for a novel to imagine: the lives of these people whose lives would not have been documented in any way or would have been documented in very small ways by birth and death records and marriage records, for instance, and I believe have valuable, important, significant lives.
What was it like to be alive in that space and time?- Anne Fleming
I did read as many of the diaries I could find. Those were fascinating. And there is just this absolute fascination with trying to imagine what it was like. That's the appeal of writing fiction broadly, imagining, "What was it like? What did I feel like? What were those tensions? What were those dynamics? What was it like to be alive in that space and time?"
MR: I'm wondering if you can talk a bit more about the character of Old Nut and why she was such an easy target for witch hunt. What are some of the common characteristics of people who got accused of witchcraft during the period that you set this novel in?
AF: It was often older women who are marginalized in some way; widows, poor women and people who ask things of their neighbours again and again.
Finally someone gets fed up and says, "No, you can't have any more of this thing that you ask for, you can't come begging here anymore." And then the older woman would be angry and just show their anger in whatever way that came out. Sometimes it might be literally a curse. Or it might just be plain old anger. And then, something befalls the person who has been yelled at. And they feel that it came from the woman.
It makes you quite vulnerable and susceptible to the generosity of others.- Anne Fleming
In Old Nut's case, she's deaf. Her father was physically abusive. He boxed her ears and she has sort of cauliflower ears. He dies when a tree falls on him and people think it's witchcraft. So she's grown up in this impoverished family that already had a suspicion of witchcraft upon it.
And she lives in the woods between two towns and she gathers nuts and then tries to sell them door to door, essentially bartering them. And you just are living by foraging mostly, and a little bit by petty theft and a little bit by this barter kind of arrangement. It makes you quite vulnerable and susceptible to the generosity of others.
MR: What did you find in the research that you did in writing this novel about women who lived as men, like Tom in the novel?
AF: I try to not over-prescribe or ascribe identity into Tom's situation, but there are some things that mattered to me about how I did that, but about the question of the historical record, most of the record that we have of people who were born female and lived as men comes from people who were discovered.
It happened in a lot of different ways. Sometimes a discovery would be in death. Sometimes a discovery would be because a lover was angry at the person and would expose them. There are many ways in which discovery happened. But as with any court records, you have to assume that there are actually going to be many, many, many more people who are doing that same thing and never got caught and never were discovered. So I was really interested in creating a character for whom that might be true.
I wasn't interested in having Tom's body be discovered, except that it is, in an important scene in the novel, a very pivotal, crucial scene. But that wasn't my primary interest, or I didn't want that to be something that was part of the climax or the end of the book.
There's tons of historical evidence that many people born female dressed as male to just travel between towns. You couldn't do that as easily as a woman, certainly not by yourself. And so that was super common. Doing it to join the army or the navy was also really common. Sometimes it was to follow a lover who was in the army or the navy. It could have been for many other reasons that we don't know about.
MR: What does curiosity mean for you in the context of this work and in the context of your life?
AF: It was a driving force behind the book, broadly speaking. And it really seemed to me that there are twin sides to curiosity. There's the driving side, the one that makes you want to know why, that makes you want to find out more. Sometimes it's a lovely sense of wonder: you're seeing something amazing that you've never seen before and "Wow, isn't that great."
But there's also kind of a greedy or dangerous side of curiosity that sees something and says, "that's weird and I want that." And so one of the things that drew me into the 17th century was learning about collectors of curiosities. Originally, when I was conceiving the novel, I thought that a collector of curiosities would be one of the main characters. And in the end, he's not. But that was one of my paths into the story.
I want to show how things that seem to be outliers are not as much outliers as they first appear.- Anne Fleming
I'm interested in things that are deemed strange or unusual or curious. I want to take those things and make them less strange. I want to show how things that seem to be outliers are not as much outliers as they first appear.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity. It was produced by Lisa Mathews.
