Flirt: The Interviews by Lorna Jackson Page B

low and shadowed the windows Hitchcock-wise. I found the hens stockstill, like a watercolour, huddled under the tayberries. The rooster – a huge and handsome Barred Rock, his tail a conquistador’s helmet – posed on the nearby pathway, ready to give it up for his girls, to be their he-man. I urged and flicked them back to the coop and fixed a board across the hole they’d excavated under the run’s wire. The vultures circled and watched and dipped close in their primitive formation and then sauntered off. Today, all day, the rooster will crow. Your voice sounds sweetly Southern and bourbon-soaked. Am I right?
    â€”It’s only noon where I am. What a peculiar question.
    â€”Are journalists asking you different questions this time?
    â€”I just kind of started, last week, so the questions seem quite fresh. They don’t seem to be questions about “does the landscape influence your work,” “Do you have a problem writing about women,” “Why are your men kind of western guys?”
    â€”Has your celebrity changed the tack we’re taking?
    â€”I don’t think celebrity lasts very long, frankly, so I’m unaware of that. For the most part, when people ask me questions they’re quite nice, and I can usually get my head into them. They aren’t frivolous and they aren’t dumb. Particularly in Canada, I’m always pleased with the kind of preparation journalists do. Much better than in the US of A.
    â€”Well that’s nice to hear. I am not only a journalist, though, and my questions will arise from several positions: writer, teacher, critic. Your writing showed me many things when I started working with the sweet calisthenics of the short story. I like men who are kind of western guys, maybe that’s it. If my questions seem odd or random, they are, and they need to be.
    â€”All right.
    â€”You have written so incisively and compassionately about father/son matters; one of your most-quoted lines is that the best thing a father can do for a son is die. What’s the best thing a mother can do for her son?

    â€”Mothers are much more, by and large, nurturers toward their children, and that was the case in my life. What I wanted my mother to do was survive, that’s the thing she didn’t do long enough. I wanted her to live on into both my adult life and her later life. And I guess the other thing that a mother can do for a son is not hold his gender against him.
    â€”Here’s what I think you meant: fathers have too much control over a writer – a male vocation according to you – when they are alive. Men are always trying to tie the silk tie like their fathers could, or mow the lawn at the correct height given climate conditions and density of ranunculus. And when fathers die, a world of feeling and perception becomes available: quit cutting it, let it meadow. Be yourself.
    My mother held my gender against me, too. The tight red jeans she called dreadful; haircuts with too much angle or sheen, dreadful; menopausal symptoms in my thirties, nonsense. She suspected every man of wanting sex from me and nothing else, suspected that I encouraged them. The choir director who made us sing Benjamin Britten’s tone cluster of twelve-part harmony; the grade seven teacher who explained Mussolini and taught bluegrass and drilled me – perfected my forearm pass to eliminate the need to fall on my knees – in volleyball; the Mennonite blonde boy who gave me yellow roses and a jade ring when I graduated and who is a doctor. He tracked me and now telephones out of the blue, thirty years later. “They never get over you,” my mother brags. “They never recover from you,” she says, now wistful and impressed with what can only be termed an unrepresentative sample. But before, that ability to attract was my dread disease, a threat to – maybe the source of – the family’s instability. Nurturer? No,