Folding in Ideas of Witness

Aislinn Hunter joined KPU in 2002 as a faculty member in the Creative Writing Department, where she teaches courses from first to fourth year, including advanced workshops on poetry, fiction, and creative-non-fiction. An award-winning novelist and poet, Aislinn’s latest novel, The Certainties, is described by one reviewer as “a skilled interweaving of subjects — love, loss, memory, personal connections.” The novel alternates between two characters’ points of view. The first, an unnamed protagonist (inspired by Walter Benjamin and his flight from Paris following the Nazi invasion of France during the Second World War) crosses the Pyrenees into Spain in search of refuge.  The second, a woman named Pia works at a hotel on an island off the coast of Britain during the 1980s and witnesses the tragic loss of life from a nearby shipwreck. Despite their stories taking place in different settings and time periods, the two characters are connected through the unnamed protagonist’s chance spotting of Pia as a young girl. This brief yet profound witnessing underscores the novel’s lyrical contemplation of the meaning and uncertainty that mark each individual’s finite journey through time.

The Creative Writing Department will host the KPU launch of Aislinn Hunter's novel The Certainties on Wednesday, January 20th at 11:00 AM on KPU Zoom.  Aislinn will be joined by guests Chelsea Franz and Jordan Roper. Please contact Department Assistant Anne Lin (Anne.Lin@kpu.ca) for a secure link to the event.

Congratulations on your latest novel, The Certainties, which was published this past summer and has been receiving stellar reviews!  What has it been like to launch this book during the pandemic?

Could you tell us what first inspired you to write The Certainties?  How did the novel evolve across time and throughout the writing process?

I was interested at the very start in the idea of isolation and survival and community. How in times of crisis or stress (like war or famine) people come together or don’t. My first impulse was quite dystopian but I shared my idea for the book with a gifted writer friend (a first for me), and she nudged me away from some of the setting and story. She was right. Around this time the migrant crisis (especially in Syria) was getting worse. I started folding in ideas of witness, what it means to watch people struggling through the lens of the media from such a distance and from a place as comfortable as mine. The last piece of the puzzle was the literary critic / philosopher Walter Benjamin. When I was doing my PhD, his writing felt so wooing. Odd, but that’s how I’d describe it – like a vortex. I knew he was in my next book somehow and in the end I used a few of the key details of his biography (fleeing war-torn Paris over the Pyrenees to Spain, being placed under house arrest there in 1940) as a plot. I shifted my refugee crisis concerns to the massive exodus of 1940 and then, well, I started trying to write great sentences. 

The Certainties alternates between two characters’ points of view during different time periods. What are the challenges and rewards of writing a story that continually moves between characters, and why was it so important to tell this story in this manner?

I’ve never been a fan of writing in first person (‘I’) – even if the ‘I’ isn’t like me at all. I find it too limiting for my style of writing which is often philosophical / humanist. I knew I wanted to write about how people intersect and converse even if they never meet – how the world is informed by relations that are textual or heritable or historical. So, I needed 2 characters to be part of this conversation. Originally (before I started typing) the main characters were going to be a philosopher (my main protagonist in the final book) and a journalist (Pia’s mother in the final book) but young Pia inserted herself into the story and took over. As anyone trying to work on a book-length project knows, a lot of writing is following behind ideas that spring up in front of you. Pia wanted her story told.  

“Writing as witness is about deep (and ideally transcendent) observation and affective response. It’s not journalism – there’s no accountability to fact per se, but there is accountability to the world.”

Aislinn Hunter, Creative Writing Department

In the Creative Writing department at KPU, you’ve taught upper-level courses on the topic of “Writing as Witness.” How do you prepare students to embark on this kind of approach to writing?  Does conceptualizing writing-as-witnessing fundamentally shift or refocus how you understand and relate to your craft?

Great question. Creative writing as I normally teach it is about conjuring. Writing as witness is about deep (and ideally transcendent) observation and affective response. It’s not journalism – there’s no accountability to fact per se, but there is accountability to the world. Students in the witness class were tasked with witnessing places, animals and events and given the option of taking testimony. What we focus on as training at the start is the question of what witness is (true ‘witness’) on the level of Being, and what bearing witness is (as a weight / response / responsibility). We start in the first class by introductions… saying a few things about ourselves and why we’re here, and then I ask the class ‘Was what we just did ‘witnessing’?’ and inevitably half the class says ‘yes’ and half says ‘no’ and we begin to unpack the affect of witnessing from there.

If you could give one piece of advice to aspiring writers, what would it be?

ONE PIECE?!!!! Ha. 

1. You won’t know what great writing is unless you read.
2. Practice seeing the world through a writer’s eyes. This means being alive to the world around you.
3. Keep a notebook. (I mean it!!)
4. Move toward people who believe in you and challenge you equally.

You recently received a 0.6% PD fund grant for this upcoming summer semester.  Would you share with us some details about this next writing project?

Ah, it’s a dire -but necessary- subject. The award (for which I’m grateful) is for time to work on my long poem / memoir about the fabric of grief time. How those of us who have lost someone we love (in my case a husband – Glenn, who died of brain cancer 2 years ago after 25 years of marriage) feel time is altered. It’s set partially on a walking day in Trieste and starts with me sitting under a sculpture of Kronos, the god of time. I cry almost every day I work on this book, but it’s the only thing I want to be working on.

Aislinn Hunter is the author of a story collection: What’s Left Us (2001); three novels: Stay (2003), The World Before Us (2014), and The Certainties (2020); three books of poetry: Into the Early Hours (2002), The Possible Past (2004), and Linger, Still (2018); and a collection of essays: A Peepshow with Views of the Interior: Paratexts (2009). She has won numerous awards for her work, including the esteemed Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize for the novel The World Before Us. Her novel Stay was adapted into a feature film in 2013 starring Aiden Quinn and Taylor Schilling.  In 2018, Aislinn Hunter served as a Canadian War Artist working with Canadian and NATO forces at CFB Suffield, an experience that led to the creation of the art video A Word and a Body Are Not the Same Thing (2019), which explores the training exercises soldiers undertake when facing the aftermath of chemical, biological and nuclear weapons. This video was part of an exhibition at the Canadian War Museum in Ottawa in 2020.

To learn more about Aislinn Hunter’s writing and latest novel, The Certainties, you can visit her website or listen to her interview on CBC’s The Sunday Edition.