The Globe and Mail

Why did you choose Toronto’s Don Valley as backdrop? The area is not normally thought of as brimming with wildlife, but at times, Fauna can make it seem like a jungle.
In fact, I feel as though the valley chose me. I’ve lived in Toronto for five years (this time around), but even before we moved here, my husband and I would always stay with friends in the Riverdale neighbourhood when we visited. From the start, I loved crossing the Don Valley. Like the character Darius in the novel, I came to anticipate that moment when the subway train leaves its tunnel for the viaduct’s airy cage. Looking down over that strip of river and forest, catching glimpses of campsites, dogs and birds – it was bound to fire the imagination. And then there were the literary echoes that enlivened the scene: Ernest Thompson Seton’s tales of crows and partridges that called the valley home when it was still a wilderness at the edge of a growing metropolis; Ann Michaels’ haunting evocation of the “great sunken gardens” that are Toronto’s ravines; Michael Ondaatje’s unlikely hero, Nicolas Temelcoff, who dangles from the viaduct and catches the falling nun. The rest of the setting grew up in relation to the valley, in part as a result of many neighbourhood miles covered on foot and bicycle, in part as a result of looking inward to see what I might find.

The character Edal has important encounters with turtles at both the beginning and close of the novel, when she finds it on the road. What does the turtle symbolize for you? Did you have particular themes or thoughts in mind for the different types of animals while writing?
Like the Don Valley, the animals seemed to find their own way into the book. The more I thought about urban fauna, the more the city around me seemed to rustle with hidden life: raccoons on the fence rails, coyotes in the parks, skunks under porches, deer in the downtown core. These are living, breathing creatures, but once we begin to tell stories about them, they inevitably become symbols for everything from secrets to innocence to death. I suppose turtles/tortoises symbolize the living earth itself (many first nations stories reference the creation of the earth on the back of a turtle), but that’s not how they made their way into the novel. The turtle on the road is an homage to one such creature my husband and I came across. We stopped the car, thinking we would save it, then got close enough to see the splintered shell, the blood. An experience like that can go a long way toward shaping a scene – even an entire book.