Susan Juby
Susan Juby is the author of several novels for adults and young readers, including Getting the Girl, Another Kind of Cowboy, The Woefield Poultry Collective, Bright's Light and the Alice series. Juby, who lives on Vancouver Island, is publishing two new books this year: The Truth Commission, a YA novel, comes out in April, while Republic of Dirt: A Return to Woefield Farm, arrived in stores earlier this month.
Why did you write your new book?
I wrote Republic of Dirt because readers kept asking me how things were going on the farm and because I kept wondering the same thing. Collectively and as individuals, the farm's inhabitants seem to lend themselves to disaster and it has become a reflex to imagine what new mishaps might befall them. I have allowed them some small successes in this book. I think they deserve it after all they've been through.
Whose sentences are your favourite, and why?
It's a tie between P.G. Wodehouse's and Larry McMurtry's. Both authors write sentences that rollick, though McMurtry's tend to forge ahead and Wodehouse's twirl and dance. Compare a first-line McMurtry: "When Augustus came out on the porch the blue pigs were eating a rattlesnake – not a very big one" – to a Wodehouse: "At the open window of the great library of Blandings Castle, drooping like a wet sock, as was his habit when he had nothing to prop his spine against, the Earl of Emsworth, that amiable and boneheaded peer, stood gazing out over his domain." Who would stop reading after those openers?
If aliens landed on Earth, which book would you give them to teach them about humanity?
It depends on whether we wanted them to stay. If they seemed like bad actors, as so many aliens do, I'd start them out with Matterhorn: A Novel of the Vietnam War by Karl Marlantes. Once they'd absorbed that and felt badly shaken, I'd give them The Stone Angel by Margaret Laurence and follow it up with A Short History of Progress by Ronald Wright. Then we could stand back and wave goodbye to the retreating tail lights of their saucers. If they were the good sort of alien, I'd give them Tattoos on the Heart by Father Gregory Boyle and Cold Comfort Farm by Stella Gibbons and The Big Snapper by Katherine Holubitsky and watch them settle in to stay.
Which book got you through the darkest period of your life?
My Family and Other Animals by Gerald Durrell. I loved to read Durrell and pretend I was being home-schooled on Corfu and that my days were taken up with studying newts and scorpions and having picnics rather than trying to figure out how to overcome my debilitating lack of social competence. No one needed social skills in Durrell's books. I could never decide what I loved most about that book: Gerry's wildly dysfunctional family, including the gun-nut brother Leslie, his spot-covered sister Margo, his dotty mother or his brother Larry (novelist Lawrence Durrell), who was much given to drink and dramatic gestures; or the other marvelous inhabitants of Corfu.
Who's your favourite villain in literature, and why?
Rupert Campbell-Black in Jilly Cooper's Riders is the first character who comes to mind. He was tremendous fun. Who can resist a rich, good-looking villain who rides horses? I also adore Louise Penny's villains because most of them aren't really villains. They are weak and selfish and striving, but entirely understandable and strangely sympathetic.