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British Author Stella Duffy

Growing up in a small town in New Zealand, out author Stella Duffy did not necessarily consider writing as a viable career choice. “It all sounds a little disingenuous,” she told AfterEllen.com, “but I promise I truly didn’t know that it was possible for someone like me to be a writer.”

Certainly, Duffy managed to figure it out. The prolific author of six novels, including Singling Out the Couples and State of Happiness, as well five mysteries that feature lesbian private investigator Saz Martin, her latest book, The Room of Lost Things, was recently longlisted for the Orange Prize.

“I don’t come from the kind of people who have writers in their family,” explained Duffy, who credits theater for helping her find her voice. When her best friend’s older brother visited her school with a company touring Shakespeare, she began to think differently: “His parents worked at the same timber mill where my parents worked – he was just like me, but he was in a theater company and suddenly I realized I didn’t have to be a teacher and an actor in amateur dramatics. I could do it properly.”

Duffy’s father was actually more disappointed in his daughter’s professional calling than her coming out as a lesbian – a surprise, she said, as he was “a proper old-fashioned, old-school Catholic.” The youngest of seven children, Duffy was the only one afforded a college education, and he thought she was wasting her intellect.

Though he died when she was 25 and never saw her success, her mother was always supportive. “She loved that I was a writer and loved coming to book readings,” Duffy said. “She sometimes read with me if I had an older character.”

Studying drama at university, Duffy began to write plays, and when she returned to Britain she got involved with stand-up comedy and improvisation. “Improv is just the best way to learn how to write,” she said. “It taught me how to bring a story together, to trust it. We didn’t just do comedy, but also hour-long plays. I do think story is a bit like a river. It will find its own course, but you have to be brave enough to let it.”

Part of finding the story is in the process of writing. With many of her novels taking up to six drafts, Duffy said she often discovers the major themes of a book in the reworking.

“I think if you start with ‘this book is about these five things,’ it’s going to end up being quite didactic. You don’t want to hit your reader over the head with those things. You want the reader to pick it up slowly as well, and I think that’s easier if I pick it up slowly.”

State of Happiness, about a couple struggling with the woman’s terminal illness and also longlisted for the Orange Prize in 2004, was considered a transition in Duffy’s work in its serious subject matter.

For Duffy, The Room for Lost Things is also a natural progression. The novel is the complex and richly multilayered story of Robert Sutton, a dry cleaner in Loughborough Junction, South London, who’s training his successor, Akeel, to take over the business. It is also a story about love, racism, secrets, shame and the life of a community.

“I started off writing mysteries, what we call crime novels,” Duffy explained of her development. “Crime novels are absolutely a political forum, a place to discuss ideas and what can we do about the state of our world. But then with my literary novels, like Singling Out the Couples, a sexy, nasty, dark fairy tale, my fun is to play with language.”

The Room for Lost Things, she said, brought together her strong political drive and her love of language and storytelling. “So in that way, I think it makes sense that it comes after all of those other books.”

One of Duffy’s primary goals with the book was to be as realistic as possible. In terms of capturing the community, for example, she first wanted to have 20 to 25 other characters pop in and out of the story – “as people do in real life,” she said. That proved too difficult, however, and finally she had to settle on six characters.

“I wanted to write a very true-to-life novel, and I found after the first draft that maybe I’m not as good of a writer as I want to be yet,” she admitted about her struggle. She had wanted to set the story in the hub of a dry cleaner’s shop while telling the whole story of the community and its members.

“Maybe I’ll be able to do this when I’m 85,” she said, “or maybe it’s not possible to bring in a brilliant character for three pages that you never see again. A reader gets annoyed. I couldn’t do the thing I was aiming to do, and I don’t know if that was my inability or that it just doesn’t work in the novel form.”

Even in her mystery novels, Duffy admires the British writing scene’s attention to current social realism. The crime novels in the U.K., she said, are based on what is real – “What’s going on in the street, the problems. British crime writers see it as their job to deal with what’s going on in current politics.”

Interestingly, this is something she finds lacking in lesbian crime writers from the United States. In fact, overall Duffy thinks that lesbian literature needs more present-tense stories. Though she has great admiration for Sarah Waters’ work (and counts Waters as one of her friends), she finds it disturbing that today’s most successful fiction about lesbians comes in a historical package.

“This has nothing to do with what [Waters] is writing, it has to do with advertising,” Duffy explained. “I think she’s a fantastic writer, but I find it upsetting that we are still safe as long as we’re in costume. We’re safe to put on television if we’re in costume.”

Duffy’s concern for this issue and the lack of present-day lesbian stories was recently confirmed when she and her wife, playwright Shelley Silas, were commissioned to write a treatment for a “British The L Word.”

When Channel 4 asked if they could write such a treatment, Duffy’s response was no, because “people don’t look like that here,” she said, laughing. “I’m not sure they look like that in L.A. though, either.”

Nonetheless, Duffy and Silas wrote the treatment, and though Channel 4 liked it, they ultimately decided not to produce the show. “What we’ve heard is that they’re making a lesbian series set in the 1950s,” she said. “So again, it’s about lesbians in period costumes. Maybe it’s that they didn’t like our work, there’s always that, but I like to think they’re just scared of contemporary lesbians.”

Part of the solution, she believes, is in widening the mainstream and making it more inclusive – “inclusive of everybody, from the women who are a little bit bisexual who don’t know it or are extremely bisexual or utterly lesbian. I want to have bigger inclusion both in the straight community and in our own community. I would like for us to be more of a community and less a group of fractions.”

Along with starting a new novel, Duffy is busy filming a BBC documentary to mark the 100th anniversary of Mills and Boon – or Harlequin as it’s known in the States – as well as helping a young theater group write a play about global warming called Earth Play.

If Duffy had time to even consider another career, she said she’d either be a “contemplative nun” or an “acrobat.” And, actually, she doesn’t see this as a far leap from being a writer.

“When I teach, I say that writing is a physical activity,” she said. “It’s an intensely private and emotional and intellectual activity turned into a physical activity. So the spiritual, contemplative side turns into someone who is still – given enough wine – willing to do cartwheels into splits.”

For more on Stella Duffy, visit her MySpace page or website.

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