10 More Questions with Carolyn Huizinga Mills
Last year, friend of the blog Carolyn Huizinga Mills sat down with me to discuss her debut novel, The Good Son. I am so pleased that she is back today to talk about her follow-up, Sins of the Daughter, a tense, tightly-crafted drama that follows promising grad student Danah as she tries to unravel three generations-worth of secrets, silences, and trauma in order to understand who she is and where she comes from.
Carolyn’s second novel, Sins of the Daughter, is out now from Cormorant Press.
1. So many aspiring writers spend years dreaming about someone finally saying ‘yes’ to their book that they don’t really stop to think about what comes after they finally do. What wisdom have you gained from the process of sending your debut novel, The Good Son, out into the world? What would you say to someone who has sold their first book and is suddenly looking around thinking, now what?
Carolyn: I once heard an interesting ladder analogy used for publishing (but really it would be applicable for any goal). When you’re just starting out, you see people with a foot on the first rung and you think, “I would do anything to be in their position”. All you want is to touch the ladder. But then once you are in that position, you look up and see people a few rungs up, and you want that. Then, you see people at the very top of the ladder, and suddenly where you are seems so low, you just want to be at the top, and so on. So, my advice would be to celebrate every success like it was the end goal. Finished an entire draft? That’s a huge accomplishment! Stop and revel in that. Revel in every moment. By all means, keep climbing, but don’t forget to take in the view on your way up.
2. Both The Good Son and Sins of the Daughter deal with family secrets and explore the way our flawed understanding of the past can impact who we become and the choices we make later in life. As your main character Dannah puts it, “What if we are missing context? What if we misinterpreted the meaning all along? What if no one ever told us the whole goddamned story?” In many ways, the trauma experienced by your characters comes as much from the withholding of truth about past events as much as it does from past events themselves. What is it about these themes that keeps you returning to them?
Carolyn: Ultimately, I think it’s my fascination with human behaviour and my personal love of stories with secrets at their heart. My current WIP circles around those same themes and I joked with my mentor that I might just be writing the same book over and over. She assured me it was perfectly natural for a writer to revisit a certain thematic terrain. You worded it perfectly, Kate, when you said, “...the trauma experienced by your characters comes as much from the withholding of truth about past events as much as it has come from past events themselves”. How do you make sense of an event when it is shrouded in secrecy, or worse, lies? These are the kinds of questions I love to explore.
3. In both books, you so skillfully unfold the past for the reader in non-linear fragments. In Sins of the Daughter, you have chapters written in 1st person from the perspectives of three different characters, interspersed with 3rd person flashback chapters for each character. All of the sections are written in the present tense, which is such an interesting choice for a narrative that is so focused on unraveling the past. How did you come to land upon this particular structure as a means of telling the story of this family? Was there a lot of trial and error involved?
Carolyn: Oh boy! Was there ever! At one point, I had the present-day sections in past tense, and the flashbacks in present tense, which was incredibly counterintuitive but for some reason that’s how I’d decided to write it. The entire story was also originally in third person, but then I tried switching a chapter that just wasn’t working to first person and it came alive for me, so I experimented with changing a few others to see what would happen. I kept the flashbacks in third person to create a bit of a remove and to separate them stylistically from the present-day storyline and there were many moments where I questioned everything I was doing.
4. Your work, for me, feels very rooted in the tradition of the Southern Ontario Gothic, a term coined by Timothy Findley in an interview with Graham Gibson. I generally think of this subgenre as a combining some number of the usual characteristics of gothic literature with a strong sense of regional place and stark literary realism in order to explore the dark underside of ordinary, domestic life in small town or rural Ontario— what the Oxford Companion to Canadian Literature refers to as "the merciless forces of Perfectionism, Propriety, Presbyterianism, and Prudence”—forces which seem particularly powerful in Sins of the Daughter. Was this tradition something that you consciously drew from in crafting this book?
Carolyn: No, but I would love to think that was the case! It sounds so much more impressive than “I tried to figure out a way to tell the story I wanted to tell.” Edith’s character, in particular, is shaped by the forces you just described, and the after-effects of those forces are felt keenly by each subsequent generation. I was 100% intrigued by the notion of the sins of one generation being visited on the next, as evidenced by the title! I originally wanted to call it The Sins of the Mother, but that title was already taken by Danielle Steel.
5. Your previous book debuted during the height of the pandemic. Acknowledging that Covid is by no means over, we do seem to be in a different place now then we were during your last launch. I can’t even tell you how excited I am that you are getting to do an in person launch this time, at the wonderful Different Drummer bookstore in Burlington, ON. I have it marked in my calendar in big block letters with many exclamation marks! What are you excited for this time around? Were there any surprising silver linings to launching during the pandemic?
Attending the launch of Carolyn’s debut novel, The Good Son, was a bright spot during those dark pandemic months.
Carolyn: I am excited for the chance to celebrate the launch of this book in proper celebration style - with food and people and music. I dreamed of what the launch party would be like for my first novel, and then it ended up being me alone in my office in front of a computer, which was about as anticlimactic as it gets. The one silver lining in that scenario was that people could attend from across the country (or from the other side of the world), but it was by no means a party. A Different Drummer Books is such a beautiful bookstore and there are so many fun details we have planned to make this launch special. I have already had pre-launch dreams, similar to the back-to-school dreams I have every year as a teacher. Since my launch and the first week of school happen to coincide it will be interesting to see what my brain does with that!
Come meet Carolyn in person at one of her fall events!
6. Our critique group, The Tarts, is made up of 5 women who write pretty different stuff. Sometimes it can be challenging to critique work that falls outside of my areas of experience, but mostly I find it really interesting. What have you learned from working with writers who work in genres different from your own?
Carolyn: Regardless of genre, the feedback we give each other is ultimately about craft and about story. I obviously benefit from the feedback on my own work, but I also feel I take away so much from the feedback given to others because it’s all applicable in a universal sense. I wish every writer was so fortunate as to have a critique group like ours - people who critique your work, but who also champion it and act as cheerleaders when the slogging gets tough.
Above left: Three out five Tarts on our most recent writing retreat squatting on a neighbor's dock in an attempt to get enough enough internet signal to attend a virtual author interview hosted by a forth member, Kayleigh Platz.
Above right: Tart member Robin Lefler is over the moon to receive her copy of Sins of the Daughter. Robin’s own debut, Reasonable Adults, is out this December from Harper Collins Canada, and is available for pre-order now!
7. One thing we tend to do when we meet up IRL is swap books on craft that we have found helpful. What are your all-time favourite writing books, and what tips or techniques have you picked up from them that have made their way into your practice?
Carolyn: Right now, the two books I’m in love with are: Story Genius by Lisa Cron and The Emotion Thesaurus by Angela Ackerman and Becca Puglisi. I’m not a plotter, so my drafts can go off-course in a hurry. Story Genius shows you how to create a blueprint for your novel and I’ve found it inordinately helpful in giving my current WIP some much-needed structure. The Emotion Thesaurus is designed as a brainstorming tool for showing emotion and I would recommend it whole-heartedly to every writer. It has quickly become one of my favourite tools.
8. What does your summer reading and writing life look like? Have you read anything great this summer?
Carolyn: I read a lot in the summer. Well, I read a lot all the time, but in the summer I have the luxury of more free time so I like to stock up on books! I have read so many great things in the past few weeks. A few titles that jump out are: Six of Crows and The Crooked Kingdom by Leigh Bardugo, The Huntress by Kate Quinn, The Sugar Thief by Nancy Mauro, and The Last House on the Street by Diane Chamberlain. I also have more time to write in the summer, which means I don’t have to get up as early, so that’s a nice change, although I almost miss those 5am sessions! Not enough that I’d actually get up at 4:45 in the summer, though.
Carolyn’s writing room, where during the school year she comes to write at 5 am every morning.
9. If you could throw a fantasy dinner party with any 10 guests, who would you invite, and what would you serve?
Carolyn: This is going to be an eclectic bunch. I would invite Kate Morton, Emily Blunt, Kenneth Oppel, Adele, Barack and Michelle Obama, Mitch Marner, Margaret Atwood, Jimmy Fallon, and Sam Heughan (Jamie Fraser from Outlander). It’s not so much that I want to have dinner with any of these people, I just want to meet them, and maybe become friends with them. With that in mind, I have no idea what I’d serve. I can assure you I wouldn’t be doing the cooking, though! I’d have it catered.
10. You're going on a writing retreat and you can only pack tea or wine. Which do you choose?
Carolyn: I’m going to go with tea because I can drink it at any time of day. But I’d be very sad to leave the wine behind.
Like most writers, the Tarts are big proponents of both hot beverages and wine. Carolyn bought us all these amazing mugs to celebrate the launch of her first novel.
