An author interview with Lee Kvern about her new political thriller, Catch You On The Flipside
Great Plains Press’ Angeline Javier sat down with author Lee Kvern to talk about her new novel and top advice for new writers.
Angeline: What inspired you to write Catch You On The Flipside?
Lee: Catch You on The Flipside comes from my experience working in the casinos in my early 20s, for about a decade and a half. I always wanted to write about the casino, but I couldn’t find a hook. Then I started to think about some of the various stories and characters that I worked with at the casino, and it’s just an absolute goldmine.
I started thinking about some of the people that we used to hang out with, and one of the people that came to mind was a friend that immigrated from the Philippines, and we took the same blackjack course together.
We worked together for about two years and were good friends, we all went out for drinks and food and stuff like that. Then one day, just out of the blue, the Attorney General’s office in charge of gaming came in and escorted my friend out ofthe casino.
I’ve never seen him since that day. And of course, we were all shocked. We didn’t know what was going on. And then over the course of time, we started to find out the details. I can’t talk about it too much without giving the book away. But while I was worrying about fighting with my boyfriend at the time who was going to clean the bathtub, my friend was involved in something much more crucial. I think I’ll leave it at that. Yeah. That’s kind of the impetus for the book.
A: The book was inspired by personal experience, but also by historical fact. What did the research for this story look like?
L: This is the first book that I had to do heavy, heavy research on. So it’s unlike all my other books, which are kind of literary fiction. This one is based on historical fact– the People’s Power Movement that happened in the Philippines in 1983 and onward, when the people overthrew the Marcos government.
I had a friend that I was staying with in Vancouver, and we were staying with her, and her parents were living in the Philippines during the Marcos regime.
I interviewed them and I interviewed another couple that were politically active during that time. So, they were just a wealth of information by giving me the sensibility and the fears of the control that Marcos had over the country. And really what a phenomenal movement that the [People’s Power] was.
They also gave me some really awesome books from that period, written from eyewitnesses that were crucial in helping to write this, because of course, I knew nothing.
So the book is a real hybrid of fiction and historical events that actually took place.
This was quite funny when I was staying with my girlfriend in Vancouver, she was going water walking with their parents.
They don’t have that here in Alberta, I haven’t seen it much. But in B.C. it’s big. It’s just a big oval pool, about waist deep and it’s warm. We were water walking with their parents every day. And so once I’d finished writing the book, I asked her parents, my friend and the other couple if they would look at the manuscript and tell me what resonated.
So they looked at the manuscript the night before, and then we were water walking the next day. It was hysterical because there’s me, walking around the Oval and there’s like five people around me telling me all different things about what is working in the book and what is not working. It’s the best critique and critical reading I’ve ever had on a book. It was just in such an unorthodox place, and they were so wonderful and so generous in sharing their experience with me. That for me was the highlight of the whole book.
A: Can you talk about how Catch You On The Flipside is such a timely story right now?
L: Yeah, that’s so bang on. I mean, essentially what happened in the 80s with the People’s Power and the Marcos regime was just the boiling frog syndrome that started off with the seemingly democratic government and then that government started to take control of everything until you have martial law and a dictatorship.
And I mean, that’s so what’s going on right now? Certainly south of us, in the U.S. It’s important to be aware that it’s happened in history. In the Philippines, Marcos’ regime lasted 20 years, and it devastated the country.
I think it’s something we have to pay attention to and something that we have to get loud about. We have to stand up for ourselves as democratic people, before the water starts to boil.
That’s one of the other things that I really enjoyed about writing the book, is the sort of intersectionality of having friends from other countries and other political systems. I mean, how would you ever know that stuff unless you were hanging around with people from outside your own bubble?
A: What would you say to your younger self about your career now?
L: I laughed when you sent me that question because the idea of a career always brings to mind that you get paid for it, right?
I’ve been in this writing game for a long time, for about 30 years. And I guess it’s a career. But what I would tell my younger self is, and it took me a long time to learn this, is to get a regular job, and don’t try and make your art pay for it.
“Don’t try and commodify your art because it’s just so difficult. I mean, you’re always subsidizing yourself.”
Certainly my stress was taken away once I learned that. And so then when I came to my writing, I wasn’t under that pressure to commodify it or to make money from it. I was actually doing it because I wanted to do it and I love to do it.
A: Do you have any tips for writers?
L: This is all from my own experience, and every writer is going to tell you something different. For me, the most important thing was learning my craft.
“I think it’s a mistaken idea that just because you can write a letter, you can write a story.”
I learned that the hard way. I wrote for about ten years, without learning any craft, and just kept getting rejected over and over and over. It wasn’t until I got serious about it and decided I was going to start doing mentorship programs and taking courses and getting together with other writers and workshopping, I started to develop my craft in order to tell a story, to put what was in my head down on a page.
That made all the difference in the world. That’s when I started to get acceptances and published stories. I think that’s one of the biggest tips I would say. It was the same as art college. I mean, for four years, that’s what we did: we learned the craft of art. Writing is no different.
Meet Lee Kvern at Calgary’s WordFest on May 8th. Get your tickets!
