It’s a snoozer of a read for her, but not for me. Sloane, an ancestor of the book’s main character, Ali. This fictional book, A History of Fog in the Bay of Fundy, is written by Percival T. My solution? The Copycat would have a book within a book. I also wanted my readers to realize that the fog has always been causing problems for this city, not just for Ali. In the end, I think I veered more into the Farley Mowat Lost in the Barrens territory, a book which had a huge impact on me growing up, because the villain is mostly the wilderness and winter weather. I wanted my fog to stay mysterious and unknowable all the way through the book. In early drafts of the book, I contemplated allowing the fog more of a storytelling role, like the tree in Katherine Applegate’s fantastic Wishtree, but in the end, I decided against it. It’s interesting, having a character that is omnipresent and wreaks so much havoc, and yet doesn’t actually say anything.
When the fog descends over the City for days on end in the story, it has a remarkable effect on my main character, Ali: she is suddenly a Copycat, able to change into any living thing. When I remembered Carl Sandburg’s poem about fog, I knew that fog was as important to the story as all of the human characters: Saint John citizens may rail against it from time to time, but it is romantic and moody and mysterious, and I couldn’t write a book set in the city without casting fog as a central character. If you’ve ever visited Saint John, you will be well aware of its reputation as a very foggy place. My most recent middle grade novel, The Copycat, takes place in Saint John, New Brunswick. But weather has always fascinated me, and as our climate increasingly plays a critical role in society’s existence, it is safe to assume that pathetic fallacy will be alive and well for years to come. I admit it: I was not a sophisticated story teller in those days. For years afterwards, the school stories I passed in to my middle grade teachers were sure to have rain in the sad parts or take place on dark and stormy nights when something frightening was about to happen to a character (See: A Wrinkle in Time). You know: ascribing human emotions to nature in order to give the reader a sense of mood or a hint of what is to come.
I remember the first time I heard about the use of pathetic fallacy in literature. Welcome to Cantastic Authorpalooza, featuring posts by and about great Canadian children’s writers! Today’s guest: Wendy McLeod MacKnight.
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