Poet, fictioneer, and professor, Aaron Kreuter, is delving into his first fiction novel with Lake Burntshore. It will be out with ECW Press on April 22.
Lake Burntshore is narrated in the third person, and focuses on the staff and surrounding peoples living within the tight community of Camp Burntshore during the summer of 2013. With a protagonist in Ruby, the narrator dives between characters and relationships like the swim staff dive effortlessly into the water. However, trouble begins after camp life is threatened when five staff are fired within the first week. The fired staff are replaced by five Israeli soldiers, which causes the camp to consider the conflict in the Middle East and its parallels to the neighbouring Indigenous land. Throughout their eventful summer of 2013—the soldiers’ arrival, romantic entanglements, and marijuana hijinks—Ruby and her peers struggle to identify exactly what it is that makes Jewish summer camp a life-altering experience.
During the course of an hour, I spoke with Kreuter over the phone about his inspiration, and writing process. While Kreuter’s and my exciting conversation about maps didn’t make the cut for this interview, it is worth mentioning that Lake Burntshore begins with two detailed and cogent maps that help readers live alongside the characters and campers at Kreuter’s fictional Camp Burntshore.
In Lake Burntshore, there are moments when the narrator speaks with certainty and then there are other times when the narrator speaks with a sense of discovery. How strict are you with the rules of omnipotence regarding the narrator’s learning?
It depends on what’s going on in the novel. Different chapters have different structures and textures to them. There’s the chapter early on called “Ruby/Stolow,” which is from their two perspectives. Other times the narrator does change points of view. In all of my writing, I’m obsessed with community and belonging. As anyone who spent time at sleepover camp knows, the four to eight weeks you’re there, it becomes a sort of micro society.
I have a theory that writers write through a lineage of who they grew up reading. Your characters read widely, from books by Mordecai Richler to Ursula K Le Guin. Which books or authors most heavily influenced you when creating Lake Burntshore?
I didn’t discover Le Guin until my mid or late 20s and, when I did, she completely changed my life, not only because of the way she writes but in the way she imagines other possibilities. Le Guin embodies in her novels the idea that a better world is possible, a different world is possible. When I read Le Guin, it suffuses my body and mind with how we can live differently and better in an ethical sense. I hope my novel could have that effect on readers as well. Le Guin has this famous line that all human power can be resisted by humans. I think that’s a beautiful way of looking at it. I see it in her, in her fiction, and is definitely one thing I want to try and do with my own fiction.
A lot of Ruby’s favourite authors happen to be authors I also deeply love, especially Le Guin and Mordecai Richler. I definitely see myself writing in conversation with Richler who is, to my mind, still the foremost chronicler and satirist of the Canadian Jewish experience. The other two books Ruby has with her at camp are the collected works of Grace Paley, the anarchist feminist, Jewish American short story writer and poet; and work by Frantz Fanon, which speaks to her politics.
You craft a musical in the novel called Tel Aviv! Can you tell me more about it?
In the world of the novel there’s a very famous and successful play called Tel Aviv! It is a musical dramatization of Theodore Herzl’s fascinating novel The Old New Land, which imagines a thriving Jewish collective in Palestine from the vantage point of 1902. Tel Aviv! is sort of like the Zionist Hamilton. The staff put on a version of Tel Aviv! in the novel. Inventing this play, and imagining how it functions in the Jewish diasporic world really allowed me to look at themes of ideology and belief and the power of art to confirm or sway ideology and belief.
How would you define the narrative of Lake Burntshore, and what is your overall opinion on the concept and essentiality of plot?
One of the ways that the narrative manifests in the novel is that it takes place over a single summer, so the novel is temporally, and geographically, bounded by those eight weeks. I knew from the very beginning I wanted the novel to be in two basic parts, which mirrors or parallels the two traditional sessions of a Jewish summer camp. Did you catch that both parts have 18 chapters?
Oh my gosh, I didn’t.
That’s part of the plot too, the structure of the novel. From my camp experience, there’s always a difference between the first session and second session. And I sort of wanted to bring that into the narrative. Tom, the camp owner, actually thinks about that, he thinks about how the second session is sort of smaller and looser and more informal. I wanted that in the plot too. I see two main movements in the narrative. First is the inciting incident where more staff than normal get kicked out for smoking pot and Brett, Tom’s son, convinces Tom to bring in five Israeli soldiers to act as counsellors and staff (which happens at a fair number of summer camps throughout Canada and the U.S.). And so that change of having these Israeli soldiers at camp, we’ll be seeing how Ruby, who’s anti-Zionist and an activist at her university, is unsure and unhappy with how that’s going to affect the camp. Then coming to the fore of the narrative in the second half is Brett’s plan to buy 10,000 acres of the Crown land around the lake for the camp, which, by rights, is the traditional territory of the Black Spruce Anishinaabe First Nation, who lives next door. Ruby attempts to stop that from happening.
I’d like to ask you more about Ruby’s relationship with her best friend Seema. In the letter Ruby writes to her she lists the reasons she will miss camp: “The stories, the myths, the rituals, the rhythms . . .The meals . . . The sense of unified purpose . . . Hanging out with your cabin after dinner, the cool night air, anything and everything possible.”
That quote is from when Ruby apologizes to Seema, who’s Palestinian, for some tensions that they had as pen pals throughout the novel. I think it’s really important that Ruby, this young Jewish Canadian, is describing this phenomenon, Jewish summer camp, to her Palestinian best friend through letters.
Thinking about the above quote, when writing a book, one lives with the characters, and some characters do stay with us forever, but never as fiercely as when one is in the process of writing. What do you miss most about being in the process of writing Lake Burntshore?
I miss a lot of it. I miss that summer, the summer of 2013 on Lake Burntshore, this place that I half made up from experiences and also from what I’ve read and seen—just being on this journey of discovery and activism and the fighting for what you think is right, which is what Ruby and Etai do in the novel. I talk a lot to my students about the concept of novel vision, which is when you’re so deep into working on a longer fictional project that everything in your life, everything you see and experience and read, gets filtered through the novel. This is my sixth book, but it's my first novel, and I really, truly experienced that novel vision, where my whole life was subsumed by the novel and by this camp. I'll definitely miss that. I'll definitely miss thinking up different ways of describing the lake and its moods. Having characters interact in different ways, in different parts of the geography of the camp. In fact, I haven’t truly left the camp or these characters behind because the project I'm working on now (and I'm almost finished) is a cycle of short stories that exists in the Lake Burntshore universe. Some of the stories have characters from the novel. Others have an entirely new cast of characters. But since I finished the novel, I’m still moving in the world. I wasn’t fully ready to let go of the characters yet.
This interview has been edited for clarity and length.
Poet, fictioneer, and professor, Aaron Kreuter, is delving into his first fiction novel with Lake Burntshore. It will be out with ECW Press on April 22.
Lake Burntshore is narrated in the third person, and focuses on the staff and surrounding peoples living within the tight community of Camp Burntshore during the summer of 2013. With a protagonist in Ruby, the narrator dives between characters and relationships like the swim staff dive effortlessly into the water. However, trouble begins after camp life is threatened when five staff are fired within the first week. The fired staff are replaced by five Israeli soldiers, which causes the camp to consider the conflict in the Middle East and its parallels to the neighbouring Indigenous land. Throughout their eventful summer of 2013—the soldiers’ arrival, romantic entanglements, and marijuana hijinks—Ruby and her peers struggle to identify exactly what it is that makes Jewish summer camp a life-altering experience.
During the course of an hour, I spoke with Kreuter over the phone about his inspiration, and writing process. While Kreuter’s and my exciting conversation about maps didn’t make the cut for this interview, it is worth mentioning that Lake Burntshore begins with two detailed and cogent maps that help readers live alongside the characters and campers at Kreuter’s fictional Camp Burntshore.
In Lake Burntshore, there are moments when the narrator speaks with certainty and then there are other times when the narrator speaks with a sense of discovery. How strict are you with the rules of omnipotence regarding the narrator’s learning?
It depends on what’s going on in the novel. Different chapters have different structures and textures to them. There’s the chapter early on called “Ruby/Stolow,” which is from their two perspectives. Other times the narrator does change points of view. In all of my writing, I’m obsessed with community and belonging. As anyone who spent time at sleepover camp knows, the four to eight weeks you’re there, it becomes a sort of micro society.
I have a theory that writers write through a lineage of who they grew up reading. Your characters read widely, from books by Mordecai Richler to Ursula K Le Guin. Which books or authors most heavily influenced you when creating Lake Burntshore?
I didn’t discover Le Guin until my mid or late 20s and, when I did, she completely changed my life, not only because of the way she writes but in the way she imagines other possibilities. Le Guin embodies in her novels the idea that a better world is possible, a different world is possible. When I read Le Guin, it suffuses my body and mind with how we can live differently and better in an ethical sense. I hope my novel could have that effect on readers as well. Le Guin has this famous line that all human power can be resisted by humans. I think that’s a beautiful way of looking at it. I see it in her, in her fiction, and is definitely one thing I want to try and do with my own fiction.
A lot of Ruby’s favourite authors happen to be authors I also deeply love, especially Le Guin and Mordecai Richler. I definitely see myself writing in conversation with Richler who is, to my mind, still the foremost chronicler and satirist of the Canadian Jewish experience. The other two books Ruby has with her at camp are the collected works of Grace Paley, the anarchist feminist, Jewish American short story writer and poet; and work by Frantz Fanon, which speaks to her politics.
You craft a musical in the novel called Tel Aviv! Can you tell me more about it?
In the world of the novel there’s a very famous and successful play called Tel Aviv! It is a musical dramatization of Theodore Herzl’s fascinating novel The Old New Land, which imagines a thriving Jewish collective in Palestine from the vantage point of 1902. Tel Aviv! is sort of like the Zionist Hamilton. The staff put on a version of Tel Aviv! in the novel. Inventing this play, and imagining how it functions in the Jewish diasporic world really allowed me to look at themes of ideology and belief and the power of art to confirm or sway ideology and belief.
How would you define the narrative of Lake Burntshore, and what is your overall opinion on the concept and essentiality of plot?
One of the ways that the narrative manifests in the novel is that it takes place over a single summer, so the novel is temporally, and geographically, bounded by those eight weeks. I knew from the very beginning I wanted the novel to be in two basic parts, which mirrors or parallels the two traditional sessions of a Jewish summer camp. Did you catch that both parts have 18 chapters?
Oh my gosh, I didn’t.
That’s part of the plot too, the structure of the novel. From my camp experience, there’s always a difference between the first session and second session. And I sort of wanted to bring that into the narrative. Tom, the camp owner, actually thinks about that, he thinks about how the second session is sort of smaller and looser and more informal. I wanted that in the plot too. I see two main movements in the narrative. First is the inciting incident where more staff than normal get kicked out for smoking pot and Brett, Tom’s son, convinces Tom to bring in five Israeli soldiers to act as counsellors and staff (which happens at a fair number of summer camps throughout Canada and the U.S.). And so that change of having these Israeli soldiers at camp, we’ll be seeing how Ruby, who’s anti-Zionist and an activist at her university, is unsure and unhappy with how that’s going to affect the camp. Then coming to the fore of the narrative in the second half is Brett’s plan to buy 10,000 acres of the Crown land around the lake for the camp, which, by rights, is the traditional territory of the Black Spruce Anishinaabe First Nation, who lives next door. Ruby attempts to stop that from happening.
I’d like to ask you more about Ruby’s relationship with her best friend Seema. In the letter Ruby writes to her she lists the reasons she will miss camp: “The stories, the myths, the rituals, the rhythms . . .The meals . . . The sense of unified purpose . . . Hanging out with your cabin after dinner, the cool night air, anything and everything possible.”
That quote is from when Ruby apologizes to Seema, who’s Palestinian, for some tensions that they had as pen pals throughout the novel. I think it’s really important that Ruby, this young Jewish Canadian, is describing this phenomenon, Jewish summer camp, to her Palestinian best friend through letters.
Thinking about the above quote, when writing a book, one lives with the characters, and some characters do stay with us forever, but never as fiercely as when one is in the process of writing. What do you miss most about being in the process of writing Lake Burntshore?
I miss a lot of it. I miss that summer, the summer of 2013 on Lake Burntshore, this place that I half made up from experiences and also from what I’ve read and seen—just being on this journey of discovery and activism and the fighting for what you think is right, which is what Ruby and Etai do in the novel. I talk a lot to my students about the concept of novel vision, which is when you’re so deep into working on a longer fictional project that everything in your life, everything you see and experience and read, gets filtered through the novel. This is my sixth book, but it's my first novel, and I really, truly experienced that novel vision, where my whole life was subsumed by the novel and by this camp. I'll definitely miss that. I'll definitely miss thinking up different ways of describing the lake and its moods. Having characters interact in different ways, in different parts of the geography of the camp. In fact, I haven’t truly left the camp or these characters behind because the project I'm working on now (and I'm almost finished) is a cycle of short stories that exists in the Lake Burntshore universe. Some of the stories have characters from the novel. Others have an entirely new cast of characters. But since I finished the novel, I’m still moving in the world. I wasn’t fully ready to let go of the characters yet.
This interview has been edited for clarity and length.