Nancy Baker is the coolest ever. We’ve known her since we were little. Not only are she and her husband Richard the nicest people that ever walked the earth, she is the author of three of the most influential Canadian horror novels of the 90s – about vampires! We are so honoured to feature her here. Please visit her site. Nancy is also family; The House of Pomegranates Press has published a collection of her short stories Discovering Japan, and will be publishing a novella this fall.

Photograph © Sarah Pomegranate

Nancy Baker is the author of 3 novels (The Night Inside, Blood and Chrysanthemums, A Terrible Beauty) and a collection of short fiction (Discovering Japan, from The House of Pomegranates Press). She is currently working, intermittently, on a fantasy novel set in a country like Bhutan (with fairies) and a sugar skull mosaic for the Square Foot Show at the AWOL Gallery. She is mostly just working. You can visit her infrequently updated web site at www.nancybaker.ca.
 

The Pomegranate Questionnaire

 
1. Can you tell us a little about what you do?

My day-to-day work life is spent counting beans, moving beans and trying to figure out how to acquire more beans for the magazine division of a Canadian media company. 
My creative life is spent working on my fourth novel, which is progressing very slowly. Other, more productive creative activities recently include assembling a short story collection for the House of Pomegranates Press and creating a pair of mosaics based on skeleton fish.

2. Why that?

Why beans? Chance and circumstance, mostly. 
Why write? I ask myself that all the time. I’ve done it ever since I was a child and it seems too late to stop now. 
Why mosaics? I took a course for the novel I’m writing. Unlike the oil painting course I took for my third novel (when I was forced to fall back on the Neil Young line “that’s my style, man”), I was actually pleased with my creations so decided to continue on my own. I’ve now done an outdoor cocktail table featuring a flaming heart and the aforementioned dead fish.

3. Does it pay the bills? Does it matter?

One part of it does. I’m glad I don’t have to make a living writing (homelessness might ensue) though one writer friend did tell me that nothing concentrates the creative will like having to pay for roof repairs.

4. What book did you last read?

In and Down, a beautiful, creepy novel by Canadian writer Brett Alexander Savory.

5. What is your idea of prefect happiness?

Sitting by a lake in cottage country with a good book, a martini and my true love.

6. What achievement are you most happy about so far?

Completing my three novels and seeing them published.

7. What is your most treasured possession?

I don’t really have one.

8. Have you swooned in the cinema?

Several times. The first was for Frank Langella in Dracula (dating myself terribly here, I realize). A friend and I actually snuck into the second show without paying because we swooned so much the first time.

9. Do you have a hero?

I joke that I’d sell my soul to be able to write like Patricia McKillip.

10. What is your motto or favourite expression or both?

I’ve been known to quote Buckaroo Banzai (“Laugh while you can, monkey boy”).