Brooke Lockyer earned a BA from Barnard College in New York City, and an MA in English in the Field of Creative Writing from the University of Toronto. The winner of a Hart House Literary Contest, she was also the co-recipient of the Peter S. Prescott and Lenore Marshall Barnard prizes for prose. Her work has been published in Toronto Life, carte blanche, Hart House Review and Geist.
Her debut novel, Burr, is set in a fictional small town that is a composite of various locales where she grew up in southwestern Ontario. The novel combines the coming-of-age story of protagonist Jane with an exploration of the nature of grief, spurred by the death of Jane’s father at the age of 39. Lockyer drew on her own experience of losing her father to a fatal heart attack, channeling that experience into the book’s main theme of “trying to maintain a relationship with the ones we love when they aren’t alive anymore.”
The story is told from three different perspectives, including that of Meredith, Jane’s mother, and Ernest, the town outcast. Lockyer added magical realist elements to Meredith’s story, including a bedroom in the woods that Meredith furnished with her dead husband’s belongings. Lockyer also used this character to explore her own “life-shattering” experience of early motherhood, “and the unexpected melancholy that accompanied my overwhelming joy.” Lockyer admits to being untethered from reality after her dad died and this feeling of living in a waking dream is reinforced in the novel’s tapestry of creative imagery and sensuous language, an alternate landscape set against a backdrop of musical references that hint at the role music plays in Lockyer’s creative process. Burr pierces your defenses with vivid, powerful writing that ultimately reassures that there is a way back after loss.
You’ve written a very memorable coming-of-age novel but one that also incorporates remarkable gothic elements and magical realism. Can you tell us a bit about the inspiration behind the novel?
Burr was born of grief and a love for my dad, who died of a massive heart attack when I was 23.
Although I was a decade older than my protagonist Jane, I drew from my experience to write from her grieving point of view. For me, Burr is about trying to maintain a relationship with the ones we love when they aren’t alive anymore. It’s about how we carry our prickly grief.
I was untethered from reality after my dad died, so the magical realism came naturally. And I’ve always gravitated towards the Gothic. As a kid, I devoured the work of Edgar Allan Poe, Daphne DuMaurier, and Roald Dahl. I dressed-up as a witch for five years in a row— not just on Halloween.
Which writers have influenced you?
Toni Morrison was a revelation to me, and I’ll forever be haunted by Shirley Jackson’s We Have Always Lived in the Castle.
For Burr, Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking was influential in the way it engages with the absurd logic that accompanies grief. Claudia Dey’s debut Stunt with its search for the father and fantastical elements (sisters who double in age over night! Postcards from outer space!) was an exciting discovery too. Late in the editing process, an encounter with Alice Munro’s masterful short story “Carried Away,” inspired me to play with time in the final chapter voiced by the town of Burr.
The novel is told from three different perspectives, which gives it a richness and three-dimensionality that sometimes eludes coming-of-age novels written in the first person only. How did you decide to use multiple narrators and how did you choose which narrators to use?
The novel originally began with Jane’s voice, and she’s the only character whose sections are in the first person. I wanted the reader to feel intimately connected to her. For me, first-person narration somehow suits nascent adolescence best.
For Ernest, third-person narration allowed me to zoom out and show just beyond his perspective when I needed to. I wanted to give Ernest a voice because people like him often aren’t heard or seen.
Third-person narration also complemented the fairytale elements of Meredith’s journey. I have an affinity for imperfect female characters, so that’s why I initially made Jane’s mother a narrator. After having my first child, Meredith became a way for me to explore my own life-shattering experience of early motherhood, and the unexpected melancholy that accompanied my overwhelming joy.
One of the novel’s most remarkable is Ernest, a misfit with a rich inner life, and a kind spirit and gentleness that has survived years of isolation and institutionalization as well as the death of his 9-year-old sister Evelyn. What was your inspiration for this character?
Ernest began as an image of a man who slept with the dead body of a young girl.
He changed as I wrote him. In the beginning, he was more predatory, but I wasn’t comfortable inhabiting that point-of-view. Eventually, I realized I could make him someone I did want to care about: somewhat innocent and childlike, trapped in an old body and the assumptions people project onto him. True predators are usually not the town weirdos, anyway. Unfortunately, they are often the people we trust, that we open our homes and hearts to.
Ernest has some Boo Radley in him, possibly a result of studying To Kill a Mockingbird at a formative age. I put some of myself in him too. Like Ernest, I love graveyard blues, wild cats, developing photographs, and being a loner sometimes. I am also dreamy and can be easily overstimulated by bright lights and sounds. In Grade 7 and 8, my best friend and I used to go into a sort of trance at our local indoor shopping centre. We dubbed it “mall mode.” One time, we unwittingly (and mortifyingly) attempted to go up the down escalator.
The novel, in many ways, is an exploration of grief. What is it like writing about grief, from three perspectives?
The year my father died, everything was tinged by my grief. Later, I had to access those acute feelings of loss again to finish the story. Writing Burr was sometimes heavy and painful, but cathartic too. It helped me work through some of my feelings and questions about death.
Having multiple perspectives enabled me to incorporate other losses too, like loss of innocence, loss of friendship, and the loss of independence that comes with new parenthood.
All of your characters have rich back stories, and secrets from one another. There’s a sense that you know each of your characters extremely well, even without their entire biographies appearing on the page. What writing methods did you use to explore your characters so fully?
When I’m writing something new, I usually start with an image and listen for the voice. The voice reveals the character to me. Later, I fill in the gaps. In the case of Burr, I thought about the music the characters listened to, the types of movies and books they preferred, how they dressed, their bedrooms, the childhood memories that haunted them.
I naturally write in bursts so short chapters made sense to me. I also wanted to convey that these characters, especially at the beginning, are sealed off from each other. I wanted islands of text on the page. I wanted the form to reflect how they are isolated.
I cut a lot of back story too. When I attended Sage Hill’s fiction colloquium in 2022, our teacher Marina Endicott said something consoling about big cuts. She told us that the deleted parts are still there. The detailed histories, the tangential action obsessed over for weeks, were not necessarily a waste of time to write. Even if the reader cannot see them, cut passages often enrich the pages that remain.
The music references scattered throughout Burr add a layer of sensory detail that sings and soars. Is music a big part of your life? Are there specific artists or songs that you like to listen to when you write?
I’m glad you enjoyed those references. I’ve always been extremely inspired by music. I read CD booklets obsessively as a kid, copying my favourite lyrics in my notebook. I was empowered by Hole’s rage and fascinated by Tori Amos’ strange dream logic. I wanted to direct music videos when I grew up.
Music is still a huge part of my life and creative process. It helps strike a mood and anchor me to the fictional world I’m building. I need headphones and a soundscape to buffer me from real life intrusions. I listen to French minimalist musician Colleen obsessively. She sings in a hushed voice, if she sings at all. I find her albums enchanting.
I also make playlists for the longer pieces I’m writing. If they are too distractingly fun to be my writing soundtracks, I play them during other parts of my days— washing the dishes, or getting ready to meet a friend. My Burr playlist has lots of graveyard blues music and Siouxsie and the Banshees songs, as well as some anachronistic numbers that fit the vibe, by artists like Beach House and Timber Timbre.
I played classical piano for many years and one of my favourite aspects of writing is listening for the music in the line.
Allowing the town of Burr to tell its story, as if it were a character, brings the setting to life. There is a sinister tone that permeates the sections about Burr. How important is setting to you as a writer, and did you experiment with different ways of evoking the town?
Setting and atmosphere are very important to me. I try to make my stories as vivid and cinematic as I can. I love including sensory detail.
I turned to Kathryn Davis’ polyphonic novel The Thin Place when I was trying to figure out Burr’s structure, and I was immediately enthralled by its setting. The book has such a deep and unique engagement with the natural world. There are even chapters narrated by beavers and lichen! Inspired by Davis’ radical points-of-view, I decided to write chapters narrated by the fictional Southwestern Ontario town of Burr itself. These chapters are at times a chorus of suspicious whispers, and at other times a place for quieter, overlooked moments.
What was the most satisfying part of writing Burr?
Writing, when it’s going really, really well (which is rare!), can be like a séance, where I feel like I’m channeling voices. As I wrote and edited this book, I sometimes felt my dad near.
I find the act of reading magical too— conjuring whole worlds from black marks on a page.
What projects do you hope to turn to next?
One of my daughters is a Caulbearer, which means she was born with her amniotic sac stretched over her face. When she emerged, she resembled a robber in pantyhose. My British midwife was delighted and claimed my daughter would never drown. In Victorian times, preserved cauls were sold to sailors as talismans. Later, I discovered that in parts of Eastern Europe, it’s believed that unless you feed the child their dried caul by their 7th birthday, they will eventually turn into a vampire!
My current fiction project is about a precocious Caulbearer who is grappling with these opposing prophecies, as well as her parents’ divorce. The novel is set in London, Ontario. Caulbearer is strange and feral, but also, I hope, darkly funny.