Montreal-based author Jocelyn Parr’s debut novel Uncertain Weights and Measures is one of the short-listed nominees for the Governor General’s Literary Award in literary fiction. Parr teaches history at Dawson College, and this is her debut novel.
The novel is based in 1920s Russia, and focuses on Sasha, an artist, and Tatiana, a scientist, who marry after meeting during a bombing. When Tatiana’s mentor suddenly dies, her speculation surrounding the nature of his death threatens her faith in Russian politics, and her relationship with her husband.
The novel was born out of a short story Parr was working on, which she was able to work on as a masters student in the creative writing program at Concordia University. She said the writing process was “an experiment to see if I could write a novel.”
Parr spent around eight years working on the book, balancing it with graduate work in English literature.
“It sounds ridiculous to a lot of people, but I had a lot of free time during my PhD,” Parr said. “So, I was able to work on it and also get an agent who would support it.”
“All that happened very fortuitously,” she added. “I just kept on being propelled forward.”
One of the biggest challenges Parr said she faced was coming up with the form of the story. She had experimented with shorter chapters in the book before deciding to use more a conventional style. She added that she also found it challenging to understand Sasha and Tatiana’s relationship and how to write about it.
For Parr, the lack of written history about post-revolution Russia gave her “a lot of room to move.”
“I think it was more liberating than anything,” she said. “It was nice to have the room to create fictional characters to go in as I wanted basically.”
According to Parr, there is a difference between writing about history and using it as inspiration, as she felt she wasn’t “beholden to a bigger kind of narrative.”
“I was really interested in what it feels like to live in history, which isn’t the same thing as writing about history,” Parr said. “When you write a historical piece, you’re trying to capture generally speaking, a whole story, a complete picture of a time.”
For Parr, the recognition she has received so far for her debut novel “means a lot.”
“It’s so wonderful to think that a thing I’ve worked on for eight years will have an audience,” she said. “It feels very, very rewarding.”
Parr’s future projects include a non-fiction work about the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. She dubs it an “account of her family’s manifestation of settler colonialism.”
Parr’s family comes from New Zealand, and she said the work will explore their identity as settlers and the oppression of Indigenous peoples.
As for the nomination for the Governor General’s award, she said she wasn’t sure she would ever publish the book, let alone be nominated for literary prizes.
“I was maybe deluded, but I didn’t think of myself as the kind of person who gets to publish a book,” she said. “So, it’s been a big shift in my thinking.”
“To have it be nominated is just mind-blowing,” she added.
