Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, November 27, 1994 TAG: 9411180053
SECTION: CURRENT PAGE: NRV-14 EDITION: NEW RIVER VALLEY
SOURCE: KENNETH SINGLETARY STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: BLACKSBURG LENGTH: Medium
After five years of writing and major revisions, her first novel, "Candyman," was printed last month by Oberon, a Canadian publisher. It's an autobiographical tale of a French-Canadian family whose father looses his government job and at 57 is forced to become a candy peddlar in Halifax, Nova Scotia, in the 1950s. Trapped in an anachronistic profession, Charles LeBlanc can no longer provide the life his children need and the romance his wife, 24 years younger than him, wants.
Poirier-Bures' experience writing her novel mirrored that of LeBlanc. She stuck with it, in much the same way that he stays with his luckless job in her novel. In her case, however, her luck has recently changed.
After earning master's degrees in English from the University of New Brunswick and in creative writing from Hollins College, she published her first short story in 1987. Since then, she has had a string of acceptances throughout the United State and Canada, along the way winning prizes for her fiction and non-fiction. Her work has been included in three anthologies.
She is at work on a second novel, also set in Nova Scotia, and Oberon is scheduled to publish next fall a memoir of her experiences teaching in Crete.
"Candyman" started as a memoir of her upbringing in a working-class French-Canadian family in Halifax, but 90 pages into it, Poirier-Bures knew she needed to fictionalize it.
"It seemed dead, like something I wrote for myself," she said in her third-floor office in Williams Hall recently. It was "pieces of experience that had no shape. If you're going to write a memoir or fiction, the material has to be shaped."
Writing, she said, has to "point to some sort of meaning."
What she's come up with is a novel "about change, family love, about a time that's gone, about being different than the dominant culture ... I think it's a human story ... It's a story that could take place anywhere."
Originally, "Candyman" was a series of short stories that she published separately. But when she tried to combine them into a novel, she ran into problems.
Twenty American publishers rejected it. Oberon agreed to print it, but only after major cuts for the sake of coherency.
"The narrative had a fragmented quality to it," said Dilshad Engineer, the Oberon editor who accepted the manuscript, in a telephone interview from Ottawa.
Poirier-Bures "was extremely helpful. She was an editor's dream. She did not resist changes or suggestions."
The book is "fairly evocative of a particular place and a particular class of family. It evokes a time and a period that not very many people know about now," Engineer said.
Having it coincide with my 50th birthday takes the sting out of turning 50, which is traumatic to most people ... If this is what it means to turn 50, that's fine with me.
"I really feel like it's been a flowering for me. I feel like I'm just getting started.
by CNB