In 1993, a single mother was stabbed 31 times in her home in St. John’s, while her children slept just steps away, in their rooms. The brutal murder, as well as the botched police investigation and mistrial that followed, shook the city. Meanwhile, a young writer, fascinated by the story, pored over court transcripts, intending to turn them into a book in the style of Truman Capote. Then he put the book down.
In most cases, a novel should not need a foreword to justify its own creation. The work should speak for itself. Yet The Death of Donna Whalen isn’t like most books, and as the only slightly less young Michael Winter — now the author of six books, including The Big Why and The Architects Are Here — explains in his foreword, a book unlike other books requires its own construction. Donna Whalen certainly has its own innovative form. A collage cut entirely from the author’s stack of court documents, the novel is a seething portrait of class, violence, and human frailty. The Varsity sat down with Winter over chips and gravy to discuss documentary fiction and the problems with Truman Capote’s voice.
THE VARSITY
So, how’s the book been received?
MICHAEL WINTER
Well, so far, it’s had a tremendously powerful reception in Newfoundland, which was… [laughs nervously]
THE VARSITY
Were you worried about that?
MICHAEL WINTER
Yeah! That’s a big relief. And now we’ll just see if it has legs and if it has universal appeal. Can people read this anywhere and go, ‘Yes, that’s an interesting book. It’s a weird community, what a strange thing.’ But also at the same time, ‘This happens here, maybe,’ or ‘It doesn’t happen here, but I’m glad to have visited that place. And I feel like having a shower now after reading all this.’ [laughs]
THE VARSITY
How old were you when the murder happened?
MICHAEL WINTER
I was 28. So in my thirties I had the transcripts and I was trying to write it. I wanted to write like Truman Capote, like, ‘Come to my city where this thing happened. This is my sense of my city and what’s going on’—like that kind of voice. And it was good, except what I was saying was: ‘Oh yeah, somebody was murdered here, and her family’s still alive and all that, but I want you to be entertained by my graphic description of what happened to her.’ And I just felt like, I don’t want to do that. I don’t want to profit from her death.
The other thing too was, even though that story was good, it didn’t seem to be as good as the [transcript] material just on the page. Reading on the page, it was plugged in, it was so alive.
THE VARSITY
What was it that made you pick it up again, since you put it down after trying the Capote thing?
[pullquote]It was good, except what I was saying was ‘Somebody was murdered here, but I want you to be entertained by my graphic description of what happened to her.’ I don’t want to do that.[/pullquote]
MICHAEL WINTER
I read a book by Nancy Lemann, who’s a southern journalist. She wrote a book in the late ’80s called The Ritz of the Bayou, which was her covering a trial of the Governor of Louisiana—what was happening, what was being said—and it had a lot of her in it, but at the same time, the testimony of characters was coming up, and I don’t know Louisiana at all, but the characters, when they were talking, I could see them. She didn’t describe them, but I could visualize them. And I thought, ‘That’s a way into this material.’ I thought, ‘Why don’t I just use that? I’ll just use that—keep me out of it. All I’ll do is shape it and curate my way to a book, and say, “Reader, come, look what I’ve found. It’s over here. It’s not me. It’s here.” And that way, I’m not receiving praise. I’m just saying, ‘This is going on in every court in the land. These stories.’ And it’s kind of fascinating and gripping and unconventional in its form, and yet as satisfying, I hope, as a regular, conventional novel. That’s what I’m gunning for. And I think Southern writers and Newfoundland writers have a lot in common.
THE VARSITY
How so?
MICHAEL WINTER
Our development economically is similar to the South, we have a deep tradition of oral story telling, and a good sense of humour, and being economically deprived. I think the rise of attention of Atlantic Canadian fiction, and Newfoundland in particular, is directly associated with the kind of attention we give Southern writers and writers from the Mississippi—that rural, Faulknerian kind of heritage is in Newfoundland as well. We’re in no way linked by history, but by geography and circumstance and [being] economic hinterland areas, we’ve developed in a literary way in a similar way.
[pullquote]The rule was I wouldn’t add any words.[/pullquote]
THE VARSITY
You mention Faulkner in your foreword to the book.
MICHAEL WINTER
Yeah, As I Lay Dying. Every chapter is a different character telling the story from their point of view. And again, hardly any context—‘Oh, I guess they’re bringing somebody to get well on a wagon, and somebody has cement on their broken leg.’ The reader has to fill in the gaps in what’s going on. The same with the Spoon River Anthology, the Edgar Lee Masters poems: it’s this testimony of characters from a village of horrible things that have gone on. It’s like, ‘I don’t know where this town is, or who these people are, but, my god, it’s magnetic! I want to keep reading.’ And I mention the D.H. Lawrence quote: ‘A story that’s not a copy of other books needs its own construction.’ And that applied to this form in the book, too.
THE VARSITY
So how did it work putting it together, then? If not a word is your own.
MICHAEL WINTER
Yeah, that was the rule: I wouldn’t add any words. So as I went through my five-foot stack of transcripts, I would highlight things that I found interesting—how somebody said something. In a court trial, before a trial has a jury, all the evidence is presented in front of the judge and the crown prosecutor and the defence attorney. They interview all the witnesses. So they go through this dry run of the court to see what people have to say. If somebody says, ‘Oh, then I heard her stabbed,’ and that’s all they say in the voir dire and then on trial says, ‘And then she was stabbed, and I heard her say—’ So there’s these repetitions, and yet they’re different. And so I would decide, well, I’m not going to have both—that would be boring. So I have the best of what this witness says, and I might take half of a sentence here and a third of it here and put it together, so it’s not exactly what she said, but she did say both things. I haven’t added a word, but contorted it in the hopes of making a slimmer novel that’s readable.
DAVID PIKE/THE VARSITY
THE VARSITY
You’ve described your novel as a ‘documentary fiction.’ What do you mean by that?
MICHAEL WINTER
This is my sixth book, and when I started writing, I started writing short stories. I’m not very imaginative in the end. I’m interested in how people eat chips, let’s say, how and can I describe that in an interesting way. So I’m like a painter trying to paint a still life. I’m not imagining the fruit—the fruit is in front of me. And of course a painting of a bowl of fruit is interesting to only me and my mother—nobody else cares—so I have to figure out how do I make this bowl of fruit interesting to you? How will she go, ‘Wow, that’s a great bowl of fruit!’ So I’ve learned, in using autobiographical material, to cultivate it in a way that a stranger will like it. I’ve gotten that cold distance from the material to know what someone who doesn’t know anything about my life will still like this story, and yet it’s autobiographical in its roots.
[pullquote]I’m like a painter trying to paint a still life. I have to figure out how do I make this bowl of fruit interesting to you?[/pullquote]
So I’ve done that in various forms for a number of books. This time I thought, ‘Well, can I apply that same technique to found material?’ Instead of the real world—I didn’t witness the murder, what happened that night, I just have these affidavits from people, these testimonies—can I apply this kind of interest to that material and present it to you. So in that way, it’s like a documentary, it’s found footage, it’s cinema-vérité, and I’m cutting a film out of this raw footage that’s been presented to me. And I didn’t shoot it. So in that way, it’s a documentary, and yet, as my publisher said when she read the first draft, she said, ‘My God, I can’t believe you didn’t write this. This sounds just like the way you write.’ Which I had not thought of at all. I was reading it, and I thought, ‘Oh yeah, she’s right.’ What I’d done was, out of 3 million words, I found 80,000 that sound like me. And if you went in there and wrote your book, you’d find a completely different book than mine, and it would sound like you. It’s both a fiction and it’s based on documents, and I’ve put the two together.
[pullquote]Out of 3 million words, I found 80,000 that sound like me. And if you went in there and wrote your book, you’d find a completely different book than mine.[/pullquote]
THE VARSITY
The perspective in the novel has a lot of the hallmarks of an omniscient narrator, in that it’s in the third person and we get these intimate details of these people’s lives, but that perspective turns out to be untrustworthy. We might be used to the idea of an untrustworthy narrator, but not from this point of view. What was the significance of changing the testimonies into the third person?
MICHAEL WINTER
The third person came about because of the failure of the first person. I tried it in first person, from all the different voices, because that was initially what gripped me, this voice talking to me: ‘I was here, I did this, I did that.’ But with the novel, the monotony of all these voices saying, ‘I, I, I’—it just felt like a lot of shouting. It took a while to think, ‘Maybe I could have some of it in third person,’ and I just started doing it, and yet I kept some of the characters’ word choices. Like for some of the characters, for the past tense of sit they don’t say sat, they say sot. ‘I sot in the chair.’ I thought, well, how do I spell it, for one thing. And does sot make the reader feel like, ‘Oh, I’m with an Okie who doesn’t know how to articulate himself.’ Or is there some kind of grammatical cohesiveness in that sot that will actually give that character integrity.
I think you’ve nailed something when you mention the omniscient voice, because the third person does present that, but then you get the colour of the voice, the person who says sot, and you think, that’s not the writer—the proofreader would have caught that—that must be the person. Sometimes when sports figures are interviewed, the interviewer will say, so, ‘What does Wayne Gretzky think about this?’ And Wayne Gretzky will say, ‘Wayne Gretzky thinks—’ He’ll start talking about himself in the third person! And in a way, that third person talking about oneself created a kind of a distance to the scene and the events, and yet was intimate with its colour and diction. I really liked that blend of the two together, and it felt, too, that I avoided the monotony of a variety of I’s speaking in monologues. There was a whole bunch that I changed to being grammatically correct, because it did create too much of an ‘I’m a bumpkin’ kind of feel, ‘I’m an idiot, uneducated,’ and the trouble with that was, it’s like the reader was thinking, ‘Oh, is the writer making fun of that person now?’ So it was a constant issue.
THE VARSITY
Did you merge real-life people into a single character at all? I would have thought there would have been more characters to a trial.
MICHAEL WINTER
Oh yeah, there’s hundreds of characters in a court trial for murder. My first novel, This All Happened, which was purportedly a year in the life of what happens in a city based on one character, in the first draft of that, there were 300 characters. I quickly realized nobody’s going to remember all these characters. So is there a way of merging characters? Writing that novel made me learn how to do that. It’s always very fascinating when your friend who’s the car mechanic is also the aunt who went to Peru and got some marble and made a statue. It’s like, oh yeah, the car mechanic who went to Peru, that’s kind of interesting, and it’s not a real person anymore, and yet I can imagine them, I can believe them. So I did that with these characters too. Like, how many neighbours have crucial information, and that little piece of information that one neighbour has, can I give it to that other woman, and get rid of them, so I don’t have to have them all? I did that all throughout. So again: didn’t make up a word, and yet I’m distorting the truth of the trial. Some people in Newfoundland wanted me to talk about the original trial, but it would be unfair for me to weigh in on what really happened, because I’ve distorted it so much. So I can talk about the fiction, but I can’t talk about the real case.
THE VARSITY
If you’ve made the still life interesting enough, in the end, it’s not about the bowl of fruit.
MICHAEL WINTER
Right! [laughs] Those fruit are all eaten. They’re in the compost heap. I mean I don’t think I’ll ever do it again.
THE VARSITY
No? Not looking for more trial cases?
MICHAEL WINTER
On the other hand, though, I’m surprised it hasn’t been done more often. Especially in this day and age of reality TV and everybody wanting the truth of things, why don’t court transcripts get abridged every day and published?
THE VARSITY
Maybe you’ve hit on something. We’re used to creative non-fiction. This is almost the opposite of that.
MICHAEL WINTER
That’s right. And that was the last thing I wanted to write was a creative non-fiction book. I didn’t want to write that.
THE VARSITY
But you’ve done historical fiction before [The Big Why].
[pullquote]This is not a Canadian novel with a Canadian title with that whimsical thing going on. There’s nothing whimsical about this story. There’s no veneer.[/pullquote]
MICHAEL WINTER
Yes, but even that, I couldn’t contain myself. Like, when I wrote the historical novel, I asked a friend who had written a couple, ‘What’s the definition of a historical novel,’ and he said, ‘That’s easy. It’s where the action of the story takes place prior to the author’s birth.’ So before I was born, that’s a historical novel. With that historical novel, my character, who was a real character, Rockwell Kent, died in 1971, and I was born in 1965. So if he wrote the story as a really old man, I’m alive. So it’s not a historical novel. He’s just writing about the past, and he’s an old guy and he didn’t live in Newfoundland very long. So it’s a long time ago in a place he doesn’t really know very well, so if he gets things confused, so he doesn’t say the right mast was with the sail on it or how oil lamps were actually lit. All these things that were boring me to death to research, and I’m totally not interested in that kind of material.
THE VARSITY
The research can kill the work.
MICHAEL WINTER
Oh my God, yeah. So if he had just mentioned the word helicopter—just blurts it out, because they had helicopters in 1971—then that’s a kind of interesting story. I’ll read that story, and I’ll write that story. So that was my way around the confines of writing historical fiction, which seemed to me to be death to write that kind of book. I’m not that kind of meticulous researcher of the past. Nor am I interested in reading that kind of stuff.
DAVID PIKE/THE VARSITY
THE VARSITY
Sometimes authors don’t have total control over the title of their book. Was this your title?
MICHAEL WINTER
This was my title. And I know it’s a meat and potatoes title. It’s just plainly there: The Death of Donna Whalen. But, you know, there’s been The Death of Ivan Ilyich, there’s been some classic books with that kind of frame. I had some earlier titles that were more evocative, or metaphoric in a number of ways. But they all had the trouble in the end of, for me, of feeling—this is not a traditional novel with a Canadian title with that kind of whimsical thing going on. There’s nothing whimsical about this story, there’s nothing artistic on the surface of the story. I mean, I know all the artifices that went through creating it, but there’s no veneer. This is just it. And I wanted a title that was just it, with no kind of colour. You know like with a movie like Saving Private Ryan, you sit down to watch Steven Spielberg and there’s like four scrolling frames of saying, ‘By the entertainment people, and the production company of so-and-so’? There’s always this kind of veneer of ‘Oh, it’s not real, even though we’ve got this hand-held cam down on the beaches. It’s been prepared for me by this entertainment conglomerate. And don’t forget it, Viewer.’ Well, I want the reader to forget it. I want the reader to forget that there was a publisher, and a writer, and all this stuff. I just want them to go right into this world. And it’s near impossible to do, to forget those layers within layers. It is an entertainment in the end, but I’m trying to get to some other kind of feeling out of the reader than what we normally get from reading a book of fiction.
[pullquote]I want the reader to forget there was a publisher and a writer. It’s near impossible to do, but I’m trying to get some other kind of feeling than what we normally get from a book of fiction.[/pullquote]
THE VARSITY
But it’s not just a death, it’s a murder, a very brutal murder at that, and also, the focus on Donna: is the story really even about Donna? What would you say the story is about?
MICHAEL WINTER
Yes, I mean, in some of those titles [included] Sheldon Troke’s name because it’s really a lot about him, and he’s the one on trial. The thing is, Sheldon Troke is a piece of work, he’s a hard case, he’s not a very good person. But I don’t think he murdered anybody. And yet he had the downtown of St. John’s terrified of him. When the cops had him arrested, he was in the jail, he was calling the neighbours. He called this one guy, and he said, you know, ‘If you heard anything in the night when Donna Whalen was murdered, tell the cops. Tell ’em everything you know.’ And [the neighbour] says, ‘Yup. I’ll do it, Sheldon. No trouble.’ He puts down the phone, and there’s a wiretap of [the neighbour] saying to his wife, ‘Sheldon Troke just called, and he scared the living daylights out of me. He threatened me pretty much, saying, like, if I tell the cops anything, he’s going to come and get me—I mean, he didn’t say that directly, but I can read through his words. He knows his phone is tapped, and he’s telling me to shut up.’ So Sheldon Troke’s own behaviour was his own downfall. He had so scared everybody to death of him that they couldn’t help him, even when he cried out for help, because everybody thought he’d done it. And they were all terrified of him. So instead of saying to the police, ‘Actually, I did hear something that night,’ they said, ‘Nope. Didn’t hear a thing. Nope, nothing here, boy. Don’t know what happened.’ They could have helped him, but they were scared of him, and they thought he’d done it. So that kind of quandary of, it’s kind of Shakespearean in a way: your own bad behaviour causes the greater downfall in one’s own being. So that was a big thing in the book. But then the whole police informant, Leander Dollymont and this whole ‘I had a sexual relationship with Sheldon Troke in prison,’ that whole lie he told. It’s so convincing. All of that. Just people telling big stories about what really happened, and yet they’re not telling the truth at all, but convincingly. That really did occur. There being no narrative voice, too, like I’m telling you now, to guide you through this—all I have through this transcript are voices, because there’s nobody judging through the whole thing.
THE VARSITY
There’s no one to say, ‘Dear Reader.’
MICHAEL WINTER
Yeah. There’s no one to say, ‘See how he’s conflicted his testimony from a hundred pages behind?’ It’s ‘But he said—and now he’s saying—oh yeah.’ That kind of thing of piecing it together, I found it really wild to be working on that.
