Maggie Helwig interviewed by Pulse Niagara

In advance of her reading at 4555 Living Arts Space, Maggie Helwig was interviewed by Pulse Niagara this week:

http://www.pulseniagara.com/viewstory.php?storyid=4261

MAGGIE HELWIG
By ANNIE WILSON

Toronto writer Maggie Helwig takes on the modern urban culture of fear and paranoia in her third novel Girls Fall Down.

The narrative itself aptly describes the modern paradox of safety: '…The nature of safety in the measured world -- you can be certain of the presence of danger, but you can never guarantee its absence. No measurement quite trusts itself down to zero, down to absolute lack. All that the dials and lights and delicate reactions can tell you is that the instruments recognize no peril. You can be reassured by this, or not, as you choose.'

Helwig will be in Niagara Falls at the Four Triple Five Living Arts Space on August 14 as part of the Virus Reading Series where she will be reading from her acclaimed new novel. A love story set in contemporary Toronto during increased panic over a seeming biological attack on the subway system, Girls Fall Down centres around Alex, a diabetic aging photographer who is confronted by resurfacing feelings when his old love, Suzanne, re-emerges in his life looking for help.

Girls Fall Down is a thoughtful look at life in contemporary Toronto with insightful comment on the collective culture of fear and paranoia that now permeates modern urban life. White robed and masked health workers comb the bustling streets and underground systems looking for traces of the mysterious cause of the befallen girls, warning citizens that another 'attack' is imminent.

With her new novel, Helwig is interested in exploring how fear works in complicated urban settings and the pervasive yet underground nature of paranoia in modern life. She explained, 'Haruki Murakami's Underground, a collection of interviews with survivors of the sarin gas attack on the Tokyo subway, was the genesis of the idea for Girls Fall Down. I read the book in maybe 1999 or 2000, and then September 11, 2001 came along, and I thought I'd have to put that idea away forever, because any book that dealt in any way with terrorism would become a book about September 11, and that wasn't what I wanted to write. And then time passed, and SARS happened, and other things happened, and gradually I started to see that there was a way that I could write the book so that it wouldn't be exactly about terrorism, and it wouldn't be exactly about disease, but just about fear as such, about anxiety, about how paranoia operates in a complicated large city; and, in a way, just about how cities operate, how we live together as a social group or fail to live together.'

Much of novel takes place in or is described through underground imagery of subways and ravines -- the idea of a body, a social body, which retreats from conceiving of itself. I get the impression that Maggie is a people watcher by trade, riding around the city's underground public transit systems, studying the common and bizarre that cross her path each day.

Helwig noted, 'The underground imagery has something to do with how Toronto feels as a city. There's a kind of muffled, underground quality to conflict in Toronto; it's not that we don’t have conflict, and it's not even that we don't deal with it, but we deal with it, often, in rather fascinatingly indirect and suppressed and buried ways. And I think that has a lot to do with the way Toronto literature mythologizes sunken places like the ravines, and the way so many of our anxieties seem to centre around subways and subterranean places.'

Helwig's story explores our personal and collective desire to connect to one another, despite how often we get it wrong. 'Maybe we never get it right,' she said, 'But I think there is a real hopefulness in how we keep on trying.'

Born into a literary family, Helwig has always written. A human rights activist as well as a writer, she has worked for the East Timor Alert Network in Toronto, the Women in Black network, and War Resisters' International; her political consciousness and her sensitivity to the marginalized is a prevalent theme in her work.

Girls Fall Down has been garnering praise among reviewers, sure to get on the Giller jury's reading list, says NOW Magazine.

Maggie Helwig will read with Stuart Ross, Tanis Rideout and Terry Trowbridge, as part of the Virus Reading Series on August 14 at 4555 Queen Street in Niagara Falls.