My conversation with Eden Robinson was a phone call between Kitimat to Vancouver, after a few failed Zoom attempts. Her voice is calming while we lament the failed Zoom call and catch up on our lives, our families, our health. It feels like I’m sitting on the couch next to her, with a blanket draped across our knees while we sip tea, laugh, and chat, as I would do with any one of my aunties on a visit home.
I think back to the very first time Eden and I met in the beginning of March, 2018. I was in my second year of the MFA Creative Writing program at UBC, the same program Eden had graduated from in the ‘90s. She was invited as a guest writer to one of our workshop classes, and I sat across from her, nervous and in awe, as I listened to her speak. The first novel in the Trickster trilogy, Son of a Trickster (Knopf Canada, 2017), was one of my favourite books. It took every ounce of control I had to not fangirl in the middle of the class — and I kind of failed. When I got an opportunity to ask a question, I spoke openly about how influential her work was for me, how I loved Son of a Trickster, and how excited I was for the next book in the series, Trickster Drift (Knopf Canada, 2018), due to be published in early April, right after my birthday.
“Oh, why don’t I email you the galley then?” she said, nonchalantly, “so you can read it before it’s out.”
Now, I was a barely budding writer at this time, with one publication under my belt, and had given her zero reason to be this generous to me. Gobsmacked, I gratefully accepted, wrote down my email address and passed it to her. Later that evening, she emailed me a PDF of the full advanced reading copy of Trickster Drift. “Happy early birthday!” the subject line read. I couldn’t believe my incredible fortune.
How fitting it feels, then, to receive the advanced reading copy of Return of the Trickster (Knopf Canada, 2021), years later, with an opportunity to review it and interview Eden about the series, her life, and writing in general. She’s generous with her answers, which is a word I keep coming back to when I think about Eden: generous. She’s generous with her time, knowledge, and care — to me and an array of unnamed, unknown readers who probably also count themselves incredibly fortunate whenever they get a glimpse of this generosity in her writing.
The first two books in the trilogy felt like an opening up, an exploration of our teen protagonist, Jared Martin, as he comes to understand this strange world he finds himself in, one imbued with magic. His father is the Trickster Wee’git, his mother a powerful witch, his girlfriend (and then ex-girlfriend) a budding witch, and there are numerous ghosts and otherworldly creatures who are magnetically drawn to him. In the recently published final installment, Return of the Trickster, Jared finally comes to terms with the fact that he is, indeed, a Trickster. The character arc from fighting this reality to finally accepting it defines the underlying motivation that propels the narrative action — and the stakes, which were always high, are raised even higher.
Return of the Trickster opens where Trickster Drift left off, as Jared is hospitalized after using an excessive force of magic to escape the murderous grasp of the cannibalistic ogress inhabiting his Aunt Georgina’s body. As he vomits up his organs (literally) in the hospital bathroom, he reckons with the consequences that led him there, and the dangers that still lie ahead for him as a Trickster. Safe to say, this is Jared at his absolute lowest thus far in the series. The novel continues in a gripping, propulsive, suspense as we follow Jared through continual emotional and physical turmoil towards another showdown with Georgina, who has marked all of Jared’s family for torture and death.
“I’m done. It’s over. Three books and done. I can’t see doing a trilogy again. People who work with series must have amazing memories because I have post-it notes everywhere.” – ER
But Eden didn’t set out to write a trilogy at all. In fact, she didn’t set out to write about Tricksters initially. She was writing a trashy band council romance.
“[The trashy band council romance] was sprawling, and I had no control over the sprawl. It was a mess and I was frustrated. So I decided to write something short and funny to get me out of that head space,” she says.
“The kids were visiting, and Dad was trying to tell them a Wee’git story and it was really funny, but they didn’t get it because they didn’t grow up with Wee’git stories. And that made me sad. So I thought ‘why don’t I write a Wee’git story? Hopefully it’ll appeal to them and they can see why he’s funny.’ And then fifty pages in, I realized it might be a novella. And then 400 pages in, I realized it was a book. At that point, I had a choice between going back to the trashy band council romance or just finishing the book off. So I chose to just finish the book off.”
At that point, Eden thought she had just one novel on her hands. Originally, the first book was to begin with Jared in Vancouver, with flashbacks to his life in Kitimat. But as Eden expanded the Kitimat sections and the flashbacks became more frequent, she realized that she had enough material for an entire book that would start in Kitimat. This was Son of a Trickster. Her follow-up, Trickster Drift, continues Jared’s journey predominantly in Vancouver as Jared moves away from home to attend school. As she continued writing, she realized, once again, that the series would require one more book, Return of the Trickster.
From a publishing and book contract standpoint, these changes and expansions came with some complications. “We had to redo the contract. We had to renegotiate things, it was messy and awkward. I’m done. It’s over. Three books and done. I can’t see doing a trilogy again. People who work with series must have amazing memories because I have post-it notes everywhere,” she laughs.
Return of the Trickster feels markedly differently from the first two books in the series, both in structure and in tone. Structurally, we start to see narration from the point of view of other characters, instead of exclusively from Jared’s. Writing from multiple narrators was a skill, Eden admits, that she didn’t think she had, but one she needed to learn for her future project of the trashy band council romance.
“I had three novels stall out for me before I started writing the trashy band council romance,” she notes. “Usually when a novel stalls out, that means either I haven’t mulled it over enough, or I don’t have some of the skills that I need to tell that story.”
It’s marvellously exciting, as a reader, to see her develop and implement these skills by the third book. Not only does it add to her skillset to be applied to the trashy band council romance and beyond, but it enriches Return of the Trickster with a growth that is palpable in the characters, and the writing itself. For two books, we’ve grown to care about these characters as we experienced them through Jared’s eyes. Now, we finally get to see themselves through their own voice.
The Trickster Trilogy, then, can almost be understood as three award-winning books written, in part, as skill development. Eden also notes, though, that she already had one significant skill that was acquired due to the death of her father in 2017: focus.
“When you’re trying to avoid your own feelings, you hyper focus on other things,” she notes. “The trilogy came at the perfect point for that. I really wanted to enter any world but my own. So Jared was a perfect distraction for me. I was using the Trickster Trilogy to avoid working on the emotional baggage from having my father die. I was burying myself in work. And now that the series is over, it’s become apparent that I do need to actually heal.
There’s a lot of grieve-y feelings about the end of the trilogy, compounded by not having dealt with my father’s death. Just kind of shoving it down and living in Jared’s world. So I know what it’ll take. I’ve done a lot of therapy and counseling. And I know how much work it is, and I know that at the end of it, I will come out stronger. It’s just getting there.”
The tone of her books have always been heavily influenced by her personal experiences and emotional state at the point of writing. She was halfway through writing Blood Sports, (McClelland & Stewart, 2007), when she went from being a two-pack-a-day smoker (on a light day) to quitting cold turkey. “[The book] quickly devolved into torture and violence,” she laughs. “You can see that split on page 100 where it’s so apparent.”
The shift to a darker, more urgent tone in Return of the Trickster can perhaps be attributed to environmental influence as well, as the book was written and released in the time of the COVID-19 pandemic. The very first draft was born pre-COVID-19, mid 2019, and had no conflict. “I had been with the characters so long, I didn’t want to hurt any of them,” Eden says, “so it was a very gentle draft. Sofia made up with Jared, and she started throwing money at everyone to solve all their problems, and there were lots of side stories.”
But when Eden submitted that first draft, her editor said it was a lovely, nice draft, but kind of boring. Eden laughs at this, “When I looked at the draft, I completely understood. There was no conflict whatsoever.”
Eden then completed her second draft during her position as the Writer-in-Residence at Haig-Brown House in Campbell River in early 2020, when the information about the novel coronavirus had just started to hit worldwide news. One of her students had been in contact with someone who had been to a superspreader event, so a contact tracer told her to quarantine for two weeks. At that time, COVID-19 tests were being rationed for healthcare workers, so Eden couldn’t get one unless she went to the hospital with breathing issues.
Haig-Brown House is two acres of garden and since it was the beginning of spring, everything was blossoming. Due to Eden’s pollen allergies, she was experiencing hot flashes and her temperature was constantly between 39-40 degrees. Unable to tell if she was exhibiting the first signs of COVID-19 or if it was just her allergies and menopause, she quarantined alone in a strange place, in a state of fear about the future of the world.
“So in that state of mind, I wrote the second draft, and everybody died,” she says. “It was one of the most brutal things. Like everyone died gruesome, brutal deaths. It was really intense. It was March when I handed that draft in. And my editor and I talked about it and she said, ‘Can we not have everybody die?’”
“I really am a method writer. If the characters are crying, I’m crying.” – ER
By the third draft, Eden had found the middle ground. The residency ended in the first week of April, and she was able to get back to Kitimat. Though she had to quarantine again for two weeks, she was in her own apartment, close to her mother and family. “My cousins would come by and drop off fresh fish, crabs, or gluten-free baking. The door on my deck has a big glass opening, so we would talk through the glass. So it was a very different self quarantine.”
Though it is less brutal, the third and final draft still holds the grotesque features, horror elements, and the tense tone of the second, as it was written in a state of fear and anxiety through the real life horror of the first wave of the pandemic; however, it finds balance in providing in-depth care, sensitivity, and generosity to her characters. Because in addition to dealing with supernatural forces, Jared is also struggling with sobriety, grief, school, and his future, and all the complicated relationships with those who make up his life. The result is a well-crafted and suspenseful novel with a high level of character agency and layered relationship dynamics.
“I think what we’re dealing with right now is pretty horrifying. With COVID-19, the possibility that I could die drowning in my own lung fluid just horrified me to no end,” Eden says, “and processing that horror was what gave us the second draft. So a lot of the emotions that I felt were translated. I really am a method writer. If the characters are crying, I’m crying. It’s embarrassing, but I think every novelist has the reflection of themselves in their novel.”
Prior to the devastation brought on by the pandemic, body horror, torture, addiction, and mental illness have been recurring themes in Eden’s work I also had the great opportunity of having Eden as a mentor while I was a participant at the Banff Centre’s Writer’s Studio in 2019. In one of our discussions about my work, I expressed worry that a scene I wrote was too dark. Her advice? “Go deeper, go darker.” It’s clear she adheres to her own advice.
“A lot of times mainstream culture is very focused on being positive, and that’s great. But I also think that there are a lot of horrifying elements to our current world, and I don’t want to erase them. I don’t want to ignore them. I don’t want them to be invisible in the worlds that I’m creating,” she says.
“I know it’s not everyone’s cup of tea. I’m just used to being on the outside and seeing things from a different perspective. I’m a high functioning depressive, so I have a very different view of the world. And one of the gifts of depression is searing self examination. A lot of the elements of horror resonate with the world view I have when I’m in a full depressive episode. There’s not a lot of validation for my worldview except in horror and gothic where everything is slightly creepy and weird.”
Throughout our phone call, we laugh whenever we talk about horror, about specific, gruesome scenes, or about the fact that her sister calls Eden “her little dark cloud.” Because that’s another aspect of her writing. No matter how tense, horrific, or scary, there’s always moments of brevity and humour. And humour, in my opinion, is deeply tied to communicating love. Eden admits that when she considered the Trickster books, the one underlying force she had in mind was always love.
“At the end, the only thing that saves you is love,” she says. “Love redeems you. Love pulls you out of the darkest places and into the connections between family and chosen family.”