Interview With An Author Featuring The Marvellous Ms. Terri Favro

Terri Favro and I met way back when at the Niagara Literary Festival and I'm so very glad we did!

Not only is she a truly gifted writer, she is a great friend which doesn't lessen the objectivity with which I view her work.

About Terri: Terri Favro is the author of novels Once Upon A Time in West Toronto (Inanna) and Sputnik’s Children (ECW); a novella, The Proxy Bride, winner of the Ken Klonsky-Quattro Books Novella Award; and an upcoming non-fiction book, Generation Robot: A Century of Science Fiction, Fact and Speculation (Skyhorse Publishing, New York). Terri is also co-creator of the “Bella” graphic novel series (Grey Borders Books). A CBC Literary Prize finalist, Terri’s essays and short fiction have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies including the Humber Literary Review, Geist, Prism, and Clockwork Canada: Steampunk Fiction. Terri blogs at terrifavro.ca

I hope you will join me today at Interview With An Author as I chat with Terri Favro.

Where were you born/grew up at?
I was born and raised in St. Catharines , which, if people don’t know, is the biggest city in the Niagara region, not far from Niagara Falls and very close to the U.S. border. Until I was about ten years old, the part of the city where I grew up was outside the city limits. Grantham Township. My neighbourhood was made up almost entirely of immigrants, mostly from southern and eastern Europe, as well as Black Canadian families, many of whose roots stretched back to the Underground Railroad. Harriet Tubman lived in that part of the city and it’s rumoured that there are tunnels under the main street of St. Catharines that date back to the era when she was helping people escape slavery and hide from “slave catchers” from the States. Years later I learned from the St. Catharines Museum that there were social contracts, right up until the 1920s, that made it permissible to refuse housing to certain undesirable ethnic groups, which included all the immigrant groups in my neighbourhood! So that has provided an enormous amount of inspiration over the years for all of my books. All of my novels are set in and around that old neighbourhood, which is now known as the Facer Street Neighbourhood.

Which of your novels can you imagine made into a movie?
All of them! In fact, "Sputnik’s Children" has been optioned, potentially to be made into a TV show, but I could see it as a movie. I can also see “The Proxy Bride” and its sequel, “Once Upon A Time In West Toronto”, being made into a movie. It could even be shot in the old neighbourhood, which still looks much the way it did in the 1970s. Toronto has changed more than the Niagara area has.

Where did you come up with the names in the story? Some characters are named for actual people, one example being “Bum Bum” who appears in all three of my novels. Bum Bum was the name of a street kid, the son of a gambler, who was well known in our neighbourhood during my parents’ youths. I thought the name was so odd, that I gave it to one of my characters.

For other characters, I often take names off of headstones (one example being the name “Barnfather” which I used in a steampunk story – it’s taken from the grave of Sydney Barnfather in St. John’s Norway Cemetery in Toronto).

The main character in “Sputnik’s Children” is named Debbie Reynolds Biondi. Like me, she’s of Italian heritage but I wanted to use “Debbie” because it was such a common name in my childhood. I once wrote an article for a magazine about how the name had all but disappeared as a baby name, and in doing the research I discovered its prevalence in my generation directly followed the career path of Debbie Reynolds! So I thought it would be appropriate to name my main character not just “Debbie” but to give her the rather odd middle name of “Reynolds”.

Marcello Junior, hero of ‘The Proxy Bride’ and ‘Once Upon A Time in West Toronto’, and his horrible father Marcello Senior, are named for a father and son (Marcello Junior and Senior) who used to hang around at a friend’s house. I always thought the “Junior and Senior” thing was kind of funny, so my Marcello is known as “Junior” in the book, and his father is simply “Senior”. They also both turn in the Bella comics I write with my husband Ron Edding.

If you could spend time with a character from your book whom would it be? And what would you do during that day?
I’d definitely want to hang out with Bum Bum. He’s one cool customer, and also an Exceptional, which means he can shape shift! His muse is Holly Golightly from “Breakfast at Tiffany’s” and he loves to disco dance, so we would definitely go out for cocktails, then to a club (after we’re finished with the pandemic of course).

What’s the most difficult thing about writing characters from the opposite sex?
This is an interesting question because in my first book (“The Proxy Bride”), the entire story is told from a male point of view. Oddly it never occurred to me to worry about that! But looking back I realize that I was patterning my (good) male characters off of men I actually knew, but the villains were modeled on evil men in the news (in particular, Paul Bernardo) and also from men in films. It helped to have a male editor (Luciano Iaccobelli of Quattro Books) for “The Proxy Bride” because he encouraged me to make Marcello Junior more stereotypically masculine – which I think improved the book. It certainly helped make him a more tragically flawed character. I wanted him to be a cross between two Greek mythological characters, Orpheus and Oedipus.

As a writer, what would you choose as your mascot/avatar/spirit animal?
I love this question! I definitely think I have the spirit of a horse looking over my shoulder when I write. Horses are hard workers and also good partners. And they love to move! I find I do so of my best writing on my feet or riding my bike. I also work collaboratively in the graphic novel world, so partnership is important. I’ve always loved horses – such gorgeous, powerful, sexy animals. Which is kind of what I try to capture in my writing, too.

Thank you, Terri, for chatting with me today!