Ask the Author: Terri Favro
Answered Questions (4)
Terri Favro
Hmmm. So many possibilities! I'd like to go into a world where I had superpowers, which opens up almost any comic book series, although I'd need to be bitten by a radioactive spider (or whatever). Yech. Silver Surfer would be a good one as long as I got to ride my own intergalactic board. I also considered "Outlander" -- being thrown back 200 years to 18th century Scotland would be cool –– except that it sounds so uncomfortable and dangerous! No hot showers -- that's a deal breaker. I think my choice would be Michael Chabon's "Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay" -- hanging out with New York's pioneer comic book creators mid-20th century. Their parties sounded amazing. And the burst of creativity that led to all the superheroes we know now -- it would be awesome to be part of that. Maybe I could be a comic book writer by day, collaborating with one of the artists. And going to Greenwich Village parties by night. Yeah: New York City and comics. That's where I'd like to be.
Terri Favro
I have a family story that remains a mystery I plan to explore in a book. When I was 17, my father told me a story about a young Italian cousin named Vigio. In 1929, he came to Canada and lived with my Dad and his parents for a while on a farm in the Niagara area. Vigio would have been about 17 himself at this time; my Dad was 9. Vigio and Dad developed a close relationship. Finally my grandfather sent Vigio off to Toronto to work in a hotel. About two months later, Vigio unexpectedly returned to my grandparents' house. He was completely traumatized -- so much so that any time he saw male strangers, he panicked, at one point crashing through the window of the house and running through the snow barefoot in his pajamas...my father described seeing Vigio's bloody footprints appearing against the white snow while my grandfather went in pursuit. Eventually he was sent home to Italy. After WWII broke out, the village was home to a lot of partisan activity and was occupied by German troops. Vigio was shot by them one day when he started running at a command to halt: when the soldier saw Vigio's face he began to weep and threw down his gun, shouting "Why did you run?" A German soldier hanged himself in that village a short time later: not sure if it was the same one. Mystery: What happened to Vigio in Toronto? Why was he shot, and what did the soldier seem so grief-stricken? Did Vigio and the soldier who killed him know one another?
Terri Favro
I don't think I have ever had "writer's block" but I sometimes find it hard to write if I've been pushing too hard to meet a deadline. Best way around this is to get out of my head and do something physical -- go for a hike, do a boot camp at the gym, go spinning or biking. Sometimes I think I actually write with my feet (in the sense that I figure out how to deal with narrative roadblocks by walking or biking).
Terri Favro
Growing up in the Niagara region of Canada during the Cold War, kids were always told that if there was a nuclear war, we'd be the first to go because the Niagara Falls hydro station powered the entire eastern seaboard of North America. (We were a first strike target, according to Popular Science magazine.) Fortunately, we escaped the fate predicted by the grownups. As a an adult, I began to think about an "alternative timeline" story, in which such a war actually did occur...and how one girl saved her world by collapsing her timeline and sending everyone in it into ours. Yet she herself has no real place here–– she is a girl with no past. It's the type of storyline you might have seen in a superhero comic or a sci fi novel of the 60s or 70s. Although fictional, in Sputnik's Children, I tried to convey the emotional experience of a childhood lived in that particular time and place.
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