Lisa Foad

On a rainy day on the Cadillac Lounge patio, author Lisa Foad — who reads as part of Scream in High Park this Monday — explains why the fractured, hallucinatory nature of her fiction may be a side effect of her Jehovah’s Witness upbringing.

“After an assembly where they were talking about the folly of music,” Foad recalls from her early childhood, “I went home and broke records with my dad. We broke Led Zeppelin, Cream. But I had this Wham! record I really liked. I didn’t want to break my Wham! record but then he reminded me that in the paradise I would have a pet tiger, a pet lion. What are you going to do? It was a trade I was willing to make. There’s so much fodder in that.”

It’s a perfectly heartbreaking, strange but also terribly funny story that’s as good an introduction as any to the tone of The Night Is A Mouth (Exile Editions), Foad’s debut collection of short fiction. Foad writes more like someone raised by wolves than Jehovah’s Witnesses, but for all her dense, bawdy prose — which is only comparable to the last two panels of The Garden of Earthly Delights if they were populated by girls stumbling through sex, drugs and a fantastical urban wilderness where mustached musclecar men lurk like satyrs drunk on Bud Lite — there’s an intelligent design to it all.

This is the result of two distinct writing processes, the first part of which is not taught anywhere.  

“I just sort of throw up on the page,” she says, laughing. “I usually don’t know what’s going on. I get a visual and get excited.”  Yet from there, Foad’s writing enters an involved, obsessive editing stage. “I am crazy about every word. In the first draft there were 15 versions of one sentence. Each slightly different in terms of rhythms, phrasing and intonation.”

Foad’s care for how a sentence can be read comes from her time spent on stages creating multimedia performances (alongside Hadassah Hill and Zoe Whittall) in her formative years. During that time, writing as an end unto itself was never an interest for Foad. In fact, when publisher Exile Editions first asked about a short-story collection, she was considering ditching her pursuit of a degree in English for business school. That didn’t happen, but completing the book turned into a four-year-long process. Her publisher kept asking and Foad kept saying she wasn’t ready. She meticulously wrote and rewrote the work while teaching herself the art of endings. When I ask if her friends ever held an intervention, she concedes, “Yes. They where like, ‘when are you going to do this?’”

The prose of The Night Is A Mouth doesn’t suffer from lack of confidence. Quite the opposite: Foad is just plain in love with the possibilities of words, the process of writing and the endless joys of saying the unsayable to the reader. Although she’s now moved onto the writing of a novel, I ask her if she remembers the greatest fear about publishing her first book.

“The writing being over. There was something really safe about not committing to something.” After a second, she adds with a laugh, “I have commitment issues.”