Featured in the 2011 edition of The Hart House Review
On the masthead of Rebecca Rosenblum’s blog, it reads: “Let’s not forget that small emotions are the great captains of our lives.” This statement can characterize much of her work. Rosenblum is concerned with the interior life that takes place around the seemingly inconsequential moments of everyday life, the mundane that obscures human vitality. Most of the moments found in her stories aren’t profound in themselves, but instead express a larger emotional truth. In this way her work skims the surface while revealing depth.
Rosenblum blames luck for her early successes, but in publishing “luck” is a modest euphemism for “talent”. Rosenblum’s first publication, months before her graduation from the University of Toronto, was short-listed for the Journey Prize, a promising start for a someone who quit her job to pursue a Master’s Degree in Creative Writing. The decision to pursue writing as a vocation was for Rosenblum a conscious one, a realization lost on many wannabe writers: writing is a job like any other, requiring training and discipline and endless patience. That patience has led to the publications in literary journals (The New Quarterly, Canadian Notes and Queries) that have acted as a precursor to something larger, in Rosenblum’s case a first book entitled Once and a second, The Big Dream, to be released in September 2011.
What interests Rosenblum is the idea of a person learning who they are, at any age, and many of her stories are notes on the experience of growing up, such as in “Sarah”. In her stories, young people are caught between the reality of being young while pulling at maturity’s strings. Teaching in a high-school, as part of a program called “Students, Writers, and Teachers”, Rosenblum was fascinated by the students in her class, from their cell-phones to how they spoke, and found they offered her fresh perspectives on the process of writing. She was also interested by the pressure on teenagers to hold down part-time jobs, which largely figures in “Sarah”. Rosenblum characterizes the story as being about someone, a young person, unable to navigate life’s problems successfully, unable to fix things on her own despite the expectation that she should. “Sarah” is a story about a kid breaking under the pressure of her emotions. The story begs the question of what is too much to expect from young adults like Sarah, but this can apply to anyone, to all of us expected to suppress reactions to the events in our lives rather than admit defeat. Does maturity mean you successfully conquer your circumstances, or rather is it the admission that we are none of completely in control of our interior lives? In our interview, I ask Rosenblum what the favourite of her stories is. She points to the last story in her anthology Big Dreams, a story entitled “This Weather I’m Under”. The title is an apt metaphor for what is present in us all, lurking beneath our superficialities.