Author uses nursery rhyme as inspiration for social commentary

By Angela Walcott

November 2008 Issue

Maggie Helwig’s third novel, Girls Fall Down, is both powerful and poetic. Meant to allude to the well-known nursery rhyme ‘Ring Around the Rosy,’ Helwig describes the story as an easy and gentle slide into paranoia. Another theme she followed was that of the Christian myth of the fall of society. Just as the title puts it, the novel’s purpose was to evoke the idea of a downward slope into society — and quite obviously, how to pick yourself if you fall. The novel is a lesson on how to negotiate fear and anxiety, she says.

A scene in the book describes how chaos ensues after a girl faints on the subway. Helwig was inspired to write the story after reading about the subway gas attack in Japan by the Aum Shinriko cult. The popular contemporary Japanese author, Haruki Murakami, wrote of the event in his novel Underground — a story about survivors which Helwig believes employed a unique story-telling technique.

“This book functions as a poem with subtle connections running through the text,” says Helwig, admitting that this novel was hard to write because every piece is dependent on every other piece. It was her experience writing poetry that influenced her fiction writing.

Being Associate Director of the 2006 Scream Festival, has broadened her perspective. When she was in this position she asked herself, “What are we good at that other festivals aren’t?” In answering this, she discovered the answer: bringing experimental, conceptual and different performance-related aspects to the table. It is a multi-day affair consisting of a reading series, with venues all across the city.

“It says a lot about Toronto — namely that the literary scene is rich and broad,” says Helwig. “There is such a deep base to draw from.”

A member of PEN Canada’s “Embedded in Exile” panel and a human rights activist working on War Resisters International, she notes that the precision of language as a moral necessity is also political. It can guard you from necessity. Helwig firmly believes that she has a moral responsibility as a writer to write what is given to her (through inspiration). According to this outlook, she simply has no choice in the matter. She admits that as a writer, she lives in complete terror that one day she will wake up and her gift will be gone.

But given her body of work, this seems highly unlikely.