Patrick Tarr

Patrick Tarr’s novel, The Guest Children, comes after a long career in film and television. He won a Writers Guild of Canada award for his first produced script before gathering over a decade of experience as a staff writer, creative producer, and showrunner. For his work as head writer and executive producer on the international hit series Cardinal, Tarr was awarded 2021 Canadian Screen Awards for Best Writing in a Dramatic Series and Best Dramatic Series. A graduate of the Canadian Film Centre, he returned as Executive Producer in Residence for the 2022 Prime Time TV program. He lives in Toronto with his family.

My Q&A with the author:

How much work does your title do to take readers into the story?

I think it gets them about halfway there, and the cover does the rest. ‘Guest Children’ was the term used for kids evacuated to Canada from cities in England that were under threat of bombing during World War II. I do think there’s something inherently spooky about those two words together, but the title in combination with a creepy photo of a remote, forested lake gives readers a pretty strong sense of what they’re in for. The original title was The Sand Palace, which is a structure that holds symbolic meaning in the story. But along the way, that element became less central and I needed a new title. The Guest Children was just sitting there, already waiting in the text. It felt just right.

What's in a name?

While they’re not the main characters in the story, the young brother and sister at the centre of the plot are named Frances and Michael Hawksby. I did choose these names deliberately to evoke the child characters from Henry James’ The Turn of the Screw - Flora and Miles. That story, like mine, deals with children in a remote place, and a character who’s called there who begins to question what is real. Their last name of Hawksby was a bit of a hat tip to Richard Brautigan’s The Hawkline Monster, another story set mostly at a remote house. In the setting of that story, anything can happen, and I wanted to evoke that same unpredictability - at least for myself - in writing The Guest Children.

How surprised would your teenage reader self be by your new novel?

Horror really got its hooks into me from about twelve, and I spent most of my teen years borrowing paperbacks I was probably too young to read from the revolving horror rack in my local library. So I don’t think I’d be too surprised that I’d written a ghost story. I’d probably be more surprised that I’d managed to get a book published, as it just didn’t seem like an attainable dream to me at the time.

Do you find it harder to write beginnings or endings? Which do you change more?

Endings, no doubt. When I started out writing, I thought I had so many great beginnings. But the truth is, it’s can’t be a great beginning if it doesn’t serve a great ending. It’s just a piece of something. I think my work as a television writer helped me become stronger as a storyteller. Outlining is a vital piece of that process, and I’ve since learned that I need to put the work into an outline when writing a novel as well. Outlines aren’t fun, but getting stuck midway into your novel isn’t fun either. By the time I sit down to write my beginning, I already know what my ending is - or what it might be. An important part of moving to a first draft is being flexible enough to change a plot point - or your entire ending - if you realize it’s not suitable anymore. But just because you may decide to change your destination, that doesn’t mean you wasted time drawing a map.

Usually the changes I make to my beginnings involve the delete key. Once I truly know my story, I realize I have more material than I need at the beginning, and need to get things in motion faster.

What non-literary inspirations have influenced your writing?

The films The Others and The Devil’s Backbone are highly atmospheric ghost stories about children during wartime, and both were major influences on The Guest Children. They’re quite different films visually and thematically, but I found strong resonances in them both when I was trying to nail down how my story would feel. Apart from those, my setting and atmosphere were inspired by walks in the Canadian wilderness. The idea for this novel sprang forth after I read a bit of history about these children who came to Canada to shelter during the war. Walking in the woods, I found myself wondering what it must have been like for kids from the huge city of London to find themselves plunked down in a remote location in Northern Ontario.

Visit Patrick Tarr's website.

--Marshal Zeringue