Interview - JoAnn McCaig and Beneficiary

Tell us about beneficiary.

Well, that's part of the question in my bio.

Who knows? The first two sections of beneficiary were drafted in the 1990s.

And in one sense, I'm happy about that because they describe beneficiary what it's like to be a single mom of a bunch of little kids.

And, um, getting that down on paper when I was actually in that pickle myself, um, was really good because it's funny when I look back now, it's like, Oh, it was so wonderful.

It was so great.

And it wasn't, it was a nightmare.

So, uh, so I'm grateful that, um, that the early drafts of those first two sections of beneficiary were written while I was hip deep in it.

But I couldn't really find a home for either of these first two sections.

They were almost novellas.

They were too long to be short stories.

So I ended up setting them aside for quite a long time.

And then COVID happened.

And everything slowed down.

And I went out to my family has a place in the mountains of the East Kootenai Valley, just over the border in BC.

And so I spent a lot of the the pandemic there.

And I don't know I just I sort of returned to these two sections and thought, well, what else, and hence the next three sections of the novel catastrophe beneficiary and distancing came into being and then, once I had those I realized that I had.

what could loosely be called a novel, I suppose.

So did you go into writing those last three parts, having the first two parts in your mind, like being a continuation? Oh, absolutely.

Okay.

Okay.

Yeah.

Yeah.

That it was, it was Saren's story.

My central character's name is Saren and it was just, okay, that's where she was then.