1 I first had the pleasure of meeting Carol Shields in Ottawa in 1993 when she read from The Stone Diaries just before it won the Governor General’s Award, followed by the Pulitzer Prize, catapulting her to instant fame. When I spoke with her afterward to tell her how much I had enjoyed her work, she was just as friendly and unpretentious as I had heard she was.

2 When my proposal for a study of her writing was awarded a research grant in the spring of 2003, I screwed up my courage to email her to ask if I might visit. She replied simply, “When can you come?” When I telephoned to arrange a date (they were listed in the phone book as “Shields, Carol and Don”), she said, “You realize that I’m at the end of a long illness. So sooner is better than later.”

3 When I arrived at their airy home in the exclusive Rocklands district of Victoria on a beautiful day in early May, I could hear children’s footsteps running through the house. A little girl opened the door, saying, “Grandma’s in the kitchen.” Carol Shields emerged from the kitchen and took my hand warmly. She invited me into her sunroom, where we chatted over tea (she apologized for the lunch crumbs on the table), getting to know one another. I had an unfair advantage, as readers do with writers, since I had been reading her novels for nearly twenty years and felt that I knew her in a way.

4 Then the author of ten novels, four published plays, three collections of stories, three collections of poems and two biographies, and the recipient of many awards and accolades (including numerous honorary degrees, plus the Order of Canada), Carol Shields had reason to be proud. But she was as friendly and down-to-earth as I remembered her being before her fame. Where she had been sunny ten years earlier, she was now luminous.

5 We talked about many issues of common interest over the three days of my visit, among them family. She had five children and eventually twelve grandchildren, and still managed to write all those books! We compared parenthood and authorship, producing babies and books. She agreed that there were a lot of “commonalities”: “I remember the birth dates of my books,” she said. She talked about the pleasure of assembling a book, which she compared to forming the character of children — “character-building,” one could say, was her forte in more ways than one. She said she needed parenthood to grow up, because being responsible for “that tiny body” demanded maturity. “I do means I am,” she said, varying Descartes’s rational proof of existence with a practical one. “Children offer you a wonderful window on the world of the young.”

6 During that first afternoon, we went on to discuss fiction and feminism. What follows, ten years after her death, is a record of our conversation in the form of direct transcripts interwoven with summaries.

7 She recalled the murder of a ten-year-old girl in Chicago. Carol, who was ten herself at the time, got out all her dolls to comfort herself, because she was coming to the age when she had to present a hard shell to the world and so could not talk to anyone about her fear.

8 After an hour of conversation, her husband, Don Shields, former Dean and Professor of Engineering at the University of Manitoba, escorted her to the hospital for tests. Our meetings had to be fitted in around her demanding medical regimen. Don was hospitable and friendly, yet clearly a conscientious caretaker who cherished Carol tenderly, protecting her from her own generous nature.

9 Despite her illness and manifest weakness, Carol was as enthusiastic as ever about discussing literature in general and her own writing in particular. Accordingly, she invited me to come the next morning at eleven, following an interview for Shelagh Rogers’s radio show. Since she had by then retired to bed, I was invited to pull up a white wicker chair beside her bed to chat with her. (A CBC TV crew had set up an interview in her bedroom two weeks before.) As we talked, she faded out occasionally, as if listening to inner voices, but then rallied and continued the conversation. She agreed to speak into a tape recorder, but her voice was so weak that I had to play the tape over and over again to catch her exact words. At some points I had to paraphrase or summarize her views.

10 She said she loved Jack Bowman of Happenstance. She thought men compartmentalized their lives more than women did. This may be biological. “Killing bison” was her example: men are out hunting while women are considering all the issues, such as, did I remember to take the butter out of the fridge. That compartmentalization may have dictated the structure of her chapters in Larry’s Party.

11 She said she then took a year off and wrote Various Miracles, as creative writing improvs, experiments or assignments, using different kinds of narrative approaches, such as starting the story from a child’s viewpoint, writing a piece all in one sentence, etc. When she returned to Swann, she was braver about her experimentalism.

12 I had lost track of time, and to my surprise, Don entered bearing a tray with French bread, cheeses and wine and said, “Let’s pretend we’re in France.”

Don recalled that, when they were on holiday in France, they rented a small apartment in a chateau. Carol needed the apartment to herself to write in the morning, and so Don absented himself. Because it rained every day, he sat and read in the car, where he had plenty of time to plan lunch!

13 Carol invited me to return to her Victoria home the next morning at nine o’clock. When I suggested that we could talk about morality, Don responded, “Oh, morality! I thought you said mortality. Morality is all right. We don’t talk about mortality in this house.” Carol laughed.

So the next day we discussed narrative method and the question of ethics and the novel.

14 When I left on the second day, I gave her my proposal for my monograph on her work, “Sparkling Subversion”: Carol Shields’s Vision and Voice. When I pulled up the white wicker chair beside her bed the next morning, she told me that she approved of my project. That has meant a great deal to me through the following years in which I have been writing about her work.

15 On the last day we discussed her teaching career — including her years as Professor of English at the University of Manitoba and as Chancellor at the University of Winnipeg. She started teaching at Ottawa after completing her Master of Arts degree with a thesis on Susanna Moodie under the direction of Lorraine McMullen, her supervisor, filling in for someone in a creative writing night course on the short story. (Carol explained that Lorraine was in a hospice in Victoria, dying of a degenerative neurological disease, and that she and Don visited her regularly. Later, I was struck by her correspondence with Elma Gerwin, who was also dying of cancer, as recorded in The Staircase Letters [2008] edited by Arthur Motyer.)

16 We agreed that one’s real education occurs when one has one’s first experience of teaching. We compared notes, as I had the same experience when I began teaching at a small, exclusive prep school in Boston.

17 In her first class, a night course in creative writing, she had a class of “mature” women and “puerile” men, so different that she thought the room would overbalance. Her story “Chemistry” was inspired by this class, although she altered the course subject matter from a creative writing class to a class in playing the recorder. She remained friends with some of the women who kept in touch with her and also kept on writing. She said she was rather “schoolmarmish” at first. She also taught creative writing one year at the University of British Columbia.

18 She taught at the University of Manitoba as a sessional, one course a term — a creative writing course and an introduction to literature. She enjoyed teaching introductory courses and younger students. She taught communications, including grammar and composition, to Engineers at 8:30 in the morning, however, and hated it. The students were first-year recruits and had expected to leave “English” back in high school. Carol looked up one morning from explaining comma blunders to find that most of the class had pulled down the visors of their baseball caps to cover their eyes so they could drift off. Don said that he was co-opted from time to time to teach the class, since he was one of “them.”

19 The introduction course covered prose first and then poetry. She taught all short stories in the prose section: Chekhov, Munro, Gallant, Canadian and contemporary women’s stories. English 200 was a writing course involving a dozen non-fiction essays and included twenty students, so it involved heavy marking. Her method was to divide the classes into groups. That helped their writing as they critiqued each other’s work. Creative writing was offered at three levels and in three genres: poetry, prose, and plays. Ian Ross won the Governor General’s Award in drama for a play written for Shields’s class.

20 She enjoyed having “an office of one’s own,” as she put it, to work in, although she did not have it until she was fifty and teaching at the University of Manitoba. She decorated it and made it attractive and homey. In fact, she made it so attractive that, while she was on an extended tour, a senior male English professor claimed it for himself. Although she was an eminently tolerant and kind person, she never spoke to that colleague again.

21 I subsequently had the opportunity to review her teaching files in the Shields Archives at the National Library, and the student evaluations of her teaching positively glowed with superlatives. Her papers are all at the National Library in Ottawa — drafts, clippings, letters, teaching materials, calendars with appointments. She said that she kept a box under the desk and shipped it off when it was full.

22 She did not do any teaching when she was Chancellor of the University of Winnipeg from 1996 to 2000. Carol and Don had bought a condominium in Victoria in 1994 to retire to, but the walls leaked and it was under repair. In the interim, Carol was diagnosed in December 1998 with stage three breast cancer. They decided in the spring of 2000 to purchase a lovely, spacious house in which Carol could live out the remainder of the three-year prognosis that she had been given. In fact, she lived five years following that first, devastating diagnosis. She said goodbye to her English editor, Christopher Potter, so many times that it became a running gag, she said.

23 Carol said that she wanted the last sentence of Unless to read, “Everyone in the house was alive.” Her British editor talked her out of that, but she thinks she will conclude Segue with that sentence.

24 Carol said that she deliberately made Reta Summers forty-three because she had once thought that was the last age when a woman could still exert sexual allure. She had succumbed to the prejudice that older women cannot be interesting. Now she would extend that age. Friends asked why she had not written a novel with a protagonist of her own age, which was sixty-five at that point. So she decided to do that.

25 The heroine of Carol’s incomplete final novel, Jane Sexton, is sixty-seven, the author’s own age, and a poet, as she used to be: Jane is a sonneteer who writes a sonnet every fourteen days. So the novel is structured in fourteen chapters. Carol said she was currently trying to write a sonnet for the novel.

26 I had brought Carol a violet because I thought she would appreciate its literary associations. When I returned the next day it was on a little white wicker table by her bed. Later, her daughter Anne sent me a thank-you note because, as she said, her mother was becoming too weak to write herself. I was astonished, upon reading “Segue” — the short story that introduces her posthumously published Collected Stories (2004), a revision by her youngest daughter, Sara, in consultation with her father, of her novel-in-progress — to discover the violet used as a symbol of nurturing. That suggests that Carol was still working on her novel only two months before her death. It may also demonstrate her ability to amalgamate reality into her fiction and to employ the most mundane details of daily life metaphorically.

27 Then she left to buy little dresses for two of her granddaughters who were visiting for Mother’s Day brunch.

28 I continued to telephone her from Edmonton, and we talked about many issues of common interest, such as our admiration for Margaret Laurence. Eventually, Don and her daughters explained that she was becoming too weak to converse.

29 I had intended to spend that summer completing my book on Margaret Laurence,2 but I was so profoundly affected by Carol Shields’s situation that I could focus only on her. When I learned of her death on 16 July 2003, I devoted the rest of the summer to writing an essay on Unless.3 For me, it constituted both a celebration of her work and a way of mourning her death.

30 As I was leaving, Carol asked Don to fetch a copy of the British edition of her Jane Austen from the basement, which she then inscribed to me. When I reached out my hand to say goodbye at the end of my third and last day, Carol pulled me to her and kissed me on the cheek, saying, “Thank you for coming, Nora, dear. Good luck with your project.” I did not expect to see her again. As Canadian writer Jane Urquhart said after her death, “She leaves an empty chair at all our tables, one that can never be filled.”