What advice would you give your ten-year-old self about being alive in 2024?

Hang in there. People will get gender-non-conformity a whole lot better in fifty years. Sort of. I know you’re going to be yourself anyway, but as the years pass, you’ll be able to be yourself with less approbation.

In an alternate version of the world—one in which you are not a writer—who would be you be?

a. Librarian.
b. Ecologist, urban planner, cartographer.

Who’s your greatest hero, and why?

I don’t really believe in the idea of heroes. But there are many people whose way of being in the world I admire. My aunt, Barb Fleming, was one of them. She was the unmarried aunt in the family, independent, athletic, adventuresome, musical, curious, very good at maintaining friendships and connections with family, completely unself-regarding, and unfailingly kind.

Your novel, Curiosities, takes readers on a wild ride through centuries-old history via an amateur historian named Anne. Why is the relatively distant past (in this case, 1600s England) such a rich and vibrant playground for you as a writer?

There are so many things I find captivating about seventeenth-century England. The language alone I find delightful, all those True and Strang Relations set forth in pamphlets hawked by chapmen hiking town to town. The seventeenth century as a pivot century between science based on the authority of the ancients and science based on direct observation. I love how wrong they were about so many things, how many weird beliefs they had. John Aubrey’s Miscellanies is full of stories of people having dreams that come true, people seeing portents, having uncanny experiences, and employing magical cures for common ills. Here is a cure for thrush: "Take a living Frog, and hold it in a Cloth, that it does not go down into the Childs Mouth; and put the Head into the Childs Mouth till it is dead; and then take another Frog." Here is a cure for tooth-ache: "Take a new Nail, and make the Gum bleed with it, and then drive it into an Oak. This did Cure William Neal, a very stout Gentleman, when he was almost Mad with the Pain, and had a mind to have Pistol’d himself."

What’s a great Canadian book that changed you in some way?

Cereus Blooms at Night, by Shani Mootoo, delighted me with its playfulness and offered a model of boldness and invention. And every single book by Dionne Brand since I read Land to Light On, Bread Out of Stone, and No Language Is Neutral has been revelatory.
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Excerpt from Curiosities

Anne’s Note

Once in a very long while—a generation, a half-century, a blue moon—a marvellous confluence occurs. Things once thought separate join up.

      That’s what this book is. A confluence.

      In researching the seventeenth century broadly, as an amateur, I came across—“discovered,” as you may have it—John Aubrey, a personage new to me, but well-known to others, hilarious and charming, maybe a bit dotty, maybe a bit dodgy, maybe more scientific than we think. There is more to say about him, but for now I’ll just note it was through John Aubrey that I found Lady Margaret Long.

      Lady Margaret Long was (and still is) counted a very minor figure in the annals of seventeenth-century Britain, not having published poetry or memoir of note, not having made scientific discoveries, having been, in fact, in her various theories of natural phenomena, quite wrong. She was classed an imitator of the Countess of Pembroke, which she consciously was, modelling herself upon the learned Mary Sidney. A correspondent of gardener and collector John Tradescant, she was in dialogue with many of the men who would later make up the Royal Society. Her fine collection of eggs was purchased by Elias Ashmole, after he had taken possession of Tradescant’s Ark and turned it into a museum (named after himself, not Tradescant; the present-day Ashmolean Museum, if properly named, would be the Tradescantian Museum, but glory goes to the donor, not the collector).

      Minor figures are, to me, the most interesting, because aren’t most of us minor characters? And aren’t we interesting? We are. I assert this over and over. We are. Ordinary, weird.

Which is to say: human. The minor figures I’ve come to know in this research are gloriously, stubbornly, interestingly themselves: Lady Margaret; Joan Palmer (about whom, more shortly); John Heard, who gives us a tiny view of war-scarred Bavaria in the 1620s (and a tightly wrapped view of his own psyche, which puts me in mind of the inside of a snail shell); and Tom Barrows, sailor, physician, surgeon, who will in due course carry us far from the others to Hudson Bay, where he will endure moment by moment, yearning for all he has left behind, one he has left behind, not knowing if he will ever return.

      That I found Lady Margaret’s papers at all is thanks to a lucky mistake. As a self-taught historian of the seventeenth century, a complete amateur, the fairest and most likely course of events would be for me to visit archives and parish record offices and churches and cemeteries, marvel over parchment taken from a sheep four hundred years ago and written upon by a living hand now long dead, a hand tallying a will or marking on a contract or some other document delightful to me in its small details, but find nothing of real historical significance. And so it was, when I first went to the archives at Canterbury Cathedral. Inordinately proud of my easily obtained researcher’s ID card, I called forth from the deeps the catalogue of collector Isaac Barrow’s curiosities, sundry ecclesiastical records of witch accusations, and random wills and deeds (in Latin, so that I could barely understand them). It was fun. But it didn’t add up to much.

      Next, I found in the Wiltshire and Swindon History Centre the papers of Aubrey’s great friend, Sir James Long of Draycot Cerne. Among them—this was the mistake—were three letters from Lady Margaret Long. Those letters should not have been there. There is no relation between Sir James Long and Lady Margaret’s husband, Sir Arthur Long. But the letters were charming enough that her name lodged inside my brain.

      Then, in Somerset, spying Lady Margaret’s name in the catalogue, I requested all the Long materials. And there, buried in an archive hardly anyone had looked at, were the two tales that follow: one of Lady Margaret Long herself; and contained inside that, one of her “companion” and “amanuensis,” Joan Palmer.

      They tell it better than I, and so ends my preface.
      
      Anne Fleming

      VANCOUVER

Excerpted from Curiosities by Anne Fleming. Copyright © 2024 Anne Fleming. Published by Alfred A. Knopf Canada, a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited. Reproduced by arrangement with the Publisher. All rights reserved.