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by: Tyrone Warner
Date: 11/3/2010 1:19:00 PM ET

Privvy to her father’s war experiences for the first time, Johanna Skibsrud brings his memories alive in her first novel, “The Sentimentalists.”

Her father’s memories from fighting in Vietnam were combined with her own of a summer spent at Flagstaff lake, which covers four submerged townships in northern Maine.

“I think that for me, the idea of a palpable feeling of history and the layers of history, and I think that we’re constantly surrounded by the way the past has effected us. I think ruins or buried towns and these intersections where you see the physical presence of the past is a good way to think about that concretely.”

Skibsrud tells CTV.ca that she was originally working on a novel that featured a veteran of the Vietnam war, and that in asking her father logistical questions about the war, he began to reveal more than she though he would.

“Because he hadn’t spoken them out loud for 30 years, they were very fragmented, just a few details that he could remember and most was very foggy,” says the author.

“I took those details and the rough outline of my fathers story and fleshed them out and incorporated them into the story of the flooded down.”

Skibsrud has been previously shortlisted for the Gerald Lampert Award for her first poetry collection, “Late Nights With Wild Cowboys.” Originally from Scotsburn, Nova Scotia, she now lives in Montreal.

Despite the acclaim for her poetry, Skibsrud says she has always written both poetry and fiction, and continues to simultaneously work in both forms.

“I don’t know when it began, but as far back as I can remember, I was always read to as a child, and I always came up with stories and poems on my own. I was encouraged in that, teachers as well as my family, and I’m grateful for that. Because of that I always had a base confidence in my abilities as a writer.”

When hearing the news that her novel had been nominated for a Giller prize, Skibsrud was shocked.

“I was totally surprised because I had no idea my novel was under consideration, so it took a while to process the information.”