Writer Kelly Kaur bases debut novel on experiences as a newcomer to Calgary

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It’s a familiar story for aspiring writers.

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More than 20 years ago, Kelly Kaur was a poet. She got a few of her pieces published. But, as is usually the case with aspiring writers, she also got plenty of rejection. So much so that she eventually let her literary ambitions slide to the background. Life happened. She concentrated on family and her career at Mount Royal University, where she has been teaching in the English department, the Bissett School for Business and the Centre for Communication Studies since 1990.

But, in 2019, she was accepted into The Borderlines Writers Circle, a Writer’s Guild of Alberta and Alexandra’s Writers’ Centre program designed to help launch the literary careers of Calgarians of various linguistic and cultural backgrounds. It had her paired with author Aritha van Herk as her mentor. As with all good mentors, van Herk had some firm expectations.

She expected her protege to submit 12 new pages every two weeks. 

“I realized I had no more excuses, that I really had to do it,” Kaur says. “I had no clue what I was going to do. I had written poetry before and had always wanted to write a book. It was on my bucket list. I really just didn’t know how to do it, which is ironic because I teach literature sometimes and deconstruct books with the class.”

The day before she was scheduled for an interview to enter the Borderlines program, she brainstormed ideas with her daughter. Submitting to that old literary adage of “write what you know,” she began toying with an autobiographical tale about a young woman who escapes an arranged marriage in her adopted home of Singapore by attending the University of Calgary in the 1980s.

Kaur likes to call her debut, Letters to Singapore, her “100-day miracle baby.” The fact that she wrote her debut in that relatively short period of time is impressive on its own, but she also had the added challenge of telling the story solely through the exchange of letters between her protagonist, Simran, in Calgary and her mother, sister and two friends in Singapore.

Like Simran, Kaur left Singapore to avoid an arranged marriage. She attended the University of Calgary and experienced a similar fish-out-of-water culture shock when it came to life in Alberta. That included enduring the weather and some less-than-stellar romantic entanglements. Like her protagonist, she realized that a life of relative freedom is different than having your future mapped out by others, but in some ways, it’s far scarier and certainly just as complicated.

So how much is fiction and how much is memoir? 

“That was the question that worried me as I was writing,” she says. “I would ponder and wonder if people would say ‘Is that your mom? Is that your sister? Is that your friend?’ I think as I started writing the story, what was true was the time frame. I had to write what I knew.  So 1985 to 1988 was when I was a student. I could log into my memories and think of Coconut Joe’s or the Calgary Stampede or the Winter Olympics. I knew and remembered details. I loved that part, when I wrote from that point of view I could delve into what was real to me. The stories and the twists and turns, that’s where I could take creative licence.”

It results in a funny, uniquely structured novel that alternates narrative points-of-view between four women. While the story may be rooted in the conflicting vagaries of a young woman’s life in Singapore and life in 1980s Calgary, Kaur says she hopes it represents a  broader immigrant experience by exploring the isolation, shifting expectations and cultural differences experienced by newcomers everywhere.

“That was one of the important things for me, the theme of being an outsider,” she says. “No matter what country, what gender, what orientation, I think people struggle to belong. And I think trying to belong creates challenges and stories. Immigration is a very big one.”

The story of Kaur’s book has had its own twists and turns beyond the narrative. She recently learned that it will join her poem, A Singaporean’s Love Affair, on a trip to the moon. The poem and Letters to Singapore are among thousands of pieces of art from around the globe that have been collected by Toronto writer and physicist Samuel Peralta. The works will be digitized, placed in time capsules and blasted to the moon as part of the Lunar Codex. It is piggybacking on NASA’s Artemis program, which will be accepting commercial payloads such as the time capsules for trips to the moon to prepare for the Artemis Program, which aims to land humans back on the moon in 2025. Peralta, who chose art from 101 countries, liked Kaur’s poem about the immigrant experience and eventually agreed that her novel could go up as well. It is set to go up in 2023.

“When the Griffin mission goes up to the moon, there’s going to be a NASA rover that is going up,” she said. “Peralta is also sending the books and the novels. They are going to go up on that same capsule at the same time. They stay up in the moon forever, these analogue/digital little batteries that will just be up there until someone finds them or not.”

Letters to Singapore is now available.